FOREIGN BODIES
POEMS
KIMIKO HAHN
Some things move in and dig down
whether you want them to or not.
Like pieces of small glass your body subsumes when you are young . . .
— CHARLES WRIGHT
Contents
Unearthly Delights
Object Lessons—From Chevalier Quixote Jackson
A Dusting
The Old House Speaks
charms i.
Constant Objection
A Little Safe
Hatchlings
The Ashes
charms ii.
Sparkly Things
The Cryptic Chamber
Notes on March 10, 1992
Another Poem for Maude
charms iii.
She Sells Seashells—Considering the Life of Mary Anning
Likeness—A Self-Portrait
charms iv.
Foreign Body
After Being Asked If I Write the Occasional Poem
Alloy—An Apostrophe for Isamu Noguchi
charms v.
Divine
The Nest in Winter
After Words for Ava
Essay: Nitro—More on Japanese Poetics
Afterword: The Bamboo Grove Where Various Individuals Mostly Think Aloud
Notes
Acknowledgments
Dedication
FOREIGN BODIES
Unearthly Delights
After you rip through the screen
and wedge yourself into Father’s bedroom,
you find a pile of art supply catalogs,
brown scraps of bedspread,
cotton batting, a rodent body, rodent turds,
and tiny white naked human creatures
flipped topsy-turvy to skewer
down the ass and out the mouth
in the primordial ooze that is manifestly
the brimstone and bile of this book left open
to Bosch’s realm beneath the left hand of God,
my foxed legacy of human bonfire.
•••
Object Lessons
From Chevalier Quixote Jackson
What might happen to the collection if we let narrative and desire back in?
MARY CAPPELLO
To answer a wish to possess:
tuck a chess piece into a cheek.
To meet a hunger not to share:
swallow a kewpie doll whole.
To recall the rubber of a nipple:
suck on a pencil eraser.
Safe-keep sincere assemblage
by stowing in a ribcage. Yes,
now I lay my
two pressed pennies
down to constant tissue.
•
Like Dr. Chevalier Quixote Jackson,
nineteenth-century laryngologist who
removed from tiny upper bodies
an involved collection of objects
—nails and bolts, radiator key,
a child’s perfect attendance pin,
a Carry-Me-For-Luck medallion—
to lay into trays of cotton, yes,
like him, each child had hoarded some thing
in her inmost chest.
•
Yes, because children crawl on the treacherous floor,
Chevalier, if I may,
removed then preserved every last one
along with stunning x-rays of needles
lodged in a small patient’s lung. Also
a charm in the shape of a hound. Perhaps
the hound who rescued him in childhood.
Perhaps a jar of charms that won’t leave go one’s origin.
(Perhaps my pooch who calms my errant heartbeats down.)
•
Origins: crime or act of preservation:
Saturn devoured his children
to save his own skin from divine betrayal.
Snow White’s stepmother devoured
the girl’s lung and liver—or so she believed.
My youngest, after Mother died, figured,
Grandma now lives inside my tummy
with dog and bird and fishy.
•
According to one biographer: at one point other children blindfolded Jackson and threw him into a coal pit, and he was rescued only after some mutt happened to find him unconscious.
•
In my cigar box, a swallow
nest of pine
lined with feathers, bits of birch bark, and trash
for comfort can coincide with comforting;
from the shred of blankie inside her purse to
his rabbit-foot keychain
to the hair she plucks and swallows
in a cycle of self-harm called Rapunzel.
Chevalier archived them in shallow drawers
according to their kind.
•
The two girls could not unlock the door to their father’s home. The girls could not open a window for the medical books leaning against the panes. The girls could neither pry open the bathroom window painted shut nor the cellar door where the carton of bleach and cans of stew were stacked against it. They could not find a ladder to climb to the bedroom window and check on a mahogany bedroom set—this, they knew to be surrounded by trash bags of mother’s clothing that they’d tagged years ago for the Salvation Army. And, hopefully, on the nightstand, there was still a collection of ivory netsuke.
Also, a reclining ivory nude, female, used by nineteenth-century doctors.
The girls wondered what he made of that woman.
•
The doctor’s x-rays captured
miniature binoculars, silver horse-charm, four open safety pins
lodged between tiny ribs.
Each feels like a story’s climax
when the heroine, dropping into a cave,
discovers a treasure at bottom
that cannot be removed unless she answers these three questions:
What is the opposite of “cleave”?
Who savors rampion?
Why not rock an empty chair?
•
How to extract an open safety pin without scarring?
How to save the object without anesthesia?
How to preserve all two thousand foreign bodies?
•
A child crawls on the treacherous floor
appraising every object inside her mouth.
•
Dr. Jackson produced the modern endoscope with the use of hollow tubes and illumination. To see inside. As if he could see the image of the horse-beating that had taken residence inside him like a primal scene, told him where his body began and ended . . .
•
In the Emergency Room, surgeons also remove sex-related objects
from the rectum (the ubiquitous light bulb or hamster)
and from the perineum (straight pins and nails)
and from the penis (rose stem with thorns).
There’s also the stripper flashing a razor in and out of her labia.
Alas, my imagination pales—
•
Newly coined terms—
Amylophagia, ingesting laundry starch
Cautopyreiophagia, ingesting burnt matches
Geomelophagia, raw potatoes
—all exemplifying specialized terms
within Pica, a disorder named after the Eurasian magpie pica pica,
known for its morbid craving.
(What does one turn to
when laundry starch, say, becomes no more—?)
•
Flashlight, trombone cleaner,
curling iron, screw, battery: all up the bum!
•
In the local Savings & Tru
st I descend to the corridor below street level. A woman sits in a cool gray light updating client info, filing her nails, text messaging. I step up to the bulletproof window, slip my ID into the slot, smile, and wait. She looks from my photo to my face. “Which one?” she asks. “The smaller one,” I reply. I am not able to say my ex-husband’s name in this ceremony of twenty years. “Yes,” she replies. And as she takes her key and mine, I think about this box as incomplete transaction: old wedding bands, diamond earrings twice worn, and Mother’s jewelry—inherited and rarely worn. No—never worn. Safe keep. Kept here. From myself.
Then there are bonds for the children. (I haven’t ever checked the other one containing the deed with the new husband.)
•
What is down the hatch?
(A penny-sized harmonica, a pea-sized magnet, button batteries, jacks!)
What then is the fourth question?
(What does that mean, safe?)
To whom does the extracted foreign body belong?
(If you tuck a crucifix under your tongue, Mama then can’t hunt it down.)
Too hard to swallow? Or, swallow hard?
(Nicole’s missing charms: sewing machine, thimble, Mother)
•
The why:
playing with a tin cup containing a white pearl button
alone on floor with lucky-shell bracelet
put toy in his mouth to hide from sister
child alone in room found hairpin under pillow
bored or unhappy
•
Dr. Jackson’s Aphorisms:
Let your left hand know what your right hand does and how to do it.
Let your mistakes worry you enough to prevent repetition.
Nature helps, but she is no more interested in the survival of your patient
than in the survival of the attacking pathogenic bacteria.
•
Yes, how to extract a barrette without further scarring?
How to store the object of your ardor, even to stay what harms
(junk drawer, purse, . . . flash drive)?
Yes, how to persevere
long enough to sound an alarm? to be alarming?
•
Somewhere I have a palm-sized clock,
green with a cartoon face,
that Daddy bought for me at the hospital
when we visited Mother, who’d just had a baby.
And could that toy
be tucked away with puka-shells, miniature sleigh, and
—and really, has the point of an object lesson come down to this—
Mother’s plastic collar stay?
•••
A Dusting
However Mother has reappeared
—say, as motes on a feather duster—
scientists say the galaxy
was thus created. This daybreak
she seeds a cumulous cloud.
•
Wherever Mother is bound
she’s joined ashes ashes
or dirt underfoot or bits
off Tower North and Tower South.
Repurpose does not arrive whole cloth.
•
From stardust, dust bunnies,
Dust Bowl and Dust unto Dust
to Ruykeyser’s silica, Whitman’s boot-soles
and Dunbar’s What of his love, what of his lust?
to the samples that astronomers collect—
dust is where the sparrow bathes herself.
•
“Not a cloud in the sky,”
Mother says as she hangs the laundry outside,
Father paints en plein air,
and we girls sweep crumbs under the rug.
This summer, Father sees
Inferno everywhere.
•
No dustups from little girls!
As a consequence, one scribbled
on the dust-bins of history
and the other dusted
for fingerprints. And the mother?
The mother lived in a vacuum.
•
Inside the senseless corridors
the daughter cannot respire.
Inside the vulgar cosmic
the mother cannot be revived
in streaming wet traffic.
•
Nowadays, I lie down in the sunlight
to see my mama
moting around as sympathetic ash.
Yes, one morning whether misty or yellow
I’ll be soot with her—
elegiac and original.
•••
The Old House Speaks
Before I became foundation, I was a chicken-coop aways from farmhouse, carriage house and barn. And around my grounds, someone’s daughter played with her bisque baby. Among stink and chicken feathers. Eggshells. Nests.
I tasted the haze of dandruff and chicken shit. The taste of my own throat.
From my planks and wire I heard the clucks. The coos. The tap-tap tap-tap as the scabby rooster pecked like the son’s paddle-toy.
I wasn’t so much humble as meager. There is nowhere for anywhere except a runaway who kneads the dank, brown, soiled straw.
The farmer’s little girl played with chipped teacups alongside the buzzing kitchen scraps. All converted, finally, into a trash heap.
•
Noisy and noisome. From that rough roost to an indoor-out: branch and ice rip me open. Birds tear into my screens, leave droppings all over my insides.
Did I say a runaway? More recently, down the hill in one family’s garage, the wife turned the car on and fell asleep to the smell of gas—shutting the door to other neighbor’s rat-a-tat-tat.
•
After winter torpor, I wince when the raccoon births her kits in a closet.
Some say a raccoon makes over two hundred sounds—and it’s true, I’ve counted as many.
And the mask, reduces glare at night.
And the ringed tail, stores fat for the winter and aids in any balancing act.
And the dousing of food, yes, “wash.”
Funny how the pregnant female kicks out the male.
Yes, where creatures thrive, I cannot breathe—
•
What will become of my kitchen? The room where the now-middle-aged woman, when a toddler, sat in the bright porcelain sink for a sponge bath. One of the few events that she cares to recall while sifting through the rubbish, once her mother’s home, her father’s house. Or was it the inverse?
•••
charms i.
Mindful
Collect a sand dollar from dry sand
And not from silted shallows
While wet it’s very much alive
And will consign its sorrows
•••
Constant Objection
More often than not, a house fills up
with only stifled objections
to a dozen glue guns, a case of Brillo pads,
jars of preserves. But—coffee cans
of chewed up chewing gum
is why he resided alone.
•
Notice that the simplest often yields the most:
OBJECT: body, doodad, meaning, purpose,
hope, butt, . . . to mind and to resist.
The theory itself yields: Pinky-Bear,
Blankie, Sock-Puppet, Nightmare.
•
Objection? Outside a neighboring clinic
three fundamentalists wait
to shoot the doctor at point-blank range.
Meantime, Father saw Medusa
on the clothes line, under the sink,
in a tureen of string beans.
•
He drew the mythic ball of live hair
that no one can s
tand or he’ll turn to stone.
Then there’s cherry-red on her toes.
Then there’s his own weekend Father
taking him to see “Boxing Kangaroos”
who turned out to be yawning strippers.
•
On objectification, Marx wrote:
As values, all commodities are only
definite masses of congealed labour time.
Yes, Hamburger Helper, trombone, robot vacuum!
Yes, covert kiwi or flagrant heroin!
•
(As for the coffee can of chewed up chewing gum—
just a necrophile’s faithful rite
to resuscitate a strict mama,
viewed on the Discovery Channel.)
•
After tossing her clothes and cosmetics
I crisscrossed the city on a bus:
peering out at the concrete,
cherry blossoms fell in my hair
from no open window. They piped up,
How much more can a daughter object?
•
Before I swept every speck of you
from the rooms where Father would carry on—
if only I’d saved your brush
with a few strands of silver hair.
Mother, dear object of my despondence,
What more can a daughter bear?
•••
A Little Safe
In a toy safe, I locked
seven glass giraffes from Grandma
once displayed on her credenza.
After she lost her riddled lung,
the hospital lost all her remains.
Or so the story goes.
•
I treasure her charm,
a tiny box housing a dollar—
not that that would get me far in a pinch.