Bird Eating Bird (3 page)
Authors: Kristin Naca
—
Museo del Prado, España
Thirteen, I stumble
into the princess’ gaze.
She’s composed, defiant.
Morning slants through
the workshop window
and charges the threads
of her blonde hair.
The Infanta Margarita
wearing a corset so tight
light spikes from it, like
a chest plate worn by
conquistadors in paintings
of Cortés announcing
himself to the Aztecs.
From one maid’s tray
la infanta grabs a piece
of amber-colored fruit
that glows warm as a heart,
while the maids search
the porcelain of her face.
Dwarves Maribarbola
and Nicolasito, and a dog,
accompany her, serving
as amusement while
she poses.
Another maid teeters
behind the Infanta, unrumpling
the lace of the princess’ sleeve
that goes astray each time
her arm grazes the boughs
of her skirt, boughs wired to
spread the fabric at her waist
and send it tumbling, a tissuey,
stuffed tun to the floor.
The Infanta shows
no regard for Velázquez
who also gazes from inside
the painting, onto the world
that lay beyond the borders
of the painting’s framework.
Somehow, Velázquez has
captured that world, too.
The King and Queen of Spain
pose, there. Mere reflections,
they appear as brief, bluish
swaths of paint, in a mirror
that hangs in the background
on a dark rear wall.
All of us onlookers
in the museum’s corridor,
standing beside the King and Queen,
a troupe of royal attendees
blued into existence by Velázquez,
who’s turned his giant canvas
to obscure our view on
the action of his brush.
How he heaves ochre-sopped
bristles across the oily likenesses,
giving the royals’ yards of skin
a taintedness—the illusion that,
with every breath, they ingest
the same bleak air we do,
the room tinged with flecks
of green and purple debris.
I gaze and the Princess
gazes back through me.
She’s luminous, a godly idea
etched into human form.
The rest of us abide with her
perfection, infallibility. So much
like the maids who ratchet up
their heavy velvet dresses
that razor dust off the floor.
Those dresses they must harness,
to concoct each step anew
as they try to walk.
The form letter reads:
If you dream
of being Miss USA, this is your chance
to turn that dream into reality!
In disbelief, I turn the envelope over.
State Pageant Office. Naca
—that’s me.
Mail in bio and recent photograph.
Always Miss Nothing in photographs,
I had the desire to fulfill Mom’s dream,
Filipina beauty queen, but a fat chance.
By ten, I was shouldering the reality
of a size eighteen blazer.
Not over
weight
, just big, a saleslady braced me,
sensing Mom was about to scold me
from the Casual Corner. That photograph,
lost to the panels of a drawer, I dream
out of me. But this letter reads
chance
—
a word more potent than reality.
At least to a poet mulling over
chance into change, small changings over,
how day-to-day I chance to change me
more permanently. The old photograph,
that suited me, I alter in my dreams.
Thinking it, I set my heart to chance.
Writing it, reality.
So, why not this other reality?—
where my real, my realm is turned over,
exposing some dolled-up, plastic me,
the makings of a bad photograph;
nightmares scare up new dreams to dream.
Why deny myself the chance,
when life’s so chancy, chancy
and (perhaps) even destined? Reality
is just most people can’t get over
beauty, can’t get by or past it. Not me,
my poems, at least, aren’t photographic,
symbols perfectly minted from dreams.
They’re just a way to outlast reality,
to take my chances and live life over,
and be me, beyond a photograph.
—
Mexico City
1.
Before I look, I test
aceras
with a rubber foot.
sidewalks
A glass leg extends from the street and comes to a hook my hand handles.
Me: a doorstop guffaws over planks of hardwood.
Each step, the arms of a clock tilt closer and closer towards noon.
2.
Once I shook my foot loose from a
hueco
in the
asfalto.
pothole
Once I shook my foot and it twinkled like a burned-out fuse.
Once I shook my breath loose inside my lungs and heard the ball-bearing’s timbal.
Once I shook on a curb, in darkness.
3.
Then the filaments of the woozy harp tolled the doorbell.
Then, she held the stringy cheeks of my purpling palms.
I dialed up my feelings: my fingers wound numbers around the rotary phone’s spindle.
Okay. This is me now: her hip bumps the table and the red in the wineglass bumbles.
In the bath, my belly button breathes when it comes to the surface.
A knock in the soapy water is just a heartbeat calling.
—
Lingayen Beach, 1977
I don’t tell lies. Memory’s more
beautiful than truth. So I say,
the air was blossoming jasmine trees
and smoke. And it’s true.
Clothes boiled in tin tubs. A child,
I watched my uncle splinter
arms of bamboo, his dark skin a blur
in steamy drizzle. A woman
with the burning end of a cigarette
turned inside her lips. Her smile,
a mouth of pink gums squeezed
together. Mornings, my brother and I
raced down the soft belly of the beach,
climbed palm trees—grasping circular rungs
like a throat—to see coconuts churning
in the surf; the skeleton of a torn-down
fighter plane, its snapped propellers,
dented cockpit; fire holes on the beach
where my family came down at night
Dad drank San Miguels and never quit
talking. Filipinos laughed at him.
Mom sat, embarrassed, in the sand.
My cousins, brother, and I stripped cane.
The story ends there for children,
but you wait in bed to hear the rest—
how the air was steam, mosquito incense.
Auntie Marietta set the table. Lanterns
turned her skin red/blue.
I sat in the clubhouse watching
old men play pool till one said
I look old enough to kiss.
[She] knocks, saying ‘Open for me, my [sister], my love, my dove, my perfect one’…My love thrust [her] hand through the opening, and my feelings were stirred for [her].
—Song of Solomon 5: 2–4, from Christiansex.com/fist
She pinches at
the rough seams
where the glove
brows into fingertips
and as she
tugs each digit
the leather tube
suctions flat and
the bottom of
the glove cinches
a cuff around
her thumb-bone
where it angles
into her wrist.
So, the glove,
now, looks like
skin unraveled from
the spokes of
her fingers, or
a bat’s wing
as it catches
wind and launches
from the bone’s
knuckly masthead. Then,
freeing the butt
of her palm
from the glove,
she flexes her
hand’s muscly cheeks
together, skin compressed
so—folded, gullying—
love lines root
in her palm
(the likes only
her lover knew
from slipping on
the bike gloves
she keeps hidden
in the bureau’s
top drawer, leather
wilted and milky
from their smallish
hands over-fingering
the throttle’s stiff,
rubber grip). With
her fingers relaxed
she withdraws her
dewy hand from
the glove’s untapered
back end, spray
of polyester hairs
and must filling
the space between
her face and
her slick skin.
Then, she sets
the gloves down
open ends against
the table where
they stand-up,
each empty nook
having trapped just
enough air for
the bulbs of
skin to appear
natural and improbable
as found sculpture.
How much like
a pianist’s utensils
the hands trained
to relax into
near perfect cradles
when she wants
to believe that
the leather’s briefed
by her unmannered
or, somehow, unrehearsed
touching. Still warm,
the gloves pose
like their very
own living tissues
keep them up,
the molded leather
surrendering the rest
of her hands’
heat until gloves
gone perfectly cool
harden in place.
—
for Karina
The world has sallied forth. Unmeasured, fumigated with acumen,
swearing I heard it. I heard it as
branch
hears its own knobs bear wind, and with it…
And I saw your eyes climb. Them and your own limbs needle spaces
laid bare in trees’ winter’s leaf drift, into their passages, little bony cups
the canaling of your ears produce their own echo, What was, is, will be
Worn against the newest weather? In the newest city you return to?
Its eloquence forced upon us the way the air frequents the prongs of
a feather, to underscore as frugal, unspeakable knowledge—how I ask (hardly knowing you),
Darling, when you name an unbearable truth, what do you find yourself
undernaming?
A shiver of false fire, the livery of a place setting beside bowls
of swollen porcelain, justness, air inside our lungs
warmed us stupidly, and the needles lay about bored by hearts gauged to
get stuck against each other needlelessly.
Ay que naca,
you say when I ask you, What is the translation for “
sin
needles”
(adverbio)?
On the floor and on the pillows, your name was like something laid before a doorway a prelude to travel, rose petals, nickels, grains of rice
that bloat swallows’ bellies—too full and too, overflowingly
There also against diminishment. These days diminishment and appearance
aren’t opposites—I remind—as much as they are opponents (distant, enemy cousins arriving at bookends of a family barbecue).
And I said it to tear the firmament freshly, like stars plucked from constellations
to bring her eyes’ confusion over forgetting; your top lip against your bottom
one in opposing operations. No, not absolutely unlike when words
turn against their truths. The phases of the moon molt the shells off
the crab’s back, wax and wane him till he’s limp-spined, his all-jelly insides
like traitors. Gaze and know my face before waking ruins the fog of my actual dream-dusted face!
Come back to the sunshine now rambling
Over the occasion like a mute apology for coming home exactly as I’d promised,
gripping green-shooted, leafyparts of beets I’d promised, purple knotted artery
talking from my fists. You’re on my lap, pounding my chest,
asking for forgiveness for accepting the part of lover who wants me, her, her love
to keep coming back in the first place.
We are near each other is what we say, and what you know I promise to feel
In the gathered promise of a girl who swirls her coffee before she drinks it,
who dives into a pool eyes open, first,
Who remembers the city as a transparent bride,
Her long hand reaching out of danger to find refuge in your bridle of echoey, black hair.
Los surcos en el sofá azul hacen
tic tac
al tiempo de las reverberaciones de sus caderas.
Los puntos en el techo de yeso esperan, pacientes como trampas para osos.
En la sala, el calor se hace penachos desde las costillas del radiador.
Afuera, ella se escucha mientras que se viene. Los granos brilliantes de arena, paso a paso, se suben por a sus pies.
Cuando ella está relajada, el techo hace
clic
. Cada minuto, se sueltan los muelles.
Revuelve su cara de la cuchara por su taza de café, y el poste se calienta, luego le calienta la mano.
Bajo los colmillos del techo. Bajo el tejado. Bajo las techumbres arcillosas que la abruman, ladrillos rojos y pesados.
La cuchara timbra en la porcelana como timbra el calor en los nudillos del radiador.
Intenta apagarlo, pero no se mueve el mecanismo. La juntura brilla con una patina azul de musgo.
Afuera, una estrella fugaz graba surcos azules por el canto del cielo.
Las válvulas resuenan con el tintinear de los gases calurosos por los escapes.
Una vez, esperó a unas caderas para calentar los cojines a su lado. Ahora, ella arde. Ahora, se hincha.
En la cara del reloj, una mano da vueltas mientras—como si bebiera lengüetadas—la otra mano tiembla inmóvil.
Una pastilla fría y blanca para cuando se hincha el corazón.
Bajo el cielo azul azul. Bajo el vapor que se sube a las nubes, y se derrama que moja el paisaje como un suave detergente. Bajo el frío cielo diluido bajo las estrellas. Bajo el camino vago del satélite que desholleja fotos de la luz, se rompe la distancia como un trozo de piel.
