Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl: Poems - Softcover

Seuss, Diane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555978061 ISBN 13: 9781555978068

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2018

Synopsis

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Diane Seuss’s brilliant follow-up to Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Still life with stack of bills phone cord cig butt and freezer-burned Dreamsicle
Still life with Easter Bunny twenty caged minks and rusty meat grinder
Still life with whiskey wooden leg two potpies and a dead parakeet
Still life with pork rinds pickled peppers and the Book of Revelation
Still life with feeding tube oxygen half-eaten raspberry Zinger
Still life with convenience store pecking order shotgun blast to the face

―from “American Still Lives”

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces―details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish―the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.”

About this title

About the Author

Diane Seuss is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize. She lives in Michigan.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

Poems

By Diane Seuss

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2018 Diane Seuss
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55597-806-8

CHAPTER 1

I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise

with the milkweeds splitting at the seams emancipating their seeds
that were once packed in their pods like the wings and hollow bones
of a damp bird held too tightly in a green hand. And the giant jade
moths stuck to the screen door as if glued there. And the gold fields
and stone silos and the fugitive cows known for escaping their borders.

I have lived in a painting called Paradise, and even the bad parts
were beautiful. There are fields of needles arranged into flowers,
their sharp ends meeting at the center, and from a distance the fields
full of needle flowers look blue from their silver reflecting the sky,
or white as lilies if the day is overcast, and there in the distance is a meadow

filled with the fluttering skirts of opium poppies. On the hillside
is Moon Cemetery, where the tombstones are hobnailed or prismed
like cut-glass bowls, and some are shaped so precisely like the trunks of trees
that birds build their nests in the crooks of their granite limbs, and some
of the graves are shaped like child-sized tables with stone tablecloths

and tea cups, yes, I have lived in a painting called Paradise.
The hollyhocks loom like grandfathers with red pocket watches,
and off in the distance the water is ink and the ships are white paper
with scribblings of poems and musical notations on their sides.
There are rabbits: mink-colored ones and rabbits that are mystics

humped like haystacks, and at Moon Cemetery it's an everyday event
to see the dead rise from their graves, as glittering as they were in life,
to once more pick up the plow or the pen or the axe or the spoon
or the brush or the bowl, for it is a cemetery named after a moon
and moons never stay put. There are bees in the air flying off

to build honeycombs with pollen heavy on their back legs,
and in the air, birds of every ilk, the gray kind that feed from the ground,
and the ones that scream to announce themselves, and the ravens
who feed on the rabbits until their black feathers are edged
in gold, and in the air also are little gods and devils trying out their wings,

some flying, some failing and making a little cream-colored blip
in the sea, yes, all of my life I have lived in a painting called Paradise
with its frame of black varnish and gold leaf, and I am told some girls
slide their fingers over the frame and feel the air outside of it,
and some even climb over the edge and plummet into whatever

is beyond it. Some say it is hell, and some say just another, bolder
paradise, and some say a dark wilderness, and some say an unswept
museum or library floor, and some say a long-lost love waits there
wearing bloody riding clothes, returned from war, and some say
freedom, which is a word that tastes strange, like a green plum.

CHAPTER 2

Girl in a Picture Frame

Red velvet she wore, and the rusty casing of a jumper.
Fur collar tight at the throat. A few of the minks
were stripped of their pelts for her, and for her
the gold necklaces and the heavy copper belt

and the ludicrous black hat, big as a tabletop but soft
for her, and the hat band tight around her forehead.
She's too young for earrings, but she's wearing them.
One glints as a band of light moves across the window.

She's fourteen. Her hair is long, and soft and reddish
as a mink. Her eyes unlined and unimpressed, one brow
raised slightly higher than the other. Gaze away;
her gaze will always win. Her interest on the verge

of disinterest, her self-exposure an act of masquerade.
We have painted a frame around her for safe-keeping.
Not barbed wire. Never barbed wire for a girl like her.
If it were wire, she couldn't rest her hands on it

as she does, the right hand half-shadowed but moving
into light, the left already bathed in it, her thumb's
reflection in the high varnish of the little white lie
of the false black frame. Forever on the threshold

of climbing over the edge and displaying something
grand, her spindly naked legs or a deformity of the foot
or nothing at all below the hips, a double-amputee:
she moves around on a cart with bright red wheels.


Memory Fed Me until It Didn't

Then the erotic charge turned off like a light switch.
I think the last fire got peed on in that hotel outside Lansing.
Peed on and sizzled and then a welcome and lasting silence.

Then my eyes got hungry.
They looked at bowls and barn owls and paper clips,
panoramic lavender fields and a single purple spear,

and it was good but not good enough.
My eyes were hungry for paint, like I used to imagine
a horse could taste the green in its mouth

before its lips found the grass.
Then I woke to the words 'still life,' not as the after-image
of a dream but as the body wakes and knows it needs

mince pie before the mind has come to claim it.
I craved paint like the pregnant body craves pomegranates
or hasenpfeffer or that sauerbraten made with gingersnaps.

Van Gogh ate paint. At least that's the myth of van Gogh.
I ate van Gogh, the still lifes of old boots and thick-tongued
irises. Then my eyes followed the trail back, to Dürer

and his plump rabbit, as perfectly composed as a real one,
as if he'd invented rabbits, and Chardin's dead hare
strung up in a brownish-gold space, its head and ears

flopped onto what appears to be a table, the ears
made of rough bands of white and black and gray
and green-brown paint, the whiskers painted in, the tufts

of fur articulated with white gestures from a thin brush.
And the vanitas paintings of skulls and unspent coins,
and Baugin's dessert wafers shaped like little flutes,

and Pieter Aertsen's Butcher's Stall with the Flight into Egypt
in which a small rendering of the Holy Family
is relegated to the background

while the foreground is loaded with gaudy carnage,
a vat of lard, a pig's head hung by the snout, cascades
of sausages, strangled hens, and yawning sides of beef.

The huge gory head of a cow is front and center,
directly below the cool blues of the miniature Virgin Mary
handing out alms to the poor. The cow's cold nose

is so close it makes my eyes water. Its watery eye
gazes back at me and I fall in love. I fall in love again.


Still Life with Self-Portrait

I look at Gijsbrechts' Still Life with Self-Portrait,
and I want to touch him. I suppose he was a bad man.
Weren't all men bad back then? Weren't women
bad as well? Or did they only exist within
the confines of the badness of men
and thus come to be known as good? I have
existed within the confines of the badness
of men. Men have existed within the confines
of my own badness. I'm bad enough to admit
I liked it when men existed within my badness
rather than the other way around.

Gijsbrechts appears to be the kind of bad man
who likes to trick the eye. He favored trompe l'oeil,
optical illusion. In The Reverse of a Framed Painting,
he paints the front of the painting as if
it were the back, complete with wood grain,
framing nails, and a tag — number 36 —
seemingly stuck to the canvas with sealing
wax. Aside from this, there is no content.
He has offered you his backside and called it
his frontside, has offered you nothing
and called it something. You've known men
like Cornelius Gijsbrechts.

In Still Life with Self-Portrait, he paints
a painting of a painting. It is an unremarkable
still life on what seems to be black velvet.
White grapes with a tendril from the vine
still attached, three peaches, an opened walnut,
and a cut squash. One corner of the velvet
canvas appears to have peeled away from
the frame on which it's mounted, exposing
the wall, the wooden frame, and the stitched
hem along the reverse side of the fabric.
The still life rests on a little shelf he's painted
to mimic a real shelf. It holds his pipe, his
tobacco jar, his brushes, and two pegs
on which hang his gummy palette and a rag.

Alongside the painting of the painting
is a tiny self-portrait that seems to be pinned
to the wall as one would pin a dead moth
to a display board. It is ostensibly the artist
himself, his thick, black hair brushing the top
of his shoulders, his white collar turned down
beneath his paunchy face, his eyes not meeting
mine but gazing off over my left shoulder.
With annoyance? I think he looks annoyed.
Or he's creating the illusion of disinterest.
I've known that kind of man. Or he's thinking,
'This isn't my real face I've painted. She will
never really know me.' A man said something
like that to me once: 'You don't know anything
about me,' a man I'd lived with a long time.
My whole life I've wanted to touch men
like Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts,
but they will not let themselves be touched.


Young Hare

Oh my love, Albrecht Dürer, your hare
is not a spectacle, it is not an exploding hare,
it is not a projection of the young hare
within you, the gentleness in you, or a disassembled hare,
nor a subliminal or concealed hare,
nor is it the imagination as hare

nor the soul as a long-eared, soft-eared hare,
Dürer, you painted this hare,
some say you killed a field hare
and brought it into your studio, or bagged a live hare
and caged it so you could look hard at a wild hare
without it running off into thorn bushes as hares

will do, and you sketched the hare
and laid down a watercolor wash over the hare
and then meticulously painted-in all the browns of hare,
toast brown, tawny, dim, pipe-tobacco brown of hare,
olive, fawn, topaz, bone brown until the hare
became dimensional under your hand, the thick hare

fur, the mottled shag, the nobility of the nose, the hare
toenails, black and sharp and curved, and the dense hare
ears, pod-shaped, articulated, substantial, erect, hare
whiskers and eyebrows, their wiry grace, the ruff of hare
neck fur, the multi-directional fur over the thick hare
haunches, and did I say the dark inside the hare

ears, how I want to follow the darkness of the hare
and stroke the dark within its ears, to feel the hare
ears with my fingers, and the white tuft, the hare
anomaly you painted on its side, and the fleshy hare
cheeks, how I want to squeeze them, and the hare
reticence, how I want to explore it, and the downturned hare

eye, it will not acknowledge or appease, the black-brown hare
eye in which you painted the reflection of a window in the hare
pupil, maybe your studio window, in the hare's
eye, why does that window feel so intimate in the hare's
unreadable eye, why do I press my face to the window to see the hare
as you see it, raising your chin to look and then back to the hare

on the page, the thin hair of your brush and your own hair
waving gold down your back, hair I see as you see the hare.
In the hare's eye you see me there, my swaying black hair.


Still Life with Turkey

The turkey's strung up by one pronged foot,
the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity
of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes

are in love with it as they are in love with all
dead things that cannot escape being looked at.
It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my

father was there in his black casket and could not
elude our gaze. I was a child so they asked
if I wanted to see him. 'Do you want to see him?'

someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother?
Some poor woman was stuck with the job.
'He doesn't look like himself,' whoever-it-was

added. 'They did something strange with his mouth.'
As I write this, a large moth flutters against
the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.

'No,' I said, 'I don't want to see him.' I don't recall
if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me
but thought that 'no' was the correct response,

or if I believed I should want to see him but was
too afraid of what they'd done with his mouth.
I think I assumed that my seeing him would

make things worse for my mother, and she was all
I had. Now I can't get enough of seeing, as if I'm paying
a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so

this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head,
which reminds me of the first fully naked man
I ever saw, when I was a candy striper

at a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran,
young, burbling crazily, his face and body red
as something scalded. I didn't want to see,

and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it,
its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated
feathers, the crook of its unbound foot,

and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread
as if it could take flight, but down,
downward, into the earth.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss. Copyright © 2018 Diane Seuss. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555978061
• ISBN 13: 9781555978068
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120