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Standing Water
By Eleanor Chai Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2016 Eleanor Chai
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71491-8
CHAPTER 1
Opticks
This is her descending
glance captured
in a hidden photograph
taken when I was
an infant and Mother held me
at arm's length. I look back
for her, unsurprised
still questioning why she doesn't return
my gaze. Her eyes
fix on a spot between
her face and my face. For the infant
there is no distinction.
Her disaffection stains the intimate
objects found years later
among her things of everyday:
a thimble embroidered with a single petal.
A slim gold watch — stopped.
Brushes held to
dry in a bamboo roll. A tiny lime
and fuchsia dress sewn by her
hands for my hundredth day.
His wedding band, scarred
a muted gray. In the gap between us
a vacancy swells and bellies
the air where her eyes avert mine
to slide off where? I wish I could see her
engage and ignite
these traces of the ordinary,
the minutely particular
totems of our daily life: holy.
In an old dream, I plot a little boy's flight.
Like a fighter pilot, I drop
a homing device back in time to spy
into the landscape of my infancy
before she turned her face away —
before my need was extraordinary.
Mare
FOR ETP
Standing in a small January rain
I look into the wet convex
surface of the horse's tired gaze.
I will not push myself in —
I wait for the giant muzzle to inch
nearer to my darkened eyes: wide
open. I wait for something
I cannot guess will arrive.
I hush as I wait. I tell myself
the smell of horse may be
as close as I will come to what
I seek. The beast begins
to feel safe.
* * *
Before she was taken, she was playing
outside with friends looking for flowers,
running from (or following) snakes.
They were by a lake.
In the myth,
that the lake was bordered by trees bearing thick
foliage, that the ground around the lake was shaded,
seems important to the tale.
Its botanical situation is always mentioned:
a body of water surrounded by a bower
is where she was designated to play.
Winnicott might call this her "potential space."
* * *
Past the cool shade of trees
orbiting the water, he saw her step into the sun.
He felt a need take him. In a blur for both
he was on her, in her, above and over her.
It was just the beginning — She couldn't close her eyes
to blot out the tattoos inking his arms
as he pushed through her. Snow-capped
mountains with clouds drifting by.
A valley emptying into the sea. A small
fishing boat. A fisherman in coolie pants grinning
or grimacing, she couldn't tell which.
On the other arm, a field of wheat,
a few specks of birds, oxen, two fat women,
flowers strewn in the summery scene.
Then it was done. He gathered her close.
She didn't resist. He rocked her a little.
He whistled for his horses. They cantered forth, not far
from the sounds of her friends, still playing by the lake.
He inserted himself into her that day.
He will always be where she is.
He will live a life within her.
She will never live a day alone.
* * *
In the myth, he kidnapped her.
She doesn't know how long they rode. She knows
they stopped — she smelled the sea. They were at a bay named
for the nymph Cyane. It rippled in slow, smooth waves.
A woman was in the water, a woman of those waters.
She started to approach the two on horseback,
but the little girl's small, torn, dirt-stained dress, her dazed stare
stopped her. She's someone's child. Save her. She would try.
Cyane rose from those waters to fight. The man hissed,
"Don't try me, Nymph. I will tear you to bits.
I will ride a road through you," and he did.
He parted her, taking his child-bride underground.
This is not a scholarly footnote in Ovid: it is there
in Book Five of the Metamorphoses.
A slim nymph reified the heroic.
Unhealed,
incurable and all in tears, she melted.
Her slimmest parts went first: hair, nails,
fingers, and feet. She swayed there dismembered —
bald with no eyebrows, no eyelashes,
with fingerless hands and footless ankles.
Her hairless skull turned pellucid with her torso
and her limbs, where one could see a small
stream system within the larger body of water:
her veins ran not with blood, but with clear water
until even the inner membranes dissolved and
there was nothing to see, nothing to hold.
* * *
Cyane was not defending what was hers,
not avenging a personal injury. In the face of a force
she could not perceive, she rose from her buoying
comfort to aid a child, save a child not of her making.
She lost everything she was and would be.
She came apart, melting — Unhealed, incurable, dissolved.
Left there strewn across the bay, dismembered
— forever, her inner membranes move
the surface of those waters — as light flecks and curves
the grape pulp of the swollen convex eye of the Mare I seek.
Those waters animate every such Beast. She looks
unflinchingly. I stand still, euphoric to be seen until I am
inside, yoked to the stream falling from her eyes, the harm
of those waters reflects the hunger and sorrow of the beast
lowering her head to me. She gives no sign.
She continues to watch. Her nostrils flare. She can smell no fear:
I am not afraid.
I've already been wounded.
That's not why I stay.
Unhealed, imperfect: she gives me her gaze,
surface into which I can almost vanish, begin to disappear
until, in the eye of a mare I begin to see all I cannot let go:
every cut, every thrust, each handle-less blade.
Where the skin has smoothed over, in her eye
I feel the white sting. My memory of it is visible
in the jelly of the horse's eye, the surface
skimming the waters of Cyane.
The beast nuzzles in.
* * *
In every purloined childhood, there lives a fantasy,
a Dreamed-of One who tries to heal the rift. Persephone
doesn't have to wish her, she's there. Ovid wrote her
into the myth. While Persephone lies in his Darkness,
an inlet of water rolls in her mind: a membrane of movement
sequined with light. Under such light there is life.
Raped, mutilated, and damaged: deep
inside it is possible she remains as pure as when she arrived —
her time was stopped by his seizure, her abduction.
* * *
From one body of water, we are given. I took
my nascence from one who was left behind.
There was no nymph to save us, no Cyane to try.
This is the cipher of my body — I leached the living
waters of the one who gave me. I took my leave
transfused with every infant need, I became
her one caul too many, the film that made living
unbearable. The life that followed
her insistence on my birth was her killing stick.
Little Hanako
In the first electric light, Little Hanako,
Maître Rodin's "tiny transvestite" drives
a blade into her kimono. Blood blooms.
Red wounds the synthetic white.
Masticating muscles and sockets rise
beneath her skin, casting a grimace performed
each night. Her ritually wide-open eyes show
her, dying — to return alive. The stage goes dim
with her vanishing. He is held
to his seat. She is a heavy dream.
She straps him down as if in sleep. Before he may rise,
she must sit — hold still — alone, for him.
Yeats's fan-dancer, Loie Fuller, arranges it ...
"Attends, attends ? pas beaucoup Hanako!"
He draws the spare distance to a few little hairs
at the bottom of her muscled torso — bare
squiggled strokes, "et en dessous, ta petite fleur," quite closed.
From underneath, a pale abalone glow flutes across an inland sea.
It is the life beneath her sex he seeks.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Standing Water by Eleanor Chai. Copyright © 2016 Eleanor Chai. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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