A Pretty Sight (5 page)

She still lolls, propped on the pediment

of the Medici tomb in Florence.

Her right elbow rests on a thick left thigh

that twists from the edge, half-aware

she must stay balanced there.

She’s tired. Is she catching some shut-eye

so she’ll stay fresh and be admired

for the next five hundred years? Stare

at the braided clump of hair that drops

across a breast, the white stomach

like stepped folds of sand left by the tide.

Has flesh ever been more alive

than in this marble? We touch a hand

against her neck; she starts and lifts her eyes.

Its sea-stack

vertical tatter. Dry rills

and dints squirrelled themselves

from worked boulder –

into shoulders, hips, elbows – a shape

hurrying to the surface

only once the mind has turned

and turned to find it.

The loosely

knotted sign for the self

ghosted from a stab

at what he guessed

might show itself, form

or the starving aperture at its centre.

Moore liked best

what wasn’t finished, no

‘happy fixed finality.’

He eventually found
Night
’s skin

thick, too leathery and polished.

Instead, he feted the pitted heads

of Michelangelo’s failed, last à,

its original stonework torn

down like an expensive set of drapes

to show thinner, exhausted

shapes inside. Not Renaissance

but Gothic, more solitary

than his greatest forms, Christ’s nose

and mouth chiselled flat,

Mary’s supporting hand

a broken edge of marble

as if the sculptor had run out

of material space to describe their pain

so left them there to rest.

A great question
, Moore claimed

of the Master’s failures:

they taught me what happened

in his mind
, the ideal

and its fracture both

scratching for the light.

Mushin Hasan, head in hands, is tableau

on the cuneiform tablet. He saw it coming. How

could he not, counting off the precedents,

from the Elamite sack of Babylon,

umpteen sacks of Rome – Visigoth,

Saracen, Norman – to all that stuff

carted back for an empire’s

display cases, Lord Elgin

or Napoleon. What’s been left alone?

Like Layard outside Mosul, camped near villages

the locals built on grass mounds,

their houses framed by giant stones

inscribed with script

turned out were the walls of Nineveh.

Clay tablets from the Gilgamesh saga

shipped up the Thames,

the Ishtar Gate to Berlin. Power

on display as the power to take and then curate

into ownership. More subtle than just

charging past the coat check

with axes and iron pipes,

screaming
there is no government or state
,

but the same result.

FOX TV
loops

of looters make us forget how families

were squeezed between a no-win/no-win

of the home regime, overseas’ sanctions

and systematic deployment

of Tomahawk missiles.

Among computers,
AC
and chairs

stripped from storerooms are plates

from the royal tombs

of Ur, and a headless limestone figure

chiselled in Lagash 4,400 years ago.

Nearby, soldiers told to hold

a traffic control point, wait

on a news crew

to get the best side of a tank-round

whacking the statue of Saddam

on horseback. No montage

of Donny George and museum staff

chaining the museum’s front doors, taking shifts with clubs

against gangs organized in supply chains

for the profit of foreign

collectors. Only days

after Baghdad’s invasion, fresh artefacts

surface on the Parisian

black market. The top three

metres of southern Iraq now pockmarked,

ransacked past dark to the clatter

of generators and shovels. What we had

of the unexcavated sites of Adab,

Zabalam, Umma and Shuruppak

are now empty spaces in human narrative.

The stone head of King Sanatruq,

2nd century
CE
,

recovered by luck when an Italian archaeologist

told police he’d spotted it on a mantelpiece

of an Al Jazeera decorating show.

If my family were starving, I’d rifle

through the storerooms.

Coalition forces pour a fresh helipad,

Chinook rotors blast sand and rattle

the remaining walls

of ancient Babylon. The Temple of Ninmah’s

roof collapses, the halls of the Temple of Nabu.

War’s aftermath: no power, no water, no work.

So what good is art?

Near the city’s edge,

a crowd in dishdashas wears stethoscopes,

dragging around
OR
gear

lifted from the hospital.

What is ‘preserving the past’? Bread flour

bakes in dried mud, near corpses from sectarian

killings. One man, a shoe repairman,

digs up an artefact, solid gold,

of a cow, so sells it

for a silver
BMW
. Every day soldiers come

to have their pictures

taken from the top

of the bullet-notched ziggurat, each click

an exhibit of the
I was here
, desert cam

lost in silhouette against the level,

ochre panorama of sand.

(
Albrecht Dürer’s
Rhinoceros
briefly addresses the tiger shark
from Damien Hirst’s
The Physical Impossibility of Death in
the Mind of Someone Living)

I’ve been trying to get you

out of my mind, a rival to the crown

as art’s most iconic

image of an animal.

With a half-millennium

head start, I’ve preened on countless

woodcut prints, a cathedral door in Pisa,

a Medici emblem,

and still am featured on tourist T-shirts,

my splayed, unlikely toes

outside the British Museum.

It’s the same way

you’ve got presence, kid,

loitering in that cabinet,

injected with 5 percent formaldehyde,

your serrated grin

trademark to an appetite so wide

you’re nicknamed
trash can

of the ocean
for gulping tires,

oil-drum lids and licence plates.

Hirst raised such a royal fuss.

Outrage hooked the media as neat

as the gaff that hooked you

off Australia, cultural status landed

by all that commission money.

Dürer never saw a real rhino;

I’m his vision of one they lost

en route to Rome

as a showpiece in the pope’s menagerie.

A storm sucked the ship down,

the trapped beast

shackled to the deck.

The artist played the facts a little

fast and loose, sketched my hide

in absentia
with scales and plates,

mounted a stunted horn

on my riveted nape

like a hairy twist of ice cream.

Hardly accurate, but it shocked the crowd,

half the battle in making a name.

I guess raw profit’s why

the master from Nuremburg

wrought a woodcut,

not a painting, guessing sales

from copies wouldn’t be outcharted

until the advent of Farrah

Fawcett. And to compensate

for investors’ losses

when the carcass washed up

against the Ligurian coast,

they put it on display

‘stuffed with straw.’

I thought I’d see you at one

of the shows this summer. If so,

talk might have gone in a million

directions, and been awkward, as we’d likely

keep it small, complaining of the lineups

at the beer tent, then finding

a break in the crowd to slip away.

Talk was never our problem;

all those late-night think-tanks

after closing the bar, cooking up

subtleties on invented games,

rules to ‘Quick Drinks’

or ‘Etch-a-Sketch Portraits.’

Though most talk was art – what might

be good and where to find it –

while we watched the floor dry,

squashed in the booth

with the lights turned low.

I know you,

so was less and less surprised

when you sidestepped

issues people tried to raise,

and worse, twisted them

into betrayal by your stubborn,

bottled-up imagination. They

were trying to show they cared

even while you bulldozed into rooms,

grim as a defeated army.

Meanwhile, work is work,

late home, five hours sleep,

coffee, then a nap. You’ve missed

a birth or two, the filled and emptied diapers

of friends’ burping offspring,

and I’ve moved, so if you ever

picture me, I don’t know where.

Mostly, when I think of you, I see

you angry and mistaken.

Almost daily, I bike past

your old studio

and the re-rented house,

rooms where our unsuspecting ghosts

still drink and smoke, contra Yeats,

imperfect on every count.

Home-grown for extra income,

they’re warmed in the watts

of a standard light bulb

till the egg forms a worm,
small

like a hair
. Each one feasts

on mulberry, a month-long course

of shiny leaves, chubbing themselves

into a pale, lazy wiggle.

They wish to be a kimono cloud,

ball of fog, white

shrouds spun for their own ghosts

as they nod off to a creaking dream

of legs and wings. They wish

they were metaphor.

To let them stretch would tear

sleek work, so each cocoon

is dropped in a rolling boil, their

lives pinched out like fingers

on a match head.

The strands are reeled on a row

of spools,

and the cocoons jig and iridesce

until the corpse is undressed.

Sixtyish, wrinkled, Ling Quang's hard look

lifts from the gravel where we've stopped,

the Honda's kickstand staked

to the road's thin shoulder,

our helmets laid like eggs on the leather seat.

He points at the place

near the silk factory where

the craters are almost overgrown,

green tangles scanned

through his knock-off Ray-Bans.

On the bike, I forget to lean

through curves, tires

eating the steep grade back to town,

past the bridge again

where a man stands fishing,

nylon net like a smudge of mist

that skims his catch from the creek,

their fins struggling in the killing air.

In the tangled field, our boots catch.

Barns wedged in thick weeds

are beached container ships

wrought in rusted brick, dust, rot whiff

of hay bales. A black stork

rigs straw on a transmission post

that sags with dead wire.

A wolf curls on a park bench,

sneers through cleft lips.

There’s a trace of skew

in the oak leaves’ lost symmetry.

The pond is hummingbird green.

The car’s waved through; a triangle

signs the split where we yield

to nothing but silence. On the bridge,

corroded guardrails

fence the phantom view

of burning graphite.

Eleven flagpoles spoke

the drive at the only hotel.

The air rings, metal

lashed by slack chains.

Pine and spruce glut the playground,

split the ball court, sprout roots

in lobbies and rooftop gravel.

School floorboards

warp and rake. The pool

fills with ceiling tiles

and flaking paint.

There are many of us here. A whole street.

They went off just as they were, in their shirt sleeves.

Around it, burdock, stinging-nettle, and goose-foot.

I’m not supposed to be talking about this.

Everywhere we used shovels.

Get rid of the topsoil to the depth of one spade.

Changing our masks up to thirty times a shift.

I would see roes and wild boars. They were thin and sleepy,

like they were moving in slow motion.

Something glistened.

It came off in layers – as white film … the colour of his face.

There it was – and there it wasn’t.

Safer than samovars.

What we saw.

The wind blows the dust from one field to the next.

Dresses, boots, chairs, harmonicas, sewing machines. We buried it

in ditches. Houses and trees, we buried everything.

There lie thousands of dogs, cats, horses, that were shot. And not

a single name. What remains of ancient Greece?

The myths of ancient Greece.

On the one hand, it’s disgusting, and on the other hand – why don’t you

all go fuck yourselves?

We heard that something had happened somewhere.

So you can picture it: a lead vest, masks, the wheelbarrows

and insane speed.

The ants are crawling along the tree branch.

‘In several generations’

‘Forever’

‘Nothing’

They brought me the urn. I felt around with my hand,

and there was something tiny, like seashells in the sand,

those were his hip bones.

Everyone became what he really was.

‘Walking ashes.’

When I got here, the birds were in their nests, and when I left

the apples were lying in the snow.

That was the worst. All around, it was just beautiful.

I would never see such people again. Everyone’s faces

just looked crazy. Their faces did, and so did ours.

We buried the forest.

We buried the earth.

We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces

and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves.

They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it.

You can imagine how much philosophy there was.

I felt like I was recording the future.

We’re its victims, but also its priests.

When I die, sell the car and the spare tire, and don’t marry Tolik.

You should come into this world on your tiptoes, and stop at the entrance.

This person will be happy just to find one human footprint.

There’s a fecund smell,

grenadine sweet,

remnants of mutant hemlock,

chestnut and wildflowers,

or it could be

cotton candy.

The Fun Fair rusts.

Stark as a double helix

of
DNA
, unused scaffolds

of the Tilt-A-Whirl

lean and shriek

in the refrigerated calm.

I don’t know what I should talk about –

A ruined building, a field of debris;

I’ll remember everything for you.