Amy Bagan
Mary McCarthy’s Letter Home to Her Third Estranged Husband
Dear Center of My Inattention,
Shredded as a lightning victim’s clothing, my map
signals only where I’m to be lost. Anyway,
a map’s a thief, looting all it sees. I regret
the welcome my purse extended it, mistaking
its intarsiaed panels for a refinement of mind.
As for the 52 oils of Signor
Jacopo Tintoretto, I’ll find those myself–
as this letter is sure to compass you, unless
you are lost to me forever, and if not, were
you lost at all? Dusk silts like the char castled
in this ashtray my waiter is too cowed by my loneliness
to empty. Soon the wrecked sun will coagulate
like the folds of a papal cloak and across the terrain
of Venice’s large, moist pores I’ll set out for home.
There, last night, the wall’s wounds sprung leaks, a carmine fluid
pulsed beneath my pillow. Tintoretto to my ear:
Come, cara, all air is predatory. Water
will hold you, dancing on your skin like fronds.
My landlady said I was imagining things,
nightmares from a pasta not al dente.
Or did she say past?
By day, I’m in the shops fingering tea-toned
camel’s hair fresh from the bolt. I mouth compunction
on hearing the indelicate refrain Don’t Touch,
Signora, as if I won’t learn to hold with my eyes.
But fingers teach you that. Dearest, I doubt you could
recall my skin without sensing its temperature
(which twice you compared to a pink calfskin glove).
Into the hollows where the sun candies
drizzled satin, I soak my palms. I brush velvet
against its nap, ride the chop of brocade. Still,
my lira notes remain pinned to my underslip.
I prefer to be wooed lightly laden:
a roseate-ferruled neck or wrist perhaps, a tendril
of scent straying from its fleshpot. This is how
we draw truth close, before stripping down to revelation.
With swatches from his father’s dye shop, and paper
the lagoon had swollen, the Tintoret built
doll houses at whose windows, the size of ravioli,
he perched rain and lightning machines like crickets
to rustle up counterfeit cyclones. Then, all action
occurred on the bias. Marble columns teetered,
crockery coasted unharmed into straw, diagonals
surged. The heavenly forces appeared. Let’s tryst:
I’ll go to my isthmus-fingered Tintor
and expect you to show yourself on a sunbeam,
a jagged bolt, or whatever is there that’s aslant.
Palladio at San Giorgio in Isola
O world of order, ask more of me. Drain me through
your sieve of sense. Logic brings me far toward passion,
easing me nearer the shapes emptiness makes.
The future, I fear, has me in its crosshairs. I’m
an easy mark, a man alone, too anemic
to anchor this low, pestilential island. Either
I give chase or conceive my church as a fortress
of playing cards to guard me, the sorry coin
in a shell game hunted by shills and dupes alike.
And thus it will never escape comparison
to a postcard tilted in water melt, a thing
that’s really somewhere else, intended to lend
distance privacy, but succeeding only in
making it small, like those prayers etched on grains of rice.
Sent by me, signed Pallas for I’ve earned it,
who was once a boy. My father was a phantom
triangle, my sisters logs of clay, now mature,
engaged columns, Doric. Like that of all mothers,
Mamma’s rotundity was stifling yet remote.
Ours was a town of blue clockfaces, celestial
discs where the eye of the tower’s needle would have
been, rendering time clean and scissile. If only
sadness didn’t require so much space. I address
this sketch to the mudbanked crabs of 1993,
when a branch of lightning will claw its way out of
the sky to lance a copper angel a cleric
gave to grace the bell tower that is now but ink
on paper. The friars will have helped to hoist her,
full of half-fugitive emotion arisen
from a day’s leave from the apiary, their sphere
of existence limited to the natural
and unnatural worlds. It’s said when lightning
charges a belfry, it’s a sign the heavens are
envious. But what of fire? Close to here sleeps
my oval flight of stairs not yet bitten
by the flames it will survive in 1823.
I laid that empty space like an egg, my only
offspring. I’d rather shelter loss than anything
else. It’s recall’s only chance.
Two hundred years from now, Lord Burlington will
siphon his fortune to collect my drawings, this
very sheet to command the highest price, which sum
will purchase a cure for a daughter’s eclipsing
sight. I sense her well, for she clings to the very
things I muscle away, reading them as messages:
dice, ingots, a hostelry of cubes. In the sun-
sleeved days of summer, she comes to the sacristy,
banks of mahogany drawers I’ve recessed and recessed
again. Her steps awaken the order, a monk
is chivvied from his cot and fetches her the keys.
She slides out each drawer, releasing the chill exhaust
I’ve stored for her. Cold is rectilinear. Cribbed
within each lies a wax head with eyes of glass
representing the friary of 1710:
Brother Prospero, Brother Septimus, Brother
Inigo. As if seeking the ripe among
a bowl of rotting pears, she handles the doughy and
impenetrable surfaces, trading her fingers’
heat with what texture will yield of depth.
Sacred conversation. Ours is a future
full of sun and cats and the hole to pour them through.
The Deviant Mind
Hands again. It seems ages they’ve been drawn
to me. A Ravenna postcard slips from a drawer.
This one, defenestrated at the wrist, lone,
unfazed as a Byzantine face, descends from loaves
of clouds whose mosaic crusts split
apart like chapped skin. Articulate,
these maker’s hands:
wise to the vegetation of the Holy Land,
he’s palmed off God’s palm in favor of fronds
below, each lime chink set like a sound.
Here, in Venice, the papers say that several hands of stone
continue to go missing, shorn from life-sized figures around town,
mostly drowsy saints parked in niches since
the 1600s. Complaints to the police
of chiselling sounds at 3:00 a.m. net
no clues, nor have any hands surfaced on the art market.
The investigation narrows
to a single suspect. O fellow
fugitive, so weary are we of being tasked to bear
water’s double weight, the full pail and the sky dwelling there,
we plunge too deep in search of order
and rend its mantle with our ardor.