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Overview
"Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." —Laura Kasischke
For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way, it was yielding,
but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom yields, its softness allied
with its poison, and your legs were not petals or tendrils as I'd believed,
but brazen, the deviant tentacles beneath the underskirt of a secret queen
—from "Oh four-legged girl, it's either you or the ossuary"
In Diane Seuss's Four-Legged Girl, her audacious, hothouse language swerves into pain and rapture, as she recounts a life lived at the edges of containment. Ghostly, sexy, and plaintive, these poems skip to the tune of a jump rope, fill a wishing well with desire and other trinkets, and they remember past lush lives in New York City, in rural Michigan, and in love. In the final poem, she sings of the four-legged girl, the body made strange to itself and to others. This collection establishes Seuss's poetic voice, as rich and emotional as any in contemporary poetry.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555979119 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 88 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Four-Legged Girl
Poems
By Diane Seuss
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2015 Diane SeussAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-911-9
CHAPTER 1
Jump rope song
Beautiful blankness, I saw you once
in a bucket of glue, on the flank of a horse with glass
eyes,
in a gown and the girl's ankles were shaking,
in Dream Whip, in hawk shit, in comfrey, cress,
campion, potato vine, pokeweed, lopseed, the dodder,
the clover and the honeysuckle flower, white as
boiled bone.
White as boiled bone until it yellows,
like the poof of hair on nursing-home women, Bunco
dice,
scrimshaw of the HMS Agamemnon on a sperm-whale
tooth,
hind quarters of a white-tailed deer, hind end
of a hare, of a Welsh cow who's born like milk and
dies like butter.
Born like milk and dies like butter, like batter after
you add the eggs,
those orbs with a beating heart inside, yellow foam
on the lake by the bowling alley, blank pins gone gold,
and the trophy mother won, and her rayon sweater
soaked in beer.
Her rayon sweater soaked in beer, her ivory hand
mirror
turning toward amber, glass of the hurricane lamp and
the monocle,
the paper holding the poem about the monocle, even
the floor, gold.
Even the floorboards. Rag rug. Lamb nightlight.
Waning
moonlight on hospital sheets on the line, and the
christening gown
brushed with pollen, cut into costumes for canaries.
Costumes for canaries, for lovebirds, aprons for dolls,
all
lined up under the mock orange tree, and where is the
girl serving
buttermilk in thimbles, is the girl in the blossomhouse
gone?
As a child I ate and mourned
Now I will not eat. I will not mourn.
Bowls of glistening peaches.
Bowls of them, I tell you.
Golden, with a menstrual stain where the pit was
pulled away.
On one of my daily strolls into the next-door cemetery
I encountered the hog snake, which even then was put
on earth
to represent the antithesis of the working stiff.
The funeral director set a house trailer
on the cemetery edge to serve as a chapel
for grievers. It was cold in there, even in summer,
the paneling warped.
A cheap box of tissues on the card table.
I slid one out and balled it up, stuck it in my mouth.
Those were paper-eating days.
The gravedigger, his shovel carried over his shoulder
like a musket.
I was pure of soul. I was.
Chosen to play the angel in every drama about God.
I had things in the right order:
i.e. the body is but a playhouse for the soul, all that.
It seems, back then, there was a mythic teapot
A napkin holder shaped like a garden gate with
painted
trumpet vines. The old couple whose goodness was
unassailable.
They slapped their knees when they laughed at our
antics,
which were really not that funny. Chewing graham
crackers
into the shapes of guns. The old couple, Mr. and Mrs.
Riddle.
Their drab mouths, their teeth in a jar, their dishes
and glassware
the color of the amber that traps mosquitos. Their
house edged
in yellow gladiolas I called flower pokers. My father's
tumors
bloomed like thought balloons in cartoons but inside
them was
only a sigh. My mother set her hair on fire leaning
over a lit
cake and it seems her hair was on fire for many days.
Or was that
the lady with the red bouffant whose big thighs shook
when she
walked up the sidewalk toward the place called
Beauty, where she
got her hair piled and pinned. The mice in our house
were tame,
willingly incorporating themselves into our games. Tail
hanging out
of the dollhouse window. A wasp hid in my
underpants and stung
my biscuit. My mother called it my biscuit. My father
said that's
the way of wasps or he thought it and I read it in the
big white
moonflower that hung above him, attached by a green
umbilical
cord. He'd walk to work every day, thin suit,
boot-polish hair.
Hope was a vinegar-colored halo that formed around
our heads.
It came and went, like fighting and fireflies. From the
schoolyard
I could see my mother holding a basket of wet laundry
with clothespins in her mouth. It was strange to watch
my own
dresses and blouses swaying on the line. As if I'd been
skinned alive.
The potato sack filled with toys was beautiful
though the toys were evil. A wooden, jointed snake.
Not a cowboy gun but a black revolver. A jack-in-the-box
that played a warped Chopin nocturne, and you don't
want to know who leaped out of the box. There were
features to be pressed into a potato to make a face
but the essential ones were missing. What was left?
A pipe. A monocle. A pair of juicy female lips. No
wonder
the old woman kept the sack in the attic where the
flying
squirrels hung from the rafters. But when I visited,
which was often, she'd creep down the narrow
stairway —
all the woodwork in the house was a slick, lacquered
walnut — and deliver the sack into my open arms.
Out of those few objects I built my dubious lexicon.
There was a hand mirror, and a naked baby doll.
And a pink-nippled bottle for the child filled with
what
had long ago been a milky liquid but was now the
color
of absinthe, once known as "la fée verte," the Green
Fairy.
People, the ghosts down in North-of-the-South aren't see-through
They don't wear nightgowns or whisper or sing
or want hazy things from the ones of us who are
living.
They have skin, bones, people. They're short in stature
and they don't walk through walls. They come in our
houses
by kicking down doors, wearing porkpie hats and
smoking
those My Father cigars. Yellow sweat stains
on their sleeveless undershirts, my people. I'm sure
there are other kinds of ghosts other places,
sad angels wearing bloomers and fanning their wings,
but here their faces are made of gristle and their eyes
are red from too much Thunderbird. They want to
steal
our valuables, mess shit up, drop a match and burn
down the house. I don't know any other way to say it,
people. They walk right into our kitchens without
being invited,
tracking mud, lifting the fish by the tail out of the
fryer
and stuffing it in a cloth sack the color of a potato
just pulled out of the ground, and if there was a potato
pulled fresh out of the ground they'd take that too.
Their pee sizzles when it hits the floor. They don't
hear
prayers or heed four-leaf clovers. We have to give
our bodies to the task. I mean we push back, people.
Harder than day labor. Harder than shoving a bull
out of the cow paddock. Two bulls. We have to say
leave my goddamned house. Go, motherfucker.
My fucking house. Shouting while pushing, like breach
birth,
or twins. They slap on that corpse-smelling aftershave
and come calling, holding a bouquet of weeds. They
want
our whiskey, our gravy, our honey, our combs, our
bees.
An occasion is a rare occasion
Rare as a bloodbath in a barn. In our county,
not one bloodbath in a barn, but a redbird
in a birdbath is ho-hum. A field is ho-hum.
A horizon is just a girl yawning at the edge
of a field holding a long, curved stick.
She remembers reading ho-hum in a book
and it was odd to her though not odd
enough to be an occasion. Rhubarb leaves
curling up out of the dirt in the spring
are not an occasion. Things that happen
on their own without help are ho-hum
like popping out a baby but a baby shower
is an occasion, a small occasion but it counts.
There are cupcakes to be frosted blue
and balloons to blow up with the breath
of our own bodies though now
there are helium tanks. Have you sucked in
enough? Did your voice sound high
and strange? That is a miniature occasion,
but then your voice goes back to its usual
ragged self so in the end sucking helium
is a temporary occasion. All occasions
are temporary in our county. A silo in a field
is ho-hum but if it burns it is a temporary
occasion. So many things burn that fires
are in danger of becoming ho-hum.
Only the strange fires count.
The supermarket fire with its exploding
jars of pickles, the outdoor movie-screen fire.
The firehouse fire. In our county
clouds are bags heavy with empties
gathered from parking lots of strip malls
and shut-down pattern factories.
Soon there will be enough to cash in.
Soon the sky will rain quarters.
Enough for bread and bologna
and squares of American cheese
and cereal shaped like stars. The milk
in the bowl will go pink with the pinkness
of the stars. That will be an occasion.
Hub
I. My first rainshade was sun-blasted,
with room enough for boys. Then came one covered in
umber-colored horses,
which galloped, when I had the wherewithal to spin
the crook handle, like figures
in a zoetrope. The kids on 17th St. called themselves
the Dismantlers, stripping
away the canopy from the ribs and stretchers and
hollowing out the wooden
shafts, filling them with gumballs and wild onions. My
father was cynical
about the whole enterprise. He'd walk in the rain like
his tumors were made
of sugar. It's not like my mother donated her skirts
and dresses after he died.
They just disappeared, absorbed into the wall at the
back of her closet.
She rescinded anything shelter-shaped, including the
parasol flowers. The wind
was our theatre, dramatically turning all bells
inside-out: school bell, church bell,
dinner bell. We became known as the town whose
clappers were stolen by a series
of gusts from the west. The only thing that tolled was
the toll road. When Wanda
gave up taxidermy and became a Jehovah's Witness,
some of us absconded with her
impressive collection of stuffed predatory birds, wings
extended in mid-flight.
I impaled mine, a barn owl with blue glass eyes, on a
long copper tube I found
at the shut-down pattern factory. I brandished my owl
like a papal umbraculum
whose purpose had nothing to do with weather, not
shade but shadow. A mayoral
candidate ran on a platform of installing a velarium
over the town, a sort of awning,
the corners tied to city limit signs, like the retractable
one at the Roman Coliseum.
He was defeated in a landslide. The minister's final
sermon had a catchy title:
There Is No Protection. Not Really. Even my mother
nodded at that one,
the smoke from her Viceroy entangled in her
unwrangled curls.
II. Was there ever a time that I bothered to stay dry?
In my previous incarnation
I didn't mind the flagellum
made of peacock feathers,
held over my head during
cavalcades. You see, I had
yet to be humbled. In New
York, buoyed by the blowsy
vapors of young love,
I carried a lacquered paper one
on a balsa handle, spring
green painted
with white violets, but only
to cut a romantic figure,
a small-breasted lusted-after
girl flouncing off
to the secretarial pool.
Wetness was a way of life,
upping the saturation
of my little white blouses
and beading my eyelashes
with prisms. Translucency
served my purposes,
which were transparent
as glass shoes. "Who's
the queen now?" He said it
in a lilting manner, the man
wearing bright yellow rain gear.
I hate foreshadowing.
III. The umbrella was the hub,
and the hub of the umbrella was the pole around which the cleats and skeleton ribs spun. From the hub arose many begettings. The peony was begotten, the woody stem echoing the umbrella pole, topped by the beguiling trivialities of petals, and the peony begat the Heartland Peony Society, which begat culture. Culture begat the faux peony, the petals sometimes made of silk, the stem, a hub of cold wire wrapped in green tape, which begat capitalism, which in turn begat tilt-o-whirls, tennis skirts and fireworks, all things that spin and flare for no reason other than the fact that spinning and flaring greases the machine, which begat the idea for a solar system — bodies circling the hubs of other bodies — which begat weather, and Christmas, which begat shopping, and denial — thus, our decision to believe that the ants crawling over the unbloomed heads of peonies were somehow rehabilitative. The lie begat love begat sex begat rabbits that lurked beneath the protective leaves of wild mandrake during rainstorms which begat the maypole, a hub with ribbons, and girls. Ma and Pa called things by their real names. Peony, they said, the word that begat us. We begat the euphemism. God, we said, looking at the umbrella impaled dead center in the lamb barn.
IV. What was intriguing was not what the man took with him;
it was the stuff he left behind.
He took the butterflies
but left the moths. He took
Krishna but left Shiva.
He left the cumbersome
fishing boat and sinkers
and musky lures but took
the poles and spinner reels.
He left the kid but took the toys.
The man rented a storage locker
and filled it with everything
he'd brought with him
from the old life, but after two
months he stopped remembering
to pay the rental fee. Everything
was confiscated and put up
for auction, the bleach bottle
filled with marbles, the Sorry
game, the thousand-piece puzzle
of the Parthenon, the big statue
of the thundercloud-colored
god of love. He left behind,
in the corner of the house's
entryway, a long black umbrella
with a carved lion's head handle,
but took with him the invaluable
praxinoscope, its circle of mirrors
and whirling cylinder
of hand-painted pictures
of a woman walking in the rain.
Spirea's covered in those clotted blooms
as a newborn's coated by vernix. Irises rise up on
meaty stems,
buds still wrapped in something like rolling papers,
purple pressing through, the color of entrails.
You see, I've noticed. See, I've seen. I have more eyes
than a potato
bug has legs. More fears than eyes, or tears.
At night I walk beneath the apple tree, the plum, the
weeping cherry.
Their cloak of blossoms is a heavy load,
as is a head of waist-length hair and the wedding
dress of that princess,
so slight in flesh but draped in velvet hyacinths, and
pearls like sinkers,
and rhinestones like salt tears frozen in the maiden's
eyes
in "The Wreck of the Hesperus." I loved that girl,
lashed to the mast of her father's ship,
her hair rising and falling like seaweed on the billows.
I wanted beauty like that, beauty that turned my
dying eyes to cold, heavy jewels,
and love like that, so stupid and blind it would
preserve me by killing me.
But now. Here, mid-May, past prime,
the tulips brown and splay like washed-up things,
and the glory girls have stepped out of their gowns,
set down their racks,
unlatched their trains. Beauty was a burden after all,
wasn't it?
And love. I remember it like some wet, leggy foal
I had to hold in my arms for nights on end to keep it
warm.
Love was an unmothered thing, for the mother of love
was heartless.
I held on, as branches hold shivering sparrows in their
arms,
and a hundred little hollow nests like crowns of
thorns.
Maybe the fishmonger, who hands over the dead
so tenderly or maybe the one rolling sushi wearing
a hairnet and a half-smile or maybe no one, for I have
held
hands with a stone, I have held hands with an
orphaned
poplar tree whose leaves chattered like the milk teeth
of a kid
left for dead in a woven basket. I have held the
freckled,
sun-burnished face of the lily and stroked her with my
palm,
my fingerprints overwhelmed by her rusty pollen.
Maybe
her, maybe the aproned fishmonger, who has held
hands
with a boning knife and brushed away crushed ice
from the cloudy eye and rid the pinkish flesh of pin
bones,
or no one, for when I was a girl I held my father's cold
hand and he wore something like an apron, a cotton
gown
fastened with bows at the back, a gown covered in
blue
stars, and his black eyelashes splayed out like the
open arms
of starfish, and oh he was sad, there was salt in his
cloudy
eye, and something swam up into my throat and
spawned
and flapped its great tail, so perhaps I'm adrift in a
skiff
spiraling the hub of that tender sea, or maybe
the fishmonger, maybe the mute cashier, or no one,
or never, or the ancient bagger tattooed with an
anchor.
White violet, not so much an image
of tenderness as an image of a memory of tenderness.
I am ashamed
to look at it this closely but can't stop fingering
its five sticky petals, nebulous as water on the brink
of becoming steam. Thin as a soul lingering for three
days
threatening to reignite into flesh, or a ghost
climbing the body's bone ladder in order to abdicate
the body's terms.
This flower might as well be a girl named Violet,
with dew on her upper lip,
who elopes through her bedroom window, leaving only
her thin, yellow-white chemise behind. Its petals are that
fragile.
They lack commitment to the material world, their molecules
ascending,
any minute now, evaporative, like a pretty infant
bound
and determined to fly back into the hands of
nothingness,
or a shepherd dispassionate about the lambs, always
looking off
into the lavender beyond.
The only way to know tenderness is to dismantle it.
That's the essential problem, how we must get out the
jeweler's loupe
and start dissecting, prying open the mauve sac
at the base of the flower
like a fox in the henhouse, looking for green ovaries
spilling over with eggs,
or Hawthorne's Aylmer, prying away at
Georgiana's birthmark.
I bring the torn flower to my mouth to confirm
the myth of its honey, only to find it tastes gamey,
green, like a hand
that's held too long to copper coins. This close, its scent is not
sweet
but sour — I crush it to awaken its perfumes —
acidic, unripe,
puerile, stinging, tined.
I remember a poet reading translations of Paul
Valéry when I was
young. I wore a white, gauzy dress with laces at the bodice,
and the poet stood in a pool of heroic white-gold
light
with his shirt half-unbuttoned, his silver hair curling over
his ears.
"Perfume is what the flowers throw away," he
read, quoting Valéry.
Later he tried to pry me open, but I ran home barefoot through
the rain
under a foggy membrane of moon — that ventricular
patch
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Four-Legged Girl by Diane Seuss. Copyright © 2015 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.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
i. blossomhouse,Jump rope song,
As a child I ate and mourned,
It seems, back then, there was a mythic teapot,
The potato sack filled with toys was beautiful,
People, the ghosts down in North-of-the-South aren't see-through,
An occasion is a rare occasion,
Hub,
Spirea's covered in those clotted blooms,
Maybe the fishmonger, who hands over the dead,
White violet, not so much an image,
ii. blowtorch the hinges,
I once fought the idea of the body as artifact,,
Long, long ago I used to smoke in bed,
I can't stop thinking of that New York skirt, turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton,
It wasn't a dream, I knew William Burroughs,
Warhol's Shadows,
I went downtown and went down,
My pants are disintegrating. Yes,,
Do you remember that spring? The breeze smelled like cake mix,
Either everything is sexual, or nothing is. Take this flock of poppies,,
iii. lush,
I can't listen to music, especially "Lush Life,",
iv. free beer,
Free beer,
I emptied my little wishing well of its emptiness,
We fear the undulant,,
I snapped it over my knee like kindling,
It wasn't love, but love's template,
Laundromat hit by tornado,
Jesus, with his cup,
Toad,
v. a period's period,
Oh, I'm a stone,
It's like this,
A poet came to town,
I'm full of sadness,
I'm moved by her, that big-nippled girl,
Beauty is over,
Is there still a Betty in this new life?,
Oh four-legged girl, it's either you or the ossuary,