DEUS EX MACHINA / Louise
Seated in the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatique, Louise watches actors on a starry stage.
A mapmaker’s sister turn constellation’s wife
How distance drapes through nowhere reach
I lament the bodiless lure
God shut the doorways of his head/ The days have vanish’d tone and tint ¹
He wouldn’t bother when he’s out with Circinus...Pictor
What’s real need be left, as when I thought I married a painter
Workers on the roof catch falling stars in pails.
Who with light pencil once made finer points
‘May some dim touch of earthly things / Surprise thee ranging with they peers’ ¹
In morning he’ll sit for his portrait as a weathered tin cup
¹ Tennyson, “In Memoriam A H H”
DEUS EX MACHINA / Louise
Seated in front of a vanity mirror, Louise holds a pair of scissors. She appears to cut images from a magazine or portrait album.
Table-to-chair doldrums or the preponderance of a dream?
A his-to-her stalemate or want for cut above?
Regardless ties were severed—his shoulders left a fantasy precipice
Not to waste a bit of silver, ground a hill of cheek—firmament
an examination table—
Frontier where she may set things. Utensils out and water in to wrought the panes
Albums dimmed with pathos, connections wry but could be soft
Hedge boots on a duckling—complexions cutting holes in her reflections
Sheared with mechanical wing, the future edges—butterfly
to couch—
Boat to bedraggled mouse—his face perched on the handle of a spoon
DEUS EX MACHINA / Gertrude
Gertrude, her face taut with anguish, moves her patinated robe aside and opens her hands to speak.
Chorus: There was a child who died
A maiden in prayer in shadow
Framed by open shutters like eye whites power a gaze
Would there be a take-over? Barrenness or loss?
Asked without the gentle lap liquid promises
Until an undulating landscape made out to be sea shapes her face—
The profile turns toward the flowing out and in
Chorus: Toward what the body prizes most
Rain takes the window in silver sheets down through darkening earth
Origin drunk on the levity of reflection
When there is no one
Chorus: —Nothing
to take the quicksilver gaze.
After Gertrude Kasäbier’s “Silhouette of a Woman” (1899) and “The Heritage of Motherhood” (1904)
DEUS EX MACHINA / Gertrude
Gertrude opens her hands to speak.
At last in autumn, an instant of depressed silence, as if someone capped
the fire
Her bowl over that blaring light for a world beset without him
Chorus: A child who died
Because earlier in Spring was late in his childhood, consumed with all things
metal, smelling foundry-like, he built his bravery armor-clad
Her spade cut the garden trench and mound to shadow
But something peeled away like a storm hoards what’s light and loose
Like when she feels an opening, a chance he might be with her
Gertrude, her face taut with anguish, moves her patinated robe aside.
Chorus: A child who died
Years later she finds him
A twisted junkyard remnant, the earth grabbing first by spine to swallow him.
DEUS EX MACHINA / Amy
Amy stands before a screen projecting a procession of black and white flowers: chrysanthemum, violet, black hollyhock, rose, lily, black hollyhock, hortensia, carnation, black hollyhock
As the flower procession repeats, she speaks:
What tarnished by holing the platinum plot?
Cabbage or gill of deep entity
Dark weather dream how my legs wouldn’t move, gummed to a bulwark
of pavement
...daffodil, daisy, black hollyhock
If this veil of wine is hopeful design
To live but to not be a part
Aperture chaos, marooned dopamine shallows, hung in pale vegetable stock
...larkspur, pansy, black hollyhock
Dim marrow soon manifests
Angel dust left on a party dress
Cut from from night’s river from last wilderness—
The projection locks on black hollyhock.
—a blossom that punctures that blots.