from Other Cartesian Meditations, and: from Arts for Things Real and Imagined

from OTHER CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS/ Jennifer Anna Gosetti I. The Glass World I am made of glass. My hands are scratched beyond clarity, yet not opaque; our bent heads are glass cherries ripened to many conclusions. The butler brings glasses (on a glass plate) for reading glass books—words sufficiently transparent to disappear should one linger over them too long: J am bewildered. They (unnamed) sing glass notes, in voices indistinguishable from water dripping into pools, while I, decked in glass ribbons, dance glassily along the ice extending from everywhere to here, a mirror for the glass firmament we call sky (dots of glass on fire). Our ocean is a frozen foam—those fish-colored bits of glass washed up on sand; then on our plates. The Missouri Review · 33 III. Empty Labyrinth Third day, and I have not yet let go. The waxy copper world outside my window has turned green, the ceiling a geometry of dragons, swords, snails. The sky's blue is about to curl in at the edges, against my senses (as if to hurt me). I cannot say I am unaffected, or leave it as it is, this tightening solicitation I still love. I can think nothing only in rooms of nothing— a dragon entering and slain, snails crawling over it. But why measure the angles of this vastness! Does it not beckon us one by one, embrace us if we just once let it? The sheets are so disheveled, and the tea is cold (its little steam has long since left off rising). If I give in, will you come after me? Call my name? Notice I am gone? 34 · The Missouri Review Jennifer Anna Gosetti IV. An Errant Season Winter: a narrow aisle I've just slipped into, my neck a stem bitten by frost, someone's pale figure only a shade on the bell-tower. Could I have been so wrong about the world? From this angle, clouds are sheep grazing untended on a hill for ages. Absurd to ask if you are there among the rocks, at the stream's edge, tossed aside (as if I didn't need you), ground down in the silence those passing animals feed on. Look: a house below. A lamp lit on the porch. That wick burning in a last inch of oil— I dread asking who will replenish it when we've run out. Must I call it loss? What is this errancy, this vast drizzling surface that beguiles me? As soon as winter withdraws, I'll call it rain. Jennifer Anna Gosetti The Missouri Review · 35 V. A Look into the Teacup I am about to disappear altogether, recede into these four walls. I've given up on God, though I still believe in the onion pattern clinging to cups and saucers on these shelves, splattering blue as if a hurt flower had left stains on surfaces it crawled along. To these (the cups and saucers): Why ask me to think of childhood? Of a book carried in the pocket all day, pulled apart. There you are sitting on the steps, hands clasped. There you are drinking tea from one such cup. Someone who loves you is just inside that door. The sun shines! You're squinting. What are you looking at? Why are you crying? Your mother calls but you can't open that door. The book has fallen. Stay here for a moment, just like this. 36 · The Missouri Review Jennifer Anna Gosetti from ARTS FOR THINGS REAL AND IMAGINED//enni/èr Anna Gosetti II. A Girl's Dress, or the Art ofReflection Here at the edge of the stream, a girl's dress is noticed. The child has run off, but the dress, starched and stitched up, is a tiny edifice with pink pockets holding down the world. The dress is what I see, walking along the stream, tossing a stick, and looking for someone who's run off— for the girl I no longer am. I hold the dress to my eye, and catch the red letters embroidered along its seams—sentences I can discern if I strain to hold the folds apart with my fingers. I cannot tell where...