X-ray Pastoral, and: Portrayal, X-ray

163 CORI A. WINROCK X-RAY PASTORAL Sent for everything capsuled in a blankness. A leeching of—. My hands cupping nothing and utterly unasked for. It is whiting-out here, a hospitaled sky. The prairie grass lapsed into the almost-opaque state of scotch tape (the flimse & gauze of lingerie held up against the light). A shortwave, a landscape draped to leaden. From out here I listen (a nurse) to the induced paperwhites burst like heartbeats on chilled countertops. Nothing swaddles, swathes, or fogs. The marrow undarking around this small field of our marriage. Look how the bleached horizons lay down like cirrusboneclouds across the lake. Look how the dendritic branches exact themselves into a mirror, haul up their roots to suck on the sky. Love, let us be rid of the abrasion of vividness. The bright bulk of dandelions, mums, the clot of forget-me-nots. Let us perform an aftermath in blue—everything stopbathed at the almost-see-through. When they trace our negatives under florescent lamps, they won’t see the perfect white corners of our house like surgery sheets—coruscant, tucked-in tight. My wedding dress crushed into the cedar chest. The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor. Sylvia Plath, “Little Fugue” 164 CORI A. WINROCK PORTRAYAL, X-RAY We snag cabs and drift through the middle of the night. The city a cathedral we are ushered into, press our ears against— listen for the sea sliding inside its shell: the hushed shuffle of feet across a pearling asphalt nave, elapsed traffic, or blank radio frequencies. The windows seal us in with the damp heat of our breathing. Outside the lakes lace themselves with ice. In this particular depiction we play at staying mum, at detecting the pre-blush blush, at transforming the stray flock of ambulance lights burst live into a charm of hummingbirds . If it’s romantic to architect a thing back into its bones—: imagine us in ruins from the start. ...