Tongue Lyre

Rose

58 Rose Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick —William Blake What is it about truth, images of truth? The American committee for the 1889 Paris Exhibition rejected The Last of the Buffalo, Albert Bierstadt’s panorama: romantic West, pink-skied, the clouds brushed as though sitting on glass, the humble brown animals eating and standing, too romantic. What is it about truth, images of truth, like the body: Mapplethorpe’s banned photographs, metallic and sculptural and sweating, these forms perfect as sand dunes in rain. ~ The man sitting behind me drags his coat sleeve across a newspaper. I think he is from somewhere in West Africa—his voice lifts like voices on the bus bringing the night shift to the hospital, the workers gossiping in cotton pastels while the strip mall flashes illuminations—their cheekbones, bodies washed in green. His voice: Always going to be my own way in this life. And: Are you listening to me? ~ 59 There is nakedness here, not in the coats draped over our chairs, but in being here. A woman shuffles her mismatched shoes past my window again waving her cigarette distractedly, a bubble wand fizzing soapy ash. Being naked has to do with being watched: my friend told me about the man in her hospital because his heroin needle broke off inside one of his arm’s purple holes— puffy swollen skin. He tried to claw the metal out. The room, jars of black ear speculums sunk in sterile liquid, fistfuls of paper-wrapped tongue depressors, was her space. I’m clean. He squinted at her. Hey, look at you sticking out your hip, cunt. She splayed one hand over her clipped-on name. ~ In the Dark Ages, monasteries kept roses alive for medicinal purposes. A man stands on the corner now among white plastic buckets, the kind sand or mop wash holds down, 60 blowing dozens of rippling cellophane-wrapped magenta-flamed roses, tight buds opening at the tops to velvety mashes of petals you can muffle your lips into and breathe or not breathe. He waves the swaying dots of color at cars. I’ve read about dynasty rose gardens that in Chinese history slicked parks with pale petals— so many roses the roots needed to be plowed under for fields of rice. This afternoon no one wants these buckets of roses: rot-soft urn-shaped insides soaked in dye to delay blackening. ~ Oh Rose, thou art sick, William Blake illuminated in blood ink so the words age on the print, and death or sexual desire or both find crimson joy in dark secret love and kill it, kill it, kill it. The man, still behind me, says, money and no, no, no, no, no. His newspaper crackles closed. I am beginning to think I should walk to the self-storage warehouse I pass every morning: glass walls 61 allowing me to see three floors of cobalt blue nearly garage doors, padlocked, obviously like options or even pasts. I remember the story where the prince must choose which door to open: the princess, or the tiger. Which? Behind which door, death? And behind which door, the chance of death? ~ The sign fluoresces Private Self Storage and on the first floor potted spider plants dangle wanly in the darkening window. The desk’s pressure-treated surface blares and the room lacks chairs. In my imagination the room means the desk versus you. And which private selves are you going to leave with us today? In my imagination I don’t ask how big each room is or how long a lease runs for each version of the body. Plato had written about selves, how the actor truly becomes the mask. I relish the masks of the Sande Women Secret Society of the Pende People in Liberia and Sierra Leone: wood folds of neck-flesh filled with power and filled with wealth, the burnished round cheeks, having sucked in the wind, holds it there, and when a man rapes a girl or tries to choke his wife, the women in these masks 62 screaming behind the carved expressions collect branches and reed whips and switch his back, punish the man, make him sorry he lived. ~ I will keep the self who relishes these masks but not the self who looked away when the Puck-like middle-school girl/boy, hair...