Cynthia Arrieu-King
A bristling fir
whispered about my vanishing. The great silence.
How, fade to black,
I, the girl of your dreams am also this tan middle-aged man
I swept into suits
and hanged. No marriage, your Eternal Virgin
in black and white. Black
and white flips a skirt, a frown until I, so famous,
fly like a buck into woods no one can see.
They knock. I don’t live here, I say.
I keep the cedar door to.
*
Here in the house, a moth bats
a lantern, holding to a flame-opulent scrim.
Slatted sandals. This clatter of plums —
I’m a chime
films end with
after twenty years of poses,
striding into the fake hall as you wanted
tilting my head
to a crinoline kimono. Catapulted to billboards
glutting the seashore, I lived this thought:
No one’s going to burn my bones
until smoke stops its creep from the kettle.
No smoked femur of mine will
mix in water;
a wash to paint a portrait of sad ether
a black to give the impression of bottomless eyes
filled with whatever you
wanted.
The blunt kite
of appearing, and now I shade the hanging wash,
my hand
a visor, my hand breaks up old ash.
The sun an unexpected hand.
I say, behind the door,
She doesn’t live here.
*
It’s been years since I tired, tiptoeing for light meters.
The fecund night of other people’s feelings
and now I hide,
a black LP played in perpetuity.
I brush the air unseen. Is life disappointing?
Yes.
*
Kurosawa. Ozu. Narusa. Inagaki.
Go on, claim with all names,
grab noise at sea, and unplanned seafoam chilling my calves
for the twenty-third time. You can’t
film this yourself. Out there
withers a million me’s in celluloid.
I accepted your fifty-cent tickets —
that hardly assuaged
my brother struck by a train before my eyes,
hardly your tripod
my face gone among chrysanthemums
and today,
a long still of myself:
Radishes in rain.
Oyster-dumb, not hoping for grit or a pearl.
*
I feel your undying admiration,
tiny boxes of white cream on spoons.
Snow lands on everything you knew of me
Snow beyond a dry indigo curtain
this backwards, unseen breath.
Into a kettle’s voice I disappear,
a smile useless without a fence.
My heart thuds
an all-interior vista
almost big
as what you loved so much, the idea
of this steady sea— these happy eyes.