Diane Mehta

Rendezvous 

You have to lose all beginnings to know where the story

really begins, all the wandering by accident or design

a way to find your tongue. Pull the everything around you.

Once upon a time, first love fed gristle in your mouth—

you Dewey Decimal it as experience, world your catalog.

Suffering is never wrong, and loving is entanglements of grand.

Remember red-sledding down back yard winter hills

when temperatures fell in daggers on the windowsills

and free was air in knotted hair? Cold snap at warp speed

on our cheeks. Wasn’t it the greatest show on earth

to sit there with our mothers, warming our hands on cider

that burned our lips, frostflower etchings on the windows?

After all the acrobatics and plot twists promising new

promiselands, how do you feel about the story now?

Hasn’t it changed, aging in its cage, and haven’t you?

What truth resists! It hides in the angles of its triangles

then punches its way to the center, guffawing at its crimes—

the soul is still the same while it makes a king of you.

The Haunted House and I Walk to the Cemetery, after Reverdy

Ivy shins the church at the curve of the upscent hill;

pipes slide up the side but don’t bassoon a note—

Half-revived, the building leans into its shade of angles

angling across the path where tires and feet boom

wanderingly by, all of us rehearsing for a role truer

than our tough faces; we become what we rehearse:

gaze of strangers on the way to somewhere else.

“Suddenly you realize you’re being escorted by a building

nine stories tall. You think that’s nothing, do you?”

We fall in step on the purgatorial middle ridge

between two valleys. Rhombuses and squares patchwork

hills climbing east to the Appenines. Harrowed over fields

plunge west into civilized roads roundabouting around town.

We are going to the cemetery, to a place of memories.

Smells of winter fill my mouth with epigrams—

killed by Fascists, died in childbirth, lived eight months—

We fret about the rumors of the sea, so far from here.

Poplars and blue-green conifers are mad with air-of-love;

crypts green with algae blossoms, urns recite biographies

daily. We live in houses haunted by our fear of losing

time, but lose our minds in time, the muse that loves us not.

“So let the quia suffice you, human species!”

Wilderness annexes everything, even the road going here.

____________

The first quote is from Pierre Reverdy’s resurrection novella The Haunted House. The second is from Canto III, line 37 in Dante’s Purgatorio, when Virgil, impatient with ever-questioning Dante, scolds him with quia, or “because!”

Rhododendron & the Maple

All afternoon, pink petals flung about,

saddling seasons of new fruit to scent

the mellow air all the way to heaven.

Tackle-shadow crowds the patio. Ivy spills

over the fence; long days to think, and love,

and mourn the maple that shaded the garden stones.

It only takes a turn of mind to imagine

a tree inside its absence, so quantifiable

with lemon leaves and bark that smelled

like prayer warming after hibernating months.

The tree threw branches to my son

who made crowns from leafy twigs.

“I am the king of here!” he sang.

I watched him in a dream.

So long since rhododendron and maple
rustled together and the patio smelled

of humid afternoons crawled over

with the sticky mess of beetles and worms.

They gossiped in the sun and shared their soil.

She sashayed pink tresses and dresses all spring.

They talked of pedicel fuzz and divets in the bark,

new life crowning up the filament to the anther,

nearly sprung; the cambium producing cells

for newer xylem, and resin bitter to the tongue.

It was a little bit of an apocalypse;

chain saw buzzing, hatchets thwacking.

Tree limbs trapezed in air.

Sawdust gusted everywhere.

The rhododendron is bigger than ever.

Women are wearing dresses again.

On Seeing Fra Angelico’s Annunciation

An altarpiece measures what is illuminated

beyond binder and pigment, egg and color, woodgrain, brushstroke.

The first time I saw it, at nineteen, I thought art was a way of becoming

composed of techniques an object will turn into; being

inside what you are seeing is as immediate as truth gets.

This was the story of my body, and all women’s bodies, to give

life and liveliness to thoughts. I was startled then,

as now, enchanted this pious friar loved with equal tenderness

paint, glazes, tempera, gold, brushes, natural light,

and believed, in a marriage of materials and geometry,

god’s word could be told through science and still be right.

From the perspective of perspective, it’s just a story on a grid.

From left to right are paradise, angel, woman, and the dove

riding diagonal gold light that sears the painting in two

     45-degree triangles

freeze-frame except this lightning

In the left corner, Adam and Eve, naked and glorious,

hurry out of paradise. Gabriel bows to Mary in the foreground,

wings open; so much a creature, with muscular purple-brown feathers.

Delicate Mary receives him in the loggia, the main act and a kind of test

to be tasked with seeing Mary recoil a little to be told instead of asked,

the way we all recoil a little at her task, and then look closer.

Mary sits amplified and queen-like below indigo arches distributing

the weight of the moment, the architecture of the moment;

Corinthian columns between the arches divide

the expulsion from Gabriel and Gabriel from Mary;

technique is all: Vertical lines steer your gaze straight to heaven

(freedom is predetermined, but you can do what god knows already)

while haloes, arches, rondeles between the columns, their curved backs

facing one another bracket between them the dove

entering the soft folds of her cascading robes—

In the act of viewing, you enter the orbit of the composition.

A penitent old wood bench

                  foreshortened

anticipates some need

as if Mary will faint, but its positioning

hints that religious feeling is equal to the leap of faith

painting took in 1420, when linear perspective found truth

arranging our physical bodies in two-dimensional space;

polygons retreating further back inside the canvas

and yelling in triumph: look how science

reveals the organized world. I keep looking past Mary

at that bench in the entrance where later she will sit alone and shake,

unsure if she is saved from the end of peril or the beginning of love.

The arrival of perspective adds dimension to the design

of humankind. We are closer to the beginning

            in this way also a beginning.

Art interprets science

science explains art.

I have looked at the painting in my mind for thirty years.

How long since that evening-hour when I, nineteen,

set about making passionate sense of my obsession

with annunciations, and the conclusion I was left with then

and now is how awesome and preposterous it is, the workings of the body,

Gabriel’s expectation and Mary’s promise, Adam’s expectation

and Eve’s broken promise, for Eve wanted what we wanted—

to be loved for her mind and not her rib, to have knowledge

and someone to share it with. Fra Angelico puzzles it out—

depth of vision, sleight-of-eye, nimble hand.

He recognized that life is, for all its confusions, primarily spatial.

We, the inconstant ones, he set outside the frame, waiting

for us to discover that truth is the story of our lives,

and it exists on a grid; lines hold our compositions together,

lines train our eyes to zigzag, lines interrupt texture,

and the imagined futures constructed inside the lines

trace the actions of our mothers, their sturdiness of heart.

Sapia the Wise

She took so little space up, violent and true,

eyes sewn shut in the project of transcendence.

Un-wise Sapia Salvani, heiress of Siena,

rejoiced over the slaughter of countrymen

she ought to love. She cursed them

and her nephew Provenzano, too.

She laughed at god: I fear you not!

Alea iacta est, the die is cast.

A woman shrieks she is undone,

undone inside her widowed dynasty,

unable to see her fortune.

Dante veiled into her simple story

a morality play about the Roman empire

fracturing into city-states.

We believe Dante’s one-story of Sapia

because she was convenient.

We believe wives and mothers are greedy

for they are easier to make villains of

than admirals or popes

bloodying up your town.

Believe me, she is worth your love.

Dante writes the story of impoverished

wealth of mind, immortalizing Sapia’s crime.

We cringe at Sapia’s psychoses

but our initial readings never quite suffice.

It happens to every woman at sundown.

How does a woman resist her madness

in the middle of her life?