Microportraits from Bestiary (2021)

NESTING DOLLS

(A locket which encloses dark, fine hair. Dried orange peels kept in

pockets, for the smell, and to touch them. A lock of a loved person’s

hair kept in a locket. A locket with a design of interlocking flowers.

Body kept in a jacket. Blind fists cradled perfectly inside eye sockets, to

comfort oneself; the body’s design of memorizing itself. A heavy black

camera in the jacket pocket. Dried poppies pressed and staining book

pages. Difficult knuckles knocking sealed eyelids, faint blurry colored

blots. The perfect darkness in which an image may be created and

preserved.)

YOURSELF READING A BOOK

You allow your eyes to travel across printed sentences and transform

them into some intelligible thing. You have to be careful, because

sometimes if you allow yourself to be distracted a line of words will

become just a squiggly black telephone wire through which to conduct

your own worries. Don’t let it happen! You must dip into the well of

your memory as you go; these images are your only materials for the

images they conjure. Follow each sentence to its end, gathering, row

by row, to the end.

OSCAR L. PERLE

OUR FRIEND

Here comes Oscar! The nose foremost, thin breaths whistling through,

river map of thready red tendrils burst all over. Tears sit in his little

eyes, rain gathering on sloped shoulders, that crooked line of grief.

What can he be remembering? His eyebrows twitch in furious

argument with some ghost knocking furniture around upstairs. He

polishes his eyeglasses, never to leave his unsteady hands idle. Eyes

brightening behind his stained skin suddenly, twin miniature selves

arriving at identical doorsteps. Laughter breaks his chest like a cough.

Our friend Oscar! Please come in. What would you like? What can we

give you?

PENNY ROACH HAND

When no one was looking she freed a poppyseed from between her

front teeth with a thumbnail. Then she didn’t know what to do with it.

She hurried along the school halls with her rosy face down. Whenever

she tried to speak, it was like trying to sing in front of a whole crowd of

people. Her voice rusted shut in her throat, a faulty faucet.

IRMA K. SITTINGDOWN

Starched white sheets and cold feet poking out every morning. Turns

head to look at little sister, fast asleep and indifferent. She’s always

spying on her, and on her father in his stuffed chair, drunk, attempting

to put on his shoes. Two stiff braids left to set like dough overnight

gives her an awful headache. Eyes disconnected from her skull as she

stares at the piece of paper, hoping for it to be something other than a

piece of paper. You might as well have forgotten your eyes on the

bedside table before school! Irma, why won’t you pay attention?

THE GNOME

My sister told me the little yellow light in the bush meant it was

inhabited by a gnome. I didn’t believe her until I saw for myself by the

full moon that the gnome was chewing on our tulips. The gnome had a

face sort of like a turnip, but the secret way a turnip looks before it has

been unearthed by anyone. I felt such an amazing tenderness watching

it eat, I decided to ask if it wanted me to be its mother. It frowned and

refused to answer because its mouth was still full of delicious tulips.

MY GRANDMOTHER

a little girl like a mischievous elf, sitting in her school clothes, carving a

cat out of soap. The many small objects she loves to hold and have,

her baby dolls. She is curly-haired, bright-faced and adored, then is

dropped from the dreamy sky one day down a dark corridor, into the

deep heart of a frightening fairy-tale illustration. Best to leave the book

shut on the shelf. She flees upstairs from her aunt and under the

mattress finds the three cards which predicted her mother’s death.

WILDLIFE IN THE FOREST LIVE CAMERA WITH SOUND

Trickling clear little stream. Translucent wrist of water. One mouse,

two mice! A leaping encounter, little players in a music box. Permanent

fixture of the leaves no wind now one flitting blade of grass someone

has entered it, a disruption. Drifting moths singular flakes of snow.

Bowed tree. Each eye a tiny flood of light. Heavy steps enters the black-

footed fox, fox, fox! sniffing thoughtfully for blood, delicately bent paw,

then the awkward beautiful leap, body over water. Wind begins, more

insistent water like quickening breath. The stream runs between both

ears, safe silver passage. Clock hand of grass.

CANDLEFLAME

Ghost blue origin. Tip of a finger. Doubling like a peripheral

hallucination. Flickering white rabbit ear, white fox-tail, white petal. It

struggles against my breath, desperate little gestures, trilling. Blurred

black blotted impression on my eyes if I look away, a tiny bright red

planet if I close them. The immaterial violet, passing a finger through

it, translucent magic cage for a wick.

RED VISION

If the two of us are in a room, there may be an encounter. An attempt at

speech might be mistaken for one of these walls. No sky, no

perceptible changes to the sky. Someone has removed the door and

walked out blindly. Despite the lack of door, the RED VISION is

encountered by the young girl like an illuminated glass of milk. It puts

on a face to be recognized. My clothes are white and formless to suit

me; it is difficult to know what it is that I am saying to you.

SMALL WINTER LANDSCAPE

Fox blood field stranger mouthful of clouds orphaned tree gossamer a

crow thin red silver metal fox bone teeth pearl shine grass ragged

fence bitten blue sky trapped ribbons muscle hair wet ice gutter tied

silk fang birds eating things out of little holes in the remnants of snow.

PICTURE I WANTED TO TAKE AT HUNTINGTON GARDENS

The gardens are lit by that inescapable gray sunlight which clarifies

everything in equally fine detail: the hairs on leaves, the edges of gravel

like torn bits of black paper. A little boy on his grandfather’s lap stares

at me as he cries and bites into a huge green apple.

PHOTOGRAPH FOUND IN ANTIQUE STORE, SAN FRANCISCO

Not a woman, not a man, they could have been anyone with their arm

thrown behind them and face leaned up to the sun, lying on their back

under the burn of a travelling sky, a black-and-white photograph taken

by a person in love, green green hills.

BOX OF SLIDE FILM, SAN FRANCISCO

Myriad tiny scenes when held up to a lamp: a baby, a mother in bright

yellow, lurid blue sky behind buildings or mountains asleep under

snow, the children holding plants, the children growing up, the strange

face they both shared with their father and the comical creased

expression they liked to make with it.

INTRUSION IN A STRANGER’S HOUSE

Abandoned on the table were an unfinished sandwich and soda

nakedly illuminated, like somebody’s diary open to a half-written page.

HOPE FOR THE PAST

Maybe he was in love with someone once. Maybe he held his breath

when he walked by her desk, tedium of a clean schoolroom gladly

interrupted by a glow of hair.

MY YELLOW-STRIPED SHIRT

We buttoned it over the white lamp to make the light more beautiful. She

said, ‘You look like a saint.’ I laughed (automatic), but then looked at

her face more carefully and understood what that meant. A change

suffuses a person in the yellow light created by the mind’s tiny theatre.

MOUNTAINS

My parents took me to where the stars were. I was very young, so I still

remembered everything. It was clear, fiery cold. We exited the

hibernating car and walked. Our shadows crossed with broken leaves’.

Hand in hand blackbirds shuddered between us.