Is what I am/ the thing I can do? —Brian Blanchfield
What’s your work
what you thought your shadow
on the distaff side
lined out women gone out
either way from you
pulling thread out of flax from the staff
typing
setting hair
doings fall off the display
but maybe we don’t
*
during the war is a reliable thing to say
what metals went into the sentence
if iron was cheap, let’s say iron
Adah masters her body like a chamber she could leave
shavings of metal on her finger tips, animal grease in her teeth in her century no edits or quick takes outside of a train
or strapped to a horse that externalizing love machines call up
*
droplet edges shine slow air threads around the water tower and pecan grove
like stage curtains heavy until they’re not like in the video of the man’s
slow lowering of his rectum over a mason jar until it shatters inside him and
the blood pours
down and levels on the tile floor for those still looking
the curtains lighten but never fall off the little swarms
Napolean Saroni’s publicity pictures lifted and split Adah into
a New Orleans baby
*
“I will create a new sensation. Depend on it.”
that tickle in your long sequence sides fold in time
in edits in the eye Adah put herself there and gone
in a dummy’s place tied to a real horse
riding four stories up a narrow ramp
a new feeling off a great horsewoman wolves on the run Inca doves fog the
stage
for an ideal man of refinement, taciturn is a woman showing through in
man’s love for a woman
seen in their thousands conical eye tunnels layering each other so many times space slapped to come up to its surface red then a fine ash in the wrinkles
it’s not a space for details that fall away in words
clean blood no one steps in the reservoir; you can see it between us
pumps, ferries, seeps in degrees, crusts, or drains into various attitudes
busy arms flail the skin off the air
“she poses better than she speaks”
“artifactual” anything
can be a mirror coupling the robes
is a copper flower clip in the attitude of a nipple the Tartar hero doesn’t care
in the work of raising his shield
in your hair, in the shine of your toes, oils pushed out in the black horse hide
against Adah’s white body hose skin we are a successful people
putting your wilderness in the wide eye of the horse for you
imagine the smallness of a European room
before stylized tendrils of whipping mane as long as we’re looking
waltz with it at the cliff
you can’t look full on but you can fold edges into an expanse of edges
her arms turning the drum of history in a particular way so the horse says
engorged my tongue flops out but in sympathy the world will increase
a color on the walls the backs of your knees open to drink in
there never is a stage much less the sand in which the theater sinks
there is a buzzard and its shadow over the prince and the horse and the
shadow is dense with its
turning iterations and wet with its water and light with their light
you can realize
the advice
“go find some spectacle where your pretty face will show”
“when the animal affrighted by the glare of fires and goaded”
“the interest is painful in its intensity” “the trail winding up between
jagged rocks”
“above a roaring stream to vanish on heights unguessed”
whoever could see they were thirsty is holding the mirror that passes for
your eyes
O, Glaucon, the negations open as gates—a woman dressed as a stripped man
from the Persians, the Mongols, or a single Muslim called a Golden Horde as a horsewoman and a naked lady, a friend who stayed well enough away
Whitened first in her own stories beside Laurelak the Indian maiden
then beside the African beauty the French threatened to cast
then the horse
oiled in a white woman’s shine, a vagabond of fancy
born a dweller in tents, a reveler in the tented habitation of war
the whole country gorgeously illuminated
it is not my shame it is your shame or we’re left available
that’s us: blue sky behaving itself and two long-tailed birds kiss a flower
between them
combinations aren’t wild but you can buy the smell of the roots under the
grass
how do I pull from a proposition the place to turn back in regard?
if in the story of a thing I say there was a place, it’s because the placed looked
back
on us this feeling
face coded to a green aspect in a system of theater you can train in
no territory expands there are only so many faces and so many feelings
to turn there
I know the crow’s shadow passes over the parking lot catching the threads
from people’s eyes
Adah put her body in the ropes bundled snug in the looking
the horse and the high ramp are givens
to both the cold or warm lighting schemes lovers bathe across the room they
document
by video you can be the real rider
or the real horse the real prince the real white skin
picks up dirt water can wash and return to the ground floor of the purpling
valley
terrific cataracts, tearful precipices
work to be a given
in the folding
which numbered chamber am I to or out of you?
“No actress is perfect.
Not even the daughter of her father.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868) was a writer and stage actress who rose to fame playing Casimir, the Tartar hero in the stage spectacle Mazeppa based on a poem of Lord Byron’s. The part was a “breeches role” requiring Menken to pass as a man. She chose to perform the show’s climactic stunt in which Casimir is bound, nude, to a runaway horse herself, replacing the dummy used in previous productions. Menken told many conflicting accounts of her origins, sometimes capitalizing on and sometimes repudiating suspicions of her mixed European and African ancestry. I take the quoted text in this poem from statements made by Menken in letters and interviews as well as from reviews of her performances. I am indebted to the extensive archival research Daphne A. Brooks did on Menken for the book Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Freedom 1850-1910 (Duke).
Originally published in White Wall Review 40 (2016)