Six Poems: Liane Strauss
The Window of Appearances I
On the third day of my visit that June of the ironically timed year of perfect hindsight, we take off our masks and eat together. I set up my laptop on the glass table Dad made, which we love especially that week.
It won’t fit in your new apartment; it already belongs to the buyers. Like none of us, it will remain where it began.
Over mahi mahi and your famous Levantine salad the MET broadcast of Akhenaten begins. It’s hypnotic, I say,
launching into a rambling, semi-informed disquisition on minimalism. I reach for the patter of rain, horse hooves, the hum of the calendar, the quadrilles of planets, the Dansk bowl we have filled with roasted pepitas. Something like, the patterns that keep us from seeing the big picture are the rhythms that keep us connected to each other, or stuck, if we don’t recognize them for what they are. If they’re foregrounded it’s harder to ignore them.
Not trying to impress you. Just testing out my voice as I look down through the table at the tiles and remember not stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk at five or six, in Queens, priding myself on my perfect track record.
Looking back up into the screen I consider how lucky it was I didn’t turn into a tree. So you see, I conclude, as if I have answered a question you had actually asked, that’s why. It has to resist the illusion of wholeness and freedom that is melody, which in another setting we refer to as narrative. You nod. I like it, you say, more than I expected.
And I remember my father trying to get me to imagine the infinite universe and play with cars, and how I preferred my record player, which folded in half like a suitcase, even to my dolls, which I also loved to distraction, sitting them beside me
so we could listen together to the same 78s over and over, mesmerized as one by the rhythm of the revolutions, seeing one thing and hearing another.
You and I do not talk about the eighteen years you have lived in this house and what they contain, already dark and tropical on the other side of the big windows.
I Always Start What I Finish
I come in to the love talk of language, history, sopranos, the significance of widows— You are deep in conversation with a member of the Delirium Team. This one is from Columbia. Ben, Premed. Though he’s having second thoughts.
I don’t have to remind you of Lucia, whom we know with a knowing whatever her name— Whatever happened.
We say more with other, more with more, and a facility that is also a place, possibly. Today is knowing what you are trying to say. This is another morning of, So, where shall we begin? Or, say, like the museum! We have already started. Blindly they call the glib— Don’t worry. They’re only words. The worries can be replaced. Every day has a number. Could we open all the wisdoms, like seeds, like buttons, let the darkness out like—ahem. Be not overtly concerned. These are mere nothings, the merest vicissitudes of a dusk, or a dawn— Merely a relative— What were they called, the opera tunes? We can’t be sure. But about those that often seem as certain, as reasonable, we might say—
And yet, what do we know, really, even about them? In this light, the shades are grey, the curtains azure.
They can be redrawn, like maps, until the world’s well, until the world’s well lit, until the words are once more
rearranged. Even so, Sonia, what can they tell us about what we want or what we know? Do they know the do you still
and do you still? Do they know that old song, how we loved it, how it used to go.
Miscellaneous, 1930-1975
The pictures that haven’t fallen out of their albums occupy unbound pages surrounded by empty corners.
Brian had to take them apart, my sister explains, to digitize them. They are all in files on the cloud now.
She sends me copies of copies. The originals are bundled into a shopping bag, in Ziplocs. Torn scraps of what must have been one or two sheets of yellow paper float like goldfish inside with them: Egypt, 1917-1950; Miscellaneous, 1930-1975.
I consider all of this to be a kind of metaphor for memory, the way everything becomes a kind of metaphor and a kind of memory. The sepia version of snow in the photos I hand you reminds me of the snow in Aspen, which is purple in the morning.
Who’s this? I ask, and we both lean in to peer into the tiny distance. In a studio, your mother’s cousin Tania fans her skirts
as if about to curtsy for the camera she looks away from. On the back of a photo of you in a rowboat between your two brothers is my birthday in your mother’s hand, a mere twelve years before the year I was born, and: La Marne. Remarques
comment Sonia se prélasse entre les deux rameurs. Look how Sonia— Jim looks up prélasser, which you can’t find
like an odd sock. They are like Cairo and New York, your two languages, two rowboats drifting apart, now and then.
Remarques with an s. You shake your head at your mother’s French. We turn it over again. This time, laughing, we shake our heads together.
You are not basking. You are holding on for dear life.
I hand you the Pyramids of Giza, floating above a group. You touch the faces gently with a fingertip, name them
one by one. In this one your father leans on a paw of the Sphinx. This, you say, smiling as you take up the next one
I hand you, is my mother’s Uncle Marc. She adored him. He is the one she named Marco for after he came to her
in a dream. He must have been gay. You say it more to yourself, knowing again, like a new word for something
you’ve always known, basking in the memory. He was the brains, you say, behind the jewelry business.
FrÈre Jacques
My father painted lipstick on his mother in the black-and-white photographs he developed in his darkroom, matching the blood-orange red she wore in life. When he shows me, I am a child. I think he is a genius. I think he has invented something: painting a photograph, whose polished surface seems impossibly slippery, susceptible only to fingerprints. I don’t understand why he stopped. Your brother Jack’s death is a photograph that keeps taking you by surprise. You come upon it every time you turn the corner into the parlor of an apartment we haven’t entered in twenty years. I chalk it up to a light leakage, a flaw in the stop bath, or the developer. I remember a landscape in that apartment, a wilderness with a small house in it I could never find. Maybe the artist couldn’t find a place for it either. Or the right color. Every visit I renewed my search. Even in winters of no snow the snow kept falling, steadily covering the canvas in a fresh coat, a slow whiteout that, come some future springtime, would finally slide from the rooftops and facade.
And you me child
I learned about this ellipsis from my first Latin teacher, taught in turn the art of conversing in it by hers, the only interlocutor with whom she was able to exercise this arguably questionable gift, as she was his.
The ellipsis, though, was in Greek, from the Iphigenia at Aulis, the great tragedy, and the most poignant example of this figure of speech, so full of pathos it has remained quietly, and heavily with me, to emerge laboriously from the seabed where it sleeps, spitting sand when called upon as an answer to a new question. Like today.
In the original, which is to say the tragic play by Euripides, the firstborn and favorite daughter, Iphigenia, understanding— which always includes ellipses, representing, as in this particular instance, what is patently unfathomable— what her father intends—which is to kill her as a sacrifice in order to appease the gods, whose dicta, in his hubris he has flouted—weeps.
For he, Agamemnon, that is, the father, he believes, for so the auguries have been interpreted by his crony,
the so-called seer, Calchas (who, presumably, sees into his bad conscience), that having killed the sacred deer of Diana, in this case Artemis, the hunting of whom he was forbidden, he is now under a sacred obligation to kill his own dear daughter that the wind the goddess has caused to die return, allowing his fleet to set sail for Troy. That is, for war. That is, for the sacrifice of children by their parents, which is war’s great ellipsis. And not just war’s. Because war is also, among its other most literal meanings, a metaphor, like this myth, which is also a piece of theater, iconographic and surreptitious, representing the great self-thwarting, eternally returning ambivalence of the species, wherein the ties that bind us to each other and to ourselves are loosened, loosed perhaps too, like Caesar’s dogs.
And as Agamemnon, like Abraham after him, like countless men and the gods they believe themselves to be before and after, stands in that recurring and blinding emotional ellipsis, holding, or perhaps hiding, I can’t remember, the knife, in preparation for the slaughter, such that she, his daughter, Iphigenia, can turn to him, her father, Agamemnon, as I turn to you now, but not at all in the same manner, nothing at all,
and implore him to explain to her, as he was once wont and able to explain all things, how this moment could have come to come between them.
And it is here, as she is about to die at the hands of the father who gave her life, that she speaks the great literary ellipsis I have never been able to grasp, or dispel, or forget, and that time and time again has come to my aid when faced with acts and scenes for which I could find no other reason.
I remember, she says, by way of preface, all we said, you and I, to each other. I who was the first to call you father.
It is only you who have forgotten.
L’Elisir d’Amour
There is a drawer in your apartment filled with programs of all the operas you ever attended, organized by year, from 1966 to the last one, which we will save for you. You look forward to it all those weeks, every time we tell you we are going to the opera, together, to see L’Elisir d’Amour. That’s a happy one, you say, every time. And after, when we tell you it was such a beautiful day, though it was January, that we walked all the way to Lincoln Center and back, you smile, bestow your benevolent surprise at the photos of the three of us by the fountain in the plaza,
which you recognize for a time, and in front of the grand staircase during intermission, which we’ll show you again and again as if we’re trying to prove something to you, like we used to when we were children, or maybe to us. Maybe it was always us.