Marianne Szlyk
Blue Green and Brown (Rothko 1952)She wonders what is intimate about an enormous canvas hung up on a museum wall. Museums are silent except for garbled conversations, docents’ lectures, spills of sound from someone’s device. Nothing is intimate, not even silence, the pristine space between each person in a public place. She sits at home with the image on her screen, all other lights off. In twilight, blue, green, and brown envelop her, keeping her company in this humidity. Cicadas call each other. Indoor and outdoors blend : buses’ wheeze, the washer’s slosh. She feels the space between her and them dissolve. Sunday on U StreetLet’s pretend that it’s midnight
as saxophonist Gary Bartz steps onto the stage. The room darkens; candles on the table flicker. Shadows hide the thickset men at the wall. The ceiling lowers; tiny lights strung above stand in for stars. Imagine moonlight rippling on salt water. The scent of mango dusted with chili powder and cinnamon trickles in with the piano and drums. We taste fruits we don’t know the names of. Tap your toes, for sure, or sway, following the pianist’s lead, but when the horn starts in again, carry yourself a little straighter. Cameras flash. Wedged in, we are all caught in the glare. All too soon imagine the empty streets above. Playing the last song, Bartz retreats into the early morning’s shadows, the color of his long-tailed jacket, and climbs the back stairs to his refuge above the club. When we leave by the front stairs, it’s still daylight on U Street. We can no longer pretend. Ms. Hawthorndreams of standing on a ridge in Britain,
looking down on cathedrals and car parks, on pubs and Morris dancers, albums she knew from used record stores and long-lost friends’ collections. Dirty blonde hair streaming in the wind, she would be barefoot, wear white, in spite of mud and wet grass. At fifty, she sits in traffic. Through mousy- brown bangs, she blinks at mist falling on her windshield, the line of cars snaking on past the exit. As violins on the CD swell, a young man sings about growing older on a morning like this one. He has just arrived in town; she has lived in this state for a dozen years. Visiting the AncestorsThe deer are visiting the ancestors,
nibbling on grass at Mt. Calvary, waiting in the shade of winter underneath the low trees that could be on a riverbank in the deep South that the ancestors fled from. The five deer browse on the pale green fringe of the cemetery, limp parsley left on winter’s plate beside the river that neither flows nor freezes. The deer have bodies the color of earth in shadow, but they could be spirit animals of family living elsewhere come to visit great-grandparents in the ground, the great-grandfather who was gentle with farm animals, remembered horses and mules, the great-grandmother who kept a pot on the stove for family, neighbors, and friends, served Red Rose tea with milk and sugar like coffee, The deer linger on the fringes like the awkward children they once were when the ancestors were alive. The Space BetweenShe remembers riding, being driven
from county to county on state roads two blue-black lanes cut through cornfields, no houses, trees, or towns, no radio or mixtape in the old car, only their words, only talk. Or maybe they did not like the same music. He liked disco; she liked hip-hop. Fifteen years after, she mourned John’s death; he did not even own one Beatles CD. She didn’t know what was there beyond the car, the road, the books they’d read, in-house gossip, the stars he knew but she didn’t, the drive to Indy or Champaign. She didn’t know about the trees or the wildflowers she was not seeing. To her friend, this was still the East, only twenty four hours’ drive from the coast fueled on Diet Coke and cigarettes bought at Wal-Mart on Route 26. Having left home, she imagined that she was changing in the space between, going someplace different from where she’d been. She shook her newly red hair then. She shakes her short brown hair now. Back East again, she puts on her glasses as if to see all that she had missed: the abandoned farmhouses, the yellow and red marigolds that outlast trees and walls, crumbling brick towers, people who emerge from whitewashed storefronts in someone else’s online photographs of all that grows in the space between. We Disaster Tourists Travel
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Seaweed on the BeachReds, greens, browns, and mustard yellow
add earthy undertones, the taste of miso, to the neons, the overexposed blues and whites and yellows, the painted plaques and t-shirts, the stick candies and salt-water taffy sold at the gift store. The rusty Irish moss on this beach will not turn into anemones or coral or even amber sea glass. Like the seagull accents wheeling in the wind past summer, the moss remains. At Low TideAlready a ghost at twenty-three,
the singer Tim Buckley howls, scaling octaves, stretching out syllables until they dissolve in salty mist. His fog of consonants and vowels, salt and smoke, hovers, grazing the skin of the dark-haired woman standing by the window, holding a candle in a baby-food jar. Outside stairs to the second floor quiver beneath keyboards and bass, heavy footsteps of a ghost. She turns away from the sea. Cupping her hand around the white flame, she blows out her candle before the voice breaks the last barrier between indoors and out. Nobody walks out on damp sands, so far from cold water, much further from yesterday’s warmth. Nobody walks out at low tide. Even the seagulls dissolve as if they were salt. The woman at the window has turned away. Her man will not climb up to her, not this morning, not tonight, not when the fog wails and salt embitters the air. Let's Go Away for AwhileThelma and her husband sing along to Pet Sounds
when driving to the Cape. Jerry Cole’s guitar begins “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and they launch into song, his voice too wild, hers with the Texas accent she never can lose. They plunge in, splashing past strip malls and swamp. But this instrumental is the song she loves best, the vibraphone like sunshine against drums like surf, the horns like the wave that crashes furthest onto the rocks, not quite the highway. The strings are clouds, meringue she has whipped up in a stainless steel bowl at home. She almost forgets that the east coast has weak surf, and slimy seaweed clings to waders’ calves in warm, knee-high water as she and her husband waddle in among the thin girls from Boston. She then remembers cold, cloudy Mondays when the two of them drive back home, listening to their inland music: Chicago blues, Texas swing, Hank Williams’ “Honky Tonkin," the old songs that better suit their voices. Maybe she likes that this instrumental comes before anyone can see the bridge or the traffic. Or she likes to catch her breath before “Sloop John B”’s lyrics grind her down like the refrain of a whiny child. She catches her breath. What I Found Among the ReedsThe reeds conceal
the wetland that remains. Smooth stalks protect algae, frogs, birds and hide the swallow of water. The bus labors through heat and humidity from early morning to past exhausted, orange dusk. When I walk, the reeds reveal a turtle, black nub on a rain-slicked log in water the color of copper left to the elements. The reeds reveal the wet stench of life, sour mud, honeysuckle, sulfur mixed with exhaust, grease, and perfume. Birds chirp and pulse above low traffic. The bus is electric; it runs silently today. Then I see behind the reeds: faded bottles and cans, the torn, black bag blossoming in the water. Maryvale Park in JulyThe pond at the park clouds over.
Flies and fish kiss the water’s surface. Three birds dart through the air above. Everywhere there is life – in the water, the reeds, the islands of brown-gray mud, the flowers that crowd around the pond as it shrinks and grows opaque. But I cannot find the turtle I saw last night. Squinting, holding my breath, I glimpse it. But it does not move. It is a turtle-shaped rock, mineral, not animal. Bronze diamond, it will stay there forever. I listen to the cicadas’ twisting percussion, look for flowering milkweed, and watch fireflies like beads of sweat on hot nights. Soon they too will die. Only sky, earth, and water will remain. In Pale Novemberwhen I was Marianne Moore, wearing a black straw hat,
we wandered through the woods he knew too well. Leafless trees clutched at the faded sky. Stones and fallen branches littered the ground. I listened to his youthful harangue and watched for birds and plants she would have seen, but it was long past time for even poison ivy or bittersweet berries. So he and I drifted until the early dark pooled at our feet to freeze and trip us like the branches, stones, and fallen leaves that always cling to pale November. For years beginning with that month, having lost my black straw hat when we fled back to the city he knew too well, I listened to his middle-aged litany and ignored the leather-bound books she wove into her poetry, following the sound of his voice into and through the woods and out the other side to the early darkness, the evergreen trees, the stray cats, the bus stop signs like clenched fists, to the long ride on empty buses back to the city he and I knew all too well. As I walk through Rock Creek Park in November (no longer living in the city I once knew), I count syllables the way she did and try to remember his voice. Medical Center UndergroundThe high ceiling, a concrete ribcage,
swells with air-conditioned breath. Commuters in white and red mill around. Like blood cells, they are ready to travel through the queen’s earthen body from liver to lung to spleen. BethesdaThe ghosts of green papayas
and used bookstores haunt the chain restaurants that rise up like invasive flowers. Even so these places cannot lose the scent of lemongrass and the brittle touch of a yellowed paperback. The specter of a woman slips past the windows of carefully folded cardigans and the greetings of the salesclerks who already know your name. No one notices this ghost.
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