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One of the first stops
on the tour is the royal family’s
glass collection—crystal birdcages.
clocks with translucent mechanisms,
chimes, tureens, and snuff boxes—
so clear it’s like looking at nothing
but heat. No one in my family
wants my dead grandmother’s glass collection,
which is just a calamity of gravy boats
and ramekins she got from a catalog
a century ago and kept in the attic
until she found her husband hanging
from a bowed rafter. Since then,
every piece has somehow survived
while all the husbands, uncles, and brothers
have died young and starving,
lost in the belly of a forest no one can see.
When your body warns you not to overstay
your welcome, listen for the harmony,
not the melody, and that’s all there is
to divining. Put the song back
together splendidly to compensate
for the shattered prayer it once was.
Both Boulanger sisters wrote unfinished operas
about princesses poised to inherit the whole ruined place.
The kings and queens went insane
with their own unlikelihood.
I thought I was seeing the semi-circular wing
of a moth orchid on the ground,
but when I touched it—gummy
and a little hairy—I realized
it was a disposable electrode.
There’s something to be said here
about the visible world, about devices
that look like flowers that look like insects
that look into the abdomens of sick people,
but how boring to open this up
and let out an epiphany.
All the hospital beds are pointed feet-first
at televisions playing the same story.
Tell me about your family history, they ask.
All I can hear is my mother’s voice,
soft as the ringback you hear while waiting
for someone to pick up the phone,
that gentle tremolo of major thirds:
B♭, D / B♭, D / B♭, D
That man they found hanging in the attic, she says,
wasn’t my father. He was just some guy.
He could’ve been anyone.
The bloodline isn’t
a strung bow; it doesn’t tense up
when you pull it toward you.
It’s a sewing circle without thread:
punctured, punctured, unfixed.
The body isn’t so precious
of a metal as you might think.
But be careful. Some of its edges are sharp
where the old soul calved away.