Ruining the Picture - Softcover

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Excerpt

COMINGS AND GOINGS

Bangkok

Once, in a house I will inherit in a land I can't explain,
       I heard the shout

of meat bones offered up from the market where it all goes
                wholesale. Actually, the morning's

heat rose from the newly paved road--thin folds debuting
          into the visible--

and much later, children were called in, one by one,
       away from, because of,

the street. All day, from somewhere beyond the billboard
                of a woman amply

luring tourists to new tastes, came the sound of temple monks
          praying for their one wish--

born wanting to be born again. I'd been told their voices'
       tidal heave and dwindle

would pay the debt, in part, to whatever local god they used
                to conjure creation,

giving it their good deeds, right notes, in- and exhalings,
          short spans of the body.

Meanwhile, this week in this world, a mound of sludge and leaf rot
       caught behind the house is,

over a week's time, veiled and parceled out among
                the red ants. And still

the black flies keep entering and exiting the air above
          the table's day-old

bowl of plums. I'd like to know how it's good, or enough, for anyone--
       this small rush into

the sickly sweet, these brief becomings, part of the increase
                we call material...

Since there's also the ten-year-old girl I recognize and hardly know,
          the one who's hired to sweep and clean,

to rid us of the dirt tracked in, and bundled out, finding the floor's
       small shames. Dust clumps,

carpet threads, the bits of fallen meat scraps, all the S-shaped hair
                that daily, secretly

escaped. What can she inherit in this country where they speak
          three languages,

one for their betters, another for family, a last for servants:
       millions of voices

pitched toward the accidents of birth? I know she could leave us
                like some of the others

who wandered down the road for a better sum in the massage parlor
          they also call a coffee shop.

Or could be dreaming already, as she sweeps, of the barker who calls
       each of the girls

by number, so that, by turns, every one is among the chosen.
                He's there, behind the strobe,

passing the bodies between one clark and the next, generation
          after generation.

And she is here for now, mid-afternoon, her small hips' swing
       a slow bargain with the heat.

As if this dust shaken from her broom could enter
                the fragile argument,

we watch the freed traces scatter in sun, then cling briefly to grass.
          We look up, then look away.

THE ANNUNCIATION

Starts with a stream of gold that's ridden
       by a relentlessly linear dove,
ready to pierce a young girl's head.

             Then, her face, her gaze looking up, out
past the easel and later, past the frame,
       eyes raised as if to ask a question. Take

the virgin robe, for instance, which Van Eyck has made
       to fall luxuriously as a second chance
across the old storyline etched below her.

             And, further down, the church's intricately
strict apse, each floorboard, painstaked as lace, showing here,
       David's lesson in beheading, there Samson's

tearing down the temple--that history
             interrupted by her silken, layered folds:
each blue built up from perfecting the oil.

             His favorite signature, "As best I can"
or "As I was able, but not just as I wished."
       Think of the endless effort: a man

in the distance, deep in the could have been,
       who sat before the easel, hours, perhaps,
past his patience for lasting regrets,

             flat refusals--the quick-drying water-based
attempts flung around a room.
       And how, alone with pigment barrels, chamber pots,

the canvases stretched, the fire exhumed,
       he poured a stream of oil back and forth,
watching it catch the light, change a wooden bowl.

             For the sake of making the mundane
seem to marry the...