Foreign Bodies Read online

  FOREIGN BODIES

  POEMS

  KIMIKO HAHN

  Some things move in and dig down

  whether you want them to or not.

  Like pieces of small glass your body subsumes when you are young . . .

  — CHARLES WRIGHT

  Contents

  Unearthly Delights

  Object Lessons—From Chevalier Quixote Jackson

  A Dusting

  The Old House Speaks

  charms i.

  Constant Objection

  A Little Safe

  Hatchlings

  The Ashes

  charms ii.

  Sparkly Things

  The Cryptic Chamber

  Notes on March 10, 1992

  Another Poem for Maude

  charms iii.

  She Sells Seashells—Considering the Life of Mary Anning

  Likeness—A Self-Portrait

  charms iv.

  Foreign Body

  After Being Asked If I Write the Occasional Poem

  Alloy—An Apostrophe for Isamu Noguchi

  charms v.

  Divine

  The Nest in Winter

  After Words for Ava

  Essay: Nitro—More on Japanese Poetics

  Afterword: The Bamboo Grove Where Various Individuals Mostly Think Aloud

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  FOREIGN BODIES

  Unearthly Delights

  After you rip through the screen

  and wedge yourself into Father’s bedroom,

  you find a pile of art supply catalogs,

  brown scraps of bedspread,

  cotton batting, a rodent body, rodent turds,

  and tiny white naked human creatures

  flipped topsy-turvy to skewer

  down the ass and out the mouth

  in the primordial ooze that is manifestly

  the brimstone and bile of this book left open

  to Bosch’s realm beneath the left hand of God,

  my foxed legacy of human bonfire.

  •••

  Object Lessons

  From Chevalier Quixote Jackson

  What might happen to the collection if we let narrative and desire back in?

  MARY CAPPELLO

  To answer a wish to possess:

  tuck a chess piece into a cheek.

  To meet a hunger not to share:

  swallow a kewpie doll whole.

  To recall the rubber of a nipple:

  suck on a pencil eraser.

  Safe-keep sincere assemblage

  by stowing in a ribcage. Yes,

  now I lay my

  two pressed pennies

  down to constant tissue.

  •

  Like Dr. Chevalier Quixote Jackson,

  nineteenth-century laryngologist who

  removed from tiny upper bodies

  an involved collection of objects

  —nails and bolts, radiator key,

  a child’s perfect attendance pin,

  a Carry-Me-For-Luck medallion—

  to lay into trays of cotton, yes,

  like him, each child had hoarded some thing

  in her inmost chest.

  •

  Yes, because children crawl on the treacherous floor,

  Chevalier, if I may,

  removed then preserved every last one

  along with stunning x-rays of needles

  lodged in a small patient’s lung. Also

  a charm in the shape of a hound. Perhaps

  the hound who rescued him in childhood.

  Perhaps a jar of charms that won’t leave go one’s origin.

  (Perhaps my pooch who calms my errant heartbeats down.)

  •

  Origins: crime or act of preservation:

  Saturn devoured his children

  to save his own skin from divine betrayal.

  Snow White’s stepmother devoured

  the girl’s lung and liver—or so she believed.

  My youngest, after Mother died, figured,

  Grandma now lives inside my tummy

  with dog and bird and fishy.

  •

  According to one biographer: at one point other children blindfolded Jackson and threw him into a coal pit, and he was rescued only after some mutt happened to find him unconscious.

  •

  In my cigar box, a swallow

  nest of pine

  lined with feathers, bits of birch bark, and trash

  for comfort can coincide with comforting;

  from the shred of blankie inside her purse to

  his rabbit-foot keychain

  to the hair she plucks and swallows

  in a cycle of self-harm called Rapunzel.

  Chevalier archived them in shallow drawers

  according to their kind.

  •

  The two girls could not unlock the door to their father’s home. The girls could not open a window for the medical books leaning against the panes. The girls could neither pry open the bathroom window painted shut nor the cellar door where the carton of bleach and cans of stew were stacked against it. They could not find a ladder to climb to the bedroom window and check on a mahogany bedroom set—this, they knew to be surrounded by trash bags of mother’s clothing that they’d tagged years ago for the Salvation Army. And, hopefully, on the nightstand, there was still a collection of ivory netsuke.

  Also, a reclining ivory nude, female, used by nineteenth-century doctors.

  The girls wondered what he made of that woman.

  •

  The doctor’s x-rays captured

  miniature binoculars, silver horse-charm, four open safety pins

  lodged between tiny ribs.

  Each feels like a story’s climax

  when the heroine, dropping into a cave,

  discovers a treasure at bottom

  that cannot be removed unless she answers these three questions:

  What is the opposite of “cleave”?

  Who savors rampion?

  Why not rock an empty chair?

  •

  How to extract an open safety pin without scarring?

  How to save the object without anesthesia?

  How to preserve all two thousand foreign bodies?

  •

  A child crawls on the treacherous floor

  appraising every object inside her mouth.

  •

  Dr. Jackson produced the modern endoscope with the use of hollow tubes and illumination. To see inside. As if he could see the image of the horse-beating that had taken residence inside him like a primal scene, told him where his body began and ended . . .

  •

  In the Emergency Room, surgeons also remove sex-related objects

  from the rectum (the ubiquitous light bulb or hamster)

  and from the perineum (straight pins and nails)

  and from the penis (rose stem with thorns).

  There’s also the stripper flashing a razor in and out of her labia.

  Alas, my imagination pales—

  •

  Newly coined terms—

  Amylophagia, ingesting laundry starch

  Cautopyreiophagia, ingesting burnt matches

  Geomelophagia, raw potatoes

  —all exemplifying specialized terms

  within Pica, a disorder named after the Eurasian magpie pica pica,

  known for its morbid craving.

  (What does one turn to

  when laundry starch, say, becomes no more—?)

  •

  Flashlight, trombone cleaner,

  curling iron, screw, battery: all up the bum!

  •

  In the local Savings & Tru
st I descend to the corridor below street level. A woman sits in a cool gray light updating client info, filing her nails, text messaging. I step up to the bulletproof window, slip my ID into the slot, smile, and wait. She looks from my photo to my face. “Which one?” she asks. “The smaller one,” I reply. I am not able to say my ex-husband’s name in this ceremony of twenty years. “Yes,” she replies. And as she takes her key and mine, I think about this box as incomplete transaction: old wedding bands, diamond earrings twice worn, and Mother’s jewelry—inherited and rarely worn. No—never worn. Safe keep. Kept here. From myself.

  Then there are bonds for the children. (I haven’t ever checked the other one containing the deed with the new husband.)

  •

  What is down the hatch?

  (A penny-sized harmonica, a pea-sized magnet, button batteries, jacks!)

  What then is the fourth question?

  (What does that mean, safe?)

  To whom does the extracted foreign body belong?

  (If you tuck a crucifix under your tongue, Mama then can’t hunt it down.)

  Too hard to swallow? Or, swallow hard?

  (Nicole’s missing charms: sewing machine, thimble, Mother)

  •

  The why:

  playing around wicker chair

  playing with a tin cup containing a white pearl button

  alone on floor with lucky-shell bracelet

  put toy in his mouth to hide from sister

  child alone in room found hairpin under pillow

  bored or unhappy

  •

  Dr. Jackson’s Aphorisms:

  Let your left hand know what your right hand does and how to do it.

  Let your mistakes worry you enough to prevent repetition.

  Nature helps, but she is no more interested in the survival of your patient

  than in the survival of the attacking pathogenic bacteria.

  •

  Yes, how to extract a barrette without further scarring?

  How to store the object of your ardor, even to stay what harms

  (junk drawer, purse, . . . flash drive)?

  Yes, how to persevere

  long enough to sound an alarm? to be alarming?

  •

  Somewhere I have a palm-sized clock,

  green with a cartoon face,

  that Daddy bought for me at the hospital

  when we visited Mother, who’d just had a baby.

  And could that toy

  be tucked away with puka-shells, miniature sleigh, and

  —and really, has the point of an object lesson come down to this—

  Mother’s plastic collar stay?

  •••

  A Dusting

  However Mother has reappeared

  —say, as motes on a feather duster—

  scientists say the galaxy

  was thus created. This daybreak

  she seeds a cumulous cloud.

  •

  Wherever Mother is bound

  she’s joined ashes ashes

  or dirt underfoot or bits

  off Tower North and Tower South.

  Repurpose does not arrive whole cloth.

  •

  From stardust, dust bunnies,

  Dust Bowl and Dust unto Dust

  to Ruykeyser’s silica, Whitman’s boot-soles

  and Dunbar’s What of his love, what of his lust?

  to the samples that astronomers collect—

  dust is where the sparrow bathes herself.

  •

  “Not a cloud in the sky,”

  Mother says as she hangs the laundry outside,

  Father paints en plein air,

  and we girls sweep crumbs under the rug.

  This summer, Father sees

  Inferno everywhere.

  •

  No dustups from little girls!

  As a consequence, one scribbled

  on the dust-bins of history

  and the other dusted

  for fingerprints. And the mother?

  The mother lived in a vacuum.

  •

  Inside the senseless corridors

  the daughter cannot respire.

  Inside the vulgar cosmic

  the mother cannot be revived

  in streaming wet traffic.

  •

  Nowadays, I lie down in the sunlight

  to see my mama

  moting around as sympathetic ash.

  Yes, one morning whether misty or yellow

  I’ll be soot with her—

  elegiac and original.

  •••

  The Old House Speaks

  Before I became foundation, I was a chicken-coop aways from farmhouse, carriage house and barn. And around my grounds, someone’s daughter played with her bisque baby. Among stink and chicken feathers. Eggshells. Nests.

  I tasted the haze of dandruff and chicken shit. The taste of my own throat.

  From my planks and wire I heard the clucks. The coos. The tap-tap tap-tap as the scabby rooster pecked like the son’s paddle-toy.

  I wasn’t so much humble as meager. There is nowhere for anywhere except a runaway who kneads the dank, brown, soiled straw.

  The farmer’s little girl played with chipped teacups alongside the buzzing kitchen scraps. All converted, finally, into a trash heap.

  •

  Noisy and noisome. From that rough roost to an indoor-out: branch and ice rip me open. Birds tear into my screens, leave droppings all over my insides.

  Did I say a runaway? More recently, down the hill in one family’s garage, the wife turned the car on and fell asleep to the smell of gas—shutting the door to other neighbor’s rat-a-tat-tat.

  •

  The male raccoon leaves shitty paw prints on the grocery circulars and coupons that flood the floorboards. Even on watercolors left out on a desk. There is nowhere where there is no scat.

  After winter torpor, I wince when the raccoon births her kits in a closet.

  Some say a raccoon makes over two hundred sounds—and it’s true, I’ve counted as many.

  And the mask, reduces glare at night.

  And the ringed tail, stores fat for the winter and aids in any balancing act.

  And the dousing of food, yes, “wash.”

  Funny how the pregnant female kicks out the male.

  Yes, where creatures thrive, I cannot breathe—

  •

  What will become of my kitchen? The room where the now-middle-aged woman, when a toddler, sat in the bright porcelain sink for a sponge bath. One of the few events that she cares to recall while sifting through the rubbish, once her mother’s home, her father’s house. Or was it the inverse?

  •••

  charms i.

  Mindful

  Collect a sand dollar from dry sand

  And not from silted shallows

  While wet it’s very much alive

  And will consign its sorrows

  •••

  Constant Objection

  More often than not, a house fills up

  with only stifled objections

  to a dozen glue guns, a case of Brillo pads,

  jars of preserves. But—coffee cans

  of chewed up chewing gum

  is why he resided alone.

  •

  Notice that the simplest often yields the most:

  OBJECT: body, doodad, meaning, purpose,

  hope, butt, . . . to mind and to resist.

  The theory itself yields: Pinky-Bear,

  Blankie, Sock-Puppet, Nightmare.

  •

  Objection? Outside a neighboring clinic

  three fundamentalists wait

  to shoot the doctor at point-blank range.

  Meantime, Father saw Medusa

  on the clothes line, under the sink,

  in a tureen of string beans.

  •

  He drew the mythic ball of live hair

  that no one can s
tand or he’ll turn to stone.

  Then there’s cherry-red on her toes.

  Then there’s his own weekend Father

  taking him to see “Boxing Kangaroos”

  who turned out to be yawning strippers.

  •

  On objectification, Marx wrote:

  As values, all commodities are only

  definite masses of congealed labour time.

  Yes, Hamburger Helper, trombone, robot vacuum!

  Yes, covert kiwi or flagrant heroin!

  •

  (As for the coffee can of chewed up chewing gum—

  just a necrophile’s faithful rite

  to resuscitate a strict mama,

  viewed on the Discovery Channel.)

  •

  After tossing her clothes and cosmetics

  I crisscrossed the city on a bus:

  peering out at the concrete,

  cherry blossoms fell in my hair

  from no open window. They piped up,

  How much more can a daughter object?

  •

  Before I swept every speck of you

  from the rooms where Father would carry on—

  if only I’d saved your brush

  with a few strands of silver hair.

  Mother, dear object of my despondence,

  What more can a daughter bear?

  •••

  A Little Safe

  In a toy safe, I locked

  seven glass giraffes from Grandma

  once displayed on her credenza.

  After she lost her riddled lung,

  the hospital lost all her remains.

  Or so the story goes.

  •

  I treasure her charm,

  a tiny box housing a dollar—

  not that that would get me far in a pinch.