Hulga’s Gift

Hulga the Angel descends in the dark.
Her stump leg scrapes the ground. She knows full well
Her presence brings no peace nor chastity.
Not here, not anymore. Because I am
Re-stitching this dress, pulling out the seam.
For each knot I tie, the tighter will be
My new skin, adjusted by the years
To fit over new curves, new bones, break new hearts.
Let down the hem, iron out the creases:
This chocolate silk dress is yours. I made it
For you. Time only makes my blood run cold
And memory gets richer with heat, with want.

Hulga points to a violin player.
She says, “Maybe this was the only man
You ever really loved. And even then
It was only your desire you loved.”
It is more than just her name that is ugly.
It is my shame, my lust, that in itself
Makes my identity, summer after
Summer. Put on my dress, cut by a bow.
Measure my life against the day we met.

There will always be death in this body.
Hold it close, embrace wounded memory.
Truth is embedded in divine flesh. Yours.
I will hear your music for my whole life
And I will remember your tenderness,
Part of me forever, like a stump leg.
If you see me haunting your dreams, or don’t,
Whether you can or cannot forget me;
I will wear this dress with everything
I ever wanted in you or in him.

Hulga points to a reveling sinner.
She says, “Maybe this was the only man
You ever really wanted. Even still
It was only yourself that you needed.”

Dreams of Vincent

Steepletop, New York: 1949

Decline to put life into fourteen lines:

Edna St. Vincent Millay walks in her garden, the path worn smooth now, after years of

loving and living so well.

Seven hundred acres of grass softened into mud, feet slipping across dew to the secret

cabin. The secrets of this woman, hidden in the forest, in her writing fortress,

secret words and secret lovers;

Roses and honeysuckle separated by time lines—

When did you plant this one, and this, this too?

Measuring your life by the flowers underfoot.

She writes an illegible scrawl, dictating her last will and testament, her eyes dripping

Morphine and her stomach bloated with unborn children, her head aching and her

liver ruined by drink & sleeping pills & painkillers &—

Her heart broken amongst the poets of Europe and her lovers lost in literary magazines of

witty irony, forgetting everything except these cruel letters of having and not,

Her sexual frustration burned into an ivory dildo that horrified darling sister, now too

tired to rub as she once had, and their morals shocked at the abandonment of

acceptable social behaviour,

(Naughty Vincent! Nude photographs for Norma’s grief!)

Her stomach wrenching and her fingers shaking, she counts her drinks and records her

cigarettes; who else is there to do it now? He’s gone and been gone, been gone

and gone—

She writes & she writes, the Pulitzer next to notebooks, pages and pages scattered across

the hard wood around her bed, lying with the intravenous pierced into my heart;

But in the beginning, and the night until the end,

Your red hair shines, Vincent.

You stand at the bedside revealed, asking, asking just this once, and you are more

beautiful now than in all the past.

Camden, Maine: 1892

A tiny baby to Cora Millay, bringing the love her husband would and had abandoned.

Two more to follow, these girls watching their eldest sister protect and comfort dearest

mother, beloved teacher of all things sweet and right.

On the seashore where the rockweed grows, you play the princess, you define the

prowess of life to come: prowler of the mainland, encourage the ever-brightening

flame!

And begin to make sketches, poems written in half-letters for Cora, Norma, and

Kathleen, the beautiful girls shaping your life’s roots; begin loving them through

your words, begin turning into the storm that will overtake this war-torn & jazz-

riddled America.

Shakespeare took your breath away.

His sonnet is no rival to your own.

You learn & you learn, each editor fancied whose fondness for you becomes piety—bow

down before the young student, eager to be such a lover, to dance the Renascence.

New York City, New York: 1920

Serenading, smoking, seducing; a ghost of the determined heart privately shattered and

disillusioned by politics; a mind too clever and whimsical, bestowing grace upon

your drama queens and magic dreams; coyly, fiercely, teeth set into the poems—

Reading deep and slow, deliberately: “Is that really my voice? Quite lovely, isn’t it?”

Pitying you not, they fell in love, confessed it and sent it, little packaged tokens of desire

which passed for you most casually. Swooning turned to devotion and possession,

men of newspapers and women of Vassar all contented and condemned to lie at

your feet.

At the party, paired with the most handsome man in the room—Eugen, love of your

life—and of all those competing, he won the prize; married in a hamlet far away

from the big city, sisters at your side, mosquito netting in your hair.

Loving him, twelve years your senior, weak and pleased, planting the seeds of life,

beginning together, planning to reap what you sow.

Or in Boston seven years later, walking the death row picket line, wooden letters of

protest on your shoulder, arrested, harassed by Republicans, thrown into a jail cell

to confirm your commitment—to ensure your heart’s dedication—sitting on the

cold floor that night, tired & tried, do you still believe as you did? Do they see it

at all?

Or does the girl poet disappear in the morning?

What lips your lips have kissed, and here, and why;

But laughing on the beach, sand in your skin, you were happier than ever before, no

matter how many men.

Sanibel Island, Florida: 1936

To the shoreline, wind whipping, seagulls crying, your legs strain to run against the

thirteen thousand miles distance home—

Turn back, see flames.

Every word you wrote has changed into ash.

What kind of memory do you have, Vincent? Were you able to set down everything

you’d missed, letter by letter, player by player? When you think of the rude fire,

Do you think of yourself stepping into it, walking through the blaze; do you think of

yourself becoming the inferno, the orange flames licking singes of your hair—you

are scarred, burned, remember each sentence as it should remain in your head;

branded black spots on your fingers from the pen’s ink, the rhyme repeating itself

and you turn over in bed.

Is this when you truly rise up, when you set free your call? Though the pain you will

suffer—remembering, writing, your arms weak and your nerves pinched, falling

out of moving automobiles, used up by life—though you will suffer pain, your

grasp on the heart of Bohemia is loosened forever this time as you leave behind

the earthly place.

This is when you left us, long before real death. After such a truth with Ugin, it was

impossible to enter that which we inhabited; you made the world your own

because it is difficult to live as others do, it is difficult to live—

So carve letters in and find home with him;

Immortal as the words you engrave,

Hold them to your pale throat.

Steepletop, New York: 1950, 2006

Edna St. Vincent Millay walk in her favourite garden as best she can. Sickness and grief

have slowly warped her body to a shape dimly reminiscent of herself, of the

century’s treasured poetess who cast spells on her readers, her devotees, her

friends, her family.

Your tiny lyrics were already wrapping the world round before this day came, before you

ever fell in love with him. Can you hear us at all? Telling you to stay?

Stay with me.

And all I could see from where I stood

Was you, standing on the stair below me, offering a hand.

It would be so easy to follow.

I dream of the written life and the imagined one, of where you really are and what you

really were; of you in the seeping darkness of these nights—I dream.

As dawn starts to break, decline to put life into fourteen lines:

See an image of a girl I know, see a silhouette of Steepletop against the sky.

Heat

It is the summer of 1890, July. Paris is hot. Relief can be found in the wheat fields.

Lie my head back into the soft ground. Tall golden stalks surround me on either side. Van Gogh loved his absinthe so, his vision was yellow. My colored eyes, huge, flicker up to his face. I’m Sien, drowning myself in the river, I’m Theo, watching over with a brother’s care. I’m Kathy, walking through the beautiful light.

How could I have not known the wound was fatal? I put the revolver to my chest. And yet it took two days to die.

It is a common misconception that “Wheat Field with Crows” was Vincent Van Gogh’s final painting. “Daubigny’s Garden” is more likely, although he spent many of his last days gazing sublimely around Auvers. The painting that survives depicts a foreboding sky with black clouds rolling in and a flock of crows flying over the field. They are held to be the symbol that Van Gogh knew he was about to die and some critics claim that he killed himself while painting it. Three paths of indecision weave their way through the wheat.

The canvas stands before me naked and pale like a beautiful woman. Masturbate in front of me. I began to use oil paints eight years ago. Now I dip the fine hairs of the brush into a glob and paint a long, dark sky threatening the hardest rain to ever hit the fields of Auvers. The yellow and amber wheat is shining like patches in the sun. And the black rooks fly off into the horizon: leave death in their wake, or go forward towards it,

Three paths. Choose.

I take the brush and paint a long, dark line down from my collar bone to the curve of my left hip, stroking, just barely, my pelvic bone. Desire. The oil lies on top of my skin in thin layers and it will not dry for a long time. Not while you’re here. You are not here, Vincent. Desire is a dream with your face, he says, desire was a dream.

“La tristesse durera toujours.”

It is the summer of 1890, July. Paris is hot. Relief can be found in the wheat fields. My eyes, huge, flicker up to my reflection in the glass. This is not my final painting. No one knows but see it in my own face, speak last words but I’m painting, painting. The black crows are flying, flying away–

Choose.