Still Life with Roses, Wyeth’s Christina’s World, and a Poem by Larry Levis in My Lap
BY NIKHE BRAIMAH
I met a man who could fuck like a country road—
narrow, winding, no guardrails, no destination,
just an occasional mailbox tipped over like a tired saint.
He told me once he used to sit in church and imagine
getting head during communion.
He meant it as a confession.
I took it as biography.
There are worse things than being the body
someone returns to after prayer,
but none of them are more American.
By then I had read Frank Bidart’s “Herbert White”
so many times I started to think of intimacy as excavation.
That if you just dug deep enough,
through the guilt and horniness and broken latches of the self,
you’d find a clean room. You don’t.
No, instead, I think I love
like the girl in the Wyeth painting loves her own futility—
arms dragging her forward,
legs forgotten in the grass behind her
like old tools.
That’s not love, exactly. But it’s a good impersonation.
Meanwhile, this man I loved shaved in the dark
because he said the light gave him headaches.
I read Larry Levis in bed and cried
at the part where he talks about watching himself
fade from the photograph
like a bad idea.
He didn’t notice.
Or maybe he thought crying was another kind of sex.
I like art because it is something
that lets me witness without intervening.
Sometimes I just want to be something
beautiful arranged by someone else
and left alone.
I still have the roses he bought me from Walmart.
They smell like plastic, but I know they are real because
they are dying very, very slowly.
