Still Life with Orchid

STILL LIFE WITH ORCHID

It is the foggy Baltic port,

the seagulls laughing on the wooden houses.

It is waiting four times for you to get off work at the bakery

and the sly smiles from your co-workers,

who seem to be parties to a secret.

It is a secret where nothing matters

and everything matters,

fleeing hand in hand

from the underground restaurant

to avoid the graceless melodies of the wrong century.

It is the oil paint drip of these things,

or maybe it’s the wide eyed silence of you

posing half-naked in the mirror,

showing off a soul that longs to be free from the body.

You’re ashamed when I say you sound like Dracula,

but I like the sly wink of the undead,

your "welcome to the castle,"

your fingers trembling for your friend’s cigarette

behind the Russian bookstore

in this nation where you are still a stranger.

Or you are a little girl on the lap of her

bespectacled French teacher in the Tsar’s nobility.

Or you are the underworld in which we hide

during this cold Baltic summer.

You lazy, Russian criminal, you.

You are the beige and black petals of an orchid—

no, not black, a maroon so deep it is only black

to the untrained eye.

You offer to train my eye to paint

or maybe just to see.

Maybe it is only we who can see the secrets,

two spies from different empires,

double agents in the little liberated Republics,

huddling in a brick basement

with tea and jangled oil-paint

portraits by the hotel proprietress

who is getting her divorce this month.

Her sand and glue and thick oil,

her red and blue and yellow.

We repair and repaint the collages that we are.

And then on that creole balcony on the

Baltic harbor, casually mentioned,

is a reason you don’t want to be touched yet.

The accidental part of you that is not a part of you

forces in you a ladylike coyness,

as we wait for your Grandmother

to give you her orchid dress

so her unearthly elegance can be yours.

“She is not one of us,” they once said,

and the men said they hated her,

because they secretly desired her.

She is proud they are now fooled

by her white-skinned descendant

who paints Leonardo’s outstretched arms

with Renaissance rock star hair,

with cock, triangulated for science,

a grid of the human body,

and all its parts.

Tell me who I am,

the drunk children sing in the hung-over morning.

A chorus of ten-year-old Latvian boys—

or are they grown women singing?

as I guess this song from my childhood.

Who I am!

You are breathing slowly at my side

and I am motionless as I rewind the tape in my mind

to remember the next line

or the line before—

Who I am!

Till I hear the melody these human birds sing so happily.

They are women, not boys.

The chain-smoking proprietress

celebrating alimony with a song.

She will invite me to reveal my lady

hiding on the balcony before work,

she will hand me the keys

to her purple Volvo with a stiff clutch

and pound whiskey in her passenger seat

as I drive my own ambulance to the Soviet

emergency room outside town.

The hotel lady has seen it all.

“So many Saturday mornings

I’ve gone to this hospital,” she'll laugh,

and my one good arm will crank the wheel,

as the other turns blue

from my blind-man’s-walk off the plank

of the trolley car onto the tracks

after dropping you secretly at the cafe

to spend your day serving pastries

trying to look alert and innocent.

The drunk-all-night morning women are my family.

Yours too, our mothers and sisters,

howling a naive plea:

Please tell me who I am!

They still call from beneath our collapsing balcony

to gather us for cheese and beer

and morning cigarettes, you, me,

long-haired boys for a moment,

as you sing Russian lullabies

to your drug-assisted lover

waiting for us to clutch our fingers together

and pretend to ignore the odd parts of you,

foreign to you, foreign to me,

which compete for space between the sheets.

We are alive at last, at least for now.

Your long careful showers

make the colored blinds blow against

hundred year wooden walls.

And it is the walls who record one love,

two loves, ten thousand mornings,

of who we are, who we could be.