A Doll for Throwing Read online

  Note to the Reader on Text Size

  In other words, a Caligari cabinet arranged like

  We recommend that you adjust your device settings so that all of the above text fits on one line; this will ensure that the lines match the author’s intent.

  A DOLL FOR THROWING

  Also by Mary Jo Bang

  Poetry

  THE LAST TWO SECONDS

  THE BRIDE OF E

  ELEGY

  THE EYE LIKE A STRANGE BALLOON

  LOUISE IN LOVE

  THE DOWNSTREAM EXTREMITY OF THE ISLE OF SWANS

  APOLOGY FOR WANT

  Translation

  INFERNO by Dante

  A DOLL FOR THROWING

  Poems

  Mary Jo Bang

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © 2017 by Mary Jo Bang

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by the Lannan Foundation, Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-781-8

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-973-7

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951417

  Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design

  Cover art © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

  CONTENTS

  A MODEL OF A MACHINE

  OF MANNEQUINS AND BUILDING EXTERIORS

  SELF-PORTRAIT AS A PHOTOGRAPH OF A PLATTER

  SELF-PORTRAIT WITH OTHERS

  THE CHESS SET ON A TABLE BETWEEN TWO CHAIRS

  ONE GLASS NEGATIVE

  DWELLING IN OUR TIME

  TWO NUDES

  STILL LIFE WITH GLASSES

  ON THE BALCONY OF THE BUILDING

  THE MIRROR

  ADMISSION

  NEWS OF THE DAY

  A NUMBERED GRAPH THAT SHOWS HOW EACH PART OF THE BODY WOULD FIT INTO A CHAIR

  THE HUMAN FIGURE IN A DRESS

  THE SILK AND VELVET CAFÉ

  OUR GAME. OUR PARTY. OUR WORK.

  PORTRAIT IN THE FORM OF EPHEMERA

  PHOTOGRAPH PRINTED WITH HATCH-MARKS OR LINES ACROSS THE PORTRAIT

  SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE BATHROOM MIRROR

  IN THE GARDEN BEHIND THE MASTER’S HOUSE

  IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH I AM UNTITLED

  THE DOLL SONG

  STAIRWAY, SEASIDE

  THE GAME OF ROLES

  FRAGMENT OF A BRIDE

  GESTURE DANCE DIAGRAM

  IN THE STREET

  THE HEAD OF A DANCER

  THE TRANSFORMATION ANXIETY DREAM

  THE BRACELET

  A BALLET BASED ON THE NUMBER THREE

  THE SHATTERED MARRIAGE

  ME, A CHRONICLE

  THE POSSESSIVE FORM

  THE ILLUSION OF PHYSICALITY

  THE SCURRYING WHITE MICE DISAPPEAR

  THINGS TO COME

  YOU HAVE TO BE UNCOMPROMISING AS YOU PASS THROUGH

  SHE HE AT THE FLOWER BASKET

  LONG-EXPOSURE PHOTOGRAPH OF A MAN

  PORTRAIT AS SELF-PORTRAIT

  LAST NAME FIRST FIRST NAME LAST

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER, BERLIN

  THE NEW OBJECTIVITY

  THE ICON IN THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY

  ONE PHOTOGRAPH OF A ROOFTOP

  MASTERS’ HOUSES

  TOMB IN THREE PARTS

  THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS

  MASK PHOTO

  AN ANATOMICAL STUDY

  THE MISSING NEGATIVES

  IN NOVEMBER WE INCHED CLOSER

  HAVING BOTH THE PRESENT AND FUTURE IN MIND

  AFTERWORD

  A NOTE ON LUCIA MOHOLY

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  László Moholy-Nagy

  Artist: Lucia Moholy (British, born Austria-Hungary, 1894–1989)

  Date: 1926

  Medium: Gelatin silver print

  Classification: Photographs

  Between 1923 and 1928, when Moholy-Nagy was a teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Lucia Moholy was one of the most prolific photographers at the school. This portrait was made at the entrance to the “master’s house” the two occupied at the Bauhaus.

  —The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Collection Online”

  A DOLL FOR THROWING

  A MODEL OF A MACHINE

  I’ll begin by saying that objects can be unintentionally beautiful. Consider the simplicity of three or four self-aligning ball bearings, the economy of a compass. Brilliant, no? We thought so. We had confidence in architecture and design beyond the base commercial. Stage settings, furniture, typography, everything came with a moral mandate. The machine was important, of course. At four o’clock in the morning ideas came effortlessly, as if out of the air, the way a teapot or a pan comes cleanly out of the cupboard. In the blank space between the following day and the previous night, you see the beauty of a propeller, for instance, and think, yes, I want that silver metal to mean something more than just flight.

  OF MANNEQUINS AND BUILDING EXTERIORS

  Living looks random and barren and formless when you’re adamantly busy inventing a now. The past will subtract itself from the new, especially wherever glass is a clean element on the edge of the no-longer-ornamented eave.

  I’m a double of myself, one half a doll that was spared, one half dead. A feather is a form of frou-frou and only so interesting. We want no more of that business. We are spent. Some. Mit freundlichen Grüßen.

  At the end of the day I never close my eyes. The landscape just is. What good is sighing. There are lines in her face that don’t yet exist. The doll’s face is breaking, she has no wrist.

  SELF-PORTRAIT AS A PHOTOGRAPH OF A PLATTER

  A platter can embody a wish to be simple. We are who we are. Wir sind. I also speak English. I married a master. I taught him something. I know what I’m doing. An image stands for the thing that is taken. I am taking everything I see. This is how I see myself. The platter is very flat and somewhat lasting. You or I might even say I made it last. Circum/ambient: as more or less to be around.

  SELF-PORTRAIT WITH OTHERS

  Before I moved out, there were five of us: me, my sister, my mother, my brother, and the man who modeled what we were all to think. He said we are nature, like it or not. Sun, clouds, rain, and reeds like those monks used to show their humility back in the Middle Ages. I wonder whether humility gets in the way of ambition? I wanted to travel. The morning my mother said I mustn’t, I wanted to stop her mouth and shake her. It felt like taking a step.

  THE CHESS SET ON A TABLE BETWEEN TWO CHAIRS

  I wanted to be my father: leave, return, leave again saying nothing to no one. My mother: a musician. An orchestra of self-absorption. My brother: a filmmaker who says he wants to re invent himself. He thinks an American na
me will make a new man of him. As if a pill dissolved sublingually can make the mouth speak in a manner the mind never knew. We are in a café. The mosaic ceiling above us is a blue overturned bowlful of goldfish. Each open mouth is a blind spot. Want. Want. Want. I catch sight of myself in a mirror.

  ONE GLASS NEGATIVE

  We were ridiculous—me, with my high jinks and hat. Him, with his boredom and drink. I look back now and see buildings so thick that the life I thought I was making then is nothing but interlocking angles and above them, that blot of gray sky I sometimes saw. Underneath is the edge of what wasn’t known then. When I would go. When I would come back. What I would be when. I was hard working but sometimes being becomes a habit: I came on stage wearing a lavender fitted dress with a stand-up collar. He looked at me, he took a drink. A man examining a hothouse flower. I clicked, then closed my eyes—the better to imagine my upcoming absence.

  DWELLING IN OUR TIME

  Knife to the narrative root, a pillow over the aperture opening, the café narrowing to silk and a single view. With a velvet curtain over your eyes you drink the ink from an open orbit. The glass lens asks you to answer: say yes for one, no for not now but maybe later. The marble maybes scatter. The bear lumbers off. Did you know what I meant when I said, Do you want someone to love you, or just this? I too am still. I refuse to ask mother may I, may I, may I, only to be given another maybe.

  TWO NUDES

  I was working in a bookstore and as an antidote to the twin torment of exhaustion and boredom, one day I went with a friend on a walking tour. We made it as far as Berlin and there I met the man I would move with to a boarding house, then to furnished rooms in the flat of a civil servant, and from there one morning in January to the Registry to be married. We then moved to a studio apartment and two years later from there to where boys returning from the war would remove their collars and sew them back on with red thread to demonstrate the end of their allegiance to the cruel and fastidious past. Everyone wanted to be launched into a place from which you could look back and ask whether the red was also meant to enact spilled blood. You could say so, but only if you want to insist that history’s minutia is best read as allegory. The fact is, history didn’t exist then. Every day was a twenty-four-hour standstill on a bridge from which we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to catch sight of the future. It’s near where you’re standing now. One day we were lying in the sun dressed in nothing but our skin when a camera came by and devoured us.

  STILL LIFE WITH GLASSES

  In the east-west dialogue between objects—i.e., chose and things and the many-colored costumes inspired by them—there are only two players: history and pictures. Each one creates images that will go on to exist in the imagination. Signs and signifiers can be subtle or not, subtext or top layer. The sweetly said doux includes the unstated question “Do you x?” Whether by design or not, the portal opens either way wide or narrow; the latter is the tailor’s eye which knows by sight both the home coming queen and the needle’s prick. When sewn together, one can be both bridge between and the lover embraced. Or does one thing insist each is one or the other? East or west, the repurposed steel becomes the semblance of a body and bodies are romantically eroticized line-&-figure simplifiers the way glass will always be en verre en France and at the same time shiro can be a Japanese castle covered with white snow and a white porcelain dish decorated with a Snow White scene and/or a watch-crystal smokescreen over a long-night chrysanthemum sun.

  ON THE BALCONY OF THE BUILDING

  There’s no sleeping now. No morphia dream-pact with night as a needle. We are staying awake and pressing against one another as if whatever is left is all that will ever be. We need one another as if one were on a fragile bough being sawed. I see the trace of a faint scar embedded above your right eyebrow. I knew then what it was to feel. The dying fall.

  THE MIRROR

  My hair is held back by a barrette, the tree in the background is green. Out of sight, birds talking on the right, to the far left and almost too far off to be heard, a dialogue between two men. I wish I could break in two and be formless, one half listening in, one half thinking about nothing but the fact that the nape of my neck is too warm. The express train flashes past, followed by a crashing silence. I’ve rejected the milk-mild smile. It’s married to the risk of fossilization. Granite with blood in its veins is still granite. On the bark of the pine behind me, a single cicada is glittering. That world is an island where it is always morning and the cool breeze is always invigorating. You can tell by my hair, how it’s blown back. You can tell by the light. It’s there and not going anywhere. There is no moment that isn’t all spectacle. The theatrical silence is the sun. The gray stage is winter. The circle is pure dilation: the shock mouth of me looking back at an avalanche of broken glass.

  ADMISSION

  My mother was glamorous in a way I knew I never would be. Velvet belt buckle. Mascara lash. Miniature crimson lipstick alive in the pocket of a purse. Her bow mouth was forever being twinned to a tissue. I never would wear that black windowpane see-through blouse, mother-of-pearl buttons tracing the path down her spine. Every woman was her rival. You could say, seriousness made me impossible, exactly the same way beauty made her. I under stand men. Some like to have one woman in their arms, while a second one stands on a half-shell, both continuously shifting between being and being seen. Even as a child, I under stood there were erotic fishhooks that one couldn’t see. I learned to use a camera to see what I could be.

  NEWS OF THE DAY

  Everything not in was out and we were the bride and groom in the marriage of this ridiculous day and life is only ever a comic opera. To write lowercase after decades of elevating the noun, this could be seen as an arm sweeping the past from the pedestal into the ashcan. To pull a question out of that hat, the one with an electric rabbit hidden inside, can become a critique if the overreaching world looking in is terribly nervous—like a diva sitting in a warm-water bath extolling the benefits of hot running water. How embarrassing, the singing chorus says above a clatter of cubicles where the press corps pushes out kitsch and vulgarity. Perhaps the staged hot bath is an embarrassment but who doesn’t want to forget the tank blocking the main street as well as every other exit. The news of each day is that time passes quickly regardless—some hours, however, are longer than others, with many more minutes that count.

  A NUMBERED GRAPH THAT SHOWS HOW EACH PART OF THE BODY WOULD FIT INTO A CHAIR

  I was born awake and knowing and time keeps proving this: men have reasons for breaking the rules. For me, thinking has always been a logical process of if this, then that. I fit into a chair. I sit in a room. I split in two—my body behaves but my mind resists. It’s a simple truth that one can occupy two places at one time while sitting in a chair—the same way a poseable doll can be divided from her dress. It’s also true that time will mesh us together. Until then, there’s another city on the other side of this wall. A list listing reordered details might read like this: light, glass, a metal stairway, one woman sitting on the sill of a window, me in a chair. My feet on the floor, face forward, arm bent, the very best of the body tucked into place. But we are not dolls. We feel. We make mistakes.

  THE HUMAN FIGURE IN A DRESS

  Naked or not, I’m a costume that moves, figurine with a face that changes. You could call me a mood. I begin cheerful but sometimes turn solemn when confronted with my own mythology (wolf in a cape, cat-claw scratch on a cupboard door, mouse tail in the hand of a bland farmer’s wife, a drop of blood on her shoe). Today’s beginning ended in a dream. In a fantastical bed, a lover leaned in to kiss me just as I realized I was part machine, part primitive urge. I left the bed and said, You know, don’t you, not everyone is so disposed. And then I heard from inside my head, You should say, not everyone is so disposed to your utopia. Only then did I realize I’d been inexact. Even here there are scolds that tell you how to be. Sometimes they live inside. Naked or not, I am trying to tuck my arms invisibly behind my b
ack so that all you can see are my breasts and my highly simplified head.

  THE SILK AND VELVET CAFÉ

  Come over here, she said. It was the façade no self can be without.

  OUR GAME. OUR PARTY. OUR WORK.

  A fire can be hot flame and black carbon contagion that ends in a smoldering that goes on emitting smoke and warming whatever is near. It was like that in the years when we moved from one place to another. Some say a war ends only when it becomes smoke rising from a book in a library destroyed by fire. And yet that fire sparks another. That library moves to another city and then to another. And so, war, not once but over and over. And everywhere, there are those who care and those who don’t. When metal and glass were becoming a building, the wealthy came in cars to gawk while the workers arrived on foot. Both brought deep scowls and the belief that if only the past would outlast today, they could be what they had never been, day after day eternally happy. They said without saying that what we were building must be destroyed.

  PORTRAIT IN THE FORM OF EPHEMERA

  Three items in an envelope. A photograph of two, four, six, eight, nine boys boarding a bus. Not boys, men. Dressed in the long wool coat of winter. Something “based on the life of.” What can a moment outlast? That question becomes a theory, theorem, mechanism. Three boys, one girl, a tree brushing back air off her forehead. Paper, six clean sheets, a monogrammed envelope. An index. The physical bias to existence becomes some wedge, the inexact value of an empire of ether. Tick-tick. The amphibian emerges from water, walks off stage. It’s as if evolution is embodied in absence. Some one is lying on her back. She turns over. Her breath is in the air. Or in the idea of atmosphere.