Alexandra van de Kamp

The Swill of Sleep

“It’s sad to fall asleep. It separates people.”
–Jean Seberg, Breathless

Each body is a bouquet of mishaps
jagged with breath. When we sleep, we tip over
the jar of our dreams and end up
backstroking through the muck of ourselves:
European airports and dark bodies
falling from the sky: the subconscious
an aging perfume giving off its musky odors
and sweating fedoras. Darling, it’s sad
to be a soul phyllo-doughed in skin: we breathe
through the apparatus of ourselves
when we wake and when we sleep.
Enmeshed in scars, Aston Martins,
and back lots weedy
with regret, how can we ever
be with anyone
but ourselves? A kiss
is a false conference of voices, a swerve
in the day two faces briefly make;
a shivering bridge
attempting to support
the breath’s weight.
Don’t get me wrong, I relish
the martini swill of sleep in my mouth:
its smoky lavenders and dusks of daggers,
its sisters and fathers cursing
from behind the brocade curtains.
The mind is always on trial.
Every decision we make a pas de deux 
we dance alone across a ballroom.
Sleep, darling, is a gash:
a giddy depth we didn’t know we had.

A Poem with a Train in it Traveling to Constantinople

1. A poem is saddled with breath, with its mints
and paprika. A poem is the Europe I slip on in sleep
like a dress: its well-thumbed tapestries, its paint-
chipped back alleys, the ever-present smell
of plumbing and espresso. It is the meandering dialog
that swims backstroke beneath my skin. It is my
Picasso striptease, my Josephine Baker
harem of sequins. 

A poem is a fussy, catch-me-if-you-can
geography. A Mediterranean sneering
with ions—the local flora fluttering
like some celebrity waving
her neatly-buttoned ivory gloves
out of a car tinted with second guesses.
Only astute poems make regret
look attractive.

2. And this poem? Is it made of fragrant summers
stitched with citrus mirrors? Rain kicking
a soft can-can against the window’s pale
applause? Perhaps it’s a B-movie replete
with an indecisive heroine and a casino’s
art-deco gambling scene. A poem can be riddled
with make-up remover and leather satchels,
cerulean French boyfriends and pink plastic handcuffs.
It sashays with a line-up of bathing suits,
swaying against whatever you thought you might do
before the age of forty. It is a city
in ruins, the green sweating vines clawing your ankles
as you climb to the top of the collapsed
French fortress—the one with salmon-
striped lizards slipping across its stones
and an iron ship rusting like some lost cause
in the nearby ocean. I’ve decided
this poem has a plot and a cadre of rented Peugeots.
Also, a large black bird that blots out
the occasional cloud, its body a glossy cough
dividing the sky. Just now, someone hums to herself
a Viennese waltz. Her heart is a pale, hiccupy
pocket watch. She’s on a train to Constantinople
accompanied only by her valise and a rushed litany
of unevenly-lit magenta windows.

They Say the Uterus is the Shape of a Pear

I wanted to play with blue she said to me;
and explained how she happened upon
the boats bottom-up on a beach in Thailand
and approached them, hoping to paint
their faded patterns, their braided vines
of blue and gray, their tired,
chipped faces. Can the face capsize like a boat?
I think not. The face can barely
float—perplexed, sweating bloom on the neck’s
awkward stem—so unlike the egret I saw
a few nights ago. Let me move like that,
dear God, up there in your palace
of quivering clouds, let me step
through the shivering, unsure fields
of an evening’s water—my neck
a snowy decanter of light, my body poised
on the edge of an appetite--
and be content with that. 

The body is a landscape of its own
making, a damn Monet with its various lilies
winking and waking, surfacing from some
algae depths I’ll never know how to dig
to the bottom of. Revise that: it’s a landscape
with its colors and irrefutable facts
dipping in and out of me, like the blue-bird I saw
one Virginia afternoon migrating
between bushes—its wings a lavender door
opening and closing, a sustained blue breathing.
There could be lightning storms inside us,
and we wouldn’t know. The body a random spiller
of secrets, a grumpy gambler. There could be
tanks rumbling through bruised orchards, French Riviera
terraces, Tiger lilies and dead birds—lying one eye up--
still as a stone on the pavement. I wanted to play with blue.
I played with wanting blue. I grew a blue I could play with.

Today, mandolins are in the rain, an orchestra
poised and ready to play. I know there is a stack of nights
waiting to be unstacked, a darkness looking to be
deposed. I know I could be speaking out of turn.
Each morning I wake up to an egg-shell glow
floating down from the wooden ceiling,
to the birds dangling their voices
like bright necklaces in the air—a performance
they seem sure of. I dreamt last night I had a job
I hated, that it drained my day of swimming pools
and daylight, of skinny dipping and the cilantro-lime
vinaigrette of the sunset. Could the body survive
an emotional biopsy and live to tell about it? They say
the uterus is the shape of a pear. They say the skin
is the saddest body part of all. If you extracted
a sample of my fear, Mr. Surgeon, and placed it
on a slide, would it be cloud-covered or lucid
as a Bermuda sky? I played with blue wanting me.
A blue wanted to play with I. Or would it slither about,
elusive as a minor spy? The trees now all have alibis--
proving they were at a particular place at a
particular time. I wish I had a story like that.
Instead, I watch the clouds brighten outside. I watch
the birds drop their voices, their
dampened violas, as if in hushed surprise.

Poirot

Could a mustache really be an ink spill
fastidiously pruned on a man’s face? Who
knew Belgium could produce a parcel
of gray-paisley ties, spats and patent leather
shoes shining so sprightly a cabaret girl
could coif her hair in their twin
black mirrors? His chest a Cornell box
of silk vests, bow ties and turn-
of-the-century buttons—a dandy’s scarf
winking from a jacket’s pocket. If murder knew
its adversary would be a perennial bachelor
with OCD, would it ever relax its jagged
tools and relentless blood, now pooling
like a rose-colored dahlia across a woman’s
breast? How matter-of-factly he now stands,
poised over the beauty who drank the wrong gin.

 
 
--
Alexandra van de Kamp lives in Stony Brook, NY, with her husband and is a Lecturer in the Program of Writing & Rhetoric at Stony Brook University. She has been previously published in numerous journals nationwide, such as: The Cincinnati Review, River Styx, Meridian, Lake Effect, The Denver Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and The Connecticut Review. New work is forthcoming in 32 Poems. Her full-length collection of poems, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, was published by CW Books in 2010 (WordTech Press) and her chapbook, Dear Jean Seberg (2011), won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. A new chapbook, A Liquid Bird inside the Night, is forthcoming in 2014 from Red Glass Books, a Brooklyn-based poetry press. For six years she lived in Madrid, Spain, where she co-founded and edited the bilingual journal, Terra Incognita. You may see more of her poetry and prose at her website