Kerry Krouse
Wax and Gold V
--after the
painting by Wosene Worke Korsof
The
city is coated in signs, a lacquer stretching
to the
sea that swallows words and returns them
to
shore, sparkling and brine soaked. In slack water,
words
rub their molting bodies against rocks,
splitting open their skins, peeling them back and off
as
they crawl out loose, amorphous. They settle
in
tide pools, collecting barnacles and limpets, bodies
growing into the sea, into the earth. A cartographer,
mapping the verified world, sets out on foot
and
moves slowly: renouncing blanks, he draws
a
street for every street, a tiny x at every door.
The
map of the city, grown to the size
of the
actual city, is unrolled only at night,
the
cartographer paving street onto street, stitching
the
dark into the cloth covered sky. Everything
finds
its twin: the front door swallows the back,
the
perfect curve of the moon slips inside its sleeve,
fish
sleep inside their own shadows. In the light
where
every object binds its silhouette
to the
cluttered landscape, it is impossible to split
the
map from the city, the city from the ruins
beneath it, the ruins from the historical exhibit where
tourists stroll the restored cardo posing for photographs
next
to the city’s catalogued antiquities. From dark
earth
to red, a sequence of layers, each with the same
promise: to wrap cinder inside stone, to seed tarnished
machinery with curling vine. In Wosene’s painting,
the
horizon is adorned with a sculpture, night sky
visible through a polished hole cut through its
triangular figure. Letterforms rise from tide pools
and
wade into the bay, their reflections shifting in
the
rise and fall of water. They take turns curling
their
bodies inside the sculpture’s perfect circle,
a
window from which they imagine the moon fought
its
way free, leaving behind the granite from which
it was
cast. Behind them, fields of basalt conceal hills
within
hills, the pattern of the land as each old world
is
lost to the next, and the wax replaced by gold.
Kerry Krouse lives in Oakland, California
and teaches English at Chabot College. Her work has appeared in
The Southern Poetry Review and Appetite: Food as Metaphor, An
Anthology of Women Poets by BOA Editions.
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