Dandarians. Lee Ann Roripaugh
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a frenzied monkey’s spirit with ropes and gags. Bring the switch into play to make it submit. After, offer candies, sweetmeats, nuts, caresses.
3 You turn off the phone, creep on all fours on the dining room floor so no one will know you are home. You creep on all fours on the dining room floor the same way a millipede once slid along your bathroom like a slim black iron filing smoothly pulled along from below by an invisible magnet. You wonder what unseen magnet pulls you along on all fours on the dining room floor so no one will know you are home. Your subject for the day, you say, will be trompe l’oeil: trick of the eye. Illusion. Delusion. Disillusion. Dissolution.
4 Once, you stayed awake all night, guarding a newly hatched cecropia while it painfully inflated crumpled tissue paper into gilded wings. At dawn, it flew. Tiny bright kite. A blue jay, too jaded to be fooled by decoy eyes, snatched it from the air and, in the nearby tree, tore away wings like plucking off artichoke leaves, then feasted on the striped creamy flesh of thorax and abdomen. Nevertheless, you will still lipstick red vigilant spies big as peacock-feather eyes onto your hands and feet and breasts and forehead.
5 Once, you watched an animal cruelty documentary. Yellow cat dunked in boiling water. Fur peeled away easy as slipping off the inner cellophane skin on a hard-boiled egg. Skinned cat still hissing and kicking. You didn’t want to look, but couldn’t make yourself stop. How can the eye paint a trompe l’oeil for things it’s unwilling to see? You know it’s possible. All those times you refused to believe what was seen through the lens of some prescient eye auguring how and when a love affair would turn to disaster well before the point of actual dissolution. Instead, the meat of that moment made sweeter by the cruelty of this knowledge. Like that time you were dizzied by windmills turning and turning and turning at the base of the Canadian Rockies. Too-beautiful thrust of mountain range into too-blue sky and the dazzled stretch of yellow canola flowers a too-pretty ruffling in the wind. But further up in the Crowsnest Pass, one side of Turtle Mountain gone avalanched down onto the coal-mining town of Frank in 1903. Frank Slide gone an underworld of rubble in the middle of the night. Yes. Like that.
6 You ask your ex-lover to blindfold you. You don’t want to be tempted into looking back. You say you are not prepared to sift through archaeologies of the underworld. Aperture is tricky, you say. Light is tricky. You want to skip the dismemberment, the postmortem, and go straight to the headless singing. You ask your ex-lover to blindfold you. And s/he does.
7 Beware of any headless singing. Headless singing is always a deception, a trick. An illusion. Delusion. Disillusion. Dissolution.
As a child, I weld the words centimeter and sentimental together because my mother pronounces centimeter as senchimental (sen-chee-mental), which sounds much like sentimental to me.
When measuring her knitting, she counts out loud, under her breath: “One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.”
I don’t know exactly what sentimental means, but it seems to summon forth some vintage, thrift-shop version of “love”—steeped in nostalgia’s mothballs, crimped with a wry twist of camp. It makes me think of the red construction paper and lace doily valentines we make in elementary school—slightly sour skins of Elmer’s glue peeling off our fingerprints—or those chalky candy hearts embossed in Courier font with words like “Yowza!” and “Hubba hubba!” It reminds me of the stuffed white cat with a red ribbon around its neck my mother stores inside a wooden crate in her closet—underneath her hand-painted silk kimonos, along with my father’s gold football from high school that hangs on a chain, and the oddly drawn, explanatory pictures of buffalo on onion-skinned blue airmail paper sent to her in Japan from my American grandparents’ ranch in Wyoming the year they spent apart before eloping.
One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.
My mother’s knitting needles are gleaming and sharp. Her tongue is even sharper.
I confuse love with knitting and think love is quietly meted out like the sweaters my mother knits for me, centimeter by centimeter. Soft rasp of yarn tugged from the unraveling skein of Red Heart worsted purchased on sale at Woolworth’s, rapid patient ticking of the knitting needles’ shiny syncopated clicking, red loops bleeding out from the needles and dripping into a complex network of Knit and Purl that ultimately takes the shape of something one can concretely name: red sweater.
Red sweater studded with bright silver buttons to push through the stiff emptiness of the buttonholes.
My mother knits us all matching red sweaters—mother, father, daughter—my mother and father wearing sweaters with brown buttons made from crisscrossed leather. It makes her happy when we go together, in our matching sweaters, to Albertsons, Vaughn’s Pharmacy, or “Mongol-Merry Wards.” In this way, she knits us all together, I think, visually insisting we belong to one another. (Is it because none of us are exactly the same race? I sometimes wonder.)
One senchimental. Two senchimental. Three senchimental.
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