​
Note: ​During the attempt to remove Whitman’s brain for storage in a jar, the brain was accidentally dropped to the floor and broke into many pieces.

On the Removal of Whitman's Brain


It must have shimmered, sloped like an island,
something of Paumanok’s tides caught in crevices
where it heard the call of that widowed Alabama 
bird, its folds like the negligent field of his woolen
comforter, a gray mass shifting toward the scent of
lilacs, quivering in the technician’s hand, as if his 
trepanned ghost held a butterfly to light that shone 
from his eyes, through his spirit’s vague walk, his 
ego’s envelope torn from this dismal flab, this hump 
of metric custard measured by trembling fingers,
as if Mickle Street, noisy Camden, industrial fumes 
drifting across the river into an upstairs window, 
were memories too heavy for the analytic balance,
all those hours he lay on the floor, unable to move, 
his untidy papers, reproachful letters, a garrulous 
trail toward the doorway he wished he could stand in, 
waving sadly like Lincoln, eyelids working rapidly
until smog cleared from the unaccustomed couplet 
of his lips, words running free, like that woman 
watching twenty-eight men bathing in the river, 
her astral body splashing beside them, slight hands 
the measure of bulging white bellies, thrill of
touch.  Alas, the bunched ganglia, the glowing 
pinpoint of his hearing, the lingua franca of each 
groove and gnarl, alas, alas, it must have rolled 
when it hit the floor, surging against gravity, 
heaving westward, it must have formed like a 
flower about its clipped medulla, gone flat 
as a nebula seen edge-on, suddenly swelling,
attracting dust motes, round knobs of drawers 
pulled open, water sloshing upward in beakers, 
everything unfastened flying toward it, tumbling 
the way planets fall into a dead sun.

First published in The Quarterly.





Note: René Magritte’s mother drowned herself when he was thirteen.  She was found with her dress up over her face.

Memories of Magritte


You imagine her dress transparent, that woman 
as she strides past your stopped tram, baguettes 
upright in a white paper bag, a drowned mother 
brought back in flesh tones peculiar to afternoon 
light after a game of chess in the park.  And in the 
shadow of a half-drawn curtain, at your easel, 
the painter nude, the painter tingling from a child’s 
memory of mother’s body, ingenuous and direct 
in accuracy of thighs, buttocks lengthened into 
the long axis of fish, the shadow beneath her left 
breast like darkness of a mouth about to speak.
Vowels and feather and black reflections of your 
half-finished coffee now a poster of peacocks
and conch shells, a half-retrieved summer
when she slipped out of a purple maillot gleaming 
in moonlight on the porch, and you wake half-erect, 
counting nicks in a molding, enumerating slats 
in the blind, coins distributed on the bureau.  A 
woman walks through an arched silhouette, into 
your mise-en-scène, curled shavings of wood
heard hissing from the carpenter’s plane.  She 
brushes past and you feel the hair rising on the 
back of your neck   easel + loss + silhouette
you feel the coarse fragments of mortar from 
that bridge they found her under, your feet muddied, 
the cloth covering her face.  Her realness like the 
sudden green glint of 1930’s glass etched with 
avocados and pears, her footfall the echo of breaking 
branches, her scent the humid interior of bromeliads.

​First published in The Wallace Stevens Journal.