Central Courtyard of the Isle of the Dead by Matthew Buxton Salvador Dalí, 1934, oil on wood panel Naked and humiliated, torn between desperate rebellion and hopeful expectation, I chased my mother’s god from the forest of childhood into a desert village— appearing suddenly and formlessly as God to Abraham—just to pin a Facebook Marketplace clown for hire for 25$ for birthdays, baby showers, baptisms, among others to an altar of sandstone far off the right side of the page. He had a body. A boy’s. He wore makeup. My mother’s. His face, hers. Stolen. Flat Stanley. Not just dimensionally, but narratively. Homerically bare. It’s easier to slide under doors that way. Through wars. He slides out from my fingers as I scroll to the next listing: a place without backstory, explanation, named only for its relation to the poet who has been here and will not flatten like Time or Space if the cork board falls, a print of this painting pinned in its center. I turn my head and lift my eyes to the real life we came from and are commanded to go. The wall of evergreens. A ram tangled in fencing. Yellow porch light on fresh snow. Light past dusk. Rising off the half-frozen river, a leg of steam, thick at its base, body a thin coiling spring with a cleaned skull like an angel whose beak could open, but won’t, and announce, Here am I.
