Marianne Szlyk

Neither Heaven nor Hell but the Afterlife

For Felino A. Soriano

In church I listen to the dead soprano
and wonder what you would have made of her song:
words first shaken, then scattered, and last transformed
into voices in a gutteral tongue known
to none in this town perched on a mountain.

I think of your poems scrubbed from the internet,
wiped away like warm breath on a car window,
spoken words shaken, shattered, and then transformed
into ash. I cling to bright horns you wrote to.
But this music is not jazz, not your music.

But it is music. Having driven past old
mountains overrun with trees, the audience
listens as a clarinet mimics frenzied
traffic with trolley wires overhead,
as girls play typewriters and actors parade.

You are here, one of the dead we still
think of, who do not wink out until the last
loved one, last reader dies. You wander the aisles
like the composer Berio, stunned to be
in this plain brick church in the Blue Ridge mountains.

Not yet effaced, you’ll walk with the audience.
You brush past trees that do not grow where you lived,
trees filled with blue jays that do not sound the same.
You feel shaken, shattered, and transformed into
a ghost who comes when called, one who cannot choose.

 

She Lives With Ghosts

-- after Raise the Red Lantern (1991), dir. Yimou Zhang

Staying out of the sunlight,
with unbound feet, Songlian
paces the cobblestone courtyards.

She lives with ghosts:
the sound of a flute’s practiced quaver,
the chirp of an indoor cricket,
Chinese opera sung before dawn,
the voice of the concubine
the Master murdered.

At night she enters Meishan’s quarters
and makes the red lanterns blaze.
They bleed like a young girl’s foot
onto the blue-black courtyard,
onto the white snow.
 
The servants say that this house is haunted.
But the red and black masks on the wall scowl at her.
She cannot fool the ghosts.

In plain sight of both masks and servants,
she winds up the gramophone,
the clashing cymbals, the rickety strings,
the voice of her fellow concubine,
the voice of the Master’s chief victim.

But she cannot fool the ghosts.
She cannot fool herself.

Originally published in Black Poppy Review

 

Girl in a Subway Station, 1992

She knows she’s a rich girl. She knows
she rode her own pony while dressed
like a cowgirl, like her mother
who rides trails on bone-dry mountains.

She could have gone to Paris where
her hair, fragrant with shoplifted
shampoo, was noir, not just dull black.
She’d be hiding her father’s eyes

in vintage sunglasses, a pair
out of a black and white world.  But
she’s here in the dim, deep subway,
yet another specter in black.

True, she wields a pawn store guitar to
match her shapeless hair.  And this axe
is faster than the express trains
that blow through this station.

Her voice is unlike the other
women’s who sip coffee, stare
blankly. Her voice is not her mother’s
that swoops up broken-rock mountains.

Her voice is her own.