Bird Eating Bird_ Poems - Kristin Naca [5]
she scores homophones
there their they’re
3. (Scratched Sapphics)
My magandang naman.* Don’t have any
words for making this better. Sadness,
perfect leavening, tugs the heart’s ill-fitting
What capacity feels like: emptiness and
ache. A backwardly line, the needle luring
thread though the holes that’ve been pierced already. Stars, so
gravity-cooked, they
bead to cushioning blackness. Tell as much as
need be: Nothing can worsen how she feels now.
Tell yourself, about anything you need to.
Heart, rest a little.
LAS MENINAS / THE MAIDS OF HONOR
—Museo del Prado, España
Thirteen, I stumble
into the princess’ gaze.
She’s composed, defiant.
Morning slants through
the workshop window
and charges the threads
of her blonde hair.
The Infanta Margarita
wearing a corset so tight
light spikes from it, like
a chest plate worn by
conquistadors in paintings
of Cortés announcing
himself to the Aztecs.
From one maid’s tray
la infanta grabs a piece
of amber-colored fruit
that glows warm as a heart,
while the maids search
the porcelain of her face.
Dwarves Maribarbola
and Nicolasito, and a dog,
accompany her, serving
as amusement while
she poses.
Another maid teeters
behind the Infanta, unrumpling
the lace of the princess’ sleeve
that goes astray each time
her arm grazes the boughs
of her skirt, boughs wired to
spread the fabric at her waist
and send it tumbling, a tissuey,
stuffed tun to the floor.
The Infanta shows
no regard for Velázquez
who also gazes from inside
the painting, onto the world
that lay beyond the borders
of the painting’s framework.
Somehow, Velázquez has
captured that world, too.
The King and Queen of Spain
pose, there. Mere reflections,
they appear as brief, bluish
swaths of paint, in a mirror
that hangs in the background
on a dark rear wall.
All of us onlookers
in the museum’s corridor,
standing beside the King and Queen,
a troupe of royal attendees
blued into existence by Velázquez,
who’s turned his giant canvas
to obscure our view on
the action of his brush.
How he heaves ochre-sopped
bristles across the oily likenesses,
giving the royals’ yards of skin
a taintedness—the illusion that,
with every breath, they ingest
the same bleak air we do,
the room tinged with flecks
of green and purple debris.
I gaze and the Princess
gazes back through me.
She’s luminous, a godly idea
etched into human form.
The rest of us abide with her
perfection, infallibility. So much
like the maids who ratchet up
their heavy velvet dresses
that razor dust off the floor.
Those dresses they must harness,
to concoct each step anew
as they try to walk.
BECOMING
The form letter reads: If you dream
of being Miss USA, this is your chance
to turn that dream into reality!
In disbelief, I turn the envelope over.
State Pageant Office. Naca—that’s me.
Mail in bio and recent photograph.
Always Miss Nothing in photographs,
I had the desire to fulfill Mom’s dream,
Filipina beauty queen, but a fat chance.
By ten, I was shouldering the reality
of a size eighteen blazer. Not over
weight, just big, a saleslady braced me,
sensing Mom was about to scold me
from the Casual Corner. That photograph,
lost to the panels of a drawer, I dream
out of me. But this letter reads chance—
a word more potent than reality.
At least to a poet mulling over
chance into change, small changings over,
how day-to-day I chance to change me
more permanently. The old photograph,
that suited me, I alter in my dreams.
Thinking it, I set my heart to chance.
Writing it, reality.
So, why not this other reality?—
where my real, my realm is turned over,
exposing some dolled-up, plastic me,
the makings of a bad photograph;
nightmares scare up new dreams to dream.
Why deny myself the chance,
when life’s so chancy, chancy
and (perhaps) even destined? Reality
is just most people can’t get over
beauty, can’t get by or past it. Not me,
my poems, at least, aren’t photographic,
symbols perfectly minted from dreams.