Issue 14
Spring 2003
Catherine Daly
Catherine Daly is from an industrial city in central Illinois she left when she received an academic scholarship to Trinity College. Working as a technology consultant to banks while attending graduate school at Columbia University, she came to develop online environments for multinational conglomerates and teach online and in person. She has two books coming out this fall: Locket, to be published by Tupelo Press and DaDaDa, to be published by SALT Publishing. She lives in Los Angeles, and is addicted to HGTV and other forms of "house porn."
Queen Anne
"windows made of sheets of Belgian optical glass slightly magnify the
palms and shrubbery outside and draw into the rooms what can only be
described as an intense pallor"
John Ashbery
The Conservatory Ferns
Dry rooms house brittle plants and starts
and careful curtains.
The plants' innate humidity rusts the harp and piano strings.
Recalling the plants, I wonder they aren't nightshade, flytraps,
or other exotica, but asparagus shooting white flowers,
spiders and babies, Boston ferns riding brass stands
arranged according to a personal order,
variegated green, complemented by setting:
not marble, but a marbled mantle, pyramids of citrus,
polished and pulpy, murals of charcoal smeared on the walls.
Plants on the parlor floor,
arrogant, dumb, waiting.
The Horsehair Chairs
The wooden front parlor, still, polished,
prickly with horsehair-stuffed chairs,
waits. Bowls of chestnuts.
The iron-and-glass wall to the conservatory
cleaned with ammonia and newsprint, sparkling.
The parlor, overabundant in the matronly sun,
unlikely like the ruddy-faced cherubs
cluttering the ceiling, gilded,
complacent,
in full knowledge of their place.
Silver Candelabra
Nearly luminous on the buffet,
on a Belgian lace runner, flanked
by gemlike candies in crystal bowls,
a pair of metal dolphins hoists
wax and string lights.
Self-satisfied by their eventual redemption,
if not their lineage, their polished provenance
glowing, different from memory and story.
Canopy Bed
Pink, white, and gold, little girl Louis XVI,
the canopy's sheer white with pink flowers, and
my sister's bed and mine are pirate ships,
equipped with sheets in the rigging, just like sailors
wearing camisole sets from Sears,
the fleur de lis not the bumble bee.
Some people need a frame, a picture window
to see the field. I don't understand some people
or these trees, bees, and grasses,
the ocean for a boat, a bed, a view,
traversal, a boat on a drink of water, slim,
cool.
God will never give the little children
bread again, just ships to fill their minds, not their lives,
that fill them with a strange obedience
less individual, like a veil, a canopy
making algebra harder or other or wrong.
I mean not limited as God's language.