knowledge of perspective . . .”
And so forewarned, I’ll try my hand: Anthony touched my face with his stump. We were fourteen. Anthony touched my face with his stump. I’ve said this phrase to myself for years. Sotto voce. Sometimes while walking. I say it in part because I like the beat, the variant anapests that beg another verse or want to break into hymn meter, and in part because that moment so impressed me. I hold the phrase itself up like an object of contemplation. His arm ended just below the elbow, this antic boy with raucous good humor, who played the trumpet and who, himself, called his arm “my stump.” The sensation was like nothing else I knew. Not a head, not a nudge. Not a child’s knee, not a ball. There was headlong force, texture, heat (this was summer on Long Island) and his unselfconscious desire, which instructed me.
In Botticelli’s portrait of St. Sebastian, the one I’ve looked at most recently in my ongoing study of St. Sebastians, it’s the outline of the arrows, the many, whole arrowheads buried beneath the skin, lodged in the flesh and those slight hillocks there, where the tip entered and stuck that holds me. So well-focused and attended, it’s more than a detail of the ecstasies of form: light, muscle, shadow. I think it’s what Botticelli wanted to paint most of all. The rise of flesh, stippled, blue-bleak; the body so changed and so reshaped, and how to praise that awful beauty— pied. Plotted. Pierced . I think this was the task he set himself.
At one time I would go so far as to get out of the tub to better hear my neighbors fighting. I’d reach, dripping and freezing, over the toilet and open the window to listen more closely. I’d wish away the noisy trains coupling down the street. I’d wish away my housemate talking in the driveway below so that I might log new accusations in their falling and rising cadences. I practiced seeing gestures, appointed gestures to their words in the steamy cold. Deformities of anger, gnashing twisted mouths, inner bile stirred and poisoning their postures. I wished them peace, I did. But when they screamed, I felt I could see the corners of mouths pull back. I felt the word “gnashing” freeze a mouth. Eyebrows slant like blades sharply down. They were real gargoyles perched and turned to stone.
All the better for sketching.
Sketching, I consider the line: “These fragments I shore against my ruin”—from a time when so much was felt to be coming apart. But no. My fragments I shore to reveal my ruin. And all the similarities my eye is drawn to: flaw. Torque. Skew. I make a little pile by the shore: cracked horseshoe crab, ripped clam, wet ragged wing with feathers. I look because a thing is off, to locate the unlocatable in its features, forged as they are, or blunted, or blown. I look because the counter flashes its surprising grin.
My own deformities, of course, abound, but they are on the inside. I do not mean the flaws of reason, the insufficiencies of heart. I mean my spine fused and fixed in place with metal rods—all inside, except for the eleven months I wore a body cast. And then I was the walking ruin for all to see, the shore to keep in sight while sailing free.
The woman with the half-arm, no, a bit more than half an arm (it stopped below her elbow) stands chatting with her friends waiting for the bus. In a gesture she must have developed long ago, she rolls a magazine into a tube and slips her half-arm into it. How well and how long must the gesture have served, because, really, who hides an arm, a perfectly good arm, in a magazine? Whose but a child’s arm could be covered by a magazine, its length or its circumference?
One sees what one expects to see: “a magazine laid over the arm.” But because I saw the arm slip in, I see instead her quiet strategy. And what does looking at her, what does knowing that teach me—since all along in here I’ve been practicing, letting the sight-of