Terri Witek is the author of The Shipwreck Dress (Orchises Press, 2008), Carnal World (Story Line Press, 2006), Fools and Crows (Orchises Press, 2003), Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Contest) and Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self (U of Missouri P, 1993).  A native of northern Ohio, she teaches English at Stetson University, where she holds the Art and Melissa Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing.

 

 

Granted, spatial relations have never been my strong suit,

even according to the aptitude tests administered in school

where you’d need to unbend shapes in your mind to count

their vertices. Sometimes I can’t even find the bathroom

 

in a particularly large house I’ve visited before. But the times

I drove a Plymouth station wagon around DC, skipping high

school or evading curfew, were the most hopelessly lost

I have ever been before or since. I grew to loathe L’Enfant,

 

veering around traffic circles and crabbing down one-way

streets, unsure if headed to 9th & E Northeast or Southwest,

aware that all the streets radiated outwards from the hub

of the Capitol but clueless how to get there and what to do

 

once I did. Three spots I could get to on remote control:

a dance club with a volleyball court separating two floors,

the Mall, and a liquor store at 14th & P that needed no ID.

Going anywhere else was part map, part hope and prayer.

 

Once coming back from a rave in an abandoned warehouse

surreptitiously fitted with strobes, booming sound-system

and a smoke machine, the kind of place you find the address

to the day of the party, driving home with two candyflipping

 

brothers, one of whom would throw himself off the Golden

Gate bridge over a decade later, I was stopped by the cops

who found a dime bag in the backseat and made us starfish

against a chain-link fence, flashlight full in our faces, yelling,

 

querying the nature of my grandfather’s asthma medicine

in the trunk, ripping out panels in the doors, threatening

to drag us all to jail until the owner of the bag, the brothers’

reedy friend, fessed up. That night our parents were called

 

but we were not dragged to jail. Under the blinking redeye

of the Monument, before the entrance to I-66 tripping

streaks on acid, confronted by two forceful cops, I literally

pissed myself standing out in the cold. No one until now

 

has ever known that sordid fact. What precisely constitutes

redemption? To confess is not necessarily to transcend.

But if I hadn’t gotten lost we wouldn’t have been stopped.

Then it’s pure conjecture. Coordinates in space I can handle.

 

 

 

Castle looms blue on the porcelain plate.

Its groves have vanished, along with one crinkly river,

 

and since the scene no longer requires a knife

this has dropped nearby like a drawbridge.

 

The window next to a window we know

must be the princess's.  Or so we infer

 

from the blue curtain and a songbird

who seems to expect a palmful of crumbs.

 

And that something's amiss—

which is to say, in her story,

 

it rubs between her shoulder blades

or under one ear as she drifts on

 

her blue bed.  Perhaps it's the insignia

under the plate, "John Cheswick and Sons,

 

LTD    England///Manhattan,"

that  so dismays her.  But even

 

to think this makes the blue castle

shake like a trellis as another pattern

 

(still blue, now above us)

fills with the grit of unseen stars

 

ubiquitous, unnumbered, so unlike this plate

hoarding dust and dark in a credenza drawer,

 

along with an alabastrite bust of a Native

American horseman frozen in full gallop,

 

and cutlery got at an estate sale in Pontefract.

Where there Cheswicks there or their kin?

 

Jowly boys with gangly limbs, pale girls

who owned closets full of rococo gowns,

 

her age but happier in that they are imagined?

Blue castles are surrounded by dry moats

 

in her story, have no recorded history

save the song she hums in rote distraction—

 

J’irais d’un vol rapide et sur…

Poulenc’s ribald relic passed on

 

A blue song, scribbled each dusk

into trees that have already gathered

 

into their own sly clatter two raccoons

who aren't afraid of  local, dream-laden children

 

and a platoon of titmice harrowing an owl

who glides down with one seven-tongued sound.

 

Maybe he's the hero, not some bungling prowler.

The sea's so dark now it's only a murmur

 

in elsewhere's throat—or so it seems here,

where empty moats thicken into a pattern of brambles

 

rounding the edge of the world.

But nothing is safe—not the drawer's teardrop handle,

 

not the hour, not the drift of song lifting

suddenly, like a blue skirt.

 

Something more lilting than a boned bodice

lined in jacquards, trimmed by crepe de chine,

 

Yet less mephetic than chrysanthemums

drooping in cut glass until they shrivel

 

surely as the suggestion of quirky impropriety

secreted away in the minds of old ladies

 

who swore never to let such insinuation

besmirch their family name, left delicate plates

 

instead, blue inked, blue-veined, not meant

for canned carrots, better kept wrapped

 

in terrycloth, never to expose its verso to the stars.

Only along her long limbs, like the scent of sand

 

after a hard downpour, had the princess

carried off what the ladies could not speak,

 

a snippet of song broken off, the dim memory

of a castle, the squared jaw of prototypic

 

handsomeness animated under her fingertips,

a man who broke horses, mounted carriage-wheels,

 

made his opinions known to the Templar Knights,

spoke softly to dogs when he thought no one saw.

 

And so what they had been in their world

enters ours, broken by touch,

 

calling back from leaves curled like fingers

an old sniffer-outer who will drop fragrantly

 

outside the first junk-shop door.

Plato, hound of the real.

 

If they're hungry, biscuits and gravy

from white plates in Hunter's Kitchen Cafe

 

and other doors chiming, loose on their hinges,

even the going-out-of-here-soon's store's,

 

whose signature goods are already down

to display cases: one waist-high, lit shelf

 

by shelf, and a taller, revolving one:

$75.00, better money for both.

 

Here even blue feathers on a stick

(the Candy Castle's owner is dusting

 

trays in his window) slightly bemuses,

as if summoned from air for a different use,

 

some other planet’s version of reliquary,

a dimension where, were it to exist among

 

the thumbprints of deep space, they are synchronous

with us, princess and hero, biscuit and gravy,

 

plate and inscription, two sides of a coin,

the imagined and the real contiguous

 

and on consignment, smelling of shawl wool and used

appliance. What particles cling to plastic?

 

What fragments cohere between the blue lines

that turn turret? If the shape of loss

 

has no shape because it is ongoing, how describe

the way he unfastened her hair from her nape

 

when both their names, once considered capital,

have washed away, down a crinkly river, vanished?

 

A whisper is a tendril is the part of her story

she was never told, though she cannot sleep

 

when black night turns blue with gathering storm—

soon as it bursts, she’s out.