Sandra Meek
Still Life with Cupped Ear
Still Life with Cupped Ear
Not flying buttress but fly-
on-the-wall crest, pressed white
as sugar, icing the stone arc
of an interior arch: a shimmer somewhere
between cut diamonds and glitter-polish
on the bride’s left-hand nails pale
against the bound stems she clutches
like a girl the May Day bouquet
borne for the granite Leader’s great
unveiling. Lieder sung
underwater: The Meat Queue, Stalin’s fronting
one row Czechs, one Russians, happy
Comrades all. When the Soviets dynamited it
from Letná Hill, some said the head rolled
whole into the Vltava, that great falling
from favor surfacing only
as a fading tracery of widening
circles, like lace shaken
from the drift of swans. Like a salting
of the fields, an arm swing’s mimicking
the broadcast of seed, the blown bones’ dust
settled the people’s shoulders, the Great Overseer dispersed
to a great listening. A word overheard, any grace note’s
staccato report, can be played
back as key tone; any echo sustained
made a gathering. Held in the wavering weight
of a single pitch, an hour glass’s sand
spilled onto the skin head
of a drum will settle each time to the same
spidery design. Four winds. Four cardinal points,
3 and 6 and 9 and the hands’ seal at midnight
indistinguishable from noon: what an A
clocks to, an anthem's operatic close
in the throat raising through sympathetic vibration
the precise flatline the concert master’s wasted hand
drew from horsehair dragged across catgut
tuning the orchestra at Terezín. Tracking
the river’s skin, the seasonal murmur
of ice crackles to the shatter of heel-
crushed glass wrapped in a bit
of lace, the groom looming
above fragments of the light bulb
which replaced the crystal goblet for its ease
of breakage. Tracking the shatter unearths
that the electrician who served as model for Stalin
drank himself away from that nickname
which ate at him through bar mates’ acid back-slaps;
of the worker who chiseled hammer and sickle
into Stalin’s jacket button outsized to a swan’s
wing span, there is no record.
Like a train so distant it almost
can’t be heard, though it drums
the earth, boxcars of names blacken
a synagogue’s walls towards the bomb-
sheltered pitch bricked behind the Gates
to Nowhere, concrete bones of a never-
completed museum sprayed with the names
of skaters who air walk the blasted plinth above
where the sculpted blade of a giant metronome
now scythes that swath of air ghosted
with the missing: wheat fields, The Meat Queue,
and its artist, all mention redacted
from the unveiling after he followed
his lost wife by cradling his own head
in their apartment’s oven, climbing the whisper
of an absent flame—as if once the scales
fell from the eyes there could be
no more music. Just a small
blue hiss.