Jenny Molberg - Mudlark Poster No. 115 (2014)

Mudlark Poster No. 115 (2014)

Four Poems by Jenny Molberg

Nocturne for the Elephant | The Dream, The Sleeping Gypsy
The Pheasant | The Muse, Posing as Maria

Nocturne for the Elephant

In the upper menagerie at Exeter Change,
where walls are striped with iron cages,
a musician sits down at his piano forte
to play a nocturne for the animals.

To him, the audience is familiar, each
a different beast, and each in its prison.
Adagio, he plays, and when
his hands spill down the scale,

the Indian elephant tilts the broad leaves
of its ears forward; tusks blunder against bars
as ivory keys prod wooden hammers,
felt-covered, like the animal’s ancient tread

on desert soil. The song is a downpour
and the elephant begins to pace. The pianist drops
to the low b flat and, in the base of its throat,
the elephant echoes the tone—dirge for a time

when, head bowed, he plodded
into a pond, tube of his trunk sloped
in milky water, lifting the drink to his mouth,
roping the trunk to drench

the ashen body, each wet-darkened foot
lifting, stirring, a vibrato of water
emitting, from the body, watery rings
which enclosed him, then disappeared.

Note: Written in response to an article about the pianist and the elephant, On the Difference of Structure between the Human Membrana Tympani and That of the Elephant, by Everard Home, published in 1823 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

The Dream, The Sleeping Gypsy

Henri Rosseau, The Dream, 1910, and The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, MoMA, New York

In what would be his last work
Henri Rousseau painted a moon 
in place of the sun, passive 

as a dying woman. What is light 
are the girl’s breasts, 
two bright pomelos, the orbed 

voyeuristic eyes of the lioness, 
the trees’ orange fruit,
the bird’s yellow wig

of feathers. My mother’s 
skin, artless, her hands deft 
as she turned each page, 

whispering the names of paintings, 
recognizing in Rousseau not the childlike 
lines or the misunderstanding 

of a world so different from his:
world of flat, vague skies, but
his layering and layering, spreading 

a strange, unutterable music
onto the canvas, slow as the acacia 
that rings its own grain as the years pass.

In the other painting, the one
we especially loved, a woman
asleep beside her gourd-like lute, 

a few incisions 
of light in the desert sky, her long
sleeping hair, and again, the lion beside her.

The moon’s face 
a cold white god. 
This is the metastasizing beauty 

of my mother. My mother the gypsy.
I, the pinpricked sky.
The lion her cancer.

The Pheasant

	... the variety of monsters will be found to be infinite. 
				— John Hunter, “An Account of an Extraordinary Pheasant,” 
				Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1780

I.

For eleven springs against the April snow, the spots on her feathers
were black eyes, the thin reeds of grass lashes, and she hunched

and cooed as the bright male beat his wings against her,
bobbed his necklaced neck like a ship’s gilded bow,

held her head with his beak and curled his tail feathers
around her body. The pheasant came to the woman

each morning for food, and each year, presented her
with a small brood of chicks. The woman began to see

herself in the bird—the way she pecked and rounded up 
her young; her subtle beauty, dulled like tinted paint

and the way she curtsied before the glamorous male,
who, almost refined, tucked her beneath him.


II.

This year, after molting, the pheasant is no longer egg-colored,
but deep golden red, her long truss of feathers

low to the ground on her small frame. Her spots
not eyes, but sapphires, and the long cleft of her tail

cleaves the sky into two skies. The woman
calls in the scientists and they pin down the bird with gloved hands.

They prod beneath the spectral plumage. They pluck
and hypothesize and write things down in notebooks.

The colors of her are fire, imperious against the pale
wood table, the humbled white of the snow.

The Muse, Posing as Maria

For her father, the sculpture represented Maria Mitchell’s singularly sweet and blameless life. 
			— Philadelphia Museum of Art, on Saint-Gaudens’ The Angel of Purity

But there is always more to it. 
The muse, the sculptor’s mistress: her stone-kept pout,
plummet of the neck, the yawning eyes.
And Maria. Dead, diphtheria, age twenty-two,
never married. The muse, his whore, but alive
in a body not made of stone. And the stone, too,
carried up from the quarry, and what he cut away.

The two of us stand before the sculpture
a century after. You turn and say,
you’re not who I thought you were.
What about before, I say, when it was different?
You say, she is beautiful.
I say, why, thinking her hooded eyes, the palms’
flesh like white plums, the ruched wings. 

Outside, the wind is strong enough 
to carve ice. Outside, the girl I once was
shoulders the cold.