In the House of Wax

Far-sighted into yesterday

they stand, gripping

their charters and speeches,

the presidents and kings,

masters of unconscious evil.

Their deputies are here —

judges, robed executioners,

steely and triumphant.

And stunned at their feet,

the beheaded, the betrayed,

healed and hallowed now

in this grave sorrow of wax.

We enter, adjust to the gloom,

to the lighting that plays

on the painted, staring faces.

We think to ourselves, murmur

to the one standing beside us:

"How compellingly strange

these people are, and yet familiar

to the world we left behind us,

the street and the household..."

These are the people whose names

we learned, whose lives we studied,

whose thoughts we have become.

Each lighted stage with its play

of the lost and the violent —

comedians and stuntmen,

heroes transfixed in purpose.

We pause, to read once more,

in deliberate, bald summation,

what art, wax, and history

have made of the dead:

something more than a mirror,

less than a telling likeness;

an ideality slick with blood.

III

How easily in the live heat

of truth and summer

these actors wilt and perish.

Henry of Church and England

is here, savage and senile,

still laced in his armor;

his lopped and stunted wives

stand grouped around him.

Bismark in his iron corset,

endlessly dividing Europe;

Wilhelm, that struttng dwarf,

abject in abdication.

And here, the fatal mischief

of Sarajevo — how swift a fire,

how long a burning, came

of the Archduke's festive ride,

his shot and bloodied tunic.

And no more telling prophecy

in the wake of armistice

than that one dated cartoon

with its hooded sentry

and its graveyard owl:

"It has been six years..."

How easily a puff of smoke,

a square of burnt cloth,

a shocked cry, can change

the world, and leave it

neither worse nor better.

Here is a man, thief or martyr,

hanged at Damascus Gate

with a hook through his gut.

He swung, seared by the sun

and kissed by the night.

And maybe one of the market

women brought him water,

and maybe not — once seen

by the Sultan's watch,

she might have lost her hands.

As in the time of Richelieu,

certain men the crown accused

were exposed in iron baskets

like plucked birds.

They fouled their nests,

starved and blackened until

they died; and the city lived

with their cries, their rank

mortality, night and day.

The hook is black and crescent,

the body swings, inert,

as if asleep and dreaming.

The guidebook tells us the man

survived his hook and lived;

it doesn't say how long.

Here, with his tins and furs,

is Minuit, buying Manhattan.

We see the Dutchman's flourish,

the Indians' foolish feathers.

He takes their land, and they

his bitter gifts, his brass

and trinkets — so little cash

in place of an earthy kingdom.

Wolfe, Montcalm, on the plain

below Quebec: the one dying,

the other condemned to follow.

We pass, reading from face to face,

from book to book, uneasy

that among these celebrations

so many rigged transactions

have gone unquestioned.

And all our wigged colonials,

our Franklins, conspiring

with their strongbox keys

and profitable lightning —

that so much ink and dust

and shuffled paper conceals

their tidy pilferings,

their purity and blunted wrath.

Were there rooms in this house,

each with its tabled motions

and false partitions

might furnish a history,

one slow truth at a time.

But never in our late arrival

have we stilled confusion,

to learn how great a folly

follows in the wake of fathers.

From their deliberate violence

we come to our own lamed

misrule, its slick banality

and crime without passion.

To Ike, to Kennedy and Ford,

golfers and temporizers;

to perennial candidate Nixon,

whose cheek was never turned.

Out of his sleek arrest

he steps towards us,

as if to greet a voter —

a fixed, ferocious smile

on the blue jowls

brushed with powder.

Nothing we have painted

and framed in our passage —

neither prayer nor courtship,

nor solace of sleep

and self — escaped the grip

of these iron centuries.

Here, in a row of lighted

cases, a few artifacts

are on display. No comfort

to us now in that familiar,

edged interrogation...

But the biting persuasion

of chains and collars,

of inching racks, fire tongs

and screws — in the eyes

of kings and churchmen

the instruments of truth.

And whosoever might trespass,

on whatever lawful ground,

would find for his solace

a more forbidding marriage.

As once in a stone embrasure

I saw a belt for virgins,

a hinged and rusted clasp,

with a lock, and a slit

for functions — all but one.

Imagine with what shocked

dismay a man might grope

for his sweetness there,

and all too soon awaken,

clamped in his ecstasy.

VII

Another room,

with smaller people

and thinner walls.

Here the Queen plays

with cryptic cards,

hands out assignments:

"You are the Hunchback,"

she says, "and You

the Hangman, and You

the Jack of Trades."

She pares and quarters

her venomous apple,

calls for her mirror,

and her image smiles

to watch her glass

fill up with poison.

Beauty is sleeping,

the Prince is awake,

and far in the forest

a frostlight winks

from the Sugar House.

The Witch is singing

and lighting her oven.

The Woodcutter's

wayward children watch,

they break and nibble

the sweetened glass.

The images whisper

and darken, conspiring

in their tumbled tale

of fretful spinners,

of drones and dumble-

dores, wise eggs

that speak and shatter.

And it looks as if

the painted sleepers

in this dreamworks

are about to awaken:

the crafty Queen

and her players,

the musical mice,

the drones

and the spinners —

All in a scampering

rush, to find

the nearest exit...

As the looking glass

draws us deeper

into the bright play

of shadows that melt

and run and freeze...

The mad, mad romp

of children, of rabbits

and dwarfs, who keep

their strange hilarity

in so much horror.

VIII

Call those from underneath,

the sold and trodden,

their slow and sweating sons,

elevate and crown them.

Patch up their clothing

and wash their skins,

rub their faces

until they glow,

and their dull eyes brighten.

Give them speeches to learn,

and eloquent gestures,

power to grasp,

laws to break and mend.

Great heat and furious labor

bring on in them

this drear and mystical change:

At first a swinish fattening,

and then a leaner look,

and in their eyes

the same feral glitter

of their late unkindly masters.

They sicken as they flourish,

until like wickless candles

they slump and totter;

their heads are rotten,

their famous flesh

has run to sticky pools.

They die and sleep afoot,

their ignorant hearts

grown wise in the ways of wax.

In all these wax memorials

only appearance changes.

Crowned heads and axes fall,

thugs and jailors rise

and displace each other

in this long, uneasy walk

we have littered

with claims and captions.

The heroes are always welcomed,

are propped and shaven,

their ruddy male composure

is sleeker than ever,

though the great sleeves

and brutal collars

give way to softer buttons.

The paper in official hands

rustles as before,

though it is only paper,

paper in cheap supply,

and not the bleached fell

of a difficult sheep.

And yet the neat persuasions

are seen to tighten,

and each new litigation

is a running noose...

All that increases,

all that gluts and fattens,

matures its option here:

Honor to thieves and merchants,

long life to the butcher.

And for the just petitioner —

sweeper of the hallways, scapegoat

and discard — no reply

but the rote of legal fictions;

to which he listens, now

as in the days of Pontinus,

stricken with understanding.

The rooms are large and numerous,

and we in our restless striding

find that they never end.

It is as if we had lived here

always, captive to this endless

and malign instruction;

had served those mighty tempers,

and learned too well

these never-blotted names.

And we live here still,

sharing these murderous spaces,

this blood-haunted silence.

And once we started from sleep,

terrorized and whimpering,

to see in the luminous,

sunken light, the head

of a long-forgotten agent:

a face like a father,

one who might have comforted,

but cannot see or hear us:

bald, vacant, and amused.

All is as it must or might be,

here at the story's end —

the jury dismissed, the witness

excused, and all are guilty.

To have come so far, walked

so easily through so much anguish,

pride, and stupor of evil,

and yet we are standing still,

locked in an echoing foyer.

In so driven, so brief an itinerary,

a day will stand for a decade,

an inch for a mile — so far

has a painted fiction served us.

These bones in their period costumes

would bend if we touched them;

their flesh would yield,

and all arrangements topple.

But see how they bring toward us

the old, sustaining gestures —

a stride, an arm outstretched —

the furrows in the smiles

deepen, and the red lips smear.

Great captains command, obedient

ranks go down. In all these propped

assemblies I know a substance

neither wax nor wholly flesh —

a tried and mortal nature,

familiar as the warmth in my hand.

XII

Were we not lost, condemned

to repeat these names

and to honor their crimes,

a voice among us might cry out,

speak to those who are

stopped here:

Whose faces are these

that melt and run?

Children and guardians, giants

and dwarfs —

Oh, people, people...

Who are these heroes

and where are their victims?

We who are standing here

with our guidebooks suddenly closed

and all the exits darkened...

Until another gallery opens,

or the sun through that skylight

strikes us all —

souls in torment,

pilgrims and doting fathers...

Source: For the Century's End Poems: 1990-1999 (University of Washington Press, 2001)