Kiki Smith
Getting the Bird Out, 1992
bronze and string 10x11-1/2x7"(25.4x29.2x17.8cm),
head1-1/2x6x1-1/2"(3.8x 15.2 x 3.8 cm), bird installation dimensions variable
Photograph by Sarah Harper Gifford, courtesy Pace Gallery
Getting the Bird Out
. . . to disimprison the soul of fact – Coleridge
1 Getting the Bird Out
You could hear it under the ribs
its flutterings wet and papery
Between her lips you could see it:
seedlings tipping their dicots toward the light
The shipping manifest the suede buttons
that last look over the shoulder: all that could be pulled out
Even the flywheel could be extracted
Without much damage delicacy itself would come free
But getting the bird proved difficult
For one thing the bird was a paraphrase
It clung like motion’s most intimate movement
to the principle of no-stone-unturned
Only when we gave up did it come out
It looked like no bird we’d ever seen
a gob of slag unheaped
On its side it lay the long red cord still deep in its throat
So many things its immobility seemed to say
were now going to be a thing of the past
2 On Broil
Onset with its per second per seconds
with its crude meticulous hustle
Onset exhilaration’s unsavory twin
that invades the definite article flip-book fast
Onset
whose mounted police line the demonstration route
Onset
that roaring tit that distress emancipator
who noisies up the lacerations
who strips of of its belongings
with its eastward-aiming
and westward-rumbling voracity
Onset and its magpie inroads
its sunset effusions
pouring out like the gospel of Job
lapsed and relapsing rolling out the patterns of pandemonium
with its brass knuckled and prowling epicenters
its mortar bandwagon
its furious fury-wilting curating
bursar of the bursting
itself homeless and perishable
luscious and heady as it passes through the turnstile
rummaging through the trash
for a boot to
kick you with when you’re down
to clog your throat with thick spit
to disrupt and foreclose on
our paradigm of governance equilibrium and care
3 At Egg
We have prepared my heartbreak
a list to rhapsodize
The irreversible in thee is what I revere
You have the toll- the doll-house to consider
It’s just me who wishes and reenacts
and wanders the house
Love loves to impersonate
So put some diminutive
in yourself some
liquify some groundwork
some believe
Calcium can be startled
just as a basement can be wooded
Has elegy ever been known
to decompose
4 Reverse Frosting
Say goodbye to my hair my anyway no longer resplendent hair
(which I’ll buzz cut before the die off)
but not to my head and its galaxies
in which you burn like a star
Say goodbye to my breast the left the larger one
but not to the rites of touch
Say goodbye to my looks but not to my lips
which still spell their wishes in a braille of tongue teeth
No more the frost of familiarity
I am molten molting
Say goodbye to my lips but not to my words
mouthed like an inmate through the walls of her cell
Say goodbye to the unlashed
but not the inward eye the deep-sea eye
where etymon sends out its nomad filaments
the pump primed for redefining
The books have been written Reread them
from memory Like me they won’t ever be the same
5 Another Thing Coming
Deadlier thing let’s scale this down
to torn luminance to the strictly dynastic
You’ve ridden the rail of motherhood
exacting of upheaval malfunction mutation
And those cow bells in your daily gazette clank obsessively
Headwind cross-hatchings are all your doing
Deadlier thing
all your atmospherics are load-bearing
all your feats of docility all our ointment and our joysticks
that you have gathered up will induct us
However misty in the pond-light of late cataclysm
you don’t neglect to pick up margarine and paper towels at the corner grocery
And if you misspell Byzantium or put a cold snap on the calliope
you’re our chief engineer after all
The work itself is ours to do
Redundance wears its royal robes
and the missiles are now so easy to make
No need to fear that we’ll recant
We love the small problems to solve
the logistics
It’s heartbreak still that breaks our hearts
6 Malady Transfusion
The short of it is: preclude precluding