Share This Poem: “Litany of Missing Earrings,” by Amy Sailer.
Pushcart-nominated and just right to address post-holiday melancholia …
“each one a little note
of longing, a little signification, incomplete
& therefore impermanent …”
Presenting an outstanding poem from our summer 2018 “Small Things, Partial Cures” issue. You can enjoy Amy’s litany as a broadside by dragging it to your desktop, or simply scroll down to read it in plain text.
Litany of Missing Earrings
Sterling bud & dripping seed pearls & lavender
under an oculus & Bakelite
& rhinestone & verte chinoiserie littering
my vanity ask for a poem
useless now for anything
besides translation, for the lingua franca
of jewelry: tiger’s eye, turquoise, lace filigree,
earrings whose spouses refuse
to be found, each one a little note
of longing, a little signification, incomplete
& therefore impermanent — but I don’t want
to catalogue decay
when what I meant is a glutton’s hymn,
a hedonist’s reliquary, my life’s
earrings strung like votive from the linden trees —
like this miniature
Venus of Willendorf, clustered breasts & thighs
that droop like foxglove. Or this —
a topaz stud, the orphan of a gift
for my eighteenth birthday.
How language & jewelry delight
& indict me — I who would write
with an eye loupe’s lavish specificity:
think the prosthetist’s brush
as it replicates the cuticle’s white crescent,
or the glass eye’s aureole
of hazel in green, in a scale so compressed
still-life, self-portrait, & abstraction meet.
How Whistler painted sex as a white collage
in his Symphony, his mistress Joanna posed
in a long, lace dress, fabric cloistered
around her necks & wrists, more virginal
than a bridal gown, as though for a Confirmation.
In contrast to what is white
in convention — lace, ivory, porcelain,
virginity, innocence — what is not
is beneath her feet: the polar bear skin rug, black lips
unfurled in a snarl, fur urinous.
Of course her skin recalls snow, but also bitten apple flesh
& her hair down her shoulder,
like blood across the bathtub’s marble rim.
Yes, Whistler reminds us white is
stench & sweat & pubic bone, & art’s abbreviations
for women are more bestial & ruinous —
so how else would I describe copper’s aging
but as a verdigris bruise? Amber to its insect inclusions
as a glass grave? Pearl as a shroud
to a sand grain?
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Amy Sailer’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Quarterly West, The Collapsar, andMeridian. Formerly the coordinator of the Poets in Print reading series in Kalamazoo, Michigan, she is now on the staff of Quarterly West.
