M A Y 1 9 9 4
GORGEOUS SURFACES
by Thomas Lux
Hear Thomas Lux read this poem (in RealAudio).(For help, see a note about the audio.)
Also by Thomas Lux:
Henry Clay's Mouth (1999)
The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball (1998)
Torn Shades (1996)
He Has Lived in Many Houses (1996)
Virgule (1992)
Snake Lake (1984)
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pastry chef at work here, the dips and whorls,
the wrist-twist
squeezes of cream from the tube
to the tart, sweet bleak sugarwork, needlework
toward the perfect lace doily
where sit the bone-china teacups, a little maze
of meaning maybe in their arrangement
sneaky obliques, shadow
allusives all piling
banal, bereft. These surfaces,
these flickering patinas,
through which,
if you could drill, or hack,
or break a trapdoor latch, if you could penetrate
these surfaces' milky cataracts, you
would drop,
free-fall
like a hope chest full of lead
to nowhere, no place, a dry-wind, sour,
nada place,
and you would keep dropping,
tumbling, slow
decades, eleven centuries (a long time
falling to fill a zero) and in that time
not a leaf, no rain,
nor grace, nor graves--falling
to where the bottom, finally, is again the surface,
which is gorgeous, of course,
which is glue, saw- and stone-dust,
which is blue-gray
ice, which is
the barely glinting grit
of abyss.
Copyright © 1994 by Thomas Lux. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1994.
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