M A Y 1 9 9 4 ![]() GORGEOUS SURFACESby Thomas Lux | |||||||||||||
![]() (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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They are, the surfaces, gorgeous: a master 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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