The 1002nd Night

The Afterlife in memory of Howard Moss T H E L I G H T D R E S S But now a year has passed and we can think of it calmly; you are already in a white dress.—Olga, in Three Sisters Out of a brown­paper cocoon let a pale dress be wrestled into resurrection from winter's long wrap. Blanched in buttermilk and lemon, moth wing fed by laundress through mangle, let the white dress dangle in the afterlife clothes pegs lift from the earth below. Let it fall from starch's grace and bleach under the full­blown moon that last year sharpened its scythe until a final sliver cut into cloud over the ghost of an orchard where each blossom opened farther, a powdery mouthful of water quenching the petals that withered around it. Let the hand­stitched lawn lie sprawled, a last patch of that snow holding, dear life, where sleep cleaves to shade. Though ground warms enough to be broken again, on this the youngest's name day let her shrug off the year's crepe. In a dressing room somewhere backstage shared with the blue, the black gowns of the two cast as her sisters, let an actress shed her own clothes for the white dress, calling up the first of the words put to her mouth in the play of a life borrowed against another. A S N A P S H O T Life will get the better of you. —Vershinin, in Three Sisters e schoolmaster's forgotten the present he already gave his sister­in­law: here's his little history of the school, another copy. She can't recall how that window or this ceiling would be spoken of in Italian; and the song about an oak tree by the sea, with a green blank, then something gold, haunts his wife, who hums again the part she knows The doctor's noted down a cure for baldness, then scratched it out. Just before lunch they had their photograph taken, a new leaf for the album to press under its gathering dust. Who is the one whose face lies in shadow? [18.117.158.47] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 16:15 GMT) T H E WINGS -Γrom battlement to keep, the ice palace wept itself a moat. No more would mummers skate away the chill, their breath fog the ballroom's blue cave, nor ice candles dipped in kerosene be set aflame. A hand that coolly checked a brow for fever would dissolve its imprint into those walls of water held together by water. Downstream, starched nurse navigating from bedside to bed, the first floe charted toward reopened sea, past an iceboat about to reverse engines homeward A warmed column of air filled with the cries of heavy gray birds guiding one another higher until the only cranes left in the province stalked a folding Japanese screen carved next to a bed with linens of ice whose pillows melted, tear into tear. Feet in a pond where before they'd waded in icicles' stubble, the birds held, breathless, the hush a taxidermist would labor to catch, stretching a skin he's tanned over gauze-dressed plaster, faded feathers dyed to mimic the transient tinge of the living. Then the glass eyes. T H E N E X T A C T etween vistas painted into vastness onstage and the cramped quarters off, a young soldier girds for a last scene before his brigade moves out, the thirty­nine words assigned him to deliver waiting final polish under his breath. A shallow sigh mists an untarnished buckle he buffs by rote with a heavy sleeve. "Goodbye, echo.""Goodbye, trees." [18.117.158.47] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 16:15 GMT) THE AFTERLIFE OF THINGS Into the disguise of everyday the actors pass, improbable as angels and as invisible, while here lies the mustache that distinguished a baron from a colonel, and his spirit gum. Whalebones corset a wasp waist, a pigeon breast of unrehearsed air. One stained wing of a collar flaps free of its limp shirt. On the dressing­room floor powder to gray the hair has come to grief—O be the man strolling without overcoat a foreign city only an ocean away, every dog and soap bearing the smell of civilization, not home: how distant the dead, just out of reach The earth turns dustier than you would remember. ...