ALL BEAUTIFUL & USELESS
POEMS / C. KUBASTA
B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New York
All Beautiful & Useless by C. Kubasta Copyright © 2015 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover art and interior images: Mollie Oblinger, diverted to fructify, detail Cover art photo: Daryl Stinchfield First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-228-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015947879 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 [email protected]
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An Extant Version of this Text
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Casus Belli [Redacted] My father calls me “bitch” sometimes: It means “great cutting comeback” or “you got me” or even “glad to be the target of that attack.” We are very close, my father & me. We are each an author of an autobiography, “whose adventures [hew] closely [ . . .] but [are] blessed with the gap that inevitably arrives between the present-self scribbler and [hir] various tawdry or gallant past selves, a chasm also known as humor, irony, or forgetfulness.” ▪ Apparently, that high-styled, poufed & pompadoured poodle, who so easily dominates the dog show industry achieves its blistering white with talcum powder. In fact, each and every dog with a showy white patch has been so dusted. ▪ Here’s something: my father’s new wife makes him look sober by comparison. Here’s another: my seven-year-old half-brother desperately trying to get away from both of them. I’m afraid he will ask me questions and that I will tell the truth. At some point, I began calling my father “Father.” Like me, he appreciates the formality. ▪ An appoggiatura is a little discord, little grace note, little descant impulse, off-key, before the melody resolves into a main note. Apparently, it’s the reason people well up during songs. In the appoggiatura, we long for resolution. Once resolved, we ache for the appoggiatura. ▪ An apocryphal story: the time he put my little brother, two years old, into the tub, filled it up, then went down to the basement to rip boards on the table saw [To rip boards on the table saw? He can’t build a birdfeeder. But sometimes you need to rip boards.] My mother returned hours later, her boy upright and blue, cried-out; her husband barely upright. [This is just a story I’ve been told; a story
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I shouldn’t have ever been told.] This story’s true: waiting on a visa, I went down to the basement to build frames for some old unstretched canvases. [Build frames? I can barely rip a board. But sometimes you need to build frames.] The visa arrived at 8:30 the next morning. My flight left at noon. Without the context (above) this supposedly true story means nothing. ▪ Even the phrases we reach for –“using” or “mining” our relationships –imply attachments turned to commodities, [ . . .] an entire landscape of emotion turned to hollow earth [ . . .] everything we’ve ever seen or forged or felt. ▪ Alcoholics are like wallpaper, nothing like the stories of books (the brilliant misanthrope; the beloved broken thing). I’m full up. A few years ago, I gave a guest lecture and invited my father. The Cinderella cluster, with Cinderella and Donkeyskin and Thousand Furs. In each, a girl is cast out; redeemed. She hides in rags, in cast-off pelts, in the skinned hide of a donkey. In each, the explicit danger is a parent. At lunch he said nothing: no bravado, no jokes. What is most him in me is the bravado, the jokes. To be stripped of that is to be stripped of everything. ▪ the most compelling stories are without ending, without closure; riddleless riddles; boxes in boxes with empty center; there is
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a version of this text without redactions. there was a version of this text without redactions. there may be an extant version of this text.
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all of the things of this world I loved: stones and seeds, the long beans of locust trees, the lacework of sycamore pods. I had hid my loving of, lest desire burn in my body
Elizabeth Parris, nine, the youngest of the original accusers –but her father sent her to live
in town, among the non-elect
The rest had passed from playing with homemade wagons, to sewing and washing and cooking, mostly in other people’s homes, until married, and then they played with
the scapegoating of Tituba was a long year of lessons
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becoming flame, signaling to the Devil I was ripe as pepperberry, half-gone already
As for “pepperberry”
There are two varieties colloquially called this: Schinus molle native to Peru, and now found often in Southern California. There are/were no pepperberries in Massachusetts.
Schinus molle looks like weeping willow
a girl’s unpinned hair fraught with brambles
though not evergreen and not hardy
thinned blood a lacework of cerulean blue delicate treachery of teeth
north of Illinois. Berries ripen in late summer
(the trials began early Spring, the timing all wrong)
and can be dried quickly to retain color.
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When Mother caught me playing these useless games, she scattered my treasures, raised her hand to strike, but Father stepped between. He said, “She is doing the work of the Lord on earth.”
Crytocarya obovata is native to Australian rainforests. And I am dreaming Ophelia.
Schinus molle sports red berries, appropriate as symbolic colors of lust, and desire, (and thus sin), and despite their heady presence are poisonous. (Think red as the Church’s robes,
red as Duessa’s cunt). Cryptocarya obovata has black berries, edible to certain larger fruit pigeons. The Australian pepperberry is a tall canopy tree,
delicate veins and cilia on each oblong leaf. (Obovata echoes shape)
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You say I knew, I must have known, there was no devil in that room.
February 1692: The devil, of course: Sometimes it is like a hog & sometimes like a great dog
Not long after, Tituba was to blame. After the trials mounted, then subsided, after pardons
and release and bills paid, it was Tituba. They recorded her testimony in painstaking detail, her yellow birds. She disappears. She was sold to pay for her confinement. “These two
persons [Tituba and John Indian] may have originated the ‘Salem witchcraft.’ They are spoken as having come from ( ) and, in all probability contributed, from the wild and
strange superstitions prevalent among the native tribes, materials which, added to the commonly received notions on such subjects, heighted the infatuation of the times, and
inflamed still more the imaginations of the credulous.”
February 1692: Mary Sibley was never to blame, though she mixed rye and urine and baked it.
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Our names Children of the Lord in weeklies and pamphlets from Salem Town.
1696: The Reverend Parris, for encouraging local vendettas, for paying too much attention to children, for cultivating strife to enhance his own station (these accusations from his
parishioners, and the leadership of his church)
(here the girls are still children, used and led astray)
Soon it would fall to them.
1706: Ann Putnam’s apology: Though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say, before God
and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan
I desire to lie in the dust . . .
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He sent me away. “The Devil takes a seat where there are too many women under one roof.”
What they promised my father:
Sixty-six pounds annual salary collected by a minister’s tax
The village parsonage, barn and two acres of land
deeded to Samuel Parris and his heirs. Me.
A supply of firewood from the village, delivered to the parsonage
Ordination by Nicholas Noyes,
associate pastor of the church in Salem Town
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I will endure the knowing that Satan has fingers long and gentle, and he beckons me.
What they gave my father:
A partial payment for the years 1689-1690
A suspension of the minister’s tax from 1691-1694
A partial payment for the years 1695-1696
The local constables refused to collect the tax
Town stood against us
By the winter of 1691, our woodpiles spent, a scattering of bark and splinters,
kindling
New church memberships dwindled, then ceased, only women beseeched my father
Blame for the witch trial from the Colony
Letters from Pastor Noyes, Pastor Hale, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather
My face absent to town for a long year
My mother’s illness in the spring of 1696 Her death in July
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I could hang for this. For the smug one I had a fit beyond sense, drooling on the floor, they bade her touch me, and relieve my torment.
What we finally took:
Seventy-nine pounds back salary for all those years
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or I, translucent, luminescent, transmogrified, and from my mouth
What they took from us:
The parsonage, the barn, the land
My mother’s grave
My faith
My loves –Father, Mother, Tituba, Abigail
Desiccated wood left uncovered through winter, frozen stiff to frosted ground,
dry as chaff by spring, a sudden flare in the stove and gone
My childhood, inciting hangings
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