☀ Today's Poem: "Nude Descending a Staircase" Shangyang Fang

“When I take off my bra, I’m unfettered like a soaring warbler,”
my cousin told me while slipping off her straps in front of a mirror.
Her hair was unbound. Her naked spine arching. The air outside
smoldered with the chirping of insects.
I felt bashful watching her
hair-shaded nape.
Her cardamom-like nipples bloomed in the mahogany frame
of the mirror. She felt at ease. Perhaps she thought I was still
too young? That I was more of a boy than a man?
Or perhaps she saw that day, by the rosemary alley,
a boy kissing my lips. He tasted like blueberries.
The sudden rain stopped my thinking.
The sudden rain stopped the flirting
of summer birds, shaping a formless cage.
“This rain ruined my day, & my date.
I’m supposed to be at a party by now,” she said, brushing her hair,
appreciating her reflected flesh, her lips two slices of a plum.
As if in the mirror she were admiring that painting by Duchamp.
As if she were trying hard to decode her body; the breeze
from the ventilation fluttered her hair
as she looked outside—
at the yellowish lampposts,
the road luxuriant with oil. And then
she sang as if to become a cello wholly would help
to recognize her untuned body. As if by giving up her shape
she expressed her shape fully. Her hourglass waist.
& the rain like sand falling.
Could this afternoon & the afternoon
of yesterday be understood
through her moving body? She sang as if the world
depended on her tongue, the way musicians depend on their
instruments. Though what holds her here in front me is still a mystery.
Was it my eyes fixing her in an articulated design, the mirror
suspending her escape, her skin of cello-lacquered membrane,
or her glowing eyes reverencing her flesh, decoding
Nude Descending a Staircase?
Or perhaps it was the air,
only the air that mattered.
As Duchamp put it himself, “The whole idea of movement,
of speed, was in the air.” She would have wept
if she’d seen the painting, a headless cello moving
through a forest of many solid, tangible geometries
of loneliness & desire—a dream
constituted entirely of disappearing.
After she left, the vision
of her nude loomed
upon the silver of the mirror. I walked toward it,
taking off my clothes. That small body
whose desire is not by nature’s strict design. My skin
smelled like rain, naked. My hair
smelled like the black black earth.
Eyes closed, I ran fingers over my clavicle, playing
a silent instrument. On the balcony, a mantis leaped
& became a part of a leaf. I thought of myself
spending a whole afternoon staring
at a tree, thinking myself a tree.
I thought of the painting, how strokes of desire
poured out of a motionless body perpetually moving;
how loneliness dissected that body
without a galloping thrash. Fear to smash a cello
& find there was no music inside. To admit it was fingers
that made music, it was looking that made beauty.
Not me.
Not me.
I look into the mirror, as if through my cousin’s eyes—
that afternoon, in the rosemary alley, a boy
was kissed by another boy, & both of them tasted of blueberry.