Gail Wronsky is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, most recently Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling (Poems from India), and Bling & Fringe (The LA Poems), coauthored with Molly Bendall. Her essay "In Sickness" will appear this month in The Black Body, an anthology of essays edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. She is Director of Creative Writing and Syntext (Synthesizing Textualities) at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

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 Splendor in the Grass (1961/1990)

Great art and great women share

a flair for betrayal—a mocking

insouciance that eludes everyone’s

            grasping. Hence Natalie Wood

 

is not in this picture—although

            her ghost is. Herodotus had it

even Helen was an absence—an identical

            phantom copy of herself

 

sent with Paris to Troy while Proteus

            kept the fleshy real girl all to himself

in Memphis.  Imagine it—war raging

            for ten years—men like Achilles

 

dying over a woman who wasn’t

            even present. But what does it matter? 

Time turns everything to euphemism

            anyway, which, according to Plato,

 

is what everything already always was: 

            copies of copies. What’s left in

Pompeii? Trite images of love. Really. 

            In Greek the word for seduce

 

is also the word for destroy. Thus the real

            Natalie Wood was gone long before  

the tabloids knew it. Replaced with the woman

            we see in this photo—the vital

 

brunette, siren of sexiness and innuendo. 

            Don’t do it, baby! Don’t

jump! Your ghost-absence leaves a

            gaping hole in our aesthetic—

 

betraying us in plain sight. It’s begging us

            to die and love and do battle—

knowing all the while we’re not anything

            but shadow and light.

 

 

 

 

Like I said, I’m just really over the go-go dancing.

 

I can’t be held accountable for the dark magic inside me—

every bone burning to be out there where

the dirt’s about a billion years old and the clouds

are totally see-through, the black hills on the horizon

full of snakes and darkness like the curdled vertebrae of

every freak-loving girl who’s died isolated and luxurious

if a bit dramatically for want of a good stabbing.

 

Maybe you think that murdering people is a tasteless

appropriation by me of an activity that is properly

reserved for ex-husbands or Baptist biker boys

but strippers, yeah, we’ve been victimized for

far too long by prejudicial images, hissy beerjoint

cliches; I tell you we’re the ultimate tassel-hung subaltern. 

 

That’s why today I’m a black rain of heartbreak with

coffins in my catsuit. I’m looking for some dizzy spinouts, some

grade B black and white fetishization of camp. Will it

lead me to a grandiose-ass iconological insight? I don’t know. 

Somebody’s got to be sacrificed. I won’t kid myself into

thinking that this brief flicker of kitsch will pump a

silver bullet into the whole master-slave dialectic. Like I

said, I’m just really over the go-go. It’s not the landscape’s

fault. This kind of thing can happen anywhere.