This next one's called "Tribute and Ash"
as a reference in the second section
to Vesalius who was one of the first biologists
to trace the human circulation in the Renaissance.
First part is about this really wretched painting,
but in a nice way wretched that my parents always had
up above their living room.
So for-- "One, A Landscape by Grant Wood.
By an open barn door two cows loll,
a Holstein and a Guernsey, and a white horse
grazes in the shadows of a hill.
A one-lane bridge, and to its right a gravel road
that winds some feeble mashed potato mounds.
A Midwest effort at terrain where barns outnumber houses,
and a bone white church spire nudges the left hand frame.
Not a town, not even a hamlet.
Grain elevator, tavern on the riverbank,
the trio of rickety windmills, water tower, willows,
and some mystery trees that flank the water, resembling
puff balls or grapes.
Each night, she'd come home from Northwest Bank,
from her ledgers, and her adding machine tapes
littering the floor like barbershop hair.
And under these drab cornfields, she'd
smoke the packs of Salem straights, curlers shaping
their weird corona, romance novels, and a highball tumbler
replenished each hour with a splash of gin.
The endless curlicues of smoke.
For 30 years, she'd cough, flip the pages
while the white frame grew the color of a spoiled apple.
A cheap print, not even sentimental value.
No one bought it at the yard sale.
Two, Memory Palace.
Vesalius, scalpel aloft, as he splits
like a melon the hanged man's skull, fragile trepanning
to unveil some terra incognita of the soul,
uncover the seat of memory, which resides in current,
in minute sacs of seawater, encoded,
shot through with electrical charges.
The cerebral cortex halved, dead wings.
No computer, this, to tell me that today
she's been dead three years.
An anniversary marked unwittingly
by purple tulips in a jar and seven days of April rain.
Reliquary.
Missed connections.
Sentences where no one stares from windows longingly.
Sentences refusing to describe old photographs.
Retrievable and irretrievable, each fragment
in its own canopic jar.
No need to tell me I reside still in that house where
she's-- say it-- by the flowerbed,
straw hat flaring and tied with a yellow scarf.
He died of this too, she was saying from the couch
where she had to be propped in a certain way
by the nurse, who'd come each morning with the morphine.
Who?
I said.
Hubert Humphrey.
He shook hands with me once at the bank.
Always smiling.
This borne to the palaces of memory.
Loot and booty, tribute and ash.
The charnel house of memory.
Open me, observe.
The bone saw's snarl.
The edifice viewed from above, almost an aerial view.
Inject the sinews with purple dye, to circle
and arc the synapses like footage of squid.
Tentacle, ink screen, the dye vats of Tyre.
I never did think much of him, but you
could see the pain on his face every night on the news.
He died, you know, at home.
Doorways, courtyards, banisters.
Beyond the room, another room.
Beyond the room."