Femme-Enfant:
a Sonata in 25 Movements
by Alifair Skebe
1
She stands, a hammer
swinging at her side. Blood runs
from her right temple.
How one makes the loveliest of axes.
Poetry and art can make
the most violent of weapons
2
The prisoners at Kosovo
are on television tonight.
The scene: work camps.
Their eyes have disappeared;
their eye cavities have become stone.
Breaking stone:
one man has a strong arm
and his body emaciated.
Another man, a mangy head.
This is on every channel.
3
The little girl cannot stop
for killing herself.
She sees the woman
with a blow to her head:
she is in the act of dying,
she did it to herself.
In the bathroom, the girl
stands atop the counter,
stares into the mirror.
Her expression changes
to one of begging,
her eyes being more lifeless.
She launches herself
to the top of the open door
and slides down to the knob.
One tries to save her.
4
A gunshot in the distance—
the stall of a car,
the call of a bird.
She is on the windowsill in panic.
One cannot eat a reasonable meal.
5
The police come to find what has been hidden.
These victims—post-Holocaust—hide in the video closet.
The house is a former psychologist’s practice:
he has moved the reclining chairs into two closets.
Four girl-children hide beneath the reclining portion.
We must do this again early in the morning, he says.
Young women are tickling the girls now,
perhaps, the police have gone.
6
The space of hiding in the US:
the room is 20’ by 10’,
four tall windows begin at 5’
above the baseboards.
The walls are paint-
ed pale blue.
One wall opens to a
smaller room—an arcade—and the bath-
room is off to its side.
The tele-
visions work,
but the CD and D
VD players are broken.
Power
Puff Girls episodes play on one set:
to fight crime in Townsville or such:
to placate other episodes.
7
One does not know—
should she turn
on her caretaker
or herself? The girl:
6, 7, 8 years in age,
her body thin,
olive skin. She growls.
The first of the acting-out.
Until this point, the acts
were directed inward.
She stops when the man
coaxes her with green fields
and pastures covered with cows.
Think of the milk, the wheat;
Think of the cheese, the bread.
8
The poet was conceived
on a grassy football field
in late Spring. The edges
of the court were lined in flames.
He has pictures.
He shows them to some.
9
His wife looks away
with hollow eyes.
She is asked questions.
She does not respond.
10
Pupils point to the life,
a chronology of the poet,
singling out the conception,
then the birth. It is about
the becoming, he says.
11
One cannot stop their cries in the night.
The caretaker finds the little girl
in front of the television at one in the morning.
The news seems harmless now,
but it’s more of the Kosovo prisoners,
seeing their faces in close-up shots.
Guns can be heard in the distance.
Those sounds are just insurgents
in their homes, the correspondent notes.
One can only see the back of her head
as she watches; the blue light radiates
in the filaments of her hair.
One can become entranced.
12
The camera pans
along the rock wall
crumbling.
The duty is
to break more rocks
to build the wall.
The prisoners
have turned
to stone.
13
They move to an inaudible rhythm
without seeing
the correspondents.
They are breaking the rocks now,
she says; and now, something
of their meager subsistence.
One pleads with the audience
to continue support for these men:
we are saving them from themselves.
we are saving them from their fate,
their country, their God.
14
The little girl comes
to her caretaker having stuck
a fork in the side
of her doll’s head.
No more dolls.
15
Here is your maker:
crayons,
clay,
markers,
construction paper.
Rebuild now.
A little boy might
get an erector set.
16
Frida molds her
spine of clay.
Dorothea folds
paper birds in the shape
of her dress.
Leonora colors a face
again and again
again and again.
17
Once they realize she is trying to jump
out of the window, the psychologist
pulls the shade. She now spends
much of her time atop the wooden table.
Pushed to the wall.
She cannot be cornered.
18
She paints a wound of fire
for the poet to enter.
The letter becomes too heavy,
groaning under its weight.
She paints pomegranate,
nectar, persimmon in the
New England snow. The
image delights. No emotion
can contain the feeling therein.
19
Her hair haloes a crown
of sleepy fibers golden and
brown. Wistful glances down
the hall.
20
The letter A. Intoned. Brief
second letter, consonant
falling hard. Bakelight, bread,
boasting canvas C.
Quantitative—she’s barking
in the next room arpeggios
and the grand scale.
21
Inside the stone is a fire
Toralee, eyes, a blind persistence
the color of old meat.
Limestone, marble, amethyst
dust of the mind reportage.
22
Dorothea paints in her mind
brilliant positions—trapped
children like ghosts, inaudible
screams of fancy. One
hears them in form—
beauteous transcription.
23
God is dead because he
won’t write back. Construction
prefigures another
construction.
24
Will the poet emerge
from Purgatorio?
25
One must not fear their
stone towers.
