Skullwise Cat

perhaps more aptly, silk and satin. She arrived fully formed, with a scarlet letter already
embossed on her ample chest, the seeds of her symbolic birth and reinvention having
been sown from adultery, abortion, and ashes. But first she was born, innocently enough,
out of both the illusion and disillusion of magic, and a dogged and desperate attempt to
recapture it.
Magic Lantern
Forget what you know about faded stars,
about curiosities and relics.
This is about magic.
Back when there was such a thing,
my father made a living
as a lanternist. I’d go with him
to the Imperial where between comedy reels
he’d show glass slides of the Taj Mahal
or lovers kissing in a Venetian gondola …
To be in limelight is to become incandescent
in the alchemy of dangerous gas and mineral, to smolder
in another’s mind or heart. I would have risked setting
myself on fire, if it meant the world could see me better.
Children are, of course, masters of make-believe, and Lyla’s imagination was doubly
indulged by the shadow puppets that her magic-making father entertained her with (I
never feared the shadows cavorting / in my room—nanny-goats and vultures / jellyfish
and centaurs—nor the hands / that made them. They hardly seemed / related, father’s
contorted fingers, a witch / riding a broom, a bear on a swing). Interestingly, the shape
that becomes most emblazoned in her mind is a snake, giving rise to the recurring Snake
Man, with all its implications of shedding skins and original sin, who appears as her guru,
guide, and manager (Your name doesn’t suit you. One day you’ll be called something
else). But was a childhood drenched in phantasm enough to pacify the reality of a peevish
and vindictive mother who seemed to rue her very existence and, in fact, “grew to hate
the very sight” of her? It is against this silkscreen of ambiguity that Lyla Dore begins
both her descent and ascent, remaking herself not by design, but out of necessity.
Mother was pregnant five times before I came along.
None of them lived to see the world.
It was as though she found me perverse
to have made a home where none could thrive before.
So, too, it is a misbegotten birth that provides the theme for the pivotal poem in Grimm’s
collection, one whose Dickensian title practically tells the whole story: “I Wasn’t
Pregnant, Dr. Moore Explained, Merely Late and This Procedure, While Painful, Would
Resolve the Matter of Lyla Dore.” Having seduced the physician next door whose
children she is tasked with caring for, a woman named Lyla Dore is born in the place and