Matt Stangel Excerpts from “the digital archaeologist”

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--the lampworkers daughter

--the language and the player piano

--a movement in the treehouse

--following a movement in the treehouse

--the mayvis

--the digital archaeologist

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the lampworker's daughter

 

My father made a point of it, to work on his glass universe each night--
first the propane, then oxygen, then lining the walls with flame-proof boards, all
to illustrate how the gas fires are closed with distance, inside the roundness of a marble.
The trick, he would say, is to lose sight of individual stars within the even rotations,
to remember your steady hands, never exposing the mirrored side to the flame.

In the mornings there were galaxies turning in the bed of his kiln.
The doctors said something was turning inside his chest,
his lungs were made raw by a series of snares: fiber glass, metal fumes,
a punty rod, rotating slightly slower than its twin.

This is the work of fathers, nurturing the tubes draining stars from his chest.
The right time was the hour of guilt, me, just a daughter
standing in the hallway outside his workshop and retreat.
So I was a shivering crescent-- the wet circle like the dark outline of a waned moon 
against a bed of sky-- the unfinished universe collecting around me. 

 

 

[Originally printed in the 2008 edition of Poictesme.]

the language and the player piano

 

it's your usual voice behind the muzzle of bees, you in your living room,
brushing a hair from your ivory lip, the paper wound on the spool of your tongue

like the player piano your mother learned from, flat on the expected notes.
her songs draped in your tapestry of motion.

a dandelion eye for a kiss, your hand clasping a rock behind your back,
the cork bobbing on the wine when we ran to the dark corners of the park. 

when i left you there, lowering your eyes to the bottle, you then understood
the significance of silence, that a head can be a catacomb 

of blinking candles, the lights busy celebrating. when the bees were sleeping
you told me that your father had a habit 

of pinching a wick to a thin line of smoke; that you wished to open his head
and find where the light hid. the bees stirred and stung everything. 

there is little light, maybe a few faint vaporous points, 
behind many thin lines of smoke, behind my usual voice.

i load the sheet music and crank up the motor,
and like a toy soldier, you plunk out the song

in rigid movement, until the collection of my turning slows
having given all of myself like used up batteries.

 

 

a movement in the treehouse

 

i wasn't so much interested in her face stung swollen and blue
but that blanket starting at the edge of her, settling into a circle of still bees.

she was playing darts and missed
and the bees poured from their hole in a thin line, a marching of flight, 

buzzing drums that slide over you, one by one.
they drop when i squeeze the trigger of the smoker. 

when the walls were peeled away, you could see the patterns of the hive,
and in the center, a baby raccoon mummified in wax and honey.

you see this often with killer bees, their attacks, though usually they kill only
small animals, birds, mice, the occasional squirrel.

but i, myself, covered in bees like the girl, then the decades
of wax growing up my dead legs?

it took twenty-six tanzanian queens and an accident to mold 
this room of honey fitting neatly inside the walls of a treehouse

 

 

following a movement in the treehouse

 

he explained he had the power to hire and fire.
mainly women from Ghana, or Croatia, or some other impoverished place.

i explained that i study bees, their hives, their removal; that i watch
my own cupped hands carefully place teeming huddles into mason jars.

you have to be quick, or the bees will thin from their huddle,
awake from out the smoke, and i watch a cloud

thin from its swarm into a beta fish with a bright white eye.
it's the fish in the wine jug sitting on her coffee table.

he asks about the average size of an individual comb of honey,
and I multiply 0.74 with my height, waist-line, calculating 

the exact number to coat me in wax. i explain the variables,
species, habitat, apiary or wild, the circumference of my mouth.

i told him about a girl with a muzzle of killer bees. they get their name
from the people who thought "hyper-defensive Africanized" sounded too scientific.

 

 

the mayvis

 

Her name? Purificacion, her daughter's I can't remember, though I roomed
in her row house on La Calle de Virgen del Perpetuo Socorro.

What a long name for the sun, I would think, standing on her burnt roof,
watching birds form a black circle above the city:

faster with each pressing orange angle of light,
always that same track unweaving itself over another windowed night.

And then I spent years picturing a Mayvis as an unclean plant,
some summery thing posted on the largest front porch:

the Mayvis there, all messy with its shadows against a long pane of lawn.
A biennial, not so much missed 

in its bare stages, just imagined, pulling a thinner weight across the grass.

But everyone knows that a Mayvis owns a boat garnished with ornamental brass
worth as much as she paid for the whole scud. She sells the purely cosmetic

pieces for scrap to be melted back down and reshaped,
into a series of leaves, 

not purely cosmetic-- some used as the belly parts of spoons,  
others, the heads of spears, still more, in lumps for cash.

It is true, when the sun is closer, it takes longer names. Speaking
not through gestures, but a sailing of movements she doesn't own. 

 

 

the digital archaeologist

That night when I will lay back under my mother,
and speak the words of my father, is the night
I will find calm in a heart of worms.

 

Comparative data report: Case#475690 (Sarah Lampworker)

Data sources:

httpusa3://www.archive.org/internet1/myspace/laurahatesglass/05122008

httpusa3://www.archive.org/internet1/youtube/laurahatesglass/05122008

httpusa3://www.archive.org/internet1/wordpress/thebeekeeper/05122008

...

and other sources I've been checking-- then ejecting our picture before going home.

Mayvis is a hollow spinning of light, again, asking me about work,
but the avatarial statements get tangled with the ones I don’t know I make.

General Interests: ... it's her eyes saying no, looking over my shoulder.
The sugar gliders are singing a myth of wounded tree, sweet sap weeping down

a singing to their pouch. I keep thinking about my mother in the video,
young and dancing half-naked on that table, occasionally stopping

to pick up marbles. Mayvis looks at her plate
and moves a stalk of broccoli to one side, sets down her fork,

picks it up, pushes the stalk back to the first side. 
The gliders are mating again. Tomorrow? I click off the hologram.

She gathers into three lines, one for each dimension,
and the spinning loosens, and the light rods quit, and her broccoli thins into the wall.

As a child my father fed me propolis extract and it’s the story
of their culture, a master scroll, the manitous etched at their lodges.

Goals: To be the spinning the Trumpet Vines stand around,
those growing up your nude building of ribs, inside, the worms huddle tight,

as if attempting to gather back into their previous shape.