In Caravaggio’s “The Raising of Lazarus,” Lazarus appears to fall: body taut with rigor at a forty-five degree angle to the stone floor, caught in the arms of a bystander, who wonderstruck, looks away from Jesus and into the victim’s face, as do Lazarus’s sisters who set the story in motion out of grief, with the best of intentions, as if this dead man alive still could be their brother and not a stranger shadowed by tomb-stench and bad luck, a stranger they must feed and dress. And who never sleeps. They hear him at night pouring out the jar of lentils, one by one dropping each in the jar, counting out loud, pouring them out again, counting again, the number different each time although nothing’s changed at all, except the hour which gets late until it’s early, when everyone else in the house gives in, gives up on sleep.
1.
The picture Norman Bates moves aside to access a peephole in order to peer into Marion’s room and watch her undress, before he enters that room later, dressed as his mother to stab the naked Marion to death in her shower, is a cheaply framed, dusty print of “Susanna and the Elders,” a popular subject for painters—a nude woman looked upon without her knowing, except in that version of the story she is saved in the end from the death the gaze initiated.
2.
He was doing his dishes. Seven o’clock on a winter evening. He looked out his apartment’s kitchen window, a little fogged from the hot water, and across the alley he saw through her uncurtained window his neighbor step out of her bathroom into her bedroom, naked, a towel turbaned on her head, another towel to dry her body. He watched her through the frame of the window beyond which she never moved as she dried and dressed as if his looking held her in view. From that night on seven o’clock was the time to do the dishes.
3.
He tries to be in bed first, so he can watch his wife undress, apply her lotions, let down her hair, move back and forth across the room as she attends her nighttime tasks. That is why he keeps his glasses on: to see, to watch. And to not seem to be watching. To be allowed a stolen glance. After thirty years, the erotic still walks that tightrope between the allowed and the stolen. What, he wonders guiltily, does he mean by allowed, by stolen.
4.
Jimmy Stewart, or rather Jimmy Stewart’s character, has a broken leg and passes his time in a wheelchair at his window with a telephoto lens observing the lives of his neighbors. His girlfriend and housekeeper do not at first approve. When one looks, one will almost always see something one had better not have seen. And once seen, how then to unsee it? How not to multiply it in memory, to fret over it, to imagine perhaps that you saw even more than you remembered? Given that we remember so little, isn’t it amazing how just a glimpse can set a story in motion? When Raymond Burr, or rather Raymond Burr’s character breaks into Stewart’s room to kill him, it is only by blinding Burr by setting off flash bulbs, that Stewart manages, crippled as he is, to survive.
The fire retains only its shape, its shifting, ambiguous, wind-shredded shape.
A bevy of flames. Sparks splayed beneath a sledge hammer. Bonfires at midsummer. Pentecostal tongues. Banked embers. Meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven. The charred body of Osiris as spent fuel. Signal fire built from a shipwreck. A thumb-struck match flaring. A fire kindled with Cain’s offering.
Although the flames rise and reach as high as the top of the stake, someone in the crowd feels the need not to beg for mercy, but to call for the condemned witch’s death as if it were not at hand.
Prior to words, the inarticulateness of fire, a long mumbled sentence through the hardwood forest, down the mountain, to the seaside dunes, where it shushed it way through the sparse grasses.
][brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven][ he took the fire in his hand, and a knife][ Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering][ in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush][ the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed][ the fire ran along upon the ground][ and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous][with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs][
Having consumed the Library at Alexandria, the flames remained tongue-tied, mute.
Fire like poppies in the wheat. Poppies like fire in the wheat.
][ his eyes were as a flame of fire][ like unto a flame of fire][ gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich][ seven lamps of fire][ And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar][ and fire mingled with blood][ a great mountain burning with fire][ having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone][ by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths][
The fire retains only its shape, its shifting, ambiguous, wind-shredded shape.
It is not long before pleasure cloys, before you look up and see the creek water shivered by wind, your horse outflanked by its shadow. As always, the uncanny returns us to the moment, which is to say the ordinary, the contradictions and anomalies. Paths zigzag up a cliff side, where the rope of a waterfall hangs. The moon’s jade crumbles beneath its own weight. Where I come from we say the prairie, by which we mean the sky weighing down on all sides. Storms latent in the convergence of air masses. Rivers, but no mountains. Tornado weather: a sickle whetted in a shed full of hornets. Like you, I’ve looked for answers in fox tracks. Once leaving the movies, I looked up and saw a homeless man dressed in an old suit I’d given to the Salvation Army, and was surprised to note how good the outfit looked on such a lean figure. I should loose some weight, I thought, and worried I had been hasty giving the suit away.
Eric Pankey is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Pear As One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008. Many of the poems from the late 80s through mid 90s were written in St. Louis, a wonderful place to be among poets.
