Dolls
But this being-less-than-a-thing, in its utter
irremediability,
is the secret of its superiority.
—Rilke “Some Reflections on
Dolls”
Our local strip club, Baby Dolls, is under
special scrutiny. The owner blundered,
failed to report a former felony.
He’ll dress his dolls or face the penalty
of closure. Clothing or Closed—the headline
raves.
And now appeals are in the works to save
the local gentlemen “their harmless fun.”
They love their spices: Ginger, Cinnamon,
and the twins, Brandi and Candi (both with i’s),
who attempt to raise some titillating surprise
as to who they really are. But no one’s claiming
these strippers toy with the metaphysics of naming,
identity, or grammar.
My daughter, one,
blue eyes, gold curls, and skin of porcelain
makes women gasp. They call her doll. They fuss.
One: Where did you get her, Cherubs-R-Us?
At home she is her own cruise ship, crawling
a vast expanse of living room while hauling
a doll at her side—a lifeboat dangling, it seems,
by appointment to her majesty, the Queen.
The other dolls left in her wake are like
a flotsam of suicidal beauties who fake
an elegant distress and subtly yearn
that a ship with lifeline floats will soon return.
We love how she pretends to care: to hold,
to put to bed, to hug and kiss, or scold
the one whose only fault is being plastic.
To love our families, our friends, we practice
with dolls or animals. We build them houses,
and give them names and pair them up with spouses.
To make us feel that someone has it tougher,
we make them, in fifteen minutes, suffer
the hurt or fame it takes a lifetime to
achieve, the fate a real-life G.I. Joe
could not survive. Ken never thinks to flee
a Wheelchair Barbie’s disability.
Are they for girls, and will our boys become
effeminate, lose all command, go mum?
The voodoo doll is funny till it looks
like us, and someone stabs the hands or cooks
the brains so we rely, like the greenest Muppet,
on tired metaphors and a rhyming couplet.
However, Russian dolls are most like the poet
inside the empty poet, and so on, inchoate
like me inside a Wilbur in a Yeats
in a Browning in a Poe inside a Keats.
But these end up on a shelf in the family room,
are rarely touched, but then there’s Harold Bloom.
We know that Rilke’s mother yearned so much for
a girl, she made him wear, till he was four,
a dress. She foisted on her little doll
(middle name, Maria) a little doll,
an image of himself, herself. And thus,
Rilke learned, the hard way, dolls answer us,
like God and Destiny, with silence, a soul,
a doll-soul, quiet as a bullet hole.
Charles Baudelaire thought children ache to see
the soul within a toy so passionately,
they dash it on walls, throw it to the ground
until it spills its stuffing and nothing, profound,
expands the emptiness of that playroom.
And thus begins our melancholy, gloom.
Does God play house with us—or even stranger,
do we make God a doll, complete with manger?
Did Jesus have a doll, a nativity set,
or Joseph carve him a wooden chariot
and pugilists who punch each other over
who gets to be Ben Hur, who gets to chauffer.
We dress, undress, and leave our dolls in poses.
We flee the graven image and climb like Moses
having put away our childish things (
to take the hand of God. Or a different doll:
a pet, a friend, a mirror, beau, or lover.
We know ourselves by virtue of another.
My little girl, that doll I deify,
dress up, wind up, screw up, and let her fly,
she’d rather hug her man, Pinocchio,
than me. Already, I have to let her go.
I’m proud as Punch she looks and acts somewhat
like me: her sunken Russian cheeks, her strut.
But life’s provisional as furniture.
I should know better than to worship her.
For God, who took from Job and then required
from Abraham by his own hand (but spared)
his son, demands that I relinquish all
my loves, for He is great and I am small.
While we have art to save us from the Truth,
we know this fountain of eternal youth
runs dry, and though its marble nudes are massive
gods, they corrode, are ultimately passive:
the sexy figure, Henri Moore’s weird bronzes,
on film, James Bond, played this time by Pierce Brosnan,
with a bevy of dolls, yet poor Miss Moneypenny…
At Baby Dolls, some wise guy thinks he’s funny:
A dollar for the doll, he slips his five
beneath her garter. She makes it come alive,
it disappears, he looks her up and down
upon her pedestal. A mere pronoun,
she leans against the pole as if to suffer
a different kind of passion, as if no lover,
no proper gentleman will ever touch her.
She strolls the strobe-lit stage where all must judge her.
He’s loud and drunk too much: You Jane, me
Tarzan.
He bares his chest; she’s not allowed. She ignores him,
looks over him to the mirror across the room
and wonders whether who she fools or whom.
Forthcoming
in Dolls (Orchises Press, 2008).