Information Desk

148 | ROBYN SCHIFF Information Desk Robyn Schiff poetry ….There was a cart we used to transport brochures from a storage closet to the Desk. You had to steer it back through the Renaissance into a passage that opened in a dark medieval hallway through a door without a handle you backed into after opening one-handed with a key called the Number Two that was hanging from a ball link chain around your neck. We talk a lot about death, my husband and I. I want to add to the utter absence of the weight that once seemed everlasting of the child asleep upon me that I can feel not feeling, which is the overtaking void circumscribed exactly, the pressure at my nape of that ball link chain when I bent down to insert the key, ROBYN SCHIFF | 149 turned it, pushed the door open, and then the glimmering, insignificant beauty of the release of my neck as I withdrew key from lock, stood up, and entered. My mother swam in a man-made body called the Delta Reservoir near the Mohawk River outside Rome, New York that was the intentional result of the engineered flooding of a village called Delta that had been developed into something more than just acreage by two men named Stark and Prosper. You are an American Girl. Here you are in an American Poem getting in the American water. Let’s go under together. “I used to get nose bleeds from the pressure. I don’t know that I want to get in the poem—” There is a ladder. Itself a salvage. Let’s back down it slowly deep in the quiet American Wing of the Museum in darkness toward a new closet—not for storage but installed for public viewing, a woman’s wardrobe. Private, folded things, ironed, crisp as peeling an orange in sunlight. Lit like a refrigerator in a dream, with almost nothing in it, who can stand before it and not divest? Stark and Prosper. Starched and Proper. Sti≠ and Angry. Forced and entered. Sorted and counted. Stored and forgotten. A pull to bottom I associate with dream ending before awakening. Not “thoughtless”; beyond thinking. End-of-recording sound of the needle dragging the void. Why should I, we, be afraid? Human consciousness far predates me oiling the mahogany handrail with my mere presence. Rembrandt/ Not Rembrandt, 1995, was the first special exhibition I attended as museum employee; paced it with the proprietary edge of a paid informant. Submit everything to the binary. It had the sti≠, infrared soul of connoisseurship; Rembrandt/ 150 | ROBYN SCHIFF Not Rembrandt, that’s the question; posed it like a strobe with the typesetter’s solidus, the forward slash, a force field between who did and who did not make it, without that indecisive human “Or” Milton imposes between the given and the made— Eve withdrawing from Adam with such gardening tools as are yet rude, guiltless of fire had formed, or angels brought. Choose a side, poet, which is it—Eve or God who forged the hoe? Forgery, forgery, forgery, flash, flash, flash. I said to myself, if you have to ask… but I stood before each painting eating half-shadow, umber, and ocher every day for a month of lunch hours trying to know. “The handling of the built-up impasto is itself a valid argument against,” writes the curator, Walter Leidke in the exhibition catalog, and yet, a few paintings over—Portrait of a Man (The Auctioneer)—“it is surprising how ROBYN SCHIFF | 151 successful the unknown painter was at imitating Rembrandt’s manner in the light e≠ects on the sitter’s left cu≠….” And so I came to love that cu≠, its lace and dust, and loved the wrist that cu≠ suggests, obscured here in the painting by the ledger the auctioneer is holding on which the trembling value of what—some cows? suggests a field, in mind, where a calf moves in the shadow of a barn. The hot smell of manure and mulch. A bull. How much is it all worth? Self portrait of the young artist as auctioneer with your check list and radiant left cu≠ that...