2 Poems by Matthew Otremba

In the Instruction Manual for Where to Find You

all of the apostrophes have been removed 

and recipes are scribbled onto every other page, 

each one calls for duck fat and something cured. 

The lyrics to “Hot for Teacher” appear 

alongside choreographed dance moves 

for lifting cigarettes at thirteen. Here, 

a list of what to bring to the sacrifice: sleep, 

waking hours, every in-between thing. There, 

pictograms representing all that you once 

felt most: murmuration of starlings; feral cats 

crossing the freshly cut lawn with eyes 

like polished agates; and shrub after shrub 

of rosemary, verdant and overgrown 

and shockingly fragrant when scratched.

Whole passages written like Sumerian tablets 

or Egyptian ledgers.  Inventories of obsessions: 

every reference to art and bird, Camus 

and Ice Cube, YouTube and the uses for meat.  

Notes on craft and a triptych of thin 

papery cutouts—frescoes from the Lysi dome—

pasted toward the back, each one a space 

with no beginning and no end. But at the end, 

after the footnotes and acknowledgements—

name after name you knew by heart—brother, 

your face appears on the jacket, eyes staring 

out at us and saying, as if through pursed lips, 

“Put your hand into the wound, remain Thomas.  

I dare you.”  

Masks Confronting Death (1888) by James Ensor    

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?

—Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Up close, the painting soon becomes abstract, 

expressionless, the veiled figures all form

and color—yet suggestive still, how uniforms 

of abstraction inevitably get unmasked 

by metaphor. A pair of wideset eyes collapses 

into ovals of lapis, rough-edged and egg-shaped,

an early shade of bruise; another’s fat lip 

turns into a pursed, wine-stained arrow tip;

while crosswise on the canvas, the thick ridge  

of costume beak—a duck-like nose job—is now 

a fleshy cone that sweats thin tan lines 

of fingery paint.  In the middle, wedged 

between patches of chiffon and cornflower,

harbor gray and red plum, a face like mine.

***

We were the only ones left in the room, 

what remained of us there, around midnight.

I have a picture as proof.  In it, you

lie on the bed in sickly yellow light 

that turned everything into chiaroscuro:

thickening beard, head propped up by 

a blanket folded over on top of a pillow, 

eyes closed but open just, and your body  

angled and covered in a bedsheet with every

ripple pronounced by the light and shadow

across it all.  Only now, it reminds me

of a painting by Caravaggio, 

where they lower that body into the tomb,

the bunched white fabric falling off of him.    

***

When I say a face like mine, I mean

the hollowed log; blue-brown eyes carved out from

what they’ve seen, and what they’ve seen

is what all these figures face. The sum—

the painting reminds us—of what we cannot see

on the canvas.  After all, there is some 

realism in it.  The clouds churn, the sea

crashes. The horizon a muted opalescent foam,

a mirror with the face most like me.

They say that Ensor never left home, 

a coastal town filled with tourists, and we

move through this gallery much the same.

taking pictures as the museum guard leans

against the wall, warning us away from the frame.    

Matthew Otremba’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review and The Georgia Review. He lives St. Paul, MN.

9 August 2021