A folio of English-language poetry by Cynthia Cruz

Cruz, Cynthia

English

Syracuse University Research Facility and Collaborative Environment

CYNTHIA CRUZ NEBENWELT Quarantined inside a wonderland of endless Dream: waiting on horse back, at the gate Of a Dostoyevsky mock death, milky reverie Of the guillotine. And a room of green and White coconut cream layered cakes, an infinite Winter inside them. A childhood of illness. The moon was the only nurse I knew. At the shore, I rode a little rowboat Out to the end of the world. I found the kill And entered it. The owl and the pussycat Rowed in a yellow boat into the gleaming. Crept out of the playroom Into the aquarium: Vienna, Salzburg, mildly German. Mother's cabinets and jewelry boxes. My small white hands dripping in amethyst, Pearls, and aquamarine. Woke on the floor Slept there, wept there, inside its envelope Of drowning. Cynthia Cruz 33 THE BIRTHDAY CEREMONY Seventeen rooms of long maroon Tables, of endless Raspberry cream cake, Cheap California Champagne, and stacks of magazines and childhood Photographs On the pale pink plush. White as milk, and cold As the hand of God, That locked empire With its slumber of ghosts, its dead Engines. The uncanny Always comes back. What white darkness: pearls, Porcelain, and medicine. The mansion of childhood Is shattering. A sentinel, I stand at the entrance To the burning fortress. 34 HOTEL OBLIVION At Hotel Oblivion, the snow Goes on for days. A small saga, Its secret voices bloom against the rotting. The rooms are painted mint green Frosting. The men are handsome. They wear wool blonde suits, take opium, Ride white horses in a flood Of bloodhounds, vanishing into the crushed Black spider of the forest. It hurts To look at us. Afraid, we mask our faces In glam make up to ward off the invisible. Wear ancient Warhol wigs and Red Falke or Fogal stockings. We are promiscuous In our thinness, don't leave the green mansion, Are trapped inside the snow box, noiselessly Splendoring. Outside, the bright pines Weep, electric diamonds, and stars. At midnight Supper is served on delicate Dresden Porcelain: lamb and endless French Macaroons; Vermouth in small Crystal goblets. When the men return, they let loose Their horses. Nomadic, they wander Back defeated to the fortress, broken, All of this vast collecting, this glamorous Danger and doom. Cynthia Cruz 35 MAGICAL Wallpapered the white walls Mint green stripes With miniature yellow tigers Aiming their woolen, precise Bodies through the halos Of hula-hoops. At the hospital the nurses Don't know the riddle, how It's unraveling. If I say The word baby a hundred times, Then please, Can it be real. 36 KINGDOM OF CLUTTERING SORROW Another helping of champagne Cream cake: stacked and beveled, A miniature cathedral smashed, Soft white box of sugar and glitter. Outside, meanwhile, the beige Mercedes Arrives, its seats of soft red leather. Its driver, the inventor of sorrow Takes me across the dead Zones, and bridges Of America, its eternal labyrinths, Interlocked, and without meaning. A collapsible cage Flocked golden and framed In wet black lacquer. And voluminous: dawn's Museum of stars. Masked and gowned, I make My way down Sokurov's Grand Staircase Leaving forever behind The dark kingdom of clutter. At night the ambassadors arrive In a ceremony of silent White blizzard. Carrying goblets and rabbits, Dragging bags of chain letters. It's true, I come from the Tricked-up hospital Cynthia Cruz 37 Of beauty and ruin. I am frozen forever in this wonder Room, this zoo of one million Diamond machines. Come with me into my blonde room Of music. Self Portrait as Marilyn In the Final Sitting. 38 OUT OF THE DESERT HOSPITAL Awoke in cobalt blue Fogal stockings, and Kiss Stage make up, inside a bathysphere Of wounding music. A mansion Of German, rooms of strudel, and quadruple Layered raspberry cream cakes. Starve the shame down to androgyny And numbness. Beige plastic trays With my name engraved on them. A rabbit-eared radio in the cabin is transmitting The parade of the dead. Dazed, I've lived inside This adored orphanage, this sorrowful Wunderkammer. Always gleaning or wasting in its Accumulating. Darboven panels and a handbook for Cataloguing the stars. Glam and gloom, a diamond Gold necklace wrapped around my waist. In drag, embellishing, collecting, then Deconstructing to stop the brutal onslaught. Cynthia Cruz 39 SETTING FOR A FAIRY TALE Cold, grey, Gogol-dawn All day. And outside the glimmering Palace, Inside the perennial garden, Among the blazing Flags, the lights Of the turrets, Blinking Into the strain Of the twenty-first century-The parade of names Race past me, And my life Blooms Into the glass scope: Small and empty As everything God Left here In this sad Dead world. 40 Cynthia Cruz I am moving You should know-Nearer The beautiful Clear windows Of the glimmering hospital. 41 DEATH: THE PROJECT Am Steinhof, or the Wagner Jauregg Hospital in Linz. Driven to Trauersee, alone In a beige Mercedes taxi Whispering Bachmann, the radio Broadcasting races from the Autodromo in Monza. Through the woodlands of hurt Foxes, green grasses, and red and yellow birds on telephone wire. To the coast of Genoa, and its pearl-Black ocean, its murk, Mysterious like the jewel-white Magnets of radiating madness. 42 THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM Over the Orinoco Through the black fields Of what once was Eden. A queen in a glass Palanquin, I slept through the burning And was laid flat on the grass Like a child Dragged in from the ocean. In the morning, three singing women arrived. They slit open the lung of my belly. But there were no babies inside, Just green sea foam and jewel Encrusted earthworms. These words, this terrible song. Cynthia Cruz 43 

Cynthia Cruz folio

https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&amp;context=correspondingvoices

Cynthia Cruz folio

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Syracuse University Research Facility and Collaborative Environment