Robyn Schiff

Robyn Schiff was born in 1973 and raised in Metuchen, New Jersey. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Bristol, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in The Black Warrior Review, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, Kiosk, VOLT, Verse, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Worth (University of Iowa Press, 2002), was recognized with an award from the Greenwall Fund by the Academy of American Poets. Schiff is an active Contributing Editor of the poetry journal The Canary. Formerly a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon, she recently moved to Chicago with her husband, the poet Nick Twemlow, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.

At Shedd Aquarium

Watch them be themselves

in habitats contrived

in dark rooms with openings

like televisions broadcasting

a dimension where Pigment rides

in its original body

and metaphor initiates impractical

negotiations with Size and Color

and Speed and Silence

too thoroughly forward

but to feel

the self an excess.

Fastness, I am tired of resting.

Isn’t it indecisive not to be smaller

driven through waters barely perceivable

but where a wake scribbles

a line like a Chinese character

abandoning its construction box

to slip as line only

into an opening

smaller than its shoulders?

Each fin scores the air

as it opens the surface.

A sliver of a fish circles

forever that day

as if to turn something over

in its skinny head keen

to resolve a difficulty

I have.

It is an opera with a lonesome

heroine pacing revolving moors

engineered to seem panoramic.

The diva opens and closes

the tragic mouth singing

deliberate, even breaths

intuition hears.

Theater of false proportion. Theater of constellations reconfiguring. Theater of readjusting the reception. Theater of missing appointments. Theater of driving into the ocean with the headlights turned lowest green and the theater of the engine shifting into oceanic-overdrive. Theater of hearing something coming closer over theatrical fields of theater set crops. Theater of this can not be my life, for which, it is too quiet. Theater of seeing something moving in the one light in the distance which is darkness. Theater of stopping. Theater of my mistake: not coming forward, going further, the something moving in the theater of lighting in the theater of the hour between the theater of morning and the theater of night in the theater of years in which the theater of regret is keeping the secret theater of the revision.

Theater of slipping between

two points in a simulated rock-mountain.

Theater of who will not tell

casually follows.

Chanel N^o 5

Waterfall gown with water-

fowl sleekness embroidered so as to rise

the speed of light while

not in motion;   slit placed

to stride from standstill to escape

as a leopard, monkey, or fox might hear an en-

emy in the dark brush

before she sees it (the coat

is lined) and try deception. These Exiled

Russian Princesses em-

broidering with Pari-

sian seamstresses learned the over-

under stitch in which the end is drawn beneath the

fabric. In photos, fire

in the fireplace a blur on

a log—the shutter was slow—workers pose

as fire beyond betrays

the presentation. If

The Grand Duke Dimitri had moved

suddenly to kiss Chanel’s mouth this also would

be recorded as a

blur. Yes, he who pushed Rasput-

in from the bridge pressed and held his mouth to

hers until light sufficed

to keep the exiled Duke

loving her. Action mustn’t take

place on the surface but in illusive spaces.

Hesitant Princes of

no domain line up on a

gold chain upon the black drop of her dress

in the dark room. Her neck-

lace is all that shows up.

Patterns of points into inde-

pendent linear shapes transformed by Perspective

on which the cold light of

her jewelry surfaces

like the searchlights of a search-boat, body

in the river decom-

posing, murderer, free.

“At my age, when a man wants you

you don’t ask to see his passport,” she answered re-

porters about fucking

the Nazi called “The Sparrow”

(his language) in 1940 when in-

vited back to Paris

to fuck him at the Ritz.

Emptiness is innocent? Not

so as Ruth Greenglass described a hollow in the

stereo-console in the

sitting room of her in-laws

in which a lamp was installed. For use in

microfilming, a bulb

affixed on the secret

documentation of the bomb

delicately renders that which is put before

it; reiterating,

smaller, in the Rosenbergs’

console, the atom bomb assembling

and assembling in

silent darkness. Visit-

ors want to hear a record, the

Rosenbergs say the stereo is broken. We’ve

been waiting on repair-

men almost since we bought it.

There’s no workmanship. Mrs. Rosenberg

who unscrewed the transmitt-

er herself says something

must be missing under the lid,

I lifted it and it looked lost.

The Rosenberg testimon-

y admits an ordinary living-

room, a stereo they

paid $21

for. Inside, nothing unusu-

al. A maid they paid too much dusted it every

second Friday morning.

Vampire Finch

Roosting in a crater with one

red foot on either side of her stony egg,

the red-footed booby endures the finch

feeding on her tail in which the

finch has inserted its intravenous

bill to drink the blood. The red-footed booby

knows what happens if she steps

from duty to shoo the finch. The

finch’s bill the ages perfect with use will

pierce the egg with one thrust and leave the egg,

should someone come along, fit to

paint an easter meditation upon

that can never spoil. A lacquer developed

by the Japanese who had

no easter, also uses egg

shell and no egg. Cracked beyond recognition,

the fragments are inlaid so as to seem one

continuous flat surface of

a tabletop on which one writing home

never knows one leans one’s elbows on that which

stood balanced alone on its

smallest point, vernal equinox

momentarily drawing the whole egg up;

likewise, darkly drawing, the vampire finch

draws on the red-footed booby’s

tail-blood; it attaches itself in the

air like Spanish moss, is already feeding

when it puts its feet down on

the feathered back of its warm source.

Pictured feeding itself, iconography

perfect for an island flag or stone-cut

sculpture through which water runs off

the roof of a church through the open beak

of one bird into the beak of the vampire

into the courtyard spouting

black rain filthy from the carved gut

of both ugly birds, finch tense with appetite,

victim-bird rigid with patience and blood

loss, the weakening stance of its

roost captured in Peter’s Basilica

where Jesus firmly droops across Mary. The

inevitability

of the finch’s thirst darts into

the arrowy point of the beak that stands in

nature for Dracula’s two pointed teeth

inscribing a sleepy neck with

marks a prisoner makes to count two more

days with the tine of a fork. When he doesn’t

hunt his own, slaves bag village

children and leave them struggling on

the Count’s floor, beds empty when parents check them

in the morning. How do they get in? There was

no disturbance but a storm in

the distance rocking a cargo ship in

and out of the beam of the lighthouse. The Count

was in the hold of that ship

raising the coffin lid off the

coffin he traveled in. On land in a train

racing the ship, Mina raises her arms

in a trance in which she gestures

emptily as the Count eats through

the unsuspecting watchmen of the ship’s crew,

the smell of shit in the air

makes Mina too sick to eat her

own meal her companions offer. On the ship,

flies breed in the wet muck. More beautiful

than the flower petal in the

prismatic bubble the male fly brings the

female, the empty bubble he sometimes brings

instead. Revolving in the

glassy glare like a globe Vermeer

would dangle, it would make you sick to see things

as fast as they happen like locking your

gaze on a passing train you have

to look away. Loeb did when Leopold

practiced passing ransom from the 3 o’clock.

He looked away from train to

cigar box to marsh grass searching

for the empty box which would contain ransom

if this wasn’t practice. Leopold knew

a good place to hide the body

from his days of bird-watching where the train

cut through the still marsh and “From the air vents we

could see civilians laughing.”

Woodpecker Finch

That bird named for the bird twice-size itself

has a twig in its mouth or would not be called

the woodpecker finch, extending its reach the length of a twig,

it probes the bark for ants

with the twig in its mouth it would not be called

the woodpecker finch without.

It probes the bark for ants

in darkness where the dead were brought—

woodpecker finch, without,

ruts of ants, within, collapsed

in darkness where the dead were brought

down on the living like salt

salting salt. Being stealthy,

being invisible,

poking with a puppet like a hyphen into

the colony while the finch is yet in the transept of the church,

machine-tragedy in which God cranked from rafters

is not the Japanese black-cloaked puppeteer walking among the living

story of a wife whose devotion to her husband is such she throws herself

from a cliff. The woodpecker finch

sticks the stick-faced stick into the sappy bark,

naked, jerking from the beak of the finch,

picking at the sand with its one foot,

what god is this without a mask

coming or going

like a snake

that won’t bend?

Goddess of Mercy

mercifully intervened

and saved the wife.

A bobby pin in an electric socket

plugged into the current

without being dropped

in front of the outlet.

Plugged into the current,

Bridge of Emergencies

from the outlet

to the outer

colony? No. The finch’s extended beak

jutting from its given beak,

temporary, light enough to lift in flight,

resolved: look look (the theater is dark)

look look (finch taps prop).

A play using multiple sets

provides contrast when a god

causes one place to vanish

mid-act. Flying machines,

trapdoors, hidden stairs,

plot twists, tricks of light,

gloved hands,

promptbooks.

There is music.

There is little conversation.

Wife escapes singing

through the stage door

where the stagehand leans between acts.

Who will fill the wineglass for the love scene?

Who will fall in love?

The final configuration of the B-2 Stealth Bomber

“flies by wire,”—flies by computer—while the pilot takes

a scheduled nap in the 17th hour of the 2-day flight,

5 minutes before the midair refueling of the clean burning engine

time for one short dream

in which your mother opens the screen door.

The facty heart, indiscernible

in graphite that absorbs trap-signals.

How will she find you?

Goddess of Mercy: I thought I saw Wife jump from this cliff

Wife: I jumped

Goddess of Mercy: I thought I saw Wife jump from this cliff

but the Valley is clean

House of Dior

Now we are on the chapter of pleats.

The impatience to fold, the joys of having folded,

the pleasures of folding them again.

Fabric enough in the sleeve to drape the dress,

in the skirt to drape a chest of drawers,

in the dress to drape the view of trees blacked-out

along the walk from here to the next

house. Walking in the dark inside the house

this is the black we black the windows with.

I have hung the last square of cloth.

Good-bye porch. Good-bye midnight postman

with your sack of envelopes. My love sings

to himself. Each pleat steps into the seam

with a pin in its mouth. Crease upon crease,

a fan on which an embroidered rowboat sits

at the far edge of a lake. The lake is deep enough.