DERIVATION, OR
THE UNEXAMINED LIFE

remorse: to be bitten
again. remonstrance:

to be displayed again;
shown again; arms

pulled back, head
following, how you

gloat, my reflection
smeared in the midnight

window: why won’t
you look at yourself?

DÉCOR

My covetous eye casts over you,
taking you apart. I’d like a trophy of you
for every room of the house.

The bend of your cocked wrist
in the join of a rafter to the wall;
an eyebrow floated in a cut-glass bowl;

and instead of an antimacassar
draping my overstuffed chair,
a crochet netting of your veins.

Something authoritative,
asymmetrical, perhaps
a bit outré. Featuring that spiral-

shaped mystery of gravitation,
making the room attend it,
composed, aware of distances.

What better in my front hall
with its fan light, its tall
mirrors, than the immaculate

roundness of your plump heel
and toes—substantial, rococo,
a handle for my front door:

warm to the touch,
it turns easily, opens….
You can go now.

STEALING THE SCREAM

It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.
That we know for certain, and what was left behind—
a store-bought ladder, a broken window,
and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.

And the rest? We don’t know. But we can envision
moonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything—the paintings,
the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;

the figure’s fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic
by the fact of something happening; houses
clapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeks
along the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;

the guards rushing in—too late!—greeted only
by the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;
and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,
a postcard: “Thanks for the poor security.”

The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whispering
in the galleries: “…but what does it all mean?”
Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping the frame,
saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.

103 KOREAN MARTYRS

Where was it that we went that night?
That long, low building: floodlights
rimmed in lavender, the moon ringed
in rose. I would rather, then, have stayed

outside, where spiderwebs glowed
like jellyfish in the damp yew hedges,
where the paths were chalky pebbles
set with giant stepping stones.

But the film was starting. In the air-
conditioned dark, a crowd of strangers,
strange families (not from our church)
in rows of metal folding chairs to see

a man quartered by horses: strain
stitched across his shining back
then, all over at once, an unraveling
and then the spill of meat;

a girl pushed through a doorway,
naked among the soldiers:
she grew a dress to cover herself,
a blue dress with a blinding sash.

Copyright 2003 by Monica Youn. All rights reserved.