Miraculum Monstrum

Kathline Carr

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781940696270
• eBook ISBN: 9781597095983
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Literature

Miraculum Monstrum is an epic hybrid narrative about Tristia Vogel, a female artist who experiences a radical physical transformation, beginning with the excrescence of apparent wings. Though she is possibly an anomalous mutation resulting from worldwide ecological upheaval, the bird/woman is co-opted by a religious cult that claims to have prophesied her experience; she is thus written as the central figure of their scriptural text. The fragmentary poem that is Miraculum Monstrum, which bears the same name as the fictitious codex quoted throughout, is presented within a catalog for an exhibit of visual artifacts and writings that chronicle this speculative history. The exhibition curator persona performs a duel function as narrative voice within the poem and critical commentator on the exhibit.

I

EXORNATIO

Words are artifacts, relics, symbols. In spring, a rabbit

opened by a crow. Dark-edged fear writes the rabbit death.

It happens in the spring. Lilac-scented air in the park

turns pages of her book as she eats her lunch, little wings in bright sun.

An April afternoon lies on the grass, not hearing

the murder of crows’ shrill gape.

The leaves knife-sharp against the sable trunks,

high-pressure finite lines written across a landscape.

She hears a bird serenade, tiny hammers on bells,

air borne notes punctuating vestiges of clouds,

now thinned to gray scraps. Her back itches.

Tristia,

a woman with brown eyes (insatiate wells)

mouth, a red moon

Manet’s Morisot.

Small-breasted, muscular

yet birdlike in body—

slender, long-waisted—

birdlike in nature,

flitting, tremolo nerves—drinking the skim from the cup.

Her mother, probing newformed eye-flesh in her womb

sees exile, vacuus, wandering loss felled-limb empty

a black fissure in ice

from the dead tongue poem of sorrows Ovid writes of the edge of the Rhine

(the barbaric lip of the world)

named her Tristia.

A cold pool, distant cries.

In her studio she paints

oval shapes. The nature of flight,

representational arcs.

Fig. 1.1. Tristia Vogel’s sketchbook, circa 2012.

(Curator) This all happened before I was born.

I imagine her as she might have been, before her transformation, before the annals of Miraculum/Monstrum: the lost years when she was presumably living as any human woman would. There was breathable air then. This was before the atmospheric catastrophe, before the birds died, before the winds and earthquakes—when there was waste, and leisure, whole days of temperate radiation. In retrospect her mutation was prophesied, as many things are reckoned in hindsight; her temples hewn and texts produced. Contrary to natural law, she was born out of herself in the April month, already fused to a mythology that had yet to be created. Anomaly. The persistence of peripheral vision. I imagine her in time, in the weave of every moment, regardless of fact, or record.²

Opening windows,

applying resinous winter

paint to new canvas;

shaking rugs into pale grass,

digging in the earth with fingers.

Eating plums

juice on chin, throat, between breasts—

like sweat rising from skin to cool tense muscles

clenched in anticipation of climax—sucking

plums, nectarines, the hummingbirds

hovering their soft bodies

at the wisteria, prodding

flowers with their protruding beaks.

Her skin wakes, a panting anemone.

She brings him home and they flit, hover, release,

pour sweat into strange cups.

(Her desire looks like a house. Boarded-up, empty rooms, bills in baskets for services rendered, dusty baseboards, stacked dishes, rusty metal, blood in floorboards, creaky bedsprings, soiled carpet, no carpet, wood flooring, Formica counters, cigarette burn, attached garage, welcome mats, and this she dreams into him.

Her, her latest lover, guileless as flocking

feather-spoken, she coax...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction to Miraculum Monstrum, the Exhibit
• I. Exornatio
• II. Auguratio
• III. Chorea Terra/Terraemotus
• IV. Prosectum/Puella
• V. Miscere In Vitro
• VI. Epilogue: Hinter Map
• Plates
• Illustration Credits