Self-Portrait as David Lynch
I wear a flower in my lapel.
I like the sweetness of its lie in my nose.
A carnation, the fool’s flower,
its heart a wilting empire.
In late-night editing sessions,
I imagine I’m planting flowers
in the sockets of eyes. Whatever helps
me reach our rigor mortis,
bound behind the wheel,
a little Bowie on the radio, maybe,
at six frames per second,
headlights plowing the dark’s divided road.
Cities grow to calcified castles.
Fish groom the coral brains
anchored in a tank’s purple volume.
I love the scratch of celluloid
and a low-register noise,
the hair of heat burning in a lit bulb.
Sometimes I swap my carnation
for an orchid or rose.
On-screen, there’s every hint
a man-child built the night.
I read it once, by flashlight, as a kid—
that Sleep and Death are brothers,
and they send our dreams through two gates,
one made of horn, for the true dreams,
and one made of tusk, for the false.
David Roderick, "Self Portrait as David Lynch" from The Americans. Copyright © 2014 by David Roderick. Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source:
The Americans
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014)
