Tarot Card Reader Waiting for Her Father, Dalí

Abstract

Tarot Card Reader Waiting for Her Father, Dalí Hannah Baker Saltmarsh (bio) In days, the exhumed bones mayvalidate your belief that the surrealist once breathed in your mother’shumming, trying on the organza dress of her hair. Then a bottleof iced champagne led by his touch fled into the small of her back.The way after bringing each other so close our damp chests suctioneach other back in, we drench ourselves in buckets of icy vanishing,lovers come and go. Even your mother’s. That whole year of their fishing-portwhisperings was outmatched by the operatic, ever-changing adviceof your grandmother that shook into chaos all creeds evenNever try to change a man. Look at that ash tree, it’s not gonna change:it’s already grown. Rumors of Dalí by the water acquire mythical status,attract conflicting stories, what withso many reflections. The severe silliness of his moustache, still intact interred,a squiggly bracket made horizontal and vertical at the same time;his painterly preference of watching over doing; the lobsterbuckled to the telephone dial, sunning on the breathymouthpiece: it all has nothing to do with the nostalgiain his bones for brushing past those he knew, becausethere’s no muse, only musing. Everyone wants her mother to be so young, whirlingin the expensive fabrics of dizzying love. Wants to be a pure love childso a surrealist artist could call your name from the grave, half-opened,while music you had sex to plays. If you could claim him as family, [End Page 53] wouldn’t you only want to turn his paintings back to the wall,deface him for leaving you guessing some sixty years? Tarot card reader, daughter of deep pastand future the same, persisting through the screens of cards,How does what-happens-next in the story happen becauseit was already happening? How secret was the secret rustlingin the street when you laid eyes on each other so often in passing,a small girl looking up at the taller figure all the timelike the Russian doll in red and black paint she fit inside? [End Page 54] Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Hannah Baker Saltmarsh has published literary criticism and poetry in journals such as Feminist Studies, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, and others. Her first book of poems, titled “Hysterical Water,” will be forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press in 2021. Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press