Chinoisserie

By Lynn Emanuel b. 1949 Lynn Emanuel

My mother in her dress of red Viyella, teetering like a tiny idol

on three-inch lacquered spikes, chignon dressed with little gold-

throated bells that chirped more sweetly than the cricket,

held her small, perfect hands to the torrent pouring from the slots.

Money went like water through our fingers: was dammed

by budgets, released, then abruptly gone at the China Starr,

that grotto, festooned with red and vivid lanterns.

Dark as the inside of a limousine, that saloon was where

our lives, dulled by the copper barons, were cleansed,

where we bade good-bye to the limp and stutter

of bad goods, to the wince of the creaky rocker, to the vast

grandmother dying in its clutch, to the dirty, wrinkled ones

and tens pieced together to cover the week. Hello, we said,

to the beautiful dark starlit bar and the luxury therein:

the runcible spoons with their slippery cargo: the snarled silk

of tinned bean sprout, the wrinkled flame of the dried lily.

Hunched over our beakers of jasmine tea, we let the exotic

rinse over us—impractical and non-negotiable.

Source: The Dig (University of Illinois Press, 1992)

Biography

Lynn Emanuel is the author of several volumes of poetry. She sees her Hotel Fiesta (1984), The Dig (1992), and Then, Suddenly— (1999) as a triptych exploring the convention and flexibility of the book, and the agency of readers and writers. As poet Eavan Boland notes, “Lynn Emanuel’s poems have a rare power: they connect to the world through estrangement.”

The Dig received the National Poetry Series Award. Emanuel’s work has . . .

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