New Orleans, 1995

This city will be gone by the end of the year.
The National Guard
from her windowmen in moon suits
lighting on the grass like clumsy animals.
The last helicopter touches down to darkness.
Piece by piece, the houses are dismantled
while she waits inside.
The roof lifts up to meet the sky.
Chairs and tables burn in the school yard
and the dead relatives sit silently in silver frames.
A boy in a gas mask soaks the images in kerosene.
Her clothes rest on hangars in the center of the town.
Someone shines a flashlight on a baby carriage
left on the sidewalk, on a pile of women's shoes.
They tell her even the trees are poison.
Each trunk must be razed to the ground.
To start over, remove every branch, each leaf.
In a line the cars follow the scar
of the old road to another city.
She read the letter: It is important to move far away.
Once this river ran black with dye
from the factories. She saw children
paddling a bathtub across the water near the bank.
Alone she carries a suitcase to the empty river
where the grass burned short and dry.
She will not leave her life behind.
Once, in one of those houses, a man slept
with his back to her, their bodies close,
not touching. She was talking quietly.
There will be no evidence I ever knew you.
Who was listening?
Her voice would stop, a match struck
in the dark, blown out. Now silence.
Over and over again each night, she saves herself.
She climbs an invisible rope to the sky.

Diane Arbus, New York

To experience a thing as beautiful means
to experience it necessarily wrongly.
                                         —Friedrich Nietzsche

Russeks Fifth Avenue, 1933

My father arranges the window like a stage.
Tea length gowns, Dior dresses, taffeta fanned
over driftwood. Faces back-lit by Chinese lanterns,
the wax women will draw crowds. He fastens a rose

to a mannequin's hair while in the Millinery Salon
Mother models the new collection, Joan Crawford coat
with a swing collar. Hand set on her hip, she poses
for the customers. The clerks are paid to watch and smile.

At home she hides my books and pushes me
outside to the street, the world of other children.
She locks the window eleven stories above the Park,
the ledge where I stand to look down at the reservoir.

In the evening the parlor is hung with smoke, cards
laid out next to the crystal glasses for gin. Mother took away
Alice in Wonderland and I wait out the end of the night
in my parents' marble bathtub, wait in the dark.

When I step from my dress, I step outside my body.
I imagine men watching from windows all along the Avenue.

Coney Island, 1959

On the boardwalk Jack Dracula sits stiff
and straight like a Victorian child.
Twenty-eight stars are printed on his face.
An eagle flies across his chest past

the head of Christ. Inside his body the dye
will turn to poison in the sun.
At Hubert's Museum I photograph
the flea circus and the family of midgets,
but what I love most is the failed magic,
the box of mirrors holding the girl
the magician doesn't cut in half.
Congo the Jungle Creep swings
his grass skirt and swallows cigarettes,
dances on a row of kitchen knives.
On the boardwalk my camera
is my passport as I cross the border
from one world to another again and again.
I am crossing the border. Along Jack's wrist
I LOVE MONEY is written in curving script.
I hold the Rolleiflex waist-level to meet his eyes.

Central Park, 1971

Between the trees I watch a woman
holding a monkey in a snow-suit,
cradling its body like a child.
I am photographing people

with the objects they love.
I photograph myself with my camera.
I am studying attachment.
I print each image again and again.

On a blackboard beside my bed,
I list objects to photograph: a pet
crematorium, a condemned hotel,

the ocean liner from my dream—
a world of women, gleaming and white
and stacked in layers like a wedding cake.

NICOLE COOLEY grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received her B.A. from Brown University, her M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her Ph.D. from Emory University. She is the author of (click title) Resurrection (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), which was chosen by Cynthia Macdonald to receive the 1995 Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, Field, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and The Nation. She won a "Discovery"/The Nation Award for her poetry in 1994, and in 1996 she received a fiction grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She taught at Bucknell University before accepting a position to teach creative writing at Queens College-CUNY. In 1998 HarperCollins published her novel (click title) Judy Garland, Ginger Love. Nicole Cooley lives in New York City, and is working on a book of poetry about the Salem witch trials of 1692, titled The Afflicted Girls.

"Diane Arbus, New York" first appeared in FIELD Number 49 Fall 1993.

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