My mother was glamorous in a way I knew I 
never would be. Velvet belt buckle. Mascara 
lash. Miniature crimson lipstick living in the 

Now I’m an archivist. Indexer of everywhere 
I have ever been. Of every ­moment I stood 
there and there. Of where I was when I was 

Some days, everything is a machine, by which I mean 
remove any outer covering and you will most likely 
find component parts: cogs and wheels that whir just 

Does the erotic exist outside architecture? The shepherd 
asleep, the shepherd awake—his staff in his hand. Sweet 
are the fields of. Exiled from home am. A sandwich of 

Virginal decorations.
The pain of countless upside-down candles.

She puts her ticking wrist to her ear and hears a house
Full of Tock from the clock that is lacking a stem.

But quiet was a difficult thing to be.
The heart makes a jump-start sound.

 

Had she not lain on that bed with a boy
All those years ago, where would they be, she wondered.
She and the child that wouldn’t have been but was now

She said as the cab passed the building
She’d passed in her childhood, is pathos.
Its mean little whip of pity. The force field filled

And tightens until language can’t bear this
Hollowing, crash cart, Please. In the silence,
A bus slithers by.

Little liquor-drink umbrellas drowse
At the margin of the mouth hole,
The moon eye, an open coronal

God’s nose-end,
White nothing tower,
White-bearded, socketed face.

Let us console you. 
Music’s the answer. 
Of course, we’re caught 

Siren girls sang somewhere. A boat rocked. She could see
nothing, really. No clairvoyant forecasts.

It was now a matter of waiting
for the haughty naughty beguilement of warmth.

The long-suffering sofa. A circular scene: the bull enters
the ring. The myth of man’s disobedience.

The raging distemper finally forced me to breed
a new brand of silence.

And what shall we drink? Water from rivers
risen by snow that was desperate to melt?

 

On the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy (1894–1989), who inspired Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection, A Doll for Throwing. Next year, Germany will celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus, a school that stressed the unity of industrial…