Essay on Beauty
By Hannah Matheson
i.
“Maudlin” appears in Late Middle English,
deriving originally (read: “sin”)
from the Latin magdalena.
What use are the transitional fossils
of our language? The half-lives
of words in circulation?
Well, let’s say Mary represents
a case study in hunger,
hers and theirs, which together
beget blame. Did you dare
to want the thing grieved?
Did you drink holy wine and wail
at his tomb? We thwart
your desire and we
detest you for it
ii.
I’ve been telling people
you remind me of someone
as a means of conveying
you are unknown to me but
also a kind of homecoming
I thought it was adjacent to grace,
to recognize someone in someone
else, but the other day it was said
to me, and I hated it: the accusation
of being iterable. And then I hated
that I hated it. How about that,
all of us dying to be original?
iii.
Oh god another
book cover I’ve got my hair grease
all over; another (self)argument
about pubes, whether I should or
shouldn’t pay literal money
to have a hot tongue
of wax uproot the time
I spent growing older,
capable of nudity.
If I hate beauty, its spliced
tape, why do I wallow
when I feel unbeautiful?
Possibly we hate Mary because
she was wanted, because when she lost
what she wanted she wanted
to cry. If I pretend to exist
outside this economy plotting
aesthetic against desire
in order to determine price,
I lie. Like her, weep
to mourn perished principles
or consummate a pitiful
performance. My mouth waters
after beauty, because, yes, I still want
you to look at me and love me
as is, to long for me specifically
like this. For ex. when I was
approaching pubescence
my mother was horrified by my stomach
had never heard of a happy trail
but I found it lovely, like
stepping stones in a lazy
river, dough-soft morass
of my belly. Would I want
to be more aerodynamic,
less labyrinthine? The truth is
I’m partial to this body composed
of pathways, corridors: birth canal,
esophagus, aorta, etcetera.
A poet I know once said he’s so tired
of hearing the word “body”
in poems and I agree,
but what stands in for the
physical fact of the body?
Alternate corpora:
a butter sculpture,
a bloodbag, a hive
of apologies.
iv.
This etymology of appetite
ends in profligate tears,
whorish sadness.
v.
Oh once again
I have wearied the hem of this morning
God how do you trust
life to be more than a mouth
opening and closing?