The Wingless Sphinx (Nature Study)
In Chicago I recently came across an iteration of Louise Bourgeois’s Nature Study (1984) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Rendered in wax, fiberglass, and aluminum, it is a shocking blood red. It reminded me of something I wrote for a Psychopomp Projects salon a while back. The idea was to write an ekphrastic piece about a work of art, then read it for the crowd without revealing an image of the subject until the reading was over. Mine was on Nature Study—but a version rendered in polished bronze.
Amanda Manitach, 2023
Like a sphinx, you Mother Goose riddle me this: I have not hooves, nor teeth, yet gore the ground and clench the unborn in my jaws. I have six breasts, but give no milk. I have given birth, but am no mother. What am I?
Once upon a time you came to me in a dream and we walked along the periphery of the endless crystal waters of my mind. And your touch was maternal, but oh so cold. As I circled you, I could see myself reflected in your gold glass: my reflection a funhouse smear against your very real and heavy, regal haunches. Your shoulders were those of a worker, a farm girl, a beast. They say lions are sexually dimorphic. I can see that in you now. In my dream I whispered to you sweet nothings, but you have no ears to hear. When I answer your riddle, will you throw yourself into the sea? Will you caterwaul in anger as you smash yourself against the rocks?
In great halls filled with marbled beds and stone cold cradles, the curvature of your sentinel spine cuts an S through the non-fluctuating, humidity-controlled air. Brittle sterile chill preserves the bronze patina across your frozen swollen breasts. Headless bitch. Do I sound bitter? Because you keep company with spiders. Your nests crawl with rotten eggs. There is not honey enough in the world to sweeten your sour milk.
You didn’t think I could answer your riddle, but it was too easy. With your feet on the air and your head on the ground….where is my mind? I found it far from shore, dashed against the breakers. Did I save myself by freeing me from you? Or is this childish hubris? After I’ve wrenched myself from the clutch of your dentata, your vagina, still wet with afterbirth, and wiped the slag from my caked flesh, I would like to look you in the eye, just once. There are no eyes. And your breasts no nipples.
But of course you have a cock, rising up as stiff as your cock-eyed collar bone, your neck jutting with the thickness of a trunk; a torso giving birth to…
another torso: nightmare.
Your cock is cradled between your breasts,
auto-mammary intercourse.
Of course,
a manticore like you would.
You think yourself the progeny of Lupa. It’s ok: I think myself hero of my story.
We are, mostly likely, both wrong. In my dreams I find you again, wandering the black vastness of the shores, looking for your head.
If this is a case study of nature versus nurture, I fear for your offspring, for both are fucked. Wrap me in the crook of your ruddy rabbit, fleet-footed digitigrade legs. You were made for running on your toes. I will run after you into the void, and we will marry in the night. We will give birth to ourselves again and again.
Mother, please tell me another bedtime story; it’s the only way I can fall to sleep.