Maria Terrone, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Disappearing Act

          After the artist Bruce Nauman

My face against
          a train window:           ghost
on glass,
          a face you can nearly
                    see through,
                                             dissolving
into the random
                    passing landscape:

woman in field with grazing cow,

woman and abandoned mill,

woman                               layered over

skyscraper, house door, lamppost.

Woman as Dadaist construct,

meant to exist                               briefly,

be seen,                                    then disappear.

                    No wonder

I want to press                               my breath

between two pages of a book.

Maria Terrone on “Disappearing Act”:

“Disappearing Act” borrows its title from the artist Bruce Nauman’s 2019 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. I’m often inspired by art in all its forms, but this is one MoMA show that I just happened to stumble upon, knowing nothing about Nauman. His unsettling, multimedia installation affected me deeply, although at the time I didn’t understand my reaction. I recall walking down a corridor with unseen audio speakers, overlapping voices reciting the days of the week out of order. (I think some were whispering female voices, but maybe I imagined that!) And I remember turning a corner, expecting what seemed to be a half-completed  physical work to continue to resolution, but finding…nothing.

According to Nauman, his “Disappearing Act” is “withdrawal as an art form.” A MoMA writer refers to “literal and figurative incidents of removal, reflection and concealment.”

It’s no wonder his exhibition struck a deep chord, inspiring not only this poem but also the first section of my forthcoming poetry collection. I’ve always been attracted in life and poetry to what lies hidden— in shadows, beneath masks and disguises. I ask myself, What’s really behind the surface? But that leads to the question, What is real anyway? Isn’t perceived “reality” uncertain and constantly shifting? Taken even further, I can question my own essence and identity—maybe my college philosophy course on Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness had a greater impact on me than I realized. After experiencing Nauman’s work, I was compelled to write this poem. I felt driven by something powerful inside me, and so the poem, which centers on a female passenger gazing out a train window, flowed freely—a rare and welcome gift.

Most of my poems have a fairly structured appearance, but I knew instinctively that “Disappearing Act” needed lots of gaps in the layout (recently I read that Nauman sometimes left holes in his sculptures). These large, scattered spaces created extra emphasis on the lines’ ending words and phrases: ghost, dissolving, layered over, briefly, then disappear, my breath.

Although I wasn’t consciously thinking about contemporary feminist issues as I wrote this poem, what emerged is the image of woman  as chameleon, blending into changing environments viewed from the train. What also emerged was the idea that ultimately women—and all human beings—are ephemeral. Now you see us, now you don’t.

Maria Terrone is the author of Eye to Eye (Bordighera Press); A Secret Room in Fall (McGovern Prize, Ashland Poetry Press); The Bodies We Were Loaned (The Word Works), and a chapbook, American Gothic, Take 2. The chapbook Life, Death & Cash is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press; also forthcoming is a full collection, No Known Coordinates, from The Word Works. Credits include POETRY, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and work in more than 30 anthologies from publishers including Beacon Press and Knopf. She is also poetry editor of the journal Italian Americana. At Home in the New World (Bordighera Press) was her creative nonfiction debut. www.mariaterrone.com