Dali’s Invisible Man at Home, by Olga Dugan

The Invisible Man, by Salvador Dali (Spain) 1929-1933

Dali’s Invisible Man at Home
 
Truth is a sword that slices along 
two edges—for mercy, for justice; 
lovely as spring blossoms, yet 
able to cut. It’s certainly not 
what he says, what he does, 
deceiving innocents at a river bank
usually near dusk; not who he says
he is in the dark where he fails 
to see any difference. Because tonight, 
as truth sharpens at least one edge,
he scrambles for the invisible
cloak of Father reading to his child 
a bedtime story of rainbow promises
in skies now clear of storms; 
the invisible ware of Husband 
trying to resuscitate his coding 
marriage—brush of skin, vintage 
wine under early evening stars. 
How surprising when all to him
seems like wrapping arthritic knees
in silken bands against the threat
of gale-force winds. 
                          Because tonight, he sees
the yellow clouds shaping his hair; 
ruins scattered across barren landscape 
forming his upper torso, the panic 
striking face and lash-less eyes; 
waterfalls creating the legs that carried 
him to and from a secret rendezvous 
where he broke it off with a little red 
dress, tongue-ring clicking against 
her teeth. Arm roping her shoulders, 
he sold the shapely, short-lived lie 
of love that doesn’t last. She bought it, 
only to end up with lean fingers in a lion’s 
clutch at nothing by the lapping waves. 
Stuns him, though, when her tears 
haunted his trek home … where now
                           he wades the disquieting 
end of trying to hide from a tyranny 
of conscience not the Father nor 
the Husband ever knew he had.

Olga Dugan

Olga Dugan is a Cave Canem poet from Philadelphia, PA. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, her award-winning poems appear in The Southern Quarterly, Virga, Kweli, E-Verse Radio, The Sunlight Press, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Peacock Journal, Origins, Cave Canem: XIII, The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, Tipton Poetry, and other publications. Articles on poetry and culture appear in The Journal of African American History, The North Star, and Emory University's “Meet the Fellows.”