"Information Desk," a Poem by Robyn Schiff

Contrary to what

I once believed to be their near-immortal

constitution,

deprived of oxygen in an old jam jar,

rounded up body by

body as they

scrambled under someone’s sink

over the course of

I don’t know how many days or weeks

and brought by coat pocket into

a French period room where the Trustees were

gathered for dinner behind a

folding screen,

cockroaches landed DOA in proximity

to the writing desk of Louis XV,

failing thus

to infiltrate that woodwork, itself an

imitation of Chinese lacquer—

God’s plastic—both the secretion

of the female

Asian scale insect Laccifer lacca,

named for the Sanskrit word for the swarm of

one hundred thousand of her coating a tree

in a sumptuous

ectoplasm I would like to

lick,

and a scarlet resin like it—

thick, deep, sticky, and hard

as the hard candy layer of a candy apple—

made from the toxic tree sap of a relation

of poison ivy.

Which is it? Insect or plant?

Who or what? The original black silk velvet blotter

upon which the king of France unrolled

his map and spread his documented

mistress was lost

before his giant desk was brought to this

gallery in the year of my birth.

But matter never disappears

entirely. I stroke the vestige

of that fabric, chewed up, swallowed,

metabolized

through the abdomen of silverfish

and shit-deposited back into earth

where the wild root hairs of an oak tree,

from which was hewn

this borrowed desk I write this down on,

groped that desperate

velvet power. The year of my birth?

This very desk?

Endowing me with what self-centered knowledge

it’s my job or fate to disseminate

from the Information Desk? A stranger

once approached me

there and said,

“I was on your flight last week!

You were on my plane!”

___________________________

From Information Desk: An Epic by Robyn Schiff. Copyright © 2023. Published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.