Seven Tributes to the Devil
by Amy Klein

I.
Performing a Serpentine Dance, Loïe Fuller has to be careful
She doesn’t become larger than life, white marble, or vessel,
Tantalizingly naked beneath her veils. She isn’t—yet
Anything. Instead, she vibrates, like the invisible twitch
In the air just before summer dazzles into a violent sequence of storms.
Mesmerized, primal, inert, the eyes of hundreds
Massage her figure in the dark. They form a circle, the unknown mouths
Joining together into one great and silent O.

A one Mrs. Stetson, alone in the audience, is cowed by the power of God.
God has invented fish and numbers and the energies that correspond to them.
And he has invented Loïe Fuller, and the charge must be contained
Within the body, and such bodies, as the law will have it
Must attach to each other, as bodies will do, occasionally
In the night, even, once in awhile, consecutively, and all attraction
Depends on the nakedness of Eve.

But oh the light! It buzzes onstage as if it were substance,
A fourth wall, a tremulous stream of pure yellow
Like a swarm of bees emanating from a violent hive.

And what a marvelous shock—to see
Such filmy radiance diffused at the push of a button!

II.
As it has been written in the great Encyclopedia of virtue
(Blank, blank, blank, as they say,)
Thomas Edison will feel a certain godlike pride
(And in the light bulb, and in the electric cityscape of New York)
And Toulouse Lautrec will paint her face as if it were beautiful,
Changeable—forehead, nose, chin, color, present, statue, and sister
All at once.

(But oh, the graceful swaying of her skirts as she passed by)

And Mallarmé will write that she is a symbol, the symbol.
And of course she is. She is performing a Serpentine Dance.

III.
Loïe Fuller must be careful not to dance so ethereally
For it makes her seem alive, and full of a mysterious
Sadness, like the sea. After all, her dress is as tall as the waves.
And under all those screens, perhaps she is not a woman
But a sea-dweller, sea-colored, and in such and such light
A mermaid—sexless, scaly, impenetrable.

IV.
Light as gossamer, Loïe, the fabric of her skin, the skin, the woman, the X-Ray, in the Museum, she sits on a pile of gleaming, white
Objects. They are very old, and their dusty fingerprints cover her thighs
As if, for many years, they’ve been clawing for purchase
On a vast white rock.

And Loïe herself must be an angel
For she wears a necklace of weeds!

Oh, she patented so many, so very many, useful inventions for the stage!

And how they cried out when she danced for them!

(Such subjective gasps she was capable of eliciting, in her day, in the mouths of men.)

And so provocative To the imagination of the poets.

(White as the lily of the valley in the alleyway at dawn.)

V.
Epitaph: She lifted off the mere surface of things
As if she were one’s mind
And not only oneself.

VI. Time speeds up. It spins around Loïe Fuller,
Like a series of veils alternately displaying and hiding, displaying
And hiding.

And those dark-rimmed eyes
That seem to stare straight ahead
While the body contorts.

Oh, tell us nothing
Is blocked, and all is visible.

Soon she will be in pictures, moving pictures,
When they are finally invented.

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