One doesn’t need to know their private intentions.  The work tells all.
—Susan Sontag

A full moon hanging in the last part of the night,
a few crickets grinding it out a little longer,
their inner workings will not let them stop,
rhythm like a train climbing,
rhythm like a hammer,
a laundromat chorus of washing machines,
a mechanized loom threshing out the soft yarn

And the first cars in the distance humming
through New Jersey towards New York or Philly,
a pedal tone for some ancient, modal chant

And the moon, its plains and craters
bright and sharp, even from this distance,
especially from this distance,
silent partner
unchanged by all this commotion,
its silence unbroken by an early jet passing,

unchanged from the time of single cells, dividing,
to the creatures who can gaze at it now,
the fires always burning on their plains,
who have found the fire of the sun inside a rock.

Inside the house, the lights come on.
The man sits up, stares at the floor.
The woman covers her eyes with a blanket.
Did you sleep all right?
but there is only the sound of running water.

I dreamt again of the ships, the tall ships

Don’t forget to take the garbage to the curb.
And call Visa about that overcharge, will you?
And we need to stop by the Shop-Rite—we’re out of milk.
And don’t forget the tank’s about on empty.

Forget not yet the tried intent
Of such a love as I have meant

In the last part of the night
when the night is an ink spilled into water
and things have not yet made it back—

§

Ships, towers, domes, theaters and temples,
steel U-Store-Its, smokestacks, Golden Arches,
landfill mountains, gas-station islands
have not yet made it back from being skyline,
from being one line,
from being settled on the murky bottom
for divers’ salvages, arriving alone,

the bus driver thrumming at his vinyl helm,
the new guy getting to the office early,
the halls one off the other, rooms
all waiting for something, waiting
with an attitude you must catch them off-guard to see—

Arriving alone, the fast food manager,
the rows of plastic seats an empty chapel

White cereals in the whites of kitchens,
white bread, white noise of televisions.

It’s morning again in America.

Fears of impending global financial crisis.
Testimony before the Senate Judiciary.
And the Philadelphia Phillies
have won the first of a possible seven games.

§

History is theirs and the people make it
and tree to tree the starlings flit
and glide and fritter away the only hour
of the dawn, trees clenched
as if heated and bent and doused in the cold water
of the day, the sky
a pale blue neither far nor near—

what the sky was to the Peloponnesians
sailing at Greece, the Etruscans
firing themselves on dishes to be smashed
by the Romans’ thousand-year tantrum, the sky
they saw through the smoke of the ships at Veracruz,
the sky that absorbed the flag over Iwo Jima.

I guess everybody just trying to, ah,
pick up their game, you know?
And do everything we usually do,
just that much more harder and, you know,
that much more better.

And what would the dogs do?
The dog would hold on to my clothes and bite me. 
Where did they bite you?
If they would let the dogs go they would definitely bite us. 
When you got to Guantanamo what happened?
I could not see anything or hear anything
and I was like that for about two weeks.

And the trees are too thick to cross,
the trees that flank the interstate,
the trees along a field’s far edge,
their vines and branches clinging into clouds
the way the atom’s forces draw
its intentions into matter

This hard work, boss, wait’ for the word.

the engine noise and deadened barking
suspended in the trees themselves,
already memory: boys with basketballs
and dogs at war with cars
and muffled back doors closing in the night—

the trees that stand up at the cities’ edges
and dive up through the asphalt from their
secret tunnels dug before the war,
trees that tower over every house
along a street where the talk runs on
like the fences out of sight.

§

I’m not saying I don’t like it here.
It’s a pretty town—it is—and I definitely
don’t have to worry about getting attacked
on my way home from work or whatever.
But we’re in bed at 9:30 every night!
It’s not like I want to go out to the bars
and do the whole party-girl thing: Woo-hoo!
It’s yellow and green shots in a test tube!
but I want to do something at night.  It’s like
Michael just decided: we’re married now,
it’s time to start acting like we’re sixty.
He’s all, Gotta get up early, Claire—
and I respect that, I do, I just
want something more out of my existence on this
planet than going to work and going to bed
and watching “How I Met Your Mother.”
I know, I know—I hated Philly.  But I miss it.
And Michael, he’s a big help: Let’s go to Aruba!
Like, we’re gonna come home to some different life or something.
Okay, he says, you want to go back to Philly?
You want to move to New York?  How about Seattle?
Well, sure, Michael, how about Seattle.
That space-needle-thing?  And what, that crazy market?
I’m not really bitching about a lack of fish.

§

Let them come to New Jersey

where everywhere the big sky flames
and trees spread out their solemn wings

And the roads are unbroken by silence,
the roads that branch and branch,

roads thrown down like a net on something wild
which stares back through it,

roads like a thought in front of what is real,
a sentiment
that gives the mind an easy path,
the mind that keeps its eyes before its feet,

the mind, that would destroy the thing that is
to have the thing it can understand

§

Jat Jamma?  I don’t know, some grass hut name.
They ran right the fuck over this guy.
Can you imagine?  Getting trampled to death
by fat chicks trying to save two bucks on a vacuum?
And this guy wasn’t any midget, either.
They just stuck him out there, like, Hold the door, pal.
And what’s he gonna do, say no?
GENTLEMEN GOOD MORNING
You see they laid off Jimmy-bird?  I told him:
Jimmy, it’s getting slow, you know?
Just show these guys you want the job, that’s all.
SAME CREWS AS YESTERDAY ANY QUESTIONS
So I’m done with him.  I’m done.
I mean, Jesus Christ, that job he did on Terlaine?
And he’s like, Oh, I got the carpal tunnel,
and all this crap.  Like it’s my problem.
AT YOUR LEISURE GENTLEMEN AT YOUR LEISURE
You coming, Tone?  Guy was from Haiti.
Yah, he was like six-six, two-seventy.

§

Las sich nach New Jersey Kommen

where everywhere the big sky flames,
where farm fields stretch their bodies under blankets
and streams push on through undergrowth,
on under highways, on around parking lots,

the bushes thrusting up through blanked backyards
like water blossoming from broken pipes

where, through that jungle, the houses look like outposts,
thatched huts on islands that have never seen a ship.

So tractable, so peaceable are these people
that I swear to your Majesties
there is not in the world a better nation.

With what delight could they have driven around,
if they could joy in aught; sweet interstate!
through hill and valley, rivers, woods and plains.

Oh, it was fucking gorgeous, I’m tellin’  ya,
the sky so blue it looked like a cartoon.

§

And these are the names of the men that shall stand with you:
of the tribe of Reuben: Elizur, the son of Sadeur;
of Simieon: Shelumiel, son of Zurishaddai;
of Judah: Nashon, the son of Amainadab

Of Harrison Ave, John Plinckett, brother of Corey.
Of Prospect Street, that guy who does duct work.
Professor Richardson, when he gets back from sabbatical.
Joey the Goose, originally from Brooklyn.
Allison Carter—yah, I know,
but she’s got balls THIS BIG, you know what I’m sayin’?
And who’s that guy there with the little mustache,
always gives you this stiff-ass wave—
kind of a wack job, am I right?
But the guy can schedule a train like nobody’s business.
I don’t need to know about his personal life.

They don’t need to know about why the big sky flames
and trees spread out their solemn wings
while they stroll campuses and stand in chapels,
talking into their hands, into the air.

And I would say, I am just a normal worker,
and work, and get my salary.
Did you ever learn anyone’s name?
They have no names.  They have borrowed names.  They have numbers.

§

They strolled the campuses.  They stood in chapels.
They stood in chapels, under the huge stained glass.
They drifted in silent, powerful automobiles.
They lived like Tudors.
They lived in projects.
They strolled the grassless lawns.
They lived in trailers, surrounded by dogs.
They lived in Tudors.
They lived in the White House
surrounded by dogs and Secret Service.
They were surrounded by disembodied motors.

They worried about the economic climate,
the falling dollar, collateralized debt.
They divided their items at the supermarket:
what the food stamps covered, what they didn’t.
They bought futures and shorts, blue chips and penny stocks.
“Spare change,” they said outside the Starbucks.

They worried about melting glaciers.
They worried about getting shot in the stairwell.
They worried about eating carbs.
They worried about getting turned away at the hospital.

They sat on marble benches
watching water erupt from the angels’ mouths.

They worked in automotive.
They worked the streets.
They were working in polyrhythms at the time.
Working the crowd.  Working an angle.
Working every shift they could get.
Working the room.  Working the land.
Working the theme of middle class ennui.
Working it.  Working out.
Working in oils, working in clay.
Working in shit up to their knees.
Working on their marriages.
Working on their flaws.
Working together to bring peace to the Middle East.

One doesn’t need to know their private intentions.
The work tells all.

§

And so we went there to the warm land.
We went to the terminus of a railroad and passed through
the land of the Osages and on to the land full of rocks,
and next morning we came to the land of the Kaws

I was there to shop but these people were, like,
ready to charge machine gun nests or something.
And then this chant broke out?
Two sugars and skim, please.  No, not that, you idiot:
“Push the doors in!  Push the doors in!”
And then the whole freakin’ crowd just started to move,
and the only place to go was into the store—
I swear to God, at that moment—No, skim milk.
Do I sound like a Jersey bitch from hell, or what?
So anyway, we come crashing through the glass—
I didn’t even see the guy, I’m telling ya,
it was like a horror movie—just grunting and breathing
and God knows who, like, thrusting into me.
And I see the guy lying there and everything—
I mean, what was I supposed to do?
And now everybody’s like, “You bought somethin’?”
Like I killed the guy by buying a freakin’ camera.

§

First of all, sir, the President has said
we are not going to engage in “Indian burns”
under any circumstances.
We are not going to engage in giving out so-called “froggies.”
We will not do the five-knuckle chuckle in front of anyone.
We are not going to engage in “forearm shivers.”
We are not going to engage in any kind of “wedgie”—
be it “super,” “destructo,” “hanging” or “blueberry.”
We are not going to engage in giving “flat tires” in hallways—
or in any other facility, for that matter.
We will not be “cyber-bullying,” I can assure you.
We are not going to engage in scratching our balls
and forcing someone to sniff our fingers.
I have given explicit instructions on this point, sir.
We are not going to engage in serving up red-eye farts.
We are not going to refer to anyone as a “fuck-nut.”
We will not, at any time, be buttering doorknobs.
So you’re asking me to answer a hypothetical.

§

In the last part of the last part of the night
which is morning, which is day, which is filled with light,

a light that is like a silence behind the noise,
a light that becomes what it touches,
a light that is like a love so deep
you don’t even know it’s there—

Light squandering itself on the hoods of cars,
light pooling in leaves and laying flat on asphalt
and boring down into the tiny caves of the grass,

Fore God, my Lord, well spoken,
with good accent and good discretion—
a light that is everywhere and therefore nowhere,
a light that is asking you to answer a hypothetical,
a light that has lit up Lawrenceville like a LAMP.

§

And so we went there to the warm land.
We passed by the projects and the Quickie Marts
and we wound through the looping miles of suburbs
where every house and hairdo looked the same,
and I saw how the people of that land were
and I thought they were not able to do much for themselves—
they were forced to leave their homes all day
and their children played behind metal fences.
And I saw how the trees were
and how the ground was covered with black tar.
And I saw the looks on the faces of these people.

We passed down into the hollows of a train station,
into a cave where the trains jarred the floor
and I saw how these people were,
how close they were pressed together,
how afraid they were to smile at each other,
for the killers walked among them
and those who would sell the tally machines
to count up the souls in the camps
and those who waited for the others to get sick
so they could come for their houses walked among them
and those whom anger had touched too deeply,
who had crouched deep into the foxholes of themselves
or crawled deep into the wooden horse of sadness
and those who would watch you gang-raped from the window
and those who saw the demon everywhere
longing only for one chance at its throat—

§

One doesn’t need to know their private intentions.

Hon, we should get that hibachi back to Oliver.
Does it still have coals in the bottom, sweetheart?
God it’s gorgeous out, isn’t it?
I have never seen so many birds!
Look at that fat little guy on the dead branch.
And the sheep?  We really lucked out with this spot.
Remember the place we looked at downtown?
Above the bar?  Can you imagine?
Oh, damn, it’s Karen.  Hello?

What is it I see but can never approach,
out past the field, out past the trees
out past the dark that fills their passageways—

always disappearing as I approach

That’s way too much work for one person, Karen.
They’re not going to give you any help with this thing?

out past the last blue ceiling bending down
behind the woods to touch the ground again—

and always the tugging, the tugging of something,
when I come out from the trees to find them:

the tall ships in the harbor, floating, waiting,
with not a soul on board,
their decks as worn and smooth as driftwood.

You have to sit down with your boss, Karen.
And if he won’t listen, you have to go to his boss.




PART 5: WAITIN’ FOR THE WORD

This hard work, Boss, wait’ for the word.
—John Berryman, Dream Song 10

A dusty light in October, a pained leaf blower,
an Hispanic man with a leaf-blower on his back
like a sci-fi jet-pack.  As though he stood today
on the edge of a new frontier:
the frontier of the 1960’s.
In the field beyond the house, some sheep
sheep-walk the hours,
considering the grass with studious mouths.
Winter may come, or it may not.
He lives in interesting times.

Space is open to him now.
His eagerness to share its meaning
is not governed by the efforts of others.
The Price Chopper is open to him now.
The front of the bus is open to him now.
A million women on the internet
are holding their legs open to him now.
He moves the leaves to the margins of the driveway,
squinting to see
what’s right in front of him, always
New Jersey: land of farms and highways,
land of oxygen and SUVs.
Their land.  His land.
A light that is like a long reaching-after,
a light that will never be better.
The trees look digitally enhanced,
sharp with the shadows of far-off mountain ranges
or the moon on a clear night in Maine.

Beyond the trees, bold clouds ride low,
as clear and strange
as islands that have never seen a ship.

§

I know it’s a hassle, but I’m glad New Jersey
is finally doing something green.
Honey?  When they’re done with the lawn,
will you carry them to the curb?
We forgot last week so we have a ton.

Pile the bottles high at Lawrenceville

I know you’re tired, hon.
Do you want to just watch a movie or something?
Do you want to just sit and read?
Do you want me to just be quiet and go away?

Shovel them under and let me work

And the cars in the distance humming towards
New York or Philly, New York or Philly,
filled to all their empty seats with purpose—

They will get to the bottom of this.
They will break it apart.
They will break it down.
They will put the pieces back together
to make some creature that may have never walked
but could have.
Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?

The dusty light, the trees too thick to cross,
their vines and branches clinging into clouds

And roads unbroken, roads that branch and branch
like the aqueducts of Rome, like the trees themselves,
the fissures in the Etruscan potter’s plate

Shovel them under and let me work

Too thick to touch, the field’s far edge,
the dark that fills its passageways
that disappear as they approach
like shining mountain ranges made of fog
dissolve to scattered towns with backyard clutter

And the touching silence of distant ships,
of towers, domes, theaters and temples
dissolves, as they approach, to backyard chatter.

§

Well, I think these things have CYCLES, Carson.
Ten thousand years ago this was all under ice.
Bela, stop that!  Come here!  Come!
When I was growing up, it was THE COMMIES.
you’d be sitting in class in your knee-length checkered skirt
and the siren would go off and all of us
would DIVE under our desks because—DUNH-dunh—
THE COMMIES WERE ATTACKING!  Joe McCarthy…
“I have here in my hand a list of names,”
and everyone got hysterical.  People lost their JOBS.
They went after all the FOLK SINGERS.
It was SILLY, Carson, it was JUST SILLY.
Oh, STOP that, Bela.  Stop that RIGHT NOW.
When you were about ten years old, Time magazine
put a fried egg on its cover with something like,
“Cholesterol: The Silent Killer.”
We were all supposed to eat margarine and Wonder Bread.
ALL the scientists said so.  Well.  GUESS WHAT.
People love to get hysterical.
That’s what sells magazines, Carson.
And that’s what sells all these PILLS everyone’s taking.
They’ve got Eliza taking all these PILLS now.
Well she’s OUT OF IT.  Not FOR ME.
What’s that?  Grape Kool-Aid?  So kind of you!
But I think I’ll just have the water, thank you.
Oh WHAT is she into NOW.  Bela!
You just can’t resist those smells, now, can you.
No you CAN’T.  No you CAN’T.
George, I really think we should turn back now,
my hip is starting to do its thing.
No, back the way we came would be best, I think.

§

By the mass, and ’tis, like a camel indeed.

Methinks it is like a weasel.

It is backed like a weasel…

Or like a whale.

It is very like a whale.

§

Senator, there is a lot to respond to in your statement.
I would respectfully disagree with your statement
that we’re becoming more like our enemy.
We are nothing like our enemy, Senator.
While we are struggling mightily to try to find out
what happened in Abu Ghraib, they are beheading people
like Danny Pearl and Nick Berg.
We are nothing like our enemy, Senator.

These Arabs, Senator, slink around in their oil fields

while we are struggling mightily to find out
how so many could be beaten and waterboarded
in U.S.-run detention centers,
and how so many Iraqis could be dead
since U.S troops invaded—Senator,

we’re still trying to find out what happened
in My Lai, and in Dallas in ’63,
and in U.S.-backed coups in Chile, Malaysia,
Venezuela, Argentina, and Haiti—

We’re struggling, Senator, to try to find out
why even under the threat of destroying the planet
we just keep burning more gas and coal,
and driving more miles, and talking louder and louder

as though we lived in a dream, Senator,
and could shout ourselves awake,

like when we were sick as children, Senator,
burning with fever, the black gate swinging open—

Oh, Senator, how we are struggling!

And all they can think to do
is behead Danny Pearl and Nick Berg.

§

And passengers ask the conductor:
Do you think these jeans make me look fat?

If Tom leaves from the same city at the same time as Jane,
traveling at a constant speed of 68 miles per hour—

Hey, what was the deal with the “spork,” anyway?
Remember those?

What place is THIS?  Where are we NOW—

the mountain rising beyond the edge of the ocean,
the joy bricked under the faces on the sidewalk,
the fire of the sun inside a rock

Onlythere is fire inside this rock,
come in under the shadow of this viewing platform
and I will show you something different from either
a parafrag splitting a city block,
or a Panzer making rubble of a church
I will show you something wicked cool, like,
Whoa!  Dude! 

Dude?

§

Remember how I told you there was one
original item in this room?  Remember
the chair behind George Washington in the painting?
Now, if you look closely at the back of that chair
you’ll see a carving of a sun.  Ben Franklin,
who sat at this desk right here and is said
to sometimes just put his foot out a bit, like that,
and trip someone up as they came to the podium—
you younger folks, do you remember Ben?
Any of you remember his experiment?
I’ll give you a hint: he was flying a kite…
Very good.  Now look again at that chair up there.
Who can tell me if that sun is rising
or setting?  Setting?  Rising?  There seems to be
a little debate about this.  Ben Franklin himself,
when this convention convened, said he couldn’t tell
if that sun was rising on a new republic
or setting on the hopes for that republic.
Remember how Ben Franklin was pretty old?
He’d certainly already done his part, am I right?
Remember how we talked about the treaties?
The Post Office?  Poor Richard’s Almanack?
With a “k”?  Say it with me, now: Al-man-ACK.
Now, truthfully, people, we stood on the brink.
Remember, history wasn’t history yet—
to these folks, things looked pretty freakin’ scary.
The British could re-invade at any moment,
the French from the north, the Spanish from the south—
and we had a lot of issues between the colonies
that could have broken into a civil war.
You ever hear, “Just showing up is half the job”?
Ben Franklin knew it was crucial just that he be there.
He rarely spoke.  He had trouble standing.
But when, after months of wrangling, these men
finally pulled together behind a deal,
he did stand, and addressed George Washington,
and what do you think he said about that sun?
“But now at length, I have happiness to know
that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
It is a rising and not a setting sun.
Folks, it’s been a pleasure to be your guide.
As you leave, security will guide you out.
If you’re touring the city today, please do take care.
It’s another day of record-breaking heat.

§

Two years.

Ten years.

Twenty years.

Fifty years?

§

Still wait’ for the word, Boss.
Still wait’ for the word.
I got the codes.  I got the briefcase, Boss.
Hard work, Boss, haulin’ roun’ this briefcase.
Feels like a ton, Boss.  Feels like the weight of the world.
And always bein’ careful it don’ go off, Boss.
But that’s the thing been botherin’ me, Boss.
First we work like dogs, we work like slaves
to make this thing—
and it’s just so we can stay up all night frettin’,
frettin’ we gon’ use the thing we made.
It’s like these highways, Boss, it’s like these jet planes—
we ain’t supposed to use them either, is we—
these tractors in the field, these furnaces,
these power plants that make these cities shine—
shine, Boss, just like your world shine up there.
We workin’ since we had thumbs, Boss.
We workin’ since we single cells, Boss,
tearin’ ourself in half to make these cities.

§

A dusty light in October, a pained leaf blower,
a light that was like a long reaching after,
the oceans and icecaps still intact,
the trees stretching out, still crowded thick
at the suburbs’ edges, the clouds of birds
still reaching down to touch their tops:
How-much-we-have-left!  How-much-we-have-left!
It was theirs now, the way they walked in the streets,
the way they lined their cars up going and coming
and swore at each other with a kind of glee,
the way they sat by themselves when they wanted
and watched the snow settle down its desert
or listened to the wrenched chords right themselves
and ate what they wanted and said what they wanted
at least to themselves, at least to what gods
at-least-to-themselves, at-least-to-what-gods
they pictured as they wanted: they had
beat the Germans, the Japs and the Commies
and taught the Viet Cong a lesson;
they had beat Saddam and Milosevic
and Bin Laden been runnin’ from cave to cave—
they damn near had AIDS beat and cancer
was giving them options, giving them time;
they had something called “secret evidence,” crime
was down again and productivity
was up, the markets were showing signs
of steady improvement, key indicators
were hopeful, they’d found water on the moon,

§

How do I feel?  How do I feel.
It just hasn’t really sunk in yet, you know?
I mean, you wait this long for something like this—
twenty-eight years I’ve waited for this.
Twenty-eight years—
and something always goes wrong for us, you know?
I really just can’t believe it, to be honest.
I mean, we can march down Broad in the parade,
and we can watch Charlie and Chase and J-Roll
holding up that World Series trophy, but

Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails
and put my finger into the print of the nails,
and thrust my hand into his side—

§

You ain’t gotta take that many carts, son.
We gonna get ’em all put back in time.
They ain’t gonna bother us none in Valley Stream.
Not after what happen Friday.
We gonna be the valued employee today.
We what be making this company thrive.
And we not just be important because of these here carts.
Oh, no.  We be important as individuals.
Ha!  You remember after 9/11,
how happy and friendly everybody was?
How we gonna send our money to them families?
How everybody suddenly woke up to the possibility
of living together in peace and harmony—
How people actually look you in the eye?
People was actually tipping me—
“Well, he a nigger, but at least he ain’t a A-rab.”
Haiti, right?  The boy from Haiti.

§

Okay.  Okay.  Let me try something else.
Look out this window, Chief.
Come on, just have a look.
See that woman with the shopping bag, on her cell?
You think she’s discussing the end of civilization?
Yah.  I didn’t think so either.
Okay, how about this guy—
looking into the window of the bookstore—
you think he’s looking for something on nuclear winter?
Isn’t it just a little more likely
DOCTOR OAKLEY TO THE TRAUMA CENTER DOCTOR OAKLEY
he’s after a bedtime story for his daughter there—
something about honeybees or firemen?
How about all these people in front of the coffee shop,
chatting away, sipping their mochas or what have you.
Do they look like they’re talking about boiling in their own feces?
Now who do you think needs the help here—them, or you?

§

The clouds are leaving and the sun stands over them.

The light is golden, the field is wide.
The parking lot is wide, the sky is wide—
wide is the road that leads to the Quaker Bridge Mall,
the trees left sharp with shadows, sharp with light,
everything pulled out clean from the fire

And who were the people who were questioning you there
and what were they asking you?

They were the Americans from the Army
and I would say, “I am just a normal worker,
and work and get my salary.”

I’m just a gigolo, and everywhere I go—

Thou art indeed JUST.

A handful of starlings tossed into the sky
to judge the wind for a fairway shot,
the oceans and icecaps still intact—

a light that is like a long reaching after,
a light that has never been better.

§

And what will be said about them when they are gone?
That they saw the sky for what it was?
The trees for what they were, the grass?
That they did better than their ancestors?
That they loved their children?
That they got up every morning and went to work?
That they were like children themselves, really,
borrowing things to play at being adults.
That look at these hieroglyphics—how cool is that?
That what they felt is ultimately more important
than whatever it was, exactly, they were doing.
That at least they left us these condominiums,
and countless gigs of research
and a flight path to the moon—
To the moon, Alice!
That most of what they did was actually legal.
That what is life for, if not to stroll campuses
and stand in chapels, under the huge stained glass?
That they had faith?
That given the crudeness of their instruments.
That, Dude!  I found an arrowhead!
That all we can do is hope that they were happy.
That they were good people, damn it,
and if they gassed somebody, they must have had a reason.
That they were good people.
That they were free?
That there goes one of them now!  Oh—
no, it’s just black ink shining bright.
That did they really die of pseudo-science?
That it’s obvious to us, of course.
That are you sure you haven’t combined
the actions of one creature
with the conscience of another?
That who are we to judge them, we of the future,
who do not yet even know who we really are?

§

I should like to object to the indictment.
I should like to say that in my opinion,

as far as    THE AMERICANS  are concerned,

the indictment does not conform to Article VII.
I can explain that.

§

So, do you want to just sit and read, then?

I want to go walking the path by the harbor
where the sun rakes its fingers in through the thin trees
and the ocean has filled every gap in their ribs,
every gap in the trunks where the death could blow through
and the harbor is held by your own arms around it
and there stand the boats that have been there forever—
their masts are all bare and they’re all through with wind—
and you could sit and watch while the sun makes them shadows
and you could just keep walking away through the dream
but wherever you go you will be in this place.

§

No, no one could live on the moon, hon.

Well, there isn’t any air there, for one thing.

Well, yes, they did, but they had to come right back.

Oh, that was an awful long time ago, now.

Yes, even before Mommy was born.

Well, it just hasn’t been that important, I guess.
It’s just a big rock up there, floating around.

§

The clouds are leaving and the sun stands over them.
They sail and glimmer, drifting by.
Here is a flame-legged spirit, dissolving.
It IS backed like a flame-legged spirit…
And here go two lovers, one’s feathery hands
firmly on the other’s airy shoulders.

Honey can you hear me in there honey

They are melting together, gliding backwards,
back to the town where their real life can begin.

STILL WAIT’ FOR THE WORD, BOSS.

And here is a walrus, and here a woolly mammoth.
And here the bones have been put together
to make some creature that never walked—but could have.

WE READY WHEN YOU IS, BOSS.

Honey, how do I get the lint out of the dryer?

How do I turn this wheel that turns my life,
Create another hand to move my hand

My client cannot tell
what the nature of his participation
is supposed to have been.

A ragged strand of geese, each tugging singly
at his private burden, shouts into the sky:
Honk-ick!—call.  Honk-ick!—response.

WE WAITIN’ BOSS.

Gentile or Jew—

We are on the line 157 337.
We will repeat this message.
We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles.




*PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THIS POEM’S SOURCES








Christian Barter’s first book, The Singers I Prefer, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize; his second book, In Someone Else’s House, is forthcoming in 2012 from BkMk Press. His poetry has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Georgia Review and Poetry Daily and has been read on The Writer’s Almanac. He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony and a Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton. He is a trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park and an editor for The Beloit Poetry Journal.

Two of the poems in this sequence, Labyrinth 34 and Labyrinth 37, first appeared in Eye of the Telescope.

Think of it all as two songs, ours and theirs,
And theirs composed of one high note, too high
For us to hear, and played so constantly, so
Uninterruptedly that they themselves
No longer hear it, if they ever could.
And ours, its crooked passage up and down
The scale of feeling, unforeseen and fated,
Note vanishing as soon as played, and played
By vanishing into the song it is–
How could it not astound them, air, just air
Resisting air, inflected with the sound
Of never-enough, and too-soon, and if-only—
Brief shapes of air between the silences
Only the song articulates by breaking.
And so imagine: it wasn’t the husband blundering
In and snatching the baby from the flames
That could have saved him, but the mother-goddess,
The glistening one herself, who held her hand
Against the heel pad, and the pliant tendon,
The skin the fire would cure now soft as ether—
An ether nearly anything could tear.
Touching the tiny foot she felt afraid,
And liked the feeling. And though the baby kicked
And kicked to feel the fire all over him,
Kicking with all his might to get free
As the flames rose, she only smiled at his strength
And gripped him tighter and would not let go.



2.

The gods laugh, that’s what they’re good at, laughing.
They laugh at the crippled god, his shriveled legs,
His hobbling, and his mother, in a little
Shadow play of suffering at the sight of him,
Her crippled baby, laughs the loudest, and then
Laughs even louder when she hurls him out
Of heaven, and he falls, and while he falls
The laughter echoing around him is
The measure of the pure unbreathable cold
Height of the heaven he’s falling from and through,
Hilarity of light and air, delight’s
Effacement of everything but itself.
And the crippled baby tumbling to earth
In a charade of terror? Don’t let him
Deceive you—he’s a god—he’s laughing too.



3.

The sodium streetlights down the avenue
Were vague globes where the dark turned orange,
And the orange dark. The avenue deserted,
The buildings all abandoned, or soon to be,
I drove, I can’t remember where, or when,
Though it was late, or early, and the night
Was heaviness my headlights had to push
Through slowly, till I passed a side street where
I saw two figures fighting, two men, one pummeling
The other against the hood of a parked car.
A woman nearby screamed, for God’s sake, stop!
And suddenly the hero of the story,
God-crazed with justice, without thinking, I
Slammed on the brakes, and, running hard to throw
Myself between them, shouted Hey Hey Hey,
Suddenly bigger and stronger than I was.

Well, that’s the story, anyway.  In the one
I’d later come to tell about what happened,
I don’t exactly say that I was fearless,
Or even that I ran to help; I say
Instead I walked as slowly as I could,
And hoped with every step the guy would stop
Before I got there. I smile then, sheepishly,
As if to say I know it isn’t right
To seem too much the hero of a story,
It makes a better story if you’re not,
And thus makes you a better hero. And so
I then say when I got there I discovered
It wasn’t a fight at all, but only shadows
The street light threw down through a wind-swept tree
Against the car hood, and no woman screamed,
Although, in truth, she did, or might have, I don’t know
Really, I couldn’t say if she was there,
Or not, it was so late, after all, or early,
in the orange darkness of a strange
Dark city I was lost in, and besides
My heart was pounding so hard as I drove past
I couldn’t tell you what it was I saw.



4.

What if they got it wrong, the tribe of singers,
And none of it was true: she never sailed
In the benched ships, she never went to Troy,
And there had been no bed befouled, no god-bound
Slaughterhouse of honor to be sung about?
What if the unsung were the only song,
The simile reversed, the rank and file
Massed for a sleep walk into corpse fires just
A figure now for storm clouds out at sea,
The storm itself a storm and nothing else,
Whipping great breakers onto breakers till
Even miles inland from his mountain top
The goatherd sees it turning day to midnight,
Summer to winter, sees it and shivers, driving
The flock before him to a cave where, safe
And dry now, he can watch the fabulous black
Sky crazed with lightning till the storm has passed.



5.

If they are only moments of ourselves,
Sifted from all that in us isn’t them,
Sifted and distilled, as in a dream,
To monsters of sensation who can give
By taking and take so fully and after feel
So far from thinking anything at all
It hardly matters how the other feels–
Then who was I last night, and who were you?
And who now is it asking, warning, taunting,
What wouldn’t we too suffer or abandon
For the pleasure of that moment of
Our feeling nothing beyond our feeling that?
And haven’t we? And who on earth could blame us?



6.

Hers were the bright veils of disclosures of
What shines by hiding, the no sooner here
Than gone sensation of desire dis-
Entangled from desire and cut loose
As mist about the body, in the heart,
The sight of her a dazzling emptiness
He swirled another mist around, gold mist
Inside of mist, a swirling doorlessness
That nothing but itself could penetrate.
And there inside it, the about to have
And having, and the having had of sleep
All flashed at once like different facets of
The single shining of the thing it was.

We’ve known it too, for moments, you and I,
Each in our own way, together, or with others,
Enclosed, and drifting, arrogant as gods
Who in the gold mist of that complete forgetting
Forget that in the killing fields below
Their shining sons, the fretted over, doomed
Swift Runner, Wily, Breaker of Horses, all
Cry out for them to bless the sword they raise
Against each other, to bless the hacking down,
The butchering, the dragging in the dust,
Not knowing that their parents aren’t their parents now,
Now they’ve never been parents, they have no children,
The only cry they’re hearing is their own.



7.

Murmur of house flies in the window where
The twisted strips hung softening in the heat,
Swaying and trembling as the stuck flies, slimed
And furious, struggled across an inch-wide desert.
Some were caught by both feet while the wings whirred
And buzzed as the body tried to lift free of
What wouldn’t let it.  And some with one wing caught,
The other whirring, could only sideways slide
And crawl around itself against itself
Over and over in a ragged circle,
Sliding and crawling till it finally stopped.
But the ones I watched most were the strongest ones,
The most determined, who would fight free of
The paper and then below it on the sill,
With forefeet glued together, and still wet
With glue, for hours would mop the gummed head with
The very gum it tried to mop away.
Sometimes I’d pencil a circle around one and
Then come back later to see if he got clean
And got away. But no one ever did,
Or if he did he only got an inch
Or so beyond the tiny winner’s circle
Of my attention before I’d brush him off
Into the pile of the other once great fighters
Filling the trough between the sill and pane.



8.

Because she was his mother and a god,
Even down at the bottom of the sea
She could hear him crying, sprawled in the dust
Before the body of his friend. Because she was
His mother she could cry and beat her breast;
But because she was a god too, she could rise
As water out of water onto the shore
Where she could cradle him, his god-like head,
The way a mother would, to soothe but not
To save him, no, not that, because, more god
Than mother, trapped in flawlessness, she was
The glistening one, who glistened even then
Among her sisters who like sisters came with her
To cry as only they could cry whose names were
Mist and Fair-isle, Down-from-the-cliffs, First Light,
Bright Spray, Bather of Meadows, Eyes of the World.



9.

The ocean’s river circles the great shield’s rim.
Inside it is a field, a vineyard, vine poles
Weighed down with gold grapes ripening like grapes,
Each dew-wet cluster soon to be stripped and crushed,
Forever soon to be, here where they climb forever,
And down the one footpath the pickers run,
Their wicker baskets swinging by their sides,
Young girls and boys, all running to the field,
And in the midst of them a child is singing,
Plucking such clear notes from a golden lyre
That the gold air all around him, could it hear him,
Playing and singing dirges for the dying
Where nothing dies, even that air would long
To be the air it isn’t, if it could long.



10.

The wave is building as it approaches shore,
Out of itself upon itself, the long
Back steepening with shine until the crest
Curls over and breaks, exploding into spray
Against the backwash of the wave before it–
Earth shaker, steadily, day and night, the surf
Pounds on the shore and, in the suck and drag,
Takes back a little of it, grain by grain,
In time-lapse plundering that in its own
Time, soon, will have it all back, beach and salt
Marsh, river basin and the rising plain–
The ancient citadel itself now less
than the collateral damage of a moment,
crushed in the giant downbeat of its crashing
into the silt the idiot force will carry
over the earth and into it and out
again, ten thousand years away, beside
another ocean in another field
where an old man sees two white stones propping up
a dead tree stump, not rotted through by rain,
and wonders if it’s the grave mound of a man
dead too long to remember, or just two stones
marking the finish line of a forgotten track
Or its halfway point where the homestretch starts.



11.

After the son dies, or the father, or the friend,
And the corpse fires all burn out; after the smoke,
The visible stench, so pleasing to the gods,
Has risen to the gods who send it back as black
Confetti, raining what began as men
Today upon the men who will tomorrow
Honor them by making more of them;
After the play hunt and the play kill of
The funeral games, and the sacrifice and feast,
When the watch fires gutter and go out and the whole
Field blackens into outer space—it’s then
And only then that even the most enraged
Can sleeping find a refuge from his name,
And for a little while the name drifts free
Of epithet and set piece into sound
No one is making. Think of a schoolroom between
Class when a teacher wipes the blackboard clean
And claps the two erasers and releases
The disarticulated powder of
A day of rules —think how they float now, the words
The men are made of, while the armies sleep,
By the wine-dark sea till the rosy-fingered dawn
Between books, before the page is turned.









Acknowledgement: Section 3 (“The sodium streetlights down the avenue”) of this poem first appeared in TriQuarterly.

Alan Shapiro is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including, most recently, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin). He is a former recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Shapiro will publish his first novel, Broadway Baby (Algonquin), later this month.

The sequence’s two threads begin with the same poem, which is a response to translations of two fragments from Sappho.

The first thread is below; please click here to see the other one.  To read writers’ explanations of their responses, as well as brief bios for the participants, click here.

The project is ongoing, and we will update it periodically.

Click here to view or print this sequence as a PDF.



TELEPHONE PROJECT 1


these toys [
after and with Sappho

The hope gets hold of me that I won’t share
anything that the blessed gods [themselves desire—

no lending those toys that smell of clay or graphite
however much apportioning was thrust

into tissue, gray or pink.  I’m sick
of placating them with string or wax—

after all I have to work.

I look toward the beekeeper keeping bees at home
that she knows damn well will sting and swarm.

—Kimiko Hahn


***


As in Cincinnati

Stung, the beekeeper becomes
the kept.

Tending to him, his honey-makers
drone and go,

leaving only their delicate cells, the holes
in a poem

by Sappho.  And after
the last bees

have gone, the sound is
of vacant houses,

of vagrants inside, building fires
in the living room.

—Idra Novey


***


Fever Fragments

Can you forget what happened before?
—Sappho, “Six Fragments for Atthis”


The picture is still so clear to me
I cannot imagine you cannot see.
The fire’s marks are red, and burn;
I turn and turn for your return.

Then I see what I did not see:
you see a different part in me
that when the cold and dark return
the fire in you will burn and burn.

*

All smoke now, the white stars, the stupid wax
that crouched too fast under the hooded heat.
No stub of toe, no crust of tears, no sex
but dissipating wisp, finished, incomplete.

*

I would make accusation a form of love
except it has been done before.

*

Sundays we watched the Giants fumble
another play, but somehow stumble
to a big touchdown.

Your hands were sure, ran down my zipper
and caught so well I took you for a keeper,
took you in my mouth.

*

I suspect the lonely ones who compose long poems
of hearts unbroken.
My suspicion is ungenerous, I confess,
fever of the forsaken.

*

Sappho, teach me to lay a curse on him that sits:
when boys eat his ass, give them a mouthful of shit.

—Jee Leong Koh


***


“Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself”

In the middle of the gallery: white string on a cold floor.
Everywhere else: guards guarding against
my strategies—

And though the signs said not to touch,
you could have touched me again,
they wouldn’t have minded,
no, the guards might have liked something fleeting

to stare at for a while,
something else to remember.
As would I—

—Catherine Barnett
[n.b. the title is from Richard Tuttle’s installation at the Whitney]


***


Bienvenida: Santo Tomás

In the middle of the yard, a goat,
bound at the hooves,
wags its grotesque tongue.
Everywhere else, I am falling in love,
and today that will change too,

for an old man has heard my uncle
drag the small beast to the block,
the music, the laughter
inside the slaughter.

The old man will come
the mile by foot
from the barrio’s far edge,
up the long dirt road,
unshod, a ratty tank-top,
with a brand new Vegas cap,
a cut black strip
of inner tube draped
around his neck,
and he rolls in front of him,
the whole way, a common
jug, emptied of all its molasses,
immense, to his hip in height
and three times
the old man’s girth.

My uncle is strumming the guts
out of his ukelele
when the old man arrives
and sets the huge jar down,

pulls the bike tube
off his nape and stretches it
across this massive ceramic
yawn, holding the strip
of galvanized rubber in place
with one big muddy toe,
then finds the first down-
beat to join my uncle
in the kind of mooing chorus
they think has tricked all
the thousand blossoms
they never kissed.
The old man plucks
from the makeshift bass
not so much a moan
but a pulse to range
a full octave
into each man’s chest,
the sinews of the old timer’s arm,
straining, the long muscle
of his back, taut,
his quadricep, his calves,
his black foot pumping
blood into his whole
miserable body,
his maw flashing
every one of his seven
good teeth to heaven,

and if a man become
the heart of a giant, the song
of a giant, each one of us
laughing like a giant,
if each one of us fulfill
the exact measure of a man,
and if the goat is singing
as its dying
among men who are singing
and dying, the youngest
cousin among us, butcher,
slaughterer, sings too,
reaches into the carcass,
wholly still now,
yanking from its belly
the entrails, like small versions
of the sky, releasing them
from his fist onto the block,
a bloody pile of white string.

—Patrick Rosal


***


Bienvenida: Santo Tomás (continued)

Three instruments, then, and still
no song, of love, death, uncles, or
old men.  Or giants.  Or goats.  Or
cousins.  Three passages are more
difficult than they look, and we
keep looking into them for saints
& someones & legendary strings
as if we knew where all this was
going.  Were going.  We’re going.
When you wish upon a star, Saint Thomas
wonders what you are, where he is too
to you and what you hold onto.
Like that other time you made the same
mistake and killed farm stock
for a song.  That was bad.  The song
was not good.  And we weren’t.
But someone has to, uncles
simply play and old men show up
like John Lee Hooker?  We already feel
the big “as if” as if we don’t belong
even though we took it all
the way the first time, that last time
it sounded good.  That’s what playing is,
Saint Thomas, without looking it up
we know it whether confirmed or not,
it’s a kind of way, of going there.
It’s where, we hear, you’re from,
Saint Thomas, your welcome, you’re welcome,
a tune you can hum before you holler
another name somewhat closer to home.

—Joshua Weiner


***


Saint Thomas: The Other Amelie

Here she must have stood
when she knew it—

Waves rushing in, aborting
flotsam, claiming her song,
coco heads wobbling on strings
invisible, the decapitation already lost
in the sibilance of the honing stone.
Begin to tell what I am,
machete, before you hide back into the sheath—

Here she must have waited,
behind the palm trellis,
a splinter of island’s flesh
summoned to wean the newborn
then return, scars dressed in crushed sage,
milky breasts upping the price,

when she remembered the goat licking
the tether around its neck with such
dreadful ease, sounds abrasive and hallow,

before she mounted the taxi scooter
and noosed her way inland,
skirting the arboretum boasting
rare plumeria—she too forced upon
this land, pliant settler duping the sphinx moth
with sweet smells, succulent yet nectarless.

Begin to tell what I am, machete,
and tell before your spare that crazed goat.
Show me home.

—Mihaela Moscaliuc


***


Amelie (An Echo)

But it was a shipwrecked message―

flotsam
in the sibilance

of the honing stone―

flesh
dressed in crushed sage

with such dreadful ease

sphinx moth

sweet smells

machete―

—Dana Levin


***


So the Flesh Spoke

At evensong, one night under the weight
of rafters in the stone, the monks asleep
in the inkwells, nodding past the hour
to gather meaning in the frayed sleeves
of discontent, not attuned to early vespers…

the bones became aroused,
undid the connections, let slip
tendon and thin, other strands…

I could not sleep, I said
to someone in their dream,
standing beside their bed
calling myself the clatter
of their rebellious bones…

The line picked up again,
the receiver startled into place…

the switchboard came alive
like the ghastly google of nerves
in a bleached whale struggling
to get back to sea…is anyone
there?

—anyone

—Afaa Michael Weaver


***


June 9, 2010 10:35 Pacific Time

One night
one afternoon
anyone: Blanche Lincoln
anyone: Bernanke
anyone: Pau Gasol
anyone: Lindsay Lohan
anyone: Stephan Strasburg
anyone: Meg Whitman
anyone: Blanche Lincoln
anyone: Lady Gaga
anyone: Derek Fisher
anyone: Rod Blagojevish
anyone: Marsha Revel
I could not sleep, I said.
drifting through deep water in plumes or layers
one nightraftersmeaningof discontent                                   …

let slipother strands…
I could not sleep, I said
someone

myself


the receiver

the switchboard

anyone

—anyone
—Juliana Spahr


***


Owl Music

Who who
were you yesterdayin the starless night     *          where did you go
Who who do you hear                        *          can you come with me

The crickety summer deceives us        *          underneath
so many           *          a swath of pollen and hazeSo many individuals so many
stridulations    *          so many retrograde eyes

Who who stays hungry           *          who will scare

At sundown it seems harder               *          to eat the air
than live the same way every dayso we take flight         *          owl music
pinions and talons       *          into the harmless night

Who who will resent my camouflage
my plumage                 *          my desire for concealmentmy predatory and nearly inaudible work
not wise but able to look downover mammals             *          their scurry their scary delay

Only to strangers         *          to those who will never see you
can you say what you believeWho who
will hear my owl credo

CREDOI have run from and risen from the real and dimly
adumbrated shapes of suburban thingsand then run back to them      I believe with ease
in things that nobody can seebut not in what I cannot hear

I do not believe that art is a form of religion
an unforgivable selfishness that takesthe time I always owe to other people
I do not quite believe it but I have come close

I have seen my own span of attention
shrunk to a burnt lightbulb’s tungsten wirelit like a pinpoint star on the back of a spoon
a spiderweb concatenationa matrix of expiation
a mock-up of a better nation               *          a trap to catch fliesand songs come at naptime or else      *          at the end of a day
miniscule in endless promisesto find a way out of the Klein bottle              *          out of the air
nachtmusik*          dignified spotlight

Who who threw
these deteriorating clothesinto their heap mound on mound
by the noble creekbedamid the curious insects wet logs sticks
where pine needles scatter      *          their scent rises over the commontracing and tracing across the private lawn

The crickets claim subscriber rights
their comforting abrasive ringblack handle on a rotary phone
we could not bring ourselves to throw awayIt too lies
where horse chestnuts prickle the darkshells split like pillowcases                  *          nothing inside

Who who
would keep eyes closedWho would not want
to suck on a thumb                  *          to becomean animal that you could sing to sleep
although the mind fades         *          recollections fadesex and death whatever they were     *          fade
as the morning stars regard the moon

and the automobiles out of sight along Route Two

stay asleep in their noise         *          owl music continues too
still underneath the overheadand baffles itself in descent                *          to scan the ground

Who who comes down to see
who gets to knowall this raw dirt            *          all this assertive script
of tangled rootlets       small asseverationsone oak’s new fibers reach down just to make
some shelter for another          seedling seedlingseedling seedling seedling seed

Your cover is shallow             you grown-up
you like it that wayYou get ten minutes to yourself         at dawn
before the creek wakes up again

—Stephen Burt


***


Salt Water

Confessor. Mother. Father. Ghost. This who
you talk to when you’re talking to yourself.

The ocean is one version. Gray green
in sawtooth blossoms
all it meets it swallows.

Such sheer abandon: it must be what flows
beneath those little mercies when the nerves
give in to sleep, orgasm, even pissing.

Or the phatic stream of “Jesus Jesus Jesus”
swims free for moments
and it feels like fullrelease, full trust: as if some listener

absorbed the whole rip-tide of consciousness.
As if the vacuum pull
beneath the blueslide to the eel-grass ledges and drop offs

were sentient. Were more than emptiness.

–Peter Campion


***


listen

them salt-water negroes

come drownin your little bit of garden

in ocean

ain’t no peace with them

they got haints spillin

from they                    done seen too much eyes

no mercy                     can pull they heads above sea-level

you been here your whole life girl

you                                          planted

in this soil

for better or worse

they won’t                   never

sweat all that salt outta him

you

join up with that man

them eyes will forever

be pullin you towards the things he

remember

mother father               ghosts

you won’t sleep free

with his heart always

draggin                                    at your roots

and you dig in hard

you rip that poor negro

right in two


–Evie Shockley (May 27, 2011)


***


mother father ghosts

Warming her milk on the stove,
mother then sits to sip her coffee as Iranian radio
crackles out the battery-operated receiver,
the ghost of a noose
whiskering around her downturned head.

My parents were for years
next. We protected you too much,
mother says, the sound of the gallows’ trapdoor

as the kitchen cabinets open and close.
I paint my toenails red

as the screen at Cinema Rex
curls aflame then drifts
into a pile of black,

the aisles lit with bodies

throwing themselves into the locked doors,
in the city that showed me my first
mega-caliber weapon

and my mother her first café glace.
We protected you too much, she says.
They tried, they did,

but a mobile of nooses turned above my crib.
On the wood-paneled TV, Mr. Rogers
changes his loafers or a friend,

who you can’t bear to see cry,
confesses to the tribunal: Today,
I don’t know why I became political.
He is wishing instead
for the coffee we are having
or the Texan light through the windshield

as he sits between my parents
on the bench seat. Ghosts

or Delkash singing out the warped tape
like a chained elephant lumbering into the big tent
would quiet my parents
as the Buick’s turn signal clicked
next
next
next
next

–SS [full name deleted]


***


Poem for Delkash

when I held the envelope
I knew the time
a little harmless
loneliness would guide
my hand holding
the circular
polycarbonate plastic
disc with the blue
letters spelling her name
into the machine
had come
and I heard
her voice in Persian
inside me make
deep ancient canyons
only sunlight
has ever known
some time passes
I suddenly notice
it is afternoon
I am standing
in the kitchen
holding a broom
she stops singing
alone for a while
the music wanders
then her voice returns
she says a word
it sounds like glacier
I’m pretty sure
the song describes
how it feels when
something important
does not happen
most of the afternoon
still listening
I think
beautiful old stove
many people
we will never know
placed their hands
on your dials
hoping things
would never change
I cannot imagine
what it is like
for those who know
they must stand together
thinking for too long
we have waited
for fear which is not
a guest to leave
they might shoot us
but we will stay
here in the street
until we are all
at last older sisters
to each other

–Matthew Zapruder


***


Of Moraines

The sky some denim. The mountain some denim.
Your Hauptbahnhof, your glaciers of omission.
They omit everything: night train to Berlin,

the Ackerstrasse summer, and lucid white arm
of the marriage certificate drowsing in its cool
orange folder. Names writ wet, twinned Balearic

blue. With their pour of pale, their luminous
monitor, moon field, summit, the glaciers pull closer,
further. Someone was watching, measuring—who?

The Alpen yawn open, click closed.
Your heart, smallest chalet, alights on their form.
Then the valley. How to describe the desire you feel

for the dark house, careful triangle, in their long
wintering shadow? Animals traverse their steep,
their corridors, coursing past pines—

lithe, perfumed pedestals—that describe you
in their verticality, darkly. How like fathers they appear
then, like sisters. Like the evenings, which take

on the aspect of loveliest strangers, one who will
come to love you as days and months—yes, years—
pass and shed in the form of mountains, of moraines.

—Quinn Latimer

The sequence’s two threads begin with the same poem, which is a response to translations of two fragments from Sappho.

The second thread is below; please click here to see the other one.  To read writers’ explanations of their responses, as well as brief bios for the participants, click here.

The project is ongoing, and we will update it periodically.

Click here to view or print this sequence as a PDF.



TELEPHONE PROJECT 2


these toys [
after and with Sappho

The hope gets hold of me that I won’t share
anything that the blessed gods [themselves desire—

no lending those toys that smell of clay or graphite
however much apportioning was thrust

into tissue, gray or pink. I’m sick
of placating them with string or wax—

after all I have to work.

I look toward the beekeeper keeping bees at home
that she knows damn well will sting and swarm.

—Kimiko Hahn


***


elegy for the beekeeper

How dazed the body after stinging, how drunk
with death & venom. We wear our good shoes

to the funeral. & our black eyes, fat
with hallucination, hold the image of the swarm

& take it everywhere: the streetlight, to church, the coffin.
Even now, the air is wild with the fever-pitch of wings.

Our girl, small graveyard of marks & stings—
so fast.

We leave her to sleep outside like a cat.
We climb into our houses & our beds, & we miss her.

For years, we dream our deaths little
as the bee’s.

—Aracelis Girmay


***


Bee at the Beekeeper’s Funeral

When they say “swarm”
What they mean is us.What they mean is blackMass of wings, a thousand
Thousand chanters.  Unison.What they mean is body.What they miss is brain
Born of lifetimes, mindMade of centuries. SackedCatacombs and tenements
And what is most sweetIs what they both breedAnd box us for.  Swarm,
What they call swarm,Is the imperceptibleRumble in the gut,
Years inside of otherYears, the stinger’s acheTo break free the abdomen.
What born warriors knowAs Noble Death.  And thereIs me, the dreamer drawn
By a laughing daffodilAway from the others,Brothers and cousins,
That massacre afternoon,Away from glory, nowWith only this to do:
To witness, to tell againWhat the eulogizer said,The beekeeper dead,
And of these wreaths,Their raucous stinkAnd hues.  I’ll tell how
I put my face deep in the bellOf each and every blossomAnd breathe deep.  Oh, child,
I breathe so deep.

—John Murillo


***


Translator’s Block

The poet translated the poem with fear and trembling,
as if somehow unworthy of the source text.

His writer friends thought his suffering ridiculous,
and perhaps they had a point.

Hardly difficult, this poem. A simple narrative
in modern Persian. For setting, the clichéd garden.

Basically, as two lovers kiss on a bench
a bee stings the man on his thigh.

He’s allergic, so the ambulance arrives.
The woman can’t find the key. (Fearing exposure

they had previously locked the gate). One paramedic
hoists the other over the wall.

On the verge of anaphylactic shock,
the semi-conscious Romeo gets injected

in the same spot of the sting. He survives.
Afterward, the key’s found in his pant’s pocket.

“Perhaps,” says the poet’s shrink, “it’s too accessible;
It opens your heart to love, which means danger.”

As she’s talking, the poet unconsciously clicks and unclicks
a ballpoint pen into his thigh.

“You have a point,” says the poet,
“but I can’t see how the lines could hurt me.”

—Roger Sedarat


***



Ball Point Pen

I had never meant to take the ball point pen apart
and yet the spring leapt away, the coiled metal
leaping into the lap of the football player next to me

in Algebra II, the class I walked to the High School
for, where I was widely considered a math prodigy
despite merely being a year ahead. He could have

destroyed me. I had done something terrible. Allowed
myself to explode into his lap. Allowed the pen
to dissolve into its component parts, each a platonic

ideal. The ink pure inkiness.  The spring pure springy-
ness.  I wish there were more here. A story about
how he turned to me and fell in love. A story about

how later on he kicked my ass.  But this is the end.
He put the spring back on my desk and returned
to his own, hunched in his letter jacket until the bell.

—Jason Schneiderman


***


Motherother

Inside me: don’t think
this. If inside is a place
then I am thinking in the suburbs
in the mud/grass
but I hate driving and pizza.

I’d consider mine:
“the boy is mine!” Or, “before,
mine was mine.” (This is
my head. Where is your head?)
Before…I can’t remember.

Before one tree was touched
before another and this
was a lovely diagram
for putting together
a plan for making it a-ok.

If I allow myself an inside,
I find component parts (coiled
metal, archaic weaponry,
plumb line). Some are
for me and some for him.

How generous! But no:
inevitable metal. Shoot
into water the find a lost
bridge. Or there might be
someone. Instead: we walk.

—Jennifer Kronovet


***


The Mother

No one saw her but me
As she stumbled through the living room
Whispering to herself in tongues
I’d not heard
Before, limned, here,
by the streetlamp’s spare
light, her hushed words
now become a song
I think she was giving to the moon:
Why, why me?

—Ross Gay


***


Instructions

Why not you?
He will think he has given you the moon.
He will think you owe him a song
with words like hushed lights,
light from a streetlamp muted
by mist and limbs and sheer curtains.
Look here.
Anything he ever says he will say only to himself
if the first time he stumbles through the living room
your only word to him is no.

—H.L. Hix


***


Anything He Ever Says He Will Say Only To Himself

As if talking could cure a slammed door,
you follow, walking through like an apparition
from an old relationship. And what else does
an apology hold other than the mist of mistakes
from the past, rearing their past addictions?

But you follow not with your feet
but with your words, writing
a letter from this downtown café.
In the background, a voice
talks over your written words
with a mouth like a sunflower
breaking from the concrete,
but you keep writing to him,
in the spirit of this voice.

Look, you say, people are living
all around me and I want in on it;
children are walking like families
of ducks led by their teachers;
couples have a hand in each other’s back
pocket; a woman is carrying her laundry
in her arms. I’m sure any one of them
would say they want more: The children
don’t want to trail behind a teacher;
the couple wants more than passion;
the woman wants the comforts
inside her home. But I’d take it
all. Sometimes, I just want to step
off the curb of the past onto whatever will stay
beneath me. But, over time, I wonder
if asking for nothing, when all is said
and regretted, too much to ask for?

—A. Van Jordan


***


Apparition from an Old Relationship
What dark/men you aroused in your young man’s veins. —from “The Third Duino Elegy”Rainer Maria Rilke

Ancestors gathered to the pulse of hate
generations past still drum in their heirs’ veins.
Those who had guns and gold, those who had naught,
those who were pushed aside, those who wore chains:
their histories continue to divide
neighbor from neighbor, like the ghosts of love
turned cruel. How long memories take to fade.
And those we can’t forget, we must forgive.

—Marilyn Nelson


***


(Unbuttoning her shirt…)

Unbuttoning her shirt in the second dream, she pointed to the hole in the center of her chest, mouthed Look.

I am not any closer to saying what I mean.

Kneeling, with my hands on her hips, I closed one eye and peered into her chest, which was filled with water.

Love has made itself so quiet, a few red fish moving in slow circles.

I want to say like blood.

I want to say like forgiveness, this obedience, looking inside her on my knees.

I mean to cease to feel, to cancel, to give up all claim to—

At some point, she rested her hands on my shoulders and I thought this is my face housed underwater.

This is a death letter.

Every word but mouthed erased.

—Allison Benis White


***


Look

If I had unbuttoned your blouse
as you lay in your coffin, I could have seen
how the tumor that killed you had grown
overnight into merely benign.

I marveled instead at your lips,
the red kept within proper borders.
(The first time in how many years?)
Unlike you, whoever applied it
acknowledged the edges
that blur in a woman your age.

The edge between living and dying
began to blur weeks before you wandered
over the finish line. No celebration
except for that party-girl red
on your lips, no doubt chosen
to match the coy flowers
that bloomed on your silk blouse.

Now I want to name it a shade
that says more than mere red,
which end-rhymes too quickly with dead,
the quick of which I’m still a part
and you dead, which I cannot escape.

Better dead than red,
I grew up hearing patriots bluster,
but came to prefer Better red
than dead. Give me better
than red, give me Raising Hell Red.

Better yet, Everlastingly Red
till the last trumpet blares
and you wake up,
your lips mouthing,
“How do I look?
Do I need rouge?
More lipstick?”
(So long in the grave,
the voice shrivels to wind
down a drainpipe.)

I open my poem-sack,
and lift out the golden tube
wherein a scarlet nib waits
to inscribe on your lips
a shade conjured from sheer
disbelief and indelible dread,
and infused with no more
than the balm of a name.
Neither Hope.
Nor Hereafter
but this gleam
of Wide Awake Red.

–Kathryn Stripling Byer


***


Calcium’s Slender Embrace

Now I see that red means nothing
in this winter landscape
with flurries of snow
across the unfenced graveyard.

Don’t stare into my ruby lips,
My Love; color is wasted on the dead—
a mockery, a hush, a denial
of what the body has become.
I have no use for a dress
drenched in prismed memory.

Say “here lies” if you must.
Wish for one last impossible word
to sum a lifetime. Pretend you knew
me — I was always a field of wild flowers,
more than this patterned dress could ever say.
I was the roots and insects and the dew,
the wind shaken stalks, the bones.

Now I have a new name for shadowed snow
that is more than the crunch and crackle,
a metered response for the end of life.
The slow grinding down, erosion, entropy,
I know as bone and ash scattered on frost,

Or calcium’s slender embrace.
No fanfare for me. I am given to the whisper
wind and then back to the field
like seed. My voice
is the rasp of flake and dust,
the low thrum
of repeated soft impact,
so long in the field
it condenses to shell
the frozen ground.

This body no longer holds
my voice. I can never be written
or captured again. The words fall
and skitter like shrouds and veils
across the sparkled ice.
My name is no longer
my name.
I am calm.
I am moving
toward the promise
of Spring.

–J.P. Dancing Bear


***


Sung (Lacking Words)

I stood where a street ravels dirt
Where green leaves clamor

When somehow in spring
My love came stumbling from a broken house:

Someone with hand flourishes and yelling
Shoved him onto a stretcher.

Ruin of handkerchief his head was bound in,
Blue shirt stained.

I raced to his side, but a child clad in blue–
Why so much of that color?–

Shaved head in a bonnet, dress flowing at her ankles,
Clutched at my thigh

Crying to be taken home.
Nothing I could spell or summon up

For language is always a something else,
A furrow beyond, a yard elsewhere

A fracture in the sensed,
Sempiternal falling.

No snapline here, nor portamento of touch.
Hands grasp at dew

Which is what my flesh turned to
When a child held me in dream’s clear light

As somehow in spring
My love came stumbling from a ruined house.

–Meena Alexander


***


A Bird in Hand

Unclasped, will soar
eventually. Kept, would have soured
surely, on the flesh-clothed
bones a hand is. Spoiled as raspberries do when we
un-tend them, leave too many
for the birds,

birds as hand-
sized fires, extinguished
season to season.

A reasonable sentence.
But the Lord spoke
through a burning bush once and gave
miracles.

Proof that fire has a mouth
and a will? With birds our angels on earth.
To say, I spent most of the day in bed
sleeping is difficult.

Love-making would have made
a less ashen replacement.

Un-held, in dreams, birds fleck and swoon—
silvery, coppery, gold. In harrowing
diving flocks. Like sparks.

–Paula Bohince


***


Borrowed Breath

The sky, an invisible cage that fetters
air with toxic bars bent from acronyms,
opens and pulls back its lone lip
while blackbirds assume a mining canary’s fate.

Fumes creep into lungs small as walnuts,
nip the alveoli, roll the eyes into
final descent—a chorus tumbling on land,
not just a clutch of folded feathers,
but diving flocks, like sparks.

There is no bullet fragment to extract
from flesh, just unseen parts per million,
a kind of counting most don’t fathom
unless playing the lottery, don’t they know
this is another ticket, a borrowed breath?

–Tara Betts


***


and Sharply



Ours to make: sparks; edges; a device

for cutting pictures out of light. We filled

tin trays with water in the backyard

and slowly dipped the paper in. Having

is accomplished not so much by attention,

but by habit. Still, we made lists: cedar,

smoke, the rabbits racing fast across

the grass. Also, the fence to slice the light

into white scissors while we pushed

the paper flat for trimming beneath the water.

She spoke through the window to say

she had planted them herself—still

we forced our way under the branches to wait

while the sun did what breathing does, but loudly.

And always shadows anyway: the junipers bent

to blue beneath our fingers cut, too, lengthwise

where the pictures made sharp frames

of our hands for holding them. We knew wood grows

like trees do, so we watched the tables

all afternoon to see our pictures lifted nearer

to that sun like a hole in the sky, burning.

–Kristina Jipson


***


Internet K-Hole

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” – L. P. Hartley


Like prehistoric petroglyphs they astonish us,
So many photos, from Aquarius
To New Wave to Grunge,
All those million gold cubes:

Sierras of snaps! Saharas of forced smiles!
Proud mullets, handlebar mustaches, muscle shirts, miles of cleavage and biceps!
Gleaming ice cream cones! Look at them.
Kodachromes and Polaroids, curled at edges,
As ancient, suddenly, as vellum, stylus, and parchment.
What fate befell those strange tribes?

A billion harvested emulsions, mulled by time,
Pent for decades in musty drawers
Until Google’s
Voracious magnet pulled them
Like iron filings—

Spent fashions sprint away and speed back again—
Hairstyles three times new and pants gone ironic
Return refreshed to chilly malls
And teeming high school halls.

Whole solar systems of style squandered on unsuspecting kids!
Why is everyone so happy? How could they be?
Or is that unbridled glee merely a try at posterity,
An aching “say cheese” rictus aimed at eternity?

Each gangly pose hints at some mystery, some dream, some clue just out of frame
That will glue the scene together somehow, show us more.
There is always so much more.

Everyone pretending to be sexy
In murky dad-fashioned dens or hot silver of mountain sunlight.
They pose and pose, tongues out, eyes crossed, head-banging to riffs unheard,
Doubled at jokes forgotten,

All the hairspray in the world holding it together,
Parting bangs like waves of the Red Sea!
Observe Venus perched in her pearl-white Pontiac scallop!And the sweaters! Like farm belts seen from the sky,
Jagged patches of cork and olive.It all seems so sad, so graceless, so heartbreaking, the triumph of naïveté.

And that milk-wet flash, constantly caught in car windows and eyeglasses,
A quasar, an exploding star, bleaching half the scene.It detonates in the mirror behind the prom couple in powder blue,
And they squint, impatient to be released burning into their summer evening.

It keeps going! We are powerless before it.
Those downy orange kittens died long ago,
Mischievous mutts gone under grassy yards,
Scarf-tailed goldfish gulped by porcelain—Forest-green shag rugs ripped up and rolled away,
Squat walnut televisions, big as tombs, hauled off!

Bermuda shorts like kaleidoscopes and toucan Hawaiian shirts! Velcro!
Zebra tights, tabby purses, Star Wars pajamas, and pillbox hats!
Water skis wielded like broad swords!
Nightmare Halloween Gorillas and, O, frowning holidays with the folks!
Such animation! Cartwheels suspended for all time, mascara’d winks,
Rabbit ears rising from perms,
Ditzy headstands, sudden kisses, icy beer-chugs,
So much to forget.

Phalanxes of sophomores, acres of acne, greasy floss of waist-length hair,
Sweat-licked volleyball stars, dirt-bikers muddy as barbarians,
Silver radios the size of suitcases, weighted with depth-charges of D batteries!
Pastel sprays of bridesmaids, arrays of such uncanny silk confections!
Cloudy pyramids of wedding cake, Crayola-hot cummerbunds—

Velvet flares of bellbottoms, misty sheen of Christmas lights,
And all that wood paneling: In rec rooms,
On the flanks of barge-wide station wagons.So auburn, so golden, so gone and lonely those years!
Up the BB-pocked water tower, into the murky lake,
Down to the foggy shore at dawn, away, away, away!

Those moments seem so happy, but possibly, on reflection,
After all this time, were no more than more wasted time,
Hours blissfully wasted on waves of blue smoke and sunsets,Or else mere remnants, meaning nothing, flash cubes discarded,
Depleted ammunition, all wasted, all trash. . . .

And yet here, after all this time, forever floating
In his one small happy moment,
Everyone’s fat friend, you knew him too,The one who made everyone laugh until ribs were raw,There he is above the mouthwash-blue
Spangle of warm swimming pool,Like a boulder hurled by a blinded Cyclops,

Yes, he’s still there, cannon-balling
For all time in that affectionate air,
All for us, eyes clamped shut,
Clasped in fetal position as everyone flinches,
Waiting for the splash.

–Ernest Hilbert


***


The Catches

I have a home I don’t like        to go home to.
Stupid people have placed a ban       on stupid.

They’ve all slowed down to savor        what they missed.
What you wished for        is pretty much what happened.

She has amassed important       memories.
He fought so long      he lost the sense of fighting.

What revelations have come         have come too soon.
Despite large changes       nothing much has happened.

I have no memory       of that conversation.
Inside the seed the full-grown flower       is wilting.

Finally we can see over         the falls.
My opposite is not     your opposite.

Of the five women        each one had her reasons.
The mathematician disproved         his own proof.

I love the stars        but can’t name hardly any.
Let’s say for instance        this is what we said.

–David Yezzi

I.

a gist (of origin) to say born Oaklandia on 6.24.01

laterchild of deserts

“the dying gasps of the old West”

til in Tucson

Benson (three hundred people and eleven saloons)

&   @     Albuquerque

in nights, long freight trains passingantiphonal thensteam whistle 60 miles yonder

small garden : Phoenix : rising, then falling

books in Mandarin(parents who lost their missionary zeal)

trips to Kansas City & musical studies & jobs as porters

but at 14, he knew that it was                    SOUND

II.

what early music?

hymns
Chinese lullabies
Yaqui Indian puberty rituals
Hebrew chants
Edison cylinder records
Okie songs(working the vineyards)

took a trashing from proper musical lessons in Los Angeles but

no
deep
&
abiding
tie

mother struck dead by a streetcar

father dead a couple of yrs


age 20 / alone from there on and ever

this young metropolis and trips to Philharmonic hall

triumphant       lovea roll/hay roll withlost Ramon Novarro(murdered by two hustlers four decades later)

always a love for the body

III.

with parts

p-a-r-t-c-h

study : history of tone

fifty-three tone system proposed          by the Chinese in the first centuryby Nicolas Mercator in the 17^th

- microtonal mishaps in the west -

as if to say

just-intonational scales





then to New Orleans and New York and London and Malta

a return to

Li Po verse

on adapted viola

where do you live?

off a city street and ten thousand houses among drooping willows


1930-1947 singing Biblical passages, hitch-hiker transcripts.

Why all the trouble?

MUSIC

“a language in itself”

IV.

Greek &
Noh
drama,


Japanese
kabuki


Mummer’s
plays


CREATION


dramas containing music, dance, mime, shouting, whistling, and slapstick




so early (to have known) so late (to have been discovered to have known)

V.

back from San Joaquin

(keeping music in hobo bundle)

at Big Surcoast work campmet Jean Varda

an understanding, as if to say we’re in    synchronysynchromyfor painters


always loving, loving, loving, loving(men)

VI. BITTER MUSIC (DEPRESSION ERA SUITE)

- alpha -

convict camps, coast of magnificentdescend-ings

CALIdown


black mountain to coast(line)every starrywhiten
ed
ridge

clasp
coast roadin moves northand east

return south to

-  beta -

warm (to) sleeping bagPablo’s soup in handwillowed sandsriver’sideentihillion stars

“Why wander?”

gone away for-everin the eternity of infinity

& thumb my nose at tomorrow

- gamma -

Slate’s hot springs

long sincedead

an ownership                         a Bright Angel leads to the baths

on board to Big Creek (wink, wink)

evening campfire, San Simonat Cone Peak

- delta -

at Ojai dry leaved pepper tree bodyriddled white snaked waterin the blacknessan inky o-high oaka beauty of hands stroke

VII.

August beach, ocean breath


Mount Diablo
sinking beneath the horizon

stay & move

to pass peak

with men

food and flops and “well-made chaps”

yes yesall thisbrazen talk

by creeks and woodsheds and more along side the highway

VIII.

to make:

“U.S. Highball,” hobo trip with music



going East mister? (plucked)

Freeze another night tonight

Stay out of Denver

It moves back and forth

Is that blanket big enough for two?

Chicago, Chicago, Chicago




end at Sparks division yards

IX.

in                 red-wood

groves of

euca-lypt

after several durations at Ithaca and Madison

for isolation, interview

founded his instrument workshop


“a philosophical man seduced into carpentry”

river camperwoodworker

“an acoustical ardor and a conceptual fervor”


tuning: total gambit of dissonance and consonance

X.

Orchestra at Gualala:


a. zymo-xyl“exercise in hither and thither aesthesia”with kettletop, oak block, on hubcap, wine and booze bottles


b. Gourd Tree Gongtwelve bells (exotic fruit) on eucalypt bar& piece of aircraft bomber


c. Mazda Marimbagod of light sounds like the percolations of a coffee pot


d. Spoils of Warsseven brass artillery casings hanging here “instead ofshredding young men’s bodies on the battle field”


e. Cloud-Chamber Bowlschemical-solution jars from the university’s radiation lab

XI.

activation of investigation and interventions with Yeats

and enticement



HP: “I have read his prefaces—I love his prefaces, incidentally.”

WBY: “A California musician called a few days ago and is coming
again tomorrow. He is working on the relation between words and
music…. He speaks to this instrument.”

HP: “The minute I brought out my viola and sang, Yeats just loved it.
He’s not one for theory.”


the taking of Oedipus an opera written.

happily written here, the land of no there there.

XII.

compelled by kithara


Partch built a great lyre of 72 strings.


Orpheus’s lyre had three stings.


Timotheus (446-357 BC), who dared to expand the scale on the Kithara by
adding four strings to the eight approved of by Pythagoras was driven out of
Sparta forever.


“These days, when someone does something different, they ignore him to death.”

XIII.

intoned dialogue god, then help us assemble


by way of chorus

Oh— Oh— Oh— Ah— Ah— Ah—


in way of supplicant’s branches

with such cries of sorrow

good news of lights, curtains


suffering in homeless sea, thunder, lightning, lost to

as “death himself is dead”

Tiresias, presented by spokesman,regales Creon


anger of mattering, basest of men,a fillingthis rageagainstevidence  ofproof?

a tumult of iron, prophets forgotten

Oh- Oh-                      Lo-       Oh-      Lo- Oh-


where is Bold Oedipus?

(quick sketches by Lebrun, Baskin, Kolwitz)




appointed end, free from                     pain

XIV.

euphoric

asidewarehousedescendingnarrowstairway

in scene six from 1956

baroque leaps



“Anyone can dream of bringing control to a Sausalito love affair.”



but only the witch can accomplish it.

XV.

back from Urbana:



Ancient Chorus in “Revelation in the Courthouse Park”

this palacealights to be seen by

piccolo

transient

(Dionysus, Pentheus, Agave, Cadmus,Tiresias, Guard, Herdsmen, and Chorus)

Greek melodrama arrived inrural Illinois

kithara & instruments





here, on the seventh day,

petals

fell on

Petaluma



in voiceless score

XVI.

west Los Angeles boulevard:


chromelodean, counts six 2/1 harmonium


collapseda monophony: the might of the HUMAN e-a-r


the breeze as perceived by Marin Mersenne, on the throat.

equivocation of the klang

in components of tone

in ratios,cyclesin intervals,immediacyin frequenciessystemsin procedures,limits


tasks to Pasadena Museum


All to be tasked by “Delusions’ Fury,” chance dramas on stage.




HP:   I would choose to be anonymous. Who cares who wrote it? Who cares what the name was?

XVII.

The Dreamer that Remains

Viet’s time

soul’s chance, five decades apart, was Stephen Pouliot


“turn left on Orpheus Drive, left on Sunset”in this small town

Pacific, a sexy beach

where, to find

PeaceLove

stairway’s chant


volcanic Harry: looking down, laughing

Etruscan touchstone

XVIII.

how to see him, on film, all too late


kimono purplePartch seesa loss of rose petal jama harmonic convergence




in this study for loving (underwritten by Betty Freeman):

in red/yellow/pale blue tank tops & jeans

a set of constructions to hold beautiful boysin floating atmosphere of whiteat San Diego State




“tongue must couple with the cavity or there’s no resonant tone. yes, this is sexy.”

XIX.

and with Lou Harrison

stackside, found each other in the SF public library

clearing house for books, for s-x years

to speak to each other.mentorship. of generosity. and. of knowing.


teased about inflexibility of his “systems”

hosted in redwood park

XX.

1974: back again: Genesis of Music springs from the Dreamers creation.

“Note: the widely current practice of using the word note to indicate amusical sound, or pitch, is not followed in this work.”



final interview after interview, lost road, the sign ever propped before


generation of youth

LISTEN TO THAT


pied piper

red-lamped night

shaded Socrates



looking out, a letter to the world, in this enclosure.






“I went outside. I’m still going outside.”













Stephen Motika is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009) and the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrival and At Mono (2007) and In the Madrones (2011). His first book, Western Practice, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2012. Recent work has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Eleven Eleven, The Boog City Reader 4, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. A 2010-2011 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident, he is the program director at Poets House and the publisher of Nightboat Books.

clip around a rock, the redwing’s dive above
stove-in banks of smoking trash, dark earth’s plunge

to underworlds where men still crouch to free
the stone whose flesh is flame, whose bone

is time, whose ghostly ash the rains
wash down into the pool from which,

blue in the owl-annotated woods past town
at dawn, deer pick their way to drink?



≈


Spectral fog along a mountain interstate
someplace between the solid world we left and these
gauzed altitudes where we have come to live,

a convoy of trucks ahead so it’s not until we nearly drive
right through them that we heel the brake and, swerving,
miss a mother goose walking her unfledged flock
across the median and straight into our lane.

We miss, but in the mirror watch the rigs behind
bear down and scatter them
easily as leaves, or feathers, into the oncoming lights.



≈


Dear O.,

Halfway between Pixburgh and Wheeling the historic college preens. Nearby, neon signsoutside the Eagle’s Aery — a club we’ve since learned welcomes only whites — lend each earlier-

falling dusk a noirish tone we relish as a counterweight to the general I ♥ Jesus atmosphere.
Last week in class, a good student confidently remarked that men possess one fewer

rib than women. I was so flustered I didn’t think of asking him to count. When a neighboring
college dean interviewed my husband and, halfway through, urged him to pray,

Tony deflected by quoting Donne. He got the job anyway, but sneaks on and off campus,
truant-like, afraid of invitations to kneel. The only imaginably gay man we’ve met is closeted,

or rather, chiffarobed. He runs the one cafe, mixing arsenic-and-old-lace décor with blasts of
urban hip,his hyper-foamed, syrup-sweetened lattés oozing on the doilied counter.

We’ve rented an old tycoon’s Victorian, built during the boom in glass. The walls are bird’s eye
maple.Even in winter we have to squint through a blind of trees to see the poorer streets.



≈


Small towns in mining country, everyone seems a little
off somehow, the damage often clear but slight:
missing fingers, a limp. In others, deeper harm emerges
through a slack mouth or gaze trained on sights beyond.
Christian fellowship is advertised, though churches
outnumber visible occupants.
When we park and walk through,the few stare like we came from the moon
and our own oddness quivers up
coldly magnetized, the way iron oxide
threaded through a rock will make a compass needle shake.



≈


Dog walk. Ahead the path grows over, lightly breeze-blown,
margins illuminated by the trembling hand of a
novice monk. Mining kills the water, yet horror vacui
drives nature still, as it drove rows of cowled shoulders
bent in the scriptorium to fill the vellum’s flank
with hatchings of azure and orpiment.

For Matins, paint the redwing blackbirds’
epaulets ablaze in preened display, the marsh-side trees
a loggia from which the flocking aristocracy
drop alms of song onto your path.



≈


First day of hunting season? Show a movie, advises my chair.
Half your kids won’t be there. Meanwhile, some ancient protein in Tony’s DNA,
long-couched, flares its nostrils at the cave’s mouth and sniffs the air.

Borrowed, an uncle’s camo jacket. Pants patterned in Leafy Oak
Breakup, bought. For masking human scent, urine from an estrous doe,
metallic, armpit-rich, almost a rasp on the back of the tongue,

purchased under the brand name Still Steamin’. Topo maps. Tarp.
Binoculars. His father’s bow, restrung, waiting in a case the same
size as his guitar. The arrow points he packs the night before

will burst on impact into five-bladed stars.



≈


Hiroshige, a minor bureaucrat in the shogun’s retinue,
charged with delivering a gift horse to the emperor,
traveled the Tokaido road in 1832, sketching views
he later printed from woodblocks — simple images
of lumbermen guiding their logs along the river
or tax collectors, stopped at the Futagawa teahouse,
entertained by geishas. His prints translate the world
to floating dream with little fuss. Pilgrims ford streams
with the aid of loinclothed bearers, and women hold parasols
half-shut to shelter their horsehair wigs from snow.



≈


In early snow a hunter knelt by the carcass
of a whitetail buck and looked again into its barely
clouded eye. What he watched receding in the pupil

that had locked on his and held him still a full
three beats before he loosed the arrow, he would not tell.
Now the deer was a winter’s meat.

When he came from cleaning it to warm his hands
and kissed me, I couldn’t recognize his smell.
Like the bride in the folktale, I woke to find

I had married the forest, married the deer.



≈


And if there were a Hiroshige of the mill towns?
The visions closest to his clarity are the postcards one student
brings me from an antiques mall, printed when tourists came
frequently enough to warrant souvenirs of local sights. So I own
snapshots of Mingo Bridge and Monongahela
tinted in aqueous pastel. The block prints are timeless;
even if the artist never saw such scenes, his images
conjure an eternal world. But photographs are full of time.
Merciless smiling shadows of the lost, the last Mill Ball Team
before Pittsburgh fell to the flood of Japanese steel.



≈


Oxidized kiln skins. Quanta of junked glass.
How many autumns of sumac

rusting beside the tipple and the strip mall’s parking lot
before this halflife, also, passes?

Mine shut. Residents gone. For thirty years
glance seams below the town have burned,

sulfur venting through rents in the tar,
roads buckling and sunk in this Flegrea

where steel-hooved industry breached the crust
dividing upper world from under.



≈


[Quecreek mine accident, 2002]

Could you die each day and descend to that black realm
borne under on the bier of the mantrip?
And there eat oily jewels of sunlight
trapped in trees that fossilized to coal?

These are the negatives of stars, for which
men give their breath.

Waiting in the air abovethe flooded mine, imagination is an awful tool.

Rise Lazarus, rise Christus, rise
as in old myths the daughter returns and life
blooms from under the earth in a rush of water.



≈


After single-point perspective, I want omniscient sight.

Not just the news camera’s flash outside a drowned shaft,
but the crush of the miner’s pick breaching
the unmapped well, and water’s vision winking out his light.

What a coal seam sees with its legion black eyes.

The merchants, matrons, dogs, and gladiators buried at Pompeii
left only their ash-filled shadows.

But painted near them on a tufa wall
the goddess Flora turns, Flegrea

greening again below her heel.



≈


[Photo, 1901]

White man in blackfaceof coal. Among a blackface crew. A mile below surfaces where he

might elbow a nigger offsidewalks. Or not? Too new yet to muscle into his stratum in the shifting

tectonics of hunkies, dagoes, kikes? Bodiessteeraged from cabbage-water towns where mustaches were the only

flourishing concern. No middle passage but slops, ratseating the straps off the baby’s shoes. All cats look the same in the dark

pit, the newcomer says in histongue that sounds to the shift crew like a cat being skinned.



≈


Artless demi-creature, at eighteen I’d sport with boys
then plump my pillows, smooth the shamefaced teddy bears.

Now when my students file in wearing tee-shirts printed with kittens
or Pooh clutching his honeypot,

cropped to bare their navel rings, they evoke
that last grab at girlhood, the threshold where

toothy blowjobs overlap homesick devotion to toys.
How old was Flora when the dark god tore her

from her meadow? The students chatter, flutter, settle, turning
their cell phones off and their pages to Ovid.



≈


Long before it lent its name to the bacteria we’re warned might be weaponized

Before Pittsburgh’s reek made it hell with the lid off (though some locals liked

joking that its artificial darkness spared them from sun’s glare)           When airborne,

rainborne sulfurs hadn’t begun licking holes in the marble acanthus on public libraries

yet-to-be-endowed by Carnegie and Frick         Earlier than the railways giving Londoners

the habit of carrying black umbrellas against its soot         Before Star Chamber convened

to hear complaints against the dregs of many counties, daillie drunkards flooding

Newcastle to work the mines           Or the narrow flues demanding chimney sweeps

no bigger than a child          Before canaries            Before pit ponies           Before pits

When the Dance of Death had not yet kicked

high its heels through Restoration smog      (the Dance’s steps: Piles, Planet,

Rising of the lights, one ailment simply called Mother, all worsened by

smoaky air where babes reeled and spun and perisht fast)         Earlier than

the London medico who wrote of buboes swelling hot until like carbuncles

of sea-coal they wept necrotic matter            Even before the Venerable Bede

observed the smoke of fired jet-stones noxious and useful in routing snakes

Ovid’s fellow citizens prized coal’s scintilla when faceted and set with gems

as on this amulet of glance worn for fertile marriage by a girl no older

than you, my dears, whose eyes in her funeral portrait burn



≈


Some Adam, hopeful or huckstering or ironic,
seeing hills behind the tipple smoked in greenery
named this patch town Muse. Its economy
leans today on auto shops and taxidermy.

All, sayeth the Lord on the Baptist church marquee, is vanity.

If you see rainbows in your water glass, don’t drink,
our neighbor warns. Your well’s leaching gasoline.
On Sundays in service the faithful forsake
this place for Beulah Land, but love it, swallow its poison,

and won’t willingly leave it for any place but heaven.



≈


To live where beauty batters your heart while poverties
bruise your mind, you must….what? From books I mined no answer.

So, to stop asking, I ran, hammering my bones each afternoon
against the hills. Caterpillars tented the sumacs

like silicotic lungs and my own breath burned from climbing
above pleated rows of houses aproned by church yards

sewn with the small gray pockets of graves.
We are all compacting into coal. I’d thought great weight

pressed coal to diamond, but I was wrong. It was common
stone I was hardening into as the months bore down.



≈


[Henry Clay Frick, 1849-1919]

Born in the springhouse footing his grandfather’s land,
this measle wouldn’t have survived a week
without nurse’s mustard poultice on his belly
every time he screeched. Reaching boyhood, he thrived
on hot dreams of doubling the old man’s wealth.

On cold cash borrowed against his father’s farm
he bought his first coal field. Barely of age, he bartered
his health and almost lost, but savored challenge,
made risk his meat. Learned not to take no for an answer.
Married. Built a manor. Buried his favorite daughter.



≈


[1862]

In my grandfather’s house there are many mansions
and an ottoman with legs cut from a deer.

Down to cloven hooves the ankles spindle.
It crouches, a satyr’s cushion, waiting to scamper,

when he whistles, to his heel.
On it I hunch reading Thucydides. Of gods

we believe and of men we know — the Athenian
boldness swells my throat — their nature decrees

wherever they can rule, they will. I rule grandfather.
Suppliant bellies offered, his dogs curl at my feet.



≈


Figures are the two things he knows best,
drawings of the body and arithmetic.
He marries them on his money
where a gleaning woman and a miner with a pick
work above the legend

H.C. FRICK & COMPANY
DUE BEARER    ONE DOLLAR    IN GOODS

AT OUR STORE
BROADFORD, 1874

The scrip’s green grays the bearer’s hand.



≈


[Alexander Berkman, anarchist]

My tongue is thick, but like Caliban I’ve learned
the master’s language well enough to curse.

Damned if we’ll die servants of a king
bloated on a throne of smoke; damned if we’ll mine
his empire, crouched below the earth to pluck
these sulfurous nuts he roasts at night.

He boasts of freeing sunlight, trapped inside each fossil tree
whose leaves drank in the day before it turned to stone.

Flame, he says, is that spirit’s jubilation.

I’ll kill him when we’re alone.



≈


[July 6, 1892: The Homestead Strike]

The river at Pittsburgh seemed to Berkman
like a starved worker stretching his arms toward monsters
belching fire into the giant hive.

So Frick, the monster-king, must die.

But all Berkman’s sense of justice — plus three bullets,
much stabbing, and a bomb clenched in his teeth — failed.
While the weeping anarchist was led from the office
Frick dabbed his wounds and went on signing deeds.

Shoot to kill, Frick ordered strikebreakers. And thrived,
buying mines and European art the city’s soot attacked.



≈


[Calendar page, Book of Hours, 15th c., Frick collection]

Illustrating March, two men have worked their arms stiff
swinging pruning hooks for six centuries in this
vineyard on a hill. They cannot read the book
where the painter has made them pastoral marginalia
for a parade of nobles entering the season,
page left. An ounce of the powdered lapis bluing
the constellations above them is rarer, nearly, than peace.
The painter, not knowing he has only a half-wheel of the zodiac
left before plague fells him, has spent hours picking out
the men’s limbs in lampblack with a licked brush.



≈


[The Homestead Works, 1881-1986]

Rumor says, when a man fell into a ladle of molten steel
the foreman ordered that ingot set in a corner of the yard.
Later when they got busy again, he’d have it reheated,
rolled, and shipped. Homestead men annealed to beams. Beams
girded the country. From the Chrysler Building to the bridge at Oakland Bay,
how many hours to build the twentieth century?

Their tale-tall hero was a mule like them: Joe Magarac,
big as a smokestack, drank hot metal for soup and squeezed slab
into rail through his fingers. To save the failing works, he fired
himself to vapor tears in the Bessemer furnace.



≈


Sadness, a gently purgatorial Sunday sadness.
Is it because there’s no mail to distract me
from my surroundings or myself? From meditating
whether our sweet neighbor’s vision of how we’ll pass
eternity at the picnic of evangelical afterlife
counts as penance when I’m obliged to listen?

Let the saved greet their own salvation.
The church-goers in church. The grass-goers
chewing a blade as they lie on their backs,
so still a hawk circles, considering.



≈


Look, you haven’t been exiled here, so don’t get all sniffy,
Professor. Sure, Ovid’s Rome seems more familiar,

his Tomis even, where the poet finally admits,
writing in their barbaric tongue, that he’s grown fond

of his neighbors. But home is where your work is, and if it comes
graced by a plate of funnel cake, say thank you.

Get your nose out of the book awhile. You’ll never quite fit,
but you can learn to paddle a canoe, spot deer in a stand of brush,

and when you turn venison into good red sauce, the locals
take seconds and see you’re not a total loss.



≈


Grief in its local dress is piercing yet picturesque.
Here lies Zarinda Fainter, Young Mother,
and at her side five miniature blank slates. One by one
unhoused too soon, or all erased in a sole fell swoop?
A winged death’s-head wipes clean her name.

Often the stones say so little that I am drawn
by silence to author their stories. In our second year
I learn to gather morels by the bed of my best tragedy,
the minister’s brontophobic daughter who,
fleeing raindrops, fell down a well and drowned.



≈


Pumiced by dust, a miner’s lungs are frailer
than the antique player piano roll I find
coffined in the Victorian parlor’s pomp. Unscrolled,
The Monongahela Nocturne spreads its stigmata
of notes. Breaker boys dividing culm from coal
barehanded in the mills the year this house was built
suffered red tips when sulfur gnawed their fingers raw.
My fingers trace where the cylinder bit
each punched hole, translating, triggering the piano’s
proper keys. So emptiness began this song.



≈


The first temple was a grove of trees
hung with sacrificial skulls. The gods praised there
were beautiful and wild, and often took the form of animals.

Our neighbor never spoke of this,
but a pair of mounted turkey cocks,
an elk’s jaw, and a twelve-point whitetail rack
crammed the bedroom where he died.

Silent, he was welcomed back to the church.

After the funeral we built a fire in his sodden field
and sent his kills to honor him in smoke.



≈


[whispered into smoke]

Overhead the caravansaries of stars
light their revolving lamps to welcome you
as they greeted your teacher, Ptolemy.

The spring Crab scuttles the ecliptic west,
stretching a claw to the Water Serpent’s head.
In its belly, the Beehive Cluster hums with young
stars seeded from hydrogen and dust.
You lovedinsisting your DNA was engineered like that,
in space, and we knew the fields were just
your pied-à-terre, the air your truer habitat.



≈


Before the leaves flesh out in spring, a hunter follows
deer trails lacing the woods, pokes at scat, scratches
at scrapes, and daily leans a few more blowdown limbs
together for a blind.

Days lengthen.Chlorophyll draws sunlight into stems.
New vines tendril over, then blanket the blind.

At dusk on the meadow’s edge a doe raises her head
from rampant green to watch a passing fox.

And the moon, white on long grass, makes the hunter
impatient for dawns of frost, the owl’s call.



≈


Monongahela, my river where bluffs fall down to the water,
though King Coal’s steamed west and steel has folded,
you are still too freighted with commerce to canoe.

But you may school us yet in metamorphoses, for all
your northward-flowing length, where for years arterial
oxide waters flamed, your banks this summer blaze green.

Below the locks we paddle your tributary.

When a kingfisher dives, Tony masters his surprise, tucks us
neatly into an eddy turn to watch its plummeting refrain,
and as we hang mid-stream the redwings clamor on the bank.



≈


Lungs are frailer, too, than a Book of Hours’ vellum page
given its tooth for ink six hundred years ago
with a pounce of ashes. Vita brevis,

the calf bawled in the yard. The birds in the bush
rustled till their limed feet burned, their bones
charred and ground to whiten the calf’s singed hide.

The monks’ calligraphy, Flora frescoed on the villa walls,
aquarelles of the river’s span at night below
a multitude of stars. How sharply they shine, ars longa, ars longa,

painted fires lighting the painted water.



≈


Not of the diamond’s water, this flame.
Not rich, not pure, not rare.

A common stone, burning, by which I’ve lived.
A sulfured smutch, a sputtering match.

Not diamond, but ancient
sunlight through a leaf

unsheathed from rock by the bare
fingers of a boy.

Truth is, these are his bones.

I’ve gnawed them to a skeleton of song.



≈


Far above our earthly woods, our earthly waters,
springs the river Eridanus from Achernar, star
of the first magnitude. Then heaven’s flume of tears
trickles north to where I drink it, iced,
from my telescope’s glass. In its shallows,
splashed by his hounds, Orion dabbles his hucklebones.
Orion the Hunter, the ancients named him. But here
winter dark is no game. It’s a coal seam through rock.
So I call him Orion the Miner, pick and shovel in hand,
the three stars at his belt a hammer, a pail, a lamp.



≈


[Monongahela Nocturne]

Indian Summer burned two weeks before the weather
finally turned, and tonight acorns dropped, popping, in fog. Now the rain
moves over, making oaks rattle their leaves with slaking, bringing
water’s course to the schoolyard and the narrow glen
bedded with whitetails, to the road, the track, the shotgun
shacks, to the pool of tailings dabbled by ducks,

and when it leaves us at midnight, it leaves rinsed stars
trembling like notes in the nocturne: Diamond above me,
diamond below, diamond at all four corners,
anthracite night, and carbon the body of miners.

V. Penelope Pelizzon’s Nostos (Ohio University Press, 2000) won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. She is also co-author of Tabloid, Inc: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives (Ohio State University Press, 2010), a study of the relations among sensation journalism, photography, and film between 1927-1958. Her poems and essays have appeared widely.

This is the beginning of talking to you: deer in the yard. Every window in the house to see. The woman is out walking the dog. The man at night.

All winter I saw the house on Cedar and its dilapidated twin, hidden by cypress. What I wanted first was solid and red but until I saw them both it wasn’t choosing. Then it was my blindness for one as the other hanging. I could almost see my pattern in the snow.

Snow is right: slowing sight way down so our dog can walk us in. Her stepping clears us to each other. If it snowed all night the neighborhood is buried, awake. We go between two streets into the clutching trees and I lose her for a second.

A boy we know lights up inside his house every time he hears the garbage truck. He sees the man swoop down, an arm at the curb. He sees his own house from the outside. He tells his mother he wants to be the garbage man when he grows up. This is Will: soon he will be almost too fast for us to see. For now he’s inside at home or at Danya’s.

Where it’s not even knowledge about others. Maybe one or two facts. The woman who brings the mail in her truck: she waves or says something about I like that dog. I get to keep her, waving as she sifts for our house and our name.

*

Then in the same month the grass under the snow lightens and parts the darkest version of where we went quiet, driving to the store.

The housewives on television gather in one of their houses to receive racks of clothes. They try talking nice. Paul and I eat pizza, anxious for the moment when they turn to the camera. How they camera-speak is mean and approximate to what they say to each other as they fly through the clothes. I saw a hawk build her nest and Ingrid waited with me, sniffed around. A sediment of ice went in with us, cracked the grass where I wore snowshoes, boots with teeth. Some of the housewives are nice to the camera then this gets boring. Someone making the show has to sharpen a nice one or get one to enlarge herself in insecurity over another.

When I get the mean woman at the checkout at Oleson’s Paul says think of how long they’re standing on their feet.  They stand all day: he’s right. Then I also think there must be a place in their minds to float. One of them always smiles and I want to ask how it happened, if it’s the resin of some kind of work or was it born in her? My parents have money from my mother’s parents, and their parents before, who went in for railroads and oil. While my father’s father was the millwright, the one watching as if it would be endless—steel tubes needed from the #7 mill. Where my towheaded father started and my mother in a pinafore dress are part of the river valley transported where they happened to connect. And here. The phrase came from my father’s father: back of the hand. From my mother and my father how they set up, their time and its textures extended. When I have money worries, I pursue money, then there’s some don’t worry conveyed. The woman at Oleson’s in this, all the women there and the swiping plastic card with us. What could I make within their care.

*

There was a spider hanging, stricken in its nest or another’s, when we first arrived. It was impossible to strike it out, about to try for work in the town. A spider makes a vulnerable portion to life. This one was far out in the path. As if we weren’t so exposed, we went out, stayed inside, read. Mornings I used coffee to write poems in the house.

Living in a new town north of everywhere—at first, like going out for reading. Then Paul got a substitute teaching job at the high school when the Spanish teacher started her maternity leave. I would go walking with her along Pabeshan. The lake tusked in its ice. At lunch, Paul would sit in the faculty lounge and come home with ideas about them. We would drive out for beers in Bellaire, define each other, play music, lose the best way home.

At a certain point in every walk Ingrid would snag a branch to feel her own bad teeth. Then, turning the corner onto our drive, she’d skim into the banked snow. Swimming, I would yell, falsetto, swim: there isn’t much except how to be inside where our acts are deliberate, burning, and cause no one else pain.

*

The spider’s web stretched available along yet indirect to the path. In all the images I returned to it. Sunlight fixed and a dune rising to our faces scratched with pine. I called it the moon. The spider’s body left in. It’s almost too random to bear, how I meet you, how you travel here.

If you travel here in summer the town will turn to art shows. The same one, nearly every other week. Someone makes and plots all winter how she will get the summer people buying. Mostly cottage or sailboat paintings. I worked on my poems then sent them to places I could find on the internet, journals akin and apart to where I was. We go looking into these places. To judge. Then we turn on the radio and hear about the Green Beret who launched himself outside of us, now his younger brother joining up. Their parents in which house? Consistently, a drone we don’t hear. Our drone.

Will you read on? For my tension, in your own interconnectedness. The deer caught up in the way I walked: woman with the dog, woman with the man, man with the dog, fawn in the yard, two, learning to walk. Their travel (seeing them) is listening.




****

When my mother gets to the house her mother is dying upstairs. She runs a bath for her. Why has no one clipped her nails? They clipped the hook in the tailbone where my neck hooked under the lake. Don’t touch me here. This is when the doula Mara turns Paul outside of me to say it’s time. Call Kristen now. Kristen is here in the dark with her stethoscope listening to him in my hips. She walks me back to the bathroom to the bed to the floor where we try dropping myself to help him down.

Then it breaks.

She takes the stethoscope out again to hear his heart. Time. Then the squat then the bed, hot. Paul scalded in me. Hot, wrote my friend Jennifer, hot, bomb, hot. I can’t shut Mara up: again, push, yes, this one, again. Kristen in her eyes my thought. Paul. The stink and winter outside.

Kristen looking at Paul: how do we turn the heat up this isn’t fine and Paul running up to the box. Mara cheering shut up. Making Paul tea. It should have happened now? Paul updating into the phone shut up. Apple juice from a straw. Our dog under the table her bones heaped. Sip. What hours are. Now? Someone’s afraid.

Someone in the room’s afraid. Kristen and Mara reading each other and Paul then I’m pathetic. Then hope. Then another dim revolting wave. I can’t animal I tell Kristen when she’s an eye. She knows he’s lodged. I don’t know or leave it says the tide. She’s reading me stay here okay.

This is when there’s no one below. I can hear them. Dry and reading theirs to sleep. I don’t have to feel too far to prick the fear around us hours and hours. This baby’s coming. He’s not. I can see his hair says Mara. Then Kristen uses her fingers. Catheter. (When?) Wait don’t push now.

I’m supposed to use the wave but it’s not right. He’s already made, can I go to sleep says my face into Kristen’s and she lets me have this one cold drop. Don’t mean it again or you’ll be fire. Push. Yes. I have to smear you Mara. There’s no one else in the storm or the house.

I’m going to break your tea bone neck. Then Paul’s voice. Look. Look now. His brain falling out his brain between me now his shoulders then Kristen’s on me suctioning out his nostrils mouth on his mouth. The placenta foals. We’re this? Then tucked on me his mouth he’s so. He’s so.

****

I’ll try for the silence in my family. My father and his dad on a porch in Pennsylvania, making ice cream. They’re bent and caught in the picture with neighbors gathered around a box. Their shirts tucked. My father has a wide smile toward this going on. There’s a man down the street. The way this photograph does not include him makes me go to my dad where he tells me about seeing the man, who was dropped down the stairs as a baby, out walking in snow. Hello, Mike. My dad to him where I am small.

Snow never fell where I was. People would ask my sisters and me if we’d ever seen it, be excited for us at this loss. I would get confused: I think I did see? Once we drove up north with snow in mind: how in its own darkness flakes started, the dry pine needles right before, how one could want to curl up or know about deer bedding down. Or have the words. “Have you ever seen snow?” I would look into a face to find room for something already there: another question: are we together where we don’t have to be moving forward? My father drawn hard in his older brother Pete. Pete breaking off the porch to buy Mike some candy. Like someone belonging somewhere else.

I couldn’t get too close to thinking about it without falling everywhere. Then I had other places, ones to hold closer if I could close around. We moved when I was twelve.  When we landed, the palm trees slashed across the airport lights. It took some looking before knowing they were made to stand it. I could be at my new school where “popolo” meant black. I could learn how this was closest to the Filipino kids, the darkest ones, or jokes about them, or later I could hear a respect pocked in. But this took too much time. One morning the house next door was gone. The next, a haole family moving in. Brighter than us—was I feeling this by then? We opened the door and their three or four kids, the boy holding back, the eldest daughter, girls with the right hair. How I went to sap for a few days. We were lining up in them trying to figure who was in grade what. Then one of them asked if we knew Jesus. My sister fell one morning in the garage and I saw my mom rush, my dad, and I could feel the tight pack of air we took for each other down the road to the hole where the tourists watched the result: air-froth splattering the rock bitten by air and salt. The repetition.

In the photograph where my dad is a young man kneeling to help they haven’t cranked the box for making ice cream yet. My grandfather is a surprise: skeletal almost like he was in the chair except here, crisp clothes. A hat. Where are the women? My son’s in my lap. I’m reading to him the book he goes for before he goes to sleep. The white noise swirls. When we get to the page where the bunny’s in the corner with dandelions or drift: there he is. Where he’s been and he wasn’t before. We read. I mean we trace him to us.

****

Most of it was planned: rows of us to the teacher. The playground. The synagogue next door. Rebecca was wild for me or anyone. She had green eyes. Reina was her best friend; Reina was my best friend but there was something in me wanting to see what would drown. When I shoved my younger sister she would bite. Janie or Cara shoved me down in the pool. Janie’s parents had a black pool like a cave made wrong on purpose.

There was a cluster of us always there, each year, for anyone walking in: writing our name and grade and address. After we were done someone took our stack and froze each card with us inside a balloon. We stood on the field and watched them lift. An ocean washing up in me for another writing back. Most of us had started in the room where she would dim the room and we would go quiet for her on our mats. There was a big day of sending our balloons up and not being able to keep it.

It didn’t stop. One year on the news they said the plastic rings linking all the soda cans together were strangling turtles or fish. Beth P. heard from someone who found her card, or she won something when I thought I had? Her mother was divorced. I would say ‘fuck’ and play with it in my mouth then wonder if I could spit it all day and be the same person if I never slipped at home.

They still move with each other in my mind. All of us and the two sets of twins—how they would separate or not depending on something they didn’t need to express. My mother stayed connected to some of their mothers when we moved. Years passed. I found things out: Joe had trouble with drugs. Cara was a dancer. Adam (did you know him) was dead. I remembered his best friend to him. Reina screaming Why are you lying? A panic in me like where it drew a cube in math around where I could be called.

Coincident to each other, we belonged. In the field we set off our balloons. The splitting mass, groups, then ones by threes and twos, then ones higher, still not solitary where we could see or begin to stop: our heads raised, one lost oneself soon. When I type in one of the more unusual names from my class she’s there. In her public list of friends are more. One has photographs she’s posted and left open—she looks tired and holds, smiling, three kids. In another she’s rested, the same smile, her hand on a mantle in rows of photographs she’s picked. She lives there. The valley where I entered too.

****

Once I entered, I couldn’t explain. To be employed is to parse anything else. He was kind. I had a part. During the hours at my desk in midtown my father read mysteries in his chair and looked up when a deer stepped in absent to where I was.

The bookeeper’s desk was next to mine. At first a smile for me shook out. She would move and they tensed. Someone took me aside: don’t take her too hard. At first her smiles then swipes at me about the girl who had my position before. The boss went between us, careful, struck my sentences, asked for more. After a few months summer landed and he left Fridays smiling for his Onteora house.

I thought I had her. Where she unwrapped a sandwich every day her grown son on the phone. They had a private weather. She let me know his name. Then her notes on my desk in the morning: did you do this, Elaine? Elaine, what’s this. Then scratch. Then asking me to answer and not answer the phone. After my last stanza, my teacher wrote “So what?” in red. There was no way back. Where did I think I was? A reader isn’t home. It’s warm where I am, he was saying, I have my ones to love.

The boss said please just work it out. His face watered to her happening like this again and before. I thought maybe she owned someone sunken in him then—where I couldn’t begin to matter she was. When the planes hit downtown he had helped her down the stairs. The whole office helped. When I went to talk to her she said not now.

Everyone dragged. She set a pocket gargoyle face-out on her desk. I tried to be there as slivered and expansive somewhere else. Then why. I looked up ‘Onteora’ from my room in Queens. There was Twain, a summer house. Ms. Wheeler in a nearby chair. Children running. A view, a way to net and release any bitter thought. Twain looking hard to me then. If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.












Elaine Bleakney’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She lives in Florida and serves as At Length’s art editor.






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Option 3
–Rachel Zucker

is not always an option. Particularly if one has not read all of Austen, all of Wharton, all of one’s favorite author. Or, if one admits to sometimes losing interest.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the novel my husband had recommended. It seemed to me beautifully written but a story I’d read or heard or watched before. Not that I usually mind hearing the same story told twice.

One must be invited and even then interviewed and this does not go smoothly.

But, twins in love with the same person? Maybe I was just out of practice with novels. It wasn’t as good as the blurbs proclaimed.

Honesty, in any case, not an asset.

This is the first page of The Book of Nothing; for proof, see the cover where I wrote: “The Book of Nothing.”

One is not one of five invited to participate in Option 3. This rejection results in a life of productivity and other characteristic dilemmas.

Yesterday I wanted to begin writing a poem. The title was going to be “Facebook or the End of Espionage.” The first line: “They already know all about you.”

One said, “It takes a long time to recover from an Ivy League education.”

By “yesterday” I might mean last year. This is a characteristic problem with reportage.

Many true things are difficult to say or offensive to others. Perhaps the idea of a “general audience” is itself fallacious or offensive.

The Book of Nothing is not intended for a general audience. Therefore I can say anything.

Option 3 is not intended for the general population and one is not the general population.

I got into trouble with a collaborative, collaged, lyric essay that I wrote with AG. We hurt B’s feelings so we apologized and took out all references to her and B’s not even her real initial, ha ha! Even so, she was shocked and saddened that I’d used her story as “creative fodder.”

When one pulls one’s first novel down off the shelf one thinks, “not bad” or, some days, “quite good, really” despite the fact that one’s agent, friend, and significant other never liked it and it isn’t published.

I take The Book of Nothing with me when I leave the city. It isn’t heavy, is hardly anything. Even so, everything is changed.

One no longer calls a friend on the phone and says, “can I read you my new poem?” or asks another writer, “should I write a novel?” Instead one has, infrequently, sensibility workshops.

Once I told someone, “Poetry is my way of making sense of my surroundings, of observing—”

It is not about “reading America on the QE2,” one said. More like a mountain range. This is the metaphor one used.

I can’t remember what that means.

Fodder: 1: something fed to domestic animals; especially: coarse food for cattle, horses, or sheep
2: inferior or readily available material used to supply a heavy demand

The Book of Nothing is not a poem. It is also not not a poem. It is nothing, after all.

One is trim, fit and impeccably stylish.

Whereas writing prose, I said, “Requires that I shut out the world. I could be anywhere.”

One attended the most famous college in the United States and, therefore, the world. But was not accepted into Option 3.

Supposedly Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections blindfolded in his basement. Or was that David Foster Wallace writing The Girl with Curious Hair? Jim Galvin said, “writing prose is just typing.”

One is much more attractive than Galvin or Franzen or Foster Wallace. Cleaner, sharper, kempt.

The Book of Nothing effortlessly adopts a pastoral soundtrack. This is one advantage of being unintended.

I wonder if one changes when one leaves the city and goes, as I know one does, to Germantown on weekends and holidays.

John Ashbery is nowhere in sight but as far as I know, living. My friend Ilana has fluid in the tissue around her lungs and heart that cannot be drained. Also a tumor in her brain and several metastases. She is also living.

One does not have children. What is that like?

I knew something was wrong but didn’t want to ask anyone for fear of seeming like the stupid city girl. The cow’s belly was twitching and convulsing and her eyes were closed, her neck at an odd angle. The other three cows in the pen gathered around her as I approached and then scattered to the far edges when I came closer. Finally I worked up the courage to ask the young woman sweeping out the other pens and she told me that cow had been treated earlier in the day and just as she said that the cow keeled over and fell, with a thud, on her side.

One plays the piano. As a child, and, now, as an adult. One takes lessons and practices daily or almost daily. One might call this a “discipline” although that is not the word one used. When the playing or practicing is going badly, one can’t complain to one’s boyfriend—he will say, “So? Stop.”

A particular sound. When she fell, I thought, “Thud.” I thought, “’Thud’ is the name of that sound.”

But playing the piano, even if it is a hobby, is about playing well.

In Music Together, where we take the baby to be surrounded by other babies all sucking on small instruments and whacking each other on the head with miniature drums, Steven, the teacher, explains that if we sing the curriculum songs to our children, at home, they might enjoy it. He brings his pitch pipe to his lips and blows a note. They will enjoy it, he says, but if you sing out of tune or even in tune but in a different key, your child will think it is an entirely new song. Even if all the words are the same. He blows the single note again.

The point is to play well.

The cow had been treated for pneumonia and was lying on her side in the mucky pen. “One thousand pounds down,” I thought. Her breath was white vapor around her snout. “Labored breathing,” someone said. She grew quiet and still and then shuddered and relaxed. “Might not make it,” said the camp director who’d been called over by a counselor. “That cow’s dead,” I thought. “Might not make ‘till evening,” he said.

One writes prose when asked to. Or, when asked to write prose, one refuses. More and more one refuses. More and more one is asked.

Our friend has decided to decide whether to get married or break up by the end of June. He is racked with indecision and says, “what if the fact that I have so many doubts and am having such a hard time deciding what to do means getting married is the wrong choice?” I try to explain the idea of a “characteristic dilemma.” I say, “Of course this is a difficult decision.” It is June 28^th, 2008, and I’ve been married for 11 years and 13 days. I don’t think I have helped our friend one bit.

One teaches graduate writing workshops and seminars and advanced literature classes and directs theses and sits on committees. One did not get tenure at the Ivy League institution and is relieved and seemingly happy with tenure at one’s present institution and with living in Chelsea with one’s boyfriend and going to Germantown on weekends. Swimming to stay fit, playing the piano and writing poetry and fiction and non-fiction prose.

I was asked to write a blurb for a book by a poet I know slightly. I liked the lines, “this room/ will always be the ghost of right now for as long as we carry it.” I liked the whole book, which had a spooky, sensual immediacy and an appealing male voice. But I think I should say no to writing blurbs: the process is stressful and overly absorbing.

Three years ago one wrote me a glowing response, via email, to my manuscript-in-progress. Later, I asked if this email might be edited and used as a blurb when the manuscript became a book. One agreed but asked to edit the email one’s self.

CNN online reported that a 7-year old boy went swimming for the first time with his family at a local pond. On the way home the boy seemed unusually tired and asked to lie down and take a nap. A few hours later he died, in his bed, from drowning. The story says unusual fatigue or changes in behavior can be signs that water in the lungs is preventing adequate oxygen from reaching the brain.

Did being denied tenure at the Ivy League institution feel like Option 3 all over again? Or was it one of those many occurrences people call “a blessing in disguise”?

I have decided to begin a series of prose poems about everything I can remember about my childhood. The idea is to distill snapshots of a past that seems to be disappearing as I watch. I have a lousy memory. This is a characteristic dilemma.

Does one call S one’s boyfriend or husband or partner? I can’t remember.

On long car rides or while waiting for food in a restaurant, my sons ask, “tell us about your dates!” I don’t remember how this started. I haven’t been on many, and they’re too young to hear the unedited versions. But these are the stories they ask for.

Does one’s memory degrade more quickly and more completely if one has children? Does not having children preserve one’s memories?

The director climbed into the pen and patted the cow’s belly and then kicked the cow. Not gently, not hard, in the side. He covered the animal with a blue tarp just as the Peapods and Seedlings entered the barn to pick up their backpacks.

One notices when I wear makeup, so I do. But only a little. Just the kind and amount of makeup others wouldn’t notice but one would and I try to apply it skillfully despite having so little practice with such frivolities. It is possible that one wears make up, but I’m not able to discern such subtleties.

“Yesterday I saw a cow die. When I called my friend Erin to tell her about it she said, ‘Well that will end up in a poem.’” This is how I will begin the essay about teaching poetry workshops that I’ve been asked to write if I decide to write that essay. I might decline the assignment in which case I should stop wasting time thinking about how description is fundamental to all good writing.

There are at least ten frogs in a small pond near the house we’re renting in Brunswick, Maine. When I venture near the pond the frogs stop moving and stop making sound so it is difficult to count them. For seventeen days I’ve been trying to describe the sound they make. The sound they make is nothing like “ribbit” or “croak” or any of the other onomatopoeias we use to indicate frog noises.

Finally, it came to me: they sound like a wide rubber band snapping once—a quick, low, single twang—a “boing,” reverb without consonants.

I believe one would like to receive a postcard with a description of the frog’s real sound.

The Book of Nothing sounds a bit Buddhist but it is not or at least not intended as such although Buddhism or some watered down version of Buddhist principles—a kind of Disney-Buddhism—has seeping into Art’s ground water.

They say memory is the spring that feeds good literature. Being somewhat impaired I can’t say who “they” is or if, indeed, anyone said this. Let’s hope it’s not true.

I imagine one has many clear memories from childhood and somehow that this is related to one’s precise and extraordinary vocabulary.

I have neither.

My mother asks: are you finding time to write?
My father: have you been doing much writing?

One’s mother is also a poet though later in life. We’ve never spoken of this. Or have we?

I give my son a notebook for his 9^th birthday. “What do you think, what kinds of things, what should I…?”  He asks. “Nothing,” I say, “unless you want to.”

One orders organic greens with chicken. It is quite a lot of chicken. Years ago one ordered a citron pressé. I do remember that.

For the first time ever my middle son reads a complete book. It is very short and has simple, straight-forward language. On every page several plot twists drag the young reader along—flying carpets, kidnapped princesses, evil sorcerers, a magic staircase. It is the first book in a series of more than twenty-five. These are books of something and something and then another thing happens. I want to hate this book but, like one’s first lover, it must be honored. He reads haltingly—sometimes aloud, sometimes silently, often spelling out words like “laugh” or “smite” or “amongst”—“what’s that one again?” he asks.

One goes to Paris, where I assume one eats in fabulous restaurants.

The baby’s head smells like goat cheese. Not a bad smell, really, but not what a baby’s head ought to smell like. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that it is difficult to bathe him in this house. One bathtub is much too big. One has sliding mirrored doors on a track. When I lean over the tub’s rim to hold the baby steady in low water, the track presses painfully into my chest.

When in New York one favors La Luncheonette for dinner and once spoke to me derisively about how overly fancy food has become.

“Yesterday I saw a cow die,” I wrote, beginning a micro-essay on teaching poetry. In truth, I began the essay 14 days after watching the cow die and have not made further progress.

I cannot remember if one paid for lunch. “I’ll get the next one” is stressful if you don’t trust your memory.

Yesterday I was informed that the proposal for a conference panel—a proposal on which I am one of five named participants—has been accepted. The panel has to do with representing the self in writing. Here’s what I have to say about that: nothing.

One has the most beautiful stationery. Thick, creamy stock with one’s name embossed in black on the note cards, address only on the back flap of the envelope.

The word memory comes from the Latin memoria, from memor mindful and from the Old English gemimor well-known, and from the Greek merm ra care.

Years ago I helped DT organize his papers and correspondence. NYU had purchased his archives. This is where I first discovered one’s elegant stationery as one had sent several notes and letters to DT.

It feels disrespectful, uncaring, when someone forgets your name. For this reason and because I doubt myself, I will often avoid greeting someone I know but whose name I might not recall.

DT urged me to always, always date my notes and letters. One did not always do so and it made DT’s archives more difficult to organize.

Memory is a funny word. It applies both to the power of remembering and to what is remembered.

One said one did not mind, at all, if I purchased similar stationery. Mine is embossed in blue and has lasted me ten years.

In Denver the air is thin and fragile. Even in the shade of trees I feel exposed to the sun’s relentlessness. I am living, for eleven days, in my mother-in-law’s home.

If one does not have children how does one’s relationship to one’s in-laws change?

I have nothing else to say about Colorado.

We’ve spoken about Art and Leisure and the Real World but I can’t remember what we said or what conclusion we arrived at about the extent to which making art is self-indulgent.

The Book of Nothing will not address the purpose of life.

What is work?

After seeing the movie “Vera Drake” one said, “perhaps you should become an abortionist!” which did not, in any way, offend me.

The poet liked the blurb I wrote. The micro essay is still one line although I have changed “yesterday” to “today” for a greater sense of immediacy.

What is work?

I have registered my “treatment” for a reality TV game show with the Screen Writer’s Guild. It has been six weeks since the prospective agent promised to call me the next day. I am also waiting for a response about an essay I wrote about teaching poetry to very young children for a parenting magazine. Tomorrow we leave for Wisconsin.

One can wear one’s perfectly tailored suit forever; one’s figure is constant.

I didn’t know what to do next. Specifically I was suffering over the question of whether or not to return to the novel I’d started four years ago and dropped after 60 pages and two years or whether to work on my non-fiction memoir that five agents had praised and rejected. Or to start something new. Or not to write at all. Hence our lunch date just before I left town for the summer.

One said, “This is a characteristic dilemma.” One said, “I can say that with confidence because I also have this problem.” One said, “I no longer ask friends to comment on my work-in-progress, but I do rely on lunches like this which I call sensibility workshops.”

My friend AG says I’m a whiner. She is right. She likes to hear my new poems over the phone and loves to read me hers but finds my angst over what to do next extremely exhausting.

I have no new poems. Which exhausts me.

What is work?

Poetry is a way of connecting me to the world, of noticing, of placing myself. I said that to someone or while teaching or in an interview or else I read it somewhere.

My memory. This memory.

I am not in or of the world. Have no childhood. Feel as if I no longer even have my annoying characteristic dilemmas having misplaced or forgotten my own characteristics.

It turns out The Book of Nothing is unexpectedly plot-heavy.

Can one imagine the realness I feel when birthing a baby? I cannot adequately describe it.

I’ve never liked short stories; I prefer the novel’s more expansive intimacy.

One has the most beautiful diction. Exquisite.

I read somewhere that fetal cells remain in the mother for 27 years after birth. I can’t remember what conclusion or analogy I was about to draw from this fact.

It was disconcerting to run into one, once, at the pool at the Ivy League University. In one’s swimsuit. One’s body.

My body has a quality of excess, unecessariness, but is, at the same time, perfectly useful, productive.

One works hard to keep one’s body constant. To play classical pieces precisely, correctly, and with proper form.

Feeling is part of the form, of proper form.

Of course you can’t eat a diseased animal so in this sense the cow is wasted. If the purpose of the animal is to provide sustenance for other animals, which is not its purpose.

Fodder.

I have nothing to say about “the speaker.” Instead I will go swimming in the pool on my husband’s grandmother’s property in Lakewood of the unmentionable state in my ill-fitting swimsuit, unshaved, untoned, slightly panicky in the goggled blue, the muffled solitude of submergence. City girl with poor form and pale, pale skin—spectacle for none to witness.

One was perfectly presentable in one’s suit at the Ivy League institution. But still.

What I like is the long, underwater glide as I push off from the wall.

Now one teaches poetry and literature to graduate students in a good program that is not part of the Ivy League. One teaches a course on the lyric essay. One teaches a course on Perversity and Contemporary American Poetry.

What I like are the irregularly amoebic blue tiles along the bottom and sides of the rectangular pool. The chipped tiles, the black places where a tile is missing.

In the car my son reads to himself. Every once in a while he spells out a word he doesn’t recognize. I like how the expansive possibilities of the first few letters narrow with each subsequent letter until the word, without context, takes shape, definitively, and becomes meaningful.

Yesterday I went to a yoga class to try to calm down. But the chanting and call-and-response prayer got me so agitated I thought I might start shrieking. After chanting we sat in silence, breathing, and then the teacher read a long passage to us from a book about the difference between experience and experiencing. It was both interesting and inane. Experience is between life and experiencing and experience is time-bound, on a continuum. The mind is a product of experience. Thought, a product of the mind. Something like that. The idea, I think, is to rid one’s self of thought, of memory, of mind, of all time-bound experience so as to be [impossibly] present, so as to approach experiencing the here and now, but it was hard to follow because while I was listening I was thinking of The Book of Nothing and how I would describe all this which is a way of thinking about the future (now present) (yesterday) failed moment of experiencing.

Does one have any inkling as one experiences summer—writing, reading, thinking, eating, sleeping, in and out of the city, alone, with friends, perhaps once or twice in John Ashbery’s company, that one is almost daily conjured and addressed? That one is invoked in The Book of Nothing, in New York, in Brunswick, Maine, in Denver, Colorado, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, in New York, New York, in Greenport, New York?

I suspect the house we’re renting is haunted. Last night I dreamed my husband was carrying a blond child about three years old. The child was crying. I took the child in my arms but could not comfort her. Then at around 5 am I heard someone say “Mother,” clearly and out loud. The sound woke me up. I looked at the clock and then at my sleeping husband thinking how strange it was that I’d never heard him talk in his sleep before and how funny it was that he’d said “mother.” Just as I was dozing off, I heard the word “Mother” again. It was not my husband’s voice. I heard whispering in what seemed like the next room. I sat up in bed and put my ear to the wall that separated our bedroom from the room our boys were sleeping in—all quiet. And neither of them has ever called me “mother.”

One keeps a dream notebook and often writes about one’s dreams.

Only now, while writing this down, do I make the connection between the child in the dream and my friend Ilana who is dying.

One has never talked to me about death. Not that I remember.

My mother forgets things. Small things like where she put her glasses or camera and bigger things like my husband’s last name. But she denies this, “I did not say Gordon—you misheard me” or “you never told me that!” On the other hand, she memorizes long stories that she tells to rapt audiences.

How memory is equated with caring. “Thanks for asking.”

One often asks about my mother. We’ve discussed my parents at length.

We have been away from our New York City apartment for eight weeks. Three days ago I took the baby there to pick up our mail on the way to this house in Greenport, Long Island. The baby seemed to have no recollection of our apartment at all and made no effort to see his room while I sat by the front door sorting junk mail. He has a limited memory. Some call this stage “the wonder years.”

What the baby remembers is me. And his father. And his brothers. This is a survival skill, but annoying when I want to leave him in the care of others.

I still think of the pool in Lakewood as Emmett’s pool. He kept it hot and after his heart valve replacement surgery walked along the short side of the shallow end for hydrotherapy. I think about sitting with his coffin in the basement of the funeral home and how I spent most of my allotted hour agonizing over the question of whether or not to open the coffin to see his body one last time.

What does one wear to a funeral?

I just wanted to move my body. To quiet my mind by moving my body—downward dog, cobra, jump or step the feet, forward bend, hands to the sun—not all that chanting and philosophizing.

In an email, Ilana told me that her childhood dog had come to be with her and had been by her side all morning. This was not a dream. Neither the dog nor the email.

One can die from poisoned berries. See the movie “Into the Wild,” based on the book by Jon Krakauer based on the story of Christopher McCandless whose name I had to look up when I typed this three months later. In the original text of The Book of Nothing it says, “based on the life of________.”

More and more I am drawn to the literal; is this a fad? A developmental stage? A characteristic dilemma?

On my favorite radio show there is a piece about a woman in her 30s who asked this question at a party: Are unicorns still endangered or have they finally become extinct? The silence that followed was what clued her in.

Or perhaps I mean the surreal. It’s hard to tell. I want to write like that but it feels conspicuously ornamental, like jewelry or a flimsy scarf that poets often wear. Self-conscious.

Now here.

Seven beds in six cities in eight weeks. Including the hotel in Newark near the airport when we missed our connecting flight from Maine to Denver.

Now here.

To do:

The ocean.

A lack of childcare changes The Book of Nothing. Lessens it. Increases its appeal. The baby still puts things in his mouth and cannot be trusted.

One must be sleeping now. It is five AM. It is still 5 AM.

Last night on the way home—[the baby swallows stories, words, all my language with his promiscuous mouth]
—what was I saying?

At 4 AM this morning Ilana Stein died.

Perhaps it is a “notebook” not a book. One small note changing everything.

On the ferry home last night my son said “I hate you.” He’d battled with his brother over the crinkly white tissue paper around his cookie or his brother’s cookie, I’m not sure. He pulled away from me but I yanked him back. “Not safe,” I said. Evening on the ferry, half-moon, stars hidden.

Does one fear death?

The ocean again.

What would one wear to a funeral?

The Book of Nothing with its orange cover out in the parking lot, in the passenger seat of the rented Kia. Later, during the shiva, in the trunk with the clothes and diapers.

In Greenport, three houses down from the one we’re renting, two houses catch fire. It is amazing to watch. We watch. We watch. There is no one, thank god, inside. A neighbor lamely hoses down everything between her house and the one on fire. We watch the first house burn. We watch as the house next door goes up in flames. We watch as the volunteer squads arrive: Greenport, Southhold, Cutchogue, Orient, Riverhead. We watch as a special ladder truck arrives, as a firefighter is lowered onto the roof. We watch as he sits astride the gable and tries to cut through the roof with a handheld chain saw. The buildings burn.

The Book of Nothing is

The bad smell as the vinyl siding collapses away from the wooden bones.

________________ nothing if not

The stars last night, after a clear day.

A week ago Ilana Stein died.

One suggested I watch the movie about an abortionist (“it made me want to be an abortionist”), which did not offend me though the idea of one as an abortionist is so incongruous it makes me smile.

In one’s Armani…

The baby has words now: wawa (water), haa (hat), zeze (zebra), heh (head), baw (ball), moe (more), nuh (nurse), tees (trees), as well as names: Mawma, Dada, Bruba, Bapah, and many animal sounds.

On the corner of 2^nd and Webb, three houses from the fire, across the street from a graveyard, in a musty house filled with knickknacks and junktoys, screens off their tracks, doors swelled past closing—I sleep well. The nights are cool. The stars.

Does one sleep well or suffer from insomnia?

Ilana was a doula, which means she supported women during childbirth. Doula, from the Greek, meaning woman servant.

There are people who do not make trash. I have heard of them. Some of them live in Maine or rural New Hampshire. I am not one of them.

The city, city, city, city, city is so full of everything I want to be quiet can’t can I get used to?

Two days later, called out of yoga, at the hospital waiting for A to have a cesarean. It’s quiet. Too quiet. Will I be able to hear the baby cry through the closed door to the OR? I am A’s doula. A is my client. In this case I am standing outside the closed door of the O.R. This is all I am permitted.

Ilana is still dead. October is almost over and I have not written a novel or part of a novel or a series of poems about memory. I have not written a micro essay about teaching. I have not written a micro essay about the line but have promised to do so. I wrote one new poem about waking up early with the baby but it’s a silly little song-poem and its sweetness bothers me. I have not written an essay about Alice Notley or the email to the agent outlining the “what happened” version of my non-fiction book, which according to her is a weak on plot. I spent a few weeks making a 9-minute movie about J’s homebirth and posted it to youtube. It’s gotten 49,580 hits in the past 4 weeks. In this way it is (vastly) my most successful publication.

Does one consider one’s audience before one begins? Is one frustrated or heartened by one’s sale’s figures? Does one consider them?

I did a reading, last week for a new political anthology, at the university where one teaches but one was not there. I was the first of ten readers and read my poem “To Save America,” which I am sick of reading. John Ashbery read third. I felt bashful and girly in front of him. He has a large, square head and beautiful eyes. He left at intermission, after the fifth reader.

Does one remember how Bethany Yarrow once showed up for class in a white nightgown? It was a small seminar—“The Versification of Poetry”—at the Ivy League institution where one was my teacher. I wrote some terrible sonnets and sestinas for that class. I fooled around with the cute guy who ended up being a relatively successful actor and showed his cute ass in the movie “Laurel Canyon” and “Junebug.” Did one know that? I liked how he liked my body, how he spoke openly of his admiration for my qualities, but I didn’t like that he smelled like perfume and after a while I got tired of listening to him play the guitar for me in the middle of the night.

Years later I was hired by said institution to teach a residential college seminar I called “The Art of Poetic Dialogue” and commuted there once a week from Manhattan. Each week I walked through the campus and surrounding areas and felt my presence erasing my past. Not erasing, really, more like putting new wallpaper up over the old. I taught that class three times in three years and at the end of those years wondered if I’d ever really gone there as a student. I do remember the future actor’s cute ass. I remember he liked my breasts.

My husband, who was not yet my husband or even a boyfriend, sent me one’s book when it was first published. It was my junior year, and I was in Paris pretending to study photography. Really I was smoking hash and living with my boyfriend who was working at international law firm and studying for the LSATs.

Does one drink? Do drugs? Did one?

Jessica and Miles are in Paris right now. My mother is in India. My father and stepmother are in Hydra. It hurts a little to hear about it. To imagine one in some fabulous place eating fabulous food wearing fabulous clothes speaking with one’s exquisite diction.

New York is gray and bleak and I struggle to find the words.

After my miscarriage in spring of 2006, my husband and I went to Paris anyway. We’d planned the trip to celebrate our tenth anniversary although it would actually coincide with our ninth. We expected to have a nine-month old baby on our tenth anniversary and be unable to go to Paris then. When the pregnancy failed it seemed too sad to cancel the trip also.

Has one ever wanted to be an activist?

I was between my pregnant and non-pregnant size and very anemic; it was hard to dress nicely or feel attractive. But I felt lucky to go to Paris, lucky to be healing after months of bleeding that necessitated a second D & C. We stayed at a nice but modest hotel in the 6^th arrondisement. I went to the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Jeu de Paume and made notes for a sophomore literature course I wanted to teach called “First Persons.” Mostly what I remember but wish I remembered even more was that we ate at Guy Savoy. Guy rhymes with “bee” not “buy” and Savoy rhymes with “blah blah” not “hoi polloi.”

David Foster Wallace hung himself.

This morning I woke up and thought, “Ilana, are you still dead?”

One is not a vegetarian. Is John Ashbery? I doubt it but don’t know why. When I think of John Ashbery I imagine him eating venison near a fire in a small restaurant in the Hudson Valley. Is this a form of character assassination or a way of caring about someone?

Are one’s shoes comfortable or simply fabulously fashionable?

I don’t actually remember attending the Ivy League institution. I have mental pictures but somehow these are like index cards with crib notes of stories I told myself. Sitting in the underground library with its stale air. The way my body feels as I rouse myself from sleep to answer the unexpected doorbell when I know it is my strange lover and know what will happen if I let him in. My boyfriend’s flannel sheets when he was just a boyfriend, a guy I was fucking with no intention of marrying. I liked knowing his roommate was there, in the next room as we made love.

A few years after graduating from the Ivy League institution I attended a tribute reading in honor of Elizabeth Bishop. Jorie Graham helped John Ashbery onto the stage and John Ashbery cried when he read Bishop’s poem. Did I dream that? No. But I can’t remember when or where it was and which poem of Bishop’s Ashbery read. It was at least 10 years ago. Ashbery seemed old then. I remember thinking, as I looked at him, he’s next. But he wasn’t.

One was my teacher. Because of one I read Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery. I read James Schuyler and Jorie Graham and fell in love with poetry went on to a good graduate program and later taught courses at the Ivy League Institution and at other schools and published books and gave readings and this makes me a poet.

Ilana was my teacher. She said, “it’s always nice to begin by washing the laboring mother’s feet.” Because of her I have cleaned up vomit and pee and applied counter pressure and sang and moaned and slow danced with naked pregnant women and sweet-talked nurses and pressed on spleen six and watched nine babies be born and this makes me a labor doula.

One likes to hear about my doula work. One does not seem afraid of birth or of the body even though, to me, one seems very far away from anything having to do with birth or babies or the female body.

I gave my books of poetry to Ilana as gifts but I doubt she read them. This has to do with the problem of a general audience. Everyone either has or was a baby or both. Few read poetry.

I bear no hostility. One was not one of the members of the committee of the Ivy League institution who voted to award all the poetry prizes to others. One was not the professor who later told me, in confidence, that my submission engendered active debate. Some members, he said, liked my work best of all, but others said it wasn’t even poetry.

The summer has disappeared into our digital photographs. All those houses and hours on airplanes. The ocean.

It’s funny how they called it “Option” 3. When it wasn’t really an option.

They said I could choose between getting a dilation and curettage in which my cervix would be dilated and all fetal and placental material would be scraped out of my uterus with a curet or I could wait to miscarry naturally in which case I would eventually experience strong cramps and bleeding. This is an example of a choice. Of two options.

During the course of one’s lifetime the pendulum of popular opinion has swung away from the idea of homosexuality as a choice and toward the idea of sexual preference as being inborn. This summer a study found striking similarities between the brain structures of gay men and straight women. Is one aware of this research? Does one care?

Orientation. One’s orientation. My orientation.

Remember the time in one’s office when one agreed to write me a recommendation and said, “I don’t like [ ]’s work but I’m glad she writes those poems so I don’t have to”? I realized one did not really like my poems either but did like me and that would have to be enough.

The City blocks out almost everything. I am.

Meanwhile: Obama, the economy, famous and less famous suicides, the Library of America publishes Ashbery’s collected poems on the day the baby I miscarried would have been two years old and my living baby turns 16 months and two days. So what?

Like a fish I grow to fit my environment in this case apartment in which I sit at my computer and listen to the MP3 of Cat Stevens singing “if you want to be me, be me” while I do not write anything for my panel about the complex relationship between self and poet and do not work on my novel or poems about memory or from memory or about the line in poetry. I do not write about Ilana Stein or John Ashbery one of whom is alive and one of whom is dead or about David Foster Wallace or Charles Bernstein’s daughter, Emma Bee Bernstein, both of whom committed suicide this fall or about Alice Notley who was not my teacher but whose poems amaze me and who said, “There has to be a way to talk about oneself without narcissism” and said, “That’s only one story: what you remember.”

Pick a particular. Other. Option. By which I mean the one I choose. Against which the self. Similar brains. To discuss ambition and/or friendship against the tide or threat/promise of a general audience. To think of one and therefore the self. Think of summer in late Fall. Of the ocean while on the 11^th floor in an apartment in Manhattan. Option “one.” Option you/me. Option 3.

—June-October, 2008












Rachel Zucker is the mother of three sons. She is also the author of four books of poetry, most recently Museum of Accidents. With poet Arielle Greenberg, Zucker co-wrote Home/Birth: a poemic,a hybrid genre book about birthing, friendship and feminism. Together, Zucker and Greenberg also edited two anthologies: Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections. Zucker recently finished writing a lyric memoir and several shorter prose pieces. In addition to writing, Zucker teaches poetry at NYU and at the 92nd Street Y, works as a birth doula and childbirth educator and keeps a strange, observational blog called w(here). You can find more information on her website.

What does it mean to be a fool?

Is it to reel about the world
Like stars made out of icicles,
Dangerous and breakable?

What does it mean to be a fool?

Is it to make the things no one
Can recognize or put to use?
For the beautiful, for hurt joy?

He spins around, wanting to learn.

The Fool is dreaming that he lies
With truth—across a grave like glass
He lies, the shaft shoaling with leaves.

What can he do with schooling dark?

Each minnowed leaf says leave-taking.
He shakes his rattle at the dark
And fills his antic hat with leaves.






A STAR IN A BOX

In a green seed
Hidden in a shell
From the first walnut tree,
Wrapped in threads of Tensan silk,
Tucked in a giant wentletrap,
Placed inside a golden treasure box,
Swallowed by the roan-red bull on the hill,
In the precincts of the Red King’s castle lands,
Inside a kingdom held against barbarians,
In a world that cares so little whether we outrage
Or whether we are bred to honor and civility—
In the out-rushing universe, the nursery house of stars,
Inside the multiverse with other worlds, each with its own Red King,
Inside the envelope that cauls all time and space in one conundrum,

The Red King keeps
His infinite,
Starry
Love.






SELF-PORTRAIT AS DRYAD, NO. 8

Riven, scorched to the root,
I offered my palm, sprout-pale,
And caught one bloody drop.
It splashed up like a crown
Conjured for a Red King,
Then pooled on my life-line
And spilled, swelling, pouring
Magic from my fingers,
Making rose-wine rivers
On the bleakness. Waters
Lapped the corkscrew forest,
Turned sea in which I swam,
Even my eyes rubied
With seeing under waves:
The gardens in their pales,
The phoenix-headed ships,
The trees of singing leaves,
And folk that burned with light
In the streets under waves—
City of the Red King!
In spring those memories
Slide in my veins like sap.

The ocean died in whorls.
A nub, a leaf was born.
A flock of greenness sprang
To ruined limbs and twigs,
And palisades of red
Like spiny bramble shoots
Spired up around my tree.






THE FOREST FOOL

The forest Fool, all geared in green,
A slough of blackened leaves his bed,
His rags as tattered as the leaves.

By light of the wentletrap moon,
The runic letters on a stone
Gave birth to dreams of golden paths

That led the Fool to the Red King.






THE TAROT WITCH

On the Fool’s long walk to the King’s city,
He met a gypsy in a rowan grove
Who told him how he rooted in the woods
Like a leaf-strewn burrowing animal,
How he was lone, a zero in the world,
And he should stay and be the gypsy kind.
Mother Crone would lay out his fate in cards;
He laughed and shook his tinseled cap in no,
Even when her daughter took his fingers
And curled them round the stem of a white rose.
Dizzy blossom: he wandered in its maze
Till flecks of pollen kissed his precious beak.
He sneezed. And ditched the gypsy caravan
Without another word, dreaming of pale
And far intangibles where land meets tide,
For seas were rumor to his ignorance:
Unweeting wantwit, he could not compass
Sand castles, spirals made of calcium
That clasp and yield an undertone of waves,
The sea-roiled bones of world, flensed and floured,
Or strands of foam on glitterings of quartz.

“The Earth is nothing if not labyrinth,”
He said, “and I’m the lost and drunken bug
Who would discover at its heart the gold
Of alchemy to dust my leaden mind.”






THE BLACK FOOL

(Black letters, through and through, were wound:
The names of sins, the years, the crime:
The thorns that pinned the words to flesh.

Even the whites of eyes went black
With lettering. Even the nails.
Even soles of the Fool’s bare feet.)

He stood convicted in his sight.






THE KING IN THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

The little cottages
And churches huddle close
Around the castle-flanks.

The citizens shouted
Only an hour ago:
Barbarians have come!

Blue-streaked and horned, they splash
Against the city gates:
The stars bow down to see.

The folk hunker in jars,
Go spindle-thin to hide
Sideways in the shadows.

Alone, the Red King goes,
Unknowing what will be,
Unknowing what to say.

He holds a flowering wand
All leafed in peaceful green.






HORTUS CONCLUSUS

Dashing along the pebble paths,
Sending up sprays of white: the Fool
Is chasing the Red King’s shadow.
They are little children in a maze.

The Red King: he is old, he is old,
And his beard trails on the ground.
The bent Fool wheels the riotous beard,
Else beard and king in a barrow.

Just yesterday the Red King died
And was sealed in the grotto walls,
But now he walks the garden dusk,
Wondering why the Fool has gone.

A white peacock floats like a ghost
Before him, shivering its tail.






SONG OF THE FISHER-FOLK, no. 2
The Fooloon Song

The minnows in the sea
And brittlestars that bite
All laugh with the Fool’s glee:
The minnows in the sea
Are nodding; all agree
The loony way is right
For minnows in the sea
And brittlestars that bite.

The rabbit in the moon
And shiners in the sea
All shrill a foolish tune
The rabbit in the moon
Was tendered by a Loon.
All pompous peacocks flee
The rabbit in the moon
And shiners in the sea!






THE WHITE FOOL

The wind came rustling in the leaves.
The rustles sounded like a fire.
The Fool was burning in the sound.

Out of his mouth there came a cry,
Out of his hair the white ash fell,
Out of his eyes came snow-white tears

When Fool walked in the rustling fire.






THE RED KING AND THE STARS

The Red King goes with magnifying glass
And kneels so long he whitens in the snow:
The winter wind is tossing the big firs
So that they seem to be clapping, and each
Clap sends an avalanche and rills of snow
To air that gyres and juggles crystal flakes.
With equal justice, sky awards its stars
To children making castles in the snow
And merrows shrilling on the crests of sea
And even to the panicked Fool who flies
Into the cold bareheaded, birthday hat
Forgotten in his haste, to seek the King
In every hillock, drift, and weighted tree.
But he is gone, and when the Fool despairs
And listens to the wolfishness of wind
That cares for nothing, neither him nor kings
Nor sparking or not-sparking snow from trees,
He knows the King is gone to nothingness.
Tears make waverings that jail his face
In bars of ice, and yet he laughs and laughs
When the Red King shoulders from a snow bank,
Hand-glass in hand, spilling streamers of snow
And blundering forward like a moving hill.
The Fool is trembling with the cold and something
More and yet he laughs again to see
The crystals dilating and melting, gone.






THE CHRISTMAS BONFIRE

Bewitched, the Fool is watching acanthus
And oak–the bristling leaves of Christmas flame–
When the Royal Alchemist empties salts
From bags and bottles, raising up chartreuse
And emerald and yellow, orange-red,
Like a sorcerer who summons demons.
Dangerous salts of lithium awake–
The crimson leaves erupt from walnut grain,
Exploding upward, battering the air,
And change to silver. Sound’s sea-constant, wind
Fluttering and folding, origami
Of one substance rumpled, crumpled, bent.

And afterward the Fool stares in a cave
Of magic rippling like a cuttlefish,
A secret place where Lord and Lady shine,
Coalescing in their blazing castle,
A tiny Red King and his glowing Queen,
Two salamanders glorying in flame.






RIDDLES OF THE KING
Made by the Fool

The Mirror King
Just the same: contrariwise.

The Birthday Cap
The Red King makes the Fool a crown.

The Rhododendron Throne
A seat carved from a blood-red tree.

The Wentletrap Stair
White-gold, to where the red dwarfs burn.

The White Queen
A winding petal-fall: the world.

The Hanged Man
The Fool who grips a greening seed.

The Red King’s Burning Stair
Darkloam: moonfire, sunfire, rosefire.

A Wentletrap
A whisper held to the Fool’s ear.

His Crown
A red gold washed in laughing tears.

The Red King’s Dream
Matreshka of the spinning worlds.

The Tower Called the Spear
Where even stones are murmuring.

The Cinnabar Throne
A chair of crystal: “dragon’s blood.”

The Secret of the Red Kingdom
A silence wrapped around a name.

Who is the Red King?
Who puts a name to mystery?












The eighth book by Marly Youmans is The Throne of Psyche, a collection of poetry just out from Mercer University Press. She is the author of books of poetry, novels, and several Southern fantasies; her awards include The Michael Shaara Award for The Wolf Pit (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and The Ferrol Sams Award for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, forthcoming in 2012. Also headed for publication are four other books, two of them poetry–The Foliate Head, forthcoming from P. S. Publishing, and Thaliad from Phoenicia Publishing (Montreal.) She lives by the mouth of the Susquehanna with her husband and three children.

Engagement: Kitturah: 1 September 1833

Dearest Tom, father says that my demand
to write myself with news that he accepts(& I of course)                 your proposal, so standing,
is sure influence of his precepts.How bold I am indeed, that preacher’s fire! It is
so then, a full unransomed YES. Setthe date soon, for I will no doubt tireof waiting now that we shall both be blessed.
& vows! Gray haired foreverseems hardly real!       How

late.   Curtains yawning wide I writedrowsed at midnight: only eager stars & onedim wick light my tableside.  So
goodnight, my love, this chirpingworld fades to dreammy fingers tangled, your raven curls—





Welcome: H.R. Monroe Farm Supply & General Store: 16 May 1834

It is rare for us to extend
credit to our customers regardless
of occupation or community
status but given your recent nuptials, Mr. Thomas,
& your father’s esteem in this great
Dorchester County know seed
& handcraft implements from our shelves
have, for generations, helped hearty
fortunes sprout. This month flaying spades,
cart jacks, steel froes & corn flails straight
from London by way of Baltimore; southern
raids on lingering Nanticoke
brought surplus beads & arrowheads
fashioned from femurs of wild
Assateague ponies; cut petunias freshly
bundled for the Missus make
a splendid housewarming & our raspberries
sweetest on the Shore. Eager are we
to be your general for life & pray
to have the courtesy of your commerce
but for Saturday eventide—we proudly
observe Sabbath at sundown as the good
Lord intended.






Arrival: Kitturah to Candice in Wye Wills: 21 March 1840

Twins, dear sister, twins! Two & forty weeks’
labored waiting, fears a second child
at thirty-five & then this week two
arrive! Of course we chose good Gospel
names, our John all banshee
wail & Jameshis manner meekeven napping
when his brother thrashes wildly.
I tell myself I’ve done all this & thrivedbefore—
night cries & nursings, how like coldmorning fog the early
fond months fade—I try
to let cheer take its place at heart—but nagging
fears, the tiny toes& hands, can I endure while Thomastends log, field & mare, another
season’s start? I praythis birth a part
of heaven’s plan—:





After the Incident: Thomas: 7 July 1853