My most recent curatorial experiment (which is how I think of these things, not of being a curator) was a six-woman gallery show called Terrestrial Transmissions. It commandeered the Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia where I teach and practice as a video artist.

The single-channel video works that I selected for this show had roots in another project, an ongoing monthly screening I organize in the Fine Arts Library at UVA. A couple years ago, I put out an open call for work to review for future programming for the library. I got a good response from artists all over the world (the internet can be great that way) and I became interested in a major theme: a number of women were making work that engaged with tropes of science fiction. And it was strong, interesting work at that.

Stephanie Hough, still from Spam (The Proposition)

Of particular interest to me was the theme of transmission—the attempts to communicate with some kind of other. Of course transmission is not an uncommon theme in video art, having roots in broadcast or signal transmissions. But these transmissions seemed different, more human–coming out of a deeply held desire to communicate with something outside the self, be it men or plants or the great unknown.

This caught my attention. I’d been thinking of a conversation I’d once had with a colleague at UVA who does research in the psychology of romantic couples. Women are traditionally posited as the gender that is better at communicating, better at listening, more attuned to the emotions of others. According to my colleague, this assumption isn’t indicative of some biological difference in women but rather the logical outcome of their historically inferior social position, at least in Western culture. In other words, the assumption is an illustration of how social power functions in individual relationships. Women are better listeners because they have for much of history been in a weaker position than men socially, financially and legally. The seemingly weaker individual in a couple, regardless of gender, almost always becomes more attuned to the partner who is seen as more powerful. When the man perceives himself to be in a weaker position in a romantic relationship, he will become a better listener, attentive in the ways we attach to the feminine. Women aren’t better communicators so much as they have just been more motivated.

The pieces I chose for Terrestrial Transmissions investigate this motivation, using female figures (in many cases the artist herself), and situating them in landscape. In each work there’s a desire to make contact with an other, an other as unfamiliar as an extraterrestrial. The desire plays out in many very different and exciting ways.

Julia Oldham’s work casts flora as the other. Her Possumhaw Plant Electrics series is product of her residency at the Bernheim Arboretum in Kentucky, during which she lived in a small cabin and had the run of the place. In the work, Julia plays a technician from a fictional electronics company specializing in communicating with plants. She wraps wire around cedar knees, plugs headphones into stumps, and tunes into the frequencies of sticks. In the most visceral of the four pieces in the series, Radioactive Fairytale (above), she becomes the tuner: copper wires sprout from her teeth and run into a tangle on the green grass. Is she struggling to hear the uncooperative plants? What are they trying to communicate? Silence presents questions, a space for quandary and desire to flourish.

Meredith Drum, still from The Double

Meredith Drum’s The Double is probably the most narrative of all the work in Terrestrial Transmissions. Again, silence plays a pivotal role. The story focuses on the oblique tale of two females seemingly trying to free themselves from some manner of captivity. They observe their captors from the grass. The two women use whistling to hypnotize and sedate them. Just when we think they are free, we’re given a clear shot of one of the women entranced, though we can’t see by whom or what. The frame cuts to a shot of a man, his slow smile, and then to the man and woman riding off into the distance on a single bicycle .Is she reconciled with a lost lover? Is she returned to the clutches of a captor? We don’t know. Through the course of the video, the men never utter a word, begging the question: what role does silence play in power and transmission?

Ashley Brett Chipman, still from Here the Birds Fly

Inspired by practices like spiritual telegraphy and deep channel fishing, Ashley Brett Chipman’s work draws on the history of transmission—in this case with the spirit world—and how technology inspired new attempts to bridge the gap between life and death in the nineteenth century. In Chipman’s work, unnamed young women seem to be striving to contact a lost loved one. Here the Birds Fly attempts transmission on a rooftop, signaling with a mirror into the sky. The means of transmission in Here the Birds Fly either pre- or post-dates wired communication – there are no cables or cords or antennae, suggesting a wirelessness that is both primitive and familiar to us. What does the presence of wires do to our ideas about silence, transmission, reception? In Spaceships in Rule 110, another of Chapman’s pieces in the show, wires connect a girl, eyes cast heavenward, to a pair of lemons and a mysterious grassy beacon.

Krista Caballero, still from All Appears Orange

Krista Caballero’s All Appears Orange complicates the theme further. For Krista, a distress signal is communicated by her handmade antennae (which also functions as sculpture in a larger installation), inspired by recent international reports that disasters will become more and more common as the world’s population increases and the climate enters into the chaos of change. The transmitter, when she appears, is a woman shot from a low angle against the sky.

Another and very different sort of distress is conveyed in Stephanie Hough’s video, Spam (The Proposition). I selected this piece to be installed outside of the gallery: the transmission is from the future, a disembodied female face scaled with sequins. She recounts the text of email spam and reinterprets them as warnings, hypnotic and sparkling. In the larger context of the show, Hough’s interpreter acts as a kind of greeter into the gallery’s transmitting space.

As curator, I had quite a few challenges in transmitting all of these transmissions in one space—blocking the gallery entry in order to create an adequate darkness, arranging all the video work so that these transmissions could be received by visitors, maintaining the integrity of each work according to the artist’s specifications. In the case of the anonymous artist Madam X’s work, I wanted CRT monitors for aspect ratio as well as to maintain the reference to broadcast television that is so strong in what she makes: frame-by-frame animations with a female voiceover conveying an enigmatic, New-Agey message from “the Human Being Society.” We used headphones for her work as well. Thinking about space in terms of audible and ambient sound engaged me in presenting these works.

Madam X, still from Human Being Society

Tech issues kept me running during the opening, which is too bad—only because the thing I like most about curating is the opportunity to see other work, to feel connected to it and to the artist. For me it’s a way of maintaining some sense of community from my outpost in central Virginia. There aren’t many people in my immediate environment working in video—exploring the different kind of functions and forms video can take—and inspired by video’s collectivist and alternative history. So I sometimes feel isolated creatively, which is probably par for the course for a lot of academic artists. At the same time, I like living in the small town where I teach. Curating allows me to connect to other artists—to other work— without the need to travel. It creates community despite physical distance. Maybe the gallery isn’t designed for video transmissions. But I can fit fifteen years worth of work onto a DVD or a website, and someone out there can find it.

__

Lydia Moyer is a media maker and visual artist based in central Virginia.  Her work has been screened at festivals in the US and abroad including the European Media Arts Festival in Germany, the Black Maria Festival in Jersey City, the Hot Springs Documentary Festival in Arkansas, and the PDX Festival in Portland, Oregon.  She directs the new media program in the art department at the University of Virginia.

Born in Ireland in 1982, Stephanie Hough grew up in a Bar, where her interest in the broader spectrum of society and social interaction began. She graduated  from the Crawford College of Art & Design in 2005 and received an MA from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

Julia Oldham’s videos and drawings dramatize scientific and mechanical systems and theories. Oldham studied art history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and then received her MFA from the University of Chicago. She spends her time in New York and Oregon.  Her work has been screened widely in the US and abroad.

Born in North Carolina, Meredith Drum moved to NYC in 1997 where she lived until 2009, working as a video editor, videographer and artist-in-residence in public schools through nonprofits and museums. In 2009, she returned to school to earn her MFA at UC Santa Cruz’s the Digital Arts and New Media program. In 2012 she moved back to Brooklyn and is now a visiting instructor at Pratt Institute.

Ashley Brett Chipman trained to be a professional ballet dancer from the age of seven. She began exploring 16mm film at the University of Virginia, while continuing ballet, and graduated in 2009. A recipient of an Aunspaugh Fellowship, she has recently relocated to New Orleans to continue making films.

Krista Caballero is a sculptor and new media artist. Her current project, Mapping Meaning, provides a forum for artists, scientists and scholars to engage topics of the environment through interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. She is the associate Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity at the University of Maryland.

Madam X is an animator based in Los Angeles, CA.  She is the founder of the Human Being Society.

On the platform, blood and wing bones
like leftovers from some Obeah jinx.
A kid’s tutu on the tracks.

On the air, urine and cold cream,
overheard talk the train drowns
as it lumbers in, whines, and bangs open.

In, to where Virginia Woolf confined
her progeny, the novelists in the future,
omnibuses and underground railways.

Via Crucisor way of virtue, she won’t say
nor venture what flash fictions or elliptic
avants will birth, hallows on instead

these the depths they will explore,
those the phantoms they’ll pursue.
Superimposed, shallow with detail

punctuated by the intermittent fade out
as the tunnel lights strobe in, bleached
by station lights, poor contorted devils sit,

the penitent stand and hold on,
souls ferried, back and forth,
to the mild prosaic hells of shifts.

The Russian hairdresser preps through
a box-full of flash-cards for the GED,
the Chicana au pair beside her nods,

nods, nods, then straightens up to cross
herself. The kid bound for Temple
or CCP, draped in insurrection-chic keffiyeh

is doing the Analects. It’s early morning
when secretaries page through catalogs
and touch up their make-up or dog-ear magazines.

I stick to the syllabus, Montaigne today
(the worst of these wars is that the cards are so mixed-up)
and haul a bagful of anthologies from place to place

like lackey to a sales-rep from Norton or Wiley,
but worst, in the paycheck-to-paycheck
gestarbeiter to higher-ed, contracted in four

stops of the line. What pays the bills?
…This world of ours is the looking glass…
…We’re fashioned of oddments put together…

I drift to tinny hip-hop. It sizzles
from the speaker of a clamshell phone
a woman by the door wedged

to the hem of her purdah. She’s beneath
the sign: no food, no smoking, no radios,
broadcasting in the musical counterpart

to the sputtery fizz of police radio
only a back up track to her larger message.
…Time and custom condition us to anything strange…





ii.

Later, I’ll be northbound with Robert Browning
or Robert Frost, the crowd thinned out
to the unemployable and unemployed.
They file through paperwork, applications,
printouts with rooms for rent.
They riffle through insurance forms,
analysis results, documents for their PO.
Later still, I’m southbound when Catholic school
kids hop in and peel off ties and v-necks.
No black bough for petals to bloom
like sumi-e in the squalor of the Metro.
Scrap also the photo-realist, fun-house
mirrors in Este’s urban jig-saws,
the convex of hand-rail, slight distortions
on a dented door, the sanitized glare
of the hyper-real, that O.R.-look.
The window-shaped guise of myself
is sebumgray and curd, a spat-on tag
slashes where I superimpose on Diablo
on the phone, beneath ads
for deodorants and loan sharks.
He’s tattooed his nom-de-plume
across his neck and notched his street-cred
with tears shaped like dollar signs,
and from behind his ear, across his nape
and to the other ear, he’s inked Requiescats
to all his fallen—as of last night. He’s going
to the morgue, has the Daily News open
to the crime report. I’m not making him up
just tallying the odds that last night’s pop-off
on Marion street might be the tattoo parlor’s
next job, just charting how wide or narrow
a semantic radius tells near from close.





iii.

(We know the uncle—a kid in his twenties really—
who moved in to help, one of those houses where
the nucleus in the nuclear of the “family”
has this blobby, inchoate, pliancy, all absorption,

all resilience, all about making the bills,
however crowded, however Children of Sanchez
slummy the whole arrangement ends up.
He worked at the depot for a while.

I’d see him mornings, waiting for the bus
in his groomed unbuttoned back-brace cool.
Then he vanished, served time, came back–
his belongings in a garbage bag, bloated

from drink and with a new set of contacts
in his phone, to set up shop, run a live corner
where Marion dead-ends on Queen Lane.
Or so it seemed, his loitering hours on end,

that aimless orbiting, that antsy twinge
of the lookout, then a crew regathering,
the boss with his black dog, two other guys
checking in before they walked down

on Marion, to the stash house which
after one a.m. was awash in beacon light,
one Rashid Olmstead shot three times.
Not that Diablo need be know associate, but…)





iv.

They’re neighbors, after all, the folk I ride with,
though I covet nothing from them.
Not distracted from distraction by distraction
swamped, ill-used, with strollers and walkers to fight.
They’re hoping for salvation and the big bucks.
They read the Watchtower or scrape the latex of scratch-
and-wins, Royal Riches, Instant Millions.
One folds the winning tickets and tosses the rest.
They’re mainly uniformed, with franchise polos,
the name-tag wore in-style, upside down
and pinned to the cap worn backward
for Willie, at least. Others wear piped trousers
and un-tuck white-shirts with epaulettes
and stitched with an outfit’s logo, Securitas,
Sovereign, Scotland Yard. So many, you figure
every lobby under siege. Some have commando
sweaters, batches, duty belts, as ornamental
as their jobs. Novelists in the future, pay heed,
their shift could be the mouth-to-mouth
that brings the Nouveau Roman back to life,
milk the existential in a chapter that transcribes
the gabble of the walkie-talkie on its charger.
Then a chapter to each screen as it multiplies
the doldrums of office jobs, the stasis of hall,
the inertia in storage rooms, the poetry in back-lots.





v.

Montaigne says the most equitable polities
allow least inequality between servants and
masters, but Amy will check for split ends
on a hime cut that has its own budget
on shampoo and conditioner alone.

Montaigne says the cannibal on tour
took note that amongst us, men fully bloated
with all kinds of comfort have their halves
begging at their doors. Ryan licks his thumb
and rubs the skid mark off his trainers.

Montaigne asks how many trades
and vocations gain acceptance
whose very essence is vicious? Anyone?
I’m pacing book in hand
shut out by blank stares.

Montaigne says. I go through zingers
underlines, back-track to anecdote
Equitable polities? They want to know
what’s in the test, to go on to their lives,
pay tuition, wait tables, work for tips.





vi.

On the platform, as usual, the wet floor
sandwich boards every few feet,
their functionalist, pared down pictogram

stuck in the eternity of mid-skid.
Their everyman, our psycho pomp to mishap
steers us from the spill and signals

where straw rusticles coil from rebar
like pins to map infrastructure
breaking down, the cracks in our foundation.

I’m homebound with my own Q&A,
my own multiple-choice quiz
nor just the usual what’a fuck? after a bad class.

Did they read? Do they care? What do I care?
Nor the who’s first in an inbox that gathers
neglect like a bad conscience, but the more

inarticulate thread that catches in small ache,
a shoulder say, but seems to unravel
like cause and effect gone berserk

through every incidental that brought
ache in the first place, bad sleep, no insurance,
overdue bills, the twenty pounds worth

of Western cannon from Homer to Heaney
I cram in my shoulder bag each day.
Jeune Homme Triste Dans Un Train?

Not so jeune, nor so triste, more the burnout
Archbishop blesses as resilience and Deans look
down upon; they ought to know.

The CNA in front of me wears my own aura
and might say I’ll cure you, measure out your dose
but want you gone, my overtime, my cross to bear.





vii.

Novelists,

From overseen Tweets and Facebook
postings you’ll gather the seeds to the next
epistolary saga of a girl lost in the big city.

If video game characters were real people,
I would want to fuck so many of them.

God if the douche bag grabs my ass
in front of a customer one more goddamned time ….

La Cucaracha on xylophone. Chewbacca roars.
Celine, Whitney or Mariah belt melismas.

In the afterlings of confession that follow ringtone
you’ll sound a whole Bildungsroman.

No, no little boy I’m not playing with you Fabree,
leave that faggot alone, unfriend him, he is a pervert.

Or reconstitute a picaresque from the husks
of minister bargaining with some politico
on the other side. Darnell is a good kid.
He is calling in a favor; he’s kept score, the canvassing
he’s done, how he brought the congregation down to vote,
shifts to the kid. The kid’s a good kid, a real good kid,
maybe you find him a spot. In another place,
this is father phoning in admissions, shopping
for a better school but here we dead end so fast
at hearings, arraignment, court. It’s your next
Lazarillo, a fresh Don Pablo with up-to-date thief’s cant.





viii.

Conversely, one might opt against
the odd details in pure surface,
keep the anti-novel at bay,
ditch picaresque, epistolary, coming of age
and go for the real unexaggerated lion,
the rounded backs, the stupid weather-beaten faces,
the work-worn hands, Eliot’s vulgar citizen,
her common laborer with his vulgar eating.

The bill of fare these starving souls unwrap
would be more than enough.
It wafts from foil and Styrofoam,
the type two diabetes, the quintuple by-pass
they pick up on-the-go on Broad and Erie
where we transfer to any of the seven routes
that converge here and a moraine of makeshift
stands has washed across the sidewalk.
Rocks, twine, tarp, crates, stretched metal
to display the wares, the do-or-die
carnivalesque of sub- or unemployment:
burned DVD’s, new releases sure, but also
Barely Legal, Almost Jailbait, Sodomize This.
Contraband, knock-offs, umbrellas, hats.

Why not hope realism solace?
Why not wish, despite the squalor
and cruelty there, Brueghel’s folksy touch
diffuse its insights on the scene,
what he knew about suffering, sure,
but also how lands of plenty cloy,
how his bookkeeper dozes,
law and order go down for the count,
the salve of proverb, the dignity of fools.
Despite the squeal and blare and tweedle,
despite their demented spot-the-difference
roughneck broil, their tear-rouges, outcriers,
the ad libitum charivari of kettle, pan and tray.





ix.

Instead, sedans throb by like heart attacks,
gangs of kids on ATV’s rip by this Vegas bone yard-
worth of broken bulb-signs hanging by their last,
the ruined mortal and pestle Rx
of an unincorporated pharmacy shut down.

Here apothecary, packing, ministers his cure
in vial and dime bag, slings beside the church
where the bilingual banner stretched across
the façade promises to fend envy, evil eye.
Fruits of the Spirit sells produce in a bag.

Instead, jaundice colors-in the emaciated
we know from Evans and Lang
and much of where I came from bleeds
to where I am, no fire eaters, street clowns
kids sniffing glue. Not yet. Still, it’s Ubar,

Vilcambaba, Palenque in the make with the looks
of squatter city, that sort of stop-gap
rigging, ragged scaffolding, crumpled tin
that the dereliction of the haves seems to squeeze
out everywhere, Rio, Mumbai, Cape Town.

Here, the coma of a curved arrow sign
points, not nowhere, but to the ill-
starred, late-capitalist nowhere of the cement
roughcast that condemns the window of a former bank.
And samaras whirl-gig their way to gutter.

One thrived. Its sapling corkscrews
and leans out and touches the powerlines.
Palenque in the make, ready for its Maudslay
come lift prints. The bookstore Ships to Prison.
The writing’s on the wall, lit morning and night.





x.

The characters that loiter or bivouac?

An Amazon, house arrest anklet, cargo
shorts, varsity jacket, skull cap pulled down.

The tiler, slater, mason, whatever he does
in a wife-beater and dog tags, so groomed
the kneepads down-gyved to his ankles blouse
his tear-away pants and sculpt a costume.
Ghetto gaucho, Cossack, Barbary corsair.

Also, the fellow selling incense, soap and oils.
In Burberry plaid Dhotis, tube socks, Timberlands.
Some days, beneath a kameez, it’s camo salwars
tucked to combat boots. Other days, argyle socks,
gingham kurta, Ray Bans. Could be Samarkand
not North Philly, the way he struts like stalwart
to a faith. God knows what time he’s served,
for what, but he’ll lord over the younger ex-con
converts. And who’s to know if he really carried
out his Hajj or if hennaed beard is just cool.

I’ve seen him drop his kid at the local charter
madrasah, same kid he schools all afternoon:
to ignore the customer who barters,
to palm the cash before he hands the soaps.
The boy is seven, with his crocheted kufi
and holds his wares like day-glo brass knucks.

The minor roles? A whole assortment of weird
the things themselves, unacommodated men,
one, poor, forked Babalawo reciting mysteries,
acerbic, with his beads, his bag, his shawl,
silhouette in fairy-tale, post-apocalyptic flick.





xi.

Another one I can see still
as I board on my way home,
and have seen him many times,
another prophet. An ailment
has him drooling, tongue
swollen, a tremor on his jaw,
the sort of existential puppet
or unnamed hero that just keeps
going on in Beckett’s prose:
I who am on my way, words
bellying out of my sails,
am also that unthinkable ancestor…
He gets on after the underpass,
dressed up to the nines,
Panama hat, button-down
shirt, soaked, sure, but still
he’ll mind his crease when
he leans back, crossing his leg,
and zeros-in on whomever stares
and begins to rant, point,
or pontificate, as if holding court.
His, that same haut you know
from Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld,
that same devil-may-care how
repugnant they come through.
Let Mad Meg tincture village
scenes with all the bizarrerie
which with no God or theology
boils to the outré in botched
procedure, the outlandish
in unpunished sin.
Like reflection of reflection,
the phantoms we pursue,
or those pixels that burned to
screens, he is faint in the dark,
as he stalks to accost a passerby
on a mission, with a job tonight,
in drag, turquoise velour gown,
foam crown. He’s Lady Liberty,
handing out leaflets for the tax
outfit promising quick returns.
He sells loosies on the side and brindles
like the nonsense Goya etched
in aquatint to let pauper mirror
Ancien Régime, robed enigmas,
dark, devils that mock and haunt.
The man exists, a graft of self
and symbol, like those hybrids
in myth which quarry the bad
in us, our gorging and excesses.
He stammers, hesitates, shuffles
around what country stands for.











Sebastian Agudelo is the author of two books of poetry, Each Chartered Street (forthcoming 2013) and To The Bone, which was selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the 2008 Saturnalia Book Prize. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Bellingham Review and The Manchester Review (UK).

Mama doesn’t care that Angel has two kids or that she dropped out of school before meeting my brother—and while I want someone to say what a shame it is that the girl out-drinks my dad at Thanksgiving, Angel’s looks are all our mother will criticize, turning from my brother to me with water in her eyes, Pray my other boy won’t bring anybody as ugly home. So I never do.















I spent what light Saturday sent sweating
And learned to cuss cutting grass for women
Kind enough to say they couldn’t tell the damned
Difference between their mowed lawns
And their vacuumed carpets just before
Handing over a five-dollar bill rolled tighter
Than a joint and asking me in to change
A few light bulbs. I called those women old
Because they wouldn’t move out of a chair
Without my help or walk without a hand
At the base of their backs. I called them
Old, and they must have been; they’re all dead
Now, dead and in the earth I once tended.
The loneliest people have the earth to love
And not one friend their own age—only
Mothers to baby them and big sisters to boss
Them around, women they want to please
And pray for the chance to say please to.
I don’t do that kind of work anymore. My job
Is to look at the childhood I hated and say
I once had something to do with my hands.















He’s a dummy for a tall woman, and Angel’s taller than him in the wrong pair of shoes. He sees her the way children see the trees they climb.

After his car quits, I pick him up for work. He lights his morning cigarette and fidgets with my stereo for something repetitive, explicit—the kind of music born when we were, the one sound we have in common.















Before he saw Eve, the serpent walked upright
And climbed and crawled like a man with limbs.
He tangled himself in reaches for green, prized
The curves of his quick and endlessly slim

Body. Days were years then. The woman spent
Most days in giggles or gorged on something
Significant placed in her palms. The serpent
Admired her wandering, her ease at being

Described, entered. No one wanted, but even that garden
Grew against the ground’s will, and this,
Child, I tell you since soon you’ll grow and harden—
No matter how much he hiccupped or hissed,

The damned snake couldn’t stop staring, and she couldn’t
Understand—though he inched close enough
To whisper, Beauty. He needed to confront
Her with what he knew, needed her stuffed

On a sweet that made her see herself, see him
And every beast in the young world watching.















As we veered onto Line Avenue, he cut off the song saying, Sometimes, I call Angel those names. She throws forks and plates when I do it.

He got out of my car laughing, but with his head in the window like it was his last chance at giving advice, as if he understood that much, It feels good to have a woman fine as she is so mad at you.















I shouldn’t be, but I’m thinking
About the woman who got shot
Fighting over that sweat-soaked
Headscarf Teddy Pendergrass threw
Into the crowd at one of those
Shows he put on for “Ladies
Only” the year I was born. How
Many women reached
Before the tallest two forgot
Their new fingernails matched
Purses and shoes? I’m no good.
I thought I’d be bored with men
And music by now, voices tender
As the wound Pendergrass could feel
When he heard what caused gunfire
Was a trick he rehearsed. Love
Is quick and murderous, bleeding
Proof of talent. He wanted to be
What we pay to see—Of course,
That’s not special. I imagine
Someone who desires any
Worn piece of man must be
Willing to shoot and be shot.















That wasn’t the day she killed him. They were together fighting and calling the police on each other for years. Nobody paid any mind.

But let me turn too quick on Line with the worst music, and I can hear him again, telling me the satisfaction of hurting a woman who’s still there the next morning. I think that’s why he loved Angel, ugly or fine. What man wouldn’t? And why can’t I? Which man wouldn’t love a try at bending beauty?
















Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans and is a recent recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals and anthologies including The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. Brown is an assistant professor of poetry at Emory University. His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament, will be published by Copper Canyon.

Herero Woman in Patchwork Dress 2 ©Jim Naughten

At Length: There has been a phenomenal amount of interest in your photographs about the Herero people of Namibia. Much of the press has focused on two main things: the perceived exoticism of the Herero people themselves – or rather their clothing – and the turbulent history of their country. What do you think about the attention your work has received thus far?

Jim Naughten: I had expected a certain level of attention, but nowhere near as much as there has been. The way the work has caught on on-line – websites and blogs — has been quite phenomenal, and there’s a very definite difference between the level of interest in “Re-enactors” and this series in terms of what’s changed over a four year gap and the increased amount of blog or internet content being used or seen now. The actual images are quite “loud,” overtly colorful, and therefore eye-catching. Although they have been made to be exhibited in print form, they translate well on a computer screen, so that has certainly contributed.  Lastly, the story behind the costume is fascinating and little known, and overall it has quite a broad base of interest – covering portraiture, fashion, history, fine art, anthropology, and so on – increasing the potential audience base.

AL: Merrell has published a book on the work. How did the title “Conflict and Costume” come about?

JN: My initial idea for the book was to simply call it “Hereros” and to have a similar aesthetic to the “Re-enactors” monograph. Merrell suggested “Conflict and Costume” as a way of leading people into the story behind the costume. They are a very successful publishers with a good reputation – with a highly lauded designer, Nicola Bailey – so I decided to trust their judgment, and I think they have done a great job. It’s a different book to the one I would have made, but a very good one nonetheless.

Herero Soldier in Red Beret ©Jim Naughten

AL: The book has garnered quite some attention in its own right. Something that keeps coming up is how little is really known about the Herero people from a historical perspective. How important is this to the series of photographs from your perspective? And from the perspective of the publisher, in that there’s an essay in the book that deals with the historical aspect?

JN: I tend to find a subject that interests me on several levels, one that I can explore photographically and artistically, and in the case of these last two projects, subjects that have or make a connection with history. I read a great deal of history books and I like to imagine my work as being kind of illustrated versions. The fact that the Herero story – or the story behind the German/Herero war – is little known adds a certain weight, and it is fascinating to consider the paradoxical nature of the story. I think the book needed to have a contextual essay, as the central subject of the images is real and historical, despite the images having a strength of their own.

AL: Do you think this is contrary to the photographs existing as fine art; i.e., is there a possibility that readers might view the photographs as a form of journalism/documentary?

JN: I think there is a gray area where art and documentary meet. I think these images are probably right in the middle, exactly where I want them to be. I would cite Werner Herzog as a strong influence in terms of my practice, in as much as his documentaries are often scripted or bent into his “ecstatic truths,” with actors, scripted scenes or the luxury of soundtracks to alter what we are seeing. I try to think of my images in this way, like paintings or films, and see where I can take them with post-production to make them my own.

Herero Woman in Red Dress ©Jim Naughten

AL: Tell us about how you became interested in the Herero people.

JN: I travelled across Southern Africa for a year after finishing college and came across the Hereros during that time. I photographed them then with my old film camera, about fifteen years ago. I always had it in the back of my mind to return and photograph them again, this time with a clear idea of making a large body of work, using digital capture and post-production, and a much clearer process behind my picture making.

AL: When you returned to Namibia, what was the process you undertook in order to make these photographs?

JN: The process of image making was logistically tough and quite physical. It took about four months and I brought an assistant out with me from the UK, and hired a car and Herero guide from a Herero tour company — a real coup. We camped every day, drove for thousands of miles staying in villages, visiting weddings, funerals, and ceremonies across the whole country, photographing as and when we could. Our guides were key to the process and they would introduce us to chiefs and elders, explain what we wanted to do, and negotiate fees, or gifts for the villagers – usually coffee, sugar and maize. In this way we made sure we could proceed respectfully and spend a great deal of time talking to the people I was photographing.

AL: Was it difficult and how? What were the main challenges you faced photographically as well as practically?

JN: It was quite physical in the sense that we camped every day, putting up the camp, cooking, cleaning, striking camp, driving huge distances – rarely on road – trying to charge the equipment, cameras, lights and laptop, keeping the sand and dust out of the kit and backing up. We had to watch out for scorpions, snakes, spiders, and the occasional elephant or lion. It does require some staying power for four months. On top of that, there was the challenge of finding the subjects, negotiating with them and then of course taking the photographs.

Herero Woman in Blue Dress ©Jim Naughten

AL: This series of photographs is your second body of work as a photographic artist, the first being “Re-enactors,” where you also made photographs about history, about costume and about identity. How would you say you’ve developed as an artist with this new work?

JN: This body of work represents a kind of backward step, but one that I wanted to – or felt I had to – make before making a big forward step on the next project (due to start very soon — watch this space). There was an itch that had to be scratched.

One thing it has done is reinforced how important post-production is to my practice, and how much my painting background is merging with my photography.

It’s perhaps another conversation, but I read an interesting interview with Tessa Traeger, where she says of digital technology “To my relief and surprise this new medium has proved to be subtle and flexible and ripe with infinite possibilities, especially in color, and the ability to make the image exactly as you wish afterward. Now it is possible to make images which you only see in your head before their creation.” This really echoes the form and direction of my practice. In addition, I have been a fan of Roger Ballen, and I’ve always been aware of the moment where his work changed from documentary to art. Despite my work mixing both of these already, I am intending to make my own version, or to “do a Ballen,” as I think of it, next.

Herero Cadet in Blue Hat ©Jim Naughten

AL: On purely scopic terms, the photographs are fascinating. The vantage point, focal depth and use of light are at once simple, yet so complex and highly crafted. Why did you make the photographs in this way?

JN: I wanted to make a set of images of the Herero dresses and uniforms and set them against the expansive landscape which, other than an aesthetic or dramatic choice, would both focus the viewer’s attention on the subject and add a sense of space, ambiguity and timelessness to the photographs and story. The backgrounds work as a kind of backdrop, and suggest a hidden history — the desert as silent witness.  They are not ‘documentary’ images, but a of study and kind of celebration of the costumes, which are spectacular, so I wanted the images to reflect this. The photographs have been described as painterly, which is what I had hoped for.

To achieve this, apart from photographing the sitters in the midday sun with a silver strobe light to fill in most of the harsh shadows – which adds to the sense of surreality – a great deal of the work is done in post-production. Whilst some of the images are made in situ, the majority, where subjects could only be photographed in towns, for example, have been added into a landscape and had work done to alter the colors and shadow detail. Some images are made up from several different elements. For example, the panoramic images are made up of several different images, usually photographed in sequence from one position – like the marching ladies – and then added into a landscape in post-production. It feels wonderfully liberating to work this way, and much closer to painting.

Herero Woman in Pink and Pattern Dress ©Jim Naughten

AL: The color also performs a crucial role, not just in terms of the Herero clothing, but how you utilize it as an artist. You used a very specific color palette in your previous work also. Tell us more about this.

JN: In terms of the color palette, I would say that I don’t think I’m capable of making a normal color photograph. I have always worked with an abstraction of color, whether it be as a black and white photographer, using cross processing in color photography, or hand tinting, but never anything resembling ‘real’ color. As I mentioned before, I’m  beginning to realize just how important the digital process is to my work. It’s more-or-less made for me, allowing me to take the work wherever I want to. This is true of both projects, “Re-enactors” and the Herero series. I have to mention Loretta Lux, as she was the first person whose work I saw that appeared to be part of a great photographic tradition, but who was clearly using digital process and a painterly color palette. It’s a wonderful way to describe the images or story in my mind’s eye, and I always consider how I might approach these subjects as paintings.

AL: Each of the subjects is ‘bang smack’ in the middle of the frame — yet you don’t seem particularly concerned about the identity of the individual person per se. It’s a formalist approach that you employed with the “Re-enactors” series also. Tell us more about that – what inspired you to work this way and why is it important in your work?

JN: In terms of the portraits themselves, I would say the work is clearly rooted in and influenced by the tradition of typological photography – from August Sander to Rinéke Dijkstra, in that sense they are the study of types, and intended to be seen as part of a series. By composing them in the center of the frame, using either a plain backdrop – or in the case of the Hereros, a simple desert backdrop — and by using a very large format or fine detail camera, I’m really throwing all the focus on and meditating on the subject.  The centered full-length images work in this instance, because the story that I want to highlight is the dresses and the costume.

AL: The photo book has just been published (your second book), and  your second solo exhibition in New York just opened at the Klompching Gallery. That’s a pretty hefty achievement. What do you hope will come out of these?

JN: The work has been well received and recognized, so it’s given me the confidence to take my work in a new direction, one that’s been lurking away and waiting for the right time. Ultimately, anything that builds confidence is a very good thing. A few more doors open, more people become aware of the work, and it’s something that can be built on.

Herero Women in Patchwork Dresses ©Jim Naughten

AL: In April you’ll be presented at the AIPAD Photo Fair; alongside Paris Photo, it’s probably the most important photo fair, attended by some of the most important photo collectors. Who do you envisage acquiring your work?

JN: Well, I would be extremely happy for anyone to acquire the work. I was particularly thrilled when Diane Arbus’ nephew bought a print from the “Re-enactors” series, as Arbus remains my biggest influence to date.  Also, It was wonderful to have that series acquired and exhibited at the Imperial War Museum. Ultimately, it’s a great feeling to have your work bought at all, and to know that it’s being displayed and appreciated as it was intended.

Jim Naughten’s exhibition “Conflict and Costume” is currently on show at Klompching Gallery (New York) and Margaret Street Gallery (London), accompanied by the photo book published by Merrell Publishers.

Still from Patrick Moser’s quiz response

For this recurring feature, we’re asking artists and poets to answer a quiz composed of questions from ten contemporary poems.

Sources for the questions and how to find these poems are included below. Here are the artists and poets who replied to our first round:

–Liz Rodda
–Jim Mattei
–Christine Nguyen
–Patrick Moser
–Allan Peterson
–Emily Hunt
–Cyriaco Lopes and Terri Witek

LIZ RODDA

Who has a mask, & a heart?

What is more distracting than clouds?

Who would you change for?

Which system is most miraculous?

What do we sing to a man who’s drowning?

JIM MATTEI

Where are you planted?

Brooklyn at present, but with roots spread across many states and continents. Am happy to sprout up in the cracks in the sidewalk or a mountain side.

Who has a mask, & a heart?

Children.

What is more distracting than clouds?

Ocean waves. Can ponder for days. Though I find both very soothing and essential.

I keep an empty blue vase./I should fill it. With what, white mice and charcoal?

I imagine the tiny mice popping out and their white bottoms adorable from charcoal dust.

Do you ever hate being American, flying Virgin, loving the master?

Never really hate being an American, though I wish there was more compassion. And less grouchy folk. Haven’t had the chance to be vexed with Virgin. And there is always something positive in loving whatever form the master takes.

Who would you change for?

Constantly changing, reminded daily that there is always more to do and learn. There was an amazing hash tag via the Curiosity rover’s twitter feed on New Year’s Day, #daremightythings. How can the outcome not lead to change.

Willem DeKooning’s “I can change overnight” is also good.

If scissors aren’t the answer, what’s a doll to do?

Make paper snowflakes perhaps.

Which system is most miraculous?

The universe, it’s still expanding, it contains everything, started with the Big Bang. We are not even close to grasping all it contains. Limitless. Amazing.  It contains our solar system which in itself leaves me awestruck and scratching my head. Miraculous indeed.

Do you go in or stay out of the house of words?

I’d open the second floor window carefully and quietly before entering.

What do we sing to a man who’s drowning?

I’ll save you! Or if I can’t save him–

Act III, Scene 4, Le Sommeil, from Lully’s Atys, performed by Les Arts Florissants and William Christie. It’s from one of my favorite operas. The music is stunning. Peaceful. Makes me woozy.

A youtube link is below as well, doesn’t do it justice really, but the music is beautiful.

From the libretto: it’s sung in french, english is below

The scene begin with Atys, Sleep, Morpheus, Phobetor, Phantasmus, The Pleasant Dreams, The Baneful Dreams on stage as Atys sleeps:

SLEEP “Let us sleep, let us all sleep; Ah! How sweet is rest!”

MORPHEUS “Reign, divine Sleep, reign over all the world;

Scatter your most soporiferous poppies;

Beguile care, charm the senses,

Secure all hearts in deep tranquility.”

PHOBETOR “Let no brutal noise be made,

Flow, murmur, ye clear streams;

Only the sound of waters

Lulls the sweetness of such delightful silence.

SLEEP ”Let us sleep, let us all sleep; Ah! How sweet is rest!”

MORPHEUS, PHOBETOR, PHANTASMUS ”Let us sleep, let us all sleep; Ah! How sweet is rest!”

CHRISTINE NGUYEN

(First Row, L to R) 1) Where are you planted? 2) Who has a mask, & a heart? 3) What is more distracting than clouds? 4) I keep an empty blue vase./I should fill it. With what, white mice and charcoal? 5) Do you ever hate being American, flying Virgin, loving the master? (Second Row, L to R) 6) Who would you change for? 7) If scissors aren’t the answer, what’s a doll to do? Eight) Which system is most miraculous? 9) Do you go in or stay out of the house of words? 10) What do we sing to a man who’s drowning?

PATRICK MOSER

Where are you planted?

Who has a mask & a heart?

What is more distracting than clouds?

If scissors aren’t the answer, what’s a doll to do?

Do you go in or stay out of the house of words?

What to we sing to a man who’s drowning?

 Van Halen, whispered.

ALLAN PETERSON

Where are you planted?

Between my exuberant maximums and promising minimums.Within my heartfelt withstandables. Somewhat short of my fully comprehensibles.  Conveniently close to my embraceables. More vegetatively speaking, low temperature can limit survival and is a factor in considering advantage or deficit for development in any location. Strangely, heat is less so. I can sit comfortably above the century mark on the silica beaches of the Gulf of Mexico and have my root extension proceed normally while having my phototropism at peak efficiency. Moisture must always be considered, of course, and to that end I try to stay fully hydrated. I thrive amidst profusion. Lush provides nutrients. Humus and loam. Complexity is an auxin, old growth my gibberellin. Every place I am is a Hardiness Zone.

Who has a mask, & a heart?

The Wood Frog, rana sylvatica. Its mask is an identifying feature which rather defeats the usual purpose of a mask, that of preventing recognition. It is held in place by two dorsolateral ridges. It does not rob.

It is however, a hugger, an unusual characteristic for maskers, and has enlarged thumbs for better gripping. If you have ever been frog hugged you will know what I mean. Not only does it have a heart, it’s heart is three-chambered instead of four. If the princess knew this, it might have caused her to kiss it out of compassion.

What is more distracting than clouds?

Not distracting for long, of course, but then clouds are themselves self limiting. I have seen the clearly recognizable sub continent of India dissolve in a matter of minutes.

I keep an empty blue vase./I should fill it. With what, white mice and charcoal?

I will presume it’s cerulean like mine, sky color, not quite cyan, heavenly, hence the name. Other heavenly contents might be appropriate as such as star thistle, actiosphaerium (a heliozoan), sundews, helianthus, Tears of the Sun, and classy stuff like that.

If scissors aren’t the answer, what’s a doll to do?

Let’s talk this over. If the cause of these disturbing thoughts of harming yourself is related to loss of limbs or persistent humiliation of floppyness,  stitching can be used to take the place of traditional joints while keeping the legs on and still providing an acceptable range of motion, tho over flexion should be avoided. The same applies to shoulders. You have the advantage of not having a joint held together with multiple connections and interactions of bone, cartilage, and tendon. Simple sewn seams can restore an acceptable flexibility damaged by, say the dog’s  vigorous shaking.  Given the primacy of vision, the eye’s delicate mechanism is often the focus (pun intended) of considerable anxiety. This anxiety does not apply if you have buttons or glass eyes such as taxidermists use , but specifically to the more lifelike moveable ones. The problem centers around the tendency for them to be stuck, so that one may be taken for dead if stuck closed sitting up, or drugged if stuck open when reclining. The most unnerving is when only one eye is stuck in one position or another, giving a particularly bizarre appearance. Frequent sit-ups should keep the weighted mechanism in good working order producing relief from uncertainty.

Which system is most miraculous?

The Egocentric system, entirely human, in which the erythrocytes, platelets, leucocytes and other fractions circulate oxygen, nutrients and lymph.

At the center of this spiral galaxy is a collection of suppositions, superstitions, biases, urges, some good intentions, sex thoughts, self preservation mechanisms, boundless self assurance and arrogance. This is essentially an unstable system, subject to periodic outbursts comparable to novas. The spinning of such volatile constituents can produce an existential dizziness.

With only limited self reflection, the system is given to delusions such as not being  connected to nature, that a all powerful person lives in the sky, that they are constantly being watched.

What do we sing to a man who’s drowning?

The first thing learned in swimming classes is the unfortunately named “Dead Man’s Float,”  Without time to fully instruct and practice this maneuver, other means must be considered. Of course, we question the choice of singing at a time of crisis unless all hope is lost. Even then, better after, than during. A better course is to take action. Bystander inaction, or standing and pointing, makes a poor impression to those in peril.

It is also worthwhile to note that, according to the American Medical Association, swimming skills may not save the victim anyway. In their opinion, lack of self reliance and coping skills are the problem, not swimming ability. They note that without a positive self image, victims may resort to useless panicking, crying or waiting for help. Helplessness can be a learned behavior in or out of the water.

See if you can assess whether you have a whiner on your hands

Try to determine if the man is possibly just waving, not drowning

The most compassionate action would be to throw them a rope while singing

“Haul Away Joe.” Do not bother with “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat.”

EMILY HUNT

Where are you planted?

beside a fish and a blue light

Who has a mask, & a heart?

me

What is more distracting than clouds?

AN APPLE, ORGANIZATIONALLY

An ache in the back of the eyeballs some,
and how that was never to have befriended an object

And objects came to be justified
that they had no life or meaning

Except to be judged daynight and tomorrow

And little by little these came to be objects everywhere,
and counted clouds, and objects came to be clouds

-Alfred Starr Hamilton, A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind

I keep an empty blue vase./I should fill it. With what, white mice and charcoal?

yes or yes but not both

Do you ever hate being American, flying Virgin, loving the master?

yes, I have never, yes

Who would you change for?

the changing master / the system below

If scissors aren’t the answer, what’s a doll to do?

speak

Which system is most miraculous?

The one and only

Do you go in or stay out of the house of words?

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

What do we sing to a man who’s drowning?

love

CYRIACO LOPES & TERRI WITEK

Where are you planted?

    in the eclipse

Who has a mask, & a heart?

What is more distracting than clouds?

   you asked me twice but I still couldn’t follow

I keep an empty blue vase./I should fill it. With what, white mice and charcoal?

Do you ever hate being American, flying Virgin, loving the master?

1.                      2.  eats               3.  air

Who would you change for?

If scissors aren’t the answer, what’s a doll to do?

    red ribbon

Which system is most miraculous?

Do you go in or stay out of the house of words?

     sem——-same

What do we sing to a man who’s drowning?

“É Doce Morrer no Mar,” by Dorival Caymmi & Jorge Amado, 1941.

Listen (Marisa Monte & Cesária Évora)

Lyrics translated to English

–

Liz Rodda is a multi-media artist. Her work has been featured at Dumbo Art Center, NY; CS 13 Art Space, OH; Big Medium, TX; Takt Kunstprojektraum, Berlin, Germany and others. She teaches in the School of Art + Design at Texas State University.

Jim Mattei is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

Christine Nguyen lives in Long Beach, California. Solo exhibitions of her work have been featured at the Hammer Museum (Project), Michael Kohn Gallery, Andrewshire Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong.

Patrick Moser lives and works in St Augustine, Florida. He is an Associate Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Flagler College. He exhibits his paintings, drawings and video work nationally and internationally. His wife is amazing and his son is spectacular. He used to be able to do a 360 degree two-handed dunk quite easily but cannot anymore.

Allan Peterson is a visual artist and poet living in Gulf Breeze, Florida and Ashland Oregon. His book Fragile Acts is a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Emily Hunt‘s poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Conduit, Sea Ranch, The Volta, and elsewhere. She lives in Northampton, MA.

Cyriaco Lopes is a Brazilian artist whose work has most recently appeared in exhibitions at Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum, El Museo Del Barrio in New York, and at the Contemporary Museum in St. Louis.

Terri Witek is the author of the Shipwreck Dress and other books. She teaches Creative Writing at Stetson University in Florida.

–

Question Sources

Where are you planted? is the title of a poem in Evie Shockley’s the new black

Who has a mask & a heart is from Alice Notley’s poem “White Phosphorus” in Grave of Light

What is more distracting than clouds? is the title of a poem in Matthew Rohrer’s Destroyer and Preserver

I keep an empty blue vase./I should fill it. With what, white mice and a charcoal? is from Jay Hopler’s poem “Meditation on a Blue Vase” in Green Squall

Do you ever hate being American, flying Virgin, loving the master?  is from Julia Bloch’s poem “Dear Kelly, All these weddings” in Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Who would you change for? is from Joanna Klink’s poem “Sorting” in Raptus

If scissors aren’t the answer, what’s a doll to do? is the title of poem in Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life

Which system is the most miraculous? is title of a poem in Catherine Barnett’s The Game of Boxes

Do you go in or stay out of the house of words? is from Jee Leong Koh’s poem “A Lover’s Recourse”

What do we sing to a man who’s drowning? is from Terri Witek’s poem”Anchor Sea Shanty” in Exit Island

The question all around the internet was,
Is Kanye West’s Girlfriend Trashy?

Her birth name is Alyssa Audrey Rose Palmer.

On YouTube, the interviews are short and sometimes
raunchy as hell.
“I’m a virgin in my ass,” she said.

In other videos, all the ones where her face is
front and center, and she’s got blue lipstick, sunglasses
in the shapes of hearts,
or her bra out–

she’s chewing gum. Like a cow,
I think, in my eighth grade science teacher’s voice.

She licks her teeth while she’s making points like,
“I don’t have a stylist.”
Something along the lines of make sure they know,
“I style myself.”

Her interviewer responds,
“I live and die for that,”
in a voice I’ve heard on black sitcoms in the 90′s.

Someone in the comments writes
to women who watch this video—like me—

“YO IF THERES ANY OTHA HOT_ CHICK LIKE THIS ONE holllaaa”

Do I respond?
Is he trashy?

Why do women watch this video of Amber?
Are they looking for the Kanye in her?

Girl, raised by her aunt, with a name as sunshine as hers—Mary Lakes.
Girl, Portuguese, Italian, African, Irish. Former
exotic dancer. Featured in music videos of Young Jeezy and Ludacris.

I remember hearing that she might marry Kanye in the Caribbean in January, 2011.
I remember thinking, Is she trashy as all get out, right on Kanye’s arm?






Suge Knight


Suge is pronounced like sugar without its –ar.
Liar turns lie. Color turns cull. Whisper, wisp.

In August 2005, Kanye hosted a party before the Video Music Awards. And Suge got shot there.

MSNBC reports:
ambulance, fire and police officials swarmed
the shooter was described as black and wearing a pink shirtGiddy. Frivolous.
Treasure, trezh. Splendor, splend. Shiner, shine.

In March 2010, Suge is suing Kanye for money, but a car accident keeps him from his court date.

Perez Hilton reports
a quote from Knight’s lawyer:
Nobody likes Kanye West anymore.
Even though he’s still selling millions of records, everybody’s sick of him.Error, err. Geyser, guise. Razor, raise blaze.

The bullet took the light from the front of the gun. The bullet took the light into the leg and bone.

I think Suge’s alight with something like grief.
Can Kanye save him from something like that?






Kanye as a Quantum Particle Yet To Be Observed


Is there room in a biography for what didn’t happen?

December 2010, Miami—Kanye’s once scheduled court date with Suge Knight.
January 2011, Dominican Republic—his once rumored wedding to Amber Rose.
Less than three hours to fly from one place to the other, to fly
over the Bahamas that fall like inch worms from Florida’s peninsula,

to fly to a country that shares an island with Haiti, that nearly touches
Port Au Prince with its border like a series of shark fins.

How would their marriage have begun? Following such trouble,
the slow pulse of the Earth destroying the Earth. But then,

how funny if Suge’s missing earring had ended up on Amber’s finger.
Photos of her in the tabloids as she leaves a car, stands from a table.

If Kanye’s life collided, collapsed. If he woke one morning
and, having made no decisions, all the possibilities came to be.






In Song


After his 2002 car accident, Kanye West wrote, produced, and recorded a song.

“Through the Wire.”

He rapped every word through his wired-shut jaw.

In the first verse:

How do you console my mom or give her light support
When you telling her your son’s on life support
And just imagine how my girl feel
On the plane scared as hell that her guy look like Emmett Till
Recently, Kanye compared himself to Emmett Till again.

On one website they explain: “discussing the VMA incident . . . he compared the backlash he faced to the murder of Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager who was killed for whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi.”

People have been outraged, but Kanye must

feel a connection to this boy. And because of Kanye,

Emmett’s story is on the internet again and again. 65 years later.


Kanye knows what appropriation is.






It’s Hard Not To Be Moved


I can tell—it’s starting to get to my husband.

Often he’s with me when I’m doing research.

Today I went to copy-paste a comment into an e-mail, and he stopped me.
He said I needed to take both comments,
that it was significant that there were only two and this is what they said.

So this part is for my husband:

http://www.411mania.com/music/news/164797/Kanye-West-To-Appear-On-Kardashian-Reality-Show.htm

Comments (2)

1) Wow, Kanye looks mad fuckin lame in that pic. At least he [mostly] makes good music. 

Posted By: SS87 (Guest) on December 04, 2010 at 01:12 AM

2) fucking awesome!!!!….no, really…i hope he dies….i do, i hope he goddamn dies…fuck him, goddamn concieted hypocrit muther fucker…the only ratings he will deliver is if he gets decapitated on live television during half time of the super bowl…i’d actually watch that

and don’t feed me any of your sympathetic bullshit…he’s an untalented con artist and racistthat deserves to be beaten with a hammer and thrown screaming from a helicopter 

Posted By: mikey (Guest) on December 04, 2010 at 04:21 AM
We’re both still surprised at the racism and violence and hate.
We’re full of fear

but that’s not what fearsome means.






Because Kanye Isn’t King Kong or Emmett Till or a N****


When I admire my small, white nose, I’m Taylor Swift.

Too, if I’m made of red candies and floral underwear,

if I spend a day descending all the stairways I can find.

It’s one way to be a woman, a woman being a girl.

I could meet the many white knights, with their hands

around swords, their ears perked to the motion of men.

If I ever thought life was a whistle, I thought it twice.






Jesus Walks


This poem could start, “I love you,” instead of ending there.
It could start, “Music.”

The key to this poem is connecting this sentence,

I want to talk to God but I’m afraid because we ain’t spoke in so long
from the lyrics of Kanye’s “Jesus Walks”
to this sentence,

Show ‘em the wounds
from a making of video that follows
the making of the third music video
for “Jesus Walks”
Kanye said, after the first two videos, “I still felt like I didn’t have the hood, and that’s what Jesus walks for, it’s for the hood.”

I can think, have thought, of great line breaks for that quote. Already had to think of punctuation.

The man who said, “Show ‘em the wounds,” is, I imagine, a friend of Kanye’s. But Kanye’s not around for this:

“I’m here with my n****, Romeo, looking smooth and shit. You know what I’m saying. Official, n****. How many times you got shot?”

“Nine,” he’s grinning and lifts up his shirt.

“Nine times goddamnit, and he ain’t even no rapper, bitch.” Pause. “I’m with my other n****,” the man to his left, “how many times you got shot, n****? Tell ‘em.”

“Five times.”

“Show ‘em the wounds. Show ‘em the wounds, show ‘em the wounds.” And he adds, “I ain’t never got shot but my n****s did.”
Stars all across my paper. Stars when I look at something blindingly beautiful. When I fall. When I first learn of stars.

Someone on the production crew yells out, “Come on in pigeon holders.” Someone says, “I got dirt and blood standing by.”

Many voices behind Kanye’s repeat, “Jesus walks.”

An actor—the one lit on fire for the video, the one carrying a cross big enough to carry him—says to the camera, “I hope people take it the right way.”

My favorite music video of the three has this man in it.

Maybe for the fire behind Kanye that rises and recedes in that hallway like the breath.

Maybe because when the police cut open a pack of cocaine in the trunk of a car filled with packs of cocaine, a dove comes out, shaking powder from its head. I count at least fifteen flying from the trunk.

A woman sings “I want Jesus,” with the fullest lips I’ve seen in years, a voice like no woman I know.

I believe in her, in Kanye, that “Jesus walks for them.”

But what is it when I believe bullets leave the shapes of stars?

Kanye, if only I could write a poem for you and not about you.






On November 10th, 2007, Donda West Died


On November 10th, 2008, you were between shows. November 9th, Dublin, Ireland. November 11th, London, England.

By ferry and car, the journey from Dublin to London takes about eight hours.

By plane, about an hour.

I have to imagine you flew. But maybe not. Maybe you spent two hours, three hours, on a ferry.

The journey between two points is such a straight line.
Maybe you needed to be on the Irish Sea. The blue of it. The blue looks miserable.

The very shape of the sea is like a face, mourning, gagging on a moan.

And it must be salty, like all seas.

Though for a sea to leave cliffs instead of beaches.

That tells me it’s killed its fair share of mothers.
The Irish stop clocks at the time of death. They stay with the body day and night until the burial. They recite poems. They sing. They cry and drink. They kiss the dead body.

Given the autopsy, at least some of these, you were unable to do.

But the first anniversary of a death. I know it.

We sometimes burn a yahrzeit candle. It burns for 24 hours, or 26, or 3 days, more. It’s white and burns in a tall glass so you don’t have to worry about leaving an open flame over night.

Do you worry about your house burning down?

You spent the nights around the anniversary of your mother’s death on a stage that looked like the universe.

Planets. Shooting stars. A Galaxy—pink and perfect.

You were glowing in the dark. And you were black in the dark.

And a monster came on stage to eat you.

To gobble you up. As mothers say.






I Want a House to Raise My Son In


I.

I feel common.
There are people who want the house I want.

And if my desires are not unique,
what is?

A combination of my desires and my face
and the mud in the yard I don’t yet have?


II.

It’s the worst time to be feeling this way,
when my legs are getting caught
on chairs and other places
I try to leave.

My hips just aren’t able to hold myself
together anymore, so ready to bear

his terrible head—as when terrible
was used to describe God and Godly
everything.


III.

I can hardly make it through.
Sleep comes and bends
my hands into positions of habit,
pinching the fluids that should move
like little fish through my wrists,
and shit. Shit. If I were my hand,
I’d be drowned. My hand is one
more part of me, maybe the last,
to realize I’m deathly ill, in that,
I could die from this.


IV.

I have made Noah promise he will save me over the boy
if it came to that.

I’ve told no one this.

It is my one non-maternal act, my one feeling
that reminds me of the selfish child I was
when I thought how I would have spit and peed
on the Torah if I’d been a child in the Holocaust,
if it would have saved me,
which, only as an adult do I understand,
would not have saved me.

I’m afraid I will be a horrible mother because
I am a horrible woman.


V.

Can I write anything after that?
Can the poem continue?
Can I return to my love for my son?

Can I tell how I imagine burying my nose
in his soft, small belly,
how I imagine making him the best room,
the best crib and chest of drawers?

One day we will redecorate his room as
he wants. And we
will play basketball in the driveway

at the house—
the house I want so badly for him.


VI.

I lie in bed, as I can hardly leave it now,
and read books about Kanye. I page through
the one about Kanye’s Glow in the Dark tour.
It reminds me of my son’s bones, glowing white
in ultrasounds, in a more wretched darkness.

Donda made it seem easy in her memoirs.
To love Kanye. To unconditionally love him.
She even knew he was a boy. In utero.

My son remains my mystery.
The ultrasounds revealing him
well-formed. No clubbed foot.
Black stomach means he can
swallow. Black bladder means
his kidneys are working. Heart
can be seen in detail, valves,
deep inside me. His hair grown.
His nose like mine. Arms, legs,
moving. Everything moving.


VII.

I want to lie in the grass of my yard with my son.
Every part of him in the sun. Every part of each of us.






Dear Donda,


I wonder if you were bored by the white woman.
I wonder if, when you thought of the white woman, you thought of Under the Tuscan Sun.
I wonder what you would think, seeing the dead white women in Kanye’s “Monster” music video.
I wonder what you would think of me.






Runaway


On Kanye West’s website is a still frame from his movie—
Kanye carrying a woman from an explosion filled with as many pinks as yellows and oranges
(and a red like a flaming heart, if a burnt thing reddened, if light were pushed through the skin).
Just below it, there’s a Twitter feed. It shows three Tweets at a time. Any Tweet hashtagged with
Runaway, runaway, RunAway, etc.

The first Tweet when I visit today:
“I txt my Mom & told her I love her, she said I coulda came downstairs to say that… I dnt think she noticed I was gone LMFAO! #RunAway”

I didn’t understand at first. So literal. So misplaced. She had actually run away. From her mother.
And she was laughing about it.

As if,
in front of Kanye.






Kanye’s Circulatory System

On the Two Year Anniversary of the Death of My Grandfather Allen


The blood helps because the heart helps because the electricity moves us.

Kanye, my circulatory system looks like yours. So you too have a soft vein
too big for your temple, a pulse in your thumb. You’re still losing your mother.

One reporter called your mother’s death “more data for the live stream.”
I apologize for him. He thinks, maybe, two years is a long time.

Last year, in Princeton, I tutored a sixth grader in every subject. As he learned
the systems of the body, I did too, beginning with the diagram of the heart.

What new words did you learn then? What new procession of breath
did you practice when I was teaching a boy how to say vena cava and aorta,

when I drew hearts on a chalkboard for him, day after day, and erased,
with my finger, the holes for the pulmonary veins to come in, to

fill the left atrium with the blood we could not draw? You recorded a song.
I’d love if you’d recorded a song. I almost forget again that your heart

looks like mine. You’ve heard the pulse in your ears then. You know
wush is not a foolish way to describe it. You miss her and I miss him but

surely I cannot say if, when you think of death, you, Kanye, think of the heart.






Dear Kanye,


I can’t draw a parallel today between you and the branch I saw on the sidewalk. It wasn’t like the tree branches here—it was like one you’d see on the beach, maybe only a New Jersey beach, but I think others, too. And it resembled an arm. That’s what I remember thinking. And it wasn’t the first time something on these sidewalks near my house reminded me of an arm or a hand. There’s a leaf I remember distinctly. My mind is so quick to see these dead pieces of trees as lonely parts of the body. And my mind tries to connect this stone-grey arm to you. My mind sees that where the branch broke from the tree (if it is a branch at all and not chopped from the trunk), there is wood that curves together to the sidewalk in such a way that fingers might. And my mind asks if these are not the fingers that move freely in a dream and play some kind of music for you, or run along the top of your head in the manner of one who loves you. Are they not the fingers that begin to resemble your mother’s?

I realize some days I shouldn’t write about you.





Acknowledgements


The Awl: “Kanye’s Circulatory System”

Boston Review: “Suge Knight”

#GOODLitSwerveAutumn: An Anthology of Independent Literature About Kanye West: “In Song” and “On November 10th, 2007, Donda West Died”

Sentence: “Dear Kanye”


















Oh, James!
–Jill McDonough






Dr. No
1962


A woman introduces herself before James
has a chance to speak. But who remembers Trench. Sylvia
Trench. Didn’t my mother
warn me about trenchmouth? Didn’t
we all practice kissing pillows, our hands, each
other, before we ever kissed a boy? Trench
presses her open
mouth to James’s open mouth, looks
like she’s gumming him to death.

The girl
is Honey
Ryder.
Honey
talks like Audrey Hepburn
as a little girl, has
no muscle definition,
appears to be sucking it in.

The locale: Jamaica. There are
no Jamaicans. One girl

might be
sort of
black.

Of the evil
Chinese, including
Dr. No, most
are white
people, their eyes taped like
Katharine Hepburn’s in The Good Earth,
Mickey Rooney’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Moneypenny’s
hot.






From Russia with Love
1963


The opening credits, projected
on bellydancing women’s silhouettes,
foreshadow the hot gypsy girlfight to come.

Love interest thinks that she’s a Russian spy.
She’s being duped by Spectre. Whatever;
she’s pretty, but the action here is Gypsy girl-on-girl.

We’re in the Balkans, seeking refuge in a gypsy camp.
Two gypsy girls, in love with the same gypsy,
must solve their difficulties the gypsy way:

this means, thank god, a catfight. Two
mute Sofia Lorens tie up torn skirts.
This exposes their tan thighs,

long and gypsy-lithe and smooth. They circle, their hands
out at their sides, fingers claws. They pounce,
then scratch, and pull each other’s hair. One terrific close-up

shot: they wrestle in the dirt, low-cut blouses revealing
cleavage pressed to sweaty cleavage while
they grunt and writhe. Imagine this on the big screen! Luckily,

James is able to tame them in a night.
By morning, they’re a peaceful scene, cooperating
on breakfast, their terrible teeth now well-employed

smiling, biting thread off at his cuff.






Goldfinger I
1964


He still wears the fifties pork-pie hat
in the intro, to the best music ever put to film:

dang ditta dit dang dit ditta
dang ditta dit dang dit ditta
MAN-AU mah nau nau
White dinner jacket, red carnation. He does that thing again:
calmly lights a cigarette while things explode.

Everyone else is running.






Goldfinger II
1964


About to be shot, he throws a lamp at the villain in the bathtub.

Auric Goldfinger. Sounds like a French nail varnish.
Pussy Galore’s the hotshot pilot who won’t fuck him.

She’s a bad guy, or possibly
a feminist, working for the bad
guy because it’s hard
to find work for your titsy all-girl flying circus
in the world of virtue and right.

Odd Job: Korean thug with the discus bowler hat
that cuts off people’s heads. Bond electrocutes him, too.

It’s kind
of complicated.

When Pussy finally fucks him, she is turned good:
Lead into gold, saving Fort Knox.






Thunderball I
1965


It’s a bomb. A code word for a nuclear device.

Sorry. I didn’t mean
to ruin it for you.

The intro: Bond
through the rifle scope.
The pork-pie hat.

The first fight: the bad guy pretends
to be his own widow. A man
in heels and stockings, beating
Sean Connery with a poker.
Like that’s never happened before.

The opening credits are still
a work in progress. Not
just ladies in silhouette, swimming.
Men in scuba suits shooting at them
with spearguns. Pre-slo-mo, it’s all
ungainly, unsexy. Flippy feet and hands.

We’re in a health clinic, sure
to rape some nurses. No, he threatens to get one
fired unless she does him in the steam room, next
to the room labeled “IRRIGATION.”

Why I will always love James Bond,
no matter who plays him, who gets raped, who gives in and cries
Oh, James: he fucks the nurse and leaves, calls out
See you later, irrigator!






Thunderball II
1965


Domino wears slutty bathing suits: zebra
bikini, black tank with sheer inset that shows, for
a second, her nipple, my hand
to God. I pause
the DVD, flickered her nipple just
to be sure. She wears the black and white surplice
bandeau wrap bikini to have sex
with James. James
wearing scuba gear.

Oh, James.

They shoot one shark
to distract the others, and he swims into them,
a swarm of sharks, a cloud of blood, to find
the sunken plane.

He skims past sharks like cats, like
the lady assassin in his bathtub. She
is naked, asks for something
to wear. He hands her
shoes. She’s thinking about Pussy:
James Bond, who only has to make love
to a woman, and she repents, returns
to the side of right and virtue.
But not this one, she says, and shoots.






You Only Live Twice
1967


The trailer shows
Bond making
out with Orientals, hints,
super-scrutably,
Bond Rises in the East.

Why do Chinese girls taste different from all other girls?
The Chinese girl he’s tasting
doesn’t get it. Or maybe she’s
just being polite. You think we bettah.
He tries to explain, comparing Russian
caviar to Peking duck. She pities him, says,

Darling, I give you very best duck.
Roald Dahl wrote You Only Live Twice, including
the lines in the Japanese bath house. Tiger Tanaka,
our man in Japan, says Remember
James, in Japan, men come first.






On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
1969


This Bond is not our kind.

a) he’s George Lazenby
b) he falls in love
c) he gets married
d) he wears ruffles

He meets his bride when she tries
to kill herself. Not really. Who tries to kill
herself in a silver and blue
caftan? By wading into the waves? Wearing fake
eyelashes? This is not even
a cry for help.

The opening credits: an hour glass rippling
with Union Jack. A man in silhouette, dangling
from a huge minute hand. Greatest hits slip down
like sands through the hour glass: Trench, Sylvia
Trench. Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Domino. Aki,
the Japanese girl who always comes last.

This Bond fights a big black man who moos.

A midget sweeps the bad guys’ lair.

Bond slaps the would-be suicide, tells her to get dressed. She
looks at him. Falling-in-love flute music swells.
1969: Unknowable. The mooing: for sure racist, but for the whites, then, was it funny
or scary? What’s the story with the midget? Was the slapping how they fell in love?






Diamonds are Forever
1971


Weapons: a shoji screen, a bikini
top, machine guns, a mud bath, a mouse
trap wallet. Thrown scalpels,
a surgical lamp, boiling mineral
mud, a scorpion. A cremation
oven, a brass urn, a bomb
in a suitcase. A canal
in Amsterdam. Bond, unconscious,
in a pipe buried as part
of a pipeline. An automated seam
welder. A gas-chamber elevator.
Two gymnasts in bikinis named
Bambi and Thumper. Flaming
shishkabobs. Another bomb, this one
inside a cake.

How the CIA talk in Vegas:
This is The Quarterback. Operation Tight End
commence.






Live and Let Die I
1973


George Lazenby
is an idiot. Offered
the franchise, he said no. What a life,
to kick yourself again and again for not being
007. To watch Roger Moore say Bond, say
Darling, say Moneypenny, say M and Q again
and again for the next seventeen years.






Live and Let Die II
1973


The opening
sequence: black women
naked, nipples and all, more naked
than white women. Flames,
black women with eyes
wide open, their heads
on fire, eyes open with terror, or
some Voodoo trance. Black
women with big afros, small
afros. Black
women’s faces turning
to flaming skulls. And Introducing
Jane Seymour. Black
women in silhouette
dancing, snake-like, then
frenzied. One painted, primitive white
diamonds snaking over
her arms, long legs.






Live and Let Die III
1973


Bond has the first espresso maker M. has ever seen,
and Bond’s Italian counterpart, a lady, in the closet.

Uses of the magnet watch: Take M’s espresso spoon
from his saucer. Deflect
a bullet at long range. Open
the closet. Unzip Agent Caruso’s sparkling blue evening dress
down to her white lace panties. Fetch
the compressed gas capsule that inflates
the bad guy, who’s black, pops him like a bloodless innertube.






Live and Let Die IV
1973


Bond in Harlem: a secret network of black men, walkie-talkies,
pimpmobiles, secret exits, pre-recorded diplomatic speeches, every
black man you see a bad guy. Even the friendly cabbie who says, Hey,
for twenty bucks, I’ll take you to a Ku Klux Klan cookout!

Bond in the Carribbean, fucking the black double agent in a calico
bikini, then threatening to kill her. But you couldn’t. You
wouldn’t, not after what we’ve just done. He keeps his Walther
PPK at her chin, says I certainly wouldn’t have killed you before.

When he deflowers Jane Seymour, she’s stunned, cries the physical
violation cannot be undone, but in a minute she wants it again. After
they survive the blacks, the Voodoo rituals with her as the half-naked
sacrifice, she sighs, white dress, pale thighs: I feel like a complete woman.

Oh, James.






The Man With The Golden Gun
1974


What’s scary: radiation, biological warfare, black people, and this guy
who might sell the secret of solar power to the coal and oil companies.

Where were we.

The bad guy has the gun. Golden bullets, golden
gun. He rubs it all over his naked girlfriend’s face.

Where were we.

The Bottom’s Up’s a bar. Bartenders in black lace panties, breast-obscuring
hair. Raised red beds behind the bar. Bartenders on their knees on the beds.

Where were we.

Two girls in schoolgirl uniforms protect James with karate. They don’t speak English,
and they are fourteen, but they are more use than every female agent we’ve ever met.

James boards an outboard, aims the rotors at the bad Hong Kong karate guys, says
What you might call a Mexican Screw Off, gentlemen. What?

Where were we.

The redneck sherriff is back. His wife is named
Maybelle, a joke about hicks. Also my grandmother’s name.

The blonde agent, Goodnight, screws up again and again. Clumsy, she turns on the laser
with her bikini-clad butt. I’m sorry! I didn’t know! Don’t they get the same training?

Where were we.
Where were we.
Oh, James.






The Spy Who Loved Me I
1977


He’s on a mission, sir, in Austria.
Well, tell him to pull out, immediately.
Chalet, firelight, a blonde on a white fur cape. Then
007′s watch prints out a label-maker strip, and, darling, he has
to go. Yellow ski suit, red hat, white goggles,
more cowbell than anyone’s
recommended daily allowance
for cowbell.

Four guys in matching ski suits, semiautomatics
instead of ski poles. Don’t worry: Bond’s poles double
as flaming dartguns.

A cliff, and then the cowbell stops, everything
stops except the sound of wind, of winter. A small
yellow figure against white vastness, blue sky.
Skis cast off, poles rising up behind him, Bond
is in freefall, unfettered, tumbling into just
silence. Seconds pass. And then the sound of parachute:
Bond’s Union Jack parachute opens with the valves of someone’s
trumpet in some studio somewhere, now blaring

ta da TA da, tadada, da da tada da





The Spy Who Loved Me II
1977


On the submarine, dismantling a nuclear device.

We need its detonator to break in
to the sealed control room. You know
how that goes. Sailors sweating it, Bond’s
hands shaky, playing Operation. He keeps it
steady, pulls out in time. Now
they love him, repeat after him, give him
anything he wants: Hand me that number six
detonator. Aye aye sir, number six sir. Did you fix
that twenty-second fuse? Yes sir, here it is.
Plastic explosive. He holds his empty hand
out to the sailor, full of faith
in the sailor, the sailor
who loves him, who hands him
the plastic explosive. Plastic explosive.






Moonraker I
1979


When the pretty French pilot with the heart

of gold betrays the bad guy, shows James the safe

in the Louis XIV clock, her evil employer

asks her to leave. She leaves. Then he

releases the Doberman Pinschers. She has put

aside the slutty low-cut frocks she wore

before she met James, wears a white dress, long

sleeves, pleats, white lace up her throat to run

through the woods, woods filled with mist, with

slanting sunlight, branches that tear at her face

and hair, sweet dress, the score rising with her ragged

breath until, in slow motion, the dogs take her down.






Moonraker II
1979


I saw this in the theatre when I was seven. Dr. Goodhead
was a badass. Bond asks:
Where did you learn to fight like that? NASA? She shakes her head:
No. Vassar.
At the end of the movie, they’re fucking in space. Houston calling
Dr. Goodhead,
Houston calling, confirm your position. Houston’s preparing a live video feed
to the White House
and Buckingham Palace. James Bond and Dr. Holly Goodhead have left their stations;
their headsets float
provocatively above their empty seats. They’re suspended, wrapped in white
terrycloth space
blanket, bare legs kicking in slo-motion, gravity-free. My God,
what’s Bond doing?
Q tilts his head at the monitor: I think he’s attempting
re-entry, sir. Seven, my whole desire,
all I wanted from adulthood:
to understand why everybody laughed.






For Your Eyes Only
1981


When you break into the drug lord’s lair, there’s
the swimming pool, girls. A Pacific Islander wears
a red hibiscus behind her ear, a turquoise bikini, tassels
bouncing at her hips. A white woman with beaded
cornrows, off-the-shoulder tank, dives in;
a black woman in a red one-piece looks on
from her lounge chair, looks like she just
got high. A periwinkle swimsuit crawls
up a brunette’s ass. She walks toward
a tall white girl: white bikini, camel toe.

The sound of heels on flagstones. Disco.
They dance on the crabgrass. The Asian’s
in lilac, reads a magazine, smiles. A strung-out
blonde fights a blonde man; he agrees
to play paddle ball. When the white girl
in a white one-piece sees the suitcase is full
of cash, her eyes widen
like a girl’s. She
whispers—Wow!—the one line spoken by a woman
in this scene. Pam Grier, or the one who looks
like Pam Grier, wears big sunglasses, sucks
her stomach in. She’s seen the suitcases before.
She grins, raises her eyebrows; the drug lord,
balls bunched to one side of his tight striped
trunks, tosses a stack of bills to her lap.

Everyone is having a good time.

When he gets hit with a dart and bellyflops, dead,
in the pool, the women laugh at first—
our drug lord, always goofing around—then
understand, cry out, reach for each other. James
shoves men in the pool, knocks bad guys around
with sunbrellas. This is their life: getting high, piña
coladas, paddleball, all the waist-chains
and swimsuits they need, that wiggle that makes me
think they all have yeast infections, UTIs. Happy
until James shows up, kills their benefactor, leaves.
In the last glimpse we have of the pool, their whole
world, they gather together, lift his bloodied corpse
tenderly out of the pool.






Octopussy
1983


You know, things are going pretty good. Sure,
your dad named you Octopussy, then killed
himself, but you’ve pulled yourself up by your
garter straps: diamond smuggling, your own
all-white-girl Indian island cult. They rise
gleaming, naked from your swimming pools
to the sound of more young women chatting, laughing,
wrapping each other up in high threadcount
towels, gold and pink saris, a hundred shades of rose.

Where did you recruit all these lovelies?
Doesn’t he get it? Did he ask Blofeld, Goldfinger,
Drax where they got all those matching futuristic
suits, the blinking lights at headquarters? No. I train
them, give them a purpose, a sisterhood and a way of life.
James is suspicious. How can it be this good? In crime?
In business. It’s 1983, you fool: I diversified into shipping,
hotels, carnivals, and circuses. Oh, Octopussy, don’t
do it; think of Gwendolyn and Midge, a dozen more
in matching scarlet spandex, the blonde
who ties her sheer pink sari to a balcony rail
and tumbles, graceful, to the ground. Don’t make
the damn martini, go to bed with Bond.

Here’s what you’ll get: three dirty men
breaking in with their knives and yo-yo saw
blades, a turbaned thug with a missing eye, no teeth,
a redneck’s giggle. Bond’s in your bed an hour and it’s
trashed, saw blades everywhere, satin pilows torn, aquaria,
teak honeycomb lattice smashed. Shirtless, sweaty
men covered in feathers lunging after you, mahogany side tables
sawn in half. Your pink silk sheers, your gilded
octopus-shaped bed, its pink satin upholstered
octopus head. Your thirty-foot ceilings, priceless
stained glass dome, your marble tables laden
with ripe tropical fruit, all sawn up, broken, gone.
Don’t do it, Octopussy: you shake that
martini, next thing you know you’re breaking
bottles over strange men’s heads, shooting
half-naked men with poisoned darts in your dressing room.
It all starts here: the Russian generals slipping
nuclear warheads in your circus cannon, duplicate
cabooses, Bond panicked in a clown suit, the works.

You’ll have to use your whole girl circus, your dancing
girls, your acrobats, your human pyramid of girls in matching
spandex. You’ll have to break out the sheik headdresses,
the ropes, the galley slaves, fake prostitutes to first distract,
and then knock out the guards. Your whispering
pole balancers, your tiny snub-nosed pistol, your nets,
your elephants, all your sword fighting skills. Is it worth
your veiled half-naked trapeze artists’ efforts, Octopussy?

Octopussy. Don’t do this, please. Take a look
at his old man’s mouth, the lewd looks
he gives Gwendolyn, poor Midge. Don’t
give up everything you’ve worked for, don’t
do it, don’t you do it, no—Oh, James.






A View to a Kill
1985


Christopher Walken, being
Christopher Walken, says

I’m happiest. . .

in the saddle.

The evil world-domination plot involves
starting earthquakes to flood
Silicone Valley. Also, Bond makes the Bond Girl
quiche.

Grace Jones is the exotic ethnic thug, for the most part
silent. Looking at Bond she says I’m sure
I’ve seen him before. What is she,
retarded? She just flung
a poisoned butterfly fishhook at his cabaret
companion, parachuted off the Eiffel Tower
to get away from Bond.

Here’s what’s new for 1985: When Bond and the
Bond Girl sneak into the mine, they steal
miner helmets, miner
coveralls. When a bad guy sees
the Bond Girl’s taupe high heels, Bond says
Women’s Lib: they’re taking over the union.
Which seems to do the trick. Later, Walken
floods the mine. He shoots, laughing, at the drowning men
in his employ. We’ve never seen a villain kill
his workforce, never seen a man in glasses, suit
and tie aim a machine gun at drowning men
in helmets, dirty coveralls. 1985: Reagan’s smiling,
shaking head. Mortgages 13%,
unemployment 7.5.






The Living Daylights
1987


Timothy Dalton lands his flaming paraglider on a lonely
woman’s yacht, lonely woman sighing, saying If only

I could find a real man.
In Afghanistan,

we see Soviets imprison and execute
Afghanis without trial, like bad guys do,

trade bushels of opium, handfuls of diamonds for arms. So Bond
joins guys who look like Osama, who smile, helping the blonde.

At the climactic cello recital in London, the mujahidin
arrive late, in pakols, burnooses, shalwar kameez,

daggers, bandoliers. We had some trouble at the airport.
When they saw James last, he was helping them thwart

the Russians by bombing that bridge, and they all waved
their smuggled rifles. They smiled, knew things were going great.






License to Kill
1989


The Colombian drug dealer has scars from knife
fights and acne. He whips
his woman with some kind
of pocket-sized alligator tail,

feeds Bond’s best friend
to a great white shark.

So this time it’s personal.

Bond breaks into the remote-control sub filled
with bags of coke, stabs the bags so they release
eighty-million-dollar clouds of milky water.

The clouds rise to the surface, expand,
opaque; white bubbles, sound
of bubbles. Later, Bond hijacks a helicopter, beating
the pilot with a plastic-wrapped cube
of hundred dollar bills. When the plastic tears, bills fly
around the cabin like snow in a snow globe, cocaine in water.
Bond grabs a handful of cash from the air and tosses it
aside: he doesn’t care if it goes out the door. Who cares, he
won, he got away. He swats at one bill clinging
to his face, grins for the first time since

his best friend was fed
to a great white shark.






Goldeneye I
1995


Judi Dench is M: I think
you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic
of the cold war.

Junkyard of Soviet statues, busts
of Lenin, arms, a disembodied
Bond-size Lenin hand. Long
shadows, sourceless light: cue
the creepy fog, a raven’s call,
a crow’s. Rusted-out red
star, rusty columns, a wreath
of wheat and stars. Strong worker
heroes, muscular men and women out
of Rockwell Kent. Three Lenins, one
capped, another trapped in scaffolding.

In the turncoat 006’s evil lair, James mocks
his loyalty to his dead parents, calls him
“little Alec.” Oh, please, James, spare me the Freud.
I might as well ask you if all the vodka martinis ever silence
the screams of all the men you’ve killed. Or if you ever
found forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women
for all the dead ones you failed to protect.






Goldeneye II
1995


After causing the deaths of hundreds of soldiers, who wouldn’t
want to make love in the freshly mown hayfields of Cuba?

Surprise! The Marines were in the hay the whole time! They looked like hay!
Maybe you two would like to finish debriefing each other at Guantanamo, hmm?

Guantanamo, 1995. Darling,
Oh, James. Darling, Darling.
Darling, what could possibly go wrong?






Tomorrow Never Dies I
1997


The opening sequence: silicone chips
up close, circuitry silver on red, rising
up, form of a woman’s body, Bond Girl, silhouette
of circuits, smoke. X-rayed bullets, pistols,
rifles, then the girl’s smooth cheek becomes
a planet, earth, sun rising up behind it.
A solar system, now in negative; jewels
float like satellites, then rush though what
we’ve learned, since Tron, is cyberspace: tv
flashing quickly by, and then, behind it, sheets
of code that make an urban landscape, through which
we’re always speeding, sometimes falling.






Tomorrow Never Dies II
1997


Bond and Wei Lin hand-cuffed together on a motorcycle.

She’s sidesaddle behind him, racing
through the alleys of Saigon, black Range
Rovers on their tail; now
she’s straddling the bike, Bond’s ass, her right arm around him, his left
holding hers: they each have half
the handlebars. Umbrellas,
fruit stands, bridges, bicycles, crowds.
Shouting left! and turning; she crawls around to straddle
Bond’s crotch
and look behind them, grabs
a knife, cuts open tailgates; in their wake: blue
plastic barrels of water, a lunch
cart with a wok, an open flame, truck stacked with cartons of Snap
Dragon fireworks. The black SUVs bring the fire to the fireworks
and crash, so the cartons blow up, go off
from back to front like dominos.

I watch this scene again and again. In slow motion,
Wei Lin’s hair’s like waves, like seaweed, trees in the wind.
The SUVs have wrecked, so now a helicopter chases
them; a lumberyard, truck
full of workers, boards, they back up, do
a wheelie, make men run. Her hair flies up, swirls
around Bond’s face. Over a line of parked cars, up
on tin roofs, in and out of open rooms; a woman ironing,
a clothesline, blue shirt pressed against their faces.
Boardwalks, little houses, everything around them getting shot;
we’re on the bike with them, we’re leaning left, we’re tilting
to the right. She swings around to ride on back again so they
can jump across the street, break through a ceiling, interrupt
a couple having sex; second-story porches crumble underneath
them as they pass. They come down on a truck of Heineken
in cans, start racing through the streets; the villagers
in coolie hats are running, looking back in terror
at the helicopter, pressed down by its wind. How many times
have we seen this: Asian peasants; violent, unnatural
wind? She can’t see the helicopter, so
she has to switch back, straddle Bond to see. I think
if she wore her hair like mine she wouldn’t have
this trouble. Construction site, dusty street, a gate. Dead end.
They turn, her hair still glossy, smooth. When they look
at each other, she looks at his mouth; this is how you know
she wants him, not the straddling. They take
a clothesline to the helicopter, skid out
underneath it, its terrible wind, so they can sling
the clothesline like a lasso, David’s slingshot, get it
tangled in the rotors, jump
together down a well. The helicopter tries to rise, gets
caught, and crashes: explosion, rubble, burned down town, but they
are safe and cool and wet, together, in the well, her shirt,
at last, transparent, clinging. She’s still cuffed to him.






The World is Not Enough
1999


The nuclear physicist—Christmas—
has a great rack. So Bond gets
Christmas coming, Christmas coming
early, Christmas coming once a year.

Oil pipelines through Turkey, nuclear
bombs, Stockholm syndrome, terrorists—
Robert Carlyle—The Full Monty, Trainspotting—
in a black leather trench coat, right eyelid drooping, right
angled red scar on his forehead
signifying “freak.” His only goal is chaos.

A bullet stuck in his brain, killing
off his senses. Touch, smell, he feels
no pain, he can push himself harder, longer,
than any normal man. The bullet will kill him, but he’ll
grow stronger every day until he dies.

Frankenstein. Dracula. Monsters
Smile when you cry, walk calmly
right behind you when you run.
On terrorist monster unfeeling freaks, in 1999, M says

This will not stand.

We will not be terrorized by cowards.

We’ll find the people who committed this atrocity.

We’ll follow them to the farthest ends of the earth if needs be.

And we will bring them to justice.






Die Another Day
2002


The movie starts with Bond getting caught
in North Korea, unable, for once, to fuck
his way out. The naked ladies
in silhouette, black silhouettes of guns—
this time that alternates with James
in a filthy prison, James
refusing to talk. Scorpions, syringes, primitive
waterboarding. A man laughing, ducking
James’s head into dirty water. The camera is
with James, under the dirty water, again
and again. The camera can’t
do anything to help. A woman
strings him up by the hands and holds
a scorpion to his face. A woman made
of ice, a woman of fire, a woman of melting
ice, water droplets filled with Bond
under water, the water hitting the women
of fire, the water turning to steam. Then men
haul him out of the water to kick
the shit out of him. Fingers of ice stroking
flanks of ice. Time passes. Bond has
long hair, a beard, a filthy t-shirt, pants
he’s been wearing fourteen months.
About to be executed, he’s exchanged
for another prisoner, a smiling, clean
Korean wearing a freshly laundered
jumpsuit. Freshly shaven. Sleek
and healthy, fresh from an American
prison. Lucky guy.






Casino Royale
2006


In the theater we laugh at the gratuitous brown girl
on a white horse, the horse spreading her legs,

bouncing her bikinied breasts. Did they laugh
in ’67, when the faux-Japanese masseuse’s

spread legs framed a prone Bond? Or at Moonraker’s space fucking,
‘79? Felix, from the CIA, stakes Bond ten million in poker, asks

Does it look like we need the money? It takes us a minute, together,
in the dark, to look past the gambling, losing, see he means

us, and Iraq. Stacks of blue million-dollar chips nothing
next to what we pour into the desert while Felix plays cards.

In San Francisco, 2006, we expect the bouncing breasts from Bond,
forgot he always has something to say about danger, fears, who

our enemies are, or ought to be. Timothy Dalton helping
Oxford-educated mujahadin beat Ruskies. Roger Moore

in Harlem fighting spooky voodoo blacks. The new one’s balls
are beaten with a knotted rope while we squirm

in the audience, think of Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib and our balls.
Bond as cultural comment, collage of our anxieties. Who knew?

Who remembered? Does it look like we need the money? No,
we guess it doesn’t. He catches us by surprise, makes us laugh

at him, at ourselves. Oh, America. Oh, money. Oh,
masculinity, military, balls. Oh, James!






Quantum of Solace
2008


Dumbest
name in the world. Octopussy‘s better. Goldfinger.

So much
depends upon one rogue CIA agent.

Molto
carabinieri killed. The song is pretty good.

They name
the Bond girl Strawberry Fields, Goldfinger her to death in oil.

When James
thinks the CIA has fucked him, fucked around, he says, a little hurt,

That’s what
I like about US intelligence—you’ll lie down with anybody.

Oh, James.






Skyfall
2012


See the scared and tattooed sex slave’s scared.
Touch her slave tattoo. Name it. Show you care

or don’t mind. Or sort of think it’s kind of hot.
Trembling, terrified, touched by your—what,

tenderness?— off to the shower she slinks.
Hurrah! scared sex slaves always think

when you slip into their showers: More
sex! But the bad guy will kill her before

long. Another dead one you failed to protect.
The real story here is the anti-Bond’s. Tech

Jesus. Once another double oh. Now
he’s a blond monster eaten inside out.

Imprisoned insurgent, ten steps ahead, everything
we hate and hate to fear. We did this to him.

We do this all day. World wide.
We make us up our own bad guys.








Acknowledgments:

Ripple(s): “Goldeneye II”
Gulf Coast: “Tomorrow Never Dies II”

Seven Kitchens Press published a limited, hand-stitched run of an earlier version of this manuscript.

















Sarah Blake lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and son. Her poetry about Kanye West is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Jerry, and Barrelhouse. She is the recipient of a 2013 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough’s books of poems include Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008), and Where You Live (Salt, 2012). The recipient of NEA, Cullman Center, and Stegner fellowships, her work appeared in Best American Poetry 2011. She teaches poetry at UMass-Boston.

In Davenport, Iowa, where I grew up, there was an elderly woman who had encountered Flannery O’Connor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the late 1940s. I heard Blanche’s side of the story many times but never tired of it, partially because she did not take any relish in the telling, always pushing her water glass aside, as though the liquid might become infected by the dirty details. Blanche lived in the Mississippi Hotel with her twin sister, Sadie. Their rooms offered a quizzical view of what downtown Davenport offered: infantry of parking meters, granite hulls of department stores weathering poor sales, levee mélange, and the tugboat-pushed barges riding one of those bends in the Mississippi River that lend eastern Iowa the silhouette of ruptured fruit. Jazz genius and cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, the city’s most famous native, had once described it all by raising his horn and walking out the notes of his winsome composition “Davenport Blues.” Blanche and Sadie must have heard the tune, though Blanche was sure to have dismissed it. In winter, when sidewalks were icy, these tiny sisters clung to the building bricks, creeping like paisley-scarfed mountain climbers with a disdain for the vertical. Neither had married. Both smoked like factory chimneys and sported fine coats of facial down that appeared blond or brown, depending on whether the shades were drawn. From a distance of twenty feet, one might have thought they were identical twins. But to get up close was to note only differences. Sadie’s blue eyes, Blanche’s green ones. Sadie’s wide smile, Blanche’s thin frown. Sadie’s lilting voice, Blanche’s academic drone. Once I had occasion to fetch Blanche from the hotel, whose lobby was scary with couch cushions squashed into the shapes of those no longer on the planet. The elevator shivered, clanked, arrived on the right floor, the edgy hall. I knocked on the metal apartment door. Sadie answered, wearing a robe, and as I was asking her to tell Blanche that her ride was waiting downstairs, Blanche popped out from behind the robe. It was like seeing an atom split. After graduating from the University of Iowa with an MA in English literature, Blanche had immediately enrolled in business school and, a few years later, received an accounting degree—smart move, given her attachment to formal verse, a kind of writing she never gave up, continually testing herself against the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, and reading the results at meetings of various writing groups. One of these, Writers’ Studio, is where we met in the autumn of 1978, when I was fourteen.

I joined the club during my recovery from the starvation diet that had halved my weight, from a high of more than two hundred pounds, and granted me a first ghost, the fat boy whispering in my ear: “Did I deserve that? I ate only what you told me to.” I had found the meeting time and place listed in the Quad-City Times and asked my mother to drop me off there, in front of a tenement on a side street in deserted downtown Rock Island, Illinois, across the river from Davenport. It was night: she was glad to do things like that at night. It made things exciting. For some of her children it worked out better than for others. She sped away. A newer car pulled up, parked, and out climbed a man in a tan belted overcoat. He wore a cap, carried a briefcase, smoked a sweet-smelling pipe: awesome. “Here to attend the meeting?” he asked. I said I was. He looked surprised, but extended his pink hand. “I’m Howard Koenig. What’s yours?” I forced it out, loud. Howard nodded and produced an old key that opened the door to the rest of my life. It was dark inside, and still pretty dark even after he’d flicked a switch. Together we climbed a narrow creaking staircase to another door off a hall with all the charisma of an Alcatraz tunnel. Howard, enveloped in maroon pipe haze, unlocked that door, too. We entered the musty room rented by the club. More lights, brighter lights, were flicked on, and I saw that steam heat had cooked the colors out of the walls. The meeting table was crooked. But such sad details, one after another, failed to temper my jubilation. I had shaken the hand of one Howard Koenig. He had taken off the coat to reveal a green chiffon suit and tie that went with. He was relating things I should know. He worked in a civilian capacity for the Army Armament Materiel Readiness Command at the Rock Island Arsenal (the military compound situated on an actual island, as the city of Rock Island was not). His favorite author was Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he shared a birthday. His first wife had died in a car accident out East and after that he had moved to the Midwest. He had remarried. Her name was Rita. They had children.

I was decades younger than any other club member. This did not seem strange to me. I had long been the outgoing misfit who found acceptance only in unconventional social circles, befriending school janitors, parking lot guards, neighborhood shut-ins—those ruminating fragile retirees. But I was a novelty to Writers’ Studio. Members stared happily as they settled onto the folding chairs. Bifocals abounded, and every pair welcomed my long stringy hair and the scar-like facial niches that dieting had cut. No one said a thing about the yellow scampish T-shirt bearing the white iron-on letters I had requested at the mall kiosk where a man would put any words on any rag you handed him. I had picked the Bob Dylan song title: DESOLATION ROW. I returned the smiles of my welcomers. Howard, club president, waived the dollar attendance fee in my case. The lady who introduced herself as Blanche lit a cigarette in approval of the move, before qualifying her enthusiasm, snapping: “We shall see.” We shall, I thought. Some strangers were mysteries inviolate and other strangers were mysteries you felt like you knew, despite knowing nothing. I saw ballpoint pens astride notepads, spiral and bound—it was one of the oldest sights in my life, the blank page to fill with colors and then, soon enough, embroider with letters and words, with a will to seek answers if not necessarily to find, and accept, them. “What have you brought to read us?” Howard asked me right off, and when I said I had come to listen—this time—there were appreciative murmurs. It meant, they thought, that I was polite. I let it mean that, too. Their affection, any love—good or bad—had me. I was the fool for love. I fell all the way, with no strings attached to their warmth to keep me from falling. They had spotted a fellow traveler. At the end of the first meeting of rhymes I was admonished to come back the following Thursday for more grins that were genuine (even if the teeth might not have been). How could I refuse? Iowa City had its aloof workshop, open only to geniuses imported and later exported, like a secret trade in diamonds, but in the most bizarre and comical way Writers’ Studio was more exclusive. Who, seeing our figures spill out of the building, could have imagined what we had been doing up there? Previously I had had but two allies I could totally trust: stroke-stricken Granny Stanley and our neighbor the widower Mr. Hickey, clad in a clip-on bow tie, polka-dotted or striped. Sitting beside Granny’s four-poster bed, and in Mr. Hickey’s immaculate kitchen, had taught me the rhythm and substance of genial patter with the aged, training that had come in handy on this night. I liked acting as if I hailed from an era when I wasn’t born yet. It was the most reliable way of briefly lightening the load that had come of being born to a certain couple on November 5, 1963, a few weeks before JFK’s assassination. “See you later, alligator,” I chirped at worried club members after convincing each, individually, that it was permissible to drive off to a post-meeting snack and leave me in the dark at a pay phone across from the extinguished glow of the Walgreens drugstore cursive. “My mother’ll come . . . ” “Aren’t you hungry?” No, I lied. “She’ll come . . . soon.” “You could call her from the place.” But I didn’t have money for a snack, nor did I feel I’d earned the right to dine with writers who had published in Highlights and Guideposts. I was in awe of their old-school grammar, marketing tips, typescripts. “See you later, alligator!”

After a motherly voice answered my call at Granny Stanley’s house up on the hill, piping “I’ll be there right away,” I stood for another half hour in the close and cavernous night. Little lights here and there cast little flares that in the sky, over dark streets, formed an oily shimmer which blotted out all but the brightest stars. It was a map-bending fact that many Iowans in the Mississippi River Valley spent half their time in Illinois, running errands, visiting relatives. The Rock Island of spittle-laced Grandpa Stanley, uncivil civil engineer, who let family in mostly to curse their bad choices in careers and stocks; of gelid Dr. Miller, with his suede driving gloves and silver Tiffany chip bowls and London vacations at The Ritz, who sent birthday gifts down to the parking lot of his Steepmeadow luxury condo with Grandmother Rose so as not to be bothered by the children of his poorest son, David. The Rock Island of the brand-new but already eternally failed brick pedestrian mall that had erased parking spots and hurt business. Mayor Jim Davis liked it—one of the few. I missed the linear camaraderie of sidewalks. Sidewalks—whether teal-blue in rain or silvered with snow or cratered as the moon—were a reliable way forward, maybe the only way, whereas diagonal mall bricks reflected no lunar light and led shoes only to the end of the mall, a few short blocks away. Rock Island’s downtown, behind its corrugated floodwall, lacked the energy that an unobstructed river view lent to Davenport. Still, vagabonds couldn’t be choosers, and I strained to appreciate my private audience with the ill-fated project stretching between the minor cliffs of office buildings. The mall had cost taxpayers millions. It had the charm, at least, of not being a slum. The slum, below the hill where my grandfathers followed the stock market, started south of downtown, separated from it by traffic spilling off the Centennial Bridge. Across the river, Davenport’s poorest area existed atop its hill and was airier and livelier, a centrality overlooking downtown, and more of a piece with it all, sandwiched between the east side’s old money, the west side’s bungalows, and the new money to the north, where the Windsor Crest subdivision, and others like it, were loosely enclosed by the lope of Interstate 80. A castaway on the mall, a fly in Illinois aspic, I was finding myself increasingly thrilled to claim my hometown of Davenport—a big recognition—when I heard the honking.

As the passenger’s side door swung open, the spurt of light, like a camera flash, caught my mother’s flushed damp jowls and bowl-cut hair and eyes in their own world. (Granny called her Tommy Lynn.) I said hi and she belted out greetings. We were both thankful, truly thankful, I had not been mugged or stabbed or shot and dumped in the river while pursuing my writing dream. Pedal met metal. She began to detail Grandpa’s drunken antics, her voice sharp in the center and on the edges soft, regretful, insecure, a sigh. “Dad disinherited Deena again!” she said. Deena, mother’s sister, the chemist, lived in Pittsburgh and seldom returned to take guff. Mother could not conceal her joy. In most ways the ride home from my first Writers’ Studio meeting was the same ride I had been on countless times following a visit to Wayne’s Comic Book Store in Moline, or some other local trove of cultural dust that I considered nutritious. Her torpid rhetoric, my fidgeting on the soiled upholstery, the eau de exhaust and engine chortles and Mississippi River churned into it all. The car’s worn tires expertly translated the idiosyncrasies of land estranged from its soil, the piecemeal stanzas of pavement: the smooth the grooved the grated the creamy the chunky. Each jolt got us, and good. The dashboard library of poetry anthologies and true-crime accounts shifted as the chassis creaked and the car, a beater perpetually on its last legs and soon to cough its fnal cough, cantered onto a ramp leading to one of the bridges over the river. I thought I glimpsed, behind us, the orange and black ILLINOIS OIL sign painted on a warehouse facing the railroad tracks. Night thickened over the water. The car felt lighter, though just as bogged with the funk of conflicts. Dare we return home, where my father, exhaling daisy chains of smoke, and five angry younger brothers and sisters waited? Reflections fattened on the hood and vanished. I was bones and ink in the passenger’s seat, the driver a migrating fifty-cent rummage sale dress. As long as possible she would put off asking: “How did things go?” She was afraid to hear. She did not want to be jealous, but would be anyway. She could see I was smiling and less in tune with her frequent contention that life was a “lonely, lonely journey.” She had always been quick to spot serious rivals for my attention, but that tendency had been exacerbated in the wake of my recently eliminating the fat boy she’d been so close to for so long. I had starved him to death, going on what amounted to a prison-style hunger strike to get her off his back. I’d never be the fat boy again, though it seemed I’d be stuck with his vociferous echo as long as I lived. When I had finally begun eating again, after dipping below 105 pounds, my mother told herself I had given up the strike not for my own sake, but for hers! I had gained twenty pounds in what seemed like an instant, thanks to honey, peanut butter, tuna and Miracle Whip. I had put on another twenty pounds since and though still gaunt, my frame was filling out, finally alluding more to life aboveground than to graves below. Heads no longer turned when my mother and I strolled the fluorescent infernos of Kmart, Target, and Woolworths. She wished to forget the months of being trailed by the skeleton of the boy she had once played the “kidnapping game” with. (In the kitchen she would whisper, “Sneak out, meet me on Fulton Street, none of the other children help me . . . your father, he . . . I’ll be around with the car in a few minutes . . . we’ll go to Granny’s, Big Boy for a burger, the Paperback Exchange—you and I . . .” Then, skidding to the pickup spot, she would wail, “Get in the back!” I got in, got down. It was one big tease. We never escaped for long. But she liked it.) She had wanted more years of low-octane mother-son odyssey, when our loneliness granted us acres of adjacent darkness—only now our darks, if not detached, had ceased communicating well. She couldn’t forget, or forgive, what I had done to her partner in crime. Why had I hurt myself to hurt her? her eyes asked, but I thought she had a clue. She was too numb to feel any direct strike. Pain might be inflicted only by wrenching from her grip a child she thought she had brainwashed. I had never battled her before, had often edited my conversation so as not to shatter her illusions about her prospects. I had only rarely rebuffed her inappropriate touching in the dark upstairs bedroom as she talked about her marital problems and the famous murders she had read of, and described—in the most bizarre twist, while kneading the balls of my feet or applying salve to my buttocks—the various ways that a child could fend off an attack, either by being perfectly quiet and still (like the student nurse, who had hid under the dorm bunk during the Speck massacre in Chicago) or by screaming and pissing and all else. On my tummy, spread-eagled, I chose the former. I listened to the leaves rustling outside the window and to her voice inside, also rustling. She requested permission before every infraction—“Can I rub . . . can I put on . . . ?”—and I complied. She asked with such need and desperation that I sympathized with her more than with myself. Her hurting me became me helping her, being with her in her darkest moments, or trying to be there—as the voice telling me what to do were I attacked was at least a hundred miles from the hands doing the squeezing. In those mad moments she offered her oldest son the mad choice either to believe in her as a protector or to revile her as an enemy, and if I knew the best choice (I could not afford to lose a parent—not then!) and tried to make it, I also knew the truth. Actually she was enemy and protector in one slippery form—and it was a story of truth devouring truth. Anyone who peeked in and saw us, who saw what was happening in that bedroom, would have faced the same dilemma of having to fathom an implausible reality or make do with a half-truth—or a half-lie, really—but no one cared to see or hear. Mother carefully picked her spots—when I was eleven, and she had put infant Nathan down for the night; when I was twelve, and thirteen—but then, near the end of a miserable seventh-grade year, I had finally refused her advances. I went on strike. When we visited the public clinic, the frizzy-haired doctor warned me: “Your body is eating its muscle to survive.” I liked that idea for a time, the body slipping into itself as if down a drain and one day leaving behind no trace save a few mid-air cells. One clean—and permanent—exit from the family mire.

I recalled a voice, her voice, begging the rib cage on the stairs to eat. “Please, you’ve got to . . . for me . . . ” The cage would not eat. I stood on the laundry-strewn step, gazing through bars of filament-infested sunlight that streaked the living room as in the old days, when I had stayed home from school for weeks to watch The Price Is Right with her, and to cheer her recitations of Emily Dickinson: “How dreary—to be—Somebody! / How public—like a Frog.” I left her wiping her bloodshot eyes on the landing and returned to my room to resume slicing me in half. I got credit for it from other people. My disfigurement, astonishingly, made me more appealing and acceptable to tubby neighbors who had been fighting, and losing, the so-called Battle of the Bulge. “Lookin’ good!” they cried from yards and driveways. School officials, and most teachers, seeing me shrink, were relieved to be no longer confronted with a child there was no place for, the fat boy bereft of “team spirit.” I ate a Granny Smith apple for lunch in the junior high cafeteria—the variety of green apple depicted on the Beatles record labels, a fact I had learned from the Beatles quiz book that was one of the lowercase bibles I read over and over during this ordeal—and a three-hundred-calorie beef or chicken pot pie for dinner each night, plus the skin of my lips that I nibbled in bed in a trance as the plastic stylus of my suitcase player slid off a side of The White Album and hit the spindle, thu-thup, thu-thup, flip disc, thu-thup, thu-thup, flip disc. “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Dear Prudence” and “Wild Honey Pie” fed me on the hungriest nights so I did not have to eat anything else. These songs blanketed the ruined room, and its terror-wracked occupant, with melancholy serenity. No nitrates of bologna, no ice cream, no cashew bits, no margarine, no Fritos, no Pop-Ts, no frozen tacos, no Banquet TV dinners. And now? Now, though eating again out of cans and boxes and foil trays, and willingly visiting McDonald’s and Big Boy, the point I had made was sticking her. It was sticking me, too, making me write like never before, in a flea-sized script. What was wrong was our bond, whereas before it had been the one thing we considered right. It had never been right, though. The bond was her gyres of energy and strategy and purse strings, and my hapless capitulation to it all. Even with her control over my fate diminished, I yet filled the car with tacit concessions to her rule over the family and its future. I had not defeated her antic force. I had only briefly resisted its weight like never before. Now we had our truce, instituted without anything having been figured out between us—a war waiting to happen. Each second on the bridge stretched its legs like a year. Finally, she fired the brusque lawyerly questions about the how, what, and why of Writers’ Studio. I answered as she yanked the wheel about. I wanted to let her in on it. I knew her well enough to know that she wanted to want for me what she’d never be truly generous enough to want for me. I could tell she wished at once for me never to go back to Writers’ Studio and for me to become the darling of the group. One wish checkmated the other, and she was relieved of the intense responsibilities of dreaming. She despised herself, I had learned, above all. Sourly she chirped: “How wonderful you found that Writerly Studio!” Then silence. But any gap in conversation now was a turbulent inlet where truth lurked, fang-toothed like a fifteen-foot sturgeon swishing below the lock and dam parallel to this endless bridge. She had to say more! She filled car with praise for members of Writers’ Studio whom she had never met. I had told her their names, which she mispronounced, making them her own. “Heyward” for Howard. I didn’t correct her. I remained a glutton for humiliation. If eager to be clear of her currents of pain, I was equally horrified of any final rejection and detachment, which promised, at least at the start, to fling me into another state of unprecedented incoherence, the confusion wrought by bitter yellow light hitting darkest spaces never before lit. While she Heywarded about Howard, I listened to the warm whistles of cool river wind, noted the blue and purplish gleams bejeweling the levees.

The junker galloped off the end of the vibrating bridge grating and landed with a double thump. Urban Iowa hummed under our wheels. We shed the trestle shadows and veered onto River Drive. There was the modular Clayton House hotel, where a neighbor lady, Buddy’s mother, had once been arrested for turning tricks. There loomed the sooty French and Hecht factory, where Lonnie had once worked the line—Lonnie the red-haired live-at-home son of a Tennessee minister who had come north to study chiropractic science at Palmer College, wanting to combine preaching with medicine, and who, after graduating, had sold that brown house to Buddy’s mother and her husband in the raccoon coat, who, in turn, sold the place to the driver of a Frito-Lay delivery truck. There were the winks of the time & temp billboard, the bulb chorus blinking, blinking, blurting staccato notes of light. Inside me I carried that meeting-room circle of pens, humble faces, “how-to” articles—a counterbalance to the jungle of grandiose and absurd conceits holding sway at home. The family myths were shields at times, armaments at other times, cheap amusements or desperate prayers at still others, but most often ineffective salves for wounded egos. “That Writerly Studio of yours, it reminds me of Brook Farm,” swerving mother murmured, oblivious now to Al’s Wineburger restaurant on the left, the Robin Hood Flour factory silos on the right. I braced. I could see where things were going. She was glad to hand back anything of yours real nice after first stomping on it real good. Over that meeting room, my smile, my notebook, over the rungs of my bones, she spread the winding sheet of  “At Brook Farm, honey, they . . .” She ignored the white lines of the road. The tires straddled them. She was expert at that—living on the edge without going over. Most of the time, when she did cross big lines, she veered back quick and became, again, merely the eccentric forging forth in an inhospitable world of conformity. In so doing, she delivered to the family the sort of heroine that misfit kids could cheer for. The heroine who spread her steam of ridiculous idealism and hapless bombast was useful to all of us, and in that hypercharismatic atmosphere we could stow, and hide, the deeply aberrant bouts of her behavior. It was vital that our forgetting keep up with our knowing. Truths too heavy to be constantly borne must be denied for the sake of one’s sanity. But that wasn’t the only reason I could sit there in the car with her, smiling. I smiled because I was determined that my life be about more than my worst hours on earth. I had snapped under the pressure of her eerie routines, but there was more to me than simply broken pieces—I believed there was more. Why? Because the dark had asked me for light. The generation of light. The scavenging of light from streets and the faces of strangers and neighbors and even from mother’s lectures on culture and reading. She was still a lot of what I had. I had no father to see me through, really. Even now I let her sit at night on the edge of my bed and caress my feet, as long as her hands stayed below the ankles, and they did. I had showed her that they must. In the gloom she sadly quoted A. E. Housman poems to let me know how much any boundary killed her. I absorbed the lines oozing from her head. The light I needed—it was there, hiding in the family dark, embedded, encoded, awaiting extraction. We were more than our worst hours, right? I, at least, had been through the worst hours, and now sought something else. It felt as if the car were suspended between industrial lots, as if we weren’t moving at all, as if instead it was the glaring night passing through us at a high speed that stilled everything. The river a blacker night flowing through thinner city dark. The river night of Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac, who had first glimpsed the Mississippi at this spot, crossing from Rock Island into Davenport in On the Road.

The ghost road to 15 Crestwood Terrace, the nowhere road to a nowhere place, often passed the only farm I knew of in urban Iowa, her reinvented “Brook Farm”—a distant, fantastical relative of the real 1840s settlement of utopian transcendental leanings, of philosophy and hay raking. Dorothy Day lived there, and Emerson, Mailer, Thoreau, Jackie O., Bertrand Russell, Margaret Mead, the Alcotts, Brendan Behan, and a motley host of other free thinkers and / or free-love advocates who could never have met except in her aching skull. The concept was so addled I had to take it seriously. Her chant of Brook Farm this, Brook Farm that, seemed shorthand for every family delusion. On the bridge I had told her I would attend the next meeting of Writers’ Studio if I had to swim to Rock Island. That was a mistake. She would try to convince me out of it. Not out of attending, but out of attending in a way that hinted at any exchange of her, of the family, for something better. There was nothing better than us—if we would only realize it. Her children, she insisted, were little Brook Farm geniuses on caffeine destined in their intellectual restlessness to hunt down enrichment wherever it existed—and find it incredibly disappointing. Her husband, though suffering from emotional stuff and apparent mental shutdown, had written unpublished novels as a young man—a feat that had made him a Brook Farm hand, too. Our address stunk of failure’s fertility: a barnyard of illusions seeking to displace our difficult, unacceptable realities. Her huckster’s voice, the hustler’s voice I knew best and despised the most, clanged like deck bells during a storm warning. But, honey, at Brook Farm they . . . sure, they raised cattle on verbs alone, and pigs on nouns, and they . . . She would do her damnedest to minimize the uniqueness of my Writers’ Studio experience and thus diffuse its threatening attraction. She was saying, yet again: Don’t think you can get away, you can’t. Was it possible she would prefer six dead interesting kids to six live boring kids who said “please” and “thank you”? She tilted over the wheel and stared into the dark where all her dreams had led. Good choices no less than bad ones had come back to haunt her. She had gone to college, and then to law school in the 1950s, when few women did, and ended up pining wildly behind this cola-yucked car wheel. She had found another eccentric to marry and it had turned ugly. When all else failed, she had given birth to six children, but those children, each one, tormented her with hungers, expectations. She could raise a family only by dividing it up, day after day, into the few with her, the majority left behind, abandoned. Crisis containment was the obsession to which all her obsessions were naturally dedicated. She would happily let me live in the attic with my books and records until I was sixty—if I asked. It was disturbing how fetching I sometimes found that horrifying notion. Yes, I, too, desired containment. But there was none. There was the spreading of trouble far and farther. The caring too much and not caring a bit—yin and yang of oversensitivity and numbness. At last she Brook Farmed herself out. She groaned, trope-less for a minute. Groggy, I sank back into the seat as the tires juggled more pavements and seemed to drop off the end of the world, but really we were just hydroplaning again on the runoff of excuses. Anyway, I had heard worse from the bully pulpit. In the house her frequent screams implied that clean sheets and towels and kitty litter and coats with buttons and mittens that matched were made for unintellectual consumers addicted to needless conveniences. Our dwelling was superior to others on the block precisely because it was neglected, the carpet clutter redeemed for being crowned with stacks of classic literature published by Signet, Knopf, and Anchor. She had yet to equate a plugged-up toilet with Walden Pond but might. To do regular chores was to live the robotic “Hallmark” lifestyle of clichés and administrative duties that squelched creativity and passion. And excuses always had believers—even if cynical or chagrined believers—as it was easier to accept the craziest alibis than to fathom the voids of humiliation and guilt that hatched them. In the car there was everything left to be said, but nothing more to say about it. When this happened, the exhausted driver often muttered a store name. The best mode of survival at our disposal, other than fairy tales or coffee refills, was a shopping trip with few if any purchases. In twenty minutes we were prospecting the Target aisles, digging for bargains on tube socks and hard candy.

No one in the family except my oldest younger sister, Elizabeth (blue bags under her eyes), could have guessed how serious I was about the Writers’ Studio business. No one in the family but she, another snakebitten striver and collector of the tragedies of strangers, could understand it was necessary to live for writing, because your life alone could not make the volume of suffering seen, and felt, worth its heavy toll. Nor could anyone but she understand that tic of mine to respond to family debacles not by patently rejecting them but by dragging them with me, out of their vile hole and into arenas, like Writers’ Studio, where the Brook Farm fantasia—that dream of mental and emotional freedom unconstricted by community—might be tempered, refined, and, instead of destroyed, lent the solidity of reality. Like me, Elizabeth dressed in carefully chosen vintage clothing from St. Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army. She also cleaved to Social Security recipients for similar reasons, I guessed. Those old hands had seen more things and, to a degree, accepted what things meant. Our shut-in neighbor Mr. Hickey, Coast Guard veteran, at the helm of a kitchen table, would study a chipped mug rim—knowing, unlike our parents, that it wasn’t the defeat that defeated you. What defeated you was not grasping, and absorbing, the small and big lessons of defeat. Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth no longer had much time for visits to Hickey’s house—she studied constantly, obsessed with good grades as her way out, her end run. Elizabeth did not have much time for anyone but teachers and Granny Stanley. She never forgot Granny over in Rock Island, trapped in the back bedroom by Grandpa’s curses, fully dressed on a high mattress, listening to a soothing recording of soft rain, awaiting our next visit. Once, though, Elizabeth and I had shared a world of Granny, Hickey, mother, writing. When Elizabeth was ten, I eleven, we had made a pact in the upstairs bedroom to be writers, pricking our fingers with a needle (teeth clenched) and signing a piece of wide-ruled Mead notebook paper in blood. We had been—and still were—severe romantics, smitten by, say, bare winter trees, whose countless stripped branches crisscrossed in gray light. We doted on the legless GI selling poppies, the detergent-scented nursing home resident, the stammering wallflowers at square dances. We loved gift store wooden nickels and front-yard wishing wells and dime store “grab bags” and wrought-iron fences—the more spears to impale the gaze, the better. We trusted that life must hurt and hurt, then hurt more. In our house we had learned that with any dream, no matter how simple, must come the puncturing needle. Days were races to keep dreaming new dreams. If you could dream one last dream and sleep before it was punctured, it was a good day, and that was the startling goal of a life of pain, right? To have one more dream than devastating punctures? We were inveterately childish in the way of the aged. Teenage spinster, teenage confirmed bachelor, coffee sippers and doily appreciators and twine fanciers and listeners to music from previous decades, the dated rock and roll. This shared outlook had not changed a whit. What had changed was logistical. The ambulances of our dire minds had taken different dire off-ramps. We were still the two oldest, still the helpers, the EMS paramedics, but we saw rescues differently—our own rescue and the rescue of family pride. There were so many ways to view, and puzzle over, deprivations rooted in the inability of our mother, a lawyer, and our father, a lawyer, to live lives of reason. Why was it so often impossible for these schooled people to keep the refrigerator fully stocked? Or even more to the point—what were Elizabeth and I to do about it? We understood that proving ourselves to a group of influential people could be vital to survival, but such different groups we picked, such different assignments. Elizabeth’s choice to be a browbeaten handmaiden of stifling teachers and sanctimonious textbooks amounted to her version of starving for her own good: get an A or I am nothing. But each triumph was fueled by stress and a fear of failure that gave her raccoon eyes and deprived her of her humor and imagination—as writing would not. I blamed myself for not having encouraged her poetry more. She thrived on it, couldn’t get enough. How I wanted Elizabeth there with me at the next Writers’ Studio meeting, where exploration counted as much as perfection, where failure was welcome! She’d never be a nothing there. She’d be a budding artist, always. Those members knew not-knowing and, I had seen, made scant effort to cover up deficiencies. Insoluble stanzas and plots were shamelessly offered up to the circle. That circle knew, and respected, the value of displaying craft’s mess. At that first meeting I sensed I could read anything to these tolerant people, be all my selves, in turn, without terror. In the weeks after that, it turned out to be true. Elizabeth would feed off such a feeling, I knew, but, collared to academic excellence, she had no time for the fluff of cinquains and haikus read in halting voices in a tenement across the river. Occasionally, for selfish reasons, I silently derided her choices. Elizabeth’s company would have made me less a target on mean detour-twisted rides to and from meetings. But there were other reasons too. Couldn’t she see that education alone hadn’t cured mother or father of their insecurities and doubts?

Elizabeth ground her teeth while sleeping in the bottom bunk beneath Marianna, my middle sister, in the room the three girls shared. Elizabeth hardly ate or went outdoors and yet had a mysterious tan, as if she were toasted from within by her fiery worries. A few times I did cajole her into attending club meetings, with predictably disastrous results. She read poems about winter trees and graveyards and felt that no one liked them enough. I revered the lines, though. I also revered her mastering of the violin and the flute, French and then Latin. She quoted Virgil faster and faster until the pale scroll of her thrift store dress seemed to illuminate, yellow flower by yellow flower. But though she seemed to believe there was no future in literature for any human born after the incineration of Caesar, she apprehended why I would be crazy serious about creation: she had been once. This unspoken empathy preserved a consoling hint of that sweet bygone notion of ours that we were a family of two within a gone family. Anyway, her homework obsession and my writing had one important thing in common: both were about a sister and a brother feeling a responsibility to help the family but not knowing enough to help. We lacked answers and were missing tools. We were driven by a livid curiosity that our neediness bred, serially suspending our disbelief as we traveled between the garish theaters of our family drama, where clues were concealed behind curtains whose eerie fluttering was the show itself. Who were we to judge? We did—at times. But we hated ourselves for it. Our parents had obviously been judged enough already by their contemporaries. As father’s ailing legal practice brought us near to poverty again and again, and mother’s ailing self-esteem made a charade of any serious project she undertook, it was natural that the explanations which Elizabeth and I found most appealing were the more clever myths handed to us, or the classic ones we found on our own and revived, or the dramatic new tales we invented out of iffy fabric. Myths could protect and expose. They were reservoirs of hope spawned by confusion. The holes in our lives were so large that only the weirdest fables could span and momentarily repair them. Beyond the myths there was one other constant. There was the unassailable given that Elizabeth and I would remain on that bloody domestic stage until the last scene of the last act, despite being qualm-riddled, plagued by overexertions and breakdowns. We were not the sort to leave anyone behind. And in our own ways, we have not. Elizabeth remains front and center in the family playhouse. I know why. I am sympathetic with her reasons. You remain in a cross fire when you have no exit, stage left. If long ago I located an exit—if I am not now soliloquizing beside her—she is with me nevertheless. I have everyone near, echo and profile. Daily I navigate the stormy presences of deep absences. Estrangement has not corrupted love, nor made it less vital, but sharpened the awareness of what is at stake when one loves, what is to be gained and lost, proving again and again how irreplaceable, and elusive, loved ones are.

Writers’ Studio members soon did not have to ask “Have you brought something to read tonight?” They could see I had. Throughout that first year I brought long poems copied out at the Davenport Public Library or up in my bedroom as the rugged vinyl spun on the wobbling turntable, creating a protective barrier of harmony between me and the dissonance of 15 Crestwood Terrace. Harvest, Neil Young. Leon Russell and the Shelter People. Time Loves a Hero, Little Feat. It all poured into what I wrote, drove my hand across the page. One political poem called “Sequel” told the story of the impoverished widow of Eddie Slovak, the only U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion during World War II. Some TV movie had inspired the idea. I recited the epic like a good composer of free verse: quick, while rocking. Blanche winced but said naught. Other members suggested I enter the monstrosity in the Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest in the high school division. I did, and the ladies checking in entries figured no youth would dare write a five-page poem, and it was added to the pile of poems submitted by adults, and won the seventy-five dollar grand prize handed out in late October at the Butterworth Center, located in a mansion. Oak-paneled library. Cosmic chandeliers. The beige and otherwise bleak program benefiting from the glitter of judge Robert Dana’s biography. Poet-in-Residence: the rare Iowa Workshop graduate who skipped the flight to New York and stayed in the state to teach. Author of Some Versions of Silence and The Power of the Visible. Hobbies: traveling, swimming. Swimming! I had only heard of poets drowning, one way or the other. At the punch-bowl reception following the to-do, feathered hats told me “congrats” and gave me “kudos.” I spilled punch on my dark blue velour jacket—the best clothing I owned. I shook hands with buoyant poet Dana. His goatee-festooned chin dipped, and a voice of grit and gravity said: “Let me know when you’re ready to go to college.” I promised and then went out and blew the prize money at Kmart and Ben Franklin, buying forgettable plastic Christmas presents for my deserving brothers and sisters and parents. Cornell, the small Iowa college where Robert Dana taught, was incidentally the very one my mother had attended before her life broke into the pieces I grew up with—sharp, sharper, sharpest.

In addition to Blanche and Howard, the other regular Writers’ Studio attenders were roly-poly accomplished Dave, who had published dozens of inspirational biographies for the juvenile audience; Betty, wife of a car mechanic, working on a biography of the eighteenth-century poet Phyllis Wheatley; Cozie, the devout Catholic—and by day technical writer for the government—who each week read a poem about cats; Norm, the retired Rock Island Lines employee who wrote only about trains; Faith, who always nearly died of a heart attack while climbing the stairs, then recovered to wail hymns she had written years ago; John, the haiku writer who lived with his mother, the heart surgeon; Karen, the red-haired fourth-grade teacher who worshipped Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen Crane; and Carole, formerly of Alabama, who had married young, divorced too late, and worked weekdays in the hosiery department of Younkers, standing still as the mannequins. The second-floor meeting room was impossibly hot in the summer. One slender window stuck in the down position. A ceiling fan that moved only when the haiku writer stood on his chair and gave it a spin. John got all the hard assignments—treasurer for a group with virtually no money. Each penny he reported in that shy, monotonous voice of his, words quavering as the rest of him dare not, could not. He was profoundly stuck, and starched. Had his mother ironed his suit with him in it? His eyes bulged to mothball size when he read his 5-7-5 haiku—the hardest of all the hard jobs he had to do. Meanwhile, the Kelvinator buzzed by the dusty window. For a quarter, members could purchase a bottle of warm cola from John. Few did. When better “digs” (as Cozie put it) were eventually located in Davenport, the beverages were left behind for the next thirsting tenant.

If the club had moved meetings to the top of Everest I would have found a way to get there. I wanted to make it in the Beauty and Truth racket. Dear Maxwell Perkins, I did. I had the bug bad, having caught it from a father who had written those unpublished constipated novels and a mother who misquoted the world’s loveliest poets (Yeats, Dickinson, Tennyson, Housman), delivered Ogden Nash drivel perfectly, and wished, I knew, to write outlandish odes of her own. Walk into any room in our home and you encountered evidence of quashed literariness: the discarded notebooks, the capless pens, the anthologies butterflied on coffee tables—the luscious pulp innards of Dylan Thomas spilling out of butchered bindings. Attending Writers’ Studio meetings helped me understand what had gone wrong. My parents had the art equation backward. They wanted to make great work only—to hell with all else. But before the creation of Beauty and Truth had to come the living out of Beauty and Truth, and if club members never got around to the genius part, they made up for the lack of masterpieces with their perfect intent to do nothing they could not do—to be who they were, without apology or any fudging of logic. Their lack of airs elevated me. I discovered I was as thrilled by the supreme modesty of John’s haiku about his long driveway and Cozie’s newest blurry cat poem as I was by the grand achievements of Emerson, O’Neill, and Whitman. The voices reading the crap were not crap, that’s why. They vibrated with humanity and conviction. They showered the plainest rented rooms with that warm, rich, otherworldly ordinariness that nourished those stray seeds of integrity I gathered in Mr. Hickey’s kitchen and Granny Stanley’s bedroom.

Picture the gym of a defunct Catholic school half­-heartedly converted into a community center. It was located on top of the hill in west Davenport, right off Locust Street. With these “new digs” came the many new members: obese Roy, who rode The Harley to meetings in January wearing no coat, only a vest; Gene, the satirist and hypnotist; Stahl, the taciturn poet, who as a youth had excelled at gymnastics, using a farm fence as his pommel horse; BJ, the single mother of many genres; Jack, the Vietnam vet and softball player who would eventually offer me a joint in the parking lot; one Lucille Eye, who never read anything; and Gordon, with his novel about a white couple who adopted a Mexican woman (Maria) whose house has burned down. A folding table of banquet length stood in the middle of a floor marred with skid marks made decades earlier by the children of German immigrants. The voice of each reader echoed and when I closed my eyes to listen, the sensation was of hearing rhymed shouts at a great, muting distance. Poets somehow dominated meetings though always in the minority. Nature was the topic of choice—flowers, trees, birds. Fiction writers targeted the juvenile audience and dreamed of publishing in Boys’ Life, Reader’s Digest, and Guideposts—except Roy, who submitted his stories of abducted tied-up women to Playboy. It excited me to hear any member report the smallest sale of any kind. Many pieces were placed in church newsletters. Some members brought out books. Betty with a press called Avalon. Dave with many presses. (His goal was to publish fifty books by the time he was fifty, and he did it.) Imagine that: money for words! One Writers’ Studio member who shall remain nameless sold the same story more than a dozen times. She dared not write another sentence, for fear it would tarnish her reputation as one of the club’s most successful submitters. When it came time to read she simply reported current earnings of “Mallie and the Snail,” which over the years climbed to a total in excess of two hundred dollars. Blanche, the most serious, never considered her poems good enough, and submitted to the trash can alone. She rewrote constantly—on the way to the club in the back of Carole’s Datsun, and while sitting at the folding table, erasing and replacing words right up until the last moment. And then, quaking, with the down of her lip sweat-shimmered, she would lift the legal pad and apologize profusely for the inept result of her labor. Not one “hill of beans” did the mountain of effort amount to. And if she could do no right, well, it would naturally be difficult for others to do better. Each week she brutally took us to task for our linguistic and grammatical inadequacies, quoting The Elements of Style while waving an ember-tipped Pall Mall. As little as one hanging clause or misplaced noun could set her off, and special ire was reserved for the incorrect use of lay. Rather than be subjected to a ten-minute lecture on that subject, the rest of us kept all derivations of that word out of our stories and poems. (And even now, more than thirty years later, I’m still reluctant to have a character take a nap—much better he drink a cup of coffee.) After the meetings in the gym there was a caravan to Riefe’s, the diner famous for serving the platters of onion rings heaped like Medusa’s hair. Karen bought me an order each week, though things were getting tougher and tougher for her—she had lost her job as a teacher, and was working as a clerk at Woolworths. At Reife’s I pled with Blanche to tell me about her famous Iowa City classmate until at last the water glass was pushed aside and her features cleaved toward an invisible center point. First of all, I must know Flannery spoke with such an accent that Paul Engle, workshop director, had to read her stories to the class himself. Second, Flannery did not keep appointments, having promised to meet Blanche at a movie theater one winter afternoon and never showing up, preferring to stay home with “that typewriter and hot pot.”

In the basement father surprised me. It was the summer after I had won the Mississippi Valley poetry contest, almost two years into my time at Writers’ Studio. He asked if I would be so kind as bring one of his venerable unpublished novels to the club and read it to the other members. He did not say which manuscript: was I to choose? I had halted on the narrow stairs when I saw his hobbled hulking figure at the bottom: smoke, slippers, a fluster of newspaper sections in one hand. He was preparing to make a painful climb after taking care of his business on the toilet with the pedestal cracked where my middle brother, Howard, had struck it with a bowling ball. He also drove golf balls off the terrace and over the roofs below. Howard, despite being just twelve, was the Miller out of a movie, girlfriends and a leading-man tan; father and I were custodians in comparison. “What do you think, Benny?” he asked, wanting in on my good thing. My hand grazed the flimsy pipe railing which, like the stairs, was covered with gray peeling latex paint. The cave-like basement walls of foundation stone were frosted with old white lead paint, now in the news for being poison. The concrete floor was red, where the red had not worn off, that is. “What about it? What do you think?” I was still thinking. An interesting request, but the most intriguing aspects of parents, I had learned, were often their most troublesome or dangerous. I hated to be the next person who rejected him . . . but no Writers’ Studio member read writing not her own. If a writer was not present to receive feedback on her work there was little use in providing the feedback. “Don’t you think they’d like it?” he asked. He wore the uniform that typically accompanied him to the recliner: tan slacks boating high around the waist, short-sleeved shirt, wire-rim glasses that made fish of his eyes behind the bowls of the lenses. Around us wafted the antique reek of pigeon shit dating to Howard’s failed experiment to raise fifty or so birds in the basement. A crap-speckled coop remained below the broken window the creatures had escaped from. The fruit of father’s “novelist period,” typed pages bound in expensive leather, lined a shelf of the pea-green metal bookcase behind him, propped against the outer wall of the least-entered room in the house. It was the basement room for storing coal. There was no light fixture, and on the floor just the webbed remnants of the final coal delivery, made fifty or more years earlier. That bookcase also held my father’s growing collection of get-rich-quick stock guides. In the side yard, boxes of files from his law practice lived, molting and rotting. He had ordered the delivery man to dump them there to be rained on! But father kept his make-a-million guides and failed novels inside, warm and dry. These choices fascinated me. They said something awful about the man, and something hopeful, and the incompatible feelings he aroused in me were certainly matched by those I aroused in him. He looked up to me because I was mother’s favorite. He looked down on me because of the same. “You don’t want to present my writing?” I shrugged. He opened his mouth again, that shovel of a mouth, and was, I thought, about to dish me lines about his salad days in Iowa City, when, as an older-than-average undergraduate, he had lived over a typewriter shop and attended a John Dos Passos reading, and another by James T. Farrell of Studs Lonigan fame, and, with a group of gadflies, had drunk beer with Wright Morris. I felt all that coming but he said nothing. I recalled the Ruth Azel Agency letterhead that had fluttered out of one of his novels like a squashed moth when I opened it one night, feeling brave. The rejection was cordial and completely discouraging. For many reasons I tried not to crack the books, and usually succeeded, but sometimes not. He had once informed me that many of his works were set in the same mythical county, à la Faulkner. I had turned hundreds of pages looking for the name of father’s county and failed to find it. “The club might appreciate my writing,” he persisted. I had descended, drawn down by his gravity. He backed toward the cold furnace. “What’s the big deal about taking one chapter the next time . . . ?” Bugs traversed the dirty laundry under the chute. I bumbled through an explanation that it would be better if he read his own writing next Thursday. Then a shock. I smiled and invited him to come to a meeting with me. It amazed me that I meant it. He and I spent too much time apart: in exile from each other in our own home. Writers’ Studio might be one thing—the only?—that could unite us. “You’ll love it!” I yelped, building up the case for his coming. My voice new, shiny, resolute. Words burst out. “There’s a guy Howard . . .” I told him what I knew about Howard. I told him about Blanche. I was picturing us at the folding table together, our injured texts elbow to elbow. There would be plenty of feedback to go around. Dave Collins would say in the nicest way to father: “Show, don’t tell.” Dave would add that even if you hadn’t the time or inspiration to write on a given day it was essential to do something writing related like reading Welty or buying a new pen. Father had no friends and would leave the first meeting with ten. Their support and encouragement might lead him to write new novels better than the ones typed after he had dropped out of Columbia and Notre Dame in quick succession in the fifties and returned home to Rock Island to endure the mockery of Dr. Miller, and the almost-as-painful pity of his mother, Rose. “They’d be thrilled if you came with me. New members are”—that new big voice leaping out leaped higher—“the group’s lifeblood!” He started, staring at me like I was a lunatic. We said nothing more—he lost in his basement of emotion and me lost in mine. The shake of a shirt shrug—the swishing plummet of his eyes—telegraphed the message that I had failed him again. He clop-clop-clopped up the stairs to the recliner and the snows of bad TV reception.

For a weak man, my father had the broadest and strongest-looking back. Watching it that day, I thought, as often before, what a perfect wall. What a great barrier he might have made between me and a mother’s anger and desire. He was the ally I really needed; I was the son he had lost to her. Our grief wandered in useless and faltering circles. I turned toward the brown on brown of the book bindings in half-light. He would not, could not read his novels to the group . . . because he did not like the books enough. It could be he even feared the books by now. Dreaded their power to retain the dream they had ended. But making art meant taking responsibility for the choices involved in the making, the club had taught me that much. Without feeling the responsibility for your flubbed plots and botched iambics, you had nothing at stake, nothing to write for. Father was sapped. Little energy for responsibilities. If not really ruined, he felt ruined. I regretted saying no to the request, but was not sorry about it. I dearly wanted something to work out for him—even more than for myself sometimes—but nothing could work out for you without your doing some work, putting yourself in places that weren’t exactly comfortable and working forward from there, crawling into the new territory. This was also the year he drove the family to the outskirts of Davenport where community garden plots were for rent below a shuttered asylum on a hill. This father whose bad hip prevented him from bending had gotten a sudden notion that a garden plot was what the family needed. He was right—right not to think for an hour about the hip pain that dominated his days—and he was right that we needed fresh food rather than the flash-frozen dinners and the powdered soups, but again a surprising ploy fizzled. He had not prepared well enough. He had never before mentioned gardening to any family member. When we arrived, we saw diffident hippies digging around behind the fence that Howard and Marianna immediately began yanking and rattling, and my father himself appeared to forget why it was so important that we come “take a look.” One of the Jesus-hair diggers glared at us like a manager who senses a shoplifter. Plots were separated by vampire stakes with rags tied to them. Father puffed. He had a puzzled, heartbroken look. He wanted to grow books, grow rich and own a Lincoln, not grow tomatoes. Why had we come? his vacant eyes asked. Mother, getting off on the pathos of the plot’s proximity to the hilltop asylum, kept pointing at that crenellated building and alluding to Zelda Fitzgerald, one of her role models. A kerchiefed digger set aside his trowel and approached the fence and quoted the high price for a summer rental of five feet of soil. It was disorienting. It was all wrong. City outskirts, where the land should have opened up to reveal Grant Wood vistas of rural Iowa, felt more cramped than the city center, where there existed plenty of vacant lots to plow for free and plant with whatever vegetables thrived on broken glass and gravel. We melted back into the car and it grumbled and coughed and we fled to a fast-food joint for the succor of bubble-beaded colas and french fries bent in supplication to oil. Wind whipped the frail restaurant-lot trees and they bent double. We never went out that way again.

Blanche and John and Cozie and Howard and Karen and Gordon and Norm and Betty and Dick had no sure cures for what afflicted their art other than grammar correctives and repeating after Dave Collins: “Show, don’t tell.” They repeated this to each other, and kept telling. But however badly we failed to convey our experiences, we still had our experiences—no disaster on the page could strip away the life that had been lived, and its integrity. There was the solace of working, the next time, to get it less wrong. And for four years Writers’ Studio members heard a little extra damage in my voice. They understood that scathing criticism was not what was needed—yet. They heard I was trying hard, attempting to learn to live with the mind I had—and to mine my heart of hearts. The technical particulars of struggle could be egregious, but the vigorous effort was noble. They had gone “through it” themselves, their open eyes said. They gathered up the fragments of my shattered voice and held them close and reported what they “got out of it.” That was grace. That was faith in time’s power to smooth things out—misplaced faith, but I loved that vision of healing. For all the group could not do for me, they did a child of chaos a sweet favor by just being there, week after week, when I showed up with my broken lines—fables that were half poems, poems that were half fables: “The Sand Mountain,” “The Tiger in the Rose Garden,” “Cat Bread,” “Mya’s Wind,” “At Night the Ballerina Dances,” an elegy called “The English Teacher,” about the Sudlow High staff member who shut the door of a garage and started her car. I wrote one piece a week, at least. There we were again every Thursday, as the rest of America slumped in front of sitcoms. We showed up for the challenge of facing down oblivion. Though near to clueless and befuddled by the relentless demands of literary craft, we exchanged “tips.” Show, don’t tell, of course, if at all possible, but if not, well, telling was better than the ineptness of complete capitulation to silence. Like Mr. Hickey, the weathered ring of stymied rhymers showed me how to “stick in there,” how to be lost without becoming totally lost. It was better to show up at seven and stumble anew than not to show up for fear of stumbling. Because if you were to make anything of yourself, if anything even mildly good was ever to work out, you must—usually in isolation and under duress—find a way to take yourself seriously when few others did. The ambition alone could add fertile layers to an existence, and generate answers out of almost nothing. Shaky and on edge when I entered meetings, I left knowing the most important writing you ever did was the writing done when things seemed hopeless, as it required the investment of courage. Action thus imbued made you real to yourself. I took that with me into the parking lot after weekly good-byes and, in the end, also cradled a “going away” basket members had packed with pens, pads, a toothbrush, toothpaste, shavers, and other toiletries they figured I would need.

My neighborhood—like Writers’ Studio membership—demanded much from the heart. The hills, some seeming to stretch halfway to heaven, were the ideal place to train for the long-distance cycling trips that I eventually embarked on with another loner named Randy. If you were not pedaling or driving up one precipitous incline, you were sailing downhill (fish­tailing, in winter). The frolic of elevations was partially natural and partially created. Tiers of terraced blocks rose from glacier-cut dips shaded by arcing trees whose leafy branches rowed like massive oars when lapped by winds off the Mississippi. The relatively modest dwellings on Crestwood Terrace were part of the first addition to the droves of magnificent mansions of industrialists that lined the ridges leading to the water. McClellan Heights—referred to locally as “The Heights”—was in the 1970s populated by successful doctors and lawyers, and the congressman with the appropriate last name of Leach. His riverfront palace contained a ballroom. The place had been built by Mr. French, founder of the French and Hecht metals company and brother of Alice French, who had written short stories under the pen name of Octave Thanet and consorted with William Dean Howells in the early 1900s. When I was a teenager I liked to walk past the storied compound in the summer, when shadows processed like silk gowns across the lawn. Often no Leach was home, but early one sumpy evening I made the climb up from McClellan Boulevard with my mother and we stopped in our tracks like characters in Writers’ Studio stories did. The low stone wall that encircled the hillside property was lined with homemade lanterns set out by organizers of a Leach fund-raiser—hundreds of paper bags, each sand-weighted and containing a candle. The glows stretched up and down the adjoining streets, ending at the litter-strewn River Drive sidewalk, across from the railroad tracks and the pewter river reaching to Illinois. Guests in fancy cars sped through the front gate toward the mansion. They missed this Candlemas under the plum clouds. My mysterious and pained mother swayed at my side, giggling as if to ward off the import of a solemn sign. Candles looked like your best friend. Candles were God even to the godless. You trusted candles, though they could burn down your house as sure as an acetylene torch.

On our block each house occupied a cramped plane of its own. Below us lived the driver of a Budweiser truck and his phlegmatic wife, a bartender at the nearby dive called Lindsay Park Lounge. Above, in a small but stately white house, lived Mr. Hickey, the retired Realtor and widower with a bad heart, worse vision, and a little pug. We arrived at the tail end of 1968, when I was five, and for a few years after that, Mr. Hickey—who insisted we call him “John” (and we tried, but often forgot)—continued to appear every noon on his glassed-in back porch, like a svelte apparition dressed for inclemency. Black overcoat and polka-dot bow tie. Black fedora on his bald head and, in his right hand, Mikey’s chain-link leash. After John, or Mr. Hickey, had exited the porch and hooked the leash to the backyard clothesline, the drooling snuffling dog would commence running back and forth, an activity which would not stop until John reappeared hours later, his face pearled in the late light. He was a proud, pristine man, an award-winning gardener. His rose bushes were wilder by this time but still produced large blooms. Then Mikey died, and our courtly neighbor grew too weak to go outside. The enclosed back porch became the very end of the world, but he made it there often to open the door for visitors, and remained spry of eye, ever hopeful that his demise was only a passing phase—that strength would return if he took the pills and cut down on salt and periodically squeezed the red plastic hand grip. Every Saturday John’s sister, Alice, and her husband, Eddie, a retired tugboat captain, drove down from Le Claire, Iowa, and brought John groceries: oatmeal, Lipton tea, low sodium soup—and a pan of Alice’s homemade salmon loaf. My mother replenished what perishables ran out during the week and often I was asked to run up the hill to deliver the carton of milk or eggs, the bunch of bananas, the box of Tiparillo cigars. This I did not mind. Being trusted to deliver cigars after dark seemed a task akin to smuggling contraband over the Mexican border. I’d stuff the brown bag under my arm and lumber up the hill toward the back steps, which were illuminated by a spotlight affixed under the eaves. John would be waiting on the back porch to make the pickup, cued by the phone call I’d made a few minutes earlier—no hat or jacket after dark, just the polka-dot bow tie and a red or green sweater vest hanging loosely on his thin shoulders. After the transfer of the bag came the invitation to step inside for a 7UP. I never refused. In fact, had he ever forgotten to invite me in, I would have reminded him to do so, as I was enchanted with his orderly, air-conditioned house. The door leading from the porch to the kitchen had a five-dollar bill taped to it. This was for a burglar. If John ever came back after chaining up Mikey and found the money gone, he would know it was not safe to enter—that someone had sneaked into the house during the five minutes he was off the glassed-in porch. I thought the ploy incredibly clever, as I did his use of old undershirts as rags and flattened soap boxes as coasters. He had cable TV and if it was summer, and daytime, we watched the Cubs bumble and persevere on WGN. Billy Williams could usually be counted on to get a hit. (I had sent him that compliment; he had sent me an autographed photo.) During the Chicago commercials for Canfield’s soda and Dominick’s supermarkets, Mr. Hickey reminded me to jump rope to improve my reflexes. If no game was on, we’d sit in the kitchen and make conversation as best we could in a harrowing world that took the right words right out of your mouth. He squeezed a red plastic hand grip to strengthen his arthritic fingers. He passed the grip to me and I pumped it. At least a hundred times, over the years, he offered to nominate me for the Junior Achievement program that matched children up with businessman mentors. Had any of those store owners been in the Beauty and Truth racket I’d have been gung-ho. I sensed that none were. But Mr. Hickey, yes. He was my Virgil repeating advice designed to guide me safely out of hell and into the clear. “Hit the rope, Benny,” he chanted.

Mr. Hickey told stories in the same terse and tantalizing fashion that Blanche did—leaving out everything but one or two crackling details (as opposed to my habit of spraying words). Between us on the table: his tea mug emblazoned with the crimson mandible of the Cincinnati Reds logo (gift from an ancient friend in Ohio), my green mottled bottle of 7UP, a box of Archway sugar cookies, numerous pill bottles, the red hand grip, a plastic pill counter, a five-band radio, and a pistol with a long black barrel. My eyes rarely left the last item. The grain of the handle gleamed and the trigger too was shiny, as if it had been pulled many times. John claimed Alice had badgered him into accepting her gift of the gun after the first heart attack, worried he wouldn’t have the strength to fend off an intruder. This was a fact, but I noted how comfortable John was around the weapon. He carried it from room to room like a water glass, with an impressive nonchalance that spoke of his wild life story prior to the domestication of becoming a real estate agent. In the 1940s there had been Coast Guard service in New Orleans. And before that: shoe shining and newspaper selling in the small town of Tipton, Iowa; a stint on the Midwest boxing circuit (“barnstorming,” he called it); a job running numbers for a cigar shop in the lobby of the Kahl Building, in downtown Davenport. This may sound like the makings of a robust life narrative but John did not indulge in romance. Each time I scooted to the edge of my seat to ask for the glorious details of his younger days, he’d press the plastic tip of the cigar to his lips and exhale a twig of smoke, and then another, and another, until those twigs weaved together to seclude his bald head in its own secret grove. Then I shut up and the whining became internal. Why did some people with zilch to talk about grab your shoulder and yak for what seemed like hours while Blanche and John, who had real stories to tell, say next to nothing—reduce the juiciest subject matter to a few dry drops? The torture was most extreme when John would relax a tiny bit and tell of his two encounters with celebrity. The first had occurred at a hotel in Keokuk, Iowa, far south down the river, in the 1930s. The elevator opened and out strode Primo Carnera, heavyweight champion of the world. John approached the Italian giant. They shook hands. And then? And then John reached for the cigar in the ashtray, and added another nutty-smelling smoky bough to the forest. Whatever words he and Carnera had exchanged, I would not be privy to. And neither would I get a clear picture of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, whom John had frequently glimpsed rushing through the lobby of the Kahl, toward the stairs leading up to the musicians’ union. Was Bix’s face as ivory and elegant as it appeared in the photos? Was the hair slicked back? What kind of coat, hat, shirt? Carrying a horn? If so, was the case leather or wood? On one occasion I kept questing until I drove John to the stove, where he put on a pot of water for tea and pondered the blue eyes in the enamel between the burners until the whistle blew. Black-rimmed blue eyes. Stubbornness, I thought it was. Old-timey wholesale modesty. But now I know better—why his stories failed to compound into either a satisfying, filled-out narrative or a soaring myth, both of which I needed in equal degree to dose my confusion. It wasn’t the glitter of the years John carried with him but the haunting littleness of experiences. The scrape of the calluses on Carnera’s right hand. The wan, hopeful faces of the men at the cigar store counter, putting down the family money.

At times Blanche and Mr. Hickey could not hide their disgust at what they regarded as my 1970s illusions regarding the influence of celebrity. Blanche’s lips would protrude, forming a chapped pale platter under her sniffing nose. John’s bald head would sink and dart back and forth, as if ducking punches in slow motion. In me they saw the future, and it flickered like a cheap screen. Your life wasn’t your own until someone famous led you to it. What they could not know, however, was that I did not represent my generation. Other kids coveted trivia about idols, but those boys and girls, unlike me, spent much of the day outside. They gave each other nicknames. They competed and chased and kissed, more than kissed. Their passion for Cher, Shaun Cassidy, and Reggie Jackson supplemented life, that gush of air into the lungs, the heat of sun on skin. They came to their gods out of power, as budding equals. You could see the confidence in the batter in the park focusing his eyes on the coming fastball and in the girl in a car window brushing hair that fell around her shoulders like sunshine. These American teenagers believed themselves to be blessed, unimaginably talented and beautiful. But I was different. For one thing, my heroes were outdated, always. Frequently dead. Their genius came with an expiration date. My mind was like a dissolving attic box, the past spilling into the present, and the present into the past. It was a struggle to get any date right, because only one calendar held fast: Fat Years and Thin Years. Usually I could recall being obese and desperate when a thing happened, or gaunt and haunted. When making even that broad distinction proved impossible, I was deepest in the abyss of years and feeling their impact most fully, if abstractly. My family was different in that we smashed the clock to pieces each day with our words and deeds. We did not use less truth to tell more truth, like Mr. Hickey did. We told less truth because we had no control over our complex story, and, to a large degree, lived in mortal fear of getting any handle on the truths roaring within. Get a hold on that and we would be carried far away, or drowned. Ours was the family of supposedly aspiring artists who had produced little art in two generations and were prone to think the great art that might have been was just around the next bend. There was a logic to that irrationality. What else would redeem our ugly and artless lives but art? I dreamed I wrung the dirty rag in the kitchen and out tumbled stars. Each week my father saw three or four “flicks,” as he called them, exchanging a lonely law office lacking clients for the crowded matinee at mall theaters. Mother came and went through the screen door five or six times a night before finally settling down to study poetry and the paperback accounts of the Manson massacre, the Clutter murders, the Speck case, and the Sheppard controversy. My five younger siblings escaped through drugs, sports, dating, or, in the case of Elizabeth, catatonically playing Claude Bolling’s Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio for hours on end. Starting very young, I had writing. I wrote. And wrote. No stopping, season after season, during the Fat Years and Thin Years. First I printed spacious looping letters in the Big Chief notebooks, then I filled Mead notebooks with flat-lined starvation script. Each page a freaky raft carrying me farther away from the chaos of the household and into a predicament of my own making. Any form I chose sought more and more expression until it ate its shape and left me with no story and no poem but an amoeba oozing between genres, trying to fuse them to create the larger mirror of realities that had overwhelmed a boy, flooded him, made him him. There existed in me a sense that to get one little thing right—the thing that counted: my version of the Canera handshake, say—I had to pry open my history entire and reexperience the totality of its murk to be worthy of that gift of clarity, to understand what it could and could not mean, and to know how to use it. Coming from a family of artless artists—cheaters and cheapeners—I had to doubt that authenticity could come easily or even naturally. Like a fervent paddlewheel my Bic pen churned in rooms and in cars and in parks and in stations and everywhere in between, trying to dredge up what was at bottom of it all, what I was really meant to reap from time’s vexing currents.

One of my early tales concerned Flannery O’Connor’s love affair with Bix Beiderbecke. Could never have happened. Flannery was only six when Bix died of pneumonia in Jackson Heights, Queens. But the details fell neatly into place and still adhere—for me—many decades later. A narrative with no beginning or middle. A story all happy ending, a temporary antidote to the confounding complexity of existence. Flannery’s stern kisses curing Bix of alcoholism. Bix’s tender hugs curing Flannery of lupus. The two moving to New York and renting the smallest-possible apartment so as to be constantly on top of each other. Bix getting a steady job at the Cotton Club with Duke Ellington and then quitting to start his own band at the dawn of the Swing Era. Flannery’s drawl quickly diluting as a result of long stoop conversations with a Hell’s Kitchen landlady by the name of Gigi. Flannery practicing newly learned Northern words on the manager of Alp’s Drugstore and the members of Bix’s band, including Jack Teagarden. Bix completing his first classical composition since “In a Mist.” Flannery finishing a story set at the Cotton Club. The two sitting in the Rainbow Room, sipping each other’s eyes. The two holding hands in Central Park. The two at the Polo Grounds, munching popcorn. The two exchanging corny Christmas gifts: To Flannery, my bird of paradise. To Bix, my horn of plenty. The two dining at the Park Avenue home of Flannery’s publisher and being toasted as “the couple of the century!” Count Basie kissing Flannery’s ruby wedding ring. Katherine Anne Porter hugging Bix. Flannery’s mother coming to visit and lifting the rag rugs, trying to find where Flannery’s accent has gone. Mother only too happy to get back to Georgia and Bix laughing when her plane lifts off from Idlewild. Flannery volunteering at the Bronx Zoo and bringing Bix with her one afternoon and introducing him to all the exotic fowl: “Teelie, meet someone who blows even louder than you do.” Bix warning Chet Baker about his drinking and Chet Baker listening, cleaning up for good at the age of twenty-five. Bix and Flannery hosting a party at which Louis Armstrong and Robert Penn Warren are introduced. Bix and Flannery starting a family late, after fifteen years of trepidation. The birth of a little boy named Frank, in honor of the late saxophone player Frankie Trumbauer. The birth of a little girl named Maple, in honor of the Iowa City street on which the two met. Bix with one child on each knee. Flannery singing “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.” Bix sliding in the mute and playing “Stardust” after the children have gone to bed. Flannery getting up early the next morning and writing her first love story, typing until the end of this sentence: The darkness wasn’t in him, it was around him, black wings nesting in the creases of an ill-fitting dinner jacket.

Ben Miller’s debut memoir, River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa, is forthcoming from Lookout Books in March 2013. He has published in AGNI, the Antioch Review, Ecotone, the Kenyon Review, and One Story, among other journals, and his essays have been reprinted or noted six times in Best American. He lives in New York City with his wife, the poet Anne Pierson Wiese.

Robert Campagna resides in Loveland, Colorado, with special connections to his lifelong home in Iowa. He is a freelance photographer, writer, and educator. Since 1980 he has created and taught photography workshops. His portfolio can be viewed at abbecreekgallery.com.

With its story half buried and held many exits away

Where all must take a ramp to lift them onto a well-paved arc of dusk

And we think of our birth desert its city the epicenter

How it reads like an instruction manual for electronics no one owns anymore

Grackle feathers and dusk draining like two fingers left of the bottle

The left hand writes as the right hand erases many exits away

The story so far no less lost

Reads like the instruction manual for electronics no one owns anymore

Youth is a meal we didn’t eat or worse

We did and its stock its blood clots the dust

Fills the grid that reads like an instruction manual its city the epicenter

Of electronics no one owns anymore where all

Must have a ramp to lift them onto a well-paved arc of dusk

There are fires in rusted salvage pieces

If weather is wick if effigy is fire sundown etc. burns off like a spill

Down its well-paved arc a finger left of the bottle

The right hand writes as the left erases

The story we stop telling ourselves we burry many exits away

Hands closing the distance around the desert’s epicenter

How it reads electronics no one owns anymore

There are fires in rusted salvage pieces

Heat rattles the safety glass its smeared groan from no one

A tired voice we don’t remember fills us








EXPRESSWAY

In the if-then that we live in then leave

Smooth stones sunk into the silt you spend a lifetime retracing them

Is there ecology in the curio shop

Trackless stretches hills and storms breaking apart

Like Kleenex where an eye pulls open then struggles to keep itself shut?

Bulbs burn across the canal as apartments jar awake

From a dream we won’t repeat stones sunk into the silt

You spend a lifetime retracing

Where an eye pulls open and shards of clear sky

Are pitching above the playground equipment

The jesses and varvels as if the falcon-headed god struggled

To keep itself aloft the trackless stretches

Storms breaking apart before the eye

Is there ecology in the curio shop

And will animal memory labor long enough

For me to bring an ear to its chest and not hear it stop?

Is there ecology as apartments jar awake

From a dream we won’t retrace smooth stones sunk?

Headlights like milk through a semi-transparent

Brood we won’t wake from the trackless stretches

Storms where an eye pulls open then struggles to keep itself

Shut will animal memory labor long enough?

My hand is on your breast you’re breathing

In the if-then that we live in then leave








COLLECTOR ROADS

Touchdown Jesus burnt to the ground

Then cottonwood seed against a picture perfect sky was like something white the near-blind see

And call out to

Then onto the rustic surface the fiesta retinue of stoplight peppers tumbled

And water beaded on farm-fresh ingredients like weather on a Corvette

And if it was cottonwoods you wanted

Pray something else toward the something white the near-blind see

Strewn against a picture perfect sky

And water beaded on farm-fresh ingredients like weather on a Corvette

Is this the hundred year flood? wet your fingers snuff that votive

Mother Life’s got a riot gun behind the door

Then onto the rustic surface the fiesta retinue of stoplight peppers tumbled

And water beaded on  farm-fresh ingredients you were stranded

But loved by everyone

But the amplified message

Of hope bungee corded to the top of the van

Echoing if it was cottonwoods you wanted

Pray something else toward the something white the near-blind see

Plastic chassis jaundiced by the sun were strewn against a picture perfect sky

Something white and the fiesta of peppers tumbling

And water beaded on the farm-fresh ingredients like weather on a Corvette

But nature then

Was no sliver of light beneath a pantry door

Touchdown Jesus burnt to the ground








SIGNAL BUTTE

Televisions turning tarot in the dark house

Sparking chimes of phones the small commands their loops emit

My chemically imbalanced sister sits on the step

As in the book of miracles and its chapter of plagues

When the call comes the clouds are saying when the call comes

As if I were the speaking pit of a cured plumb it’s in your mouth

And may I be literal for a moment the loops emit

The chimes of phones the small commands

When the call comes the clouds are saying when the call

Skins stretch taught around misfiring synapses

Who cut the floodlights from the parking garage?

The clouds are saying its chapter of plagues

When the call comes the clouds are saying when

My chemically imbalanced sister sits on the step

Shelling peas into a commemorative cup

She dreams of a Pepsi machine at the bottom of a mine

My chemically imbalanced sister as if I were the speaking pit

And may I be literal for a moment when the call comes?

And lonely chatter relay after relay the loops emit

A moment of floodlights as in the book of miracles

When the call comes the clouds are saying when the call comes

Shelling peas into a commemorative cup

The mind a hand no higher power stays

Televisions turning tarot in the dark house








CHILD IN UNLANDSCAPED MEDIAN

You pumped gas as she chased blowing trash

Across a cracked and weedy space no transformation from carcass to sanctuary

The calendar oxidizes but shines like lead

Shut up dream weaver you season of snares and heavy-tongued euphoria

The child’s face is crumpled foil and Velazquez’s little person

Is a cluster of chromosomes season of brightest flower

Scurries with ants from carcass to sanctuary

A cracked and weedy space no transformation

The child’s face is crumpled foil and Velazquez’s little person

Can’t stop shaking for Pablo Picasso

Whose unstrung posts stretch a dark road homeward

Shut up dream weaver you season of snares and heavy-tongued euphoria

The child’s face is crumpled foil hinging the nozzle

Back into its holster the calendar oxidizes but shines like lead

A beetle smack against your face

To prop up the facade that you know what’s happening

The calendar oxidizes but shines like lead a cluster of chromosomes

Brightest flower scurries from carcass to sanctuary

Season of talk to hear yourself talk a cracked and weedy space

Scurries with ants shut up you weaver of snares and heavy-tongued euphoria

The child’s face is crumpled foil and Velazquez’s little person

A beetle smack against your face

I hear your wings but I can’t see you

You pumped gas as she chased blowing trash








EL CAMINO VIEJO EXIT

Ask and answer are the echoing hemispheres

Empty bowls for owl-call for a last forkful to come spiraling back to us

But we’ll find our way as we did to early retirement which lead us to

The mountains we told ourselves we’d always come back

Severance package in the pocket of our sweatpants

Our mustachios trimmed we have time to mill around

The great bird on the spit for owl-call for a last forkful to come spiraling back to us

Empty bowls cracking the words severance package

In the pocket of our sweatpants

I would welcome the opportunity to serve jury duty in the near future

Ask anyone and the story of our lives is that the story and the mountains changed on us

The mountains we told ourselves we’d always come back

Severance package in the pocket of our sweatpants the scattered trees

Each tree is the hanging tree so unlike our memory of the mountains but we’ll find our way

Now my buddy there see his mouth he can’t remember the hymn

Float–me–a–boat–oh my soul–take-it–from-me and I–will–search–take–it–from-me 

As we did to early retirement which led us to mill around

The great bird on the spit for owl-call for a last forkful to come spiraling back to us

Still in flight the bird fills the valley the empty bowls

The great bird on the spit come spiraling back we told ourselves we’d always come back

Severance package in the pocket of our sweatpants

Now my buddy there see his mouth

And-I-will-search-for-it-or-deny-it-which-is-the-soul’s-story-take-it

Ask and answer are the echoing hemispheres








CRIMSON ROAD

A swallow escapes the tree exploding into flame

A tawdry symbol for spirit I know but it’s here as you drive to work

And suddenly you’re encircled by a moral light exposing every blemish

The mutual sorry you feel when looking at carp swaying in too little water

There’s a lull in the pageantry and fear becomes a kind of felt-covered prerogative

A tympanic expanse beyond your cracked windshield

That has always been there it’s here as you drive to work

Which is another tawdry symbol for spirit

There’s a lull in the pageantry and fear becomes a kind of felt-covered prerogative

Nothing like instinct

But your hands stay under the faucet for a long time

The mutual sorry you feel when looking at carp swaying in too little water

There’s a lull in the pageantry trees burn birds flee

Are you worthy of wine and soft carpet when suddenly encircled

What makes the cone of light you occupy so heavy the desert so much shovel-work?

Is this mysticism now?

And you’re encircled by the tympanic expanse of your cracked windshield

That has always been there it’s here as you drive to work

They’re firing into the crowd there’s a ladybug on a girl’s arm a tawdry symbol

It’s here the mutual sorry you feel when looking at it

There’s a lull in the pageantry and in the cone of light

So heavy the desert so much shovel-work

The brink or swell cresting its end without end that sets us free

A swallow escapes the tree exploding into flame








INTERCHANGE

Swift-like torrent of rapacious birds between us

Sunlight spectral as if woken from a deep sleep to shine a flashlight

Onto the paths empty our path perfect the horizon a replicating fork with

Buildings are we agents of this profligate and prodigal event?

From pelvis to skull and in the arches of our feet

Heat slowly burns off between buildings

The dog’s blind face barking at my bedside shine a light into it

Sunlight spectral as if woken from a deep sleep

From pelvis to skull and in the arches of our feet close the lid

On the day the minutes’ moth-like proboscis sipping from a flower

Along the road heat slowly burns off between buildings

From pelvis to skull are we agents of this

Profligate and prodigal event and are we the bereft

On our perfect path the horizon forking us into the midst of it?

The rug beneath the spider web is peppered with planes without pilots

We’re staring into the ductwork who’s filming us?

The paths empty the horizon a replicating fork between buildings

A dog’s blind face shine a light close the lid

To tumble through rough bedding to the dog’s blind face

Spectral and woken from this profligate and prodigal event

From pelvis to skull and in the arches of our feet the rug

Beneath the spider web is peppered with planes without pilots

Spiraling don’t you feel it?

Swift-like torrent of rapacious birds between us








POWER ROAD

The Moog synthesizer on the island of secrets

Is leaking

As if right into the foamy ochre of our lives dreaming of taco salad and a friendly face

The synthesizer the size of a small house is safe from us but leaking

I shut the car door so I won’t hear you cry any more

And tell you (but you can’t hear me)

That the massive transmitter cabled to the parking lot is

Leaking

I shut the car door so I won’t hear you cry any more

Into the weather or signal that the transmitter was erected to warn us about

The power goes out in the Country Buffet

The synthesizer is safe but leaking

I shut the car door so I won’t hear you plan the rest of your life i.e. what you would do

On the other side of celebrity

Because how can you know I don’t

Take any of this lightly

As if right into the foamy ochre of our lives (but you can’t hear me)

That the massive transmitter cabled to the parking lot

Making me feel so I dunno intrinsic is leaking

That the massive transmitter cabled to the parking lot is safe but leaking

I shut the car door so I won’t hear you cry any more

Because how can you know so don’t

On this side of celebrity the siren dopplers and diet colas spill

The Moog synthesizer on the island of secrets








ADVANCE SIGNAGE

Felt marker frown drawn in the unventilated hour

Dust motes hanging inside the car I remember

The Western Black Rhino is extinct

And there’s the naked welter of the town the arrows’ neon silenced

Something old and eaten reappears on the firmament

As paragliders spiral toward a distant grand opening

Their purple flares smoking over traffic I remember

Dust motes hanging inside the car

Something old and eaten reappears on the firmament

Hot wind twitching the door’s torn seal

Stokes the ashes with more coals as grease drips through floors

Through the welter of the town the arrows’ neon silenced

And something old reappears on the firmament a welder’s arc

On the naked eye the Western Black Rhino is extinct

Piggybacking and aloft the heat-smeared morning

Damsel- and dragonflies’ pleasuring brains two grains but are they brains?

The Western Black Rhino is extinct paragliders spiral

Their purple flares over traffic like feather boas

Tossed onto the astronauts’ tickertape parade

The flares smoking over the cars their arrows’ neon silenced

Something old and eaten reappears on the firmament

Piggybacking and aquiver the heat-smeared morning

A newfound presence pauses for the fanfare their numbers our

Felt marker frown drawn in the unventilated hour








ALMA SCHOOL ROAD

The withers the bridle the bit each horse was different and one was yours

An animal cut from the boreal hardwood of memory the carousel

The white star on her chest burns as your bedroom goes black

It’s here you tap your chest that wants to be whole

And see what the animal keeps

But not all the bulbs are broken bad company until the day I die plays

And you hear the recursive music and feel okay an animal cut

From the boreal hardwood of memory

And see what the animal keeps

Tomorrow try answering the question the half hours amass

Superfast is coming so fold it up in your pocket

It’s here you tap your chest and ask who wants to be whole

And see what you keep of the lights at Legend City

The white star as your bedroom goes black

Your arms are around the animal’s neck

I don’t know how to be alone the wood is split

The white star on her chest as your room goes black but not all the bulbs

You hear the recursive music and feel okay

The wood pinches your leg the boreal hardwood of memory

You hear the recursive music and ask who wants to be whole

And see what the animal keeps

Your arms are around its neck

Your mother digs through her purse for a match

The withers the bridle the bit each horse was different and one was yours








ARTERIAL ROADS

The preacher rose from the canal with a girl in his arms

And in the sky a helicopter winked as we stood in dirty water

Welcome to answer city

The hum and lure of check-cashed halogen and fans were the throne-chariot

And shopping carts rattled in spillways as it rolled

He said there was a table and a sink inside the motor home

She was ex-Jehovah’s Witness their pit bull’s name was Caiman and a helicopter

Winked as we stood in dirty water

The chariot was the shopping carts rattling in spillways as it rolled

The best year of my life we never locked our doors

But if you jimmied that lock Caiman would know

The hum and lure of check-cashed halogen and fans were the throne-chariot

And shopping carts rattled as it rolled

Caiman was a boy pit bull welcome to answer city

If you looked Caiman in the eye Caiman would know

The danger of roads is global the thirst to keep driving un-slaked

Welcome to answer city there was a table and a sink inside

She was ex-Jehovah’s Witness their pit bull’s name was Caiman

A plastic loaf of bread was broken beside the railing

She was ex-Jehovah’s Witness and in the sky the lure of halogen

The throne-chariot rattled in the spillways as it rolled

If you looked inside Caiman Caiman would know

Where is Caiman now he said Caiman would know

The preacher rose from the canal with a girl in his arms








PEREGRINE TERMINUS

To unfurl a wing before whatever world you want

And to look freely into the sun’s conspicuous absence of destiny

Scaffolding around structures you have come so far to see

Puling discord of tires as airplanes land world enough

For the vows of separation or a bridge out in between

On either side of it you want through

Before you their haze their towers’ conspicuous absence of destiny

You want to look freely

Into the vows of separation or a bridge out in between

Travel diaries open and read to you the words massacre  rock hen  vertigo   weather

Droplets like hunting spiders on the wire

Puling discord of tires as airplanes land world enough

The vows of separation or a bridge out in between

Structures you have come so far

To see the counterweight sinking as you rise

Stained glass esophagus the elevator rattles through

Scaffolding around structures on either side of it you want through

Before you their haze their domes the towers

And there is the neck of the blood bird pulling and the crow’s conspicuous absence of destiny

Before you their haze their domes the towers’ puling discord of tires

The vows of separation or a bridge out in between

The counterweight sinking as you rise

Your hands against the glass as if

To unfurl a wing before whatever world you want













Miles Waggener is the author of two poetry collections: Phoenix Suites (The Word Works, 2003), winner of the Washington Prize; and Sky Harbor (Pinyon Publishing, 2011); as well as a chapbook Portents Aside (Two Dogs Press, 2008). Since 2006, he has been a faculty member of the University of Nebraska at Omaha Writer’s Workshop. He lives in Omaha with fellow writer Megan Gannon and their son Manny.

There are stories we don’t tell, for whatever reason. Mostly
embarrassment, I’m thinking right now. Or,
more specifically, that then people wouldn’t like me,
or would have some conception of me that I
don’t want them to have, accurate or not. So I’m feeling today
that, as I’m being non-fictional and truthful,
or at least because I’m forcing myself
to write without making anything up,
that I should at least nod to all the stories
I’m not telling.
Because that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

A moment of silence then
where my stories that are not being told
can mingle with yours. Let’s drive across the state.
Let’s go over the river. Let’s run off
into the woods with them. And what is a life anyway
if not partially hidden? Is any of this a life? And what of the stories
we would tell, but we forget? Like the time I just remembered
when I fell backward into an empty fish tank
that was lying on its side, breaking out the glass,
wedging myself into the jagged edges. When I pulled myself out
I could feel the blood going down my legs, but
I couldn’t see it. No one was home. I was
a teenager. By the time I got to our neighbor’s house (who
was a cop), I was woozy with
thinking about it. And I haven’t thought about it since. It all blends
into the soup of our inner lives . . .

The only time I ever went to a psychoanalyst
was because there was this free consultation offer. The only thing he said,
at the end of the 45 minutes, was that
I had a lot of stuff we could work on. There you are. And so what
do we do with them, these stories we don’t tell? I admit
that I have few answers, if any. I got a tattoo once. I’d do it again,
even though I nearly fainted. I’m not much good with needles.
Most all of these things we’ve done, if the circumstances
were right, we’d do again, I’ve heard. So thank you.
It feels good to get that off my chest.




LVIII

Richard’s back, talking about Easy Riders and Raging Bulls,
a documentary of the auteur period
in American film, and how it closes with the shot from the end
of Raging Bull, where DeNiro’s face is hamburger
and he says, “You never got me down.” I’m struck,
now that he’s left, how we all cling to ways of doing things
because they tell us where we are, or where we were
when we were our most happy, like I’ve heard we do
with hairstyles. I don’t know if I really
believe that, but there is a way that we cling to things
long after we should’ve stopped. What is it
that makes us do that? And then we pretend it’s a virtue.

Maybe I’m doing it now. That’s one
of my greatest fears, that I’ll wake up one morning
and realize I’ve been clinging to something that’s long gone,
and now we’re both ghosts. But then there’s this other
story, the story of perseverance. We all want to be that
person, the one who keeps going, who at long last
is shown to have been right all along. The way they say
honesty is a virtue. But still there’s as much weight put on playing
by their rules, where in Rome, you do as the Romans do.

In fourth grade, maybe third, several of us were passing
back and forth a paper on which we were writing
every bad word we could think up. The usual words, yes,
but including such flights of fancy as “Flesh Gordon”
and “Mike Hunt.” When we were inevitably caught,
we told the teacher that Danny Moynihan, the student
who tormented us at recess, our bully, Danny, gave it to us.




LIX

Most things aren’t necessary. So? Are we
to impoverish ourselves to make the point? And to
whom are we making it? We all go our various ways
after high school, separated into what Nancy calls
“money attractors” and “money repellers.” A couple decades
later, we check in, most of us. First, when we’re
around 38, and then, after that, whenever. Lance
raises dogs and has worked in the security field, and now
does something in the field of law (attractor). Brendan
is in a band, still, between Kansas City and various points
in Colorado (repeller). My brother’s in Chicago,
working for Kraft (attractor). Jackie is still in New York,
as is most everyone else I knew then . . .

If we could sit in several places at once, as our particles
are apparently able to do, I’m thinking right now, we’d know
better how to communicate with each other. Some
better version of waving as we pass on our way to find our box
of rain checks. What if we were to list them, our rain checks,
and find the ones to cash? This time it’s, “Yes,
I’ll do that! I’ll go!” How different would any of us
be? Or are we destined to be what we are? You gotta
have faith, George Michael sang, but really, faith
is the wind that blows from all directions at once.

I remember Watergate as bored looking men on TV
preempting reruns of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. We were between
houses at the time, staying in an apartment, where the landlady
had a granddaughter who she wanted to have play with me, but not
my brother. We both kind of knew why, but not enough to say—
especially then, when none of us, including him, knew exactly
what race he was. He’s always ignored it, and I’ve
always been a little jealous, which is another trick of adoption.
I also remember gluing a popsicle stick to my upper lip,
as a moustache. It burned. And now I’m reading that we all
have invisible lives that encircle us, some imagined thing that defines us
in some way, and I’m thinking it’s more true to think that there’s nothing
invisible about us. This is what we are. Look around. We stagger
because we stagger. It’s where we get to.




LX

Improving our circumstances has been a stalled idea
for some time now. I grew up in the era of domes
and visions and the imminent arrival of
a new world, and instead we got the 1980s. John Cage
once proposed a Summit Lecture Series
on War, where all the national leaders would individually
address the world on why it’s important
we kill people. It was a great critique until
they realized he was serious, that he thought there
might be something to know, something
to find out, which is why, I suppose, it’s the
academics and artists who are always the first to go.

World betterment—even saying it sounds like
an advertisement for sometime around 1968, where
the women might still come and go, conceivably
talking of Michelangelo. Michael and Richard
were talking about that couplet of T. S. Eliot’s this afternoon,
how it’s being thought about again in the introduction
to a new anthology, and for a second I remembered
an idea I had one time of how each of us has
internal and external lives behind two different walls,
like the interior and exterior of a hat, and that
no one can ever see both at the same time, unless
one were to spin the hat on its brim, forming a blurry oval.

That probably doesn’t connect to anything, I’m thinking
right now, a few hours later. But Bob the Builder is playing
on the TV, and my son’s watching it, and he’s named
Eliot with the “E-L-I-O-T” spelling. Bob has just dropped
his construction helmet, and I thought how
they’re able to build whatever future they want on TV,
which is another reason not to like it, the way artists
are often not liked for their alternate worlds, as the universe
constantly contains everything in it, so that no matter
how big or how small it is, it’s always the same size.




LXI

I want a house with a lot of windows, and all the windows
stained glass. And to live in a place
with a lot of sun. Piles and piles of sun. Last night
the TV went to static, and Natalie, one day
past her eighth birthday, said, “I LOVE
this channel!” and then we spent a few minutes
making things up about trucks and people
playing in the park, and I mentioned my house
on the hill with stained glass. Eliot, still three, said
he could see it, and that it looked red.

Twenty years ago I was living with a woman
who had a son, about three. We lived in a trailer park,
and I had to pick up food for them
from the Baptist church food bank. She was
too embarrassed, she said. I’ve heard she lives
in Alabama now, and works for the postal service. Back then
one could still work on cars. These days it’s all
indicator lights and schematics. But back then,
I spent a little time every Saturday putting more
bailing wire around the drive train.

The house I’m living in now has a lot of windows,
but not many on the west side, which would look
great through stained glass. I have one stained glass star
in the west side, in a little window over our stairwell.
When the light hits it just right,
I like to stand in it for a moment.
“The sun is full of candy,” Natalie said yesterday.
She knows better, she’s studied the sun in school,
but we’re both happier this way, making these things
real, because someday we won’t be.




LXII

Is your life the series of events
or is it something else? Maybe this is another of those
“are you a dog person or a cat person” kind of things—
but I’ve always been dogged by the whole “sins of the heart”
and “state of grace” economy on one side, and the
“fake it ’till you make it” on the other. I’m sorry. I mean it.
I feel this need to apologize, but I’m going to have to side
with the exterior on this one, walking by the houses, seeing the people
walking in and out. First warm day after a series
of cold days. Guessing at intentions and inner lives
has always left me standing on train platforms late at night,
in winter, inappropriately dressed.

Looking at us this way, then, the “keep your enemies closer” thing
would seem to be the logic behind most marriages,
and most of everything else as well. We’re in our cars,
and it reminds me of driving a guy from work to his AA meeting,
1987 or 8—or maybe it was his NA meeting—because I promised
I would, and they kind of brought me into it, and I felt too something,
not really embarrassed, but I didn’t want to seem
like I was trying to look superior or aloof, so I went along with it—
I even went back a second time when the guy
whose name I don’t remember, asked for a ride again. “It’s OK, everyone
has problems,” the leader of the meeting said. And then a few years ago
I was out with Roger having a beer, watching a game
at Carson’s Bar & Grill, when a friend of his came in and ducked back out
when he saw us. Roger couldn’t make any sense of it. They
were friends, he said. And the guy was going through a
tough time. Why wouldn’t he return Roger’s calls? Why
withdraw like this? And then a year or so later, Roger got his
terminal prognosis and stopped returning my calls. I
had to find out he left town by seeing his car gone.

So when I look out at the world and am humbled
by all the ways the trees and rivers
pass our understanding, I can maybe take a bit of solace
in the fact that we do a pretty good job passing our understanding
as well. Still, we have the houses and buildings, the trees
and train schedules. It’s not nothing. As you have to try
to understand the things you cannot destroy.




LXIII

Why not love pictures? Each time they come back,
they come back in exactly the same way, and sometimes
quite unexpectedly from a box. What’s not
to love about that? And then the ones that are unattributed,
like the ones Rosie brought in once
from a trunk she found in the basement
of her duplex. Two women in the 1940s or maybe early 50s
in front of a tract home, and the younger one, pretty
with dark hair and dark lips, looking at the camera
with a “please hurry up and get me out of here” look,
so that forever she’ll be wanting to get out from this place
she’s certainly gotten out of by now.

And still she gets to be pretty, and the shot, a little
square, gets to be pretty as well, with the scalloped
edges. The way memory is mostly collective, as we practice it
in front of people who tell it back to us
or have it place itself around these pictures, and my baby
pictures as well, inscribed with someone’s handwriting I’ve never met,
“Marty 11 mos.” So I got to be a Marty for a few years.
I remember it the way I can feel sometimes that I remember
being on the moon, my feet in the baby powder of it, the flag
with the wire top that doesn’t blow.

The other day I saw a picture of the band
I used to be in twenty years ago,
and remembered we played a strip club on accident once,
a few days before it was taken,
as our drummer knew a drummer who said we could play this club,
see, without telling us what kind of club it was, so
there I was singing Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)”
while a mostly naked woman danced beside me
around a pole. I’m glad there are no pictures of that moment,
as all of us seemed to be on a race
to find who could be the most not there.




LXIV

When one studies math, they say that what’s important
is not the algorithm per se, but the logic
behind it. It’s never what it is. Or it is always what it is
but what it is isn’t what one might be thinking
it is. Like being useful, how there are many ways
to be useful that aren’t about carrying boxes. Mark
wrote to tell me that in deeper ways I probably am, and have been, useful
to many persons. “Probably mainly in good ways,” he said,
“though there is also the possibility of having been useful to someone
in a bad way (as when we speak of having been used
by someone).” And how, then, that might have even turned out
to be useful, who knows. I have this vision of myself
bumbling through my life, suddenly, in a sort of “Pippa Passes” way,
where all manner of good befalls the people I accidentally cut off
on the freeway. I just looked up “Pippa Passes” and found
it’s not just the drama by Browning, but also the name of a city
in Knott County, Kentucky, where possibly a lot of good luck resides.

What bad relationship have I been in that I can possibly
test this out on? Maybe we could make a few calls, ask about my
cruelties and the cruelties done to me. Sit
and think awhile. I suppose the worst thing I can think of right now
is how I just found out last spring that the child my first wife said
was mine, and then said wasn’t, turns out to have been mine
after all. He’s twenty-five now. When he contacted me,
I think he was prepared for me to be hostile
or to try to ignore him. Mostly I was sad. Maybe that’s
a kind of being useful, where all we could do was talk.

I wanted a girl to talk to me once when I was twenty-five,
and she wouldn’t. I even went by her work, as she was a checkout girl
at the HEB in New Braunfels, Texas. She only looked at me
and rang up my groceries. Maybe that was useful. Maybe
it’s all been useful. How a couple years after that, I got fired
from my job at the radio station there, and they took my keys
and escorted me to my car, so I left. And I almost felt important,
knowing they’d have to change the transmitter security codes,
and how I wondered for weeks if they did. So then I went
to graduate school. All useful, how all I have
of my own birth-father is a picture that I ripped in half once
for no reason I can remember. Such things are useful
in the “everything I’ve been through
has made me who I am today” way, which leads to
people not wanting to take their medications, especially people
with psychological disorders, afraid it will change them. Change. Change.

But mostly, we’re not in charge of whether we’re useful
to others or not. (Was I? Wasn’t I?) Maybe “useful” isn’t
a good enough word for it. But then “helpful”
isn’t much better. That’s the kicker. Anyone can come back later
to say some little kindness of mine or yours
saved them or nearly did them in, or that some thoughtlessness—
though they didn’t recognize it at the time—saved them . . .
or nearly did them in. As in lifting that box, or donating blood,
or that card, or telling them to go fuck themselves. Our
cruelties, followed by some sketchy philosophy.

But still, who’s to say? It all becomes part of the mix, so that
however you’re doing right now redefines everything
you’ve been through. The guy that picked me up in his white Econoline van
when I was hitch-hiking, who tried to get me to take my
clothes off, and who was a lot bigger that I was,
now, looking around, I guess he helped make me who I am. I got a chance
to practice looking calm and figuring a way out—which,
that time, consisted of me saying how great that sounded,
but that my dorm roommate would, I’m sure, like to join us,
so let me go in and get him, and of course
never coming back. Ian Hunter sings, “I ain’t no chain,
I’m just a link . . .” as a sort of mathematics of accretion,
though there’s also subtraction and the continuing question
whether math was invented or discovered.

So there at the end, what’s the suicide to say
other than everything’s all been bad, when it becomes too much,
though obviously everything’s not always been bad, or all cruel, so that,
climbing the bridge rigging, say, preparing to throw herself
into the parking lot, we know she’s going through something internal
more than external. What’s the difference, though, when all we have
is ourselves? There’s the river below. It’s night. It’s
1983, and I’m trying not to panic, and then it’s 2009, and in the paper
a woman is looking down from the high wire, filling me
with that fear I get in high places, that I could just step into the air.




LXV

Tonight’s program is Clandestinophilia, insisting
we make cookies. It’s LXV, the retirement-age. And here I am
nearly a year after first writing this sequence, tossing something in,
as the poem that was here has been merged with LXIV (“Sixty-four
and there’s so much more” as Neil Young says.). The lake
continues to ripple. The solar system runs over us
and we take no notice. Time may well be a hallucination, I just read
in Scientific American, but if so, the question is why then
is it such a persistent hallucination? My uncle survived the air crash,
though his recovery continues. Mark died. Terri had everyone over
a few weeks after, and we had a nice time. I played his guitar.

You never know what you’re going to find. Once, when I was
delivering newspapers, a guy flagged me down,
and then dove into the car through the passenger side window,
finding, when he did, that the car was full of newspapers. He
was terribly drunk, demanding I drive him to the hospital,
as he practically swam around inside my car, so I did. The only other time
someone’s done something like that was a few days ago
in Puerto Rico, when a guy jumped on the trunk, directing us through
a tight tunnel to where we could park for “seven dollars
and whatever else you want to add for tip.” We thought for a moment
he was leading us to some sort of robbery, it was all so odd. Turns out
we parked in a graveyard at the outskirts of the Castillo de San Felipe
del Morro, at the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean.

They keep saying Social Security won’t be there when I
get to retirement age, and they say this while I continue
to pay into it. I suppose we’re all supposed to die young. That would
solve things. I thought I was going to die, briefly,
when I was in the floodwater in Texas twenty years ago, and then again
a few years ago when I went in for the MRI, and I probably looked
like I was capable of killing someone
the time my alternator adjustment rod broke at four a.m.
while I was on the paper route, and I wedged it back up
with an axe I just happened to have in my trunk. The way I looked
driving down the roads of San Marcos, swerving back and forth,
throwing newspapers out the windows, the axe jutting from under the hood,
the head off to the side like a flag that means you harm.

John Gallaher is the author of the books of poetry Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls, The Little Book of Guesses, and Map of the Folded World as well as the free online chapbook, Guidebook, from Blue Hour Press, and, with the poet G.C. Waldrep Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, BOA, 2011. He’s currently editing, with the poet Laura Boss, a selected poems of Michael Benedikt.  His next book will be the book-length essay-poem In a Landscape, coming out in 2015 from BOA. Other than that, he’s co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press.

My aunt, a committed practitioner of Zen Buddhism, sent me a book that fall as I struggled with a new discomfort: plainness was liberating but hadn’t given me perfect inner peace about my relationships or roles in the world. The story of my experiment wasn’t moving briskly toward some happy ending. The book was by a woman who had been a member of a Zen monastery and then become a first-time parent in her forties. I didn’t feel I had much use for this personal growth/self-help book, yet I read it the way one drinks blue Gatorade after thirty-six hours of food poisoning—my cherished personal objections becoming irrelevant in the deliciousness of its functionality. ¹

As I read the book, I was reminded that in graduate school, I’d relied on a semiregular meditation practice to dull the sting of days when I understood myself to be an admissions mistake. And so one night I got out a candle and the brass singing bowl I picked up in Vietnam. I sat cross-legged in our bedroom window seat with my back straight, a zafulike pillow tucked under my butt, my eyes unfocused at a vague spot six inches away from my knees, and my hands in the meditation mudra, the shape of infinity and openness.

After forty-five seconds, my jaw went slack, and I fell asleep. I jerked myself awake, assumed my position with much more resolve, and promptly fell asleep again. I blew out the candle, got into bed, and stayed up late reading—sullenly—about how much meditation can help people at wit’s end.

The next night I caffeinated myself. I didn’t nod off and did manage to count my breaths past six, but instead of calm, I got more chatter about my problems, courtesy of the Voice.

I can’t believe your OB didn’t give you a postpartum-depression screen. Hello! This is not the fifties!

Innnnnnn and Ouuuut. Breath one and breath two.

I mean you got some of the best medical care available in Asia! What about all those women having babies over on the Mainland or in Vietnam? What do you think is going unnoticed or unchecked or crappily stitched up in them?

I pretended not to be interested.

You fucking should be interested! Why is it that you think of motherhood as a path to personal fulfillment instead of a basic human chore? Who told you labor and childbirth were an opportunity for self-expression? And if you’re looking for inner peace and happiness, then why are you being such a hard-assed drill sergeant about everything? You want to be self-disciplined about your work, self-disciplined about health and exercise, self-disciplined about not using plastic bags and buying organic—and now, on top of it all, you have to be disciplined about beauty? You’ve given up pretty hair so you can obsess about a pretty MIND?

Yes.

Come on! It’s really hard to be woman, and it’s really hard to be you!

I didn’t listen to whiners. These thoughts were simply clouds passing through my mind.

They ain’t passing, sister. I got a six-month supply of unused estrogen right here telling me to sit tight.

I gave up on the meditation. Whatever she was fueled by right now, the Voice of complaint was just too loud to contend with or wait out. And while she was annoying, accusatory, and defensive all at once, I felt she had valid points, maybe even all valid points. Harping on them, however, solved nothing and gave me no peace.

“Your life is a garden,” the Zen parenting book said. “And you are the only gardener.” Maybe this was so, but during the year of my experiment, I just couldn’t see it that way. I felt the garden was elsewhere, out on the Morning Path, hidden deep inside the vegetative awareness of the banyan trees, or located somewhere in the future when all the problems of all the world’s women (starting with my own) were solved. I insisted—and the Voice in my head backed me up 100 percent—that my problems lay with John’s job, my weakness for skin-care products, the expatriate lifestyle, an archaic medical establishment ignorant of female experience, a sensitive and sleepless kid, and the last hundred pages of my novel. And the solution to all these problems was the story I told myself about beauty—both inner and outer. I believed it was something out there, and attainable, if only I could improve myself enough to gain its blessing. I was very attached to this beauty story because I thought it was all I had.

*

On a brilliant, cool morning in late October, John and I drive the kids out to Concord for a walk around Walden Pond. On the banks of this pond, Henry David Thoreau threw off the bonds of civilization and took to the woods “to live deliberately–and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he] had not lived.” ² I’m excited to see the small, self-made cabin, even if it’s only a reproduction, but when we arrive, the adjacent parking lot is jammed with cars. I fret, but John stays cool and we find a spot. We head around the pond on a woodsy, unpaved path, and as the stroller hits gnarled roots, I wince. Five years and two kids have turned my scorn for “overcivilized” hiking into appreciation for sidewalks.

We make slow, bumpy progress, stopping occasionally to throw stones in. Fringed by scarlet leaves, the bright, still pond looks beautiful to me. But I’m also aware that today, each of us is projecting our own story upon its emerald surface: the story of easy parking and literary sightseeing (me), the story of an athletic warm-up to hearty fall lunch (John), and the story of innocence and an unjust reprimand (Hattie, who gets yelled at after nearly pushing John in). Orson, at two and a half, is the only one of us who meets Walden Pond where it lives: in its wetness and splashiness. Halfway around, even he comes up with a pond story that has to be curtailed—the story of a wild forest boy swinging a pointed stick near people’s eyes. Our stories delight us intensely, yet often fail us, or come to an end.

I saw straight through my own beauty story very briefly, in the fall of 2010. Orson was already a year and a half old. Like anyone going up to bat a second time, I’d invented some inspiring motivational tales about how things would go in my second child’s babyhood: better sleep habits, better mealtimes, better attitude, better everything. Eighteen months in, my inner sales pitches were failing me, and the chaos was still expanding like a mushroom cloud. From experience I knew meditation was beyond me as a sleep-deprived baby mama, so I turned to a book of Zen koans instead.

The idea of a koan is that you run a piece of verbal nonsense through your head until sense and nonsense trade places and offer up insight. For all of us who like to butt our heads against something, the answerless riddle of a koan is an ideal wall. The bonus is that no staying awake on a soft cushion in a quiet room is required. You can work on a koan while pushing a swing or washing a dish.

The koan I began with was this:

Does a dog have Buddha nature?

No.

I started repeating this Q&A in my mind while I diapered, folded laundry, and shopped for chicken breast. After a week or so of unproductive repetition, I started thinking that “Buddha nature” was pretty much equivalent to “inner beauty,” and so I subbed in those words, instead.

Does a dog have inner beauty?

No.

Is a dog beautiful?

No.

I was dismayed by how negative this riddle solving was, and how cruel. Why was “No” kicking the poor dog? Frustrated by my lack of progress, I tried switching the subject around, too, so that I became the dog.

When I tried to stay patient with the kids, was that inner beauty?

No.

When I bought used snowpants to economize was that Buddha nature?

No.

Sometimes I couldn’t believe how hard “No” was riding my ass. How could it be that even with my very best efforts at being an attentive mom and wife—at staying in the game professionally, at vanquishing the yardwork and paperwork, at sending the relatives pictures of the kids in a timely fashion, and not freaking out at my husband when he couldn’t figure out where he was going to move us to next—the answer was still No? My writing? No. My education? No. My hopes, even for health and love and peace in the world? No. No. No. Not beautiful. Not Buddha nature. I decided that koans were for masochists and people with better senses of self-worth than I. I told No to go to hell, but it kept running through my mind like a spiritually nasty pop song, endlessly repeating its downer mantra.

My fight with No ended one cold fall morning as I took Orson for a walk to Kelley Pond. This small, man-made runoff basin was hidden in the woods behind a nearby elementary school. It was a convenient nature walk, if imperfect: I didn’t like to pass the muddy town mulch area to get there, and the woods were not thick enough to hide the plastic toys in people’s backyards. That day, though, the water in the pond was bright and clear, and the surrounding trees were decked out in autumnal finery. I looked at the long grass tilting at the bank, still a summer green. Orson stared quietly at the yellow, red, and brown trees and mirrorlike water, rapt.

Is this pond beautiful?

Does it have Buddha nature?

No.

If this pond isn’t beautiful, my brain screamed at the koan, then nothing is!

With that, the word beauty dissolved. It cleared to the edges of my understanding like grease moving away from a drop of soap. And in the clean, empty center that remained were just the plain things themselves: the water in the pond, the deleafing trees, the breeze carrying vapors of pine and compost, the bright dots of sun on the toes of Orson’s boots. I looked from the pond to a pile of discarded beer cans in the undergrowth and found I had no feelings of comparison or preference for either one. I didn’t wish the traffic noise away; it was okay with me. I looked down at my hands too—dry, cold, and veined, resting on the stroller’s handles. The knuckles were raw, and palest pink. The realness of my hands surprised me, as did the pulse I could feel inside.

That moment of realization was a powerful shock—my brain would always draw me to what it knew as beautiful and would always give those things special value, but that brain itself was acculturated, hormonal, self-referential, and hardwired in certain limiting ways. It was deeply marvelous to draw my own mental software aside like a curtain—even for an instant—and peek at a whole universe unbound by my classifications, judgments, language, or beloved stories.

We do live in a world filled with these stories: success stories, love stories, stories of redemption and failure. The good ones can help us grow, or point us in the right direction. In the years since my experiment, I’ve worked on creating a new story of beauty for myself—one inspired by the rings of a banyan tree, with the gift of life at the core, and the delight of art and artifice at the outermost edge. But even a good story can set us up to hold reality at gunpoint, waiting for the promised payoff: I need youth or a semblance of it! the Voice rails. I need happiness or self-worth or inner peace! I need my life to be better than it is, and I will do whatever it takes to make it that way—just give me the ten-step program! But just as caffeine doesn’t solve a chronic sleep debt, stories of ambitious self-improvement don’t address the reality of a chaotic and imperfect world. Sometimes the gardens of our lives become stroller-unfriendly jungles filled with pet-snatching Burmese pythons. And what then? Raze the forest and unroll the Astroturf?

The more effective approach, I’m beginning to see, it to embrace the paradise that is already here: my real, living body; my real children; and my real husband. All of us are more deserving of my best effort than the phantoms of perfection: the woman I feel I should be, the husband I sometimes wish I had, the children I hope I am raising.

Phoebe Baker Hyde’s fiction and essays have been published in High Plains Literary Review, Confrontation, Chrysalis, the online travel journal Pology, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her forthcoming memoir, The Beauty Experiment, takes place in Hong Kong, but she currently lives in Boston.

Photo by Harriet Liang.