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



2.

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



3.

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

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



4.

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



5.

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



6.

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

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



7.

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



8.

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



9.

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



10.

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



11.

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









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

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

If you were hired by Classics Illustrated and told to choose a book—any book!—to adapt into a comic, what would it be? Why that book? What would it look like?

The responses dig into the problems of transforming work from one medium to another with wit, sympathy, and just a touch of sarcasm. We’re very pleased to present new work by Kevin Cannon, Pascal Girard, Melissa Mendes, Andrea Tsurumi, and Noah Van Sciver.


***


A “CLASSIC” IDEA
by Kevin Cannon





***


By Pascal Girard





***


MEDIUMS
by Melissa Mendes





***


THE PEEP OF DAY (1836)
by Andrea Tsurumi





***


SEX, DRUGS, AND COCOA PUFFS
by Noah Van Sciver





***


***


Kevin Cannon wants to be an important businessman, but mostly he just draws comics, such as the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Far Arden, and the much-lauded mini comic Beard Hero. In his free time he listens to professional hockey on the radio and collects first-edition Arctic narratives on eBay.

Pascal Girard was born in Jonquière in 1981. He received his interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts from the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi in 2004. He lives in Montreal. His book Bigfoot won the best book of the year at the Doug Wright Awards 2011.

Melissa Mendes is a cartoonist and illustrator living and working in Hancock, MA with her best beau Charles Forsman and their best cat Bruce.

Andrea Tsurumi is an illustrator and cartoonist living in Astoria, Queens. She’s also currently an MFA student at the School of Visual Arts.

Noah Van Sciver, a native of New Jersey, was born in 1984 and is currently located in Denver, Colorado. He draws a weekly comic strip for the Denver alternative paper Westword called “4 Questions” and is the creator of the much-loved comic book series Blammo. His work has appeared in Mad magazine, Mome, The Comics Journal, Best American Comics 2011, and numerous other comics anthologies. He has recently completed his debut graphic novel about a young, melancholic Abraham Lincoln called The Hypo for Fantagraphics Books.

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

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

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

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



TELEPHONE PROJECT 1


these toys [
after and with Sappho

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

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

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

after all I have to work.

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

—Kimiko Hahn


***


As in Cincinnati

Stung, the beekeeper becomes
the kept.

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

leaving only their delicate cells, the holes
in a poem

by Sappho.  And after
the last bees

have gone, the sound is
of vacant houses,

of vagrants inside, building fires
in the living room.

—Idra Novey


***


Fever Fragments

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


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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

*

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

*

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

—Jee Leong Koh


***


“Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself”

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

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

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

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


***


Bienvenida: Santo Tomás

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Patrick Rosal


***


Bienvenida: Santo Tomás (continued)

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

—Joshua Weiner


***


Saint Thomas: The Other Amelie

Here she must have stood
when she knew it—

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

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

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

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

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

—Mihaela Moscaliuc


***


Amelie (An Echo)

But it was a shipwrecked message―

flotsam
in the sibilance

of the honing stone―

flesh
dressed in crushed sage

with such dreadful ease

sphinx moth

sweet smells

machete―

—Dana Levin


***


So the Flesh Spoke

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

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

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

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

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

—anyone

—Afaa Michael Weaver


***


June 9, 2010 10:35 Pacific Time

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

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

myself


the receiver

the switchboard

anyone

—anyone
—Juliana Spahr


***


Owl Music

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

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

Who who stays hungry           *          who will scare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the automobiles out of sight along Route Two

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

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

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

—Stephen Burt


***


Salt Water

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

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

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

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

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

were sentient. Were more than emptiness.

–Peter Campion


***


listen

them salt-water negroes

come drownin your little bit of garden

in ocean

ain’t no peace with them

they got haints spillin

from they                    done seen too much eyes

no mercy                     can pull they heads above sea-level

you been here your whole life girl

you                                          planted

in this soil

for better or worse

they won’t                   never

sweat all that salt outta him

you

join up with that man

them eyes will forever

be pullin you towards the things he

remember

mother father               ghosts

you won’t sleep free

with his heart always

draggin                                    at your roots

and you dig in hard

you rip that poor negro

right in two


–Evie Shockley (May 27, 2011)


***


mother father ghosts

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

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

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

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

the aisles lit with bodies

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Solmaz Sharif


***


Poem for Delkash

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

–Matthew Zapruder


***


Of Moraines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Quinn Latimer

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

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

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

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



TELEPHONE PROJECT 2


these toys [
after and with Sappho

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

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

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

after all I have to work.

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

—Kimiko Hahn


***


elegy for the beekeeper

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Aracelis Girmay


***


Bee at the Beekeeper’s Funeral

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

—John Murillo


***


Translator’s Block

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Roger Sedarat


***



Ball Point Pen

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

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

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

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

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

—Jason Schneiderman


***


Motherother

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

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

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

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

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

—Jennifer Kronovet


***


The Mother

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

—Ross Gay


***


Instructions

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

—H.L. Hix


***


Anything He Ever Says He Will Say Only To Himself

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

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

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

—A. Van Jordan


***


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

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

—Marilyn Nelson


***


(Unbuttoning her shirt…)

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

I am not any closer to saying what I mean.

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

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

I want to say like blood.

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

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

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

This is a death letter.

Every word but mouthed erased.

—Allison Benis White


***


Look

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Kathryn Stripling Byer


***


Calcium’s Slender Embrace

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

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

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

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

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

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

–J.P. Dancing Bear


***


Sung (Lacking Words)

I stood where a street ravels dirt
Where green leaves clamor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fracture in the sensed,
Sempiternal falling.

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

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

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

–Meena Alexander


***


A Bird in Hand

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

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

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

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

Love-making would have made
a less ashen replacement.

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

–Paula Bohince


***


Borrowed Breath

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

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

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

–Tara Betts


***


and Sharply



Ours to make: sparks; edges; a device

for cutting pictures out of light. We filled

tin trays with water in the backyard

and slowly dipped the paper in. Having

is accomplished not so much by attention,

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

smoke, the rabbits racing fast across

the grass. Also, the fence to slice the light

into white scissors while we pushed

the paper flat for trimming beneath the water.

She spoke through the window to say

she had planted them herself—still

we forced our way under the branches to wait

while the sun did what breathing does, but loudly.

And always shadows anyway: the junipers bent

to blue beneath our fingers cut, too, lengthwise

where the pictures made sharp frames

of our hands for holding them. We knew wood grows

like trees do, so we watched the tables

all afternoon to see our pictures lifted nearer

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

–Kristina Jipson


***


Internet K-Hole

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Ernest Hilbert


***


The Catches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–David Yezzi

Ethan Hill‘s portrait of W.M. Hunt © Ethan Hill

At Length: You’ve been collecting photographs for a long time. When did you realize you were a collector?

W.M. Hunt: It sneaks up on you. I didn’t set out to collect photographs. I bought one and found that to be a very intense experience because I didn’t really have any money. The whole thing seemed unreal. Why had I bought a photograph? It was an impetuous, daring action.

AL: It must be quite a thrill to have the exhibit for the Unseen Eye collection opening at the George Eastman House this month, as well as the book being released by three different publishers. Do you see it as a form of recognition, an endorsement of some kind?

WH: It is thrilling, and at the same time very dense, lush yet strained. There is a great deal of work, by me striving to place the work, of thinking in front of people and trying to keep that smart and varied. The notion of three different publishers is incredibly cool, and kind of slippery I think. As for it being a form of recognition, I will offer up the correspondence that Thomas Neurath—who runs Thames & Hudson, my primary publisher—sent to me, initiating the collaboration.

15 July 2005

Dear Mr. Hunt,
I was in Arles for a couple of days and of everything I saw there it was the presentation of your collection which impressed me most. I found it spell-binding and thought-provoking and on my return made enquiries about how I could contact you via my friend, Bill Ewing, who was kind enough to give me your email address. To come to the point immediately: would you ever contemplate working with us to fashion a book very much in the spirit of the Arles exhibition? I would be enormously pleased if your first response were positive and I am sure we could then figure out a way of exploring the notion even though you are in New York and we are here in London. You may not know a great deal about Thames & Hudson, but photography has been a mainstay of our list these last thirty years, and Bill Ewing and quite a few other people in your and his world would vouch for us, though quite often the books we undertake appear under imprints other than T&H in their American edition. Very much hoping to hear from you, I remain with kind regards and much admiration for the genial way you have fashioned something that goes far beyond the mere sum of its parts.

Sincerely yours,
Thomas Neurath, Chairman

That was so astonishing really–how many people get a solicitation like that? Plus, it was a validation (and vindication of sorts) for four decades of obsession. I have always had huge issues with my own sense of self esteem, and those have been resolved in many ways by my life in photographs. In my heart of hearts, I feel that I am modest and intimidated, although it seems that much of my life in photography is characterized by single-mindedness and forthrightness. Ironies abound!

The three covers for The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious. From left to right: Thames and Hudson photograph by Lee Friedlander; Aperture photograph by Carrie Levy; Actes Sud photograph by Erwin Blumenfeld.

AL: You’ve mentioned in the book’s preface that the photographs in the collection are “all portraits of me.” Could you elaborate on that?

WH: I make the point that early on I had an epiphany one night when I was looking at the dozen or so pictures in my apartment. I was in analysis, I did the dream thing in which you are all the characters, and, hey, the pictures were all me. At first I was mortified, because I thought that anyone walking into my apartment would know everything about me. Of course, the reality of that is that people would ask if I was a photographer. People don’t want to see.

AL: What comes to mind is that the book is akin to the cabinet of curiosities that aristocrats would display in their homes after their grand tours.

WH: I think of it more as bringing home magical things to insulate myself from the world. My early talks about collecting were called The Walls of the Dancing Bear or $#*! I Dragged Home. There is a lot of voodoo and juju connected to collecting. Two of my favorite museum rooms are the André Breton library wall installed in the Pompidou in Paris and the extraordinary surrealist Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer at The Menil in Houston. That whole place is like an oasis for your soul.

AL: What sort of “voodoo and juju” have you encountered through your collecting?

WH: I mean that I have encountered crazy stuff that seems to have miraculously presented itself to me. An image like the Alinari [Hooded performer on wire, 19th c.] is a unique jewel, and I swear it was as if it was shining in my eye across a room—it was meant to be. That has happened many, many times.

Elinor Carucci, Sleep (Eran’s Back), 1998 © Elinor Carucci

AL: When considering the proverb “the eyes are the windows to the soul,” it’s quite haunting not being able to see through the window.

WH: This doesn’t respond to that directly, but a part of collecting is like listening for the Geiger counter to go off. I have stood in stands at art fairs sensing that something was there to see. It isn’t that uncanny when it most often reflects that a dealer has taste and eye that resonates with mine. Think of the windows of the soul as doorways or entrances, invitations to use your mind’s eye to see. It is the power of your imagination taking you to a personal place and making the piece specific for you.

AL: “Delight in photography for me is the unique sensation of encountering a great image for the first time. My eye fills and my heart sings, and with the best ones, it happens over and over.” Is this experience becoming rarer?

WH: It was always rare. Greatness is special. There is a sea of good work out there, but the great stuff is hard to find. But when it happens, Zowie! I make my students locate and write about 25 great yet unknown photographs, at the end of their first semester. Last year two kids picked the same Roger Ballen image, and I just danced around with it because it was soooooo good. It was good because it broke lots of rules for me in its structure. Talent is amazing. I accept that most everything in museums and galleries is OK, and that I shouldn’t burden myself with imagining that everything is great, because it’s not—it isn’t. Don’t kid yourself. But then every so often …. I describe collecting as running around in a thunderstorm praying that you’ll be hit by lightning.

AL: Currently there are so many ways to acquire works—via galleries, auctions, online and directly from artists. What advice do you give to the novice collector in navigating the marketplace?

WH: Commit! Buy the fucking thing and keep moving. Look, react, COMMIT! Keep breathing.

Frank Yamrus, Untitled (Paul), from Rapture, 1999 © Frank Yamrus

AL: Most of the images that represent your collection in the book are black and white. Is this because you seek black and white photographs, or are they the ones that usually make your heart sing.

WH: There is no good reason. Part of it is that my taste is very formal and restrained, at least graphically. Color work gets bogged down by its informational component. I like Alex Webb because he works and sees beyond that. It is harder for me to respond to Martin Parr, for instance—it doesn’t transcend its report. I get that work, but I never needed to own it. I was looking at a National Geographic book of so-called beautiful pictures at a friend’s house, someone who has fallen in love with photography and who imagines that I think his taste is crap. Everyone is entitled to their own way of seeing, but I do not subscribe to the notion that most stuff is good—it’s average. As a mean ol’ crack ‘ho, “I want good shit.” All those color pictures of sharks in a frenzy make for a dramatic tale—full of energy, color and INFORMATION—but my boat may remain unfloated, safe from their snapping jaws. Treasure the experience of that image that sends you reeling.

AL: One of the things we enjoyed most about your book is the journey that you take us on through the photographs. The magic is infectious and the ride wonderful.

WH: “Thank you,” says the crack ‘ho. “Just leave the money on the bureau.”

Frederic Weber, Untitled No. 77, 1995 © Frederic Weber

AL: Then, every now and again, an image is revealed that is rather more confrontational or difficult. Did you organize the book to keep readers on their toes?

WH: I will give credit to Mark Holborn, a well established book designer in London, who did the initial edit. He suggested that there was an operatic arc to the material, birth to death basically to infinity. That said, I found his actual layout to be deadly, with everything treated like a heavy-weight jewel—leaden. It had no music, no jazz. Ironically his son, Jesse—whom I have yet to meet—ended up doing the design. But the final edit, sequencing and flow are completely the work of Connie Kaine, longtime art director at Thames & Hudson, and me. We took Mark’s stolid edit and literally tore it apart but worked with that arc. He found the end note of transcendence, and that is where the book is headed all along. I am proudest of the sequencing, because I think the viewer moves through it trusting the journey. As an editor, I behaved as a spirit guide. I say in the preface to the book that it is like a dream, and I believe we found that. The liberating quality of a dream is that it doesn’t have to make literal sense. It’s an invitation into my head, so go with it. Also, you know that I am a very provocative individual. I want people to react! To the book, to the exhibition, to me! Étonne-moi!

AL: You have said that the decisive moment is as much for the viewer of photographs as it is for the photographer. What is that moment for you?

WH: John Szarkowski maintains that the only element of time to consider in photography is the moment the shutter clicks. That is the big moment. I think this disregards the equally unique and powerful instant when the viewer meets the image for the first time. Wham! I am interested in audiences. So much of art consideration seems to step past the notion of how something plays on the viewer. The part of me that loves the theater insists on that in visual art. Otherwise it is masturbation, which is great, but not the only or best game in town.

Debbie Fleming Caffrey, Untitled (Pattonville, LA, Child Covered with Blanket), 1970s © Debbie Fleming Caffrey

AL: Do you have to experience that moment to purchase a photograph or are there images that take a little longer for you to appreciate them?

WH: Overwhelmingly, I want that moment. The times I have talked myself into something have proved unsatisfactory. The moment can be drawn out over time, when you fall in love with a talent but don’t see the photograph yet. Sometimes you have to stay tuned. Look at F.A. Rinehart’s Shot in the Eye. I had seen platinum portraits of Native Americans, by an artist who was not Edward Curtis—that alone was news. I thought the work was splendid and overlooked in the marketplace, but because they were conventional open eyed portraits—not going to happen. Then one day…. Fabulous.

Also, I encourage collectors to recognize their taste so that they can communicate it to others, but to always challenge it. At some point, I consciously sat down and looked at landscape photography, because I never paid attention to it. I had seen work by Mark Klett and thought that he was really smart, that he had some sort of existential take on seeing. If you keep looking, one day you find that your instincts were totally on the money. Imagine finding a gem like A portrait of the Artist atop a small hill on his 30th Birthday, a self portrait of an individual—an artist(!)—silhouetted on a perfect hill. Great photograph.

AL: We love the Neil Winokur portraits of yourself and Chip that are included in the collection. Tell us a little more about them. Did you have them specially commissioned for your collection? The image of you is quite mischievous and fun!

WM: I always liked Neil’s work. Also, part of it is that I love Janet Borden. She is so, so smart and alive. I pay attention to her. She has been so committed to her artists, and I find that vision to be galvanizing. So, the commission actually includes three portraits: me, my partner Chip, and our-then neighbor, Mary Anne—whom we called our wife-in-law, because it was one of those perfect next door situations. We did the three and put them by the elevator. I put Chip and Mary Anne’s portraits in the absolute center of the exhibition in Rochester. They will completely freak out because they are both very modest. Again, that is me being a noodge.

In the portrait of me, there is the red background—my choice—and a bubble of spit on my lips from licking them. Also, the print has a halo over my head. It is very special to me. But you notice in the book that I am vague about who it is. There is another completely transgressive portrait of me by Gerald Slota in the book, but since no one recognizes it as me, no one comments. Gerald and I have collaborated on a new image, riding on Carrie Levy’s cover image on the book. I wanted something to brand the performance piece I am doing at Aperture on October 28th and this is just right. It is rude, funny, and a little naked.

Gerald Slota and W.M. Hunt’s collaborative riff on Carrie Levy‘s cover photograph © Gerald Slota

AL: What is the pattern of your acquisitions? Do you purchase works as a result of encountering them unexpectedly, or do you consciously seek them out?

WH: Hmmm. One thing to bear in mind is that I am not really collecting anymore, as I indicate in the book. I worked out something for myself psychologically—over 40 years of collecting—and I am no longer driven to collect as I did. That said, I always made myself available as a collector. I was always open to seeing, reacting. I am still that guy, although now I don’t need to OWN them. The covetous part is resolved. I like the Joel-Peter Witkin line that I cite in the book, “The photograph is out there, you just have to find it!” Collecting is like walking around with your antenna wired for action.

AL: Your collecting interest is well known. Do you find that photographers/dealers are increasingly contacting you with suggestions of work you should look at?

WH: I get approached much less often than you would imagine. Approaching a potential client is an act of seduction I believe, and most people give up right away. Like in life, that’s not the way to be successful. People don’t listen to how others respond. Think romance, not seven minutes of carnal takedown. When I talk about portfolio reviews with artists, I encourage them to consider those 20 minutes as the meeting, the flirtation, and the taste of more to come—not the marriage.

AL: For 15 years you worked as a dealer—first with Ricco/Maresca and then Hasted Hunt (more recently Hasted Hunt Kraeutler). Has this experience influenced your collecting habits at all or how you relate to photographs more generally?

WH: One big difference was liking and respecting talent that I did not need to collect, but whom I felt I could talk about and present. You really do want to LOVE what you have in your inventory—at least I felt this way—so you could talk about it with conviction. As you know, dealing is a lot of work.

AL: Do you think upcoming dealers benefit from building their own collections? Would you advise them to do so?

WH: Sure. Many dealers were collectors before they became dealers, so they have feelings about and insights into collecting. Collecting is so personal—or at least what I consider to be good collecting is—that I can’t imagine another way into it. I am sure it happens, but it isn’t my experience so I can’t relate to it.

Gerald Slota, Untitled (Head No. 1, Freckled Boy), 1996 © Gerald Slota

AL: We’re often asked how to start a collection. Do you think it’s important to consciously purchase images that fit into some kind of parameter? Or do you think it’s a more organic process?

WH: I don’t know. It is hard to persuade someone to collect. A couple of acquisitions, sure, that is not so hard, that’s just advice. “I think this is a good one.” I will say that, as a dealer, I always offered my own opinion. “For ME, this is the best one and here’s why.… Now what do YOU think?” Talking someone into something is a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Also, I always found it hysterical when a client would say that they had to talk to their husband. I always wanted to pull out my phone and get them on the line. As a dealer, I was not blessed with patience.

AL: There are some very difficult images in your collection, which include Richard Drew’s image of the falling man from 9/11 and Thomas Howard’s infamous and historically important photograph of the execution of Ruth Snyder. What’s the importance of such imagery to you as a collector?

WH: I try to downplay their importance and to place the images in the larger context of the whole collection. The reasons why the images are iconic have to do with many things like timing, framing, seeing. They are not more important than other works in the collection, although presenting them involves some extra considerations, because they violate the sensibilities of many people and I don’t want to brutalize visitors to the book or to a show. Actually, I wouldn’t hang them in my home. As a collector, I want to have them, but I don’t need to see them—I know where they are.

AL: The range of photography in The Unseen Eye is quite remarkable. There are images from luminaries such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan and Diane Arbus to contemporary practitioners like Bill Armstrong and Amanda Means—as well as works by unknown photographers and vernacular works. What are your thoughts on the collecting of works by unknown photographers and vernacular works? Ultimately, does it make a difference to you?

WH: Absolutely. What distinguishes this collection is its inclusiveness. It is the history of photography considered through a very specific sensibility—mine. The urgency of collecting most often outpaces the availability to pay for it, so there was relief in finding inexpensive and amazing stuff. I even bought frames when I was out of money, in the hopes that the elves of photography would break in and fill the frames with beauties. It never happened…. Also, there are probably a dozen photographs in the collection that I have NO IDEA of where they came from.

Phyllis Galembo, Omolu, Brazil, 1987 © Phyllis Galembo

AL: Are you planning on bringing some of your other collections to the public eye?

WH: There is another collection of images of American Groups before 1950 that those elves I just mentioned really did hide under my bed. As you know, the Houston Center for Photography hosted an exhibition last year. I will do something more with that in time. Also, the vernacular work in the no eyes collection will find a separate life.

AL: The images of American Groups are often really quite amusing to look at. We have a few cherished group photos from our past—swim team, high school graduation—that never see the light of day. The images in that collection are anonymous, formal and displaying pomp and circumstance. What’s your connection to the imagery?

WH: There are also many groups that are chaotic. I like the opposite end of the spectrum just as much, those images are, in fact, harder to find. There are a couple of elements which interest me: how the crowd itself behaves—orderly or a mob—and then how the photographer chose to see it, to frame it, to capture the crowd within the shot. These images don’t suggest much of a personal reading in the way they do in the collection featured in the book. Right brain versus left brain maybe.

AL: What’s next for you? Is your collection complete?

WH: James Bond, “Never say never.” It has been very, very difficult for me since I left my gallery situation. I have projects that I am not so public about, but they are photographic and collaborative. My success as a collector, and as a dealer and strategist, is based on showing up as much as anything else, and that continues to lead me into a very full and exciting life.

W.M. Hunt (Bill Hunt) is a New York-based collector, curator and consultant, a champion of photography. He is responsible for introducing many major contemporary artists in the US, including Luc Delahaye, Julian Faulhaber, Andreas Gefeller, Erwin Olaf, Martin Schoeller, and Paolo Ventura, among others. His Collection Dancing Bear is the subject of a new book, to be published this fall as The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious by Thames & Hudson (UK) and Aperture (US) and as L’Oeil Invisible by Actes Sud (France). Highlights of the collection have been exhibited in Arles, Lausanne and Amsterdam and will go on view at the George Eastman House in October, 2011. He was one of the principles in Hasted Hunt (more recently Hasted Hunt Kraeutler) and Ricco/Maresca Gallery.

I.

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

laterchild of deserts

“the dying gasps of the old West”

til in Tucson

Benson (three hundred people and eleven saloons)

&   @     Albuquerque

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

small garden : Phoenix : rising, then falling

books in Mandarin(parents who lost their missionary zeal)

trips to Kansas City & musical studies & jobs as porters

but at 14, he knew that it was                    SOUND

II.

what early music?

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

took a trashing from proper musical lessons in Los Angeles but

no
deep
&
abiding
tie

mother struck dead by a streetcar

father dead a couple of yrs


age 20 / alone from there on and ever

this young metropolis and trips to Philharmonic hall

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

always a love for the body

III.

with parts

p-a-r-t-c-h

study : history of tone

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

- microtonal mishaps in the west -

as if to say

just-intonational scales





then to New Orleans and New York and London and Malta

a return to

Li Po verse

on adapted viola

where do you live?

off a city street and ten thousand houses among drooping willows


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

Why all the trouble?

MUSIC

“a language in itself”

IV.

Greek &
Noh
drama,


Japanese
kabuki


Mummer’s
plays


CREATION


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




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

V.

back from San Joaquin

(keeping music in hobo bundle)

at Big Surcoast work campmet Jean Varda

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


always loving, loving, loving, loving(men)

VI. BITTER MUSIC (DEPRESSION ERA SUITE)

- alpha -

convict camps, coast of magnificentdescend-ings

CALIdown


black mountain to coast(line)every starrywhiten
ed
ridge

clasp
coast roadin moves northand east

return south to

-  beta -

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

“Why wander?”

gone away for-everin the eternity of infinity

& thumb my nose at tomorrow

- gamma -

Slate’s hot springs

long sincedead

an ownership                         a Bright Angel leads to the baths

on board to Big Creek (wink, wink)

evening campfire, San Simonat Cone Peak

- delta -

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

VII.

August beach, ocean breath


Mount Diablo
sinking beneath the horizon

stay & move

to pass peak

with men

food and flops and “well-made chaps”

yes yesall thisbrazen talk

by creeks and woodsheds and more along side the highway

VIII.

to make:

“U.S. Highball,” hobo trip with music



going East mister? (plucked)

Freeze another night tonight

Stay out of Denver

It moves back and forth

Is that blanket big enough for two?

Chicago, Chicago, Chicago




end at Sparks division yards

IX.

in                 red-wood

groves of

euca-lypt

after several durations at Ithaca and Madison

for isolation, interview

founded his instrument workshop


“a philosophical man seduced into carpentry”

river camperwoodworker

“an acoustical ardor and a conceptual fervor”


tuning: total gambit of dissonance and consonance

X.

Orchestra at Gualala:


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


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


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


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


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

XI.

activation of investigation and interventions with Yeats

and enticement



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

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

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


the taking of Oedipus an opera written.

happily written here, the land of no there there.

XII.

compelled by kithara


Partch built a great lyre of 72 strings.


Orpheus’s lyre had three stings.


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


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

XIII.

intoned dialogue god, then help us assemble


by way of chorus

Oh— Oh— Oh— Ah— Ah— Ah—


in way of supplicant’s branches

with such cries of sorrow

good news of lights, curtains


suffering in homeless sea, thunder, lightning, lost to

as “death himself is dead”

Tiresias, presented by spokesman,regales Creon


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

a tumult of iron, prophets forgotten

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


where is Bold Oedipus?

(quick sketches by Lebrun, Baskin, Kolwitz)




appointed end, free from                     pain

XIV.

euphoric

asidewarehousedescendingnarrowstairway

in scene six from 1956

baroque leaps



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



but only the witch can accomplish it.

XV.

back from Urbana:



Ancient Chorus in “Revelation in the Courthouse Park”

this palacealights to be seen by

piccolo

transient

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

Greek melodrama arrived inrural Illinois

kithara & instruments





here, on the seventh day,

petals

fell on

Petaluma



in voiceless score

XVI.

west Los Angeles boulevard:


chromelodean, counts six 2/1 harmonium


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


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

equivocation of the klang

in components of tone

in ratios,cyclesin intervals,immediacyin frequenciessystemsin procedures,limits


tasks to Pasadena Museum


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




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

XVII.

The Dreamer that Remains

Viet’s time

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


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

Pacific, a sexy beach

where, to find

PeaceLove

stairway’s chant


volcanic Harry: looking down, laughing

Etruscan touchstone

XVIII.

how to see him, on film, all too late


kimono purplePartch seesa loss of rose petal jama harmonic convergence




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

in red/yellow/pale blue tank tops & jeans

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




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

XIX.

and with Lou Harrison

stackside, found each other in the SF public library

clearing house for books, for s-x years

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


teased about inflexibility of his “systems”

hosted in redwood park

XX.

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

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



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


generation of youth

LISTEN TO THAT


pied piper

red-lamped night

shaded Socrates



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






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













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

A Correspondence with Julie Lequin

Two years ago French-Canadian artist Julie Lequin found herself on the road, about to turn thirty, and looking back. The experience inspired Top 30, a multidisciplinary video project condensing each year of her life. Effervescent with humor, woe, error, and play, Top 30 paws the line between autobiography and fiction. A generous helping of selections from this work in progress along with stills, watercolors, and Julie’s thoughts appears below.—Elaine Bleakney

Top 30 (Chapter 28), 2010; work in progress

AL
How did Top 30 become a formal project for you? Did the traveling you were doing at the time inform the way you shaped this work?

JL
I started thinking about Top 30 while attending a two-month residency in Nebraska during the winter of 2009. Nebraska was drastically different from what I had romanticized. I was expecting fields of corn filled with snow, incredible finds at thrift stores, unexpected fun conversations at music concerts. Instead the streets were grey, I shopped at Walmart, and there was zero social stimulation. I was stuck with boredom. Every Sunday was a tragedy because everything was closed. I was mad at myself for going for a residency in Nebraska. I was twenty-nine at the time and I started thinking I would be thirty in the spring…I was curious about what had “happened” to me all these years. I tend to have ideas for projects awhile before working on them.

Traveling has shaped some parts of this work. Yet traveling has also uninspired me. For instance I spent three months at Les Récollets in Paris in the fall of  2010. I was having the hardest time working on Top 30 there. I was lonely in a gold castle. The apartment and studio space I was given for the residency were amazing but I was miserable and found it hard to connect with Parisians. So while I was in Paris I visited Les Puces, walking everywhere, looking at clothes and architecture. I felt more like an observer and than a maker of something. Since returning from Paris I’ve made the decision to work at home in Montreal, and it has been good since.

AL
Disconnections from people and places are so vital in your work. And difficulty in communication—would you write a bit about the story you chose to represent your twenty-eighth year? How did this story become the one that you wanted to tell?

JL
The choices I made in telling this story came very naturally. I received my MFA from the Art Center in Pasadena right before turning twenty-seven. I found graduate art school quite challenging, especially the social aspect of the program. The year after grad school was way more difficult and awkward (finding work, looking for the energy to work by myself in a studio, feeling a bit alone: no one looking at my work). Twenty-seven was a low point for me.

At twenty-eight, I moved in to a house in Highland Park with three roommates I didn’t know. The housemates were not artists. I felt safe, loved. They were interested in my projects and in me: they gave me back the energy and will to work.

Roommates, 2009;pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 28

At that time, it was very hard as a Canadian citizen to find work in the United States (unless I was an artist-assistant, something I was not interested in doing). I decided to try the residency path. I didn’t know anyone who had done that before, but I thought it could lead me in an interesting direction. I loved L.A. (still do) but I didn’t see myself there at thirty. And I wasn’t ready to move back to Montreal yet. I sent applications and everyday I would frantically wait for the mail man. He ended up bringing positive news (I got in to a few programs).

Disconnections from people and places was important (and still is), but I manipulate what you see by romanticizing, adding some fiction, editing. My reality is less dramatic.

Top 30 is autofiction, very different from my past projects Car Talk or True Stories. There are no goofy characters and less HA! HA! humor. There is still humor though, and that’s what keeps me working. I spend so much time with my projects and it’s important that I feel something like humor when I illustrate, write, and record my story. In a way, it’s pretty didactic, but that’s how I hope my work can relate to a diversity of viewers.

I understand how someone can feel and act, if they can’t fully express themselves. I am very interested in wordplay, mispronunciation, and translation. And even more now, as I live in Montreal (a fully bilingual city) where everybody speaks Franglish. Half of Top 30 will be in French (year zero to year fifteen), and the other half will be in English (sixteen to thirty), with subtitles.

AL
Speaking of wordplay, I love how “strike of mini-joys” ends the story in Chapter 28. The line has a way of feeling like confetti falling into the piece.

When you mention how it feels when someone can’t fully express herself—I would like to hear more of your thoughts about that. Do lines like “strike of mini-joys,” when they come to you in English, help smooth the difficulty of being understood in a way? Does having a different language to work within create a need to talk about your personal experience?

JL
When I write my narration, I first make a list of things I want to say. Then I think of the illustrations that will go with these things, making written notes about them on the printed list. Sometimes I just make up an expression based on an image (a drawing) I had envisioned. If I can understand the phrasing, even if it sounds weird, I assume that the viewers will be able to understand as well. (Or they won’t and they will imagine something else.) Like I said before Top 30 is bilingual and now I am writing in French. The process is similar but when I work in my native language, I feel like there is less play.

I Wanted to Become a Secretary, 2010; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 17

I moved to San Francisco in the fall of 2001 to do a post-bacc certificate at the Art Institute. I barely spoke English at the time. I remember arriving with one red suitcase, checking in at the hostel for a week, and looking for a place to live in the Mission.  I could barely make a phone call in English. I had to use of a lot of charm, pizzazz, and really I had to learn to repeat expressions the way I heard them. Also I had to work on my accent in order to be understood. So basically I had to perform in my everyday. I wanted to communicate (I enjoy people) and it was so hard without words. I had to rely on body language, facial expression, and making my eyes speak. The year I was in San Francisco I learned a lot of English but I also developed a lot of  “acting” skills without realizing it.

At the same time I became interested in storytelling. I did my undergraduate work in painting and I was growing bored of making abstract paintings. I lost the fun. In San Francisco I started observing people and there was always a spark happening. I would try to describe to my patient roommates what I had seen. In order to keep their attention, I had to be funny, quick, and I had to reenact what had happened. So that’s basically how ideas about storytelling and performance started.

AL
When working on Top 30, do you imagine an ideal viewer, a person or persons you are talking to?

JL
I don’t imagine my ideal viewer, I just have an idea of an audience.

AL
Making lists comes up a few times in your stories. Do you have any memory about when you first started making lists and/or why? How did list-making became part of your creative process, rather than something mundane or behind-the-scenes?

JL
I remember my mother making lists when I was a kid. She had her own business and there was always something for her to do: a grocery list, a list of people to call, a list of things to write in a contract. She was writing a list and then she would lose it. I would laugh at her but nowadays I lose my lists too, and it’s terrible when it happens. (I recently lost the list of songs for the kids starring in Top 30. I had worked so much on this piece of paper! I found it again in a flat box full of drawings after I had stopped searching for it.)

Anxieties (as a Nice List), 2008; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 28

Making lists became part of my life when I started learning English. I would look up the words of the things I needed to do or say in order to be more efficient in English. The process stayed when I attended graduate school. I was having a lot of flash ideas for projects and I was afraid to lose them. I would scribble each idea down and leave the list by my studio door.

To me lists have the potential to be incredibly narrative driven, insightful, and poetic—they can hold so much. Including lists in my art-making became more of an obvious choice for me after I made the book from my project The Ice Skating Tree Opera.

Top 30 (Chapter 29), 2010; work in progress

AL
Thinking about process, how did you go about choosing the girls and women who sing a song from each year of your life in Top 30?

JL
This is such a simple but complex question.

I was selective with the choice of singers. They had to look nice on camera and I had to see something about them that reminded me of myself at their age. (As you can imagine, it was very subjective.) I dressed them up with old clothes of mine or clothes I got at the thrift store—the clothing had to match the wallpaper background. Also—very important—I had to get along with the singer, we had to have a connection. I wanted to feel confident enough to give them directions and I wanted them to feel good on camera (even if they were nervous or shy.) I met with everybody once or twice before filming to get to know each other and rehearse. I kept repeating to them that mistakes were good.

Kelly, video still from Chapter 29

It was incredibly easy to recruit singers when I started the project in Los Angeles because everyone’s secret dream in L.A. is to be a star. Then I tried to search for singers in Paris (when I was in residency there) and it was an epic failure.

In Montreal the search went pretty smoothly. I noticed that the English-speaking schools were really into my project and forwarded my call to many of their students. I got a lot of help from people who had randomly heard of the project. (Strangers have such kind and generous hearts.)

Working with friends is very tricky. But I make exceptions in this project. For example, I’ve asked my friend Roxanne to be on camera with her daughter Colette to film the chapter for age one. At night Roxanne becomes Donzelle, a French-Canadian rapper. We are filming her segment soon. I cannot wait for that.

AL
Did you find that you were talking with your singers about the project at large? If so, did you find any new illumination about Top 30 during your collaborations with them?

JL
I started filming the people closer to my age and went gradually in descending order. I wasn’t sure how to talk to a twenty-year-old and a fifteen-year-old about the project. I figured that if I took it slow, gradually, the words would come. (They did.)

For the teenagers I said a tiny bit in order not to overwhelm them. They ended up going online and seeing clips of my work. For some of the kids, we would spend a few hours together because their parents were at work. It was really fun, something like a theme park. “A Day in the Studio with Julie.” We would rehearse, film, have popsicles, draw, go out and try on shoes, read graphic novels at the store.

Sometimes the singer would ask me why I picked this song or why I picked that outfit, and while explaining I would have to take notes because the question would make me remember an event from the past.

While organizing and collecting the clothes for each singer, I remembered being a preppie in my teen years. I had totally forgotten. I still like prep clothes and I LOVE the quest of searching for them at thrift stores. I would have never worn used clothes when I was a teen, I was way too proud. Also, now I cut my bangs myself—the opposite of prep.

Margo, video still from Chapter 12

One singer (Margo, twelve years old) asked me where I would usually listen to the song by Jean Leloup I had asked her to sing and I saw myself sitting in the middle row of the yellow school bus. This image reminded me of my cat (his name was Minou) who disappeared for a whole week when I was that age. Everyday after school my dad and I would go on walk around the perimeter of our property calling Minou, Minou. We thought we could hear cat meows but that was just crazy…there was no cat anywhere. We thought we might be going insane from sadness. A few days went by, Minou wasn’t back, and the meows persisted. My dad and I kept going out to find Minou, and we realized that the cat was actually stuck in a fifty-foot-tall tree by the river, one kilometer from our house. Someone with a big ladder truck came (either firemen or the person who cut trees) and Minou returned. He didn’t run away again.

Appeller Minou, Minou, Minou, 2011; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 11

AL
In working with autobiographical material, do you ever experience anxiety that you’re misremembering? You mentioned before how awful it felt to lose that list of songs/singers—does forgetting part of your life cause you anxiety or pain?

JL
I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with a ball of stress on fire in my belly from being scared not to complete Top 30 on time. Or not finding a four-year-old singer (the search is still on.) But I’m not scared of misremembering. Not at all. I hope I don’t sound light-headed.

I think this is the charm of autofiction: I can do whatever I want with my narrative. Sometimes I misremember on purpose an episode I would rather forget than go deeply into. Or I go into fiction because it’s more fun to tell than the everyday.

AL
Do you ever have anxiety about how you represent others in your projects? Have there been experiences when someone mentioned in one of your projects had objections to the way you portrayed them?

JL
Well I remember on a few occasions that people were not “satisfied” or “intrigued” with the way I portrayed them.

1. My Dad in my submission to This American Life. He didn’t like anything about his character. In the project, I tell how my dad would pressure me to apply for a job at Cirque du Soleil. He had all these big hopes for my future and when I ask him in the project what is he doing today, he replies: “Oh I am just waiting to die, Julie.” He didn’t see any resemblance in the portrait I made of him with a captain’s hat.  I personified him as more “pessimistic” than he is in real life. But still he said: “I never said such a thing, Julie.” I had to explain that some aspects of his character were exaggerated to make the story funny.

2. I sent an image of the mother character from True Stories, Almost to my mom. She was rather insulted about the look.  She said: “I don’t look like that. Where did you get your inspiration from?” Her unhappiness didn’t last long though. And now every time a picture of this character is printed in a magazine, she is ecstatic and says “my picture is going to be in a magazine.” Ha! ha!

Mom Character, 2010; video still from True Stories (Almost)

I am usually not nervous about representing others in my projects because there’s always a bit of fiction added to the character. Generally my friends want to have a part in my work—they like it. For my next project, I’m designing a character for my boyfriend. He’s very good at newscaster voices.

AL
I wonder if Joyce Maynard will watch your video of Chapter 29.

JL
Oh yeah funny you ask about Joyce because we have been emailing lately, so she’s been on my mind. (I never told her that I mention her in the video…) She has a very good sense of humor and she probably understands autofiction better than anyone else.

Top 30 (Chapter 30), 2010; work in progress

AL
I’m curious about your influences. You mention Ghost World—is Daniel Clowes someone you like to read?

JL
YES I used to love Ghost World. I was amazed with the resemblance between the characters in the book and the film.

I am inspired by the morning radio podcast I listen to everyday on Radio-Canada (but they talk so much that I can’t listen to it in the morning), by conversations I overhear in the Metro, by people I see at the grocery store or the public library. The Ethicist and Savage Love are blogs and podcasts I like. I just enjoy the question-answer dynamic.

A great place for me is the thrift store where I usually get conversations with people I don’t know and weird outfits that I can run in the sewing machine. I am also inspired by images I see online and fashion blogs. I keep a file on my desktop of curious-interesting stuff. I try to stay away from art magazines as I find them depressing and not impressive.

Specimen tissue (fabric) #1, 2011; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 3

All my books have been in boxes since June 2008—the time when I started doing residencies. A few weekends ago, I visited my storage (read: my parent’s apartment and garage), and got Matthew Brannon’s book out. I was happy to discover him again. His work is a mix of illustration and wordplay. I like his balance and structure.

This weekend I came upon this—Auerbach’s craft is so clever! It conveys a message. Her aesthetic is handmade yet calculated. I met her when I was living in L.A. and it is a pleasant surprise to see her work online.

I also love artist’s lectures. I really enjoy witnessing artists present themselves to a large audience. Tonight I go to see John Currin’s talk at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. I am curious to hear what he has to talk about for an hour. I wish there were most artists lectures in Montreal.

Generally, I like work that shows a skill, has a bit of humor and some narrative. I can’t say what artists I am really looking into right now but yesterday I stumbled on this site and I liked what I saw. It is fresh.

AL
I love you how you milk humor out of the question/answer dynamic (Car Talk makes me laugh especially.) Was there anything notable about John Currin’s talk last night? I’m curious about your take on his presentation.

JL
John Currin’s talk was light, honest, and generous. He kept referring to his wife—the whole time, she seems to be telling him what to paint a lot. I kind of liked that. He was dressed with a pastel-colored button down shirt, coat (with a little scarf in the front pocket), and a tie. (I am thinking of making his portrait.) It was terribly hot and humid in Montreal yesterday, I could not believe his outfit, though I enjoyed it. He looked like a business man. I liked that he talked about his personal life while showing his artwork. (Example: “I was in a terrible relationship at that time, so this is why the painting looks like that.” Or “my studio mate and I are butt naked in this painting.” The painting shows two men on a boat fishing.)

I enjoyed seeing his early paintings versus the pornographic work (which I didn’t know about). He showed the porn paintings very fast, like he was shy. Also, there was a set of plates that kept coming back in some paintings…he said: “oh I just put them down there, because there was room left at the bottom of the painting.” I loved that.

Fancy John Currin at the Musée Looking Like My Dad When He Was Young, 2011; pencil and watercolor on paper from Chapter 2

*

Julie Lequin’s Top 30 will be shown at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida from October 7 until November 24, 2011. She is the 2011 recipient of the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. A book documenting her project The Ice Skating Tree Opera is available from 2nd Cannons. For more information about Julie and her projects, please visit julielequin.com.

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

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

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

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



≈


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

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

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



≈


Dear O.,

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

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

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

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

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

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



≈


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



≈


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

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



≈


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

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

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

will burst on impact into five-bladed stars.



≈


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



≈


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

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

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

I had married the forest, married the deer.



≈


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



≈


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

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

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

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

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



≈


[Quecreek mine accident, 2002]

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

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

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

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



≈


After single-point perspective, I want omniscient sight.

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

What a coal seam sees with its legion black eyes.

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

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

greening again below her heel.



≈


[Photo, 1901]

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

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

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

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

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



≈


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

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

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

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

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



≈


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the Dance of Death had not yet kicked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



≈


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

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

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

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



≈


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

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

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

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

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



≈


[Henry Clay Frick, 1849-1919]

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

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



≈


[1862]

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

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

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

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

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



≈


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

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

AT OUR STORE
BROADFORD, 1874

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



≈


[Alexander Berkman, anarchist]

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

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

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

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

I’ll kill him when we’re alone.



≈


[July 6, 1892: The Homestead Strike]

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

So Frick, the monster-king, must die.

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

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



≈


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

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



≈


[The Homestead Works, 1881-1986]

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

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



≈


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

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



≈


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

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

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

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

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



≈


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

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



≈


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



≈


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

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

Silent, he was welcomed back to the church.

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



≈


[whispered into smoke]

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

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



≈


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

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

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

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



≈


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

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

Below the locks we paddle your tributary.

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



≈


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

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

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

painted fires lighting the painted water.



≈


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

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

Not diamond, but ancient
sunlight through a leaf

unsheathed from rock by the bare
fingers of a boy.

Truth is, these are his bones.

I’ve gnawed them to a skeleton of song.



≈


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



≈


[Monongahela Nocturne]

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

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

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

Marshall goes crabbing
First and second cognates
plague/pilgrimage
     crab/wish

The summer he turned thirty, the only task my husband Marshall could stand was setting nets for crabs off the Santa Cruz pier. The simple hauling and suspense of the enterprise appealed to him — he was far too clumsy and impatient to fish. Crabbing was like casting pennies into a wishing well, only what he wished for actually surfaced when he drew the rope back up.

On his birthday, Marshall left his wooden cabana next to the boarding house he managed and descended into town. He could hear the tubercular barks of the burgeoning sea-lion colony nearby. He took the shortcut by the river, through the tent city where homeless people camped. Sea lions had swum upriver, and they crowded now among the garbage and sleeping bags. They hobnobbed atop the flattened tents and nosed through rags and bicycle parts. A small, dark-eyed female found a bell and stroked it with her nose. It rang — a brittle, shivering sound. The rest of the sea lions fell silent. She rang it again. They all gazed at Marshall. She rang the bell a third time, solemnly, and the nylon tents fluttered. Marshall shouldered his crab hoops and kept on.

Sea lions dozed alongside junkies under the railroad bridge. On the other side of the river, a cluster of pinnipeds obstructed the sidewalks. They left steaming, ropy scat on the thoroughfares. They sunned themselves in the crosswalks, oblivious to pedestrian curses, revved engines, and car-horn blares. At the post office, they preened on the steps, proliferating like junk mail. From the public fountain their gleaming heads rose, snorting and spouting. They hauled themselves over the fountain’s lip, they lolled in its spray, combing their ears.

On one corner of the square, a quartet of junior-high boys played homemade marimbas. A gang of sea lions humped toward them, barking and sniffing the air. The boys scattered. Planks splintered and PVC pipes lollopped across manholes, skidding into the street, providing hollow accompaniment to the sea lions’ disconsolate cries as they nosed the remains. Marshall, intent on his course, failed to notice a gang of sea lions attacking a sushi pushcart. As he progressed toward the pier, swinging his bag of fish guts and humming apprehensively, the sea lions overturned the cart and sent the vendor running. They ate everything, even the rolling mats.

At the foot of the pier, a group of rubberneckers gave interviews for local TV.

“I’ve seen some of them cruising the boutiques,” remarked one surprised onlooker. “Which is weird, because they don’t even wear shoes.”

Behind the TV crew, demonstrators waved signs that read “Santa Cruz for the Sea lions!” and “Animals are people too.” A spokesperson bullied her way in front of the camera and demanded that the local government erect a shelter and provide aid for the stranded animals.

“They’re no different than any other refugees!” she shrilled.

Looking out at the seal-clotted waves, another local remarked, “Unreal, man. They actually outnumber the surfers.”

Marshall, preoccupied with his own mortality, paid no attention.

*

“Only the deathless believe in death. The thing that peeks out of the eyes, that struggles in its envelope of flesh knows otherwise—”

Ah, hell. The Tinfoil Dude was out today.

“—but the boneheaded body, which believes so little, is firmly convinced by death.”

Marshall set his sack of fish guts on the pier, sighed, and dug into his hip pocket. The Tinfoil Dude adjusted the silver photographer’s umbrella above him, then smiled.

Marshall fished, but the coins in his pocket refused to bite.

“Gimme a break, it’s my birthday,” he said.

The Tinfoil Dude, by way of reply, put on his sunglasses. He had covered one lens with new foil.

The mendicant pelican, Happy Jack, sidled between Marshall’s feet and darted at the bag of innards. A tourist lobbed French fries at the bird, but Happy Jack was no tame opportunist, no voracious and undiscerning seagull. He was still young, a yellow-feathered purist. Happy Jack tore open the bag and dragged out a fish skeleton, which had hooked a roll of intestine, which was in turn tangled up with some rubbery blue organs. Happy Jack whisked it all along behind him like ticker tape. The pigeons and seagulls and cormorants made it a parade.

Marshall chased after the pelican with a half-irritated sense of camaraderie. Tourists, bored with the bobbled backs of sea lions on the beach, stumped after the bird, too, snapping pictures and making the boards shake with their fat city feet. Marshall did his best to ignore them. He had his wish to catch.

More sea lions sheltered under the pier. They looked like large, unappealing women with mustaches, Sicilian perhaps, round and rubber-coated, bowling-pin shaped, with huge liquid eyes, helpless and somehow Catholic, filled with too much soul for Marshall’s taste.

He settled a crab hoop on the pier and cocked an ear to the distant splashes and consumptive barking of the sea lions. They lummoxed into the water, bobbing down and shooting back up. Jesus, there really were a lot of them.

Marshall rummaged in the hefty sack and picked out a ripe, green-headed crappy. He strung stiff yellow twine through a gill, avoiding the baleful glare in the fish’s scuffed eye, and tied its head to the center of his net. He peered down through the crack in the boards, certain the sea lions were watching him. Thirty feet down, in the shadowy water, a pair of eyes met his.

“Stay away from my catch,” he said — adding, since the eyes looked hurt and knowing, “please.”

Before he could lower the net into the water, a flash off the Tinfoil Dude’s semaphore blinded him. The Tinfoil Dude caught up with Marshall and resettled his lawn chair and reflective umbrella next to the bag of bait. The sunlight spattered like hot grease off the crimples in his foil suit. He cocked his head and looked at Marshall through a lone black lens.

“The sea is a sieve, and bottom feeders inherit what lasts long enough to sink. The drowned, the bony, the calcareous, all drift down alongside ingots and amphorae, where crabs dwell. Those bone pickers, those rag and bottle men engage in daily congress with old dreams. Whatever humans wish on and lose and hope to recover; those things they consign to oblivion. The coins and rings, the crumpled cans, syringes, tied-off rubbers — they all fall to the crabs. The crabs trim anything essential enough to decompose, and strip wishes to their simple, everlasting bones. What do you wish? The crabs will offer it up to you. What do you wish? Claws relinquish what hands cannot keep.”

Marshall shivered and turned his back. He lowered his first net into the water. A fisherman watched him from a few feet away.

“Fool’s errand. Only a jackass’d go crabbing during a spell like this. The sonsabitches will take your bait before it hits the bottom.”

The fisherman tossed his cigarette into the water, watched it hiss out. A seagull dove for the butt. Marshall looked vaguely at the man, who held his rod and reel across his chest like a bayonet, his shoulders squared for a fight.

“Well, you’re fishing, aren’t you?” Marshall asked mildly.

“Hell no. I’m trying to hook the sonsabitches in the eye.”

Out along the break, a young surfer caught a wave. He sheared back and forth along the glassy curve. A sea lion crested alongside and tried to climb onto his surfboard. She knocked him to his knees, and the wave folded them both under. The young man surfaced, gained his board, and paddled furiously toward the beach. The sea lion followed. She swam placidly but steadily, gaining on him. The surfer ran his board aground, shouldered it, and dashed through the surf toward the high-tide line, then tripped on his leash and fell. She was almost upon him. He scrambled upright and pounded up the steps to the pier, where he collapsed at Marshall’s feet.

Marshall and the fisherman unzipped the prone man’s wetsuit to give him some air. Tattoos covered his upper body.

“Couldn’t shake her, dude. It’s like she’s in heat.” The surfer panted, scrubbed a hand through his hair, and dashed the salt from his eyes. He sat up and looked at the circling sea lions.

“Where are the males?”

The waves were packed like bleachers — tier upon tier of dark-eyed lionesses on the swells.

“Strange times, my man. Strange times,” said the surfer. He considered the sea lions.

“I lived through a plague of caterpillars once, when I was a kid. Big black mothers. Really sick, and I don’t mean in a good way.”

He dislodged a pebble from his great toenail and flicked it into the sea.

“But the butterflies that year were something else.”

More semaphore, and the Tinfoil Dude’s cockeyed black gaze was upon all three of them.

“Humans have souls that show in our eye whites. Our bodies are frail and unpeeled, and yet we are strange shelled beings all the same. Divinity reinforced in flesh. Only the most vicious and primitive — the cold-bloods, the sharks — mistake men for animals, for food, for seals, for themselves. Captive orcas will drown their trainers, but that is war, and they are prisoners. The spermaceti kill men, but only in self-defense, and that is allowed because men (cold-blooded, vicious, and primitive) kill them. But the other creatures know men as terrible angels, mammal-ethereal. Cousins of the cetaceans and pinnipeds. Like birds, we stand upright. Our souls, they say, have straightened us. Where wings (or fins, which are only wings for water) should be we have hands. Hands! Those double agents. The soul’s other seat.”

The Tinfoil Dude picked bits of foil off the lens of his sunglasses and chewed thoughtfully on the pellets until the fisherman gave him a cigarette in hopes of discouraging further transmissions. Marshall edged away. Suddenly even looking at other people required such an effort that he could feel the muscles in his lips start to twitch. Hopefully they thought he was smiling. He fled to the other side of the pier.

The first net came up empty. He moved to the next station and pulled it up, straining to catch sight of crabs beneath the sunlit and shifting water. When the net burst to the surface, it held nothing but the remains of his bait. He came to the last net and stood looking down for a long time, following the line with his eyes. He fingered the twine. It chafed his fingers pleasantly. He adjusted it so it fit into the notch worn into the railing by countless other lines. He reeled it up, hand over hand. The net rose swiftly. He could tell from the weight that he’d caught something. The silver hoop broke the surface, and he saw a nest of crabs, three of them — a decorator, a Sheephead, and a rock crab — scooting along and overlapping one another as they tore contentedly at the fish head. Relief loosened his grip. Beneath the water’s surface, a dark, oblong shape skirted the net, turned, swooped, and spread a pair of shadowy wings.

“No, you bitch!”

He hauled. The sea lion’s head rose and threw off water. A quick nudge flipped the net. The crabs spiraled down. She threw him a coy look and sped under.

Waves chopped against the pilings. Marshall leaned against the rail and let the net string dangle. Happy Jack gripped his way sidewise along the railing toward Marshall. He shook himself, raised his crest, and clapped his bill.

“Get out of here, Happy Jack.”

Marshall sighed and dragged up the net. It clung briefly to the skin of the water, dripped and swayed, and left a rippling bull’s-eye.

The pelican launched, wheeled once, arrowed into the water, and came up with a fish.

Marshall could hear the sounds of salsa music and laughter from the beach out beyond the empty roller coaster in its drop cloth of mist. It started to rain. Tourists squawked, zipped up their sweatshirts, and herded their kids toward the parking lot. Happy Jack’s head appeared and disappeared above the railing, like a gas flame. Marshall brooded over the water, which was still the clear dark green of a wine bottle. The mist pearled down. A small dark head turned liquid eyes up at Marshall, apologetically. He saw something come-hither in her glance. A mute appeal; an invitation. Her nostrils dilated. She snorted once and disappeared.

Some pocketknife-wielding kid had carved a pair of blocky initials into the railing and, lacking the ability to fashion a heart, boxed them in with a square. Marshall traced the letters with a fingernail. He peered down through the tatters of mist, but could see nothing.

Had she winked at him?

The Leap
Third cognate
suicide/courtship

She surfaced again and combed out her whiskers, beckoning. She executed a neat flip, pointed her toes (flippers? flukes?) at the sky, rolled like a hoop. She came up and offered him her bottomless eyes. She was flirting with him. He let the hoop drop. It curveted on the boards and beat to a stop. He smoothed his mustache. He looked over his shoulder. The pier behind him was all mist. Even the pelican was gone. He turned back to the water and there she was, swimming steadily toward him, with a smiling wake. Peace lapped at his stomach. He considered the drop. She waited for him, stirring the water with her foreclaws, writing a message on the surface.

Come on in. The water’s fine.

Marshall plucked off his sweater and cast it on the pier, heeled his shoes free, stripped his socks, unzipped and shucked and stood with the mist stippling his bare skin. He set an instep to the lower bar of the rail, mounted, and stood, wavering, his arms flapping slightly, above the pier. It was a long drop. She cocked her whiskers at him with the coquetry of woman hiding a half-smile behind a swept fan.

He leaped.

His body knifed the water, and the water winded him. The wound his body made on the skin of the ocean closed instantly and left no scar. He was under, plummeting true. He flipped and kicked down to meet her. Her fur brushed his skin, rough and frigid as she swept the length of him. He reached for her, but she bristled through his fingers, eluding him, like a fish. Another desperate flutter and he caught up with her, hovering over her sleek swimming back. He locked his arms around her neck (her breast?) and scissored his pale legs around her midsection. His whole body felt bone-hard. She was cold, all cold, and surging through the water with powerful lateral strokes. They left long bubble trails in the water. A spike of desire pierced him. As if he could boil the sea to steam.

Marshall lunged at her. He had almost come to the end of his air. She bucked beneath him. He held her, but she began to rise, carrying him. They approached the sea’s upper skin. He pressed himself against her. They broke the surface. Delicious shafts of air punched into each lung. His head felt as though it might explode. She was serene, floating beneath him. She ferried him, slung across her back, all the way to shore.

Marshall lay propped on his elbows on a stretch of beach. The pier was faintly visible now. A cow-nosed ray that had washed ashore stirred the sand feebly. He watched its quiet death, feeling sad but oddly contented. He lay back and fanned out his arms, making an angel in the sand. One palm happened upon a piece of sea glass. Still new, and jagged. He gripped it in his fist.

She humped out of the water, dragging her cumbersome body toward him. She passed the dying cow-nosed ray with indifference. She loomed over him. Her gassy breath enveloped him. The sound of the sea enclosed them. He realized, looking at her ears, small and neat like moth antennae, that he had always been lonely. He looked at the trembling fibers of her whiskers, at her liquid eyes, which gazed at him with desire and sympathy. Joy exploded within him. She barked, and as he looked up at the vault of her mouth, at her clutter of teeth, he laughed and reached for her.

The puddle of her former skin
Fourth cognate
undress/flay

The sea lion rolled over, her vast belly pearled with grit. He sat up and moved to straddle her, but her sharp, nipping bark checked him. Marshall fell back on his haunches. She lifted her head and looked at him hard, then tucked her muzzle and tore herself open just below the throat. He watched the shaft of her eyetooth ease into the fur. It made a small popping noise as it broke the skin. Blood flowed down. She drove into her throat more deeply, worried and mumbled at the skin, her eyes starting. Her chest heaved, and she beat her bottom flukes against the sand. Marshall’s own eyes stung. The sight of his tears seemed to spur her, because she expanded her vast ribs, thrashed her tail, and hitched her jaws down sharply, unzipping the skin. The sound was moist and ragged. Fur and flesh parted, and she hitched again. She fought the layers of hair and fat, sometimes coaxing with her tongue, sometimes gnawing violently, until she had opened a seam from her neck to her sternum.

Her flukes thrummed a quick tattoo in the depression she had dug while she struggled. She gasped in quick spurts, like a beached fish, and he feared she was drowning in her own blood. But she was barking, or trying to bark. He could hear it now, a soft aspiration of the glottis. She nosed his fist. He pulled back. A stripe of blood on the back of his hand and the chilly spume from her nose.

Marshall opened his palm. She barked again — a horrible, hacking sound. He understood.

He brought his piece of sea glass to her breast, jimmied it into the tear she had made, and gutted her.

There was no spill of intestine. Instead, something white and slippery moved between the lips of the gash. He pried back the folds of seal skin, looking for viscera to pull free, for tendons and ligaments to cut. Something moved inside the skin, distended it, poked through, withdrew. Her lap was so bloody. The head continued its noiseless barking, and something struggled to emerge. Small and pale, it poked through the gape. He grasped it and pulled. It felt wrinkled and delicate, an arch that fit the cup of his hand. He squeezed, it kicked. He had it by the instep. Again he pulled and his hand slid up the sole of the bloody foot and gained an ankle. A pair of legs slid free, oiled with blood and yellowish foam — lipids, or sea curd. The skin opened further, disgorging its contents. Thighs emerged, and when they parted, he saw that it was she.

The sea lion sat up, her navel a goblet of blood. She thrust free of her lower flippers, which crumpled, diminished, on the sand. She raised her upper flukes and pushed her entire head back, as if it were a hood. The sea-lion skull hung down her back, whiskers trembling beneath stretched and vacant sockets. She shrugged off the rest of her hide as casually as a woman divesting herself of an opera cloak. She shot her cuffs and sat, triumphantly naked and blood-streaked, on the puddle of her former skin.

When she discovered her hands
Fifth cognate
hand/soul

Her hands lay in her lap. Blood inked her palms. She stared down at them, her hair hanging and her face inscrutable. She fanned her fingers inward, beginning at the pinky, then flared them back out, testing the muscles and joints. He caged one of her hands, then the other, and their fingers meshed. He could feel her delight at the hook and eye of thumbs, at the flat fit of their cupped palms. She turned his hands over. She stroked him again. Her fingers shook.

He grazed her knuckles and saw goosebumps flash up her arms. Hands socked together, twining and sliding, clasping and twisting. Wrist rested in palm, hands closed around wrists. Fingers collapsed on fingers and gripped (here is the church), fingers tented (here is the steeple), fingers dove and plaited and turned. Padded fingertips rolled like rain, straying down the inner skin of forearms. It came to him that this is what hands were made to do. Digits knit. Pulses kissed. His palms grew slick and still she urged him on, her hands untiring, devouring his. At last, when all his senses drew to a point in his fingers, she released his left hand and set his right hand flat on her neck. Using both hands, she guided it down her vulnerable breastbone, along the line of symmetry, between her ribs, over her navel, and down, until it encountered crisp hair and heat.

She looked at him, pressed his hand, and let go. His third finger didn’t pause. It plunged and carved out her last vestige of skin.

And thus were we married
Sixth cognate
her/I

Carved out of follicles, shedding the beast, she joined with him. His soul entered her through his hands. He breached her new (true?) skin with his fingers, groped the channel. His fingers pierced her heart, drove and pressed until her own soul stirred, cried out, then cried again. I cannot say if this was pleasure. I had no idea it went so deep.

I drew more soul from his mouth, and he gave without knowing what he had to give. I thought he did. (I thought you knew! I thought you knew what you were doing.)

And last of all, the animal part of him found its seat.

And thus were we married.

Imagine me undivided
Seventh cognate
moon/migration

I was the last of our exodus. I’d gone about it singly; unlike my sisters, I knew better than to frighten the men. Such marriages cannot be bullied. I simply waited in the water, watching men’s hands, seeking out the one who would recognize me beneath my skin. I observed their hands, the passes that they made, lowering our food into the water. When one scratched his nose it was a miracle. Another tied a shoe. I felt a yearning so deep for those hands, to be under those hands, that I had to marry. I am translating all this after the fact, because at the time, of course, I neither spoke nor thought. I had muscle-knowing, and scent-knowing, and belly-insight, and instinct, and fear. And, of course, the longing for men’s hands, for what they could give and do. Imagine me, then, undivided, muscle and buoyancy and bone.

What was it, why did I hanker for a human husband? I would betray myself if I put it down to dumb curiosity, to the witless drive to investigate oil slicks, to swallow tin, choke on flannisters or mistake balloons and floating bags for jellyfish. It was in truth the sweetest yearning. I bore its clutch inside me like a shark’s purse, and one evening as I dove, it hatched. A new creature swam inside me; it fit close like a membrane. It wasn’t hunger. It wasn’t estrus. A desire to rise to the upper air, to escape the pressure of that skin and the skin of the water around me. It moved me and thousands of my sisters. The barking started with the sickle moon. Call it instinct. We abandoned the colony and arrived in one single-minded surge of longing.

It afflicts some of us — the females only, of course. There exists no love (strange word) between the bulls and us in the hot press of the harem. The turbulent schools of us, herded on the rocks. The cormorants. The ripe piss and fish. It is a kind of innocence, in your tongue. In your way (now mine) of looking at it. We have no word for it at all. Why can’t I remember that life as I was? Now that I’ve put off that skin, I’ve lost my old inabilities. Who would have thought one could lose a lack, or miss a deficiency?

That world is closed to me.

She almost loses her skin
Eighth cognate
fur (noun)/(untranslatable abstract verb)

When they rolled apart, sweating, Marshall looked up and saw that the mist was beginning to clear. The scrimshaw quality of the light told him it was almost sunset. She lay on the sand, looking up at him. Her eyes were already losing their luminous, animal quality. But the look she gave him was deep. He turned away from it; he felt joyous and disgruntled. He pulled her to her feet.

“I guess you’ll have to come home with me.”

She stumbled against him. Her legs were not supporting her. Marshall felt a flicker of pride. Her breast brushed his bicep and she looked into him again, with worship. He returned her look, half afraid he might glimpse some lingering shadow of Nothingness, because her eyes, when she’d beckoned from the water, seemed bottomless. Instead, he saw his own reflection flicker on the skin of her irises.

“Come on.”

She didn’t budge. She looked over his shoulder with the same intense focus she’d trained on him. He turned and followed her gaze and saw the ocean encroach on her cast-off skin. She gave a small cry, pulled free, and dashed back toward the waterline. She ran awkwardly, the toes of one foot catching the heel of the other; her soles clapped together and she fell. The tide swooped in. She pulled herself forward on her elbows, dragging her legs behind her. In this position she was astonishingly fast. A wave flooded over her abandoned skin, lifted it, and sucked it into the surf. She floundered after it. Another wave cast the skin back, relaying it to a new wave, which drew it further away. She cried again. The skin floated beyond her reach. She thrashed into the water, gained it, clutched it to her chest, and tried to stand.

Marshall saw her go under, and he ran. The brine lashed at his claves, and by the time he reached her all he could see was the billow of skin atop the waves, anchored by the determined grip of her hand. The sea flashed around her narrow wrist. Marshall dove and dragged her up by the hair. With the skin she was twice as heavy, but she would not let go. He carried them both back to shore.

She gasped, coughed, clung to him, clutched the skin that was pressed, clam-like, between them. He guided her back to softer sand. She looked over her shoulder at the crepitating waves, shivered, and tightened her grip on her skin. She dropped to her knees and spread it out. It was drenched and faintly steaming, lapped in old juices. It reminded him of a moldy raincoat. A crab scuttled out of one eyehole. Marshall looked away. She smoothed the skin gently and wrung the water from the empty flippers and cloven flukes. Then she rolled the sodden rug into a tight bundle and gathered it in her arms. She might have been carrying a papoose.

He propelled her inland. They were both still naked, but no one bothered them. A gaggle of sea lions parted on the bridge to let them pass. She strode by them, her legs still unsteady. A sea lion nosed the crack of Marshall’s behind. She barked, and it pulled back. Cars honked. Marshall led her home.

I should have left it to the sea. If I had abandoned it there, I might have entered our marriage absolutely. But stripped of it, I’d felt so cold and insubstantial. No fat, no hair, just a sparseness pulled over an arrangement of bones. When I watched my bloody, abandoned shell unfurl on a wave, I saw for the first time the true shape of my self — the speechless, instinctive part of me; the swimmer, the fisher — torn free and taking its leave. I had shucked it too eagerly, and so I ran — even in panic wondering at the jarring bounce, the novel impact of each foot, the alternating rise and fall of breasts, and the shortness in my chest. When I held it, I felt whole again.

Fur Elise
Ninth cognate
Muzak/music

She had no name, and did not know how to speak. Marshall called her Fur Elise, then explained the pun. She had already learned to shrug. So he produced the tune for her by calling up his credit-card company and having himself put on hold. He pressed the receiver to her ear, and she jumped, at first, at the sea of sounds that broke through. Then the music gathered itself into a melody and cycled, achingly, over and over. She held. Marshall’s wrist began to throb, but he was already too much in love, too puzzled and amused to break the connection for her. He had never in his life encountered anything as strange as this: sitting cupping his phone to the unshelled ear of a naked woman who sat on hold with Visa, rapt and absolutely mute.

Some other things hands can do
Tenth cognate
Tears

We put the skin in Marshall’s deep freeze and lived naked off one other for three weeks. I learned about the temple and frigate that is bed. Marshall’s tenants jammed their rent checks under the door, and his machine picked up their cries of lost keys and faulty plumbing. Oh why is love the hardest to translate? Is there anything so consuming as the first flush of physical love, which feels, which is, intensely holy? Perhaps there’s too much seal in me to tell it clearly. We had three weeks of sexual bliss so deep I mistook it for marriage. It disturbed appetite and sleep. Our souls shot to the surface of our skins and leapt back and forth between us, crackling. And then it just — becalmed. We sat, with sails flat, on the surface of a dull mirror.

I admit part of that was due to me. A soul made the world more bitter, cold, and breathtaking than I expected. After the first flush of wonder wore off, the world slapped me like a wave and wet me through. Marshall couldn’t understand it. I suppose he got used to it in childhood. But for me every moment felt like snapping awake — and freshness hurts; I was constantly agasp, aghast. I was drowning.

Words from that time: Kaleidoscope. Churn. It was a kind of seasickness, a disease of the inner ear — or of that spirit function which corresponds to the inner ear. I never quite regained my balance. My soul slopped within me. I could feel it dashing itself against the cliffs of my body: it spiraled into eddies, moved in tides, rose, fell, climbed the walls, and tried to reach the moon.

“You need to learn tears,” the Tinfoil Dude told me.

“Every human born on this earth learns to cry, first thing. Before they open their eyes, they open their lungs and let fly. Tears come before language. Tears become language — that’s all language is — just an elegant form of tears. You’ll settle down some if you learn to cry — it’s just that your soul’s too new, and too big for you — that’s what hurts — it’s kicking against its confinement. Learn to shed tears — they’ll let some of the soul leak out of you, ease the pressure on your valves. Get your husband to teach you tears.”

Tears. Love’s glue and love’s solvent. Oh, I learned to cry.

The memory of pleasure knits itself closed, like the memory of wounds.

The first time I peed, outdoors, naked in the starlight beneath the redwood tree, he thought it was sexy. But later, when, in my innocence, I chose a corner behind his TV, his whole aspect flashed white, and his anger caught me in the sternum. “STOP!” he yelled, towering above me — but of course I couldn’t — and so he grabbed a newspaper, furled it, raised it, dashed it over my head, and beat my face and chest until my skin was a smudged series of headlines. It didn’t hurt my body. Between the flash, the swats, the blur of paper, and the confusion, I watched the beautiful curve of his hand.

The color left his face and he let the paper drop. He reached for my chin and pulled me up, but still, I saw he had to suppress his disgust, and he didn’t answer my eyes when he explained it all to me in the room where the stainless eel came out of a flat coral wall coughing saltless water. Marshall showed me how and where to do it, how to clean the mess, and he washed the printer’s ink from my skin. Although I marveled the whole time at the gentleness and dexterity of his long fingers, it was too late. I’d glimpsed the other things hands can do.

That night he made me sushi with those hands. They were so sure, slicing the fish, a fascination of knives, the blades as fingers, more precise than a tooth. How bright they were, his hands, how strong and bony, directing the silver to slice the flesh. Shaping beds of rice. He fed me by hand that night, too, and I overcame my disgust at the dead food by tasting the tips of his fingers first.

That night I slept beside him, and in my sleep, I slipped. There is the song we sing inside our skins, when we slip over the skin of the rocks and into the skin of the water. It is a song of warm blood in cold water, of darting light and fish, of salt.

Basking; she is basking. The sun brushes tips of my fur; it opens pores and heats blood. My heart beats slowly and steadily, and my breath overlaps with the sea’s. Occasional spray lashes up around the rock, but the rock takes most of the wetting, and the water that hits me is so fine it only causes an ear to twitch, brings on a sneeze. Fish blood still lingers on her tongue.

Turn and slip into the water — its green folds part around (me?) and bear (her?) up. The water pares warmth, languor, heaviness from her as I dive. How strong she is: a circuitry of power and awareness, of decision, reaction, speed, and force. The long muscles of her body propel me forward, down, sideways, and her broad forefins thrust aside the water. She arcs, I twist. We fly. We angle and roll, we make quick turns and darting sallies. I draw her belly along the sea floor and shoot to the surface. We blow two sharp reports from each nostril, expand our lungs, and plunge. A rock cod darts past. She charges after it, dives, and catches it. I had forgotten the stark vitality of a live fish. She bobs, draws air, and leans back on a wave, her flukes treading the water. We are not at all tired. We dive and surface, muscling through the water, light and vigorous and singular and enclosed.

*

At the touch of sheets, I awoke. Marshall straightened the bedclothes. His hands gripped the sheet and pulled it taut. He smoothed a stray crease with his knuckle. What a weird naked pink bone. What mean little patches of hair. I kicked off the sheet. The cotton felt too dry, too light. She stood on my funny little feet and went to draw a bath.

The cold-water faucet stuck and I couldn’t turn it. I wrenched a tendon in my hand, struggling with the tap. She didn’t want to sleep in hot water. Ugh. I pulled the plug and stood under the shower. But she couldn’t sleep standing up.

*

In this dream I walk naked out of the house, along the highway, over the bridge, and down to the shore, to lie on the rocks as I used to. But the rocks are sharp, and the air is cold, and I have no fellows.

*

Night/day. Dream/wake. Woman/man. A world stitched from opposing skins.

*

In this dream, I am standing on the beach. The sea throws a cold mantilla about my ankles. The tide goes out, bare stretches of sand gleam. My footprints fill with water, the heels sink, the arches recede. The ocean reads, then smoothes over, our passing. That house, and that woman’s body, and her husband, lie in the distance behind us, but here, at the edge, they are impossible to believe in. The sea unearths trivia and casts it at our feet, and suddenly the smallest stone, wet, looks promising, and a sand dollar, half broken or buried, seems a coin we can thumb into the slot of — what?

Only here, at the boundary between water and land, do I feel the possibility of wholeness. Least confusing of refuges, this beach, with its contradictions. Here at the tide line. This is our first and last home. Where it begins and ends differs with the tides; this narrow strip of country shifts constantly, and the sea itself (fertile, sterile, salty) threatens to both claim and withdraw from me, take me or leave her, as it takes, and trades, and leaves the wrack of empty shells, of dead and dying things.

It hands me a bottle. Or rather, casts one at her feet. A green one, long-necked and hippy. I upend it and tip out the thread of gray silt and fumble with a forefinger in its throat and take out a letter that’s thick and wet and sticks to itself, a letter that shreds into tears when I try to unpeel it. What is written there matters terribly. But I remember, waking, that she can’t read.

*

In this dream she is back in the colony, surrounded by her kind. It is raining, and her fur sheds the rain. They press together for warmth. Against every part of her own skin, I feel another pulse beat.

She wakes and finds my breasts unaccountable.

*

In this dream, she is diving under the docks. In the shadow beneath the pier, the water is colder but calmer. A current thrills along her body, and I outstrip the falling crab net easily, plunder it and swim away, up and out of the water, looking over her shoulder at the bipeds that shake their fists and bark in their feeble way.

*

Marshall shook me awake. (She turns in the water and surfaces.)

“I was scared,” he said. “You weren’t breathing.”

“It’s morning. Take us to the beach.”

*

Her heart beat and I bounced from foot to foot while he shouldered our towel and checked the locks. My palms and armpits were damp, and I felt all her muscles gathered and ready, felt her inhabiting this foreign body. We could taste the ocean.

In the car I closed my eyes and called up the flex of her spine through the water. We sprang out of the car before Marshall could pull the parking brake, tearing off my clothes and turning them into kites that the wind cast onto the footpath. Mommy that lady was naked!

We sprinted toward the ocean and it was good, that first sight of the water. The waves ran high. They beat the surf to thick cream. I stumbled, laughing, through the foam; she barked and we dove under a breaker.

A terrible burning flooded my chest and lit up my brain, seizing her with confusion. She had expected to be sealed, water-tight, but the liquid invaded our skin, filled our mouth and nose, drenched our hair, licked our eyes, and seeped up high between our legs. The wave tumbled me and she tried to dive under it, but this body would not obey her. Instead of pulsing steadily, my legs thrashed, and her foreflippers pawed feebly at the wave; the wave flooded between my fingers, then brushed them aside, and she couldn’t move forward at all. She struggled, and the wave threw us to the bottom and ground us against the sand. She fought to float and I to stand, but the wave insisted. Although she could hold her breath, my lungs wouldn’t expand. She inhaled a wave and (oh, like knives) more waves (she cleared them so easily) dragged her down. I collapsed, but she, stronger, gave one last surge. She beat her flukes inside my feet. But had forgotten how to swim.

On the beach where we were married, Marshall blew into my mouth and kindled himself in me once more. I lay listless in his arms with my face turned away from the water, looking up at the sandstone cliffs, at the young fossils embedded there. Clams, mostly, their living meat caramelized to cold yellow crystal. The rock beneath me cased old bones. I traced them with my hand, the phalanges of the fins of my ancestors. Along the cliff above me, a green-lined shore crab sat in the stone concavity of a fossil clam. Thrown there by a storm, the crab crouched, legs drawn up, eyes revolving, taking in the lap of bones, the distant sea, its native country, my husband, me. Strange kernel, this castaway in its multiple casks of shell and stone and cliff. It sat, too wise or too small or too stupid to feel otherwise than at home.

When I felt she could walk, we headed for the car.

We almost stepped on the dead cow-nosed ray. Half-rotten, half-mummified, humming with flies, it lay above the high-tide line, among the cast-off skins of condoms shrunken in the weeds. The ray’s tail had shriveled to a turtle-stub, and its tear-thin skin had sunk over its gills, giving it a strange, sealed-off smile. The cartilage around its wings had gone soft. It was the color of road dust, dried up and ripening but still beautiful.

“Oh, Marshall.”

He detected a smell and wanted to move on. I squatted next to the ray and inspected the fruit-peel skin that had drawn back from the creature’s head.

“Don’t touch it honey, it’s dead.”

But she reached out to move it, and he could tell she’d need help. It was big, five feet from wing to wing.

“Don’t touch it, Lise.”

She picked at one edge and turned it. The death-smell blared — a more-than-fish smell. She gasped as they beheld the insouciant maggots at their feast.

Now she was crying, really crying (Elise, who never cried, who didn’t know how), saying Marshall please, please. We can’t just leave it, please, help me.

He wrapped it in their towel, averting his face, then jogged the dead ray down to the water. He dumped it on an incoming wave.

The waves carried the ray out. Water licked the animal so it gleamed, and the waves lifted its wings. It tumbled in the breakers, flashing its white belly. The surf returned it again and again to the beach. Marshall dragged the ray out further, but it kept coming back. Finally, he swam it into the deep water, where the waves closed over it, and it sank.

Marshall and I didn’t talk on the way home. My whole body itched with caked salt; my lungs felt scoured. I was colder than I had ever been. And the need to get to my skin, to feel it, to handle it with my naked hands, shook me.

Her skin came between them
Eleventh cognate
rot/comfort

When they arrived home, she marched to the deep freeze and pulled out the package of foil. She picked it free and shook the frost out of the old thing and held it to herself, stroking it and smelling it and singing.

She let it defrost and brought it into his bed. It stank of wet compost, and then of a rendering plant. The skin buzzed with sand flies and sea lice. At first clammy and placental, it grew tacky and stiff. The sawed edges where they’d parted it cured into sharp points that scratched him in the night. The bloody inner membrane dried black and flaked off, revealing nasty jaundiced buckskin beneath. Each morning he found flecks clinging to his skin. The shafts that held the claws loosened their grip, dried up and drew back. And the claws themselves, brittle keratin, began to break down. The crease of his sheets collected splinters, and curved quills embedded themselves in the sleepers’ unprotected skin. He would awaken to find one of his fingers protruding from her former nostril, and once (he shuddered at this), his undiscriminating penis inserted itself, during a nocturnal reverie, into a vacant eye socket.

She trailed the skin behind her like some freakish transitional object. It became baubled with growths — buboes of chewing gum, tar, wax, and something unidentifiable and sticky (varnish? semen? sap?). It left damp patches on the sheets. Its soft bits got softer, and its hair seemed to grow. It provided all of death’s textures: the coarse, the spongy, the rank, the friable, the dry, the powdery, the black.

He left the bed.

*

I missed him. I did. If I could have, I would have clawed an opening in him and put him on like a second skin. I wanted so badly to inhabit him.

He left the bed, and I was cold, colder than ever, and he was sealed off from me.

I grew fearful for my skin. What was there left to put on?

*

He found her trying to refasten the torn belly. She closed and reclosed it stupidly.

“Stop this. You stink. This stinks. Take off that goddamn thing.”

The head no longer fit her snugly. The eye sockets gaped over her cheeks; he felt discomfited, addressing those drooping, blank patches of skin.

“I can’t even see your eyes, Lise.”

He swallowed hard and steeled himself to adjust the head. The muzzle sagged onto her chest. Its upper lip snagged an eyetooth. He noticed the gums were turning black, and the teeth looked dead. When he adjusted the head, the sea lion’s tongue fell over his hand. It felt like very old flypaper. He looked into her eyes. Against the stiff fur they stood out, moist and healthy, with pale blue whites.

“Let me get this off you. You can’t breathe in that thing.”

She hugged the skin more closely.

He abandoned tenderness.

She didn’t respond.

Took it up again.

Nothing.

He braced himself and then, as a last resort:

“I love you.”

The head slipped down and lolled to one side. A tuft of her hair poked through an eye socket. The snaggled mouth curled a derisive lip.

“You have to choose. Right now. Me, or the skin.”

The sea lion shook her head.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Me? Or it?”

She said nothing.

His hands pressed mine, then ground the bones together. I felt how strong his hands were. They knew so many things I might prefer not to learn. He crushed my hands between his, but the skin kept away the pain. I filled my sinuses with my sweet smell, the smell of my skin. I rolled it over my taste buds and drew it into my lungs. His fingers squeezed mine with sharp impatient pulses: press, release, press, release. It began to hurt. I ignored it. And then the pressure left, his hands left, and I heard him brush them together in disgust. Then I heard them rummage through a drawer. A rustle of plastic, and his footsteps, advancing.

He slipped one blade of the scissor into her left socket and brought the shears together. Half of the face fell down onto her shoulder. He hewed through the second eyehole. Her other head emerged, eyes utterly black and astounded. She saw that he was crying. He grasped the halves of her head in his fists and tore them apart. He stuffed the rotten rags of flesh and fur into a garbage bag. She beat at him, but her hands had no effect on his. He went on tearing her skin into strips. He broke her jaw over his knee and tossed the tinkling bone and teeth into the bag. He ripped the skin from her shoulders and bared her chest. His nails scored the flesh, and he plucked and picked and pulled, and the blood matted under his nails and he shredded her skin into gobbets, stripped the mitts from her hands. As she bent over to save the scraps, he attacked the hide on her back and stripped her down to her bottom fins. She held a last large piece in her fists. He tore it from her, and she was left with a slick tag in either hand. He shoveled the last of the skin with a dustpan and dumped it in the bag.

*

I stood at the railing of the pier and watched him tie my skin to his crab hoops. A crowd of dark-eyed women and their husbands gathered around us. The women nodded at me and steered their husbands away. The husbands looked over their shoulders at us, their eyes eager and bright.

Marshall drowned the hoops of my skin and drew up crab after crab. He put them in a wicker basket lined with seaweed.

“Dinner,” he said.

“Now open your hands.”

“No.”

“Open your hands.”

He pried away the last two pieces of my skin and flung them out, hard and high over the water. One piece fell to the bobbing gulls. Happy Jack caught the other and bore it away.

My husband took my face between his hands, and I could smell myself on him.

“Lise, now you have to stay with me.”

His hands felt how she, inside my skin, turned away from him.

His eyes were red, and wet, and pleading. But his hands knew.

What could I do? I took his hand.

The seal wife, having dismantled her skin
Twelfth cognate
together

We sat alone on the beach, our hands spread out on the sand beside one another, not touching. We sat together, quite alone. People do not herd. Even in groups they remain upright and isolated. Something about their (our) bipedal symmetry suggests it: marked stanchions of loneliness.

The sand pressed my feet comfortingly. I burrowed in past the ankles. A line of pelicans dipped low and skimmed the surface of the water, as though ironing it with their flight. I watched the dorsal drift of a sail as it passed the point. There must have been people on board, sunning, watching the water, yet at that distance the boat was just another solitary creature making its way.

How would it be to simply sit and let the tide come in around me? One wave broke like a woman winding curlers; another opened out in a fan. Some swirled, a sidewise fleeing of individual channels; some drew straight lines of retreat. Others met on the bias, a careless film, a cast, a drag. Taken all together, a great cold shrug of sea.

A surfer emerged from the ocean and flicked the water from his tattoos. He joined his group of sunburned buddies where they’d pitched camp beneath the rock wall. They were stoned and full of the air and the sea, sore-muscled from bracing their boards, cutting through waves, riding them sweetly in to shore.

“Two blondes were on opposite banks of a river,” I heard one say.

“The first blonde yells to the second blonde, ‘How do you get to the other side?’ The second blonde hollers back, ‘You are on the other side!’”

An explosive chorus of barks, resonant, overlapping. It sounded so strongly of grief that my own chest swelled in sympathy, my throat opened, my glottis vibrated. The human in me heard sorrow, but the other remembered how it felt to make that sound with her fellows, and had no memory of grieving.

The seal wife, having lost her skin, looked toward the rocks, where the remains of her colony pressed together, basking, chewing fleas, arching their backs with their noses to the sun. She remembered that wet-dog press of haunch and shoulder, the way touch defined their borders and yet connected the close-crowded bodies of her former colony — how it was to be a center in a crowd of centers.

I miss the comforts of pressure. My body’s is the loneliness of a body released — the too-light freedom of the air. Now I am a floating element, unmarked by the press of rock, or belly, or fellows’ hind feet. I even miss the colder, absolute pressure of the sea. I swam in that vast and singular tear without knowing it, inhabited the soul of the world, which was better, far more free and painless, than having a soul inhabit me and express itself in drops, tiny and sterile, in which nothing swims but salt.

—

Amy Parker is starting her second year studying fiction at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she is a Teaching Writing Fellow.

Download this story as a .pdf.

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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




****

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

Then it breaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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












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






______________________________________________________________________



Option 3
–Rachel Zucker

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

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

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

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

Honesty, in any case, not an asset.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t remember what that means.

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

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

One is trim, fit and impeccably stylish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One does not have children. What is that like?

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

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

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

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

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

The point is to play well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have neither.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have nothing else to say about Colorado.

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

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

What is work?

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

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

What is work?

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

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

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

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

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

I have no new poems. Which exhausts me.

What is work?

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

My memory. This memory.

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

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

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

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

One has the most beautiful diction. Exquisite.

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

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

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

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

Feeling is part of the form, of proper form.

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

Fodder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does one wear to a funeral?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now here.

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

Now here.

To do:

The ocean.

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

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

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

At 4 AM this morning Ilana Stein died.

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

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

Does one fear death?

The ocean again.

What would one wear to a funeral?

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

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

The Book of Nothing is

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

________________ nothing if not

The stars last night, after a clear day.

A week ago Ilana Stein died.

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

In one’s Armani…

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

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

Does one sleep well or suffer from insomnia?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does one drink? Do drugs? Did one?

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

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

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

Has one ever wanted to be an activist?

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

David Foster Wallace hung himself.

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

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

Are one’s shoes comfortable or simply fabulously fashionable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orientation. One’s orientation. My orientation.

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

The City blocks out almost everything. I am.

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

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

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

—June-October, 2008












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