The Voices by Albert Goldbarth
1. Paged
The dead will speak through anything.
Give them a rock and they’ll call it a PA system.
Give them light and they’ll fax.
The new dead are teetering
dextrously on the legbones of the old dead,
like stiltwalkers, summoning us to their powwow
in circles of chalk and foxfire and lime. The dead are
tapping out morse on their knucklebones,
are rattling (maracas), shivering (sistrums), though no one
metaphor ever suffices, the dead are flashing their millisemaphore
out of the poplar’s disjunctive bough.
What we call memory, anyone
once called ghosts: they know your name,
your dreams are their calling your name
in choric cut-and-paste recombination.
There’s that country where a flock of ibises shirring the sky
is something like a sentence being diagrammed. The air
is the dead’s; it is the dead, resimplified to particle and wave,
and we grow jittery at this, jittery, having learned
from the perfect Chinese vase and the sonnet: form
should close itself with grace and finality. Studying
the John Deere backhoe go at the ground for another grave,
the industry of it, the plain hard fact of the casket,
it’s impossible to think of anything other than nothing,
nothing nothing nothing, in that clayey earth. The mouth
must be among the first of our softnesses to crumble . . .
Afternoon. Ohio. Heat. You
pass by a stone and the summer air is
humming around it. You’re being paged.
2. Nuts
“Not this one, this is junk . . . THIS one!”
– my friend Bob Lietz is lifting an intensely coral fountain pen
with a marbled girdle of celadon-green, from a weltered-up tray
of inferior others. Slowly, this week I’m visiting him
in the slumbering swales of hicksville Ohio, I’m beginning
to see these 60-year-old beauties – these neglected
panatellas and cheroots of yesterwriting – through his zealousness:
a burgundy laminate Maxima Vacumatic,
a Duofold Lapis Blue and a Duofold Mandarin Yellow,
a Montblanc filigree Spider-and-Web, and the rest . . . It
isn’t the money (although there’s wheelingdealing by
the oodle: a Parker Aztec goes for $10,000), “They’re
lovely,” his voice pressed thin by the weight, the sweet
and intimate weight, of this observation, “and people . . .”
he searches, and settles, half-satisfied only, on “cared so much.”
I’ve seen him lost inside the lustrous finish of a blue-black cap
for fifteen nearly-sacramental minutes. Later,
the long lawn and its scumbled heads of clover growing
shadowy with dusk: “This might sound crazy
but some of these pens, they’re telling me stories
about their original owners. I live with the pens for a while,
I get glimpses from those earlier lives. Here – ” one
is engraved HON NYLAND DARBY. “Hon, you see?
The Honorable. He was a judge, I think a hanging judge
of the old school. Over time I’ll know more.” He sees
my look. “I told you it’s crazy.” Maybe. I think
of the canes of the blind, defining an alien world, and how
tonight Bob might be holding a pearl Wahl Deco-banded,
figuring out the details on the other side
of the greatest darkness. “Some pen collectors are really nuts.”
3. Ghost-Mouth-Home
The bowls are scored in a ritual design
“whose meaning is lost in far antiquity” – we guess,
though, that this diamonded pattern means
a net: a something to catch, then hold. The bowls
are filled to the lip with cistern water, and
then brought by the shaman (sometimes
today, it’s a priest) to a consecrated mud-brick hut
on the high plains, where a set of rough-cut jalousies
slits the winds. The water’s surface feathered
north-to-south means such-and-such; east-to-west,
a different reading. These are the ancestors
speaking. There are endless combinations of repeated
disturbance, glisten, duration, force; the dead
have many homiletic comforts and admonitions,
it turns out the dead are breezy old coots. Well
why shouldn’t they be? – the living are yammering
daylong, from their first ass-slapped bewailing to
the last of their deathbed natter (“come close, the gold
is buried in . . . gghhhk . . . “), with any number
of Creative Writing Workshops stuffed between,
their flags of self-expression flapping (“I’d
make that ‘yapping’”) over the labor of all of those
sovereign-states-of-one. Meanwhile, the sun
is lush in the east; the hut of the ancestor bowls,
the “ghost-mouth-home,” is glowing like an ingo
in that undiluted touch. The goats are rounded up,
and the kitchen-embers are coaxed into flame,
and the children are marching chattering
into their poetry writing class the teacher
back from the city started this year.
4. Primitive Engine
All afternoon and half into dusk, a man and a woman have hurt
each other, using words like horsewhips – when he thinks of it
in this way, he can see the cruel exactitude: that brutal force
into the handle, then its delicate translation at the fine and
damaging tip. He sits there, watching dusklight moil inside
the dust of the road with a sedimentary thickness. Nothing’s
clear. That morning, he sentenced a fellow for stealing a horse,
a constant offender, a snake-eyed son-of-a-b. This thief was
the size of an ox, and cried like a kitten. Only now, with
day’s-end light in his auburn two inches of whiskey,
does he question his decision. “My client had every right to consider
the roan his property”; “Your Honor, I object – the bill of ownership . . .”
and so on, into the usual murk the truth becomes under anything
over a single gaze. And who is the High and Mighty Nyland Darby
to pass stern judgment – eh?: a man who’s made his wife
cry down black lightning from the sky, to fry them both
clean off the Earth. With one more whiskey-inch, her waterfall
of red hair, and the strawberry-roan of the mare, will mix
in a sickly sugary way that knocks him weak to his knees,
dry-heaving . . . then what would his grandfather think, surveying
this sorry world from his august oil portrait? The first
robed representative of the Courts to preside in the county, and
to this day no one man more just has graced that bench . . . He
doesn’t swig his third inch from the bottle, though;
he’s only had enough to lift the Old Man’s quill pen nimbly
from its crystal well – the locally-famous “sentencing pen.”
It’s beautiful, isn’t it? All of that weightless faery substance
framing a central rectitude. The more he holds it,
strokes it, as if charging a primitive engine, the more the Old Man
fills the room then clears his throat.
5. When the Word Is Whispered
An amateur rockhound’s cracking a basket’s likeliest
gray candidates, but – nothing nothing nothing . . . / “This
statue is basically wicker, decorated with metal buttons.
At full moons, ‘the lean ones’ – their lineage of kings going back
at least 16 generations – communicate through it.” / . . . nothing
still, and nothing, but then . . . / “The goddess’s temple-devotee
lifts the viper, flings it to the tiles, and in its writhing esses
reads deific prediction.” / . . . the final split reveals a perfect
fern in the center, each rung of it eloquent. Quite the granite
raconteur.
My father is dead, and while I sense him
in the air sometimes – a kind of psychic jacquardwork
I’ve weaved of sun and oxygen – I’ve never heard one syllable
of post-interment jibberjabber. “Yes” or “no” would work
on almost any occasion; given my ability to face temptation,
“no” reiterated once a day or so, and only “no,” would do just
fine
– one lousy sound you’d think an elm could utter,
given infinite time and infinite wind (both are). But
I’ve visited Lietz in Ohio; from now, I’m going to keep my ears
emotionally skinned, and when the word is whispered up that parfait
shale and bitumen, the dime-sized gong-bones are going
to boom. I’ve seen Lietz cleaning the cases of Schaeffers of his
with all of the care of a Vatican artisan giving a final chamois-shine
to the rose-marble pizzles of putti. Yes and I’ve
witnessed him bearing a good day’s collecting
out of the junk shop’s mausoleum-like gloom, and into
the ordinary leafy light the car was parked in,
dancing like mad, and I’ve heard him
saying (maybe not in these words, but saying) this is the gold one,
this is the chosen one, this is the nib that will save us.
Poem Beginning with a Quote from Keith Laumer’s Galactic Odyssey and Ending with a Quote from Mika Waltari’s The Egyptian by Albert Goldbarth
Two thousand light years is a goodly distance. . . . Along the way
we encountered life-forms that ranged from intelligent gnat-swarms
to the titanic slumbering swamp-minds of Buroom.
And on a world that circles Ultima Three are beings
that are little more than consciousness set in a wad
of electrified jelly. On the moon of Farther Kush we find
the Master Race of maggots – if a maggot
had a scissorsy beak and the I.Q. of a physicist.
The slitherpeople of Fomalhaut mate
in the hollowed-out bowel of an enemy, and they only pray
to transitory states of matter (having, as they do,
a fear of stasis). We would be amazed especially
by the fishy cast of faces of the Spawn Folk,
with those thick-lipped gills around their throats
like coils of sentient leis, and with the tentacled
excrescences that grow forth from their heads
and are cyclically sloughed – except
that life on the ocean bottoms of Earth is equally
in this image, and Darwinianly closer
to home. The bodies seemingly all-over studded
with living rusted spikes, or swagged
in fleshy wormlike dangle-bulbs,
the blobular and ginsu-jawed and tissue-shrouded
demon fish 5,000 feet below! . . . But
really these are only logical extensions
– deeply, fittingly adapted – of the standard
range of trout and salmon and Lake Superior whitefish
that my grandfather placed on shard-ice
in the barrels of his fish store, and as well in the display case
where a few of the sharper specimens, so lushly grained
and speckled, were set like gems. He worked,
this greenhorn Jew, his sixty-hour weeks
amid an endlessness of chucked guts; there were times
when the air in the back room filled with scales
like the sky of a shook-up sno-globe,
there were times his hands were slick with so much fish
he couldn’t grip the length of pipe he kept
by the great spool of twine for protection. Once,
the story goes, it slipped like a bar of bathtub soap
to his own toe, oont I hop around der sawdust
like a rabbit! And then: oont a goot thing, too!
The enemy he was ready to bop, a stranger
with a great Egyptian honker and the decidedly
“other” fashion look of Arabic dress – this man
become my goot frien’! In the version I know,
the immediate bonding gesture is when Wallih lifts a shnozzy
porgie up to his face in profile, and then right away
up to my grandfather’s face, to indicate
they’re nose-kin. I think of that
anecdote as I walk these crazy late-20th-century
fractured American streets: how we’re the variations
worked upon those elements we hold in common:
pain, and pleasure; need, and need again. On Mars
it wouldn’t be different; not in ancient Egypt. The journey
was profitable to me, for it taught me that,
if the rich and powerful are everywhere alike
and think in the same way, so also are the poor
the same the world over. Their thoughts are the same
though their customs differ and their gods bear different names.
A World Above Suffering by Albert Goldbarth
1.
When my grandfather Louie came here, from Chicago,
his phlegm was already marbled with blood.
So here he stayed for a year, in the flat
and unclogged light of the mountains,
and here he healed. He stayed on one year more,
a kind of payment, he helped with the gurneys and the pans,
in Denver, in 1906,
at the Jewish Sanitarium for Consumptives.
2.
Even near the giant windows, the air in the ward seemed brown
with institutional viscosity. Outside, though,
on the balconies designed to accommodate hospital beds,
the patients were lined up side-by-side like tiles in a game,
white tiles in sunlight.
In the left bed,
Morris Rosenfeld, the “sweatshop poet,”
“the voice of the people,” coughing up the bunched threads
of his 15-hour days bent to the hemming machines or the irons
“. . . until I was a machine as well,” he says, then starts
some quavering lines from one of his poems
of raw-throated grief and indictment.
In the bed on the right,
Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden), whom they called
“the Jewish Byron” – translator (“Hiawatha,”
even the Koran), lexicographer, diarist, and aspirant
to the gates of the lofty, “singingness” he termed it, and
he cultivated an Orientalist’s interest
in the music of Chinese poetry, its willow and plum.
* * *
My grandfather tended to both of their enfeeblements,
the spit-cups and the soiled strips. In the afternoon light
of the balcony, which seemed to hit the three of them uninfluenced
by a single touch of the Earth, he’d listen bemusedly
to their conflicting Yiddish.
3.
Today they’re reading new poems to each other.
“And this time, Mr. Shakespeares,” says the nurse,
then wags her finger, “NO EXCITEMENTS! Louie,
see they shouldn’t get heated.” Last time, both of them
waxed apoplectic in righteous aesthetic wrath.
“Hokay now,” Rosenfeld clears his throat
and
we’re back in an attic firetrap shirtwaist work pit,
tethered there by hunger to an 84-hour week, in the heat
that clambers on your naked shoulders pickaback,
in the piles of scrap and mouse-filth past your ankles,
in the insufficient gaslamp, eye wobble, wrist fatigue,
the stitch in the hem and its sister stitch
the razor-edged worm in your side. For this,
twelve dollars a week. For this, with twenty people breathing
thickly in a windowless room, the gaslamp trickling fumes,
the bucket toilet radiating waves of human waste in a corner.
Some of these workers are twelve years old, some in their seventies.
Rosenfeld soars in exhortation, then squinches his spirit down low
in hurt or self-pity, then takes off soaring
explosively again. “The time clock drags me off at dawn
to the corner of Pain and Anguish . . .”
And Yehoash
is moved by this, and by the rocks and birds
his balconymate makes alternately with his gesturing hand.
It would be unfair, saying anything else; Yehoash
is moved, his eyes grow damply alive. But also
his work could be, as Irving Howe would later phrase it,
“willfully distant from any Jewish experience.” This
afternoon, he reads lines modeled loosely on
“The Song of Picking Mulberry,” “Song of Plucking Cassia,”
“A Fish Trapping Song,” “The Cowherd’s Song,” and
“Song of the Woman Weaving,” where, if there’s complaint
(“. . . the levy of the silk tax comes too early this year . . .”),
labor isn’t pain so much
as cause for meditation, under the great, gong Chinese moon,
and weariness isn’t more than mist
a white crane sculls obliquely through. He reads
about the Empress Yang-Tse-Fu, and in the Denver air
appear her hundred golden doors, her sapphire-sided palanquin
and honor guard. “And the cherry blossoms
settle on the shore,” he ends.
So of course
in a moment they’re squabbling, and their normally pale,
whey-blue faces ruddy the color of brick. “Boys!
BOYS!” – the nurse can see it from out on the lawn,
and yells up: “Louie, DO something!” And
my grandfather stands between them,
in their utterly befuddling adjacence, holding out
– ineffectually, for no particular reason
other than chance – a length of bandage gauze: something
like an ancient Egyptian attendant
whose mummies refuse to hold still.
4.
That night, my grandfather dreamed.
He was back in Chicago, following
the stink of the tenement twistways.
Here was the cart of herring piled like ingots,
just as he remembered: wavering
in their day’s-end rank aurora . . . Here,
the rubbish mound to the height of a three-floor warehouse
with, as usual, some street kids sledding on greased planks
down its wormy length . . . Everything was real,
more than real. At one corner he saw a woman,
above, in a sixth-floor window, naked from the waist up.
It was an ironing sweatshop – the heat was too much.
Her breasts were small, but drooped with appalling weight
to the six floors of gravity. She was retching. “I don’t CARE!
I need the air from the roof!” – then she disappeared from the window.
Now, in the dream, he saw her sitting at the roof-edge
as the rim of the city turned the burning tulip colors of sunset.
It was cooler here; her breast-flesh pebbled slightly in the air.
The moon came out, the whole of a wheel-of-cheddar moon. She
started singing, it was “The Song of the Hemmer and Ironer”:
Near dawn the pigeons stitch the sidewalks.
Later, at noon, the streets of my city are ironed
By the August sun.
Mother, a life is harsh but also beautiful.
Father, the rhythm of the piecework is a red thread
In my wrist. At night I want to unfasten this immense
Bone button in the sky, and see what’s on
The other side of the night, if work is required there too.
Let the ladies of the court play their flutes
And peek at the day from behind their fans.
I’m going down into the streets, I’m going
To dance stitch-stitch in the gutters!
* * *
Then he woke. “China,”
he thought – and he would always picture this roof –
“a world above suffering.”
* * *
He woke, he washed, he walked into another shift
of pads and ointments. Everything
was ahead of him still. He, who believed so much
was behind already, in merely his getting here . . .
everything was ahead of him still. The caged-up days
in the elevator, wearing the liver-colored-and-gold-braid
organ grinder’s monkey outfit, whisking the buyers
of silk kimonos and homburgs to their appropriate floors . . .
the fish store, and the failure of the fish store, and
the dented awl for chipping the pike from its jacketing ice . . .
and Rosie, meeting Rosie, wooing Rosie in the candle-lit dinge,
and sticking with Rose, over whatever
decades of sexual ardor, scrimping, and piety made their life then . . .
all of it waited for him, in him, was a seed
inside my grandfather as he lathered his hands, then
wheeled his charges into the immediate sun.
Both Rosenfeld and Yehoash would be cured, and off
to their individual destinies. But that would be long after
Louie packed his satchel and took the train away
from the mountain of poems and wetly rumbling lungs.
Enough was enough.
5.
Years later, back in Chicago now, he wandered
into Chinatown. Not the tourist version; the actual
squat-in-a-corner thing. He recognized
the ghetto poverty, the open ghetto
furnace of a heart – although the milky smoke
unwinding from the joss sticks wasn’t his,
nor the amazing hothouse orchid-like fish
in pails on the peddler carts. A man named Lee Hsün
stopped him, he was so obviously lost.
“Fella, where you from?” He meant
what neighborhood, but my grandfather answered
“From Poland.”
“Ah – Poland!” And Lee’s eyes
widen in admiration.
“Poland! Princesses! Palaces!”
Fang by Albert Goldbarth
1.
They both remember the throat
is silver riverined
in the deep beet-color of blood,
a shockingly lovely expanse
the spent – the loser – wolf displays
below the aimed jaws of the victor wolf:
these two that have been battling
to the death, and yet now that the death
is a gift, an admission, the victor
turns from its completion, neurally-wired
for what the PBS narrator stops just short
of calling pity or mercy. He goes on to flashing
stills of a similar stimulus-sign in the violence
of baboons and other animals – zebras
was it? chimps? It’s the throat of the wolf
they remember, the undeniable
persuasion of its flaunted susceptibility; that,
and how at this moment the three-year-old
came wringing the tears of a three-year-old
into the living room: he had peed,
it turned out, on the bigdeal heirloom rug,
and this announcement of the crime was
at once his protection.
2.
There’s also a five- and also a seven-year-old.
She remembers it this way: every day
a three- and a five- and a seven-year-old, belovéd,
inescapable;
they’re nice all right, and funny, and you can watch them rummage inside decision-making as if they were trying on grownups’ clothes, some suit that hangs like an elephant hide about them, but mostly they’re me-me-me and snotdribble, talking really talking to them is like talking into one of those stupid fake cellular car phones people use to look important, and anyway how can you say my children are rapidly driving me with their endless savage opera of whoops like small game to a cliff edge, how can you say this to your children, and yet who else does she talk to outside of her nowhere job in Poop, Nebraska, well her husband of course who she loves, and who’s so even-keeled in dealing with the nicked knee and the borrowed car and remembering that when Nan and Oliver come for dinner Oliver can’t eat shrimp so let’s do some of the fettucini plain just butter and who-really-hit-who-first and even the tax deduction for Christ sake ALL AT THE SAME TIME that she wants to make his penis smile as wide as a piano out of pure appreciation and then immediately hates herself for always having to play at The Appreciative One, not that he ever asks for that, of course not it would be too imperfect, some days she could smash his face in the press of the waffle iron, that’s a good one, tell that to me-me-me for a bedtime story, a three-year-old wouldn’t believe it, surely her friends her thirty-three-year-olds would shrug at her list of narcissistic bitching, there are people being mangled under taxi wheels and raped with cheap green bottles of wine by gang boys, who the hell is she to snivel about this invisible little nibbling-away at her quickmeats, look it’s nothing even Vivian says her closest lady buddy, do you want a one-term membership at the workout club and we’ll go shop for a lycra suit like mine with the matching sweatbands, look it’s nothing.
But the bite of the wolf is something. The bite of the wolf can’t be denied.
It’s so simple: she makes of her wrist a throat. “. . . is silver riverined in the deep beet-color of blood.”
When he returns from the store he’ll find her absentmindedly holding the razor.
There! (So simple . . .)
There! NOW do you see?
3.
Love cuts, his daddy told him once.
It’s night, she’s asleep, the bag of fettucini
is still where he dropped it.
He remembers
it this way: every day, for everyone, needs stitching its imperiled seams together every minute.
Nan came over, after she’d heard. She was full of pronouncements. “Everybody has problems. Look, I have problems. Oliver’s as crammed with them as an olive loaf. You can’t take one woman’s troubles and make a fetish of them.” And there was more: the term “emotional blackmail” kept appearing. He had to ask her to leave – politely; she meant well.
The grunge of it doesn’t leave, however. He stares at himself in a polished spoon. He tries so hard. Well, they all try hard: he has to be fair. But some people’s trying, let’s face it, keeps a family a humming working unit. Some people’s trying barely keeps themselves from blowing apart into pointillism. He feels very alone in Pit or Poot or Putt-Putt, Nebraska, as they call it. A smear in a cereal spoon.
She really wanted to kill him and the kids, he knows, but loved them at the same time, to the same degree, and so she attempted its inverse. “This is a very creepy thought,” he says to the spoon. And should he just beat the bloody shit out of her now, or seem as if he might, would that be cathartic? Should he simply go about the quiet tender ministrations of a worried caring husband? Yes, but wouldn’t that very unruffledness and show of capability be an implicit rebuke to her recent hyperdrama? Mr. Spoon says, “It’s a no-win situation.” Once he hears it from an outside authority – Mr. Spoon is stern and impressive – he gets to say, without feeling guilty, “It isn’t fair.” Or anyway, without feeling terribly guilty.
He can see a line of civilized reaction (in a way, it’s emblematic of what makes civilization possible) extending from the law of the pack to their own much-mortgaged shingle roof in Puke, Nebraska. Now the entire world has to stop and admire the glint of her razor blade and revolve around it.
. . . now that the death is a gift, an admission . . .
You can’t win against such weakness.
4.
Later that week, I visited.
I heard the story three times: his and hers
and theirs, which really makes three
different stories. The tv show
and the scatter of spinach pasta . . . all of the details,
all of the pennyweights and bearings that keep
a great unthinkable thing from flying off.
They put the kids to bed, goodnight-goodnight-goodnight.
Then we could lose the public edge of ourselves
in a couple of bourbons – excellent stuff,
the kind with smoky ghosts inside – and talk with our individual
softnesses showing: the talk
of trusting friends. And then they took themselves to bed.
I was sleepless. This is what I remember:
I wanted to gather them all in my arms;
but life doesn’t work like the songs.
I wanted to write a poem that would heal;
but eventually we grow up, we learn about that.
So I just kicked around the guest room,
watching the night refold itself
over Putz or Pap, Nebraska,
a singularly opaque and enigmatic night.
I have to admit: I was useless there,
I was only a small slow bellows of sighs,
like some machine they’d left on, to humidify the room.
I walked out: the night was something enterable,
a black gas, something filming the face.
And then I heard it, and quickly returned inside,
I’d heard it licking its lips, I’d heard it
circling these friends of mine. And it wasn’t only
this house on the plains, this clinical grief – no,
everywhere, I saw now, it was waiting for its chance,
wherever a door was open, any time a voice cracked.
It was born in the bones. It was burnt in the sky.
And the moon up there was an old old moon,
so slim and sharp, the oldest moon
that ever stabbed us
– the tooth of a wolf.
Acquisitions by Albert Goldbarth
The museum’s newest, tooted in the media even down to a what
to name them competition for the kids (where Scooter & Skeeter are
so far
favored) is a pair of flying waterfowl an Ice Age artist carved
in ivory so abstractly it takes a blink to see this stylized
cross or dagger is really a sleekly avian glide, and
then your breath catches. The city’s glitziest connoisseurs
and tv news were gathered here when, who knows why,
a young street artist snapped, began a dance somewhere between
kabuki and epilepsy, and very quickly was roughhoused out
of the gallery, back to the street, and from there to another museum
of sorts, the City Asylum. I’ll return to the ivory birds but
not before we watch him being stripped of everything,
his clothes, his name – he spends a week unpersoned this way,
then the following morning they find he’s written SHIT
with his own, across the rec room wall in letters two-feet tall,
it being his only possession and, to that extent, the whole
of his increasing need to individuate himself
(although they’ll only understand it as one further stage of the madness).
Other inmates save their fingernails in tiny caches hollowed
out of the soaps, or build up balls of the dirt from under their nails
– nothing stops our urge to say this beautiful thing
is mine. Those striking tannin-color ivory flyers
the p.r. staff is so gaga over, are carbon-dated to such a dizzying
point b.c., I wonder were they functional
(the keys, let’s say, that opened winter’s iced-up locks;
or tally markers; or small hellos to the god)
or did these enter through that nano-door in history
where someone simply wanted his or her own life
embountied by the loveliness of owned and otherwise
wholly gratuitous objects? If not these ivory birds,
these scored bone buttons. If not these buttons, this plaque.
As soon as burials appear in the strata,
there’s grave goods. Here’s the photo of the skeleton of one
Cro-Magnon man, still in a headband strung from fox teeth,
wearing garlands of beads as fatly swagged
as these overpacked, orotund stanzas of mine.
* * *
I’ll write with the strict, and yet-mild-tempered, reserve
of Elizabeth Bishop. I’ll write with the loony encompass
of Kenneth Koch. I’ll revile this war and all wars and their
retrospecies makers; and I’ll praise the teeming details
of my purview, from the fires-stippled night sky, to the little
kitschy quiddities by which my day is lightened – like this 1937
Ungle Wiggily board game, mighty fine an item even fifty-four
years later: Ungle Wiggily Longears suffers from “the rheumatiz” and
only your plucky throws of the dice can safely maneuver this
sympathetic rabbit gent past perils like the awful shears-beaked
Skeeziks, to the ministrations, far in the upper-right corner,
of Doctor Possum. The museum tells us this is nothing
new: toy rams and chariots have been raised from the rubble
of Sumer; or from ancient (circa 1300 b.c.) Egypt, here’s
a board game, senet, of acacia and faience, all
of its wood tokens and knucklebone dice: intact. It’s easy
enough to see two soldiers sliding the hours away with this,
in the lull of a shitty campaign. And then the horn sounds, and
in the snap of a finger they’re two lopped necks on a battleground.
Update it to poker and fighter jets, and nothing’s really changed;
for some, “acquiring” means nation-states – the very urge
I’m writing this about, but on a monstrous scale, making
human Skeezikses of everyone it touches. I say: keep it
small. Those ivory birds: exquisite spirit-thumping things, but
small, a flock could fit in your pocket. Of course we know
someone who isn’t allowed to have pockets. In fact he
isn’t allowed to use the ward’s one toilet himself,
not after the wall-smearing scene: they
make a bored attendant stand there, watch him wipe, and wait
until he flushes. And at night, in the isolation cell,
when he’s strapped to his pallet and finally alone, “Eyesaiah” comes
to visit. It’s a pun he’s invented, a Biblical-sounding name
for when he closes his eyes. He sees his friend
in the shape of one of those Ice Age birds. It circles,
then lands . . . The darkness under those two closed wings
is the one thing they can’t take away from him.
Entire Lives by Albert Goldbarth
If only the simple indigenes of the place disported themselves
in heathenish ways, and were like children, were degenerated
progeny of Adam, then it would be in the name of Christ that
they’d be made to work their fields for the Crown – and,
lo! they were, upon investigation, simple, and like children,
and denatured sons of Adam since Biblical days. How
well things work. How slyly beautifully the past
condones the moment. If only they this, if only
they that. If only my uncle touched me, here, and even
here, when I was young, if only my mother drank and
walloped me with the waffle iron, then you’d understand
I’m not responsible for this dangerous weather
storming around my head: the sudden floods, the falling rocks,
of getting to know me. In Victorian novels, narrative
* * *
is the logic of causation: once
upon a time there was a violent rending of moral order.
An infant is abandoned in the dust mounds; or
two newborn babes are switched at birth; or one night
in the rookery an innocent serving-girl is seduced . . .
Whatever the wound, its stain appears 800 detailed pages later,
vengeances and curses and legacies shaping, in fact
explaining, entire lives. A friend of mine is up all night
in the 19th century, energetically touring its topiaried estates,
and the dike-workers’ wattle huts in the marshlands, and
the gypsy camps, and the barristers’ inner chambers . . .
There’s some problem of a birthmark – though a problem
with an origin and a culmination, comforting
to that extent; exterior; nameable; blameable. But eventually the light
* * *
of the 20th century, the late and frazzled drag-end of the century,
occludes the candles of Abbotshire and Chumley-in-the-Dingle, and
their place in an elaborate linkstitch pattern. Another
day of “real life” begins, and she faces into its pummel of unsolvable
mysteries. Is there a God? or no God? and in either instance how
and why
are we here at all, and is there a Final Edge, and what’s beyond it?
She sits at the window and watches the random drift
of the planet’s dander winking in the weak and early sun.
What physics says is that we’re elements (a little) mixed
in emptiness (a lot) – is it true? does it really describe
her hand she turns for study in this light, her hand
that’s slapped a face, that’s slept around a penis? is it
only densed-up air? is there a Purpose? are the lizard-selves
we once were still alive in us? . . . That afternoon,
* * *
in her therapist’s office, several questions backtrack
to her childhood. A part of her is five and half-remembering
/ no, inventing / no, remembering / now there isn’t any difference /
monstrous things. The part that’s thirty-five blushes,
yes, then makes a momentary imagistic linkup
to a blush-red birthmark suddenly revealed
in a lawyer’s rooms in Abbotshire: 800 busy pages
of deceptions and misapprehensions suddenly take regulated
shape, are given history, which is something like being given
a reason for having turned out this way at all. If only . . .
The therapist reaches into a mossy cavern . . . reaches and,
lo! – into the tar and the bone-pit, into
the boggy deep . . . Her uncle is moaning,
her mother is swinging the iron in its dark wonderful arc.
Real Speeches by Albert Goldbarth
The Child is Father of the Man
– William Wordsworth
“Applying for the mortgage loan is inimical
to the poetic imagination,” Coleridge says
somewhere, as he sits in patient, ursine contemplation
of the tinder glimmering lower in the fireplace, in a world
so far removed from verification of charge card balance
(or even from velcro), that its sea-tint crystal inkwells
and bills of Parliament and reticules may as well be rockjut
slathered over by trilobites in the Devonian ooze.
This makes it more amazing that Coleridge’s insight zips
unerringly to its future-century target: “The poetical fancy
exists inversely to any interior process undertaken by
the pecuniary and slimy,” or words to that effect, I’m sure
of this, although I remember that Wordsworth rushes in
just then, his alpenstock held overhead
like a megalomaniac conductor’s baton, and cogently argues that
“a poetry desirous of incorporating the real speech of real men
must therefore” (and everyone loves the dingy floss of his hair
and deepening apoplectic pink of his forehead) “incorporate even
the reptilian prattle of pinchpenny beancounter branch-bank
credit officers in their neutral-upholstered décor,”
I know I’ve read that in the preface to Lyrical Ballads,
or a version of that. Then Wordsworth, still expatiating,
insistently tugs at his friend’s great rumpled sleeve,
and leads him over the leas and the moors and the downs
and the dales and vales and dingles, as set
as a squire’s best-trained pointer on bringing Coleridge
to the one place that he knows of, where the poets
and the CPA’s of our con- and involuted “human condition”
most readily mingle in an easy mutuality
– and he’ll morph them both through time if necessary,
he so loves to make his point.
At McDonald’s at 8 in the morning, every morning,
the widowers club convenes: Eddie Tummy,
Wholesale Sam, Bad Bridge Job Sid, and The Other Sam,
four coffees and four bland danishes no matter what
meltdown horseshit heat (the term is Eddie Tummy’s) or knee-high
winter snow the weather brings. The famous speed of light
and the value of pi are no more constant
than this foursquare klatch of which, in some
mythology no doubt, the whole of the universe is borne
without a wobble from its first explosive yawn
unto its final chilly fizzle. Even here,
amid the wadded wrappers – even here, with the mother smacking
her stone-faced child (drowned out by the blare of the horns) –
a rightness happens, shapeliness occurs,
if the daily pattern of four men kvetching,
shaggy-dogging, and in general tower-of-babeling the b.s.
in a shared aesthetic is shapeliness. I’m lost
in the moneygibberish application form for the mortgage loan and a thick
Sargasso coffee mist, and by the time I look up,
Coleridge and Wordsworth have already joined these four,
the formermost having splurted Wholesale Sam and Eddie Tummy
with a novice’s squeeze of his ketchup packet,
entirely missing the amber plaque of his hash browns
– I can see he takes a barely suppressible pleasure in this
tomfoolery, and would like to include Bad Bridge Job Sid
in a second (and intentional) bombardment. Wordsworth
peckishly frowns. The Other Sam says, “Boobeleh,
kiss my a! This cocksucker nebbish they call a President
can mouth about his ‘trickledown prosperity’ until the moon
is as blue as Sidney’s balls, but I’m tellin ya” (now
he deftly orchestrates his lingo with his plastic coffee swizzler)
“you and me ain’t gonna see diddlysquat come tricklin.”
Eddie Tummy begins a rebuttal around a bite of scrambled eggs,
“Look, Mr. Economist Schmuck – ” and it seems to me
that Wordsworth isn’t as pleased with these exempla of his
as he’d planned: he likes to think about the rabble,
in their uncouth bumpkin way, decrying the florid excesses
of monarchy, but this unseemly convening is so . . . he
looks at Coleridge. Coleridge is absorbed
in eking grins from the smacked-around kid at the opposite table
(mommy having slipped to the john) by demonstrating his sudden
mastery of that very challenging instrument,
the ketchup geyser. “Ooo,” the kid says.
“Nebbish! Nebbish!” says Coleridge back. “. . . and clamp
their Congressional lips,” says Eddie Tummy, “around your wallet
like a putz, and suck your blood straight out.” I believe
it’s disapproval I see claiming Wordsworth’s face, but it’s
maybe dyspepsia: I’ve also tried the sausages
from time to time. “Ker-smish!” says Coleridge.
“Hey! You!” says the mother on returning. Now The Other Sam
is reminded by this frolic that he’s promised to bring
the latest Happy Meal toy to his granddaughter, who
he loves so much he carries her googoo face around (in a mystical way)
in his pacemaker, as some others would a loved one in a locket
– he’s up at the counter now, conniving a secret decoder
out of a register boy who’s sure he shouldn’t have to bother
with Happy Meal (i.e., burger or Chicken McNugget) requests
in the middle of breakfast trade. “You guys – I’m gonna go
put this in my car.” “Why, it’s so precious? Okay, go.”
Yes, it’s so precious. Out in the morning sun he’s suddenly
out in the morning sun of 1931 – he’s five, he’s standing there
with one hand, as small as a penny is how it feels, in his mother’s hand;
in his other he grips his Little Orphan Annie Club Decoder,
not unlike this later model but metal, real metal, not a crummy
acid-yellow plastic. Everything then was more substantial, yes?
The pie safe in a restaurant looked as solid as an ocean tanker.
Marriages lasted. Nickels could be saved and mean a new home.
Not like now, some dummy sitting in there with his stinking
home loan paperwork and a nickel-diameter ulcer.
Back then – morning sun. His mother wets a twist
of cotton napkin in her mouth and swabs a small smudge from his cheek.
They’re off to visit Tantë Mahlke – mommy’s mommy’s sister,
they tell him. She’s sick. She smells like unwashed laundry, unwashed feet.
He was scared. He sat there, as the grownups babbled, determinedly
entrancing himself with the circular deco design of the decoder,
falling into it, as if it were a hypnotist’s disc, and willing himself
away from these enormities, to another plane of being. Unaccountably,
he’s scared now: 1995. He does it still – he’ll lose himself
in the overdetailed workaday plot of “police procedural” novels,
Sid or Eddie will need to dig him out by force. “I guess,”
he says, “that the kid I was is the father
of who I’ve become,” or words to that effect, I’m sure he says this,
near the drive-thru lane, abidingly somewhere inside.
The Compasses by Albert Goldbarth
If the past will be seen to validate a current national image
of grandiosity, then the state will subsidize scholarly
archaeological expeditions, historical research, manuscript
codecracking. And if not, then not. This is the earliest
formulation of how the state and the softer sciences
interrelate. The supersecret government project
shrinks the medical research team to under-corpuscle size
and then injects it into the subject’s circulation (there
to ride the great blood rivers and micropinpoint the problem,
rooting it out completely at the subcellular level) only
if the health of a statesman or military commander
is in jeopardy; it’s unthinkable they’d fund it
for the purely wonder-stuffed pleasure of learning
the body the way we’d paddlewheel up other unknown interiors,
stopping to watercolor the spigoted caverns, meditate
inside an expanse of densely webbed and brambled parkland,
dig up a tussock, sing off-key, return home with a bag
of souvenirs. If I’ve been describing a poem (the tweezery
exploration of a self, until we disappear inside
the poet’s system like a pill) it isn’t one of the Old Ones: then,
the gods stomped lightning out of the mountain, and
the poem explained their impossible, Parnassian ways
to mortals; then, the poem was many-armed and
many-faced, and spake the Verities that govern us. Now,
– well, as Howard Nemerov said, “Every poet’s middle name
is Mimi.” I’m here! I had grandparents! Look, I even have
a photograph of them! – much triste and joi and frisson
the size of a hatband. A poppyseed dinner roll. A condom.
A new age “healing crystal.” A tear duct like an s-f
“wormhole” into alternate spacetime. This increasing
personalizing is the difference we see between the compasses
Blake etches gaping out of the Creator’s hand (they bind,
he says, the infinite with an eternal band) and
the compasses Donne has stand for the love-hinged
parting of one specific couple glorying in their everyday
seventeenth-century soap opera. Don’t
misunderstand me; the universe inside-outs itself
from anthrocentric to solarcentric, nations topple,
dinosaur ideas stalk the land . . . of course I cherish
the counterbalancing intimacies of the small
and finely-calibrated lyric poem! Of course I love
each sesame seed and eyelash of its warbling. But
I think I was wrong, before: I think the governments
will fund that poem. Will keep its author regarding
the family album. While the iron wheel rolls imperturbably
over the hills, and the bucket-jawed scoops eat
empires out of a thousand tiny lives, and the planets
clink together inside a velvet bag on the fat hip of power.
The Amounts by Albert Goldbarth
According to Franklin J. Foster of the University of Alabama, there
are in existence about 200 pistols of which each owner believes
he has the one that killed Abraham Lincoln.
– Curtis D. MacDougall
As if there weren’t enough. As if the 4,000 shoes
of Imelda Marcos packed like satiny roe in her closet
weren’t enough, as if 300 species of the hummingbird
erasing clarity out of the still air weren’t enough,
as if the secret names of God, and the winged skulls
on gravestones, and the total of the nocturnal emissions
of any night, and the stars in the night, and the sheer
and vexing twentieth-century info on neutrinos,
didn’t anchor us in detailed texture enough. Oh,
and the Panamanian millipede with 784 legs.
The 4 million tons of bulk the sun loses per second.
And here’s a sinuous Etruscan noblewoman reclining,
half-undraped, with bronze in her body (and so
a fake), as if the original (copper, tin, and trace lead)
weren’t enough, as if the original Rembrandt beggar
with that vatic look on his candleglow face, or this
authentic Degas ballerina, as if the bedrock goddess
shaped in the cave mouth, fail but for called forth
duplication, sequels, xerox largesse.
1099: the sacking of Jerusalem brings back two
heads of St. John the Baptist. At least three churches
claim “the relic of Jesus’s circumcision.”
* * *
In the stories there are always six wandering brothers and
six imperiled, sequestered princesses. Three
wishes. Seven labors to perform. They start out once
upon a time, but of course the “once” is misleading,
the point is: singularity is something won through effort,
through enduring repetitive pattern, then
transcending it, to someplace out of the story.
Now he’s sleepily reading the three-year-old to sleep
– a tale of Thumbling Henry nimbly overcoming,
one page each, “Ten Terrible Trials” (here
he’s hitchhiking over the River of Doom on a turtle,
here he’s spying on the no-goods from his hideout
in a hollowed ostrich egg, etc.); finally, with
the decagauntlet done, Hank wins the beauty’s hand and
grows to full man-size – which on another night might
flicker some Freudian witticism through his mind but
this night, following bitter hours of bickering, the story serves
to say the fussy upkeeps of a marriage must be tended to,
the dooms and no-goods daily met head-on. He’s
suddenly weak, with a remembered image of dailiness:
a bas-relief-rich pillar – around which, centuries
of pilgrims’ individual kisses had worn a smooth ring.
* * *
Nothing is one thing. Sometimes the enormity
of that simple statement bonks him on the noggin with tweets
and zipping planets, just like in a cartoon. He sees
himself at the ever-mutating edge of the whole
Darwinian whelp it takes to be a Homo sapiens, his history
of brotherly consanguibeings, scaled
and nippled and webbed; he sees himself in partite,
every grainette and its infinitesimal chaff,
the atoms, the “sky” of atoms inside him, and
the emptiness inside that, and the “edge” of him
his wife might stroke, his rubber-gloved physician
lube and poke, but really the living skin is fumaroles
of give-and-take with every other singing, caterwauling
skin out there. Such skins . . . ! It’s late and he’s traded
the fairy tales for Sensual: a catalog of intimate products.
Who are these models? – slinkest they from what
genetic vat? – their skin like cream on fire, their wild and
cumulus blondness . . . Every minute, they’re another world
than this one, where he looks in at the three-year-old and then
the thirty-three-year-old, his wife, in bed, with her own
unduplicatable web of connections . . . There’s a simple prayer
sane lives require: Let this one (blank) be sufficient.
Cheese by Albert Goldbarth
We know now it’ll kill you.
Though they make a fake from vegetable oil
and zee it (“cheeze”) so not to lie,
the real thing – what one old friend dubs
“dairy beer” – will clog the pipes
in opulence, and kill you. Yes, it’s that
good. Cream uranium.
Even cheap ones melt luxuriously.
As gold, as rich, as a general’s braid
or a Fabergé egg. Well, eggs will kill you.
The general’s helped kill crowds of thousands.
Death’ll kill you, and life’ll kill you, and
all of us will be opened one day
found lined with a tincture of Muenster.
* * *
In Donald Hall’s densely-textured paean “O Cheese”
– o sweet, or fungally musty; o white and upright
as a clerical collar, or peppery with the ambushed bite
of the mamba waiting inside – his subject is litanized
into an earthiness that glows: as if the magi
might have uncasketed these, for gifts as fit
as frankincense and myrrh, or even fitter, supposing
a god defined by birthslime
mingled equally with nimbus, and the close smells
of divinity and cow. They might be signs of exactly
that line where the body unbodies itself into something
beyond. In any case, I remember being a child,
a silly dumb Jew, and passing the church, and hearing
“Cheeses Love Me” winging into the clear high blue.
* * *
But the underside of a craggy saucer-sized fortress of
yesterday’s cheddar is an exemplary study of entropy
and, possibly, simple offensive gunk. I’ve seen the maggots
overtumult like foam on an ale, out of an unpasteurized
wheel in Nice. “Toe cheese,” my sister says, of our flesh’s
own accumulation; “dick cheese” is another. “Who cut
the cheese?” – as if the body’s sulfuric tuba is
never far in our minds from the pungency of a Brie.
Here’s Mr. Dickens, describing a putrid room: “the walls
and roof of damp bare brick tapestried with
the tracks of snails and slugs . . . the air was
sickening.” So of course “it had been used
as a storehouse for cheeses”; he adds: “a circumstance
agreeably suggestive of rats.”
* * *
And “The other night at a college party / some students
told me that eating cheese / is when you eat a woman.”[1]
Maybe that explains it: 7th grade, and we were touring
(wild little boogers that we were) the local Kist-Rite
Dairy Processing Plant. And if my heart went ooga-ooga over
Linda “Lovelips” Simon’s nubbin nubility, in her
scraplet cling of a skirt – well, I was only one of seventeen
hormonal boy/men rapt at her each new cha-cha step
up the catwalk stairs. But it was Stevie Moskowitz who
angled so nobly far for a peek at The Goods, they needed
to rescue him, with clamorous interim drama, from a vat
of Swiss-in-the-making – gooped completely in it, rising
like a bad dream from its sticky matrix, scared
and gasping and staggering off and, I remember, smiling.
* * *
When Morgan lived on public welfare, raising Dane
herself, the county food truck cornered up once a week
unloading a loaf “about as big as a couch or a coffin.
Now, the littlest whiff of anything similar, I’ll start gagging.”
It will follow us to the end. Those bitter contests
with my father, over a contraband dab of American
on my burger in his kosher home – the picky, pissy
battlegrounds love chooses! It will lump in our eyes
and our nostrils when we first break into light,
and it will follow us to the end. The day after
his funeral service I idly paged my “baby book,” and in my mother’s
scrupulous hand, I read “First Words”: “ba (ball),
ca (car), chee (cheese).” It was there from the start.
It will tick like a time bomb in the ravenous singsong heart.
* * *
Fifty tiger penises destined for aphrodisiac use in France
were confiscated on June 5, 1991, at the Luxembourg border.
“I’m told,” a customs official explained, “you grate them
on your food like cheese.” But it needn’t be so exotic.
Congregated, these are our brothers and sisters: as veined
as a fist of bleu, as blandly smiling as a family of farmer’s.
The idiots (wouldn’t Whitman say it “holy idiots”?)
dribbling from their rinds. The stalwart Cheshire,
the Gouda as smoky as a pillow saved
from a burning house. The rectitude of certain wedges;
others like fat pashas and their billowy odalisques.
The smearers, the crumbled, the shredded, the goat-funky ones.
The cheeses artificially flecked with dill or salami or chili speckles.
Humble cheeses, chutzpah cheeses, on-fire Greek saganaki.
* * *
And this is Linda Simon in her primmest (although it failed
at that) hand-tailored best. And Ava Becker, and “Choo-choo”
(really: that’s all I remember) Tannenbaum. Here’s all of the 7th-grade
raveables, and we who, whether brazen or craven, raved: Dick
Fleischer, Ronnie Mogel, Louie “the Bop Man” Nyeberg, oh yes
Stevie Moskowitz spiffily duded-up – there’s thirty-six of us
plus Mrs. Stimpson our “homeroom” teacher, bleachered together
in three rows, all of us, ripening into the various zeniths
and deeps of that insatiable thing the future, all of us being
eaten alive by time that starts at our toes and won’t give up
until it sucks the leastmost of the pang-bones and the whim-bones
and the woe-bones hollow, but that we don’t know: we’re fiiiine and
fierce and radiant. You know
what the photographer has us say.
[1]James Seay, in The Light As They Found It
Little, Big by Albert Goldbarth
Words I’d like to get in a poem,
hemoglobin and chifforobe and ombudsman and mahogany.
Meanwhile, a friend is studying the maha¯yuga,
the “Cycle of Cycles,” 4,320,000 years,
and its relationship to subvibrations of charm
or salsa or stodginess or whatever other
qualities are being ascribed this afternoon to the spectral
stipples of quantum physics. Another friend is formidably
gaga over cetology, and if she could would happily spelunk
the living gullet with rope and calipers; the penis
is prodigiously ten feet, their underocean songs
unscroll a hundred miles, etc. And here I am,
with seiche, chignon, persnickety, with hobnob,
allemande, fandango, and grommet. Here we all are,
* * *
mostly, cleaning the pleats of our fussy little pursuits,
our ball bearings and milk teeth; banging spear
on horsehide shield, against the residue
kablooey of the Big Bang; gung-ho throwing our bodies
into love, our bodies that are jackstraws
cast by gods in games of chance. Inside
such vastitude, our harvested ambitions pop
like corn and are gone in an instant. Either that, or by
their brevity, and a passionate care we lavish on this brevity,
they take on their peculiar human beauty. When I
stayed with my cetologist friend, I saw her bed,
a box spring cleanly joindered to a frame of varnished
whale ribs; so she and her husband dreamed
and clutched in a basket of those colossi. Late
* * *
that night, I pass their door: I’m thinking fritz
and blitz and scalawag and leukocyte but stop
at sex’s tremolo (she’d have her fist of hair unpinned,
outfanned; and he’d be lost inside her rhythm . . .);
or it’s sobbing. Rumor, is that what I hear? or tumor?
– one more pointillistic jitterdot
by which a life for better or worse is transported.
I walk out on the deck in a cloud of the small words,
photon, muon, leprechaun. I know that somewhere
a man paints faithful portraits of friends on grains of rice.
I know that out on the waters tonight, the whales slide
together like hands in prayer the size of city blocks.
And gently, almost powdering it, the ombudsman moon
ameliorates the naked light of the sun.
Bungle: A Survey by Albert Goldbarth
I’ve made errors too. How bad? Some,
just a sliver – as if I’d passed my judgment
carelessly over a length of unfinished pine.
Others . . . ? Lacerations, deeply opened up
until you could see the shine of the pulse inside.
And how many? This much:
in a 1934 rouser-
of-a-space-adventure saga called “Thundering Worlds”
by Edmond Hamilton – a future in which the entire solar system
has been colonized – the sun is dying (“a sullen
blood-red disc,” says Julud of Saturn,
a “ranking member of the Council of Nine”), and this
is the busy, visionary solution: “That the nine planets
be torn loose from our sun and steered out into space
like nine great ships in quest of a new sun.” Jeepers!
A necklace of pearls – of planet-pearls! A caravan
the length of the distance from Mercury to Pluto!
In the capital cities of all of those planets
– supermegalopolises of a kind beyond
our puny twenty-first-century abilities – it could rain
all day, all night, and flood each street of them
to the spires: that would be my life’s
accumulated errors, with enough
left over to roil in hundreds of rivulets
through the rocky outback of Mars’s and Jupiter’s moons.
* * *
And so I trust it’s not just condescension
when I laugh with my friends at the jiggled language
in student papers we see.
“Two Gentilemen of Verona.” Also one about the angry
vigilante group that zealously patrols
the Texas-Mexico border, and takes its name
from an earlier band of patriots: “The Minuetmen.”
* * *
Death is a fine idea
– to the genes, to the ecosphere. Replacement
and a consequent reshuffling: it’s enabling
on their level. To me . . . frankly, I’m not so keen on it.
A student writes that her father is dying,
a one-time well-known tenor in our local opera company;
so masterful, some solos of his have seemed to be a vent
in our world that translated sound
of Olympian origin into the comprehensible terms
of human tears, of those small gasps
that we make when we’re in public and confronted
by the unbearable. He was that good. So,
throat cancer. Of course. “They had to cut a slit
for a tube, and I thought for a second that even out of this
he might try singing.” Another reminder of how
our original error – at least, as mythology fashions it:
the apple in the Garden, and our letting in
of death – is necessarily (and confusingly) mixed
in our genome with a radiant
propensity for beauty.
* * *
“I’d made a mistake,”
said Dorianne Easton, 29, of Surrey, meaning
she’d accidentally slipped “[her] bosoms” into an underwire bra
instead of a soft all-cloth, and – oversensitive to chafing,
from the sticky weather – suffered through that day.
No really big deal, although it encourages our wondering:
if a day is a graphed-out line, at how many tiny points
along it are we susceptible to error? It could be
even for an ordinary day the answer is: infinite; although
that doesn’t take likelihood into account. But
for extraordinary circumstances . . . ? “There would be hardships
during the voyage,” says Julud of Saturn: surely the ultimate
understatement, since even the commonmost
of our life-decisions can prove to be blunders: since they both
were orphans, Saul Ambrosio and Doris Salerno Ambrosio determined
that their love would last and mean a cohesive upbringing
for their own three children, Naia, Tyler and Shawn; and it’s
because of their story of sacrifice and valor that perhaps by now
you’ve guessed how in 2005 an unexpected discovery of old documents
showed that they were brother and sister. Is it any surprise
we strive so hard to circumvent misfortune? “I was detained
on Saturn,” Julud explains, “by the final rechecking
our scientists were giving to the details of the plan.”
“So did the scientists of Earth!” says Runnal, then Wald
speaks up: “Our Jovian scientists say the same!” And
Lester Wallman, divorce lawyer, says that prenups
“have incorporated any number of subjects: the apportionment
of closet space, custody arrangements for pets,
number of copulations per week.” Well, sure.
Years later, we’re prone to regret.
We’ve all seen someone with that tattoo.
* * *
None the less, this story is true: the gunfire stopped,
and the street was left empty except for the body
of Dorianne Easton, who had been caught in the vengeance rites
of rival gangs: and who would be dead
right now, except the bullet was deflected by – oh yes –
the underwiring in that misselected bra. Another
example of error reborn as serendipity.
The accidentally tipped-over tub of acrylic paint:
eureka! the creation of a new school of art.
The excess runoff goo from another botched attempt
at inventing a perfect bioterror weapon:
viola! a wonder drug for the treatment of maladies A through Z.
We need to cling to these unlikely
instances of history. They rarely occur, and even so
our fervor for their occurring never abates. I remember
a night in way-south Texas, in 1978, when I was drunk,
and I was holding up the night sky in its burning
like a candelabrum I didn’t dare drop, when I was searching,
searching, and when everything depended on a pattern
I would or wouldn’t construct, from a floating olfactory scarf
of patchouli I followed through the dark, and from
the gigabillion brain cells of my fellow human beings . . .
but that’s already too revealing, coyly metaphorical though it is.
Let’s simply say we’ve all been desperate there
at the Texas-Mexico border, and waiting to see those two strange goyim
approach, their sandwiches of spiced Verona ham held aloft
for a sign, while at that very moment their partners appear
from across the broad and divisive water, and suddenly
a stately music indicates that the beautiful dance may begin.
* * *
Sometimes it’s botched beyond any hope of redemption.
It was true that night; and I awoke the following morning with its residue
in ash, in hieroglyphics of spit and ash, on my forehead;
some of it – the grittiest of that paste – seemed to have percolated down
below my breastbone, staining a corner of the heart. That’s
metaphor again. But you get the idea: none of my bungling
uprose like the phoenix into a new resplendent morn.
Sometimes, however, everything “goes off” – my father
would have put it this way – “without a hitch.” Although
the calibrations and the terraforming and population redistribution
and energy consolidation and sheer gut-twisting tests of faith
are endless possibility for failure (think of it:
Julud mentions, almost as an afterthought, “the worlds
with moons would have their satellites with them, of course”;
oh of course), there comes a moment on the final page
when the planets all drop into orbit around a new sun, Vira,
as perfectly as expert-driven pool balls
into their pockets: “At last our voyage is ended!”
Usually, though . . . well, usually it’s confusing, with the moon
and the sun, and right and wrong, and our various obligations
to the living and to the dead . . . we make mistakes,
and yet we don’t know they’re mistakes sometimes for years.
And we may love them anyway, parts of us
that they are. “I don’t know whether to laugh
or to cry,” my mother said as we were going through
my father’s effects and came upon his cardboard box of gags
– the whoopee cushion, the “snapping pack of gum,” and the rest.
To laugh or to cry. . . . My student’s father died
an hour after the operation: “personnel malfeasance,”
in their hospitalspeak. Her mother still hears him practicing
the scales late at night. “He had such a beautiful voice.”
And then she writes: “It was horrabil. He
was bleeding” – I didn’t correct it –
“from every orpheus of his body.”
Qebehseneuf by Albert Goldbarth
William Petty in the seventeenth century attained considerable notoriety when he began to anatomize Anne Green, a murderess, and found that she revived under his scalpel.
– Douglas Hay, Albion’s Fatal Tree
I want this poem to be that black
she saw.
The peccary
roadkill-death made general,
made an indication of peccaryness
– like an animal on a tavern sign –
that children are afraid to touch
in the lobby display of the Austin Nature Center . . .
she looked that far
beyond reclamatory powers. If
she did “dress flash,” all razz and sass,
to cheat them of another scabby doxie in rags gone
weeping to do “the air jig” at the Hanging Tree,
if she stepped in the cart with a wedding gown on
and “flipped a fullmoon arse” at the crowd
from out of her cloud of bridewhite satin and taffeta,
and took the rope singing, took it on arteries
winged out wide in singing,
she was an ashen satchel
of death on the table, her only other colors
a mustard-green and muddied plum in the shape
of a braid biting into her throat. You could feel
its hard and regular ridges . . .
Now
a small boy’s screaming. The guide asks why.
She bends to the haunch of the peccary,
where he’s wild-eyed with horror, and asks.
He knows she knows he’s seen
a shock of excelsiorwork and taxidermist’s carving
through a peeled patch, and that he can tell her.
But how can he say
near Chimney Hill is a giant revolving cowgirl
sign, for some motel, but broken, so
by night you can see her fluorescent
ribcage glowing.
* * *
An Indian medical text of the 15th century
discusses closing intestinal wounds by lining
black Bengali ants along the rupture. Really.
They clamp it together. Their bodies are snapped off
and the jaws remain, as ample sutures
that dissolve by the time the wound heals. But – why
think of it? There she is, so
small. And when she sleeps she’s even smaller.
My mother. The tubes running into her. That,
and the language they use! . . . “cut her open.” “do a little
exploratory.” Yes, and when the last ant vanished,
then the bowel could be coiled back into the abdomen and
sewn up. A way of thinking of her now
I can return from. So small. A sleeping pill
has vanquished her, a pill the size of a typed o. She
will float that dark all night and wake
to gulp a breath of living, once, then sink through ether
back to the dark. And the language they use! . . .
They’ll “put her under.” The boy at the peccary
fainted. And was roused by the rub of a warm cloth.
Now I’m going to think about her in her oncology sheets
by thinking of him. But – deeper,
as her darkness is deeper.
* * *
It was something like this
that Anne Green said: “Me mummy wor anged
fer er filch uf a barrister’s quidpouch off is person
wot she coaxed wi er winkin an doveycoos
into a stoyt of ineebriation in is coach
OR SO THOY SAY, an me dud wor anged
the bleedin peabroyn fer is poachin
uf a wormy-eaded brace o doocks off a jodge’s estate
OR SO THOY SAY, an me sis wor anged an me own
true luf, th idjit sot, wor anged
wi me poolin is legs to asten th end uf is sooferin, AN
OY by Gawd an Satan an evury sober Christian witness
wor anged – AN CAME BACK! (a pause – the children
in the street are the only ones who will listen a third
or fourth or seventeenth time to her tale, but they
listen rapt, and her stagey pacing takes direct effect)
Or it wor dark. O it wor blacker n noyt, o
blacker n ink on a printers thomb, an me darlins
oy felt black as Death meself alriddy
standing onder th oistin tree wi me own pine coffin
alongmeside loyk a woyt woyt shadow, everthin wor so black!
Loyk oy wor lookin into a scuttle o coaldust,
broyt, an soft, an in it me mum and dud an sis
an rumwit Arry isself who oy luffed so dear
was callin me COME ERE COME ERE COME ON IN
AN KISS US IN THIS ERE SWEET BLACK DUST when
uf a sudden it wor loyk a and ad snatched me op
an out an a voice sayin This
ere lattle coal lump still gots a bit o waitin an
burnin to do. (wink) An
whan oy opened me oyes
oy foun a Surjun bleenkin
ployin wi me bubbies in a pooblic ployce!”
* * *
Mother, the gut is the longest of us.
It’s 30 feet. It’s our gravity, dragging.
Weren’t you always ahead of us? Parting the traffic?
Testing the waves at the beach?
I once saw a gull there soar from its offal
so easily – air, parting air.
And mother, without it you’ll simply be
the closest of us to flying.
* * *
Tutankhamun’s intestines
were folded in linen, then
set in a miniature mummiform coffin
“of beaten gold
inlaid with colored glass and carnelian.”
On the inner lid, the goddess Selket is
traced in the gold with her wings spread, proclaiming,
in glyph script falling like rain about her,
Now I place my arms on that which is given to me:
Qebehseneuf, who is now within my protection.
– More traditionally,
the simple stone “canopic jar” was used.
On this, the lid was carved
as the hawk-headed god and spirit-of-the-intestines
Qebehseneuf, and there might not even be an inscription.
Even so, his guardian beak is sharp and,
always, the worker who fashioned him has placed the eyes
in focus on a plane that we can only say
extends itself into Eternity.
* * *
Rotogravure. Lorgnette. Dagnabbit.
Some words truly die. But others . . .
Anne Green may have been like that: grabbed
last-minute out of her final blackflamed burning;
given second breath. She might be,
as these words are . . . quaint. “Maw, lookee!
Thir goes th Crazy Lady!” “Leave er be,
poor thing wot promynods oldin conversoytion
wi erself.” Alembic. Roustabout. Phlogiston.
O’er. In a conversation on poetics,
Galway Kinnell has talked of the singular pleasure
of salvaging junkheap words, of turning them
lubed and ahum in new vehicles. Mizzling,
he uses, stillic, droozed, bast, damozel, biestings
– words be-aura’d with the ancient power of having touched
the fossil possibility inside themselves,
considered it, then turned and taken
one last fullfleshed clarionhood on a living tongue.
She might be, as these words are . . . charged.
Phlebotomist. Escutcheon. Swain.
The Lazarus Lady who entered that unrefusable black of the pit
and refused it. “Maw. . . .” “Hush! Lissen wot she be sayin.”
Oracle Lady. Shaman Lady.
Black of the beetle, black of an ancestor’s eyesockets.
Halcyon.
Trilby.
Cameleopard.
Lady who came back o’er.
Mugwumpery.
Ectoplasm.
Pooch.
Scoot.
* * *
Mother, the skin is the least of us.
The rest, the most, has never been touched by light.
And it will be all right. But first you need to pilgrimage
boustrophedon through your own gut-dark.
And it will hurt. (I couldn’t lie.)
The form of it may say rape, say death.
It isn’t enough you’re on your knees.
We want you on your back.
* * *
The grass the blanket the grass. . . .
Livia was four – remember? We
picnicked in Humboldt Park and a group
of older girls asked if Livia could “go to the water”
with them (meaning the swimming pool all afternoon)
and you said yes, sure (meaning the drinking fountain)
– remember? And three hours later there you were
in a cop car cruising all the leafy bylanes and screaming
you’d kill yourself if you didn’t find her, the cop
saying lady now lady, then Livia stalking calmly
up to the cop announcing she’d learned to swim
– which
over the years has taken on the lustrous-verdigris surface
of myth.
These sheets; the nurses’ chalky uniforms;
the patients’ pale faces (all are calla lilies
centered on pillows). . . . White. Such white. Like living
in an aspirin. White, and day and night an artificial
regimen of visits, and everything, time included,
dissolving. . . . You young again. Livia four. Me
squeezing the bark off a tree to study its grubs and
sun is on my cheek in a wedge as heavy and gold and
overhot as a slice of doublecheese pizza from Vito’s
where Daddy’s going to meet us. Your husband,
alive. Of course, alive, how crazy, 1956, and how come
Livia’s not back yet with the girls, and light and
chlorophyll all over throwing soft aquarium
shadows on your own soft skin. . . .
Now 30
years later, what is it
except the words we remember it in? The words
are everything, Mother.
The words we save
are the words we save everything else in.
Really
what do we fear in looking at each other tonight
if not that every word we’ve said
so urgently between us all our lives
will herd at the edge of the memory record, stare
a moment into cloudiness, then step off . . .
love
being foreplay for loss.
* * *
In a friend’s friend’s house, I’ve seen a vast
and gaudy collection of whiskey decanters;
a hula girl, a golfer, a kilted and bagpiped Scot,
a circus clown, an aeronaut, an alpine yodeler . . .
“And here,” he said and winked, “we keep our spirits.”
——
And here’s the baboon-head canopic jar (the lungs).
And here’s the jackal-head canopic jar (the stomach).
And here, a jar for grace (a mountain ibex).
And here, a jar for the brain (a dragonfly convoluting the air).
Or here, the mind (a dragonfly shadow).
——
Dark. A few pills
circling in your system for a clock.
How strange, in this city of windowledge pigeons and sparrows,
to be in the world of Qebehseneuf the hawk,
that spirit, your totem, night’s lid.
* * *
And this is what we cherish: words
with one foot over the precipice,
called back
to bodies again. In some
Medieval Hebrew manuscripts, the text
is done so finely, with such supple twists, as to be given
entirely over to forming the bodies of human beings,
beasts, and birds. . . .
A single “paragraph” might draw
the picture of two grass-appraising oxen, a parrot their
same size, fish, a huge central tree with a husband and wife
enjoying a supper under its reach, each leaf a word, each feather,
scale, flex of flesh. . . .
The whole of Creation, literally
from language, as it was “In the beginning . . . The Lord
said ‘Let there be. . . . ‘“
Now what does He think
of a hospital, Mother? All of these bodies,
seen from His height, bent by the needs of their hundred
individual easings. What word
are we part of? Tenderness. Torture. A woman asleep,
and a man with his head in his hands like a flashlight
shining on her all night, afraid if it blinks off once. . . .
At
least we’re still in His dictionary. An early 14th-century Bible
from Germany speaks of a “great fish” and this text comprises
Jonah being heaved from the jaws of a whaleish thing.
How long he’d been lost in pain in that gut!
In darkness unimaginable! And here he is,
arms open in wonder, as if the creature is
comicbook-like speaking him
into the light of the page.
* * *
It was something like this
that Anne Green said (in translation): “I touched it.
I was there, I wore Death’s black chemise.
Death took me partying. I swigged black hootch.
(The tongue has 10,000 buds and not one burned.)
I danced. I danced the black shimmy.
I shot black craps. The dice are black
and their markings are equally black. (Nobody wins.)
I rode in Death’s luxury Caddie: mobster-black,
with monster fins and a one-way meter. Oh
children, listen: I was in Death’s library. There
is only one entry in Death’s thesaurus, “black,” and then
a thousand thousand synonyms. Death’s own
bed is black, and Death’s lubricants black, and Death’s sex
is a black prosthetic penetrating blackness. Listen,
oh children of mine: when Death was sleeping I
went for a walk on Death’s black estate.
I undid the black deadbolt and slipped out alone.
The sky was like black acetate. The black grass sighed.
And something – who knows what? – but something . . .
– or how or why? But this: I heard my name being called
far off, Anne Greeeeen, or someone, maybe one of you,
but someone, saying Mother. Simply: Mother. Fastened,
strapped black in a black seat bolted black to the deck / some
marlin yanked me out and over
the waters, it hurt, I must have blacked out, I flew, and when
I opened my eyes light stung inside me like a white whip of salt.
* * *
da Vinci played a joke.
In Rome. The court of the Medicis.
Fancy schmancy. All the dinner guests
with ziggurats of painted snails and candied goose brains,
that kind of thing. What Leonardo did: he
inflated the entrails of a large ram with a bellows,
and from around a corner he launched those by-now
overballooning intestines floating
blimpwise into the room
– Why think of it now? Bengali ants. . . .
Why say it? Eviscera spiraled by hand
(like boat rope) into their proper Egyptian ceramic. . . .
And she’s so delicate now, I think my touching her direct
could break her. So I need these gloves,
these images.
I need facts
returned from where she’s a guest tonight
in the realm of the uttermost, returned but
in bearable form.
Or you might
or I might break.
* * *
This morning. And its whetstone dazzle.
Even through the shade of this immensely full-bouffant Chicago elm,
such light . . . its
edge could sharpen surgical blades.
They’ll be shaving her now. . . . So bright. . . .
Qebehseneuf,
hawk-god, guardian, weight it darker, a little, bring
the ageless rind of blackness I’ve seen smiling
in the mouth of your jar. A little. A hypo’s worth.
A shot of inoculate
blackness up a vein, no more.
The band of black that blanks the skies each night and some nights
says, in the whisper-rush of roaches, in the oilblots under parked cars, it
refuses to yield, and
yet it yields. That blackness. Bring it. Be with me.
Take my affidavit. Listen: I pledge my pulse.
Attend her. Be gentle. They snug their handsize
ether-mask against the mouth and nose, and then it’s endless
floatingfloating the anthracite-black backwash of the brain
until a person is revived; if. And Qebehseneuf,
see that she is. Reprieve her. Agitate for archangelic and
gubernatorial pardon. Black: Houdini’s-top-hat-black: the flowers
disappear but the point is, pop back
later umpteenfold. Perform that magic. Saw and rebuild her. Pass that
inky fifth of blackberry brandy out, until she passes out,
and be there when she comes-to. Hawk-god, listen:
I’m just me. I try to write these poems, be middling decent
with a lady, not add overmuch malarkey to the thickening
slick of it filming this planet – for me it’s enough
to enter another day. But you can enter rooms through walls,
you’re a god, can enter through the protein of a body,
ride the hemoglobin, be there. Qebehseneuf:
be there. See the honest justice done. The first
incision now. . . . This meat doll, on their slab. . . . Be
in communion. Show your shape. Prescribe a draft of black
regurgitant. Take two black every black. Be her bannister.
Ready her, steady her, black a rhizome thrives in. That
rebounding black Anne Green saw, dozed in, rose from
cockadoodling with her noosed voice; and the black some words
return from, saved by maybe just a few
such uses as this: Cahoots. Peruke. Hotdiggity.
Potentate. Flummoxed. Tootsies. Imbroglio. Cuirass. Suzerainty.
I’m just me in the sun,
just me in the threshing of dust and light,
the deckled depositions of high tide over the shale,
the way the cosmos beats us like a good pimp
so no bruises show and then we shake back out to the street
and work for it, here in the sweetness
at the bullseye of pleasureful sex, and with whatever
rabbinical wisdom in our blood is mumbling
holiness and prohibitions, me in the morning,
me a halfass pinball-play in the maze of Chicago traffic,
walking, talking to an ancient Egyptian
idea of things, and a word even older,
as if she might hearken
and come to me as she always did when I needed her,
me in the root of it,
out in the weather.
Please.
Mother.
* * *
The kids are filing out of the Austin Nature Center.
“Whass that?” – one points.
The building’s front is total glass. And the woman says,
“Small birds might crash here and die.
So these are the shapes of hawks
we put up cut from black paper.
A bird gets close enough, it spots the black hawks,
and it wheels right back where it came from.”
The Book of Speedy by Albert Goldbarth
1.
The far trees bristle up like a hairbrush.
Overhead, the sky is a wan blue.
Two clouds look as if they’re sharing
cellular material through a mutual wisp. I suppose
we could speak of the sex of clouds,
their combinative ways,
their freight, their fume-edged separations. We
could speak of ourselves through anything
really, any mask or mannequin our happenstance provides,
komodo dragon, moray eel,
laser surgery, pee from a rocketship freezing and
circling Earth forever, rain, no rain,
the rotunda skullbones of whales,
the chain-gang ants in the grass . . .
* * *
The universe
wants to talk to us, I’m sure of that,
it wants to and it does,
though we perceive it as the white talc
over thumb-plump purple grapes,
as the shakos of dust below the bed,
the umber fronds of rust up a bumper.
Even the universe’s most stentorian proclamations . . .
it isn’t the hog hit broadside,
it’s the dusklight in the rearview mirror
dwindling to a needleprick.
The High Gods
are my theme here, or whatever
psychic monologues, or everwiffling red-shift edge
of energies we call “the Gods” – but
fallen, from such aboriginal nebulousness,
to language:
something common and
salival, something, anything, though
by that I mean the Gods have been recorded as speaking
as well through thunder and fiery orbs
as the picked-apart scat of the peacocks.
* * *
“The tree that I was thinking of was one we always stopped to look at. Often there was a black donkey tethered to it. When the donkey opened wide its jaws and brayed it made the most tremendous heehaw, it was like the creaking of the door of the world. It was much too big a sound for a donkey to make, it was as if something else was making itself heard through the donkey.”
2.
Among the stunted duns and tans
of the print tacked up above his study desk, the donkey
is lavender-black; the woman at the well,
while based in grays, is fleshed in umber-pink, and
even the clay of the jar she holds against this background drabness
shows the rosiness of life – she holds it
upright on her shoulder like a tiny child lifted there
to better see a parade. The woman, the animal,
the mouth of the jar, and the relatively cavernous mouth of the well
would have a four-way conversation
for the proper person, each a different Biblical passion
rendered, from the bedrock of this uninviting landscape,
into speech, into perhaps – who knows? – prodigious,
chthonian, luminous speech; but not
now and not here: not for him.
* * *
“Jee-zus,” he’d muttered. “Oh
just don’t give me any of that Jesus shit,” she’d
spat back, “money is your God.”
That was a year ago.
Now
he’s reviewing the tax shelter’s rolled-over funds,
and the dividends. Was she right, that day?
She’s in the bedroom, the door closed: some kind of burbly
synthesized music leaks out.
The boy’s in the playroom, kabooming and zooming, POW!,
with his plastic figurines and tacky gag shop items.
It’s a happy house, isn’t it? Almost
blessed. Devotionally, he tic-tac-toes
six-digit figures into his pocket calculator, thus
calling them down to shush around benevolently
in the calm night, on their greenback wings
– his Lord’s host of pecuniary angels,
the Angel of Daily Compounding, the Angel of Wall Street . . .
he can hear their rigid, numerical madrigals.
* * *
The boy’s in the playroom, kabooming and zooming about.
KASHMOOSH! He’s four. His (chewed-on) Captain Cosmo figurine
is headquartered in his Captain Cosmo Choco-Drink for Lunch mug.
That’s the good guy. The bad guy is Borneo Joe the Wrestler
who lives in the Tiki-God mug that his parents brought home
from Tiki Gardens Dinner and Drinks. In alternation,
Joe and C. C. decimate each other – WHOARRR! – with dropped
eraser bombs and lobbed salvos of broken-up crayons, one
of the primary pleasures of being four. I’ll tell you
this
about the ethereal tether that, though thin, still
links our lives to timelessness. The Gods
– the unimaginable patterns in the atoms of stars
and nervous systems – need to be imagined; we
provide them Masks: Ahura Mazda, Mithra, Jehovah, sometimes
sculpting lesser masks for these Masks: out of soapstone,
coral, marble, clay-with-seeds-and-pig-tusks . . .
Sandalwood was the material for Hawaiian gods,
like ku-kaili-moku, the “eater of land,” but
trade, and visiting Christian missionaries,
halted the production of these ancient holy images
by the early 19th century. “Today,
Hawaii is visited by millions of people hoping to find reminders
of a Polynesian paradise where unspoiled people once lived
beside idyllic lagoons. So the tourist trade has fitted out
the old gods with new names and bogus legends. These
are called ‘tikis,’ a Maori name
that has nothing to do with Hawaii . . .” Tiki
party lights in red, white, green and yellow,
Tiki key chains, pop bottle openers, vases . . .
* * *
How do you measure the fall of a God to Earth?
In units of bathos.
* * *
SCHWACK!
one excellent souvenir Tiki mug in moss and chocolate glazes,
in pieces – uh-oh. This is a price paid
in our endless war against the forces of darkness.
Oh, he knows there’s good and evil, it’s just that
evil for him is a cartoon man with mellerdrama sneers
inked in. He doesn’t understand it can be corporate,
that people somewhere hate his father for merely
institutional allegiance. He doesn’t understand, not
yet, the ways that tragedy can be the size of a node:
his mother’s
in the bedroom, the door closed. Goopy synthesized music
washes over her rolled-up body in waves, in nearly
oceanic waves, and what she’d like to be is something
smooth and fetal heaved up on a beach. So she could start
over then, without the cancer. Shhh. She hasn’t told him
yet, she’s waiting until he’s done for the night
with his goddam stock market pedantry, yes or maybe
she won’t tell anyone at all: the radiation therapy
will work, it will work, then this momentary flaw
in her system can be her secret. “Radiation” – whatever
that is. It’s her religion for now, as difficult
to picture as the subtleties and precepts of religion, and
the mask that makes it personal for her
– she can’t help it, she knows it’s a joke – is the logo character
used for years in his company’s advertising campaigns:
the beaming bulb head and zigzag voltage body
of Mr. Light-Brite. “Hey! All day and night,
It’ll be all right . . .” (and then he tips
his zillion-watt derby) “. . . with LIGHT-BRITE” – his tune,
his mnemonicy tune she needs so much to believe in.
* * *
“These are our modern mythological figures, avatars of Another Plane: Smokey the Bear; Elsie the Cow; Mr. Clean; Snap, Crackle and Pop; the talking Kool-Aid Pitcher; Speedy Alka-Seltzer. These are the icons, like it or not, of Cleveland and Pocatello and Philly and Jacksonville. And under their trademarked, tutelary scrutiny, with the cultic theme-music and slogans appropriate unto each, the organizing rituals of our American days take place. The Dutch Maid Cleanser Girl is helping us, in advantageous units measured by single scrubs, to keep back the legions of disarray and besmirchment. Charlie the Tuna (tuna), Tony the Tiger (corn flakes), and the M-G-M lion (movies) remind us: once we lived as equals among the Animal Powers, only later shaped them to our Neolithic needs, and in our blood we keep in vibratory concert with them yet. I mean this tongue-in-cheek – and seriously as well. For who are we, to say their presence functions less than mythologically because their other purpose is commercial? (Isn’t any religion a part of its economic times?) Yes, who are we to say to the supplicants thronging at various niches and altars: this mouth is an oracle, this one not?”
3.
And the future is read in the slippery knots and inclines
of the raw lamb liver. Deity
has written in the liver, where a few will claim to understand
a language otherwise spoken in effluvia, photons, and genes.
And the future is read in lees, in heated cracking tortoise shells,
in cast beans . . . Divination:
the divine
rising out of our marketplace stuffs and shuffling its
schoolroom flash cards. This is the moon,
the cock, the coffin spider, the cesium atom . . .
repeat after Me.
* * *
Once, sitting in on anatomy class, I saw
an intern stretch up fatty strings from the torn-open purpled dough
of a woman’s body and, an impish seizure,
tauten them with one gloved hand
to play them with the other. Not
that there was really any sound, except I remembered,
when I was a child, seeing the distant shapes in a room
through the vibrating side of a harp.
The lesson,
the music lesson, is everywhere.
* * *
“Of composts
shall the Muse disdain to sing?” James Grainger
simply asks: The Sugar-Cane, a Poem,
his 18th-century verse treatise
on efficiently running Jamaican sugar plantations.
Johnson’s critical response is droll,
of course, and Boswell reports a performance at Reynolds’s house
one night occasioned witty scoff; but, still . . .
the slipknot signatures of flies in the air around it . . .
then a season, another season, and then the earliest
pale-green shoots of the sweetness . . .
Grainger knows where in a person
murmurs of poesy oft first stir their effects. “Now,
Muse,” he continues, “let’s sing of rats . . .”
* * *
I once heard a blues harmonica player
insist his soul was in his spit.
4.
Thunder
breaks out of the deeply fulminous clouds . . .
Then later, nascent sun breaks through . . .
And when a Tiki mug – SCHWACK! – breaks? . . .
* * *
then Jiffy Boy yodels his famous Sponge-It-Up jingle, bows once, and nimbly glissades (on jet-blast rollerskates) down a mountain of glop and rubbish toward our own telltale mess: his eyes, like cat eyes in a car’s beams, are electrified henna; he has the dancing fantods, in excitement over the mopping ahead; his hands, in fact, are whisk-brooms, and his torso is a scouring pad. He lives with Mr. Zip (the Post Office), Little Oscar (wieners), and The Chicken King (cluck cluck). And Betty Butane (with those ooh-la-la red lips and inky lavish lashes) has a gas flame for a head, and so is perpetually her own natty wimple, plump and bunsen-blue. And Skweezme is a tarantella-frantic roll of paper towels. The Keebler Elf presides over cookies. Mr. Goodbuy, Mr. Goodwrench, and Mr. Goodmeat each is the potent genius of his domain, and has it bad (I mean the spasmic cardiac pitterpat of sexual yearning) for Penni Wise, and Cora Gated, and Bar-B-Cutie, and maybe even the bluesy chanteuse for The California Raisins (raisins). Need I belabor the dapper, top-hat-and-monocle charm of Mr. Peanut? The onomatopoetic panache of that snazzily gnomic triumvirate, Snap, Crackle and Pop? And Mr. Clean says: “dependable power.” The Curity Nurse says: “comfort and ease.” And Pinky the Salmon is leaping with our happiness in mind. And the Pillsbury Dough Boy, homuncular, promising. Tee and Eff, the Tastee Freeze ice cream sprites. The thousands of years of vernal, panurgic clutter that thinly attends, but does attend, the Jolly Green Giant, busy overseeing his demesne of fresh June peas. The Michelin Man has survived since 1895. Perhaps the reigning bey of these winsome schlockorama eidolons is yes, of course, Speedy Alka-Seltzer (effervescent analgesic tablets “for relief”) – with his hillock of carroty hair below the tablet hat, with his wand, his wink, and a smile so sturdy it might be wielded like a shield . . . who else could so hopefully lead us in battle against the ravages of – remember Peter Pain? He looked like a pickle with three-day stubble, with a troll’s schnozzola, a thuggishly slanted gauchoesque hat, and a cruel if miniature trident, for the implementing of “muscular aches and pains.” As if we need to be reminded that we live in the vale of woe and we exit it dying, loss is writ in us as soon as the umbilicus is cut and from that moment never ceases, darkness blocks the way, our sicknesses can fit in a thimble but truncheon us to our knees, it’s night, nobody cares enough or at all and a woman is curled to a monstrously diagnosed ball of hurting flesh in this poem, in this city, at any moment you think about human suffering, there’s suffering.
5.
That night there’s a “scene” in the bedroom. She
tells him. The “growth” – the fire – inside her is past all
masking over, and so she tells him. Not understanding
and understanding vie for control. She weeps, he
tells her their money will buy the best care possible.
Millions of years slip by, and finally they sleep
on a raft of exhaustion and mutual fright. That’s
all. I won’t reveal the long-term word from the lab.
What I want is studying them, where they’re fit together
like soft tongs until morning; studying them, in their
unit-of-two unconsciousness and inarticulation; even
the rise of their chests is invisible now,
they could be a painting.
* * *
Yes, and
in the tacked-up print in the upstairs study, it’s much
the same: the woman at the well
is singing – grief? or exultation? we don’t know, but
singing, surely singing: in her world. For us,
outside of that plane, the room is silent,
dark now and silent, the woman is silent and still.
* * *
She
whaps the donkey’s scabrous-yet-eloquent rump
– which right now signifies Animal Churlishness; and then they’re
off, across the mallow dust of the plain, to the foothills.
The water jugs are stoppered and lashed to the pack-beast’s ribby sides,
the sky is striped with cloud too thin to be anything
other than decoration . . . a day, an ordinary day
as it should be and usually is.
The priest
of the foothills is waiting at the cave-mouth. He’s also
a mouth – that is, the Mountain God and the Bull God,
the Unutterable, the Tempering Flame and the Slayer of Infidels,
speaks through him: he wears the mask of a bull,
of beaten gold applied to cedar, as if to say the human medium
has been in contact intimate enough with the deific
to resemble it, as cast in human terms. He is one
of the “sensitives,” one of the holy schizophrenics,
of his people. At night, he wanders from his body
through the abode of demons and guardian seraphs, only
a tendril of phlogistonic substance connecting him
back to his sleeping form; by day, he is known to fall
to the rockfloor like a man who’s had his ankle-tendons severed,
and writhe there foaming, later to rise and deliver
the wisdoms of the Flame and Bull.
And so she
is come for counsel: let’s say a pain, let’s say a mustard-grain
of pain, in her belly won’t let her sleep, and what
does it mean? He stands in the smoke of the brazier,
the mask becoming even more life-like to her eyes.
It gleams – the Flame. He bellows – the Bull.
He bellows, he charges around the hill-floor crazily,
stumbling, smacking into the cave walls, overflowing
with his roar and gesturing wildly, like a hurt thing, like
a vessel touched by contents from a different world,
until even the far birds, even the stunted grasses, seem to her
to be symbolic of a level of Birds and Grasses
paradigmatic to ours . . . And then he drops, and cools and quiets, and
then repeats what he was told in his trance.
The donkey,
even – she’d tethered it at a nearby bramble –
is braying, with the desperate edge of some ubermatrix message
to its simple yowl, a message larger than it is.
* * *
It’s winter. Pipesmoke snow
skirtles over the blacktop.
The new moon’s only a bone sherd
dug up out of the ungiving cold.
By now – how many poems do we need
to read, before we’ll admit one thing
says another? that even the hummingbird skull,
the cigarette paper, the thumping cranberry heart
in the caked-over runt of the litter,
says another?
* * *
Nor is the initiation easy, into the shaman-like role of American Costumed Critter. “One contestant kept tripping over his Hula-Hoops. Another seemed dazed inside the costume, reeling like a top on its last spin. Another removed the Hugo head and vomited . . .” These failed acts are try-outs for a new Hugo the Hornet in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Every day, minimum wage or the glow of a Higher Calling beckons hundreds of Americans into becoming human-sized owls or collies or spritzerbottles of underarm deodorant (ambulatory, sequined, googoo-eyed) and parading the theme parks, astroturf, tv sets and neighborhood streets of this country.
There are, though, as Ned Zeman admits in American Kabuki, “pitfalls to walking through midtown Manhattan dressed as a giant white rabbit.” Costumes can weigh up to 40 pounds. “Imagine that and oversize stuffed feet and hands and a head the size of a beer keg, a head that has no real eyes, allowing you to see only through a little hole in or near the mouth.” The heat inside can be hellish (so can the odor of earlier occupants). And often enough, mosquitoes dervish circles through the head.
For those who demonstrate the Calling to Assume the Role – to be, not don but be, the hallowed Lotta Bull (roast beef) or Michaelangelo (a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle) or Dottie Drop (a glistered bead for the city water monopoly) – these hazards are only further spurs toward epiphany. This is the beauty part. “It’s what I was put on this earth to do,” says the man inside Cocky the Gamecock, “It’s a gift.” A man inside Bugs Bunny: “After a lot of practice, it all clicks. You actually become the rabbit.” A voice from out of the lime-green shag-rug megaphone-snouted body of the Phillie Phanatic: “It’s what I am.”
Whole stadiumsfull stand cheering with the synchronized rise of hackles. Grandmas let go their crutches, accept a rubber paw, and boogie. Toddlers fasten themselves to carpeted legs and, out of love, like any of us, refuse to let go. The wish of dying 7-year-olds is often to spend a day with such as these, the roosters and alligators and frolicsome mice of an alternate Earth where comic and karmic are wedded as one.
“Explains the Chicken, ‘I want the Chicken to supersede the man.’”
* * *
She can’t sleep. Much too much
floods in. Amid it all, she remembers
holding the boy to her shoulder once, at a parade;
he was as easy to hold as . . . the jug in that picture
up in the study. Captain Cosmo rode by
in his Cosmobile, the boy liked that. And,
near the end, not so important a figure
as all of the various Mickeys and Goofies,
Mr. Light-Brite slowly rolled past on a float of tinfoil wattage.
“Look,” she’d said, “from Daddy’s office.”
The boy didn’t care at all. But she,
refusing to think of safety in terms of money,
could think it as “Yes,
he’ll protect us.”
6.
And the battle is fought in the filamental flash
up someone’s nerve-connected dyed-to-match
prosthetic hook-of-a-hand; in the shoptalk of light
and leaf sugars; the battle is on our bedsheets, is
in gamma rays, is sifting through the charged ennui
of the video-games arcade . . .
the battle of wholeness
versus flying apart, the battle of the universe itself,
and of its planisphere: the beermug rings and their
shotglass moons, complexly staining a bar top.
* * *
A hush falls over the mallow dust of the plain.
* * *
And then he awoke, and arose, and smote his keepers,
and like the reeds of the waters he broke his chains,
and unto him called his (plague)mates
Weal and Woe, and then did he walk the lands
of the people once more, P-t-r Pain
for I shall fear him, I dread his (evil eye) (?)
And then did he seek out conquest
I shall fear him, I dread his green step
P-t-r Pain, the in-my-bowels-the-stabber
P-t-r Pain, the in-my-chest-a-jackal / (lion) (?)
Up is down, and every hand is turned against another
And then there was no safety for the people
from his three-prong-lance
for I shall fear his three-prong-lance
And then did the cries rise up, and the people
beseeched. And it was heard; and from
the central plain, and thereupon the temple
of the central plain,[*] did Spee-d-Alka stride forth
with the Tablets of Relief
it is ours to swallow (? see “ingest”)
with works-like-magic
praise him
it is ours to take as directed
Spee-d-Alka who rallies the forces that stay our anguish.
Then did the battle ensue
* * *
It’s summer. The air is smeared with summer,
the drone of the bees is a fat sound, and the long day thins
away like trickled butter over the lake.
The waves
are involved in the project the rows of aspen boughs
continue: trans /
substantiating the light, into another
one of the fragmented bodies of Earth.
And
the flowers close, and the awnings furl,
and the alley becomes a lushly-stocked thesaurus
read by the whiskers of rats.
Everywhere,
the intangible is verified through its messengers.
The stars speak spectra. Moses
understood the announcement out of the bush.
* * *
The prayer is the same in any language:
Thank you. Help me. Look upon
our plight and daily striving, Absolute of Absolutes,
and rain down armies of Your fierce and invincible Righteous Enablement.
Heal us.
* * *
And thus did Alka make war on Pain, and
(here the script breaks off)
The battle is daily waged, the cosmic battle
of Order versus Entropy
If you would deny it
a place at our table
try telling this woman curled in her bed despairing
tell the biopsy slide
7.
“The Reverend Patrick Brontë, wishing to know more about the minds of his six motherless children than he had hitherto discovered, placed each one behind a mask to make them speak with less timidity than before . . .”
I’ve turned to watch her undone face in sleep
become the spokesface
for the morphic fields of sentient life
in the air, for the presto-chango
physics of void and matter, of matter and void,
and for the lovely broken continguity
of mind and flesh . . .
and needed to kiss it halfway wakeful, back
again into being her face.
* * *
The house was charged with . . . he didn’t know
what, he was four. He was four and
awake in the gravid darkness.
This had happened before, and he knew what to do
to quiet himself: he went to the upstairs study
and turned on the light there. This was his father’s room,
the light was Mr. Light-Brite most
especially here, a personal, watchful light.
And even at four he wasn’t immune to the sexual
stamina held in check in the skin of the woman
at the well – the way her simple gown was shadowed
at an angle from her hip-swell to the lifted vessel,
over her breasts. And in the silence
he can hear, or sense the possibility to hear,
that world – to hear,
not the clay, but the crystalline grid
in clay, not the donkey, the Donkey,
the prototypical wail, the first condensing gas
this plain of mallow dust with its grief and brief pleasures
descended from in the time before time,
and was mixed to an iffy stability with the spit of stars
and baked to crazing under our own relentless sun, and
now out of the mouth of clay pours forth the water;
and out of the woman, a song
[*]Scholars currently believe this was the Miles Laboratories, Inc., in Eklhart, Indiana, where a statue to Spee-d-Alka (sometimes Alka Sel-T’zer) was honored.
I’m Nobody, Who Are You? Are You Nobody Too? by Albert Goldbarth
– Emily Dickinson
1.
She undressed in the candlelight – disclosure
enough to excite me (even given
the intermittency of the vision) and enough
to reveal that right there, in the swan-neck soft of her
between her navel and what a more discreet memoirist
than myself would call her pubis, was an amateur tattoo
– perhaps an inch high, in a clumsy Gothic lettering –
that stated: PEPE’S. I looked for a moment
too long, so she had to say something, and what she said
was candid. “That? Oh, was maybe a year ago.
I gave him naming rights.”
2.
The tree, the wind: a fricative relationship.
A sound so shaped that some nights
it’s less music and more language.
Words. A few words, anyway. There
have been nights, admit it, when
you’ve thought you heard your name in the air,
your name being sung, a recognition
that you’re a part of the star-resplendent sky
and the musty vapors of earth – they
know who you are, you owe them for this special focus.
Listen: your name; a part
of the wind’s acoustical graffiti.
3.
These days it’s everywhere. On the highway side
of a stadium: MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION NAME.
On the round of a silo: HUMONGOUS COMPANY NAME.
Mowed into the side of a champion steer: A FEED LOT NAME.
Sown into a field of sorghum: A BEER MANUFACTURER NAME.
In films (and surely music videos) it’s sneakier;
we call it “product placement.” Soon how much will it cost
to insert your brand in the paragraph of a novel?
(Or does it happen already?) “He lifted his wine and stared
at her with a sullen fixity over the rim” – or $50,000 later
he lifts his Sunnydale Autumn Pinot Noir and stares at her. . . .
How much did it cost for Pepe’s insertion? This
is true, it comes to me from my friend who works
in “advancement” (i.e., money-raising) at Blah Blah University:
they were planning a new school library and were actually considering
the selling of naming rights not only to various rooms,
staircases, multimedia collections, and books-by-field,
but also to individual toilets. For the man
or the woman who, as we say, has everything. As you probably know,
a company exists that, for a tidy fee, will register a star
in the name of your choice. It has no standing
in the scientific community, but think of walking
into the night with someone you love
below star Name-of-Someone-You-Love!
It isn’t useful: it isn’t monogrammed luggage.
But then neither is it a toilet bowl. A few of us
have made our lovers immortal through being granted the right
to officially name a new insect. And I know someone
who contractually must keep the name of a rugby team
shaved into his hair for a calendar year. I know someone
who only agreed to accept a divorce
from his eight-months-pregnant wife if he was granted the right
to name the child. An ugly story. Once,
they probably strolled out into the night like anybody
in love and made gifts of the stars to each other.
4.
And so I find it interesting to consider that
this ostentatious and overprodigious showering
of the world with names is no more in the news than is
their theft. It’s common. Identity right now
is as liable to being burgled away as, say, a TV set,
a computer, a purse left overnight on the porch. It happened
to Eva: one day she discovered that “Eva”
had purchased a new sleekola whizbang gewgaw’d
speedmobile and a cruise to the Bahamas.
Standard reaction: felt-like-raped etc.
Evil-doppelganger etc: somebody else, who somehow isn’t
“else,” but technically “me” – the way
a cancer is. Unnerving; and yet
a rightness prevails . . . as if some law of natural proportion
is at work, and as the names (on keychains,
t-shirts, megabuck athletic fields, toe rings, vanity plates)
proliferate, at the same time
some, like overcrowded lemmings,
must be taken away. “And really,” Eva said – a day
of one too many mai-tais – “I could almost believe
I deserve this thing.” Well, I’ll believe it too;
won’t you? – there is an outlaw other in us,
a me-gone-wrong. In Eva’s case
it left one night – it stepped out
with the driver’s license adroitly slipped into its garter.
5.
Somebody with your credit card.
Somebody with your social security number.
Somebody with your wife.
Somebody who needs your life more than you do.
6.
2006: We’re expert now at obliterating
other people’s identity. On the largest scale,
genocide. In Orwell’s 1984 the erasure
of who-you-are is a science
– bureaucratic offices exist for its implementation
and perfection, and it goes from paper trails
to an insidious surgical neurofutzing. This exists
in its place on a line that we can follow back in time
to an active theogovernmental attempt in ancient Egypt
to eradicate out of existence – in effect, to retro-abort –
the name of Akh’na-ton, an earlier pharaoh
whose maverick vision included monotheism (and,
by implication, an end to the current priesthood): his cartouche
was chiseled out of walls and obelisks by the thousand: dust,
and dust, and dust again: by now
the powders of those minus signs are reincorporated
into our own ongoing fracas. When I met her
six years later, she said, “Allen – wow! Hello!”
I would have corrected her, but . . . for the moment
I’d forgotten hers altogether. That night, in a scumble
of shadow and candlelight no different from the atmosphere
of our first encounter, I kissed her exactly where Pepe had been
before the dermabrasion.
7.
I am nobody.
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.
– Richard Wright,
from his series of haiku
When the moon disappeared it took his face along.
– Davis Grubb,
Fool’s Parade
8.
An alloy: name
and subject.
There’s a privilege in being allowed to observe
its founding moment,
still with the heat and the damp of creation
flimmering there.
/ Traditionally the Eskimaux woman
in labor, with the community surrounding her, wildly
calling out names. And when the child at last
hears his . . . he comes forth.
/ In a Jewish tradition,
the child can never be named for a living relative:
the soul might leave the elder of the two, to take
new residence. That my parents named me Albert
is a proof my father’s father was dead
already by the time of my birth.
/ My wife
– although from long before she was my wife –
was Lora. That didn’t work for her,
for a number of reasons, none of them requiring
details here. Let’s just say life is thorny;
bruise and disappointment are its nutrients; and sometimes
it can happen that a word is too full of association
to carry into the future. She stopped the car.
She was alone with the day, alone in the car
like a seed in its husk, that the day was pressing down upon,
the sun and the invisible planets, pressing down as if to print
their pattern on this forming thing. “I’m Skyler,”
she said, out loud. And so she is, now: Sky.
From out of the blue.
9.
His parents named him Michael: Mike as a kid, then
Em Boy, that was his gang name, then Moloto, that
was when he “was finding his roots,” then
Miles Long – maybe you’ve seen him in Hard Ramrodders 2?
There are cases of multiple personality disorder with up
to sixteen separate “lives” in one hive of a brain, and each
its history, its quirks, its name. But then
there’s Ellen’s mother in the nursing home, who needs
to wake each morning and remember what a “morning” is, remember
who her “me” is in the midst of the aches and indignities.
She looks in the mirror . . . most days,
simply being herself enough
is enough.
10.
And Ellen’s mother, Norma, she can remember her way
through dominos, can talk to her daughter
in loosely narrative structure. There are others
in the halls . . . hey, Dave? hey, Sophie? Sophie? – nothing
answers back. It’s like all of those places
that are named now for exactly what’s missing:
Thousand Oaks Estates. True Comfort Convalescent Home.
11.
One company buys up naming rights to the race car,
one to the driver’s jacket, one to the spandex’d asscheeks
of his pit crew girl (the cameras stick to her
like sprinkled talcum on a baby). “He got her pregnant,
did you hear? They’re going to name it Coca-Cola.”
That’s one story. There are jillions by now. Here’s one
that comes today from my friend:
Her hair is cornrowed; he was bald.
Her weight is under a hundred; he reminded everybody
of one of those sci-fi blobs that eats Cincinnati.
She’s turned thirty-eight, a black-and-Puerto-Rican mix;
and he was sixty-two and Irish-Hawaiian. You
can imagine, then, the comedy and confusion at first,
when the cops showed up at the ATM machine
as he withdrew the last of the cash, and his
voluminous ID proclaimed him Eva.
“I suppose I’ll just have to think of it
as my cottage adventure in cloning.”
12.
[Charles] Lyell, in his Principles, introduced additional units known as epochs or series to cover the period since the age of the dinosaurs, among them Pleistocene (“most recent”), Pliocene (“more recent”), Miocene (“moderately recent”), and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene (“but a little recent”).
– Bill Bryson, on geological time
And in sixth grade, during an oral report, I announced to the world that dinosaurs existed in the mezzanine. . . .
The pleasures of verbal coinage – of defining the world through language, and of feeling that definition on the tongue, for its first time, almost the vital writhe of a tiny, beating thing – are real; an awareness of the many opportunities for naming seems to be neuropunched into the matrix of us from the get-go. “Rock,” some pioneer of the art would have said in one of the proto-languages, and soon her best buddy was “Thrower-of-Rocks.” Somebody else, “A-Few-Rocks-Too-Short-of-a-Stonehenge.”
Tulips, roses, orchids, strippers, yachts, racehorses, angels strewn throughout their thrones and dominions, superheroes, show dogs, mosses, thick alchemical elixirs, the months of the Mayan calendar, rollercoasters, fish lures, wrestlers, quasars and their cockamamie cousins, all 900 (or 500 or 10,000) names of God, that roll call of Dickens’s (Mr. Guppy, Mrs. Jellyby, Uriah Heep). . . . We love the lingual gush of such invention, love to stack them and stroke them and yoke them to our purposes. Champagnes. Colognes. Dot-coms. Clouds. Every visible pock of the full moon’s.
Timothy Archibald’s Sex Machines is a book that surveys your everyday, low-key, often mom-and-pop or guy-at-the-office visionary tinkerers in quest of the perfect homemade mechanized sex toy – usually a version of some dildo attached to a pasta maker, a bicycle frame, an electric kitchen mixer, a reciprocating electric saw, an antique dentist chair. . . . The fascination here is not in how exotic these people are, but how quotidian. Dan and Jan (she’s an elementary school teacher) “seem to be the kind of neighbors anyone would want next door.” They’re also the proud creators (and the namers) of the Monkey Rocker.
The Fucksall. The Gang Bang. Two to Tango. The Ultimate Ride. Fuckzilla. The Predator. Thrillhammer. One Der Woman. The Erotichine. (Maybe if they’re commercially successful, major corporations will pay to see their names inscribed on the vibrating sides of these pounders and plungers.) The Wand. The Explorer. The Mastermate. We love this little “Let there be . . . ,” this pour of more and more, it’s like those oceanbottom vents that feed the mega-heat of the planet’s magma deeps out into the blank slate of the waiting water, and hydrogen and oxygen and a salty, womby stew of microbial possibility start to create – right there, right then – the specific shapes of nameable existences.
Most of which die immediately; surely they die eventually; or maybe they evolve, to such a fractally far-removed, unrecognizable extent, the very strangeness of the ongoing life is a death. In any case, names decease. The Mugwumps don’t exist any longer, their cause is a scatter of ashes. No one calls for the postilion or uses a hectograph. Bodkins, anyone? And Lily Langtry, whose name was once a beacon . . . Maimonides . . . Yuri Gagarin . . . Who? . . . a scatter of ashes. (The inventor of the Holy Fuck says, “Well, I’ve gone through a lot of name changes recently. I was Raven Solace for a while, but now I’m Ruiin, with two i’s.”) The names of losing Vice-Presidential candidates? . . . the rumor of the ghost of a scatter of ashes.
We can witness all of this process – the delighted bubblings-up of nomination, and the following oblivion – if we travel back in time, and go past the Oligocene, and the Miocene, and through the front door of the Pleistocene, to the Inthebeginocene itself: today, with hoopla, Adam is naming the animals.
They parade before him, one kind at a time, while he sits on a grassy promontory, concentrating – not that furrows could ever appear on that perfect and innocent dawntime face, but concentrating none the less. And then, with a thoughtful, doughty breath, the names begin.
And as they begin, the essentialness of the creatures begins as well. Oh sure, they had their individuation already – they had it technically. The stegosaur and the pocket shrew were distinguishable from each other. But now, as they’re outlined, colored in, hammered to their fastenings by the force of a word – their word – an indispensable and unduplicatable character develops. “Rabbit,” he says, with a shriek of pleasure, as if he’s just got this one smack in the bullseye for sure – and the rabbitness of this frantic, furry hopper enlivens every angelhair scraggle of lavender capillary backlit by the sun in its swiveling ears.
And then, if there’s going to be a bullseye . . . “Bull,” he says as one enormous pawer of the earth plods past. “Rat.” “Tiger.” “Sabretooth tiger.” “Goat.” In a way, they’re like the gypsy’s crystal ball: a nothing, a purity, that the future gets read into. With this difference: Adam doesn’t merely see the future, he creates it: “Whale,” “Bat,” “Flamingo,” “Ocelot” – forevermore.
Could anything be more happy and empowering! “Weasel.” “Kinkajou.” And then the joy, as the day wears on, of further verbal dexterities. “Honey badger.” “Howler monkey.” “Great tit.” “Bird of paradise.” The butterflies alone are a language-lover’s confectionarium: monarch, purple emperor, tortoiseshell, gatekeeper, chalkhill blue, saint’s red, the question mark, the comma, skipper, hop merchant, large heath, northern brown Argus, meadow brown, green-veined white, empassion, azure floater, mountain ringlet. . . . And then the fish! And the beetles!
What we know, of course, is how ephemeral all of this is: we know how it looks, this fingersnap of certainty, to the eternity-eyes of the seraphs; or to the steady movement of evolution. For all of his nomenclatural fertility, it isn’t given to Adam to think up “history” or “fossil.” The duck-billed platypus is doomed: its lovely quintosyllabic moniker won’t save it. Nor will all of its seven-hundred-and-fifty-pounds provide a permanence for the sabretooth tiger: along with other megafauna, it will die out, after several glacial cycles, at the beginning of the Holocene.
And Eve and Adam . . . soon, they’ll have a glimmer of what we know. They’re going to enter time, and start to be dissolved in its invisible secretions. “Shame” is a word they’ll need to coin now. “Pain.” (He’ll feel it right there, below his kidneys – they have “kidneys” now – at the end of a day of back-crunching labor.) “Sorrow.” (One morning she’ll look in the waters, and see what this does to refeature her face.) “Mortality” – that’s the kicker! That’s the vise around the heart!
The Bible is silent on their reaction to Abel’s murder, but we can imagine, we can barely imagine, the shock of this, the first death ever. Abel is a crystal ball, for all of them. Adam only vaguely remembers the carrion birds, the vulture and the buzzard; he hardly paid attention to the maggot; but he must have named them too. Now he knows why. The names of things that they have now! The “mourning veil.” The “plow.” The “grinding stone.”
And yet we can’t completely and only regret this event. In the meditative science fiction novel All Flesh is Grass by Clifford Simak, the narrator comes to feel a stirring pity for undying things. He scents “the odor of immortality, the effluvium of that great uncaring which could not afford to care since anything it cared for could only last a day, while it went on into an eternal future toward other things and other lives for which it could not allow itself to care. And this was loneliness, I thought, a never-ending and hopeless loneliness such as the human race would never be called upon to face.”
Perhaps “the creature that cares” is as good a name for our species as Homo sapiens. Perhaps, on this side of those barred gates that are guarded by the cherubim and the flaming sword, “accomplishment” exists, and “art” and “ambition,” because we die. Perhaps we weren’t fully human until we awoke with an understanding of loss. “Suffering,” “beauty,” “the blade,” “the book,” “the monument,” “the runnel of tears” – the future for them is an empty dictionary awaiting its filling.
That’s a glorious labor, but first they must be brought to this ground zero. It’s where we leave them for now, two loinclothed travelers, heading heavily into their lives – “without,” as my mother would have said, as if gossiping over two neighbors, “a pot to piss in, or two pennies to their name.”