by Unknown
(1995)
Matter
Love was alone with love. And there was nothing I could do about it. Love was alone with love. Why make another move? Why move? It’s your turn over there, someone said, and I thought I’m going to open my legs and see what happens. Hurry up, lay down your cards. The cards were in my hand. I put down the card to see what would happen while I opened my legs. You open now, I said. And love responded quickly. You are a good player. Have you been playing long? I learned from an expert, said love. Is the expert still living. Yes, she is. A she, I said. Love was impatient and wanted to know if I had another move. I closed my legs up to see if that counted. Look at your hand, said love trying to be patient. And you, I said, prefer these cards over other forms of excitement. If you can’t play, you’ll never meet the expert, love replied. I didn’t really care, but my body was standing on end at the thought of fucking. When I saw that I and my body were not the same, I knew what card to play and played it as soon as my turn came without second-guessing my opponent’s position in the game.
(1995)
MARK JARMAN (1952–)
Epistle
When the thief does come in the night, it is mid-afternoon on a sunny day, with everybody at work. Although we are unprepared, the house is ready. The door waits to be smashed open, the drawers to be pulled and left gaping. The things—whatever things he chooses—wait to be taken. They are always ready to be released from our care, from their obligations to us. The thing with sentimental value especially waits with a saintly indifference.
And the things are transfigured, given new meaning, as if they joined orders, took vows. When we meet them again, if we do, in the monastery of the pawnshop, they have earned a new humility, and we must try to persuade them back to their old life. Or we might glimpse at the symphony concert the stolen watch, like a golden snowflake, strapped to a young woman’s wrist.
The thief is a communicant in a country that worships in secret, on the run. He improvises the elements of his ritual at every ceremony. In this one a gold watch with clasp and a cunning shell to cover its face. In that one an oblong case that may contain a violin or high powered rifle. In this one a collection of objects—an answering machine, a camera, a pair of binoculars, a laptop computer. In another, moving service, a .38 caliber revolver. In every period of worship these things take on the numinosity of faith, each with its inherent worth abruptly revealed.
Theologians spring up among our friends. Our visitor, they say, had been watching us, studying us, there was some plan. We join them in speculating on the location of our possessions, the new plane they occupy, and their miraculous return.
The man spraying to check for fingerprints says this scrotebag will not be back. He finds nothing and crowns each empty place with a halo of soot. His severity and solemnity are like John Knox’s, if he smoked after the service and complained bitterly about sin moving into the better neighborhoods, because of the mayor’s new policies. Knox fuming, after his fulminations in the pulpit. Knox driving off in a crime scene van.
We attached ourselves to things, and now we feel like amputees. The wrist of the watch, severed. The fingers snapped from the neck of the violin. The eye of the camcorder plucked out. Where the laptop sat, a lapse.
We try to feel lucky in our violation. He could have burned down the house. He could have kidnapped the children. We could have surprised him and driven after him and been shot dead through the windshield. He didn’t take the wedding album. He didn’t take the TV. Here, safe in its drawer, he didn’t take this. There, in plain sight on the desk, he didn’t take that.
Now we see others as thieves or not as thieves. Anyone we pass is a felon or an upstanding citizen. We listen to the gospel of electronic security. Listen and believe. It is religious, but not a religion that brings joy or consolation. We enter the feast days of anxiety, the high holidays of suspicion.
This letter goes out with a list of things encoded that we still possess.
(2001)
MARY RUEFLE (1952–)
Monument
A small war had ended. Like all wars, it was terrible. Things which had stood in existence were now vanished. I had come back because I had survived and survivors come back, there is nothing else left for them to do. I had been on long travels connected to the war, and I had been to the centerpiece of the war, that acre of conflagration. And now I was sitting on a park bench, watching ducks land and take off from a pond. They too had survived, though I had no way of knowing if they were the same ducks from before the war or if they were the offspring of ducks who had died in the war. It was a warm day in the capital and people were walking without coats, dazed by the warmth, which was not the heat of war, which had engulfed them, but the warmth of expansion, in which would grow the idea of a memorial to the war, which had ended, and of which I was a veteran architect. I knew I would be called upon for my ideas in regards to this memorial and I had entered the park aimlessly, trying to escape my ideas, as I had been to the centerpiece, that acre of conflagration, and from there the only skill that returned was escapement, any others died with those who possessed them. I was dining with friends that evening, for the restaurants and theatres and shops had reopened, the capital was like a great tablecloth being shaken in midair so that life could be smoothed and reset and go on, and I had in my mind a longing to eat, and to afterwards order my favorite dessert, cherries jubilee, which would be made to flame and set in the center of the table, and I had in my mind the idea of submitting to the committee a drawing of an enormous plate of cherries, perpetually burning, to be set in the center of the park, as a memorial to the war, that acre of conflagration. And perhaps also in my mind was the hope that such a ridiculous idea would of course be ignored and as a result I would be left in peace, the one thing I desired, even beyond cherries. And I could see the committee, after abandoning my idea, remaining in their seats fighting over the designs of others, far into the after-hours of the work day, their struggles never seeming to end, and then I wanted to submit an idea of themselves as a memorial for the war, the conference table on an island in the middle of the pond, though at least some of them would have to be willing to die in the enactment. And then I saw on the ground an unnamed insect in its solitary existence, making its laborious way through tough blades of grass that threatened its route, and using a stick that lay nearby I drew a circle around the animal—if you can call him that—and at once what had been but a moment of middling drama became a theatre of conflict, for as the insect continued to fumble lopsided in circles it seemed to me that his efforts had increased, not only by my interest in them, but by the addition of a perimeter which he now seemed intent on escaping. I looked up then, and what happened next I cannot describe without a considerable loss of words: I saw a drinking fountain. It had not suddenly appeared, it must have always been there, it must have been there as I walked past it and sat down on the bench, it must have been there yesterday, and during the war, and in the afternoons before the war. It was a plain gunmetal drinking fountain, of the old sort, a basin on a pedestal, and it stood there, an ordinary object that had become an unspeakable gift, a wonder of civilization, and I had an overwhelming desire to see if it worked, I stood up then and approached it timidly, as I would a woman, I bent low and put my hand on its handle and my mouth hovered over its spigot—I wanted to kiss it, I was going to kiss it—and I remembered with a horrible shock that in rising from the bench I had stepped on and killed the insect, I could hear again its death under my left foot, though this did not deter me from finishing my kiss, and as the water came forth with a low bubbling at first and finally an arch that reached my mouth, I began to devise a secret route out of the park that would keep me occupied for some time, when I looked up, holding the miraculous water in my mouth, and saw the ducks in mid-flight, their wings shedding water drops which returned to the pond, and remembered in amazement that I could swallow, and I did, then a bit of arcane knowledge returned to me from an idle moment of reading spent yea
rs ago, before the war: that a speculum is not only an instrument regarded by most with horror, as well as an ancient mirror, and a medieval compendium of all knowledge, but a patch of color on the lower wing segments of most ducks and some other birds. Thus I was able, in serenest peace, to make my way back to my garret and design the memorial which was not elected and never built, but remained for me an end to the war that had ended.
(2001)
KILLARNEY CLARY (1953–)
Because the ones I work for do not love me, because I have said too much and I haven’t been sure of what is right and I’ve hated the people I’ve trusted, because I work in an office and we are lost and when I come home I say their lives are theirs and they don’t know what they apologize for and none of it mended, because I let them beat me and I remember something of mine which not everyone has, and because I lie to keep my self and my hands my voice on the phone what I swallow what hurts me, because I hurt them—
I give them the hours I spend away from them and carry them, even in my sleep, at least as the nag of a misplaced shoe, for years after I have quit and gone on to another job where I hesitate in telling and I remember and I resent having had to spend more time with them than with the ones I love.
(1989)
Life is boundless. Matter is without edge. We grow always outward from ancient explosions and the heavenly bodies distance themselves from each other, then steady, balanced with various pulls. There is a new place.
Like a cartoon, like a promise that we, too, could buy new cars and eat anything, Armstrong bounced his puffy life onto the powder of the moon. We were all watching, tired of the delays.
If there is too much to keep track of, or if it is simply discouraging or overwhelming to live in the world, there is a hideout which can look something like the Sea of Tranquillity. There is aimlessness like dust in a light shaft. There are alternatives now: vacant expanses, time’s measure lost, the emptiness that turns us inside and prods us empty and stupid like that funny flag he kept trying to straighten—taffeta-stiff and unruly. And then it stood out flat.
Disappointed in the dead moon, we could believe the myth of abandon, the giant step of surrender. We tired young, each begging, “Take me, weightlessness, where it is quiet, dark-sky’d and clean.”
(1989)
FRAN CARLEN (1954–)
Anna Karenina
1
All night everything was ending. Happiness defected to another family. “And how was your day,” she would ask him. “Stupidly perfect. More like a gesture than a day,” Karenin complained. The declension of bright start-overs divisible by a televised parade of swan-girls. “The more we want swift return, simulated union, apparel . . .” He began talking at length about resurrection. “Another drawn-out expository with pointed indifference,” she sighed. Her phlegmatic eyewear and his long-suffering cravat were at cross-purposes. It would be interesting to see where he stood when the universe broke in two.
2
“I think . . .” “Prunes, don’t get started on that again.” He felt he was above brand-name bifurcation. Fixatives like fidelity and flight spelled fiction in her book. Anna paused to sense the tremor of the planet, wobbling in its lopsided orbit. Or the pull of an older world with more accessories.
3
Death came like a door suddenly blown open by the wind. Then came the stationing of strangers taking Polaroids. All at once she was a widow. She put on a disc. Schwanengesang always took away the bottom. Her problem was how to undo the domino of numbers. And redemption, threadcount, smog and plate tectonics all tossed together. Distilling dirt from money had driven some people mad (it was one of the paradoxes of modernism).
4
“Grizzled cult! Esthetes! Back away from the door!” The lamb showed up with pince-nez and a supercilious grin. He said his name was Andrey Bely, and he bore a striking resemblance to Andrey Bely.
“Where are your works on paper?” he demanded.
Movers took away the divan. “When she doesn’t sing, she counts. When she stops counting, she sings. When she’s not singing, she’s counting. When she’s not counting or singing, she cries,” the factotum explained to the lamb.
“Tu es vraiment dégueulasse.”
Animal cruelty. Movie lies. Levin missing. The blank noise of lack.
“An excursion to the seashore could alter everything.”
“Ah, peregrination . . . is just so sweet you want to disappear,” Bely brayed leaving.
5
Her fertility was mental. After all who can fault the wind? Well, everyone. It wasn’t like her to ask why. She was going to die. She put on another disc. An oblong monologue about herself or transport. Dwelling on events that may never have happened. In her mind’s eye: Alma Ata. And dread of slipping through the tissue of the ridiculous. Listening to the adagio she felt as lonely as the moon, and fell asleep with her hands in her pockets.
6
In the Bildungsroman, the hero never reads the gazette but deliberates his own demise or mankind’s. She read The Lives of the Saints. At a moment’s notice she could give up whom she desired. The paste of her saintly pallor. She ambled along yawning like a dog.
7
Would he call on her again, the lamby? She guessed nyet with certitude. He was the type who liked to stay up late and make senseless rhymes. That morning he offered her fish in a bucket if she could fetch him water without the bucket.
8
She spilled two glasses of tea but still had the keys to the dacha. At least the confiture and poésie were still intact. She had wanted him to stay all day, in the bathroom. She should have lacquered herself, put butter in the butter dish. “There goes the muse, the sepulchre, the tidy sacrifice, witless but uplifting reason,” she thought as the door blew open.
“Cuttlefish! Why pay a fine for sugar! What are you, period. Nice and crisp, mind you!” Palimpsest, his calling card. “Anna?” Or was it palindrome?
“While you were away, I dreamt I was throwing everyone and breaking them, just like a child.”
“Angels are allowed to watch but they can’t get involved.”
“. . . trying to break the sound habit of reasoning.”
“Yet since Vronsky you keep changing the subject back to yourself.”
“. . . to show up as myself in mimesis.”
“Just imagine a devouring dragon in a crinoline. Medusa with more élan.”
“That’s your remedy for glossolalia?”
“Do you have any Pop-tarts?”
“I have some lamb-chops.”
“Register your anguish as it breaks your heart and makes you want to die.
Sign here.”
This devochka must lie. “Diaries take up space,” she thought.
“Everything is born in ether,” she tried.
“It’s Folsom for you this time, baby,” he replied.
Your basic enfant térrible. Behold, what, gone. “Goodnight, sweet pike, goodnight, goodnight . . .” Her toy-boat voice bobbed up and down over the surface of the song.
9
Or danger hanging voluptuously in mid-air, ebbing and flowing of faces, bedlam of incandescent limbs, vehicles, ragged archetypes, handy alchemical settings, lingual bridges to concomitant connectors, any system would do, certain death: sleeplessness.
10
Layered innuendo and memory. Checklist of her shortcomings. The poseurs were dropping like flies. The others were just lucky at cards. The next card she turned would bring her closer to death. There was the anesthesia plus the shiny lubricants they use for electroshock. Women from another continuum stood at the foot of her sledge. “Snap out of it, Anna.”
(to be concluded)
(2000)
Anal Nap
Am an ass. Max calls, wants jam—fast. Can’t. Sax’s flat. Talks and rants. Max grabs dark Anna at bar, lass drank a malt, Max grappa. Play blackjack—what a lark. Anna asks Fat Sal, and Sal has smack. Anna bags a gram. Chants, Shall waltz! Falls alas daft Pallas. Bad crash�
��wan gal, Max brash, whacks Anna, what crap.
Catch a tram. Pass Schrafft’s. Grab BLT and Franz Kafka at St. Mark’s. Hank stands at bar and drags a fag. As a prank Jack’ll smash Cal’s watch. Cal slams Jack’s glass at wall. Glass shards catch Nan. Nan bawls. Brat! All damp and sad. Back at B’s pad, B barfs all day, shat. Saw B scratch wall and scrawl tract: Last Law. What a mad bard. Shan’t last.
At park, Bach’s rap, rap Bach. Car alarm. Van stalls and cabs and fast cars stand. Sat and had a nap. Want a warm black shawl, cash, mass, a dark psalm. Want calm.
(2000)
THYLIAS MOSS (1954–)
An Anointing
Boys have to slash their fingers to become brothers. Girls trade their Kotex, me and Molly do in the mall’s public facility.
Me and Molly never remember each other’s birthdays. On purpose. We don’t like scores of any kind. We don’t wear watches or weigh ourselves.
Me and Molly have tasted beer. We drank our shampoo. We went to the doctor together and lifted our specimen cups in a toast. We didn’t drink that stuff. We just gargled.
When me and Molly get the urge, we are careful to put it back exactly as we found it. It looks untouched.
Between the two of us, me and Molly have 20/20 vision.
Me and Molly are in eighth grade for good. We like it there. We adore the view. We looked both ways and decided not to cross the street. Others who’d been to the other side didn’t return. It was a trap.