Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

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  Fifty Contemporary Writers

  Conjunctions, Vol. 50

  Edited by Bradford Morrow

  CONJUNCTIONS

  Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing

  Edited by

  Bradford Morrow

  Contributing Editors

  Walter Abish

  Chinua Achebe

  John Ashbery

  Martine Bellen

  Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

  Mary Caponegro

  William H. Gass

  Peter Gizzi

  Jorie Graham

  Robert Kelly

  Ann Lauterbach

  Norman Manea

  Rick Moody

  Howard Norman

  Joan Retallack

  Joanna Scott

  Peter Straub

  William Weaver

  John Edgar Wideman

  published by Bard College

  Contents

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Peter Gizzi, Tradition & the Indivisible Talent

  Edwidge Danticat, The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special

  Ben Marcus, On Not Growing Up

  Joyce Carol Oates, The Beating

  Peter Cole, Why Does the World Out There Seem

  Charles McLeod, Edge Boys

  Cole Swensen, Two Poems

  Sandra Cisneros, Natural Daughter

  Richard Powers, Modulation

  Shelley Jackson, King Cow

  Charles Bernstein, Three Poems

  Paul La Farge, Contact

  Lyn Hejinian, A Bit of Nocturnal History

  Stephen O’Connor, Man in the Moon

  Julia Elliott, The Raven

  Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Animal Communication

  Reginald Shepherd, Three Poems

  Rick Moody, The Problem of Impairment

  Edie Meidav, Beef

  Rae Armantrout, Three Poems

  Brian Booker, Gumbo Limbo

  Martine Bellen, Two Poems Inspired by the Dreams of Emily Dickinson

  Frederic Tuten, Self-Portrait with Sicily

  Can Xue, Moonlight Dance (translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping)

  Christopher Sorrentino, The Photographer Upstairs

  Joan Retallack, Archimedes’ New Light

  Carole Maso, From Mother & Child

  William H. Gass, The Man Who Spoke with His Hands

  Bradford Morrow, From The Prague Sonatas

  Rikki Ducornet, Because His Youth Or The Parrot’s Spanish

  Andrew Mossin, Trestle

  Eduardo Galeano, Women (translated from Spanish by Mark Fried)

  James Morrow, From The Philosopher’s Apprentice

  Diane Williams, A Helpful Story, a Devious Storm, the Weird Directions, the Difficult Wait, the Risky Wait, the Happy Appointment, the Familiar Property, the Safety Sign, the Frightened Enemy

  Nam Le, The Boat

  Donald Revell, The Rabbits

  Joanna Scott, Sally Werner

  Robert Kelly, From Fire Exit

  Matthew Hamity, Refugees

  Thalia Field, Hospice

  Robert Antoni, The Historic Voyage of the Rosalind

  Mary Caponegro, The Translator

  Jonathan Carroll, Nothing to Declare

  Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 82: Hinge

  Brian Evenson, Angel of Death

  Valerie Martin, Secrets and Lies

  Peter Orner, The Aquarium of the Dead: Chicago Stories

  Robert Coover, Red-Hot Ruby

  John Ashbery, Some Silly Thing

  Ann Lauterbach, Elegy: Or to Begin Again

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  THE FIFTY WRITERS IN this fiftieth issue include those who go back to the very first volumes of Conjunctions, together with startlingly imaginative writers new to our pages. This is what we have tried to do over the course of the last quarter century—gather new voices together with those we have believed in over the years. When I founded Conjunctions, it was my hope to publish a few issues before folding. On days when naive hubris surfaced, I thought maybe we could even make it to ten. The history of the literary journal in this country and abroad, now and in the past, is one marked by idealism and, so often, the disappointment of good intentions flying headlong into the chasm of commerce and cynicism. Our project has been one of the fortunate survivors. We have done so in large measure because of several publishers, idealists themselves, who have taken a chance on supporting Conjunctions. I’ll always be grateful to David Godine and Collier Books, who were our earliest proponents. But it is to Bard College that my deepest gratitude goes. Bard has stood by Conjunctions since our fifteenth issue in 1990, and continues to shine as a paragon of what a literary journal publisher should be. We have thrived under Bard’s aegis, and many of us in the literary community are indebted to the college for its steadfast belief. Colleagues to whom I’m also grateful are legion, from our editorial assistants to our contributing editors, but without the help of Michael Bergstein, Pat Sims, Bill White, Brian Evenson, Micaela Morrissette, and J. W. McCormack, it wouldn’t be possible to conceive, construct, and circulate Conjunctions every spring and fall. All of us who are devoted to this project celebrate our fiftieth foray as a milestone, yes, marking a moment in which to look back. As important, it is a fresh threshold, a beginning anew.

  —Bradford Morrow

  April 2008

  New York City

  Tradition & the Indivisible Talent

  Peter Gizzi

  If all the world says something

  we think then we know something

  don’t we and then the blank screen

  or memory again. You crazy.

  No, you crazy. It’s like this

  but almost always

  when time-lapsed words

  and weather-swept flowering trees

  move in empathetic wind.

  I am rooted but alive.

  I am flowering and dying

  I am you, the wind says, the wind.

  The embiggened afternoon

  was just getting started

  and to be adrift and stuck

  can be a pleasant sensation

  like loving abstraction

  or a particular object’s nimbus.

  Pick one and look at it,

  human or digital, vegetable,

  mineral, alive or dying,

  it’s all atomic anyhow

  much closer to the electron

  part of yr being. Being,

  it’s a small word.

  After all absence makes

  the particles move faster.

  The path tilted up to the right

  and the angled view

  so dramatic in boisterous sun.

  When a thought’s thingness begins

  to move, to become unmoored,

  and you ride the current

  with your head and feel yourself

  lift off like birdsong caught in the inner ear

  even the curios seem animated

  in their dusty shelves.

  When the inanimate gestures back

  with an imperceptible howdy

  then the known sets in—

  the song is alive. A scale

  rendered invisibly opening onto once.

  That part of tradition.

  Birdsong and daybreak,

  are they not the same at the root?

  Twigs torn from brambles

  nest and house this cooing thing.

  C
lose your eyes. The notes

  imprint their solar magic homing

  a musical refrain built out

  in a sculptural vortex and time

  is this sculptural vortex—

  the applause of rushes

  sung into a larger sequence.

  The sky. And now the word is fire,

  fire in the heart, fire in the head.

  Fire above and fire in bed—

  seemingly the only element

  to get gilded up in song.

  How about dirt? I love you

  like dirt. I miss you dirty mouth,

  dirty smile, oh, and my dirt

  is your dirt is nice also.

  Closer to the ground, perhaps,

  on the ground, that’s real enough

  and those goddamn spuggies

  are fledged and it’s spring

  and the books in my shelves

  in my head have all turned, nothing

  but earth and peat and mold

  and rich soft living manna

  you can breathe, the must.

  The must at the root of it all,

  desire and wanting, must know.

  The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special

  Edwidge Danticat

  “THEY TOLD ME, MADAME, that I am going to die.”

  I don’t know if it was a dreadful gut feeling that had sent Mélisande to an AIDS clinic, but she had gone to the one down near the bicentennial park downtown and had gotten her arms pricked and her blood drawn, only to receive a death sentence. She’d been coughing for some time, soft and discreet at first, then more and more thunderously, which had led to my removing my young son from her care. But only this morning when she got a fever and developed a level of sluggishness, which I instantly recognized from my own dead parents’ battles with various types of respiratory illnesses, as pneumonia; only then did she finally decide to seek medical care.

  She was sobbing now as she stood in the doorway of my bedroom, her body as flat and lean as one of the sides of the mahogany door frame. Leaning against the somber wood, she hiked up a flowered silk skirt to wipe the tears from her face. I immediately recognized that skirt as one I’d formerly owned. I had paid about seventy dollars for it at a sale at a fancy boutique in Miami—that is, when I was in college—before I married a classmate, a fellow Haitian, whose family owned a hotel in Port-au-Prince.

  “Have you told your mother?” I asked her.

  She was a child really, a girl, fifteen or sixteen at most. Her mother worked as a cook at our hotel. They had lied about her age so that Mélisande could get the job as one of our son’s nannies, but given the fact that the mother had six younger children in the provinces, in Léogâne, I figured that Mélisande had plenty of experience for the job. I don’t know why I trusted Mélisande. Perhaps it was because she was from my parents’ hometown. Some of her relatives might have known some of mine. I didn’t trust that many people with my son, but it was obvious as soon as I placed him in Mélisande’s arms and she probed out of him the loudest laugh he’d ever tried that he loved her. Perhaps what drew him to her were the same things I found appealing about her: her elfin face, her reedy voice, her slightly hesitant walk, as though she was never really sure it was safe to touch the ground.

  Roland, my husband, had thought that Mélisande should be in school, but we hadn’t forced it or insisted, as we could have, that she go. Or at least that she attend some type of vocational class in cooking or sewing when she wasn’t looking after our son. Sometimes, during her free time, we saw her helping her mother cook or I saw her joke with one of the maids as she cleaned the guests’ rooms with them. The deal she had with the maids was that whenever she helped them out whatever was left behind in the rooms would be split with her. Sometimes, aside from the tips, they’d find small pieces of gold or silver jewelry—mostly earrings and bracelets—that my husband would hold on to for a while and then after no one had called or come back to claim them would allow them to sell to the jeweler down the street, who’d pay them a few dollars just so he’d melt them again into other pieces to sell back to other hotel guests. This was a bit of extra money that she might not be making if she were in school, I sometimes told myself. But school might have helped with the future. And now she might not even have a future.

  Shame on me, I think now. I’d kept hoping that she’d find a good night school or an adult literacy class, but I never did more than hope. I never even talked to her about it, never offered her the evenings off to do it. I was prepared, however, to let her go if she asked, but she never did. Now I would right this wrong. Somewhere between when she came to work for us (or maybe it was before) and now, she had contracted this disease. Perhaps if she had been in class, and had had homework and exams and yearly promotions, it wouldn’t have happened.

  “Come in and sit down.”

  I got up from my bed and walked over to the doorway. I was still in my pajamas, blue pajamas that she was supposed to inherit from me one day. My son was downstairs with my husband in his office. Guiding Mélisande toward my favorite rocking chair—carved for me by a local artisan—she felt extremely light to my touch, almost like paper, cloth, or air. Even though her feet were gliding across the wooden floor, I still felt as though I were carrying her. Her body slid down into the chair, where I immediately piled up a few cushions around her. I pulled an ottoman from a corner and pushed it against the back of her knees. Resting my arms on her shoulders, I felt some of the warmth of her lingering fever through her plain white T-shirt.

  “What did the doctor say exactly?” I asked.

  “He said,” she replied, with her head and face buried in her hands, “that I have AIDS.”

  I was expecting anything but AIDS. Perhaps pneumonia or some bronchial infection for sure, but not AIDS. When she came home from the doctor, I was prepared to tell her not to wait so long the next time to get herself checked out. There were things that could kill people in the countryside that could easily be treated in Port-au-Prince. This is what I had prepared myself to tell her. I thought at most she would need antibiotics.

  “Even with the AIDS,” I was telling her, “now they have all these drugs. People live for years on them.”

  This provoked a new flurry of sobs from her. Her shoulders were bobbing up and down even as a sudden panic set in for me. My son. My Gabriel. My boy. She had touched every part of his body, had washed, had wiped, had kissed and cuddled him. Had they accidentally exchanged saliva, blood? I suddenly wanted to leave her there and run through the hotel and find my son. As usual, he had woken up earlier than all of us and Roland had taken him to his office. He was probably even now crawling under his father’s desk, giggling, singing with delight.

  Mélisande was still sobbing, her face soaking in the pool of tears gathering in her hands. We’d have to have Gabriel tested. And how would we deal with it? How would I live with myself—how would I live—if he had been infected?

  I decided that I would simply let Mélisande cry. Let her get it all out of her system before we tried to come up with some type of solution. There were plenty of clinics, though of course not enough, which offered retroviral treatments. Some offered them for free. Others expected you to be a guinea pig in some questionable experiments. The clinic where Mélisande had been tested, however, offered counseling but no treatment.

  Why hadn’t I suspected all this sooner? I stepped away from her and staggered to the edge of the bed. I should have urged her to go to the doctor when she first began to lose weight. I should have stopped her flirtations with many of the hotel’s male guests. The concierge, a former brothel bouncer, had told Roland that Mélisande liked to seek out some particular guests—the fat white ones—who she thought, because they seemed to have never missed a meal in their lives, were rich. It didn’t seem to matter to her that most of the time she had no idea, until they grabbed some part of her body, what they were saying. The exchanges of “What?” and “Who?” were delightful games to her. By repeating some of the s
ometimes obscene things they said to her, she thought she was learning English or Spanish or whatever language they spoke. She would disappear for a few minutes with them into their rooms, but it never seemed to me long enough for her to have had sex with them, only to make a date, perhaps, for a later encounter, during her free time. Again, I didn’t want to cause trouble for her. There were six young children counting on her and her mother for food, clothes, and school fees back in Léogâne. I thought she was protecting herself, aux moins.

  She stopped crying for a few minutes because she seemed to run out of tears. And now she had the hiccups, which forced her head to jerk back and forth toward and away from me.

  “We have to find you another place where you can get a second test performed,” I told her.

  She raised her head and glared at me, then she opened her eyes really wide as though a beehive or a bird’s nest had suddenly appeared on top of my head.

  “They told me there was no cure,” she said.

  Her eyes were extremely red, the bulging capillaries having taken over her eyeballs.

  “Let me talk to Roland,” I said. “We’ll find you some care.”

  I had no idea where to find the best treatment in town, but I knew that Roland would. He knew something about nearly everything, especially things that involved worst-case-scenario types of problems. This was a hotelier’s job, he sometimes reminded me. If someone shows up hungry, you feed them. If they want drink, you ply them. If they want to be left alone, you make yourself scarce. If they want company, you entertain. If they are lovelorn, you find them love. And if someone shows up sick, you find treatment quickly before that person expires on your watch.

  My sigh of relief was as loud as hundred-mile winds. My son was negative. The same Canadian doctor who performed his HIV test was the one who’d help us get the retroviral drugs that Mélisande needed. The best thing, he told us, was a new one-pill treatment that many of his patients were opting for because it made compliance easier. Someone like Mélisande, he could already tell, was not going to be compliant. First of all, she was claiming that she’d never had sex and since she’d never injected herself with a needle or had a blood transfusion, all he could conclude was that she was in terrible denial.