Murgen agreed to let Stiles search his shop in hope that the mob might desist. The physician came downstairs and announced that a deal had been brokered: he, Dr. Stiles, would search the premises. If any mermaid was discovered she would be returned to the sea forthwith.
There rose a skeptical noise. The mob invested scarcely more trust in the doctor than in the apothecary, since in those days, as in ours, it was much the same business. A man named Horace Sympus stepped forward and demanded the liquid of the jar in question be tested for iodine to determine if the beast had lactated. Grover Stiles denied this request, but said he would permit Sympus to join him in searching the apothek. Sympus agreed on the condition that he could in turn appoint two additional searchers, forming a citizens’ committee of three plus the doctor. Stiles agreed. Sympus looked around and couldn’t see anybody he knew, so he indicated at random a small round-shouldered man and a stern sour-faced woman, whose names turned out to be Clive Dungeon and Chimpiffany St. Clair. The four then entered the shop through the doorway.
Murgen stood behind the counter, steadying himself. He tried to recall who these people were. He believed he’d treated the St. Clair woman for the limbic fever; to Sympus, who’d come confiding the shameful anomaly of his infant son Lyle, Murgen had been able to offer only condolence and discretion. Dungeon he’d neither seen before nor heard of. Murgen feared them: whereas before they’d come for help, they now came to ransack his shop because the wicked youth’s mad aunt had told them lies about a decayed girl in a bucket.
They searched the apothek from top to bottom and front to back, and in the back room they found the wreckage of Murgen’s stores. Somebody had smashed a cobblestone through the deadlight. Glass and spattered liquid lay everywhere; volatile powders clouded the air, and the room was filled with the bitter smell of potent chemicals.
There lay a piece of darkish matter on the floor that must have come from one of the busted bottles. Clive Dungeon prodded it with the toe of his boot, but Murgen stopped him:
—That’s nothing to do with it. That is only my concern.
Then they saw the big-headed child huddled in the corner with his skinny arms hugging what looked like a two-gallon jar. The boy wept over the jar and his knees shook.
The doctor approached the child and asked him what he had there.
Liam, gazing up, could not make out the face that was speaking to him. He said it was a creature, a creature who had been ill and was his friend.
—I am going to need to take a peek at your friend there, said the doctor.
The boy shook his head. His eyes were rheumy and unfocused and he blubbered softly.
Murgen wanted to say something but the words caught up in his throat.
The three members of the citizens’ committee closed in. The doctor knelt and gently moved the boy’s arm off the jar. The boy cried out sharply. Then he began murmuring to the jar.
—Where are we going to go? Liam asked the creature.
His friend didn’t know. It was comfortable in its liquid, unmoved by the great calamity.
—Do we have to let you go?
Liam could imagine what would happen: the old man would put a hand on his shoulder—We got to let it go, son—and together they would carry the jar down to the seashore. In his mind’s eye the boy saw how the villagers followed at a cautious remove like a throng of sodden mourners. He saw how the long rain had smoothed the features from their faces. Then the boy and the old man knelt on the sand; the ground-glass stopper was pulled, an odor wafted up; the jar was tipped; with a gulp the thing slid forth, landing with a meaty splat on the sand where the foam purled over it; and tipped all the way over, the jar’s dregs petered out, the piddling faint green afterbirth of this sad seashore expulsion. I forget that it comes again, and takes me back in, his friend had said. Then I remember water. The friend receded into the neutral gray distance where sea and sky dissolved and Liam saw the rotten ropes of the fisherman’s net, hemp gnawed by sea lice, the scream of the little girl, the awful discovery. There’s nowhere else, no further to go. Isn’t this the end of the sea?
—I just need to be able to see what’s in there, said the doctor.
Grover Stiles peered into the liquid and frowned. He retrieved his spectacles from his coat pocket and had another look.
Then he glanced up at Murgen. Sympus looked to Dungeon, and Dungeon to Chimpiffany St. Clair, across whose sour face a strange placidness had settled. St. Clair looked to Sympus and Sympus to Grover Stiles, who nodded and cracked his knuckles and stood and replaced the spectacles in his coat.
The crowd packed in the lane received the news with despair. The rain fell on their hats and shoulders; heads bent, they stood in puddles in blank amazement. They were bereft. Anyone who had harbored in his mind a special picture of the secret captive in the apothek felt robbed of the chance to see that picture brought out alive in a jar of fluid. None of it was real but the rain.
Gumbo Limbo woke to the same rain after a night of dreamless sleep. In the gray dawn light Tim Rutter stood in the empty, sludge-washed lane before Murgen’s Apothek. He’d been up all night drinking a potent alcoholic clam broth. He was drunk and exhausted and vexed. He hollered in the lane and flung bits of refuse at the shop. A few people wakened by the noise, or who, like Murgen, had been unable to rest all the night, shuffled out to witness the commotion. Rutter cried forth deranged slanders against Murgen and the apothek and the boy. He said the boy wasn’t a boy at all but a hermaphrodite with the God-granted bodily parts of both the male and female species. He said the old man and the child had deceived the search party and all of Gumbo Limbo, but he knew just where they had hidden the grisly specimen: he meant to smash out all the remaining windows and go in there himself, this very minute, and haul the thing out in the plain light of day.
The crazed youth was shouting such things when, as tended to happen, he was struck dumb. A paralytic innocence smoothed his contorted face. And all of a sudden that charmed countenance was transfigured by an unearthly light. The light seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once. The sun shone through: and it made Tim Rutter’s face look a little green.
The clear weather didn’t last for long. A mist rolled in, though a kind of dry mist, softening and soothing away the vision that had emblazoned itself in such hard and burnished outline in the mind of Gumbo Limbo—a desiccant mist that seemed to dry up all the rotting remainders of nightmare and panic, the wet stench of the terrible festering wrack—a mist that swept down the coastal plain from higher, drier ground, and a wind blowing dust through the village and out into the sea.
It has never been known for certain whether Murgen and the boy remained in their home for a few days, quietly sorting through the broken things, or whether in fact they left Gumbo Limbo in the rainy predawn hours of the night following the mob and the search. Or whether they almost didn’t make it out of town, the causeway being flooded, the marsh waters lipping the highway’s edge, so that it might have appeared to a distant observer that their odd vehicle was skimming the surface of a vast gray lagoon.
And the boy, going blind from a secret cause that was a mystery to the old man, said:
—What do you see out there?
—Nothing but water. Water and sky.
—All the same?
—All the same. Lovely. And it looks like the rain has stopped.
The big glass jar sloshed on the seat, wedged between the boy’s thighs, his hands on the lid.
The old man said:
—Maybe we’ll just let it go somewhere out there.
Like the rain ponds and storm pools that took some time to drain, the rumors lingered. There had been a mermaid, but she’d grown so shriveled that no one could recognize her as such; or she’d shrunk to a size where the water in the jar suited her, and she stopped raging, and so the rain stopped. Or Murgen’s boy did have a secret jar, but with nothing in it except a dead seahorse or maybe a horseshoe crab, which through blindness or insanity appeared to t
he child as something more—and the old man, not wanting to hurt the boy’s feelings, had kept silent so as to protect his belief for a little bit longer. Or else a truly unmentionable thing had been quickly disposed of, out the back door in the night.
Liam dreamt he’d woken up with a disease, a seasickness that was an emptiness inside him, or a failing heart, blood like seawater washing in and out of a grotto, a stony cave. He realized the creature was his heart and the creature was gone, back into the sea whence it came.
—What do you think it means? he asked.
—I don’t know, said his friend.
Asking your own heart a question: how could it make a reply? It says only one thing ever, no matter the question you put to it. And even if you never ask one question your whole life, still it says that one thing, always and only that one thing:
—I’m here. I’m going. I’m here. I’m going. I’m here.
The boy cradled the jar with a sad feeling of happiness in his heart: the feeling you get when you wake up from a bad dream to find out it’s not true, it’s still OK, and will be so for a long while yet, as far as you can see.
Two Poems Inspired by the Dreams of Emily Dickinson
Martine Bellen
WHEN ROBERT SCHUMANN MET HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
She rubs a match against the wall.
(running/falling)
Mood: Green
It bursts into flame and where light sprays, the wall becomes transparent
And she sees the steam of roast goose stuffed with apples and plums—
A psychical consummation for the suppressed wish/desire.
Mood: Forest fire
How fire burns
Her grandmother
And her cottage-cheese cottage of whooing owls
With dancing sirens massaging microzones of body.
Her three magic peas. She sleeps on peas, seven Ps on her forehead,
In sea green soup, pea fog on her mind, pea dreams, drowning in peas.
Echoic images shadow her through dark avenues—P Street—They wear
Peacoats and breathe down her neck
Their breaths shake her skeleton. Sigh!
(She might be left outside to fry
In a forest without letters for trees—a long, quiet, resting forest … )
“Peas, I AM a poor little girl with neked feet.”
Elements need not have x in common to freeze.
It’s all about shoes. Father was a cobbler.
Memory, like music, swirls around the cortex.
It’s running tones
Toes and trees and stories // Sliced braising tongue
When the content oversteps the personal censor, she thinks, “I was only a dream. I was only running for running’s sake. It wasn’t as though I wanted to arrive, to win. I am only living because I am born.”
How much has to do with scoring?
In logic, “mood” and “modality” convey possibility / impossibility, existence / nonexistence, contingency / necessity. “Mood” in grammar, derived from “mode” with its elongated vowel, is associated with states of mind (e.g., a good/bad mood).
Mood: Knifed
Red’s the central character that might live inside her. No matter how beat up she gets
Her flesh is without wound. It’s more comfortable
When the damage is seen.
Once the music stops
The words stop
Even though it was a gnarly, old-growth forest,
Unyielding, impenetrable, at least she was walking through a friend.
She could run through it as though it were a forest in a fairy tale,
Read through it, red through and through
One person, who is dependent upon another, will at some point in time make a remark bound to be disagreeable to the second one, and because of it, a simile is born.
It’s as difficult to build a daughter as to build a Shinto temple.
It’s especially difficult to build an ocean,
And even more difficult to build on an ocean.
The floor slopes forward, the sitting mind wanders,
Pillars and perspective lines tilt.
The one who crosses the ocean acts as a drum, throwing sound forward—none
Should be wasted. (Water beneath her for optimum resonance.)
She slips words down her teeny throat
Just in case a line is later needed.
Emily has never seen the ocean (nor the sea).
… open a closet and mourn the death of white dresses …
… close the mouth and prose …
Just in case some dreams are forgotten.
This bridge is not a symbol, but a way of finding
Herself, of running into the forest.
Her bird body has drifted away. A letter in the mail. Emily’s e-.
How far across time can the voice reach?
The human form. Fox-form. Formlessness.
Tangled letters in scripted forests—underbrush and calligraphy. Spirited.
Suddenly all worldly attainments
Vanish. Her youthful flesh.
Calling out among the ivies, thieves, pines.
A loon song and the clicking of cicadas. Lone song. Plainsong.
We feel awkward at first light on the far side of the bridge,
Devoid of limb and limn, seeing and sound
Seafaring // the soundness of reason
Its soundlessness ghosting
A faded boy
I got so I could take his name
He put the Belt around my life
Mama never forgets her birds.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HOUSE-KEEPING
“She died at play / Gambolled away / Her lease”
*Five Chinese brothers live with retarded cats, wander the edge of the woods in wait. The five brothers with one name, one nature, with five gills, five gifts, housed in one body with five doors. As Emily dreams, she floats to the top floor, head in clouds, laughing helium. A cup of cinnamon tea. She visits the five chiming brothers who save her from drowning, burning, fading, shrinking—nightly she retreats into a spectral episode and the brothers draw her near—sing to her / recite her favorite lies, bouquets of jasmine and buttercup pregnant with songbird scent. A goldfinch Eucharist flutters against her teeth (ooh!), attempts to escape belief. In one dream she’s a porn star—wraps her diminutive thighs around a pole, how she wraps her mind around death, poem after pole, after poem, and then she’s Frankenstein’s construction—a patchwork of putridity, baking loaves of gingerbread**, sifting sugar, licking tears from hummingbird eyes, always she’s Emily recalling a world in a house, the objects in a kitchen—desire, hope, love—now*** rolling pins, an herbarium, the wire mousetrap. She embraces each noun that will vanish when she dies to the nothing it came from—the word—the way a cloud pie**** flies like a bee buzzing past the ear, flakes, and tenderly melts. Night blows out the single star for fear.***** Trombone air. Troubadour.
What kind of a world do we love in?
NOTES
*A poem without “I” wanders purgatory, swims through tormented seas of unsewn sheafs, travels farther into summer than birds.
**The lost chapter on bread baking.
***Language is a machine that brings abstractions into being, semiconductor that permits contact between light wave and light bulb; its antonym: death, which acts as a microtransformer of objects, reversing them into concepts. Without the authority of one fatal tongue, words fall into the vast vat of sound.
****Place 1/2 cup of cloud in glass bowl. Saturate with lemon water. A pinch of salt from teardrops. Introduce feathery chartreuse, magenta, cobalt, and cream—slowly stir in memories of pleasure until light and well blended.
*****Without a child she will always be a broken pine, burning the oven.
COMMENTARY
She who wrote: “To die—takes just a little while—/They say it doesn’t hurt”
—How willing to expire might she have been
? As a specialist
in dying and a meticulous record-keeper
of the dead—their possessions, thoughts, senses—
She inhabited a world that could be trusted
To forget.
Self-Portrait with Sicily
Frederic Tuten
“HAVE YOU BEEN AWAY a long time?” asked the short Sicilian, looking away from me.
“Is it my accent that makes you inquire? Do I sound foreign?” I added, alarmed to think that I had changed so obviously over the years. He did not answer but went on hungrily eating hunks of bread he tore from a brown paper bag.
The train turned, mountains on one side, the cranky sea on the other. Lemon and orange trees, fields of wild rosemary crowded the sky and invaded my memories.
We were moving so slowly that I could see my grandmother through our kitchen window as she was spooning snails into a boiling kettle. “Pull down the shade,” I called out, wanting no one to see that we ate snails, because when I was a boy no Americans my age ate them—worms with oily shells. Nor did they eat the dandelion leaves my grandmother—a black silhouette—plucked from the Bronx Park fields, just some few miles from the outskirts of Palermo, where street lamps spread rectangle shrouds on the winter-night streets.
“You people eat grass and worms,” the kids cried out when they wanted to start a rock fight with me. Small rocks, hard stones. I still have a scar over my left eye, the one with which I can see the man in the moon and his bucket smile.
She was making the evening meal, my grandmother, and soon we would be at the table putting oil and salt on our bread. And soon we would be eating snails drowned in olive oil and garlic. And then a dandelion salad, bitter like the Bronx winters, the kitchen oven and burners left on all night for the heat. Sometimes there was wine, even for me at ten, from Segesta, where two thousand years ago the Greeks planted temples and sacred groves in whose tranquil shade they turned their minds to reasoning out the world. All that reason wasted in the hills, where hot tempers rule.
“But now you’ve returned,” the short Sicilian said. “Now you’ve come back home.”
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 22