Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  Fruit and more cheese for dessert. The photographer’s girlfriend happily lists the fruits on the plate to which she is allergic. The pears, the apples, the grapes. I rise to offer her a banana. It is intended as a comic maneuver but I am embarrassed by my failure to amuse, holding the banana arcing upward, in the form, roughly, of a male erection, or a Lorenz curve. Neither is funny. Nor is the banana itself, overripe, stippled and streaked with brown. There’s port. Of course. I grab the port from the green furniture. The green furniture is a sideboard that is not actually green. A can of green paint has been stowed inside it for two years awaiting the day that it will become green in fact, green outside of the system of private references my lady friend and I have developed. I take four small aperitif glasses from it as well and place them on the table. I still don’t drink, says the photographer’s girlfriend, in a friendly way. I apologize and put the bottle down on the table before me.

  D’you know the bishop of Norwich? asks the photographer upstairs. I do not.

  Archimedes’ New Light

  Geometries of Excitable Species

  Joan Retallack

  Mortals are immortals and immortals mortals; the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life.

  —Heraclitus

  Bodies cleave space of all the triangles in the prism :

  one glimpse of cornered sky in all the triangles in the sphere :

  fleeing over cardboard mountain with all the segments in the parabola :

  gray morning blank aluminum all the parabolas in the sphere :

  their own cold love song breached all the circles of the sphere :

  abrupt start of rain all the vertices of the prism :

  clacking sticks

  night barks

  window blank

  * * *

  Reason is a daemon in its own right.

  another song whose bird I do not know

  .the.center.of.gravity.of.the.two.circles.combined.

  around them in us we were very they

  what comes to mind in this five second cove

  .whose.diameters.are.and.when.their.position.is.

  changed.hence.will.in.its.present.position.be.

  lacking usage equal to the noun she chose

  .in.equilibrium.at.the.point.when.all.the.angles.

  all different before he heft laughed defiled gravity lost again

  .in.the.triangles.in.the.prism.all.the.triangles.in.the.cylinder.

  interior angles exposed collapsed into each each

  .section.and.the.prism.consists.of.the.triangles.in.

  the terrible demonstration of fluid dynamics beginning again

  .the.prism.hence.prism.hence.also.the.prism.and.the.

  areas of distortion the burning vector fields

  * * *

  more mathematics of the unexpected:

  the total curvature of all spheres

  is exactly the same regardless of radius

  Lacking experience equal to the adjective she chose

  scratch abstract sky shape

  hoping for more

  .whole.prism.containing.four.times.the.size.of.the. .other.prism.then.this.plane.will.cut.off.a.prism.from.

  struggle to flee her altered nativity

  repeat story of stilt accident now

  no the drama has not abated

  .the.whole.prism.to.circumscribe.another.composed. .of.prisms.so.that.the.circumscribed.figure.exceeds.

  exhausted boy soldier reads book numb

  rag head taken by stiff light

  fig one triumph of the we’re

  .the.inscribed.less.more.than.any.given.magnitude. .but.it.has.been.shown.that.the.prism.cut.off.by.the.

  empty listen ridge cold whistle

  unison whipped wide awake

  box of spook salt

  .inclined.prism.the.plane.the.body.inscribed.now.in.

  .the.cylinder-section.now.the.prism.cut.off.by.the.

  not a coast but a horizon not a coast

  blank seas soak grain senses demented

  sense of thigh once now not yet juked

  * * *

  may deter may bruise

  bequeath before death

  green countdown bluebook

  she said now that she thought about it

  she thought it must have had something

  to do with that feeling of self-possession in

  the moment after the apostrophe took hold

  One’s .inclined.plane.the.body.inscribed.in.the.cylinder.

  a stock image

  a rhetorical device

  a dubious gesture

  an obsolete hope

  One’s .section.the.parallelograms.which.are.inscribed.in.

  quadrant spoke motion

  a prod to come to life

  meddlesome meaning meaning tangent

  One’s .the.segment.bounded.by.the.parabola.but.this.is.

  sordid alignment of slippery parts

  please hold that place stretch the we

  jelly throat made good hold that note

  One’s .impossible.and.all.prisms.in.the.prism.cut.off.by.the.

  * * *

  no such five illusions

  no vowel exit mutters fruit

  my no flute war

  torque valley breath

  gun cold air cont’d

  night barks windows blank

  gray morning’s blank aluminum

  its own long cold burst that kills

  a look cornered sky

  One’s .inclined.plane.all.prisms.in.the.figure.described.

  geometry of the tragic spectrum

  eye caught in grid

  this thought empties itself in false déjà vu

  the echo seen but not heard

  the absence of x had been distracting all along

  * * *

  Rationalism born of tenor turns to ecstasy.

  .around.the.cylinder-section.all.parallelograms.in.the.

  .parallelograms.all.parallelograms.in.the.figure.

  .which.is.described.around.the.segment.bounded.

  .by.the.parabola.and.the.straight.line.the.prism.cut.

  .off.by.the.inclined.plane.the.figure.described.around.

  .the.cylinder-section.the.parallelogram.the.figure.

  .bounded.by.the.parabola.and.the.straight.line.

  .the.prism.the.prism.cut.off.by.the.inclined.plane.

  From Mother & Child

  Carole Maso

  ONCE A MONTH, WHEN the moon was full and the weather was right she would invite the child out to the night garden. The garden at night scared the child, who was afraid of the dark, so she would always stay inside. It was time again for applying the fish emulsion: the ritual feeding of the roses with the bodies of liquidated bass and trout. It was a sight: her mother working through the night. When the child looked out the nursery window she saw fireflies plastered to the outline of her mother and she watched her like that for a long time. Small things seemed to attach themselves to her, to cling. When the raccoons came, as they always did, with their awful tiny human hands pressing, the child would be jealous and she would try to force herself out the door, but she could not.

  And in the morning, stinking of fish and roses, and wiping away bits of fur and fin, the mother would bring the child out into the daylight world, dropping her off at school or camp or wherever it was the child was going that day, and the men would pant and swoon and grab the mother and the boys would hum and trip and fall, and this alarmed the child, for they lived in a household without boys who hummed or men. How laughable is mankind! The glittering mother laughed. How laughable is the human race! Mother, don’t laugh like that, the child begged, and she reached out to try to hold something of the gleam.

  The mother knew she would have to wait for the day when the men would at last leave her alone. The mother on that day will become invisible to them and she will at last be able to live unencumbered. And she will dance in the cities all night, and she will dance in the valleys, and in t
he night gardens. Until then she will have to bide her time.

  *

  Exiled from childhood but in the constant presence of it, the mother felt covetous of the child sometimes because the child still had childhood and to the mother childhood was no longer accessible. There was no going there again; she could only watch. She was walking, she knew, on thinning ice.

  Even the mother’s mother, the North Pole grandmother, was not young anymore. The light was bright in summer there late into the night. When the North Pole grandmother came with a platter of fish preserved in vodka and lingonberries, the fish had a face on it and the children ran and hid. In winter the candles were lit and there was juniper and holly.

  The child is busy making sculptures out of apples in the corner. Next she is sculpting a boat. Even the child will one day die. It takes three cups of salt to cure a fish. The mother tries to remember being small, not as an adult remembers, but as a child, but it is hard. She would like to fit inside a thimble and someday she probably will. There is a casket the size of a walnut shell that waits in the garden. There is a husk. There is always the sorrow of the last morsel of fish to consider. Many of the children are still hiding in the garden. When she was little she remembers going into the sewing box and taking out her favorite thing: a pincushion encircled by Chinamen. When she was small she remembers the bright thimble and the way it looked like a castle on her thumb. The North Pole grandmother was in the next room, where the child could hear her preparing the fish. Lingonberries are something else she remembers. While the mother reaches to remember, the child wishes she had a picture phone so that while she talked to the North Pole grandmother she could see her face and watch her white hair blowing in the wind. The life span of a North Pole grandmother is eighty-three, the child reads.

  *

  The mother received a telephone call from her sister Inga. The sister had some bad news. The child had never seen her mother listen harder to anything than she listened then. The listening had a hard, smooth quality to it, like ice, only hot. After she hung up, the mother curled up into a ball and did not speak or move for a day and a night. The child watched her mother curled up like that and she thought about nests and she thought about shells. She felt so alone she did not know how she would bear it and so worn by the duration of time.

  After a day and a night the mother finally uncurled, but the child saw the mother held something still clenched in her hand. When the mother saw the child she wept and opened her hand. Look, she said. In her hand she was holding the left ventricle of a heart.

  The child took the left ventricle of the heart from the mother. She walked down the hallway and she laid it in her bed. Although it had looked blurry and ruined on the X-ray, here it did not look bad at all. She was happy to have it on the pillow next to her. This way if anything went wrong with the heart she would know right away. It cast the room in ruby light. After pink, red was her favorite color. She thought of her aunt seven and a half states away.

  After a while the child fell into dream. A kindle of kittens appeared under the bed. A clowder of cats soon came to join them outside under the sill. The mother came in to lick the kittens until they began to breathe. There was mother’s milk for all. Then the mother went outside again with the others. Everything seemed contingent on this arrangement: the clowder under the sill, the kindle under the bed, the ventricle next to the sleeping child slowly repairing itself.

  *

  Snow falls and the roots call to the mother and the sleeping small-clawed animals in their burrows and tunnels and the winter vegetables that lie peacefully untouched under the earth. When she walks on the earth’s crust she grows drowsy now, feeling their sleep. Magnified, so many sleeping creatures multiplied, she can barely lift a foot. What is wrong, the child says, and lies on the ground on her back, and helps the mother lift her feet one boot at a time.

  The child has read that beneath the city of Paris there is another city. There you can find a home for abandoned children. I should like to see where the animals sleep in winter, says the child, watching her mother’s eyes slowly begin to close.

  The Man Who Spoke with His Hands

  William H. Gass

  THE MAN WHO SPOKE with his hands was not deaf nor did he speak with his hands because he was communicating with deaf people. The man who spoke with his hands was not noticeably shy, therefore unlikely to say much, or be inclined to wait for a passing noise behind which to hide his remarks. He engaged in conversations with average frequency and ordinary ease, and employed for these everyday purposes a voice that was mellow enough to spread on bread; neither so low as to approach a whisper nor so high as to threaten screech. It was a voice as brown as his eyes.

  The man who spoke with his hands did not gesture expansively, because he spoke with his hands, not his arms and/or eyebrows. His hands tended to remain in close touch, mostly about midchest. His hands were made almost entirely of fingers. These were long and slim and supple. One thought of cigarette holders except for the supple. A cigarette holder is not supple. It is a bamboo tube with a coating of lacquer. Those who believe that smoke filtered through the stem of such a holder is less likely to sicken them are probably mistaken. According to authorities, they are being poisoned when they breathe such drugs. Smoking is a bad habit but the man who spoke with his hands did not appear to have any other habit than his hands.

  The man who spoke with his hands had cheeks that were tanned. Except for those two places—the left and right cheeks at the lower edge of the bone—his skin was pale. His fingers were exceptionally white and consequently easy to see, which is possibly one reason why he decided to speak with his hands, although nobody supposed that he actually chose his gestures; what made them so graceful and attractive was that they (his fingers for the most part) seemed to dance outside the range of their owner’s attention. It is no longer fashionable to describe anything as “unconscious.” The few who still employ the concept have probably been smoking too much Freud. Freud had a cigar habit, and we know it was bad because it killed him.

  The man who spoke with his hands would, while speaking, sometimes move the thumb of his right hand gently (one might say with circumspection) back and forth, in and out, of a hollow formed by a downward curl of the left hand’s lengthy fingers, as if they were lightly gripping a pole where the thumb slid. Professors Rinse and Skizzen understood this to be a meditative moment; for instance, if he was saying that he hadn’t taken any of the students in his History of Religious Music class to hear some famous organist who had come to Columbus yet again this year (it was the sixth occasion), they would take his hands to be indicating that he had debated long and hard about it. As Professor Skizzen saw the thumb glide gradually out again, he thought of the trombone. Freud would have ascribed this habit to another practice that was equally compulsive and otherwise unspeakable.

  On the whole the man who spoke with his hands created movements that were slow, as if they were distant from his words, and reluctant to leap to conclusions. Only when his forefinger, seemingly held back by the pressure of the thumb, sprang forward in that snap one uses to flick a crumb from the dining cloth, did they call attention to themselves. This gesture meant—the professors believed—that whatever it was he was discussing—an event, a meeting, a class, an opinion—was over and done with, was no longer held by him, was not to be taken up again. When he said: I just couldn’t face another long bus ride with a load of noisy kids, there was neither snick nor snip, but a gentle, almost imperceptible movement of the fingertips, the nails in full view, as if brushing something away or warding it off, pushing the imagined thing out of his purview. Then he might conclude: so I didn’t. The snip would follow this.

  A gentle brushing of a tabletop with the fingers will roll crumbs to the edge and over it onto a ready palm. There is no need to flick offending grains of salt or sugar into space where they will sand up something else—a chair seat or the floor beneath your feet. A table knife will scrape them to a corner and fancy folk or atten
tive waiters in high-toned restaurants employ a silver blade just for this purpose. So the flick is probably a bad habit too. The flick removes a problem from your presence but does not rid it from the world. Indeed, the cloth from which the crumbs have been so casually ushered remains stained and abused, and the gesture that removes these ashes and these cinders also signifies an intention to renew the table’s use as if it were new and its covering not in need of removal. Germs are not thusly scraped away and remain to infect the éclair and its brood.

  The fingers of the man who spoke with his hands might mesh like the tines of forks, but gently and easily, for tines may jam. Then one could watch his fingers slide between his fingers like blending fans, again very gradually, so the hands were clasped, and almost immediately moved again, separating with the silence of cream, and thereby measuring degrees of commitment or withdrawal, of coolness or ardency, agreement or disavowal. His hands often assumed a prayerlike stance when he began to speak—pardon me, your humble servant, by your leave, sir—and then the right hand would withdraw, its fingers sliding very slowly down a calm left palm until the wrist was reached, when they would hesitate a moment before rising up again or continue to drop on down to the wristband of their owner’s watch.

  Yes, the man who spoke with his hands could be nervous and impatient too, the fingers of his right drumming on the back of his left, those tappings reminding Professors Skizzen and Rinse of the way his long slim white fingers flew on and off the holes of the flute, whereas if the left danced a bit on the back of the right, it meant, they calculated, expectation coupled with serene acceptance. Occasionally both hands would droop from their wrists like fresh wash hung from a rope, but this was not a feminine gesture, even though Professors Rinse and Skizzen judged it signified: you win, I give up, you don’t say. Unless, of course, the hands suddenly flew up again, when it meant a very firm go away, take your topic elsewhere, little boy, run out and play.