Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  Because His Youth

  Or

  The Parrot’s Spanish

  Rikki Ducornet

  HE HAS ALWAYS DEPENDED on his boundless, one might say uncanny, vitality to keep his head above water. Because his youth sustains him, he cannot grow old without it. His hands, once so elegant, are now reduced to paws. His entire body like some great damaged paw. Already he can see it fallen to the pavement, its contours marked with chalk. An hour does not pass without his cursing the Fate of Man. His own fate in particular. When he sups, he sups on clay.

  At lunchtime he had passed his daughter in the street. She introduced him to a raven-haired beauty in vermilion sandals who treated him to instinctive apathy. The memory of that, the girl’s impeccable feet, her scent of freshly steamed rice, compounds his torment.

  These days any disagreeable encounter, even with lesser creatures such as salesgirls, mortifies him. He takes care to shop in familiar places where he is respected and well known. In the precipitously receding, yet palpable past, he had purchased a Panama hat from a woman his daughter’s age and with whom he flirted so successfully she called the house—the risks of his duplicity are immense—just wondering, she had whispered, her voice pleasantly unhinged, just wondering if …

  But already unlike his former self, he had put her off. His prostate, for God’s sake, gave him pause. His marvelous sperm was thicker now, unfamiliarly so—as if he had changed species. And he has! He is become a member of an endangered species.

  “You are fascinating,” he had said to her, wondering as he spoke how many such as she he had possessed. But his past was littered with conquests and he had lost count. “Fascinating … ,” he breathed it, “but I am about to go on vacation with my wife.” He sighed and when the salesgirl laughed knowingly, he laughed along although the wife in question was relatively new and a hottie with a mane of magenta hair and a lapis lazuli navel stud. She was a successful therapist; he took wives who were independent: an actress, a scholar, a neurologist—the better to conceal his own mysteries.

  “We’ll leave it to your return,” the girl offered with all the cheek of youth, “but when you wear the Panama, think of me.”

  He liked to say that to assess a woman’s erotic capacities was a form of ecstatic divination. His clairvoyance, the ease of his seductions, establish him in his own eyes as a prince of erotic practice. And the many brief encounters, the extended affairs, demand ingenuity and diligence, a cautious crafting of the hours. (He had once loved to sail and had prided himself on his skills with charts and compass; he handled his daily agenda with equal caution.)

  The women assured that he never had time on his hands—a thing he abhorred above all else. As his wives faded into insignificance, the women in their variety provided for fresh forms and a sense that his life—in fact mundane—was significant. The world carried little meaning for him, and the women functioned as semaphores. When he fucked he was alive among the living. When he fucked he was hatched of his shell like any new thing.

  Weeks passed and when he did not call, the salesgirl wondered if, in fact, they had been laughing together at his easy duplicity and the promise it implied, or if she had simply been jacked around.

  She called again. She was bored and she was broke; she wanted an older man to treat her to a good dinner at the very least. She imagined receiving presents. She entertained this fantasy: they would meet at Victoria’s Secret when his wife was out of town and he would look on with admiration as she modeled underwear. She did not know that he was too much a narcissist to consider spending time and money on a shopgirl. A few hours of illicit sex was all he planned to give her, although illicit sex was a thing he liked above all to give himself. Also, he was putting money aside for retirement and dental work—those inevitable indecencies. (There was a brief period when he did enjoy helping out a certain very pretty Vietnamese waitress whose exoticism and infant daughter—so full of promise—inspired unprecedented acts of selflessness.)

  The salesgirl was his first and last experience with Viagra. Initially impressed, she soon became dubious, even skeptical. An hour into it she wondered what was wrong with him. Was he overcome with guilt, unable to forget his wife and so incapable of orgasm? Something of a sexual athlete herself, she grew irritated. And he, exhausted, looked at this woman who was gasping with irritation beneath him and, for the first time in a lifetime of fucking, feared for his sanity. Fucking the shopgirl was like fucking in the underworld, airless and interminable. He imagined he was an old bull about to be sacrificed to a bankrupt god; he imagined his throat was about to be cut. Hers was the last Panama he’d buy.

  That night as he slept beside his wife he awakened from a nightmare, shouting.

  In his recent youth, a mere decade or so ago, and at the height of his powers, he was a magnificent animal with an uncanny capacity to shimmer with sexual heat whenever he entered a crowded room. He thought of himself as a minotaur, his world mazed with cunts. But now he can feel himself cooling down. He considers fish oil and a personal trainer. Terrible thoughts come to him at his most intimate moments—when flossing his teeth or sitting on the can. These physical acts remind him of death, stampeding. His mood is abrasive, the minutes pernicious, his guts tied in knots. Advancing age is torture! Torture! It is like having one’s knuckles fractured with screws! He thinks of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib—those unfathomable mortifications. He thinks his own predicament is somehow this terrible. Hell. He might as well be shitting fossils. Pissing thorns! Like the codgers he despises precariously nursing their old bones down the sidewalk, he too is reduced to taking powders in order to function like a normal human being. In other words, it is evident that old age is a monstrosity of nature. There is no room left on the planet for a man trundling toward seventy at twenty miles an hour! If only he had the sexual energy he’d lost just yesterday, he’d go out like a firecracker. He’d go up in flames! Fuck his wife’s solicitous blow jobs; fuck his doctor’s cautious inquiries! Fuck his wife’s twenty years’ leg up on him!

  One early evening he finds himself alone, his wife detained in city traffic. It is the end of summer and the light in the living room is dim. Another summer gone, goddamn it! Even the seasons betray him. He catches himself before he can doze off. Five years more of this shit and he’ll drown in his own bloody tears.

  He thinks that to have lived in the present was a gift of real beauty. He thinks that those who have the gift of the present are the ones lively women like to be near. He considers that what he had offered was both indecipherable and indescribable, something manic but not exactly scary: his own brand of super-attenuated joy. Unsustainable, clearly. Risky—God how it had cost him! But absolutely essential.

  And irresistible. Not only to women, but small children, girls above all (!); sometimes little boys. When on the rare occasion he would accompany a wife to the supermarket, a little boy might offer him a gumball or a rubber worm. His current wife likes to tell how she had seen an unknown toddler dash down the canned soup aisle to hug her husband’s knees. Other people’s household pets adore him. Cats that habitually despise visitors leap onto his lap. Once when they walked into a café together in Mérida, a dejected parrot surged to life, pressing its face against the bars of its cage to cry out with such passion all conversation stilled and everyone turned to look. And although he had only just assured his wife he would not abandon her in public places in his quest for attention—a thing that had begun to seriously test her temper—he responded to the parrot’s solicitation without hesitation. His Panama balanced jauntily on a head of hair that at the time was barely threaded with gray, he walked to the cage and leaned close. The parrot’s little black tongue, its eager eye and urgency, caused his pulse to quicken. If the attention was anomalous and uncanny, it was also flattering. As his wife stood by impatiently tapping her foot, her bottom appealing to the local crowd, he engaged the parrot with impudent good humor. The parrot’s Spanish was far more extensive than his own, yet this did not appear to
faze either of them. They kept it up, his wife remarked, beyond the bounds of sense or decency.

  Trestle

  Andrew Mossin

  And every ark awaits its raven,

  Its vesper dove with an olive leaf,

  Its rainbow over Ararat.

  —Melvin Tolson

  Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

  One ought to speak of events that reach us like an

  echo awakened by a call.

  —Walter Benjamin

  A Berlin Chronicle

  1.

  Is it paradise to know the end

  is coming by water the ending and the water

  as they come are there in dry eastern banks

  likeness without form the bright innocent

  tasks undone undoing the wintry onslaught.

  What are acts

  how do they define who we are where we

  may yet go undone becomings

  unsituated alternative selves whose limits

  cannot yet be determined.

  A decade is not so long to utter one true sentence.

  Knots lying on the floor and the hands

  supple to the touch as a woman’s hair

  divides one part of her face from the other

  Reading how he wept

  how he stays weeping after the event

  in a text of Avrils unfurling April-like in a rush

  of bitten-off leaves … .

  “He wept he weeps on my breast

  a womanlike man is crying for his life and I—

  what should I say?”

  The dusty trees, the elongated arms that stretch

  out to receive the rain that comes in bands

  down the hills where one goes

  as another breaks open the Gospel

  “No man trespasses without water at his side”

  in idioms of faith

  dispensed almost as an afterthought

  over blanched bones of the

  unburied dead.

  2.

  And if you

  Put your body in place

  of others memorialized the positions

  again of bodies in death as they lie

  under earth no salient record of their having died but these:

  The soldiers and their prisoners entered the Katyn Forest at sundown.

  It was April they wore their summer uniforms.

  Hands tied behind their backs they were led to the graves and shot once in the neck.

  The rope used to tie their hands was Russian.

  The bullets used to kill them were German.

  Most were found with indecipherable documents in their pockets.

  They had been wearing their summer uniforms.

  It was April their hands were roped together.

  One by one they were led into the forest on the banks of the Dnieper and forced to dig

  their own graves and were shot once in the back of the head.

  Three iron crosses now mark

  the ground where corpses lay indistinguishable from

  each other … so perfect does a thing become

  it cannot live out its time on earth … .

  Ideas that turn into words & back again.

  “The way of killing men and beasts is the same …

  truckfuls of chopped-up men

  who will not be saved.”

  Alter the language the bodies remain out in the open for all to see.

  “When the graves were opened some were still

  holding their rosaries. Their hands were tied behind

  their backs, a single bullet to the back of the

  head at close range. The rope looped through

  their hands and around their necks to choke

  them if they offered resistance.”

  There is this record between us. We saw

  them once in a photograph. Passed

  and passing. A ritual

  of reenactment that leads ineluctably

  elsewhere. Away from where they lie in an embankment

  still covered in snow.

  What we hold in common

  are those we have killed. “Black

  entrance, white shrouded

  figure of far-flung familiarity.”

  I cannot redeem your voice

  sadly can neither remember the last

  time we heard you or saw

  your shadow, there.

  3.

  There’s no end to the giving of names.

  Alleged blankness. Blind allegiance. “I saw you …

  terrible … light built a shrine in place of

  your presence.”

  What obliterates suspends belief.

  Some toughness some illogic that can’t accept

  degradation terror inhumanity

  as the only proper subject.

  Posthumous debt. Posthumanist drift.

  “One cannot speak of inhumanity … protection …

  by contrast the international community … ineffectual … ”

  When Jan Karski said to us, “Never

  let others know how smart you are”

  he meant: recognize your own complicity

  intellectual prowess that cannot prevail if seen

  by others as they will surely recognize it

  and kill all sign of “you.”

  To get to the other side

  we must build arable rivers, wide avenues

  of grass and trees. There must be

  a motive for return, as if the very spirits

  were called forth again, the dead

  arrayed before us: “drink black

  waters, there too will humanity go.”

  Or else an accord reached within oneself

  that to survive means to mask oneself to undo

  identity spiritual theft forging selves

  foraging leftover speech spiraling

  out of control as if one’s body

  were witness to itself

  in perpetual freefall.

  Blood slickens the palms.

  Moving with the rhythmic depressions

  of dystopic suffering

  time slides backward and forward

  across the grain of encounters

  too numerous to name—

  you are reading me right a friend writes I was pushed

  down on the ground they handcuffed me & said here’s something

  for your book you fucking faggot here’s something

  you can tell your folks at home

  So that when he stood in the sunlight

  they brought him upward until his elbows and forearms were

  parallel with his chest and pushed him into the

  waiting car one of them making sure to

  grab his crotch as he did so.

  4.

  At random

  what can it be that strips volition

  compels us each in our own way to a

  politics of silence. Why should the

  tragic facts come back at all. A man

  stoops over bends down hears

  the voices inside when they come to take him away.

  Hears nothing but the wind against his home.

  “And what I carry in the bag on my back

  wherever I’m exiled, to whatever prison … ”

  Abandoned city, its population center held in an image

  that will not settle will not sharpen

  with time’s passage.

  In the forest there is

  nothing noble, the deer stand apart

  from us, go off, blackness of their departure.

  We cannot see past where they have gone

  into the trees the human inhuman

  shelter where the animals stare back

  at us, not noble, not suffering, simply

  present.

  And the burden … on whose

  legs when they stop running the bodies

  stopped in place:

  memory can’t suture the
fragments

  back into place the bodies can’t be summoned

  back from their hiding places: loam seventh octave

  supple hinge of breastbone cartilage

  fleshy cadavers arranged

  for burial.

  I remember my father (reading from Oppen) as a younger man than I am now

  My mother was a tragic girl

  Long ago, the autonomous figures are gone … .

  Or the deaths are merely fantasies the holes

  cut through the box and light seeping through until

  you can break the spell memorabilia

  of the fortunate

  Its war their war the same war

  is never the same war we fought here is salvage stricken from the record

  they kept so little there is what remains in this son’s blackened hands.

  His own shadow

  was more than he could bear the war

  And yet fugitive traces

  emblems stitched together …

  the young face of a soldier in Palestine 1941

  reunited with the Polish Home Army

  football played against the Iraqi team until late afternoon

  in blinding desert heat … .

  5.

  Fatal to recall

  in human time the end of

  our ability to record what we did.

  The surface brittle, even the script

  mottled and illegible. “Looking

  for you, smoke trail above me,

  you, in the shape of a woman … ”

  What stills existence when it shuts

  down before the camera. No hunt

  no privy or intimacy. Mordant

  regret? Sanguine policing of the last