Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  quadrant of memory? There is no building

  left standing, no ditch we can

  stand in where we might find again

  those present at the scene.

  “You are the last who will see him … .”

  Undefinable indeterminate gesture of one passing between.

  And held in one hand

  a bag of red stones its archive of

  suffering blown open.

  6.

  If one can look

  one can look away

  the distance can be covered in a

  second: appeal of hands

  smothering grafted pieces of wood

  fingers caught on wire that

  miss their spacing in the frame.

  What is the burden

  when it is encapsulated as bulletins

  jagged marks that weave through air in solitary

  intimacy paralyzed almost

  before the subject has emerged.

  Does will mask

  the authoritative record, the unfurling

  of a narrative almost remote enough to

  converge in myth. Acts and actors

  spilled onto the landscape, there were

  so many at first you couldn’t undo the layers

  as they lay within touch. You can kneel

  beside the forms of them, you can

  almost ascertain their textured delicate flesh.

  And if one sang these songs

  before they were written he would still

  smell the burnt gasoline

  the dead who lie underground and rot

  like black branches under the earth.

  7.

  When it comes it comes to us it comes back to us it

  comes little by little the humiliation shame severed from

  discourse the exilic figure his face chagrined near tears

  manhood in tatters or obliquely attending errant strains of

  knowledge dependent upon erasure ellipsis the radical

  plasticity of language that conceals as much as it reveals.

  I walked where he is walking now gnomic father partner

  to none recognizing only “it is terrible to see the children”

  their faces delivered to us again & again in some

  paralysis of image formation we cannot abjure what is

  seen the images of their eyes as they look dead

  straight into ours a complexity immutable bound

  as real happenings that repeatedly fall to silence

  one is carrying a plastic gallon jug of water and behind

  the tree another looks through cut glass her eyes small

  and black like stones or stars from which light has gone out

  and if one begins there one ends there for our pity is

  exigent our own complicity in survival remains

  and what can we do when (we fear) we can do nothing

  but get down on our knees and in the saffron light

  of evening help bury the dead.

  8.

  To offer: hidden bread, stolen lace.

  To offer: dirt smudge, fingertip, rusted blade.

  The hands submerged in mire, the arms

  dissolving like pins in a smoky clearing.

  We may carry nothing less

  canteens tossed onto a road in Basra

  nets thrown over children’s bodies in a camp

  to protect them. There is little

  protection. The word is ugly

  even if it means what it says.

  Only a tree only if

  a woman kneeling her hands

  caked in mud her white

  tunic ripped to the breastbone

  only if the wail

  is banished only if their enmeshed

  faces appear when soldiers enter the rooms

  at sundown & search each one for weapons.

  Only if one comes between

  the girl and the soldier

  her mother holding out

  a plate of olives some bread

  and lays it on the ground before them

  and doesn’t move until an

  arras of silence barricades them

  “with these near ones made afar.”

  9.

  When what is evident

  testimony that leads toward the gap

  fissure silent partner of witness

  so that there is the history written

  in the gap of history

  “I started to flee … how many times … in the woods

  the soldiers … our own companions … one by one … how many … ”

  “I can only stammer”

  when asked how she felt

  now that the worst had happened

  the possibility of the worst happening is always

  that it never happened

  she said, “I stopped where it ended … a voice

  inside me tells me there is no one left. … ”

  Avowals—or is it aversions?—that lead

  back to the erased facts

  erased person one was once

  “a crystal of breath”

  chrysalis of faith

  the burden of which is to testify

  of no one. Again.

  10.

  Evident as toil task tertiary meaning. Nicht becomes night. Plenum of voices too many to believe.

  In a day (say this is evident) you will no longer exist.

  Can we archive

  what was never present? Or do we

  become like memory considered after the facts

  a locale impressive

  readily repeated?

  Is it reclamation we’re after? reversals too numerous to count.

  Story is slippery, the facts’ illogic imperils easy canonization. “I was leaning

  out my window, the day like this day, when I saw the man below

  explode into a ball of flame … .”

  Invention? phantasmagoria? Blood blots out

  the rest, “this day … a man … exploded from within … flaming up … ”

  Let it enter. Failures of spirit, guerdon of loss. Encircling our torso

  the arms of those no longer present.

  11.

  “In the evening the convoy pulled onto the road and suspended in the distance the men could see coming from behind them civilians who’d hidden from snipers now coming toward them the candy truck moving slowly behind then merging with the column when it was suddenly run over and smashed the occupants inside smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death the only one from the way they lay there was of a husband and wife ripped open dismembered their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars that lay around them on the ground. The entire platoon hadn’t eaten for 24 hours and as we stood there one by one we began to pick up the candy bars and wiped the blood and fuel from the wrappers and ate them standing in a circle around the bodies and the empty van.”

  12.

  Each round

  nothing more desolate

  hindrance captive sign

  worn linguistic creation

  a doll

  suspended on wire

  futile to speak of it

  some say it comes

  without effort

  stripped art of bread and sinew held above

  a denuded head

  widening its cavity opening

  yellowed hands built to this conclusion

  of paper and sand

  “give us this day”

  what we are not worthy of

  no rite no pledge

  only these foreign signs

  passed hand to hand. …

  —To Catherine Taylor

  NOTES. The writing of this poem arose from a reading of multiple documents, testimonies, and archival materials related to the Iraq War (2003-), including The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (eds. Karen A. Greenberg and Joshua A. Dratel) and commentary by Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books. Sour
ces for certain lines and phrases in the poem are as follows: Jan Karski, Polish Catholic who traveled at great risk to his own life into the Warsaw Ghetto and brought back to the Allies news of the German liquidation of the Jewish population. He made this comment during a private conversation with my father and me in 1989 in Washington, DC. Information in Section 2 on the Katyn massacre has been drawn primarily from Norman Davies’s God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume II 1795-Present. The historical and cultural significance of this event for Poles in the postwar period cannot be overstated. As Davies suggests, “In Polish eyes, this one concealed crime became the symbol for countless other recorded atrocities committed by the USSR against the Polish nation.” “The way of killing men and beasts … ” appears in Tadeusz Rosewicz’s “The Survivor” (tr. Adam Czerniawski). “No man trespasses without water at his side” and “Drink black waters” are from Hölderlin (tr. Michael Hamburger, Hyperion and Selected Poems), as is the adapted text that begins “In the forest there is nothing noble” (tr. Richard Sieburth, Hymns and Fragments). “His own shadow … ” is from Jerome Rothenberg, Poland / 1931. Paul Celan is the source for “Looking / for you, smoke trail above me” and “with these near ones made afar” (tr. Michael Hamburger, Poems of Paul Celan). “Like black branches under the dead earth” is from Nazim Hikmet’s “Last Will and Testament” (tr. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, Poems of Nazim Hikmet). “It is terrible to see the children” is from George Oppen. The prose of Section 11 has been adapted from David Bellavia’s House to House: An Epic Memoir of War, reviewed by Massing in The New York Review of Books (December 20, 2007). Shoshana Felman’s extremely useful “Benjamin’s Silence” (Critical Inquiry 25, Winter 1999) is the direct source for language in the second stanza of Section 6, as well as insights into Benjamin’s theory of history as trauma that inform my work here.

  Women

  Eduardo Galeano

  —Translated from Spanish by Mark Fried

  SUN VICTORIOUS, MOON VANQUISHED

  THE MOON LOST HER FIRST battle against the sun when he spread word that it wasn’t the wind who was impregnating women.

  Then history brought more sad news:

  the division of labor assigned nearly all tasks to the females so that we males could dedicate ourselves to mutual extermination;

  the right to property and the right to inheritance allowed women to be owners of nothing;

  the organization of the family enclosed them in the cage of father, husband, and son;

  and along came the state, which was like the family, only bigger.

  The moon shared in her daughters’ downfall.

  Left far behind were the times when the Egyptian moon would devour the sun at dusk and at dawn would sire him,

  when the Irish moon kept the sun in line by threatening him with perpetual night,

  and when the kings of Greece and Crete would dress up as queens with taffeta tits, and in sacred ceremonies unfurl the moon as their standard.

  In the Yucatan, moon and sun lived in matrimony. When they fought, there was an eclipse. The moon was lady of the seas and the springs, and goddess of the earth. With the passing of time, she lost her powers. Now she only reigns over births and illnesses.

  On the coasts of Peru, we can date her humiliation. Shortly before the Spanish invasion, in the year 1463, the moon of the Chimú kingdom, the most powerful of moons, surrendered to the army of the Incan sun.

  MEXICANS

  Tlazoltéotl, Mexico’s moon, goddess of the Huasteca night, managed to elbow her way into the macho pantheon of the Aztecs.

  She was the most mothering of mothers, who protected women in labor and their midwives, and guided seeds on their voyage to becoming plants. Goddess of love and also of garbage, condemned to eat shit, she embodied fertility and lust.

  Like Eve, like Pandora, Tlazoltéotl bore the guilt for men’s perdition; women born in her times lived condemned to pleasure.

  And when the earth trembled in soft vibrations or devastating earthquakes, no one doubted: “It is she.”

  EGYPTIANS

  Herodotus the Greek proved that the river and the sky of Egypt were unlike any other river or any other sky, and the same was true of its customs. Funny people, the Egyptians: they kneaded dough with their feet, and clay with their hands, and they mummified their dead cats and kept them in sacred chests.

  But most remarkable was the place women held among men. Whether nobles or plebeians, they married freely without surrendering their names or their possessions. Education, property, work, and inheritance were theirs by right, not only for men, and women were the ones who shopped in the market while men stayed home weaving. According to Herodotus, who was not entirely trustworthy, women pissed standing up and men on their knees.

  HEBREWS

  According to the old Testament, the daughters of Eve were to suffer divine punishment forever.

  Stoning could be the fate of adulteresses and witches and brides who were not virgins,

  to the stake marched the daughters of priests who became prostitutes,

  and off with the hand of any woman who grabbed a man by the balls, even in self-defense or in defense of her husband.

  For forty days a woman giving birth to a son remained impure. Eighty days of filth if the child was a girl. Impure was the menstruating woman for seven days and nights, and her impurity infected all who touched her or touched the chair on which she sat or the bed in which she slept.

  HINDUS

  Mitra, mother of the sun and the water and of all sources of life, was a goddess from birth. When she arrived in India from Babylonia or Persia the goddess had to become a god.

  A number of years have passed since Mitra’s arrival, and women are still not very welcome in India. There are fewer women than men, in some regions eight for every ten. Many are those who never arrive because they die in their mothers’ wombs, and countless more are smothered at birth.

  Prevention is the best medicine, since some women are very dangerous. As a sacred text of the Hindu tradition warns: “A lascivious woman is poison, serpent, and death, all in one.”

  Others are virtuous, though proper habits are being lost. Tradition orders widows to throw themselves into the fire where the dead husband’s body burns, but today few if any are willing to obey that command.

  For centuries or millennia they were willing, and they were many. In contrast, there is no instance ever in the whole history of India of a husband leaping into the pyre of his deceased wife.

  CHINESE

  About a thousand years ago, Chinese goddesses stopped being goddesses.

  Male power, which by then had taken over the earth, was also aligning the heavens. The goddess Xi He was split in two and the goddess Nu Gua was relegated to the status of mere woman.

  Xi He had been mother of the suns and the moons. She gave comfort and succor to her sons and daughters at the end of their exhausting voyages through day and night. When she was divided into Xi and He, each of them a he-god, she was no longer a she and she disappeared.

  Nu Gua did not disappear but she was reduced to a woman.

  In other times she had been the founder of all that lives:

  she had cut off the legs of the great cosmic tortoise to give the world and the sky columns to rest on,

  she had invented love, lying with her brother behind a tall screen of grasses,

  and she had created nobles and plebeians by modeling the higher ones of yellow clay and the lower ones of mud from the river.

  GREEKS

  A headache may give birth to a goddess. Athena sprouted from the throbbing head of her father, Zeus, whose temples split open to deliver her. She was born without a mother.

  Sometime later she cast the deciding vote when the tribunal of the gods on Olympus had to judge a difficult case: to avenge their father, Electra and her brother Orestes had chopped off their mother’s head with an ax.

  The Furies prosecuted. They demanded the murderers be stoned to death because the life of
a queen is sacred, and killing one’s mother cannot be forgiven.

  Apollo took up the defense. He maintained that the accused were children of an unworthy mother and that maternity did not matter in the least. A mother, argued Apollo, is nothing more than an inert furrow where the man throws his seed.

  Of the thirteen gods of the jury, six voted to condemn and six to absolve.

  Athena would break the tie. She voted against the mother she never had and gave eternal life to the power of men in Athens.

  ROMANS

  Cicero explained that women ought to be ruled by male guardians “due to the weakness of their intellect.”

  Roman women went from one pair of male hands to another. The father who married off his daughter could cede her to her husband as property or tender her to him as a loan. In either case what counted was the dowry, the patrimony, the inheritance. For pleasure there were slave women.

  Like Aristotle, Roman physicians believed that women, all of them, patricians, plebeians, or slaves, had fewer teeth and smaller brains than men, and that on the days they menstruated their mirrors darkened with a reddish tinge.

  Pliny the Elder, the empire’s greatest scientific authority, demonstrated that a menstruating woman soured new wine, sterilized crops, caused seeds and fruits to wither, killed grafted plants and swarms of bees, tarnished bronze, and made dogs go crazy.

  From The Philosopher’s Apprentice

  James Morrow

  Vain is the word of a philosopher by whom no suffering is cured.

  —Epicurus

  341-270 BCE

  THIS BEGINS WITH A butterfly. The insect in question, a monarch, was flitting along a strand of morning glories threaded through the chain-link fence outside my apartment window, systematically dipping its proboscis into the powder blue cones. It was a warm, fecund morning in August, and I was twenty-seven years old. The butterfly mesmerized me, this Danaus plexippus with its ethereal antennae and magnificent orange wings limned by black stripes as bold and stark as the leading in a stained-glass window. How numinous it must have appeared to a lesser insect: a cricket’s epiphany.