Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  In this corner of the world hidden from prying eyes, in the grainy light of dusk, on a June evening in her sixteenth year, Sally knelt at the mossy edge of the spring, cupped her hand to hold the fresh water, and drank her fill. The water was as cold as ice. Colder. She ate those sour strawberries by the handful, and then, in the darkness, she made a soft bed from dry pine needles and slept. She slept for one hundred years. And she woke to a whole different life.

  How was it different?

  It was raining.

  Oh.

  A soft, soaking rain fell all day. It was the kind of rain that washed away caked mud from fingers, blood smears from a sanitary pad, and dirt from the soul. She sat beneath a rocky ledge beside the spring and waited for the rain to stop. Late in the afternoon, she was as bad a girl as ever.

  Bad Sally.

  That’s her.

  In ancient times the oracle would have predicted a bad end. But there are no oracles in the modern world. There are only fears and hopes.

  And hunger. Dear Jesus, she was so damn hungry she was ready to eat her shoe.

  But still she sat there below the dripping shale, feeling cold through to her bones and furious at everyone she could think of—God, her family, Miss Krumbaldorf, the Jensons, the men who started the war, the German soldier who threw the grenade that sent shrapnel into Daniel’s eye, and of course Daniel Werner himself, who couldn’t see straight enough to know that he would never convince the cousin he loved to love him back.

  Dripping, bubbling water. It was early in the month, not yet summer, and with the rain the temperature was dropping steadily. There could be frost in the morning. She’d freeze to death if she didn’t do something besides sit there watching raindrops disappear into the spring, the bubbles pop, the foam swirl, and—why, look at that sneaky little worm slipping out from beneath the lip of stone, sliding soundlessly into the water. Just a slimy gray newt with yellow spots. Yet in the tension of her loneliness, it was more than that.

  She stared at the surface, trying to catch sight of the creature as it swam away. At first she didn’t see it moving in the water. Then she saw the tiny snout sticking out above the surface, the black beads of its eyes locking with hers as though challenging her to imagine the potential for conversation.

  What else was there to do but say hello?

  At the sound of her voice, the newt pulled itself under water with a jerk, leaving only a single circle where its snout had been. As the faint ripple widened, Sally caught sight of thready brown hair trailing below the surface, hardly more than a shadowy blur in the water. And were those arms stretched out, along with the flickering motion of tiny hands paddling through water? There and gone, leaving enough of an impression for Sally to wonder about what she’d just seen.

  But wonder doesn’t last long when a belly is rumbling its complaints. Sally had never heard the legend of the magical Tuskawali and didn’t want to have to figure out how to make sense of what she’d seen. Why, a newt was just a newt! Forget about it. More importantly, the spring was a vessel of stone and mud spilling water in a constant stream. The water moved through the narrow channel and toward the meadow as if on a single-minded mission, going on its way with a certainty that Sally envied. Where, she wondered, was it heading? Where would it lead?

  She couldn’t begin to guess the answer. Her parents’ farm was at the bottom of the east side of Thistle Mountain. Here on a distant western plateau, the stream meandered through the meadow and then bent toward the slope. She’d never been on the west slope of the mountain before. She’d never been farther than the field behind the junkyard where one Sunday afternoon she’d lain with her cousin Daniel.

  As soon as the drizzle had lightened to a warm mist and before the sun had sunk behind the far ridge of pines, Sally Werner set out walking, following the bank of the meadow stream, descending through the forest as the stream widened into a stony creek and fell over mossy granite shelves. The creek would lead her to her destiny, or at least that’s what she wanted to believe. The flowing water was the next best thing to an arrow mounted on a sign with her name on it.

  This way, Sally Werner.

  A girl in a plaid sheath dress and saddle shoes just walking along, stepping over roots stretched across the ground like knobby fingers, squinting against clouds of black flies, hoping that she was heading in the right direction, with a destination that would include a hot turkey dinner, walking to the rhythm of the ballad she was making up to tell the story of her life.

  Mother, daughter, sister, lover.

  Wretched Sally Werner.

  And then what?

  Then she disappears down the mountainside.

  Quick, come say goodbye to Sally.

  Goodbye, Sally.

  But she’s already gone.

  From Fire Exit

  Robert Kelly

  How could I miss you I’ve been right here with myself

  and missing is a devious art

  one that needs its Aeschylus

  (frantic raptures of abandonment tu me manques

  always too polite to specify)

  whose poetry would be a vast forgetting

  a machine forever waiting to be installed

  is the sweetest morning dear Proust

  what language does this day speak

  let it be a cleaner lingo

  hidden from the dynast who rules over us

  but I am not permitted by my ragione

  reason to doubt his right to do so

  though I would unseat him if I can

  to everyone a Rocinante of one’s own

  or change my name

  I never liked me anyhow

  get on a bus to Annapolis

  plenty of hot water and Coke for breakfast

  left-handed government

  pallid sailboats stand out in mist

  but not today, only sun sheen

  only the glue that keeps us thinking

  insert here from Coleridge

  I suppose we would call that thinking

  all by yourself in the dubious hotel

  while waves crash unobserved on rocks

  one morning she was gone

  and all the rest was thinking

  lots to think about in a white wood wall

  and in disorder something more

  an urgent Christian ‘burn

  only in your heart, leave

  the stake to those who believe in the state,

  banish martyrdom’ jihad

  is a massacre within,

  as if there were a way to do it

  overtake the wind and freeze the rainbow

  hold everything in mind

  keep balance, halte Maaß

  said Dürer, keep the measure,

  understand divine proportion in your hand

  Saturn in Libra, perspectiva

  artificialis, a cherry bomb

  goes off on Barrytown dock

  thirty years back and it remembers

  but who was the girl in the car with him

  remember just the hum of the refrigerator car

  left all night on the railroad siding

  idling, but who was the woman

  and the river and who is the moon.

  *

  We change the lines but it cannot change,

  starbeam trapped forever in our amber

  {star} put there as an easy sign

  so the knowers know and the doers forget

  and both be darkened by a random thought

  the same pretty little cloud, nuvoletta,

  star and heart must rhyme in some language

  the mark on the wall that means

  a movement in your soft mouth

  a sound in the cave—

  apposition they taught: to set

  two or more words in balance

  so each casts its glow and shadow on the other

  arid though the space around the signs but not between,

  the between of anything is the loveliest tune.r />
  *

  No action in the Achaean fleet assembled

  even killing has to wait for night

  uneasy shepherds grumbling at their sheep

  this is no place for an animal

  a man with eyes

  something is about to begin to begin

  the World Cup of Waiting with no referees

  arms spread to catch

  a living noise from the sky

  old women wore veils when I grew up

  matrons’ eyes behind violet organdy

  gauzy with little flecks of flowers

  a line looped round the light

  then they wore nylons to vanish and reveal the ordinary

  always had to coat their presences

  or else they’d overwhelm us

  but not tonight

  too many islands in this world

  sometimes things are done and never know it

  a court hand engrossing a charter

  all good comes from the queen

  to her I recommend this rubble

  comely pebbles on a midnight ocean

  lit only by the intelligence

  the dark pain that can’t help seeing—

  and it is only that special pain that sees

  only the pain that understands the door

  and the little boy who watched the fire exit

  all through the movie and understood

  that led to the real mystery

  the thing outside the theater

  on the other side of all this art

  but you could only get there through this confusion

  there, waiting for him out there,

  a thing in a world of things

  a thing is patient,

  often they told him about heaven

  he guessed it was a place

  where understanding was,

  they knew the answers and they told you

  and you saw the back side of the moon.

  But what if the dead are as dull as the living

  what if nobody knows?

  What if there’s nothing really there

  and you have to make it up new every time

  or bring it with you

  knowledge squeezed through confusion

  like a child being born into this world

  and there it would be in the other

  a gasping knowledge full of pain and relief

  licked into shape by a weird (that is, fated) geology

  where stones are soft again

  and cool fire plays around your hips

  and it turns out it isn’t about knowing at all

  it’s about saying

  and sound by sound making it so

  into real place

  a poem is a ouija board without the wood

  it shows you where you want to go

  the sea is no color but the sky

  try it drink it all down

  and see what colors are left

  words are always looking for silence

  a text always in love with the end of itself

  gnomic palaver, meat on your plate

  then forget theory, Nietzsche is just mustard now

  changes the taste of what you think

  just enough to make you think he thought it

  the Crucified, the one with powerful ideas

  until he sang, music

  is no way to please the Muses

  or only one way and watch the waiter move

  and the hostess perched behind the reservation book

  and TV crews devouring this same stew

  we thought was our food our life our destiny

  we have no destiny

  we only have what we found in a book

  the taste in someone else’s mouth

  when we say I love you and they say nothing

  and what is there for music to say

  the philosopher collapsed in the street

  the philosopher endured a restriction in discourse

  we do not know the words he said in that condition

  sun and moon go hide and seek

  you grow up part of a time machine

  we’re at the stage where only kindness helps

  publish it not in the streets of Askelon

  no one listens to the silence in the heart

  whose sound is it, one thing can save us

  us us always you’re talking talking

  there is no us, that’s the problem

  if there were us we would be living at this hour

  not this rain of flies on Pershing Square.

  Refugees

  Matthew Hamity

  MY MOTHER KEPT JARS OF moondust in the kitchen cabinet, replenishing the stock after each lunar mission. She would be gone for months at a time and my uncle, who was also an astronaut, would stay with my brother and me. When she returned, she would mumble hello and escape with a jar to her bedroom.

  Hours later, when she finally emerged, the jar empty, her nails white with dust, she would say, 642, or she’d say, 998, or 1201, always with great sadness in her voice, the greater the number, the greater the sadness, counting the days that stood between her and the next encounter with the moon. On the rare occasion that she cooked, the dust would inevitably end up in our soup. If I complained, she would declare that moondust, like tofu, takes on the taste of whatever it’s cooked with. Close your eyes and slurp, she’d say.

  I came to anticipate my mother’s moonward journeys as much as she did. The second she stepped out the door, I’d go into my room and open the window by my bed. I would stare out at the sky and wait for night. As the sky turned gray-black, I would place my thumb and forefinger at each of the lunar poles and bring them together, squashing the moon along with my mother and grinding them both into a fine dust. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t on the moon just yet, that she would still be busy conducting microgravity experiments on the forty-six-and-a-half-hour translunar flight, experiments like GRASS (Gravitational Rising Archetypal Semiconductors Special) and VICKS (Visuo-motor Independent Coordination Kinetics Special), which she said would someday lead to new treatments for sleep disorders, and the way she said it, you’d think sleep disorders were the gravest problem in the world. I couldn’t wait for the next moon to appear so I could squash her again.

  But just a few nights later, after another of my uncle’s bawdy tales (all of them revolved around Yury Gagarin, the first astronaut to complete an orbital space flight mission, a minor feat, my uncle said, compared to Yury’s organizing and participating in the first ever interplanetary orgy), my anger would yield to the moon’s magnetic power, and I would go back to my room and tip my head out the window, opening my mouth as wide as I could, waiting for some of the fat white light to drip down on my tongue. I wanted to fill up on moonlight, and during those moments, I believed that I could. I believed I could love the moon and that it would love me back. I believed I could be happy. Who needs a mother? Who needs her?

  My father had left when I was small and pink, when my brother was still fetal. We never saw him again. That made my mother one of two single parents in the entire National Manned Lunar Missions Agency. (A renegade group, the NMLMA was founded twenty-seven years ago in Dallas by eight astronauts, my mother and uncle among them, who were displeased with NASA’s moratorium on lunar missions. They were also unhappy with the increasing number of unmanned robot space missions. At the beginning of each year, the NMLMA, now ninety-two strong, builds a robot only to explode it.) The other single mother was Rita Betts, but Rita had a billionaire ex-husband (the divorce settlement had gotten the NMLMA off the ground and the alimony helped keep it afloat) and a live-in who did all the housework and took care of her three kids. Rita used to brag that she had never changed a diaper, that she didn’t even know what her kids’ shit smelled like, so my mother said Rita didn’t really count. But my mother only barely eclipsed Rita’s maternal performance. I can still remember watching her change my brother’s diaper, her hands quick and rough,
like she was patching a leaky field joint. Of course there was no time for baby powder.

  As if relations between the moon and me weren’t complicated enough by a negligent astronaut mother, when I was eleven years old, my uncle died in the lunar plains. According to Darla Meltzer, one of my uncle’s paramours, he’d begun to lose it after six hours and thirty-two minutes of moonwalking (this was corroborated in the official NMLMA antiliability report by Sal Creech and Nelly Fordoon). He’d blathered that, living much of their lives beyond the protective shield of the earth’s atmosphere, they were all a hundred times more likely to get cancer than the Joe Earthbounds and Jenny Leadfoots. He said he was scared of dying, that no one fucks a dead man. He’d laid down in the smallest crater he could find, his head in the center, his feet at the lip, his body a perfect crateral radius, and demanded that someone bash his skull in with a phosphorous rock he’d been holding tight all morning (Fordoon and Creech claimed the rock was shaped like a woman’s face). I can’t live with this fear of death any longer, he’d said. He’d begun to cry and wouldn’t stop until finally, Robert McKenzie, who had never liked my uncle because he suspected him of sexing his wife while Robert had been at the bottom of the ocean testing moonwalking techniques, obliged.

  I was angry. First the moon had stolen my mother’s affections; now it sat idly by while my uncle was destroyed. I needed my uncle around because he’d been a reliable source of the carnal knowledge my mother denied me. Since the second grade (because my mother was single, we didn’t have the money for the tiny private NMLMA school the rest of the astronauts’ children attended), I had been able to impress the other kids with his stories, substituting Yury Gagarin’s name with that of Mr. Sellis, the principal, but now, with my uncle gone, I ran out of juicy details and soon became a favorite target of the middle-school bullies. They called me Astroglide, told me to suck their astronuts, broke my nose. My brother said I should stop wearing my waning gibbous moon sweatshirt. He had me try on some of his sports clothes, but, looking in the mirror, I felt like an impostor. Even in his Minnesota North Stars jersey.

  After my uncle’s death, I would not look at the moon directly. I treated it like the sun. If I went out at night, I wore a visor. I applied sunscreen after sunset. I complained of how the moonlight sapped all my energy. But when almost two years had passed and exactly 719 moons, I grew unbearably lonely, and on a particularly clear night, I caved, ogling the huge pockmarked face. I could almost feel the moon pulling me toward it, could almost feel its gravity. But the earth kept dragging me down with its own force. This was also the night that I noticed my first armpit hair.