Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  More than anyone else in the world, Joanna loved her mother. So when the woman called to say she’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had no more than half a year to live, her daughter immediately quit her job, told her husband she was going to her parents’ house for as long as it took, and was on the road the next day in her old car.

  As one would expect, the next six months were hideous. Her mother deteriorated very quickly and the woman’s last days would haunt her daughter for the rest of her life. Every night Joanna called her husband and, usually crying, told him what had happened that day.

  Squeezing the phone cord so hard in frustration that it left dents in his palms, he felt useless and way out of his depth listening to his beloved partner talk. Repeatedly he asked if she wanted him to come and keep her company. Joanna always said, “No, no, stay. It makes me happy thinking about you there in our life. Like in our living room watching TV. Any time I’m able to clear my mind a little bit and think about normal things it makes me happy. I don’t want you to be here and caught up in all this … mess.” And then she would begin to weep again. That sound of her crying was the only thing that bound them together then over the miles and sorrow that separated them.

  But the saving grace when matters got really bad, what she took out and unwrapped one at a time like rare precious objects, was the stories the man in the café had told her. They were some of the only things that buoyed her over those agonizing days. Sitting next to her mother’s hospital bed while the withered woman slept, Joanna would smile or close her eyes contentedly when she thought of the stories he had told her in the last weeks. Sometimes she got out her notebook and looked at what she had written down there to remind her of their specific talks.

  She didn’t know what it meant to drown in her own life but the sorrow she experienced during her mother’s final days brought her very close at times. What helped Joanna was remembering and then concentrating hard on some of the funny, memorable, or beautiful things the man had described. They gave her back some balance; they reminded her that life can also be funny and splendid, not just pitiless and lead colored as it was now.

  Three days before she died, her mother finally opened her mouth and took the slim section of tangerine her daughter offered. She had not eaten anything for a very long time. The joy that surged in Joanna’s heart seeing the food go in was huge.

  But huge was not the word that came to her then; it was smallicious. What her mother had just done was wonderful, not small. Joanna hoped that small bit of tangerine tasted delicious. So maybe that was why the funny nonword came to her, stuck in her brain, and wouldn’t go away.

  Only later did she realize why smallicious owned that last great moment shared between them: because in another time, her mother would have liked the word too. With her sensibilities she would have understood exactly what it meant. She and Joanna would have used it often when they talked to each other on the phone. Smallicious.

  Watching her mother’s mouth move slowly there at the very end, the man’s word was so strong in Joanna’s head that she almost said it out loud.

  Draft 82: Hinge

  Rachel Blau DuPlessis

  I.

  The book is a mine

  of intersections. Margins.

  Its inner edges pun on hinge.

  The book subsists

  by spurt and overlap,

  link and lack,

  subject and answer,

  declaration and perversity.

  Hinges are cunning, pegs allowing circulation through notches. A book hinges; it holds the doors in place so they may open. Like the page, a cool mist slides down the mountain.

  *

  The book is a mine

  of intersections. Statements.

  Thickness implies the combustible.

  Sparks catch flame and burn out words.

  The fire of the book can even scorch itself.

  “We stand bewildered before our own destiny … .” Perhaps there should be no more poems, only acts of writing. There would be no more books, but transfer points; no finished pages, simply work sites. There would be no more honors because these mainly police, with all the force of convention, any useful blunder art might make. There would be questions, and thereupon other questions. There would be no illusion of instrumental uses and no rhetorics dibbling in frill or decor. There would be no worship. O, it would be austere and demanding; o, it would be infinitely interpretable!

  II.

  Here’s a single tangled page that stakes a claim.

  Its interplays of hole and hold, of dead and dread

  Seem dialectical, yet operate in a structure

  Whose tip-top, top-you term I can’t supply.

  I don’t know what to do, how to articulate it.

  My stepping stippled feet feel cold.

  There are clots in my ear from ashen coals

  and eyes set deep

  as refugees

  in exile from illusions of another world

  as from illusions of transcendence.

  Let the head smolder in its grief.

  But they were only illusions!

  *

  Here’s another tangled page that stakes a claim:

  The interplay between hole and hold, dead and dread

  Doesn’t even begin to represent the tangle—the exposition

  Being so complex.

  Are you that surprised?

  I’ve jumped on a strange train without checking the schedule for return. For anything. Outside, darkness, and no one is calling out stations. The present is dismembered. Undecipherable. The future is paralyzing. Where are we? The covenant? I understand that it is broken. Look—we have just passed the scattered tabernacle!

  III.

  Rubble is continually before me.

  Silence of the stalled train.

  It lies in its own shadow; the day circulates.

  Is this the destination?

  Deep in the gutter, my margin split.

  The little needle

  The patch of gluey parchment

  The intelligence of textual scholarship

  Can neither mend nor bridge it.

  The page falls away.

  *

  Rubble is continually before me.

  Silence. The stalled train

  blocks the grimy tunnel,

  its catenary off the current.

  Wet, my life, and spent in wonder—

  was it important? Did it matter?

  Who broke these hinges? Who profits

  from such resistance to turning. Why block

  sorties from side to side, for understanding.

  “What’s it to you?” Stories, I mean,

  There are things for which I am very stony and sorry.

  Is there something I need to do that I am not doing?

  IV.

  First, arrive at the spur-line train stop

  long out of service, virtually nameless.

  A blur of faded letters taxes vision:

  sgraffito—scratchy opposite of the readable.

  I’ve heard about ghost tracks

  underneath train stations,

  where ghost people stand

  awaiting embarkation.

  -ston -ville -tola

  -ash. Half Word gaps

  get released from storehouses

  of half-effaced maps.

  *

  First, arrive at the spur-line train stop

  long out of service,

  yet expect someone, expect to be met, to get picked up.

  Came tacit greetings from soldiers, but

  I was totally unprepared to encounter this

  “metaphor,” and therefore stumbled,

  vertiginous,

  tripping over switches and formidable

  overgrown tracks.

  Day and night, night and day

  ostinato continues stubbornness

  in another language.

  My heart was in a basket.

  Or maybe i
n a passport.

  I fantasized

  about carrying it carefully into the woods.

  V.

  Look, I have carvings here on my hands.

  The flesh lines of my palm can be read as letters.

  In our writing H

  on my right hand—

  Acca acca acca

  Aitch and aitch—

  two uprights plus a line of force

  zygomatic,

  a simple yoke

  of satisfying aspirate—

  air being expelled in a heave,

  loud as a sigh but more ironic.

  On my left hand π

  something endless that disappears straight into the universe

  infinitely, with comic (albeit numerical) glee.

  “Eclipse” is related to the Greek word

  for abandonment,

  although we are not quite orphans

  but dots of consciousness

  pierced by points of pulsing light

  as far away as that

  but close as this.

  *

  Look, I have carvings here on my hands

  that open as if opening a book.

  Considering the textures of need and the paralysis of motives,

  considering what could happen in modest fairness,

  the newspaper suddenly stops. But it did not whirl

  as in the movies; it pulled itself together with a sucking in of breath

  and caught itself stolidly against a barrier

  and would not blow away no matter what the wind’s direction,

  no matter how battered, partial, and twisted.

  That pole was like the peg of a hinge.

  That paper like a book, unbound and bound together.

  It was closed, but it could, like the palm and psalm of the written

  be opened, be regarded.

  The first sentence teaches you to read; the second sentence tracks the surface. Third and you’re gone; then you arrive nowhere, in order to explore what that “nothing” will generate. Suppose you cannot turn back? Suppose there is no return? Then it is the poem, claiming nonetheless the interlock and open hope of hinge. For it will sometimes say that there is a pivot. Yet sometimes there is not.

  NOTE. “We stand bewildered … ” is a citation of Rilke’s argument, made just after the beginning of World War I, that art and theater should have prevented that war. The Rilke material (in a letter from June 1915) is discussed in George Rochberg, The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-century Music. “See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” is the actual citation from Isaiah 49: 16, modified here.

  Angel of Death

  Brian Evenson

  I.

  TO BEGIN, THERE ARE eight of us, but only one of us can write. And so I am assigned to keep a record of all that passes and to each day make the count of our number, and when one of us is dead or missing to inscribe his name in the back of the record. I have been given the blank book and a thrust of pencils just for this purpose, and though the others would not know were I to inscribe something other than what I have been commissioned, I intend to take my task seriously.

  The difficulty comes in knowing what is real and what is not. There is no agreement on this. What I am nearly sure is real is bursts and jolts and the smell of singed hair, but others recall none of these effects, recall other things entirely. And how we came to slip from one dim world and its dim deeds to the place where we are now none of us are in any position to say. And why we are together, this too I do not know.

  But here we are, and we are together, even if we cannot say why or even how. As for me, it was as if my vision ran dark and when it went lucid again here I was, in this new place, tramping my way wetly forward. Soon I was conscious of other footsteps surrounding me. And shortly we began to think of ourselves as a company, moving forward as if one body, though we knew not where.

  But I am already beginning to sway from my purpose, and my scribbling in the blank book slows me as I walk. I lag dangerously behind the others. They will not stop for me, but sometimes they do call out to hurry me along. Thrusting one finger between pages, I hurry to catch up with them, sloshing my way forward. But soon, writing, I am lagging behind again, and so it goes.

  Perhaps it would be enough for me simply to record the world in notation, scattered bits, things like—

  walked, gray light

  one more dead

  walked, darker gray light

  —and so on as I fully record the full names of the dead when they die.

  But having begun in another fashion, I find it hard to believe I could be satisfied with less.

  Here is what I think I know about how things stand for us now:

  There are, or rather were, eight of us, together.

  We are walking, or rather slouching, forward.

  There are no landmarks. Nor, for that matter, technically speaking, any land.

  We are going somewhere, for surely one is always going somewhere, even if that somewhere is only in circles. But where? And why do we not feel the need to sleep?

  I have indeed queried some of the others, but they speak only with great reticence, in short, clipped sentences, just as I did before I was given the book. But now something has changed for me. There has, I fear, developed the worst of needs, the need to know, coupled reluctantly with an awareness that I probably will, in fact, never know. And yet I write. And cling too to that past I know, or hope, to be real: smell of singed hair, slowly fading vision.

  Recorded now in the back of this book: two names. There are six of us left. The other two simply slowed and then fell to their knees, the water lapping against their thighs. And then each of them lay down, facedown, and we left him there, the backs of their heads and the blades of their shoulders disturbing the otherwise smoothness of the water’s surface.

  I add the latest dead man to the list in the book and then the remaining others each give me a share of their food: not much, a portion hardly bigger than my thumb. They extend it toward me, pronouncing their own names, and I take it, repeating their names as I do, assuring them that I will remember them when they die, that I will record them.

  At first I thought it was a sort of immortality they sought in this recording, a sense they would not be forgotten. But it has become clear this is the last thing they want. Through their few words in response, I have gleaned that instead they fear not knowing if they are alive or dead, that they want their death marked out and delineated so as to be sure that they will not have to come to life again. That this can be done with the recording of a name I sincerely doubt.

  And yet, still, it makes me mildly anxious to think that there will be no one here to record my own name when I myself die. How will I remember I am dead?

  One more dead, his name recorded, the five of us trudging dimly on. The landscape in all directions fog and water, feet clammy and wet. Horizon, at least for me, undifferentiated, the light varying from dull to dark gray. Behind us, the last body still visible, a small damp island. Soon that too will be lost from sight as, in company with the other four, scrawling in this book, I continue forward.

  II.

  I do not know which one of them starts, but one of them, one of the other four, shuffles into place beside me as I walk. He gets very close and—perhaps not in the first instance but certainly in many of the instances that follow—even encircles me with one arm, aligning his stride with my own. I do not care for such intimacy; it makes it difficult for me to write. But I tolerate it, take it as one of the duties of having the blank book and the privilege of filling it.

  And then, much of the time, the fellow will move slowly away, not a word exchanged, leaving me to wonder how to record our interaction in the book. Which, in a manner of speaking, is what I am doing now.

  And yet, at other times, it has gone farther than this. I do not know how much I

  An unfinished sentence, left long solitary as my mind churned over what, if anything, it
was expedient to record. Finally I will leave it as it is, its own little outcropping of words, alone.

  I myself am not alone. I continue on in this company, walking through a landscape that seems at no variance with anything, even itself. Sky and water welded together without joint or seam, no sound but the slow roil of our footsteps.

  No more of us dead yet. I will record it, after all: sometimes as they fall in step beside me they also whisper softly into my ear:

  —You are the one who will record my name when I die.

  —Yes, I whisper back. I am the one.

  —You know my name.

  —Yes, I say, I know your name. And I repeat it. I would record it here, in this sentence, on this page, but it is not to be written in the book until they are dead.

  He nods.

  —Yes, he whispers, this is my name. You will not forget it?

  —No, I will not forget it.

  —This is a promise?

  I promise him and, somewhat dazed, he moves off.

  This is what my connection with others amounts to now. It was perhaps, once, different, but what it was before, I can no longer recall.

  No more of us dead yet. Perhaps the rest of us will walk forever.

  Questions have begun to plague me. About where I am, what I am doing here, where we are going.

  As I have not even the faintest, most tentative of answers to them, I find I have no idea how to entertain them. Instead I will write:

  sky dark gray

  water as slate

  sloshing forward

  and cling still to that acrid smell of burning hair, the last outcropping of my lost past.

  And then, suddenly, a different conversation. One of them, a pale, gaunt man, after asking the same questions, tacks this one on at the end:

  —When will I die?

  —I don’t know, I say.

  But he does not believe me.

  —Please, he says, please look into my face and tell me when I am going to die.