Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  The singer came over to the bar, to try to cadge a drink maybe, and Georgie told him flat out he hated hillbilly music. “Go fuck a horse,” he said. The guy only grinned faintly out of the side of his mouth and shrugged and said he didn’t like it much either but it was all he could do except drink and split the beaver. “Know a better way to make some bread?” “Well, I been looking. But no.” That eased things, and though neither could afford to buy the other a drink, they ended up trading tales, leaning there on the bar, Georgie finding himself telling the truth for a change about his fucked-up family and fucked-up life, while the singer, who introduced himself as Duke (Georgie gave him his Italian name, just to let him know where he was coming from), told him about the shit life of the country music road circuit, and the even shittier life of the bush leagues. He said, when asked, he used to throw a little, and Georgie said he used to hit a little but could never stay sober enough to go pro. Maybe just being strangers helped. Georgie even got around to telling about the girl who had been killed, the girl who was, he only realized this just now, the true love of his life. “One thing bout country music,” Duke said, “is they got a song for ever damn thing that ever went wrong. They ain’t many different tunes, but some words is better’n others.” “And some words are worse,” Georgie said and asked him why he was singing that awful mommy and daddy graveyard merda when he came in. “The girl ast for it. It was the third time I’d done ‘White Dove’ for the moony little thing tonight. Probly has sumthin to do with the first night she got laid. Most usually does.” Georgie felt warm enough toward Duke by then to ask him if he’d like to join him on a run to Waterton, go give the dog a bone, but Duke said it was still too early, he had to stay on until midnight in case anyone came in. “But I’ll be around. Got no place to go. Drop in agin.”

  The fat unseasonal snow is still falling in thick clots as Georgie, hunched over the steering wheel, pulls out of the motel parking lot. After the warm day, it is melting as it falls, though it is a nuisance without windwhield wipers. Probably ought to forget it. Way he’s feeling, he may not be able to get it up anyway. But it’s his last chance while he still has wheels. Lem will be pissed off enough about him keeping the car overnight, especially since he won’t be buying it, so no chance for seconds, it’s tonight or who knows. Another thing he should have picked up on his rounds, he considers, was a pack of rubbers. Could have asked little Miss No-Tits in the drugstore this morning to go fetch them for him, telling her to be sure to get the right size. If she’d told him there was only one size, he’d have asked her what she was doing after work. But then she probably would have called her boss and had him thrown out. Would have ratted on him for stealing the centerfold.

  “Goddamn it, Ruby,” Georgie asks, “what’s all this for? If life is such shit, why do we go on living it?” He answers himself: because you’re scared not to, asshole. And because there’s always hope for one more piece of tail. He pats the dashboard (he’s glad he didn’t turn her in, he’d be all alone without her), his nose at the windshield, trying to see through it, thinking about dying. Or rather, trying not to, but unable to keep it out. Where was Marcella Bruno killed? On this road? No, out by the mine. “What’s it like, Ruby? What happens when you die?” The Waterton road is empty, almost spookily so. Nobody else fool enough to be out. No risk of hitting anybody, but it is easy to lose the road altogether. Maybe he should never let Ruby go. Just drive through Waterton and keep on rolling. Go somewhere warm, make some money, fix her up. Whitewall tires. Radio. Leopard-skin seat covers, soft to stroke. Then he sees it, a small dark thing scurrying across the snowy road out in front of him with glowing ruby dots where its eyes are. It startles him with its sudden challenging presence. Raccoon maybe. Cat. Squirrel. Whatever. It’s dead meat. Georgie floors the accelerator. No pickup at all. If anything the old girl slows down. He knows if he can hit this thing, everything will be all right. “Come on, sweetheart, throw your hips into it! You can do it!” His fingers are snapping at the wheel as if working pin-ball flippers, his whole body twisting and pushing. The animal has frozen. He’s got it! And then, just as he’s about to score, Ruby starts to fishtail, he whips the wheel back and forth trying to straighten her out, everything is suddenly spinning around him, trees that weren’t there wheeling about in front of his face, and he braces for the impact.

  The whumping crumple of metal is not as loud as he’d expected, though in the silence that follows it echoes loudly in his mind. He has been thrown around a bit, but he’s OK. He switches off the motor, leaves the lights on, crawls out. He has wrapped Ruby around a light pole on the passenger side, the old girl nearly cloven in half at the waist, her rear end at right angles to the rest of her. “Oh, baby. I’m sorry.” He is. It is the saddest thing that has happened in a long sad day. He’s even crying a little. For her. For himself. He walks around her in the falling snow, whispering his apologies. His farewells. He crawls back in on the driver’s side to rescue the centerfold, looking a bit the worse for wear. He kisses the steering wheel, getting out. He has a long walk back to face. But first he clambers up on Ruby’s hood and, kneeling there in pious homage, lowers his pants and, using the centerfold’s taunting raised ass to arouse himself, jerks off on Ruby’s cracked windshield, fantasizing a loving blow job (“Marcella! I love you!” he whispers as he comes). His final blessing. He wipes himself with the centerfold, no doubt inking his dick colorfully, and, a mile or so down the snowy road toward town, tosses it in the ditch.

  Some Silly Thing

  John Ashbery

  It’s so confusing these days,

  what with the activity and the fuss, flurry,

  fluster, what have you. I’m in sympathy more

  with the elves and you, good, hospitable

  demons we can cherish with. At least

  in those times was the flour and salt of difference,

  liquor of misunderstanding the baby’s presence

  withdrew. Some of us were born fooling around

  to be captured later in life and classified.

  More of us played the fingerboard. Then there were the oval tops

  spinning away as though their lives depended on it.

  What other streets made such an impression

  and why? Why did some stand out or read

  as darker while others registered as pale and correct?

  The truth is nobody knows what is happening anymore.

  I for one am not sure it’s a mistake

  to go crackling on like this, with parents in a tizzy

  and royal figurines registering disapproval.

  What if there never was an infinite series

  bisecting one’s own orchard? Would that help?

  And if the silent reading and the listening coincided

  in a bellicose fraction this side of miscellany, would

  they be confiscated any sooner? To the contrary, I believe

  we are just this side of an enormous breakthrough,

  that the captain knows about us and is on his way over.

  Similarly in the last century you would see feedback

  degenerating into laissez-faire. It was nice for those who lived then,

  but few would want to be part of the rival solution

  even if it left them breathless and on the edge of a forest

  in a gothic novel. And then there was all the turning out all right

  to be commandeered and somehow exploited for one’s own narrative

  off of whose dregs we are still living today.

  Wilde said that history is merely gossip.

  To that add that portraiture is what a dressmaker’s dummy feels

  about today’s hiatus or harvest, whenever bands of light

  or shadow have taken over. Honestly, we’re good with that.

  It’s like dawn in this globular attic room, one’s inmost thoughts

  to be breathed upon and revived like flowers, again and again.

  Elegy: Or to Begin Again

 
Ann Lauterbach

  —In memory of Katherine Mester Luzzi

  1.

  Way over in the particularities of evening

  so many missing it seems we are alone at

  last, you and whatever I am thinking about you,

  not a happy thought, but not indifferent.

  And that other world? The image

  had receded under the angry

  claims of the image, and in this redundancy

  we stopped to buy apples, and to speak of the dead.

  The face of the dead came into view

  as a consolation, and the apples seemed

  a magnitude of form, brightly gathered, a crowd.

  These are impossible things to say clearly because

  the proper name has less than accurate

  attributes: so little had been copied from life.

  But think now of Seurat. Think of Child in White

  rendered as absent agitations of a crayon. The end.

  2.

  Or to begin again

  gold touches the back of her neck. It spawns

  a crest, a brief tattoo. She moves

  into and beyond

  shedding its improvisation, its effect.

  The effect of gold is bright heat. She

  seeks cover in a passing cloud, a passing leaf. Gold

  moves off into the landscape, touching a wasp, a truck,

  a stone. Down at the end of the path, a head

  appears as that of a man, riveted to a wall.

  Gold moves off and vanishes

  as night ignites a halo

  around the head at the end of the passage.

  This is the assemblage of the nevertheless,

  its sudden rupture. I thought of something else.

  I thought of a stranger seated in a tent. The end.

  3.

  Or to begin again

  I had wanted a location but had become embattled

  in a zone of supposition and indirection.

  The emergency is ink-stained.

  A temporary orange blocks the view.

  An ambulance is climbing slowly uphill.

  Returning to the lost, a sound increased

  over whatever exemption had been founded on passage.

  Around and around they went, the metallic children,

  carving an arena into the climate, an

  erasure that would become a road, repeating the turn,

  learning its rhythm in the denuded wood.

  He began, I sought, this time, to approach him.

  I thought then of the witness, of the body’s carriage

  moving downstream on a barge, and the small

  red tug like a living toy, riveted to its mass. The end.

  4.

  Or to begin again

  in the miraculous scale of the small nouns,

  their mischief and potential.

  Auden imagining the good at a sidewalk café.

  Oppen staring into the face of a stranger,

  into the face of his beloved Mary.

  We want to be here.

  I was thinking of table settings: folded napkins,

  polished ware, sparkling glasses.

  And the prayer? What was the prayer?

  What if everything had slowed

  and she had chosen to wait, to forget her chore?

  There were, I recall, ripples of violence

  that caught on twigs and snapped wires.

  Words were spoken from too far away to be heard.

  There was a blind spot, a stained cloth. The end.

  5.

  Or to begin again

  suspended above the habitat, bees

  dying in their boxes, salmon

  desiccated in their nets, flight on flight,

  origin marked by tracks in mud

  and the river newly revealed

  through naked bark

  like a silver coin skipped across time

  the migrations of time

  the small noun time.

  The world fallen from its skin

  into the airy wild, abode of infinite

  contractions, this in which it is, adhering.

  A swarm and a nub, tumbleweed shadowed on ice.

  The facts encroaching on intimate constraint.

  These could be a hand, a voice. The end.

  6.

  Or to begin again

  an accident disperses the law. Thrown there,

  there. Less than forgotten

  in the usual ditch of leaves, weeds, caps,

  a massive gold afloat in the autumnal sky.

  At whose approval? The call stuffed in a sock?

  Faces of the war dead in a signature farewell:

  boy, boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, girl

  picturing evidence, picturing silence,

  and the chorus ready to respond: holy, holy, holy,

  to awaken the dead but not in the language of the dead.

  Perhaps a finite contraction,

  the child practicing to fly overhead, to drop the bag

  on the dusty road below, to watch it spill into flames from on

  high, from a mobile perch

  cruising through its episodes of grief. The end.

  7.

  Or to begin again

  some got lucky, came rushing

  toward the giant appeasement of the given.

  Singing along with the anthem

  they distributed coupons to the rest

  to redeem, solace for those who do not

  begin but stay back in the infrastructure

  of the singular: what you said, what I said, before

  the fact. Were we to be among those to be counted

  one by one, like days? Greeted by our host?

  In which language? And what were we meant to

  carry away, down the road a bit, into the rest?

  Light strays across the dry grasses.

  The arm lifts, the head turns.

  A gathering, an image, a dispersal.

  In whichever order. The end.

  8.

  Or to begin again: now now

  birdlike, repeated,

  the noise of nearness,

  yet without either body or mouth.

  In the mind’s eye, a wall

  painted robin’s egg blue

  behind Paul Klee’s dirty yellow circus.

  Nothing noticed, nothing gained.

  A clown on his head, a dog, a ball.

  And yet the acquiescent rain,

  and yet the passage

  of a massive chorus

  through the fictive pilings of a cage.

  Comest thou now? Comest thou now?

  Repeated, birdlike, from over there.

  Look up and then look away. The end.

  9.

  Or to begin again: virtuous moon

  appears to be taking a star for a walk; I

  cannot see a leash, but the star

  is obedient. Together they traverse

  the night sky. It is winter

  and the ground below is a dull shell.

  The secular ghost is chastised

  in its moody camp; it fears ice

  as it fears the dawn when the moon

  will have vanished, star in tow.

  It knows when things begin to melt

  there will be a forgetting and, in the wan face

  of the beloved, the stigma of desire.

  Fuck desire, says the ghost, only

  no one can hear and so no one can answer.

  Fuck desire, it repeats, birdlike, at dawn. The end.

  10.

  Or to begin again: a gift is in the offing.

  Something a sparrow might drop

  on its way, something sent

  across the boundaries of time.

  Why is the deck at a tilt

  so that the day and its objects

  might slip off the edge? The boy

  with the fiddle, his

  dark brows fla
t, eyes recessed

  into the harbor of play:

  four strings, taut bow, the arc

  of elaborations, note by note, his wrist

  traversing their wake. Sound, what is sound?

  The day has its spelling, the night also.

  Tell me what she heard in the splashing instant.

  Say the last kiss. The end.

  11.

  Or to begin again: still no sign

  in the field of negation:

  all appears to be ordinary.

  Sea birds depicted above the sea,

  the pretty couple dancing,

  the buzzing saw,

  evening clouds assembled, mountains dark.

  Yes, but the page is not blank.

  Yes, but the sun’s pallor

  consumes as it rolls

  across the heavens, dragging

  the head of the beheaded despot,