by Monica Youn
The trumpet, gaining confidence, starts up a long, meandering arabesque in a minor key.
Another drawn-out creak from the wooden door.
The green car pulls into view and drives off to the right.
The door latch clicks firmly.
Your lover is now talking to the old man, with the black-and-white dog sniffing at her ankles.
The sound of a car door opening, then closing.
The old man throws something down in the dust, and the dog begins eating it.
The green car is now driving away on the road around the far side of the arena.
Pausing every few steps, your lover walks away from the arena, then stops short, leaning on one foot, staring toward the window.
A distant police siren, wire-thin, in a swift crescendo.
A woman calls out in Spanish.
The sky now visible above the arena wall.
The camera has moved outside, passing through the bars of the window frame.
GREENACRE
Gold flecked, dark-rimmed, opaque—
like a toad’s
stolid unsurprise—
the lake never blinks
its hazel eye.
Manmade, five feet deep,
the exact square footage of a city block.
Lakewater murk
precipitates
a glinting silt of algae,
specks of soil,
minnows wheeling in meticulous formation,
the occasional water snake, angry, lost.
Two pale figures in the lake,
half-
submerged, viewed
at an oblique angle.
At thirteen, I spent summer afternoons
reading in my treehouse, a simple platform
without walls,
like a hunting blind,
a white painted birdhouse,
without walls
so no bird ever visited it.
Leaf-light dissolving in still water.
Two pale figures in the lake,
half-
seen, chest-deep
in the mirroring
lakewater so they seemed all bare
shoulders, all lake-slick hair.
Standing face to face—
not embracing,
but his upper arm
entering the water,
half-concealed, at an angle that must have meant
he was touching her, beneath the surface.
Unblinking, the lake
giving nothing away,
caring nothing
for whatever shape
displaced it, unremembering,
uncurious. Did his arm bend,
and, if so,
to what exact degree?
At what point
did his hidden hand
intersect her half-submerged body?
The mirrored horizontal of the lake is where
memory presses itself
against its limit,
where hypothesis,
overeager,
rushes to fill the void, to extrapolate
from what is known. Because I knew them both:
Ann Towson,
a year ahead of me,
scrawny, skilled
at gymnastics, gold
badges emblazoning the sleeve of her green
leotard, her chest as flat as mine.
And John Hollis—
the most popular boy
in our class,
his tan forearms emerged
gold-dusted from rolled-up shirtsleeves.
He fronted a band called White Minority,
which played at weekend parties
across the lake.
We shared a bus stop,
a subdivision.
Once he spoke to me, the day I swapped
my glasses for contact lenses. Something’s different,
he said, eyes narrowing,
Yeah, no kidding!
I snapped back,
turning away. Later,
my best friend scolded me for rudeness.
Every day, boarding the school bus,
John Hollis
faced the bus driver
with a bland smirk —
What’s up, black bitch?—
as if shoving her face down into a puddle
scummed with humiliation, which was always
dripping from her,
dripping down on her—
she hunched her shoulders
against it, narrow-eyed.
Every day, some kids smirked,
some kids hunched down, stolid, unblinking.
Two pale figures in a lake,
half-
witnessed, half-conjectured,
a gold arm
like sunlight slanting down through lakewater.
But now a clinging, sedimentary skin
outlines every contour:
what is known.
No longer faceless shapes
displacing water,
the voids they once inhabited can’t be lifted
dripping from the lake, rinsed clean
enough for use.
What drips from them
coats the lake
with a spreading greenness—
an opaque glaze lidding the open eye.
BROWNACRE
We were sitting, leaning back against the house,
on the stone patio, or terrace, looking out over a steep drop
at the mountains arrayed in a semicircle around us,
all expectant angles, like the music stands
of an absent orchestra—summer colors, orangey golds
and dim blues and there must have been greens as well—
I wasn’t paying attention: I was watching the thing
you had just said to me still hanging in the air between us,
its surfaces beading up with a shiny liquid like contempt
that might have been seeping from the words themselves
or else condensing from the air, its inscrutable humidity—
the droplets rounding themselves as they fall
etching a darker patch on the patio tiles, a deepening
concavity and, above it, a roughness in the air,
the molecules of concrete coalescing grain by grain
into a corrugated pillar topped by a cloud—a tree form:
not a sapling or a mountain tree, but a tree
that would look at home in a farmyard or meadow,
sheltered from winds, branches stretching out
with all confidence toward the horizon—
a shape that should have been an emblem
of sufficiency, of calm, but whose surfaces
were teeming with a turbulent rush of particles
like the inner workings of a throat exposed and
whose dimensions were expanding with shocking speed,
accumulating mass, accumulating coherence
and righteousness, pulling more and more
of the disintegrating terrace into its form, taller than us,
then shadowing us, and doubtlessly, underground,
a root system of corresponding complexity and spread
was funneling down displaced nothingness
from a hole in the upper air and then it was time
and I stood up and went inside and shut the door,
unsure what still anchored us to the mountainside.
BLUEACRE
Lamentation (Martha Graham, 1930)
What shall I compare to you, that I may comfort you, virgin daughter of Zion? Lamentations 2:13
Wordless, ceaseless,
a second seamless skin—
this blue refrain
sings of comfort,
camouflage, the rarest
right—to remain
faceless, featureless,
the barest rune of ruin:
a chessboard pawn
that rears up into a castle
then topples in defeat,
an exposed vein
on a stretched-out throat
pulsing frantically
as if to drain
unwanted thoughts
into the body’s reservoir—
an inky stain
bluer than blushing,
truer than trusting,
the shadow zone
at the core of the flame—
too intense, too airless
to long remain
enveloped, as if
a moth lured to the light
were trapped, sewn
back in its cocoon,
the way the pitiless
mind goes on
shape-making—
gamma, lambda, chi—
a linked chain
of association no less
binding for being silken,
a fine-meshed net thrown
over the exhausted
animal, having given up
its vague, vain
efforts at escape,
and now struggling
merely to sustain
a show of resistance,
to extend a limb toward
extremity, to glean
one glimpse of light,
one gasp of air, then folding
inward, diving down
into the blue pool
at the body’s hollow center,
there to float, and drown.
WHITEACRE
the trees all planted in the same month after the same fire
each as thick around
as a man’s wrist
meticulously spaced grids cutting the sun
into panels into planks
and crossbeams of light
an incandescent architecture that is the home that was promised you
the promise of your new
purified body
your body rendered glasslike by fire now open to the light
slicing through you
through the glass
bones of your hands as you lift the light free of its verticals
carry it blazing
through your irradiated life
IV
The Stranger mused for a few seconds; then, speaking in a slightly sing-song voice, as though he repeated an old lesson, he asked, in two Latin hexameters, the following question:
“Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?”
That Hideous Strength (C. S. Lewis)
BLACKACRE
one day they showed me a dark moon ringed
with a bright nimbus on a swirling gray screen
they called it my last chance for neverending life
but the next day it was gone it had already
launched itself into the gray sky like an escape
capsule accidentally empty sent spiraling into the
unpeopled galaxies of my trackless gray body
BLACKACRE
Sonnet 19: “On His Blindness” (John Milton, c. 1655)
1. SPENT
In Sonnet 19, Milton makes the seemingly deliberate choice to avoid “the” and “a”—respectively, the most common and the sixth most common words in English usage. Instead of these articles—definite and indefinite—the poem stages a territorial dispute between possessives: the octave is “my” land, the sestet is “his” land, with the occasional “this” or “that” flagging no-man’s-land. We come to understand Milton’s mistake—the professed regret of the poem—as this act of claiming. It is only through his taking possession that the universal light is divided up, apportioned into “my light”—a finite commodity that by being subjected to ownership becomes capable of being “spent.”
“Spent”—a word like a flapping sack.
My mistake was similar. I came to consider my body—its tug-of-war of tautnesses and slacknesses—to be entirely my own, an appliance for generating various textures and temperatures of friction. Should I have known, then, that by this act of self-claiming, I was cutting myself off from the eternal, the infinite, that I had fashioned myself into a resource that was bounded and, therefore, exhaustible?
2. WIDE
The “wide” is always haunted by surprise. In a dark world, the “wide” is the sudden door that opens on unfurling blackness, the void pooling at the bottom of the unlit stairs. To be bounded is our usual condition; to be open is anomalous, even excessive.
A wide-eyed girl is extreme in her unliddedness, her bare membranes flinching at any contact, vulnerable to motes, to smuts, to dryness. A wide-hipped girl extends the splayed arches of her body to bridge the generational divides. A wide-legged girl unseals a portal between persons; she is disturbing to the extent that she is open to all comers, a trapdoor that must be shut for safety’s sake. A wide-eyed girl is often thought desirable; a wide-hipped girl is often thought eligible; a wide-legged girl is often thought deplorable. A wide-legged girl is rarely wide-eyed, though she may have started out that way.
We can understand why Milton, in the narrowing orbit of his blindness, would have considered wideness, unboundedness to be threatening. What’s less clear is why the wideness of the wide-legged girl is also considered threatening. Does the wideness of the wide-legged girl evoke a kind of blindness, a dark room where one might blunder into strangers, the way two men once met each other in me?
3. HIDE
“But why hide it in a hole?” asks the Master, returning from his long absence, smouldering bewilderment sparking into rage.
An unanswered question worries at the Parable of the Talents: why is the Master so terribly angry? It is not as if the servant had stolen the money, or spent it—his sin is one of omission, of overly risk-averse investing. A talent was a unit of weight in ancient Greece: in monetary terms, it was worth eighty pounds of silver, or 6,000 denarii—nearly twenty years wages for the average worker. But Milton uses the word in its more modern sense, dating from the fifteenth century: a natural ability or skill.
How did a word for a deadweight of metal come to mean something inborn, innate? Confusion between the inorganic and the natural trickles into the parable and the poem. The Master prides himself on being a man who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he did not scatter seed. Was the servant’s fault to confuse coins for seeds, did he think he was planting when he was merely burying, did he mistake for viable what had no chance of living, what had never been alive?
4. BENT
And what about the hole, which for so long had held treasure? Did it wonder why—despite all the moisture and nourishment it could muster—those cold, glinting seeds never sprouted? Did it understand that, if released into the wider world, the coins could have quickened, multiplied? That instead of an incubator, the hole had become an oubliette, a place where otherwise fruitful things were sent to languish, to become lodged, useless?
“Useless”—a word like a capped lead pipe, like the extra bone in my foot I will never pass down to my daughter.
A thing becomes useless if it is bent out of shape. To “get bent” is to be put to another kind of use, a use my therapist considered tantamount to rape. To bend is to be bound, to bow down without breaking, with perhaps just the head tilted at an angle so as to peer upward.
5. PRESENT
The Master has become the Maker. The servile body wholly “his,” splayed wide in a welcome-home, bound up in a beribboned bow.
But the reader will object. This is all wrong. First of all, in the sonnet, “bent” doesn’t mean to bow down as if in submission to an outside force, but instead denotes an innate or internalized tendency or inclination. Second, a “present” is not a gift, but a verb meaning to offer openly, full-faced, the sun beaming down on a clean page. Third, the body never comes into it at all.
“Therewith”—a safe word, a strongbox to be buried.
6. CHIDE
Is a “true account” a story or a sum? Is the Maker an audience or an audito
r?
The page scoured white by little grains of fear.
A story has an ending. A sum has a bottom line. There was no accounting for me because my allotment leaked out of me, month after month, I scrubbed the sheets as if effacing the marks of a crime.
Then one day the fear reversed itself. Like a photo negative but in higher contrast—its whites more glaring and its darks more glossy, as if a whisper-thin suspicion had come unzipped.
“Chide” is an enormous understatement. The servant isn’t merely scolded, he is cast into “the outer darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” If the “outer darkness” is deemed to be a punishment, then does that lustrous inner darkness count as a reward?
7. DENIED
It seems unfair, is Milton’s point. To be assigned a task, but not provided sufficient materials to complete it, is to be placed in a situation of contrived scarcity, like a lab rat or like the youngest sister in a fairy tale.
The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins—which prefaces the Parable of the Talents—centers on this scarcity. The virgins wait for the bridegroom, to greet him with lamps alight. Five virgins have brought extra oil flasks, but five virgins have let their lamps burn out and must go lampless into the night to look for oil. That much we are told, but questions hover around the shadowed margins of the story. Why isn’t the bridegroom with the bride? Why is he so delayed? Why is the bridegroom met in the middle of the night by a phalanx of lamp-bearing virgins, like a troupe of pom-pom girls or like a sacrificial rite?
The virginity of the virgins renders them piquant, memorable—much more so, one suspects, than if the parable had called them “maidservants” or even “bridesmaids.” Adorning gothic portals, evoking thresholds, entrances, they are a particular feature of French cathedrals.
The presumed desideratum of the story does not interest us much: the sated bridegroom at the midnight feast, the smug, unctuous faces of the wise virgins. Instead, the imagination pursues the foolish virgins rushing into the night, their desperation making them vulnerable, their vulnerability making them erotic, the fill-holes of their useless lamps dark and slick with oil. Is this how I was taught to sexualize insufficiency, the lack that set me wandering night after night, my body too early emptied out?