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Blackacre

Page 3

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?

 

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