by Monica Youn
8. PREVENT
“Prevent”—a word like a white sheet folded back to cover the mouth.
A white egg bursts from the ovary and falls away, leaving a star-shaped scar. Corpus albicans, the whitening body. Such starbursts, at first, are scattered constellations, frost embroidering a dark field. But at what point does this white lacework shift over from intricacy to impossibility, opacity, obstacle—the ice disc clogging the round pond, the grid of proteins baffling the eye?
“Prevent”—a word that slams shut, a portcullis (Latin: cataracta).
Letter to Leonard Philaras, September 28, 1654: “the dimness which I experience night and day, seems to incline more to white than to black….”
9. NEED
Has Patience been looming in the background all along, silent, so as not to intrude upon a blind man’s consciousness? Patience, whose garment is “white and close-fitting so that it is not blown about or disturbed by the wind.”
At the turn of the sonnet, Patience pries open its sculpted lips, its stiff tongue like a weaver’s shuttle drawing woolly strands through the warp and weft of Milton’s blindness, a white monologue that admits neither interruption nor rejoinder.
Milton’s little murmur stitched back into his mouth.
Woven tight enough to repel need—a liquid beading on the surface, the blood the needles drew from me week after week, hundreds of stoppered vials consigned to the biohazard bin, en route to the incinerator.
“Need,” from the High German, for danger.
“Murmur,” from the Sanskrit, a crackling fire.
10. BEST
The best beam in contentment, ranging themselves in rows. Upright as test tubes but forswearing undue pride in such uprightness, mustering shoulder-to-shoulder with the fellow-elect. The best arrayed in regimental ranks, in refrigerated racks, white hymn of the unneeded, white hum of the unneeding.
“Best,” originally superlative of bot (Old English: remedy, reparation).
The best adopt a pious pose, mouths held taut in tongueless Os. Sotto voce chorus of that soft, subjunctive song: if you were complete … if you were replete …
Superlative. The most remediated. The most repaired.
11. STATE
To be scooped out, emptied of need and rinsed clean of its greasy smears, pristine as a petri dish on a stainless lab table. Enucleated, the white of the egg awaiting an unknown yolk.
“Yolk” from geolu (Old English: yellow). Not to be confused with “yoke” from geocian (Old English: to be joined together). A yoke is an implement, meant to be used, to fill a need. But where there is no field to be plowed, no wagon to be pulled, why demand a yoke that is useless, needless?
One day the Romans sent for Cincinnatus to lead the republic against the invading Aequian army. He laid down his plow in the field and went to war. When the Aequians surrendered, Cincinnatus spared their lives but decreed that they must “pass under the yoke.” The Romans fashioned a yoke from three spears, two fixed in the ground, and one tied across the tops of the two verticals. Since the horizontal spear was only a few feet off the ground, the Aequians were made to crouch down like animals in order to complete the surrender. This is thought to be the origin of the word “subjugate,” to be brought under the yoke. To bear a yoke is to be bowed down, oxbowed, cowed.
One day they laid me down on a gurney, my feet strapped in stirrups, my legs bent and splayed like the horns of a white bull.
12. SPEED
But why would Milton, of all people, use the word “Kingly” as a compliment? Roundheaded Milton, who wrote tract after tract in defense of regicide, who would later be detained for opposing the Restoration?
At this point, our suspicions are confirmed: Milton has disappeared entirely from the poem. We haven’t heard from him since the turn of the sonnet. We’ve been lulled by the cadenced voice of Patience, its dusty tongue self-lubricating, its pallid breath clouding the room, precipitating frangible chains of hydrocarbons, their branchings barbed like fluffs of eiderdown. Through the faint reticulations, we discern no dark stoop-shouldered figure, but only white-robed forms, upright as if hung from hooks, their faces unyielding as lanterns, shuttered as if once aflame.
13. REST
Rest—a word like a gauze bandage, a ropy weave of collagen knitting its way across a wound. Outspread as if fingered, gelid gestures suggesting solace: to stanch, to shield, to seal, to shut off.
Rest—the rind of the best, a contoured pod that cradles the shape of what it doesn’t hold.
Rest—those who are left when thousands have sped away, the bereft, who litter the land, with husks for hands, vacant-eyed, vacant faces raised like basins under the contrail-scarred sky.
14. WAIT
To stand and wait is a task far weightier than simple waiting. It is to permit the distractible body neither ease nor action, nor food nor drink nor any such reprieve; it is to pit the body in enmity against its own heaviness.
To abide in readiness as in a winter orchard, the lacerated land bandaged in snow. To exist inert as if limbless, skin seamless as if reknit over what had been pruned away, knotted root-stock fit for no other service: no branch, no leaf, no fruit. To persist as a stripped stick persists in a white field, bark peeled back from one exposed split, uptilted as if eager for the grafted slip.
Mercy sugars the starving soil with nitrogen, potassium, phosphate. Mercy captures rain in silver beads and stitches them through the threadbare weave of cloud. Mercy wields a scalpel cutting a cleft in the lopped-off stump, mercy forces home the rootless wand, mercy seals the join with tar and tape.
To foster the raw scion as if it were a son; to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own.
NOTES
The term “Blackacre” is a legal fiction first used by the great English legal scholar Sir Edward Coke in a 1628 treatise. In Anglo-American legal parlance, “Blackacre” is a standard placeholder term used to denote a fictional plot of land, often a bequest, much as the term “John Doe” is used to indicate a fictional or anonymous individual. For example, in a legal hypothetical, one might say that John Doe wishes to bequeath his property Blackacre to his sister Jane Doe. Similarly, one could designate other hypothetical properties Whiteacre, Greenacre, Brownacre, etc. Every law student in the Anglo-American system encounters the term “Blackacre” in his or her core course on property law.
The poems in section I are loosely based on François Villon’s 1462 poem “Ballade des pendus” (“Ballad of the Hanged Men”).
“Greenacre (Annuit cœptis)”: The Latin motto appears upon the reverse side of the one dollar bill as part of the Great Seal of the United States. In context, it can be translated as: “He favors our undertakings.” It may derive from Virgil’s appeal to Augustus Caesar in Book I, line 40 of the Georgics, which reads “Da facilem cursum, atque audacibus annue cœptis” (Give me an easy course, and favor my bold undertakings).
“Blueacre (Lamentation)” is formally indebted to Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “Artless.”
“Blueacre (The Passenger)” is a list of the sounds and actions in the penultimate shot of Antonioni’s film, a seven-minute-long, single-take tracking shot in which the camera adopts the perspective of David Locke (Jack Nicholson), and is positioned to look out of his hotel room window.
“Blackacre (Sonnet 19: “On His Blindness”)”: The description of Patience quoted in section 9 is from Tertullian’s On Patience (trans. Rudolph Arbesmann). The anecdote of Cincinnatus in section 11 is adapted from Livy’s The History of Rome (trans. George Baker).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the editors of the following magazines, journals and websites where versions of some of these poems first appeared: The Academy of American Poets: Poem-A-Day, The Awl, The Bear, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Boston Review, Folder, The Harlequin, Horsethief, jubilat, Lana Turner, The New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Rattapallax, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
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“March of the Hanged Men” was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2015 (Sherman Alexie, ed., Scribner, 2015), The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review (Lorin Stein, ed., Penguin Books, 2015) and, together with “Portrait of a Hanged Man (Piero: St. Julian)” in Feathers from the Angel’s Wing: Poems Inspired by the Paintings of Piero della Francesca (Dana Prescott, ed., Persea Books, 2016). “Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket” was republished in Devouring the Green: Fear of a Human Planet (ed. Sam Witt, Jaded Ibis Press, 2015). “Portrait of a Hanged Woman” appeared in the Plume Anthology of Poetry 3 (Daniel Lawless ed., Mad Hat Press, 2015).
Thanks to the institutions where many of these poems were written: Poets House (where I was a poet-in-residence for fall 2015), the Civitella Ranieri Foundation (and especially to Dana Prescott, whose art history talks inspired several of these poems), the MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the Corporation of Yaddo. Thanks to Josephine Guerrero, Liesl Schillinger, and Mark Wunderlich, for offering sanctuaries where I could write. Thanks to Steve Burt, Drew Daniel, Katy Lederer, Meghan O’Rourke, and Jason Zuzga for their help with the manuscript. Thanks to Jeff Shotts, Katie Dublinski, Fiona McCrae, and all the folks at Graywolf for putting their faith in this book and their efforts behind it. And, finally, thanks to Whitney and Toby Armstrong, for understanding.
MONICA YOUN is the author of two previous collections, Barter and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. A former lawyer, she lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.
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