and registers the work unit a fetus
and agrees to come home to it
*
intricate marks on the shell
taken for writing and whole kingdoms
of possibility referred to as music
or a language of tones reduces sound
to the merely legible creases in the palm
are signs to them who
rent out their sight to prophecy
*
could hardly be a more lucid account
total river as interplay of movement
and its inconceivable opposite
will not be described here
without provoking a disturbance
from a time-elapsed version of the same problem
captured in words
*
in eye contact with a state-run probe
-t’s why we chained the Doge to his pet Luther
and lit out for West Clench
across the night barrens
mules build their fires
but on the Morning of the Reciprocator
a shade refuses to be a shade
*
what appears
is an interiorized space mastering its effect
on an absentee perceiver
has enthroned those of us here at the entrance
waiting our whole lives to get in
we masters of all
we did not survey
*
and for these reasons He Smithed me out
with His womb transplants and nerve harps
and I was lost all over the place
juggling again with no hands
all the old pauses in His story
were a series of interlocking bleeds
were a shiv coda
*
and for this reason He black boxed the field of lambs
with His pressure holes and beheadings
and I was sub-jacked by His purist dynamic
like a particulate in a heat exchange
hold Him at False Church why don’t you
sure / wrap Him in a layer of math
in that throne grease of yours
*
He’ll just flush the heroic mode
with a method of heroic sleep
so as to elasticize the modulus of the aggressor
running all wounds through the proper channels
coordinating field adjustments with Langley
the asset is en route
His tongue is never out of your ear
*
another bone toss another racket another alone
another dire circumstance another head cage
another source of power another ink blossom
another crank buyout another valley in the distance
another dark aggregate another alien threat another map
another torrent another proverb another run-in
another somebody else another some other thing
*
beneath the multisyllable words meaning
they became bony animals
and the guts in question lying on a plate of zinc
to which Mengele attached the conducting wire
are forces which shall give rise to enormous carved heads
memorials to the mystery of ant peoples
who tear up their floors to preserve their shoes
*
powerless / making an improbable passage
across a wilderness of voter IDs
home to “Florida” and certain syncopated slogans
where as soon as the germ vector
differs from standard frictions
in that it’s a color
stuffing flailing things in ships
*
during those hotly disturbed few hours
that are my history of lust
shaking free its paralysis
in submission to the fathers of paralysis
yet with a thick wall of oil behind them
from which His iconic face shall surface
“I” is the NRA
*
whose nerve god transmits His message
along a rebus of product placements
in His film of my life
whose thirst ran away from His quench
and this made the water
and the moment free of its history
and the life of the world to come
Big Burnt
Joyce Carol Oates
From the start the plan had been to include a woman. Not the woman but a woman.
Yet it hadn’t been clear if the woman would be a witness or whether the woman would be involved in a more crucial role.
“Don’t panic.”
Her eyes glanced upward, in alarm. Somehow, without her awareness, the sky had darkened overhead. The temperature was rapidly dropping and the wind was rising.
At the wheel of the small rented outboard boat the man pushed the lever that controlled its speed and the boat leapt forward, slapping against waves in a quasi-perpendicular way that was torture to the woman though she was determined not to show it.
“We’re not in trouble. We’ll make it. Just hang on.”
The man spoke almost gaily. Quickly the woman smiled to assure him—Of course!
They were only a few minutes out onto the wide wind-buffeted lake when lightning flashed overhead in repeated spasms like strobe lights and there followed a deafening noise like shaken foil, many times magnified.
The lake was the color of lead. The first raindrops were flung against their faces like buckshot.
The woman, shivering, was sitting so close beside the man she could easily have lifted her hand to touch his wrist, which was covered in coarse, dark hairs; she might have touched his shoulder in a gesture of (wifely) solicitude. If the situation were not so desperate she might have—playfully, provocatively—pressed her hand lightly against the nape of the man’s neck.
He liked her to touch him, sometimes. Though he rarely touched her in such casual ways. His sidelong glance at the woman would be startled as if she’d touched him intimately.
(But is not all touch intimate?—the woman reasoned. For her, touch was the most intimate speech.)
For the past two and a half days the woman had been calculating how to make the man love her. The man had been calculating how, when the interlude at Lake George was over, and he’d returned alone to his home in Cambridge, he would blow out his brains.
Earlier that day, when they’d taken the boat to Big Burnt Island, several miles from the marina at Bolton’s Landing, the lake had been calm, even tranquil—glassy. Vast lake and vast sky had reflected each other in an eerie and surpassing beauty that made the woman’s heart contract with happiness.
“What a beautiful place you’ve brought me to, Mikael!—thank you.”
The woman spoke warmly like a heedless child. In an instant she was the ingenue Nina of The Seagull. She heard her voice just too perceptibly loud, rather raw, overeager. Yet the man who did not smile easily smiled then with pleasure. Yes, this was what he liked to hear from a woman’s mouth. For indeed the vast lake surrounded by pine trees was beautiful, and his.
Now, a few hours later, the glassy surface of the water had vanished as if it had never been. All was agitated, churning. The wind made everything confused, for it seemed to come from several directions simultaneously. The sky that had been a clear, pellucid blue that morning was bruised and opaque.
“Christ! Hang on.”
“What?—oh.”
The man was white lipped with fury. On their left, out of nowhere, a large motorboat bore down upon them like a demented beast. In normal daylight this twent
y-foot boat would have been dazzling white like their rented boat but the light was no longer normal but dimmed, shadowy. In normal weather, boaters on Lake George were courteous and respectful of others but with the approaching storm, no. In the wake of the larger boat that crossed their path their boat shuddered as if rebuked. Thump-thump-thump, the small boat slapped against waves sidelong, slantwise.
Don’t panic. He will hate you if you panic. You are not going to drown.
She had an old terror of collision, chaos. A childhood terror of dark water covering her mouth, a panicked swallowing of filthy water. The sensation of water up her nose, recalled from swimming as a girl in a school pool amid a flailing of arms and legs of other girls, thrashing, splashing, sinking, gasping for air, and yet there came water up her nose and into her head, which felt as if it were about to explode.
The woman gripped the seat beneath her. Tightly with both hands. Crazed waves in the wake of the rushing boat were making her head pitch forward, and then back; forward, and back. She was being shaken like a rag doll. Her neck ached alarmingly—whiplash?
Frothy water was beginning to wash into the boat, onto the woman’s feet, wetting her legs, her hair, and her face.
Deftly, or perhaps it was desperately, the man turned the wheel, that the boat might roll with the waves. Always he was shifting the speed lever—forward, back. And again forward, and back. The boat jerked, bucked crazily. But no sooner was one danger past than another boat, not so large as the first, but large enough to stir waves like punitive slaps against the smaller boat, crossed their path from the right, at a fast clip.
Just. Don’t. Panic.
She’d resisted the impulse to press her hands against her eyes, in a childish gesture of not seeing.
Surely they would not be capsized on the lake? Surely they would not drown?
She didn’t think so. Not possible. Well—not probable.
This was Lake George, New York, in late August. This was not a remote region of the Adirondacks. Or a third-world country vulnerable to typhoons or tsunamis where thousands of people died in the equivalent of a key click. There had to be rescue boats in a severe storm—yes? The equivalent of the US Coast Guard?
The woman was determined to smile, that the man would see how she was not panicked. The woman recalled her children, when they’d been young. They too had tried not to show fear, sorrow, grief when these emotions had been perfectly justified. They had tried not to cry brokenheartedly when their daddy departed with a (vague, guilty, unconvincing) promise to return. The woman who was their mother had loved them fiercely, seeing this: stoicism in such young children! Surely this was a kind of child abuse.
On the island, the woman had seen flashes of heat lightning in the sky, in the distance. The man had taken no notice; most of the sky had been clear at this time. But the woman had noticed other boats leaving the island and had asked, “Will there be a storm? Should we leave now?” and the man had merely laughed at her.
“Don’t panic. We have plenty of time.”
Once they were in the boat, however, he’d seemed surprised by the quick-gathering thunderclouds. The rapidly increasing wind, the drop in temperature, and the first raindrops chill as hail striking the bow of the boat, the windshield, their faces. He’d asked her to retrieve their nylon rain jackets from the back of the boat, and the bulky bright-orange life vests he’d disdained earlier in the day.
Being taken by surprise was upsetting to the man, the woman could see. She had not ever known any man who’d liked surprises unless the surprises were of his own doing.
Now came rain pelting like machine-gun fire pocking the water’s surface. Amid the churning waves visibility was poor. There were drifting mists. The woman peered anxiously ahead—she had no way of telling if the boat was making progress.
Beside her the man was steering the boat with the fiercest concentration. His face was tense with strain. His jaws were clenched. He was enjoying this frantic race across the lake—wasn’t he? In his mostly sedentary life in which he gave orders to others, subordinates, and was not accustomed to being challenged or questioned, let alone actively opposed, this lake crossing to the marina at Bolton’s Landing had to be an adventure, the woman thought. Several times he’d admonished her not to panic; she had to surmise that it was panic the man most feared, in himself as in others.
He’d told her when they’d first arrived at Lake George that he knew the lake like the back of my hand. This was not an arrogant boast but rather a childlike boast and so the woman had smilingly questioned whether a person did indeed know the back of his own hand, and could recognize a picture of his hand among the hands of others.
But the man hadn’t heard her (quite reasonable, she’d thought) query. Or if he’d heard, he disdained schoolgirl paradoxes.
The woman had examined the back of her own hand. Her hands. She was shocked to see—what, exactly?—had her hands, already in her early forties, begun to age, to betray fine, faint lines, odd little discolorations, freckles? Or was she imagining this? But there was no doubt, she couldn’t have identified her hands pictured among the hands of other women her own age.
Sometimes, glimpsing by chance her reflection in a shop window or a reflecting surface, the woman thought with a quizzical smile—But who is that? She looks familiar.
The man had no time for such caprices. His mind was not a mind to “wander” but was rather a problem-solving mind, or rather brain, sharp and fine-tuned and galvanized by challenge. When he ran, he ran—for a specifically allotted amount of time. When he walked, he walked—swiftly, with a minimum of curiosity. Driving a vehicle, he drove swiftly and unerringly though consumed in thought, thinking. In any public neutral space through which he was merely passing he had no time to waste merely seeing.
As he’d claimed to know the vast lake like the back of my hand—its inlets, its shoreline, its myriad large and small islands, the mountains in the near distance (in particular, Black Mountain)—so too he knew the little fifteen-foot outboard he’d rented that morning at the marina in Bolton’s Landing for he’d once owned a near-identical model, trim and compact and dazzling white with a canopy and a 65-horsepower motor, purchased in the bygone days of a marriage now disintegrated like wet tissue.
Did the woman dare ask the man about this marriage? She did not.
The man had come to a point in his emotional life at which he had no need to articulate My marriage but only to feel the edginess and dread of one who has come too close to a precipice, without needing to give his fear a name.
Intuitively the woman understood. The woman was adept at reading the secret lives of others, which are presented to us in code; she could sense the man’s fear of something not to be named, and would make herself indispensable in combating it.
That morning the man had deftly steered the small boat between color-coded buoys on the route to Big Burnt. He’d had no trouble avoiding the trajectories of other boats. To his admiring companion he’d pointed out landmarks on shore, and mountain peaks in the distance. But now in heavy rain he was having difficulty steering a course to take him to the inlet that contained the marina—though (of course) as he drew nearer, he would begin to recognize crucial landmarks.
Unless, as in a nightmare, he’d forgotten these landmarks. Or the landmarks had ceased to exist.
When the rain had first begun, they’d put on light nylon rain jackets, with hoods. But now, as rain and wind increased, the man conceded that they might put on life preservers also.
When the woman had difficulty adjusting the bulky orange vest that was much too large for her, he’d tied it, in a lull in the storm, to see that it was properly secured.
The gesture had been curiously tender, protective. The woman was touched, for the man did not always behave toward her in a way that signaled affection, or concern; often, the man seemed scarcely aware of her. She wondered if when he’d secured the ties of the
life preserver the man was thinking of his children when they’d been young, as she often thought of her children, not as they were at the present time but as they’d been years ago, requiring their mother for the simplest tasks.
Impulsively she thanked her companion with a quick kiss on the mouth. He laughed as if surprised, and a flush came onto his rain-wetted face, which had a slightly coarse, just slightly pitted skin as if it had been abraded with some rough substance. “Mikael, thank you! I feel like”—the woman hesitated, not quite knowing if this was the right thing to say—“one of my own children. Years ago.”
To this feckless remark the man did not respond. She had noted how, frequently, it was his way to smile stiffly and in silence when another’s remarks baffled or annoyed him.
I can love enough for two. You will see!
The storm lull had ended. The boat was bucking and heaving and the man had to grab the steering wheel quickly.
It was at that moment that the woman happened to glance behind them, to see to her horror that water was accumulating in the back of the boat: backpacks, towels, articles of clothing, bottles were awash in water; the back was alarmingly lower than the front. But when she nudged the man to look he brushed her hand away irritably and told her there was no danger, not yet for Christ’s sake, and not to panic.
“Are you sure? Mikael—”
“I’ve told you. Don’t panic.”
If the small boat were to capsize, or to sink—if it were swamped, and they were thrown into the turbulent lake—they would be kept from drowning by the life vests. Still, the woman was frightened.
She recalled a canoeing accident at a girls’ summer camp in the Catskills years ago when she’d been eleven years old and away from home for the first time in her life; inexperienced girls had been allowed to canoe, and one of the girls in her cabin had drowned—the canoe she’d taken out onto a lake with another girl had overturned; she’d fallen into roiling water screaming and within seconds disappeared from view as if pulled down by an undertow.
Lisbeth had been in another canoe, staring in horror. No one seemed to know what to do—no one was a good enough swimmer, or mature enough to attempt a rescue. By the time an adult came running out onto the dock it was too late.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 16