Negative Space
Page 4
And the profiles of my grandparents?
They posed for twenty minutes
standing in front of a daguerreotype camera
until the smiles evaporated from their faces
leaving them exposed
and bitterly dignified.
John Coltrane, on the other hand, never stares at you.
It’s difficult to remember one of his gestures or looks.
He simply plays the saxophone.
Measures time with his feet. Vigilant.
His melancholy intervenes at the right moment,
like wrapping a nude woman in a jacket.
Van Gogh sketched portraits of people’s backs,
naming them “Orphan Man with Long Overcoat,”
“Orphan with Top Hat” …
Or did those backs sketch him?
It’s a question of speed
and depends on who was faster.
When my three-year-old daughter Lea
needed a passport photo,
I took her in my arms and we posed together,
as she was afraid of the camera.
The photographer cut out her face from mine,
snipping away the context.
She feels calm inside that false identity,
and has yet to discover the betrayal.
Joyful youth, their feet teetering from too much beer,
spill out of a club and disappear
into the wide métis cheekbones of midnight.
Anxious sleep-wasters,
they stumble through night’s buckram robe
like statues at an inauguration.
Meanwhile, statues of heroes and rulers in city squares
have won the game against time.
With the triumphant expression of Julius Caesar,
all of them say: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
But wasn’t he the same Caesar
who, with bulging eyes and a knife at his throat,
spoke his last: “You too, Brutus?”
INDEX
Days were never this long before.
Their whiteness a lactose too difficult to break down.
He dozes wherever he can. Gets upset only when lunch isn’t ready on time.
Speaks a little less each day and moves from one sentence to another
without argument, as if drifting between rooms
in a house without corridors.
Yet sometimes he asks questions like:
“What did God have in mind when he made man?”
A rhetorical question you don’t need to answer.
He falls asleep as fast as a book that drops from his hand.
It is said that the most ordinary among us is a written book
that exists in heaven, a book so huge
that human eyes cannot read it.
That’s where everything
is recorded—what we’ve done, said, thought, felt,
even what hasn’t happened yet. Who could imagine
that a human body—some square centimeters
that were once only a cell—
could contain so much space for history?
He understands other people less, including his wife,
the book he’s lived with cover to cover
written in two different languages
and placed on the shelf
according to the index.
We need a third language to communicate.
A language with idioms and innuendos we don’t recognize.
A camouflage
of colors to blend in with our surroundings
of tones to conceal weakness
of temperature to shield ourselves against those who hurt us
(some prey are exposed by their own warmth).
Now he is a closed book.
No time to add or revise anything.
All that remains is touch,
the touch between the leather covers,
the feeling he gets on elbows, knees, hair,
the laughter when his arms cross over her neck
at an outdoor cinema
as they watch the movie under the summer sky.
TRANSIT TERMINAL
No sky except the floor beneath your feet
scraped by the dyslexia of passengers
traveling for the first time.
Wheelchairs
aggressively cut through the terminal—
their cold comet tails
cloud up the display windows of duty-free shops.
And yet “Marc Jacobs,” “Louis Vuitton,” “Armani,”
“Chanel” are always someone else’s fantasy
(Think carefully before you step in!)
served under a Scandinavian neon sun
on a deceptive cloud of parquet.
Inside luxurious smoking rooms
Camel ads offer an adventure in the desert.
Characters chain-smoke
without exchanging glances—
the first act in a theater of the absurd.
Music. Oh, you can never tell where it’s coming from—
maybe from the fire sprinklers above
or from our own soul pockets.
The last call for late passengers disrupts the tune.
Nothing threatening in the announcer’s voice.
If you miss this flight, you can take the next one
sooner or later.
Leaving here is unavoidable.
And it’s karma that constantly forces me toward corners,
to sit on the floor and watch everything from afar
as if one of Archimedes’s disciples
who knows the secret to balance:
what you lose in weight, you gain in distance.
LIVE MUSIC
Nothing consoles you more before sleep
than this pub of cheap beer and live music,
the callous voice of the singer, the lyrics
thrown forcefully together inside rima pobre.
The beer, too. An argument in the corner
marks the only difference between the days of the week
and Friday night. And the phosphorescence of free, platonic sex.
What happens on board, stays on board.
At the edge of the table, wet receipts
with a circled digit at the end
are indulgence’s shortcut from purgatory to paradise
(not worth doubting any of this).
A sweet nothing of apathy and a mockery
latches onto the singer.
“Oh man, she started too high, won’t be able to reach the refrain!”
“You think so?”
“You wanna bet?”
When nobody really needs to hear the refrain.
They’re here precisely for the emptiness
the vast emptiness in a divey pub
like the white, fluffy inside of artisan bread
and its smooth crust on the outside.
Exiting this place is less than ceremonial.
Imagine sitting in a barber shop
and the barber—sympathetically, according to ritual—
gives you a slap on the neck after finishing your cut:
“Get up now, it’s someone else’s turn!”
RAMESSES’S LAST JOURNEY
Because of threatening floods
they broke the statue of Ramesses into blocks
and moved it to a safe and sequestered place
far from where it was created.
For many hours
his Egyptian nose
hung between sky and earth
drawing the attention of a derrick-man and a part-time porter.
His scepter hung there, too, the scepter of a man who once said,
“I carried away those whom my sword had spared
as numerous captives pinioned like birds before my horses.”
In a few days
all his broken parts will reunite
and he will be the Great Ramesses aga
in,
the star of morning and evening,
ambushed by the camera’s sanguine flashes
like knives in a sailors’ tavern.
But the intelligent eye
will not see the sculpture itself but the geometric
cuts between the blocks, the transportation scars,
asking, “How heavy was it?” and “How did they get it here?”
Like the folded lines of an overused map
where mountains were flattened a long time past
and roads and their conventional symbols have disappeared,
the names of cities coagulated.
Statue or statuette,
the last confession doesn’t belong to the pharaoh
but to those who shouldered the burden,
to the blind map circulating in pieces
that shows our only landscape
and the speed with which we traversed it.
from HOMO ANTARCTICUS
HOMO ANTARCTICUS
“The wild will keep calling and calling forever in your ears. You cannot escape the ‘little voices.’”
—Frank Wild
1.
Here I rest, in South Georgia.
A few feet of evolution away
lie the graves of whale hunters, pointing north.
A white fence shields them from elephant seals
and their apocalyptic screams that each day warn
of the end of the world, or maybe the beginning …
I survived five expeditions to the Pole.
The one before last, “Imperial Trans-Antarctica,” nearly killed me.
For two years I put up with the ice—no man can reap or sow these fields.
And, unlike farmers, I didn’t even need to ask God for rain,
because ice is sated
and more desolate than the Sahara.
I survived distance. Wrote one message after another
beginning with a capital letter and a “P.S.” at the end.
My own personal post office under my pillow
closed for two years already, on holiday.
I survived six-month-long polar days and nights;
to this day, I don’t know which one was worse.
My epitaph is simple. Carved in granite:
frank wild
18 April 1873
19 August 1939
“Shackleton’s
Right Hand Man”
For those cast away here
by a defect in the engine of the ship
or nostalgia of the womb.
2.
Ah, yes … in the beginning was the ship. The ship stuck in ice. Endurance.
Ships are women. They prefer soft seas.
In the best-case scenario, she’s called La Santa Maria
and she throws you, like Columbus, on some foreign shore.
But if you get too close to her …
The very day after
we washed her deck with warm water and soap,
warmed her arteries with gin,
stroked her lower back with our surrogate songs,
shaved our beards and exposed the illiterate lines on our faces,
she took off.
And from the shore,
we saw how she broke her ribs, sinking,
aft first, so fast we didn’t even have time to pray,
leaving behind her ash-tree fragrance
and faux pearls on the water.
“Such a woman!” someone laughed bitterly.
“She knows when to leave so as not to be forgotten.”
3.
A woman, naturally, has no business there.
Antarctica is a masculine continent—
male penguins keep the eggs warm,
the moon stands up on the street to urinate
after being kicked out of the tavern,
the cold like a cutthroat razor, dulled for three thousand years,
and the sled dogs, the huskies,
we kill with a single bullet
so they won’t starve to death. In this way,
we instill a little character into the new land
before the arrival of conquistadors, thieves,
assassins, missionaries, prostitutes,
the first invading army of every continent.
Antarctica is a man’s continent,
because only a man chooses to break into the darkness of the mind
by conquering the body,
as Amundsen and Scott did, their glory
reaching to the apex of ecstasy.
Zero degree of geographical latitude,
utter collapse.
4.
Hunger is overestimated. The stomach functions much like the brain:
when it has nothing to think about, it feeds off memories.
It can last three days just thinking of a single biscuit.
But those who have a better memory, meaning a much stronger acidity,
can go on for months
remembering a slice of prosciutto, two fried eggs,
sweetly folding their eyelids like napkins after a meal.
Then hallucinations begin. Banquets. Easter supper.
Feet move impatiently under the table;
the scent of rosemary wafts from a platter
and two clean serving hands with burns here and there.
That’s when you feel grief-stricken
and you attack the seals and penguins with your
alpine knives and shoes like a madman
in an empty amphitheater.
Or is this, too, a hallucination,
and in this case not ours
but Antarctica’s?
And when clarity finally returns,
both stomach and brain
notice only their own deep wrinkles.
5.
Blubber, blubber, seal’s blubber.
Blubber that keeps your spirits alive, rendering it for fuel, for light,
blubber to mask the body’s foul odor,
—a mixture of doubt, hope, and ammonia.
And if you have nothing better to do,
think of a cow’s thigh hanging at the butcher’s,
its delicate streak of fat
like a silk ribbon.
I survived even this sarcasm.
And every night, before bed,
we read recipes to each other
one of a few things we secretly rescued
from the ship before she sank,
as if these items were her lingerie.
What a show it was!
What pathos in pronouncing prosciutto, sugar, omelet!
What sensuality in milk, parsley, cinnamon!
We made these words up ourselves.
Nothing exists until its moment of absence.
But first, in order to warm up our mouths
like actors before going on stage,
we’d repeat mechanically, palates dry,
“Bless us, O Lord,
and this food we’ve received through your mercy.”
6.
It was the Romans who spoiled the word
studying rhetoric
before anatomy and mathematics:
Vir bonus dicendi peritus
“The good man skilled in speaking” (Marcus Porcius Cato)
But in Antarctica, words are measured differently: by calories!
With a simple greeting you lose five calories,
just as many to keep a fire burning for a full minute.
And a Ciceronian argument can consume a whole day’s nutrition;
think carefully before you open your mouth.
The word is overestimated.
Sometimes it’s enough to avert your eyes from your shoes
to imply “gangrene”;
and a vague exchange of glances between men
is enough to understand that the ice is cracking beneath your feet
and death is closer than your fingers.
7.
/> Stretched smooth from end to end—such is Antarctica. In fact,
even a baby’s skin looks withered by comparison.
No emotions. No regrets. No warnings.
Either fight or die.
My father was like this more or less. A teacher at a village school.
In classrooms that smelled of sheep-wool pullovers
drying on the body. And eyes that moved freely
in their hollows, like toes
inside an older sibling’s shoes.
Unlike the Romans,
my father preached about justice and honor,
his hands folded behind his back.
His shoulders seemed twice as wide
as his worn jacket.
I inherited his sharp, gray gaze,
and his soft voice.
Eyes that say “Go” and a voice that says “Stay.”
You never know which one to trust.
8.
And mother? Oh, she was simply Captain Cook’s niece,
—the great James Cook—
from morning to night
when she washed, swept, dug potatoes from the garden,
fixed her husband’s tie on Sundays
even from her bed, while in labor.
She never spoke of this. As it wasn’t necessary.
People speak of what they have, not what they are.
She was a tailor. Measured everyone’s perimeter with a glance;
erred only on the width of one’s neck, an unknown strength.
Her large scissors followed
the white chalk line on the cloth so precisely. “Snip!”
She said little. Her silence followed the white outlines
of another tailor,
over a fabric much older than she was.
But now that I think of it,
how did the poor woman respond to her friends asking,
“Where is your son?”
“He’s exploring the world.”
“And what does he bring back from there?”
“Himself, alive, I hope.”
“What’s the point of returning empty-handed after two years?”
Was she at least a little proud of me? Of her Frank?
Certainly not. She was Captain Cook’s niece.
The past always conquers.
9.
I was the first of thirteen children.
And as a rule, each of them
eyed one of my belongings.
One eyed my bed near the window
that overlooked the water where frogs lived
and asparagus grew on the shore.
Another eyed my green jacket bought with borrowed money,
poker cards, a fishing net,