A Newer Wilderness

by Roseanne Carrara

  as in that Bradbury story, in which a man,

  returning from a dinosaur hunt, exits the time-

  travel office to find his world altered,

  because at one point on his hunt, he stepped

  off of the path and a butterfly stuck to his shoe,

  almost dead, writhing. Reading this,

  we are thrilled to parse out our ascendancy

  over this fool of a man who paid to see and shoot

  a dying animal. Then there is that shock

  in our discovering that his slightest movement

  from the pathway really did astonish the elements,

  though not the landscape or the course of the weather,

  but certain habits, or habits that once seemed certain

  though they never really could have been: that man’s

  own reading, writing, spelling, his speaking with a tickle

  in his throat, his kind of attitude. It is true enough,

  but not entirely true, that we transform this earth,

  some by pummelling, and some as willing to save seed,

  and that our physical and intellectual habits are hardly

  immune to this taking from or drawing into

  the finest greenery. Still, our hold on decay is hardly

  in dominion. As if the sunlight flashing on the egg

  — 47 —

  of an unconscious spider won’t, alone, awake

  a new poison in all its perfusion, as if Nature

  or Nature’s God, with all of these fribbling atoms,

  does not recreate a newer wilderness in us

  and in our languages before we have roused

  ourselves to damn and hail our sway.

  — 48 —

  II

  KENOTAPHION

  Time’s the king of men,

  He’s both their parent, and he is their grave,

  And gives them what he will, not what they crave.

  – Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, II.iii

  i.

  arrived at ephesus

  Pericles III.ii

  That this tar-heavy coffin and this woman’s body,

  dead from its own labour, could be so heavy

  and yet still float. That the ocean would forfeit

  this guerdon – those gems still startling through

  her closed lids, the epitaph, a scroll

  fitted into her clenched fist, that fist

  poised to endure – rather than drowning her

  and winning her over for a constancy,

  for good. Bury this woman, dead in child-

  birth. We couldn’t keep her body and the boat

  in the storm. Also consider her husband’s

  loss, or the grief of her father, and be kind.

  If the ocean had only considered the misery

  of a Pericles, taking a wife in its vast body,

  in kind, she might have remained unconscious,

  dead for once and for certain. Or at least,

  in that airtight box, in and upon the water,

  she might have woken to remember the birth

  some hours previous, the infant body she yielded

  only to the air and to its own patience. And surely,

  if not with fondness then with very little spite,

  she should have died again, forever, and for good.

  But see how the ocean’s thrown her up, become

  an empty grave for all its spreading. Nothing

  — 51 —

  left now but to wake her, brush the fillet of gold

  already breaking from her unstrangled lashes.

  What a relief, if she immediately stood

  and delivered herself to the temple here.

  What a relief, if she were to up and propose

  herself certain and celibate for the local deity –

  for how can we suggest to this woman, belched up

  from an unwilling ocean, suddenly awake,

  that if she chooses to rest again, to return

  to sleep as a means of recovery or to express

  an immediate sense of mourning, she might very well die,

  for sure and forever, right here, and in front of us?

  — 52 —

  ii. herald

  Matthew 28:1-7

  Here’s some angel, pectoral muscles

  the size of human heads, lumbering up

  the side of the hill, making heavy of it.

  Here’s a body Blake would have died for,

  would have etched over and again to underscore

  our own very diminutive nature

  and all our wants, blue veins writhing.

  Here he is apologizing as he bows,

  making himself known to the gardeners

  and the guards who scatter or are levelled

  by the land, shaking. Here he is, struggling

  to bend low enough to loosen the stone

  that covers the tomb, then sitting on

  that stone, cross-legged, mindful of himself.

  You would think that with this kind

  of a body, it would be easier to battle

  some grotesque allegory of sin, any one

  of our moderns, monstrous, conspiratorial,

  than to lie in wait for two grieving

  women, widows of a sort. Some mechanic

  battle seems easy compared to this stopping

  for two Marys come looking only for what’s haggard

  and broken here. For two Marys who have imagined

  only the comfort and salve they might bring

  to one failed body, on this of all mornings,

  to be greeted by a mammoth! Save some

  — 53 —

  sympathy, then, for the mammoth who sits

  making the tomb look smaller, this bulk

  by his looks alone, come to tell these women

  there’s no body in the tomb, suggest to them

  even, that it’s risen, awake. For a moment, then,

  pity the brute who must shock the women,

  making them acknowledge their capacity

  for felicity in the presence of a grief not

  easily fathomed, though it continues to return.

  — 54 —

  iii. aubade

  Tobit 7-9

  Before you woke, I went to pray at the window

  almost as usual: Take me out of this earth,

  I still hear their reproaches. Except the smell

  of burnt fish roused me out of it. I stopped

  to watch my father in the field beside the house

  with his buddies from the town, filling in

  the grave they dug in the night. He was drunk.

  He kept climbing in and out of the hole

  waving a piece of parchment paper, our

  marriage license. Once, he lay flat in the grave.

  Then he rose into a sitting position, hallooing.

  The men roared and then took turns pushing

  him in and pulling him out again.

  They had loosed the goats, too. They milled

  around, disoriented, near the graves

  of the seven husbands I already buried.

  Once they’d mated, multiplied, but at some

  point, they’d all become of one age, too old

  to bear or to be eaten. The goats that morning

  seemed particularly hungry, starved, nipping

  at the heels of the men who stood on

  the furthest edges of my father’s posse.

  The goats looked as if they, too, had been up

  half of the night, minding the diggers

  as they handled their shovels, waiting

  for one of the women to shriek.

  Far away from the others, near a woodpile,

  your cousin Azarias, that hulk who looked

  — 55 —

  nothing like the rest of your family (has he ever

  resurfaced?) bent over to gather four fingers full<
br />
  of mud. He smeared his cheeks with the stuff.

  No one called to him. He was not recognized,

  nor did he want to be seen. Though later, during

  the wedding breakfast, he’d claim that overnight

  he destroyed something sinister, some demon

  foreigner – so you would not die like the others,

  so this marriage might take. I still don’t believe him.

  None of those other deaths resulted from some spirit’s

  conniving, nor is your living that kind of miracle.

  Downstairs, something broke, a plate, maybe,

  or a bottle of wine. I could hear the women circling,

  irritating each other with all of their attempts

  to keep silent, fumbling with their kitchen tools.

  How they must have counted on it being spoiled.

  Hadn’t they grown used to these breakfasts as wakes?

  But parts slid together. My father shrieked his last

  halloo, climbing out of the hole with his shovel.

  The goats ran like kids into the hills, bleating.

  I heard Azarias lumber into the kitchen, encouraging

  the women to clean him up, giving them some purpose.

  And your little dog leapt to my ankles, cowering,

  as if he, too, knew what was going to happen,

  that we would be spied, against the window, by a deep-

  breathing man collecting his first full wash of sun.

  — 56 —

  iv. sweet spices

  Mark 16:1-4

  Why couldn’t this have been more slapstick?

  Three hefty women carrying their equal weight

  in groceries and linens shoved up against

  their breasts or slung over their shoulders,

  three horse-strong women barking at each other

  about how heavy the door over there is, and who’s

  going to bother to open it once they get to the house.

  You’d see Mary, sunburnt, carting a tub of aloe

  on her left shoulder, fixing a braid with her free

  hand, saying, no, not me, as she shoo-shoos

  a pigeon from the sidewalk in front of her, then James’

  mother, the little Mary, almost upending herself

  as she bends over to swat at the first Mary’s pant-

  leg, saying, I’m not touching that door. She’s trying

  to remove a leaf that’s caught on the ankle, swatting

  at it with her box, a box half the size of her own body.

  The leaf’s still sticking as big Mary walks, and the spices

  in the little one’s box, cinnamon and cassia, keep slipping

  out at the sides, followed, sometimes, by larger,

  gummed-up pellets of myrrh. For a moment, it looks

  like little Mary’s shaking her spices out purposefully

  over the sidewalk, as you’d mill icing sugar over

  the top of a cake for decoration. Salome, swaggering,

  brings up the rear, thinking the spices smell sweeter

  in the outdoors. She remembers a story about a queen

  who had herself embalmed in cinnamon when she died.

  How she made the whole town cover their bodies and blanket

  their walks in layers of spice. How they kept it up for years

  — 57 —

  after her passing, a sign of honour. They say the demand for cinnamon opened up trade routes there. So Salome’s fagged

  out, too busy rooting her nose in her basket of linens,

  thinking tonight’s the night she might finally play sweet

  in bed, play dead to make him think she’s winsome.

  Wouldn’t it be better if the butt of this whole thing

  was that those women were able, even with all

  of their packages, to open that door, but that they

  were just too lazy? With all this, wouldn’t it be

  sweeter, then, for them to find the door already

  open when they got there, to watch them drop

  their heavy parcels, maybe knocking each other over,

  before they entered the house, rearmed with pots

  and rolling pins, ready to attack the robbers?

  — 58 —

  v.

  prayer to a heroine of romance for a better memory

  Pericles IV.i

  Having been nursed on stories of your birth seems

  to have increased your capacity to remember,

  keeps the knives recoiling from your white

  throat, the throat of a paragon, a throat that continues

  to release songbirds in its turn. Some other

  heroines go as far as to remember the formation

  of the stars or the kind and colour of the flowers

  that bloomed the morning of their birth. With these

  odd snatches of history, told to them by their nannies

  or nurses, the accomplished save themselves

  from spinsterhood, retrieving the men they’ve lost

  to clowns, female ambassadors, or demanding

  fathers. But you’re tops with this phenomenon.

  Why ask anyone else?

  Nothing escaped your nurse, and you can tell

  the wind was north when your mother died.

  The night of your birth, your father cried, good

  seamen, clung tight to the mast like a toddler

  to a mother’s skirts, clung to the mast with a king’s

  hands because that tempest had already been fed

  your mother’s body. You tell and even repeat

  to yourself how your father stood on a deck half-

  bursting with ocean. And it does not escape you to herald

  what the canvas climbers said or how they whistled

  down to match the water’s confusion.

  If you hadn’t

  been taken off the morning Leonine moved

  to trace an artery in your neck, your memory

  — 59 —

  would have saved you anyway. When he asked you

  to pray your last, you did not say you could not

  remember doing any harm but that you could recall –

  clearly, you’d never spoken a harsh word, never crushed

  a mouse. And this was true, this carefully netted

  register of your faultlessness – sweet enough

  to save you. Or if it was not, quite, your reminding

  Leonine he had a gentle heart would have kept him

  from harming you, even if the pirates had not seen

  you standing there, rapt, and taken you off.

  Good Marina, despite the fact that I have

  parents living, and close by, despite the fact

  that despite their living, I still do not know the story

  of my birth, not even the hour I was born – in my

  recounting all of this, in my coming to terms here

  with what is yours, grant me half as good a memory,

  so I might escape this dying, too, a while longer.

  — 60 —

  vi. old road

  Luke 24:1-12

  It was lumber, their treading,

  no one looking up or over

  at the sides, or if they looked,

  all glazed and passive stares.

  The women paced slow enough

  but were far too interested

  in their own conversation

  to witness much, dropping

  half of their supplies along

  the way. They never saw

  how their aloe and myrrh,

  fallen, served to plug up

  the wider crevices struck

  into the path. Nor could they

  mark it, running back

  with unbelieving looks,

  their eyes knocked open

  but only giving out, not taking

  in the scene. Not soon enough,

  a single man sp
ed by, almost

  at a guilty pace, making for

  the place where the women

  were frightened. Was it that

  he did not believe the story

  they came to tell with their

  shocked faces, or did he want

  to see that kind of absence

  for himself? In any case,

  consider it only another

  instance of the old denial.

  — 61 —

  It is an old complaint,

  but I will make it anyway.

  Had they looked up, or down,

  or to the sides at any moment,

  they would have known some-

  thing or someone had come up.

  Had they noted the ground here

  was thick in places, broken

  in others, that the palms bent

  so low you might consider

  climbing into one and being

  catapulted across the city,

  had they noted the wind

  blew against the normal,

  or that the sun, shaving off

  the ridge like that suggested

  more of an evening than day-

  break, they would have saved

  themselves too much amazement

  and merely been amazed, they

  would have saved themselves

  some heavy time and a little

  more perdition.

  — 62 —

  vii. eye of tobit

  Tobit 11:7-15

  In his basement, this genius of a kid

  has rigged up a Museum of the Apocrypha

  for Halloween. There’s Holofernes’ Head

  hanging on the wall, looking as if it’s

  only just been cut off. And there’s the Eye

  of Tobit, moulded in plastic and set

  in a coffin built to suit. Masterful,

  the things kids create, though they don’t know it.

  That’s what we say, but they’re always aware.

  Proud, the kid squirts paste on the eye he’s made

  (a freckle rimming the iris, just like

  his dad’s) to fake glaucoma. Then, magic.

  He waves his rubber fish above the eye

  and wipes off the gall so it can be seen again.

  — 63 —

  vii. in the garden

  John 20:14-17

  You would not believe it was his daughter

  either, if you sat with her as he sat through

  the mandatories and the electives, if you

  had watched her come out of the convent,

  (their play on l’hôpital or l’hôtel dieu)

  wrapped in linens, almost gone. You

  would say it was some other child,

  snatched, or kidnapped maybe for her looks,

  brought in to replace the daughter or to atone,

  milling in and out of the rose bushes there,

  commenting that the roses he’d planted

  at his daughter’s birth smelled like cinnamon