Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  Nocturnals

  Conjunctions

  Edited by Bradford Morrow

  CONJUNCTIONS

  Bi-Annual Volumes of New Writing

  Edited by

  Bradford Morrow

  Contributing Editors

  Diane Ackerman

  Martine Bellen

  Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

  Mary Caponegro

  Brian Evenson

  Peter Gizzi

  Robert Kelly

  Ann Lauterbach

  Norman Manea

  Dinaw Mengestu

  Rick Moody

  Fred Moten

  Karen Russell

  Joanna Scott

  David Shields

  Peter Straub

  Quincy Troupe

  Published by Bard College

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  NOCTURNALS

  Edited by Bradford Morrow

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Frederic Tuten, The Bar at Twilight

  Cecily Parks, Nineteenth-Century Nights and Nocturnal Lights

  Brian Evenson, In Dreams

  Anne Waldman, Nocturne

  Sallie Tisdale, Twelve Hours

  Sarah Gridley, As Mica Means Crumb, and Galaxy, Milk

  James Morrow, Psi, Phi, Omega

  Carmen Maria Machado, Haunt

  Peter Gizzi, Ship of State

  Erika Howsare, Prey Ethics

  Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lux

  Steven Potter, The House at the End of the Night

  Cole Swensen, George Shiras: The Heart Is the Dark

  Ann Lauterbach, Nights in the Asyntactical World

  Han Ong, Dutch Kills

  Raven Leilani, The Blue Hour

  Kathryn Davis, Walking in the Dark

  Robert Walser, Ten Poems (translated from German by Daniele Pantano)

  Martha Ronk, Four Night Poems

  Rick Moody, One-Eyed Jack

  Bennett Sims, A Nightmare

  Rita Chang-Eppig, Saving the Monster of Kowloon

  Gillian Conoley, In the Next Night

  Paul Park, Anosognosia

  Joyce Carol Oates, Nightgrief

  G. C. Waldrep, Night Watch

  Elizabeth Robinson, Four Nights

  Danielle Dutton, Nocturne

  Sejal A. Shah, Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent

  Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Cosmos, A Nocturne

  James McCorkle, Two Poems

  Carole Maso, Solstice Night

  Daniel Torday, Neighbor

  Laynie Browne, Four Poems

  Bin Ramke, Nycticorax Nycticorax

  William Hicks, Them

  Heather Altfeld, A Scribe from the Double House of Life

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Night shrouds, but also illuminates. It is a time of meditation and celebration, but also of madness and grief. Nighttime is marked by loss and soul-searching, sweet dreams and grisly nightmares. Whether under a full moon or new, the night is a time of prayer and murder, of love, hate, and epiphany. A cascade of contradictories, night is sometimes restful, sometimes restive. Dread, loneliness, and dislocation are often intensified in the darkness of night, but the mind may also be set free during the hours in which Edgar Allan Poe’s “sable divinity” reigns. Whether awake or asleep, we spend half our lives during the night, lives that are often very different during the day.

  In this Nocturnals issue of Conjunctions, readers will encounter the fearful monster of Kowloon, which, like many such monsters, relies on the dauntless imaginations of children in order to continue to exist. In a debut story, we follow the fates of three men on a hallucinatory journey into the snowy pitch-dark night of the soul. Like werewolves and vampires, ghosts are classic—chimerical?—denizens of the night, and they too haunt these pages. Purgatory can be found here, along with alternative universes, an East Village bar that doubles as a portal to another life, and a personal chronicle of a visit to Burning Man in Black Rock Desert. The nightbird Nycticorax is invoked in this issue, as are musical nocturnes, night thoughts at solstice, wheeling galaxies, and the cosmos itself. The pioneering nocturnal photography of George Shiras is celebrated in these pages, even as the dichotomous world of night versus day in equatorial Uganda is observed by an ethnographic eye.

  In order to sustain her life, Scheherazade spun her stories for a thousand and one nights. In a spirit that recognizes how vital it is to voice our own stories, these fictions, poems, essays, and memoirs in Nocturnals address the myriad ways in which the night, from dusk to daybreak, is central to our experience of life.

  —Bradford Morrow

  April 2019

  New York City

  The Bar at Twilight

  Frederic Tuten

  —For Henry Threadgill

  He walked into the bar, twilight at his heels, and without thinking ordered a Scotch, neat. He surveyed the room and its vacant tables. He was glad there was no TV, no music, blasting or otherwise. No colored lights brightened the liquor shelves or gave hope to the dim mirror. Nothing was there wishing to appeal, to please, nothing of false cheer and hollow welcome. But he had left his home hoping to find a bar to lift up his spirits and this was not it.

  He considered making a quick exit and saying to the bartender, “Sorry, I forgot something at home.” Then he’d leave a dollar—maybe even two—on the counter to show his goodwill, and split before he got further dispirited by the surroundings. Ghostly photographs of horses covering a wall had already sunk his spirits.

  The bartender: she was neither tall nor short, neither blonde nor brunette, neither young nor old, neither composed nor disheveled, neither enticing nor repellent, neither extraordinary nor commonplace. He soon quit trying to place her.

  But before he could turn to leave, she said, “I have a single malt Scotch for you. Been mellowed in stout oak barrels for fifty years in the depths of a highland castle, lulled to sleep at bedtime by the bagpipe’s lullaby, and woken by a soft drumroll at dawn.”

  She poured him a shot.

  He took a sip, out of courtesy. Then another. He looked around the room, which now appeared like a misty glen with a salmon-crowded brook running through it. Finally, he said, “This is the most extraordinary Scotch I have ever had.”

  “Thought it would suit you. I spotted you for a man of distinction the moment you walked in.”

  “How so?”

  “The polite tilt of your homburg gave you away.” “It was the blind wind that engineered it.”

  “The wind’s a savvy artist,” she said, giving the bar a towel wipe for emphasis.

  A young centaur pushed through the door and spun once about the room.

  “Is this the bar for horses or have I come to the wrong place?”

  “Once was,” Marie said, “but they’ve gone.”

  “My grandmother spoke about this place many times before she died.”

  “Maybe there’s a picture of her on the wall,” Marie said, “if she was a regular.”

  “May I have another?” the man asked. “A double?”

  Marie half filled a water glass. Studying it, the man said, “That’s more like a quadruple.”

  “It was your tilted hat and that you said ‘may’ instead of ‘can,’ is how I was sure you had the distinguishment. The drink’s on the house. And I’m the house.”

  She crossed to the other end of the bar, where a ruddy-nosed man with a sailor’s watch cap and graying beard was resting his elbows on the counter. “Marie,” he said, “go out with me.”

  “That didn’t work the first time around.”

  “Didn’t we have fun?”

  “I liked the tugboat ride down to the Narrows. I liked your effort with the liverwurst with onion sandwiches and the cold beer
and the side of dill pickles you plucked with your fingers from the jar. I even somewhat like you, Harry, even though your beard smells like wet nails.”

  “So? Where did I go wrong?”

  “You’re too old for me.”

  “Not too old to love you with feeling. Profound feeling. Feeling that comes with having walked around the block a few hundred times in all weather and sailed many seas in storms and in swells the height of tall buildings and learned at the end what’s to be treasured in life, knowing who’s an authentic woman when you meet her and knowing how to appreciate her.”

  “Too old, dear Harry.”

  “What, Marie, has age to do with the heart’s disposition? With its fickle waywardness and adamant devotions, with its reckless longings and childishness?”

  “Anyway, Harry, I have enough in my life what with the bar and Red.”

  “Sure, Marie, but can’t I fill in when Red’s away?”

  Outside, in Tompkins Square Park, the wind tortured the trees, wrenching leaves from their branches and speeding them into the bar’s large plate-glass windows. The door rattled; dust and pigeon feathers whirled under its sill and introduced the street’s chill of impending night into the warm room.

  “Another storm,” Marie said.

  “My grandmother told me there were stalls for the horses in the back and that sometimes she’d sleep over if she had got too tipsy to trot home.”

  “They’re stockrooms now but they still smell of the horses’ sweat and the aroma of their beer swilling,” Marie said. “Sweat and piss, I mean, and their droppings, which harden into plates of straw that you step on for good luck. I miss the horses. I wish they were back.” “This is an odd place,” the man said, waving his hand as if delineating the territory. “Its lack of charm is its very charm.”

  “You’re a good example of that yourself, Mister,” Marie said.

  “The name’s Louie. Like ‘Meet me in St. Louis, Louie.’ Thank you for the compliment and for its brevity. In art and in life, less is more,” he said, his faced flushed, his glass raised in a toast, indefinite to whom addressed.

  “Not necessarily,” the centaur said. “Sometimes less is simply less or sometimes less is a form of emotional stinginess, a miserliness of spirit in the guise of an aesthetic ideal. Or it’s a striptease in reverse.”

  “It’s about seeking perfection, I suppose, about making things so lean that nothing may be added or subtracted,” Louie said. “But the removal of all unnecessary ornamentation from a person or an object or a text or a musical note must be done with restraint and with care not to obliterate the blood and tissue and guts of the thing.”

  “Must not remove the stink of life from life,” the centaur said. “We centaurs have known that from the beginning of time. Even though our heads and thoughts are high up to the dreamy stars, our rears, which do the shitting and pissing and fucking, keep us grounded from floating to the abstract heights. Thus, we centaurs know what’s what and what we are.”

  “I would say the same,” Louie said, addressing all around. “After all, I’m no delicate reed with a scented hankie stuck to his nose in the subway at rush hour. I praise the unkempt and the irrelevant, the loose ends and the unresolved, the untidy and imperfect, the ragged edges and pieces that don’t fit—the incomplete, even. I praise art that sweats life and life that sweats art.”

  “You sure let out a lot of line, Mister,” Harry said.

  “When you were young,” Marie said, addressing the world in the bar and the world beyond its door, “when you were semiformed things in grades just above kindergarten, did you paste dead leaves in your scrapbook? Did you one day open a trunk and find your longforgotten scrapbook and study the dried leaves you had embalmed there, and did you say to yourself, ‘Oh, look!’?”

  “My grandmother was in love with the man she met at this bar,” the centaur said. “He was the love of her very intense life.”

  “Was she called ‘Red’?” Marie asked, coming from behind the bar and taking a stool between the centaur and Louie.

  “Yes, that was her moniker,” the centaur answered. “She was in love until her last long breath.”

  “The love between a horse and a man is a difficult one, I imagine,” Louie said. “Both physical and emotional, I’m sure.”

  “It posed problems, but then what doesn’t?” the centaur noted, raising a thick eyebrow for effect.

  “The centaur makes sense, Marie. Nothing matters if you are in love,” Harry said, in the voice of his fourth rye and two beer chasers.

  “Less is more,” the centaur said, “in love too. The less of whatever clutters love, the less fat of the everyday that smothers the passion and purity of its flame, is what I mean. The physical self is nothing but a caretaker of that flame, and the flame burns in the souls of lovers, horse or man, young or old, even after death.”

  “Only the very rich can love so totally,” Marie said, “unencumbered, as they are, by what you call the fat grease of the everyday. Only the rich or those who can love purely, unrequitedly. As I love this bar, for example.”

  “Are you more horse or more man?” Louie asked the centaur.

  “In equal distribution,” the centaur said. “Neither predominates, but the blend of both has made me—made my kind—rather special. We can, for example, discern patterns in the stars.”

  “And your grandfather?” Marie asked. “Of what stuff was he made?”

  “The stuff of humans who were lonely and through love became less lonely.”

  “These are the consolations of love, Marie,” Harry said, in the bleary voice of his fifth rye. “Consolations both temporal and eternal.”

  “My grandfather was an ordinary man, an ordinary clerk in an ordinary office,” the centaur continued. “He lived alone across the park here on Tenth. He knew little of life except for his desk in the day and dinner at a local Polish restaurant after work—mushroom soup, black bread, and a vodka, neat—his daily fare. He was a sweet, solitary man and would have lived and died alone until he accidentally came here, to this very bar, and met my grandmother, Red, the then recently retired circus show horse.”

  “Marie, let’s tug downriver to the Narrows and this time we’ll make for the open sea and out into the vast itself, out and beyond until we blend with the sky.”

  “There’s too much brine in you for me, Harry. I’m a landlocked woman who likes the firm ground underfoot, who loves the elms before her eyes and a hawk or two plying the sky.”

  A tug’s long hoot from the East River caressed the bar, leaving all there in a mood of inexplicable longing.

  The centaur grew melancholy and said, “There are times when one must go home, or to its nearest facsimile. I think I’m going home.”

  Louie said, “There are moments too sad for anything but mild oblivion.”

  Harry said, “I wish I had a dog that didn’t bark or shit or shed or smell bad with a bad wet stink after a walk in the rain. I wish I had that kind of dog.”

  “There is nothing like the mournful call of a tug to summon up thoughts of love and death and what lies in the between,” Marie said, sinking a double shot of Scotch and pulling a face between pleasure and pain.

  The snow rushed the night sky and clotted the windows with an icy-silver sheen that spread over the bar and its inhabitants.

  “Look at us,” the centaur said. “We’re like ghosts with sheets.”

  “Marie, I’d be happy to be a ghost if I could be a ghost with you,” Harry said.

  “A ghost in love,” Louie said. “There’s something in that to suggest that death might be worth living for. By the way, Miss Marie, isn’t that a piano in the back?” he asked, nodding to the gloom at the end of the corridor. The drink had warmed him, puffed up his spirits.

  “A piano from the horse-bar days,” Marie said. “Never played since.”

  “Mind if I try it?”

  “Only if you don’t murder the air with sugary sonatas or bubbly show tunes.”

  Lou
ie dusted the keys with his handkerchief and gave his wrists a few twirls and cracked his fingers and gave them a few warming rubs before hitting the keys, which produced notes like milk gone sour. The centaur reared and whinnied: “Stop, please! It’s killing my will to live.”

  “You call that music?” Harry said. “Stop fooling around.”

  “Give him a chance,” Marie said. “He’s just warming up to it.”

  “May I continue then?” Louie asked.

  He knocked off an assortment of melodies by Chopin and, just as the air was enjoying the romantic mood of moonlight and champagne, he switched to some jazzy sketches that hinted at store-bought bourbon and hand-rolled cigarettes in a brothel on lower Maple Street in the New Orleans of the twenties.

  But soon Louie dived into his innermost core, producing music keyed to a tug’s mournful hoot and the swoosh of its wide wake and to the tones of an owl preaching in a cemetery at midnight and to the wild cries of the river gulls.

  The piano trembled, seeing the cold East River gazing up at the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, waiting for the next jumper; nights spent in a furnished room with a forty-watt bulb dangling from a crack in the ceiling; a dying cat shivering in a patch of moonlight on the windowsill; the soul’s darkness at the basement of the heart; the first shovelful of earth on the coffin of the woman you love.

  “He makes joy of the Futile and the Why-Go-On? He makes perfume from bouquets rotting at the roadside. He tells Death to fuck off. He shames Death’s jealousy of Life. He makes Death long for a day off. He makes Death yearn to make love. He raises Beauty from Death,” Marie said.

  “Yes, yes, Miss Marie, even his pauses between notes open to eternity and to the moment after,” the centaur noted, his head bowed.

  Louie had earlier, in the day’s shadow, left his apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park, having chosen, from all the others on his rack, a homburg. He left behind a sailor’s cap; a sombrero he bought in Chapingo, Mexico; a cowboy hat from Fort Worth, Texas; and a brand-new beret found on a bench in Barcelona. The snow would ruin the homburg, take years from its youth, fade it before its time, drain out its original ivory-black color, and coarsen its supple skin. But he wanted to stroll about with a jaunty hat, to appear jaunty, debonair, pleased with himself even, as if life and he were on good terms.