Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  We go walking in the dark, Connie was singing, sitting on her kitchen chair in the corner of the living room on the other side of the parkway, playing her guitar. We go walking out at night. And it’s not as lovers go, two by two, to and fro; but it’s one by one—one by one in the dark. We go walking out at night. As we wander through the grass we can hear each other pass, but we’re far apart.

  Cal at the edge of a cliff in California, looking out over the moonlit ocean, Margaret in a bed in Nice, kicking up her moonlit leg. The great green, the great green room. Cal at the edge of the cliff, spreading wide his arms, Margaret on the bed, kicking her leg high in the air like a cancan dancer. She wanted to show the doctor how good she was feeling postoperation and then, worse luck, she dislodged a clot and died from an embolism. But Connie—where was Connie? Night had fallen, the days had gotten short. Maybe this was the shortest day of the year. Her VW bug had very little horsepower but then again Connie hardly weighed anything. Tunnels took the heat from the exhaust into the interior of the car; it was very cold outside and Connie didn’t have a lot of meat on her bones. Looking at maps. Talking to herself. Driving her blue VW bug from the midwestern city where she had been living with her brother, Philip, and toward the coast, passing through town after town and then stopping to live in one of them. Buying groceries. Visiting the clinic to have her insides unraveled, trailing time like the gauze trains we made for ourselves as queens, as little girls.

  “If you become a tightrope walker and walk across the air,” said the bunny, “I will become a little boy and run into a house. I will give up all my magic, and become human, and grow old, and die, to be gone from you.” “If you become a little boy and run into a house,” said the mother bunny, “I will become your mother and catch you in my arms.”

  My daughter: born in darkness, pulled forth from darkness. I can’t see where she will end. Even to write this is terrifying.

  Ten Poems

  Robert Walser

  —Translated from German by Daniele Pantano

  IN THE MOONLIGHT

  Last night I thought

  the stars were singing,

  as I woke up

  and heard a soft sound.

  But it was a lyre drifting

  through the rooms,

  such an anxious sound

  in the cold, sharp night.

  I thought about failed

  efforts, prayers, and curses,

  and for a while I heard it singing,

  lay awake for quite a while.

  CIRCE

  How nice it must be to sit in a bark

  and go on your nightly excursion.

  The lake lies spread out like a silk coat

  and has gently beckoned me to come to it.

  The surface of the water glistens darkly bright,

  how solemn is heedlessness and slowness quick.

  The moon hangs down from above like a lamp in a room,

  life resembles a stage; with gestures as delicate as

  birch twigs, Circe appears center stage,

  she who brings to mind misfortune and happiness.

  CITY IN THE SNOW

  It snowed into the land of evening.

  As I am already on the move,

  I continue to walk through the streets

  and watch the glittering silver snow fall.

  Some handsomely walk in pairs

  and are perhaps already used to this beauty,

  goodness, they have sought and found each other,

  and one does not want to part with the other.

  Nevertheless, some are walking alone

  and are in such isolation

  often less alone than the others who found

  each other and are bound forever together

  and who would like to feel themselves unbound

  to casually walk through the city now and then,

  for snowing reminds us of the rose’s

  shedding itself of loose stinging leaves.

  DEEP WINTER

  In the windowpanes are buried

  those infinitely fond, frail

  flowers, like a giant tear

  the yellow moon hangs in a nebular garden.

  The world is a garden, in which

  all delights have now died,

  and sound and heaven are spoiled.

  The window flowers are the frozen mind.

  On the many white rooftops,

  on the fields, which are just as white,

  the moon weeps, even in rooms

  where people are mad or wise.

  EVENING SONG

  There are only a few people still walking around,

  now there is one left, and then they are all gone.

  Something like the weariness of nature

  wants to lie down on the houses and fields.

  It smiles so subtly from tree to tree,

  but you can barely recognize the smile.

  How miserable is the small breeze

  that still travels the evening world.

  I begin to feel hesitant and tired;

  I consider only the gravest of men,

  the moon, who grows more important,

  as soon as the sun breaks free from the earth.

  EVENING

  In the snow before me a path glimmers

  black-yellow and goes on beneath the trees.

  It is evening, and the air is heavy

  and damp with colors.

  The trees beneath which I walk

  have branches like children’s hands;

  they plead without end,

  ineffably kind, when I stand still.

  Distant gardens and hedges

  burn in a dark maze,

  and the glowing sky, rigid with fear, sees

  how the children’s hands are reaching.

  WHITE LAUNDRY

  The white laundry stirs quietly

  in the garden, in the gentle breeze,

  which blows whimsically from the sky.

  The sky is half still, half wild;

  it drifts halfway into the clouds,

  it peeks boldly halfway through the blue.

  The sun has already been forgotten

  and the world readies itself

  to set in a garden,

  the evening; white laundry is blowing

  in the evening and in the gentle breeze,

  in the evening wind. Does something

  inside me also stir like billowing laundry?

  I do not believe it, the calm night

  is already completely in charge here.

  A tiny breeze no longer stirs inside me.

  DREAMS

  Turbid dreams sped

  through my sleep, and

  thus spoiled my sleep.

  Now the shapes of night

  can no longer hold on,

  because morning has struck.

  How gloomy this morning,

  already the day’s worries

  are crowding out the day,

  which, above all else,

  will bring me calm,

  no matter what it will bring.

  THE SLEEPING ONE

  Shall I carefully pull back the curtains

  before your eyes, to lead you to something

  fanciful, which the forest accommodated?

  The fir trees stand with a grand allure,

  slender and pale with evening like folding doors,

  as if the forest were now a large hall

  and dreaming of the faded echo of bird sounds.

  Would it be worth it for you now

  to witness

  how I, without regard to their pleas,

  laid the girl down on the moss?

  There seems to be no path passing

  through the hedge to this beautiful image,

  which I was allowed

  to unfurl before your eyes.

  Only squirrels, rabbits, crows, and deer

  can be allowed to come visit her

  on tiptoe. />
  BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP

  As it has been granted yet again,

  as the world is in its blackest rest,

  I will do nothing else,

  except to joyfully open

  the longing veiled by day.

  Four Night Poems

  Martha Ronk

  INTERPRETATION

  means what obscurity always means

  for the ambiguity found therein

  places where no one could find you,

  geographically hidden from view

  and one’s amorphousness blessedly

  wrestling the ill-formed angel

  as two men arranged details in orange—

  geraniums, cosmos, the blue-with-light

  lunar moth flattened as if planted there

  from their door to mine nightly

  and under the wooden plank of a bed

  the meaning of how I’d found myself

  sitting it out in the impenetrable air

  through letter-sized panes of glass

  blackness welled up each time night was

  the gender of solitary, pages of foxing,

  the Rorschach press of a cloud of found metal

  fitting herself under the mattress, slapping her hard

  adolescent configurations mordantly tactile,

  one man deconstructed the dream

  since night had been his all along

  ILLUSIONS OF MOTIVE

  Illusions of motive as fog colors itself gray, white,

  bullnosed, then fragmented fingerclouds passing Trinidad’s rock

  we call this darkening beforehand, evening,

  the purposeful seemingly located in the moving of imperceptible air,

  the mélange of so-called

  motives for what seem motiveless shifts, desiccation relocating

  entire herds, fiery grass exploding, filaments of mind set adrift by

  chemical intrusions into synapse, obsessions over cryptocurrency,

  conspiracies, the everlasting dying of a species

  fog slides soundlessly onto mudflats a white glaze slipping across

  would-be water

  effortless seed wings in adjacent fields, underfoot & earthborn

  branches overhead splitting and moving darkly upward.

  THE BLUE HOUR

  so blue it cancels itself darkening into itself what night

  was it thrusting myself into it a stroke of charcoal

  thinking Tuesday’s ordinary as paper and went to

  where love was brick and its evocative tendencies

  whose wrist and its twisting its particular twisting

  how to make a mark I asked about how to do it

  the paper lies there I couldn’t hear them at that distance

  a book stood between night and how we talked of it

  his blue sleeves shortened into wrists night coming on

  in the brick building a hallway and maroon carpet

  could have been, then wasn’t a moon, a hall light disinclined

  you leap onto the paper it darkens with several marks

  an apartment you found there a love on the other side

  could I learn it like having it again on paper

  touching charcoal night blue pressed rags

  RECOGNIZING ONESELF

  The body is more an along-the-highway sort of thing

  each part struggling to compete with other sticks and weeds,

  as time catches hold—in the dream I’m bagging up leaves

  blown in by a mighty wind in every corner of the scaffolding,

  dragging/ sweeping/ sweating, yet the master shows

  only the back of a raincoat and refuses our efforts

  on his behalf, was it sifu now dead himself who said

  I could keep the quilt if I liked, old and dirty as it was,

  wrap yourself up in night he said, how often the dream is bagging

  up against a leaking present, endless sweeping leading only to

  useless effort in a structure near collapse and in need of paint

  as the apartment where I sanded the floors and painted them deck white

  as if and always as if, but these days I wouldn’t do it

  wouldn’t recognize myself any more than I already have.

  One-Eyed Jack

  Rick Moody

  There were three of us guys, Len, Dave, and me, and we all taught at the community college in town, and once a month on a Saturday evening, during summer break, we played Hearts. You know the card game. Wives accompanied sometimes, excepting that Len didn’t have a wife anymore, because she ran off with Mark’s wife, Mark being the guy who was once our fourth. (He went into landscaping and moved to Vermont.) Dave’s wife, Aileen, was very friendly with mine, whose name is Debby. Aileen and Debby often sat in the kitchen and drank cheap red or sat out on the deck, playing tapes on a boom box that still somehow performed the task. We men cloistered ourselves up in the attic for an hour and a half, around the card table, box fan in the gabled window, shooting the moon. We’d been playing for eleven years.

  We knew one another well, I’d like to think, as well as you can know people with whom you grew from idealistic young college professors to weary middle-aged parents. There was a certain kind of banter that was routine among us, some of it good-natured complaining about college students, some of it about naming conventions for asteroids, worst presidents of the United States of America, and everyone who played on a certain Coltrane session in 1965.

  I can remember a long conversation at one game, during which Dave successfully controlled the lead for all but one trick, in which we discussed at length the physical complaint known as Burning Mouth Syndrome. It bears mentioning not one of us had personal experience with Burning Mouth Syndrome, which is rare, but neither did we refuse to believe in Burning Mouth Syndrome—as though Burning Mouth Syndrome required belief in order to make irrefutable its symptomatic course.

  Knowing each other well was why the other guys were surprised on this night last July when there was a fourth chair at the card table. No one could play who hadn’t been through a rigorous vetting process, a process so rigorous, in fact, that we had entirely given up adding new players, perhaps because of the situation with Len’s wife.

  —Who’s the extra chair?

  Dave said,—Travis’s putting his leg up again.

  Len said,—But we agreed.

  Dave said,—We definitely agreed.

  The plantar fasciitis wouldn’t remit, probably because of the marathoning, but it seemed that putting my leg up, in a friendly card-game competition, left me open to charges of examining other people’s hands. Even though we didn’t really give a shit about the winner, didn’t keep score beyond a given Saturday, there were kinds of fair play that were the sign that civilization was taking place.

  The chair sat there for a while.

  The chips in the oversized ceramic bowl were the classic chips, because we had lengthily discussed the varieties of chip effectiveness, rejecting avocado oil and sour cream and onion as needless innovations. The salsa was medium spicy, and later on we intended to grill something conservative. Salmon, I think.

  —He’ll be here in a little bit.

  I pointed at the chair.

  There was no good way to describe him, there was no reliable bit of cultural commentary that would suggest what was to happen. It either would or it wouldn’t. Because I really liked these guys at the Hearts game, I had a hunch that we could easily share this next particular strange turn, and these guys, my good and true friends, would accept it without, for example, mounting a whisper campaign.

  In the interim, I must admit, Len again commanded an entire run of diamonds, top to bottom, excepting the two I had played in the first trick, and that sinking feeling set in, as if the tax authorities had just sent me a request for information. It was clear that Dave and I were about to be far behind. You know, there’s some kind of mise en abyme that comes with Hearts, even more so when Len
shoots the moon, because he does it with performative zeal, with a kind of running commentary about his mastery of this and all games. Highly ironized, of course, but funny and charming, especially because Len fails when trying to command the run of game on many an occasion. Anyway:—All you cisgendered heteronormative STEM guys, with your unexamined privilege, and your guarantees of appointments on all the standing committees, can’t even beat one associate professor from American Studies!

  Len and Dave were uproarious over this comment, and hitting the chips hard, and the beer, and how could we stop Len, and would history just become one long run of Len spieling while amassing the suit known as diamonds?

  And then the guy walked in, the guy for whom I put out the chair.

  It is safer to say, though I am suspicious of the terminology, that he substantiated, because there was no real physical sense of him walking through the doorway, shuffling through, really, because the door was not open, nor imperceptibly ajar. The floorboards were old as befitted the crumbling New England housing stock of our address, and there were dust bunnies gamboling, and these were unbestirred by his substantiating presence; his physical presence was nonphysical; and there was an insufflation by the assembled, and there he was beside the card table, over by that rusting metal bookshelf with the trade paperbacks on it, one hand hovering above the topmost. He just kind of was there.

  I could see the other guys arrest, and Len even reached by habit for his inhaler, ever at his side in his latter days of asthmatic symptoms. Dave said, Holy shit, under his breath, even though I know—because at one point our kids were in day care together—that he had internalized that contemporary day-care advice that suggests: never overreact. He’d picked Shirley up at pre-K, that one time, when she had sliced off a majority of one index finger, without a word.

  Shimmering would be a good word for it, the guy I was preliminarily calling Knuckles, because of the evident swelling of his fingers, sign of some postmortem arthritic inflammation. Knuckles did not substantiate in any complete way. On this day, for example, he didn’t seem to have a below-the-knee self at all, not fibula nor tibia, just a shimmering into nothingness where his trousers, which looked to be abundantly befouled gray chinos, just ceased to be. In certain spots, you could see through him. Right where his knee was, or would have been, I mean, I could see a run of Asimov paperbacks behind. He was wearing a houndstooth tweed blazer in tan, wide lapels, over some kind of light blue permanent-press dress shirt, which I presumed was short sleeved because you could see his wrists, or a suggestion of wrist, and he had on a skinny tie that didn’t go low enough on his paunchy middle, like he was pretending to be the slim man he once was. There was a folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. It bore a little crest of some sort. Let me also note in the spirit of completeness that he had on graduated sunglasses, and his hair, even in his apparitional immateriality, glistened with some pomade from the 1950s. The effect, overall, was of a compulsive gambler, fresh from some really bad bet at trackside, walking into your attic unannounced, when you had an elaborate security system.