Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  On a quiet street in Berkeley, we packed and repacked the cars. The light was falling, orange and pink streaking the sky; we could hear the people across the street on their terrace or roof deck grilling, glasses clinking, laughter. They shouted to us, Burning Man? Yeah, we hollered back. Have a great burn! they said. They returned to their grilling and drinking. I half wished I was on a deck with my own friends, staying. Chris was riding with Leah, a woman he had met on a ride-share board. He had secured me a place with his friend John, who needed someone to share gas money. Chris told me Leah was going to leave on Saturday, before the Man burned, and I could get a ride back with her.

  Leah adjusted something on her bike with bike tools. She was in her early twenties and unfriendly. Before we climbed into our cars, I said, Chris said you’re leaving on Saturday and I can go back to Oakland with you. Leah said, I’m not leaving until Sunday, after the Man burns. I can’t remember now if Chris was in hearing distance of this conversation or if I approached him after and told him. This is where everything gets fuzzy, slow motion. The last light disappearing, night and stars emerging, a beneficent moon rising. Chris said nothing.

  It was the moment for me to pull out, but I had dropped two hundred on a ticket and another hundred on food and supplies. I had asked my uncle’s downstairs tenant for a ride to Berkeley. I had borrowed a friend’s sleeping bag (he had made a special trip to drop it off at my uncle’s house) and a headlamp too. He said, Don’t do drugs. I said, I won’t! and shot him an eye roll. I’m not interested in that.

  I had bought a case of water and a sack of oranges at Costco and packages of prepared food from Trader Joe’s. I had bought the last package of baby wipes from a Walgreens in Oakland. My friend suggested this. He had been to Burning Man many times, but was taking a break. It seemed too late to back out, to call up my uncle and go home loaded with sacks of oranges, apples, water, and a sleeping bag I no longer needed. I decided to be hopeful and maneuvered myself inside the blue Honda. Where else is there to go but forward?

  *

  I found a way out. At the end, when I was in our far-off camp, a light-blue Prius crept toward us. Aviva, whom I met at a camp devoted to dance, helped me haul my two backpacks and sleeping bag over to the car. I left food, my bike, a bottle of wine, and garbage for my camp mates to contend with. I was leaving Burning Man before the Man burned. (I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I said.)

  I didn’t know if I should go with Nate, camping next to us, who had also decided he was going to leave before the Man burned. He created video games, seemed nice, we had even attended the same state university. But I had the sense he was looking for something and I didn’t want to drive many miles and stay in a hotel room halfway to Oakland to find out what it was he was searching for.

  I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I murmur, even while we pull away from the camp. I am in the car and Aviva is driving. I decided to go with her. I don’t know if it’s the right decision. And then I am asleep for a long time, those drugs, no sleep, relief. Twice, on our way to the Bay Area, there were no bathrooms and we pulled over. I unfolded myself from the front seat, dashed to the side of the road, untied my drawstring pants, and squatted. Weeks later, Aviva said she didn’t realize how out of character that was for me.

  *

  These days, when I am far from the heat and confusion and sweat and exile of Burning Man, when I am wondering when I will find my next job, a partner, a place to live, I remember driving down my street on my way to the store or to the gym and pulling over. It was WDKX, the local urban station. There was a preacher preaching (it was Sunday morning) and he said, once and again and again: Your wilderness is not permanent. Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent. There were capitals in his words. All capitals: YOUR WILDERNESS IS NOT PERMANENT.

  I was so scared in the desert, without friends, unable to reach anyone, a phone drained of power, a spirit without charge, and so many things in those days seemed hopeless: finding my way around Black Rock City, having enough water in my water bottle, enough sunblock on my face, enough food, energy bars; a bandanna against the dust storm, a program guide, being present enough that I could find my way home. I stopped worrying about the fact that I didn’t have employment, that I had failed. I regret not taking more pictures, but the desert demanded I stay present.

  Chris says, when I talk to him a few months later, You manifested that situation when you worried about things. You made things difficult for yourself by worrying. I knew you would be able to get out of there OK. I thought he might apologize for the misinformation. There was no apology. I had nothing but good intentions, he said. I knew you wanted to go, he said, and I did what I could do to make it happen. That was true; he did. I almost didn’t see the beauty at Burning Man—the pageantry, the terrifying spectacle of biking in a wind and dust storm, the enormous desert night sky, the exhilaration, because I was so worried.

  At any particular moment, your wilderness, wild as it is, is not permanent. We danced and kissed, and rode our bikes around the desert, tripping. Chris and me, apparently (he tells me; I have only a vague memory). I ventured beyond what I had seen or done before, not knowing enough to pay the fee to camp with a larger, organized camp with meal plan options. I wanted to see what brought people back to Burning Man again and again. I wanted to go beyond what I knew. I wanted to break some rules.

  I was angry at Chris for promising me a way home that did not exist, and I was angrier at myself for getting in the car at all when I could have eaten the price of the ticket and stayed in Berkeley. I wanted to be like the free spirits and pot dealers I’ve known; I wanted to just go. All my life, I have been biking with brakes on, filled with fear.

  We want to be able to move. We want to be able to do what we want to do. I wanted to go to Burning Man and needed to get to Big Sur after, which I had planned my whole year around. I wanted to see the spectacle. Maybe the dust and sparkle would rub off on me, maybe I would strengthen my nerve, maybe I would learn to have some balance, to ride out my anxiety; maybe I would coast.

  Instead, I forgot to take my antidepressants, drank scotch, took acid, and had no way home.

  *

  In the only pictures I have from my four days at Burning Man, I am wearing a black T-shirt with the words Savage Beauty written in white letters. The shirt references the title of the biography of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; it was part of a fund-raiser for a writers’ colony in upstate New York. No one who saw me in the desert would have known that. I had not brought anything with me that looked particularly savage. I knew I was no savage beauty. I was just brown. It started to feel like a bad joke. I left the T-shirt in California.

  Now I wish I had taken it. I wanted to be both savage and beautiful; what woman doesn’t? I felt neither in the desert; the desert was both. I was both too, but who knows that kind of thing at the time? I was more accustomed to writers sitting around in idyllic retreats than radical self-reliance. I want to say I found a fierceness in myself; did I? I found some sort of desperate nerve to bike miles in the blazing sun to find a way to leave. I talked myself out of panicking when by myself in the night and darkness.

  It’s some months later, but I am still thinking about what being there meant. Was it OK to ask for such a big favor—eight hours out of her way from someone I had just met? I did it. Was it OK to break into someone’s car? I did that too. I no longer had a job. I was no longer living in New York. I had moved back to my sad upstate city, I had left the epicenter. I wanted to burn. I wanted to be free.

  *

  Many years ago, I spent a week in Paris. I thought I would visit the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. I went to the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay, but not the Louvre. I did not see the Mona Lisa; I did not climb the Eiffel Tower either. I went to the desert for Burning Man and did not see the Man burn—the culmination, catharsis, the highlight, the point. It was me burning, my old self, I had been after all along. I wanted to shake it loose, my old ways, rules, teaching
. I was a phoenix, I wanted to burn. I was a circle of stars, silver in the night sky. It was me: I was the spectacle in the desert I had traveled so far to see.

  Cosmos, A Nocturne

  Rachel Blau DuPlessis

  1.

  I began this far away

  down-where

  before dawn

  in a night saturated

  with pitiless derangements—

  part dreamed, part head-blood,

  part galloping times,

  capital letter concepts

  arranged in categories

  then scrambled, intercut

  spilling counterpart ides.

  ILLJUSTNEST

  ECO-EATH

  DISUST

  NOXXUS

  ASTERAGE

  ONWRECK.

  Every abstract noun

  an inchoate block

  that, struck like a rock,

  gushed

  a water choke,

  ready at any odd cell-small

  no-sleep-image-anger

  to cover the world

  with mud.

  Not dreams, not nightmares:

  It’s sludge of political failure.

  Systemic ruptures, looms of dooms on earth.

  Yet the quiet gate stayed open,

  the slide into sleep had seemed assured.

  It was no help being

  rebar-rigid with rage,

  no particular sense to pit

  extreme heat

  caged children

  bottled water litter’s micro bits

  against sleep.

  Yet these things burst,

  flooded over, further embittering

  other unstoppable tides.

  2.

  It seems I have no skin,

  am hungry ghost to haunt the stormed-on streets,

  wading in elements so engulfing and poisonous

  I am about to die again.

  3.

  The merger of two black holes forms

  one binary black hole—is this really a thing?

  did I say it right?

  The person lying flat in awe and fear is

  not quite sure

  what this entails

  except black holes are rare,

  and somewhere there.

  Implosive antimatter stuff?

  The inside out of cosmos outside in?

  A heavy dot with which to rebegin?

  Galactic collision between long-zone

  bifold double swooshing light-year slough?

  Although the person seems secure

  that she is / I am here

  implacable as astrophysics,

  though not so impressive

  nor as long-term,

  withal the double question

  does this count?

  Does it matter being here?

  4.

  Can this cosmos be trusted

  with a list of words,

  daily simples,

  nothing abstract

  like WILL or JUSTICE, can it

  be trusted to accept that

  nouns (like “home” or “night”)

  are invested with our feelings?

  Say: the touch

  of that particular door,

  its key to jiggle in a certain way,

  then a little kick; you’re home.

  The light flickers

  the leaves get shadowy luminous

  endarkened colors shine.

  The moon is up.

  The door is shut.

  The night is full.

  The world is clear.

  Can the cosmos bear

  my pitcher in the shape of a rooster—

  flowery, charming, and (it turned out)

  impractical; can it dare

  the word “mother”

  without evoking

  something mendable;

  can it share our bread.

  Does the cosmos

  care to understand

  house, bread, pitcher, night, door?

  5.

  Yet ferocious mismanagement ensues

  (a series of if-then clauses follows

  involving plastics

  and electronic waste, generating

  profit, disordering the drinkable, fracking

  plasma fields of cosmic blood)

  from which a flood

  of moral suffering rises above

  last night’s crest.

  What is to be done?

  What could or should we do?

  To live in our world, is what I mean.

  And is it relief or infinite sadness to think

  that this will be destroyed,

  whether we (insomniac mites)

  do it, or approve, or not?

  Will be absorbed and be transformed

  in the long-term normal course of things

  no matter whether we wake tomorrow

  or stay awake till light, to say

  “pitcher, door, house, bread, night.”

  6.

  Glints of cosmic greenglass pierce our rocks

  (blackglass! azure arrivals! jewels of song!)

  all from drifts of dust.

  It’s cosmic dust.

  These matter-swirling beauties generate

  our astonished empathy, considering

  that all this

  is innumerable grasps and gasps of cells

  and minerals hooked into each other’s processes

  where chancy atoms frisk and frost

  setting night and day in motion

  where we can see their turns.

  Does it matter that we can?

  We see them now.

  This place, these multiples, this time

  barely countable, barely accountable

  with the numbers we possess—

  it’s an unfixed archive,

  neither all omnivorous

  nor all complete

  but present as colors, mixed

  and metamorphic,

  just like that.

  Crystals of small light fall from a compromised sky.

  And once you know what you must face,

  you try to wake.

  Two Poems

  James McCorkle

  TWILIGHT BIRDS

  They are there last, the cardinals, before veering into folds of walnut

  or maple foliage at summer’s fullness, my century, in need

  of so much attentiveness, and so young, that like my daughters will long

  outlast me—before nightfall, hummingbirds veer toward the tree line.

  I strain to see them against the black-green foliage that mimics bird shape,

  what is there or not, to be part of the air that swallows them in their flight.

  Thin boned, a metabolism for the long haul, for what’s needed, known

  or not, the familiar contours of lake and river, air streams, and lights

  to where one must be before the weather closes, foxglove or coneflowers,

  milkweed and thistle gone, each hinges on the next and last: which sutra is it

  that tells us we are never alone, each silence held between beats, wing dip then lift—

  whose bodies do they belong to when assigned name or meaning, when taken

  as a thing abstract, the there and there, spotted at evening—

  so many shadows crossing lungs, heart, tissue, an evening fired with the vireo

  singing, let go let go, or so we think, cardinals hooded

  and the drone of a hummingbird midair suspending:

  on the other side of the world a missile lifts off, another test, so many countdowns

  corals bleach white, bone brittle, brittle trees, a branch snaps

  a body plunges, each event part of an equation

  of continuous adding, new reactants, here—

  a flock of cardinals fly up in unison from necessity, the wind

  and the not-wind, light and loss and the coming round again

  every evening, c
aught in an undertow of light, each a citizen of the yard

  and air, like us I want to say, but know the truck trailer parked in an empty lot

  nineteen hours south of here is packed and locked—

  passing them in the rest-stops how many are carrying, or have, migrants north—

  when a cooling system breaks down, there’s room only to stand

  and when the door opens, you fly out, a new territory, at twilight

  the asphalt lot and the familiar gray-blue

  lights of a Walmart wash out the sky, and if this is

  the right city someone will meet you, gulls, circle overhead even

  though it is evening and the ocean a continent away, pounding coral-shredded shores,

  lines of combers about to break, we push to shore then fall back, losing all form,

  pulled deep then return as another almost the same, again, petrels and shearwaters

  pull between sea and air, ecstatic in their urgencies—

  there is no other way to say it, but to have been out there, shoreline and nightfall

  converging, shore lights, aerials blink red and white, to guide you back from open water—

  far inland, yards mottle with low light from streetlamps or a car

  beam’s lazy swing around a corner, migrations have already begun, flocks speckle

  the night sky, black constellations settling on fields, then lifting off, gleaning

  for the next length until they arrive wherever they do and put on new bodies—

  if we could too—

  begin to pack around the bones, for returns

  past the same lakes and river bends, locked to this

  song that carries them, until it runs out, we ask ourselves

  when was the last one, so ubiquitous once attention was not required, so we thought

  that too of love, or just living, nothing to be done, the loveliness of each scene, a cardinal,

  all red, a male, almost rude in its livingness, evanescent, in that moment who he was, all and only.