The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far

by Quintan Ana Wikswo

  My throat holds the taste of war and liquor.

  A stone settles into my uterus with the lowering sun of afternoon.

  It will turn a young green inside, form albumen, form a yolk of mold and gold muscle.

  Soon as dark falls, the sailing man will come, coax it from my pelvis, then raise anchor, and away.

  HOLDFAST CROWBITER

  Like the others, her legs are heron stalks. This is another way of staying unmarried besides war: she is poor, and she is not fat. When she crosses the dunes, she leaves holes instead of footprints. Standing hip-deep in the Baltic, her thin limbs don’t disturb the waves. But she is young and her teeth are strong, and the crows die in her mouth with a flap of black feather.

  Our world a punctured lung that contracts and expands without ease. What is close comes near, then billows away far from reach. So much is evacuated, then all is spasm, and gashes, and wet tissue.

  Where there is pain, there is a gasp.

  Our rib cage a cleaved accordion, the organ no longer used for lovemaking. The air we expel is stale with fear.

  Please don’t pick up all those rocks.

  Pray to be turned into a blanket, a hat, a pair of socks: anything that comforts.

  Pray for what now gives way, that it some day hold.

  Pray that the dunes will stay around the roots.

  Prayers for bones that bend instead of break are prayers for our bodies to be soaked in vinegar, pickled, unable to expire.

  Pray for good winds. Pray for calm seas. For our immortality.

  As often as possible, pray for something that does not exist.

  Give promises that predict a new kind of orifice, something that opens and closes in a part of the body that is currently undiscovered, through which something good emerges.

  A body mollusk—as though there are pearls waiting inside us. As though our poverty of spirit is only passing.

  Please don’t take away all those rocks.

  Like the men who sailed off the edges of this sea and fell into the void, there are areas within us that contain a precipice.

  Start collecting sticks and cloth. Learn how to wrap them for a shroud or sailcloth.

  We are using them for ballast, for the time when the undiscovered has at last come into view.

  Consider these Curonian woods a pincushion, if possible. A soil pricked with pines that climb straight up. Everything poised to hold together. The sands only half bound upon the earth, impermanently affixed.

  When the winter comes, we stitch ourselves to the dunes with pine needles.

  The trees have nearly no branches, yet still the wind whistles through their wooden teeth. A seducer’s song, meant for the winter sun.

  What an armisticed romance: how can the sun come down, when everything here is sharp enough to kill?

  The Baltic sun is distant, but wisely, because it is wary of what comes with a descent.

  She has gone fishing again, and in this tide she struggles, thin legs wrapped up in that thick, wet pelt of bladder wrack. Whole belts of it broken loose: the sloughed-off spongy muck of a uterus at new moon. The vesicle cysts close by, for buoyancy, for surfacing.

  What a tangle, what a mess of trumpets and vines and the kind of crying that accompanies a split of sinew and tissue: saline.

  Death, birth, what of it? The insides have come out. The disgust is in transition, both the coming and the going.

  There is one tame crow that sleeps in the attic eaves. She came and took it, and fed it meal soaked with liquor until it fell asleep, compliant.

  The crows now sacrifice themselves to the women. It is a way of saying thank you when there are no other gifts to give. Because the beets ran out, and then the beans.

  Her bag—a pouch—some sort of textile tension that suspends a burden, the crow. Later, on the plate, they will place this burden into themselves, suspend it in their gut.

  Today the rain, an inverted sea, a mess to get through it. Cold, painful—despair in love with gravity.

  Up there on the hill is an old woman. She is a human horseshoe, pried off the battle-weary hoof and lost, rusting. An osteoporotic woman oxidizing within the saline mist. She stands on the heights of this dark mound and watches for ships that do not come.

  Her every finger an apparatus cocked for curing—tumors, sausages, curses.

  The old woman stands at the deep square trenches dug along the coastal forest ridge. These fortifications seem the graves of some geometric god. They are filled with mysteries for killing.

  If such weapons pits house a furied god, who made this land his altar?

  Underneath the flap of skin—let’s call it a tear—where inside something’s flickering. A rip in the epidermis: embroider the membrane. Decorate the opening like an about-to-be bride. Make it a grandmother stitch of doilies and faded daisies. Beauty woven through disaster. Pull each thread of it tight and nick it with the teeth. Just a snip of the lips so it’s white and wet.

  The mouth is a pocket of wind and wanting, and also of words. It smells of a mother licking its young. One tongue or two, accommodating. Just a flip of muscle, a flap of skin there we call a cheek, the sag that goes taut with shrieking.

  She is so hungry, she uses the side of a fish for a mirror. She isn’t divining the topology of her features, or longing to confine the sweetness in her fleeting greed: one silver fish and laid against it a pair of late potatoes and a cut of bread—in its shining sides, the tubers become four, the bread a loaf.

  Pike. Herring. Beans.

  How it feels in winter, eating only what is white.

  When the end is near, gather close to the old woman. Become small as sand, and cling within her wrinkles. Later, some will say, Oh, they have built a hut of sea-washed wood along the dunes. It guards against the sand attacks. It is a house made for old women.

  Forget this. When the end is near, gather close to the old woman, and be gathered into her arms. Be wrapped by her legs like the loved is wrapped by lover, like tree by vine. When the end comes, it is bone, not wood, that will protect us.

  We have so little to work with here. We live in houses where woman flesh erodes from bone. Climb inside a woman, and wait for her bones to build a house. Her arms and legs the pylons.

  Look, we have built a hut of sea-washed woman along the dunes. It is a house made of old woman.

  In the summers, the green snakes once slept with us in curls, fresh as ferns. They were as much among us then as men whose hands were for creation. The crows slept safely in our eaves.

  There were moments of still, once, where the tide pulsed within its bounds of vein or dune. The linden tree, the birch, and the rue grow roots to embrace the buried.

  There is another way of staying unmarried.

  The girl has not returned from fishing.

  The bees weave a thatch of wax, and with them it sticks, collects. Whereas with us, all is precarious: we leave holes, not footprints. A fletch of salt-soaked crow bone in the sand and silt.

  MY NEBULAE, MY ANTILLES

  Let’s say she lies all day on a beach in the Antilles, and I embroider her until she becomes my buttonhole: a silken stitch with needle and thread of seaweed. I slip through her skin of sand and cashmere, as though a pearl fastened tight against the rise of her flesh.

  This letter from the Antilles tells me of progress regarding her strategic plan: to wrap a series of single square concrete blocks in colorful stripes of spun sugar. To artificially inflate the price of artisanal fishhooks, and profit by controlling the market for radial netting, handspun by a sisterhood of leprotic Haitian nuns.

  Her tactics remain vague. This discussion incongruous, superfluous.

  What of our more esoteric conversation?

  Why now this intrusion?

  I wrote back to the Antilles and told her to cease clarifying her schemes for artistry and insurrection:

  Why now this inclusion? What of our sartorial distractions? Please—tell me nothing of what you did today, of what foods you ate, or of
your fragile frustrations.

  Let us go diving in a different sea.

  Let us stay down so long we come up with barnacles, with gills.

  I once overheard one meat-packer whispering to another on an eastbound train:

  When I was a small child, I was very silent. I was known for my silence. It was not known that I kept a diary. In its earliest life, it was a simple count of the day’s activities. Tally up the scabs on my kneecaps. The sixteen colors that live within a beet. As the days passed, I learned that paper listens. And later, as I became more courageous, and my life took on a more uncertain meaning, I began to talk. Secrets of the sort spies are trained not to divulge from within the calibrated agonies of torture. Exquisite. You might think a young child would not have secrets of those means, that capacity to heal and to destroy. But I urge you, reconsider. There are intimacies some are inclined to pursue against the wishes of a silent child.

  It became clear my house was unsafe for the keeping of this diary. We lived in a remote area many miles beyond the nearest town. When I could escape the range of civilization, my companions were foxes and falcons, tigers and weevils. They read only the language of the senses. They lacked thumbs. Safe, I placed my diaries within a series of large glass jars and buried them. Each week, another jar.

  We were far from the cultivated fields . . .

  Although the train car was quiet and my ears unusually sensitive, I averted my attention for some time.

  Not from delicacy, but because I believe in the ethics of eavesdropping.

  One false choice, and the luminosity of another person goes dim.

  The letter—the next consecutive letter, highly anticipated—remains delayed. Weeks pass.

  New magazines arrive from my agent in Riga. I read them.

  Latvia is only a distraction. The way home is a hole at the center.

  I dislike the wind in Riga, and the sound it makes against the buttresses, whose angularity and rigidity are merely concealed by the distracting romance of cleverly carved vines and furbelows.

  Ah, Riga, all your sands have long since turned to stone.

  It was winter when I fled to the Antilles. This was many years ago. I remember I was exhausted. Three months I planned to stay—no more, no less. Solace.

  I rented a room in a house that proved unsettling. There were reasons they rented to foreigners. Even the local children knew why birds would not land on the tower balustrades. Why the floorboards had been painted, and why the cracks so very carefully filled in. Why the aloe grew thickly along lines of nonexistent pathways, and why the lizards refused to cross into those furrows.

  Because of this, and through the desire to change the habitual patterns of my fundamental inclinations, I spent my days and nights on the beach, or under some wide-legged leaf.

  The language barriers proved significant and insurmountable. The islanders had never heard of my country—my every attempt to gain legitimacy failed. My willingness to show them my passport only underscored their suspicion.

  Despite their conviction, I had nothing to reveal: many meetings began with speaking and ended in the extended silence of stalemate.

  So becalmed, there was little to do but learn to evade these predicaments altogether. I ceased all social activity. I ceased moving about the island.

  With thin and inconsequential new data, my brain began to relieve itself of a lifetime of congestion.

  In isolation, memory after memory unfurled themselves for mere instants—their dendritic fronds arrayed like firecrackers against my darkened sky.

  And I, a slack-mouthed bystander, gaping wide-eyed from below.

  In dread that these memories would rapidly reconstipate themselves within my mind, I decanted them onto paper, just as the meat-packer had suggested. But unlike the meat-packer’s urge for burial, I wished to push them from myself—to set them into movement, to hurl them outward.

  I began posting several of these as letters to myself.

  Each day at the post, a familiar charade: the scrambling quest for communion, the ego’s thirst for false impressions. A performance pantomimed for the clerk.

  These must be on their way at once

  They are already terribly delayed

  Someone is waiting for me back home

  I never had sufficient coins in my pocket for full postage. This invoked ridicule, or pity, or censure. Someone always helped with condescension, as though making some oblique religious argument regarding my insolvency.

  Refugee, drifter, panhandler

  As the weeks passed, the claw I stretched across the government trestle was not mine; as I wrote through the winter, the skin on my hand gradually dried and cracked—a result of the climate, and the length of time spent writing near the microscopic spray from the surf.

  Even the fingernails were iodined, archaic.

  I probably posted four or five letters each day.

  I endured the many long flights that brought me home, and my skin again softened and smoothed out, but it was as though my travels to the equator had altered the passage of time.

  As though some spine had risen inside me along which time nestled, like a dune.

  When the letters began to arrive, I had been home for nearly six months.

  I found I had no memory of writing them.

  I barely recognized this woman, their writer.

  Despite all claims of dry, hers is a damp heart, and pounding.

  As time passed, I remembered her less and less, yet knew her more and more.

  Is she who I was, or who I have yet to become?

  What harbor harbors her?

  The equatorial sky above her is so unlike my sky of roof. Concrete, I-beam, tar, shingle, chimney, aerial, contrail.

  The letter arrives. The delay: I have misspelled my own name.

  How easy it is to lose myself through administrative error, or through the foibles of sloppy typography.

  The lunar curl of half claw, shaping an ill-lettered alphabet.

  I move through my world half-phantomed. As if to perhaps avoid myself, in all locations.

  Today’s communication relies on the preposterous.

  She writes:

  I am reading a book about the native crustaceans of the Antilles.

  I do not recognize the characters as letters, and thus when I read, I fall asleep.

  In this way, I have learned nothing of the crustaceans of the Antilles.

  Yet when I am asleep, I dream: I am a crab nebula.

  In this way, I have learned everything of the crustaceans of the sky.

  Her distance from me in time and space remains a question due to uncertainties in every method used to ascertain her existence. Clearly, however, her presence is expanding outward. Within days of her creation, she could only reach to the end of her pencil.

  Then to the government postal office, and no farther.

  Whereas now, her words find me on the other side of the earth.

  She writes that in the Antilles, there are two methods for reading fortunes:

  First, one must set a basket of crabs on one’s bare stomach and deduce the future in the bleeding scratches.

  She spends afternoons in this pursuit:

  Their remarkable chelae equip them for mastery of a uniquely delicate lexicography. In fact, the sea floor is a dictionary of unprecedented accuracy and eloquence. It has made me eager to learn how to swim. I ask the fisherfolk to teach me, but they refuse. They say anyone who gazes for too long at the sea floor is beset by madness. I asked to meet one of these aquatic lunatics, and the fisherfolk obliged. But again, I encountered a language that is not my own. The lunatic gave me a basket of crabs, and indicated that I should set them on my bare stomach. The remainder of her instructions I deduced largely from context and innuendo.

  She feels no pain as scrying tablet for the crabs.

  The crabs see an end to machines that inhabit the sky: airplanes, spacecraft, satellites, and that perplexing muddle of invisible vibrations that comprises our
telephony.

  She says the crabs offer an optimistic presagement of some great reversal of sea and sky.

  The crabs tell of an immense starfish with sweet-fleshed, swinging scabrous arms who cuts through it all—they call it Sea Sky Spider, or She Who Tears It All Down.

  She says their new god, they say, will keep swinging until there is nothing left.

  They see an end to these aerial boxes of commerce.

  Afterward the sky will be white, a transparent vista of clean crème nothingness, and the crabs will come from their nebula to scratch out a new vista.

  She writes that this particular lineage of crabs dates back to the Jurassic—they know certain things to be true.

  They have long memories, which are interrupted only by cookery.

  And they do feel pain.

  There exists a clever implement for the construction of egg salad. Within a plastic and aluminum apparatus lies the quivering egg, unshelled. It glistens, and then its moist promise of birth evaporates, and its opacity takes on a dullness, and the metal wires cut through the cataract of it until the core dawns golden, a sort of morning glory, edible.