by Unknown
The stained and clear glass windows alternate. A demographic priest, full of impatient proverbs, speaks under a baldachin of twisted trees—of life—is it?
2
“. . . if those shmigglaroonies that live their shithead lives in bilkoland had only once said to me, look here, shmiggle . . . then I’d have what to go on, to begin the negotiations . . .” “Shokh mat!’ ”
“That pligl calls everybody he knows a shmiggle.” That’s Italian. “Shah mat!”
(“Lift up your Hefty bag and look in it midsummer when the larvae swarm and tell me if in that douchebag you don’t see the provost’s and the censor’s scared imaginations: crowded dreams numerousness without numinousness imaginary gluts of people overpopulation smirks on shifting faces street, tunnel, wall, orange fire escape, street, crossings, tracks, another tunnel, swarming over the leftover rightover cartons and the rest to get out”)
3
In a sandbank in the parish of Uig near peat moss and shipwreck they found chesspieces, figurines, robust, humorous. The bishops hold crozier hooks to their cheeks; some bless; some read books; the knights grim, compact; the queens palm their faces, pin-eyed, aghast; the kings lean forward over their swords. Scored shapes, cornery ovals with flat bases, serve as pawns. Our pieces are more abstract.
Rings above rings! Closed horseshoes, thrown simply, by a kilned ghost, across the yard, the ceramist.
4
This hominid ant on two legs looks like a chesspiece: he holds a bishopric or a rookery.
He’s got a diagonal strategy—pawns massacred—massacres pawned. All activities, no actions, half ground, Brueghel’s picture, the census at Bethlehem, activities, local accountability; and slightly past that to a freer infinite, the other census, with no need for the one infinite birth to offset particular births: so in the sheen of bad demography, a poetic sheen that offsets particular shinings, the poetries become self-appointed local juntas, amphitheaters of northern dream violence, drama exiled south to machiavellian theaters.
Hey, lettuce head, you’re the only narrator left. Think your way from the migrant workers’ hands to the neoconservatives’ tables, dialogue’s got all the vowels starting with i, pretty green, but hey see here they in this mercurial estuary the fish dying the they in an alchemy of quicksilver freedoms.
5
University warden or lieutenant or whatever plant who grows in linoleum and reads verse; complacent easy demographer “population explosion” p’s of rigged terror baby “booms”; collectivity-designer; exponential resistance polyrhythms logistics; percussion apocussion; eyes closed he listens to the late Autumn holocaust poem, savoring the December cadences (what polysemy!) nugae marketed, streaks of quotational blood. Just like that, yes just. Translation-worship. Frieda used to say over and over: “I did not do my work.” An autistic child. A diagnosis of agnosia.
“Yiddish—well. We believe in communication.”
6
An ant stands up on two legs—looks around defiantly like a chesspiece.
The new moon’s dark bundling says: you didn’t do your job your job is to migrate.
The most important migration’s perhaps from perhaps to maybe and if you ask us whether we’ve made it the answer’s maybe.
Exempt and stet! Right in the halfmoon’s face: you have no right to question us you have aphasia.
The father feared unemployment; his courage was broken. A cold Memorial day. Winter dovetails with summer.
Blacklists: long Washington wall. A fear of migration. To read Yiddish well!
7
The sun slid forced to behind the checkered clouds on the reflective umbrella over the chessmaster’s head (he made his living in a dirty yellow straw hat playing in public seldom interrogated by the sergeants). He played there in University Square under a striped umbrella in the checkering rain. It was still raining. He was still winning. Someone was reading a poem by Auden there, every long line of it like the technical name of a newly instituted disease, but though the square was vibrant in the chickenshit rain that caulked the bricks with light and the hominid ants upstanding like chesspieces slid quietly toward a decent autism in old auditoriums in still worse places there was unlikely and banal torture, activity furious at not being action. Omnia migrant, one ant said. Apocussion.
8
But prose is Moses.—“We’d made a mistake and had been making it for millennia, not nihilism it was messianism and had been treeing us for god doesn’t know how long and the truth is if it weren’t for Moses’ migratory nonmessianic ideas he had nothing to do with a messiah or for that matter if it weren’t for his brother’s nonmessianic staff stiff negotiatory rhetoric and empty apostrophes and empty dialogues there’d be no movement away from the slave civilization. Neither the symbols nor the negotiations saved us. Rescued not saved. He died there: migratory nonmessiah. To remain slaves we invented the idea of a messiah. The mistake: there are no translations; no messiahs, symbols of negotiation; only the empty negotiations themselves. So then we were looking out the windows of the rainrunneled shmigglaroonie cars ourselves and saw the migrant children in the fields lifting heavily as if they were trying to hoist up their parents’ toys.”
Now we know what you mean (of coerce, of coerce).
9
Judah and dialogue!
(Cupid’s darts and the black map arrows of migration. “Let the trapped wizards who yawn in their music boxes stay there if they want to in the pawn shops.” “All the board!” the three-year-old shouts joyously over his electric trains. “All the board!”)
The chessboard is on fire. The flat, even squares of handcrafted wood burn evenly. No children in no fields. Rails. In the game, the king is never actually taken off, but if the board burns, the king also burns. The bishop becomes himself for the first time. The train: the terrain. You grasped it from the start (they told me about it when I was too young) so don’t pretend now that this is some obscure language when all of them are private, exclusionary genocidal dialects. You are a wonderful translator. You catch the defensive truth of the original. In the well of Yiddish. Now you buried yourselves in translations instead of dialogue because it was safer to audit elsewhere than to listen to your own people, though dialogue is the wrong term for something else.
Over the mercurial estuary a kind of nonmessianic sunlight. It’s not a story. The story of the stories isn’t a store.
(1990)
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (1947–)
Nude Interrogation
Did you kill anyone over there? Angelica shifts her gaze from the Janis Joplin poster to the Jimi Hendrix, lifting the pale muslin blouse over her head. The blacklight deepens the blues when the needle drops into the first groove of “All Along the Watchtower.” I don’t want to look at the floor. Did you kill anyone? Did you dig a hole, crawl inside, and wait for your target? Her miniskirt drops into a rainbow at her feet. Sandalwood incense hangs a slow comet of perfume over the room. I shake my head. She unhooks her bra and flings it against a bookcase made of plywood and cinderblocks. Did you use an M-16, a hand-grenade, a bayonet, or your own two strong hands, both thumbs pressed against that little bird in the throat? She stands with her left thumb hooked into the elastic of her sky-blue panties. When she flicks off the blacklight, snowy hills rush up to the windows. Did you kill anyone over there? Are you right-handed or left-handed? Did you drop your gun afterwards? Did you kneel beside the corpse and turn it over? She’s nude against the falling snow. Yes. The record spins like a bull’s-eye on the far wall of Xanadu. Yes, I say. I was scared of the silence. The night was too big. And afterwards, I couldn’t stop looking up at the sky.
(1998)
The Hanoi Market
It smells of sea and earth, of things dying and newly born. Duck eggs, pig feet, mandarin oranges. Wooden bins and metal boxes of nails, screws, ratchets, balled copper wire, brass fittings, jet and helicopter gadgets, lug wrenches, bolts of silk, see-through paper, bamboo calligraphy pens, and curios hammered out of artillery
shells.
Faces painted on coconuts. Polished to a knife-edge or sealed in layers of dust and grease, cogs and flywheels await secret missions. Aphrodisiacs for dream merchants. A silent storm moves through this place. Someone’s worked sweat into the sweet loaves of bread lined up like coffins on a stone slab.
She tosses her blonde hair back and smiles down at everyone. Is it the squid and shrimp we ate at lunch, am I seeing things? An adjacent stall blooms with peacock feathers. The T-shirt waves like a pennant as a sluggish fan slices the humidity.
I remember her white dress billowing up in a blast of warm air from a steel grate in New York City, reminding me of Miss Firecracker flapping like a flag from an APC antenna. Did we kill each other for this?
I stop at a table of figurines. What was meant to tear off a leg or arm twenty years ago, now is a child’s toy I can’t stop touching.
Maybe Marilyn thought she’d erase herself from our minds, but she’s here when the fan flutters the T-shirt silkscreened with her face. The artist used five shades of red to get her smile right.
A door left ajar by a wedge of sunlight. Below the T-shirt, at the end of two rows of wooden bins, a chicken is tied directly across from a caged snake. Bright skin—deadly bite. I move from the chicken to the snake, caught in their hypnotic plea.
(1998)
A Summer Night in Hanoi
When the moviehouse lights click off and images flicker-dance against the white walls, I hear Billie’s whispered lament. Ho Chi Minh: The Man rolls across the skin of five lynched black men, branding them with ideographic characters.
This scene printed on his eyelids is the one I was born with. My face is up there among the poplar leaves veined into stained glass. I’m not myself here, craving a mask of silk elusive as his four aliases.
He retouches photographs, paints antiques, gardens, cooks pastries, and loves and hates everything French. On his way to Chung-king to talk with Chiang K’ai-shek about fighting the Japanese, as day runs into night, he’s arrested and jailed for fourteen months. Sitting here in the prison of my skin, I feel his words grow through my fingertips till I see his southern skies and old friends where mountains are clouds. As he tosses kernels of corn to carp, they mouth silent O’s through the water.
Each face hangs like swollen breadfruit, clinging to jade leaves. How many eyes are on me, clustered in the hum of this dark theatre? The film flashes like heat lightning across a southern night, and the bloated orbs break open. Golden carp collage the five faces. The earth swings on a bellrope, limp as a body bag tied to a limb, and the moon overflows with blood.
(1998)
MAUREEN SEATON (1947–)
Toy Car
Slippery as the word deserve. How the Catholic never gets washed out of you, the temple crushed completely. Once my husband brought home a little car. It fit beside the sleds and carriages like a toy for someone bigger than a toddler, smaller than a rock star. My husband deserved it, he said, and who was I to doubt him knowing as I did how his mother lifted him into her lap and pressed against his small back, the names of her troubles seared in his skin like Latin in the mind of a ten-year-old. Introibo ad altare Dei. I will go in to the altar of God. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. To God who is the joy of my youth. I couldn’t help the way I felt about toy cars and Bangladesh. The Jesuit in my book bag wrote on the board a thousand times: It’s harder for a rich man, etc . . . . The Sister of Sorrow in my lunch box crossed herself and thrust her hands up her cavernous sleeves. I had great ideas, my essays on the poor rivaled Merton and Marx. I was tortured by the hair shirt of my nondesires, I was living on the mountain and I couldn’t get down. I lay beside my husband at night and thought: Who is this man who deserves such a tiny automobile that costs more to fix than food for a family of six in the South Bronx for a whole year? I thought: I am too tired to deserve anything and look, how shameless my rich husband, how wild his hair blows on the winds of Westchester in his toy car with the luscious leather seats big enough for him and someone else.
(1996)
Lateral Time
I’d never held the ashes of a dead man but I’d always wanted to know a famous artist, so I reached out my left hand and she spilled him into my palm. He was flame-white, his flesh dust, he was tiny bones you could play with—they could be doll parts—peaceful in my hand like light. I kept my hand open in case he needed air and I knew it was not the essence of him but nevertheless I whispered: Don’t worry, you’re safe with me. I whispered: I love your paintings. This happened on the Upper West Side in ’89 as the light changed over the Hudson, and that light was in the apartment sliding on floor and walls as we passed a dead man’s bones between us, weeping.
Once I spent the winter in Manhattan with a woman whose desires were so unlike mine the air in the kitchen was sweetly skewed. She told me: Pleasure, and I bent at the refrigerator choosing the precise onion. I told her: Juice, and she stood at the stove removing lemon seeds from basmati. We were perfect as thumbs, we were starved and greedy as shorebirds, dipping down, grabbing our food, devouring it.
Now I’ve begun to write “NO!” on my body parts, small cross-stitched reminders to throw me back and hook another. Tattoo on my right breast, sticker on my colon, scribble of bright blue between my ovaries, hollowed now of eggs but still handy to balance me out. The day I decide to go I’ll erase the words from my body then disintegrate quickly like any dying fool, you’ll see me rising from the shore—equal time lateral time—don’t hurry into anything but love.
The man who lives in 4D sleeps above me every night in the same rectangle of space, one floor up, beside the door, our double beds appearing to the gods like open-face sandwiches with two chubby figures shifting and rolling in dreams or trooping to the bathroom. Sometimes I watch Tai Chi on cable at 6 A.M. because the man upstairs has jumped so hard from his bed, and sometimes I sleep right through til 9 or 10, his footfalls barely piercing dawn.
(2001)
LESLIE SCALAPINO (1948–)
That They Were at the Beach
A Sequence
She heard the sounds of a couple having intercourse and then getting up they went into the shower so that she caught a sight of them naked before hearing the water running. The parts of their bodies which had been covered by clothes were those of leopards. During puberty her own organs and skin were not like this though when she first had intercourse with a man he removed his clothes and his organ and flesh were also a leopard’s. She already felt pleasure in sexual activity and her body not resembling these adults made her come easily which also occurred when she had intercourse with another man a few months later.
When sexual unions occurred between a brother and sister they weren’t savages or primitive. She had that feeling about having intercourse with men whose organs were those of leopards and hers were not. Walking somewhere after one of these episodes she was excited by it though she might not have made this comparison if she’d actually had a brother. At least the woman she had seen in the shower had a leopard’s parts. In these episodes when she’d had intercourse with a man he didn’t remark about her not being like that. And if women had these characteristics which she didn’t it made her come more easily with him.
She overheard another couple together and happened to see them as she had the couple in the shower. The nude part of the woman was like herself and the man had the leopard’s parts so that she had the same reaction and came easily with someone, as she had with a sense of other women having a leopard’s traits and herself isolated. The man with whom she had intercourse did not say anything that showed he had seen a difference in her and that made her react physically. Yet other women seemed to have a leopard’s characteristics except for this one she’d seen.
Again it seemed that a man with whom she had intercourse was her brother and was ardent with her—but this would not have occurred to her had she really had a brother. Yet her feeling about him was also related to her seeing a woman who was pregnant and was the only one to be s
o. The woman not receiving attention or remarks on the pregnancy excited her; and went together with her sense of herself coming easily and yet not being pregnant until quite awhile after this time.
She also felt that she came easily feeling herself isolated when she was pregnant since she had the sense of other women having leopards’ organs. They had previously had children. She was the only one who was pregnant and again she saw a couple together, the man with leopard’s parts and the woman not having these characteristics.
Again she could come since her body was different from the adult who had some parts that were leopards’, and having the sense of the women having had children earlier than her and their not having younger children now.
Her liking the other women to have had children when she was pregnant had to do with having them there and herself isolated—and yet people not saying much about or responding to the pregnancy. She thought of the man coming as when she caught a sight of the couple together—being able to come with someone a different time because she had a sense of a woman she’d seen having had her children earlier. There being a difference of age, even ten years, between a child she’d have and those the other women had had.
She happened to see some men who were undressed, as if they were boys—one of them had the features and organ of a leopard and the others did not. The difference in this case gave her the sense of them being boys, all of them rather than those who didn’t have leopards’ characteristics and this made her come easily with someone.
