Speaking Volumes

by Bradford Morrow

  Wilda tries to speak, but the words will not come. Her throat feels dry. She takes another swig of wine.

  The dress brings out the secret lights in Aoife’s eyes, the swan-like curve of her neck.

  Wilda feels ugly, small, though she has not seen her reflection in a good, clear mirror in seven years, not since her parents and brother died and her aunt sent her off to the convent.

  Aoife chooses a fur cloak from the wardrobe, slips it over Wilda’s shoulders. Wilda feels cold, but then a feeling of delicious warmth overtakes her, and her spine relaxes. Aoife picks up the lute, strums a strange tune, sings a song in her mother tongue that makes Wilda feel like she’s dream flying, her stomach buckling as she soars too fast into whirling stars, the air thin and strange and barely breathable.

  Imitating the Abbess, Aoife hobbles over to the bed, climbs up the ladder, peeks over the edge at Wilda, who can’t stop laughing.

  “It’s a boat,” Aoife says, crawling around like a child. Wilda remembers her brother, galloping around on his stick horse. Memories like these stopped haunting her two years ago, part of the earthly existence she has kept at bay. Now she remembers the two of them rolling in the garden, flowers in their fists, singing bawdy songs they barely understood, laughing so hard she thought her ribs would crack. She remembers the way her parents would scold them with stanched smiles, trying not to laugh themselves.

  Wilda climbs up the ladder. She sits beside Aoife on the high bed. The stiff fabric of the coverlet smells of must and myrrh.

  “Look!” says Aoife, opening a cabinet built into the bed’s headboard. Inside is a crystal decanter encrusted with a ruby cross, a burgundy liquid inside it. Aoife sniffs, takes a sip.

  “Wine,” she says dreamily, “though it might be some kind of liqueur.”

  Aoife offers the bottle. Wilda drinks, tasting blackberries and brine and blood, she thinks, though she has never tasted blood, for the Sacrament does not transubstantiate until it passes into the kettle of the stomach, where it is boiled by the liver’s heat, the same way alchemists turn base metals into gold. Some kind of matter floats in the liquid. Wilda feels grit between her teeth. The grit dissolves and the world glows, a fresh surge of pink light shining through red windowpanes.

  Aoife’s hand scurries like a white mouse over the coverlet to stroke Wilda’s left wrist. Their fingers intertwine. Wilda marvels at the deliciousness of the warmth streaming between them.

  The two sisters sit holding hands, leaning against thick down pillows, sipping the strange concoction at the very top of a stone fortress, snow falling in the eternal twilight outside—upon the monastery and meadows and forests, upon frozen ponds and farms and villages. They discuss beasts in winter, the mysteries of hibernation, the burrows and holes where furry animals and scaly things sleep.

  “Do you think their blood freezes?” whispers Aoife, her breath on Wilda’s cheek. “Do you think they dream?”

  Wilda has the strange feeling that everyone in the world is dead. That she and Aoife are completely alone in an enchanted castle. That they are just on the verge of some miraculous transformation.

  Wilda wakes to the clanging of monastery bells. She clutches her throbbing head. She tries to sit up, thinking she’s on her cot. But then she smells musty perfumes, odors of pickled fish and honey, and her cheeks burn as the previous night’s feast comes back to her in patches. How had it happened so fast?

  Her swollen belly throbs with queasiness, the sea monster slithering in a mash of wine and food. She has no choice but to lean over the bedside and heave a foul gruel onto the floor. Bright sunlight shines through the windows. How long has she been asleep? She turns to Aoife, still dozing beside her. Not Aoife—where is Aoife?—but the Abbess’s fur cloak, crumpled, patched with bald spots, sprawling like a mangy bear. She remembers a tale from her childhood, about a fair woman who turned into a bear. The she-bear scratched out the eyes of lovesick hunters and devoured them whole. The bear, like Aoife, had eyes the color of honey. She sang with the voice of a nightingale, luring hunters into deep woods.

  Wilda climbs down from the bed, hurries back to her cell, and latches her door. She paces around the cramped space, feeling the rankness of the flesh upon her bones, the puffery of her belly, the sea monster roiling within. Her brow and cheeks are hot. She wants to check on Aoife, see how she feels, laugh about the previous night’s feast—a whim, a trifle, nothing—but her skin burns with shame. She pictures Aoife singing in her green dress. She imagines fur sprouting from her freckled skin, yellow claws popping from her fingertips.

  Wilda vows to stay in her room without eating, without sleeping, whipping herself until the hideous sea monster ceases to squirm in her belly, until she has purged her flesh of excess fluid and heat and is again a bird-boned vessel of divine love—arid, clean, glowing with the Word. She has a clay bottle of water, almost full, the only thing she needs.

  Wilda kneels on the floor, naked, whipping herself for the third time, bored with the effect, not feeling much in the way of spinal tingling, her mind as dull as a scummy pond. She sighs. Tries not to think of Aoife, the lightness of her laughter. She contemplates Christ in his agony—hauling the cross, grimacing as iron nails are hammered into his feet and hands, staring stoically at the sun on an endless afternoon, thorns pricking his roasted brow. But the images feel rote like a rosary prayer. So she hangs her whip on a nail and lies down on her bed. She watches her window, waiting for the day to go dark, the light outside milky and tedious. She hasn’t eaten for two days, but her belly feels puffed up like a lusty toad. Contemplating the beauty of Christ’s rib cage, the exquisite concavity of his starved and hairless stomach, she shivers.

  When she hears the giggle of young nuns running down the hallway outside her door, her heart beats faster. And there’s Aoife again, knocking softly with her knuckles.

  “Sister Wilda,” says Aoife, “won’t you take some food?”

  Wilda says nothing.

  “Sister Wilda,” says Aoife, “are you well?”

  “I am,” says Wilda, her voice an ugly croak, her throat full of yellow bile.

  Her heart sinks as Aoife slips away.

  When Wilda wakes up, some kind of flying creature is flapping around her room. A candle flickers on her writing table, her book still open there.

  She spots a flash of wing in a corner. A dove-sized angel hovers beside her door like a trapped bird wanting out. An emissary, Wilda thinks, come to tell her that Christ is near. Wilda unlatches the door, peeks out into the dark hallway, and lets the creature out. The angel floats, wings lashing, and motions for her to follow. The angel darts down the hall, a streak of frantic light. Wilda lopes after it, feeling dizzy, chilled. They pass the lavatory, the empty infirmary. The angel flies out into the courtyard and flits toward the warming house, where smoke puffs from both chimneys. Crunching through snow, Wilda follows the angel into the blazing room.

  The angel disappears with a diamond flash of light.

  Fires rage in both hearths. And there, basking on a mattress heaped with fine pillows, is Aoife. Dressed in the green gown, drinking something from a silver communion goblet, Aoife smiles. Hazel lolls beside her in sapphire velvet, munching on marzipan, an insolent look on her face.

  “Sister.” Aoife sits up, eyes glowing like sunlit honey. “Come warm your bones.”

  Overcome with a fit of coughing, Wilda can’t speak. It takes all of her strength to turn away from the delicious warmth, the smells of almond and vanilla, from beautiful Aoife with her wine-stained lips and copper hair. Hacking, Wilda flees, runs through the frozen courtyard, through empty stone passageways where icicles dangle from the eaves, back to her cell, where she collapses, shivering, onto her cot.

  When Wilda wakes up, her room is packed with angels, swarms of them, glowing and glowering and thumping against walls. An infestation of angels, they brush against her ski
n, sometimes burning, sometimes freezing. She hurries to her desk, kneels, and takes up her plume.

  A hoste of angells flashing like waspes on a summer afternoone. My fleshe burned, but I felte colde.

  One of the creatures whizzes near her and makes a furious face—eyes bugged, scarlet cheeks puffed. Another perches on her naked shoulder, digging claws into her skin. Wilda shudders, shakes the creature off. A high-pitched humming, interspersed with sharp squeaks, fills the room as the throng moves toward the door. She opens the door, follows the cloud of celestial beings down the hallway, past the infirmary, out into the kitchen courtyard.

  Wind howls. Granules of ice strike her bare skin as Wilda follows the angels toward the orchard. Her heart pounds, for surely the moment has come: The fruit grove glows with angelic light. Wilda can see skeletal trees sparkling with ice, a million flakes of wind-whipped snow, the darkness of the forest beyond. And there, just at the edge of the woods, the shape of a man on horseback. The angels sweep down the hill toward the woods and wait, buzzing with frustration as Wilda trudges barefooted through knee-deep snow. But her feet are not cold. Her entire body burns with miraculous warmth. And now she can see the man more clearly, dressed in a green velvet riding suit, a few strands of copper hair spilling from his tall hat. His mouth puckers with a pretty smile. His eyes are enormous, radiant, yellow as apricots.

  Five Poems

  Paul Hoover

  THE BOOK OF UNNAMED THINGS

  The house where he was born

  fills with dust and birdsong.

  Its rafters crash in memory.

  She begs of the book of measure

  a seam of restlessness and also

  desperation. No title yet

  for the book of names.

  What to do with unnamed things

  and the shadows they are cut from?

  A sun for the book of origins,

  moon for the book of sources.

  He took the road of snow

  to the house of exhaustion

  where the book of ice was written

  in the language of rain.

  She sang in rain the ending

  of a life too weary to speak.

  The book of the sea was written

  in the book of all that is.

  He sang things into being,

  recited the book of life

  to a melon patch and dog days.

  She was born and crawled sideways

  toward a light she remembered.

  She stands in the book of standing,

  writes a page in the book of night,

  sleeps one day and the everlasting.

  He leans in the book of leaning.

  Time, he knows, is on his side,

  the vagrant house, wandering far,

  hand of fire on the throat of fire,

  the book of sand, its pages turning.

  She unwrites what’s before her,

  keeps close what’s gone away.

  She asks the ceiling to oversee

  what’s spoken and what’s silent,

  a reason for the book of ending,

  and just cause for beginning.

  WRITTEN

  The written stone rests

  in the unwritten river;

  unwritten rain is falling

  over the written town.

  Nothing written today,

  but tomorrow you’ll be written

  as you sit in your room not writing.

  Lo, it is written.

  Pollen writes on the stamen.

  The man writes a child

  in the body of the woman.

  Your eyes write the view

  into the window,

  but it doesn’t stay forever.

  It returns with you into the unwritten.

  All that means is written.

  Lo, a tiger of a word

  has escaped its cage.

  Our quiet words

  wait beneath the stair

  for a reason to speak,

  an edge or fold or cause

  to remark. Oh, we say,

  no way and no how.

  This is how the world begins,

  dark branches written

  against a white sky.

  The written stone rests

  in the written river;

  written rain falls

  over the written town.

  HANDWRITTEN

  this is handwritten

  touched by no voice

  hand and mind moving

  in search of a dwelling

  a form of resurrection

  the language rich in spoor

  something like infinity

  plus the number one

  sensations aren’t fictions

  distances reach your skin

  become the world you’re in

  the scent of lemon peel

  reminds you of the real

  summerbread, heartleaf

  serve as “groundation”

  not intrusions but the basis

  meadow comes to mead

  mountain to its scree

  night wears night glasses

  feeling for its way

  the deepest cut is absence

  its essences running in

  forty-watt glamour

  of words upon the page

  whose intentions are we

  call the night watchman

  the pig from his pen

  our father in heaven

  must have been dreaming

  impercipience please

  not the gold standard

  eagles are not endless

  and neither is resemblance

  a woman’s green face

  laughing in the painting

  matter, mutter, is only matter

  it doesn’t love or hate

  the bullet doesn’t despise

  the body it pierces

  it’s only following orders

  a hummingbird pierces the flower

  looks quickly into your eye

  so busy it’s hazy

  and where does it sleep

  we are on our way

  never quite arriving

  our words are only stations

  metaphysical weather

  for an actual grammar

  summer seems to be slipping

  back into the spring

  the shine on each leaf

  knows what we’re thinking

  it won’t be long now

  before all is known

  if not quite understood

  squirrels fly

  birds swim

  shadows don’t lean

  their objects do

  get out of paradise

  your pronoun knows

  there’s a sale on shoes

  at J. C. Penney

  DEAD MAN WRITING

  The dead man smells of cigars and roses,

  of turpentine and persimmons.

  The dead man yells, but only the cat,

  grown far too thin, and a lonely child

  named Moises can hear him.

  Erect in a kitchen chair,

  in the place where he had lived,

  his hand moves heavily over the page.

  The boy hears him scratching

  and thinks the cat wants in.

  Soon he has filled a page,

  then many pages, but he is not revived.

  His writing fills one room then another.

  The dead man is not distinct

  from the shadow of his hand.

  T
he stain of his pen is great.

  We believe the world was created

  in a similar fashion.

  In most rooms,

  there is light somewhere,

  allowing a face to be seen

  or the size of a dead man’s shoe.

  Light insists more than darkness;

  it can awaken a room entirely.

  A mouse also lives there,

  chased all night by the cat.

  They move like breath in a furious circle,

  like the soft liquid of an eye

  intent upon seeing.

  THE BOOK OF NOTHING

  Nothing isn’t empty.

  It fills a room so completely

  it spills into the street.

  Everything comes from nothing.

  Something, poor something,

  stands vacant at the door.

  A rose opens and opens

  until its petals fall.

  Then it seems vacant,

  like a room with one chair.

  Beauty is always fading.

  We know an object best

  when it starts to disappear.

  Words are here but nothing,

  meaningful sounds passing

  then nothing but pleasure.

  Light and space are something

  passing through the trees.

  A cry is heard in the distance.

  It is something briefly

  and then present absence.

  A background seems like nothing

  until a figure emerges, from what

  seems the beginning.

  But there is no beginning.

  Something always comes before,

  receding here, approaching there.

  Only you remain

  to bring it back from somewhere—

  that shade of blue in the hallway,

  black depths of the water.

  Yellow fires, gray earth, and green

  of wheat are something: actors

  without equal, cock-crowing town.

  Everything nature says

  is ancient, careless, and cruel,

  but it has no concept of nothing.

  Leaning against a sunlit wall,

  it projects casually something.

  A mirror out of doors

  catches the eye because

  our eyes are in it, because

  it seems to eye us