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by Bradford Morrow


  in pale smoke with this stranger passing

  a stranger eating beside me

  eating beside me in his hunger

  sharing with me this hunger this purest

  half of my death.

  When I rise in the morning I see

  roses on a trellis roses that sprout from essential speech

  roses blackening on a forehead of rock.

  —For Thomas Bartscherer

  Annandale-on-Hudson, NY–Doylestown, PA

  August 10–September 10, 2012–May 10, 2014

  RED MOON

  In the world through which I travel I am endlessly creating myself.

  —Frantz Fanon

  1.

  In the body where the red moon lives

  in sulfuric shards broken from the city

  in the red book waiting to be written

  on hands of black meal herbs calf’s snout

  on virgin earth in the calumny

  of sheared laurel where the text grows

  inside a wheel of wormwood and wheat meal

  clothed in hieratic papyrus

  our barren root sprung holy in the white

  April dusk as one might offer lamella and iron ring

  forming a ring on papyrus painted red

  as the moon is a black penned surface

  uttering amorous spells inside and outside

  a frame of marked and discrepant writing

  for which the name is outlined in charcoal

  red writing around a charcoal heart

  inside the formalism of canvas

  inside the rudiments of a snare drum

  blackened by moon water

  rising from the inside of a waning spirit

  this vocabulary of molecular change

  this boundary of epideictic loss.

  2.

  As if in a chain of dusk

  portending new night new white

  elements of eyesight

  shorn of their tropic urge

  spun from elliptical navigations

  words wrung from holy destiny

  in the ghost dance of the goddess

  Klotho who will spin out her threads

  and bear us new life. In the white

  waning moonlight to hear

  light adjunct to the potent

  precincts of shadow—

  Let the bar of Tartaros open

  in which forth rages Kerberos

  armed with a thunderbolt. Bestir

  yourself, Mene, who needs the solar nurse

  guard of the dead

  let your beams draw us back

  let us come back into your ghost-white

  silence of one who knows

  where we were self-gendered

  self-taught on an isle left alone

  decades upon the dark wheel

  and saw you rise like the morning dove

  black miraculous bird of flight

  glossy and locked in bloom.

  3.

  I wake star lion

  deprived moon gut

  song wrung from the hieratic gleam

  locust flowers in your bright hair

  morning water blackening

  each movement aroused by your appearance.

  Night goes into night

  another spectacle of my ghost-ridden self

  merged with my Beloved—

  Plunged in darkness, I whirl the wheel for you

  The cymbals I don’t touch

  Nile’s birth cloth

  wrapped around you

  until you cast dark light from your eyes

  enclose my body in traces of jasmine and honey.

  4.

  In the eidetic glow

  these signs from heaven

  A colander black water jug silver plate

  utensils of home that serve as symbols

  I carry the weight of them

  in the indexical night storm

  without futurity I leap from one

  cross to the next

  as if the falcon’s arc were a meeting place

  beyond my left hand

  and the promontory deepened

  and one morsel of flesh

  offered itself again to me

  beneath a sky split open

  letting loose its mesh of wet ash.

  5.

  To forge memory again

  black tonic of spirit’s blackness

  where the book of sorrows ends

  and the catholic drumming inside a text

  whitens until there is only

  this transparency left

  words inscribed inside a helical

  space without guide or guerdon

  beneath the pantomimed shards

  of early red moon

  when we rose to find you inside the paratactic

  legend born of another’s

  cautionary tale

  and heard it say, “Lift a single block

  of hollowed-out juniper

  have an asp covering the top as a capital.

  Fashion him during the new moon

  and consecrate it in celebration.”

  For which a coiled snake

  makes its way through the silent

  partitions between thought and action

  as though one had broken his staff

  on a circle of red dust

  and the snake were a legend

  held before us still waiting to be told.

  6.

  Here in the tangent

  formed in a crystal block

  Here in the Book of Spells

  written in cloud musk daylight

  broken from a winged serpent

  hand over hand the digital display

  that lies like a cataract of vision’s

  despoiling artifice.

  This bent instrument unbraiding itself

  to teach us wandering again—

  notes of the diaspora

  bleak new song of the eidetic son

  his image reflected back in the low light of

  waning tropic.

  These islands with all their minium and lampblack

  islands with the vertebra of Zeus

  In the reimagined reenactment

  of ancestry

  wandering in the spell-blasted spring

  tide of island waters

  islands with their drinkable blue volcanoes

  shifting steadily westward

  Star-coursing heavenly

  born register

  untiring flame caught

  blackening on an iron wick

  as if one were planted here

  for the duration of a life

  inscribing on a surface of blue-gray sand

  its desolate cry.

  7.

  This magical material

  stripped of its essentials

  carried across the miles

  to rest here

  in mineral light

  in alchemical dark

  Born of blood

  Shedding blood

  putting out roots

  androgynous

  Born with blood

  saffron dyed with golden arrows

  A red spell bred from stalwart bone.

  8.

  And what is sea when I know it.

  And what is wind from the east when I taste it.

  Black cormorants rising

  blue shreds of teal

  The magical material that was this book

  in its first imprint on flesh

&n
bsp; Dark bay barley and crab

  Sage rose fruit pits

  Who will set these where they belong?

  Come from the black courtyard

  sit and hear the spell recited

  like a sleeper daydreaming death

  hear the quadrant slip

  from her hands and pass back

  into night’s moon red sway

  cylinders jogged from memory

  capitalized in blood

  sweet arc of penultimate sea hawk

  slivered flute of horizon

  risen like a metallic horn

  A shell of handsome bark passed between us.

  9.

  And who will survive

  the end of the Book of Spells?

  Cavern silence

  moonlit

  crows black winged

  in flight away from earth.

  Heaven is down there

  where the sea divides earth

  and we revolve in the light drum

  of serene monadic spaces.

  A weary cut blazes its way through

  canals lit by incense and boatman’s candles

  far-off inside the systemic barge

  the lifted lean-to of cypress and willow

  merges with holy waters

  drowned bartered pieces of white

  writing lifted to the stars

  placed on an altar of parchment.

  And one is waiting at your bedside

  for what she has come to receive

  blood of a sea falcon

  embryo of a water pigeon

  risen to the heavens

  dashed on the rocks below

  in water and blood.

  10.

  As She is the Goddess of Three Roads

  and claims my heart inside the vessel

  spread over these pages

  black spirit red moonlit forest

  I would rise to meet you here

  in the book we are starting to read

  like a lantern poised above

  our heads

  beam-lit bat’s cove

  written out of saving

  To take its body alive

  and release it to the heavens

  Seize its body and release it

  cut from its eyes a portion of one eye

  Watch it go blind

  cave-bat blind in the blink of an eye

  in the fiery tonic of its release

  given back to a form

  without resistance—

  pure alchemical release

  of the bat shape inside

  the right fist

  And the needle threaded

  and given back its blood

  pages of spells

  darkened patches of lettering

  ciphers deposited at the crossroads

  blackening the bronze point of a stylus

  stored among seeds of barley and wheat.

  11.

  And the choric urgency lifted on high ground

  And the sea dark moving past our sight

  in time in time the sea moving past our sight

  And the moon inside the book swollen from disuse

  And the hand laboring past sundown darkened by sun

  So labor begins here and forms a ring inside the circuit of one’s arm

  And the surface is black caked with mud and barley seeds on one’s palm

  As if prayer were a form of residence on land from which the sea has gone

  And flowers are the eyes of Horus and seed is Pan’s gift

  Washed in resin as the body becomes what it was when it first came to you

  placed on pure linen cloth and onto cloth placed on its surface

  seven seeds of wheat and an equal number of barley mixed with honey

  poured onto the ground from which they grew and mixed their beings

  digging up with their hands in black soil what they could find.

  April 17–May 5, 2014

  NOTES.

  “The Language”: The work of a number of writers contributed to this poem: including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Prose of the World (translated by John O’Neill); Charles Darwin’s On Natural Selection; Hannah Arendt’s “What Is Freedom?”; Sophocles’s Antigone (translated by Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal); Robert Duncan’s “Dante Études”; Rosario Castellanos’s “The Other” (translated by Maureen Ahern and Magda Bogin); Mahmoud Darwish’s “The Rose and the Dictionary” and Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982; Joan Retallack’s “Afterimages”; M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!; and Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost.

  “Red Moon”: The source text for this poem is The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation Including the Demotic Spells (edited by Hans Dieter Betz).

  The Childhood of the Reader

  Joyce Carol Oates

  At the roadside fruit and vegetable stand on Transit Road, in Millersport, New York, I would sit reading. Head lowered, scarcely aware of my surroundings, which is the consolation of reading.

  Comic books—Tales from the Crypt, Superman, Classics Illustrated (Ivanhoe, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, The Call of the Wild, Frankenstein)—Mad Magazine.

  Or books from the Lockport Public Library in their crisp plastic covers—Ellery Queen, H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Illustrated editions of the Iliad, the Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield. Great Dialogues of Plato.

  (Yes, it is bizarre: I was reading, trying to read, Plato as a young girl. More bizarre yet, I was writing my own “Platonic dialogues” on tablet paper—though perhaps Socratic irony was lost on me.)

  (Often the librarians at the Lockport library would look at me doubtfully. Who is this girl? Is she really reading these books? Trying to read these books? Who is giving her such outsized ideas? But I’d been brought to the library by my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, whom the librarians knew as a loyal patron with an impassioned love of books; since my grandmother had arranged for me to have my first library card there, the librarians may have felt kindly disposed toward me.)

  Difficult to concentrate on any kind of reading in such circumstances! At a roadside farm stand you are distracted by vehicles approaching on the highway, and passing; for the majority of the vehicles pass by without slowing. There is an air of derision, mockery, repudiation in such circumstances that will linger in the memory for years.

  Only now and then a vehicle will slow, and park at the roadside, and a customer will emerge, usually a woman.

  “Hello!”

  “Hello …”

  “Is it—Joyce?”

  A hopeful smile. Or is it a craven smile. When you are selling, you are smiling.

  Quart baskets, bushel baskets of pears. How much did my parents charge for a bushel basket of pears? I have no idea; surely not much. Their prices had to be competitive with those of commercial vendors, if not lower. If you were a small-time farmer you could pitch your goods so low that you made virtually no profit and worked for nothing. (All of the farms in our vicinity employed “child labor”—the farm owners’ children. Hours of such employment are not negotiable.) Yet I remember the sting of embarrassment when a potential customer, frowning over our pears, or strawberries, or tomatoes, deftly turning back the tight leaves of our sweet corn to examine the kernels, decided that our produce wasn’t priced low enough, or wasn’t good enough in some way, returned to her car, and drove off.

  Sitting at a roadside, vulnerable as an exposed heart, you are liable to such rejections. As if, as a writer, you were obliged to sell your books in a nightmare of a public place, smiling until your face ached, until there we
re no more smiles remaining.

  Years later, as an undergraduate at Syracuse University, I was grateful to work as a “page” in the university library for as many hours a week as I could manage—for one dollar an hour. This was my first authentic job; I could consider myself now an adult. Alone, stationed on one of the upper floors of the library (which seemed immense to me, for whom a “library” was the Lockport Public Library), as I pushed a cart to reshelve books like an enthralled Alice in Wonderland, I could explore the stacks—rows upon rows of stacks—English Literature, American Literature, Philosophy; there was an open reading area with a long wooden table that was usually deserted and here I could sit and read with fascination what are called “learned journals” and “literary magazines”—an entire category of magazine utterly unknown to me before college. Discovering these journals was the equivalent of my discovery at age nine of the wonderful Alice books.

  For here was Poetry—in which I read Hayden Carruth’s harrowing autobiographical poem “The Asylum”—Epoch (the first literary magazine in which a story of mine would appear, under the name “J. C. Oates,” in 1960)—Journal of Metaphysics (which I read avidly, or tried to read, as if “metaphysics” was as firm and respectable a discipline as physics)—Modern Fiction Studies (the first academic literary journal of my life). Equally intriguing were Philological Quarterly, PMLA, Romanticism, American Literature, American Scholar. A treasure trove of original fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews—Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Hudson Review, Partisan Review, Dalhousie Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Georgia Review, The Literary Review, Transatlantic Review, Quarterly Review of Literature—the very “little magazines” in which, over the next several decades of my life, my own work would appear.

  (My first published story in a national magazine wasn’t in one of these, but in Mademoiselle, in 1959. Like Sylvia Plath in a previous year’s competition, I’d received an award from this chic fashion magazine in which, in those days, writing by such distinguished contributors as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Paul Bowles, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, and Truman Capote routinely appeared. How improbable this seems to us, by contemporary standards! Yet high-quality fiction appeared in many glossy magazines of the era—Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, intermittently even in Saturday Evening Post and Playboy, as well as in the more likely Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, and New Yorker. It did feel to me, at the age of nineteen, that my life had been magically touched, if not profoundly altered, by the Mademoiselle citation.)

  One of the great reading moments in my lifetime—if it isn’t more accurately described as a life-altering moment—occurred in the second semester of my freshman year when I entered a classroom in the Hall of Languages, and idly opened a book that had been left behind—a philosophy anthology in which there was an excerpt from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. A sentence or two of this German philosopher of the nineteenth century, of whom I’d never heard, and immediately I felt excitement, and a kind of rapport; after class I ran to the campus bookstore, where, with reckless abandonment for one who had virtually no spending money, I bought paperback copies of Nietzsche—Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil—which I have, heavily annotated, to this day.

 

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