Speaking Volumes

by Bradford Morrow

  under the surface,

  like moving marble

  eats the colored bits, gradually.

  One day maps will show this.

  (Amaruśataka 1.11, Sanskrit)

  ____________

  01.13

  To the Nightingale an island is not as bright as a star.

  But which can it land on?

  Is the earth really bent

  so gradually

  that we can make a bed anywhere?

  Not in the dark-skinned sea, or in night,

  which fills the shape of your mouth

  until your face is bloated,

  like something newly born.

  So we plant ourselves in some clearing, in a forest,

  until our bodies break like seeds at night,

  until a white tentacle, as tender as a root,

  grows in a glass of water.

  (Amaruśataka 4.2, Sanskrit)

  ____________

  13.38

  Why is the forest canopy strung with rope?

  What have the children done with the branches?

  Now the sun can only reach us through a maze.

  As if it, too, had to pass through their games.

  We walk around, all of us now, preparing the morning

  with a grid of shadows on our skin.

  As if we only escaped sleep

  illicitly, the print of its servitude

  still on us.

  It was a cold morning on the forest floor, and wet.

  And now, waking to a canopy of ropes,

  as if the tree trunks were a spider’s legs at night

  needling a web around us in the air,

  we, awaking already within its mouth …

  The old man has gone back to sleep another night.

  What have the children done with the branches?

  (Amaruśataka 7.9, Sanskrit)

  ____________

  28.8

  The bird is in the center of the sun.

  Its outline is silent,

  as its nude, smooth wings extend

  across its sphere of light.

  They almost block it.

  I can never tell

  which part of nature is posturing:

  To the sun the bird becomes a wall of glass,

  its eyes, in the middle of its silhouette,

  pass pure light—

  the fire of the underworld

  seen through a slit between two stones.

  (Amaruśataka 1.12, Sanskrit)

  ____________

  27.7

  The dancing girl has veiled her body

  in movement. The drums grunt like voices

  calling for water in the sun.

  Dripping on the hot skin of a drum

  droplets would also dance

  until it soaked up their sound.

  (Amaruśataka 1.12, Sanskrit)

  ____________

  34.17

  As the village goes up

  in smoke

  a dry cloud is rotating overhead,

  fed like a whirlpool

  in the sky.

  We press our hands together.

  It is better to be

  together in life, willingly,

  than by any force.

  (Gathasaptasati 6.85, Prakrit)

  ____________

  34.19

  A sand dune came toward us like a sail ship

  made of stone

  that was breaking in the wind.

  (Gathasaptasati 6.85, Prakrit)

  ____________

  28.92

  Hair covered a face

  like old vines conceal a door.

  The iron eyes of an owl

  open at me

  like ornaments from a mother’s home

  familiar from youth.

  (Amaruśataka 1.12, Sanskrit)

  ____________

  22.01

  My tigers have left me.

  I wake too late in the day,

  after a heavy rain

  has played its notes on my roof.

  I don’t even tie them to anything.

  (Gathasaptasati 18.46, Prakrit)

  ____________

  22.02

  Friend, we can no longer ignore it.

  The wind reminds us that our house has no windows.

  Tell it that it has made its point,

  and that it can either stay, or leave.

  But that it must stop

  with this coming and going.

  (Gathasaptasati 18.46, Prakrit)

  ____________

  22.03

  Daughter, along the rim of what you were knitting

  I can see the circumference of your will.

  You rarely show it,

  and most often you end where you are silent.

  But somehow, after the edge of this quilt

  there is refusal

  where there is nothing.

  (Gathasaptasati 18.46, Prakrit)

  ____________

  22.04

  The tree collapsed on itself

  leaving a pile of bark

  over its roots.

  What, foolish daughter,

  did you think?

  That it would shrink back into the ground?

  (Gathasaptasati 18.46, Prakrit)

  ____________

  15.30

  A lamb blinking over a patch of earth

  does not know what you have done. Feed it,

  and it will eat from your hand

  as if you wore the skin of a washed grape.

  (Amaruśataka 30, Sanskrit)

  Rubrics

  Rebecca Lilly

  AT THE READY

  Early a.m., at my desk, documenting this as it happens—a book on sociopathy, but let me explain my intentions: at the center of my chest, the X, the echo of coordinates, is a base of quantum cursives, pungent and bitter, the inky fibs glowing, my heart’s music in drums; a hollow pounding and ugliness result: eye sores, blue rings from marrying my heart, then scissoring its strings in violent divorce—documented in my book draft on sociopathic “friends,” the definitive text on that, where I acknowledge real-life personas who lie with impunity, pledging I will not, in good faith, cover ennui with distaste, or feverish pitches of wanting, promising I’ll not be a desperate and explosive protégée who authors a book of “heart’s tales,” while the eyes of more merciful books (shelved in dark cubbyholes with bent spines and hunchbacked lives of toil) confirm it’s the topic of the day: lies, blasphemy, nothing on blissful states, the rightful province of the heart—only the drumroll of a horrid librarian knocking on the door (and since my library’s in there, I don’t want her conversing with schemers and toadies—ear fleas who say the closer to truth words are, the greater the danger of misinterpreting meaning)—that’s why the ageless great books get translated yet again by contemporary monks, or famous scholars of mind-body consciousness, later on quoted by wry, twisted politicians, who sell them as viruses to white-collar scammers, as if what matters weren’t the character’s suit, but the wrangling of his muse. In our advancing digital age, truth will be a look, a voyeur surveying windows of the book (if shut, restricting subtleties of oscillations), but the glass blinks in any case, whether transparent or reflecting, and there’s a niggling intuition to open it, to let air in before the phone rings and you lose it momentarily in getting down to business.

  HARD CHARGER

  Found objects, the words, when gathered up, evolve into pictures, then concepts, whereupon I stop—back to pictures, the encounter with The Thing, since it’s all about communion with the living word: self
-referential, entangling the world with self-mattering, until, electrified, it burns itself up. I don’t remember the book I’ve proffered here as an example: dreamt momentarily, a placeholder for authorial personas, some harboring a vengeful motive toward the hero, that generous rebel whose jokey ways and hard charging stave off tragedy—and yet, a frail tension turns the page, desire and patience perfecting a leverage, so the fatal flaw turns out to be a “minor wounded part,” in the lingo of psychologists—clandestine, it’s a U-turn behind, swerving by a hair’s breadth the formidable sword of your own eyes reading close to your gloveless hands.

  KEEP IT NEAT

  He’s more afraid of life than death, so keep it neat—a snarky attempt at publicity, this blurb that fancies the oddness of people living out their books, calling forth more life in persona, his flat-footed, laurel-crowned sorrows limping in to mint the dust, so readers have to wonder why it wasn’t just one trampling another …

  It’s not as simple as it seems: there are subtle differences in suffering; it’s a multi-grained phenomenon, an hourglass of umbers and ochers—so this author’s color plates were a nice touch, and his website’s enticing: an author who invites us to his homeroom, but perhaps not into auras of his characters: the one, a notorious villain.

  He jokes in the forward on colluding with us: obviously, we’re just cosigners, voyeurs, less serious a crime among the literati. As for his milestone of poison pen, authored by the quintessential villain: it was flagged by his publisher (whom he calls, rather baldly, “the Old World Self”) as “highly elliptical and probably fictitious as his strolls in virgin woods, and the foundling myths he tells straight from the mouth of the minstrel”—to say nothing of his hopeless lamentations.

  Sneak up in the woods and follow him sometime—but if you do, be prepared not to get in print.

  PAID WITNESS

  Reminiscing, as I was once the author of this piece, but am no longer (a paid witness is revising), I recall a silence of created stillness different from the silence that wells up from nothing. Who I was is null—the real story is this: the book’s spine electrified into a blowtorch, which flamed out, sending me tumbling down a sinkhole. I’m not so naive as to upend the book or back up to where I first found myself, although reversible text is in fashion, an immaterial cursive running in bifurcated silty channels, while a writer at the wellhead (a stone cairn marking the forest edge) lowers a rusted bucket: the magnetic pull of self—now if the sun’s out and it’s hot, I’m suspicious of contaminants; I’m smart enough to know I can’t drink dirty water, but I confess my lifelong habit is to stop and wait, while my hand’s facepalming off the page, and margins recalibrate until I eye up my way to a launch, a flash point where surface lights confound, for waters travel only one direction in the Book of Hours: forward. Where is it then: a sky-compass for an eye navigating Styx? When it’s choppy enough so waves crash over the hull, you need a paid witness to be a scribe. Only nothing’s inviolate. Fact is, sanity is stopping and waiting to be guided. The river recedes into pines—I spy it from the library portico—bright red leaves skitter, pages picked off in the wind, an omen for the blind.

  THE ILK OF THE OLD

  My book slouches to where sunlight gets a foothold on the afterthoughts’ long breach of conscious wants. Nothing can be done about darkness; pressed upon, it holds in what I’ve coined the ilk of the old in my dank rental building.

  “It’s your language,” the manager professed with distaste, throwing my book down (one I’d given him, hot off the press), “the palette of painterly touches. Why bother when the moon will do,” he spat, cursorily inspecting the chimney, “assuming it’s full enough to show through?”

  To be honest: it’s not my house of language, but a rental, and because I’m dissatisfied with rundown radiators, bats, and spiders in the chimney, a furnace that creaks, a work order has been signed as of yesterday—the manager assures me. “A fire would do to drive out bats and swifts from the chimney, but you’d need to scoop out the ashes.”

  “Chimney sweeping—my old man did it, and thought he was God’s gift, but let me tell you it’s a venerable profession,” the surly manager said, and I nodded. No comment. (Forgive the aside, but I’m a dyed-in-the-wool antiquarian, and book burning hasn’t, through the centuries, been a private thing; it’s a contemptible practice of the Inquisition of Learning.)

  Implausibly perhaps, those birds ousted from the chimney speak my mind, brooms of pines sweeping soot and ashes from their feathers, hazing the night sky, gray granny birds fluttering and pecking in the author’s head, waking him—

  Here I am, wearing a feathered coat of many colors (my body, a metaphor obscuring the close-ups). There was an antiquarian job, I recall that much. When he left, the manager said it’s imperative to pull the flue for insulation, and my latest rental payment’s past due.

  As-ever-is, as-ever-is, chirp the chimney swifts outside my window on the gable roof in this little fiction of ears, my excuse to be an Old World poet to whom no one pays notice, as in a modern fable no one looks for clues—laborious, it is, to create books from the ilk of the old, and doubly so to present them as true.

  Pages from Days and Works

  Rachel Blau DuPlessis

  He died, a young and ambitious artist, of a cocaine OD and the related heart attack.

  It was a long flight, strong headwinds.

  If you read Standing in Another Man’s Grave in bed, what kind of dreams do you expect?

  “What am I doing?”

  “You’re eating sweet things; you’re eating sugar. It always happens after a death.”

  I understand, as if from every angle, the Dante word that means dazed, dazzled, vertiginous, undone, stunned, and awestruck: smarrito. At the beginning. At the end. And punctually in between.

  Sing through the scintillate deeps of sky, pulse mists with huffs and beeps, and bounce sweet booms off a sublimity that’s packed so tight and wrapped so round, it shimmers, shakes, and sometimes downright laughs with its own vast, unreadable astonishment.

  “I can pick up the alphabet!” she said. And, as from an artesian well, the other end of the writing came up.

  *

  At the moment when the book becomes questionable, possibly obsolete, or at least not alone in the world of inscriptions on something like a page, it appears that I think in nothing but variants of books.

  The stele, the monument, the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the electronic screen. A flattened surface on which there are socially legible marks.

  Though hypertext externalizes the cultural brain, it cannot sort this out without interventions of another brain.

  At a time when—as is claimed by some university penny pinchers—you don’t “need” libraries, at a time when digital archives create a potential web of access across worlds, via languages, territories, nationalisms, and holdings (if also potentially privatized, not open source), I am still considering that discrete entity of intervention—the book. Small, contained intentional arrangements, copies put in circulation.

  Who would not worry when the precise college president who eliminated a library as unnecessary and put money down on a total electronic “system” was the very college president so up to her neck in malfeasance and criminality that suicide was the inevitable and accomplished end? This is a true story. It was in the news.

  Without the book, we die? And with it, also. That story has no moral for the book. There was no causation, just correlation.

  And correlation does not mean causation. But weren’t there links? Wasn’t that administrator seduced by, even paid by, the profiteers in such “systems”?

  On the other hand, people and groups have been put to the sword (the flame, the rack, the flail, the bomb) for not seeing one of those books precisely the way some others saw it.

  One moral is: Do not destroy the book. Do not destroy the person. Do not destroy the
reader.

  Awake, awake

  today! sings

  the wood thrush with a silvery sobbing

  gurgling warble

  first day of hidden nesting tones.

  Tomes.

  *

  I see a pink screen laced with mesh capillaries. So this is what holds the eye together! I’ve just seen the back of everything.

  What happened next was swift and brutal. The soldiers seized the man and repeatedly stabbed him.

  “He was dead within two minutes,” said Peter Bouckaert of the New York–based Human Rights Watch, who observed the killing.

  Bouckaert documented the vio-

  An old woman fusses for coins in a metal-click change purse. Fingers twisted cannot pick up dimes. The years move along; she lives in her webbings of electricity making small sparks. She picks out a quarter. Eventually she will have nothing in her purse and lack the fine-tuned touch to take the change. O now dead woman, did you feel an erotic dream of writing and of books—a kind of desire identifying the words with the breadth of your rapacious and incommensurate yearning?

  The newest dead land story concerns a drained and ruined ecology. The other news story details another bombing—people in pieces. One’s frustration, one’s resistant disgust with the politics of others (which are also officially one’s own), proves what point? What would social good really look like? The shadowy was taking shape. This darkness held the “I” together.

  lence in a series of tweeted photos. The victim’s leg was severed.

  “A man just walked up with the severed leg of the lynching victim, just walking around,” tweeted a shocked Bouckaert.

  And the most suggestive recent typo was allienation.

  *

  QUATRAINS

  Suddenly I realized that I was set

  among the dead. I was a mix of old

  and young, sporting a formerly

  fashionable jacket. Jackal.

  The library (inevitably) is close to closing.

  The librarian announces,

  “This library is almost closing”

  and I answer testily, “I know.”

  There was no time to find any book.

  The right book wasn’t there anyway.

  Set is an Egyptian god. So sue me.

  Then I drive home, but was it home?

  *