Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  At that moment, I felt the need to write something down. I reached into my pocket for the pen I’d hidden there earlier. It was gone. I remembered then holding Lily in the Bing, holding her close. I thought about it for the first time—a writing instrument and a weapon in one. It had been a ballpoint, and contraband.

  nine

  “Look at it this way,” one of my students said. “We agree that all dualities are man-made. Maybe it’s just me—but this poem seems to keep enacting differences that present larger psychic reversals. Where Saint George bites the dragon back—good literally consuming evil? Especially, I might add, there in the fourth line. Is that inversion intentionally ironic?”

  I glanced out the tall windows of the classroom. I could see part of the campus, Low Library, and imagined the pillar gates of Columbia, upper Broadway. It was sunny. Students, teachers, and panhandlers popped in and out of the subway stop at 116th, where one caught the Number 1 and Number 9, up-and downtown IRT. For a moment, I wished that I were on the subway, or sitting in the West End bar—anywhere but here, among the inquiring minds of my near-peers. I was honored to be teaching at Columbia, but I was troubled by all the aesthetic confusion.

  “But the dualities here seem imposed. The poem lacks internal focus. And it lacks, you might say, passion.” I tried to speak with authority, as if I’d inhabited the dualities in my innermost consciousness.

  Ten graduate students looked back at me, not sure how to react. I wasn’t that much older than they were and I was seriously opinionated, if confused—a possible recipe for insurrection later in the semester. I had been hired as a junior faculty member among hugely intimidating colleagues. I was now on faculty with, for example, the exiled Russian poet Joseph Kyrilikov, who insisted that his students memorize pages of poetry. He’d asked this once of himself—in order to teach himself English and English poetry during his months and months of hard labor in prison camp near Archangel. He had been sent away as a “social parasite,” and the word “poet” had actually been used to convict him at his trial. “Who enrolled you in the ranks of the poets?” the judge had asked. “Who enrolled me in the human race?” Kyrilikov answered. The transcript of his trial had eventually been smuggled out (samizdat!) to the international media and he had become, in an instant, the literary hero of the world. The Soviet Union, shamed, yanked him out of the labor camp and sent him to the West. After some time in Europe, he’d chosen to live out his exile in Manhattan while teaching in the graduate writing program at Columbia. He was, in historical reality, living proof of the great shining cause I’d tried to beam on Lily Baye: Kyrilikov had actually been imprisoned for the “crime” of being a poet. Years later he would win the Nobel Prize, then die of a heart attack—he’d paid for his love of poetry back in the hard labor camp, with a (as he put it, pointing to his chest) “bad teeker.” He had dark red thinning hair and bright green eyes. Once he’d shown me, kneeling down on a campus path, a nezzabutke—a flowering forget-me-not.

  Also on faculty was Devereux Waldron, genius poet of the Caribbean, who would later be a Nobel laureate as well. And there was the wild poet and playwright Amiri X, né Lester James, who frightened everyone. Whereas Joseph Kyrilikov annoyed his students by demanding that hundreds of lines of poetry be put to heart and recited in class, Amiri X challenged his students to make their poems “relevant.” He suggested, deadpan, that they go down to 116th and Broadway and read their poems to people on the street: See how many of them will connect to your imagery, you dig? Cool.

  His students were outraged, but a few actually trooped down to the intersection and planted themselves, cawing out lines like

  I sit alone, within my shadow, exhort the demons

  Of solitude to release me into pale moon trauma,

  into the flotsam of desire.

  These brave, sometimes beautiful word-vessels were launched onto the great sea of traffic racket, subway roar, newsstand conversation, dope solicitation, shouts and murmurs of passersby. Once in a while a transient soul would stop and listen, then cry out: “What you say, pale? Shut the fuck up about your goddam flotsam of desire, Mary Alice! Get your flotsam-of-desire ass out of here, man!”

  It was not a hospitable milieu for the cultivation of Rilkean rhetorical flourish—or for winning converts to the public ode.

  I myself was a fan of Rilke, like every other poet I knew, but secretly harbored resentment against him. Why did he have to weep, as they said, every time a goddam leaf fell from a tree? Plus he’d abandoned his wife and child. Plus advised one of two strong artistic women who loved him to return to her husband and the pregnancy that killed her. She was a talented painter, Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose last words as she died in childbed were “Wie schade!”—“What a shame!” I resolved to have a T-shirt made up with John Berryman’s dissenting vote printed on the front: RILKE WAS A JERK. Still, all the crisscross energy was undeniable: we were living in a time of poetic turmoil, antiwar poems elbowing their way onto the stage of the Spanish surrealists (rendered dramatically in Bly’s translations), a scene lit by flashes of Deep Image, swept up in the drift and cumulus of James Wright’s lyric epiphanies, Muriel Rukeyser’s fierce and tender statements. There were the pyrotechnics of Sylvia Plath, the catapult into the red eye, the vertiginous poems of Ariel. And Adrienne Rich’s uncompromising feminism—her unforgettable line about Marie Curie, which ran through my head night and day: “Her wounds came from the same source as her power.”

  I had a lot of time to think, taking the subway up from the Village to Columbia. Sometimes the crazy Poet of the D Train would turn up on the uptown IRT, rocking, staggering a little through the hissing pneumatic doors in his Ray Charles sunglasses and army jacket and knit cap, smacking his white cane back and forth and against the floor and sides of the car, belting out “My Funny Valentine” in an eerie off-key baritone. Most passengers ignored him as he stood before them (even as he prodded them with his cane) reciting his strange poems—a few people clapped a little when he was finished and dropped coins or bills into his proffered cup. I always listened carefully to his poems because they were familiar: like the ones I heard at Rikers Island.

  A rainbow is a bridge to Coney Island knife in the heart—

  Keep your chicken feet off my many-colored bridge!

  He shouted out his lines, and his tin cup rattled with change. If you paid a dollar for a poem, he gave you a copy, handwritten, signed “The Poet of the D Train.” How did he write out the poems, I wondered, when he was blind? Did he have an amanuensis, like Milton?

  I read manuscripts at Samizdat West in its tiny midtown office with Sam Glass. I sat with the editors and staff members, hunched over black coffee and piled ashtrays, reading hundreds and hundreds of submissions. Stacks and stacks of ambitious and derivative and occasionally insane poems, short stories, dreams, sent with self-addressed stamped envelopes for safe return. (“Dear editors: Here are my latest poems: ‘Signs of Crisis While Composting,’ ‘Scherzo of the Snowflakes,’ ‘Erotic Mailbox,’ ‘My Friend’s Llama Speaks of Fate’—If you do not publish these poems, please note why in space provided below.”) And then, out of nowhere: the occasional good poem, the brilliant poem by the well-known writer, or (miracle of miracles) a jewel written by an unknown writer—the story, the poem that leaped up, full-blown, syntactically fascinating, from the page.

  Sam Glass hovered about, talking on the phone, shouting at the printer (who shouted back), grousing to himself. Occasionally he would sit down across from me and glare owlishly.

  “I don’t agree with you about this piece,” he’d say. “Convince me. Tell me why we should publish it.”

  “It has a certain quiet tumultuousness,” I said.

  “Not good enough,” he said.

  “It’s bold,” I said, “and it makes its argument so skillfully you don’t even noticed you’re persuaded.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”

  I took the bus to Rikers Island. I hadn’t missed a workshop, but I moved ca
refully now—I’d stopped bringing in contraband and I asked no questions about charges or trial dates, though I’d heard from Baby Ain’t that Lily Baye had been taken to Bellevue for psychiatric testing. There was a part of me that wanted to know, badly, who the spy was in the workshop—but another part of me wanted to know nothing, wanted to think only about poems and the writing of poems, wanted nothing but the pure act of the imagination, nothing more.

  Never had brought her poem back to the workshop, revised, and there was further haggling over word choice.

  “Neither word, neither ‘screwed-up’ nor ‘discombobulated,’ works,” I said. “Never, what did the shouts from the male bullpen sound like when you walked past? Not screwed up, not discombobulated—what?”

  “Like ‘woo-woo,’” she said. “Like: Ooh mama! and I wanna do you!—you know, all that pussy coo. And some fuck and cunt too.”

  “Well, that’s not bad,” I said. “Listen to all the vowel sounds. Can you find a word that has that ooo sound?”

  “Don’t write down pussy coo,” shouted Sallie.

  Billie Dee cried, “Coo you, Flat!” and slapped Sallie’s hand.

  “It’s a cruel sound,” said Never. “You feel like a piece of meat that they might tear apart.”

  “Then what about ‘cruel’? That’s ooo,” I said. “You might say ‘I got past the cruel baying.’ Like that?”

  Never sighed, crossed out a word on the page.

  “‘I got past the cruel blue pussy-baying of the male bullpen.’ How’s that?”

  “That,” I said, “is perfect.”

  “I wrote me a new poem,” said Baby Ain’t. “But I’ll wait my next. It about fresh meat on the block. A new hooker she call herself Turnpike: you pay to get on and you pay to get off. You all dig?”

  She slapped her knee twice and cackled. Darlene smiled at her, a Jesus-to-the-whores smile, and Roxanne looked bored, chipping bloodred polish from her long nails.

  Sallie was staring at Polly Lyle Clement.

  “I keep sayin’ this, girl. I like to know why your hair so white like that.”

  Polly Lyle Clement had entered the workshop in what seemed a good mood. She had been laughing with Gene/Jean about something or other—Gene/Jean had a sense of humor all her own—and when Polly sat down, Akilah sat up and watched her closely.

  “Sallie.” Polly left her place and sat down in the empty chair next to Sallie and turned to her to speak. “Did you ever notice that dead people are once and for all who they are? People ought to start out dead, and then they would be honest so much earlier.”

  “What the hell you talkin’ about, girl? You sayin’ I ain’t honest? Or you sayin’ I should be dead?”

  Everyone was listening now. Darlene was praying as usual, but quietly. I noticed that Akilah, who had seemed very protective of Polly of late, had fixed a steady angry gaze on Sallie. Aliganth was out of the room—she’d been paged by the Dep and had been gone for ten minutes.

  “Honest? Sallie, we’re both dead, though I can’t even tell you in what certain way we ain’t alive a-tall. I’ll tell you—I’ll tell you all now about how my hair got white—but you have to make me a promise first.”

  “What you want?”

  “I want you to promise that you’ll tell us all how your face got cut in two. I know—and it’s time for you to tell.”

  Sallie started to laugh, then stopped and kept her split-level eyes on Polly. There was a very long silence. Then Sallie laughed again, but it wasn’t exactly a pleasant laugh.

  “It just so happen, Sight, just what you say—I got my poem about what been done to my face to read here today. I don’t have to talk about it, it’s all there on the paper. So after everybody hear you, they can hear me. Then they know two secrets, right?”

  “When you’re dead,” said Polly, “you can talk about anything. There ain’t no lies for the dead.”

  “There ain’t no lies for me dead or alive,” said Sallie, and she and Polly stared at each other, calmly, resolutely, I thought. But I couldn’t really tell what was going on between them, and I resisted knowing.

  Polly sighed, then I watched energy pour into her from some hyperactive astral plane. She was quoting the Whorehouse Bible one minute (Blessed are the sodomites, they stand at the back door of Heaven, Blessed are the debauched, for they rise again in the morning…. Consider the hookers in the field, they neither bake nor sweep), then staring back at Akilah the other. She shook her head at Akilah and pointed to her temple.

  “I know you. I see who you are.”

  “You crazy?” murmured Akilah—she sat back in her chair, caught completely off guard.

  “No. Wrong. You think you got this world all figured out. But the world figures you out as fast as you can think back. The world ain’t on the receiving end of you figuring—you are.”

  Akilah started to speak, but Polly went on.

  “And you didn’t shoot that gun. I see you in the car with all the police lights on you. You held a weapon but your hand was shakin’so bad. That gun shakin’ and you close to droppin’ it before you could find a trigger. You had no heart in you to shoot. You talk so bitter, but you ain’t no killer, not near.”

  Akilah shook her head, stunned. Her face flooded suddenly with what looked like gratitude or relief, a light came into her eyes. It was then, I think, I began to believe that Akilah Malik was innocent.

  “Well,” I said. “Are we sure we want to handle all this in one workshop meeting?”

  I wished that Aliganth were there—it was unclear to me where we were headed. Since my experience with Lily Baye, the strongest sense I had in the workshop was uncertainty: how to proceed, what to say—and finally, the power and danger of each woman’s fear, the magnitude of each woman’s longing, and the enormity of the consequent ever-present unpredictability. I was not afraid. It was just that I had, for the first time in my life, grasped what it meant to act according to circumstance.

  “I won’t be long,” Polly said to me in a strange voice. I looked at her. Now she seemed half in and half out of herself, as if she were slipping into a trance. Her gold-flecked eyes glowed. She looked around at everyone, then seemed to drift away. She put one hand over her shadowed cheek, and the Southern accent, the deeper voice, came back.

  “I’m up to tell this as it stands. If there’s anyone can’t hear this old story like it needs to be told—it might be best to step away now from where we’re shoving off.”

  No one moved. No one said a word. Then I waved my hand toward the door.

  “Listen, Polly,” I said. “C.O. Aliganth will be back. Do you want to wait to tell your story when she’s here?”

  She just smiled at me.

  “My hair turned white on North Brother Island. And because of what happened there, I’m now lookin’ to set the river right again. I had been living fine on the island, as I told you before. I had enough to eat and I had made a lean-to inside the old lighthouse where the roof had gave in. I slept there—I found an old mattress and a horse blanket and pillows from the hospital. I had a fire I kept stoked and I’d lit a rusty lantern I found. And I slept easy—though I was lying awake looking at the stars when I first heard it.”

  The women had pulled their chairs in closer without even being aware of it, I thought. As with the beginning of each story since the beginning of stories, the thrill was slightly ominous, but something still kept drawing the listeners together as one.

  “I heard a kind of faraway singing or sighing—and it kept on growing like it was coming up nearer, then would muffle a little as the wind shifted. It sounded to me like a choir of angels, crooning at me from who know’s heaven, across the water. I got up, put on a jacket, and picked up the lantern. I climbed out over the rocks toward the shore where I heard it on the wind. There was the sound of the waves lappin’, a ’course, and a bird cry here and there, but there was this other sound, getting higher-pitched as the air carried it to me.”

  Everyone was so quiet that it must have spooked
Aliganth as she came back into the classroom. But she didn’t say a word—I looked over at her as she stood, eyes narrowed, at the door, listening too.

  “And the birds got up flapping their wings and screeching, hundreds of birds, up in the night sky—and then all at once I saw it, rounding a bend, plowing through the water toward me—big as a city on fire.” Polly closed her eyes and I noticed that her hands had begun to shake. “I heard that sound of blood screaming, louder and louder, drowning out everything. Coming at me were a boatload of people burning alive. I saw it speeding fast through the waves toward me—three stories high, a ferryboat all ablaze, lit up like a sky-high torch. All the island birds kept on flying up and above the flames, over the burning decks—the foredeck shooting flames and people running on the texas with their hair and bodies on fire, waving their burning arms, and some leaping over into the merciless currents. I saw the name of the boat lit up like gold on the side: the General Slocum. I could see the captain in the pilothouse—his cap was flaming like a birthday cake as he turned the wheel. I could see that man’s face. They were about twenty-five feet off North Brother when she stove on in. He ran her right on the beach, bow on, in about twenty feet of water. There were many folks aft, where the fire sprang up highest. They jumped in not knowing how deep and fast the water was and were swept right away. I heard them calling in German: Hilfe, Hilfe! I could see the lifeboats were on fire, showering sparks, as they tried to lower them. They were no good. Then…”

  Her whole body shook now; the chair legs rattled beneath her. I glanced at Aliganth, wondering if she would let this go on, and I saw that she would.

  “I heard the other sound. The contagious hospitals had come alive—there were patients in them, the castaways, the ones with scarlet fever and TB—and they were all beating on the hospital windows, beating and beating on the glass, crying out soundless at what they saw happening. I was looking at the island alive again—I tried to remember what year it was, that wreck. I set my lantern on a rock and I waded out. The General Slocum was still pure fire at the waterline and then I watched it swept by the current for another thousand yards until it crashed hard around Hunt’s Point. There were people floating, on fire, in the water, and there were people shouting to each other, swimming out to help them. There were other boats gathering, picking up the still living and the dying, and they were towing the dead bodies behind them. A few of the contagious-hospital patients broke free and flung themselves into the water to help. And I saw the inmates from Rikers Island who swam the currents. That’s how I know what I know. They swam all the way from this island to North Brother—and they were heroes. One was called Lewis and the other Mandy. One Irish and one Mulatto. They had asked the officer if they could risk the currents and were told no, but broke free and dived in right out here. I watched them working alongside the others, pulling in bodies, swimming out to drag the burning living in to shore. The water was cold, iron-cold. Floating by me was a girl, my age, my size, it was like looking in a mirror—bobbing on the water, half burned to death, flickering flames where her hair should have been, and I reached out for her. That’s when I understood that what I saw was not there.”