Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  managed for miles above the locks:

  even at the source—

  I left the poem and thought about the word “source.” Then I picked up a copy of a book of poems by Hart Crane and there it was—a source, a revelation. A sudden linking of poetry and politics in the lines “Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits / The agile precincts of the lark’s return.” There it was—Ho Chi Minh’s “mind turned to steel.” So it could be Vicky Renslauer was right after all, a mind could be steeled, according to Hart Crane. The steel trap, but leaping—because poetry is always leaping. The steeled intellect choreographing in memory the flight and return patterns of the lark. This was not the steel fist of cognition punching through a wall of oppression—or not only that. This was the same mind, hardened, tempered in the fire, but in love with beauty and compassionate—the power of the lyric was beyond proof. A poem must leap and the heart leap with it, I thought. Steel made of silk.

  Sam Glass and I were at dinner at a famous writer’s floor-through brownstone. We’d been served fish quenelles and béchamel sauce and had been more or less ignored by the older, established writers at the table. I was bored and wanted to go home. Then suddenly our host, a famous Southern writer transplanted to Manhattan, began talking about North Dakota, the prairie state where my mother and father had grown up. He told a story about how his father had bravely ventured out there—“into the hinterlands”—as a young man working for the Roosevelt administration. He mentioned that his father had been sent to an unknown town called Wyndmere, near Wahpeton (he pronounced it “Wa-pay-ton”), to calm down the “natives,” who were suspicious of federal policies.

  I happened to know why those natives were restless—the government was there to support the banks taking away their land, foreclosing on their farms after the great drought and the Depression, when the ruined farmers could no longer meet their mortgage payments. My own grandfather had narrowly escaped losing his farm. When it rained just a little—after months of dry blowing soil—my grandfather would stand out on the farmhouse porch, my mother said, and sing to the rain. He would make up a poem of thanks, a hymn, and let it fill his lungs—his hat off, his face, wet with rain and tears, lifted up to the dark rolling prairie sky.

  “And the rain,” he would sing, “the good Lord sends down rain.”

  I smiled up the table at the famous author—“Wyndmere? That’s where my parents are from!”

  The author had been relating how his out-of-place father, fresh from Harvard, had reacted to the Dakota wilds, impatient with the local hayseeds, the lack of manners and sophistication, the dull food and crude accommodations. He looked down the table at me, unsmiling.

  “Fascinating,” he said. Then turned back to his friends.

  “His daddy was lucky he didn’t end up with a rear end full of buckshot,” I confided sotto voce to Sam Glass. “The farmers loathed the government types who hung around their land. They warned them off their property with sawed-off shotguns.”

  Sam Glass looked at me, an unreadable glance, then swallowed a spoonful of raspberry fool.

  “Sort of reminds me of your own attempts at diplomacy,” he said.

  “We disagree about almost everything,” I said to Sam Glass later.

  We were exiting the dinner party, where we had been disagreeing about the world, disagreeing about poetry and politics, disagreeing about what we liked to eat. “So what’s the point of whatever this is?”

  “I give you something you need,” he said, and put his arms around me and brushed his lips against my ear. I stood still, waiting, barely breathing but feeling his breath, steady and warm inside my head.

  “I annoy you,” he whispered, “with a deep recurring annoyance. I get under your skin, I get under your opinions, I’m like an irritant in an oyster—but the result is something shining and tumescent, pearl-bright.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Glass,” I said. “Pearl-bright?”

  “I won’t shut up,” he said. “I’m under your skin. You don’t know how to get rid of me. And I’m not stopping. You have to choose, here—between your pale savior and me. I’m trouble, but the kind of trouble you need.”

  But the fact was, I didn’t need Sam Glass or his kind of trouble—I knew better than to listen. Why then was I standing there, mesmerized by his honey-warm poison in my ear? O steeled Cognizance! Why wasn’t I in flight? Because—was it true?—a part of me I didn’t want to recognize hovered above that honey and pearl-bright, contemplating it?

  The next day I worked on my poem again, but I could not add a single word. Outside a rainstorm blew up, thunder spoke under the rising sound of car horns. I sat for a while chewing on my pen, and then I got up and went to the front closet, where I’d placed our (very slim) wedding album (actually just some photo prints in a manila folder) and an album my mother had sent me. She’d typed out her reminiscences in a very organized fashion and pasted in old photographs and the silhouettes of long-ago pressed flowers. I opened it at random to a description of the house and surroundings in which she grew up:

  On the west side of the house was a huge grove of cottonwood trees and next to that the biggest vegetable garden: everything grew, from potatoes to peas. On the east side was the apple and plum orchard. The crab apples were my favorite. There was a huge cottonwood tree close to the farmhouse with a bag swing that I loved. I had a playhouse in the grove of trees where I made mud pies.

  There was a black-and-white snapshot of my mother at about nine years old in sunlight, in her mother’s flower garden—wearing a middy blouse, her blond bangs cut Buster Brown style above her level light eyes. I’d done a double take when I’d first glanced at the photo—I’d thought it was a picture of me.

  The fall of 1921 was a great time for me, as I would be entering first grade in Earl School in Wyndmere. The school was just a half mile from our farmhouse and we could walk through the meadow on the way. I loved school from the very first day and was always sad when I heard the four o’clock bell.

  There were other photographs: my mother feeding a wobbly-legged colt, my mother and her siblings seated in a step-by-step ascending row on the mastodon-like back of a threshing machine, my mother and her friends in white dresses in a schoolyard holding the flower-bedecked ribbons of a maypole. My mother as home-coming queen with her attendants, my mother in a mortarboard: salutatorian.

  Followed soon enough, like a dust cloud forming on the horizon, by the terrible drought and her mother’s death when she was sixteen. I couldn’t bear to read once more about my grandmother’s death, so I read about the drought:

  The dust storms continued, but the worst year for me was 1934, the year I graduated from high school. That year has gone down in history as the driest year in North Dakota. Not a drop of rain fell all year. The farm turned dry as ash. The scholarships I had won were useless—there was no money left, not even for a bus ride to St. Paul—and my dreams of college ended.

  Her hopes: dry as ash, blowing. The farm turned to straw and kindling. The plum orchard and the cottonwoods and the potatoes and peas and the poor horses:

  Some days it would be so bad the horses would become blinded and frightened by the blowing dust and break away from their halters and run around the farm dragging their harnesses, completely lost. Some days, during the dust storms, it would be completely dark by three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was blotted out by the swirling dark dust.

  I felt that dust settling around me, the sun disappearing. Outside, though, in the present, in New York City, it thundered, and rain fell, ironically, as if it would never stop. The phone rang and I answered it, expecting it to be K.B. It was Kyrilikov.

  I told Kyrilikov about my grandmother, who had died when my mother was sixteen. The nurse who’d tended my grandmother (and who had come back with the body on the train from Minneapolis to Wyndmere after a botched operation took her life) stood at my mother’s side at the open grave. On my mother’s other side stood her high school English teacher, Miss Byers. She’d put an
arm around my mother and recited poems, one after the other, a kind of endless kaddish, so that my mother would have these poems to remember, so that she would never forget how the words adorned the grave, like the wreath of irises she’d placed there, her mother’s favorite flower:

  I hang my harp upon a tree,

  A weeping willow in a lake;

  I hang my silenced harp there…

  For a dream’s sake.

  Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;

  My silent heart, lie still and break:

  Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed

  For a dream’s sake.

  “You know,” said Kyrilikov, “all this you are telling me is in your eyes. Also the poems, there too. Your eyes will never grow old. I can see this.”

  He reached out and gently touched my brow as if he were blessing me, then withdrew his hand. Then he bit the filter off another Camel and lit up, waving out the match. We’d met at a coffeeshop and were having soup and tea. We’d both gotten pretty soaked in the rainstorm. Kyrilikov pulled a blue-flowered silk scarf from around his neck, shook drops from it onto the floor, and winked at me.

  “Well, then,” he said, “I will take vodka with my tea. This I need to restore my blood. Today he is feeling a little weak.”

  I smiled at him and tried to change the subject. I had been reading (in translation) the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, and I was full of questions about her. I had come to revere her—a woman within whose life poetry and politics had collided. Tsvetayeva—like Rilke, whom she adored—was a poet’s poet. Her poems were intensely lyrical, intensely complicated. She was moody, bisexual, willful, dreaming constantly of a male muse ( great: a male muse! I thought), constantly distracted, but always lyrical. After a halcyon period of poet-adolescence in Moscow literary circles, she was catapulted into the Terror, still hanging on to her poetic purity. She was thrown into unimaginable loss and deprivation and fear about who would be taken next by the secret police. Marina watched family and friends arrested—and finally her husband (the White Russian spy) spirited away and shot against a wall. Then her daughter imprisoned, her son in jeopardy. Every person she knew under suspicion, under indictment—what could that be like? Still, she refused to accept the amnesiac narrative that ideological politics weaves: another roof garden over the slaughterhouse. Her poems veered away from the steel trap. Kyrilikov ordered more hot tea (sipping a little vodka on the side from a flask) and talked about her, then talked about his elderly parents in Moscow, whom he did not expect to see again. Then I tried to tell him about the women in prison on Rikers Island, but he would not listen and would not spare them a second of sympathy.

  “You cannot see in the same light real poets—who embody the enduring aesthetic, who have stood up to death and prison for this aesthetic—and these criminals who manage to scribble one line or two behind bars.”

  I argued with him, but he was unrelenting, steeled in his mind.

  “Try to imagine,” he said, “a country that has been taken over by believers, you know? Et cetera, et cetera?” He often dropped “et ceteras” into his conversation as he searched for words. “And if, in this sad country, all the words coming out of the mouths of its citizens are the lies of this…belief, this invention, if lying is a near-sacred civic duty, then Poetry, et cetera, et cetera, becomes a moral act.”

  After a while, the rain stopped. Kyrilikov and I were walking back to my building on Twelfth. We walked down Eleventh Street, past a boarded-up town house that had been blown up one warm spring night a year or so earlier. A group of young ideologues, members of the Weather Underground, had been assembling a bomb in the basement of the town house. The house belonged to the wealthy and distinguished poet James Merrill, who had grown up there. I told Kyrilikov that I’d heard that the bomb-makers (who had planned to detonate the explosive at a military base in New Jersey) had gotten into the house through a family connection. He remarked bitterly that they had gotten out again by mis-setting the bomb timer.

  “I know this poem,” he said, gazing up at the collapsed roof, puffing on yet another cigarette.

  “Perhaps could be called ‘Revolution,’ true? Perhaps these young True Believers thought they would add to poems of Mr. Merrill—a few quatrains of their own? What do you think?”

  “I think your English is improving, Joseph,” I said.

  Friday night. Aliganth stood just outside the classroom door as usual, accepting passes, checking everyone in.

  “Same old trouble on the way,” she said to each arriving student. “You takin’ your time there, trouble. Billie Dee, you slower comin’ than Judgment Day.”

  Billie Dee was penguin-walking, which meant that she had been given an extra jolt of Thorazine. There was dried spittle around her lips. She looked at me, one eye rolling, the other unfocused, then glanced away, distracted. She began singing, in that power-quaver, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”

  Polly Lyle and Akilah had shown up early and were deep in conversation as I came in, with Sallie trotting just behind me. I’d watched Akilah during the previous class as Polly had told the story of the island and her white hair. Akilah’s usually stoic cynical look had dropped away. She’d looked intensely involved, she’d appeared moved as she listened to Polly talk. Now she sat head to head with Polly, asking questions. Polly Lyle shook her head, then nodded slowly, then began sketching something in her Rainbow tablet.

  Akilah looked up and saw me, and her face went through a series of split-second changes—from deep concentration to surprise to a hidden fearful look. I saw her reach out, about to tear the page from the tablet, but Polly Lyle ripped it away, crumpled it, put it in her mouth, and began to chew it. I heard Sallie make a sound behind me.

  “All right, then, I’ll go to hell!” Polly called out, the words a little garbled as she chewed and swallowed. She grinned at me, because she knew that I would recognize the quote. It was one of the most famous moments in literature—when Huck Finn tears up the reward notice for a runaway slave and decides to stay loyal to Jim, decides to help him escape.

  “Teacher, sometimes we do what we do no matter what we’re told. Even if it be told to us as Law.”

  “So does that make us all outlaws here?” I asked. I wasn’t sure, yet again, where Polly was headed.

  “Who you sayin’ all of us an outlaw?” Sallie growled. I felt her swift deliberating presence, felt her struggle to grasp what she had seen.

  “Do you know,” Polly said, still holding my gaze, “that there are names carved into the trees on North Brother? And right there among ’em are the two inmates who saved people? Lewis and Mandy? There they are, big as an elephant’s alphabet, all carved on a weeping willow tree. We were talking about that willow tree.”

  Baby Ain’t, Billie Dee, and Darlene entered and sat down.

  “Here I am, ladies!” Gene/Jean stood in the doorway. “And Yours Truly/Yours Truly holds in her hands here the best poem ever written in this class.”

  She waved a piece of tablet paper back and forth.

  Baby Ain’t held her nose and waved the air too.

  “Where you been, Jean? You piss your poem before you get here? Or it got rank B.O., like you.”

  “A haiku,” Gene/Jean announced. “But it ain’t the size that matters. It’s the way it used. It’s like me: irresisting.

  “Now this haiku,” Gene/Jean bragged, “would be seventeen syllables—five in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third: count it out, ladies! An ace job by Gene—one cool stud.”

  “A half-ass job by a half-sex half-wit,” murmured Sallie. Gene/ Jean spun around on her heel and swung hard at her, a big roundhouse punch, nearly connecting. Aliganth intercepted the blow in a flash, straight-arming Gene, her hand on her nightstick.

  “Don’t tempt me, Mister and Missus,” she growled. “I hit you so hard you come up a third sex.”

  Gene shrank back a little, looking dazed and surprised at herself. I sincerely hoped she wou
ld not throw up again.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I apologize profoodly.”

  Aliganth glared at Sallie.

  “You keep that mouth in check, girl. You start enough trouble with that lip of yours. Don’t think I don’t know what you up to.”

  The lower part of Sallie’s face smiled slowly, but the upper part—the asymmetrical eyes—remained cold and watchful. Looking at her face was like staring through a camera lens at a distorted image as one turned the focus rings, trying to align the overlapping edges of the object in the landscape, but her face never came into clarity, never got properly aligned. She looked at me and winked—a strange sight since her eyes were askew, one higher than the other.

  “Bombs away,” she whispered. And winked at me again.

  After Gene read her haiku and we talked about it, after we discussed hyperbole and its opposite, litotes (Gene/Jean seemed to combine both), Aliganth suggested we finish up—and then she left to escort poor dazed Billie Dee to a “hand-off” officer, to take her back to her floor. The other women lingered for a while before Aliganth returned—and to my enormous surprise, Akilah came over and sat next to me, not smiling, but not looking unfriendly either.

  She nodded quickly, once, twice—as if she’d heard a voice in her head saying something with which she emphatically agreed.

  “I was acquitted of bank robbery charges in Manhattan court yesterday,” she told me.

  “Great,” I said. (What did one say in this situation? “Congratulations”? “Way to go”? “Guess that’ll teach them!”?)

  Akilah nodded again.

  “I’d really like to ask you something. I’ve been wanting to ask you this from the beginning. You actually think you can teach poetry? I mean you in particular. Because I believe in order to teach poetry—you have to have lived.”