The Cataracts
Page 4
the fight or after the fight
but it says nothing
about the fight itself
which is always two animals
trying to hurt without being hurt.
If you can say you won
even though you recall weeping
and heaving for breath
certain you could no longer breathe
but had the strange presence of mind
to be grateful
that the sand of the beach
was not so hard-packed
that you had to worry
about cracking open the head
of the boy you were fighting
because you didn’t want to kill him
though everything you did
proved otherwise
and yet you worried about the softness
of the sand
and whether you would twist
your ankle which you thought
would be painful even though
you were already cut and concussed and
bleeding freely from your mouth
and exhausted and absently
cataloging which parts
of you would work and
for how much longer
how much longer
because you needed to keep
the boy’s head in the crook of your elbow
until he went to sleep
and you were already so tired
and you even rested your head
against the sand
and held the boy’s head
to your chest with one arm
while fending off with the other
his desperate grip
waiting to see which of you would sleep
first and for how long
if you can say
that is winning then I won.
I thought This is like rescuing
a drowning man
because the ocean
was right there and I had been trained
to do that to rescue swimmers
from the sea even though
I was drowning a boy
on dry land.
The other story is about a little girl
just ten months old
who had been left in my care
and with whom I had lived
since the first week of her life
and though she knew me
as well as she knew her mother
or her father
she had never before been
without both at once
had never been alone with me
or maybe ever even alone
with only one other person
but her mother and her father
had somewhere they needed to be
and so for a while
I would be her custodian
or guardian or companion
and while I knew what she liked to do
with her newfound ability to stand
was to listen to funk
or anything with a conspicuous beat
and dance
I did not know how long that joy
would work
and you cannot know
as a child dances uncertainly
but bravely enough
for the first few minutes after
her mother and father have left her
how long her courage
will last or how she perceives time
or absence or if you
are doing the right thing
to encourage her to keep dancing
or to pick her up and dance
with her into and out of the rooms
where she wanted to go
and in which she did not find
her mother or father.
There is no sound like a crying human baby
and if you believe there is
you are not a human.
Responding to that cry
as if there is nothing else like it
is how you know what animal
you are and you are the animal
responsible for this animal
who seems to want to die
who seems as if she cannot have
the world she wants will asphyxiate
herself or will empty
her lungs of the air
she needs to scream beyond her ability
to scream or breathe again and
if you do not know any human babies
it can sound peaceful
to hear that she cried herself
to sleep empurpled exhausted
but it was like watching her die
each breath shuddering
with the residual effort to scream
impossibly hot and coated in sweat
she fell asleep against my chest
and I knew
no human who can remember
can ever remember what the ache
she is feeling feels like
but I remembered
that boy I had choked unconscious
and that the closer to death you get
the more like an infant you become
as you panic and weep
and I thought God there are
so many things that can go wrong
but then No there are so many ways
to make things go wrong
and so much wrong I had done
or could do
but I also thought about how I held
the back of his head
and laid him on the sand
gently without thought
exactly as I held that baby’s head
as I set her down to sleep
because that is how a human body
knows to hold another human body
the boy who for a while
I had killed and the little girl
who for a while
I kept alive.
Pilgrims
The poem about impermanence,
written by the itinerant poet,
comes to me translated,
as a quote in a book
in which the poet himself is itinerant,
though he resides permanently
in many equivalent quotes
in many equivalent books
that, after being shipped across oceans,
sit on shelves that have been shipped
across oceans, so that I may ponder
impermanence and be grateful
for his poor sleep, his three nights
in the stable, his meditative report:
lice, cold, horses emptying their bladders
by the head of a man whose discomfort
means no element of what he hoped
it would mean, because someone knows of it,
still.
Mine
The draglines abrade Arcadia’s face.
If a mine is a mouth, the perimeter of its pit is the open jaws, the biting, bitter portal.
When I say mine I mean this, not what belongs to me, because this hateful hole cannot belong to anyone.
Picture the skin of a face pulled taut by gravity—the head flung back on its neck, the mouth flung open.
Pinned to that skin, the angles and wires and shovels, the tools.
From some mines it can take an hour or more to emerge, but an hour within the throat of Arcadia might as well be the ocean.
A head pulled back, water poured down the mouth until a lake laps at the mountains of the jaw, the mountain’s carbonate ring.
Eventually the lake is a clay.
In the body of the screaming man is the poisonous matter of men.
Drowned upon descent in grit and silt and in mortal work.
Because we thought this barely-earth was ours, it went to water and it ate us, and when it ate us we screamed, as if surprised.
Tertullian
Surely, says Tertullian, surely:
There are more of us now than then, which is true now
and was true then
, and there are fewer inaccessible places
now than then, which makes me laugh even though I agree,
there are now farms where once were wastes,
and I marvel at his ability to distinguish them,
what now are fields were once forests and again, wow,
that he can tell the difference between the two,
deserts are sewn, marshes are drained, and here I savor leaping deserts
and marshes that bite back, just you wait, Tertullian,
single houses multiply into cities and cities
will multiply infinitely until they are earth itself,
everywhere houses and people and government;
everywhere is civilization; and at this I wonder what
he thinks he means.
Yet our numbers are burdensome to the world, true,
and burdensome to us because, as he says,
everywhere we want more and more desperately,
we suffer more and are louder in our suffering;
disease and starvation and war and earthquakes;
these disasters are the remedy for the human race;
it is hard to resist their wretched, wrecked glamour,
but surely even then these remedies were never applied equally
or fairly, but he guesses and doesn’t know whether it is
all to determine whether the nature of life is as of fire
that is more easily extinguished than rekindled;
to determine if the living proceed from the dead
as it is clear that the dead are drawn from the living,
and I shrug and say Well, he isn’t wrong.
But Tertullian insists God is everywhere,
and the goodness of God everywhere;
demons are everywhere, and the cursing of demons
is everywhere; the invocation of divine judgment
is everywhere; death is everywhere and the sense of death
is everywhere; and all the world over is found
the testimony of the soul, and now I wonder
if he knows that God and demons are like his fields and forests,
in that what looks like the latter can simply be a cultivar of the former,
whether death is everywhere because of the life he insists
is everywhere and awfully,
but this same Tertullian who accuses Herophilos of Alexandria,
the anatomist and founder of that city’s medical school
who in dissecting the human eye found several of its parts
(the cornea the retina the iris the choroid the optic nerve)
and even speculated the calamus scriptorius
(so called because it resembled an instrument of writing,
the reedlike hollow in the cranial bowl in which rested the soul,
which suggests that the body is the pen and the soul is the ink)
of vivisecting 600 prisoners—and look, I doubt it.
If ever there were persons who came to no conclusions
or who made no assertions we have no record of them,
perhaps these persons would be like ink without a nib
and dissolve or disperse themselves
as an undifferentiated stain of souls
but of those from whom we have a record or a legend
we know that sometimes they are in error
and sometimes they simply lie. People lie, Tertullian,
and sometimes they are wrong because they lie.
One way to be in error is to assume that what there is to know
requires that one merely look around,
so that what one concludes is sure, because
that is what one sees, anyone could see it.
Another way to be in error is to distrust the act of seeing
until one knows its mechanism and assume that knowing
the mechanism is knowing whatever is seen thereby.
This is why the idea of the soul persists, Tertullian!
You know, the soul? which is never seen?
which is everywhere! and the report of which is everywhere!
but which cannot be to be seen.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem
a note?
I won’t
even leave
a body
Of Grasses and Flowers
The mountains of Florida were planted according to the design
whereby Floridians ponder elsewhere. In Florida
those who go back ten generations imagine
elsewhere requires mountains and plains and great cascades of ice,
and have forgotten that the ground here
can bear the weight of none of these,
and thus have one ocean that serves
as all three: heavy as the mountains,
wide as the plains, and even ice
just not right now.
Under the sea stand mountains. Over the sea, a plain.
In between, the much-changed bones of sailors
who would not learn to swim.
It will all boil and turn gelid before it freezes again.
In the future architectures of ice, the ships
will wait to thaw
and smell of weeds.
Today the cities are named after saints and succulents
and words for paradise. The citizens
are poisonous and everywhere.
Outside they would come to smell like sweat
but they are all indoors. The most Floridian
of them all even go indoors when they want
the sun.
Beneath the weight of the roads and the buildings
the not-stone of Florida slowly seethes.
Air hisses in pockets. The not-stone exhales
and on the in-breath consumes a street,
part of a stable of chariots, a plaza,
and a palazzo.
The parasitic saints and dwellers in paradise
are unaccountably, grimly enthusiastic.
Under thick slabs of safety glass
they exchange coin for potions and unguents
that promise hours of industry. They wait.
The mountain of Eden hovers six inches
above the skin of Florida, untouchable.
When it sinks, into the chasm made by its weight
will rush the astringent plains of the sea.
Descender
From five thousand feet, the island:
a model city, rivulets of steel, it aspires.
The model of the city is not a surface
on which you would want to fall.
But if you fall far enough you fall between:
rivulets into rivers, spires into stones.
At this scale you do not even know
that the island is an island. It is land.
Solid as rock though porous, riven
with tunnels, each hole atrial.
A mile beneath the city is no longer
the city’s henge, but the city’s chamber.
From here the city’s a single stone,
its room hidden as a pock in marble.
In the room off the alley under the island
in the river: a bed and a dresser, a mirror.
A nightstand and papers, a paperweight
heavy enough to satisfy the hand.
Its shape a broken cube, steeplejacked.
Serrated to spikes and steel. This city.
Five Million Years to Earth
Also known as Quatermass and the Pit,
Five Million Years to Earth is a story told twice
and each telling in the middle of a longer tale,
that of Professor Barnard Quatermass, a type
anyone would recognize as an Explainer,
one of those who, in the presence of the abnormal, remains
reassuringly lucid and in the absence of the abnormal,
comes to appear strange himself. He makes old
things ne
w and things thought new, ancient.
By the time of the events of Five Million Years to Earth,
Quatermass has already established his utility
in a world stranger than a postwar England wants
to acknowledge, and so when workmen excavating London
find what appear to be a paleolithic skull and a bomb
and what are in fact the fossilized remnants
of a mutated prehuman and a rocket ship,
it is Quatermass who puzzles out from the initial mystery
a greater mystery. A skull and a bomb are strange
and a mutated human and a rocket ship
are stranger still, but when you dig a pit you are obliged
to whatever you find in it, for at every layer of the pit
is proof that it was once not a hole in the ground
but the ground itself. A hole in the ground is the eye
through which the past sees the present and the present
can fall into the past, as if via an act of memory, whereby
we make sense of the insensible, looking into shadows
to explain a fear of darkness. London’s riots were white fear
of brown faces, but in Five Million Years to Earth the alien races
are actually alien, are actually races, and for humans