by Monica Youn
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But if you observe that the sun warms the soil, you must also concede that the soil will grow colder
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BLACKACRE
Also by Monica Youn
Ignatz
Barter
BLACKACRE
Monica Youn
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2016 by Monica Youn
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-750-4
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-946-1
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2016
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931136
Cover design: Tyler Comrie
CONTENTS
Palinode
I
Interrogation of the Hanged Man
Portrait of a Hanged Woman
Portrait of a Hanged Man
Lamentation of the Hanged Man
Testament of the Hanged Man
Exhibition of the Hanged Man
March of the Hanged Men
Portrait of a Hanged Man
Portrait of a Hanged Woman
Hangman’s Tree
The Hanged Men Reprise
II
Desideratum
Against Imagism
Sunrise: Foley Square
Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket
Quinta del Sordo
Landscape with Deodand
Epiphyte
III
Greenacre
Brownacre
Goldacre
Whiteacre
Redacre
Goldacre
Redacre
Blueacre
Greenacre
Brownacre
Blueacre
Whiteacre
IV
Blackacre
Blackacre
Notes
Acknowledgments
BLACKACRE
PALINODE
1.
a bird / falls off / a balcony / panicked grasping / fistfuls of / air
2.
I was wrong
please I was
wrong please I
wanted nothing please
I don’t want
I
In one hand Nemesis held a designer’s square,
or a pair of reins, or an apple branch.
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
(Roberto Calasso, trans. Tim Parks)
INTERROGATION OF THE HANGED MAN
What is your face?
A house, of sorts.
What is your foot?
A chipped stone blade.
What did you dream?
A rain-washed road.
What did it mean?
It meant nothing.
What have you learned?
The sky forgives.
What does it forgive?
Each jet its wake.
What do you want?
A smile, of sorts.
No, what do you want?
I want nothing.
What’s in your hand?
A leafless twig.
No. Show me. What’s that in your hand?
PORTRAIT OF A HANGED WOMAN
The Greeks
had it wrong:
catastrophe
is not a downturn,
not a fall
from grace.
No, it is
the sudden
terrible
elevation of
a single point—
one dot
on the topography
of a life. That
is the crux
of the punishment:
the singling out,
then that brutal
uplifting.
It is as if
a steel clamp
had seized upon
one square inch
of a flattened
canvas map then
jerked sharply
upward:
the painted landscape
cracking along
unaccustomed
creases, cities
thrown into shadow,
torqued bridges
twisting free.
A life is not
this supple,
it is not meant
to fold, to be
drawn through
a narrow ring.
The Greeks
were wrong.
Necessity
is not a weaver,
there is no spindle
in her hand;
it is a woman
wearing a steel
collar, wearing
a stiffly pleated
dress, which lifts
to reveal nothing
but fabric where
her body used to be.
PORTRAIT OF A HANGED MAN
St. Julian (Piero della Francesca, c. 1470)
the eyes / as if / pinned in / place tacked / up at / the corners / then pulled / taut then
pulled down / then endlessly / pouring down / the unstoppable / torrent from
the unseen / source as / if inexhaustible / downpouring remorseless / but made / of remorse
LAMENTATION OF THE HANGED MAN
The minor winds
hemmed all around
with little brass hooks
of birdsong.
They fasten
on me bonelessly,
failed wings.
They tug at me,
each with its own
pained sense
of imperative.
I am always turning
in the same
idiot arcs,
always facing
the horizon’s white-
lipped sneer.
How I would love
to flatten myself
against the ground,
to stop the small
crying blacknesses
of my body with the all-
sufficing blackness
of the earth. Even now
a rake of small-toothed
howls is dragging
toward us, combing out
the hills. If only
I were lying still,
pressed to the ground,
I might be taken
for part of the earth,
tilled into the soil
like any other
enrichment, like
labor.
TESTAMENT OF THE HANGED MAN
ITEM: I devise and leave my body
The Testament (François Villon, 1462)
ITEM: a man
now pendant (still sen-
tient), as tempted, as
amen-
able as Odysseus, strapped to the mast,
seeking knowledge sans
experience: a test
(or a tease)
of the tame,
the sane
meat;
a statement
of intent, of well-meant
amends; an acquiescent an-
athema in its seam-
less unseen net.
ITEM: I bequeath this mean estate
to whoever hungers to taste this marbled meat,
who—having eaten, sated for once—may rest.
This oubliette I once named Little-Ease
now teems with eager tenants: an ants-nest.
EXHIBITION OF THE HANGED MAN
To spectate
is a verb
that does not
mean to watch.
It is
intransitive.
Although
the Latin root
spectare
means to watch;
nonetheless,
it is wrong
to say
you spectate me;
but not wrong
to say
you watch me.
If you spectate
you become
multiple;
you are
an audience
defined by
your attention
to the spectacle.
If I am
the spectacle,
I become
temporal; bounded
in time. I am
an event now,
a kind of show.
I entertain
visitors.
There are
new entrances
to my body,
their edges
outlined in
blacks and grays
and reds like
the entrances
to the face
of a young girl.
MARCH OF THE HANGED MEN
1.
hyperarticulated giant black ants endlessly boiling out of a heaped-up hole in the sand
2.
such a flow of any other thing would mean abundance but these ants replay a tape-loop vision
3.
out of hell the reflexive the implacable the unreasoning rage whose only end is in destruction
4.
the way the dead-eyed Christ in Piero’s Resurrection will march right over the sleeping soldiers
5.
without pausing or lowering his gaze for he has no regard now for human weakness
6.
since that part of him boiled entirely away leaving only those jointed automatic limbs
7.
that will march forward until those bare immortal feet have pounded a path through the earth
8.
back down to hell because there is no stopping point for what is infinite what cannot be appeased
PORTRAIT OF A HANGED MAN
unremembered
all those years sealed
in the desiccating
chamber what
once fed us now
shrunk to a stark
architecture
sweet segments
long consumed
down to the exposed
core the stripped
stalk the taut neck
stretching up
to that lipless
rictus that almost
unwilling first gasp
fixed in recollection
as if cast in liquid
glass that poured
into you that first time
you let your mouth
fall open that first
second you felt
yourself go slack
PORTRAIT OF A HANGED WOMAN
Now she could see that the air filling their rooms was supersaturated, thick with unspent silences. It was starting to precipitate out, the silences spinning themselves into filaments just below the surface of the visible. They drifted whitely upward like seed floss releasing from summer trees. They clustered together at the darkened ceilings of that house. They made no sound, of course—it would have been contrary to their nature—but sometimes she could feel a small pleased patterning of the air, like a cool current deep underwater. Over time they flourished, doubling and redoubling into braids and garlands, lustrous, self-satisfied. They were long enough now to brush with her fingertips, then to drape around her shoulders—necklaces, scarves. They had the seamlessness of the fur of a healthy animal; she learned to trust in their cohesion, their tensile strength. She knew herself, still, to be a creature bounded by gravity, but now she could travel from room to room never touching the floor. She sensed his approaching footsteps not as sound nor even as vibration but only as a stirring among the coils at her throat.
HANGMAN’S TREE
Yggdrasil
To see a living thing—
a badly damaged
thing—and to fail
to understand
how life still catches
hold of it and clings
without falling through,
like water falling
through a bowl
more fissure than bowl.
Just as a bowl
must be waterproof,
a body must be
lifeproof, we assume,
as if a life were bound
by laws of gravity,
always seeking
a downward escape.
But then there is
this olive tree—
if tree is still
the word to describe
this improbable
arrangement
of bark and twig
and leaf—this tree
ripped in three pieces
down to the ground.
No longer a column,
instead a triple
helix of spiraling
bark verticals
sketching the outline
where the tree
used to be. No heartwood,
very little wood
left at all, the exposed
surfaces green
with moss, dandelions
filling the foot-wide
gap at its base. And still
the tree thrives,
taking its place
in the formal allée
that edges this gravel road,
sending out leafy shoots
and unripe olives
in the prescribed shapes
and quantities.
Lizard haven, beetle
home. I was wrong
when I told you
life starts at the center
and radiates outward.
There is another
mode of life, one
that draws sustenance
from the peripheries:
each slim leaf
slots itself
into the green air;
each capillary root
sutures itself
into the soil.
Together these
small adhesions
can bear the much-
diminished weight
of the whole.
I won’t lie.
It will hurt.
It will force you
to depend on those
contingent things
you have always
professed to despise.
But it will suffice.
It will keep you alive.
THE HANGED MEN REPRISE
1.
a blunted / hook beneath / the breastbone / as if / someone yanked / out a / strip of / you a / great inrush / of cold / night an
d / taillights and / the avenue
2.
the nerves / frenzy feeding / on nothing
3.
I knew / god to / be absolute / zero all / movement slowing / coming to / a stop
II
Trust not an acre early sown,
Nor praise a son too soon:
Weather rules the acre, wit the son,
Both are exposed to peril.
The Elder Edda (trans. Paul B. Taylor & W. H. Auden)
DESIDERATUM
But what is it that you want? For example, you are in a high-school parking lot. It’s summertime, empty, the asphalt sticky in the heat, or maybe the soles of your shoes are sticking, or both. The humid air is visible—sluggish cellophane ripples, epoxy threatening to go solid. A lone white truck guns its engine. Knotted to its tow hitch, a length of yellow plastic rope, thirty feet maybe, a messy pile. The carbon-monoxide reek. The truck starts up, the yellow rope begins to play out, uncoiling, looping, unlooping itself. Maybe this is a game, a kind of dare—the rope now hissing in widening arcs across the tarmac as the truck zigzags, accelerating, coming around. And you find yourself lurching after it, staggering, then sprinting forward even as your mind is still trying to grasp what that rough plastic rope would do to your hands, what the sudden jerk would do to your shoulder joints, whether, once having grabbed hold, you would ever be able to let go …
AGAINST IMAGISM
Late July. The wet
and dry zones of a firefly’s
chitinous body
fuse in a blue spark:
a squash-racket-shaped bug
zapper brand-named SHAZAM!
SUNRISE: FOLEY SQUARE
one siren stains the morning in concentric rings
another starts up … stops … starts again … stops—little chips of sound like a climber’s
hammer testing for handholds on an upward sloping face
daylight floods the soundscape with a clear liquid, thickening, flowing over and around [ ]
a lack that could be displaced but not entirely dispersed, an air bubble trapped in rubber tubing
something cone-shaped, nearly discernible, starting to resemble a cry
SELF-PORTRAIT IN A WIRE JACKET
To section off
is to intensify,
