Nocturnals
Page 9
this was the total … the ongoing … I was deranged
and deregulated … I was free of property … I was
earth … and it was myself circling the moon … to
be simply here then simply gone … to follow the
moon’s path … the scatter on water … to become
that report … passing over trees and garbage alike …
decomposing and flowering … and the life of rot and
the body there … immobile, that the trees and grass
are speaking to it, for it …
the bones, the head … the
gone gaze in the eye …
8.
see this town from a hill field standing … a scenic
postcard lit from yesteryear … or the soft lines of a
small town seen from a distance … a local boneyard
sleeping time away … the open landscape we face
together … sky changes, momently …
9.
consider the brow … consider the head … its
incandescent globe-like quality, that it’s loved …
consider the brow … consider the head, its globe-like
ascendancy … consider the eye, the eye socket … the
aperture, the opening of the eye dilated in love or
death … consider the years since anyone’s offing …
since that tree went down this field hasn’t felt the
same … consider the corpse, the rich life of ions … the
unstable reanimation of flesh and grass … consider
the prow, its translation … consider the night boat on
its way with the soul … consider its passage …
historically we think it an easy ride in a small bark
from shore to shore … but there are many boats and
glutted waters … see the yachts and liners, gondolas,
and tugs … many vessels tossed in water, skiffs,
canoes, trawlers, junks … all of them full, stalled,
discontented and decaying … as it is … so then … as
here … so there … it figures … the light is filled with
dead people …
Prey Ethics
Erika Howsare
I awoke
sheets
scopes my silver
a bow Winchester
a hand reaches
the joy of
suspense
*
During that night in town I was struck by the thick orange sky, a snowstorm closing down on the subdivision’s loops, and from my makeshift bed on the floor I looked up at the deer head mounted to a wooden plaque. It was posed in a slight turn, eyes vaguely cast toward the dark kitchen, a gaze made of glass.
Sodium lights spilling upward onto the clouds. A deep silence in the house, the sky, the neck.
*
A small pliant tree has been stripped of its bark by a male deer rubbing its antlers up and down on the trunk. “Similar damage may be caused during aggressive display.”
*
Nocturnal hunters include foxes, owls, hedgehogs, and the Greek goddess Artemis.
Artemis is the protector of young girls, those giving birth, those leaving fawns secured in vegetation while going abroad to feed in the daytime, obviously off-limits. But the usual essential problems are these:
1. The quarry is nocturnal, the hunter diurnal.
2. Immobility = invisibility, while
3. The less you move the more you see, yet
4. Paralysis in sleep confers blindness, not sight.
Thus the hunter must roam against the instinct for shelter, while cultivating attention against the instinct for sleep.
*
In the Anthropocene, deer living in proximity to humans are observed crossing roads and moving around in the nighttime, daytime, and points between. Their rhythms flexible in response to habitat loss and other changes.
They flourish and overflourish up and down creek beds, bottomlands, hillsides, reproducing, browsing, marking trails, acting out ancient instincts for territory establishment and communication, old patterns of sleep and rut and food, amidst the new conditionals: driveways, fruit trees, invasive plants, Liquid Fence, overpopulation, school bus, Thanksgiving, interstates, night vision, salt licks.
If unthreatened, deer might feed and rest at regular intervals over a twenty-four-hour period, but pressure by humans may push them toward a more nocturnal rhythm.
As I have been told not to walk alone at night
up the slope to the ridge.
*
cock and wait the lady
approaches:
doe
a full moon
its retinue
unmarried, her nightstand empty of a clock
one feather shifts to denote a window
in the cover:
first aim best aim
*
Domestication has its degrees. A chicken in a coop is made a human invention. Birds at the feeder. Mice in the baseboards. Hoofprints in the garden. An antlered head on the wall. A bra in a drawer. A doe in the bed, just waking.
*
A fact that doesn’t fit: I would like him to pursue me through the house.
I had been told in the library “You will come to my room.”
Age fifteen, I had received nighttime phone calls. “Ub-seen,” as we termed them in those days.
In a full moon our eyes adapt and we find it possible to roam the meadow, rubbing our velvet on cigarette machines.
Take me against a tree.
To be hunted by hand.
Hunters prefer bucks as trophies, though the does are better eating.
Take me with my spine against the spine of a running buck.
*
At dusk, a neighbor and his cousin shot a deer on our land, which they’d tracked from the nearby mountainside. We complained that we could have been injured had we been out walking at the time, and after dark, in apology, they gave us the best cut of venison, and we consumed it.
Another time the neighbor asked me if he could track a deer across our land, a wounded runaway he, out of honor, needed to find and finish off. I said yes and watched through the window as he slowly moved into our woods, past the baby swing at the edge of the yard, examining the ground and twigs and other signs invisible to me. If I posted NO HUNTING signs on trees at our property line, they would be unreadable to deer.
*
If I gaze
a shadow breaks off
and Artemis’s large ears
turn in my direction
edit me
count points
*
There is the urge to enclose, to possess, to pierce, to control, to locate and contain; to witness magnificent running on slim legs and then to arrest that movement.
*
In Virginia, for example, the 2017 season saw nearly 200,000 whitetail deer harvested by hunters: 95,563 antlered bucks, 12,967 button bucks, and 82,093 does.
*
There is the urge to intently eat, interrupted by desperate listening; to flee uphill; to warn other members; to leave scent on trees along paths; to fragrantly exist as a body that flees; to be witnessed in all one’s magnificence, running.
*
An atom bedded in a thicket, attended by nymphs
a position a range a velocity of 3,100 feet per second at the muzzle
*
Scatter, tails up, white rumps signaling danger. I tossed my hair
as I left the library having been summoned to the bedplace of a male who would remove my ear tag and corral me with his intention, his scope, that I happened to walk in front of
I looked back through a window in the branches of the shelves I saw him carrying a strap and ammunition
He was neither kind nor unkind
*
Artemis, protector of her own hide. Her attendants expected, also, to pledge chastity. She can turn a gaze backward on a seer.
She can aim a touch back onto the toucher.
She wears the skin of deer while hunting.
Stags pull her chariot; they are silver antlered.
She takes, at times, the form of a deer.
Gaze at what is sacred, even accidentally: Actaeon, the unlucky hunter, witnessed Artemis bathing and so she turned him into a buck. Was his mind still human as his own hounds chased him down? Or had he turned stag even in thought? And what, in such flight, would be the difference?
*
Spotting: A man in a truck notes your late-night position via spotlight on your reflective eyes.
You cannot disobey your instinct to return the gaze, although this might prolong your life by hiding your eyes from the spotlight.
Habitual alertness to danger turned to one’s own disadvantage. The man will be back, on one or another edge of the night.
*
Greek Artemis, associated with the moon, evolved into Roman Diana, etymologically associated with daylight (di- as in diurnal) although her connection to the moon persisted.
“The symbol of the crossroads is relevant to several aspects of Diana’s domain. It can symbolize the paths hunters may encounter in the forest, lit only by the full moon; this symbolizes making choices ‘in the dark’ without the light of guidance.”
*
Pursuit may be highly desired by a target.
At any time she may change her mind.
To save her hide.
A gaze may be performed in semidarkness.
The quarry may be more adept at navigation than the pursuer—for example, better equipped to see in the darkness. Thus, entering the forest puts the hunter at some disadvantage to the deer.
But entering the night puts me at some disadvantage to a potential pursuer.
There is a theory in which pursuer and pursued, hunter and quarry, predator and prey, gaze and bullet, distance and contact, musk and perfume, animal and trophy, midnight and morning, Artemis and Diana, desire and fear, may at any moment change roles.
*
My husband showed me a video of a hunter being attacked by a buck—the man unable to keep his footing, stumbling backward through brush, repeatedly falling, while the buck pursues him, using front hooves to punch down onto the hunter’s face and chest—the hunter, having dropped his gun in confusion, having little defense remaining other than arms crossed softly over his face, and looking considerably less masculine than the antlered animal, which had, until moments earlier, been his fleeing prey.
Of course someone else, friend or hunting partner, was also present, holding a camera, pointing the lens at the struggle.
The video includes no resolution to the conflict. But one imagines contusions, perhaps a broken nose or clavicle.
One feels little sympathy, somehow. As quarry.
Or just say: Here are two animals on earth, both armed. Both aiming for dominance, which may be only an extension of survival. But only one is traveling with a companion primarily motivated by documentation.
Involvement by gaze, not flesh, turning aim on another human.
*
“All photographs were taken by the author”
“All deer were killed by the author”
*
Artemis in the Anthropocene could sit on the deck with a glass of iced tea and aim at the hostas, grapevine, okra, sedum, tomatoes. Sooner or later the deer will arrive, ready to eat or to hear certain words. “But that’s not hunting. That’s just killing.”
*
“This old mosshorn was sure to do a sneak along one of those trails. This supposition was such a certainty I scarcely needed the reassurance of placing my hand in his warm, recently vacated bed.”
At dusk, we awake and prepare to track, following sparse trails of gum wrappers, spent shells, a fragment or two of neoprene fabric, blaze orange.
To walk to the library alone was forbidden after these phone calls gazed into my bedroom. A male friend walked with me.
The attention is flattering. The ammo is in place.
One never knows, one’s protector never knows, whether a hunter has amorous or violent intention. Until we meet in the field.
He arose in the dark to seek me, or allowed night to fall over him while waiting for me to pass, sitting downwind of me, a gun in his lap.
Wanting to be hunted with honor; not only that, but with a danger that is a convincing but utter pretense, like a camouflage jacket, entirely removable.
*
Technicalities:
“the pull”
(that is, the feel of the trigger at the moment of release)
“should break like a winter icicle”
*
Crust of ice on the step, a fan of snowmelt that refroze overnight. A red-painted curb under orange light. An alley door, a no space, a dim void through which she travels, up and down a ravine. Dark music. I look down at my body in its protective coat and part of the scene breaks off from the rest.
*
Through the parking lot under orange lights, dampness in the pavement cracks, on a cold planet where one animal takes another.
Searchers fan out through the woods, looking for signs of a hunted girl. Cameras downtown had captured the image of her walking past in the dark, a little drunk, then a predator catching up to her, capturing her with one affectionate arm, one gently loaded arm. Tomorrow the searchers will find her by a stream. Partly dismantled.
Hard to understand, Artemis’s complete disdain for the entreaty of a desirous pursuer, her single-minded devotion to performing the act of pursuit.
Never feeling chased.
Or maybe it isn’t hard.
*
Under the ethics of Artemis, young girls receive protection. So do wild creatures as a group although individual animals may be hunted. General protection, specific predation; kind and unkind. One wonders if the formula was turned back on her human flock. Artemis personally killed the seven daughters of Niobe as punishment for Niobe’s blasphemy toward Artemis’s mother. And perhaps there were other mortal girls who, having shown insufficient interest in chastity, were permitted by Artemis to be made into prey.
*
proto-prey obvious
to arrowheads trophies
as appearance as target
seeing what asks for crosshairs—
I want grab
I take come and
get me
as my face
I feel standing out from the background of trees
*
On his way to fight the Trojan War, the Mycenaean king Agamemnon accidentally killed a deer sacred to Artemis. The goddess retaliated by sending unfavorable winds to prevent the Greek ships from reaching Troy. Agamemnon decided to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to appease Artemis.
After luring Iphigenia and her mother, Clytemnestra, to the sacrifice by claiming he’d arranged for the princess to marry the warrior Achilles, Agamemnon prepared to murder the girl. In some versions of the story, he succeeded. In other versions, at the last moment, Artemis replaced the princess with a deer.
Years later, when Agamemnon returned home at the conclusion of the war, he was himself murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover. Homer has the king posthumously complain to Odysseus: “That woman, / plotting a thing so low, defiled herself / and all her sex, all women yet to come, / even those few who may be virtuous.”
*
Minor adaptations: More than three million women in the US are now licensed to hunt. And though they are essentially herbivores, a few species of deer have been observed eating insects and other very small prey.
*
Artemis could see so well she could hit a target at three, ten, a hundred leagues.
I can see almost zero distance into the future. But I know it will get dark tonight.
_____________
NOTE. Quotations are from The Deer Hunter’s Guide by Francis E. Sell, The Natural History of Deer by Rory Putnam, Wikipedia, and The Odyssey as translated by Robert Fit
zgerald.
Lux
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
How to describe ETs who exist in a realm without distance or time
1.
She does not distinguish spirit from body, which interweave via the
senses.
“It begins with wonder, then interest.”
The light of mind and sunlight entwine in your eye, though
separately each is unseen, like starlight without an object to fall on.
Deep space is black.
Inner life coalesces with daylight, a spectrum on which
fluctuations of light from the object stimulate sight, while you
simultaneously enhance your reception until finally you see the
ideal within the real.
Your consciousness lovingly assimilates new events to enhance
cognition that ensouls space.
I present physical evidence where applicable, but my interest is in
my informant and her words.
I learn more about that Eureka moment when intense phenomenon
becomes transparent to the ideal.
2.
Material and imaginary flow into each other through a crack of
light, “observation,” between worlds.
Juxtaposition becomes a blend of unconscious and external event;
the more distant the relation, the more emotional, poetic, the
perception.
For my witness, bright physical light weakens the interpretive.
But there are two emanations, one from the eye (close to mind) and
one from a star, which conjoin.
Her close encounters inscribe such diffuse, liminal boundaries of
the imaginary.
Psyche becomes increasingly collective, as it assimilates with the
gorgeous world.
It’s as if a star offers you the nourishing ineffable light of a new
realism between subject and object.
That beings of light from outer space manifest to you physically is
unproven in my field, but still true.