Nocturnals
Page 26
Indeed the husband walked the wife out of the brightly lighted grocery store, firmly gripping her beneath her arms, holding her erect; he helped her into their car, returned to the store stony faced and determined to retrieve the wife’s cart, nearly filled with groceries at the end of aisle nine, for the husband had no intention of aborting the shopping in such a way, abandoning both their carts, squandering forty minutes’ effort, a bloody waste of time. Pushing the wife’s cart, and, awkwardly, his own cart, filled with fewer items, to the checkout counter. In a loud voice insisting that his wife was all right, his wife sometimes fainted, she was on blood thinners, or maybe it was low blood pressure, or both.
Certainly the husband had seen the scarecrow with the grinning pumpkin head, (expert) hangman’s noose around its neck, he’d even counted the number of coils, ten coils, all in an instant, scarcely blinking he’d seen, he’d understood, taken charge, wresting the narrative into his own control, where it belonged, as he’d taken control of the grocery carts, maneuvering them together to the checkout counter, completing the shopping on this Thursday night, but it would be the last time at goddamned Safeway, that was certain.
*
It began to happen then, she hated him. The husband—him.
Ceased speaking his name, indeed ceased thinking his name as (she realized) he’d ceased speaking her name months ago. In any case night made “names” ridiculous. The redundant is by nature ridiculous. Night swallowed, enveloped, rendered redundant and ridiculous the preoccupations of daylight—distinctions of identity. Why did anyone care in the slightest who they were, or who anyone was? As the husband would say scornfully, what did any of this matter? Only the drop matters.
The drop is all that matters. Too close to the floor, your neck isn’t broken in an instant; instead, you die a slow death by strangulation. Too far to the floor, the weight of your body can cause your head to be wrenched from your body, decapitated. Gushers of blood, to the ceiling and beyond.
(Such astonishing instructions, on the Internet! They’d discovered, or rather the forensic specialists had discovered.)
Hating him, a humid sort of hatred, as a seed falls through a crack in pavement but germinates nonetheless, pushing up, upward, blind, eyeless, in a perverse tropism. Hating him, wandering in the night in the back lot of their property, grateful for a starless night, moonless night, groping her way. Smelling the dark, wet earth beneath her bare feet, she feels her heart leap with something like hope—she is alive, that’s to say she is alive, but the sensation soon fades for he will be calling to her pettishly, he will be seeking her out, his companion in nightgrief, he will not allow her to escape. He is one who never forgets a grudge, his hurts are boils and bunions upon which his (ungainly) feet insist upon walking. The wife is aghast to discover that the husband, a fastidious man in his former life, has let his toenails grow in this posthumous life, thick as horn, deformed, surely painful; she wonders if the (ingrown?) toenails might become infected, abscessed, and in that way the husband will begin to die; a lengthy, awkward, improvident, and spiteful way of dying that was, in its way, a refutation of his former efficiency. As if declaring, sneering—You would like me to kill myself more readily but I will take my time.
But if you want to die, go ahead. No one is stopping you.
But it is to be nothing like this. For the second time within a span of 237 days, the wife is astonished.
The room at the top of the stairs. The room never (again) to be opened.
After the last of the investigators had left. After everything to be removed from the room had been removed. A confused memory of the emergency medics who’d been the first to arrive, the first of the strangers, the first to intrude, shockingly young, balletic in their grace, shouted words, commands, descending the stairs with the slender, broken figure on a stretcher, belted in place. There was something tender in such care, in such dispatch. But the wife remembers mostly the silence of the young medics, for words are mere sounds even when shouted, and fade rapidly.
Pressing her ear against the door. For some reason lifting herself onto her toes, as if this might help her hear. How long she has been pressing her ear to the door, she could not have said.
Yes, she can hear—faint music on the farther side of the door, his music. Never before had she listened to his music, which had (vaguely) repelled her. She can almost hear—is it breathing? Of all sounds the most miraculous.
From the foot of the stairs the husband calls to her. “What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”—he is excitable, frightened. His words are slurred for he has been drinking whiskey. He has been taking more than his share of the barbiturates. His eyes burn red with rage and bafflement and so quickly she calls to him—“It was not your fault.”
She sees how he recoils from her. She sees that his (male) grief is rapacious, never to be satisfied. In a quavering voice he mocks her—“No. It was not your fault.”
Then climbing the stairs to stand beside her, panting. It has been forbidden to open the door, to enter the room, there has been no need to speak of it, each has understood, and indeed the wife has not even thought of opening the door and betraying the husband’s trust. Only just pressing her ear against the door, holding the breath in her lungs, listening. At first the wife expects the panting, trembling husband to strike her but instead the husband gropes for her hand. It is a shock to her; the husband no longer looms over her, a threat. In his stocking feet he is no longer a tall man. His back broken, he is no longer a tall man. His hand gripping hers; not in recent memory has his hand gripped hers, not since the late winter of the year; she’d have thought that the husband would want to break the mangled fingers of her hand but no, he only holds the fingers, there is gentleness, almost timidity in his hand closed about hers. And so, blameless, they stand at the top of the stairs side by side, virtually of a height. Blameless, they will forgive each other, she supposes. They have no one else to forgive.
Night Watch
G. C. Waldrep
NEW WILMINGTON
the species is a place
not always warm-
or -blooded
but tempered, beat
on the stretched
skin
of what you want
& the sound
layers up, the night
has no
intentions, as such
around the stretched
hide, legible
with perforations
systole diastole
special instruments
introduced
from the continent
evolved
to measure our
exquisite carousels
CHORALE
a gentle ear, husked
in the night’s
field
this far & no further
admit
the tool, & then
the plural gestates
my
beard’s dark pollen
confers its spiral
well-met,
Inheritors: I salute
this nation
foresight prophesied
*
contagion sifts
Jerusalem
from Jerusalem
its black book
crammed with soot
its gangrenous
foot
& backlit mesh
How great a city
is sprung
from a cinder’s rung
SPRING PLOWING
shaking my loss—
so that peace
ran down from it
I laid my beggar
crosswise
against the door
Sleep, beggar
I hissed
—be a king
on this awful bier
Go on, you
league of lilies
beneath
the sea’s dial, you
stinging cloud
sleeping,
&
nbsp; my beggar asked
for nothing
& so the night
passed quietly, I
stanched my sores
with my eyes, I
never thought
myself a prisoner—
PAREIDOLIA
the precise rubric, as of origin
the maternal
crup
phonic in its mesh—
*
dense lapis of
exhalation, saline psalter—
*
rage’s tangent murmur,
prismatic
funds the cultus,
propagates—a loyal host—
*
remit
the twilight chord
as something
ecliptic,
signed against trespass
*
but stellar
in its chipped embroidery—
NIGHT WATCH
gaudy crypt of the moon’s brass
bleating
against the high passes,
the distaff channels
beat a lip from vacant measures
suffer the night’s tragic
counterpoint, compunctive
a bone-prowess
& seized
handsomely, the awl’s
fresh gimp as it speeds
the lovers’ half
echo, half quarry
—there’s a war on, undisclosed
effluence
the flesh’s tempered bell
& a bank
where I wash sparrows
lay them gently
on the shrine’s bare shelf
other organs fled (& left behind)
Four Nights
Elizabeth Robinson
A ZONE IN THE DISTANCE, A LOCOMOTIVE IN THE NIGHT
Imagine a nocturnal landscape.
Imagine the purely imaginary.
Lay yourself down here. On it.
On a red velvet couch sheened with the shed pelt of an animal.
As distance is—
Coated with itself. Tempted
to make its absence tranquil, drowsy
instead of imaginary.
*
One sentence runs across this landscape, emitting steam
or smoke.
We said it was “purely” so, but then were troubled by the idea of
purity.
Steam, or tufts of silken hair coating the night. It was neither
tranquil nor calm, but resulted in the
use of this pronoun, “we.” Inadvertent,
imaginary train jaggedly deciding whether or not it
will accept destination. Far
*
from itself, but what
is far from itself? Distance is, its
movement in darkness, enough
light, barely
to make the landscape, a cool body we make
to move toward warmth. Red plush.
*
A remote imaginary soothing a near one.
Yes and no. Yes.
A couch laid with blankets under which figures lie.
Match struck to conceive the night and glaze it with faint sulfur.
No and yes. Yes.
ON THE SOLSTICE
What’s below the bridge,
whatever it is
as it tumbles past,
forsakes time altogether.
The bridge, its hollow self,
wished to be less hollow or
wished less to be hollow.
Something sleeps beneath it,
rubs like flint on its surface.
Trite as fire and water,
light and dark.
Time curled in its hollow
and rare time in perfect—
in contradiction—its
bridge mute
amid itself.
“DARK” “NIGHT” OF “SOUL” PECULIAR ANATOMY
The body of itself walks in an unlit garden
Pulls its flesh from its bones in hunger
Border of dark imbuing all with blur
Lips on it, cheek’s soft rounding with the content
This would be no night
Night was a mountain cut into its own plane
The rack of horns on its head and
flesh undoing the list of presences
Before going on, it pulsed
Creatured Floraed
As night’s self-definition:
to go forth without being observed
whose uncertainty so guides
*
It felt as though
It seemed
Seam as though there had been a death
but no hovering from which to subtract
Pursed at the rime rhyme border
Perceived, and wrongly
Death was not absence, and is
Death is not this, and so prickling
Death’s sac holding it in
*
The body bests itself as presence
Quills of it
perturbed as if hope in a garden one cannot quite see
As if and though
The barb nestling like a moth in its self-
same light
*
If it were light it were not
To remove it all like scent off skin
Remainder scales, armor
almost
As it was the night’s volition, ultimate, to go forth without being
Render the night the night the coating on the eye that remains
when the lids move away
Reversal of blindness to a garden replete and vacant
Soul immersed in it as if as a stain moving upward
LIKE NIGHT
Description is like night, like an atom dividing, like all that is
subject to perception but insubordinate to it.
Like night, description is fibrous, its certain and particular elements
less “thing” and more like a means of groping. Like presence,
but less linked to the rhyme of presence, its there-not-there:
description is fissile, like the smallest unit of itself made potent by
abolishing itself into absence. Like, in
fact, night, despair comes into description whose increments shuffle
forward aborted in these increments, ever more precise, and like all
sheens overlaid on a
dark surface, more brilliant. Like a crack opening on realization, isn’t
description always palpating its own darkness and then cut on the
ragged edge of its own
luster? Was night temporal or less than temporal, and what would
time reveal about the many ways it describes itself? As like as
describing is to description, so night is
like time, but time’s bitterest antagonist. Like the fine fibers of
the eyelashes tangling in black inability to sleep or to see. Like
indirection, and the way
indirection starves itself in blindness. Yes, description is as subject to
division and emptiness, to the beauty of the eyelashes shading the
eye from no light. Like
beauty that may exist—or may not—bearing no witness. Things that
disintegrate are like that. Description is again and again like night,
taking a thing at its
vulnerable wholeness and taking it apart. Description, like distress,
occurs so often in quiet, and rouses itself to be as unlike perception
as night is to waking,
and waking to certainty. Description—alert but not really awake,
brought forth like night to assuage its hesitation. Qualifying thus:
that hesitation is a fullness and not a
fragmentation. Thus night, inured to itself, crumbles and description
builds. Without compare: this. Atom. Fusion mistaken for likeness.
&
nbsp; Nocturne
Danielle Dutton
From the back seat her son explains what would happen if she got sucked into a black hole. Moon-faced flowers are wild sweet potato with heart-shaped leaves and hairy seeds, white and alive in the night. “It’s a perfect example of exponential growth,” he says. In summer the light stays long, cicadas apocalyptic with the windows rolled down. Fast down the hill toward the Ohio heading home. On the opposite bank an oil refinery spreads into Kentucky, its tall stacks shooting flames into the sky. “Imagine your body being split in two halves,” he says. West Virginia is wild. It’s right there on the signs: montani semper liberi. Montani semper liberi means mountains are always free? “Then imagine both halves of your body being split in half, and those halves being split in half, then those halves being split in half, and then those halves being split in half. So you’d just keep splitting your pieces until you were only molecules.” You were only molecules, she thinks. And those sweet potato flowers like a million wagging moons. “Mom?” he says. “Are you listening?” In a story she read last week at the beach a man in a straw hat cut off a duck’s head while the children stood and watched. “Lid—lid—lid—,” the man called. “Qua—qua—qua—,” said the duck. Then the head fell to the grass and the duck’s feet ran its bottom half away. “Yes,” she tells him. “Yes!” She shouts over the wind.