in pale smoke with this stranger passing
a stranger eating beside me
eating beside me in his hunger
sharing with me this hunger this purest
half of my death.
When I rise in the morning I see
roses on a trellis roses that sprout from essential speech
roses blackening on a forehead of rock.
—For Thomas Bartscherer
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY–Doylestown, PA
August 10–September 10, 2012–May 10, 2014
RED MOON
In the world through which I travel I am endlessly creating myself.
—Frantz Fanon
1.
In the body where the red moon lives
in sulfuric shards broken from the city
in the red book waiting to be written
on hands of black meal herbs calf’s snout
on virgin earth in the calumny
of sheared laurel where the text grows
inside a wheel of wormwood and wheat meal
clothed in hieratic papyrus
our barren root sprung holy in the white
April dusk as one might offer lamella and iron ring
forming a ring on papyrus painted red
as the moon is a black penned surface
uttering amorous spells inside and outside
a frame of marked and discrepant writing
for which the name is outlined in charcoal
red writing around a charcoal heart
inside the formalism of canvas
inside the rudiments of a snare drum
blackened by moon water
rising from the inside of a waning spirit
this vocabulary of molecular change
this boundary of epideictic loss.
2.
As if in a chain of dusk
portending new night new white
elements of eyesight
shorn of their tropic urge
spun from elliptical navigations
words wrung from holy destiny
in the ghost dance of the goddess
Klotho who will spin out her threads
and bear us new life. In the white
waning moonlight to hear
light adjunct to the potent
precincts of shadow—
Let the bar of Tartaros open
in which forth rages Kerberos
armed with a thunderbolt. Bestir
yourself, Mene, who needs the solar nurse
guard of the dead
let your beams draw us back
let us come back into your ghost-white
silence of one who knows
where we were self-gendered
self-taught on an isle left alone
decades upon the dark wheel
and saw you rise like the morning dove
black miraculous bird of flight
glossy and locked in bloom.
3.
I wake star lion
deprived moon gut
song wrung from the hieratic gleam
locust flowers in your bright hair
morning water blackening
each movement aroused by your appearance.
Night goes into night
another spectacle of my ghost-ridden self
merged with my Beloved—
Plunged in darkness, I whirl the wheel for you
The cymbals I don’t touch
Nile’s birth cloth
wrapped around you
until you cast dark light from your eyes
enclose my body in traces of jasmine and honey.
4.
In the eidetic glow
these signs from heaven
A colander black water jug silver plate
utensils of home that serve as symbols
I carry the weight of them
in the indexical night storm
without futurity I leap from one
cross to the next
as if the falcon’s arc were a meeting place
beyond my left hand
and the promontory deepened
and one morsel of flesh
offered itself again to me
beneath a sky split open
letting loose its mesh of wet ash.
5.
To forge memory again
black tonic of spirit’s blackness
where the book of sorrows ends
and the catholic drumming inside a text
whitens until there is only
this transparency left
words inscribed inside a helical
space without guide or guerdon
beneath the pantomimed shards
of early red moon
when we rose to find you inside the paratactic
legend born of another’s
cautionary tale
and heard it say, “Lift a single block
of hollowed-out juniper
have an asp covering the top as a capital.
Fashion him during the new moon
and consecrate it in celebration.”
For which a coiled snake
makes its way through the silent
partitions between thought and action
as though one had broken his staff
on a circle of red dust
and the snake were a legend
held before us still waiting to be told.
6.
Here in the tangent
formed in a crystal block
Here in the Book of Spells
written in cloud musk daylight
broken from a winged serpent
hand over hand the digital display
that lies like a cataract of vision’s
despoiling artifice.
This bent instrument unbraiding itself
to teach us wandering again—
notes of the diaspora
bleak new song of the eidetic son
his image reflected back in the low light of
waning tropic.
These islands with all their minium and lampblack
islands with the vertebra of Zeus
In the reimagined reenactment
of ancestry
wandering in the spell-blasted spring
tide of island waters
shifting steadily westward
Star-coursing heavenly
born register
untiring flame caught
blackening on an iron wick
as if one were planted here
for the duration of a life
inscribing on a surface of blue-gray sand
its desolate cry.
7.
This magical material
stripped of its essentials
carried across the miles
to rest here
in mineral light
in alchemical dark
Born of blood
Shedding blood
putting out roots
androgynous
Born with blood
saffron dyed with golden arrows
A red spell bred from stalwart bone.
8.
And what is sea when I know it.
And what is wind from the east when I taste it.
Black cormorants rising
blue shreds of teal
The magical material that was this book
in its first imprint on flesh
&n
bsp; Dark bay barley and crab
Sage rose fruit pits
Who will set these where they belong?
Come from the black courtyard
sit and hear the spell recited
like a sleeper daydreaming death
hear the quadrant slip
from her hands and pass back
into night’s moon red sway
cylinders jogged from memory
capitalized in blood
sweet arc of penultimate sea hawk
slivered flute of horizon
risen like a metallic horn
A shell of handsome bark passed between us.
9.
And who will survive
the end of the Book of Spells?
Cavern silence
moonlit
crows black winged
in flight away from earth.
Heaven is down there
where the sea divides earth
and we revolve in the light drum
of serene monadic spaces.
A weary cut blazes its way through
canals lit by incense and boatman’s candles
far-off inside the systemic barge
the lifted lean-to of cypress and willow
merges with holy waters
drowned bartered pieces of white
writing lifted to the stars
placed on an altar of parchment.
And one is waiting at your bedside
for what she has come to receive
blood of a sea falcon
embryo of a water pigeon
risen to the heavens
dashed on the rocks below
10.
As She is the Goddess of Three Roads
and claims my heart inside the vessel
spread over these pages
black spirit red moonlit forest
I would rise to meet you here
in the book we are starting to read
like a lantern poised above
our heads
beam-lit bat’s cove
written out of saving
To take its body alive
and release it to the heavens
Seize its body and release it
cut from its eyes a portion of one eye
Watch it go blind
cave-bat blind in the blink of an eye
in the fiery tonic of its release
given back to a form
without resistance—
pure alchemical release
of the bat shape inside
the right fist
And the needle threaded
and given back its blood
pages of spells
darkened patches of lettering
ciphers deposited at the crossroads
blackening the bronze point of a stylus
stored among seeds of barley and wheat.
11.
And the choric urgency lifted on high ground
And the sea dark moving past our sight
in time in time the sea moving past our sight
And the moon inside the book swollen from disuse
And the hand laboring past sundown darkened by sun
So labor begins here and forms a ring inside the circuit of one’s arm
And the surface is black caked with mud and barley seeds on one’s palm
As if prayer were a form of residence on land from which the sea has gone
And flowers are the eyes of Horus and seed is Pan’s gift
Washed in resin as the body becomes what it was when it first came to you
placed on pure linen cloth and onto cloth placed on its surface
seven seeds of wheat and an equal number of barley mixed with honey
poured onto the ground from which they grew and mixed their beings
digging up with their hands in black soil what they could find.
April 17–May 5, 2014
NOTES.
“The Language”: The work of a number of writers contributed to this poem: including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Prose of the World (translated by John O’Neill); Charles Darwin’s On Natural Selection; Hannah Arendt’s “What Is Freedom?”; Sophocles’s Antigone (translated by Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal); Robert Duncan’s “Dante Études”; Rosario Castellanos’s “The Other” (translated by Maureen Ahern and Magda Bogin); Mahmoud Darwish’s “The Rose and the Dictionary” and Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982; Joan Retallack’s “Afterimages”; M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!; and Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost.
“Red Moon”: The source text for this poem is The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation Including the Demotic Spells (edited by Hans Dieter Betz).
The Childhood of the Reader
Joyce Carol Oates
At the roadside fruit and vegetable stand on Transit Road, in Millersport, New York, I would sit reading. Head lowered, scarcely aware of my surroundings, which is the consolation of reading.
Comic books—Tales from the Crypt, Superman, Classics Illustrated (Ivanhoe, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, The Call of the Wild, Frankenstein)—Mad Magazine.
Or books from the Lockport Public Library in their crisp plastic covers—Ellery Queen, H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Illustrated editions of the Iliad, the Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield. Great Dialogues of Plato.
(Yes, it is bizarre: I was reading, trying to read, Plato as a young girl. More bizarre yet, I was writing my own “Platonic dialogues” on tablet paper—though perhaps Socratic irony was lost on me.)
(Often the librarians at the Lockport library would look at me doubtfully. Who is this girl? Is she really reading these books? Trying to read these books? Who is giving her such outsized ideas? But I’d been brought to the library by my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, whom the librarians knew as a loyal patron with an impassioned love of books; since my grandmother had arranged for me to have my first library card there, the librarians may have felt kindly disposed toward me.)
Difficult to concentrate on any kind of reading in such circumstances! At a roadside farm stand you are distracted by vehicles approaching on the highway, and passing; for the majority of the vehicles pass by without slowing. There is an air of derision, mockery, repudiation in such circumstances that will linger in the memory for years.
Only now and then a vehicle will slow, and park at the roadside, and a customer will emerge, usually a woman.
“Hello!”
“Hello …”
“Is it—Joyce?”
A hopeful smile. Or is it a craven smile. When you are selling, you are smiling.
Quart baskets, bushel baskets of pears. How much did my parents charge for a bushel basket of pears? I have no idea; surely not much. Their prices had to be competitive with those of commercial vendors, if not lower. If you were a small-time farmer you could pitch your goods so low that you made virtually no profit and worked for nothing. (All of the farms in our vicinity employed “child labor”—the farm owners’ children. Hours of such employment are not negotiable.) Yet I remember the sting of embarrassment when a potential customer, frowning over our pears, or strawberries, or tomatoes, deftly turning back the tight leaves of our sweet corn to examine the kernels, decided that our produce wasn’t priced low enough, or wasn’t good enough in some way, returned to her car, and drove off.
Sitting at a roadside, vulnerable as an exposed heart, you are liable to such rejections. As if, as a writer, you were obliged to sell your books in a nightmare of a public place, smiling until your face ached, until there we
re no more smiles remaining.
Years later, as an undergraduate at Syracuse University, I was grateful to work as a “page” in the university library for as many hours a week as I could manage—for one dollar an hour. This was my first authentic job; I could consider myself now an adult. Alone, stationed on one of the upper floors of the library (which seemed immense to me, for whom a “library” was the Lockport Public Library), as I pushed a cart to reshelve books like an enthralled Alice in Wonderland, I could explore the stacks—rows upon rows of stacks—English Literature, American Literature, Philosophy; there was an open reading area with a long wooden table that was usually deserted and here I could sit and read with fascination what are called “learned journals” and “literary magazines”—an entire category of magazine utterly unknown to me before college. Discovering these journals was the equivalent of my discovery at age nine of the wonderful Alice books.
For here was Poetry—in which I read Hayden Carruth’s harrowing autobiographical poem “The Asylum”—Epoch (the first literary magazine in which a story of mine would appear, under the name “J. C. Oates,” in 1960)—Journal of Metaphysics (which I read avidly, or tried to read, as if “metaphysics” was as firm and respectable a discipline as physics)—Modern Fiction Studies (the first academic literary journal of my life). Equally intriguing were Philological Quarterly, PMLA, Romanticism, American Literature, American Scholar. A treasure trove of original fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews—Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Hudson Review, Partisan Review, Dalhousie Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Georgia Review, The Literary Review, Transatlantic Review, Quarterly Review of Literature—the very “little magazines” in which, over the next several decades of my life, my own work would appear.
(My first published story in a national magazine wasn’t in one of these, but in Mademoiselle, in 1959. Like Sylvia Plath in a previous year’s competition, I’d received an award from this chic fashion magazine in which, in those days, writing by such distinguished contributors as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Paul Bowles, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, and Truman Capote routinely appeared. How improbable this seems to us, by contemporary standards! Yet high-quality fiction appeared in many glossy magazines of the era—Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, intermittently even in Saturday Evening Post and Playboy, as well as in the more likely Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, and New Yorker. It did feel to me, at the age of nineteen, that my life had been magically touched, if not profoundly altered, by the Mademoiselle citation.)
One of the great reading moments in my lifetime—if it isn’t more accurately described as a life-altering moment—occurred in the second semester of my freshman year when I entered a classroom in the Hall of Languages, and idly opened a book that had been left behind—a philosophy anthology in which there was an excerpt from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. A sentence or two of this German philosopher of the nineteenth century, of whom I’d never heard, and immediately I felt excitement, and a kind of rapport; after class I ran to the campus bookstore, where, with reckless abandonment for one who had virtually no spending money, I bought paperback copies of Nietzsche—Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil—which I have, heavily annotated, to this day.