Anne Waldman
then there exists a magnetic stellar blackness
a carnivorous oasis of blackness
where the suns derive their power from obscurity
—Will Alexander
night here and demons
one arrow for every thought
floats through
this one is demon impermanence this one
seduction
dark angel still in charge but on wane, rehearses
tantrums, purrs of collusion’s disillusion
human? you have wonder how brain stem in off mode
is node of escape for the Decider,
he wonders too, all the Deciders do, men mostly
make enough noise
but you are assassin in charge
of think tanks
and no one decides without cunning
bots of regression, the moon turns back on
itself, ghostlier ode in which you used to be loved
and you welcome eclipse,
create ode to a priceless red pearl moon up there
with glowing state building lights
we’ll get the blue on
and you’re back in Paleolithic
leaving the universe to its devices
maybe this is canny darkness
maybe innocence
touch my fear
maybe this is a sign
cut that thought
and an epic told of progress in the bellies of nymphs
how creation would be nocturnal
a language come up of grisly virgin sacrifice
hurtling stones and birdsong, wind was an ally
now they spurn you, powers, what did she say about
another dead rock star in the room?
monster of the mill
what kind of win?
world is secretly kind, but won’t return
always an immortal wishing for more attention
keeps you in focus when a cruel tune
intrudes, reeks of nostalgia
count the footsteps
my lover! my lover!
light a candle for your face
cradle your aching head (it tells secrets)
barbs of projectiles, gear up, load up,
why do they lie to us
we’re here to make a new world!
lies turn cities to dust and detritus falls
words need to be retracted
spill whole magnitude in night’s regressive tremors
hard to be in love but love the words of love
as you escape the falling city
we still dream as one
your tattered wings tucked under
no identity to hold this time
soft impostures for the steal of fire, keeps edge on
deeper magnitudes, stasis preferable?
touch my heart and where I have loss
touch the vacant wound
sans eyes sans ears sans nose sans everything
touch belly’s sweet reward
let me rise and turn up this nocturne
the ten thousand things
in the after hours
it sounds like this:
don’t ever second-guess, but listen in Liszt,
a reckoning of shreds and half notes
and shots ring out in the concert hall
skeletons sway, the electorate gets boozy
slinks in longhouses of ritual, gets ready
another day on the meat wheel
some victory in the wings
an inch on the progressive side
hey we’re shouting CRISE CRISE
au secours au secours
counting hours in nightmare
crisis time we’re screaming you hear?
dream all hours in a reversal scenario
drums minutes in systemic cistern-like symmetries
torque toward us, then splays
all about a radiant nexus or exit scenario
blue waves of retaliation, counterpoint
a clear melody floating on left hand above
arpeggios, break chords
of melancholia!
but you’ve got to get off the planet and see
visions from atop mount sky’s dominance
the retreat of the ice
mount of an ICE raid
concentration of carbon dioxide
highest in three million years
and scientists study stomata
on surface of fossilized leaves
analyze air pockets
marooned in Antarctic ice
flying wide above synthetic missiles
my Masters and their dharmas
Mistress Nod and her serene pleasure
Molecular Madams will whisper in soft repose
“see the little people squeaking by”
another succubus liberated beyond binaries
clues me in misunderstanding cosmic silence
petty and suffocating
speak in obscure night tongues don’t denigrate
reticence for revenge, fury knows no restraint
I won’t shut up but beg it shuts me down
be stilled, “metabolism of centuries”
memorize your new name,
for a tournament,
night’s dominance of the prisoner Anne,
and her battle
with hyperactivated sense protectors
& you will see into fear with this special costly lens
not handing you in a spoon but drink this now
and scry your heart out,
but don’t waste time while it stops a sec for another
“Hey! Way to go!” grow back skin, reptile woman
anything you want in your sub-alterity groove
be a thousand words for Mistress Chance woo her
rollick a long day in another new century
decision in the wicket in the ballot in the body
ayahuasca is ancient immortality clung to a vine
before it was plant or man,
or human’s guilty woe or was just an ear listening
& could read flowers, read leaves
read hours, put the cup to your mouth
and listen to the earth moan and heave
and chatter of pixels lock you in
to vomit the universe
bury in, retreat, barrel down another mountain to ring around
an echo, nothing to win
in this time of peregrination you know best
to circle and dance with elves
but you are mastodon
and you shatter hard
what new planet’s moon you on?
won’t you ever sleep
reconstitute in new plasma
ever more duty in postconsciousness
lap-in-motion paralysis not the game today
I didn’t order that up
whatszup cynic,
put down your defense mechanism reboot smile
refuel
cyborg warriors come out to test the water
let the rider dip a foot
measure temperature, silvery moonlight
what do I pay for sound?
what is a night tax?
have your torch nearby
light escape path then enter bardo’s
sleep tantra, keep breathing,
visualizing a shimmery “AH”
seed syllable of surprise
good to come down the tunnel
some wilderness sorrow
can’t fake it anymore
where is our rose continent
Mount Meru here to climb
center of the universe, exhausting all meditation?
nocturne paired horns with spring
come on the heels of a wartime serenade
Chopin, imitations of twittering birds
a far-off sound, a betterment, a moment
peak of a solstice
&
nbsp; future midsummer dream
no one saved
female choir singing between the notes of tranquility
won’t ever be tranquil enough in this pastourelle
not saboteurish,
no one saved, sisters
and go batten down our hatchless imaginary
get safe model, its premiums,
with a safety lock
of genderless person,
distinctly perfumed, soldiered up
won’t care but blast and destroy
can you see in this nighttime?
find Debussy’s lost manuscript
with its mysterious songs of Sirens
who pass us by, laughing:
wait in line, suckers! gin it up with a new motive
because the night the treaty broke
because the night more raids more bombing
because the night a poet died lonely
because the night
we stopped remembering
you think a nocturne is easy?
it’s a magnum work
a stunt job
sometimes misjudged with fluttery hands
sounding footsteps like traipse of a giant
of what are you afraid?
old stars were lost to us but left trace of
reckoning
“move away we want to know all the answers
the morning after
be armed and ready (with love) to disappear”
Twelve Hours
Sallie Tisdale
The first time I crossed the equator, I stopped for a photo. People usually do. I had come to work in a small clinic in a coffee-farming village in southwestern Uganda, just to the south of the world’s belt. I grew up in the midlatitudes: long summer days and long winter nights, the swing of light and dark like a rocking hammock. I thought of the equator as a human idea—a line on a spinning globe. Its tyranny was a shock. The image of equatorial countries is always hot and tropical, and that means sun: bright, constant sun. Uganda is hot sometimes and the sun beats straight down, because it is straight up. There is no change of seasons. There is only wet and dry, day and night. The sun is always perpendicular and the equation never changes: twelve hours of daylight, every day. Which means twelve hours of night. Half of life in the dark.
My plane had landed in Entebbe during a rolling blackout. We passed through the dense, humid city in a darkness broken only by the shivering glow of charcoal and fires in barrels beside the road. People walked along the road, shopping and talking and waiting, passing in and out of sight. The haze of smoke crawled along the ground like a spirit, but the darkness was a physical thing. It felt thick as syrup. When the power came back on, the city’s low-voltage light was sulfurous and dim, the whole of Kampala a collection of small pools of yellow and long brown shadow.
The village, Ddegeya, was hours to the south along a two-lane highway passing through farmland and small towns. The clinic complex, next to the road, was the only part of the village with electricity. Except for headlamps along the highway and a few huts with kerosene lamps, this was the only illumination for miles. The electricity came from a scary pile of old car batteries. Everything flickered. We learned to carry headlamps in our pockets, never knowing when a meal or a meeting would go dark. On rainy days, the unlit exam rooms were too dim for work, so we played Bananagrams by lantern light until the clouds faded.
When is it dark? How do we know? For most of human history, people couldn’t quit working until the light was gone. Every culture had a definition. Japanese monks say it is dark when you can no longer see the line in your palm. In Paris, it was dark when you couldn’t distinguish a small coin of one region from that of another. Medieval Europe eventually had definitions for natural night and legal night and church night and merchant night. In Scandinavia and Iceland, the sun sets obliquely and slowly, when it sets at all. The time between the sun going down and full dark is long. Some call it twilight rest, a welcome time when it is too dark for work but too bright to justify a lamp. A time for rest and prayer and talk.
There is no such thing at the equator. In Uganda, time is traditionally told as two sets of twelve rather than twenty-four hours: hour one to hour twelve, and repeat. Dawn is always at seven. Sunset is always at seven. Day closes with a snap; the earth spins away so abruptly that you can be caught halfway across a yard. Early in my stay, I was visiting a woman and her children in their small clay hut late in the afternoon when the room abruptly collapsed into black. She kept talking as though nothing had changed, and for a moment I was annoyed. I waited for her to turn the light on, and then I remembered.
The night is longer than sleep. In the evenings we played Hearts at the table outside, under a quivering light bulb, or by lantern. Geckos darted up and down the stucco wall beside us. Then I’d lie behind the mosquito net in my bunk and read by headlamp for a long time. Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night to go to the latrine. I could hear voices in the dark, see the glow of coals—a family around the fire. Shadowed faces, the waver of a charcoal brazier, the dim, shaky light of kerosene. People were awake, of course. I walked to the latrine behind my bright headlamp, hearing faint laughter, a baby’s cry, a song. A moan of pleasure, the click of tools. Voices murmuring together where nothing could be seen.
I began to leave the headlamp behind. I found that I could easily walk by moonlight. On clear nights, the starlight, frothy as snow, was enough. The atmosphere itself shines, a photochemical transformation called airglow; one never sees it when the lights are on. During thunderstorms in the rainy season, the explosions of noise and light were like bombs bursting overhead, a white phosphorescent so bright it left afterimages. I thought darkness had no color, but I was quite wrong about that. Darkness is silver, brown, green, white and black and gray in every shade.
I would sit on the porch alone in the middle of the night. The starlight alone could bring me outside; I never got enough of it. I would read and sometimes write, and then gaze over the long valley. The only artificial light I could see was a single bulb at the Catholic church three miles away. But I could see: low rolling hills, fretted fields, winding paths, mist snaking between trees. Across the clay road, I heard sibilant talk from the pitch-dark huts and knew that I had company in the dark.
I still live near the forty-fifth parallel, a few hundred miles from where I was born. I have a cabin in the woods. By late afternoon, even in summer, the trees are darkly shadowed, and the dark is saturated and close. In Europe, the Catholic Church resisted artificial lighting for a long time. Rousseau said, “God does not agree with the use of lanterns.” Night was sacred, a place where you could meet God, who dwells in the darkness of the infinite, the unknowable. Divine night. Sometimes when I am at the cabin, I turn off all the lights but one and walk out. Black envelops me; I follow the little wavering pool of the flashlight, careful of roots. I listen to the comforting, peculiar sound of rain falling on the pines and the noisy breath of the river. The stars seen in the small windows between the black branches are like writing I can’t decode—encrypted words written on the sky. Then I turn the flashlight off. When I turn around, there is the cabin only a short distance away, an islet of yellow light in the distance. I imagine that I can hear a whispering chorus pressing gently against the lonely night.
It can be so easy to romanticize the lives of others. We like to imagine what could be gained by giving up what we have, by becoming something completely different. Living in the village was dangerous that way, because I was often quite happy there. I wasn’t foolish about the hardship, the suffering both physical and psychic, the boredom and discomfort and pain. I did not want to be an illiterate coffee farmer. But I wondered about the intangibles. The villagers laughed easily, touched each other often, adored their children, and cared for their elders. They were together. What little we know about what makes people genuinely happy is that it comes in part from intimacy and purpose. The villagers had an abunda
nce of those things. So I had to guard against fantasy. I had to guard against impulsive decisions. I was disoriented in the first few days after returning to the United States and the strange, noisy world of supermarkets and privacy and the light switch.
Especially, the light switch. Artificial light has always been rare and expensive; only the rich and royal can waste it. Before electricity was mastered, there was no greater spectacle than a party with a thousand candles, a procession down a torchlit avenue. And now electricity is mastered, and this is still true: a party filled with pretty lights, a procession down a brightly lit avenue, the darkness at bay. A quarter of the world’s electricity consumption is spent on light, but more than a billion people don’t have it.
When I wake in the night now, I am alone. I don’t go outside. I sit up and I turn on the lamp and reach for a book. I think about those twelve hours and all the people sitting together in the night and all the schoolwork not done and all the books not read and all the sewing and repairs and art never started and all the lost time, left behind in the dark.
Sometime after my last stay, the village school installed solar panels. It was a project of several years’ effort, and everyone came to see. For days the lights burned like a star that had come to earth. They left the lights on all the time, because no one was willing to turn them off and let night back in.
As Mica Means Crumb, and Galaxy, Milk
Sarah Gridley
Cautro cosas tiene el hombre
que no sirven en la mar:
ancla, gobernalle, y remos,
y miedo de naufragar.
—Antonio Machado
Perform no operation until
all has become water.
—Alchemical motto
I start
with matter. Daylight’s grain, slag, scrap, and litter,
core cuttings of fall, apples mashed, dark drawer envelopes
gathering seed. Wherever nothing happens to the sand,
where it can settle
in the absence of vibration, it appears disposed
to pattern, as if the resined bow
were getting from the rim
a transposition, or deposition—the streaming of a mare
in gallop against the wind. Sleep, says a body,
but the ear stays on
for balance, knowing earth is both a handful and
a home. Sleep, and light is like a thing
put out at the prow. Sweeter now for being out.
Good night to daylight grain and seed. Sleep, says body,