2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
PITT POETRY SERIES
Ed Ochester, Editor
Asylum
Quan Barry
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
The publication of this book is supported by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15261
Copyright © 2001, Quan Barry
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 0-8229-5769-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-7931-9 (electronic)
for my parents Tom and Ingrid Barry—with love and laughter
CONTENTS
asylum
child of the enemy
The Glimmer Man
If dy/dx=4x3 + x2 - 12/ 2x 2 - 9, then
intercellular aubade
intermurals
Job 42:4
kabuki
Kaiserschmarn
lullaby
lunar eclipse
maleficium
masochism
Meanwhile, Back in the Relative Safety of a Ticker Tape Parade, Buzz Aldrin has a Moment of Epiphany…
night soil man
oracle
plague
post-partum
reading
Snow White
some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked
studio audience
synopsis
tradition
triage
“’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land”
vigil
visitor
Whitsunday
Whitsunday
Whitsunday
Whitsunday
woman in love/Agatha, doubting
Zeitgeist
epilogue
acknowledgments
I've lain with the devil,
cursed God above,
forsaken heaven
to bring you my love.
—P J Harvey
asylum
The fish are the first to return:
the moorish idol, the black surgeon,
the trumpet and lesser scorpion, the angel
seemingly radiogenic, the goatfish
with its face of spikes. Whole phyla converging:
the devil rays in fluid sheets, the leatherbacks,
hawksbills, their shells reticent as maps.
On the atoll: the golden plover, the kingfisher,
egrets and honeyeaters
nesting like an occupation. And the flowers:
the flame trees, the now forgotten, the wait-a-bit
all drawn to what we desert, a preserve
where the chinese lantern's elliptic seed
is bone-smooth, cesium-laced.
child of the enemy
I've seen thousands of Amerasians, and I have two Amerasian [children] of my own. Amerasians are willful and stubborn. They have serious identity problems. They have no discipline. Down the street at the Floating Hotel you'll find Amerasian prostitutes plying their mothers' trade. I think there's a racial thing here, something genetic.
—an American ex-soldier as quoted in Vietnamerica
I. NIGHT TERROR
It started when I was four.
Vacation. Door County, Wisconsin.
The alewives rippling on the rocks
like a flock of birds, the sudden knowledge
growing like a toll. Then
I couldn't have articulated it, but I knew.
It wasn't the beached fish that frightened me.
It was the ones that got away, far away
under the wreck of water. The ones that survived
by fleeing, kin left rotting on the shore.
II. TWENTY YEARS LATER
Someone who had been there
(and now incidentally is serving
a natural life sentence)
told you it wasn't all
about killing. Don't ever believe
you weren't conceived in love.
You take his word for it
like an imago splitting the shell,
each wet wing a voice
purged and steeling.
III. CHILD OF THE ENEMY
a.
I was born with a twelfth hole. Instantly
the floating world carved its shame
on the dark meat of my face. A love child, child of perfidy, allegiance
split like a door.
I was born a traitor in the month of Cancer, the white phosphorus
pungent, knowing.
b.
1973. The rice winnows out like shrapnel. Before it's over
there are fifty thousand new hostilities, each birthed face inimical
as our fathers stealing home.
c.
Think of the places women dilate. Beds. Barns. Saigon's streets.
No good Samaritan comes forward and only the moon like a platoon
treacherously approaching, its extended hand like a speculum, the better
to illuminate, disgrace.
d.
Or more importantly
the places women leave. An unsuspecting caretaker. The bacterial streets.
Or
perhaps the unspeakable pitch into burlap
and water. A gulf off the South China Sea where another sinking form
is anyone's guess.
e.
That time Tet fell in the year of the snake. As in reptilian. As in
no turning back. As in when I became
a child of containment. As in how like a monetary policy
I was loosed to an existence feral as a raised bayonet. As in
what the serpent might say: knowledge for knowledge's sake
is both industrial and complex.
f.
At birth
I was swaddled
in a blanket. Pink
wool. Threadbare.
Like everything else
moth-eaten.
Man-made.
g.
Before the last vertical bird lifted like a gurney out of April
and twenty years clotted to a tumor brilliant as a stuck fish
and the dreams began in which you saw yourself as the killer
of trees, before the army finally said it was something in the water
and orange came to be the cloak of mourning, tell me soldier:
who taught you to love like a man, you with nowhere to go
but tacitly free?
IV. THE EXILED
I liked it in South Vietnam.
—Lieutenant William Calley
Later when the black
and white photos came in the rice
sinking in its makeshift grave at the right
of the picture three children wound
about their mother like meat on a spit one eye
rolling loose amazed in the dead
silence of the frame the freshly dead
posed hastily each wound
breaking open like a smile each eye
cocked as if winking under the black
hood of hair the stalked rice
a backdrop nobody wanted to write
the story after all no american in his right
mind would rise to this black
mission 109 civilians dead
gunned down in the eye
of the hunt it was never about them the rice
lush in ways their children could never be wound
so tightly to old wounds
the chinese the french now this blue-eyed
christ seated at the right
of the throne coming to save them from a black
plague that left so many dead
rotting in fields like unharvested rice
this is where it began in the rice
paddies of vietnam my mother her right
hand gripping the earth's black
pillow the night bleeding like a wound
the soldier digging into her with the dead
weight of his lust every star an amazed eye
rolling loose in the night nine months i
had just one picture taken in saigon my black
hair sprouting toes wound
in knots mouth like a fist the rice
paper riddled with figures my right
foot inked marked like a prayer for the dead
listen you don't know me eyes wild as rice
like wounds scarred black
lieutenant if revenge is a rite of passage i need you dead
V. OUR KAMIKAZE
semper fi
Next time they won't be crazy.
They won't stand in My Lai laughing at the split throats, the humid spring
pitted with shells.
They won't drop down on the darker places, a gun in each hand, beguiling:
Here and here. Come and live.
They won't cry out when the doors throw open and they stream like teeth
They won't forget the children, the undeveloped girls they seeded,
shredded.
They won't enter the cities on foot, arms outstretched
to bring the disciples their blood.
Later
they won't not have enough gas to make it back.
VI. FLASHBACK
Every night Achilles laid down to this: how he roped
the breaker of horses to his disfiguring wheel, Patroklos
a boy in wolf's clothing. Then
when the arrow in its thirst arrived, this hero,
tired of living in two worlds,
let it plant, forgiving seed et al.
If only my father could do the same.
VII. OBITUARY OF A BIOLOGICAL MOTHER
She was born upon a time.
In what became. The defoliated.
Congenital. Occidental. Out of order.
Everything. She knew she learned
from rape. Involvement
in lieu of war. In the bladed years. She conceived.
End of ever after.
End of happily.
She is survived by one. Who lives.
As though she were dead of childbirth. Consequently.
She must have. Done
some things right. Mother of a bastard.
Who died on whom.
(VIII. A CODA
Now belatedly
I see
the moon's dry surgings
for what they are.
Newton
believed the Bible
hides our names
in its pages, our deeds
printed like receipts.
I didn't know
I could need to know
like this,
the moon
cutting her indifferent
recessional. And you,
you,
my once-met,
tell me
who gave the world
free will?
Subsequently
who made
the fifth dimension
mercy?
It's rhetorical.
Mother, I never
didn't believe.)
IX. NAPALM
I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree
rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling.
Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled
like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map
pinned with targets, where I'm raging even now.
It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies
and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries,
I won't only bloom where I'm planted.
The Glimmer Man
“Seagal told acquaintances that he believed he had been a holy man in a previous life.”
—Esquire
“I'm not supposed to fight—it's against my religion.”
—Steven Seagal in The Glimmer Man
He has a memory of begging, of shaving his scalp
smooth as an alms bowl. On the fourth night,
in the dojo behind his eyes, he waits for the songbird
to visit him again, open the wheel. He believes he is found
in the old ways—dreams, a shaman pitching silks
into a lake, waiting for the reflection to settle, disclose
where the soul replants its light. To him his last life
explains much—the reed-like timbre of his voice
whittled from the thin mountain air, his taste for black
traced to his immolation in white. “I am a refuge
from the three worlds. My path is love.” He receives
his title in the year of the wood bull, his one act
of choosing the dead man's conch proof enough
to name him revealer of treasures. Cloaked in gold brocade, the joss
sticks' fragrant sacrifice, his body shimmers quietly, illuminated
by butter lamps sconced to the walls. A tulku,
he knows from this life what the right role can do,
how some lights last only until push comes to shove.
If dy/dx=4x3 + x2 - 12/ 2x 2 - 9, then
you are standing at the ocean,
in the moon's empirical light
each mercurial wave
like a parabola shifting on its axis,
the sea's dunes differentiated & graphed.
If this, then that. The poet
laughs. She wants to lie
in her own equation, the point slope
with flagons. What is it to know the absolute value
of negative grace, to calculate
how the heart becomes the empty set
unintersectable, the first & the last?
But enough.
You are standing on the shore,
the parameters like wooden stakes.
Let X be the moon like a notary.
Let Y be all things left unsaid.
Let the constant be the gold earth
waiting to envelop what remains,
the sieves of the lungs like two cones.
intercellular aubade
inspired by The Matrix
As if the maker didn't know where to begin—
diastole or systole, the warring symmetry of closed circuits,
the zygote's rapid spoking into other.
Like everything that shoots grappling hooks, say
the lacewing with its compound eyes, its thousand thousand brood
oviposited to beat the odds. And for what?
A toehold? Dominance? For the right
to determine the helix, the how
things know to differentiate—
the fetal calf's multi-chambered stomach,
the distinctly cooling planets, the stars
zodiacal, seemingly white-hard? The why am I
I and not you? The reason we come into being?
O poor Tom! O flesh which bleeds air!
O how everything wants to generate something!
O there ain't no life nowhere! O judgment coursing
through each particle of an atom's weight!
O the sea's green platelets! O the sky's nitrogen grace!
intermurals
The first time my mother decided to come
somebody lost an eye. Almost, besides,
valedictorian, ivy league-bound, Lorie Ardiff had no right
being on the field, the fifteen fibrous seams
basting her eyelid together
a consequence of this. The
second time
it was Zoë Burbridge who leaned into it, jumped back
like a dancer with the spirit, her cheekbone split,
fresh as an oyster. After that, my mother stayed home
four long years, not even trekking to the Berkshires, NESN
and the state championship where I made
that incomplete pass out of bounds, hands numb
with December, the ball hard as an explicated tumor, pillaging
free at last. She said she didn't spend the sixties
bra burning so her daughter could master the subtle art
of bloodletting in a kilt. Suit yourself. Like marijuana
field hockey led to harsher things—
lacrosse, two semesters of collegiate rugby
where I learned to take it like a man,
dish the dirt, wrap my arms around the enemy's knees
and snap, the contact inflicted with affection. It's only now
I remember the one who didn't get up, the girl
they carried off the field in a fireman's stretcher, leg cocked back
like a carbine. It goes without saying
that I was exultant, frenzied with the power
to cripple. Who wouldn't be?
All those years my mother stayed home
determined like a conscientious objector
to blow this wall tumbling down.
Job 42:4
Forget all you've seen,
bird, old woman, cage…
—Osip Mandelstam
Like a telegram
announcing your death
two months too late.
An exile
to the disaffecting—
the snow, the river
pouring endlessly
over your death-wound,
the cruel hinge.
Nights
the guards warm
vodka in their throats,
the Urals anonymous
like a tourniquet,
like famished hands,
like the blue flames
of corpses.
Where the silence goes on
like a horse
after the rider falls,
where man
is the only god,
you are manifold.
It is our right to ask.
kabuki
Why his father taught him to bite the corners of handkerchiefs, pout
as they had done for the last half millennium, his father's father and others
passing it to their sons—onnagata., woman-like—each generation perfecting it,
switching from lead-based paints that left them dumb to shellacking their eyes