Notes toward the Chernobyl poem I will never write

In the forest, an uprooted tree stump quietly un-breathes. It appears, if you squint, like a massive boar’s head: roots tapering to a snout, many-nostriled, and the mossy, worm-rich eyeholes.

The reports that came out of Germany two years ago sound like a Biblical plague. Wild boars, having rooted in befouled fungi, pullulated in number like fallout. Under headlines run rampant with hyperbole (“rampaging,” a favorite word), the boars, one read, had attacked humans, hulked on roadways. Hunted, their meats were too radioactive for consumption. For 50 years more, reports said Exodus-esque.

Before sleeping I thought about them. Boars glowed (cartoon green outline) through pines. They moved inside the carpet that hangs on the wall, its interlocked red-yellow Oriental tendrils turned to hoof and skull. The helmet of Beowulf, I thought. Gold tusks, gold muzzles mizzled in blood.

Then once in the spring, teenage boys lined up, uniformed, in a clearing by the school. The forest was a dark wall at their straight backs. Small children watched, drawn, as the call came: “Gas!” ONE they reached for their masks TWO raised them to faces THREE pulled at the opening FOUR FIVE SIX the green skin slid over their skin. One fumbled. His head was too big. He dropped the mask and the children’s somberness broke into laughter. As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. Finally he fit it on; the boys faced us uniformly, hairless, with bulbous glass eyes.

For a long time I gathered them in – the boys, the boars, the deathly atoms – and then, confounded, helpless to make them new, I released and forgot them. Though sometimes still they’d morph and mingle in me, projected on a red background. In the dead red grass 25 years after the explosion, nothing grows. And there is little noise, except for a steady click like Geiger counters or the mandibles of a dog-creature I once saw in a photo. Its mutant body clawed all its many small legs.

Death doesn’t care whether it’s written about, or how well. So why this anxiety to deal with a tragedy, to do justice to it? – these active verbs writers use as if to animate their art in describing it. Or not to deal: to obliquely reference acts of violence for which no one is to blame and no insight offered (Ted Hughes, Jorie Graham, I’m looking at you).

Chris sent me Jean Valentine’s chapbook Lucy, and I read this –

Lucy
When the dark bodies
Dropped out of the towers […]

And Iraq
And Iraq

– and feel a flicker of anger lick up the length of my brain.

The poems, addressed to the earliest known hominid Lucy, are too lovely and quiet to elicit anger. Loveliness, maybe, ignites it. Those dark bodies, blasted into symbol. It’s not fair of me to pull these lines out of their whole context, but I the reader am supposed to feel some emotion at 9/11 and Iraq and I just feel anger at the poem for abstracting, for making itself weightier through so slight a gesture. Joshua once commented on yet another futuristic film that alluded to Nazi Germany: “World War II is not a metaphor, it was a specific set of events. If you turn a war or tragedy into a metaphor, it loses its specificity.” 

Everything in human life is symbolic – I read this again and again* – gas mask and ancient helm, the card drawn for the lightning-struck tower, the monster in the forest. But how to render what’s symbolic dynamically? This question is not rhetorical.

O Apocalypse which has already come and never stops happening, I will not do justice to you or for you. What interests me more than reality or justice or prophecy: when reality itself perverts, slips, tricks the eye (a trick that could show what’s under or surrounding or in things). These things: The face in the dead tree. The faces of my pupils made alien. The long slick of brightness today, unbearable, sunlight in the road's melted ice. A black figure wavered there, like a heat pocket, like a figure in a vision full of eyes. As it drew near, an old woman appeared inside it. She smiled as she greeted me.

...

* “…Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.” Boris Pasternak,Doctor Zhivago

“At every single moment of one’s life, one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.  Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.” Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Cain in the Moon

So how do we feel about people who post their poems on blogs? Really grossed out, or only a little? I have to tell you, this winter has yielded a surfeit of poems. So I share one with you. It’s based on a medieval legend that Cain lives in the moon carrying sticks. I hope you like it.

Along the road towns happen,
Then, like a match struck, burn out
To fields ice-scratched but unbroken
By anything human. At times you catch
A scrap of coat, a shuffling flutter,
Where under packed branches someone bends.

These roads without rest for him
Seem designed to shame a pedestrian
Seen through bus windows in the prose
Of his labor. But a sibilant transience,
How blue smoke ribbons trees across the field.
You think of the boy and his mother
Beside a station who sang, put out palms.
Vague-aged, puckered like the too-soon-born,
We sing to bring the spring, both song
And action a lisped recitation, noteless.
Palms closed on coins and scorn.

Alone those figures mark you,
Barely. Like a little movement, forked
With twigs, inside a shadow on the moon.
Taken together they might gather,
Eternal, into some noble symbol
Of fugitives and wanderers. Noble,
Yet small, for seen from a great distance.

On an altogether separate orbit,
The bus stops in another town with a name
You won’t remember. Sodden, aproned,
A woman in the road battles water.
Ankle deep in it, she fills a bucket
With snow as it melts into pools, runs,
Fouls, freezes, again melts. Having been
Meted this arrival, you loiter un-met
But by her shovel, which receives
Then disposes what it doesn’t need.

Friendmongering

Dear friends and casual acquaintances,

Do you feel boring? Do other people’s eyes glaze over when you narrate your life’s mundane details?

Well, you’ve just found a captive audience: kind, gentle, good-listening-skills-having ME!!! If you’d like to describe your dinner or complain about your job, I actually don’t have anything better to do than listen. (Everything here is cold as balls and crushingly lonely, and after I finish my work I end up under all the blankets in the house with Middlemarch and go to sleep at 9 p.m.)

For the price of a cup of coffee, you can Skype my phone for a few minutes, whenever you like (984981952). I regret I don’t have enough internet capacity to use Skype myself, but in return for your call I'll amuse you with jokes.

Love, your best sad friend,

Ashley

Magnificat

The women washed each other’s feet. They unrolled thick stockings down thick rolls of ankle. It was cold. Even the light, though the room had the inoffensive anonymity of all community center rooms, was cold. The meat of their calves, white and heavy. Some kneeled and the water poured down into plastic tubs. Then they stood, held each other and prayed. My soul magnifies the Lord.

Nastia, in her pink dress, more pink ribbons than dress, weaved through them with her sing-song phrases. In the year since I lived with her family in Kaharlyk, she has learned so many words. She made up stories. A fox goes into the woods to pee. As she is peeing, a wolf comes along and yells, “Go away!” So the fox goes home and goes to sleep. The end. The other stories were variations on this one theme, though with different animals.

Other children stood quietly. They were stunted, milky, with blue shadows under their eyes. One boy stomped around muttering, “Fock, fock.” Once they came with their grandmother to the house. Her hands were enormous, all bone. Taras complained to her about Ilya’s poor grades with Ilya in the doorway. She made her grandson read aloud Ilya’s report card, with her running commentary of “Oh, terrible … terrible,” as she clamped an enormous hand to her face in horror.

In the cold room, the women prayed the way little girls in watercolor paintings pray: hands tightly clasped below the throat, arms pressed to their breasts. Blessed is she who has believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. I think I would wash a stranger’s feet if I was asked. I was not asked. When men came back into the room, the minister prayed in a high, breathy voice. “Praise, praise God,” he repeated, his eyebrows knit into an upside-down V. When they pray, they always seem on the brink of tears. My attention slid off. Pieces of the day – no, that’s too poetic, it was mostly thoughts about sex – came sliding into my brain to fill up the idle space, like swampy water where children dig holes in a riverbank. 

…

Nadia and I went to the market one morning and saw the spice seller. In the middle of a day that was colorless – half-melted snow, asphalt, drab black-clad bodies under a leaden sky – the spices stunned me. Cumin, saffron, star-shapes I’ve never seen before, all the dark reds and yellows. The spice seller is from Azerbaijan, his face composed of sharp angles and deep hollows. He talked on the phone as his hand, swift and accurate, scooped up spices. Something that’s maybe Arabic came from the back of his throat, punctuated with odd hard Russian words. His beauty stunned me. It was ancient. Like that of a mournful onlooker at the crucifixion.

…

Barely suppressing a wave of giggles that welled up in her, the angel arrived at the annunciation. Nastia (my host brother Igor’s girlfriend, not the toddler) recited her lines in front of the church in white-feathered wings. Igor made an uncomfortable Joseph, arms stiff at his sides. All of the teenagers bit their lips in the half-smiles of trying to laugh at themselves before anyone else can laugh at them.

That afternoon, at the youth group party, Nastia traded the wings for a plastic set of bunny ears. They flashed red and blue lights. No one explained to my friend Megan and I why we had to attend this party. Maybe we are still “youth,” though we were some 10 years older than the others. That is, except for a middle-aged man whose presence also went unexplained.

Boo Radley, I thought. Doughy skin, pale blue eyes blinking with an infant’s guilelessness, gray teeth. He wore a yarmulke. “My costume is a Jew!” He seemed kind of off, maybe autistic, which is now the more medical-sounding catch-all for those who seem “off.” When he sat beside Nastia, she’d squeal and edge away. Mouth curled, she shook off his hand in the prayer circle as if it were contaminated. I took the hand. It was thick and rough, almost crusty, as if covered in scabs.

He thought it a good joke, whenever laughter broke out, to add a scream-laugh. His neck tucked down into many folds, and he shrieked, “EEEEE-hee-hee-heeeeee!” The minister’s young son mimicked him, cake frosting smeared on his face. Stretched in the mock-laugh, his face looked not yet formed, almost fetal. He pointed and shrieked and shrieked.

In the rising noise, I felt myself trapped in some kind of Fellini film. At any moment, Boo Radley would stage his own funeral and fat tears would roll down his doughy face, and Nastia would dance around him with bunny ears flashing, and the child would shriek his unbearable laugh.

…

It is difficult to forgive children. Adults are worse. But adults have logic, even if it is used perversely to justify cruelty. Children are cruel just to see what cruelty feels like. Maybe I will renounce this statement later. I am trying to figure them out, children. When handed baby Pavlik, at first I am alarmed – he is heavy, and wriggly, and kind of freakishly muscular for a baby. He tries to wriggle from my arms. I bounce him around, raise him up in the air. He had a fever, and then one night my head is burning, pounding like no pain I can remember. I wake up Nadia at one a.m. She gives me some pills, then puts a wet cold cabbage leaf on my forehead. It feels wonderful. “Everyone is getting sick,” she says. “First Taras, then all the kids, now you…” She stares in front of her and looks so tired, like she could lie down and sleep for days and days. I touch her arm, in a lame sort of way; I am the cared-for one and caring comes strangely.

…

In 1968 my friend Penny wrote a book of poetry that she never talks about. She Who Has Believed is about the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth. They walk quietly in the hills. They love each other. “Wisdom without answers,” she wrote. When I told her I found the book, Penny said not to take it too much to heart. She speaks in a voice so quiet you fear a careless motion might shatter it. Everything she’s said I take to heart. She loves purely. And so she is the only person I love without selfishness, without self-consciousness or fear of being shamed. What would it take, to love like that always? “She has seen her mother on hands and knees,” another friend, Amy, once wrote in a poem –

She only knows that there is bowing involved
when caring for some other thing’s mess,
and she has never bowed.

Queen Jane and the Empire of Death

“So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in,” Rilke wrote of Paris. Everyone comes to Paris to die. I saw their graves growing out of mossy hills in Pere Lachaise, stone pressing up to stone. It smelled wet. Writers especially come to Paris to die. On a glass partition around Oscar Wilde’s enormous grave, I planted my mouth in a dingy cloud of lipstick kisses.

There is something selfish in these pilgrimages to the literary dead, or maybe just naïve. A grave, or even a site where someone lived, does not bring you closer to a writer or her work, just as eating madelines in bakeries does not actually retrieve lost time. Being in a graveyard does make a person want to kiss something, I guess. But encounters with the living of Paris are equally shallow: streaming beautiful bodies glimpsed only in fragments. Mentally I butted against them, their features compiled into a murky hermaphrodite.

…

One night outside the Moulin Rouge, Joshua and I wait to meet a friend of mine. We don’t go in; a show costs 200 Euros, and the tourists under flashing red windmill-lights give the scene a lurid Disney World vibe. A family exits a cab. I mean, an absurd, gay parody of a family: an older man, orange-tinted with swoopy white hair, dressed as if he’s come off a yacht; a younger man sporting oversized glasses and bow tie; and a very tall woman, or drag queen, with striking bones in her face. “They look like a Wes Anderson movie,” I say. We become greatly excited.

We wind up in a dive bar blanketed in old celebrity photos cut from magazines. The bartender stoops beside us, a slight, grayish man who I deem Our Lady of these flowers, of smoldering Vivien Lee and a toothy Brad Pitt. When I ask if he has whiskey, his wrinkles breaks into a puckish smile: “Yes… YEEEeeesss!” He giggles. He is very drunk.

Later, familiar riffs fill my ears – he’s put on my favorite album from the summer after college graduation, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. "You’re tired of yourself and all of your creations … Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?” Like coins in river mud, that old life rises in burnished pieces. The bartender’s singing along, in words that aren’t actual words, and he stares at me. As if sealing a pact, we nod to each other.

…

“There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey.”

Rilke again. I read this in his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, two summers ago, between the air-conditioned cafes of Manhattan. I was hiding from beautiful young people. Joan Didion referred to New York as a place only for the very young; I wished then I had been much older, whole-er, my outlines calcified into one stable shape, my face into one face.

“Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something to be tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.”

The multitude of faces in a city like New York, or Paris, all of them changing and desired and quickly forgotten, I sometimes resent as a symptom (or cause?) of consumer culture. Shopping for friends – their social world, an amnesiac and antic carousel. Do I pity myself? Very well then, I pity myself; so does Rilke at times, and being strange in strange places can make you do so.

…

You can tell what a culture values, they say, by a city’s tallest building, be it a church, a castle, a city hall, or a skyscraper. There is only one skyscraper in Paris, a black angular phallus lumped on the skyline. They can’t build any more, Joshua tells me (full of fun facts as ever), because the ground is too full of the dead.

The catacombs beneath Paris, which I was unable to see, have a disgusting history. By the 17^th century, the city’s earth overflowed with corpses, their putrid residue seeping into the water supply. Mass exhumations began in the latter part of the 18^th century; one description (it’s from Wikipedia, sorry) is particularly evocative: “From the eve of a consecration ceremony on the 7th April the same year [1788], behind a procession of chanting priests, began a parade of black-covered bone-laden horse-drawn wagons that continued for years to come.”

Now these skeletal remains, from millions of bodies, are arranged throughout the tunnels in massive, terrible, beautiful constructions – like here and here. Before the entrance is inscribed: “Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort” (Halt! This is the Empire of Death).  

I should end this. I love the idea of the catacombs, but to end here, at the Empire of Death's gate, feels too much like a morbid, moralizing Victorian novel: Here is where the carousel gets off; here the result of our vainglory; here the skyscrapers sink into pus. But I am no crow croaking doom, not yet.

So I’ll end here: the second floor of Shakespeare & Company bookstore. The room is walled with old books. There’s a picture of Walt Whitman, mistletoe hanging from a janky light fixture. Huge bouquets of flowers gather around the window, offerings to the longtime owner George Whitman, who died last month. From a bench you can sit and watch the river outside, and beyond it, Notre Dame.

The store, you might know, is another literary pilgrimage site, offering board to vagrant writers, and has been visited by Hemingway, Henry Miller, various Beats, and other assholes. But let’s not scrape for traces of the dead – we’ll leave the dead to themselves, and talk about pleasure.

Physical, unlike all others, is the pleasure of selecting one book at random from very many shelves. This is what happens: The day – in its clattering, inchoate, relentless noise – draws together in form of words. I chose a book of Vita Sackville-West stories. A plain hard-bound copy, heavy in the hand. Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour, it was called. I sat and read. Outside, the cathedral bells rang.

Cities in the very rich hours

Seen from a bridge over the Seine, the city of Paris extends in wide boulevards. Winter light slants on it in a gold smolder, early morning runs into evening. You may feel, as you look, that the city returns your interest, and opens orderly out for you.  

In order and distance, cities become like books of hours. You see the sweep of a day in stark perspective: plowed fields like lines of verse, peasants threshing, nobles riding. Just beyond, towers grow from the walls, stacked tight in their peculiar perpendicularity. All laid out for your looking. So a traveler, facing wind off the water and a breadth of streets, sees the city: an unbroken fruit.  

My brother Joshua, who accompanied me on this trip last month, told me that modern Paris was designed in the interest of crowd control. In wide streets, without winding alleys to duck down, the rabble can’t evade police so easily.  

And Paris turns you into rabble. Christmas Day, pouring into Notre Dame, you are a swarm of awed bodies between columns. Windows assault the eye in many-colored glass, humble you. They are meant to. Under impassive stone heads impossibly far, you see yourself prostrate and ridiculous: flung before the altar in filthy rags. Worship, the stone heads said. To God the heart must fly up.  

Or to gold. Herded from room to plush and mirrored room at Versailles, again you’re rabble. There is nothing there not gilded, garlanded, jewel-encrusted, crystal-faceted, plumed, painted, pregnant in abundance. Too much, a claustrophobia of splendor sends you reeling outside again. There, at least, there is the long canal, dull-colored trees in rows, air, stone. Your eye breathes again.  

I look now at a postcard I bought, a December scene from the Très Riches Heures book of hours. Hunters circle in a clearing. Their hounds descend on a boar, barely visible but for limp black legs, one tusk. The trees around are dark with burnished leaves. Towers behind them jut upward. I can’t stop looking at their colors, brilliant white stone, blue sky.  

They make me think of Chicago. That is, approaching Chicago from a distance. Its outlines rise sharply from flat miles of factories, stacked boxcars, dry grass along roads. Once, in high school, in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, we gasped: a building burning. But it was the sun, going down in the windows. 

Light in winter – always it comes, it seems, from within things. Some days I’d see it hit Michigan Avenue as I crossed the bridge past Grant Park, and one gold roof blazed. Wind sliced through my coat, but the city was before me, whole and knowable.  

One can see and call it knowing. Such is the illusion distance lends. In travel and in memory, it makes you smug. But if we were to do either – truly see or know, bend close enough – the world would swarm, flies on a fallen animal.

The god running after

The first frost has encased the world, and fog erases it. Nothing moves. Out of white walls come faces set hard against the cold and expressionless. My favorite willow is frozen now, jagged branches rime-edged, like a waterfall shocked into stillness. Like a nymph is trapped under its bark.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, nymphs are always turning into trees. Struck with love, Apollo pursues Daphne. She calls out for help and in answer, roots and branches envelope her. This change forecloses all possibility for further change. Not dead, but also unalive: “her head was confined in a treetop, and all that remained was her beauty.” Beauty untouched by the god or, like a statue, by time.

Gianlorenzo Bernini sculpted these figures in mid-flight, just at the moment of metamorphosis. Apollo, so close to overtaking her, watches as Daphne sprouts buds from her fingertips, the bark beginning to wreathe her waist. His desire is that of the lover on Keats’ Grecian urn – “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” – a desire forever deferred.

When we think of forever, Keats’ ode might seem a natural choice for comparison; freedom from the temporal and its corruptions, an eternity in art. But eternity can also be terror. Not truth in beauty but, as Louise Bogan once wrote, “beauty with a rusted mouth.”*

Bogan rendered another, more terrible mythic transformation in “Medusa.” After glimpsing the Gorgon, the poem’s speaker has turned to stone. The entire surroundings have also frozen: “This is a dead scene forever now. … The water will always fall, and will not fall, / And the tipped bell make no sound.”

The poem ends on a quiet, leaden note:

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

The world in “Medusa” is a stone world, de-naturalizing even the dust. A live world is one of change. To be human is to see and suffer those changes, again and again.

In his book on the archetypal hero myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes of Daphne as someone who refuses the hero’s “call to adventure.” She would not give herself over to the god, and in that refusal, refused giving herself to life.

Granted, women in Greek mythology who did succumb to the seductive power of gods didn’t necessarily make out any better, seeing as those gods often had vengeful wives who turned nymphs into cows. But I wouldn’t read this myth literally (i.e. if men chase you through a forest, you should just have sex with them), nor does Campbell suggest we do so.

Forces of life are always in pursuit. Maybe “forces of life” is too vague, but I have my own in mind and maybe you do too, and I know they are not beautiful like the god. They make messes and bruises or a general feeling of discomfort. They will not necessarily make you better. They would take hold of you, and in entering you, make you changed.

There is a painting by my mother of Daphne, the nymph’s face just barely visible beneath a pale film and leaves and the emblazoned word,  “Transform.” The word is an imperative. It is not a choice. To revise Rilke: You must change to live.

In the autumn I went to a Rosh Hashanah celebration in the city of Dnipropetrovsk. We went to the Dnipro river. It was wider than I’d thought. The light was a deep autumn light, it cut deep shadows. The wind tore the waves, and the light tore them blue and black. Rolls of bread were passed around and broken. It was the new year. We were to think of our sins in the past year, and the parts of ourselves we wanted to leave behind. I tore the bread into many small, soft pieces for my many sins which have been neither small nor soft. I threw them into the Dnipro and gulls dipped down to eat them. 

...

*From “A Tale.” For your interest, you can listen to Bogan read “Medusa,” and poet Mary Kinzie (my former professor!) comment on it, on this podcast. Both of them have great poet voices.

One last thing: Toot toot toot shameless self-promotion! Read my guest post on Tori Dot Gov! It will make you uncomfortable but you'll love it, I promise. Then read all of Tori's posts ever, laugh until you weep, weep until you laugh, set yourself on fire!