Robert Lunday: Coins

Coins

Several sections of this work originally appeared (often in different versions) in Artful Dodge, Cold Mountain Review, and online in Plum Ruby Review.

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Every thought is a light coin which rolls, in its shy secretive being, into a song, into a painting –Adam Zagajewski 3 of 53

Indian-head: fusion of John Tree, Iron Tail, Two Moons; flip-side bison, “Black Diamond” of the New York Zoological Society – “hump-backed, little tail encurved, head butting against the rondure of eternity”1 – spark out of time. When I was a boy, you could still find them in your pocket change: Indian, bison, child, elegies to the lost world. Hobos used to carve it a different face, sometimes the hobo’s own, capped, bristled, sharing the profile, eye of the Indian – currency at ground level, ear to the rail. · In the roundhouse the watchman pounds one glove into the other; the table is carved with initials and curses, covered in matchsticks and an unfinished hand. 4

· Put your ear to the ground and the world is your Big Table: the current always flows, the blood of the world carves its snake from the raw physics.

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Imagine answers to various questions as what springs to the hand of the change-maker, the silver pan-pipe of coinage on his belt: to owe an answer to a question, to pay it exactly, in pure silver. · …I came back from overseas with my pockets full of foreign coins; jammed the parking meters, pay phones, arcade games, threw foreign wishes to the fountains, pencil-rubbed Lincoln kissing Queen Elizabeth, played tooth fairy for the United Nations!

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The bracteate is a coin stamped through – two heads with no tails; the jugate, two heads on the obverse split left to right, or overlapped in dual relief: flip such a coin and count your heads two to every tail; but when are our masters ever not two-faced?

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Florins swaying in the fields, blossom-heavy and wet. Coins under water falling like leaves. · Belisarius, marshal of great victories, rose and fell. In legend he was reduced to wandering the streets, “A penny for a blind man! A penny!” but according to Gibbon the legend is unlikely; until the end he lived well enough, dying within days of Justinian.

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He nailed the doubloon face down to the mast – noble golden coin of Ecuador, medal of the sun and tropic token-piece. Minted mountains, masted Pequod, misted Ahab, mantled world: dark-cloaking theater, vast plains of markings, seas of infinite projection. World spinning, dark world turning in the starry sky – world of worlds, gold-glinting peaks and crests and faces, O embraceable, O nailable, O world-at-hand!

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Briefly I took up knitting, coveting a sweater in a shop that would have cost me one week’s pay. I bought a book, needles, yarn, sought advice from a friend, and set to work. First, a simple square, a test – meant to be six inches to a side. But my fingers knotted when they should have knitted, labored at the wool as if it were metal or leather. I was left with a postage-stamp-sized plug; hundreds more like that, linked together in a vest, would have done for stopping bullets. “Knitting is so relaxing,” my friend had sighed. I looked at my woolen coin, all air and calm exiled from its face, and felt the cloak of stress tighten on my back. One week’s pay and fasting got my sweater from the shop.

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“Perhaps a woman is only an abnormal man, and a man an abnormal woman.”2 Obverse, reverse. One the monster to the other. You walk that way, I this. Sex a quick, fissured sky, thunderclap! – lightning strikes and makes you male, strikes again and takes it back. · Space the mother, time the father. In the field the wildflowers are a shout of color, the field taking notice of itself.

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Love the transvestites, who weave through the supermarket with breasts that have not yet grown pear-like from the long caress of gravity. The beauty of the transvestites is stepped and flurried, and though their hips are far from parabolic, they do impress with a certain precipitousness; their boy-swords are cleverly tucked back, and their eyes are Egyptian. · Some saints wear quotation marks instead of halos: the transvestites quote women or misquote them and quote each other quoting women and the aisles of the supermarket are filled with the large-winged sound of their eyes.

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Sifting through your pocket change you find, now and then, a Canadian. I had a salt-dip for them, far-North cousins; infiltrations as far as Florida, tourists from Toronto or Quebec seeding the Queen in vending machines up and down the coast. · Stare for an instant at the sun as it sets, then close your eyes to feel the ions burn into your head. There are coin slots in the air if you can find them, and they take only the alien currencies.

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Glistens a sovereign from the sun’s kiss of a high window, every flicker, every slide of the sun: saccades, jetons, polka dots, leptons, brockages, cowries, pearls, floaters, cows’ eyes, lozenges, tiles, bottle caps, cameos; sparks, afterglows, cysts, blood and dross, ulcers and drips; bagatines, cecchines, gazets, knetalls, moccinigos, portagues, silverlings, stivers; zeros, oh’s, vortices, blind spots, broken wax seals, black coins, orifices; sun dogs and angel zits and wormholes to everywhere.

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Out of the tunnel and thundering above the city the rain like endless small change, and our heads thick as moneybags. · O violent world, window that won’t shut! – and the dead fade back to life.

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For the cap of the Sienese Girolamo Marretti Cellini made a medal of Hercules wrenching open the lion’s mouth; and for Duke Alessandro the first full-face coin in silver ever made! – or so the Goldsmith claimed. On another occasion, a two-carlin coin for the Pope with Christ reverse, walking on water, hand stretched out to Peter. · Benvenuto, Malvenuto: there were tests of his honesty, at times; and always, treachery and violence down every path – but beauty curled around and into everything, and everything was gold. Years later the Pope, blind and dying, 16

called for the lovely medals he couldn’t see, to fondle with finger and thumb, cradle their weight in his palm; sighing, Cellini remembered, as their heavy beauty kissed his hand: the blind Pope sighing, rubbing the mute images, as cardinals circled and his bastards waited in the wings. · When he was a boy, Cellini sat by the hearth. His father spied a salamander in the flames and slapped the boy hard on the back of his head: “Don’t cry, little one!” he pleaded; “I struck you only to make you remember.” · The gold in Cellini’s hands was also living and burning and he struck it into medals, caskets, candlesticks, and vases. Skilled as well with weapons 17 of 53

of all kinds: swords, daggers, hackbuts and words. · “…since the order for my assassination was to be carried out an hour after sunset, an hour before sunset I rode off with the post train towards Florence.” – so skilled he was as to count the coin-flips and guess it right: “heads – but not mine; not tonight!”

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(“Nike, Who Hesitates”) 3 So much flesh and blood, alabaster, ghost-white stone, dust of a dry road:

Nike is most beautiful at the moment when she hesitates her white hand beautiful as a command rests against the air but her wings tremble because she sees a soldier set to die; desires to kiss his cheek, but stays, to keep the boy at battle. Hesitation coins the moment: a lyric, orb-shaped, the soldier’s name – the hand holds it but the lips refuse it: the currency of boys is to keep on dying. The nation is a womb of death:

this boy must be found with an open breast closed eyes and the acid obol of his country 19 of 53

under his numb tongue – coin for Charon’s palm, if the soul is to be ferried over; or it will wander aimlessly. Many a coin has not been properly planted under the tongue! I see spirits crossing the street, furtive looks left and right, hands in pockets digging for coins. When I see money on the sidewalk I leave it for them. Sometimes the tokens to hell rain from the sky, sometimes when you close your eyes they’re just there.

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Farthing, penny, shilling, pound, pause at the corner and count your crowns; up, down, rich, poor, go to your uncle and ask for more.

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We woke up one day and all the weaponry was gone. Nothing in the armories, silos, factories, barracks, gun racks, holsters: everything gone. The President got on the phone to our Allies; fishing and hedging, he sensed they’d suffered the same effect. (One must take care: allies with an edge might be enemies.) Perennial foes, neutrals, rogue states, nations in need of regime change buzzed and banged at the screen door: but it was clear their stingers were bent, their fists empty, their venom as thin as our own. The blank and level battlefield was not cause for relief. Rather, terror among the formerly terrible was boundless. What was one to focus one’s fear on? The guns were gone; soldiers, hunters, high schoolers, criminals, cops, all disarmed. The Joint Chiefs were all out of joint. In the War Room, they pondered. One general flicked at his lighter, but even the cigarette lighters were useless. Another officer pulled out a book of matches; matchsticks, at least, ignited and burned. This was progress: everyone smoked. They collected all the matches they could, stacked them, counted them, discussed ways to improve their efficiency. They looked at the big pile of matches on the table before them: what could one do with a million, billion matches? How many matches would fit into a B-1 bomber? They scrounged everywhere for more matches, they hoarded them; they looked at the piles of matches all around the room, they smoked, and they worked on the problem, day and night, night and day.

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In the World Aviary of coinage: Athenian owl, turtle of Aegina, colt of Corinth, condor of Peru; eagles as common as crows.

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I found someone’s Good Conduct medal in the grass: ribbonless, the bronze only, and I put it in my pocket, where it stayed for several days. When I pulled it out one evening to show my stepfather, he scowled and told me to put it back: medals were for those who earned them. But what is a medal thrown away? I tossed it back into the yard. Then I looked for it again the next day, but it was lost. Riots of clover came and went. I mowed the lawn and made my conduct right.

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…purl of desire through memory, and the field flips from dark to light to dark, day to night to day. Still, the field keeps its boundaries; you’re always the center. The field might be of a size such that if you lost something there, within one day you’d find it. Start: [.

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back and forth, forth and back: path of the ox as it plows the page.

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At seventeen I moved to Manhattan: bus ride overnight on I-95, Port Authority early morning, room and a job by evening: God loves the idiots, and sometimes gives us a hand. I remember walking out at dusk the next night, into the park, past the chess players, prayers and doomsayers, dope sellers, scholars, and gawkers: more good and evil than I’d ever seen in one view. Under the Washington Arch, a man in black walked a tightrope six feet high inside a ring of onlookers. His torches made circles in the air and and his eyes were pin-pricks. This was the Frenchman, Philippe Petit, who’d walked the sky between the Towers. First day at work on Worth Street, I took lunch and walked beneath them, felt my tightrope on the ground and my whole life shock-blue above: beneath such scale and steel I might fall home. But the towers are gone and the sky there has three thousand shades of blue. When the wire-walker dismounted he looked at the crowd and picked me out for being new. Reaching behind my ear he drew a Kennedy half-dollar and held it high, as if the magic were mine, ours, everyone’s.

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Walking westward between avenues, near dusk, the sun about to sink into the river: street corners ahead and behind, brackets of Now. No one on the street, in all the city, as if everyone has left the island. Then one fellow-walker, heading opposite, enters the street, the sun behind her shoulder. The matrix tightens, the moment grows shorter; your mind in anticipation crouches toward the instant: she passes and you trade one glance. Clok-clok-clok of her heels receding, your own tread noiseless. Her steps are twice as fast as yours. The brackets widen, shift; before you turn the corner you turn your head to see the woman turn her corner, turning her head to see you turn.

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All time as we imagine it bearing down, past and future, the hoarding of nows, pasts of pasts, futures forward and anterior, thens north-bynorth-west, inevitables, nevers, seldoms, frequentlies, all burrowing, winging, crawling, swimming – by the time they’re nigh and soon, we smell their musk and breath, our always fuse with their eventuals, our nevers devour their constantlies. · Time fits the thickness of a dime. Scattered coins melt below the surface: coruscation, glance and glare, evanescence, fade and flare.

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God brought finger to thumb, and in the gap he saw, just as the circle closed, the figment of his law.

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Obsession was the first computer: ochre, azurite, madder, boneblack, cobalt, mallow, miniare superconducting elements of Van Eyck, Messina, Giorgione; perfected by da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael.

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John Evelyn in his Numismata wrote fervently of coins and medallions, many of them imaginary, all eternal, history brought down to the size of the eye. · Louis XIV wished the story of his reign told in coins: a nickelodeon, a movie in medals.

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Acanthus frame and ingest: caryatids whispering, shifting slightly, faces in the ceiling, blinking. Sweat glistening on their cheeks; a slight cough echoing in the empty choir.

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The light of dimes, Mercury-headed angels with the fasces of empire on their backs, a quiver of nuclear mercy, nuclear grace. · But it was Liberty’s radiant face and not Mercury’s on the dime; posed by Elsie Stevens, wife of Wallace.

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(AU) 4 From the memoirs of an autistic Australian author: "I loved letters and learned them quickly. Fascinated by the way they fitted together into words, I learned those, too." (And words learned you; sentences like garlands, gum-wrapper chains, vines and beads, necklaces, webs, strands.) · "I was echolalic till I was four." (Paying in kind: small change, phrase by phrase, as if the world and all its relations were spooled by its stray threads into a marvelous, moving tapestry.) · “I discovered the air was full of spots….” (Not that you liked the spots of floating words, faces, mouths,

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so much as the spots were drawn to you – pixies, fellow-exiles from the real; a turnstile spins and churns and bodies keep coming through and going out, but the space beyond is dark; only thunders of trains, and the sound of the tokens plunked through the insatiable metal mouth.) · "One particular day, I was swinging from a tree. A girl approached me and began to talk to me as I swung. Her name was Carol....my face must have shocked her, as I had painted it with patterns using my mother's makeup. I thought it was beautiful." (In the living mirror the reflection is detached; not reversed but versing, light lax, breath taut, the body flapping like a flag. No one in here but you: the distance to your nearest neighbors measured in Astronomical Units.) · 35 of 53

"We went to Carol's house. Her mother was shocked about the state of my colorful face. I was surprised by her shock." (The mirror silvers to shock, whites to surprise, grays to amazement.) · "‘Where does she live?' said a voice. ‘I don't know. I found her in the park,’ said another voice. ‘I think you'd better take her back...’"

– What do I owe you? – One pucker, an arched eyebrow, a pout, a wink, and five squints. – I haven’t got change; can you break a winning smile? · "I wanted to live in Carol's world, in Carol's house. 'Where do you live?' came her voice, as she slipped away from my reality. I stared at her, I screamed inside with frustration. No sound came out." "She became 'the girl in the mirror.' Later I became Carol." (Donna to Carol then back again; but the exchange rates are too high each way.)

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The gangster flips his half-dollar up and down, buying the moment with each catch: heads, tails, heads, tails; but in the air there is no heads, no tails… flip-flip-flip and the edge glistens like life, saliva in talking mouths, strands of the web, spirit, incuse of the body; a stamp in clay, a bit of fear, hunger, and one groat’s-worth of divinity.

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The fireflies come out or they come in, in here – the dark of an early evening, a closed room. The pinpricks move about and we catch them and become large.

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On average, a coin in circulation loses 0.2 percent of its weight per annum for even atoms want to die.

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In the Zeus Ammon of Alexander those Ram’s horns purling back, the Herculean cloak – “the bright pride and immortal youth and wild sensitiveness”: 5 a comedy of signs, and a man somewhere whose spirit creeps through the spirals of time and everything human – stomachaches, migraines, dream visions, a mother’s love – all that, and the world-conquering.

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(Provincetown) Nina Cassian, visiting the poets at Provincetown, seductive sexagenarian, deep-East-European, preened before the American boys. Still blond, gold-glint of a guilder; sitting on a couch in meager lamplight, her long, curved nose she weighed into the shadows, knife in profile: “DAN-te,” the magic mug shot – speaking the name in Gothic letters she medallioned in her hand; then stepped down from her party-trick profile back to the den of dismal royal boys.

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(The Birth of Criticism) Ordinaries see in straight lines; superlunaries see in triangulation (their post cards are theaters, their coins, pocket-children). · Author, reader, heads, tails. The author senses the reader behind him and turns, but the reader acts like a passerby, whistling innocently, hands behind his back. (What living rooms lack passers-by, what bedrooms strangers?) Every time the writer turns a page the reader clears his throat or blinks; the blinking our writer finds especially disruptive. So one time the writer turns the page 42

and merely copies in reverse the words behind; the reader, so absorbed in his navigations, felt his eyes turn inside out. The text, like an infection, continues on the screen of the mind, other than what the writer was writing. The writer writes, the reader reads – pleased, inspired, even, and singing in himself the gloss grown larger than the work.

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(“To Please a Shadow”) 6 A typewriter, the Latin regiment of its keys so different from the Cyrillic; its teeth-marks into the facial leather. Writing in English, said the Laureate Brodsky, was to get near the Master, Auden; to get near, in the medium, in the mechanical arcs of the hammerletters, what made his code of conscience possible. The face of Auden! Face of a weary planet. Water has run down it: not tears, but the general moral weather. It’s a face without need of profile for the honor it exacts from time: small eyes, like awl-points; looking from a distant place inside the head, nose-up to the world and to us. – And it wasn’t arrogance, but merely the arid countenance of the gay patriarch; weary, but willing to speak with us. · The Laureate speaks of Auden’s elegy to Yeats; holds the poem up to the light, turns it around, and we see: the poem as a thing tracing Yeats’ own metrical weave backward through time; a physiognomy of the work, not meters but the changing of style: the poet’s body. · Brodsky speaks with love of the hand-sized anthologies of English and 44

American verse – those Oscar Williamses, with the oval portraits on the inside of the front and back; coin-like, though few of profile – excepting Eliot’s, his nose the very cornice of Western Civ; less the coin or medallion, the Quattrocento Italian profile, than a mug shot. · “Stamp-sized” portraits, the Russian calls them. Brodsky enriched himself: the famous Russian memory for verse, the devoted study of every word of the foreign tongue, every possible rhythm; and the love of etymologies, the shrews burrowing down deep in the poet’s brow. · And Brodsky wonders if “the visual eludes the semantic”: can a face fit the words of a poet? But there are many versions of a face behind the work; and he recalls a black-and-white photo of the youngish Auden, before the crevices gave each patch of skin its own profile – “unkempt bed,” as Brodsky calls that later visage. Then, an act of facial divination:

The contrast…between those eyebrows risen in formal bewilderment and the keenness of his gaze…directly corresponded to the formal aspects of his lines (two lifted eyebrows = two rhymes) and to the blinding precision of their content. What stared at me from the page was the facial equivalent of a couplet, of truth that’s better known by heart. “A sum total of a face,” he concludes. “The face of a physician who is interested in your story though he knows you are ill.” · 45 of 53

Brodsky touching his favorite poet, caressing the face, through the same eyes that read and think; the face thinks, the eyes think – every part. It’s a need, he says later, to find oneself close to what resembles truth, as you have read it, in a face or a voice: both are a physiognomy: the tacit knowing that the Laureate settles on as “proximity.” Not that we always want to be physically close to the poets: they’re rascals, rogues, bitches, bastards – still, that’s part of the portrait. I love them, and often want to slap them. · So it’s a criticism to connect the texture of words to the textures of the man. As for me, I want no criticism that doesn’t teach me of the life, and I don’t mean:

poetry is criticism of life 7 but that the only way into poetry is from life. Saying it, it sounds so elementary; but I have failed at it nearly every time. · My poem, my book, and my face aren’t finished. If I could without weeping, I’d name all the things that I love; all the things that I love more than myself. And there are some things I’ve learned to love more than poetry,

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by which poetry has gained in worth. Someday I’ll write a poem in which I name them, and you might believe it. · And now I’m waiting for my son to uncurl and wake on our bed, where he moved himself in the wee hours; the dog barks at another dog, my wife in her bathrobe laughs on the phone in Japanese – you can laugh differently in different languages! – and it’s a Saturday morning here, Saturday nigh to Sunday over there, in Yokohama. The world turns over itself, as does the mind in reflection; infinite numbers of poems fill the distances between cities, and every second of a boy’s sleep is a poem of waking.

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(“In the Village”) 8 Walk through the streets of this story: · Sounds that shaped air of the memory-to-be (memory’s not in us, but we in memory); “Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it,” the sound of the scream her mother sent forth, zipper on the mind; a madwoman, fit to be locked away, being fitted for a dress. “It hangs there forever, a slight stain on those pure blue skies….” “The dress was all wrong. She screamed.” Not the mind, but the body mad. The body loses its way. In the mirror, we look at the back of another being, but only the madwoman knows it. Madness is the leap down from the trees. Madness is getting ahead of the being in the mirror, seeing the back of the back, seeing the other side that threatens concavity: that our face is a mask, a cast, a coin with no reverse:

flip, flip, flip through the air and never landing; love the glint and the globe of pure motion 48

of the coin flipping in air! · “In the blacksmith’s shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things” – The child’s and poet’s eye seeing in all directions. The brain, Huxley said, sifts infinity; the eye filters light into shadows and things, concealment/unconcealment, without which things would gather to critical mass; a thing has to edge out of its shadow tentatively, and the light we see it by filtered through body, or it would fill the room and blot the sky. · Coin of the realm: that mother-of-pearl gleam cast by everything real and now – “glistening piles of dust in each corner.” But the blacksmith’s shop has double doors front and back; a wind out of the distance, tanged with sea-smell and old world, wafts through; and the dust of the Caesars loitering in corners is blown through the back streets, out of town, into the plains. Disuse, an elegy, hands just falling from prayer. But the cosmos keeps its order, the scream settles like a streak of cloud in the dusk, the dress fits the body, the body fits the mind. Flip, flip, flip. · Clutch at the coin, which while spinning makes a sphere. What was a sound is now a smell: 49 of 53

the infusion of music, perfume of memory, into a cloth, perhaps a cover on the vanity table, chance images of faces, and now all the woman beyond her madness, lounging in the back of my head, her body in shadow, her face framed by the window, which is my eye. To dream is to make a thing love its peripheries. We look so slow to a higher being, barely alive; and our things to us, they just take their time: more time, perhaps, than the universe allows: to blink, twitch, flare, turn over, hurt, remark….this pen is alive. Perhaps I abuse it! This paper of course had wind in its leaves, a symphony of greens, and then bare branches, fingers searching for a latch – opens from the other side, and the sky has a surprised expression, looking at us. · Later, in the same dress shop where her mother gave birth to the scream that was now the climate of her life, the little girl receives a five-cent piece from the dressmaker; she slips it into her pocket. “King George’s beard is like a little silver flame….” Poets find cinema in things, popping their heads now and then out of the cave; but really they prefer the dark, and the genial blazes. The five-cent piece, upon which the child remarks: “What if one could scrape a salmon and find a little picture of King George on every scale?” The poet’s flip-book would become holographic: one man’s silver beard that multiplies and shatters sunlight wherever the salmon writes its passage through the sea-shallows…more and 50

more and more – how wealthy we all are, to look and look and look again at something! – and then there’s the face itself, from which the wonderment shines out. · But the little girl, near-orphaned, walking home to her grandmother, swallows the King George coin. Down and down and down the bearded fellow falls, pulling his kingdom with him, into the worlds growing in a girl. And a child walking near the sky is almost transparent; the light flints a thousand faces out of her, in the grown-up’s memory.

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Notes

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Allen Ginsburg Denis Diderot A reading of Zbigniew Herbert’ s poem by this name (trans. Czeslaw Milosz) Based on passages in Nobody Nowhere by Donna Williams Robinson Jeffers Based on an essay by Joseph Brodsky Matthew Arnold Based on a story by Elizabeth Bishop