Robert Lunday: Saints And Cannibals

Saints & Cannibals

Robert Lunday 120 Cutting Horse Trail Bastrop, TX 78602 (512) 718-9352

[email protected]

Con tents In Praise of Babel/4 The Nursing Home Poem/12 Brilliant Cannibal/38 Seven Dimensions/60

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“In Praise of Babel” in an earlier form appeared in War, Literature and the Arts. Brief excerpts from “The Nursing Home Poem” appeared online in Small Spiral Notebook. Brief excerpts from “Seven Dimensions” appeared in Euphony and The Chicago Review.

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I. In Praise of Babe

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– a cenotaph for ret. Major James E. Lewis, disappeared October 3rd, 1982 –

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From nineteen seventy-two to nineteen seventy-four we lived at Benning, home of the School of the Americas, the Airborne School and Infantry Center, the 75th Ranger Regiment and 199th Infantry Brigade with which my stepfather, then-CPT James Edward Lewis, had served in Vietnam. There he is sleeping in his chair: a cigarette burns between thick fingers of a deadly hand. Brave lad, I lift the half-smoked butts from an ashtray where they’re piled high and head to the firing range, quietest spot on Earth after nightfall. I flick the see-through lighter with a mermaid bathing in its flammable waves, 5 of 88

stolen as well from the drawer of old wallets, skydiving logs, medals and ribbons, insignia from past assignments – and the most magical artifact, breast-pocket notebook pierced by a bullet: metonymy of a soldier’s heart. · He was hard and he was tender: would hit me, then lovingly put me back together. That and what I stole was the little that we shared though he didn't let on, dozing each night in his chair to rise fist-hooked in nightmare. · His is a life that will have to be remade; consider this the blueprint torn and taped together a thousand times. Or consider it a writ of habeas corpus 6

to bring forth the body in words tall and dangerous. . My life is small but towers backwards: the memory of freaks at a sideshow flexing and posing their dissonant lyrics. I could feel the heavy stares of the crowd above my head and knew even then that spectacle was the poverty of response. A young man with two stomachs sat on a metal crate; an old man with a hole in his face held out on a dish the plastic counterfeit of his nose; in a bathtub at the end lay a beehived mermaid so serenely bored she was hardly there at all. · Sometimes as my stepfather slept in his chair the rest of us held a slide show on the kitchen wall: images of the earlier family, 7 of 88

mother, first father, and my toddler sister before divorce and the coming war. Clearest of the images was Châtelaillon on the coast of France two years before I was born, its summer beaches near the American Army's caserne in La Rochelle; the new-fangled Kodachrome of more than fifty years ago, my first father’s hobby before White Star, Pathet Lao and Montagnards. Our two fathers would meet in Laos and share their love of getting close to the full colors of hell. · Before all that France still grudgingly needed us; so my mother stood between the alarming blues of Atlantic sea and sky lofting her daughter at full arm's-length in praise to the gods bestriding clouds of the Cold War. ·

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In a few years France threw us out but the new family was sent to Germany where I fell from a swing from which you could see to the Rhine when you swung past the bar: cracked my skull and swooned and pitched into a room inside my head where I’d never been: lime-green walls, spare furnishings, military nurses fluttering the perimeter; curtains sucked out the portals of my eyes. · At Bragg when I was ten we practiced war, died and rose again, then died once more and rose again; fought over who was dead and who was only wounded or altogether missed. But dying could be a pleasure, lying still as the others ran and yelled; death was the brace of air, the press of voices through eyelids. Then, when war had lost its fun, 9 of 88

when almost everyone had gone or simply refused to die the umpteenth time: called to armistice by our mothers, living and dead alike dispersed. · At sixteen, stoked on a siphoned whiskey, drunk but not so much as I believed; once again my stepfather’s rage full on me until he slept; I sought the quiet of the firing range Sunday late afternoon to spin arms out, falling and hiding beneath the blue; buried deeper still inside closed eyes and quick to the spinning of the globe; then opened eyes to the green with snail-drag, the marching ants and the anarchic ones along the flat-topped blades; looked to the shot sky towering above, burden of a single column of air on me, a tower miles high and all my own but in the whole air, in the crossed vapor of jets protecting

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as I knew nothing could our American, our living daylights. Was I a channel to the angry voices descending the endless spirals of sky? Drawn down by our own silence, victims of blue, sacrificed to the blue beyond: blue was everything, blue was the dissipate vision from the tower, all that one might claim of a life, one's own or another's; the blue when nothing's left to decay, the vapor gone, the jet, and the thunder of jets gone with it.

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II. The Nursing Home Poem

– in several voices – Entropy always goes up. Order always goes down. Evidence of this universal tendency toward disintegration is everywhere. Cars rust, stars grow cold and die, stereos break down, people become old, mountains erode, buildings collapse.... – John Boslough, Stephen Hawking's Universe • Pity is not your forte.... No hurt, no pardon out here in the cold with you you with your back to the wall. – Adrienne Rich, "Orion"

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1. Before I go to her room I wander the halls. From each door I catch the falling arc of a life: • I have this rivulet of flesh left to me and a desert before me, a beautiful blooming emptiness that holds darkness like a plum. • If you can’t come but Fridays, she says, don’t come at all! Wait, she says; I didn’t mean it. • Sorry I’m late, Mother. Here – I found another copy of your book; that brings us up to seven. There's someone's creased photo in it, like a bookmark – a young woman’s face, from maybe forty years ago, when your book was published! – a sharp, worried face, but lovely and curious-looking, and smiling for the camera: her face could be one of your poems. The book’s a bit marked up with comments, I’m afraid:

lovely! – 13 of 88

nice image – how true – what does this mean? – funny, but sad too – God I wish I’d written this one! – From the script, I’m guessing a woman; maybe the same as in the photograph. But that was your readership: women, and spiritual men. Here, I'll put it with the others. Why do you suppose she got rid of the book? Yes, she might have died; we’re all dying! but the books don’t die, Mother, even if they do go out of print. • In the wilderness I'll be the sidewinder, the writer-in-sand. • The nurse's aide winks, shuts the door, and someone drags her hand in the cold stream of the Yangtze. Li Po lies near the border of everything with nothing, in the Three Gorges. He's drunk starlight by the cask-full, so much the pitch dark sticks to his eyes 14

and he wakes in a comic blindness. The weeds of old age, the tight-fisted flowers on spiky stalks, whip his eyes: punishment for horses who won't go on, but must go on, serving the whip even at death. • The whip loves us more than the grooming-brush loves us, more than the sugar-cube or the apple, more than the shade. • If this building crumbled, if the sun and rain broke in, we would be the walls, we would be our own rooms and the windows would be small, dirty, cataracted, light would needle through one injection at a time: the one-fanged light. • When I imagine the life to come I see with the nether-eye; 15 of 88

mine at least works; my roommate's is boarded up – she shits from her side. It's the murmur of underground streams I hear, Hades, Tartarus, eternal cocktail parties underground, boring conversation, Hitchcockian buzz-tracks, a universe of extras talking about our lives… was I an extra?

I am the blond goddess I am Cary Grant played by Aeneas I am the sibyl grown small as a match – When the nurses are on break and want a light, it's me they strike against a wall. • Stare at the ceiling, make a stairway out of being still, no trapdoor, no porthole but a porous surface you can creep through: insinuate yourself, get through the wall by joining it. Light breaks out like a rash held in common.

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Stare at it, count the blossoms of light, give each a name: these are the children you might have known could it have been that every day's desire found its mark. Then they're all one; and it's another day with the personality of Wheateena, Day First, Day Middle, Day Last. • Li Po says farewell to a visitor returning East:

Tonight is my last night – no, no, I know it is; I’m dying, and I'm happy! – tonight is my last night and what seems most important is that I buy the wine on credit.

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2. The event horizon of the leper colony begins where your wagon turns away just before your sobbing sister enters the black hole. At the event horizon of the leper colony the new arrival seems to turn forever toward the center where in an imploded world the receiving nurse has already fallen from the edge of your departure. From your vantage, the new arrival is forever new never arriving never finishing her departure; she freezes in the act of drawing her shawl close in the sub-tropical heat as your wagon seems to her forever on the verge of turning back. • I told the nurse's aide, a horse's ass, to leave his stethoscope with me. At night I crawl to the wall right, and listen:

moaning moaning but there's no one in that room, it's the wall that moans. I wheel to the wall left 18

and glory upon glories – in this of all places where nothing is ever born but bedsores it's moans of love I hear; moaning of love it does indeed seem, close to the sounds of dying, but different. I listen and then the wall begins to melt away, someone's love-medicine has lengthened a curve in me I thought returned permanently to embryonic; and I pull back, I listen to myself, I put the heated tab of the stethoscope to my own heart and this is what I hear: • Seventy years ago my grandfather, Thomas Hardy, lay dying in his own room, his own bed, the very one his mother lay in when he was born. He woke on his last day

– I know it is, don't be afraid of it, I'm not – 19 of 88

he woke on what he knew was his last day and said to the cook: "Make me a rasher of bacon, right there, Woman, on my own hearth, in my own bedroom, just the way my mother did when I was a child." And when the cook returned with the raw bacon she brought as well a package of grapes just arrived with the Post. "I tasted of those vines myself, Old Woman, years ago, in Spain; they'll trample the blood out of me soon enough. And what kind of wine will I be? Peel one now for me, My Dear, then eat your fill; and throw the rest away." • Then I put the stethoscope to my forehead, I close my eyes and see Orion: he's breathing heavily, the hunt has energized him, he leans his bow against the garden wall and takes his sword out; he cuts my eyes in a ringing flash then the sky is afire

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as if the stars had stopped running and all turned back at once to stare, to urge me on. •

If heaven were only the endless Doppler-effect of life's starting cry; if I could get out and push – • The city in my mind invites me home. I want to go out I want to go out as I was – not as I am now.

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3. St. Jerome prays into the televangelist's yap, the prayers fry in his vellum palms: smoke tickles the nose of someone traveling far from here with the roof down. • The deck is pitching almost vertical, the ship's steward has tied himself to the mast an arm's reach away from me. We never liked each other but we try to touch hands as the ship sinks; in my mind’s eye I see the captain in his cabin looking frantically at his charts. • The hall-sitting ones are a halo of doubt: what they doubt is doubt itself. The hours turn to mildew, The wheelchair-sitters bruise the walls, they split rocks in the Siberian camps. The Major from Tobolsk, a perpetual drunk who drowned in his own fluids 22

in a carriage-ride through the Urals, kisses the wounds of the hall-sitting ones. • Gerard Manley Hopkin's boots, sent for repair, just walked in. Hopkins died and soft-sifted through the wall, up, out, soul inseamed, hemmed to the inside of an angel's skirt. Inscapes are the best éscapes, but it was his boots that took themselves in for injuries painstakingly acquired: no instep, feet all arch. The boots came back, ordinary, wearable for anyone, thrift-shop fodder. • Orion scabs the ceiling: night's fevered forehead. Memory's oversimplified so it will fit on the return address; the rest is lost, sold off, abandoned to attics 23 of 88

the stairs no longer reach. • The Africans turn the making of beds into looms for work-songs. At the end of the day they go home. Charon takes the fares: whatever you paid when you rode the subway as a child. The Africans work together cleaning the shit from a woman's skin-folds, they fish a maggot out of a bedsore and sing of its vigor. Charon closes the token booth for the night. His is the last train: the fare-collecting train with no windows, slow-moving, laden with Pluto's gold. The lament-songs weave through the subterranean air, the breath of the women expands, they throw dust into their hair. Charon takes his token from where he stows it in his fuzzy ear, plinks it into the token-slot, rows the turnstile westward and home. 24

4. The aide puts me in bed, his black hands are callused but loving, he does love me, he speaks sweetly to me, his voice chimes with the rhythms of the Caribbean; when I close my eyes his black skin is deep purple, his hands are the equator, I am so wide, wide as this world I’ve traveled: I walked battlefields, I walked the streets of a liberated city, I caught blown kisses from little girls sprouted in war's blacked-out nights; I walked boulevards several times the width of the medieval pathways they replaced, cruel medieval streets that still shadowed the livid faces of the butcher, the gendarme, and the concierge. I brought freedom and a glorious future with every American stride, I was loved, I was the hero, I was the wished-for brother. • 25 of 88

The aide, Thomas, changes my diaper, he tells me to sleep. I ask him, will you be with me tomorrow, but he says he'll be gone.

I want you here always I tell him, all day, all night, every day! and only for me and he knows I’m not selfish or insane but insatiable: the last part to die. His labor ends; he'll take a Sabbath, praise his God, shoo his kids into the family car and touch wheels with the waves. Between feedings Monday he'll stop by my door and describe it all: every moment of his one day off and the more that I demand.

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5. Caesar’s in his tent with the sheet over his head and a map on his knees. • A thought is a punishment; a thought is the stabbing pain of sunlight through clouds. The Rubicon is flowing down the drain; Caesar's smile is a rivulet of phlegm and blood. • I think for those who can't think anymore. I think and think in a shipwrecked body thoughts that need bodies of their own. • In the bath scars soften. I think of flowers growing in the cracks, songs traveling over the river; I think of a woman tending her sheep on the steppes, a tent of skins, 27 of 88

and the cold tile floor beneath my feet swept in the wind's journey. I shovel snow down a driveway without a house. • The pachysandra in C-12 is on a respirator. The rhododendron in A-10 is in the first stages of Alzheimer's. The Christmas Cactus roams the halls, no one seems to know what room he's in. He and the Wandering Jew bump into each other and bicker. The fern wears a clean, fancy robe; he sings Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, he pretends to smoke syringe caps. • We live in the narrow corner between caring about and caring for: • Though eating might kill her, I have reluctantly agreed to bring her food. Look, Mother, mint candies – I even got the ones with your profile on them: coins of the realm, minted in my heart of hearts. No one here will call you Your Majesty (they have too many) but they agreed to call you Victoria, though it’s wound up “Vicky.” That's the best you can hope for, Mother: the Empire's lost. When I feed you the mint patties I must break them into pieces: you know they’ve told you if your swallowing fails, you'll breathe the 28

chocolate down and catch pneumonia, or die on the spot; you'll die, but it’ll be a sweet death! – you'll transubstantiate. It's my fingertips they'd blame; my fingers that fed you, and couldn't keep you home. • The building's Y-shaped, old, older than anyone inside it. In A-wing, the ghost of a tubercular child haunts a certain window. The curtain is her dress; the sooty stain in the glass, her inquiring face. Open the window a crack and watch her dance – oh, she was happy, her dying was a rose in her throat. Her hands caught moths that flew off her dress, she held them to the window grating and they flitted through. The ailing children live in the walls, they burn slowly in the gaslights, they drip from the ceiling when it rains and for a time after. The streetcars roll through the grass under the children's graves; the junk man's old mare stops and nuzzles their hands.

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6. Baudelaire, on dialysis, is in a room to himself: his mouth is too foul for anyone here. His rage is liquid and stagnant in his side. He has a sign above his mirror:

and scrawled below:

Genius is childhood recaptured; but senility is its revenge. •

St. Teresa, bent like a crescent, is held on the bench-scale: 65 pounds and most of it prayer. • Mother, do you remember when my High-Episcopalian girlfriend took me to Communion? It was a kind of date, going to church together: I hadn’t been to church in years and never one so elaborately furnished – Well, I told you about it years ago; and last week, too. Anyway, I went down for the wafer and the wine, I was nervous, and the wafer stuck to the roof of my mouth – as I hear they sometimes do. When I went back to the pew, she asked: You've been baptized, haven't you? And as you know, I haven't been – you thought birth was baptism enough, and I told her so. 30

She leaned away, waiting for the bolt of lightning to strike me. But wasn't it her fault for not asking earlier? And why must God's punishments be calamitous always? The wafer was still stuck to the roof of my mouth; no one in the world knew it but me and, I suppose, God. That was punishment enough; if He'd wanted worse it'd still be there. • Please write a poem on my chart, Nurse. Forget the systole/diastole, the degrees, descriptions of bowel movements. Write a poem for me, something to make my fever rise, not fall. • John Greenleaf Whittier’s wheelchair has a frame of spliced birch-limbs. With one hand on the hall railing he creeps along, slow as a vine. His mantra:

help me...help me...help me about a thousand times in the voice of a pixie before someone yells at him,

shut up! Down the fifty yards of the C-Wing hall:

help me...help me...help me 31 of 88

at 5 rpm's. Once, the birch-arm of his chair snagged the edge of a hand-truck blocking the hall and he couldn't move: help me...help me...help me then more firmly: GODDAMMI T SOMEBODY C LOOSE!

OME OVER HE RE AND B REAK ME

so someone helped him.

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7. Death is contagious. You'll catch it from us so it's wise to fear, it's wise to abandon us. • Death is sitting in the hall with the rest of us; he's the one in the wheelchair at the very end, the one who keeps receding as you walk toward him, the one who makes the hall turn corner left and left again and left again – and here you are: contagious. • The TV is on; no one is watching. The TV is watching; no one is on. • Now I have to go, Mother. Take care of yourself, ha ha. Please don't howl while I walk down the hall. It doesn't pull me back! It propels me faster away. Close your eyes and we'll be together; I'll talk to you over your radio, I'll sing you Bach and Beethoven while your younger self and I 33 of 88

smile down on you from the photo on the shelf. • I only came here to visit –

At the nurse's station they got corpse-candles foxfire swamp-gas napalm My bedsore howls all night, a succubus: it's all the intimacy I've got.

Fluorescent lights dispense drugs when no one’s looking I'm not even old, a mere quadragenarian; I came just to visit! – and if I'm sick it happened after I got here.

It’s a goddam war but it don’t mean nuthin’. They got love, they got bleedin’ valentine hearts strung along the perimeter. • Sidney Lanier in a shabby gilded frame and oh so frail, frail as a flute-puff, 34

sits by the eastern wall. For a moment the screaming and bickering in the hall stop.

I shall not go West I shall not go West and before he can whisper it a third time he dies into the arms of his Savior, west of the West. •

The sun labors with the glow of fabulous atoms.1 The aide shields his eyes from the brilliance as he cuts the braid from Achilles' marble skull. The hero has died but will not decay; they take him away afterthought by afterthought. • "He's not so old." "Why doesn't he move? Is he dead?" • I wake in the room next to my mother's. Oddly, we’ve not spoken for some time.

1 The Life of Sidney Lanier by Lincoln Lorenz

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But if I wanted to I could wake in my own bed in my own room, I could sail away with my sheet for a sail as I dreamed so long ago, a child warped by fairy tales. • Head turned towards the meadows, then a small stream of blood flows north: another death without anyone in the world aware for now. Between now and the casual discovery sunlight rises over the Yangtze; a pretty hand cuts the stream and the ocean waits.

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Your shadow is death, old dog, yet you lie down beside it. • Cicada, cicada, fey doorman, loop my heart in your skein till my foot finds your lintel – Vassar Miller 37 of 88

II I. Bri lliant Cannibal In the case of the camera which is synchronized with the machine gun, the dissociation between man and instrument, and the independent relationship between reality and camera, is carried to an unanticipated degree. If this film can be said to reflect any intention, it must be that of death, for such was the function of the gun. – Maya Deren • Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.

– Simone Weil

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1. The Pac t …but my Dear I must insist you keep your camera focused on the window: I am effaced, and the best of me is there, glassed in the sea, diffuse, though my voice is here, tenant of shadows. Mephisto's sleeping on the mantel; he's been there years and hasn't moved, disguised as my one Academy Award – given on agreement that my last film would be left in the can (I conceded the point: in the end, the audience dies). Now, my Dear, I'm in escrow, and Mephisto's wings brassed over until this film of yours decides our fate. · I'd made a pact for a cinema of will, film neither real nor dream nor memory: a life's work so assured the life itself would be lived entirely on the surface, geology trumped by topography. · 39 of 88

Please come out now to the terrace; the fog is breaking up, we can almost see down coast as far as the lighthouse.

It sees us –

but only as a few seconds of arc within a great circle; to it, we must look the same as those sheep that have strayed to the edge of the road. ·

Your questions, Dear, are good: because they hurt, I can feel them, I answer first and only then remember – it makes me feel restored, if only for a while: stories are my last body. · Stand there and look for me down the coast and several decades back where I’m working on a script, not only for a film but for my actors' lives.

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Watch me as I watched Manuel undress before the door, then step out onto the lawn just as the rain began to fall: his white robe, coiled on the floor, stares at me. It was a sudden storm, and he'd entered it as if he'd turned a knob in the sky: I was in love with the pure form and nothing else: no face, no mouth or eyes, nakedness the eye's own surface. · And here you are my Dear – I watched you hiking up the switchback from the highway; you were the first visitor in years I had my nurse let through alive. I felt you look right into me even from the bottom of the hill: look as if you'd kill as easily as you’d listen. It was like love again! – my heart would have leapt were it not stored in a vat; as if you were Manuel returned 41 of 88

from a walk. I made a quick movie of your coming; your film of me, this documentary you’re after, a reversal of my own – not the siphoning of dream but the distillations of insomnia. · Look back down the coast: Pitched wind swept rain indoors, the page in my lap stained blue, the film eddied around the stilled image of Manuel. I slouched in my chair, pen hovering over the script, struck by his beauty: I had him on the page, in the room, and neither was real.

· Sunk inside my chair, struck by his beauty which was the beauty of the rain, my lens: sight penetrating all – sight failing precisely in its escape 42

from aperture and horizon; lens of ocean lens of sky lens of finger to thumb of connection each pleat braid curve nerve root skin's halo lens of stipple of fish scale on knife's collar of worm hole giving sight to the leaf of flame of water flaring in its cellophane-like fan off the bowl of a spoon lens of the instant into neighbor instants degrees divided down ticks and sub-ticks marked until I touch my brow and feel 10,000 miles away far from everything by virtue of my unlimited command of the details. · Cut to the theater, the film’s premiere, Manuel exiting in anger 43 of 88

before the end: I’d given the lead to my mistress of the hour (later married, murdered, and packed into the urn that marks the southwest corner of my garden); Manuel I’d cast as her maid, to remind him of his place – stardom had gone to his head; he’d begun demanding roles as a man. So exiting while I stayed because my films weren’t complete until I’d seen how they played in performance – staying to The End to script it direct to the screen; then left to find Manuel still walking away, caught in the flat infinity of my deep focus, shrouded in mist, shot through with arrows of rain-reflected light that crossed my lens; twisting back as if he knew I was there, shooting him – as you did, when you came today – the contempt all characters have for their authors.

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2. The Garden Come with me now to the garden, a forlorn planet I tend when I will. It's to pass the time; I pull, now and then, what seems a weed – often, I think I pull what I'd planted. It's very pleasing, your footsteps on the gravel path: a new soundtrack to the garden plot. If you could stay, I might get used to this; Someone else could think it into being, and I could rest. · First, these ferns, my most ancient friends, fawning and close; beyond, those who forgot me floating like lotus face-up in the pond. Further still, red columbine to remind me of every infidelity; violets knotted through to hide the evidence. From here of late, my eyes fly to the poppies there, on the northern slope: a clean, white fog of oblivion 45 of 88

but off my property. Over there the imported fragment of an Irish abbey, its three archways, the outer two bricked in; clematis above the middle one, evergreen, its several hundred four-point stars to light the way through: a hundred-foot fall to the rocks below – I take it daily, to no avail. · So I putter in my garden, read, or walk the beach; sometimes I do them all at once, letting my hands, eyes, feet go as they will. I'm still a man, though scattered like seed – do you think I'm evil? Couldn't you accept me as magnificence beyond both good and evil? – · Something once stared right through me while I knelt in the garden; I could feel its eye like a flaming spear and turned to see an owl casting its gaze upon the stump or stone I'd been: sessile, one of my own stalks 46

become a statue, all day dangerously close to breathing – then a breath, the explosion of pain in the lungs. I woke to a world gone about its business: blossoms opened, fog come in, a sun setting through the middle arch, eye of a needle.

for thou art fair –

stay awhile,

stay awhile,

who would not want the knack of getting everything he plants to grow?

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3. " Soon After I Died…" Soon after I died I went to San Francisco. Upon my return a young man appeared at my door, having found me out and followed me back – a graduate student doing research in sign theory who nonetheless paid no regard to the No Trespassing on my gate. We poisoned the boy as we have all others before you, then potted him and placed him in my bedroom; but first let him coax me onto film, which I'll give you now. The screen is here, in the air between us, blank but simmering; films now are storms recorded nowhere.

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4. The Liqui dation You're wilting a bit; perhaps the late sun is too much – follow me back in and focus more toward the corners of my room where there are photographs: portraits, headshots, movie stills, handshakes with various presidents, princes, dictators. · My films have premiered at coronations, against ceilings of basilicas, chapels. grottos, lockets, microscopes, cathodes plugged into cortices of condemned men; in museums where each film fit a frame of different scale fragmented from its proper ratio (as when broadcast or played in video, cropped to one corner of the mise en scéne): rare orchids of technology,1 to each screening the imputed originality of a limbless or headless statue, priceless in verging on destruction. · Years ago I attended a retrospective of my work. 1 Adapted from a phrase in Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

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There in the revival house, the whole of each film on a water-stained screen framed by ragged curtains and chipped art-deco nude reliefs, I sat one fathom beneath the projectionist's ray watching, as the films unrolled, the unraveling of my life as I had known it. Though the signature elements were mine – custom film-stocks, filter saturations, pigmentations, surface grains drawn line by line, room tones, bridge music played direct from my inner ear – though mine in the sum of details, each scene was not from the body of films as I had made them, but episodes of my own life behind and beyond the camera; my own life, in all its criminal advances, as if the camera had filmed in two directions. · Life and art obliterated one another. After the retrospective I retreated home to find Mephisto, sunburnt and languorous, naked in my favorite lounge chair:

Don’t you like this life you've made, your own hand silvered to mirror,

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every reflection a new birth as who would happen by; but I think it's getting tiresome for you. You’re better for the lesser arts – poetry, for example, that quaint business, which we’re prepared to offer you with a temporary sub-lease on your life if you agree to cease those horrid movies – what say? · … and here I am as you find me, in a film out of life on a reel closed in its can, but moving; film's metabolism my own.

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5. The Opera tion

Stay awhile –

stay awhile,

for thou art fair –

it wasn’t I who spoke but the anesthetic begging the ghost in me to stay suspended; the operation a success so that I was (though dead) beautiful again and young. Everything begins again. The film spliced into my blood and with the blink of an eye the audience was lulled into the after-image of their own lives: cared for, caressed by a choir of pale-green, tight-gloved angels watched over by whiter angels and others in dark suits, others still who looked on from the galleries, some with pity, others with disgust, most with a professional detachment. The sun in a halo of steel burned above, melting my masks, one after the other; I was reduced to the good – the smallest part of me, but persisting.

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6. My First Film My first film I've put into the pages of a book lost now somewhere in the shelves behind you, books like bricks, unremoveable: A man, tied to his mast, ears plugged with wax passing archipelagoes where sirens lure in silence by the silver luster of their cheekbones, eyes kohl-black, hair Egyptian; but he with his stopped ears, his cocoon of rope, believes their silence to be song to all but himself. By day see him as Kirk Douglas,

by night, Keir Dullea:1

he wants to go home – or on, a little more. It is the difference that compels him:

to go between the on, the home.

The sea's fretful surface Is the ear's own music to itself. 1 The astronaut/Everyman in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kirk Douglas played Ulysses in Ulysses (1954), directed by Mario Camerini.

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The sirens are lovely: they act, they emote –

what is their consciousness if more than their attention to the seafarer who doesn't hear them? –

he's a prince but also a goat, a liar, and a thief. The waves go up, or down; the sirens sing though the sailor is already beyond sight.

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7. A Stor m My Dear, look at the hour – was it by your choice or mine that we stayed awake so long? Another storm: the glass reflects only you, and your camera; I feel the breath of the wind, I'm part of it, but could swallow it – swallow the earth, and feel it turn inside. The land's distance to the south: no more than the crook of my arm into a rough harbor; my mind the lighthouse at the end of the headland, scanning the sea for endangered and delinquent sailors. · Even with so little light Mephisto on the mantel glares with all the utterance our fame allowed. It is that which keeps me the little that I am alive: the less than human, the little more than human, without the human core. · 55 of 88

I have faith that films never burn; but I don't know in whose vaults they're kept. · He never really liked the films I chose to make – too cold, he said, not fit for his Southern blood. I think he might like them better over time. Perhaps even a devil can evolve; evil's most excellent trope is in its doing good. · The storm passes into my eye. . . to say "I'm sorry" –

to say "I'm sorry"1 would be too little;

are you here to tell me they demand it? · It wasn't the power of the gun I bargained for, but only the skill of fashioning the barrel. · I've offered you nothing to eat or drink, please forgive me.

1 Adapted from words spoken by Leni Reifenstahl in the Ray Muller documentary about her.

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And will you leave now? But wait: In a dream I filmed while you were sleeping (just for a moment, so I let you; your camera kept on running) you were my daughter and the boy in my bedroom in the potted iris your brother. You left me and came back the next day with a spade instead of a camera to dig up everything in search of him; didn't find him, but found all you'd made me believe you'd come for, the artifacts of my career for which you now had no use at all, and which you left littering my garden and my house: all the things in memory I had lost. · Then I saw you on the beach beneath the cliff staring up at me as I stood in the middle archway: looking lethally through your lens, unfilming everything I'd made. · 57 of 88

Still in the dream I walked the beach at morning, the tide was going out, I felt you come behind me, like the sun: my divine path, spread out before me – then only my shadow. a stain on the world, · What will succeed the cinema? What could surpass it? · I wait; Mephisto sleeps, his sunburn faded gold. I have not found it necessary to wake or sleep but walk in this dream on the beach, blinking it from night to day and back.

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You can make a film or you can grow a garden. · I have been photographed to death.

– Jean Renoir

– Marlene Dietrich 59 of 88

IV. SEVEN DIMENSIONS

– in the voice of the painter, after his blindness – He might still show up in a fedora and overcoat but the cigarette did not hang so defiantly from his mouth, and all his edges had been smoothed and polished… – Michael Stephens, "Fritz Bultman and Myron Stout: A Provincetown Memoir"

• "Just think, you're not merely blind, you're practically dead! Line, that divine trait, mistress of the world, eternally escapes you…." "My child," Kerensky replied, "…I don't need your line, vulgar as truth is vulgar. You live your life as though you were a teacher of trigonometry, while I for my part live in a world of miracles…" – Isaac Babel, "Line and Color"

• If losing and obliterating the outline constitutes a Picture, Mr. B. will never be so foolish as to do one. Such art of losing the outlines is the art of Venice and Flanders; it loses all character, and leaves what some people call expression: but this is a false notion of expression; expression cannot exist without character as its stamina; and neither character nor expression can exist without firm and determinate outline. – William Blake

• They are always asking: "What does this music or that beauty mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?" In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness. – Helen Keller, Story of My Life

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At what point do I become only a line of thought-speech, without an environment of sensation and perception? What happens to the tracks when there is no longer ground to support the line? What happens to the spinningtop when only the axis is left? Where do thoughts come from? Upon what do they depend? Into how many worlds am I inserted? What is blindness? – John M. Hull, Touching the Rock • I have frequently travelled through a part of the country with which I was totally unacquainted, at the rate of thirty miles in a day; but this was only in a case of emergency, for my usual rate was from fifteen to twenty miles. This, however, is too much for a person in my situation; for supposing a blind man sets out to travel on foot alone, to a distance of twenty miles, he will experience much more fatigue, and go over more ground, than he who has his sight will do in a journey twice that length. – James Wilson, Biography of the Blind

• The spider weaves with as much skill as did Minerva, but all its skill is restricted to this narrow sphere; this is its universe. How marvelous is the insect and how narrow the sphere of its activity. – J. G. Herder, Origin of Language

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1. Through the horns of the great stringless lyre1 Siddhartha rode, on a white mare. Before him went a disciple, tapping a stick as if blind: divining fire from below, drawing invisible flames to cleanse the ground where his Lord Buddha would pass. • I stood under the street light, tired after a night of petulant debate at so-and-so's apartment on Eighth Street. (always better to paint than talk; but I love to talk). I took out my cigarettes and felt for matches; then the Prince of the Sakyas approached me, lit a flame and held it to my Galoise and then his own Lucky Strike. I heard the paper crackle, smelled saltpeter and tobacco, followed the veins of darker fire within the brighter glow: sensed all milliseconds before it occurred – the thinnest line of the future 1 Adapted from a phrase in Sanford Schwartz's essay on Myron Stout.

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ignited by perfection. Thunder and lightning, too, might reverse. The young prince smiled then passed into darkness. At home I tried to draw the sound of footsteps echoing beyond the ring of light, and draw his smile, the only adjective this world might need – both sketches unfinished.

• . . . thus was their battle ended. And so the tempter was defeated, but resolved to defy the Master forever, living as his opposite; became a man of power and wealth, named Devadatta; and one day was carried into the marketplace on his palanquin: no sooner did his feet touch ground but the flames devoured him. When the spectacle was over, after day turned to night and the market was deserted, his cooled ashes rose with the wind, searching everywhere for his opposite.

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. . . after speaking thus to the multitude Gautama received a bowl of milk-rice from a girl dark as carob, the same lovely one who had supposed him nothing more than a tree-sprite and had laughed at the splendor in the air that burned around him in her eyes; but in fact he was a man, like you or I, though free. He ate, bathed in the river, filled and drank from the bowl then gently lowered it to the water, watching as it disappeared downstream.

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2. Hans Hofmann,1 Provincetown, before the multitude:

“The QUESTION asked of us tonight is: Can ART be TAUGHT? And the ANSWER is: NO! ” – thence lecturing upon his answer two solid hours.

• I tried to sketch that negative, capture its deportment, the clear curve of its line; worried it for years, but never finished.

• Blindness is not a punishment: in the theater lights are extinguished and the movie begins, smoke drifts across the screen from cigarettes lit in the front rows. Beyond sight depth is discontinuous in time. Stand in darkness 1 Loosely adapted from an anecdote related by Myron Stout in an interview with Robert Brown, 1984.

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and the world is your sensorium: its pales and palaces your complexes and complexions.

• I was reared in Denton, Texas. My earliest memory is of Mother's piano: I remember it was white – it had been black, then Father painted it white; though still it showed the thinnest lines of black in secret places. I could see the black coming through the white; I recollect that some notes sounded white and some black as if they'd gone away and then returned; but together, under my mother's hands, they made all colors. I don't know why my father painted it white. Mother was dark for years and years about it – played dark music on the white piano, and her face darkened the room whenever Father was in his chair, reading the newspaper, smoking his pipe.

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Some days I felt all white, like the white keys; and some days I felt like the black keys. The music in me was major, then minor. Mother's hands flew over the keys.

• A whirligig spun the devil's face out of the dry air, a shutter somewhere banged its anti-music, a sheet on the line slapped out a wild semaphore to nowhere.

• English gardens filled my mother's books: terraced, sculptural, best viewed from above. the stories she told me, the figures she turned were a landscape counter to our own, a Europe telegraphed across the plain.

• Edens only at the borders – a field briefly fired in wildflower. The Texas plains were flat enough to hold the body of God but not his irony: mountains cast their shadows only when I closed my eyes long enough to make the journey, 67 of 88

flying faster than the whirligig.

• I travel everywhere; gray is my mare, swift as daylight – my hand could be a match, a flame, but a light enters from outside (there are many outsides – all mundane, which is to say all near at hand; the world is various but not profound) –

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3. I used to stand on this beach every day developing in my mind the sea's slow carriage of sand building the land's end to a stalled spiral, a haunted mirror to the main: the line one might draw with the sweep of a hand, a young god in a new world gathering to him what turns away, forever-afterimage of the wave.

• I draw in my mind contemplative, palm-sized sketches, thought-experiments taking light from silences, shadows from words. Sclerotic, reticulated, slow, my line advances: heavy ridges, emotive ties as Arnheim calls them, like those that blind sculptors make to represent the kinesthetic tensions of the face: in my sighted drawings, such lines carried over from the body, 69 of 88

the shape of an ache surrounded by quiet. • A painting moves, shimmers, shunts. Think of vectors, not essences: where to becomes from. Adjust the shape of the white space one hair’s breadth and the whole thing might shock itself out of sight, into another world; you'll look at it from your own dimension, but look wrong and it won't be there.

• Between blindness and invisibility is spirit; among the three I prefer invisibility.

• For the Greeks, water was black, the color of blood, wine-dark as the mariner bent over his raft to stare at the contents of a bowl 70

he might bring to his lips; or in a field above the Hellespont, Alexander resting after battle, all the blue in the heavens consigned to that shade beneath the oak where he reclined.

• Blindness isn't black but a bell that never rings before it rings, flax separated from its stalks when it loosens and becomes corrupt, the blue notes of whales carrying the curve of the earth in them. My smallest drawings were for the hand that didn't draw, drawing secretly in its own space: hand through a microscope, the pencil’s gaze. Such seeing was never far enough; I'd give up and walk.

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4. The young Athanasius knelt in the confession box. The priest had become enflamed at the boy's inquiries and wandered for a moment in the transept, looking through the rose window for angels of forbearance. As the boy waited, he imagined the confessional a camera obscura: an image from beyond formed on the panel before him, moved as if movement were the very soul. The shape was upside down and would not be touched:

perhaps it's me thought the boy; his older self, in heaven or hell, topologically warped but real: how to capture it?

• Each of my drawings worked toward a sound: line the acoustics of the image, hatch-marks disappearing into echoes of work, and finally no work remained: the world-curve in my hand that the smallest ships descend, 72

a sidle that survives the headlong rush, time-negative, photograph of infinite exposure.

• As sight faded I took to leaving pencils and brushes in precise locations; the day came that I never picked them up again. I fired my studio assistants, re-hired them as readers. My brushes stay where they are because they're part of the painting; unfinished canvases on their easels, rough sketches pinned to the wall.

• All winter readers feed the fire in the wood stove: true consort, though extremely temperamental. We keep a kettle always warm – I drink a lot of tea, and like it strong. The foghorn settles in like an old friend with many complaints, but we've heard them all before. My eyes have gone out past the horizon. 73 of 88

• You accept it too well, far too gracefully – I think I'd end it all if I went blind –

as for myself,

• No offense taken.

• Colors besides black and white I lost on purpose years before I lost my sight, to gain a most careful modulation. Now near-blindness shows me the curve of the straight line, that there's no such thing as a straight line: nothing but the decency of the line, the organic truth of it.

• I like my tea strong and I like my friends to like their tea strong, too.

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5.

(a dream; neoclassical) At our garden's edge a doe was threading her heartbeat through that world and this one: that world just to my hand and ready to touch – not hold, not take; only to lay the chuff of the hand on the creature's flank. Then I heard the noise of a carriage rattling down the lane a hundred feet from the woods: my uncle, a madman who lost his mind down a well where he stared so long down came up. The deer had vanished, or I'd lost my eye for it. I gave the bread to my uncle as he stepped down to greet me; he could sense the deer's near-trust 75 of 88

and the line's eye where my hand had thrust toward the darkness coming back bright with its own wish. My uncle took the bread with such gratitude as if I'd given him a work of art though it was only bread from the palm of my hand; and he ate.

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6.

(Greece: anticipation, actuality, remembrance)

A bazaar before the day begins: each stall's shadows silvered in the last suggestions of darkness, thieves scaling themselves to the size of flies, merchants waking, here and there a curse like mica in silence.

• A guitar plays in the orchard. Thought is where effraction makes the edge that we mistake for lines, rough geometries that are only feuds and fellowships.

• Here at this stall the grinder of lenses, formerly a weaver of silk. He’s drawn them so carefully you can lift one from the cloth hold it to your eye and see a fringe of color, the astigmatic edge between worlds or a slight thumbprint where the silkweaver put his creation to his eye 77 of 88

and called himself a maker of lenses.

• One might be sighted like a statue – the kouroi on opposite sides of the hall eyelessly staring the look we give them; the stiff gait of time and the eternal youth of atoms. The lights down the hall, antiquity's place on the power grid, the shine of marble that survived the blind years: to see without eyes.

• My readers read to me from the magazines towering at different heights around the room:

Nature, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Art in America, Scientific American – we're three years behind on each tower, and life now is a matter of never catching up. Alone, I listen to talking books of Louis L'Amour, 78

boxer, soldier, merchant marine, writer of westerns, who of his roustabouting made a passel of Homeric stick-figures used as needles in the knitting of his yarns.

Stories are fiction, he said; settings are always true – or something like that, in an interview. Therefore Wyoming never lies, nor Oklahoma, nor North Texas, where I'm from; but at the borders of things, always a slight prevarication.

• In the '50's, in Provincetown, a group of us spent winters reading Homer and Aeschylus aloud. Snow fell in our voices and outside on the wine-dark sea; we got drunk and more so as we read. The Atlantic was deep space in us, stars and debris flicked our faces like sparks from a fire.

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Midnight: our servant in Crete, Kariakis, phallus in the evening's festivities, lies limp in his hammock. Kariakis sleeps: The sea is a lacquerous rim to his dreams; the tide extends to just below his eyes. Millennia have balded the mountains; it’s night, Kariakis sleeps.

• When the wind blew harder the sound of the guitar forced its way up from the orchard; I was seduced as far as my door, no further. Something had occurred earlier that evening in our little group, but I wasn't sure what as I had removed myself: sex, money, politics, something for the ordinary passions: not my realms.

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• Back in Greece I left my friends to spend one week alone at a monastery, white-washed against the black sea: immobile but like a chess piece from afar. The monastery was on the verge of time, a still cinema: when I looked at it from across the bay countless hatch-marks threaded its walls into darkness, commas of accumulation, chance images of devils and angels, wings beating at cross-purposes, a weather in the eye. •

… and winds from the north pared down our sails at Aulis; we languished, I heard the gods' reproach, 81 of 88

and in what some would call my arrogance I steeled myself, official and obedient to the horror of the gods' command: kings are the adjutants of terror. Daughter! –

offer yourself to the narrative, insatiable. •

This line, the plowman's single thought, and this one the plowing; this shape, the blood that will not seep into the ground. • Signal-fires flicker across the mountain-tops as we read: Agamemnon returns, the foghorn moans, his wife will marry him to his mortality. Fires burn on the mountain-tops, a phrase:

I have returned

to die.

I read out loud, alone; then pin blank paper to the wall to draw the arc of a proud man's fall.

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• My last day at the monastery I woke lying on the beach across the bay from it, no notion how I got there. Hell is a moment in which left could be right or right, left – succubi had carried me away; or one of my other lives had strayed over the border. I woke and the day was well a-progress: a half-naked boy played or rather worked in the rock-pools,1 trident poised (Proteus of my dreams! your youth was the shine of the sea) and the boy stopped still as a marble cupid, Eros with trident staring at an enormous eel in the rock-pool where a page from a newspaper waved like a jellyfish. I was the eel, 1 Adapted from a passage in Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell.

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something in me wound round the boy, the air electrified between here and my monk's cell: a devil's polymer, every isolation's link to the mainland.

• This is the shape that lives by lines unseen: the frontalis, muscle of attention, little mouse in the brow, drawn with the razor of breath where I blew away dust from the surface of the drawing. This is the line hermaphroditic, the cross between halves on the terms of the third half riding the wave of our confusion. This is the ice, the melt and sweat and its line across memory: melting stone, melting hour.

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7. Alexander, dying, crawled from his tent through mud, hand over hand grappling stones and roots to the river to drift toward the sea and drown, godhood intact. But his laundress found him and dragged him back, and in the morning he died a man, not a god.

• Turning at the temple's gate I looked back down the mountain's slope: a lithophane, caught in the sun's momentary angle, one body of light and shade.

• Nothing compensates for blindness; but if it's descent, it's with the chance of rising in some other space: in fear and joy, the torsion, the enduring of one another, or in the cold unthinking waters and the burning on the shore (smoke rolling back and forth in the wind's, not its own jubilation); 85 of 88

burnt laurel leaves sent smoke entwining with the legs and arms of dancing bodies. I saw it all, in a long exposure, so that a blurred field of flesh and smoke coalesced in my eye. Run your fingers along this lathing of time, run your fingers along the edge of this life, find me and I am yours as much as you can draw into yourself by the tracing the caressing the erasing where the finger says: this is the delta of my search. The face to the hand becomes large, large as a journey; I touch your eyes and I am seen.

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The shape of a broken eggshell, the smell of a damp place, the sight of a rag in the gutter, the feel of the touch of some surface, the sound of someone saying a single word, a word itself and alone, what you tasted when you licked your lips a certain day at a certain place: it's not just that these feelings have become single facts in your existence. There's not a one which exists alone; there's some strange and inexpressible set of relationships. They are tied together in such an intertwining maze of knots and loopings over and under, that not even the greatest patience could ever trace their directions. It is out of this dim and vague, this confused and almost chaotic world that our intuitions of new concepts grow. By-passing our conscious thinking, so to speak, they reach out into a still dimmer world. – Myron Stout, Journals, undated (perhaps 1950) 87 of 88

Furt her Notes “The Nursing Home Poem” draws on my experiences at a nursing home where I assisted the poet Vassar Miller. Other details are borrowed from an article about nursing homes in Time Magazine, and from The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home, by Joel S. Savishinsky. Some of the details of the dying days of Hardy, Hopkins, and Lanier have come from the following books: Thomas Hardy: A Biography by Michael Millgate; Hopkins: A Literary Biography by Norman White; and The Life of Sidney Lanier by Lincoln Lorenz. Several references in “Seven Dimensions” are drawn from the true life of Myron Stout as I know it from interviews, biographical and critical writings, the artist's journals, and my memory of conversations we had when I read for him in the fall, winter, and spring of 1986-87. However, most of the poem is fictional.

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