Emily,

Emily,

Do you believe it’s possible
to be dominated
and respected
simultaneously?
I’m interested
in getting to know you better.
I felt endeared, repulsed
and bemused
viewing your photos.
I spend a lot of time
thinking about
tits, ass, what I’m going to be
when I grow up.
You should message me if
your lower body resembles
these buffalo wings I once ate
that were so plump and tender
they should have been wrapped
in sweatpants that say
Juicy on the back.
Girls often notice
my pecs, biceps,
symmetrical facial features
bone structure, crotch, etc.,
and guys, their feeling of envy.
I’m really good at
all. You should message me if
you like a man with a few rough edges
and won’t secretly plot
to smooth them out the whole time.
Do you feel like you can write well?
For a white girl
you look like a decent rapper.
You look pretty gangsta
for a white girl.
Can I sleep with you?
It would really help.
I could never do without
water, it’s so pure.
Do you love hot sex?
Hello there.
You have some very atypical pictures, hello.
Hey! You look like you like to have fun.
What are your days like?
I’m just hanging,
going swimming whether summer or winter,
taking trips to tropical places,
going out to eat.
I’m diligently striving
to live a life of true purpose
and trying to find
true purpose while I’m at it lol.
There’s a grammar mistake
I your what am I doing
with my life section.
You could probably create
a killer erasure
if you were stuck in a cave
with all the food and water you needed.
I always love to see other people's
creative processes, so forgive me
for what I imagine will be
the start of a barrage of questions,
but what inspires you to write?
Who/what has influenced your style
and, I guess, to a further extent,
the principles that guide your writing?
I'm constantly making simple, overlapping
generalizations about life as a whole
in an attempt to actively examine
the world as I pass through it.
I'm always focused on something or another.
You should message me if
1. You’re not shy
2. You like coffee
3. You've got a great personality
and you want me to know it.
My humor is dry as a dessert
but my moves are sleek as silk.
I love bad puns, cities, and life in general.
I was also on Jeopardy once, as a subject.
So, take that as you will.
I'm a huge Velvet Underground fan.
I saw Lou Reed live in 2007,
he played Femme Fatale,
and I was the only person in the audience
to sing along.
I could never do without thoughts,
Science, Kindle, Beaches,
Friends, Beer, The Atlantic,
The Economist, The Liberal Elitist, Skylines.
Honestly, I'm having troubles
putting my life into a confined box.
It tears at my values of being human.
Hi there!
I’m enjoying my life
through and through.
I’m a city person.
Good morning.
I just visited your profile.
I don't know you anything
special or important to say.
I’m a great guy if you get to know me
but mostly pissed off lol.
Ever been with
two European guys?
Would you be open
to an ongoing, casual relationship?
Your profile is very intriguing.
Artists are a dying breed it seems.
Welcome, stranger.
Have you ever used the word
dreamy to describe someone?
I used to live on a road
named after you.
It was a beautiful place
that Google maps couldn’t find
where I could wander out into the yard
almost every afternoon.

________________

Note: “Emily,” is built from messages and profile excerpts found and received on OkCupid and Tinder in 2015.

Another Poem About Birds

The nest outside the living room window

Contained a brood of four eastern phoebe hatchlings

They were getting huge

Stretching their wings

Too scared to leap and fly

One evening we noticed a rat snake under the nest

Right where the shit accumulated in a little chalky pile

About eight feet below where the babies were seated

It’s casing the joint we joked it’s coming back for the birds

We thought we were overestimating the snake’s sense of geometry

But the next night we heard a thump against the living room window

It was one of the babies having fled

And when we turned on the porch light

We saw the rat snake dangled next to the nest

Like a slick black pendant light

Long cord of its tail pressed against the beam

Geometrically to support its weight as it hung there

It was halfway through swallowing one of the hatchlings

The wing poked out like a ragged sail

The rest of them had fledged

To avoid the predator’s jaws

It was one way to learn to fly

*

I had been documenting the birds on Instagram

I felt obligated to update everyone on what happened

Which also felt kind of sad

I had taken a picture of the snake

Dangling there with the bird in its grip

But I didn’t post

I just shared in words

The picture felt too close to something I didn’t want to touch right then

Because even though I am not afraid of death

I have a dumb soft heart

*

Every night when I put my baby boy to bed

In order to avoid being pulled out of my sleep

By the vivid hallucinations I am prone to

Where he’s missing

Or not in his correct location

Or otherwise in palpable danger

I have to tell myself just before I tumble into my dreams

The baby is safe in his bed

The baby is alone and safe in his bed

The power of these words is enormous to me

They let my brain unwind into nothingness

They let me drop into the chaos of my sleep

And let my ears be blocked by the metaphysical sound

Of the spinning plate of existence

Like a sound machine in the baby room

Of the universe where I’m baby

I have to trust that something will let my words be true

Even as the uttering of a statement

Creates also its opposite statement

*

I’m not equating baby birds in a nest to a baby boy in a bed

I’m not equating myself to an instinct-driven adult passerine

And I’m especially not equating all the worst fears I have

To a snake driven by hunger

That would be too easy

And much too hard on snakes

*

Neither rat snake nor eastern phoebe

Is endangered at this time

Neither is facing habitat loss

But as the climate shifts to warmer

The birds will get the urge to nest earlier in the season

And the snakes will shift their energies to nocturnal foraging

To avoid the uninterrupted sun on their scales

And overwarming and the need to move to shade

They will begin to hunt more often at nighttime and the crepuscular hour

Surprising adult birds as they sit the nest

It’s not one influencing the other

It’s that you adjust one setting

And the equilibrium of the whole system changes

Perhaps in this case it will mean additional snakes

And fewer birds who want to use this particular nest

I’ve spent so little time thinking about the settings

And the systems

My own systems

A little shortage here or there

A little change to what I eat

I’m not in the business of strangling birds

But sometimes I can’t find my fake meatballs to buy

Or my husband can’t find his bran flakes and so what

There’s such a variety at the shop that we don’t care

But what careened on earth in order to make it so

Who lost a job and whose crop withered and whose water supply

Was diverted by other corporate interests

I feed my baby avocado for his first food

Even though it’s imported

And out of season besides

*

Eastern phoebes mate for life

Often reusing the same nest

The same pair will return here

To the site of the snake scenario

Maybe the snake will return here as well

To the site of its convenience meal

And I as the audience

May also return

Dread in my eyes

Oh I have such

Sympathy for babies

I find myself sad for them

The one that got eaten and also the ones

That sought cover in the heavy foliage of night

But the snake was also just looking out for itself

And the little birds had to fledge sometime

Why not then said the snake

Why not then

"Enter ghost ; ; ; ; ;All the beautiful rooms"

Enter ghost                All the beautiful rooms
are empty

All the accounts deactivated

Calendars vacated of all spectacle      all spectacular affairs

We no longer touch
each other’s faces

We dream of vengeful animals
escaping their electrified enclosures

Suspiciously low flying airplanes

Houseplants sickening and dying      from the burden
of our smothering love

"Where is the daughter the son"

Where is the daughter the son

The monogamous swans
tucked in for the night under their white wings

Have you ever seen a swan in flight

I have never seen it

The winter sun bleaches everything

Blanches the snow-dusted hills

There is no swoon     no afterlight

Have you ever seen it

I remember when we were ravenous for the sun      and the sun
was ravenous for us

_from_ O

In a court masque from the seventeenth century, twelve Ethiopian nymphs travel to beg for a favor from the river god Okeanos: they want him to wash them white. The ladies of the court, who portray the nymphs, diligently smear their hands and faces with black paint. They are now the river god Niger’s daughters. Over their elbows: gloves made of snow are another tragedy.

There’s something womanly about water. It enfolds and dissolves, it attracts and repulses in equal measure. When the world’s very first woman explored the garden, she leaned over a green pond and saw herself emerge from it; she fell in love. The twelve black nymphs see themselves in their father’s mirror and weep, sob, dissolve back into water.

O watches the masque with a vacant expression. Her mind is elsewhere. Her red dress exposes her left breast. SUSAN SONTAG: It is easy to think of death in Venice. O wouldn’t know; she’s never been to Venice. NIGER: “As one of Phaëton, that fired the world / And that, before his heedless flames were hurl’d / About the globe, the Aethiops were as fair / As other dames; now black, with black despair.”

The last time O thought about death she told herself: “One day I will bury my mother in this soil.” Out loud she said: “I will never bury my mother in this soil.” There is black despair in water.

 

     *   *   *


When O gets home she tries to recount the play from her scattered notes. O reads:

At first there’s a sketch of a landscape
     Small woods and void places
     Resembling an artificial hunt
     The waves break the billows break
     Almost as if rushing forth
     Aside from their skin and hair
     Their temperament is human
     The orderly order
     Music rushes in from the sea
     In shape and cast a daughter
     For variation’s sugarcane
     The shadow of an ornate mantle
     Encircled by black backs
     His hair markedly kinky
     The top of his head a radiant light
     Niger is a daughter

     *   *   *


     The sea might rush forth
     As if flowing
     An artificial temperament
     Murex snails and radiating
     Various shapes and expressions
     Encircled by black daughters
     Others’ faces various ways
     The torch-bearers have various ways
     Some backs were seen from the side
     Forehead, ear, wrists
     Best set off against the black
     Best set off against the black
     Present the players

     *   *   *


     Waves seem to move
     Imitating disorder
     Upper parts human
     Save their skin
     In shape and cast nymphs
     The head turned to the side
     They’re seated one above another
     Decorated with bulrush
     Presenting shimmering
     Carefully selected
     Niger’s daughters are best set off
     Algae and red seagrass
     All were alike
     All were artificial

     *   *   *


To start with, a sketch of a landscape. I wish for an orderly disorder. I wish for a mantle of rain. I wish for a harmless sea that billows and breaks; I wish for scrolls of taffeta and mother-of-pearl. Blue hair. Blue skin. An Ethiopian in shape and disposition. When they carry the torch, a glorious light, I wish nothing were human. Multi-colored and wreathed with bulrush. I wish for a harmless sea. I wish for a different temperament. When the forehead, ear, neck, and wrist are set off I wish nothing were nature. Ornate in shape and disposition.   

                                                                 *

The two figures are, for the sake of variation, choice pearls set off against the black. Differences borne on their backs. Water to touch the face, azure and silver, my hands break. Everybody’s hair was on fire. If Ethiopians were commonly found in nature their desinent parts would’ve been human, their necks mother-of-pearl, their heads attractive dressings of feathers. The stage is built from snowfall. He turned to me on the train and said: You all are Niger’s daughters. When we present the players it will be in the regular disorder.

                                                                 *

Turn the other cheek to better set it off against the black. Behind these were extravagant, artificial daughters. They were bearing light. From the underpass streamed airy pieces of taffeta, blue light, a stench of urine and the scream traveling sideways. Others’ faces are shimmering, singing pearls; mine is an excited dance. Present me, the player, and I’ll give you sea monsters. The hunt dominates the void places. It is not hard to raise the world above your head and let it fall. Imagine having a human form.

                                                                 *

“O, the more angel she, and you the blacker devil!” O yells at herself in the bus shelter before she hides behind a trash can, howling with laughter. Afterward she buys a bag of banana gummies; they swell in the mouth.

O’s task is simple: to carve out so much of herself that an audience can fit inside her. The audience is not black; the court calls it a refinement process. When she goes to see the alchemists they turn up her palms, pinch her thighs, and conclude that it’s going to require both time and patience. But it is possible. O: “Is’t possible?”

     *   *   *


     Where common landscapes
     That light befits
     Press an ear
     Pressed against the shell
     Which wasn’t blue
     What, then, do you hear
     A red pearl
     Be identical
     Be honest
     Be fine hands
     Ornate heads
     Homelands
     Shimmering black
     Braided
     Back to back

     *   *   *


     A parted light
     Can make it seem
     In one part
     Like a partial account
     One over another
     For my part
     I have tried
     I have trained as
     Painted moon
     It streams behind
     Practice different
     Angels and angles

     *   *   *


People like to take an interest in the subversive potential of the hybrid. O is, in some ways, a hybrid. But in discussing hybridity we indicate simultaneously a closeness to power and a distance from the other, from that which is much too foreign, that which cannot be embraced and neutralized. What happens to the other when we center the hybrid? In some ways, O assumes, it’s that same old debate about reform or revolution. She’s snuck backstage and is silently watching the ladies of the court wash off their dark color into silver bowls. Their scoured skin is so red that they must paint it white again: they smear themselves with amber, powder their faces with crushed alabaster, almonds, they paint thin blue veins over their decolletages.

O squeezes her exposed breast. Is it full of milk, white milk, is it good enough to feed their children? Or is that dark ink, leaking out of her and into their pens?

 

     *   *   *


“It is not words that shake me thus,” O explains. During a private language lesson she looks with surprise at the notebook beneath her damp hand. She reads:

Lay down close to the pain
But not so close
That the contours of the wound
Are too obvious.

Don’t be inscrutable.
Who are you running from?
You’re the only one here:
Your hair’s round shadow.

                          Translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson

Pleasant Morning Walk

Just a few cable-lengths from my room, I was sometimes startled, my morning walk only just begun, by dissonant clashes of copper emerging from the demolition of a charming little brick house. Based on the chosen themes of that mysterious orphéon of ruins, I’d imagine behind that sad plaster façade a full procession of ingenuous morning arbors, where electricians in red overalls, blond streetwalkers at dawn, professional corteges in costume facing the rising sun dispersed nocturnal mists in a few of those finely wrought pewter tankards that look so lovely in the foreground of a comic-opera bacchanalia. Could anything more charming be imagined, before the morning rush to work in a uniform’s froggings and pleasing galaxies, than the choir fresh with dew, fanned by extinguished girandoles, and raised toward the sun by those ingenuous stagehands condemned, for the entire day, to hide like delinquents in the dustiest wings of a modern city? A hasty ball, the flight of a lace petticoat in twilight’s darkness was the limit of what I could imagine of the scandals behind that tiny enclosure hidden from land surveyors by the ordinary spring of a plaster curtain wall sure to be demolished in three strikes. But already a lovely tavern with uneven crossbeams was letting its shutters sing in dawn’s light, like the elytra of happy garden bugs unfolding in the morning. Already the street was warmly beckoning me, the misaligned cobbles taking their places in their cells—nothing, isn’t it so, had happened—and like a domino mask on a coquettish woman’s most seductive face, after their morning entrechat the streetlamps and rickety trash cans had resumed their collective watch under the military eye of the city’s sweepers.

                          Translated from the French by Alice Yang

On the Banks of Fine Bendemeer

I had wandered a long while, in the fading hours of the afternoon, through the cool streets in the neighborhood of cemeteries and riots near the mixed-style cathedral. A pronounced nonchalance, like that of ringed fingers drumming discreetly on a jewelry box in the penumbra of antiquarians’ elegant Merovingian salons, made my step heavy with each turn in the blind spiral of buildings. The transparent prison of air spread the sound of gongs. The only respite given me now and then came from worm-eaten benches that evoked the funereal stations of the cross blazoned with Roman emblems and phalerae, as complex as the metro’s canvas. This labyrinth seemed to serve as pedestal for some shadowy Calvary, some outlying Babel. Doors swung mysteriously here and there, though always beyond a bend in the road, and the dismal pursuit of that sordid opening to the outskirts excited an itching desire within me. Those calls deep as horns, that anxious pursuit through heaps of rubble, ladder scaffoldings, rows of blind shops barren as the Hoggar Mountains, suddenly brought me, behind the screens of a fine rain, before the apse of the most ambiguous building I’ve ever seen—then slid me the password that neutralized the sentry at the postern, and under the wide beams of light, smooth and sea-green from the stained glass windows, with tears in my eyes, I felt the lower half of my body melt in the vigorous, tufted grass of an oceanic meadow.

                          Translated from the French by Alice Yang

Ross Ice Shelf

One must rise early to see the day ascend over the ice floe’s horizon, at the hour when the sun of the southern latitudes spreads paths onto the sea in the distance. Miss Jane carried her parasol, I an elegant double-barreled shotgun. At every glacier gorge, we’d kiss in the mint crevasses and take pleasure in lingering to see the fiery sun carve a path through a lacework of glittering ice. We liked to walk along the shore where, the cliff breathing steadily with the tide, the sea’s soft, thick rolling predisposed us to love. The waves beat against the walls of blue and green snow, and threw giant crystal flowers at our feet in the coves, but the day’s approach was especially perceptible on that faint hem of phosphorus that lined the scallops of the waves’ crests, as when capital cities set sail at night on the stillness of high seas. At the Cape of Devastation, in the fissures of ice, grew edelweiss the color of midnight blue, and we were always sure to see, day after day, a fresh supply of those seabird eggs that Jane believed could brighten one’s complexion. It was a daily rite for me to repeat Jane’s words on her mouth, as if to gather them with my lips. Sometimes the clouds concealing the cliff’s foot announced an overcast sky for the afternoon, and Jane asked in a small voice whether I’d taken care to wrap the Cheshire cheese sandwiches. Eventually the cliff grew higher and chalky from the sun: that was Desolation Peak, and on Jane’s signal I spread the blanket over the fresh snow. We lay there a long while, listening to the sea’s wild horses beating their chests in the icy caves. The horizon of the open sea was a diamond blue semicircle submerging a wall of ice, where sometimes a flake of vapor emerged, protruding from the sea like a white sail—and Jane recited Lermontov to me. I could have spent entire afternoons there, my hand in hers, following the cawing of seabirds, and tossing chunks of ice into the chasm and listening to them fall, while Jane counted the seconds, sticking out her tongue in concentration like a schoolgirl. Then we embraced each other for so long and so tightly that a single channel narrower than a baby’s cradle formed in the melted snow, and when we got back up, the blanket among the white knolls brought to mind those Asian mules that descend from mountains laden with snow.

Then the sea’s blue deepened and the cliff turned purple; it was the hour when the evening’s sudden cold detaches from the ice floe those crystal castles that crumble into a dust of ice with the sound of a bursting world, turning over, under a blue wave’s gigantic scroll, the belly of a liner with dark algae in its cracks, or the heavy snorting of swimming plesiosaurs. For us alone there grew brighter and brighter, up to the edge of the horizon, that apocalyptic cannonade like a Waterloo of solitudes—and, for a long time, the freezing night, in the great silence, was punctured by distant ghosts gushing forth from tall, white-feather geysers—but I had already squeezed Jane’s icy hand in mine, and we were coming back to the light of pure Antarctic stars.

                          Translated from the French by Alice Yang
 

_from_ The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card

The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card

Voice open
like a dictionary
of pleases—
to briefly hold
what I am
supposed to want.

__________

The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card

We either die
or live forever
like a tag
spraypainted on a church:
HORSE BIRTH
DR FART.
The dead
are only open
to the living.

__________

The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card

A crumb of poem
only feels like a meal
to those who're already fed.
We each need something
only others can make.
Make what only you can make,
never knowing who needs it,
only knowing someone does.

__________

The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card

Dig through the mirror
& unearth a garden.
Write your name in dirt
until your name is dirt.
Time blooms,
then blushes,
& bleeds.

A few days

I came yesterday
on the Empire State Express,
eight hours of boredom.

Once again,
it’s another day, a gray day,
damp as a dog’s mouth,
this unlikely August.

If anybody called me
by my camp name
nowadays
I’d sock them—

A few days:
how to celebrate?

It’s no day
for writing poems.
Or for writing,
period.

There aren’t any novels
about blindstiffs
these days:
Tramping on Life.

I’d like to spend part
of this lovely day
in a darkened
theater:
only there’s nothing
I want to see.

You suddenly look
like an old
woman,
the old woman
you may one day
become.

She sits all day,
a monument to patience,
almost eighty-nine
if she’s a day.

Like the picture
in my grandmother’s Bible
of Judgment Day:
Rembrandtesque beams
of spotlights
through cloud cities
on a desolate landscape.

Sunday, “the worst day,”
and we all sit
snowbound
in drifts
of Sunday paper.

Monotonous days,
daydreaming
of any place but here.

The radio is on:
perhaps this will be
a lucky day.

Today,
the color of a buttercup,
winds on the spool of time,
an opaque snapshot.

It’s cool for August
and I can’t
nail the days down.

Tomorrow is another day,
no better than today,
if you only realize.

Today
is better than yesterday,
but I still feel cold.

I mailed letters
today:
Denver Art Museum,
Chemical Bank
(that should bring
in money),
Savitsky, my lawyer:
he pays my bills.

Good day,
Signor Oscari:
are you still a grocer
by trade?

Thirty-five dollars
for a dozen roses,
Sterling Silver:
not today.

On the last day of August
I feel much better
than I felt
in June,
heaven be praised.

But Queens
seems awfully far
to give the day
a gentle lift.

It’s Wednesday morning,
but later than
I got up yesterday:
the sun is off
the balcony.

People say,
“Ooooh,
you have a balcony,”
as though I stand there
every day
surveying Twenty-Third Street:
Chelsea Sewing Center,
Carla Hair Salon.

Today is tomorrow:
the dead time.

What will it be like
when there’s no more
tomorrow?

It must
have been horrible
to live
before the days
of modern medicine—
all those greats
going off their chump from syphilis
or coughing their lungs out
with TB.

A few days,
spend them riotously.

I wish
I could go on a diet
for a few days:
to reduce the outer man
to weigh
what he should.

For today’s repast
remembered.

One day
the telephone:
it’s Hilde.

Here it is
Labor Day Weekend
and all my friends
are out of town:
just me
and some millions
to whom I have not yet
been introduced.

Now
tomorrow is today,
the day before
Labor Day, 1979.

________________

Note: “A few days” is a poem from my housebound, pandemically composed complete English-to-English translations of the Collected Poems of James Schuyler (1993). For my poem, I’ve excised, sometimes transformed, and collaged every instance in Schuyler’s poem “A few days” (originally more than 25 pages long) where he uses the words “day,” “yesterday,” “today,” or “tomorrow.”

"Today is the fifth day"

Today is the fifth day of the rest of my wife. If I were to sit across from you in the board room, meeting room, interview and say read me, fine, tell me all the things, you could say, card shark, first, then blond card shark, then trickster, muffin, potato acer, ship runner, overland comer, movie longer, Garbo hoarder, with a wrinkle under your so’s your uncle for your favorite rock. I am looking forward to a time when I can compete. Until then, I am slavering in the mix and no I don’t know what that means but it won’t stop me from translasting it. I was born for it, you say, this movie is great, it’s got a crazy lady, you say, you’re not a turnip. I like that very much.

"You’ve got the brains"

You’ve got the brains I’ve got the books let’s lose lots of money. It’s all come down to shade. Shadow fill in the blanks and box checker, is that the new dead job, the one they’re handing out with diplomat diplomas these d-days. Did you just say disciple or am I fantasizing again. Like at the grocery in line for crepes and the little boy with the twister shirt on begins to sing into the microphone like he never left it. There I go again you say, what is it with the world and percentages. I am nine times nine of myself and still too much. If he wasn’t that kind of doctor what would he be. This referent refers to nothing and I draw a tree to prove it. You and I decided these rules long ago when we were babies, the babies of humanity, decided it all. That might not be the problem.

"Flaming in the installation"

Flaming in the installation
museum the one with the
mattresses on the walls and
the big pink puffy bed and
pillows and the art of dark-
nesses and they say minim-
alism can’t be beat unless
you try. The number of
Russian artists trying not
to make a statement out
numbers the number of
everyone else. Three steps
forward into the polka
dot turns you into a cat.
These are the muumuus
you wear for yourself
and these are the ones
you wear for someone
else and this is how you
put on your glasses the
wrong way so everyone
knows you know what
you’re saying. The ones
deep inside the café wear
the best overalls patted
over all with abstract tulips
sakura daffodils buttercups
and other common spring
wearing flowers. Political
statements you can truly
sink your nose into, like
an installation on the very
top floor you walked miles
to get here together and
the guards watch you watch-
ing their phones. You could
really get into this if you didn’t
have to be somewhere else
soon. Everyone is talking
around you about how they
don’t know what they’re
doing. The tiny white socks
someone took time to sew
individually covered in beads
they look like little penis
covers or maybe hoods
tiny ones. You want to
take a picture of these
ladies in their large match-
ing print wear that could be
from Finland but isn’t. It’s
from here. The sick sock
sculptures represent the
Catholic church and their
abuses. Ties to ropes from
the ceiling dangle them
at your knees and shoulders
at first sight looking like a
bunch of bowed head flow-
erring classic rock cloths,
at last reading themselves
into the century light, blue
light, red corners, white mid-
dles. The note at the end of
the line explains everything.

Moravian Beeches

             for Claude Louis-Combet

after a long sunny walk
there came a rough footpath
then crossing the Ondrejnice
by a libidinal bridge toward
the dark forest facing us down
off the slope

crisscrossed by roots
rocks heaped here and there
the path passed by the foot of a white ash
scraped into its bark a mandorla
and its vulva arch

the last rays of the afternoon were tickling
the naked beech trees
their trunks with scarred eyes

things took a turn
at the spiderweb
in the trunk split into a trident
two large orbits the mouth hole
under the nose hole a filigree and
vibrating death-mask
that left us speechless

witches rode the Moravian
mare of nightmares
those maleficent ones unleashed
storms and desires
into the country of the Inquisition
where Institoris searched for words
and plants to hammer open the spirit
then disappeared once and for all

near the Hukvaldy beeches
Janáček composed in F
the melody torn from rumbling thunder
to expand music
these same Hochwald beeches were
the little secret paradise of Freud who
in ingenious insight dreamed of
leaving behind the empire of his empiricism

the unconscious made of sonorous sylvan groves
full of white holes was up till then
the domain of female fortune tellers

Freud no longer wrote vain love poems
we never found Janáček’s bench
the storm took aim at the little hills
where Janáček dawdled
and Freud delayed leaving home

                          Translated from the French by Matt Reeck

The Lone Willow of Saeftinghe

             for Elke de Rijcke
             in the memory of Franck Venaille

muck instep in the clay banks
the community of stuck
bleating behind it—the grass embankment
of Emmadorp staunching the first fear—
beneath the lines cutting through the distant fog
toward the center of platens
among the shifting sands where everything’s
in between and everything delves into the muddy
betweenness as much water as sugared
echo of the grassy odor
fearing coming onto stage

floral rusts of the gales of the galerne
sea onions bulb sucked by
wild geese without counting the
grassy leaves of lamb’s ears
taking over in the struggle
between strata of clay and grassy growth

the fight of the sweet frothrubs against
the odious brine in the disgust of muds

what dies out dies down reassures
among the perfidious stirrings
up to the melodious clay-chirpings
these word bubbles in fetid schist

footfall on the skin of a somnolent
stomach the tremulous film of browns
rising from the clay grays
where the insouciant shadow of tires
oscillates down the road toward the dune
engraved with crow’s feet

the immovable bay of the movable space
closes upon itself it insinuates extravagance
in a choreography of canals
but then opens onto the sky

when the festive skein of geese laboring
through a slow adagio rustles by
like wings of the convoy’s end
pressed down by the howl of
the wind into silence

only thoughts of the loss of landmarks
tramping through dense drowned wool
of the mute wave

each step sucks up from the streambeds
on the path wetting the grassy isle—if the
water flows up it’s being pushed up—
patchy milky bacterial mud
puddling on heaven background

the salty coating is thrown off
spasmatic space will shout out
the sea ejaculates

in the arms in the vase
the galloping respiratory allure reversing
in a pansensual final acme
recovers its name in oceanic verse
rising to prose in solemn cadence

in this shard weaving together tiny rambling islets
that would be darkened underneath sod rolls
it’s time to turn toward the tree
the lone mast in the flattened wave
the area constructed from a wild stomach
full of a monster to be born
the mound of the crumbling cabin
surrounded by streams and nettles
where from the horizon are seen
what are ostensibly the melancholy of tramps and
the adorable steam of the nuclear power station

the wind soliloquizes over this stretch of stable earth
isolating
this irritating body so out of place
that powdery clay-blanched hands
want to fell it

the cafe corrupts as much as the old random willow
so hospitable offering a nest
to the baby crows that will never pass by

                          Translated from the French by Matt Reeck

Appreciating Art

The idea to eat the helicopter was mine. I say that now to excuse everyone else involved. In the end I won over the detractors by explaining my approach was actually quite conservative. My initial vision for the project had been much more drastic. The eating-an-aircraft part, at least, had been done before. People have been eating everything forever, I told my gallery representative one night over the phone. A guy ate a Cessna in the 1970s.

“Will you be eating anything else?” he asked. I imagined him picturing a hunk of metal on a plate with rice and string beans. Yes, I told him, of course. You can’t live off nothing but helicopter. No, he agreed, that couldn’t be healthy.

The Hind D is the most beautiful piece of military hardware ever produced. Its Rubenesque curves culminate in the paired communications domes positioned above the stacked baby bumps of the two-person cockpit. The stunted winglets bristle with rockets and machine guns, lending the craft a kind of cherubic hermaphroditism. Its camouflage patterns evoke the Afghan desert or the steely blue of the Caucasus mountains or the pine forests of Siberia, and whenever I watch a video of it flying, I feel a chill, like I’m listening to heartbreaking music, as it emerges from the landscape, its body pressing against the fabric of reality until its true identity is revealed in a blink of metal and glass.

My assistant, Nora, and I easily found a Hind D for sale on the internet. The Hind is the AK-47 of helicopters, ubiquitous in armies and paramilitaries around the world. While more modern variants, such as the Hind E, come equipped with advanced avionics and electronics that inflate the price, the barebones weapons platform is pretty reasonable. We ended up in talks with a seller from the Emirates who was willing to do low six-figures, with a couple RPGs and AKs thrown in for some colleagues of mine who were doing an installation upstate. I shouldered the up-front cost on spec and Nora and I began searching for co-sponsors.

At first I was reluctant to involve corporate money. I’ve never been much of a salesperson, so the thought of standing in front of a bunch of MBAs explaining how I wanted to eat, excrete, and then 3D-print the disassembled parts of a Soviet helicopter for the sake of art struck me as a non-starter.

Thankfully Nora was much more enthusiastic. She got on the phone and talked to people and found money. She was very smart about which parts of the project to “provide color on” and what to leave to the imagination. Within three weeks of buying the helicopter, she had landed us a partnership with a nonprofit arts organization, as well as supporting grants from an energy drink company, a regional bank, and an art supplies chain.

I asked Nora if the sponsors understood what they were supporting. I worried we were overstretching ourselves, that the money would vanish the moment the real project was revealed. She offered to show me email receipts. “I’m not misleading them,” she said. “The project speaks for itself and people are really excited.”

She pulled up a wireframe of the splash page the energy drink company had thrown together to promote the event. “Are they going to put me on TV?” I asked. “Webcast only to start,” said Nora. “We can renegotiate the digital rights after we see analytics.” She closed the tab. “You just think about your diet,” she said. “Don’t worry about any of this other stuff.”

Parts of the Hind started arriving in the mail. I unboxed and photographed each one, logged it in the database, repacked it, and sent it to the processing company that oversaw the transformation of the raw materials into edible 3-D printed replicas made from a solution of broken-down helicopter and soy-xanthan paste. The resulting slabs of helicopter-enriched protein I would stir-fry with brown rice or thinly slice and layer with avocado on a whole-wheat wrap. Years of vegetarian faux-meat experimentation had prepared me well for the Hind diet. The flavor of the helicopter is vivid in my memory, like plastic-y baloney spiced with graphite. The more I ate, the more addictive its distinctive bite became. As an ingredient it was versatile and forgiving. I bought a dehydrator and started making helicopter jerky that I snacked on between meals. I simmered it in olive oil with tomatoes, onions and garlic to prepare a rustic helicopter ragu.

One day I offered some pickled helicopter sausage to Nora and was pleasantly surprised when she accepted. “It’s sour,” she said. “I actually like it quite a lot.” “I know,” I said. “It turned out really well, I thought.”

There had been a nag in the back of my mind that Nora, for all her hard work on the project, secretly thought it was a joke and I was a fraud. But eating helicopter particles suspended in protein paste was the perfect Kool-Aid test. “I’ll bring you a bag from home,” I told her. “I’ve been trying out a few different recipes.” She smiled, cheeks puffing, eyes slivering. I took this expression to mean no, please no, even though she said yes.

But that Friday, she asked if I’d forgotten about the helicopter jerky I’d promised her. I was taken aback. “I thought you weren’t that big a fan of it,” I said. “Oh, the taste is fine,” she said. “But my thinking was more along the lines of keeping it.” I looked at her blankly. “You’d just hold on to the bag?” I asked. “Yeah,” she said. “Is that so weird? I was going to have it framed.”

***

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’ve never been able to convince myself that my work has any value. Value as in it could be worth something to anyone other than me. That my art could be somebody’s investment makes my stomach ring hollow. I do not have a commercial sensibility. My work is intensely personal, my body a vitrine of organs marked by outlandish masochism.

For most of my “career” I incurred more money in fines performing than I earned in grants or appearance fees. My catalogue raisonné is a dossier of criminal and medical records: indecency after indecency, exposure after exposure. I have lifetime bans from dozens of regional contemporary art museums. I’ve hidden from angry audiences in supply closets and once my rental car was firebombed in a gallery parking lot. I find myself unwelcome in a greater and greater number of homes. Fewer and fewer friends call me back. That my spectacular self-immolation would ultimately prove to be my most marketable asset is an object lesson in capital’s inexorable drive to produce ever-diminishing and more absurd and abstracted versions of itself.

The turning point came in the early aughts, when I harvested stem cells from the bone marrow of my coccyx and exposed them for one year to high doses of radiation. I then re-injected the marrow back into my coccyx and attended weekly checkups with an oncologist until she could confirm that the tumor I was growing in my lower back had metastasized. After the cancer was removed, I contacted my gallery representative to see what could be done with it. A couple days later I learned an anonymous buyer had come forward with a sizable offer. This person, the founder and CEO of something called ChainSwap, which, my gallery representative explained to me, moved private information from one part of your phone to another part of your phone, all without you knowing it—this person wanted the tumor for his home collection.

Fueled by the hype surrounding this obscene purchase, my stock in the art world began to soar and I quickly became very rich. My gallery representative skimmed a generous percentage of these earnings and the rest I took as a lump sum, cash in a duffel bag. I am not lying when I say I have no idea how to spend money. I bought a bunch of nice clothes that fit me (I had lost a lot of weight because of the cancer) and a sofa I liked for my studio. I had bigger ambitions. I wanted to renovate my workspace and buy a Hind, but I was clueless how to do these things because I’d never had any capital to deploy (another Nora-ism).

I asked my gallery representative if he could recommend someone to help and he connected me with a client named Constantia Robins, who’d had a wonderful experience with a young woman from a company called YMRW. Their arrangement had been freelance and off the books, but she assured me the young woman would welcome referrals. I had my gallery representative drop her an official-sounding query and she responded within five minutes, from a different, non-YMRW email account. We arranged to meet for breakfast at my studio.

Nora showed up on time, neat, under-slept, and wired. She ate no more than a token nibble of the bagel spread, but by the time we’d finished our coffees she’d picked apart and reorganized from scratch every aspect of my finances. Watching her shuffle numbers around spreadsheets on her laptop recalled the prestidigitations of a casino dealer, morphing old, low cards into brand-new, higher-value hands.

“Do you realize you make six payments for Blockbuster late fees on your credit card every month?” she asked. “You know Blockbuster went bankrupt, right?” I had no idea what she was talking about, though it didn’t surprise me that my statements were rife with such oversights. Nora had to get back to her office, but offered to take a look at the rest of my administrative backlog that night. I said OK, only if it wasn’t too much work. “Don’t stay up late finishing it or anything,” was what I actually said. She looked at me like I’d just called her something unbelievably offensive completely out of the blue. “I’ll have it back to you for the morning,” she said. “I never sleep.”

With the money Nora was able to save by plugging all the embarrassing holes in my accounts, I could offer her a salary high enough above what she was making at YMRW as something called an “HR junior business partner” to become my full-time executive assistant. She had majored in art history as an undergraduate before going into management consulting, and expressed no shortage of excitement about switching fields. We entered the early phases of the Hind project less than a month after she started.

Things were going smoothly. We had deals lined up, a publicity campaign building steam. My meals were proceeding without complication. My movements were regular. Maybe it was the artistic and personal achievement for which I had been preparing my entire life coming to fruition more than what I was physically passing through my body every day, but I felt better—more alive and stronger—than I ever had before.

Then the stock market entered correction territory, the cost of long-term capital went up, creditors demanded extra margin, and all three of our biggest sponsors pulled out. I was speechless with confusion when Nora told me, but she helped give words to what I was supposed to feel. “For us, this suuuuucks,” she said. 

***

Nora and I decided to ignore all our commitments for the rest of the day and go out partying instead, since everything we had been working tirelessly on for the past year had been rendered meaningless by an arbitrary spasm of the financial system.

We got margaritas at a Mexican place and beers at a biergarten and something called the Drunken Boat, which was one of those miniature wooden boats they serve sushi on, hollowed out and filled with jungle juice, in the backyard of an upscale dive bar Nora said she came to all the time.

“They’re all a bunch of fucking cowards,” she said between sucks of punch. “Leave it to these Wall Street freaks to clip the lowest hanging fruit and keep the really risky shit lodged safely in the books. Like the Hind project makes a dent. When money’s cheap art looks like a bargain, but when the ten-year flood comes no one’s pulling the paintings off the wall.”

She was frustrated and drunk, and I was too, but it was harder for me to talk about my disappointment, which usually expressed itself in the form of inflicting pain on myself for creative or conceptual purposes. The bar had filled up by the time our straws rattled the ice at the bottom of the Drunken Boat. “Wanna roll?” Nora asked. “This guy I used to see is here.”

Minutes later we found ourselves flopped across each other in the back of a black cab heading back to the studio. It was hot, in the nineties, and the sugary booze and stress and lack of proper hydration had us both in a state of torpor, sweaty in our work clothes, heads still ringing from the bad news and the ambient sense of crisis in the air. Nora reached behind her head, which was resting in my lap, to roll down the window. From her bag she pulled a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and propped her hand on the windowsill so the smoke trailed behind the car. I had never seen her smoke before, had never suspected that she did, since she never smelled like it, and she just didn’t seem like the type. I was surprised but liked what it did for my overall picture of her, adding a little vignette effect, a halo of darkness, around her sharp, bright edges.

“Can I ask you something?” Nora asked. “It’s personal, so you can say no.” I said sure. I didn’t care. The most shameful things I’ve ever done are a matter of public record, with ample video and photographic evidence free to view online anytime. “Do you like men or women or both or neither?” she asked. She was holding her cigarette upright, parallel to the side of her head, the smoke curving over her shoulder and out the window. “I’m just wondering,” she said. “I’ve wondered since we met.”

“I was married once, to a woman, for eight months after I had just turned twenty-one and she was forty-five or forty-six,” I said. Skeptical runnels formed on Nora’s forehead. The taxi bounced off a pothole and we both screamed as we went momentarily airborne. I was drunker than I’d thought. “I take it you’re not anymore,” Nora said once we’d stopped laughing at ourselves for losing it over a fucking pothole. “Married,” she clarified. “It ended badly,” I said. “I’ve been deliberately unattached ever since.”

We cruised past some new sort of animated billboard that seemed to slow down time around itself. “Did she have a name?” Nora asked. “No,” I said. I had only ever known her by her official title, which was Big Gran.

Nora passed out on my beloved studio sofa under an Afghan blanket covered with a pattern of Hind Ds and AK-47s, camels and mujahadeen. I floated around for a few minutes, clearing mugs, straightening magazines, checking and rechecking the locks. Nora’s snores sounded like dejected sighs. As I passed her on the way to my apartment, upstairs from the studio, I saw she had twisted the blanket around herself, giving the appearance of a hastily wrapped mummy. You learn so much from watching someone sleep. The tossing of the body is an index of dreams and inner torments, the position of the covers—greedily snatched at or fitfully cast off—a window into temperament, desire.

I could have lingered, kept looking. But as I get older I defer more to propriety, shirk my excess oddness to better fit the world. I was tired anyway, sluggishly drunk. My thoughts squiggled like bacteria under a microscope, colonizing and breaking down the question of what to do next.

***

I came downstairs the next morning after one of the best sleeps I’d had in ages and found Nora already awake, sitting on a stool at the breakfast nook, sweaty and wearing workout clothes, with two iced coffees and a brown bag of bagels on the countertop. She’d just run six miles and called the Hind-protein processing company to cancel the remainder of the contract. Her skin emitted a faint amber glow. Under the kitchenette lights she was a beacon of youth and vigor. I asked if she’d slept well. “I woke up at four thirty with a brutal hangover,” she said. “But I just had to sweat it out. Those came in,” she added, nodding toward the door, where a few large cardboard boxes were stacked.

“I’m sorry if things got a little personal last night,” I said as I unpacked 3D-printed replicas of the parts that make up the Hind’s avionics and navigation system, arranging them in an exploded cross-section on the studio floor. “Sometimes I get in a talky mood.” “It’s nothing to apologize for,” said Nora. “I asked, after all.”

She microwaved half a bagel for ten seconds. When the timer dinged, she took it out, scooped out the softened inside with a cantaloupe spoon, and spackled the gutter with lite scallion tofu cream cheese. She returned to her seat at the counter, folded the bagel skein in half so that cream cheese oozed out the seams, and ate it, alternating sips of coffee, in under a minute. Then she came and knelt on the floor with me and the Hind parts.

“Are these stage three?” she asked. She knew full well they were. Her command of the supply chain was better than anyone’s. The integrity of the whole project rested on her ability to keep the orders straight, the inputs and outputs separate, impossible for me to mess up even at my most absentminded. I had taken seriously her order not to worry about any of that stuff. I detected a sadness in her voice, as if she were asking the recipe to a dish whose main ingredient had gone extinct.

There was a really easy way to tell, I told her. I picked up a piece, a hexagonal tube pocked with tiny indentations, and handed it to her. I asked her what the first thing she noticed was. She balanced the part in her palm, taring the scale with infinitesimal rotations of the wrist. “The color?” she asked. “Or maybe the texture is, I don’t know, smoother, like it’s been sanded?” I conceded she might be right, though neither of those things had occurred to me. “It’s lighter,” I said. “Just slightly, but you can tell if you handle the material a lot.” “Weird,” she said, tossing the part about a foot in the air and catching it again. She seemed bothered to have missed a detail as salient as a few percentage points of unaccounted-for matter.

“Why does it happen?” she asked. “I must be absorbing more of it than we thought,” I said. “You should have an MRI or something,” she said. “See if it’s concentrating anywhere. You don’t want it to sit and build up.” She passed the part back to me and I replaced it in its spot on the floor. I said I’d think about it. “Your call, boss,” said Nora. “I just don’t want you pissing helicopter in a couple months because you got complacent.”

The body is an inefficient and capricious artmaker, which makes every artistic act also an act of faith, faith not only in the art itself but in the body’s ability to endure its creation. The translation of an idea into something perceptible, material, always undermines the integrity of the unrealized original, perfect on its altar in the temple of the mind. And yet it is in this gap between the mental and the material that meaning is conferred, as if by alchemy, and so it is only by failing to reproduce what one imagines that any artwork acquires value. As long as it is not destroyed, and even in some cases if it is, art is an appreciating asset. The damage done in transit from the unrealized to the real is in some ways the only provenance that matters.

Nora helped me unpack the remaining boxes, the stage three main rotor and transmission and swashplate, and place their contents on the floor according to the diagram. If our estimates were correct, the whole disassembled and reconstituted Hind would have been able to fit in the studio, where I was planning to photograph it before returning the parts to the processing company for stage four. This final task, the laying out of these last parts, we performed without words, an obsequy for the aborted project and all its promise.

After the work was done, we sat on the couch for a while and watched TV news of the conflagrating financial crisis, or “meltdown,” as the experts were calling it, which had now spread from Wall Street to Main Street, and was threatening Green Street and KLAANG Street, too. I asked Nora if she could explain in layperson’s terms what was happening. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

It was all very interesting and complicated, what she told me, and yet the sudden end of the Hind project made it impossible to pay attention or care on any level beyond my own seething resentment at the hypocrisy of a global economic system that would sooner cannibalize itself for fear of not overindulging enough than allow me to express myself as I must. I probably said something sour about it, because Nora trailed off in her econ lesson, her focus drifting inward. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just expressing my…” “Shut up, shut up,” she said. She closed her eyes and aggressively tapped the side of her skull, as if she were battling a stuck key on a keyboard. “I’m thinking, sorry, hold on,” she said.

On the TV, smoke was billowing from a window of a drab office building. The broadcast cut to a wet and cold-looking field where some men in uniform were pointing at a bank of fog on the other side of the field. The scene was infused with a distinctly Eastern European brand of folkloric menace. What lay beyond the fog was never revealed. The feed cut abruptly to the stately red carpets and white walls of the Reichstag, now in emergency session. The news had moved on to other parts of the world while Nora was getting me up to speed on what a financial crisis was, but what was going on in the United States was having ripple effects everywhere.

Nora’s eyes flipped open. “I’ve got it,” she said. “How obvious. What a fucking idiot I am sometimes.” She tapped her head so forcefully it made my teeth hurt. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up like that,” I said. But she was already on the phone. I asked who she was calling. “The processing company,” she said. “We’re un-canceling.”

***

We were on the buyer’s schedule for seventy-two straight hours, waiting for a window to open in his tightly orchestrated annual visit to the United States. Half a dozen times we got a text that he had a free upcoming block, fifteen minutes in the Barnaby’s lobby, twenty minutes at the R&H’s online orders pickup window on 23rd Street, only to have the meeting postponed or canceled or marked as tentative in the Outlook calendar Nora managed for me. She and I took shifts sleeping, one of us on communication duty at all times, and during these snatched naps I found myself visited by ghosts of missed calls from unlisted numbers, messages buried deep in spam vaults. At 8 a.m. the morning the buyer was scheduled to fly out, the buzzer rang, electroshocking Nora and me out of our exhausted despondency. “He’s here,” Nora confirmed, checking the video feed from the studio building’s exterior.

The buyer was accompanied by three men in argyle suits and sunglasses, each fitted with fleshtone earpieces. One carried an aluminum attaché case. I hung back while Nora made the introductions. “We spoke on the phone,” she said to the buyer. “It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.” The buyer nodded. At six and a half feet tall, he was the tallest person in the room by many inches, yet his movements were slow and graceful and leonine, all coiled power, his own and that of others under his control. His silence and menacing disposition worried me, but Nora was accustomed to dealing with such people, the taciturn, proud, and dangerous.

She led the buyer and two bodyguards counterclockwise around the dismantled Hind D while I leaned against a wall and watched with my arms crossed. “Is this the whole helicopter?” the buyer asked. His voice was soft and authoritative, edged with the smirking humor of the well-protected and unaccountable. The remaining bodyguard stood by the studio door, denying exit. Only when I’d set it up myself for the sake of art had I felt more likely to be assassinated.

“We have documentation if you’d like to see it,” said Nora. The buyer shook his head. He never looked up from the floor, mentally cataloging the components as he followed Nora around the room. Once the circuit was complete, the buyer walked over to the bodyguard by the door and conferred with him in hushed tones. While they talked, Nora threw me eyes that said it was time to come over. “You might need to answer a few questions,” she told me in our own parallel huddle to the buyer’s. “It could kill you to be a little less weird.” I apologized. I just hated this kind of meet-the-public thing.

The buyer approached us, a peremptory smile rippling his lips. “We have an offer,” he said and passed a pink flashcard to Nora. A figure, written in thick sharpie, had already bled through the back of the paper, forming a Rorschach of what appeared to be a very large sum. Nora’s face gave nothing away. She tipped the card toward me but I waved it off. I trusted her to decide if it was enough.

Nora folded the card in half and slotted it into the breast pocket of her blazer. “This is acceptable,” she said. I detected a tap of the brakes in her voice, a tic of hesitation. I wanted to ask her about it, but now was not the time. We needed to present a unified front to the buyer, play it cool a little longer. The buyer beckoned for the aluminum briefcase. “This is half,” he said. “The rest we will deposit electronically into an account of your choosing once we receive the shipment.”

As he and the guards were leaving, he stopped at the perimeter of the exploded Hind and picked up a small, coccyx-shaped joint from the floor. He examined it, turning it over in his hand, then raised it to his mouth and bit the edge.

“Unusual flavor,” he said. “Like what are those candies? Warheads.” He knelt and returned the part to the floor. “Light too,” he said. “Some kind of alloy?” Nora shrugged. “We’re just the conduit,” she said.

The deal was done. The parts would be packed and shipped piecemeal to contacts in Switzerland and Belgium. From there, a trusted fence would reaggregate the materials and facilitate their gradual introduction into the conflict zone. For his services, the buyer would collect a 15 percent fee for each change of hands, as well as a portfolio of undisclosed kickbacks from the end-users.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” he said from the backseat of the Land Rover that had ripped out of an alleyway to pick him up the second we stepped outside. “We’ll be in touch.”

That he said this last part to Nora and not to me didn’t register immediately as significant. I had, after all, remained aloof for most of the meeting. The buyer, in his line of work, likely encountered many silent partners. There was an understanding in place: Nora had been my voice, my agent extended into the inhospitable world of business. But then I got it, the reason we’d received such a favorable price, Nora’s momentary mental stagger over the sum. She’d been thrown in with the bargain.

***

After the buyer had left, I took Nora out to lunch at a farm-to-table restaurant that had recently opened on the waterfront, to thank her for all her hard work. We ordered some small plates and a bottle of Riesling and sat not talking for a while on the deck, watching the boats and the waves and the seagulls perform their peaceful repetitions, as if the view were a looped clip of film. The restaurant was mostly empty. It had not occurred to us that 3 p.m. was an unusual time for a meal, only that we had not eaten one for the past three days.

“I’m going to miss our time together,” I told her. “I bet you’ll be pretty busy, but I hope we can keep in touch.” “I was worried you’d be disappointed,” she said. “It means a lot to me that you’re supportive.”

Did I support what she was doing? It was hard to say. The value Nora had added to my life was incalculable, the little assists and shortcuts she brought to bear too numerous to count. I worried that without her I would slip back into the apathetic chaos of my old patterns, the financial overwhelm, the mid-project doldrums she had so expertly navigated me through. And yet I knew there was nothing to be done. Her choice was made and I supported it, materially and now with my blessing. A restless excitement flickered behind her eyes. The buyer was flying her out to Baqubah next week. The perks, she had gushed, were un-fucking-believable. I couldn’t compete with the compensation package. Nora was moving up.

We splurged on dessert, a rhubarb crumble with fresh mint and a quenelle of lemon-vanilla sorbet and a geographically improbable Bourbon Black Forest cake and two syrupy golden vials of Sauternes. “I’m sure you’ll meet some interesting people in your new job,” I said. She laughed, chocolate carnage from the cake dribbling down her chin. “God, I’m gross,” she said, and chugged a full glass of water and wiped her mouth with a napkin. I asked what she’d found so funny. “Nothing,” she said. “Yes, I’m sure I’ll meet all kinds of clients.”

The check came. I paid with the tortoiseshell rewards card Nora had set up for me and left an exorbitant tip, since the restaurant had kindly let us linger through the break between lunch and dinner service. I promised myself I’d come back once the seasonal menu changed. Nora and I walked together until we got to the intersection where our routes diverged. “What am I going to do without you?” I said. I was being maybe sixty percent serious. But her expression hardened and she punched me remonstratively in the arm. “Come on, boss,” she said. “You can literally shit money. You will be fine.”

***

About a month after Nora left the country, I was eating a cup of noodles in the studio kitchen when a nail bomb of pain detonated in my lower back. I fell off my stool and lay paralyzed in agony on the floor for a few minutes before I remembered my phone laying on the countertop. I had never used its voice-activated features before, was skeptical of the whole concept of talking to technology, but before long I was screaming for 911 and apologizing to Samsung and Verizon for doubting them. Sure enough, I soon heard sirens cutting around the block. A paramedic team jimmied the lock of the studio, loaded me onto a stretcher, and ambulanced me down to the ICU, where a troika of nurses knocked me out with drugs.

I woke up in a recovery room. The lacerating pain in my abdomen had been replaced with a dull ache everywhere. I took this as a sign I was on my way to recovery. The room was a copy-pasted version of every hospital room I’d ever been in. An air conditioner roared under a window draped in blackout curtains. My bed was aimed at a dresser with a muted TV on top of it, tuned to news of war. I squinted to make out the closed captions, unfolding like censor bars over aerial footage of smoking cityscapes and protesters versus military police.

I heard the door click open and a middle-aged nurse came in. She was sturdy and attractive in a confrontational sort of way, with blonde hair arranged into a complicated braid coiled up and piled on her head in a cartoon turd shape. “You’re awake,” she said, unimpressed. Her voice revealed the trace of an Eastern European accent. Maybe she’d been watching the TV while I’d been passed out. She went to turn it off, but I croaked in protest and she let it be. I saw now that she was carrying a small plastic jar. She set it on the bedside table. A black-gray lump, hard and crystalline, rattled inside.

“Did that come out of me?” I asked. “You expelled it, yes,” she said. According to the biopsy, the mass was mostly inorganic, a concretion of metal and plastic and glass and uric acid. “All we could say was: What on earth has this guy been eating?” said the nurse. Her laughter disarmed me. Behind her, on the TV, a group of soldiers was carrying a wounded man on a stretcher toward a Hind D idling in an airfield. The landscape was all fog and pine trees and faraway mountains. The rotors blurred to black circles, kicking up whirls of dust, blowing back the soldiers’ hair and clothes, tamping down the twitching grass. I uncapped the plastic jar and shook the helicopter stone into my palm. The wounded man was lifted into the fuselage and the Hind D began to rise. As it banked over the trees and shrank against the mountains, I massaged the calculus between my thumb and forefinger, working over the spiky points, the blistered surface. The helicopter faded to a translucent blue and was gone.

Witnessing war makes even the most comfortable among us consider the inevitability and random horror of death. It is a concept at an indeterminate distance, camouflaged, a blurred shape on the horizon that may at any moment swing screaming back toward us, its shadow flickering like black flames against the ground. We may die. We may lose parts of ourselves. But as an artist I’m not chasing immortality. Even if they have to scrape it off my insides, I will leave behind something that was not here before.

Pet

We had a key to Michael’s house on Lake Michigan so we drove up there after his funeral. It would be a few days, at least, before his sisters arrived to claim Michael’s things, such as they were. This would give us a few days there, to talk, to make our arrangements. We had decided, after all these years, to separate.

Pipes often burst in winters on the lake, especially in houses that are untenanted. We thought if his sisters showed up, we could tell them that Michael had asked us to check on his house. By the time we pulled into the driveway of the beach house, a sixties era A-frame dwarfed by the more modern homes on either side of it, we’d cemented our rationale to the degree that it was almost as if Michael really had asked us this favor as a last request.

His sisters would not have known that Michael had been in no condition to ask for anything during those final days, only humming a sour note over and over again, gazing into a corner of his room. At one point, he muttered a few lines about his fleet of mixers, though cement had been Michael’s father’s trade, never his.


We set our bags down. We nudged the thermostat up and checked to see that the water was running. We fucked on the floor in front of the big triangle window overlooking the frozen lake. The sex was quick and dry. We didn’t excite each other anymore. We called out, your pussy! your cock! your asshole! We’d always liked it that way. But the words were just words now and they hung in the air stupidly. After, we pulled a rough afghan off the sofa over our naked bodies.


Michael had been our marriage counselor until one night at a party we seduced him. This was a decade ago. Afterwards, as he pulled up his socks, his pink bottom perched on the dainty ottoman next to our bed, he said he couldn’t be our therapist anymore. And that what had just happened must never happen again.

This was for the best. Even naked, sweating and engorged, Michael was unable to abandon his role as an unbiased counselor. He endeavored to please us both equally, to eradicate imbalances in the dynamic, with no understanding that the wildly swinging tensions, usurpations, and coups are part of the fun.

We ought not to have seduced Michael. We’d been making progress under his care. But we did manage to remain good friends.


When we woke, it was night. Above us, in the cavernous dim, a double scull hung from the rafters. Michael had been a champion rower in his college days. The scull appeared as something alien descending to encase and carry us away.

We dressed in layers and descended the rickety steps that zig-zagged the cliffside down to the beach. On the water, slabs of ice creaked as they muscled their tonnage against one another. We walked north about a half mile to where the titanic houses were, the old homes of families whose names were plastered on libraries and museums, and the newer structures owned by tech barons. One house stood directly on the beach, a gleaming cube lit from within by a party.

A child peering out through the glass spotted us and waved, then tugged on the sleeve of an adult who slid open a door and bade us entry. The atmosphere was warm, snappy with the scent of juniper.

I thought you were ghosts, said the child.

Not yet, we laughed.

The boy was maybe six, dressed in a bulky fisherman’s sweater that made his neck look very thin and sweet. He continued to look at us. We’d adopted our own daughter, Lizzie, out of the foster system when she was nearly twelve. We hadn’t known her as a very young child and we found her own child, our grandchild, who was roughly the same age as this boy, perplexing. After a moment, an older man in a blazer came up and shooed the boy away.

How do you know Michael, the man asked.

We understood it was another Michael.

A tall beautiful woman in a white shirt and apron approached with a tray of martinis. Several of these women moved among the crowd with trays. Their hair was pulled back and their makeup was understated. They were meant to be more beautiful and also less beautiful than the women attending the party.

We toasted our martinis, grinning at each other. Maybe we were ghosts!

The little boy was back, suddenly, gazing at us as if he’d never left.

Come look at something neat, he said.


Back at our Michael’s house, we placed the small animal we’d stolen from the party on top of the afghan which we’d spread out on the couch. We gave the creature a bowl of water and a crumbled saltine on a plate, though it did not acknowledge either.

This crime was less significant than our last. Shortly after we married, we’d defrauded the shipping warehouse where we worked out of several hundred thousand dollars using a scheme we’d learned from the plot of a film that involved inventing fictitious employees and depositing their pay into accounts we’d opened. For the crime to work it was necessary to enlist someone from human resources, and so we seduced James. James had a long, pock-marked face. He ate lunch with us at the picnic tables behind the warehouse and often spoke to us about how he’d missed all the saucy stuff because he’d married too young. The entire seventies, he said. In the end, James just watched from an armchair as we fucked, then asked that we spread what came out of us onto his face.

We couldn’t have our own child, and it cost a lot of money to adopt one. So went our reasoning. In the end, since we adopted a nearly twelve-year-old out of the foster system, it cost very little. We gave the money we’d stolen to charity. It had never been about the money, although getting away with it all had been thrilling. And above this, we got Lizzie. Those were the best years of our marriage. Then things came apart, which was when we started seeing Michael.


At the party, the boy had led us upstairs to a bedroom where a man displayed the small animal to an assortment of guests. The animal crawled up and down his arm. Apart from being small, it was white. Other than that, it had very little to distinguish it. It wasn’t any kind of animal we had ever seen.

Then a woman entered. Her blouse was elegant and it billowed in the wind she’d made by throwing open the door. Her cheeks were bright and glossy with tears.

Michael, she shouted.

Both the little boy and the man turned to her. A few of the other guests moved to hold the woman back, for now she had sprung violently toward the man with the creature, who must have been Michael. The small animal jumped into a pile of winter coats on the bed. During the commotion, we fished it out of there and left the party. We ran down the beach laughing. The animal made a small noise, too, which might have been laughter.

Stealing the animal had been like our seductions of old. We decided as one and moved quickly and without consideration of failure. When he was our therapist, Michael had warned us that sort of behavior might corrupt the boundaries meant to hold two people, even married couples, at the necessary distance. He’d said so on the same night we’d brought him to bed.


The animal did nothing for a while then it pushed the bowl of water over the edge of the sofa. The bowl broke into three pieces. The day we brought Lizzie home, she’d broken a cookie jar in the shape of a bear with a hat. The hat was the lid, and this was the part she broke. Her terrified face as she looked down at the pieces of the hat on the linoleum floor of our kitchen was the saddest thing we’d ever seen. After that, we tried to teach Lizzie it was all right to break things by accident, but it was not a lesson she could take to heart.

As for the creature, it did not react to its action or appear to expect any consequence. It toddled about, then settled into a clumsy sit, exposing a gray belly. Then it started to chirp.

Hey, we said. Stop it.

But it kept chirping. We thought if we ignored it, perhaps the creature would stop chirping.

We got ready for bed.


It occurred to us, then, that we’d met the crying woman in the billowing blouse. She was a poet of some renown whose signing we’d attended at a chain bookstore not long after we started seeing Michael. In fact, he’d been the one who recommended the event as an outing we might enjoy. We’d purchased her collection of abstracted verse and placed it on a shelf in the living room where it gathered dust. Once, Lizzie had taken the book off the shelf and paged through it, then looked at us as if we’d done something wrong. After that, we would come upon the book in unusual places in the house, splayed open as if someone had been reading it. Lizzie was trying to tell us something, but we didn’t ask what, only placed the book back on its shelf. Such silent thrust and parry with our daughter had been a constant in our home.

The chirping subsided and we imagined the animal had fallen asleep. Brushing our teeth, we smiled foamy smiles. We felt goofy, giddy, the way we’d always felt when we brought someone home.

And then Lizzie called. She often called us late at night to make sure we were asleep and was always disappointed, even angry, to learn she hadn’t woken us.

Put me on speaker, she said.

We spit minty froth into the sink.

What was that, Lizzie demanded. What are you doing? It’s late.

She was angry that we were at Michael’s house, even now that Michael was dead. She’d always hated Michael, as if she sensed what was unseemly in our relationship with him, although of course we hadn’t told her about it. She would never call him by his name. She called him That Man in the Bathrobe, because once, when we’d stopped by his house one morning with Lizzie to return a drill we’d borrowed, he’d opened the door wearing one.

We could hear the rumbling of Lizzie’s dryer. Lizzie often sat up late in her laundry room on a stool, washing and drying and folding her daughter’s clothes. When she brought our grandchild for a visit, the girl was always dressed neatly in joyful colors. She called us Nana and Pop-Pop, names Lizzie had assigned. Our granddaughter was polite but regarded us with trepidation, like someone who’d been warned.

I want to say something, Lizzie said. I want the two of you to come and live here. With me and Tom and Jackie.

Something heavy thumped in Lizzie’s dryer, perhaps a pair of tennis shoes. She would have placed them inside a netted bag.

Because this separation business, this talk of splitting up, well I think it’s ridiculous, two people your age.

At Lizzie’s the dryer buzzed and suddenly the chirping started again, louder this time.

What is that now, Lizzie asked, shouting into the phone. Who’s there with you?

We told her it was the pipes.

Pipes, she shouted. Pipes! This is what I mean! This is exactly what I mean!

The chirping stopped but Lizzie kept shouting.

You’re not getting separated! You’re not getting a divorce!

Okay, we said. All right.

What else were we going to say?

We will consider coming to live with you, we said.

We knew we wouldn’t consider anything of the sort. We had our plans.

But our Lizzie was upset. Sometimes, when she first came to us and we’d sit on the couch watching sit-coms, each of us would take one of Lizzie’s always cold feet in our hands to warm them in stereo.

We brought the phone close to our faces so that Lizzie could hear both of our voices. We looked at our reflections in the glass of the small bathroom window. Through our reflections, down on the beach, a half dozen flashlight beams criss-crossed wildly.

Okay, okay, we said, until she calmed down enough that we could say goodbye. The animal was quiet now. Possibly it was gone. There were so many crevices in Michael’s house to crawl into.

Something so small could easily escape.

The Performance Artist

Eunice makes her own contexts to perform in—parties, alleys. She brings lights, makes invitations on matchbooks and hands them out at other performances. She performs for a weekend in a decommissioned gym by the ocean. She rehearses and sleeps there the week before. There are rats. It doesn’t occur to her until then that there can be rats by the ocean.

She is asked to lecture in college classes. Annually, a few instructors feel they should teach their students something about performance, but they haven’t seen much performance art. Eunice turns what is supposed to be a $200 lecture into a performance. If she’s feeling good, she also teaches the students some simple wiring and costuming, how to make it look like parts of their bodies are lighting up from within.

Eunice’s kitchen has all handmade ceramic dishes and hand-blown glassware she collects. She has ten stools she got when her neighborhood diner closed. They were just sitting outside with the trash.

Eunice wears T-shirts as much as she can, preferring them even for more formal events. They hang by color in her closet. She mends their holes. She learned how to fix leather shoes, becoming good enough as a cobbler to take in work from her friends and her friends’ friends. She maintains a rigid diet and teaches herself to crave nothing else but granola, bananas, tea, rice, and fish. She is not at all concerned with the live recording of performances or preservation of artifacts related to her performances.

She knows how to tell fortunes. When people come over, she asks if she can wash their hands for them. Sometimes she offers to wash their feet.

She has performed in hundreds of other people’s performances and videos. She wears masks, plays clowns, politicians, a baker, a plush heart with pointy aggressive fingers. She climbs in and out of trash cans, washers and dryers, piles of flags and bodies.

She sleeps on a mattress on the floor.

She dropped out of a teacher training program. The language was always about inspiration, which she still can’t understand. She doesn’t wait around for inspiration. She is always working on something.

People call her poet, actor, teacher. She doesn’t affirm or correct them.

She’s a waiter. Other waiters talk about what they will do when they don’t have to wait tables anymore. She has no problem being a waiter.

She shows up for protest marches she hears about. Her son is in medical school. He grew up in the suburbs with her former other half who pays for everything.

She likes to wrap things around her body. Laptops using a web of belts.

She collects wind-up toys that she imitates. She collects old hand tools that she also learns to imitate—egg beaters, 1940s staplers. Her apartment is filled with TVs and video recorders. She captures scenes she likes and learns their dialogue. The newscaster, the patients, and commandos about to die.

She will pay for one matinee movie ticket at the megaplex and stay all day and all night. She volunteers at the community center where, in the summer, she teaches the kids how to swim.

Her friends say she’s a darling to the critics. This means that her performance work gets written about. When this started, Eunice thought it would lead to more—some travel perhaps. It doesn’t. She asks her friends why. They don’t know.

The critics write about her ability to transform overlooked spaces, about her capacity as a mimic. They try to justify her resistance to photographs. Once, a critic described her open mouth.

The Host

Eric’s Labradoodle. His first dates.

Being older and getting into online dating.

He likes dried fruit and buildings painted white, how they catch so much sun.

He watches a man carry his cello down the street.

He wears a leather jacket and a ring of keys on the belt of his tight black jeans.

He always goes out for lunch at the deli. For dinner, he eats peanut butter sandwiches while reading. He likes mystery novels.

Occasionally art students ask him to do studio visits. He knows the custom is an hour per visit. He usually stays longer. Once, he was asked to contribute to a group show. He sent along a box of his to-do lists. They hung with T-pins.

Missing frying pan in artist housing
Return microphones
Order light bulbs
Thursday dinner reservations, coffee before panel

Eric takes exquisite care of his car. It’s nothing special but always spotless.

Eric realizes you can’t control anything. People cancel, get sick, are mean or late, curse, miss their planes, get so nervous. Still, the speakers he hosts always remark how perfect the projector is, how impeccable the sound and lights.

He has keys and access to everything.

His family is close by now, but they never come to the events he hosts. He likes buying toys for the kids, his niece and nephew, the crafty kind of toys. He asks his local store to hand-deliver them. He suspects his brother-in-law returns them.

He watches a girl on her bike without a helmet.

He went to Johns Hopkins for economics and there discovered the screenings for the film courses and got a student subscription to the symphony. He worked at a big public library in a small city then at a college in the woods. Every time he moves apartments, he moves somewhere smaller and more expensive.

He sends a student to pick up the guest speakers at the airport and take them to dinner. He never goes. He makes excuses when asked to come along.

He was hit by a car once. Cars are so quiet now.

He goes to watch a climbing performance. A woman scales a building with no ropes.

Once a year, he hosts a professional development panel—people with different jobs talk about how they get by. Every two years, he hosts a film series on a theme. On alternate years, a panel discussion on a different theme.

He likes to travel by train.

He likes first dates and thinks he is pretty good at them. If only they could be a thing in and of themselves. He doesn’t want other dates to follow.

His hair is gray.

On his train travels, he copies poems and memorizes them. He recites these in the shower at night.

When he is with other people, if he doesn’t plan carefully, he is usually at a loss about where to go. When he is on his own, he discovers good chocolate, shoes he can afford, another white shirt to replace the one that just got stained.

His doctor tells him to give up bagels. His dentist tells him to give up red wine. This is Eric’s draft list in progress of potential film series topics:

Rage and Cultural Appropriation
Marijuana and Art
Killers of Sheep
Art After 9/11 After Trump

He goes to his sister’s every Sunday. She calls him The Lonely Heart. His desk fan, his clipboards, his half-size index cards.

Eric loves his Labradoodle, Charlie. Walking with Charlie he gets mugged by a group of kids. They run off with his wallet, full of cash and credit cards. One of the kids comes back a few moments later with the wallet, now empty. The kid, short and sheepish, asks: “Do you want this thing?”

Eric imagines raising a family with the roommate he shared a place with after college, his roommate who ran every morning and married a comedian.

The Renegade

So many of Nann’s friends seem to know the history of almost everything, where it was published, and who really did the work to publish it. Books and artworks are everywhere in her loft apartment. There are canvases stacked four and five deep in the guest room with the folded blankets. Her friends are awkward in groups, having spent so much time alone. Warbly on social legs, they’re like loose drawings without frames. She’s a lot like them.

She hosts a Sunday conversation on housing then one on voter redistricting. She likes the energy of these events, artists waking up, realizing they can’t be neutral.

She gets a telemarketing phone call saying she’s won a cruise. She hangs up on the chipper recorded voice and calls her nephew. He doesn’t answer.

She looks at her canvases and the work of former students kitchen-hung in cohabitation with the dented pots she uses. Where would all of this go later, when she dies? Her sister’s family wouldn’t do anything about it.

Her friends seem to read the rest of everything she doesn’t read. Her lovers talk about their CVs, about what is missing from them, why they won’t get the awards they think they should be considered for. They tell her this from her shower, from the toilet, at the folding TV table she uses for meals.

Nann didn’t spend more than a few days in college and was always an annoyance to her teachers in high school—not showing up, reading more than they did. She moved to New York with a lover, with a duffel bag. She taught for a stint in California, in a sculpture department, driving around in her red convertible, before they didn’t ask her to come back. Even when she was there, she was still a New Yorker.

She attended a whistling concert in Central Park once and, every year or so, the opera. She knows how to make some vegan dishes that she thinks are pretty good, but she isn’t vegan. She avoids her landlord, who is rent-controlled and does not fix the elevator.

She almost always asks a question during question-and-answer and people at talks usually think she sounds frustrated. She can draw anything just as it is with seemingly few marks—a crumpled piece of notebook paper, an elbow, an ankle.

Every weekend, she pulls a couple of dead leaves off her plants, and if they are leaning too much toward the sun, she rotates them to help them straighten up.

Even when she can’t really afford to, she gives money to the still cash-strapped nonprofits that had earlier produced her performances. She spends time on the phone convincing her friends to buy the work of a young painter she likes who makes black-and-white cartoons that look sort of like they’re doing yoga.

When she doesn’t want to leave the house, her friends tell her she just has to show up and show her face, that she will be adored. After all, she is well-collected. There are her portraits; they are known. But, she is nervous anyway. She always feels unprepared.

She keeps soap slivers and seems to never finish a bottle of shampoo. In her bathroom, you can hardly see the edges of the tub. She’s known Jack Whitten, Paul McCarthy, Yoko Ono, Richard Foreman, Anne Waldman, and Sylvia Sleigh. She knows all the words to a number of Russian and Irish folk songs she sings at Thanksgiving.

She knows the streets. She can feel in her body when they are about to get busy. She knows where Lead Belly lived in New York with his wife Martha. She knows where Susan Sontag lived in Chelsea, where Alan Sonfist built his primordial park, and where Gordon Matta-Clark arranged railroad ties into a small park trellis and amphitheater.

She knows all the diners in the city and the waiters and waitresses recognize her, know what she likes (soup, turkey clubs, lite beer), how she sweats from below her sideburns in droplets that spring up there, and how she whips her hair. She is alone again now, without a lover, but probably not for long.

She is surprised by how often people wear sneakers, but she does too. Hers are bright orange. She goes to a place called the Performance Garage in Delaware to see one of her students win an award. She says: “We used to wear ties and dresses to performances. We weren’t capable of constant contact the way people are now—this weird digital intimacy. But we looked nicer.”

She responds to all of her emails graciously within a few days or apologizes for being grumpy which no one perceives because they value her critique of their play or her response to their boyfriend’s comments about the president.

Nann says, “Come on over.”

She gets up from her chair and hardly ever ponders over a passage in a painting, but she loses herself for days worried about a faraway hurricane. She watches news talk shows. She reads a book about North Korea then the second edition of a book she’s read before on race and sociology. The people who come to visit her show her their thesis drafts or their ‘zines and hand-sewn verses. Her bedroom ceilings are long-past peeling.

She likes cannoli.

When she paints, it has to be all texture, like a swamp with sticks. She has puppets, a bugle she can play, underlined articles she likes or that piss her off.

The landlord probably doesn’t mean to be a prick, she thinks. His son could get more for her apartment and the building. She eats crackers. She doesn’t mind them stale. She makes coffee and goes for leftovers in the fridge.