... having been breathed out

(Content warnings for rape, violence, war)

If they were to borrow from the forests
the necessary vagueness for their image,
they would be lying,
the image laid bare.

Our cities will remain
on their knees, hopeless,
falling like slaughtered goats,
raping our cunts with brooms.
They are the true forests.

From the kitchen my mother announced
the fall of Baghdad.
There were nations and uncountable shaved heads
standing in the living room
as the bare forests wept.
No vagueness but in their books.

Whenever they borrowed from the sea
its blue to describe their intentions,
their mothers fell into the jaws of sharks.

If I said in a poem
that love is blind as carnage
and meant it,
I would be lying.
The victims would seek revenge
for my transgression
and strip your love from my skin.

I was lying when I likened
my desire to tigers.
The first is base,
the latter mighty.

When I tried to rouse a reader’s pity for my heart,
I made it shrivel like a pumpkin.
I was lying.
I made it yellow like the pages of the Old Testament.
I was lying.
I turned it into boiling tar.
I was lying.
I conjured a sewage ditch.
I was lying.
I sat it on a sharp stake.
I was lying.

It was a mute lump of clay,
nothing more.

When I swapped therapy sessions
for poems that cost nothing
to survive, and poured into them
the stuff of previous minds,
the lie flourished
like stalks in a forest.

Forgive me,
have I transgressed again?

I mean like sta—the li—
the stalks are li—

The point is.
The problem is not that poets are liars.
The tragedy is that they’re believed,
blindly as carnage.

—Asmaa Azaizeh, trans. Yasmine Seale (Five more of Azaizeh's poems here.)

Conventions of the time
held them together.
It was a period
(very long) in which
the heart once given freely
was required, as a formal gesture,
to forfeit liberty: a consecration
at once moving and hopelessly doomed.

As to ourselves:
fortunately we diverged
from these requirements,
as I reminded myself
when my life shattered.
So that what we had for so long
was, more or less,
voluntary, alive.
And only long afterward
did I begin to think otherwise.

We are all human—
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception. As in
the consecration to which I alluded.

And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occurred.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.

—Louise Glück, “Earthly Love” (from Vita Nova)

And in either case, it will end.

Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.

———

Geryon was amazed at himself. He saw Herakles just about every day now.
The instant of nature
forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life
leaving behind just ghosts
rustling like an old map. He had nothing to say to anyone. He felt loose and shiny.
He burned in the presence of his mother.
I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room.
It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light.
He was filling his pockets with money, keys, film. She tapped a cigarette
on the back of her hand.
I put some clean T-shirts in your top drawer this afternoon, she said.
Her voice drew a circle
around all the years he had spent in this room. Geryon glanced down.
This one is clean, he said,
it’s supposed to look this way. The T-shirt was ripped here and there.
GOD LOVES LOLA in red letters.
Glad she can’t see the back, he thought as he shrugged on his jacket and stuck
the camera in the pocket.
What time will you be home? she said. Not too late, he answered.
A pure bold longing to be gone filled him.
So Geryon what do you like about this guy Herakles can you tell me?
Can I tell you, thought Geryon.
Thousand things he could tell flowed over his mind. Herakles knows a lot
about art. We have good discussions.
She was looking not at him but past him as she stored the unlit cigarette
in her front shirt pocket.
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved. It depends on light. Light that for you? he said pulling
a book of matches
out of his jeans as he came toward her. No thanks dear. She was turning away.
I really should quit.

—Anne Carson, from Autobiography of Red, “IX. Space and Time”

for hours at the end I kissed your temple stroked
your hair and sniffed it it smelled so clean we’d
washed it Saturday night when the fever broke
as if there was always the perfect thing to do
to be alive for years I’d breathe your hair
when I came to bed late it was such pure you
why I nuzzle your brush every morning because
you’re in there just like the dog the night
we unpacked the hospital bag and he skipped
and whimpered when Dad put on the red
sweater Cover my bald spot will you
you’d say and tilt your head like a parrot
so I could fix you up always always
till this one night when I was reduced to
I love you little friend here I am my
sweetest pea over and over spending all our
endearments like stray coins at a border
but wouldn’t cry then no choked it because
they all said hearing was the last to go
the ear is like a wolf’s till the very end
straining to hear a whole forest and I
wanted you loping off whatever you could
still dream to the sound of me at 3 P.M.
you were stable still our favorite word
at 4 you took the turn WAIT WAIT I AM
THE SENTRY HERE nothing passes as long as
I’m where I am we go on death is
a lonely hole two can leap it or else
or else there is nothing this man is mine
he’s an ancient Greek like me I do
all the negotiating while he does battle
we are war and peace in a single bed
we wear the same size shirt it can’t it can’t
be yet not this just let me brush his hair
it’s only Tuesday there’s chicken in the fridge
from Sunday night he ate he slept oh why
don’t all these kisses rouse you I won’t won’t
say it all I will say is goodnight patting
a few last strands in place you’re covered now
my darling one last graze in the meadow
of you and please let your final dream be
a man not quite your size losing the whole
world but still here combing combing
singing your secret names till the night’s gone

—Paul Monette, "No Goodbyes"

Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness.
And anchored in his home and reached his wife
And rode within the harbour of her hand,
And went across each morning to an office
As though his occupation were another island.

Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge.
His terror had to blow itself quite out
To let him see it; but it was the gale had blown him
Past the Cape Horn of sensible success
Which cries: ‘This rock is Eden. Shipwreck here.’

But deafened him with thunder and confused with lightning:
—The maniac hero hunting like a jewel
The rare ambiguous monster that had maimed his sex,
Hatred for hatred ending in a scream,
The unexplained survivor breaking off the nightmare—
All that was intricate and false; the truth was simple.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day,
Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;
He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect,
But wears a stammer like a decoration:
And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.

For now he was awake and knew
No one is ever spared except in dreams;
But there was something else the nightmare had distorted—
Even the punishment was human and a form of love:
The howling storm had been his father’s presence
And all the time he had been carried on his father’s breast.

Who now had set him gently down and left him.
He stood upon the narrow balcony and listened:
And all the stars above him sang as in his childhood
‘All, all is vanity,’ but it was not the same;
For now the words descended like the calm of mountains—
—Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish—
Reborn, he cried in exultation and surrender
‘The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.’

And sat down at his desk and wrote a story.

—WH Auden, "Herman Melville"

If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock’s harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? ‘Tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute’s intents.

As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

—Robert Browning, from “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

Watching a certain Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries episode last night kicked off an unexpected revisitation of my love for Robert Browning. He was such a master at… well, plenty; but in particular, in the above passage, using the interplay of complex character psychology with this extremely vivid, visceral physical imagery to create narrative tension. Not much really “happens” in “Childe Roland"—essentially the narrator takes a long, depressing walk, and the poem ends just as he may have reached his destination. The bulk of the poem is devoted to what might seem simple physical description of the wasteland through which he’s progressing. There’s never any real explanation of why he’s seeking out the tower, or what he hopes to accomplish there, or why disaster has befallen so many of his former friends. But the poem is gripping not only because of its language and its foreboding atmosphere, but also because of these glimpses we get of the narrator’s unreliability: if he thinks a dying horse "must be wicked to deserve such pain,” how much of the rest of his journey is similarly filtered through the lens of his own preoccupations? Have his friends turned traitor? Is the landscape really this blighted?

I’ve been thinking for a while about the version of Gothic horror I would write, if/when I ever try to write Gothic horror, and it occurs to me that this poem is a pretty great example of some of the things I’d like to do. I love the early stages of a classic Gothic horror story, where it’s just a collection of resonant, unsettling details encroaching on the characters’ lives; and I love the final stages, where all those resonances come together into a symphony of creepiness. The part that always bogs down for me, and undermines my creeped-out investment in the world, is when the characters name and explain what’s going on: “According to the lore, this is the curse of the Hodgemodglin, who preys on nine-year-old boys every full moon and can only be killed with fresh-mown hay and a thesaurus,” or, “And ever since that fateful battle, the maguffin’s keepers have pledged themselves to travel the world, avenging its theft,” etc.

Essentially, I want to cut out the middle, logical explanations, and just go directly from the creepy overture to the creepy symphony, while still maintaining enough internal logic & narrative tension that (a) the thing coheres as a story, and (b) resolution, however open-ended, is possible. “Childe Roland” does a great job in all these categories; and I’ve been trying to think of other works that do. Something like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire, maybe. They function by their own nightmare logic, and build tension through recurring motifs. James's The Turn of the Screw gets sort of explainy, but the explanations are all part of the possibly-unreliable narrator’s psychology, so I think it kind of fits. I’d say Kafka’s novels might fit, except they seem more directly allegorical than I’m really looking for… (Edit: Helen Oyeyemi's Mr Fox is another one that skirts the edges of what I’m describing; and I’m curious to see if White is for Witching gets even closer.)

I dunno! It’s interesting to think about. If y'all have any recs for me based on the above, I’d be interested to check them out.

At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.

—HD (Hilda Doolittle), "Euridice"

Everything’s like that, more or less.
The heart moves in jolts.
Living means not meeting up with yourself.
At the end of it all, if I’m tired, I’ll sleep.
But I’d like to meet you and for us to speak.
I’m sure we’d get along well, you and I.
But if we don’t meet, I’ll keep the moment
In which I thought we might.
I keep everything—
All the letters I’m written,
All the letters I’m not written

—Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), from "Poem of the Song About Hope"

let it go – the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise – let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go – the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers – you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go – the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things – let all go
dear

so comes love

—ee cummings, "let it go"

The jellyfish
float in the bay shallows
like schools of clouds,

a dozen identical — is it right
to call them creatures,
these elaborate sacks

of nothing? All they seem
is shape, and shifting,
and though a whole troop

of undulant cousins
go about their business
within a single wave's span,

every one does something unlike:
this one a balloon
open on both ends

but swollen to its full expanse,
this one a breathing heart,
this a pulsing flower.

This one a rolled condom,
or a plastic purse swallowing itself,
that one a Tiffany shade,

this a troubled parasol.
This submarine opera's
all subterfuge and disguise,

its plot a fabulous tangle
of hiding and recognition:
nothing but trope,

nothing but something
forming itself into figures
then refiguring,

sheer ectoplasm
recognizable only as the stuff
of metaphor. What can words do

but link what we know
to what we don't,
and so form a shape?

Which shrinks or swells,
configures or collapses, blooms
even as it is described

into some unlikely
marine chiffon:
a gown for Isadora?

Nothing but style.
What binds
one shape to another

also sets them apart
— but what's lovelier
than the shapeshifting

transparence of like and as:
clear, undulant words?
We look at alien grace,

unfettered
by any determined form,
and we say: balloon, flower,

heart, condom, opera,
lampshade, parasol, ballet.
Hear how the mouth,

so full
of longing for the world,
changes its shape?

—Mark Doty, "Difference"