Albert Goldbarth

John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard, he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave unseen with Phil’s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it into the mounded deeps of the city dump. Simply, there were things that Phil didn’t want to hurt his family with. Do you have yours? I have mine. The brown suitcase. Sasha’s sister, on her deathbed—dinky, frail, just a mild skim-milk trickle of a hospice patient— tensed, sat up, and unloosed such confessional invective that it seemed the walls and the sheets would have to be splattered in shit, her cancer having acted with the harsh, disbursing force of a tornado on the brown and hard-shelled suitcase in her electrochemical memory webs. Is yours secure? from love? from sodium pentathol? Last year, when a tornado hit our fringe of downtown businesses, the air was alive for counties around with the downward dance of naked canceled checks, handwritten notes, hotel receipts, e-mail transcripts, smeary Polaroids, a swirl of lacy underwisps that jellyfished the skies, and from The G-Spot Shoppe a rain of plastic pleasure aids, of which one prime example pierced a cow between the eyes and struck her dead. Maybe AIDS—I wasn’t sure. But he was dying, that was sure: as dry as a stick of human chalk, and making the terrible scritch-sound of a stick of chalk, in his throat, in the community air, in the room across from Sasha’s sister. Something . . .hidden in the trace of rundown aura still around him as we chatted there one morning . . . a tv? a sissyboy tv? I wasn’t sure, but it was obvious his life-chalk held a story not yet written, not confessed yet for this storyniverous planet. And when I remembered my mother’s own last days . . . the way a person is a narrative, the strength of which is either revelation or withholding. It was summer, and the garden at the nursing home was fat with summer’s pleasures: flowered mounds like reefs of coral, bees as globular as whole yolks. In her room, my mother disappeared a breath at a time, and everything else was only a kind of scenery for that. The wink of pollen in the light. The birds. Their feather-lice. The bursting spores. Those opened-up cicada husks abandoned on the patio —the small, brown, unlocked luggage that’s completed its work in this world.

Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners with an arc of piss, and then—until he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,” incanting a doggerel prayer about God the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and she, if loose in the halls, would join him, squatting in the center of the room and masturbating with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why they were sent to the madhouse: this is what they needed to do once in the madhouse: this is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion there, created from the few, make-do materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago: her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers (for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session), nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom; the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet; endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose, in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise. One dusk, one vividly contusion-color dusk, with my fists in my pockets and a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window (Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in: a full-grown pig was splayed on the table, stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife, and then they both scooped out a tumble of many dozens of wasps, preserved by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I see it? From inside this, over their wrists in the tripes, they carefully removed the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun and matching brass coin of a moon, and then a child’s-third-grade-version of a house made out of pallid wax: a square of walls, a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.

We know far more about the philosophical underpinnings of Puritanism than we do about what its practitioners consumed at countless meals. —James Deetz 1 Yes. So we must reconnect ideas of God, and the definitions of “liberty,” and the psychology of our earliest models of governance, with oyster peeces in barley beer & wheet, chopt cod & venyson seethed in a blood broth, hominy pottage,also squirell. Their heads might well have brimmed with heaven and its airborne personnel, but still their mouths were a mash of white meat[cheese]and a motley collation of eel leavings,a fine samp,and a roast Fowl. Worshipp first,then after—butter Biskuits! David Ignatow: “seeking transcendence but loving bread” 2 And it is too easy to get lost in abstraction, as if smoke, and dream, and quantum ersatz-states are our proper environment... it’s easy to conceptualize in “politics” and not in the clack of the black or white dried bean we drop in the voting bowl. In some tribes, there’s a designated “reminderer,” and when the shaman novitiate—or sometimes simply a mournful family member—follows the star trail into the country of ghosts, and lingers there, this person tugs the wanderer back home: perhaps a light thwack with a broom-shock, or the rising steam of a broth that one can hungrily shinny down to Earth like a rope. In the Mesopotamian Inanna myth, it’s water and bread that resurrect the goddess and allow her to begin the long ascent out from the craters of Hell. We can spend all day, and many days, and years, in theorizing. “A Computer Recreation of Proto-Hominid Dietary Intake: An Analysis” ... we’ll float off, through these foggy lands of argot, in the way that someone else might dissolve in the blue cloud of an opium den... no wonder there’s such pleasure in uncovering the solid fossil record of those appetites, and in emptying out its evidence grain by grain, a stone piñata. How often the stories bring us back to that grounding! In 1620, a first exploratory party from the Mayflower went ashore on the northern Cape Cod coast. The weather was bad and disorienting: a half a foot of snow, in air so thick as to be directionless. But we sense they recouped their spirits that night, from three fat Geese and six Ducks whitch we ate with Soldiers stomackes. 3 And it is too easy to lose ourselves in cyberthink, untethered from the touchable, from even the cohesive force suffusing through one atom. “What we keep,” reports an archivist at the New York Times, “is the information, not the paper”... everything e-storaged now. A thousand years of pages,pffft: dismissiveness as obliterative as a bonfire, in the long run. Oh, yes, easy to cease to exist as an actual shape, inside the huge, occluding mists of legalese: we say “repatriation of native archeological remains,” and we mean human bones, that’s what we mean: hard and dear and contested. We say “ritual signifier of threat,” but what the Narragansetts sent to the colonists at Plymouth was a bundl of thair Arrows tyed about in a mightie Snake skin. I died. And I was stolen into a land of strangers—of not-the-People. I floated all day, many days. And here the ribs of my cage were empty: always I was hungry, for the things that People need. But this was not the sun, and this was not the soil, of the People; and I was restless, I had no one for between my legs, and no drum in my chest. There was much war from this: the People desired me back, they said “this one is part of many-ones,” and after words and words, their word was so. One day the breezes sent the fishes and savory beaver parts, and I knew at last that I was home: my mouth of my skull watered. 4 “When hegemonic identity-structures systemize cognition—” whoa. There are times I think my friends might flimmer away in that high-minded mush... and I concentrate, then, on the names of those people from 1621, names that are true, specific labor and specific, beautiful common things. Cooper. Fletcher. Glover. Miller. Glazer. Mason. Carpenter. Cheerfull Winter. Oceanus Hopkins. Lydia Fish, Nathaniel Fish and Steadfast Fish, of Sandwich. Zachariah Field, father, and daughter Dutiful Field. Pandora Sparrow. Who wouldn’t care to meet Peregrine Soule? And who could wish to let go of this life when faced by Countenance Bountie?

It's the other ones, who soon enough return to being happy after the funeral, that are nearest to their own deaths—in their gaiety and everyday distraction, they're so open and unguarded . . . anything could enter them; could claim them. It's the ones who weep incessantly that are saved for now, the ones who have taken a little of it into their systems: this is how inoculation works. And sorrow is difficult, a job: it requires time to complete. And the tears?—the salt of the folk saying, that gets sprinkled over the tail feathers and keeps a bird from flying; keeps it stationed in this world.

The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore could not please the ears of a traveller more than hearing the words “nitrogen,” “oxidation of iron” and “hygrometer.” —Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century scientist-explorer When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire, one longs to hear the cry “Hygrometer! Fresh hygrometer for sale!” Yes, and when the fair sex sidles close and coyly murmurs “nitrogen” into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation is very easy. The allurements of a local siren, whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure, evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen. Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation difficult to sustain. I think of my grandmother: “We're not hirin’ today” “Go away” “Dumb Jew”— her share of the language that greeted her here in the land of alien hygrometer and freedom, where she was only one more funny-skirted for- eigner yearning to hear a lulling Hungarian nitrogen hum her to sleep. Eventually, of course, the American nitrogen sufficed. Her daughter could speak, in free translation, both uranium and argon; and her granddaughter gigs with Fire ’n Ice, a skinhead punk-grunge group that performs in sheer black nighties and clown wigs—she plays mean electric hygrometer in the first set and then, for a twofer, ( very American, that) plays paper-and-comb. Far out. She’s so fluent in various World Wide Webbery that nitrogen in a thousand different inflections is her birthright, and almost any translation, mind to mind, gender to gender, is second nature. “I earn my keep, I party, I sleep” is her motto. Though she’s for- tunate in having a lover who’s CEO at Hygrometer, Potassium, Klein & Wong: it helps to pay the “hygrometer man” when he knocks at the door. I won’t say that they fear this guy exactly, but he’s a major badass nitrogen- sucking cyberwired ninja-kicking shitheel (or, translation: call him Sir). It makes one pine for a land where the birds all choir in sweetly trilling melodies on a flower-scented shore, and a translation sings all night. Row gen- tly toward it. The tender forests sigh, and the soft whirr of the hygrometer promises oxidation of iron.

The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes. Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does “earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No, yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard, hammering winter? When my father was buried, the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . . Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened, mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But they have their validity, don't they, yes? their sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . . questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal, and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics. What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if I wept? What if I simply put the page down, rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising light, and walked back up to his stone a final time, just that, no drama, and it was so cold, and the air was so brittle, metal buckled out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me, where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s heartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.

1862: Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried his young wife Elizabeth Rossetti with a sheaf of his unpublished poems. . . . and then of course the weeping: some demurely, some flamboyantly. Those elegiac tears, if shed enough, will alter a face and the person behind the face. We all know that erosion is a mighty thing, and even—for example— the seemingly permanent, hard-black Mississippi banks undo and slip south. In a sense, the delta at New Orleans—the land gone silt, and rebuilt— is the Mississippi’s second thought. “My pet, your wiles have altered my earlier obstinacy, and the vision of you in your luxury stateroom beckons; I shall join you for your voyage on the Gigantic —what? oh. Titanic”—is a tragic second thought. A happy one: when Skyler and I decided to try again to “save the marriage.” Now we’re lazing in a pour of Sunday morning light as orangely voluptuous as marmalade. A simile’s a first thought, then an equaled next. She slips back into sleep, and now I’m reading about the night that shady London dandy Charles Augustus Howell (1869) unshoveled the grave at Highgate, broke the coffin, and looted her bone breast of “the book in question, bound in rough gray calf, and with red edges to the leaves,” on eager orders from Rossetti —who’d had second thoughts in seven years, desiring to publish now a volume of his verses (1870, Poems ). Lizzie’s death-stenched pages were saturated with disinfectant by a medical practitioner “who is drying them leaf by leaf”—and then they joined the world of woven radish baskets, bobbered fishing skeins, and god dolls in their second life as art on a museum wall; a world where the “conversion pool” saw swimmers step in white robes from its farther end, reborn to new religion; and the lumbering land animals said no , and gave up legs, and so their legs rolled up like stored-away and useless rugs inside them, and they returned to the waters, and birthed and breached in the waters, and made the waters their orchestral glory, and spouted out their great Ionic columns of air and water in the touch of the changing mind of Earth, that’s sunlit at times and at other times darkened.

This sweater is made from only the finest, softest underhairs of the Mongolian camel. “Fancy-schmancy,” my father would have said, whose snazziest sweater was still a declassé synthetic from the sweatshops of Taiwan. My friend Deloris, however, who really owns such clothes, would say “exquisite” or “sublime”—her opened closet’s row of shoulders teases late-day bedroomlight along such textures, there are days when the laboring brain and throbbing crotch appear to us to be not much more than her wardrobe’s tasteful accessories. “. . . woven from genital-down of prepubescent yeti, and then hand-sewn in our undersea domes.” “Untouched by anyone other than albino elves, this wool is . . . .” ______________ Rarefied—to Helthi Hart, the diet guru, it’s a cup of clear organic cauliflower broth. And for the Emperor Excessia, it’s a mad dessert of swans’ tongues —there were, what? ten thousand?—dipped in a slip of stiffening honey and set out to await the banqueteers like a field of fresh shoots they could graze. Some Roman party hosts had great roped bowls of snow brought from the mountaintops to entertain their guests with dishes of rose-petal sherbet and chilled roe. They might even allow the household slaves to slide leftover snow along the burning welts the ropes ate into their shoulders all down the mountainside. ______________ Afterwards it was an unrecognizable tatter. But an image of my father’s worn-thin Bargain City “all-weather” jacket is still whole in its polyester glory. This is what happened: the alley dog (he later called the thing a “cur”) had cornered Livia, and she screamed once, with a seven-year-old’s unselfconscious terror. And then my father was there, with his jacket wound around his arm, and a rock. When it was over, he tore the sleeves off, tied the poor dog quiet and, after comforting Livia, they both kneeled down to comfort the dog. He was like that. And the jacket that served as weapon and restraint?—was like him, every day of his life. It did what was needed. ______________ I misread “migraine.” Which of the two would we call the most rarefied? “Margarine”? Or maybe comparison isn’t the point. A ghost is a person rarefied through the fine, fine colander death; that doesn’t make, for most of us, extinction an ideal. It was hard to think of Frank and Deloris divorcing, since it was hard to imagine the two of them engaging in anything so mundane as sex or rage or envy with the rest of the hoi polloi. They seemed unearthly in close to a literal way, like radio waves. And yet divorce they did. They found something real they could unjoin, hertz from hertz until there just was air. ______________ A dream: We own the softest of the soft Mongolian camel underhair sweaters. One day (we think we’re doing the “right thing”) we release it into the wild, to romp with its brother and sister desert sweaters, out where it “belongs.” You know, however, what happens by now: it’s unfit to fend for itself amid that hardened herd. They beat it. It’s hungry. It crawls back into the city, mewing, curling up at night against a door my father opens and, seeing something in need, brings it inside, wraps it in flannel. That’s how he was. He’d give you the cheap shirt off his back.

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly. —Guy Murchie “He was mortared to death.” A pity, how we misspeak and mishear. —Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either makes a difference to the increasingly cooler downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what do

I’m sitting at Nathan’s, reading a biography of Darwin who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle “no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”: he’ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years. Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”: those philosophical poems of William Bronk’s. What’s most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten, are reading, each of them enmazed in a fantasy novel that squeezes them by the attention-bone behind the eyes in its thimble pool of pineal juice and drizzled endorphins. Tristan cared enough to cry when he finished his previous book and its battle of shadow and radiance was over. Each of us: his individual book; and yet the silence is communal. This is a natural state at Nathan’s. Holly, however, is reading the Sunday paper and so serves, without saying a word, to remind us how natural it was for Raeshawn Nelson, seven, to fall while running and burn out his eye on the disregarded meth pipe, or for Anna Rietta, nine, to have come home from school and excitedly been the **!star!**, each day, of the homemade porn her parents peddled as “young fun” over the Internet. This was what they knew, and all they knew, and so they entered it as comfortably as Tristan does his opened world of sorcerors and valiant knights and fancy-talking beasts, since use x frequency = familiarity. That’s the strict, imperious math of everybody’s insular subuniverse. Sherena asked me what this thing “vermouth” was (she pronounced it “mouth”) and ordered quiche as if it were the brother of “touché”; but then she needed to explain to me why C-C was the “bottom bitch” and what a “T-girl” is and how to put down money on Ice’s book at “the county,” by which she meant jail. And those years when Darwin parsed the slimy fiber of his barnacles (discovering the species where “the female has no anus” and the one with “tiny parasitic males [that were] embedded in one female’s flesh like blackheads”), “squinty . . . laborious,” were among the final decades of hundreds of years when a woman in China would suffer ritual foot binding, at five, the bandages limiting growth until the toes were bent and curled (the toenails growing into the balls of the feet) and the arches broken. This resulted in the desirable “shrunken plums” and “three-inch golden lilies” sought by marriage brokers. Traditionally, a prospective mother-in-law would check below the hem, and reject any feet over four inches long. Entire generations of women could only mince and hobble. And this was natural, this was the air and the light and “the-way-of-things-forever” that you woke up to every day . . . as natural as the implicit laws in Aidan’s book, by which a bear converses with a girl in growly mutual-speak, and a boy of sturdy heart and his wingéd horse ascend their sky with the unremarkable grace of birds in ours. That’s ordinary Newtonian physics there, and Aidan subjects himself to the rules of flying horsemanship, and the code of those of innocent spirit about to war with wyverns and the wormfolk, and the governing instructions of gods with the heads of wide-eyed animals . . . and even now, Sherena texts my phone to say that WEATHER GOOD and SHINE GOT BULLET IN LUNG FROM POLICE