Ben Belitt

(White River Junction, Vermont) Bringing “only what is needed—essential toilet articles” in a paper bag, dressed as for dying, one sees the dying plainly. These are the homecomings of Agamemnon, the odysseys to the underside of the web that weaves and unweaves while the suitors gorge upon plenty and the languishing sons at home unwish their warring fathers with strong electric fingers. The fathers are failing. In the Hospital Exchange, one sees the dying plainly: color televisions, beach towels, automatic razors— the hardware of the affluent society marked down to cost, to match the negative afflatus of the ailing, the bandages and badges of their status. Under the sandbags, rubber hoses, pipettes, bed-clamps, tax-exempt, amenable as rabbits, the unenlisted men are bleeding through their noses in a perimeter of ramps and apparatus. In that prosthetic world, the Solarium lights up a junk-pile of used parts: the hip that caught a ricochet of shrapnel; tattoos in curing meats; scars like fizzled fuses; canceled postage stamps; automated claws in candy; the Laser’s edge; and barium. The nurses pass like mowers, dressing and undressing in the razor-sharp incisions and the flowering phosphorescence. The smell of rubbing alcohol rises on desertions and deprivals and divorces. It is incorruptible. A wheelchair aims its hospital pajamas like a gun-emplacement. The amputee is swinging in his aviary. His fingers walk the bird-bars. There is singing from the ward room—a buzzing of transistors like blueflies in a urinal. War over war, the expendables of Metz and Chateau-Thierry, the guerillas of Bien Hoa and Korea, the draftees, the Reserves, the re-enlisters, open a common wavelength. The catatonic sons are revving up their combos in the era of the angry adolescent. Their cry is electronic. Their thumbs are armed with picks. The acid-rock guitarist in metal studs and chevrons, bombed with magnesium, mourns like a country yokel, and the innocents are slaughtered. On the terrace, there are juices and bananas. The convalescent listens to his heartbeat. The chaplain and his non-combative daughter smile by the clubbed plants on the portico. “They shall overcome.”

When last we came this pleasant way The hedgerows blossomed, high and hard, And blue with shade the violets lay In every cherry-lightened yard. Now, in commemorative rain, I walk the quiet way alone, And there are violets again As blue as I have ever known. Useless to barricade the flesh To splendid branch and flower-row: I see the cherry, flaked and fresh, And smell the violet as I go Perplexed past wetted flowerbed And boxwood glimmering into leaf, Companionless, disquieted, And fearfully as any thief— Smarting of some sacrilege Too profligate to understand, As one who disavows a pledge And treads repudiated land.

When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave. —John Keats 1. You are here on the underside of the page, writing in water, anachronist, showing your head with its delicate fuses, its fatal telemetry, a moundful of triggers and gunpowder like a field-mine, your sixty-one inches and your gem-cutter’s fingers, anonymous, taking the weight of a “roomful of people” but making no mark, pressing the page as I write, while the traffic in Rome, demotic with engines and klaxons, circles the Pyramid of Cestius, crosses a graveyard, and submerges again like the fin of a shark. 2. I write, in the posthumous way, on the flat of a headstone with a quarrier’s ink, like yourself: an anthologist’s date and an asterisk, a parenthetical mark in the gas of the pyramid-builders, an obelisk whirling with Vespas in a poisonous motorcade. I make your surgeon’s incision for solitude—one living hand, two poets strangled in seawater and phlegm, an incestuous ego to reach for the heart in the funeral ashes, a deathbed with friends. 3. Something murderous flows from the page to my hand— a silence that wars with the letters, a fist that closes on paper: a blow with the straight edge of a razor that falls with a madman’s monotony; or the adze of a sleepwalking Sumerian nicking the wet of the clay, hacking a wedge in a tablet in the blood and the mica, till all glistens with language. The criminal folds up his claspknife. The shutters slam down on the streets.Nobody listens. 4. Out of breath with the climb, and tasting a hashish of blood, what did he see on the brink of the Piazza di Spagna? A hand in the frame of a cithara where beggars and sunbathers clotted the levels like musical signatures, a Wordsworthian dream of “degree,” “unimaginable time” touched by an axe blade—or a pram on the Steps of Odessa torn from the hands of its mother, gathering speed for the plunge and rocking its tires in the rifling, like a gun barrel, smashing its way through the Tzar’s executioners, to a scream at the bottom? 5. A failed solitude... The bees in the Protestant grass speak of it delicately in the sweat of a Palatine summer, guiding my hand through the Braille of the letters. Violet, bluet, or squill— what was it I picked under the epitaph, what rose to my touch in the thirst of the marble, a cup from the well of your grave in the noonday miasma, a hieroglyph in the water, saying: solitude, solitude, solitude: you have it at last—your solitude writing on water, alone with its failure. 6. You are there on the underside of the page, a blue flower in my Baedeker, writing on water. I know it. The paper pulls under my pen peaks into waves running strongly into the horizon. The emptiness hardens with balustrades, risers, and levels, a staircase of Roman azaleas. I slip on the blood and the ink toward the exigent bed of a poet. All is precarious. A maniac waits on the streets. Nobody listens. What must I do? I am writing on water, blazing with failures, ascending, descending among lovers and trippers. You are pressing me hard under the paper. At Santa Trinità dei Monti the stairway parts like an estuary, rises and falls like a fountain. There is nothing to see but a death-mask, your room in an island of risers and treads, oddly gregarious, an invisible hand in the granite. 7. The tidal salts drain on a living horizon, leaving a glare on the blemishing paper. The silence is mortal. Nobody answers. for Joan Hutton Landis

They splay at a bend of the road, rifles slung, the shadows minimal, their hands tugging their slings by the upper swivel to ease the routine of the march. They have been moving since morning, and over each has descended that singleness, mournful and comatose, which is the mysterious gift of the march. Their helmets shadow their eyes, their chinstraps dangling. In the raddle of grasses their solitude floats in a drift of identities, a common melancholy. A captain enters the frame at the head of his company. His face flashes. With his left hand he tilts back his helmet, while with his right he draws the length of an elbow across forehead and nose, his stained armpits showing dark. A bracelet flashes behind him. The column recedes, rifles close over the canted belts, moving up, the packed backs vulnerable: (Cut) Late afternoon. In the half-light a handful of blazing sticks, four infantrymen heating mess tins over an eddy of smoke, a fifth on his hams, his eyes upcast from the rim of his metal cup. Nearby a corporal works a patch into the chamber of his rifle; he repeats four syllables and smiles sleepily into the camera. The camera moves to the bivouac area; a group, their meat-cans close to their mouths, spooning the compost, Chinese-fashion, and clowning between mouthfuls. Very close. Their jaws, lightly bearded, the necks in their jacket collars strained in an easy horseplay, the Adam’s apples rapidly raised and released in the human exertion of eating. In deep shadow, the light failing, very close. A private tugs at his boot by the toe and the round of the heel. Deliberately, he draws the boot clear of his foot, sets it aside with deep satisfaction, massages his instep over a maternal thickness of socks. He bends toward the other foot, camera-shy, a half smile breaking; (Cut) It is not yet possible to distinguish the forms behind the camouflage netting. They move in the central darkness of the gun, stacking shells and bringing up powder charges. Only the bulk of the howitzer is sure, the gun-barrel crossing the line of the valley under the tented netting. A village is burning in the valley. In the watery light, smoke deepens over three hearthbeds of brightness. A spire. A siding. A ladder of rooftops. The gun fires. The picture trembles. (Cut) An iron darkening. The hip of a tank darkens a frame, foreshortened, the treads close to the lens, a rushing of hammers, rings. The lens is cleared. A cobbled street. A row of country-houses, walled. A rosebush in the heavy light, blown forward. Dust falls in the afterdraft, a grain at a time. The camera is watchful. A rifleman moves up the frame, his rifle at low port, his shadow buffing the cobbles, crouched. He pauses under the rosebush, his rifle hiked. A second figure breaks through the frame, freezing between the foreground and the far doorway. The man under the rosetree sights carefully. The second man listens. He raises his rifle, barrel backwards, and brings the butt down heavily on the door-panels. The rifle rebounds. He measures a second blow, his teeth bared slightly in a reflex of anxiety. His eye is large. The butt-plate smashes over doorknob and lock, the knocker flies upward once, the panel splinters all at once. The man kicks the door open easily with a booted foot. He listens, bent toward his rifle-sights. He signals to the second man and enters the doorway, stooped like a man entering a cave— (Cut) Brightness through trees. A damascene. At the edge of a clearing, a parked jeep. Two medical corpsmen lash litters to the jeep engine a few hundred yards behind front lines. The litter-poles enter the lens over the arch of the engine. On the litter, a swathed head, a shock of broken hair, motionless, a fall of blankets. The stretcher-bearers vault lightly to their seats and move off at a crawl. Roadmarker: Battalion Aid Station. A corner of charred wall, rubble, glass, timber. Legend: Épicerie . The stretcher-bearers dismount. The film is bad. Presently a gloved hand in a surgeon’s sheath, holding a forceps. Briskly the hand moves over a circlet of maimed flesh noosed in a bloody bandage. A scalpel flashes between the living hand and the human hurt, forcing the rind of the wound, filling the frame. The camera submits, framing the wound like a surgeon’s retractor, its gaze nerveless and saline. The gauzes blacken swiftly, too heavy for the jaws of the forceps.... The surgeon at full figure. A breeze finds the fold of his tunic. In the distance the litter-bearers are leaning for the litter-poles. His eyes hold the optical center of the lens, unanswered. His mouth rejects contemplation, not yet relaxed. His hands are void in their glimmering cicatrix of rubber.

Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. —Genesis When the Deluge had passed, into my head, by twos, came the creeping things, the horn of their jawbones shining, and the things of the air, wing-cases breaking like clasp knives, asking their names. Storm-light colored their passing with an animal imminence. They wheeled on the pile of their plumage, in the dread of their animal being, and rode in the ark of my head where the possible worked like a sea. Nothing was given me there. Nothing was known. Feather and scale, concussions of muscle and fur, the whale and the name for the whale rose on the void like a waterspout, being, and ceasing to be: till keel clashed and I spoke: mayfly, wood-weasel, stingray, cormorant, mole—

The orange-peelers of Mérida, in the wrought- iron midday, come with mechanical skewers and live oranges, to straddle the paths on caissons of bicycle wheels and work in the dark of the plaza, like jewelers’ cloths. The orange is ceremonious. Its sleep is Egyptian. Its golden umbilicus waits in pyramidal light, swath over swath, outwitting the Caesars. It cannot be ravaged by knives, but clasps its mortality in, like the skein of an asp. The bandstand glitters like bone, in laurel and spittle. Behind their triangular catafalques, the orange-peelers move through the thirst of the world with Rameses’ bounty caulked into the hive of the peel while ratchets and wheels spin a blazing cosmology on their little machines. Under skewers and handles, the orange’s skin is pierced, the orange, in chain-mail and papyrus, unwinds the graveclothes of Pharaoh in a helix of ribbon, unflawed, from the navel’s knot to the rind and the pulp underneath, like a butterfly’s chrysalis. And sleeper by sleeper, the living turn with their thirst to each other, the orange’s pith is broken in a blind effervescence that perfumes the palate and burns to the tooth’s bite. And the dead reawaken.

for Jean Brockway When the walkers-on-water went under, the bog-walkers came out of the barberry thickets, booted in gum to their hips, in a corona of midges, their ears electric with sound, beating the stale of the swamp with their whips and flailing the ground for the itch under the frond, the fern’s demonology, the mosquito’s decibel. Night-sweat clotted their palms. They tasted their gall. The sumac flickered a swatch of its leaves in the lichens and venoms, a dazzle was seen in the fog as a vegetal world gave way to a uterine, pitch pulled at their heels and blackened their knuckles, the bog-laurel’s fan opened its uttermost decimal and showed them the Bog. Paradisal, beyond purpose or menace, dewed like the flesh of an apple with the damp of creation, the disk of the pond glowed under the dragonfly’s bosses, where a faulting of glaciers had left it—vaults of bog-rosemary, buckbean and Labrador tea, a dapple of leavening mosses soaking in ice-water, peat-wicks feeding their gas to the cranberry braziers. They entered the bonfire together. The moss took their weight like a trampoline: they walked on the sponge and bitumen without leaving a footprint. In between, in the vats of mat-roses where the waterline closed like a skin, the ambiguous world of imbalance, non-being, the pre-human and tentative, was one with the ludicrous. The quaking began—under their bootsoles at first, like a whale under ambergris, then cramming their wrists with a drummer’s vibrations, knocking their ribs and their knees as all sagged and rebounded. They lurched on the wet as though tracing a profile of breakers or displacing the cords and the voids of a net, and staggered back into their childhoods, till their feet touched the granite again. The bog tossed them over the threshold that opened a path in the spruce toward the opposite edges. The leaves closed behind them. They walked an unyielding and tangible world like strangers, remembering only the hovering glare where the pitcher-plant’s hammer closed on the fly—the light shaking and shaking— as a pulse touched their feet from below, and passed over.

Rise, cleanly trust, divided star, And spend that delicate fraud upon the night— A lover’s instance moving mindful air To make its peace in dedicated light Whose look is charnel. Lusters, intent and blind, Give darkness downward with a glow like sheaves— A gleaner’s pittance withered in the bind That keeps the summer godhead of the leaves And bends tremendous evening under it, Doubles its theft within a lonely course Till eye and eye repeat the counterfeit And shape the replenishing mercy at its source. All else were ravage: a demon-gaze of terror: The emblem blackened in the living head, The eye, the image, and the image-bearer Struck to an awe with smiling on the dead. Therefore that bounty which, however false, Tenders survival, and is purely given, And lends the viewless prisms at its pulse To make an easy legendry in heaven. Restore that grace! Indeed, the look is grace That deals this desert providence in air And lifts a deathshead, burning, into place To serve a lover’s faith. Rise, carrion star.

...at the still point, there the dance is. —T. S. Eliot The errand into the maze, Emblem, the heel’s blow upon space, Speak of the need and order the dancer’s will. But the dance is still. For a surmise of rest, over the flight of the dial, Between shock of the fall, shock of repose, The flesh in its time delivered itself to the trial, And rose. Suffrance: the lapse, the pause, Were the will of the dance— The movement-to-be, charmed from the shifts of the chance, Intent on its cause. And the terrible gift Of the gaze, blind on its zenith, the wreath Of the throat, the body’s unwearied uplift, Unmaking and making its death, Were ripeness, and theme for return: Were rest, in the durance of matter: The sleep of the musing Begetter And the poise in the urn.