Fanny Howe

The hotel bar downstairs was dirty and dark and almost empty except for him whom I didn’t know I lost my balance because evil is aroused by absence Outside on the island a brick city had grown up and old A person could only nibble on its shadows Where was my beloved? The cornerstone was familiar but unrecognizable and I didn’t understand why infinity was seeping into my hair Somebody said: “He’s out of his bottle” I guess it meant Temporarily out of service and empty. But then there was Arsene beside the last remaining cabin wandering with his eyes on the camera Dynamite in his pocket and a piece of thread to trap a rabbit. Evil is a growing thing It has its own gravity and never answers to its name It is a hole into chaos. It is real Arsene held me in his arms He was drunk as usual and his nipple smelled of rum But still I loved him— loved him madly!— as if he was the one

When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. —Fyodor Dostoevsky I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction. The paper slept but the night in me woke up. Black letters were now alive and collectible in a material crawl. I could not decipher their intentions anymore. To what end did their shapes come forth? To seduce or speak truth? While birds swept over the water like pot-bellied angels beautiful bells rang to assist the hoist. Up they went to slake their thirst, drinking from the mist for the sound of bells seemed to free as well as hold them. Then down to scavenge the surf and eat the innocent. “I love God and the ferry too,” wrote Kerouac. Only that which exists can be spoken of. *     *     * I wonder, will our imagination remain a temple burning with candles against all odds? Behind a nipple and a bone? The simplest of glands laid in a circle around skin and liquid that stirs up imagery winged and prismed, as if blood were a wine inducing visions *     *     * Some people cry when the characters die. Then they kill themselves offstage, away from the pages that they are turning in the night. Some people sacrifice themselves on a whim and regret it later on paper. Now I see you in the window. Are you in the book I was looking for? The one who traveled back to the happy days when she could jump on a moving bus and swing in the open air clutching a worn novel in her purse . . . ? A curtain, a knife, adoring eyes? *     *     * I watched the children running and turned to Alyosha for a blessing. He was sunk in the morass of rural life I like to sit with him in the grass. Then we see the same thing at the same time, and are one mind. We two masses, one a book, one a hand. When Alyosha spoke to the boys at the end I anticipated their next question and his answer For they formed a single gesture of kindness. “Will we?” “We will.” *     *     * It seemed evil to read about people we would never meet. We tested their fortitude as if in sleep. They generally failed the challenge being strangers in a strange brain. They were baffled by the tools handed to them and by the traffic’s direction. Frankly in a dream or story, the goal is absolutely hidden from the one to whom it matters. *     *     * Eons of lily-building emerged in that one flower. Eons, eons. Pins and wool, thread and needle, all material made of itself and circumstance. It was a terrible century: consisting of blasted oil refineries and stuck ducks, fish with their lips sealed by plastic and tar in the hair of cooks. Filth had penetrated the vents. Institutions moan. Balls of used cotton from the hospital dumpster, redden. Yawning on obsolescence the computer wonders who punched in such poor grammar. First-padded virgins graduate to this suffering drama all by her-selves. Who once were cells. *     *     * History is more than just another surmising grandmother at a window or a reminiscence twisted in the scrim of translation. Some long-ago light is pulsating in a trout’s heart on a laboratory dish. That light has entered all the holes, no matter how small, because it is the light that wants to live. *     *     * Still waiting for you my sunshine of justice and mercy. If west is east of Moscow, depending where you’re going then will you ever find me coming from a northerly direction? Are you even looking at the earth? Remember the map is flat but everything else is not. Is the newest child the oldest body in creation? Does he carry more information than his mother? Does her mother, his grandmother, do I seem redundant by having arrived with less, though first? Is that why I read at night with my lips compressed? *     *     * The fact is, I never knew if anyone felt me the way Nijinsky knew how to feel. Or Nastasya. Nothing could shock that woman who had done so much wrong. As if trained in a theater, multiple personalities streamed from her tongue. This made her an exemplar for our time. She knew how others felt and became each one, forgetting who she was before. I remember her as a child. Her skirt got tangled up in a thorn bush when she watched the sky. Shaking herself free, she had to see the spiders, ants and dirt around her skirt, It was like peering into her own body and she screamed in horror. Later, consolation would be extended by a man dark and handsome: It came with his semen (when she wanted hibernation). She didn’t commit suicide this time, but ran down Nevsky Prospekt as it began to rain, and paused to lift her umbrella. For this moment we were in our soul a child rushing home to granny five floors up. *     *     * I dropped the book, wept and went to the movies. It is here where I can forgive someone for his crime. Poisoning babies for profit. Harry Lime. I can actually forgive it when he is crawling in shit. Otherwise we will stand on the ferris wheel together forever stuck in the fog and iron. I just a witness to his ironic story He will be a mix between Paul Celan and Oscar Levant when we are at our happiest and no forgiveness is asked. Neurotic, pale, and drawn to the canals, we will lean over the embankment like sister and brother who are tempted to be actors. It is here that his shoes and cat will converge in the dark. Like fish in a secular city flipping through sewers for a flash of Christ.

I have never arrived into a new life yet. Have you? Do you find the squeak of boots on snow excruciating? Have you heard people say,It wasn’t me, when they accomplished a great feat? I have, often. But rarely. • Possibility is one of the elements. It keeps things going. The ferry with its ratty engine and exactitude at chugging into blocks and chains. Returning as ever to mother’s house under a salty rain. Slave up, slave down.

Coyote scruff in canyons off Mulholland Drive. Fragrance of sage and rosemary, now it’s spring. At night the mockingbirds ring their warnings of cats coming across the neighborhoods. Like castanets in the palms of a dancer, the palm trees clack. The HOLLYWOOD sign has a white skin of fog across it where erotic canyons hump, moisten, slide, dry up, swell, and shift. They appear impatient—to make such powerful contact with pleasure that they will toss back the entire cover of earth. She walks for days around brown trails, threading sometimes under the low branches of bay and acacia. Bitter flowers will catch her eye: pink and thin honeysuckle, or mock orange. They coat the branches like lace in the back of a mystical store. Other deviant men and women live at the base of these canyons, closer to the city however. Her mouth is often dry, her chest tight, but she is filled to the brim with excess idolatry. It was like a flat mouse—the whole of Los Angeles she could hold in the circle formed by her thumb and forefinger. Tires were planted to stop the flow of mud at her feet. But she could see all the way to Long Beach through a tunnel made in her fist. Her quest for the perfect place was only a symptom of the same infection that was out there, a mild one, but a symptom nonetheless.

Infinite nesting pushes all matter towards emptiness: child-nodes, tree-droppings with a root element of null. None is always included in every cluster of children. Nothing in nothing prepares us. Yet a fresh light was shed on immortality for me climbing the stairs firm foot first. Everything was in the banister: crows on branches, crickets, architects, handsaws and democrats. Red moon at 3 am .

The descent has deepened the interior lengthened designated ending Blind pulled down inside and then shot up again to see east via the plateglass a moon a monsoon an ashram I used time almost wantonly in that bald but sensual sky to give me gusts and more measurement not to snap the stars shut but Joseph said you really ought to tender how you sail by eye your soul is just a length of baby

I want to leave this place unremembered. The gas stove is leaking and the door of the refrigerator stained with rust. The mugs are ugly and there are only two forks. The walls are black and soft, the bed a balloon of night-clothing. The stairwell sloped to a dragger’s pace. There are big windows with blind-slats dusty and gray. Street life goes all night and at dawn freedmen shout and laugh outside the kitchen. Where does life begin and end? In the lamb or the cotton? My pillow is my friend.

From raindrenched Homeland into a well: the upturned animal was mine by law and outside the tunnel, him again! Everywhere I turned the children ran between. “Loose dogs!” he roared. I remember one sequence: a gulf in his thinking meant swim as fast as you can. But it was winter and the water was closed. The mouths of the children were sealed with ice. After all, we were swimming in emotion, not water. “Shut up! you Father!” I shouted over my shoulder. Racing, but not spent, my mind went, “It isn’t good that the human being is all I have to go by .... It isn’t good that I know who I love but not who I trust .... It isn’t good that I can run to a priest but not to a plane .... I lost my way exactly like this.” Inverted tunnel of the self. Throat or genital search for the self. Light that goes on in the self when the eyes are shut. Uniformity impossible in the psyche’s pre-self like a day never spent, or how the unseen can make itself felt. It was as if a boy was calling from the end of a long island. Docks were vertical and warlike. I would be on one side of my bed like a mother who can tell she’s a comfort because she’s called Mother. Still, we both would be able to see the edge of the problem. It’s true that the person is also a thing. When you are running you know the texture. I was clawing at the palm of one hand and brushing up my blues with the other. A man who wore his boxers at night remarked that my daughter was tired. He had nothing to do with anything. Ahead was the one with magnified eyes and historical data to last. Know-how and the hysteria to accomplish his whole life. It was horrible what we would do for peace. We told him the story of the suffering he made us feel with the ingratiating stoop of those who came second in the world.