Peter Balakian

In the mud of a tire rut, we were the filaments. We said if Mrs. Agnew could make music on Spiro’s flute we said the clubs in the hands of the Chicago cops would liquefy. The trees shook with the throb of steel. What did we do to be so red, white, and blue? We were inexorable like the dialectic unraveling from Hanoi to the Jacksonian grass. We were the inebriates of vitamin C and cocaine, the daughters of the gray flannel suit. And when the shaman spread his yellow robe like the sun he was all teeth and amp and what were we?

When I saw his face on a wall at a party in a parlor looking out at the Hudson, at a fundraiser for the winter soldiers over blocks of cheese and baguettes, I had just come from some grainy footage of Dien Bien Phu in a hot black room, where the scratched print showed the hills undulating, bodies and parachutes disappearing in jungle grass. Between decadence and the alien Mao was propped in yellow and rouge with lipstick and eye shadow, a real queen—part décor, part radical something the American lexicon hadn’t filled in yet. From the aerial cameras Haiphong Harbor was liquid light. In liquid light, I saw my draft card float like a giant litho over the highway at 79th the letters popped—selective service system— and morphed into gray rain— anyone could have done it— singed, blurred, laminated— and the bartender poured me another unidentified drink. In the scratched cellulose nitrite, parachutes kept drifting down on the hedges of the Laotian border. On the wall Mao was the punctum in rouge and yellow and smear. Didn’t every myth signify confusion? Confucius, Charlie Chan, Chiang Kai-shek? (An American vision of a place.) The guy behind me in class asked, “Where is this place?” Hanoi was glittering flecks on the nightly news, and the teacher answered, “Every snake of land is someone’s history.” We didn’t know what we didn’t know about the backyard furnaces, the tens of millions. Even if Mao swallowed Darwin and Adam Smith swimming the Yangtze—here on the Upper West in late spring, he was wallpaper, the most recognizable face in the world. There seemed no point in breaking through the mask— I was glued to the colors for a while, until the next war let us out of Asia until the sun went down on the wall.

When I left Eli Zabar the cut-out star on the window was whirling in the animation of the rich and hungry hunched over tables for a $30 sandwich and a Diet Coke. It was raining and the blurred glass of the galleries was the gold leaf of the Carrig Rhone frames— Childe Hassam’s dabs of Connecticut trees the diaphanous blue on the fleshy rocks, the melting opal of the shoals. Inside the Whitney the rain trailed down my face; and I found myself in a quiet corner staring at the pink face of Marilyn Monroe. I could still smell the smoldering high-tech plastic as it burned the air. In the whiteness of her teeth, in the almost aahh of her mouth and the half-drugged eyes under the lids of teal shadow, the air kept singeing my nose. Against the pale walls Marilyn’s face dissolved like a stretched mesh and litho ink where plain form is a place of no desire like the empty mirror of the Hudson at dawn. In the fissures of her make-up, the planes of color led back and back behind her teeth longing— to the deception by the Falls on her honeymoon (with Joseph Cotton in Niagara)—where we found her clothed and alarmed, and later desperate for the affirmation, of a President’s limp dick and the crisp sheets the same color of these walls—as my t shirt dries to my skin and the faintest scent of ground zero sifts down on the walls whiter than the wingtip vortices of melting in the morning light.

Paolo It was not Virgil you read (though I asked you to), but the Peruvian, part Indian, part cousin of Lorca whose words were spiky points, wafts of privet, week-old cod. When you breathed them at me nothing in the outer world ceased its turbulent grim direction. You breathed on my unhooked eyes and uncovered me. Above the roof a windfucker smacked the air, and wind kept eating the island rocks. Francesca We ate along the riverside at sundown. The clear green juice dripped from my mouth. We didn’t fuck missionary on clean sheets. I lost my head between your legs. My nose spreading like honey. A whiff of narcissus swept across us. I ate the flowers whole, tried to outfox Satan with my tongue. I felt as if I shimmied up your legs to find this point on the Jersey cliffs. The sun was God’s eye. I plugged my ears so I wouldn’t hear your crappy verse, then tore into your pants like a scared cat. The Chrysler Building was a pin. I tasted you five hundred feet as the Hudson pulled me under.

1. What were we watching on the tube under mildewed ceilings in Eastlands? A Kenyan guy shaking a rattle made from a can while another guy in the band was talking to the queen about making sound out of anything? The queen smiled. The Jubilee receiving line filed through. 2. We shimmied past tin shacks selling wigs and bananas, coke and goat lungs; the tine of a kalimba kissed my face. My face kissed the blue plastic of a soda bottle sliding down a hill of glass. I paid the gang leaders for protection and we walked into the hills of airplane garbage, black and blue plastic bags glowing in the sun spray over the heads of the marabou stalking the mounds with their knife-blade beaks. 3. Stevie Wonder and Elton John moved through the Jubilee line. Prince Charles thanked God for the weather as the camera cut to fireworks spewing over Hyde Park and then to an image of Nairobi and the Slum Drummers picking metal out of the collages of garbage. 4. My jeans were charred from the tin-can fires, and the grilling pig guts when some men looked up from scraps of wire— and you went back and forth with them in Swahili before they offered us some sizzling fat, before we thanked them with our coy smiles and moved on with Michael who took us down a maze of alleyways where tin shacks were floating on polymers and nitrogen and a dozen pigs from nowhere snouted the garbage. 5. You were saying “Dad”—when a marabou-hacked bag shot some shit on our shoes—“Dad, kinship roles are always changing”— when a woman asked us for a few shillings and salt for her soup. Salt? Did I hear her right? Or was it Swahili for something else? And through the sooty wind of charcoal fires and creaking rusty tin you were saying, “Hannah Arendt called Swahili a degraded language of former slave holders.” In the soot of my head—I was listening— and Michael was asking for more shillings for the gang guys who were “a little fucked up,” he said, “but needed help”— and when I turned around the heads of chickens were twitching, the feathers fluttering down on oozing sludge; “Arendt called it a nineteenth century kind of no language,” you were saying, “spoken”—as we were jolted by a marabou eating a shoe—“spoken—by the Arab ivory and slave caravans.” 6. Out of bottles, cans, pipes, mangled wire—the Slum Drummers twisted and hacked, joined and seamed their heaven into the black plastic ghost of a mashed pot. Pure tones blew from the vibrato holes like wind through Makadara where the breath of God flew through sewage pipes. I heard in a tubophone the resurrection of ten men rising out of coal and pig snouts into the blue Kenyan sky where a marabou swallowed a purse—and a woman’s conga was parting at the seams above boiling soup cans. 7. Down a slope of stinking plastic you kept on about Arendt— “a hybrid mixture of Bantu with enormous Arab borrowings” I could say poa poa  sawa sawa  karibu. We could make a kalimba out of a smashed pot and pour beans into a can and shake it for the queen. Yesterday in the soundless savannah the wildebeests and zebras seemed to float through the green-gold grass toward Tanzania. We could hear a lion breathe; we could hear wind through tusks. 8. On TV the guys were grinning into metal go-go drums; hammering twisted sewage pipes and cut wire like sailors from Mombasa— harder nailed than da Gama’s voyage down the Arab trade coast— 9. So, where are we—in a slum of no language? Walking through steam shovels of light, breaking over mounds of metal as if the sky were just blue plastic? Isn’t English just a compost heap of devouring grammar, joined, hacked, bruised words, rotting on themselves? I keep following you, daughter of scrutiny, into plastic fields of carrion between sight and site, vision not visionary, pig guts on the grill, trying to keep balance between streams of sewage and the sky, as you keep hacking, Sophia, at the de-centered, the burning text, anthropology’s shakedown. A marabou just knifed the arm of a woman picking bottles out of plastic bags. A rooster crows from under a pile of galvanized tin as if it were morning on a farm.

In the hermetic almost dark under the fluorescent dizz I found her broken nerves, smoke coming off the dashes, the caps like jolts to the neck, the pried-open spaces between vowels where the teeth bit off twine and the tongue was raw then cool with ice. The air of the stockroom after lunch was the marbleized silence of the small blank pages she stitched into privacy. Air of paper and faint glue bond, carbon, graph, yellow pads, in the stockroom I could read alone— the confetti of money dissolved on the blank wall. After work, I slid the numbered poems on blue mimeo into my playbook, and felt the open field the zig-zagging past cornerbacks, the white lines skewed to heaven. Excuse my mood—unbridled, chemical, her scrawled messages smooth to the mind, excuse my absence, again and yes, then, too— the cold stone of the Palisades was there after we split— alone naked in the Hudson, the water greasing me in the tepid, chemical mix, before I returned to the cement of 9W in my father’s Skylark the night black and soundless within.

1. Balak in Hebrew (devastator)—King of Moab son of Zippor (sparrow), meaning he who was always running away into the desert as the Israelites were fast on his back. Angry, humiliated, full of vinegar and sap, looking for the diviner. 2. Balak (in Turkish, eccentric variant) meaning baby buffalo— something forging Anatolian rivers, Armenian fossil of the word, flushed downstream. 3. Who drowned wading in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There the sky is cochineal. There the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes. 4. If you thought of diaspora, you were thinking of emerald stones. If you thought of the marshes of snails and magenta bugs, you were wading in the reeds. Ur: like rolling a good Merlot on the palate till it runnels up the nose. Ah: breath of the unknown. Tu: also, everything, self and side of mountain. The soul sweats. The blue knifes the canyon. In a cave, a man lived on herbs and water; the sky’s grisaille was a visitation; the leaves were out of toot sin Jants; the angels were alpha and omega— 5. This road goes north— no need to ask where you are, sentimental pop songs are stuck in the CD shuffle there’s a valley, a river, a smoking something— if you ask what color is the sky can anyone say—cloudless, clotted, open?

—Faulkner My mother is a fish and the sky is low and orange, and the long grass rises in the still air. The mud is black and worms turn their cold segments at my feet. I used to walk with an old lady. It seemed far from water and the ground sank. Weeds were higher than my head. Slugs slept in the mud. My mother is a fish and the sky swallows my head. A fine rain comes and softens the ferns. In March before the crocus and the lily, eggs bunch in the shoal of green jelly. Crabs glide through them. A kingfisher is dead on a rock. My mother is an eel winding a light around the rock. Even without a moon the black glows. * The sun grows like an egg over the bridge, the first birds are silver and swoop down for my mother. When the lady came we jumped— She took us to find worms we could squeeze in our hands. I went with my father to the dark water. I went with a bucket of mud. When we doubled the worm on the hook and it coiled, I could hear how a bass could thud. I grabbed it with a wet hand, and watched its eye go black as I dropped it in a metal bucket. Hack it along the gill and throw the head to the gulls.

1 After the Reformation had settled the loamy soil and the lettuce-green fields of dollars, the clouds drifted away, and light fell everywhere. Even the snow bloomed and New Hampshire was a big peony. A red barn shone on a hill with scattered hemlocks and white pines and the gates of all the picket fences were big shut-eyes. 2 Sometime after the Civil War, the bronze wing of liberty took off like the ribboning smoke of a Frick factory, and all the citizens in towns from Stockbridge to Willamette ran wild on the 4th. The sound of piccolos lingered, and the shiny nickel of the sun stood still before it fizzed in the windshield of a Ford. By then you were a lawyer. 3 Charles Ives was a bandmaster in Danbury, and you didn’t give him the time of day. He played shortstop on the piano. He never made it to his tonic home base, and his half-tones were like oak leaves slapping clapboard. 4 How Miltonic are we anyway? 5 In that red glass of the imagination, in that tingling crystal of the chandelier where light freezes in its own prism and the apogee of the green lawns of New Haven wane like Persian carpets in twilight, there you saw a pitcher, perhaps from Delft, next to a plate of mangoes. 6 But still, history is a boomerang, and the aborigines never threw one without a shield. 7 Beyond the porches of Key West, beyond the bougainvillea, your speech skipped on tepid waves, was lapped and lapped by lovers and friends, by scholars who loved romantic nights of the sun. But the fruits and pendants, the colorful cloth, the dry palm fronds, and the fake voodoo wood Cortes brought back as souvenirs were just souvenirs. And the shacks and the cane and the hacked plantain were tableaux, and who saw them from your dark shore? 8 The Protestant dinner plate is a segregated place, where the steak hardens, and the peas sit frightened in their corner while mashed potatoes ossify. Some gin and ice cream, and the terror of loneliness goes for a while. 9 As they say in the sunny climes, un abrazo.

I drove through the narrow Gods— privet and cholesterol, or Irish creamery butter as the waiter called it, as it shaved another day off my life. There was no salt and antimony, just lumpy roads through Meath and Leitrim. The sky was a show of flashing mirrors as day broke on Rosses. Tide out and weed like cow pies on the shore. The punt down and the EEC on the horizon, as I read in the guidebook about pilgrims climbing St. Patrick’s barefoot every summer. Out of the fog a man in Wranglers and spurred boots, clean-shaven, a cigarette in hand, waved me down. “Scrum faced house at the end of the bay.” “Hop in,” I said.“You lookin’ for where John Wayne made