Quan Barry

And both the girls cried bitterly (though they hardly knew why) and clung to the Lion and kissed his mane and his nose and his paws and his great, sad eyes. Then he turned from them and walked out onto the top of the hill. And Lucy and Susan, crouching in the bushes, looked after him and this is what they saw. — C. S. Lewis , The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Tonight we will function like women. The snow has gone away, the ice with its amniotic glare. I clasp my sister’s tiny hand. We will not turn away Though spring, spring with its black appetite, Comes seeping out of the earth. The lion was sad. He suffered us To touch him. When I placed the bread of my hands In his mammalian heat, I was reminded That the world outside this world Is all vinegar and gall, that to be a young girl at the foot of a god Requires patience. Timing. The White Witch has mustered her partisans. Because I am fascinated by her bracelets strung with baby teeth, I will remember her as the woman Who grins with her wrists. From my thicket of heather I note that in her own congenital way She is pure, that tonight she ushers something new into the world. I cannot stop it. I cannot stop it just as in that other place I could not keep the planes with their spiked fires from coming. Though in this closed realm the smell of camphor is overwhelming I have nothing but my hands to use In ministering to the dead. Here too My hands must suffice. Hush now while I testify. They are shaving him. The corona of his mane falls away Like pieces of money. In the moon’s milk light Her bangled wrists grin as she raises the blade. Something is diffused. In whatever world he comes again There will be women like us who choose to.

Literally the thing has been gutted, a ragged gash carved under its tail to midway up its chest, eyes like stagnant water, horns intricate as a woodwind. Where did the viscera go? Where do the viscera ever go? I am in a car driving to the northernmost point on this spit. Porte de Mort. Death’s Northern Door. Literally where my grandmother lives. Her 89-year-old cousin has just fallen out a window but is all right, the bruises like stained glass. Enthusiasm. To be in God. My grandmother says it is proof, and I nod my head because I too would like to live in such a world where an eighty-nine year old crawls out a window and falls seven feet to the ground, in turn the miracle of her body stained a deep blue, vitreous. In one room of the unfinished mansion where we will celebrate the day, the ninety-year-old matriarch sleeps in her four-poster bed under the canopy of a wedding dress, its hundred eyelets a fallacy. After dinner someone will hand around an indulgence of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the lady’s dark cheek marred as if she has been scratched. Who at this table fled the police? Who left that place in flames, the rubble of infinite hearths? The deer’s eyes like perfect cataracts, the evidence cooling. When I think of my room in the earth, I can’t breathe. A friend of a friend recently hit a small bear with his car. At the end of my favorite novel a bear is dancing on a makeshift stage, the bear a grotesquerie like the rest of us. No one stopped to help, said my friend. Traffic barely slowed. I do not judge this, or even the surreptitious footage of the workers somewhere on the killing floor, stomping the breast-heavy creatures with their rubber boots. How we raise them not to fly, what should waft gnostically through the air, the hollowness of evolving. My heart is doing that thing again, saying climb the stairs on your knees. I tell a friend a man halfway across the world has been killed, torn apart by motorbikes, each limb tied in a different direction. Could a universe be born this way? One minute you are scarping the silvery bark off a birch when it comes to you forever and there you lie in the bed of a blood-smeared truck at a stoplight on Highway 41 because this is the season of messages. The man was a teacher. He taught girls. When they came for him he told his children not to cry. Then the men took out half his bowel, the viscera steaming as they do, and they tied him ingeniously in such a way that they tore him apart. In that other place three million of us died. When I left, I left them all behind. In the unfinished mansion someone will ask me what I’m thankful for. What to say? That one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was a paper nest secreted by wasps, and that in the summer I would sleep under it, the runnelled mass turning like a planet in the moonlight? I will admit I was in favor of war and now look what’s happened. At the end of the road the man driving the truck will eat the deer. If I had to watch someone be torn apart by motorbikes I would still be me, which is the horror of it all.

Nowhere    in   the Halakha’s     five   thousand   years   of   rules does   it     specifically    state Thou     shall     not     [                      ] but     sometimes    tradition    carries    more     weight    than    law and   so   for    much   of   the    past    year   we    have   not    talked about     what    will    happen    on     Thursday,    how   the    cervix will     start     its     slow    yawn,     the     pelvic      floor     straining as         the           head        crowns,      the      fontanelles     allowing the       bony        panes       of       the      skull     to      pass    through until,     over    the   next    24   months,    the   five   cranial   plates gradually      ossify,     the      head      forming    its     own    helmet as     structures     harden    over   the    soft    meats   of  the  brain, nor     do   we    talk   about    the   colostrum  sunny  as egg   yolks now   collecting  in   your   breasts,   the    thing’s   first   nutrients already    ready    and    waiting,    the     event    just    days   away and   still  we  do  not  talk  about it, the mass growing inside you tucked    up    safe     in   the     leeward   side    under    the   heart because   sometimes   our   god   is   a  jealous god,   the evil   eye lidless    and    all-seeing.  Instead  we  will wait  until  it is  done, until  the  creature  has been  cleaned and wrapped in soft cloth, the    bloody     cord   that    binds    you    severed.    And   maybe you       will      name      it      Dolores,      which       means     grief, or perhaps you will call it Mara, the Hebrew name for bitterness because       this      is      how     we      protect     what     we    love, by   hiding   what  it   truly  means  to   us,  the little  bag  of  gold we    keep   buried   in  the  yard,   the  thing  we will do anything to      keep      safe,      even    going     so      far    as    to     pretend it    doesn’t    exist,   that   there’s   nothing  massing in  the  dark despite  the steady  light  emanating  from  your  face, a radiance so bright sometimes I can’t look at you, the joy so  overpowering you     want    to     shout   it     from   the    highest    mountaintop straight into God’s ear.

Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body like a limp flag on a windless day. Draw a map, someone says. Let yourself remember. In the refugee camp a hundred thousand strong draw the stony outcrop from which you could no longer see the plume of smoke that was your village. Draw a square for the bathroom stall where Grandpa hid each day in order to eat his one egg free from the starving eyes of his classmates, an X for the courthouse where you and he were naturalized, a broken line for the journey. Draw a map, Jon says. Let it be your way into the poem. Here is where that plane filled with babies crashed that I was not on. Here is where I was ashamed. On the second floor at Pranash University the people wait their turn. Have you drawn your map, Jon asks. He has rolled up his sleeves. Forty-five minutes to noon the Prince stands up and says that the monks must be excused. We watch them file out, saffron robes as if their bodies have burst into blossom. Draw a map. Fly halfway around the globe. Here is the room next to the library where you realize how poor your tradition is, the local people with poetic forms still in use that date back to the time of Christ. Tell us about your map. Explain how these wavy lines represent the river, this rectangle the school-turned-prison where only seven escaped with their lives. This is my map. This star the place where I sat in a roomful of people among whom not one was not touched by genocide. Every last map resplendent with death though nobody knows where their loved ones lie buried. How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell? The woman stands up and says she is not a poet, that she doesn’t have the words. She points to a triangle on a piece of paper. Here is the spot where she found human bones in the well of her childhood home, and how her mother told her don’t be afraid because it was not the work of wild animals.

Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there. The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see the meaning in their hands, palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them by their names, Light that Shines Throughout the Universe and His consort, but there were stories of  travelers lost  in the foothills of  the Hindu  Kush and a distant brilliance that led them home. The way a candle physically enters your body after it has been snuffed out. The pearly smoke suffused in the air. In one school hundreds  of  miles  away  all  the   girls  my age  were  poisoned, and last week outside the capital a woman like my  sister was shot dead  in front of a crowd by two men who forced their bodies into her body and then judged her an infidel so they could kill her and be done with it.  After the  visitors were blasted I had a dream. I saw a human man standing by a lake and no one was looking at him directly. His image on the surface of the water cleaner than anything in this world. In   my   dream  the  man   said,  “Thousands   of  lifetimes  ago when my body was cut into pieces by an evil king, I was not caught up in the idea of the self.” Then  in  my   dream  someone   picked  up  a rock  and  I  woke  up. It took almost a month, the  great  heads  drilled with holes,  then anti-aircraft  tanks rolled in. Each hundred-foot niche now empty but each cavity left shaped like us, like a person. Before it happened we talked about it. Grandfather said don’t they have a share in heaven? Second Aunt said it was more realistic this way. God not in heaven but in exile.

Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review the critic writes, “Barry seeks not to judge but to understand.” Did she want us to let her be, or does she want to be there walking the grounds of the old prison on the hill of the poison tree where comparatively a paltry twenty thousand died? In the first room with the blown up black-and-white of a human body gone abstract someone has to turn and face the wall not because of the human pain represented in the photo but because of her calmness, the tranquility with which she tells us that her father and her sister and her brother were killed. In graduate school a whole workshop devoted to an image of a woman with bleach thrown in the face and the question of whether or not the author could write, “The full moon sat in the window like a calcified eye, the woman’s face aglow with a knowingness.” I felt it come over me and I couldn’t stop. I tried to pull myself together and I couldn’t. They were children. An army of child soldiers. In the room papered with photos of the Khmer Rouge picture after picture of teenagers, children whose parents were killed so that they would be left alone in the world to do the grisly work that precedes paradise. And the photos of the victims, the woman holding her newborn in her arms as her head is positioned in a vise, in this case the vise an instrument not of torture but of documentation, the head held still as the camera captures the image, the thing linking all their faces, the abject fear and total hopelessness as exists in only a handful of places in the history of the visible world. For three $US per person she will guide you through what was Tuol Sleng prison, hill of the strychnine tree. Without any affectation she will tell you the story of how her father and her sister and her brother went among the two million dead. There are seventy-four forms of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.

Shagged-gold, at rest the great haunches as if axled, fur sleeked like a butter rug. In the Serengeti sun, the male’s harem like a solar system, each lady kept exclusive, her seasonal heat for him alone, estrous belly pressed to the ground, then the male’s riding her musculature— throughout evolution the cat’s barbed penis nicking his breached mate as he dismounts. See the deliberate walk, cool as a criminal, the multi-jointed forepaws placed consciously even by the usurped king, his eye teeth blacked, his tail rotted off, tired wag of a bloody stump as he finally falls dying, the crucified face bedded in its wheel of hair, the tawny miscegenated eyes binocular in breadth. Shark in the long grasses. Shark in the long grass. Smell everywhere, the gazelle with its small-headed splendor gracing the plains is ambushed, devoured, its horned bone rack souvenired, the murderer’s ripping muzzle crimsoned. In the despot’s sons’ palace of pure gold the three in the iron cage lazing like statues. When the American unlocks the hinged door our shackled hearts contract. Unhooded and naked we are pushed into their presence, and for a shining moment the animals study us, these fabulous aliens. Here in a desert captivity snatched from the baobab’s sour fruit, their swagged bellies shifted, broken, and resignedly the ancient drive rose up only in one— its head wreathed beyond sorrow as it slouched out of the habitual darkness, the permanent rictus of its terrible mouth pain-struck. The thing came toward me with its ruined light, and I saw affliction in it. Dream of mastery. Dream of being wholly consumed, freed. I am the lion and the lion is me. Then the American pulls us out.

I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling. Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map pinned with targets, where I’m raging even now. It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries, I won’t only bloom where I’m planted.

One day we will all be like this—the boat’s sickening pitch, & the delicateness needless, consumable. How everything here naturally passes into night, a room w/o walls. Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors? Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her father being shot in the head. Imagine needing to believe the one you love has been destroyed. Now it is after midnight—the spindrift lunar & diaphanous. Here alone on deck could I make peace w/it all in thirty seconds—the water’s inherent rising, the gasping for air? I have never seen such omnipresence, such vast dreamlessness— but I too am such things. What does it mean to be eroded? What would be the significance of slipping one leg over the rail & straddling the indifference? Yes. Once upon a time we spent three days on a boat out of Kobé, Japan. All night the waves. All night the somnambulistic urges. Or how as children we would swim in a hard rain—the lake’s surface ragged & torn, but underneath the roots of the water lilies like ladders trailing down into the marvelous.

The   first    great    poet  of the  crisis  the   one  whose generation   was  left  as  if firebombed     though      if you    look     back   at    the seminal    work    you   will see  that only a  handful of of   the   poems    explicitly touch   on   that  dark time the    blood    filling     with virulence    and   the  night always          black         and spangled   with  stars  says when           faced         with difficult      material      the poet       should          begin obliquely      creeping     in from   the   edge  a  square of         light             moving imperceptibly   across  the floor as    the earth    turns and   so   I   will   tell    you that  ever  since  I saw  the footage           of              the journalists   hiding  in  the attic      the    rope    ladder pulled     up     after    them only     the       one       with foreign   papers    left     to stand   her   ground  down below   the   journalist    at first     calmly    sitting   on the      couch      but     then huddling  in  a   cabinet  as the     soldiers    enter    the apartment     next       door, the   cries   of   the  mother floating       through       the wall ib’ni       ib’ni the language     ancient       like something       whetted   on stone     the   way   I   image language      would        have sounded     in     the  broken mouth    of     King      David Absalom        Absalom the man-child       hanging     by the    shining    black   noose of     his     own    hair  in the fragrant         woods           of Ephraim ib’ni           ib’ni next    door    the   sound  of a    body      being     dragged from     the    apartment    as his            mother           wails into      the        dark        how many     mothers   and   how many     sons    dragged   out into    a       night     spangled with             stars          where everything    is  a   metaphor for      virulence my     son my   son and   ever  since  I saw    a   clip  of the   footage the       foreign        journalist managed   to    smuggle   out of   the  country   images   of the        journalist       herself hiding   in   a   space   meant for   buckets   and   rags    as next     door    the     soldiers drag    away   a   young   boy please     hear     it   again   a child    of    no    more   than twelve         his        mother’s lamentations             forever seared   in    the    blood   of this    thing   I   call  my  life but     really     what     is    it what   is   this  light  I   hold so   dear  it  wants   to move imperceptibly    across   the floor    as   the   earth   turns so     as   not     to      become too       aware      of      itself?