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Let’s start with a thought experiment.

Step One: Imagine two huge icebergs, one representing Ernest Hemingway’s writing and the other representing everything else in his life. Imagine that these two icebergs sometimes bump up against each other and sometimes drift apart. Imagine that these icebergs are like the one Hemingway uses to make an analogy with effective writing (especially his): its “dignity of movement . . . is due to only one-eighth of it being above the water” (Death in the Afternoon).

Step Two: Imagine that you decide to sculpt a new, smaller iceberg by synthesizing core elements of the two huge ones. Imagine that you challenge yourself to make seven-eighths of this sculpture visible above the water even as it has its own dignity of movement. Imagine that you develop what you regard as a viable vision of this iceberg.

Step Three: Imagine that you undertake the task of converting this vision into a 6-hour documentary about Hemingway’s life and work for PBS. Imagine how you will craft that conversion so that it both remains true to the sculpture in your mind’s eye and appeals to a contemporary PBS audience.

I’ll pause to give you some time to conduct all three steps of the experiment.

I start with this thought experiment for three reasons (1) It helps capture the ambitious and daunting task that Ken Burns and Lynn Novick took on in making Hemingway, their three-part documentary that recently aired on PBS (April 5, 6, and 7). (2) The experiment highlights the larger purpose of the documentary, its goal of replacing the myth of Hemingway with a far more accurate and layered view of the life and the writing. The myth constructs him as the epitome of machismo, a man with prodigious appetites and the will and means to satisfy them as well as a man with extraordinary talent who produced an enduring stream of what he liked to call true sentences. Burns and Novick retain the idea of the talent but complicate everything else in ways I’ll discuss below, and, in so doing, they reposition the writing within the life. (3) The experiment invites each of us to think about how we would have constructed the relations between the writing and the life in our own distinctive ways.

These three reasons, in turn, underlie my reflections here. On the one hand, I want to celebrate Burns and Novick’s execution of their challenging project: in breaking through the myth, they construct a much more complex and interesting Hemingway, a strange blend of strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, who has had more than the usual allotments of good fortune and bad.   On the other hand, when I took Steps One and Two of the thought experiment, I gave more attention to the writing than Burns and Novick do, and this attention led me to a different vision of the sculpted iceberg than the one that emerges in their documentary. I want to discuss my sense of the writing iceberg not to find fault with the documentary but use it as a spur to move some of what’s submerged there above the water line of the synthetic one.   First, though, a little more on Burns and Novick’s Hemingway.

In keeping with its myth-busting purposes, the documentary gives considerably more attention to the life than to the writing for two interrelated reasons. First, the myth about the life dominates Hemingway’s legacy in American culture. He is a figure that many people who have never read his writing know something about—and even have opinions about. Changing those views requires a new biography more than new analyses of the writing. Second, the genre of documentary lends itself to a greater focus on the life because it is a fundamentally narrative genre, and because Hemingway’s life is filled with tellable events. Giving pride of place to the writing—or even giving it equal prominence—would be extremely difficult because its narrative raw material would be the single event, repeated multiple times, of the writer sitting down to write. Hard to imagine that even the PBS audience would sit still for much of that.

In keeping with the goal of humanizing Hemingway, Burns and Novick give the greatest attention to his intense and fraught relationships with his four wives, Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh. Using Geoffrey Ward’s script, voiced by Peter Coyote, to supply the baseline narrative, the filmmakers show the good, the bad, and the ugly in Hemingway’s behavior toward these women. Ward’s script includes testimony from the women themselves and Burns and Novick enlist accomplished actors to voice that testimony: Keri Russell (Hadley), Patricia Clarkson (Pauline); Meryl Streep (Martha); and Mary-Louise Parker (Mary). More generally, Burns and Novick’s skills as visual storytellers lead them to interweave these voices with Hemingway’s (ventriloquized through Jeff Daniels) and with a range of other materials—photographs, newspaper articles, and newsreel footage—that often bring in other events. Although Burns and Novick do not offer substantial new revelations about Hemingway’s life, they call attention to some things that have circulated more widely among scholars than among the general public. Especially noteworthy is their attention to his interest in bending and even blurring standard gender roles and the consequences of that blurring for sexual encounters. Above all Burns and Novick succeed in making visible what lies beneath Hemingway’s behavior throughout his adult life, identifying both distant and proximate causes of it. Among the distant causes are his mother’s increasing disapproval and his own disappointment in his father; his being jilted by his first love, Agnes von Kurowsky, the British nurse he met in Italy, while serving as an ambulance driver during World War I, and whom he thought he was going to marry; his witnessing of combat and his own wounding. The more proximate causes include his willingness to promote an image of himself that eventually he could not live up to; his multiple concussions; his alcoholism (called his “overdrinking” by Mary); and of course the complex personalities and histories of the women he loved. Burns and Novick also make judicious use of interviews with Hemingway’s son Patrick, with Hemingway scholars and biographers, and with the psychiatrist Andrew Farah as they round out their portrait of the artist as a fascinating and flawed, charming and repulsive, young, middle-aged, and aging man.

Even as they give greater prominence to the life, Burns and Novick make a valiant effort to highlight the writing and to explicate its power. The first image they show is the typescript for the opening of A Farewell to Arms, and they continue to sprinkle images of manuscript pages throughout the documentary, including ones for all the novels, for the nonfiction books, and for multiple short stories (“Up in Michigan, “Indian Camp,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and more). In addition, they employ the actor Jeff Daniels to read numerous excerpts from the writing, and Daniels does an exemplary job of bringing out the tones and rhythms of Hemingway’s remarkable prose. Furthermore, as Daniels reads, Burns and Novick guide their audiences to engage more deeply with the writing by putting evocative images on the screen, ones that capture moods while opening up rather than closing down interpretations.   To pick just a few telling examples: a dock in the gloaming to illustrate the setting of “Up in Michigan”; an oar pulling through the still water of a lake for the ending of “Indian Camp”; the exterior of stone building with a substantial set of stairs leading to an empty street for A Farewell to Arms and its final sentence (about which more below), “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”

Having prompted this engagement with the writing, Burns and Novick then rely on the commentary of a wide range of thoughtful, well-informed experts to explain how and why it’s often so powerful (and sometimes not). These experts include Hemingway’s recent biographers, Mary Dearborn and Verna Kale; notable contemporary fiction writers, including Michael Katakis (executor of the Hemingway estate), Tobias Wolff, Edna O’Brien, Tim O’Brien, Mario Vargas Llosa, Paul Hendrickson, and Abraham Verghese; and first-rate literary critics, including Stephen Cushman, Miriam Mandel, Susan Beegel, Marc Dudley, and Amanda Vaill. They even bring in John McCain to discuss his life-long engagement with For Whom the Bell Tolls.

All these commentators are smart, engaging, and insightful. Wolff, for example, characterizes Hemingway’s effect on the writers who came after him by saying that “he changed all the furniture in the [writers]’ room.” Edna O’Brien frequently pushes back against the common view that Hemingway was a thorough misogynist and goes so far as to suggest that parts of A Farewell to Arms, her choice for his best novel, could have been written by a woman. Other arresting comments include on-target descriptions mingled with praise: Hemingway remade the language (Vaill); he goes beyond previously accepted boundaries (Katakis); he works against the modernist grain of difficulty that characterizes the fiction of James Joyce and William Faulkner (Cushman); he articulates a view of war that no one had ever articulated as clearly and powerfully before (Wolff); he creates a male character in “Hills Like White Elephants” whose subtle but incessant pushing to get his own way women will readily recognize (Mandel). Furthermore, in keeping with the myth-busting purpose of the film, these commentators also discuss what they regard as ethical failures in the man (his seemingly gratuitous meanness to other writers, even those who had advanced his career) and aesthetic ones in the writer such as Across the River and into the Trees.

Yes, yes, yes, I nod. And then I think back to my thought experiment and what I would want to do to make what lies beneath the writing more visible. If I were to convert my vision of the sculpted iceberg into a documentary film, I might well use the same commentators, especially Wolff, Edna O’Brien, Cushman, and Mandel, but I would ask them to comment more consistently on the interrelations of three aspects of the writing: (a) the material Hemingway works with, (b) his treatment of that material, and (c) how that treatment guides readers’ inferencing about the characters and events in ways that significantly influence readers affective, ethical, and aesthetic responses. I even think such commentary would appeal to the PBS audience. To illustrate what I have in mind, I’ll discuss two texts that figure prominently in the first episode of the documentary (entitled “The Writer”), “Indian Camp,” and A Farewell to Arms.

In “Indian Camp,” as Geoffrey Ward’s summary efficiently indicates, Nick accompanies his doctor father on an early morning trip to the eponymous camp, where he watches his father perform a successful but extremely painful Caesarean section with a jackknife on an Indian woman who undergoes the procedure without anesthesia. Once the operation is over, Nick and his father discover that the woman’s husband, who has been lying in the bunk above his wife, has slit his throat. That discovery changes the direction and emphasis of the story; rather than being one about birth and new life (and Nick’s father’s horribly insensitive treatment of the Indian woman—he tells Nick that “her screams are not important”), it becomes one about suicide and death. The ending, which Daniels reads with his typical skill, brings the story to an affecting conclusion, as Nick first asks his father questions about suicide and about dying and then retreats into his own thoughts. Here are the story’s last lines:

“Is dying hard, Daddy?”
“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”

They were seated in the boat. Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

Burns and Novick bring in Wolff and Cushman for commentary. Wolff makes the astute observation that Hemingway is working with sensational material but handles it in an unsensational way. Cushman nicely underlines the paradox of the ending, the juxtaposition of Nick’s knowledge that he’s going to die with his denial of that knowledge. Good stuff, as far as it goes. But let’s go a little further beneath the surface.

Hemingway makes the sensational unsensational by restricting his audience to Nick’s perspective and, thus, having us take in the events as Nick does and then follow his struggle to process them. Furthermore, Hemingway’s treatment of that struggle demonstrates his impressive ability to deploy both dialogue and the representation of consciousness to guide his audience’s inferencing. Hemingway uses the dialogue to show that, although Nick’s father answers Nick’s questions with genuine care for Nick, the answers themselves are not particularly helpful because his father is not able to adopt Nick’s perspective. When Nick’s father says that the difficulty of dying “all depends,” the natural follow up would be “it depends on what, Daddy?” but Nick’s silence signals that he has now stopped trying to get insight from his father.

Cushman’s comment on the ending perceptively points to the way the details of the scene play into Nick’s denial or evasion. But digging deeper reveals how much Hemingway both trusts and subtly guides his audience. Hemingway reports Nick’s misguided conclusion without any narratorial comment because Hemingway knows that his audience knows that he knows that Nick is in denial here. (That’s a mouthful, I realize, but one I hope you’ll find worth chewing on.) What’s more, Hemingway affectively aligns his audience with Nick, despite his denial, in part by inviting us to see how nature seems to support Nick’s conclusion. The rising sun, the jumping bass, the warm lake water juxtaposed with the chilly air: as we follow Nick’s perception of these things, we also feel his connection with the ongoing stream of life. Feeling that connection leads us to empathize with Nick in denial, even as we find it poignant. More generally, Hemingway turns the genre of loss-of-innocence narratives on its head by making “Indian Camp” a story in which the protagonist denies that he has lost his innocence. Paradoxically, however, the inferencing that Hemingway guides us through makes us register Nick’s loss even more deeply. We come away empathizing with Nick and admiring the artistry of his creator.

The beginning and the ending of A Farewell to Arms provide even greater opportunities to reveal what lies beneath the writing iceberg. Here’s the famous opening paragraph, which Burns and Novick reproduce via a nice variation of their usual pattern with Hemingway’s writing. Daniels reads the first sentence and then forms a duet with Edna O’Brien, who reads the middle sentences with him; Daniels then yields the floor to O’Brien who reads the last one. This strategy highlights the rhythms of Hemingway’s prose.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving, and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Cushman calls this passage a demonstration of “rhythmic mastery” that also “breaks all the rules” (no one before Hemingway would use “and” fifteen times in four sentences), and O’Brien suggests that Hemingway is applying what he learned about rhythm and repetition from Bach’s music to English prose. Again, good stuff, but let’s dig deeper by looking at material, treatment, and inferencing.

Material: nature in the form of the river, the plain, the mountains, the blue water moving swiftly in the river channels, the leaves on the trees; humans whose presence disrupts that nature.

Treatment: the first-person perspective of a soldier in the village, who, we learn later, is a young American called Frederic Henry.

Inferencing: Hemingway guides his audience to see more about the scene than Frederic himself does. More specifically, Hemingway invites his readers to recognize that (a) the causal connections between the presence of the troops and the disruption of nature—”the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees . . . and the leaves fell early that year”—and thus the general destructiveness of the war; and that (b) Frederic does not register those connections, restricting himself to his faithful recording of one thing after another. All those “ands” are crucial to this inferencing.

Similarly, later in the chapter Frederic does not seem to register Hemingway’s implicit association between the effect of the rain and the effect of the troops: “. . . in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain.”  By guiding his audience to see Frederic’s situation more clearly than Frederic does, Hemingway constructs Frederic as an unreliable interpreter of his own situation.

Hemingway then uses the last two sentences of the chapter to nail down this discrepancy between his audience’s inferencing and Frederic comprehension: “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked, and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.” Who says, “only seven thousand died”? Who confines the casualties of the cholera to those in the Allied army? A committed ironist, a military official trying to minimize casualties, or a callow young American volunteer in the ambulance division who has not thought much about war. Frederic does not qualify as an ironist, given the earnestness of his recording, and he is no military official.

In sum, underneath that stylistically brilliant first chapter, Hemingway invites his readers to infer how much innocence and naivete Frederic has to lose and how much he needs to learn about the war and the world.

In contrast to the Nick Adams of “Indian Camp,” Frederic not only loses his innocence and naivete but recognizes the loss. Indeed, he learns a lot about the war and the world from Catherine Barkley, who once tells him that she’s afraid of the rain because she sees herself dead in in it. (The issue of how Hemingway’s ideas about gender influence his construction of Catherine’s character is a complex one that I won’t get into here, except for a few comments below.) After Frederic makes his farewell to military arms, he and Catherine establish their own happy but fragile existence in Switzerland. That happiness is permanently shattered when Catherine dies in childbirth, along with their baby. Burns and Novick use their commentators to emphasize how much Hemingway struggled with how to end the novel after Catherine’s death—the ms. shows forty-seven different attempts! The documentary, however, does not address why the ending Hemingway chose works so well, and, thus, misses an especially ripe occasion to make visible more of what lies beneath the surface of his deceptively simple prose.  

Material: what should the final part be? A philosophical reflection along the lines of the famous “If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them” passage? Indeed, why not use that exact passage? Or should the narrative end with a line of dialogue? Or a report of Frederic’s actions in the immediate aftermath of Catherine’s death? Or something else?

Treatment: Once that choice is made, what’s the optimal way handle it? Should Frederic explicitly express his grief and sorrow about losing Catherine? Or should the emotion be suppressed? If suppressed, how to invite his readers to recognize it?

Hemingway opts for the report of a final action and treats it by returning to the style of the opening chapter: “Troops went by the house and down the road and . . .” becomes “I went out and left the hospital and walked. . . .”

Inferencing: The style is similar, but Frederic’s voices are radically different. The first chapter is in the voice of Frederic the naïve ambulance driver. The last sentence is in the voice of the enlightened man who feels Catherine’s absence and the destructiveness of the world in every fiber of his being but who is not himself destroyed by those feelings. This man now understands rain as a synecdoche for that destructiveness but who carries on despite its presence. As Hemingway matches voice to action, he invites his readers to recognize that, in taking these small steps back into the world, Frederic is not yet strong at the broken places but is deliberately (in both senses) advancing toward such a condition. The final sentence, then, though suffused with Frederic’s grief, also indicates the completion of his transformation from the unreliable character narrator of Chapter 1 to a character narrator wholly aligned with the perspective and values of his creator. From this perspective, Hemingway chose well among the forty-seven options he considered for the ending. We may cry, as Edna O’Brien did, in reading this novel, but we also come away moved by its aesthetic power.  

After such responses, we may also want to raise questions or objections. Here are just a few. Does Hemingway, despite initially giving her a perspective aligned with his—and showing that she is one who is strong at the broken places—treat her as a disposable woman, important primarily for her service to both Frederic and his own artistic ends? Even as he transforms his experience with Agnes in his construction of the Catherine-Frederic relationship, does Catherine’s fate include a tinge (or more) of vengeance against Agnes? Does Hemingway overdo it with the emphasis on the world’s destruction and on his use of the rain? (Riddle: What’s Hemingway’s answer to “why did the chicken cross the road?” Answer: “To die. In the rain.”) But I would suggest that these questions become more intriguing when put into dialogue with the answers that emerge from a focus on Hemingway’s handling of material, treatment, and inferencing.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

There’s a lot more to say about that handling in Hemingway’s other work, but I hope this much indicates how I’d go about saying it. I turn now to why I think the sculpted iceberg needs to include several holes.

The sculpture needs the holes to signal that the relations between the life and the writing can never be fully explained, and it needs more than one to signal that there are multiple gaps in those relations. The first, and perhaps largest gap, is between formative experiences and ultimate achievement. When Burns and Novick look to the life for experiences that help explain Hemingway’s famous style, they highlight such things as his extended childhood engagements with the music of Bach; his experience as a journalist for the Kansas City Star who insisted that their writers should: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English”; and his reading of Gertrude Stein with an eye toward her experiments with repetition and syntax. Influences, yes. Explanations, no. How many others played Bach, wrote short sentences and paragraphs, and read Stein, and how many of them became accomplished writers?

A second gap is between specific experiences and the transformation of those experiences into powerful fiction. A Farewell to Arms is based on Hemingway’s experiences in World War I, including his relationship with Agnes. But A Farewell to Arms is far from a roman á clef, and the departures from Hemingway’s personal experience are crucial to the success of the narrative, especially the different trajectory of the relationship between himself and Agnes and the one between Frederic and Catherine.  Where do those departures come from? Not from other direct experiences, but rather Hemingway’s own imagination in combination with his sense of what the narrative needs. In other words, the transformation of experience into powerful fiction depends not just on the experiences themselves but also on the writer’s ability to see beyond the experiences to their significance. This transformation also depends on the writer’s sense, often intuitive but sometimes deliberately conscious, of how introducing something that departs from the experience can have ripple effects on the rest of the narrative. A third gap arises because writing is itself its own activity in which one learns by doing and in which what one learns has an existence apart from whatever else is happening in one’s life. How does one get to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize in Literature? Practice, practice, practice—and, to adapt what Michael Katakis says at the beginning of the documentary, be like “so many other people, except [have] enormous talent.”

In a sense, Burns and Novick devote six hours of filmmaking to unpacking Katakis’s description of Hemingway as such a man and to looking for connections between his fundamental similarities to so many others and that enormous talent. If I’m right about what stands apart between the life and the writing, it is inevitable that Hemingway succeeds more with the similarities than with their connections to that talent. Inevitable and perfectly fine because the life is captivating. Nevertheless, it’s the writing that fuels the interest in the life, and just how Hemingway was able to produce it will, I suspect, never be fully explained. What we can do, however, is continue to increase our understanding of what lies beneath its surfaces.

They were arguing, stupid fight, about if you were color-blind how many colors would you see.  Would there be only black and white?  Or is color-blindness something larger in scope, with many shades of color, only re-assigned to objects differently than others see them?  Listening to them fight, Elaine thought more than once that you could perhaps characterize the two men by the positions they took on the issue.  The one who believed that color-blindness reduces everything to black and white, was he the more romantic one of the two?  Or was he the more classical?  “Like Balanchine,” she thought vaguely, having forgotten most of everything she ever knew about Balanchine somewhere over the years.

No wait a second, there must be still plenty she recalled about Balanchine.  Seemed like she could almost see one of his dances, right in front of her eyes, the hush around the dancers, the andante of the music—live music, as she recalled.  Did the City Ballet rely on taped music nowadays, hard to know who to ask.  My God, George Balanchine meant everything to me at one point, Elaine thought, trying to work herself into a frenzy, and now I can’t even think of the names of any of his dances.

She sipped a little bit of her drink, then put the glass down on the marble coaster.  I love these coasters, she thought.

Balanchine, everything black and white, Allegra Kent in some kind of white leotard with little handles around her hips.  The stage all very dark except for spotlights from beneath the stage.  It must have been the 70s, she thought.  She remembered Balanchine’s profile, the way it looked like a mountain peak, and his long legs.  They’d met at a party and she wondered why all the women went for him, then she’d decided the women in question must be a horribly neurotic bunch.  Last autumn she was down in Los Angeles for the West Hollywood Book Fair, and a woman was speaking who’d written a book all about her late-blooming passion for anal sex, and Elaine had been puzzled and a little nauseated, and then all became clear when the speaker revealed she had been one of Balanchine’s ballerinas.

It had been a beautiful afternoon, outdoors, the speakers at long tables under tents, everyone wearing sunglasses.

The heat concentrating on the very top of your scalp, so Elaine had guarded it with some kind of flyer for the ballerina’s anal sex book.  A discreet flyer, thank God, it could have been far worse.  There was something almost dignified about it, just as there was, Elaine realized, about all of Balanchine’s work, no matter if he were choreographing for elephants at the circus (surely he did something of the sort, it was part of his legend), or for these incredibly elegant and soignee analholics like Suzanne Farrell or Vera Zorina.  And that woman Joan in The New Yorker who never wrote an article without bemoaning the way the City Ballet had forgotten about Balanchine and treated his legacy like so much flypaper.  Nowadays there’s a general cultural amnesia about the past.  Why in her dim memory she recalled being taken to the NYCB by her godmother, oh, in the middle of some war, everyone upset outside, but inside a dim sense of peace and money.

“You must know Mary Sue,” Tim was saying, “she’s colorblind and you don’t have to be intimate with her to know, just take a look at her outfits, stripes with plaids, everything five different shades of orange.  It’s like, when you go into an elevator and it’s all gray rubber, gray steel?  At least this is how I understand it, and say you stepped into a big puddle of blood, you wouldn’t even know it.  Gray and red are the same thing.”

“I do know Mary Sue and she has often told me, that she has shoppers who put together her clothes for her.  It’s a service for the colorblind, and there’s a whole C-B department at Macy’s or Saks.  One of them.”

“Oh, she doesn’t buy at Saks.”

“No, that’s true.”

They thought awhile about Mary Sue.  Elaine remembered her from the days when all of them used to act in Beach Blanket Babylon, a San Francisco institution that had been running a hundred years; a revue of songs and topical skits and big, brash satire like Saturday Night Live.  Mary Sue often played the big, clownish types like Dolly Parton, Peggy Lee, Imelda Marcos.  She always dressed beautifully, in Elaine’s opinion, but maybe she had the Macy’s shoppers working for her even then, or else maybe her disease hadn’t spread up to her eyeballs yet (or wherever color blindness affected you last).  She imagined it was in the eyeballs, sort of like cancer except not as painful, perhaps not painful at all.  You certainly never heard people give little gasps or clutch hankies to their eyes and claim they had just had an attack of color blindness.  It couldn’t be painful, but who knew?  That Balanchine woman had evaded the question entirely about whether or not anal sex was painful.  This guy who she met through the personals (of The New York Review of Books believe it or not) didn’t like her lubricated.  He would come over and she was just supposed to lie there while he plunged into her, without a word, without even taking off his pants, just pulling down his zipper—which he could have done easily, in her foyer—and he’d be out of there in two shakes—so to speak—and leave her rapt, restless, and with another chapter’s worth of anal sex to write up in her so-called “diary of obsession.”  So, Elaine thought, if Mary Sue indeed suffered from being color blind—in fact, whether or not she was color blind at all, and she, Elaine, did not think she was, despite what Tim and Gerald were swearing, so united in this one lie, despite being at loggerheads in every other aspect of the color-blindness debate; anyhow, if Mary Lou were colorblind she did not seem to ever have felt pain a day in her life.  Save perhaps for the day when she was fired from Beach Blanket Babylon for moving to Oakland’s Lake Merritt.  You were fired just for moving out of town?  They said it’s a betrayal of the BBB ethic.

 “Could we stop the car, please,” she said faintly.  They’d been bucking up and down the hills of Pacifica and Devil’s Slide for what seemed like hours, and she wasn’t feeling at all comfortable.  The drink she put down more firmly in its slot, above the cunning marble coaster.  Tim took another glance at her, over his shoulder, with an unspoken fear in his eyes.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, dear,” she said.  “That last drink was just a little on the strong side.”

“That’s Gerald,” he said.  “When it comes to pouring out, guy’s got an iron hand.”

Gerald protested, as Tim pulled over to the wide gravel next to Highway 1.  “It’s hard when someone else is driving.  You can’t anticipate, that’s the problemo.”

Elaine put one foot down on the sand, judging its wet firmness.  Thirty yards below, the ocean slopped and howled, a hungry beast prowling the shore.  When they asked her if she felt better, she nodded, but the truth is it’s so hard to gauge how well or ill you’re feeling when you’re looking down at this horrible wet ocean that’s suffering its own spectacular storm from underneath.  All roiled up as though octopi and squids were fighting it out on the ocean floor like King Kong versus the T Rex.  In France didn’t they call nausea the “mal du mer”?  That expressed it absolutely, the sea suffering, and “mal” meant—evil.

“I’m fine, Gerald,” she called back blithely while slipping a little mirror from her purse and quickly dabbing on some blush.  You’re never so sick as makeup won’t help put a better spotlight on things.  She wondered what the colorblind did about blush.  Weren’t they always putting weird colors on their face?  Maybe that’s what happened to all those women the Germans painted in the Blue Rider school, with deep blue cheeks and green chins.  It wasn’t the painters who were colorblind, she flashed, it was the models!  She should write an article for Art Notes about it.  Tiny flakes of powder dusted her fingers and surreptitiously she wiped them on Gerald’s leather seats, the rich leather he was so proud of.  However now the apricot dust was staining the black in a way that reminded her, disconcertingly, of a crime scene.

This wasn’t her first visit to Blanc Marie.  She had endowed the sisters with a $10,000 fellowship to say prayers in some sort of universal novena in Marty’s memory.

Tim had not been in favor of this investment at all.  And Gerald was, predictably, on the fence, not wanting to hurt Tim’s feelings by being disloyal to him, and yet not wanting to rock the boat so far as Elaine went either, for things had been rocky between them ever since Gerald had picked Tim up at some kind of gay cruise and married him on the steps of City Hall.  Tim didn’t understand why she felt it necessary to have prayers said in Marty’s name.  “I loved him too, Mom,” he said.  “But he’s dead and all the prayers in the world aren’t going to bring him back.”

That was his argument, and how could she say that she doubted his sincerity?  But the truth is she knew he would rather she spent the money on what, an extra bathroom on the house Tim was building for Gerald in St. Francis Wood.  Not that it was all so black and white, she admitted.  Marty hadn’t been the world’s best father, number one, and hell, maybe two men living together (with herself to be installed in this deluxe sort of “inlaw” apartment in what wasn’t actually the basement—but amounted to one)—maybe two men needed two bathrooms.  (She’d have her own, of course.)  Gerald thought it would be cute to have a bidet in his.  She made herself grin when she joshed him about it, but inwardly she was thinking of whether or not he enjoyed anal sex and if so, why and how.  She kept looking at Tim wondering how she had raised a son who would inflict anal sex on another, smaller boy.

Well, he was forty.  And Gerald close to it.  They weren’t boys, they just acted like it sometimes.

Today was supposed to be a nice drive in the country but now, as the two men stood there in twin sweaters, staring at her balefully, she felt alarm, seeing her nice afternoon go up in smoke.  “What?” she asked.  “I’m not going to feel any better with you two glaring at me as though I were–“  She couldn’t think of what.  Instantly they broke their gaze off, as though ashamed.  One looked up the side of the cliff; the other, to the rocks below.  They might have been two surveyors, in fisherman’s sweaters, assigned to measure cliff erosion.  Softly, out of the side of his mouth, Tim said, “Mom, do you want a handkerchief?”

“For what?”

“You’ve got all that makeup on the leather.”

Abruptly she swiveled in the backseat and pivoted herself out of the car entirely, hoisting herself up on her pins.  Marty always told her she wore too much makeup.  That she was beautiful just with a touch of lipstick.  She didn’t need all that junk on her eyes.  But what did Marty know?  He was the one who said they shouldn’t leave New York, they’d be crazy to leave a place they knew, and at night she would feel the fear in his bones as he lay next to her, feigning sleep, in that awful apartment on the Henry Hudson, their last before abandoning the city for once and for all.  That lumpy mattress she could have sworn had bedbugs.  Him staring at the ceiling through closed eyes but his pulses jumping like the trotters at Aqueduct.  

“Are you awake?”

No reply.

“Marty, you’re not kidding anyone, you’re awake.”

You’d hear a snore, a horribly unconvincing snore, a snore so fake it seemed to signal the very pit of despair, for it didn’t seem to, well, it didn’t seem to care if you thought it was real.  Whatever it was, it was not going to then turn around and say, oh yes, I was awake all along.  She got up, put her feet in her slippers, padded out to the kitchen, and in the glare of the pink “Pharmacy” neon she picked up her crossword and sat down again at the table, thinking that it would be the last crossword she’d ever do in New York.  The sugar bowl was empty, white crystals clinging to its rim.  The Daily News printed the most preposterous puzzles, clues so simple little Tim could finish one up by the time he was seven or eight.  They did have the Jumble puzzle which has pizzazz, a fairly elegant mess of consonants and vowels you could scramble till they formed a real word.  ECRMA.  You’d look at that combo and then “cream” would bubble to the surface.  She used to tell Marty, “People talk about ‘I love New York,’ all the shops and shows, but all I love is the Jumble puzzles and the City Ballet.”

“Yes,” she said to Tim, “I’ll take a hanky if you have one.  I don’t know why I’m so clumsy.  It’s just the emotion of the day, I suppose.”

“That’s all right, Elaine,” Gerald said.  “We understand.”

“Do you?”

Was there a simper of condescension in his voice?  There always is, when the young address the old.  But they were neither of them young, neither of them old.  Wasn’t there some fellow feeling among the middle-aged, or was your birthdate everything forever?

“Of course we do.  Marty was a great guy and you probably miss him to bits.  I know I do, and who am I?”

“Yes,” she mumbled.  In her fist she was rubbing great streaks into his leather, like a Number Two pencil eraser, till it foamed with shavings.  The white of Tim’s handkerchief, the thick black leather.  It was like some old-fashioned view of the world she had put behind her long ago when she had become a feminist and taken up International Modernism—the new.  No more black and white, she’d laughed to Marty, who shook his head like a rueful cart horse.  “Everything new,” Marty said, looking around him at the new place on Russian Hill—well, sort of Russian Hill.  She never knew when he was kidding.  She only knew when he was afraid of something.

Too, he was the victim of a dreadful pair of, well, you could hardly call them parents, they were just monsters.  That’s all, monsters.  The Nazis, Goebbels and Goering, were better parents, probably.  They gave all three of their kids a loveless childhood and made them feel guilty for wanting to get away from them.  They picked on the one boy so much he gave it up at thirteen, expiring in some sordid Coney Island brawl that made the papers.  And Elaine could just about remember Marty’s sister, who tried to join the Army during Korea and then disappeared into the bars and clubs of the Village sometime around 1956.  And the monsters lived on, as monsters always will, their posture stiff and immobile, ruling the roost and keeping poor Mart under their thumb as though he were still a little boy with his father’s—

“Stop staring at me, boys,” she said.  “It’s just not polite.  Let’s let this be a happy day, shall we?  And when we get to Blanc Marie the sisters are going to treat us to a lunch you’ll never forget.”  The food they offered the public was spectacular, that was the only word for it.  Pressed by friends to describe it, Elaine could only compare her experience at the refectory table to some great fireworks display, perhaps the one Leopold Bloom describes in Ulysses while he’s melting and rubbing himself over that innocent convent girl.  Vaguely she knew, somewhere in her soul, that the voluptuousness of the food was in some direct relationship to the simplicity, some might say harshness, of the nuns’ order, but she couldn’t think why.  “Sublimation” seemed too simple a concept, something beneath the register of the experience.  She had heard that M.F.K. Fisher, the famous California food writer, had devoted a chapter to Blanc Marie in one of her early books, either The Gastronomical Me or I Ate A Whole Fat Pig, but as of yet she hadn’t tracked down the reference.  M.F.K. Fisher—the Balanchine of food writers—joyous, vigorous, sensual, in fact downright sexy.

Gerald had picked up a small stone from the side of the road and was expertly tossing it from one hand to the other.  “Well,” he said, “you want to get a move on, Elaine?  You’re making me hungry, and we still have quite a hike.”

A hike?  Just as though they were walking instead of driving.  But that was Gerald for you: imprecise.  Sometimes, she thought, dealing with him was like dealing with someone who didn’t speak English very well.  His expressions were either slightly askew, or else so vulgar you’d think he’d have dropped them years ago as he rose higher in society and status.  “Chunk of change,” for example.  To Gerald everything was a big chunk of change.  The outlay for Marty’s novenas, of course.  The cost of a bidet.  He whistled beautifully, like Bing Crosby, but only in connection with mentioning a sum of money.  “Four hundred dollars!” he would whistle.  “That’s some chunk of change all right.”

“Oh yes, let’s move on, I’m so sorry,” said Elaine, drawing her feet together and lifting them back into the car proper.  Tim shut her car door from outside, then walked around the car, grabbing for his keys in his pocket.

“We had a little break, that’s all,” said Gerald generously.  He held the black stone he’d found in his palm, gazing at it as though it were worth something.  Elaine watched it glisten, catching the pinkish cool light and something of the rigor of the waves far below.  All greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely!  O so soft, sweet, soft!

“I don’t even know how the sisters get to the farmers market, considering they’re not allowed to talk to men,” Elaine said, looking forward now to her lunch.  “Maybe they speak only to the women farmers there, I don’t know.”

“Or eunuchs?” Tim said, pulling the car back onto 101, eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.  “That would be practical.”

“Hard boiled eggs for lunch?” Gerald suggested.

“Stop it, do,” Elaine laughed.  “You two are terrible, terrible.”  Tim had grown up with Marty’s sense of humor, an uneasy humor you might say, one that found the wry jest in every awful turn of fate.  For Marty, she knew, all too well, such a philosophy had come naturally, for his life really had been tough.  Hearing it from Tim, it seemed a little false, for outside of being gay, which in San Francisco was hardly a tragedy, what had he to complain of?  It was the same way that the jokes coming out of Woody Allen’s mouth at least seemed felt, whereas the same jokes from Jerry Seinfeld lost punch somehow, or even meaning.  Still, nuns were always ridiculous, weren’t they, and the best of them even seemed to concede as much.  Mother Hilda always wore a little smile as though she, too, the intimate friend of Loretta Young and Teilhard de Chardin among others, saw how crazy it all was.  And good with money too!  Tim said that Mother Hilda had the mind of a steel trap, and sometimes she frightened Elaine, just a little; she was utterly pragmatic, hardly spiritual at all in affect.  Like a character from one of her favorite books, The Corner That Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s divine novel about a cloistered order.  But then again, the older she got the more Elaine realized that the important part of life, the life of the soul, was all about simple things, and like it or not, the simple things cost money.

You could make a little chart, she thought, about which ballerinas, the ones she’d seen and envied over fifty years, which ones were Catholic girls and which were not.  Maria Tallchief, yes.  Alicia Alonso, for sure.  Janet Collins, probably.  Margot Fonteyn, don’t make me laugh.  The drive was lovely, but a little dizzying, and it was beyond her now to correlate the data of religious background to the need some lovely dancers seemed to have for anal sex.  Maybe after lunch all these columns and lists would add up.  In the meantime she applied a renewed vigor to finding a comfortable place on the bridge of her nose for her sunglasses.  In the shadowy back seat, she saw what amounted to a stranger—herself—reflected in the tinted glass.  A stranger with an expensive pair of shades that looked as though they were biting her nose, as though she were in pain, and a stranger who wore a grimace even on a lovely day.

“Can I roll down the window?” she called up to Tim.  “Or are we childproof?”  The three of them laughed, just burst out in guffaws, at the incongruity of—of what?  That she was no child, and that they had no parental authority over her?  That they had no children and they didn’t really want any, so why buy a “childproofed” car?  Well that last wasn’t strictly true, for Gerald in fact had three children, apparently, though Elaine had never met any of them.  To her they were phantoms, forgettable phantoms, to be trotted out whenever any of them wanted a reminder that Gerald wasn’t maybe one thousand percent gay as he so often seemed.  Those three kids, hidden from him by a vengeful ex-wife in Manila or Melbourne, were like the Lost Boys in the story of Peter Pan—they were doing something tropical somewhere, forever young, and noisy, but just about faceless.  Elaine supposed that Gerald knew their names but they were so little a part of her life that most of the time she forgot they existed.  She had to give him that, he wasn’t one of those fathers who was always trying to show you slides of his children, or JPEGs of their first day at school.  Even when he’d downed a few, he never sobbed into his beer about Gerald Junior and the others.

“We’re childproof,” Tim affirmed, and this sent them all into giggles all over again.  It was almost as though they had never been at loggerheads, her wonderful son and herself.

“May I see your little rock?” Elaine asked Gerald, raising her hand to his shoulder, pressing her fingers into the wool of his sweater, with what she hoped was a tender sort of touch.

The face he sent back was confused.

“What rock, dear?”

“That little stone you picked up from the roadside,” she said.  “It was such a thoughtful souvenir of our day.”

“Did I have a rock?” he said.  It was clear he’d forgotten the incident already.  “Sure it weren’t no hard boiled egg, Elaine?”

Her nose itched.  Sort of a flimsy sensation probably aggravated by the severe bite of the bridge.

“You were tossing that tiny stone around as though you wanted maximum publicity for it,” she said, coolly enough.  “I saw it in your hand and for a moment you reminded me of Saint Francis.”

“St. Francis Wood maybe,” said Tim, for that was the luxury neighborhood in San Francisco that he and Gerald aspired to.

“I’m no Saint Francis,” Gerald chuckled.

“Apparently not,” she agreed, with an asperity that afterward dismayed her.  Why couldn’t she keep any affection going for Gerald?  She would catch it for a second, and she could nurse it for minutes at a stretch, but then like a firefly in her hand it would buzz and flare out, you could almost feel it dying, vacant with beauty.  How long did it take to be able to love someone?  With Marty it had happened in an instant, like snapping your fingers—or was that the marvelous diminution that time brought with it—everything seemed to have happened in a jumble, fast as thought itself, even falling in love.  Or one day she, walking through Flatbush, seeing a used condom on the steps of St. Cecilia’s, suddenly deciding that come hell or high water she would move her family out of New York.  And that was that.  There were things irrevocable, matters of the spirit, decided in an instant; and then there were men like Gerald who no matter how hard you tried to treat him like a human being, you just kept seeing Tim’s thing in his mouth, his fat little mouth like a daffodil.

“It might be on the floor,” Gerald said.  He shook his head from side to side.  “The rock thing I mean.”

“You could look,” Tim said.

“Oh it is so unimportant,” Elaine said.  “What’s important is having a good time while we still can.”

“Or when we stop I could get out and get you another one,” Gerald said.

“It’s not like they’re expensive,” said Tim.

“Oh, that would be fine,” agreed Elaine.  “I wouldn’t want you to be out a chunk of change.”

She noticed, in the side mirror to her right, the cheerful orange and white boxy shape of a U-Haul van in their wake.  It was keeping right up; as she thought back, she had been noticing it here and there, in the twisty turns of 101 by Devils Slide, or later, along the bleak Dover Beach seascapes of Pigeon Point, in her peripheral vision that U-Haul van had been almost traveling with them.  When they had pulled over for their impromptu “stretch of the legs,” the van had maintained a discreet distance a hundred yards down the highway’s edge.

“Have you boys been watching this U-Haul truck?” she asked, wanting to amuse them.  “As Marty used to say, remember Tim?  It’s been sticking to us like white on rice.”

“I don’t remember the white on rice thing, Mom.”

Gerald laughed.  “What would he say today, when rice isn’t necessarily white, I wonder?”

Tim glanced in his rear view mirror.  His lip twitched.  “He’d say that the fucking piece of shit was on our ass, is what he’d say.”

“Tim, please,” said Gerald.

“’White on rice,’” he hooted derisively, and if there was one thing Elaine hated it was when someone mocked you by imitating your voice or your expressions—the very things that belonged to you.  “Give me a fucking break.”

Gerald leaned over the back seat, cuffed him on the shoulder.  “Tim, let’s just try to have a nice day, okay?  Our last one for a while, let’s make it nice.”

Last one for a while?

What was going on with that?

“I hurt you, Tim?” Gerald said in a small voice.  “Baby, I’m sorry.”  Then he must have pushed down a button in the armrest of the “childproof” car, for his window rolled down, nearly inaudibly, but she had always had good hearing and she could sense the atmosphere within the sedan changing, shifting slightly.  “I don’t think I hurt our boy, Elaine,” he continued, his voice getting blown about by the wind so that, or so it seemed to her, the syllables in the different words he used seemed to bounce all over them, like the inflatable silver pillows Andy Warhol made for his Factory parties.  Those silver pillows she had seen in Time magazine when all New York was talking of Pop Art and Warhol’s Silver Factory, which sounded so elegant.  Even in the best of times, Gerald had an affected way of speaking.  “He’s made of sturdy stuff as we both of us know all too well.”

Elaine was barely listening to him . . .  When she got to Blanc Marie she planned to tuck into whatever rich dessert the Sisters had set aside for her.  Too often in the past, she’d scrimped and cheated herself to keep the figure she’d had as a young girl, but we can’t all be sylphlike, so we might as well eat what desserts we may.  Look at Violette Verdy!  Balanchine had made dozens of dances for her, might as well call them “pipe cleaner dances,” but by the time she retired it was as though someone had pumped air into her like a dirigible so that by the time Reagan became President dear Violette had that silver pillow look herself, like a dumpling wrapped in foil at some dim sum place.

That U-Haul van was really moving. She saw its squarish cabin comically bumping up and down. She glanced at Tim’s knuckles on the steering wheel, how white and old they looked, his fingers knotted around the wheel as though arthritis had molded them into hooks.  Poor boy, really.  Upset about a tiff with Gerald, no doubt.

A good meal would sort them all out.

“Mom,” Tim said.

Chicken, spinach, chocolate cake—dumplings were in her head thanks to Violette Verdy; maybe there’d be dumplings.  Not the Chinese sort, the—

“Mom, it’s not like we haven’t talked this out over and over,” Tim said.  He sounded resigned.

She felt Gerald’s paw on her left shoulder.

“Oh, Elaine,” he said.  “So awful to see you like this.”

“Don’t pretend you’re, like, all in the dark about the U-Haul, Mom.”

“In the dark?” she repeated.  It was like he was being patient with her.  An unusual note for Tim.  Patience.  Something new for our boy.  “In the dark about what?”

“About the U-Haul,” Gerald whined.  Oh, maybe it wasn’t whining, but his affected way of speaking.  No wonder his kids never liked visiting him.  Who would want a Dad who talked like Lauren Bacall in an old Douglas Sirk weeper like Written on the Wind?  At least Tim had had a manly sort of father, a mensch as they say.

Marty.  Buried on a hill, the sea breeze lilting, the stars above blinking out unendurable messages of gravity.  A branch of one of those sea-drenched white trees pitched above his grave.  Him a suit of bones, as she had used to lie in bed next to him, pressing his skin with her thumb, feeling the bone along his skinny little spine, his absurdly large skull.

“In the dark about what about the U-Haul, can you tell me that?” Elaine cried.  “Because I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about.”

“Oh Elaine,” said Gerald, patting her shoulder, gently, as though she were some sort of National Velvet.  “Those nuns are gonna take such extra good care of you.  You’ll be their sugar doll with all your beautiful clothes and manners.  Look!  I can almost see it now.”  Suddenly his face was next to hers, wreathed in smiles.  “It’s coming up around the bend, just you wait and see.”

“#imaginary,” “#genuine” and “#phenomena” belong to a series titled with words from Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” that I have hashtagged and run through various social media platforms—Reddit and Twitter most often, though Instagram has played a role as well. Each poem is then sculpted from its hashtag’s search results. 

 

#imaginary

Her name was Nadine. She existed solely to blame things on.
I knew what she looked like. But I didn’t see her.
I understood that some people could be invisible. 

His name was Business Duck. He was the back half of a tugboat
and the front half of Donald Duck. He would do absolutely nothing
except occupy seats that other people wanted to sit in.  

I also had one named Boy for years. I had to intervene
in their arguments many times: you know, kid stuff,
like what to have for dinner or how they should murder everyone.  

I used to just talk to people, as if
there were people with me all the time,
even when I was completely alone. 

One of them was a skeleton dog.
It would race everywhere, and always be beside me.
I practically had a midget vampire following me. 

His name was Splashy. Miss that guy.
I had these black panthers that would run alongside the car,
going into the houses of kids I didn’t like and messing with them.  

My best friend and I each had a fleet of friendly bed bugs.
My Mum would often hear me when I was taking a tinkle speaking to them
and thanking them for helping me shake off my junk. 

I had a husband when I was four.
He was a giant sweater vest named Herman,
and we had a son named Boobie. 

We had two restaurant chains:
Chi Chi Nose Shop, a Chinese restaurant run by mice
in the roofs of cars, and the Nake, a restaurant that you ate in naked. 

Alice was pretty tame, just needed to have a spot saved at the table, car, etc.
Then one day, I just got sick of her, and threw her out the car window
as we were driving, saying, “Goodbye, Alice.” 

I remember what she looked like (a glow worm)
and I remember having conversations with her.
I would make my parents re-open gates and doors, telling them they forgot her. 

I even remember asking her to stop coming around
because I was too old to have friends like her anymore – five –
and when I couldn’t stop thinking about her,  

I tried to flush her down the toilet on a few occasions.
After that I had a star with a face that would float around after me,
or dance around during class to make me laugh.  

He was a blonde version of me
and we ran around on the edges of grass and pavement.
It didn’t take too long for my dad to inform me 

that my friends were the devil’s minions,
and he drew the star I described on a piece of paper
so we could burn it. That was the end of that.

 

#genuine

Death removes a lot of cover
When you’re covering the world in your thoughts.
It’s not like losing a pen, is it. 

That’s not the argument.
These are the sorts of things I say to people.
I work their job for them so they can stay home and grieve. 

I know you’re hurting.
I’ll be over Tuesday to mow your lawn for you.
I’m all for your fucking off with your secretly soy self. 

I’m talking about YOUR lawn, widow.
Not just some canned cliché that means nothing.
Surely you have more complex feelings about it than “thoughts and prayers”. 

There are no words that will fix it.
It’s not about you. Don’t try to make it about you
By being the one who has to say the deepest, most touching words. 

I’m Christian and personally don’t like this statement.
My child got run over by a car and is dead.
I’m going to write a facebook post about his death 

I’ll be tweeting about his death tomorrow #YOLO
It’s a double standard, and nothing changes: it falls on you.
I didn’t give a damn if they were sincere or not. 

You’re just throwing those emoticons everywhere…
protecting yourself from awkwardness
people use it use it on the internet all the time when someone dies. 

Hey man. I’ve been thinking about your dead mom.
I talked to Jesus about her for a little while. Mostly good stuff.
It felt like a token comment to make her lower her shields in respect 

while her boyfriend was getting a lung transplant
and was in the public eye too much. Shut the fuck up.
I acknowledge you, you’re part of my social group, and I’m not a threat.

 

#phenomena

A kid I knew lost his backpack and needed a replacement.
He came to school the next day with a big mailbox in his hands
Filled with his books. A couple of days later he added straps to it.  

Voilà, he had a mailbox backpack. He made a million dollars!
When women would wear thongs to show high on their hips,
Kids started to spike up their bangs and bleach them. 

Grown-ups are sporting plastic decorations on their heads
In the shape of vegetables, fruit and flowers.
We had a few kids choke on them from chewing on them. 

If you survived the rubber band installation alone, you were lucky.
But if you snapped them open and slid them against someone’s skin
It was just like a knife. It had a star on it, so I told the gas station attendant  

I was getting another one for free.
She thought I belonged on the short bus.
We wrote a letter demanding reparations  

For having tracked down so many star-labeled pops.
They wrote back essentially saying, very softly,
You kids made this shit up, stop bothering us. 

Every flea market in Florida still sells these to old people.
Mine looked like it could fit a doll when I took it off.
If you stuck two together, it would make a baby. 

I worked at a day care when they got really big.
If someone ripped the bracelet off, you had to perform a sexual act with them.
They were color coded and could range from a hug to anal sex.  

Sixth graders said You have to do it doggy style! to each other.
Girls everywhere when I was in elementary school
Wore pacifiers around their necks like a necklace. 

Like women who purposely shave off their eyebrows,
Only to draw them back on with a pen.
It was pretty cool to color on yourself with those gel pens. 

Have we gotten to the point
Where we no longer understand
How ideas can spread without the Internet?

Beverly, a town near Salem, spring 1692. A STRONG GUST of WIND then lights up to see a young girl, ELIZABETH, pacing back and forth behind a meeting hall. Her apron has been intentionally placed on the ground to hide something. The sun hangs late in the day. ELIZABETH seems very aware and disturbed by this.

ELIZABETH

 

Another young girl, ANNIE, enters dressed in similar attire. She carries a wooden bucket and wears her apron.

ANNIE

I prayed you’d still be here!

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

I will do no such thing.

 

2.

ELIZABETH

Do you strike out against me?

ANNIE

ELIZABETH

ANNIE turns away.

ELIZABETH

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

You take their story for sport?

ANNIE

ELIZABETH

  3.

ANNIE

Pray, why do such a thing?

ELIZABETH

ANNIE

Shut it, Elizabeth. You talk nonsense!

ELIZABETH grabs ANNIE by her arm and holds her tightly.

ELIZABETH

ANNIE

ELIZABETH releases ANNIE’s arm.

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

  4.

 

ELIZABETH

Ye are afraid. Admit it!

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

   

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH quickly covers ANNIE’s mouth.

 

ELIZABETH

Hush, someone will hear you!

 

ANNIE removes ELIZABETH’s hand

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

I SHALL NOT FAIL!

 

ELIZABETH quickly moves aside the apron on the ground to reveal a bloody knife and a cup. She picks up the knife and cup.

 

ELIZABETH

5.

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

     

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

Because Goody Henry gives him none.

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

  6.

     

ELIZABETH thrust the bloody knife towards ANNIE’s neck then pushes the cup up to her lips.

 

ELIZABETH

You must drink!

 

ANNIE

I SHALL NOT!

     

ELIZABETH

DRINK!

 

CATHERINE, another young girl, sallies in holding three poppets.

 

CATHERINE

I pray, what is the matter here!

 

ANNIE

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

You do not believe me?

 

ELIZABETH lowers the knife and the cup. ANNIE seizes the moment to escape into CATHERINE’s arms.

 

CATHERINE

 

ANNIE

 

 

7.

 

ELIZABETH

 

CATHERINE

   

ANNIE

 

CATHERINE

 

CATHERINE hands the poppets to ELIZABETH and curtsies.

 

ELIZABETH

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

That’s what you think.

 

CATHERINE

  8.

 

CATHERINE (CONTD)

 

ELIZABETH

You are truly wise, Catherine.

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

I am neither sensible nor wise.

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

Aye…you are right. So dangerous.

 

In a flash, ELIZABETH drops her knife, grabs CATHERINE by the hair and quickly pours the chicken’s blood into her mouth. CATHERINE falls to her knees gagging while trying to spit out the blood.

 

ANNIE, alarmed, rushes to CATHERINE’s side.

 

ANNIE

I pray it be tomatoes or beets!

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

You will live, unfortunately.

 

9.

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

Let Catherine give us a word first.

 

CATHERINE

 

Elated, ELIZABETH kneels down next to CATHERINE.

 

 

CATHERINE

OH, GOD! OH, GOD! I FEEL HIM!

 

ELIZABETH

GOOD, I WILL FEEL HIM TOO!

 

ELIZABETH drinks from the cup. The WIND begins to blow.

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

I… I can not.

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

10.

 

The sound of CAWING CROWS joins in with the sound of the blowing wind. Afraid, ANNIE kneels with the others. She takes the cup and drinks. She violently coughs and rolls to the ground.

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE’s body jerks, convulses. The WIND HOWLS LOUDER.

 

  CATHERINE

My Goody Johnson will hang! 

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE rises to her feet and starts to flap her arms.

 

ANNIE

I’M ABOUT TO FLY! I MUST FLY!

 

ELIZABETH and CATHERINE also stand and begin to flap their arms.

 

  CATHERINE

I’M GOING TO FLY, TOO!

 

ELIZABETH

 

They continue to flap their arms while crying out – Goody Johnson must hang, Goody Williams must hang.

ALL

Goody Williams, Goody Johnson, Goody Henry…THEY MUST HANG! THEY MUST HANG!  HANG…

BLACKOUT.

Winter

Woman wants forever
And man wants heaven
And sometimes not oftentimes
The two wants collide
And both become a cloud
Less often still but sometimes
They die, actually die
Before it can rain
And the world stays dry
And everything remains
Just fine

 

Rome, February 2015

Then a white bird comes. A big white bird. And it is close, closing like it is going to land on your head. After the rain has stopped. Wings level with your shoulders. On the rooftop before you’re due to leave. Exactly like it’s on your head. And you in the dark with no umbrella over you. The size of your suitcase. On the roof the night you’re due to go. Before getting lost at the station. The water running to your feet. And the sun lost in the light. And beneath a Roman column. The alleys that curl. And the wind which irons the umbrella. And the umbrella yawning. Life at both sides of the road. And life is always a life. And rain until departure. And the umbrella lifting in the wind. And the sound of the suitcase’s wheels. Gravel then tiles. And the dream of faces in the glass. The taste of thyme in the potatoes. A building the colour of a peach. Mounds of melon beneath shavings of mortadella. And the shavings which curl. And the blacks selling umbrellas. And on the thresholds of the restaurants. Speech a song sung over and over. And a white bird saying farewell. And the umbrellas at the entrances to the restaurants. And the wind at the entrances to the restaurants. And life at the entrances to the restaurants. The size of your suitcase. And life always a life. 

 

Shipping traffic

The grey ships come from the north,
The snow-white ships come from the pole,
The ships of the south are all broken down.
O harbourmaster sitting on the cloudbanks,
O harbourmaster walking on the water,
Tell those leaping on the equator line
How their flesh might turn to wood,
How their bones might turn to steel,
Until from out their bodies comes a ship,
Its black pushing through the swell. 

 

Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.

A Song About Bread

Here it is, the harsh brutality,

The full meaning of human suffering!

The sickle cuts the heavy ears of wheat

The way they slit throats of swans.

 

Since time immemorial, our field

Has known the morning shudder of August.

Straw is tied up in bundles,

Each bundle lies there like a yellow corpse.

 

Carts, like hearses, carry them

Into the crypt: a barn.

Like a deacon, the driver,

Barking at the mare, heeds the funeral rites.

 

After that, with care, without anger,

Their heads are laid on the ground

And little bones are pummeled

Out of their thin bodies with chains.

 

No one ever thinks

That straw is also flesh.

The bones are shoved in the mouth of the cannibal mill

That grinds them with its teeth.

 

And then, fermenting the dough,

They bake piles of tasty viands…

That’s when the whitish venom enters the jug

Of the stomach to lay eggs of spite.

 

Condensing all the beatings into a loaf,

Distilling the reapers’ cruelty into redolent brew,

It poisons the millstones of intestines

Of those who eat this straw meat.

 

And the charlatan, the murderer, and the villain

Whistle like autumn across the entire country…

All because the sickle cuts ears of wheat

The way they slit throats of swans.

 <1921>

 

* * *

I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry.

All will pass like smoke from white apple trees.

Overcome with the gold of wilting,

I won’t be young anymore.

 

Touched with cold, you will no longer

Beat in the same way, heart,

And the land of birch chintz

Won’t tempt me to gallivant barefoot.

 

Nomadic spirit! Less and less

You stoke the flame of my lips.

O my lost freshness,

Mayhem of eyes and deluge of feelings!

 

These days I’m stingier in my desires,

My life—or did I dream you?

I might as well have galloped on a pink steed

On a sonorous early spring morning.

 

All of us, all of us will perish;

Quietly, copper leaves pour from maples…

Therefore, blessed be, forever,

Everything that’s come to bloom and to die.

<1921>

 

Letter to My Mother

Are you still alive, my dear old lady?

I’m alive as well. Hello, hello!

Let that ineffable evening light

Keep streaming over your hut.

 

They write to me that, barely hiding your fear,

You’ve gotten awfully sad over me,

That you often wander the road

In your tattered old-fashioned coat.

 

In the blue dark of evening,

You often see the same thing:

In a bar fight, someone has stabbed me

In the heart with a Finnish knife.

 

It’s nothing, my dear! Please calm down.

Just a terrible hallucination.

I’m not so hopeless a drunkard

As to die without seeing you.

 

I’m as gentle as I was before,

And I only dream of one thing:

To come back from my rebellious anguish

To our squat house.

 

I will come back when our garden,

White with spring, outstretches its branches.

But this time, don’t wake me up at dawn

The way you used to do eight years ago.

 

Don’t wake up the old expectations;

Don’t disturb all that didn’t come true—

I’ve endured loss and exhaustion

Far too early in life.

 

And don’t teach me to pray. Please don’t!

There is no going back to the old.

Only you are my help and my joy.

Only you are my ineffable light.

 

So forget your anxiety,

Don’t get so awfully sad over me.

Don’t wander the road so often

In your tattered old-fashioned coat.

 <1924>