The Cataracts Read online

  since she was doing the telling.

  Bear in mind this was my mother’s telling,

  to make us laugh and distract us

  as we too walked or were walked into air.

  You know the game, you’ve likely played it,

  it is a killer of time and cheap.

  You know what exculpatory lies you would tell—

  I told her to stop,

  I didn’t know she was so close to the edge.

  Tears and protests.

  But either she was paying attention

  and it was malice

  or she was not paying attention

  and it was depraved indifference.

  When my mother walked off the edge of the wall

  it might as well have been the edge of the world

  even though at the beach you are always aware of the edge

  because you can always hear it:

  the sea the stupid wall exists to stop.

  Still, hearing it would not stop your body

  from falling or help you know

  whether you were falling a few feet or ten feet or

  from the surface of the earth itself.

  When I asked her if it hurt,

  she always said the fear was worse than the pain,

  laughed it off by saying

  I just had the breath knocked out of me.

  If you don’t know that it’s about to happen

  or that such a thing can happen at all,

  to be breathless is terror:

  you are trying to do something you have never had to try to do

  and you cannot do it

  and everything you want to do

  —scream, cry, call for help—

  you cannot.

  When we asked to be told this story over and over again

  my father would attempt to empathize

  by reminding us that when he was a child

  he built a pair of artificial wings

  and leapt from the roof of his house and so

  he too had the breath knocked out of him.

  And my mother would make a sound

  that was laughing and crying

  and neither and both and say

  You jumped but I was pushed.

  I remember that sound, the expression

  of too many things at once,

  what pressure ejects from the vessel

  lest the vessel explode.

  It was a story we told because it was funny

  and it was good to laugh because laughter

  kept the vessel from exploding.

  But then her sister would say

  I didn’t push you,

  you walked off the wall by yourself.

  No one wants to hear of one’s suffering

  that you did it to yourself.

  Even when it is true, it is a lie.

  When you call it “blindman’s bluff”

  it could be that you are speaking of the trick or the cliff,

  the bluff I bluffed you off of.

  But the name of the game is “blindman’s buff,”

  and buff means to push,

  a phrase deteriorated over time,

  each retelling changing the meaning of the game

  without changing its rules.

  That undifferentiated exhalation

  is what saves the lungs from explosion,

  an expression that is one thing and the other,

  what she could not for long moments say

  because of what she did not see,

  falling whether she jumped or was pushed,

  saving herself by being breathless,

  because then it did not, would not matter

  whether she had wanted to laugh or to cry.

  Haven

  Is the name for the place of safety or refuge.

  Though refuge from what is unclear, unspecified,

  it matters in that the nature of a haven depends

  on what you are fleeing from but it doesn’t matter

  in that once there, whatever you flee cannot—

  what?

  That might matter: whether whatever I was fleeing

  could not get to me because I was in haven

  or could not see me because I was in haven

  or maybe it was that once I was in haven I didn’t exist.

  This haven was a part of the woods where the trees

  were younger and so we called it haven, as if

  the older trees had preserved this place just

  for the younger trees. Even though we knew

  it didn’t work like that, it looked as if it should,

  and in this even though it was forested the haven

  resembled the haven from which the word comes,

  the haven that is a water-word. A haven is a port

  or a harbor, water shallower and safer than open

  ocean, a crèche for wavelets, a bay for babies.

  Haven is where we went for sticks we enhanced

  by calling them staves, the word for wood

  from which one makes a bow, but made of

  as little wood as possible. Haven was sacred,

  so we could take a little timber but not too much,

  and of that wood make a shaping. For a bow

  you need a dense wood and you need to know

  that wood well: if it fails it will explode, which

  sounds fantastic, excessive, but if there is a knot

  or a warp or something unseen in the weave

  of the wood when you pull it back it will not

  just break or splinter, it will shatter.

  You want all that force and more, but you want it

  stable, transferable. A carpenter’s children

  let loose in the woods are dangerous,

  for they have words for everything they love,

  and the word for one who works wood in this way

  is bowyer, and a bow carved from a single stave

  can look to the unfamiliar like anything but what it is

  until you string it. Once strung everyone knows

  the smiling shape and the function, the suborned stick.

  Not everything that can be a weapon is only a weapon,

  nor any word the wood with which it shares the world.

  I never shot at a living creature and never would.

  A nocked arrow was a portal to haven: the arms opened

  to the anchor point, a posture in which I could stand

  forever, waiting. It is as if that in-drawn breath,

  unlike all others, would never require an exhalation.

  The limb draws the line, the arm points to a point,

  space is drawn by releasing the hold on the drawn shape.

  Who would teach archery to a half-blind boy?

  As the ability to discern detail fades,

  the eye’s emphasis on motion increases.

  To stand at anchor point is to be a stilled ship

  in a haven, to see is to forget the miracle by which

  moving things always seem to be in motion

  and stationary things always seem stationary.

  There are increasingly complex machines for this

  archaic task—wheels and pulleys, pins and mirrors,

  a bow of parts and pieces, not one stave shaped

  like a stick until strung. But if you rest in that recurve,

  wait in haven, wait for water, wait for wind,

  if you wait until something in the great green and blue

  blur moves. The limb will draw the line. The line

  will collapse the space. There will become here.

  Of course I confused it with heaven.

  The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts

  What half-blind is like:

  like two microscopes in my head

  each with differently stuck objectives.

  They enable the small and the very small

  and reduce everything else to blur and shade.
/>
  Yet you can train even this.

  Train it to spot the shape of sharks’ teeth,

  of which there are many samples and many shapes

  but not as many as flecks of sand, pieces of shell.

  I have hundreds plucked from the shore.

  But in the same beach I buried a toy

  and never found it again. A tiny toy:

  articulate, a translucent man, a smallness

  to whom the world was an unbounded wonder.

  Blemished and damaged I would hold him up

  and say He is broken and anyone who could see

  would say He looks fine to me.

  But they can see well, not finely.

  Look at his face, etched and serrated

  by that gargantuan saw.

  The cracked shell of his translucent skin

  buried in rubble now, and those teeth,

  all that remain of terrible and invisible jaws.

  Psychotic Mood Swing

  Shout down the valley.

  Crowd out the mountain.

  Array and display the glade.

  I heard, I heard, I heard.

  Tony Tony jump around.

  Help me find what can’t be found.

  Viridescent

  Of the emerald blur I could distinguish no sense

  save names and purposes, plant lore.

  Wolf’s foot, stag’s horn, running pine,

  whose spores are flash-explosive.

  Fiddleheads, ash for forest glass.

  Resurrection fern, one hundred years without water.

  Sand cedar, from which bows could be bent.

  Live oak, curved for shipbuilding.

  Black mangrove, black in its salt-extruding heart.

  White ash, from which one could cut a staff or a bat.

  Rum cherry, cabinets of which intoxicated their contents.

  False box, the butcher’s block.

  Devil stick, of universal use, the angelica tree.

  Witch hazel, diviner of water.

  Black nightshade, killer of children.

  Even the leaves of bastard indigo and wood violet: green.

  Like grass or emeralds, viridescent.

  Artichoke, asparagus, avocado.

  Dark green is dark green.

  Hooker’s green, laurel green.

  Light green is light green.

  Myrtle, mint, pine.

  (Not teal, nothing is teal.)

  Olive.

  Celadon, hunter, copper.

  Verdigris. The emerald blur.

  Because it was green it was grass

  and because it was grass it grew.

  Destiny and Mystique

  The question I would not answer:

  Are you a boy or

  a girl are you a boy or a girl

  and my interrogator would hit me in the face

  alternating fists with each cycle of questioning

  and might have done so

  even had I answered

  but I didn’t like the question and so

  Fuck him

  or at least that’s what I said

  to myself

  as I crushed ice and put it in a bag

  to place over the periorbital hematoma

  of my left eye

  because even though he had been switching hands

  apparently could only aim with one

  are you a lefty or a righty

  a lefty or a righty I sang

  as I read one-eyed

  about how the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants

  planned on getting this party

  (by which I and they meant a better and more just world)

  started

  by killing some pompous senator

  and whether it would or wouldn’t happen

  all came down to the actions

  of an elderly blind precognitive mutant

  whose lover and best friend

  was a queer blue shape-shifting terrorist

  it was 1981

  and all this for fifty cents

  Destiny wore a gold mask & could see the future

  and as my eye swelled shut

  I wondered what the future would look like

  when you couldn’t see

  and I wondered about Mystique

  and what it meant to never have to change shape

  for the person you loved

  because the person you loved couldn’t see you

  anyway and didn’t care

  so when my mother asked me what happened

  I said

  Well Kitty Pryde has come back from the future

  to change the past

  and she said

  No what happened to your eye

  and I said

  Well the Brotherhood is fighting for mutant liberation

  and she said

  OK are they good guys or bad guys

  are they good or are they bad

  are they guys or are they good

  are they bad or are they brothers

  are they X-Men or are they bad guys

  and I said

  they are mutants

  they are all X-Men to me

  Vertumnal

  Vertumnus, god of gardens, a whom out of a what.

  From dirt I declare I can make anything:

  the quartz and loam and severed insects,

  the gourds and grasses, up from dirt

  the hares and the dogs and the men

  who can run down neither hares nor dogs

  yet somehow manage to kill and eat both.

  Of dirt, all these. In quadrants, exhibited,

  I declare all outdoors my garden.

  Glass it in, I threaten, but with water and light

  my garden will grow and die and grow by dying

  and thus subsist forever and ever.

  In the garden stands the thing that stands for human,

  to scare away hares and dogs, to be the garden’s god.

  Only a man would look for a god in grass and see a man.

  The dog runs for the hare and the rabbit runs from the dog,

  one for its dinner and the other for its life.

  But a man just stands and attributes himself to god.

  The search for Vertumnus reveals the rendering,

  then the god rendered, and only then the renderer.

  Space

  Stand in the doorway of the Santa Maria del Fiore

  on a beautiful day.

  Stupid perfect clouds in a stupid perfect sky.

  Gaze straight ahead.

  The boy had rendered on a square wooden panel

  the baptistery of San Giovanni

  and in the center of this panel drilled one small hole.

  His friends he had directed: with one hand hold the panel

  to your eye, so that the rendered building faces

  the actual building, and with the other hand hold

  a mirror.