Anastasia & Sandman

by Larry Levis


The brow of a horse in that moment when
The horse is drinking water so deeply from a trough
It seems to inhale the water, is holy.

I refuse to explain.

When the horse had gone the water in the trough,
All through the empty summer,

Went on reflecting clouds & stars.

The horse cropping grass in a field,
And the fly buzzing around its eyes, are more real
Than the mist in one corner of the field.

Or the angel hidden in the mist, for that matter.

Members of the Committee on the Ineffable,
Let me illustrate this with a story, & ask you all
To rest your heads on the table, cushioned,
If you wish, in your hands, &, if you want,
Comforted by a small carton of milk
To drink from, as you once did, long ago,
When there was only a curriculum of beach grass,
When the University of Flies was only a distant humming.

In Romania, after the war, Stalin confiscated
The horses that had been used to work the fields.
"You won't need horses now," Stalin said, cupping
His hand to his ear, "Can't you hear the tractors
Coming in the distance? I hear them already."

The crowd in the Callea Victoria listened closely
But no one heard anything. In the distance
There was only the faint glow of a few clouds.
And the horses were led into boxcars & emerged
As the dimly remembered meals of flesh
That fed the starving Poles
During that famine, & part of the next one--
In which even words grew thin & transparent,
Like the pale wings of ants that flew
Out of the oldest houses, & slowly
What had been real in words began to be replaced
By what was not real, by the not exactly real.
"Well, not exactly, but. . ." became the preferred
Administrative phrasing so that the man
Standing with his hat in his hands would not guess
That the phrasing of a few words had already swept
The earth from beneath his feet. "That horse I had,
He was more real than any angel,
The housefly, when I had a house, was real too,"
Is what the man thought.
Yet it wasn't more than a few months
Before the man began to wonder, talking
To himself out loud before the others,
"Was the horse real? Was the house real?"
An angel flew in and out of the high window
In the factory where the man worked, his hands
Numb with cold. He hated the window & the light
Entering the window & he hated the angel.
Because the angel could not be carved into meat
Or dumped into the ossuary & become part
Of the landfill at the edge of town,
It therefore could not acquire a soul,
And resembled in significance nothing more
Than a light summer dress when the body has gone.

The man survived because, after a while,
He shut up about it.

Stalin had a deep understanding of the kulaks,
Their sense of marginalization & belief in the land;

That is why he killed them all.

Members of the Committee on Solitude, consider
Our own impoverishment & the progress of that famine,
In which, now, it is becoming impossible
To feel anything when we contemplate the burial,
Alive, in a two-hour period, of hundreds of people.
Who were not clichés, who did not know they would be
The illegible blank of the past that lives in each
Of us, even in some guy watering his lawn

On a summer night. Consider

The death of Stalin & the slow, uninterrupted
Evolution of the horse, a species no one,
Not even Stalin, could extinguish, almost as if
What could not be altered was something
Noble in the look of its face, something

Incapable of treachery.

Then imagine, in your planning proposals,
The exact moment in the future when an angel
Might alight & crawl like a fly into the ear of a horse,
And then, eventually, into the brain of a horse,
And imagine further that the angel in the brain
Of this horse is, for the horse cropping grass
In the field, largely irrelevant, a mist in the corner
Of the field, something that disappears,
The horse thinks, when weight is passed through it,
Something that will not even carry the weight
Of its own father
On its back, the horse decides, & so demonstrates
This by swishing at a fly with its tail, by continuing
To graze as the dusk comes on & almost until it is night.

Old contrivers, daydreamers, walking chemistry sets,
Exhausted chimneysweeps of the spaces
Between words, where the Holy Ghost tastes just
Like the dust it is made of,
Let's tear up our lecture notes & throw them out
The window.
Let's do it right now before wisdom descends upon us
Like a spiderweb over a burned-out theater marquee,
Because what's the use?
I keep going to meetings where no one's there,
And contributing to the discussion;
And besides, behind the angel hissing in its mist
Is a gate that leads only into another field,
Another outcropping of stones & withered grass, where
A horse named Sandman & a horse named Anastasia
Used to stand at the fence & watch the traffic pass.
Where there were outdoor concerts once, in summer,
Under the missing & innumerable stars.

Incubus

by Craig Arnold

The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs
on the peg over hers, and he's inside.

She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on,
buys herself a minute looking for two
matching cups for the lime-flower tea,
not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves
and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze.
She talks a wall around her, twists the string
tighter around the tea bag in her spoon.
But every conversation has to break
somewhere, and at the far end of the sofa
he sits, warming his hands around the cup
he hasn't tasted yet, and listens on
with such an exasperating show of patience
it's almost a relief to hear him ask it:
If you're not using your body right now
maybe you'd let me borrow it for a while?

It isn't what you're thinking. No, it's worse.

Why on earth did she find him so attractive
the first time she met him, propping the wall
at an awkward party, clearly trying to drink
himself into some sort of conversation?
Was it the dark uncomfortable reserve
she took upon herself to tease him out of,
asking, Are you a vampire? That depends,
he stammered, are you a virgin? No, not funny,
but why did she laugh at him? What made her think
that he needed her, that she could teach him something?
Why did she let him believe she was drunk
and needed a ride home? Why did she let him
take her shirt off, fumble around a bit
on the spare futon, passing back and forth
the warm breath of a half-hearted kiss
they kept falling asleep in the middle of?
And when he asked her, why did she not object?
I'd like to try something. I need you to trust me.

Younger and given to daydreams, she imagined
trading bodies with someone, a best friend,
the boy she had a crush on. But the fact
was more fantastic, a fairy-tale adventure
where the wolf wins, and hides in the girl's red hood.
How it happens she doesn't really remember,
drifting off with a vague sense of being
drawn out through a single point of her skin,
like a bedsheet threaded through a needle's eye,
and bundled into a body that must be his.

Sometimes she startles, as on the verge of sleep
you can feel yourself fall backward over a brink,
and snaps her eyelids open, to catch herself
slipping out of the bed, her legs swinging
over the edge, and feels the sudden sick
split-screen impression of being for a second
both she and her.
What he does with her
while she's asleep, she never really knows,
flickers, only, conducted back in dreams:
Walking in neighborhoods she doesn't know
and wouldn't go to, overpasses, ragweed,
cars dry-docked on cinderblocks, wolf-whistles,
wanting to run away and yet her steps
planted sure and defiant. Performing tasks
too odd to recognize and too mundane
to have made up, like fixing a green salad
with the sunflower seeds and peppers that she hates,
pouring on twice the oil and vinegar
that she would like, and being unable to stop.
Her hands feel but are somehow not her own,
running over the racks of stacked fabric
in a clothing store, stroking the slick silk,
teased cotton and polar fleece, as if her fingers
each were a tongue tasting the knits and weaves.
Harmless enough.
It's what she doesn't dream
that scares her, panic she can't account for, faces
familiar but not known, déjà vu
making a mess of memory, coming to
with a fresh love-bite on her left breast
and the aftershock of granting another's flesh,
of having gripped, slipped in and fluttered tender
mmm, unbraided, and spent the whole slow day
clutching her thighs to keep the chafe from fading,
and furious at being joyful, less
at the violation, less the danger, than the sense
he'd taken her enjoyment for his own.
That was the time before, the time she swore
would be the last—returning to her senses,
she'd grabbed his throat and hit him around the face
and threw him out, and sat there on the floor
shaking. She hadn't known how hard it was
to throw a punch without pulling it back.

Now, as they sit together on her couch
with the liquid cooling in the stained chipped cups
that would never match, no matter how hard
she stared at them, he seems the same as ever,
a quiet clumsy self-effacing ghost
with the gray-circled eyes that she once wanted
so badly to defy, that seemed to see her
seeing him—and she has to admit, she's missed him.
Why? She scrolls back through their conversations,
searching for any reason not to hate him.
She'd ask him, What's it like being a girl
when you're not a girl? His answers, when he gave them,
weren't helpful, so evasively poetic:
It's like a sponge somebody else is squeezing.
A radio tuned to all stations at once.
Like having skin that's softer but more thick.

Then she remembers the morning she awoke
with the smear of tears still raw across her cheeks
and the spent feeling of having cried herself
down to the bottom of something. Why was I crying?
she asked, and he looked back blankly, with that little
curve of a lip that served him for a smile.
Because I can't.
And that would be their secret.
The power to feel another appetite
pass through her, like a shudder, like a cold
lungful of oxygen or hot sweet smoke,
fill her and then be stilled. The freedom to fall
asleep behind the blinds of his dark body
and wake cleanly. And when she swings her legs
over the edge of the bed, to trust her feet
to hit the carpet, and know as not before
how she never quite trusted the floor
to be there, no, not since she was a girl
first learning to swim, hugging her skinny
breastless body close to the pool-gutter,
skirting along the dark and darker blue
of the bottom dropping out—
Now she can stand,
and take the cup out of his giving hand,
and feel what they have learned inside each other
fair and enough, and not without a kind
of satisfaction, that she can put her foot
down, clear to the bottom of desire,
and find that it can stop, and go no deeper.

Sonnet 6

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Is he native to this realm? No,
his wide nature grew out of both worlds.
They more adeptly bend the willow's branches
who have experience of the willow's roots.

When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk
on the table: it attracts the dead--
But may he, this quiet conjurer, may he
beneath the mildness of the eyelid

mix their bright traces into every seen thing;
and may the magic of earthsmoke and rue
be as real for him as the clearest connection.

Nothing can mar for him the authentic image;
whether he wanders through houses or graves,
let him praise signet ring, gold necklace, jar.

trans Edward Snow

sonnets

It's that time again, for pretty projectives, the occasional evocative description of interpersonal turmoil, and far too many cosmological references.

We Feel Fine?

• We Feel Fine is a fascinating polyamorous relationship between programming, psychology, and art. A bot searches public blogs for the phrases "I feel" or "I am feeling", and harvests the complete sentence surrounding said phrase, e.g., "I feel sheepish for willingly allowing him to use me to replenish his narcissistic reserves," or "I am feeling excited to watch my dissertation co-chair on Oprah today" or "I feel guilty for using him to replenish my narcissistic reserves." Available identifying information about the writer is also harvested, and linked with the feeling statement when it is published, database-style. What results is an ability to search for feelings by age, date, geographic location, gender, even weather. The authors have created six "Movements" from which to experience the messiness, some messier than others (if you are going for messy, try "Madness". Less messy? Try "Metrics").


• Emotion dysregulation or vocational saturation? Sometimes I am so consumed by emotion (mine and others) that I would like to subtract it from my experience, if only for a couple of hours (much longer than that and I'd feel frightened, though then I'd be feeling, which would take care of it, no?). I don't want to feel numb, per se, as numbness feels like, well, a not-nice feeing. Being in a state of "flow" (which is not really considered an emotion, rather a state of operations - pardon the imprecise language here) seems like a good alternative (though sustaining it seems not only impossible, but perhaps also ill-advised).


• One coping method I've used for those annoying periods of emotional saturation is to read about winners of The Fields Medal (sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize for mathematics). Though I try to limit my focus to their work, I nonetheless usually end up wondering about their inter- and intrapersonal lives, which inevitably elicits a stirring of The Feelings. So, partially to my chagrin, it's only partially effective.


• Emotional State 3A: It has recently been brought to our attention that some of you are stuck in emotional state 3A, Consumed by Fear. Though we have made a number of announcements recently about the need for an emotional-state change, and had hoped that this would be a relatively smooth and uniform process, we understand that 3A is a particularly robust state and that many of you may need further guidance on how to proceed...

Escalation of osculation. Time and oranges.

• Apparently it's not a given that kissing is important in courtship & mating, though (at least in the particular studies reported here) not as much for men. The consistently delightful VS Ramachandran suggests that kissing stimulates mirror neurons that, ostensibly, "promote empathy and reduce inhibitions". Obviously (to me, unfortunately not always to those I have smooched), empathy and reduced inhibitions is important for certain types of good, ahem, interpersonal relating. Why some people don't like kissing, or are just plain icky at it, seems like a societal issue, or at least one to which one should apply a good deal of introspection (and more practice with a vocal collaborator). Such folk are not going to last long in my dating pool (though, unfortunately, even the rare seemingly divinely endowed kissers have not yet found a way to stay afloat). Though it does make me wonder about the kissing plebian's state of mind in regard to attachment. It does not seem unreasonable to assert that someone with a dismissive state of mind would not want to get all mooshy and gooey (and empathic and uninhibited) with the kissing and would prefer to go straight to copulating. And then drive off onto the lonely highway. Likewise, someone with a preoccupied state of mind might want to kiss and kiss and kiss until repetitive lip injury occurs. Perhaps there's a study there!


• On an entirely unrelated note (though good kissing and pondering this topic are not so dissimilar, at least on some level), here's a delightful, interactive article on time space, travel, using oranges and other household items as educational props. Perhaps good date night material, before the smooching. Or a Family Home Evening activity!

Econometrics of sex & 'happiness'

...the economists compared the levels of happiness produced by a vigorous sex life with other activities whose economic values had been calculated in prior research, allowing them to impute, in dollars, how much happiness sex was worth. They also estimated that increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week provided as much happiness as putting $50,000 in the bank.

New York Times Week in Review: Sex May Be Happiness, But Wealth Isn't Sexiness