After Sarah Messer

The first writer to talk extensively with me about literary constraints, particularly those derived of the French OuLiPo movement, was the exquisite poet Sarah Messer. Before she left academia to become a cheese maker in Ann Arbor, Sarah was my professor. And mentor. And dear, dear friend.

In the past week, I've had two groups of students work with lipograms. First in a Master Class for the Southern Humanities Review in Alabama, and then with my undergraduates back home in North Carolina. I wish it were possible to present you with the results from that class in Auburn, especially since the only text I had with me was my novella (which, torn up, gave everyone in the room something to recast), and especially because so many of their lipograms were startlingly beautiful--far more interesting and lyric than my original sentences.

What I do happily have, however, is the result of a recent exercise wherein a group of brilliant undergraduates divvied up the lines of Sarah's "Prayer from a Mouse" and rewrote them under the constraints of a classic lipogram. Which is to say that students were to rewrite their assigned lines with language that did not include a single use of the letter 'e.'

Below is Sarah's "Prayer from a Mouse," which I happen to reread every week. Beside it is the version my students created on the fly. With great thanks to Sarah for teaching me, so I could teach them.

“Prayer from a Mouse

Dimensionless One, can you hear me?
Me with the moon ears, caught
in ice branches?

Beneath the sky’s long house,
beneath the old snake tree,
I pray to see even a fragment
of you—
whiskers ticking

a deserted street,
a staircase leading
to the balcony
of your collarbone.

Beloved King of Stars, I cannot
contain my animal movements.

For you I stay like a mountain.
For you I stay like a straight pin.

But in the end, the body leaves us
its empty building.

Midnight petulant
as a root cellar. Wasps crawling
in sleeves. I sleep

with my tail over
my face, enflamed.

Oh Great Cataloguer
of Snow Leaves, I pray
that you may appear
and carry every piece
of my fur in your hands.”

“Worship from a Timid, Gray Thing

You of Unworldly Body, can this all find you?
I with small, round radars, caught
in cracking limbs?

A cloudy roof on top,
and a winding poison plant,
I pray if to look upon only parts
of you—
fur ticking

a lost highway,
a stairway guiding
us to a balcony
of your collar’s cliffs.

Darling King of Stars, I cannot
contain my animal actions.

For you I, as a mountain.
For you I, as a straight pin.

But in finishing, our body gifts us
its worn out building.

Midnight childish
as a root in ground. Wasps crawling
in hulls. I nap

with my tail masking
my shy snout, burning.

Oh Amazing God
of Snow Buds, I pray
that you may abound
and carry all locks
of my fur in your hands.”

My Gift to You

John Jeremiah Sullivan was the first to tell me about Bolaño. John said, 'The Savage Detectives, go get it.' Later that afternoon, I was told by a dozen bookstores that no such title existed, which is the problem with having friends who get ARCs of everything. 

I had lunch with John and our friend Joel the other day. Joel made soup; John made biscuits. The light was fine and white and wintry. I owe my career to John, a fact of which I was reminded sitting there in his immaculate kitchen.

Afterwards, I came home and looked up this poem, knowing I wouldn't be aware of its author, nor of a certain slant on its reading, without my friend.

'My Gift to You'

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you’ll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You’ll find it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you’ll remember me,
if only just a little.

--Roberto Bolaño

Blue winter doors

I've neglected this spot for a while, but I keep track of all the passing things I mean to tell you. Last Tuesday, for instance, at 5:21pm I wrote down: mackerel sky, pink! I was sending a package at this strip mall in midtown and everything was hideous and a kind of cold drizzle was falling, but there in the southeastern sky...

Since you were, as usual, nowhere in sight, I told the old, Indian man at the counter that he should walk to the front of his store and take a peek at the sky. After I leave, I said, thinking he wouldn't have to then. And he said, I'll do it right now, so we walked up to the windows and stood there staring past the cars and power lines, and he told me, This makes things interesting. When I drove away, he was still looking, even though the light was gone.

The next day, a friend took me to a house she's thinking of buying to show me its barn. The building is long and low, a hundred years old, and a little worn out in the elbows, but otherwise very much a barn. We peered in the windows and tramped up to every door.

There were a lot of doors. The last one made me think of Maggie Nelson's Bluets: 'At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God.'

And also of 'The Door' by Robert Creeley whom I met once shortly before he died and not far away from the barn door above, the one which will belong to my friend if she buys this house, and the one which finally was unlocked and let us in. Here's the poem--I think of you every time I read it:

The Door

for Robert Duncan

It is hard going to the door

cut so small in the wall where

the vision which echoes loneliness   

brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.

What I understood, I understand.

My mind is sometime torment,   

sometimes good and filled with livelihood,   

and feels the ground.

But I see the door,

and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,   

and would get there if I could

with my feet and hands and mind.

Lady, do not banish me   

for digressions. My nature   

is a quagmire of unresolved   

confessions. Lady, I follow.

I walked away from myself,

I left the room, I found the garden,

I knew the woman

in it, together we lay down.

Dead night remembers. In December   

we change, not multiplied but dispersed,   

sneaked out of childhood,

the ritual of dismemberment.

Mighty magic is a mother,

in her there is another issue

of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal,   

the charge of the command.

The garden echoes across the room.   

It is fixed in the wall like a mirror   

that faces a window behind you   

and reflects the shadows.

May I go now?

Am I allowed to bow myself down

in the ridiculous posture of renewal,

of the insistence of which I am the virtue?

Nothing for You is untoward.   

Inside You would also be tall,   

more tall, more beautiful.

Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You.

So I screamed to You,

who hears as the wind, and changes   

multiply, invariably,

changes in the mind.

Running to the door, I ran down

as a clock runs down. Walked backwards,   

stumbled, sat down

hard on the floor near the wall.

Where were You.

How absurd, how vicious.

There is nothing to do but get up.

My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.

For that one sings, one

writes the spring poem, one goes on walking.   

The Lady has always moved to the next town   

and you stumble on after Her.

The door in the wall leads to the garden   

where in the sunlight sit

the Graces in long Victorian dresses,   

of which my grandmother had spoken.

History sings in their faces.

They are young, they are obtainable,   

and you follow after them also

in the service of God and Truth.

But the Lady is indefinable,   

she will be the door in the wall   

to the garden in sunlight.   

I will go on talking forever.

I will never get there.

Oh Lady, remember me

who in Your service grows older   

not wiser, no more than before.

How can I die alone.

Where will I be then who am now alone,   

what groans so pathetically

in this room where I am alone?

I will go to the garden.

I will be a romantic. I will sell   

myself in hell,

in heaven also I will be.

In my mind I see the door,

I see the sunlight before me across the floor   

beckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt

moves small beyond it.

(via Poetry Magazine)

Another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean...

 '. . . she’d been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliancies. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable.

And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn't sure she hadn't loved him with a love she hadn't seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea.' --Marguerite Duras

Most people would have said I was too young, when I encountered The Lover, to read a book like this. I was twelve, thirteen maybe. The slim volume slept at the foot of my narrow bed with a pile of other books. I read it until the cover fell off. That was the year I had gone away to boarding school. About a year after, I watched the film. My interior was ravaged again by sharp hunger--so strong was my desire and fascination and revulsion that the awakening didn't happen once, but over and over. One bird taking off again and again within in me. When no one was around, I watched the film, speeding up to the shot of the slim leg propped on a ship railing, to the shadowed room of sex and street sounds.

In college, I brought in the passage above, the one about Chopin. (You, the bird-who-flew-into-a-window, brought in--do you remember?--Bukowski, of all things.) Now, a lifetime and several countries past those days when my toes brushed the tattered pages as I slept, I have gone hunting the book down again. On a panel earlier this week, May-Lee mentioned L'Amant, and this afternoon I pulled my copy (a new one, with a cover still attached) down from the shelf, turned to this page, and underlined the lines again, which begin: 'Another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean, night had begun as before and in the lounge on the main deck there was a sudden burst of music, a Chopin waltz which she knew secretly, personally . . .'

Lines for identifying the vanished

I have been under the trees. Before that I reheated yesterday's stew. With a friend, there was a mention again of that plane that vanished. I am deciding that vanish is an indrawn breath. Inside what body is that plane now and can you tell me what the ceiling is made of there. I'd like to know the landscape of such a place. Now, I've had more wine, more trees. I've remembered something my father once taught me about women and men a long time ago. It was a hard and amaranthine lesson about respect and friendship and despair, and he did not intend to teach it.  I exhaled the memory, watched it rise into a heartbreak of contrails that broke the amaranthine sky.

That Crazed Girl

That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea'

--Yeats