Trieste

Twist an anchor so it doesn't end up where lost things go: in the vine without a machete; a lexicon with no syllables; an illusion of reputation. What treasure do we dream charged on the other side, changed by the crossing? And below, water going in some other direction while the sun beats the street, this sea of my prayer. In the distance a silent pond flashes like an astonished remnant of madness: almost this and nothing more. All I need is that old anguish again, an eve of thinking about nothing. There are too many minutes in the margin, in the face, in the suburban street. Yesterday things in the grass, unknown things with no hands or lips, frightened this ardent man. Dust becomes my village. These clouds are like mountains.

 

Bristol

You must, he said with authority, you must write a story as if you're speaking hurriedly and urgently on the telephone to your father, mother, brother, or sister. Breathless, panting almost, you can't stop to make any changes, to cross anything out, or add anything in, not the color of the eyes and if they match the sweater, not the brightness of the stars. Go, quick. But before you start this recitation of events – of joys or horrors or some combination of them, imagined or real – you must have in mind a character to whom this occurs and a place where it unfolds. He repeated then for emphasis: where did these events occur and to whom did they occur and maybe at the end, he conjectured now, less authoritative than when he started, we'll arrive at why or some ambiguous indication of a possible explanation, that's the modern way, he added, almost parenthetically. There will be an end for there will inevitably be a beginning and if there is a beginning and if there will be an end then when that end arrives a middle will be decipherable, knowable, or, at the very least, locatable. The reader can look back, he asserted, but would the reader do so, he then asked, if your narrative has sufficient forward propulsion: call it, suspense? Remember, you're breathless, excited, and this is urgent. This is urgent, he repeated and thus dulled our sense of its potential urgency. The writer must look forward, he continued, but vision will be limited for time and not grandfather time, but time as a punishing and most unmerciful God, always imposes itself. For example, today you have only ten minutes to relate these events that take place in a specific location to characters you must by now have some inkling of in your artless minds. And so, you must now commence. Pull at the weeds, he challenged us, and he pledged to grade our work severely.

 

Vienna

He saw himself in the ornament looking out at the surrounding tree. It had been painted silver by his wife and his hair, too, was silver and so hard to see in the orb. There were green lines about it, mimicking the pine garland that led up the stairs. She came down and saw from a distance that the ornament had not been secured tightly enough, hook to branch, that it was too far back. He sat off to the side, quietly, his head cupped in his hands and his elbows on his knees. She reached out and tried to fix the ornament without disturbing any of the others: the red ones, the blue ones, and the gold ones. He reached out for her hand and she felt something then, some nuisance, and swatted it away. She then got a better grip on the silver ball balanced in the palms of both hands now free from all nuisance but then stumbled slightly as she leaned forward to tighten the hook with the fingers of her right hand. She squeezed the object then as if to use its airiness as counter balance for her motion forward, but instead of providing needed equilibrium it broke in her hand and her blood dripped on to the brightly wrapped gifts at her feet. He then went into the kitchen for a towel and some cortisone ointment. He would dab at her hand. He would clear the festive gifts of his wife's blood. He knew one gift must be his — at least, one must be his, and now that the hand-painted orb had broken and he had left for the kitchen she would no longer see him there, reflected in her handicraft, though he did not know what this would mean. When he returned from the kitchen with the towel and the cortisone ointment the tree, too, had fallen. It had fallen on its side and rolled toward the door and the door was now slightly open and cold wind entered the room, chilled it some. It had fallen toward the door and away from his wife who sat cross-legged holding her bleeding hand and singing the second verse of "Faith of Our Fathers". He hated that hymn, especially its second verse. He sat down and put the ointment on his own hands and wiped his hands clean with the kitchen towel. He felt betrayed. He stepped over the tree, opened the door wide, and walked into the garage where he found her red paisley scarf on the cracked cement. He bent down, picked it up, inhaled its residual fragrance and then went to his band saw and cut the scarf into very, very tiny pieces that reminded him of something else. The following week he warned his analyst not to make too much of this.

 

Amsterdam

Darkness and damp have cut the city's population into half its high season size and, for a moment, gauzy snow covers the barren patches of a near-empty park. Then the quiet breaks: a merchant rattles up the grate that guards his place, snug in the façade of a former prison, metamorphosed into flats and cafes and shops. I am at home on a steel black footbridge. Here and now I daydream of another possible life. I read late last night in Het Parool: "one-third of all conversations that last at least five minutes involve at least one lie." A tour boat passes; a small dog barks, about to leap out of its basket; a man dressed in black stands by the weather-beaten kiosk trying to keep out of the rain.

 

Hartford

His house is empty when he arrives – empty and quiet and large. Perhaps, it is too large for one man and one woman. From the window of his study he can look toward the town he travels to each morning and returns from each night. It is winter and the slope of his yard, so green six months ago, is now awash in white, patterned slightly by the paws of the neighbor's cat. Of the garden nothing remains but the dried out sticks of roses trimmed low to the ground and protruding some above the snow. He sits in his study and thinks of the green of May and red of June. He awaits the return of his wife and the start of his dinner, hearty, he hopes, and hot. He dreams the sound of her feet upon the stairs, but realizes that if he has fallen asleep he is now awake for she has entered his room. He smiles, stretches forth his hands, hands that she steps forward and holds. He remembers how he used to write to her when he went to distant places such as Greensboro and she stayed here at home to guard the fort, as they used to joke. She pulls slightly and he stands, shaky at first; yet, recalling the hikes he took last spring.

 

Oslo

A treatise of this kind is exasperating, a turning away from originality. Two moments within the so-called "narrow sounds" highlight an important (and wholly creditable) contact with skeptical notions of rationalism. It is remarkable that the road to illusion offers walnut instead of pine. The fundamental nature of internal tension reintroduces narration with an impulse to interrogate the performance. What must be emphasized has become increasingly a tool far beyond a minor plea for debate. Thought is, first of all, temporary. We must arrive at the price one hour illustrates, if only to sort varieties of what can be called discontinuous features of fiction that abolish the relationship between the intangibility of the fragmented and the invariably emancipating attack on the unity of historical struggle itself. There is no doubt that conflict is the price of a long-term process of laboring to restore agents entangled in their position of a reluctant brood. Subversion of the self-conscious is the subject of those works structured around the inclusion of devices that have been satisfying to the most authoritarian personalities. The truth is so utterly within the limits of conventional plot that the rejection of feral combinations clarifies the narrative line and would maintain anger in such revelations. It accepts real disaster. The incorporation of materials, the bringing together of constructions efface the performances closely related to the death of words. Compare this statement to that created in the pistol used to create the most obsolete letters. Earlier the narrative dreamed of full presence, of maneuvering and recurring themes counted on curious fingers mediated by interpretations from other quarters.

 

Durban

All my thoughts and recollections languish in a purple room. It is not the purple of royalty. It is not the purple painters use to imagine a color that nowhere exists on the horizon at sunset. There is no escape from this purple, nor from my sweater with so many holes. The blue sky has been perforated by white clouds. Out there on the other side of the wall there is no purple. Birds cluster tight-knit in trees: white birds and blue birds in green trees. There is no purple. And the sea has so many fish, but of that tinge not one. All of this purple in here is a chain, a barred window – my only window. My sweater is purple, too. It does not have enough holes. If it had more, then perhaps I could … maybe … or, perhaps, not. This room and its garish walls stipulate that you must remain on the other side. In the market square shopping for parrots, shopping for paint. May the cry of the animal at my feet reach those cobbled streets; may it take your hand.

 

Jakarta

What notice have the trees taken of me? Do they grow upward and out somehow affected by the fact that daily beneath them I have walked? It's not a matter of temperance, but a disciplined practice to walk under these trees so much of the time. Some are tolerable, but most are little tortures for me: prickly and squat in the all day mid-day sun. The wind that occasionally stirs such still air never turns to prophecy, but only certifies a despair that rises in humid steam up from the barren soil and then disperses like so many flies fleeing the glue strip that would trap them. The broken arm of their branches betrays my alarm at the shrinking of the sticks that prop up this head I carry about upon my proud shoulders. Style is the denial of expression and the bright colors of your gown silence me, the repetitious shade of all this green clamps this sullen jaw. I have been reluctant to call out and shout at the roots of these trees, to gain their respect by well-timed violence. It is a conflict, a struggle to remain here. I used to like Hart Crane. Now beneath these trees, upon this soil I see myself, and all my poetry.

 

New York

There were three of us in the main office: April, Bill, and me. The three of us differed so much from one another that when it came time to make a selection we could never reach a consensus. We always like that which is closest to ourselves, and so we would select nothing from the hundreds of manuscripts submitted to us. This is no way to run a publishing house.

I like romances. I write them occasionally, too, real bodice rippers. Those books you see at the checkout in the supermarket or airport pharmacies, those books with women swooning on the cover, swooning right into the arms of a stalwart and muscled man.

Bill was a little skinny guy who loved ghostwritten works by former sports stars. If the star had fallen, if he had an addiction to overcome or a battered wife who refused to forgive him, then Bill would argue with especial vehemence for the book. The fatter the manuscript, the more he seemed to like it. Sometimes he'd come into an editorial meeting and – he was such a puny guy – we couldn't see him slumped behind his huge pile of my life in sports manuscripts. Quite frankly, I couldn't understand how he could tell them apart.

April reads deeply in history, too deeply. So deeply, in fact, that she has little understanding of the present world or, more importantly, the current book market. Gibbon, Edward Gibbon of all people is her favorite author.

But then one day last spring at a most unpromising meeting Bill, half hidden behind his mound of pitches, let drop his bomb. We laughed at first and the laughter alleviated the shock, but it did not do much to dispel the sense of gloom that immediately settled about the room. Bill was dying. Terminal. Period. The end. That's it, he said.

Several weeks after his death, I found a sealed, unmarked envelope pushed back deep into the top drawer of my desk by some other papers, paper clips, and the general office detritus of several weeks work on romance novels, both mine and others'. It was a letter from Bill that he must have placed in my drawer during his last week in the office, that last week during which he looked so awful, so like he hovered above the open pit. "The perception that things change fast persists," he began, "even as the chill wind of mortality blows me about these midtown canyons of industry, April." I read no further for I realized that in his delirium he must have placed a note for April in my desk. Perhaps, I thought, he had also placed a note for me in her desk. A case of mistaken notes, then, but what was there to be done about it?

I hate April. The small rent in our professional facades evoked by Bill's imminent mortality further increased the distance between us. We vied for something new, but in the same old hurtful way. I rode home that night shadowed by questions I could not answer. Should I give the note to April? Is there a note for me? If there is one, why hasn't April given it to me? The note in my desk got lost inadvertently in a morass of memos and other papers. What excuse does she have?

I decided to burn that note from Bill to April. Clearly, that was wrong of me. But I didn't read it. I'll say that in my defense. I didn't read it before lighting it with a match, holding it and twirling it for a moment in my dark apartment before letting it fall into an otherwise empty ashtray.

The train's plunge into the tunnel under the Hudson River the next morning seemed oddly deeper and darker than it had the night before. Weighed down with sadness, unsettled by an inchoate sense of shame, and troubled by the possible consequences of what I had done, I wondered what my obligations to April had now become. For some reason my secret and violent action made me feel closer to April, indebted in some sense to her for something that I couldn't quite explain and still can't.

I told April what I had done. She told me that there was indeed a letter for me, that it was in her drawer that she had found it, that she had kept it in her purse for a day or two and then she had burned it. Bill had brought us together, history and romance. I think we were both relieved.

 

Here

All facts are fables: this secret passes such minor streams impatient to move faster. Every theory disappears in the Bureau of Statistics, neither here nor there. I imagine a form that at crossroads becomes the sun itself. I know, light is desire and things fall so fast that the sound of falling thrills our prospecting hands. The heather blows, a wind perhaps was always waiting. In any event, after breakfast – so soundlessly – a little boy hangs up the telephone; I dream the waves ashore, those tribes of lunar beauty, and I cry out once more for those leaves that bring us so many melodies in the heavy arms of air.

 

copyright © Dennis Barone, 2004.

Dennis Barone is the author of several books in the USA: Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); The Returns (fiction, Sun & Moon, 1996); Echoes (fiction, Potes & Poets, 1997); Separate Objects: Selected Poems (Left Hand Books, 1998); Temple of the Rat (fiction, Left Hand Books, 2000); The Disguise of Events (prose poems, Quale Press, 2002); Walking Backwards (fiction, Quale Press, 2002). Avec Books of Penngrove, California, have just published his collection of short prose, The Walls of Circumstance, in their Pivotal Prose series. He is Professor of English at St Joseph College, West Hartford, Connecticut.