On Seeing the Country
By Emily Conner
Mammoth Caves, KY
We would crawl down into these holes in the ground when we were kids, the guide says, explore the caves all summer long. He bellows down the aisle and steadies himself against the lurching tour bus. White-nose syndrome has been a problem for the local bats, he says, and the bus shudders to a stop. You take this chance to record his accent in your handmade journal, then follow the vacating mass to a bleach mat meant to disinfect your soles.
It’s hot. The vines are everywhere. You pass through a hole in a massive rockface.
On the descent, everyone pauses at a massive stalactite formation. People from other countries, people from four states over, even the rowdy children: all humans acknowledging what’s special. You try to understand something even more special, something about the history of this cave tour, how slaves were the first guides, how this particular curve in the trail is recent, funded by a grant from a coal mining company. But all that’s on the website, and you can’t imagine how to describe these colors in any but the most obvious ways.
At the bottom, the guide calls this the largest hall in the longest underground cave known to man. Couples take selfies on benches, kids hang wildly from grandparents’ arms, and you perch at the edge of the group. Have you ever seen complete darkness, the guide says, and together everyone imagines their darkest moment. He says, I will show you complete darkness, and the ceiling lights blink off and the path lights go invisible, and three, two, one, the last light goes out and it’s blackness. A thick underwater darkness. Your eyeballs are suddenly huge. You can hear them moving inside your head, feel them rub against the pink inside of their sockets as they roll left, right, up, out, straining, with no satisfaction, no result, blinking at the wind from someone’s breath.
And then the guide lights a small wooden match whose tip fills the whole room, the ceiling and cave walls, limestone swirls, the knees of all the people on this national park vacation tour: everything is lit, and everyone gasps at the breath of one tiny light, which the guide brings to a tea candle, unbelievably small and bright. Unbelievable. Everyone is thinking it.
Back above ground, the driver waits in the bus, idling loud, a/c blasting. It’s hot and the sun glares. The children yell and chase one another, and the adults slowly corral them. You linger by some trees, watching the scene with your fountain pen in hand. A rabble of butterflies fucks on some rot nearby. The sentence, as it forms on the page, comforts you.
A Trans Landscape Elegy
By Nathan Erwin
for L
i. Good morning, little Lithosphere.
Wake up, it’s a cool air slippage kind-of-day. Coriolis wind
deflects the god of AA meetings & rushes into the foyer
as you leave for school.
Your mother is still refusing to look at your body, to say your true names.
In the Chemung Valley, where she carried you to term, the wind comes westward,
falls on the rich-pastured earth, wraps the beeches and their loamy soil
with a woodland roar.
Brother, this is a silent holy war. Your mother insists
you are just like her – in body, embodying, in topography, you must grow food
just like her – raise beds, raise bees, reduce runoff. Wake up, all of you:
a fifteen-your-old boy who set his mother’s house on fire. She has you.
Unwind your breath.
Now she doesn’t.
She has you. No, she doesn’t.
ii. Good twilight, little Lithosphere.
Wake our old, stoned father resting where the crust is the thickest,
his body has grown some thirty miles deep.
Sigh in a high tenor,
Difference lets you see.
See.
See. Chanting again and again, so he hears you.
There are a number of things you are in need of
locked behind your bedroom door, so head home.
Like a lost cartographer, orient your map to the landscape, line up
fir behind fir,
the storyline of early dark. Did you know even the Tundra Swan pushes its neck
toward human vestiges, toward shelter?
Get home. Find the room where it’s raining in the corner,
with the ritual scroll for birth:
shower in warm milk and herbs, wash your face in burning birchbark.
That’s how
the fire starts,
just as Spring breaks open,
just as your mother walks in.
Creation Story
By Nathan Erwin
Albuquerque, NM
In the Monzano Mountains, a billy goat
is trying to fuck his mother.
I place the kid
in a separate pen,
while an electromagnetic sky
forges blue warnings somewhere beyond
the divisions of time. And I am afraid
to place my pain on the table
beside the squash & the steaming meat, afraid
of touching the bloody tool of regulation. Sometimes,
I let the kid inside the house.
I asked my mother, do you want to stop
revolving? To break through
the great snowbank of the Milky Way
and starve in the open desert beyond?
This sandstorm is her response.
This wind is inside the goat, inside the soft laws
of nations. There are no necks to break
between us. I open the gate
and lead him back home.
Down in the South Valley,
sands swallow this sprawling desert city.
95 Theses
By Hannah Matheson
I am always embarrassed to be telling this story.
When I tell this story, I am always embarrassed.
I am always embarrassed;
I am always telling this story.
My boyfriend pointed that out once, the cockled ulna of this narrative that elbows its way to the front, jovial crowd be damned.
We had gotten beers for my birthday.
Day off, late afternoon, before dinner.
Maybe I had had too many.“We were just having a nice day with my sister,” he said, “it was weird.”
I don’t think I disagree with that. So I couldn’t figure out why it hurt me.Let’s put aside the subtext of selfishness. The premise, acknowledged, might have looked like “non-sequitur = irrelevance.”
But clearly we had different starting places. Because to talk about relevance, he would have to know — they would all have to make themselves capable of recognizing — that even when I don’t narrate it, the story is told.
The story tells itself. Remember:
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
This word cannot be understood as the sacrament of penance, because of course the soul itself does not repent.
We make of the mind a hot place
(a conflagration)
then roast the soul upon repentance like meat on a spit. (Constantly revolving; relevant.)
Bleeding heart, that other man had called me. Might as well have said, little lamb. Those were not my name — though I turned at the sound they made. (Constantly revolving, my back-glancing face a repeated decimal. A beckoning.)
So I can admit that there’s awkwardness, delicacy, to the things I say. That I do not need to say them all the time, to everyone.
And if we look at salvation as a blueprint, you might take martyrdom seriously. Not seek it out, per se — but listen to the creak of a son felled, and come to love the groan of that giving tree. And the songs sung at the sky after. The water cycle of willingness.
Like, my whole life, I thought I would be saved from suffering by outsmarting separation. I thought I could win everyone over through goodness. I thought, if I endure this pain with grace and kindness and resilience and forgiveness, someone will see it and think, wow, she’s good, and then they’d want me, and nothing would hurt.I didn’t know I thought this.
Once I realized I thought this, it seemed as if I had played a part. I was not honest. And why would a liar deserve a bail out?
And even if my charade had won love, that love wouldn’t have been for me.
And so relief could only come from goodness, from turning your heart good. (Constantly turning; forging the soul in flames to reverse its forgery, its transparent desire.)
And so you had to suffer. You had to suffer to not suffer anymore.
And so whether or not I knew it, I understood that telling was a kind of selfishness, a greed.But I got confused.
And to understand better I spoke, so that I could be spoken to.
(Mortification of the flesh requires a public; the audience was already there, and louder than me.
(That might not be true. I went crazy, sometimes, in the silence of no one addressing me. Eating cabot cheese slices at midnight; sweating in my polyester sheets; waking at 2pm, after the house had been empty for hours, when my room clogged with afternoon sun and the thick pulse of cricket scratch and beetle wings. (I mortified myself.)))All this contortionist logic; . Compulsive, acrobatic, what the brain will do with a thought. Wiggling the loose tooth of it till it breaks, the psyche like a socket pooling blood from the root.
Eventually, I had to agree with me on this: a secret kept to the self does no good.
A secret even and especially keeps itself from you. After all, no one can confirm what it is you think you know. Your secret is secret to you. Seeing as you’re outside your secret, the self has evicted you.
A secret, then, is privacy.
When I am private, I am godless,
entirely alone.
That summer, he gave me a secret — what he took from me was private.
When I am godless, I am just a girl, no greater than the sum of my parts.
My private parts, people say. Isn’t that awful?
For logistical reasons, a just society requires proof.
Lacking evidence, we only have hearsay and plain sight.
And you can understand how it looks.
How it looks convinces me I am secretive. How can I explain what happened and admit that afterward I still thought of his hair sweat-curled to his forehead, how when he laughed deep the force threw his head back till the base of his skull touched the top of his spine?
Impossible to omit me.
How can I explain what happened when half of what happened I don’t remember?
The bottle, the darkness, the bed I left next morning omit me.
I was a whole half of it. Ergo
A secret is a crime one does to oneself, because.
I said, “I feel like I told you my boundaries and you’re not listening.”
He said, “It sounds like you’re enjoying yourself, and you just like changing the rules.”
This shocked me so much that I remember it, so I doubt I took what I said back.
(I doubt.
I took.
I said.
I went back.)Even if I didn’t recant, what would you call the fact that I kept kissing him? A bargain? A second draft?
God and I share such few lines, but here’s one we both know.
I’d like to start over now.Let’s begin again here: “I am always embarrassed to be telling this story.”
This is a social calculus.
Once I’ve demonstrated self-awareness of my faux pas (foisting discomfort, insisting on recursion, conceding to solipsism), I may proceed to the telling.I give disclaimers because it’s in my nature.
I give disclaimers because I am a good student. I have learned the circumlocutions of the guilty subject.
I give disclaimers because it’s more than he gave me.
Though there were signs.
In those days my gut was faulty. It misfired. Or, it fired all the time. You know the consumer’s dilemma? Where you’re paralyzed by indecision because you have infinite options and scant means of differentiation? It was a little like that — when every man made me uneasy, one was as good as the next. As low as the upcoming, the former. Take-it-or-leave-it not to be left.
Long story short, the lion’s den didn’t look so bad.
Or everywhere looked bad so what’s the difference.
Maybe my vision wasn’t quite right.
But –
It wasn’t easy being easy.
I never made it easy.
All those hairpin turns — letting hands get below my waistband before saying no, thank you, no.
His bedroom toggled between mouthfuls of Jim Beam and my mouth, full of excuses.
His choreography of reversals easily rescinded sweetness.
In this way, reality was a series of switchbacks.
I became suspicious of myself.
For example, why am I still talking about this?
Did anyone even ask?
Either I’m right that he hurt me, or he’s right that I’m emotionally dishonest.
This is my deepest shame:
Sadness is useful.
A little engine that runs on recriminations is nothing if no one hurts her first.
In high school, I became obsessed with Mary Ruefle’s poetics, how she articulates the immaculate conception of the moment. “We can go back to a nanosecond before the beginning,” she prefaces the clusterfuck of temporality…
One of the biggest problems with blame is that if I met me I’m not sure I’d like me either. The other is that I can’t decide if there is free will.
Often causality, like time, amounts to the epistemology of a wormhole.
“We can go back to a nanosecond before the beginning, before the universe burst into being, but we can’t go back to the precise beginning because that would precede knowledge, and we can’t ‘know’ anything before ‘knowing’ itself was born.”He began, my everlasting instant. Out of silent night, from stuttering obsidian, came the red breach of dawn, its speaking, irrevocable tongue raining light.
For him, what was the catalyst? What ferrous knowledge bloomed that licensed him to transgress? What makes a beginning begin?
It began badly. It didn’t end, because we never began. It began me. I started. I keep stopping. I can’t stop starting.
In college I wrote, “Eve’s water-
ing mouth pre-
meditating the fruit
she’d never tasted.
how can craving
come first? sometimes
a cell encircles thirst
and that is the only
answer your god
will give you.”You can’t develop your palette without encountering a flavor. What I mean is — we’re never going to know what really happened. God made appetite, right? I’ve just always been suspicious that she knew to want it.
Believers would probably say, “Well, that’s where the serpent comes in.”
That’s true. There was a serpent. Between you and love must inevitably lie a translator, a cartilaginous intermediary, who turns all facts to sibilance, slippage.
Facts: the fruit was poison, but it was I who reached for it.
Ok, but he wasn’t fruit. He was a man who made choices with his real, unmetaphorical hands that grasped my ankles when I tried to pull my legs away.
He stopped. For others, he didn’t stop.
Fuck apples. Fuck him.
Fuck the whole muthafucking thing.
I read Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up” the June after this man happened. In a subversion of Adam naming the animals, the speaker curses every identifiable phenomenon, every government and species, each earthly thing — even the tomatoes. He damns all but his beloved in an attempt to undo his loss. Raze the broken world, raze yourself, and clear the way for the antidote of your longing to return to you via that bulldozed corridor.Surprise, surprise! I took away the wrong thing. And I told myself this: that the soul still sings its diluvial song, that love is a kind of fury.
That love was a kind of fugue state. I cannot forgive myself for what I can’t figure out.
Instead I grow grateful for abstractions: their cotton-mouthed comprehension, their side-stepping mercy.
Hunger is an irrational number.
The brain is a bad computer when it comes to the irreducible, interminable.
An equation is a perpetual state of asking. An eroteme pries open a sentence that wanted to be over and done.
For example, I had a dream that I saw him back on campus (though he’s banned) and I smiled at him, reflexively. I wanted him to smile back. Even in my dream, after all this rearrangement, raising funds for self-worth to be more properly angry. And then, in this dream, where I must have invited him in, I spent the whole oneiric opportunity positioning myself oblique to the conversation to place him in my peripherals; so that I could not be seen transparently trying to see if he were looking at me. I woke up and felt
— I don’t know what I felt. Fraudulent. Defrauded.Indignation is the ashed end of a long-burning loneliness. When it falls away, I am a child asking
what did I do to make you treat me this way?
I wanted to be a sophisticate, but I’m as predictable as the rest.
I don’t trust anyone to love me.
I’m horribly demanding. I ask everyone to love me.
A serpent knows how to answer a question such as this.
It was my fault for asking, for having to ask.
Guests of the Nation
By Peter Mladinic
L, a poet, was married to a poet,
more recognized but not as good as she.
We rendezvoused at the beach one day,
and after a few hours
she followed me to my parents’ house,
not close but not terribly far from the beach.
An early summer night.
My mother laid out a meal of cold cuts:
ham, salami, baloney,
cheeses and bread. A light supper.
L was preoccupied, worried really.
Her car was low on gas and the latch
to her tank wouldn’t open.
The talk was all L’s predicament
at the table in the dining area
back from the kitchen.
Two windows faced a back yard.
Light came through the windows as L
ate a little and worried so her trouble
became my parents’ more so than mine.
My father got some device, not a crowbar
or anything, to damage her tank.
Out front of the house my father worked
the device, my mother looking over his
shoulder, L also looking, and I detached,
but out in the street as they were.
Finally he pried open the latch.
L followed me in my car to the nearest
gas station, then a few miles to a circle
where she got onto a highway
that led towards her parents’ home
where she’d been staying, while her poet
husband was off on a series of readings.
Not too long after this latch incident L
died in an auto accident, a one-car fatality.
She hit a tree. A few years later my
parents died, my mother at the start of the year,
my father at the end. I was teaching
Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation.”
Bonaparte narrates the story.
Like Belcher and Hawkins, prisoners
suddenly executed, lifeless in a bog,
L and my parents, so intent
to get the latch opened, know all
about everything, everything or nothing.
Bike Rider
By Kenneth Pobo
When Harold Fizzlebotts rides
his bike to town, always taking
the same streets, he’s perplexed
on Tuesday when the final street
leads not to the Dollar Store
but to Heaven, a nervous place
like rapids before a waterfall. Angels
slide over the edge,
wings soaking wet.
On the shore Harold talks with
a decaying tree
limb which fell off in a storm--now
it remembers better days.
Harold remembers better days too.
Like when he flew balsa planes
in his back yard. By the time he
turned thirteen, those planes had
flown off or died in terrible
waste baskets. Sometimes he dreams
of Heaven—a sound of a badminton
birdie sailing over the net.
The Magical Mr. Mistoffelees
By Emily Neuberger
“Watch me,” my brother said, and began to turn.
During the lull between the understudy run-through and tonight’s performance, he’d snuck in another rehearsal in the theater basement. He had hardly enough space to avoid knocking his ankle on the washing machines. After turn sixteen, he tried to add arms for flair and fell out.
I brushed the dust off my rehearsal tights. “We need to eat.”
James shook his head. “I don’t have time.” He bent his knees in a deep fourth-position plié, already prepping to go again. I slid into a split for the pleasure of the stretch before standing.
“You nailed it in rehearsal today. Let’s go.”
“We’ll never land principal contracts if we aren’t consistent,” James said. “You want to be an understudy forever?” His voice bounced off different parts of the wall as he spun.
He was baiting me, but I needed dinner, not an argument, and James’s bonus rehearsal had already swallowed most of my break.
In the last few weeks, his rehearsing had advanced from disciplined to compulsive. This wasn’t the first meal he’d worked through. He’d been losing weight and snapped when I reminded him that part of his job was fitting his costume. Well, he could ruin his own dinner, but he wasn’t taking mine.
I had to hurry. My makeup took me half an hour. I didn’t perform most nights, but I still had to wear the full feline face paint. I felt like a kid grounded on Halloween. While James was a true understudy, performing every night in the ensemble and covering a principal role, I was a swing. I covered the ensemble, and waited backstage ready, in case any of the female dancers were injured mid-show. My eye for choreography landed me the gig covering eight different tracks. No matter what occurred inside or outside of the theater, the show must, must go on.
That night, elly had a migraine, so I was performing. I rushed out to grab dinner before getting dressed. This morning’s snow had turned to putty-colored slush, and I jumped to clear a wide puddle. The neighborhood was swollen with Christmastime tourists. On the corner, a man sold New Year’s glasses, the eyes made of the two nines of the approaching decade. It was surreal to see people celebrate the passage of time. Inside our theater, the men rehearsed to cover the gaps of those who wouldn’t see January.
My parents were finally venturing into the city for the show tomorrow. I’d had to beg to get them to come, and only the bargain of comped Christmas-week Broadway tickets could draw them out of Edgewater. They’d never seen any of James’s performances, only mine. They didn’t even pay for his classes; he’d caught my teacher’s eye while spending his afternoons following along in the waiting room. Talented boys with the drive were so rare, she taught him for free.
The line at the deli was long. Serves James right if he doesn’t eat, I thought. Let him pass out during the Jellicle Ball. I couldn’t do everything for him. But then it was my turn at the counter. “Two tunas, please, rye.”
*
The marquee glowed over the line of tourists with their disposable cameras and scarves wrapped around their necks, smiling under the photos of us leaping in cat costumes. All throughout midtown, storefronts boasted twinkling lights and red bows, and bars enticed people with hot toddies or eggnog. We’d sold out nine shows a week. The other day, Rob, one of the male swings, had heard a scalper offering three hundred for orchestra seats. I shouldered through the line of hopefuls begging for last-minute cancellations outside the box office and opened the stage door. Several of them gasped and pointed at me like I was somebody special.
Inside, I initialed the sign-in sheet twice. JC, JC, Jules and James Carmichael. He never remembered to sign in. James was eighteen, just one year younger than me, though it felt like more. All my life he’d followed me, first into dance classes, then auditions, and now, here, to our first major gig. I think both of us had expected it to be more fun. The mood inside the theater was far more somber than the one outside, and not only because our weekly show count rose from eight to nine between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. The brutality of the schedule meant injuries and colds and flu; I’d gone on more in these weeks than any other time of the year.
I’d been saving the overtime to move out of the apartment I shared with James in Hell’s Kitchen. I was sick of living so close to the theater, of talking only about dance, of him shaking me awake to go to a ballet class at eight o’clock in the morning. I wanted a place I could bring a boyfriend to, if I ever got one. January first, I’d move to a studio in the village. The lease was signed. I’d bought the previous tenant’s bed, dresser, and kitchen table. The only task left was to tell my brother.
I ducked into the male ensemble room to deliver James’s sandwich. He was swiping the white makeup over his neck. Most weeks he didn’t remember to buy groceries, much less launder his rehearsal clothes. All our lives, James had been like a little laser, focused only on his goals. When he was small, he’d dissolve into hysteria when things went wrong. It was my job to walk ahead of him, sweeping chaos out of the way.
His white t-shirt was so drenched that it was transparent. The pinkness of his cheeks looked wrong to me. My brother’s body was as familiar as my own, and the way he held his head was different, heavier than usual. I smoothed his hair, damp with sweat.
“Thanks, sis,” he said. We were built similarly, though our bodies presented different problems in our careers. I was too muscled for a ballerina, and he was too small to lift a woman over his head. We both inherited our mother’s tight Achilles tendons, and had to stretch them to avoid injury, though that was more of a problem for pointe work. Before I gave up the dream of classical ballet, I’d battled this genetic reality, vacillating between starving myself and purging, hoping in vain to shrink my muscles into sleek reedy limbs like Suzanne Farrell’s or the women of the Bolshoi. Broadway was more accepting, if only slightly.
The faces beside James in the mirror were drawn. Still, someone played music, and two of the dancers gyrated against the chairs, trying to make Frankie, the most serious in the bunch, laugh. But there was something forced about it which called to mind eating your vegetables; it was important, these days, to laugh.
Joan, who screeched out “Memory” every night, told me once that Broadway wasn’t what it used to be. “There’s a pall in the air, girl,” she said, waving her hand. I could almost see a cigarette there, though she wouldn’t let the smoke near her voice. “You missed how it used to be. The theater was a refuge. Now, it’s a warzone.”
*
I ate half my sandwich and then slipped on my wig cap. Normally Robert, the male swing, hung out backstage with me and we put on a cassette and danced around in our tights and wig caps like little bald aliens. But he was performing every night now that Lee was gone, and the producers hadn’t been able to replace Gabriel. Half the male dancers in town were doing seasonal contracts over at Radio City — and the other half were in the hospital or praying to stay out of it. Still, every night the bridge and tunnelers packed in, jubilant over our feline antics. I thought of them and their grubby kids infesting midtown and more than once wanted to spit during curtain call. It was obvious why we were such a hit. Cats glinted distractions before the eyes of those who did not wish to see. It was a balm of nothing —yet the something seeped through our walls like poisonous gas, smothering our dancers one by one. Still the audience paid to clap. The whiskers made us invisible; they let the audience enjoy watching men spin and twirl their glorious bodies without discomfort.
Once I squeezed into my lycra, I drifted down to the wings. The Winter Garden was one of the largest theaters on Broadway, and backstage was an ant farm, with hallways and staircases and little rooms tucked away, the cast and crew streaming like insects. I waited in the wings for a microphone, stepping aside to let Joan go ahead of me. Twenty years of Broadway earned her the right. The tech was wearing blue latex gloves. Joan presented the back of her neck to him, so he could tape down the wire, and caught my eyes. “War,” she mouthed.
My brother was stretching with Robert. It would be easier, I thought, to leave him with a boyfriend than an empty apartment. But he always said he didn’t have time. Last week, after we all went out for a post-show dinner, I’d pressed harder than usual. He just shook his head. “I have a chance at Mistoffelees once Neil’s contract’s up, Jules,” he’d said. “That’s my priority. I don’t have time for a boyfriend.” It seemed just as ridiculous now, as Robert’s dark eyes crinkled in laughter and, no matter where he looked, always returned to my brother’s face.
Sometimes, I wondered. I’d hear the door open late at night. Or I’d have to shake him awake in the morning, his body heavy with sleep. But he never offered an explanation, and in truth I did not want to know. I worried about him all day, I could not give him my sleep, though of course at times he took it anyway, while I lay awake, waiting for him to come home.
In the stairwell outside stage right, I used the railing as a barre. As they passed, the singers who danced murmured to “break a leg,” the dancers who sang said merde, ambling in their catsuits and wigs toward their places for the opening number.
I felt fingers tap the back of my neck as I balanced. Heat flushed my skin, and I smiled before turning to face him.
“Jules.” Neil, the dance captain, played the most difficult and lauded role in the show, the fouetté-turning Magical Mr. Mistoffelees. He had ascended at New York City Ballet as one of the last dancers selected by Balanchine himself. The master had choreographed a solo for Neil, only a member of the corps de ballet at the time, before he died. This granted Neil a mystique and respect around town: the father of American ballet’s last prophet.
“Neil.” I lost balance and looked up at him. He was dressed in black and white, his costume a glittering tuxedo. He had a good eight inches on me, and leaned against the railing, teeth gleaming. “Hey.”
James was Neil’s understudy, though he’d never performed the role. Neil was on a sabbatical from the ballet and credited ten years of twelve-hour days for his stamina. James aped his lifestyle from the weight training to the vile shakes – spinach, yogurt, blueberries, three raw eggs. Neil’s number concluded with a series of grand-jetés around the stage and twenty-four fouetté turns en lair, which he could turn into thirty by adding a triple pirouette every eight count. James had been rehearsing these turns every day for a year, and could do them almost every time now. But it didn’t matter, because Neil never called out of the show.
“You have such beautiful turnout.” He gripped my knee and moved it into second position, watching how my hip flexors adjusted to keep my pelvis straight. “Gorgeous.”
I blushed. “Thanks.”
“Did you tell him the news?” His thumb pressed on the inside of my thigh. “When’s the move-in date?”
I couldn’t believe he remembered. I held my relevé, eyes fixed on the wall opposite so he couldn’t read the giddiness there. “January.” My calf burned. “I haven’t told him yet. He’s going to be upset.” I pliéd to stretch out my Achilles.
He cupped my leg once more, his thumbs on the tender back of my knee, and rested my foot on his shoulder so I could stretch my hamstrings. I bent forward, his hand closing on my inner thigh. “Have you ever done a night rehearsal?”
I brought my foot down in an enveloppé and closed in fifth. “No.”
Neil eyed my flat fifth. I’d worked hard for my turnout and relished his eyes on my feet. “It’s magic. I rent a space on the twenty-fifth floor. You turn the lights down and dance with the city all around. Come with me tomorrow, after the show. Dance out the stress.”
Angie called two minutes. I couldn’t find my tongue to speak. He tapped my nose this time.
“Think about it.” He picked up his green protein shake, and I watched his quads and glutes moving as he sauntered off.
*
The overture twinkled on. I entered from the back of the house, leaping through the aisles. The tourists turned their heads, the shyer slumping into their seats. I always chose these people to hiss at, baring my teeth like I had rabies. James and I passed each other on stage crosses. He grinned, his back convex in a gorgeous curve, thighs twitching up as he bent his knees. My parents were fools to have skipped all their chances to watch him. They acted like the suggestion was obscene. I did not know a greater pleasure than dancing together. So much of life, he drove me nuts, but when we danced, we were one person, as though we had originated as one embryo. Every time we performed together, I felt a pulse of wonder. It had come true.
The choreography in the ten-minute Jellicle Ball punished. Even after all this time, I reached the three-quarter mark wondering whether I could finish. My fur leg warmers burned on my calves, I could feel the sweat pooling underneath. I hit my mark, my brain a step ahead of my body, sorting through different tracks I covered. If I mis-stepped, I’d bang right into someone onstage, causing havoc or even injury. But my body recognized the symmetry of the choreography, the way the crosses completed the stage picture. The movements came to me then, and I smiled, my muscles singing even as they screamed.
Dance was different from other art forms. Sometimes we were mere puppets — ask any of those Radio City dancers. But an Alvin Ailey soloist wasn’t only someone’s paintbrush, they were also the painter. Their bodies were their art, and the choreography was the instrument through which it flowed. We, the cats, were somewhere in the middle. Once we got to the middle of the ball, I felt my soul lighten and lift. My fatigue melted away as we jetéd, battemented, pirouetted as one. Slowly, finger by finger, limb by limb, I ceased to exist.
During Act II, Neil executed his solo beautifully as ever, and by his eighth turn, the audience began to cheer. I crouched on the stage, watching. His black and white costume glittered rainbow under the lights. My compact form meant I was a better turner than most, but even I couldn’t help drifting six inches or more when I fouettéd. Neil might have been nailed to the ground, only I could see his standing foot rotating on the spot. When at last he leapt out of the turns, his grin was real, as if he was relieved, even after executing this perfectly over four-hundred times, that he hadn’t fallen out of his turns. Or else he was just enjoying the cheers thundering through the house.
*
My disdain for the audience did not dam the adrenaline that came with every curtain call. After the lights dimmed, we ran backstage. James gripped my shoulders and pushed off, leaping through the dark.
“Meow!” he cried, then spun around, throwing his head back and kicking his leg. I laughed, though the post-show glow ebbed faster than usual. I needed to tell James about my move. But he was impossible to talk to in this state, like a helium balloon that kept rising to the ceiling.
As he passed me, Neil squeezed my shoulder in praise, but left before I’d recovered enough to speak. The air was humid with dancers’ sweat. I unsnapped the shoulders of my costume and pulled it down around my waist. The cool air rushed over my fevered skin. James did the same, his chest glistening, dappled with red, and when Robert joined us backstage, James leapt on him and pulled off his costume, too. I watched Robert smile, his eyes shifting over James’ face, trying to read through the exuberance as my brother’s fingers brushed his skin.
Our spirits soared as we raced up the stairs to our dressing rooms. James crawled up like a cat, then jetéd through the hallway, turning back, his chest rosy against the white paint on his neck.
“Sexual cats, prostatical cats, backstagical cats, erectical cats, fellacical cats…!”
James put one leg on his chair, waving his hands in the air like claws. He was sweating so badly that his neck makeup ran. He dropped into his chair, gasping, then tugged at his wig, one of the pins sticking. “Help,” he whined.
“If you do me next,” I said. The wigs were the worst part of the costume. They were hotter than wool caps.
My heart was still pounding, even minutes after the show. I had never betrayed my brother before, and I knew he’d see my move as just that. In one more day, I reminded myself, I’d be in a studio with Neil, his hands on my body. I just had to tell him first.
I began to unpin James, brushing the back of his neck. My fingers came away moist and too hot. He was feverish.
As I removed the wig, I saw his neck, skin swollen and puffy beneath his ears, round as Christmas baubles. My mouth went dry. He’d been sitting for several minutes now but the flush on his chest did not dissipate.
He was still whispering the dirty version of the opening number under his breath. I said his name. But Robert caught my wrist and grasped, hard. I looked at him. He was pale, staring at my brother’s lymph nodes. Slowly, he shook his head, eyes flicking to the other boys in the room. I looked in the mirror at James, who was still smiling to himself, high on his performance.
*
Once we were alone, I asked when he had found out. James kept his eyes on his feet to avoid me. People passed us on the dark sidewalk, heads bent against the cold, but they were nightmarish figures, unreal, I did not care that my voice was loud with hysteria. I asked him who. I named names. Still he kept walking. How could this even happen? James was young, immature, but was he so careless? All at once I was overcome by the same frustration I felt when I washed his clothes or bought him dinner, intensified now into fury. I should not have had to tell him to use protection. I shouldn’t have to tell him to get tested.
I caught his wrist, afraid of being left behind on the sidewalk. Questions bottlenecked in my brain, until I could not speak at all. It didn’t matter. None of the “whys” would tell us what to do next. No words of comfort existed. But I realized I already knew how long.
“Your rehearsing,” I said. “All those extra hours.”
James raised his eyes to meet mine. “I told you,” he said. “I don’t have time to waste.”
*
In the morning, I woke to James banging around in the bathroom, but I kept my door closed, my eyes on the ceiling, hands gripping the bedspread, until he left. All the while, my blood thickened in my veins with each passing second, as though I was trying to slow down time. I was wasting these moments with him, and knew I would look back on this lost day later with regret. But I did not know how to look into his face. I had dreamed that I, not he, was sick, and woke up feeling that this was somehow true.
I had planned to grocery shop that day, do laundry, go to the chiropractor. Instead I lay under my covers, waiting for the light to fade in the early afternoon before I dressed for the theater.
*
My father was waiting for me under the glowing marquee. His hands were in the pocket of his coat and he was scowling against the wind. Surrounded by the corporate cheer, he looked like a spirit sent to spoil Christmas. “I thought we said six?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Napped, overslept.”
His expression made it clear how lazy he thought this. I didn’t rise to it. I presented the tickets. “Center orchestra, row F.” I saw his blank face. “Great seats.”
He slipped the tickets into his inside coat pocket. “Do you know what we paid for parking? Your mom is at a café.” He looked at Times Square. “I didn’t want her hanging around here.”
It had been a long time since I noticed the peep shows and adult bookstores around the theaters. “James and I want to take you backstage after the show. Can you stay? Go for dessert?”
“Your mother isn’t sleeping well lately,” he said. “We can’t be out late.”
Three young men, swathed in scarves, passed us. “Hey Jules,” one said. Robert was last. “Is this your dad?” He pulled the scarf down from where it covered his mouth and smiled. “Hi, Mr. Carmichael. I’m Rob, I dance with James and Julia.” He held out his hand.
My father huffed through his nose. I waited, my face growing hot. Then Robert put his hand, pale now in the cold, back in his pocket. I tried to apologize, but he just moved for the stage door. My father watched him go.
I glared. “You can’t get it from shaking hands.”
He stepped back, as if proximity to me, now, made him nervous. “It’s cold. You should get inside.” He stepped toward the curb, looking around the crowds. I knew without looking that his hand grasped his wallet inside his coat pocket.
*
I found James in the laundry room, shining with perspiration, practicing his fouettés. He didn’t see me. I stood near the dryers with my arms folded over my chest as he turned and turned, his face shining with perspiration. I dropped my bag with a thud. “Have you eaten?”
He fell out of his turns and shook his head, beads of sweat flying off. I flinched. “No time,” he said. “I still have my core exercises to get through. Don’t worry, I had a shake.”
“That’s not food.”
I walked forward and handed him a bottle of water. He had that look on his face, the obsessive one. Finally, he finished with a perfect, straight pirouette, and used the last of the strength on his standing leg to launch himself into a jeté.
I didn’t have any praise in me. “James. This isn’t good for you. You’ll make yourself sick.”
“I want to dance,” he said, then, quietly, he added, “While I can.”
He prepped to go again. His shoulders were too tense, too high up near his ears, he’d never get around properly. I was right. He fell out. He glared at me like I’d pushed him. His face was high in color, and he looked healthy as Apollo. Finally he said, “Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“James.” My voice broke as desperate dreams for him piled up, and I didn’t know which to pick. I wanted him to be healthy, I wanted him to dance, I wanted him to live, to do everything neither of us had done yet.
He faced the front of the room, spotted the exit sign, and began to turn.
*
I huffed up the stairs. Anger pingponged through my body, looking for a target, and it latched on my parents, probably complaining about the small theater seats, before it spread to the rest of the crowd. Fuck them all, I thought, and their hotel rooms at the Marriott Marquis, their chocolate lava cakes, their family values. They’d brag about our show over the water cooler – what a phenomenon! None of them, I thought, deserved to watch my brother dance, not when I knew that after the shows they went to sleep thinking that the disease had nothing to do with them.
Neil caught me by the shoulders outside my dressing room. “What’s with the scowl, Julie?”
“I have to put my makeup on.” If he was gentle with me, I was sure I’d cry.
He cupped my face in his hands. I averted my eyes, but he stroked my cheek. “Hey.” His voice was soft. “Are you nervous for your parents?”
I laughed. I may not be Balanchine’s last hope, but I was over stage fright by now. “I’m not even dancing tonight.”
He put his fingers under my chin and tilted my head so I was looking at him. “You’re a beautiful dancer, did you know?” He pressed me closer when I rolled my eyes. “Really. I love to watch you move. In the understudy rehearsals, you’re like a storm.”
My face warmed. “I can’t believe you watch. James would be thrilled.”
“He’s talented.” His voice was light with disinterest. I hadn’t noticed before the flecks of gold in his dark eyes. “But when you dance, I can’t look away.”
I bent my gaze again. I squirmed away into my dressing room. I felt disloyal admiring him now. Neil took pride in his stamina. While he played the role, James would never perform. And by the time his contract was up, James might not be capable.
Neil leaned over my makeup station, squinting at the pictures and cards I’d shoved into the edge of the mirror. I dipped my sponge in the makeup and swiped it on my cheeks. I had to concentrate on each task to keep from crying.
“Is that you?” He put down his shake to examine a picture of twelve-year-old me wearing a white nightgown, in an arabesque, holding a nutcracker. It had been my first year in pointe shoes. When I didn’t answer, he knelt beside me. “Talk to me. Did you tell him? Did he take it hard?”
I put down the sponge and squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m not ready to move out yet,” I said. I had to break the lease, I realized. “I can’t leave my brother.”
He frowned. “Okay.” There were other dancers in the room getting ready. He reached a hand up, as if to brush my hair away from my forehead, then let it fall. “We still on to dance later? Or maybe just dinner?”
I turned back to the mirror. My brain couldn’t fathom anything outside the crisis at hand. He moved toward the door. My silence had hurt him. “Wait,” I said. “If you were dying,” my throat went thick, “would you keep dancing?”
The question didn’t seem to surprise him. We were all thinking about it these days. I watched his face clear as he understood, on some level, my anguish. He took his time before answering. Finally, he just said, “What else would I do?”
*
Makeup on, I waited upstairs in my leg warmers when the opening number began. I usually went down to wish James merde, but today, I couldn’t. I sat with my Walkman over my ears, mind racing.
Somewhere out there, James was dancing in front of my parents for the first time. I doubted they’d be able to tell which cat he was. They would miss it without knowing they wouldn’t have another chance. But I could pick him out anywhere. I knew his athletic movements, the lift he had in his ribs, the way his feet didn’t seem to touch the floor when he was in the groove. When he danced, I danced. It did not seem that my brother’s body could harbor an illness that did not, too, infect mine. For so many years we had battled our tight achilles tendons, our stocky frames.
I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror. The green shake sat in front of me.
*
There wasn’t much time.
No one noticed as I slipped my jeans over my tights, my hood over my wig cap, and hustled out the stage door. I had seven minutes until intermission.
I kept my head down in the freezing mist. My makeup was waterproof, but I doubted it could withstand the wet winter. Still, people saw me. Only in Times Square would people double take at my cat’s face; anywhere else in the city and no one would care. Of course I had to commit my crime in a place filled with tourists. But I hustled on, and they pointed, excited to see an authentic New York City freak.
In the drugstore, I found what I was looking for at once. I knew the orange box from my flirtations with bulimia. The pills took some time to work, which I didn’t have. Still, I doubted even the most robust digestive system could withstand a triple dose.
The cashier bagged the laxatives. “I thought you guys just got hairballs.”
Inside the theater, I slipped off my wet hood. Jim, the security guy, scowled. “It’s mid-show,” he said, probably upset that he hadn’t noticed me leave in the first place. I held up my bag.
“Lady trouble.”
Neil’s shake sweat on my makeup station. I took it to the bathroom where, sitting on the toilet, I popped the pills out of the foil. My hands hovered over the cup of green glop for a long time, picturing Neil’s exultation as he finished his number. But then I thought of James, and crushed three of the pills into the mixture, stirring them in with the straw.
As the final notes of Act One sounded through the house, I was waiting with the shake outside Neil’s dressing room. Seeing me, a smile broke across his face, and he pulled me against his damp body. I pressed the shake into his hand and escaped his grasp. I couldn’t meet his eyes as I slunk away, but I heard the throaty sound of the last of the shake, sucked up through the straw.
*
I waited with my eyes closed, listening to Act Two through the tinny monitor.
And then I recognized Angie’s voice. She was announcing a second intermission, barely minutes after the first. My heart skipped. I could not believe it had worked.
Out in the hall, some of the cast came upstairs. I kept my face blank as they passed. “Someone’s out,” Joan said, shouldering her door open and drizzling water into her mouth.
I searched the group until I found him, running toward me, his face breaking into a smile like sunshine through a storm cloud. I opened my arms and he ran into them. I held him as tightly as I could, even as he struggled for his dressing room.
“It’s Neil.” He panted. “He’s sick — help me, Jules, I have to get dressed…!”
He peeled off his costume and threw it at me. I was ready with the black and white glittering tuxedo, Mr. Mistoffelees’s costume.
His makeup was designed so he wouldn’t have to change it if this happened, but as it never had happened before, his hands hovered over his face, frozen, frightened, unsure of what to do. I unpinned his wig, careful of the puffy glands on his neck, as Angie came into the room.
“James, you ready in five?”
“Five!” he shouted, grinning, his eyes sparking. He turned to me in his wig cap. “Oh, Jules, I’m going to throw up —”
“We can’t have two sick cats.” My voice shook, but he was too preoccupied to notice. He closed his eyes as I fastened his black wig, reciting the choreography under his breath, mimicking the footsteps with his hands, steps he knew better than anything in the world. I added extra pins so the wig was secure as could be. He shook his head back and forth, it didn’t budge.
He stood. “All right, I gotta go—”
I gripped his shoulders. The dressing room was empty. All the other men were downstairs, holding their places, ready to begin again. I pressed my forehead against James’s and held him there for a moment. His shoulders vibrated under my fingertips.
“I’m so proud of you,” I said.
He squeezed my hands. “Will you watch?”
I blinked away the tears before he could see them. “Of course.”
He grinned at me and then ran to places.
*
On my way down, I passed the bathroom. The door opened. Neil, costume around his waist, emerged clammy and white. I dropped my gaze to the floor. When I looked up, he was still staring. I swallowed.
“Lucky your mom and dad are here tonight.” I felt as sick as he was. He bent forward with one hand holding his stomach, but continued to watch me through narrow, gold-tinted eyes. They were wide, hurt. Then he whispered, “You could’ve just asked me.”
“Your shake sat out,” I said, mouth dry. “The eggs.”
Neil continued to watch me, but then something must have moved in him, because he reached back with a wild hand, grasping for the door.
My heart was pounding. But the show was going on. I heard Angie’s voice, announcing the cast change, and ran for the stairs. I squeezed into the wing where the audience could not see me. They groaned, they were disappointed to miss Neil. But it didn’t matter. My brother’s name was called in front of everyone, in front of my parents.
Robert was crouched on stage left when the curtain went up. In the dim lights he could see me hiding backstage in my warmups. Robert blinked at me, slow, like a cat giving a kiss.
And then James leapt onto the stage. I realized, as he began to dance, that every muscle in my body was taut, as flexed as though I myself was dancing. As he pulled a rainbow cloth out of a hat and began his circle of grand jetés, I realized I had been worried that he would be stiff or nervous. That he would be in his head, that his obsessive rehearsal mode would carry out onto the stage and petrify his performance. But none of those fears had come true.
My brother was glowing.
His eyes glinted, gleamed, crossing the audience, his shoulders dropped, his body as relaxed as if he was doing nothing more difficult than strolling down the sidewalk.
And then he began his turns. I blinked away my tears. I knew he would want my opinion, after, and even though I would offer no criticism, no matter what happened, I refused to miss even a moment. My eyes could not see enough, time moved too quickly, I was missing it even as I watched. I needed to remember. The lights shined on the sparkles on his costume, sending shards of rainbow off in a thousand directions. His back was straight as though lifted by invisible wires, his standing leg strong. But it was more than that. As he turned, as the spotlights glowed on the glittering shirt, the stones sewn into the legs, my brother seemed to catch fire, his foot seemed to lift off the stage. He ascended right before my eyes, and he stopped dancing, and started, instead, to fly.
Saturday in Costa Rica
By Tess Congo
According to the clock in the kitchen, it’s Saturday.
The cat pucks the condom wrapper across
bedroom granite. The New Yorker
I’d become, not yet risen from sea foam, listens
to your voice on the balcony, how it softens
into deerskin. Time splashes like headlights
in our faces, how suddenly you could love me.
I wanted to learn what that meant—to love
you. Back flat on the kitchen linoleum,
you smiled like a canoe upon broken water.
I sunk my ear to your sternum, listening
for fists against the screen door.
The cat breaks a water glass in the bedroom,
and a year later, I’ll walk like a lioness, smiling
over glass shards.
Tom Sleigh with Solar Editor Amy Kinder Moore
Tom Sleigh is the Program Director of Hunter College’s MFA in Creative Writing, as well as the author of eleven books of poetry. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent book, The King’s Touch, came out in February 2022.
Tom spoke with Solar for our fifth issue. Our conversation explores his relationship to his own creative longevity, the unique intimacy of friendships between writers, and making art in a “murderous age.”
Solar: Your most recent book, The King’s Touch, has been out for a little over half a year. Now that the dust has settled, how are you feeling about it?
Tom Sleigh: I’ll answer your question by backing into it with some context. I’ve published eleven books of poems by now, two books of prose, and a translation of an ancient Greek play. I’ll be 70 years old in November. According to the IRS actuarial tables (who knew until you asked me this question?), I’ll probably kick off when I’m 84. Given that I published my first book when I was 30, that means I’ve published a book about once every 3 years for the last 40 years. If I do have about 14 years left, then that means I’ll publish three, maybe four more books, provided that the rhythm persists. But then the end of life, unless you’re extremely lucky, can destroy you—a bad stroke, for example, and you’re done. I have a friend who suffered a catastrophic stroke. She thought she’d die but she didn’t. And here she is putting together her collected poems. But she’s too impaired to do it on her own, and so her executor is helping her.
Then there are writers who suffer noticeable cognitive decline, and their work goes downhill. But not David Ferry, who published perhaps his best book, Bewilderment, when he was 90. And now that he’s 97, he’s still continued to write poems that are as strange and quietly original as anything he’s ever written.
I also know older writers whose work has gone to hell, not because of age or cognition, but because they need to be poets too badly. They want to thread the needle so that they’ll be relevant, hip, with it. The problem is, the eye of the needle keeps changing and the harder you try to keep up with the cultural moment, the more alienated you can become from your own linguistic gifts. That isn’t always the case, of course. Yeats modernized his style when Ezra Pound pointed out how fusty his early work was. He stopped using stock poetic diction and quaint-sounding inversions and began to revise, as he said, “in the interest of a more passionate syntax.” By which he meant a syntax that was more speech-based, more compressed, less dependent on Celtic twilight melancholy, and more responsive to the appetitive self that grew stronger in him as he got older. Yeats and Ferry, then, make it look good to be an old poet, although Yeats died when he was 73—3 years older than me, 24 years younger than David. David had published one remarkable book of poems shortly before he retired, and then just as he retired, published his second one. In effect, David has done most of his spectacularly original and strange and deeply felt work since he turned 65 and stopped teaching. He’s a model to anyone at any age, but I keep him before me as an example always.
Sadly, I also know poets for whom language no longer has any interest; or else words no longer like them, and it shows. There’s a strange way that you connive at your own relationship to language even as the gift ebbs and flows. Being a poet is more than just writing poems. Seamus Heaney makes the beautifully idealistic point that writing poetry is as deeply dependent on “the quality, intensity, and breadth of your concerns between the moments of writing, the gravity and purity of the mind’s appetites and applications between moments of inspiration” as it is the time when you’re actually working on a poem.
So to answer your question as to how I feel about the book six months out: I feel glad that it’s out, even as I’ve been moving beyond it in what I’m trying to write. I finished a long prose piece about my mother’s suicide this summer. And I’m writing new poems. Once a book is done and published, it has its own life to live. The culture will judge it and be judged by it. Whether it’s well received or ignored is something beyond me, what Montale called “the second life of art,” by which he meant its reception in the world. I’ve won prizes, I’ve lost them. Everybody has by the time you’re my age. I’m glad to be noticed, unhappy when I’m not. It’s like what Lowell said about reviews: “The good ones make me feel good, the bad ones make me feel bad.” But once I’m writing a poem, and focusing on “the gravity and purity of the mind’s appetites and applications between moments of inspiration,” all that ego-noise shuts down, and I’m totally absorbed into what Elizabeth Bishop called a “self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”
Solar: I love the poem “After a Sentence in a Letter from Pasternak to Rilke, 1926,” which interweaves stories of three poets — Pasternak, Rilke, and Tsvetaeva — and comes about halfway through The King’s Touch. Reading it reminded me of your conversational register, and how naturally you incorporate stories of past writers in your day-to-day speech. Could you tell us a little about the process of writing that poem?
Tom Sleigh: About two years ago I felt acutely out of tune with the drive toward abstraction which had overtaken the country. And so I sat down and re-read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir about her life with her poet husband, Osip Mandelstam, during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. I was intrigued by some of the similarities between her era and ours: in Mandelstam’s new Russia, ideology and politics had completely coopted the arts, and the arts were nothing but mouthpieces for Stalinist views. Of course, there was nothing so coherent as a “Stalinist view.” However, there were Stalin’s personal whims, and those were synonymous with the State. If you watch the truly dark and hilarious comedy, “The Death of Stalin,” you’ll see a society dedicated to keeping all of its members in a realistic state of terror at every moment. The belligerence and cowardice and sheer ruthlessness of Stalin’s ministers in vying to placate the dictator made a strange hinge with what American society seemed to be like: an inability to tolerate opposing views; trivial controversies being conflated with important ones, and both being fought over to the death because they’d been turned into quasi-religious battles between ideological purity or damnation; a deep unease that the body politic was being torn apart and that all of us, no matter what we believed, were entitled to get our own way.
At any rate, I read the book and I came across a chapter in which Madame Mandelstam talked about the fate of her husband’s fellow poets, notably Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, and Pasternak. And I was fascinated by how the competing ideologies of the day completely destroyed the lives of Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva, both of whom eventually committed suicide. Madame Mandelstam also tells of her husband’s struggle to regain “his sense of inner rightness” once he ran afoul of Soviet orthodoxies. When he emerged from that crucible, he wrote the great poems of his final year of exile from Moscow, the Voronezh Notebooks, before being transported to one of Stalin’s forced labor camps where he died, so it’s reported, from starvation and disease. But for reasons that have more to do with the arbitrary nature of Stalinist terror, in which some died for ostensible resistance to the regime, while others died for no reason at all, swept up at random by the recurrent purges, both Akhmatova and Pasternak were inexplicably spared. That was the initial germ for the poem, the subconscious atmosphere, you might call it. The actual content of the poem, however, was sparked off by re-reading the letters among Tsvetaeva, Rilke, and Pasternak. As I read them, I became more and more repulsed by the hyper-Romantic attitudes, not to mention the gush of mutual flattery they dished out to one another in this truly drippy, epistolary threesome. Despite my personal revulsion, I still think the letters are astonishing documents: they give you not only the tenor of the era, but they show three highly intelligent and gifted poets, not exactly lying to one another, but writing past each other in some essential way: as if the other two weren’t real people with real problems, but idealized selves that they longed to incorporate into their own poetic egos. Underneath all the Hail, O Great One rhetoric, you can sense the urgent need of both Pasternak and Tsvetaeva for Rilke’s poetic seal of approval, even as Rilke pulls his usual inscrutable sphinx act by hiding behind elaborate compliments and windy statements about the sacred nature of poetic utterance. And yet the more I read about these three, the more I could see the desperation of their lives—and particularly of Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, who persisted in his loyalty to her when everyone else had abandoned her—being transmuted in their letters into high Romantic rhetoric that was, nonetheless, eerily prophetic of their future suffering. Cringeworthy, yes, but scaresome in what they foreshadowed.
Still, it makes sense to me that a poet like Yeats was rumored to have read Rilke, thrown the book across the room in disgust, and sat down and wrote, if I remember rightly, “The Tower.” Anyway, a poem like “The Tower” that has no patience for sentimentalities about absolute inwardness, or silly-solemn poppycock about love being “two solitudes which border, protect, and greet each other.” When you realize that such metaphysical hocus-pocus enabled Rilke to slip away from his marriage to Clara Westhoff, not to mention his daughter, Ruth, it’s hard not to agree with John Berryman’s assessment in “Dream Song 3” that “Rilke was a jerk.” But then so was Berryman and so, at different times, are we all.
Anyway, Rilke as a BAD MAN is its own form of cliché, and so I can’t honestly say that I regret reading Rilke’s flattering letters to countesses in which he pretty aggressively angles to get himself lodged in their castles. There’s something almost slapstick in all this epistolary grovel, and it’s that quality of the ludicrous sorting with the sublime which makes Rilke seem like just another benighted Earthling. That said, the guy could write, just as Pasternak and Tsvetaeva could write. The tragedy of being caught up in a murderous age, as well as the brutally self-justifying ways in which NKVD agents felt themselves entitled to arrest and torture their fellows in the name of achieving ideological purity, is something that writing the poem helped me to understand. That, and the sheer ordinariness of Rilke writing a letter to Tsvetaeva adroitly keeping her at bay when she proposes they become lovers. And once he finishes the letter, picking up an underwear catalog and ordering some soft silken long johns. All of that speaks to our time, but not too directly: you have to squint a little to see the resonances.
As to the speech of other people, and spoken speech in general, book after book, and without really trying to, I’ve moved closer and closer to spoken speech while trying to hew as closely as I can to the look of things, how they actually present themselves when I perceive them. A kind of purged accuracy is what I’m after imagistically, whereas I want the idiom to sound both natural and original. My mother’s way of talking was the ideal amalgam of down-home speech and unstrained eloquence.
Solar: You like to say that poets should be wary not to have a fixed notion of their own “poetic voice.” How has your practice of keeping your “voice” fluid evolved over time? Is it as simple as trying to avoid habit — trying long lines if you’ve written short ones for a while, and so on?
Tom Sleigh: It can be that simple—realizing that form is cognitive, as Thom Gunn once told me. That is, as you’re trying to make a rhyme on “moon,” if all you can come up with is “June,” well, you’ve got your work cut out for you. To discover something more interesting you’ve got to think a lot more deeply into what you’re trying to say. But as to the larger question about poetic voice, I remember having a truly depressing conversation with an older poet who said that he only found his voice when he’d thrown off the influence of Modernist X. And he had indeed found HIS VOICE. Every poem sounded pretty much alike. His subjects were more like corpses in a mortuary waiting to be embalmed by his “signature style.” It was only when he wrote most unlike HIS VOICE, and turned his gifts in an unfamiliar direction, that he could write something that didn’t feel canned.
I know of another poet who had a highly eccentric style that his epigones followed slavishly. But whereas this poet was like an octopus playing eight different pianos at once, his acolytes had only two hands and could only manage to swat the same few keys over and over. Sometimes you write more originally and interestingly when you write least like how you think you should sound, and write more like how you think other poets sound. There’s no formula for any of this. It’s new every time. If you’re looking for a reliable method to relieve you of the burden of having to tear up your style and create a new one every so often, you’re doomed, I think. Or at least I am. Some poets go forward by changing their linguistic spots, and for better and worse, I see myself as one of them. Though between what I think and what I actually write, I try to keep a strict separation: best not to get too self-conscious about it.
Solar: You’re the Program Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at Hunter College, so here at Solar, we know you as a teacher first and foremost. How do you think teaching has affected your writing practice?
Tom Sleigh: I don’t know. I’m not sure how my teaching has affected anyone that I’ve taught, let alone anything I’ve written. I’m inclined to say, Not much, since I’ve always been the kind of teacher and writer who’s been able to keep very strict boundaries between the writer and the teacher. All I can really answer is that as a teacher, I hope I’ve communicated a love of the art that goes way beyond who wins this year’s book prizes—I always find it bizarre that anyone cares about such stuff in a literary way. Yes, in an ego way, I get it entirely and I’m as guilty of it as anyone. But I try to keep a strict separation between the circus end of publishing and the artistic one. I recently came across a book of poems by an English poet, Charles Boyle: incredibly fresh poems, smart, idiosyncratic, funny. He’s out there doing something no one else is. And that’s the kind of aloofness that I hope my teaching instills in people: that is, there’s something far more important and noble in the art than all the folderol attached to a career. When I’m in class and we’re talking about work, it’s an utterly impersonal love of a third thing that all of us are talking about: not me, not you, but the poem on the table. Beyond that, I’ve immensely enjoyed talking to students year after year about poems that I love and that I can bring their way.
That said, I never set out to be a teacher. I did all kinds of stupid menial labor jobs for years and years: I ran a blueprint machine in a civil engineering firm back when they used ammonia. At the end of the day, it was like being gassed. Very likely, I should have been wearing a respirator, but expressing such concerns would probably have gotten me fired. And I needed the money. I also worked construction, especially swimming pool construction, which I really liked. Then I was a gardener, the one job I truly loved—pruning and planting and transplanting, working outdoors all day, getting to know the people I worked with and for, some of them immensely generous and kind. I’ll never forget the bricklayer, also named Tom, a big bluff Irish-American guy with a handlebar moustache, who interceded with the owner to rent a jackhammer when I was asked to dig a fairly deep fishpond in stony ground with nothing but a pick-axe, telling the owner in a no-nonsense voice, “Look, you’re killing your help, it’s taking way too long, if you rent the guy a jackhammer, he’ll have this done in a day. And to the owner’s credit, he immediately got it and did as he was asked. Then when it became clear that I had no idea how to use a jackhammer, Tom very kindly and gently showed me how. He was a great teacher: he cared about me as a human being, he wasn’t afraid to stick up for me, and he believed in my ability to learn—three qualities that I hope I’ve learned from him.
Solar: Speaking of teaching at Hunter: you like to remind your students that our connections with each other as young writers are bonds for life. What do you think is crucial in a good friendship between writers, or artists more broadly? What do you think writers can do to be better friends to each other?
Tom Sleigh: I was immensely lucky. When I was young, I had the example of Seamus Heaney who always had the time of day for everyone, who never put on airs, and who thought it was his duty as a human being “to suffer fools.” Just like Thom Gunn, he offered me immediate terms of equality. He never praised his own work to you: the only thing I ever remember him saying in reference to his own work was about a poem that he’d asked me “to hit”—Seamus’s way of asking for criticism. He always made it easy for me to tell him exactly what I thought, and when I had reservations, I weighed in without a second thought. But in this particular poem, I loved it and told him so. I think he was embarrassed by my enthusiasm and said, a little shyly: “Well, I guess it’ll have to do.” And then he sighed, “If only there were more like this one.” That kind of modesty and dedication to a certain standard that was highly idiosyncratic even as it looked backward toward past poetry and forward to a future dream of oneself, kept him from turning into an “eminence grise.”
As far as my own contemporaries, I have a handful of friends that I send work to, and they send work to me. We’ve been doing this for 45 years. We’ve never fallen out or gotten annoyed or let our egos intrude in the pursuit to write the best poems that we can possibly write. For example, Alan Shapiro’s and Michael Collier’s poems are as crucial to me as my own poems. I feel almost NO difference between what they write and what I write. It’s a wonderful extension of self that at the same time is selfless. And to get to know Alan and Michael in that way, to understand who they are as human beings, and how the human being and the poet are connected, but not in ways that you can neatly predict, has been one of the great solaces of my life. When I finally do die, they’ll be a part of me just as I’ll be a part of them. Love of that kind comes rarely, and it only comes if you’re lucky enough to have such friends. When Yeats wrote, “Say that my glory was I had such friends,” it was more than stirring rhetoric. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. To applaud your friends’ poems even as you envy them, however, is a desirable kind of envy because it spurs you on to try to write the best poem that you can possibly write. You’re writing for your friends, not against them, and all of you are writing toward an ideal of poetic expression that’s personal, highly idiosyncratic, and that each of you intuitively comprehends. As I said earlier, NOT to know too much about it keeps it fresh. And as you change and age and your body changes and ages, that understanding has to keep changing too. You can’t fall back on anything you’ve written in the past because your friends are there and they’ll simply say, “Yeah, yeah, been there, done that. Now do something else, something stranger, something better, OK?”
Contributors
Tess Congo's work has appeared in Publisher's Weekly, PANK magazine, Curlew Quarterly, Luna Luna Magazine, Bowery Gothic, and the anthology Ripe (forthcoming). She's been the recipient of the Frederick Hyde Hibberd Scholarship, the Colie Hoffman Prize, and scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She earned her MFA in poetry from Hunter College.
Emily Conner is a teacher, illustrator, writer, and mother. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Alabama State University. She lives in Portland, OR.
Nathan Erwin is a poet in love with place. With a family tree rooted in the North and South, Alabama moonshiners and Vermont dairy farmers, he grew up on Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia.
An IAF and Harvard trained organizer, Erwin currently operates at Boston Medical Center to prevent overdose deaths and at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for farmers, farmworkers, and land stewards. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about land, drugs, myths, and wanting. His writing has most recently appeared in FOLIO, Willow Springs, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Bombay Gin.
Hannah Matheson received her MFA in poetry at New York University, where she served as poetry editor of Washington Square Review. Previously awarded scholarships to attend The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, Hannah has poems published or forthcoming in Four Way Review, The Adroit Journal, Pigeon Pages, Solar, Image Journal, Honey Lit, Best New Poets, Hobart, and elsewhere. Hannah currently works as publicist and editor at Four Way Books.
Peter Mladinic’s fourth book of poems, Knives on a Table is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications.
An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA.
Emily Neuberger is the author of the novel A TENDER THING, published by Putnam in 2020. Her writing has appeared in The Common, Joyland, The Sun, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, and lives in Brooklyn with her tuxedo cat, who is not named Mr. Mistoffelees but nevertheless is magical.
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Asheville Literary Review, Nimrod, Washington Square Review, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.
Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry, including his most recent book, The King’s Touch, from Graywolf Press in February 2022. Other works include Army Cats, winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. In addition, Far Side of the Earth won an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Dreamhouse was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and The Chain was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. Station Zed was published in 2015 and includes his long poem about Iraq, “Homage to Basho,” a version of which received Poetry Magazine’s Editors Prize. In 2018 a book of prose collecting his essays on refugees in the Middle East and Africa, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In An Age Of Refugees, was published simultaneously by Graywolf Press as a companion piece to House of Fact, House of Ruin. He has also published a previous book of essays, Interview With a Ghost, and a translation of Euripides' Herakles. Widely anthologized, his poems and prose appear in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Threepenny, The Village Voice, and other literary magazines, as well as The Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others.
He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn. During the last decade, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya.