Anthony SEIDMAN
BIVOUAC
Midnight, I sit with my dog by the parking lot on a weathered bench, and stare at Mars. Sanguine dot among the sandblast glitter and blackness; minute, like the first drop of menstruation. My dog smells the gasolined rags, squirrel’s musk, the sweat snails secreted and that now glisten in the moonlight; he yawns, shivering for an instant, the way a man does when peeing after a long commute. A car backfires, and then the leaves and apartment building creaking in the wind. My dog doesn’t understand, but this parking lot is my loneliness; empty cars, and litter scampering. And so I think, this is why I look up at Mars: an absence, like my words in the comprehension of this dog or other men who rise confident in sunlight. Barrenness, soil of iron-oxide, dunes swirling in the gaps between near and far, poetry and silence, man and woman. Because what were once open fingers, clenched into a fist, yet will open again to scoop water or touch a breast. These thoughts wax and wane, polar-caps expanding with permafrost of dry-ice; I remember her, and my words, like dust whistling in no ears, ancient water, buried, and that will never burst until the sun swallows the earth. Another dog barks from a yard, and the dog at my side stretches, howls, is answered, and sets off into the street. The difference between this parking lot and my dunes is the air pressure and proximity of hope; the difference between man and beasts is like that between new water on Mars, and ancient water in a rusting basin in a desert where rattlesnakes nest.
SPOOR
Lame dog, rag of hide and bone—there are none like you among the coyotes. They converge when midnight nests in air still smoking from smog and brush fires, beasts with noses sniffing out possum and raccoon. I lie awake at night, while you wander the avenues, and I think of the blood-colored planet and how it streaked the imagination of young warriors the way spoor stains fallen leaves, or sharks dye the sea crimson, as when the testicles of Kronos were severed, and Aphrodite arose from the froth. In groups, sprawled beneath starlight, their teeth blackened from unmixed wine, the young Greek men so proud of their Thracian spears, their gold coins, gazed at the evening star, and at Mars, and how those spheres crackles, like the gazes of older men or sandaled prostitutes, when only torch-lights illumined the path to the fields beyond the revelers and wineskins. Far off, my dog barks, and a car’s headlight slides up the wall and across my ceiling. There is no wind tonight; I hear an orange fall from the walkway tree with a thump like a wet washcloth thrown into the shower stall. My dog is like that lame master of the anvil who, for a while, savored Her lips and fingers, Her hair that unleashed soft crows smelling of summer and honey. But those ancient youths—now more forgotten than the dust of my great-grandparents—at last resigned themselves to such pairings as man and woman, procreation and death, and gave Her the other one: Mars, with his scepter and shield bearing a gorgon’s tongue, Mars, delighting in bloodshed. My dog, you are like that black-smith, wed to no constellation or orbit, bereft of your pearl; and I too, stretch out in my sheets, past midnight, with the Pleiades set, time blurring, and I, like you, lie alone.
ON TRANSLATING THE WORK OF ESTRELLA DEL VALLE
Estrella, a name like vapor, water hissing on coals. She who wrote those lines that now brim over within me as I translate them into a secondary English: Water. My memories also turn into water. I too try to remain fluid, but my movement among words is ants over carrion, a worm threading the soil. No matter how I try, my words grow top-heavy, and desire turns into dark wood, and the drizzle. Not water, but mud. Not her almond grove, but weeds in a vacant San Fernando Valley lot. For if there is any movement in these words as I imagine her writing, it is that of dissolution, ink that yellows on the page, and the paper that becomes brittle. Weight of stagnant water, sap bubbling in the cane, as the cutters burn the fields outside her native Xalapa, blowing away the afternoon when she wrote of foam, and a shoal of fish, while I grow heavy, my ribs buckling under the torrent of her words, her bluest aguacero.
MAN AND WATER
What makes a man write a river, pushes
him into the flowage, viscid secretion from
dog-eyes, ammonia, beer squeezed out of rag?
How he writes that tired, persistent
water; tired, persistent as a tin-shack mother,
estrus slugging along with hunger and rheumatism?
Not silken water of swimming pool, not
the odalisque in Turkish bath, her thighs
wade, winking ripples in the water,
but river running so it appears to
barely move at all: a tar-mud winding
its course, mosquitoes, scribble & chalk dust
above dead pools, humidity so bad
those sweating noon fan their mouths while
breathing to dilute wet air; what
drags a man into that flowage, where there is no
fish daggering currents, no Susanna?
Must be the propellant replenishing
sperm, pinches his eyes open each morning even
after grayness mushrooms in his crotch.
What makes a man write rain? Dusk or
dawn’s ale, acrid as vomit’s nickel, rain
rinsing statues, storefronts, sidewalks,
stained from that backwash, and wells up
in gutters, sludge for nervous
drilling of crow beaks, gnat swirling like
frazzled electrons. How he stares
at those lead shavings tumble outside
his window, rattling on roof,
spit of night embalming him. Next day,
when streets glisten sun, detritus
clogs puddles, and car tires,
a washing hiss over asphalt, all
remind him: stains endure when
puddles shrivel up revealing
soda cans, plastic, and pennies
tossed not for a wish, but discarded.
Must be a precipitation like taking
to drink, to cleanse mud inside, piss it
out, throw it up, yet leaves him lurching.
What makes a man write the sea, that
jellyfish siphoning krill, oil, sailors, sharks,
through teeth with which it excretes flotsam?
Because sea is not womb, not
dais for some slut of testosterone, but
invertebrate peeing life that slinks from sun, peeing
multitudinously, like egg-laying of turtles, spiders.
A man will write the sea in a room
facing the desert, and with black ink
he will spray the electricity he saw,
(things he saw, what others imagined as seen):
night green as housefly, rainbow saddling
sky, and giant serpent barnacle-riddled
shored in marsh seething sun, stink,
wasp clouds above the wrack. If the lines
stir interest, he’ll believe his own
lies. What makes a man write the sea?
Must be what pushes men into an argosy,
gums bleeding scurvy, for a fistful of dysentery,
syphilis, for the credo of maps.
To distill: What makes a man write water?
In clay pitcher, in womb, tears, in
tears; in a glass on a starched tablecloth so that
the man intuits the transparency
shaping him, stifling him, imprisoning him in air.
Does he tastes flowage, persistence, the roaring
where his current gushes, tributaries gorging the estuary?
Is the water he writes really the drowning
in water that is not water but
blankness of space full of its own emptiness?