Claire Bateman
Recurrence One day while you’re on your morning walk, a flash of light catches your eye and you look up to see a window gleaming naked in the great elm’s branches. Of course, you can’t help but sigh at the thought of yet another sky-house sailing through the night, slowing, hovering, giving up height just long enough to release the window into that leafy bower as though laying it down in a four-poster, then rising and gliding toward the coastline and out over the open water to deposit a sister-window on the waves like a visual portal to the sea from above or to the clouds from underwater. As it travels, the house will let go of doors and walls, joists and floorboards, until what passes overhead is merely the structure’s memory, its ghost. At the thought of this, you frown and shake your head. Yes, times are hard everywhere, no one disputes this, but these self-dismemberment rituals have to stop. ** This is from the author’s forthcoming hybrid collection, The Pillow Museum (FC2). ** Fathoming In one sequence, Orpheus follows Eurydice into the underworld to retrieve her; in another, it’s Orpheus who’s died and Eurydice who goes in after him equipped not with a lyre, but with a basket full of honey cakes and a cut-glass flask of ouzo to beguile Hades. And so, the lovers trade places in version after version, each of them true, all of them overlapping until they’ve passed themselves coming and going in ghost-light so many times that suddenly, they decide they’ve had enough, so they fuse into a single pair. Now instead of venturing upward yet again, they turn to descend even deeper, leaving Hades gape-jawed above them on his obsidian throne agleam in infernal light. They clamber bloody-handed down subterranean frozen waterfalls. They sidestroke through the 31 shades of black in abysmal rivers, almost parting ways over which is more luscious, onyx or ebony. They feel their way through labyrinthine grottoes, feeding each other the delicate flesh of what will centuries later be called bébés champignons de l’oubli—pale, flavourful morels that cause them to suffer through the seven stages of forgetfulness and then back into memories which may or may not be the same. They stagger like sleepwalkers through the molten core, beholding each other limned in flame. They suffer vertigo when down becomes up as they struggle toward the surface on the opposite side, arguing over what this might mean about the shape of the world. They endure the most harrowing passage of all, a monotonous granite road that seems to slope on forever. At last, they push themselves out through a karst into open air to stand aching, upright. Soon they’ll look around, even dare to reacquaint themselves with the sky, but for now they gaze only at each other in the natural morning light that stings their eyes, familiar and strange as any couple. ** This is from the author’s forthcoming hybrid collection, The Pillow Museum (FC2). ** Reprieve The same day the doctor confirmed my mother’s pregnancy, he also informed her that she was carrying not one but two children-- twins, one a human female, the other a pearl. “They are chemically incompatible,” he said. “You must choose in favour of one, who will then absorb the other, or you will surely lose them both.” Cruel dilemma for a woman who not only possessed a strong maternal instinct but loved the beautiful and the mysterious as well! For the proverbial three days and three nights she pondered, unable to make up her mind. Finally, however, as if to register my own opinion, I gave a feeble kick, a gossamer flutter, and that decided her, so dutifully, though with considerable sorrow, she began an intense course of the balancing medicine the doctor gave her, and my sister the pearl gradually weakened, finally dissolving into me. Had she been the one with fishy little legs and arms--in other words, had she been human and I a pearl--no doubt she’d have done the same thing, and I wouldn’t have begrudged her this feeble gesture toward self-preservation, so I’m certain she experienced no rancor as she felt herself begin to come apart. Surely there are many aspects of my nature that can be explained only by her presence in my bloodstream–for instance, my acute sensitivity to sunlight; any true pearl would sell the very soul she doesn’t have for five minutes of shade. There’s nothing a pearl detests more than daylight–in fact, she goes into a kind of hysterical coma in sunshine, recovering from her swoon only in the safety of her long, black-velvet-lined box. I myself get migraines from glare, burn easily, and would, if permitted, permanently hibernate indoors. That’s why all year round I wear enormous black sunglasses despite the ridicule of passersby. Also, like a pearl, I am mostly a loner, and I tend to surround myself with loners, just as each pearl pierced through by the same golden chain basks in the luminescence of the others even at the same time as she secretly believes she’s the only one suspended there, and whines, “I’m so lonely.” As for differences between my sister and me–were you surprised when I mentioned that a pearl has no soul? It’s true; you can test this for yourself–candle her like an egg, and all you’ll find is a cool cloudiness; send x-rays through her with the most state-of-the-art lauegram, and all you’ll see is that tell-tale hexagonal pattern of dots designating the crystalline structure; slice her in half, and all you’ll discover is layer upon layer of aragonite, no true core at the centre, only the original parasite or grain of sand, not a soul but an anomaly, an intrusion, though come to think of it, a human soul does feel to its bearer, that is, to me, not unlike an irritation, so maybe in this aspect too, we are more alike than different. Very probably, then, I’m a pearl on the inside and a human on the outside, in which case my mother is not, as she has assumed all these years guilty of my sister’s death, for in choosing me, she saved both of us, and thus, she can unshackle herself from the underwater rock where she’s been doing penance all these years, her chin barely above the surface. ** This was first published in Clumsy (New Issues Press), and in The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume One (Texas Review Press), and in A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry (Ninety Six Press). ** Literary Contrivances of the Future Not like the book wheels of previous centuries, those bulky vertical monstrosities with their double-mirrors and epicyclic gears. Not like the slightly more recent “reading hats” whose migraine-inducing straps and bolts bit into flesh as the books revolved at a pre-set velocity according to a scholar’s absorption capacity. Such devices merely embodied the very limitations they were fashioned to overcome, since no matter how swiftly you cranked the haft or flicked your eyes back and forth, you could still proceed only page by page by page in a sequence of ones, your mind toggling between texts, starting over again and again as the apparatus repeatedly failed to fulfill that dream of eliding the gaps between volumes, that dream of all the words hitting the brain’s pleasure centres instantaneously like the lights of a tiered city winking on together as the books rotate so swiftly they appear to be motionless while passersby erroneously exclaim, “Why does that reader caged inside a whole-body oaken crown gaze fixedly at just one page?” Nor can any of the contemporary models serve as vehicles for transcendence, not even the portable panoramic transmitter-headset constructed of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, spider silk, aerogel, and silica nanofibers—which is why we have to hold out for injectable literature, entire libraries syringed into the cerebral spinal fluid of citizen after citizen as demand crashes the markets, bringing to a close the long, tragic era of mutually reinforcing capitalism and existential loneliness in one shared simultaneous internal read. ** The White-Dark, Some Speculations That it began as a little leakage left over from the separation of darkness and light, and now contains pockets, cavities, migratory passageways. Or that it is dark-dark’s (otherwise known as “night’s”) alter ego or out-of-body experience, neither singular nor plural, spawning offshoots of itself that coalesce simultaneously in separate parts of the City, then dissipate to reappear elsewhere. Or that it is of foreign manufacture, smuggled into the City as a cloud-seed in a sealed lead box, and then released. That a small portion has been isolated, analyzed, and found to contain salt crystals, diatoms, magnetized iron filings, chimney soot and ashy residue from crematoria and distant volcanoes, seed husks, snake eggs, fish scales, feathers, scraps of lace, catalytic powders, ammoniac, sulfuric, and phosphorescent gasses, gold dust, and tinctures of ink and anthrax, as well as many unidentifiable substances. That from it have issued mutters, groans, creaks, hums, roars, a sound of prolonged and unendurable suction, the static-laden whispered alibis of the dead. That lovers have hurled themselves (and not infrequently each other) into its path. In every back alley you can purchase a map of its interior or a bootleg radar report, information restricted by law to that portion of the populace able to afford equipment. Since the white dark will claim someone most days, best that the victim be one of the underclasses, though a few agitators continually and unsuccessfully press for a Bill of Reform. Like the dream of universal acid loosed upon the population, it creeps, glides, skims, rushes, electrically charged as the fur of a hissing, spitting cat. Other time, it floats incandescent, a fine-spun aurora suspended so silkily over the streets that one might, as a tipsy kitchen maid was said to have done, step into it as if entering a steam bath. And there the crowd gathered, sucking on oranges and trampling the rinds while they placed bets, squabbled, and speechified, awaiting her reappearance from out of the blossoming foam. When the white dark dissipated, her fine bones shone, scoured clean as those of the infant chimpanzee in the Zoo’s piranha tank, though her dress and petticoats remained untouched. ** This was first published in Phantom Drift, and in Scape (New Issues Poetry and Prose) and is from the author’s forthcoming hybrid collection, The Pillow Museum (FC2). ** Claire Bateman is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently, Wonders of the Invisible World with 42 Miles Press and Scape with New Issues Poetry and Prose. Her hybrid collection, The Pillow Museum, is forthcoming with FC2 Press in 2025. She has been awarded individual artist fellowships from the NEA and the Tennessee Arts Commission as well as the New Millennium Writing Prize (twice) and two Pushcart Prizes. She is also a visual artist. |
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