Deeds of Utmost Kindness 9780819522092, 0819522090

Table of contents :
CONTENTS......Page 8
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 10
Prelude......Page 12
Roasted Gingko......Page 16
The Blue Rock Collection......Page 28
Ozark Log......Page 38
The Second Presence......Page 52
Librettos for Eros......Page 62
The Faculty for Hearing the Silence of Jesus......Page 72

Citation preview

D E E D S of U T M O S T KINDNESS

This page intentionally left blank

D E E D S of U T M O S T KINDNESS

Forrest Gander

Wesleyan University Press Published by University Press of New England Hanover and London

Wesleyan University Press Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755 © 1994 by Forrest Gander All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1 CIP data appear at the end of the book

To Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Bradford Morrow, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Peter Cole, Zatoichi, and most of all to you, Carolyn

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prelude

/

/

ix

1

Roasted Gingko / 5 The Blue Rock Collection I Ozark Log

I

17

27

The Second Presence / 41 Librettos for Eros

I

51

The Faculty for Hearing the Silence of Jesus

I 61

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

My gratefulness to the editors of the magazines in which these poems first were published: sections of "Ozark Log" were first published in New Directions: An International Anthology of Prose and Poetry and in The Southern Review, "The Faculty for Hearing the Silence of Jesus" in Conjunctions; "The Blue Rock Collection" in Ironwood: The Final Issue; "Roasted Gingko" (as "Gingko") in Conjunctions; "The Second Presence" in Conjunctions. Sections from "Librettos for Eros" were published in Agni and in Partisan Review; an expanded version was published in Sulfur. The untitled Prelude appeared in O-blek. Thanks to Bradford Morrow at Conjunctions for nominating poems in this collection for the CCLM-sponsored Award for Younger Writers.

This page intentionally left blank

Prelude

All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps. MICHAEL ONDAATJE

This page intentionally left blank

Mostly I am thinking about your body Which has run through my fingers Like a river burning underground Like a river burning underground For which there is no hour no language No ease from its molten glow, no music whatsoever For which there is no hour no language But a theory and practice of go Emptying itself of mouthlight But a theory and practice of go Small birds that strafe A case-hardened crow, I want you to mistake me for The angel the world is subtracting Small birds that strafe The end surrounded by scaffolding Woven into the fabric, a negative The angel the world is subtracting Its wings blazing in the coffin of the delta Its wings blazing in the coffin of the delta A case-hardened crow I want you to mistake me for Woven into the fabric, a negative, Or your pubic hair twisting into a braid Which has run through my fingers The end surrounded by scaffolding

PRELUDE

3

Emptying itself of mouthlight Mostly I am thinking about your body Or your pubic hair twisting into a braid No ease from its molten glow, no music whatsoever

4

DEEDS OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S

Roasted Gingko

This page intentionally left blank

Shibuya The view from here of Empress Shoken's garden reveals the fuschia's adolescent comeliness. Tied to that mulberry tree, the angriest dog in the world strains all day against the chain. The Empress was famous for flaunting the imperfection of her curved nose by highlighting it with make-up and by always seeming to address others to their noses. As for your questions, while they symbolized eloquence, wealth, music and learning, the new stirps of dog she raised proved too large and vicious for the typical Japanese home, this one is the last of its kind. At Koyasan, the Empress commissioned a lifelike sculpture and ordered a new bib tied to its throat every day. This gave rise to gossip, not true incidentally, that her dogs were thanatophagous. Empress Shoken was known to be a gracious hostess and to visiting dignitaries she often made gifts of paintings which, like a form of divination, she created by dipping live pond snails into brilliant colors, letting them crawl away from the center of the canvas. The remaining

ROASTED G I N G K O

7

collection is of national regard. Watch your head please. Visitors come each June to view the extensive tulip gardens and the lily pond on these grounds. There are so many, it is common for every tenth group member to carry a flag bearing a particular tulip color so that no one is lost when tours intersect. In her thirties, when the Empress became obsessed with aging, she began scrupulously to maintain a visceral calendar. For instance, here is a date and the notation "Twinge, 2:15 a.m." You will learn more about her writing when you visit the Willow Room where I hope you will notice a dragonfly on the ceiling, work of reputed artist Tohaku Hasegawa. At the pond behold ghostfish luminous as yellow plums. And thick-bodied diamond-scaled carp which wag upward to stare at tourists and open their mouths, as if incredulous, so the surface stertorously rushes in. They have whiskers long and fleshy as noodles and often they swarm the shallows composing loud sucking arias. You can distinguish Japanese from Kyoto who will all be staring enchanted at the small turtle. Please have a good time if we don't see you.

8

DEEDS OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S

Ryonji An aesthetic of perimeters emerges: the shoji screen slides open and disappears, migrating cranes. The rocks perform their heuristics in freshly tamed gravel; borrowed scenery looking on, and over the oiled earthen wall. Her conversation drifts laterally. If I entered here, my heels would not break off their monologue with the stage. So would present love be displaced by longing.

ROASTED GINGKO

9

Silk The worms are kept far from the house, their chewing is so intense. Like a June rainstorm. Through which, across the Kamo River, concatenate empty passenger train cars smooth themselves across the night landscape carrying green light. On this same thin paper I wrote you a letter in your own hand. Odd, conveying someone's image so far from its source, to let it loose in places you have never seen. Putting it mildly. Inside her sleeves. Instead of a bra, she wears small wafers over each nipple to keep them from arousing through the sheer kimono. Across the earth, you are sleeping.

10

D E E D S OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S

Six Changes In The Imagination He is not programmed to women, she told me, he is programmed to pornography. Did the minor gods consider themselves so. Most business men do not like the sculpture, but have come to identify with the space around it. Highest readership per thousand: 1. Japan 569 2. Iceland 557 3. Sweden 526 4. E.Germany 517 5. Finland 480

Highest advertising in millions: i. U.S. 61.320 2. Japan 11.120 3. England 5.925 4. W. Germany 5.536 5. France 4.484

Danmari— in Kabuki, a wordless slow motion pantomime which takes place in total darkness through which the protagonists glissade from one scenic pose to another trying to gain possession of an object or letter. To the audience, their movements are invisible.

ROASTED GINGKO

11

Onnagata, the art of female impersonation The masks embody a denial of all specific human qualities whereby it is possible for them to express a vast range of human emotions. The stranger fans her scent to me. I move my forearm as close as possible to the shared armrest. Clearly, a man's thick wrinkles behind the small white mask of the heroine, and his oversized hands floating from her sleeves. Sonority muffled behind the wooden mouth; without lifting his feet, he turns around. Between us the axis is reconceived as a means of access.

12

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Figures of Travel Corollary to the phenomenon of looking familiar to strangers: the language which escapes you in one country haunts you in another. Lip reads uninterpretable speech for clues. Whether you are in her seat or fine where you are. Cherry trees along the tracks adumbrate platforms. Clucking increases among those leaving the subway through the long corridor as the number of closed, dripping umbrellas increases among those coming in. Too crowded to move, I am fascinated at the strangeness of a young man masturbating against me.

ROASTED GINGKO

13

The Silence in Another World In Kamakura, away from the hill where the famous hollow Buddha exhales and inhales strings of tourists from the guarded back door to his gigantic inside, there is a wooded ascent lost in smoke sent twisting by disconnected women purifying their raiment and passing their hands through the drift from holy incense sticks they have just plunged into open air altars of sand before they intend to climb further, with something shining in their arms, along the serpentine rock path and its adjacent brook which, interrupted by tiny waterfalls, is rimmed as the path is rimmed, by foot-high golden bodhisattvas extending over and punctuating every visible centimeter of wold and swale, thousands of bodhisattvas sitting naked in shadow or slashed with bright air, draped in cloth bibs bearing calligraphic prayers, or infant clothing, or strung with dried flowers and pairs of small shoes; a few propping cheap sienna reproductions of generic mother and child, crowding each other so seriously that no .ground is apparent anywhere but for the dim path rising under thick branches where umbrella pines and cedars segue to larches at the fifth station, and everywhere else: bodhisattvas each placed by a woman whose child was stillborn, or aborted, or wounded fatally in birth, next to another left by another, and this for many years until every geography unjammed by tree thrusts has fallen occasion to the sculptured elegies, alike as newborns and repeated like a mantra, so to seem from a distance, in winter, a golden death-cap pulled over the knob of a mountain, a cap woven as in a tale, from the wounds of women, strangers to each other but mourning the same dispossession, more women weeping than any dying emperor, or any man has known.

14

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Rings To the audience his facial expressions would suggest a mood, a shape, a movement particular to some bird, a color. The tombstone, a triangular white pillar, was inscribed with his name and an invitation, which had been accepted, to graffiti the three flat surfaces. A system of counting where each person is represented by one clap. "In the garden you will notice Island of Crane and Island of Toad—no, Turtle!" tozan—mountain climbing haikingu—hiking hanami—cherry blossom viewing hiking momijigari—maple mountain hiking tsutsujigari—azalea viewing hiking I can eat Japanese style meals. I would like to eat some local dish. I can eat anything. Yes, I can eat it. No, I cannot eat it. The construction workers balancing their boxes of lunch on the roof beam wear identical khaki, short-sleeved uniforms, white gloves, and black, cloven boots.

ROASTED GINGKO

15

This page intentionally left blank

The Blue Rock Collection

This page intentionally left blank

IGNEOUS

granite (slab) They will slaughter you pray for you and wish you peace but there is something wrong with this.

gabbro Scarecrow in the field

with a bow and arrow.

THE BLUE ROCK

COLLECTION

!9

lava I wake on the futon, a stream of ants shining to the baseboard from the cut in my palm.

moon moon

2O

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

METAMORPHIC

horneblende schist A deer in the sun covered with flies.

ophicalcite marble Two tendons sieze the throat, pulleying her breasts taut.

serpentine Green came to the forest like Helen Traubel's voice.

THE BLUE ROCK COLLECTION

21

CRYSTALS

geode You are entitled to be uncertain: swallow the cambrian tongue, now crack the head crammed with teeth.

tourmaline The man who will not pay dues. The moonshine in which a cottonmouth steeps.

22

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

yellow quartz Men cruising the park. Dogs barking. In the highrise, lights.

garnet Politicians squeeze hands. Pigeon eyes.

THE B L U E R O C K C O L L E C T I O N

23

SEDIMENTARY

sandstone Across the quiet river, fog spins out blanking the doorsteps of houses from which fathers shout for children and crumble, and have only their tiredness to go on.

diatomacious limestone In the roofless auditorium soldiers are sleeping under helmets and long snows.

24

D E E D S OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S

TERMS

pitcheblende Light's skill is its failing.

pyrite I bet you are judging this poem already.

erosion We wake, drunk. The planetarium locks into place under our hair; we take the bus, neurons flicking out in pairs.

plate techtonics Tug

of slow war. THE BLUE R O C K C O L L E C T I O N

25

the earth as an evolved body You enter the trap door, unlatch the windows, open them. Birds are humming like women with thread. No one is fond of burials here. At the root of each flower,

odor of baked bread.

26

D E E D S OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S

Ozark Log

This page intentionally left blank

landscape and character So there are problems I have settled early, about which I cannot bejudged: the long faced monk knocks in the season when bees crawl and he is alone. Whether I open the door. There is a science of goodbye. Colored shirts on the line, summer expired in an afternoon. The scuffed up children's noises barely carry through evening when the burning bush goes up and the palings of broken fences along the river lie down in sand.

OZARK LOG

29

breakfast, diner Opens the door at five. What would we like this a.m.? the waitress asks. Under a sign for Infrared Broiling, the coming loose of her face at its corners. The neighbor with hounds defends himself: Well, I seen them dogs eatin on that hog, but I don't believe them dogs killed that hog. Suddenly, I recognize my own face in the waitress's eye. Like the brakemen who are absent, I know all that I can know: tender undertones in July, porchsteps which need pointing, frogs signifying coolness.

30

DEEDS OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

diner, evening Riotous air (as when Clyde Goforth did not notice where he stepped before church and the choir breathed through their mouths like trout, attentions lost, sweating, until he crossed his long-tongued shoes during the sermon, smearing a ripe swath across his cuff. And parted).

All the catfish you can eat: $5.95 5 p.m. until gone. At the next stool a woman insinuates her knife behind gill rakers along the brain case, down the dorsal shield and across the tail. Pale meat unzips from bone.

OZARK LOG

31

ozarks Now does the sun beat on synchronous fields, the whole family picks up rocks from the newly plowed acre. The youngest boy screwing his face for the baby: butterflies extravagate on her sleeves and on the stroller planted in the shade of the last row. The years will scab over, impossible not to pick at them. From a porchswing hung on dogchains, she licks her Mississippi Mudpie wrapper, and counts polled Herefords unfiling near the pond. Already she is dreaming the view from a boyfriend's Plymouth: ruptured truck tires curled to the shoulder, the pulp and bloody shell of armadillo, its corkscrew tail wrenched off and to one side like the instrument of its murder. Cattle egrets light in the rice paddies or fly against dusk blinking their wings. The windshield flecks as a Peterbuilt passes— flatbed hauling satellite disks— the bestial gaze which is summer's. While across the median, in the emergency lane, the funereal army convoy

32

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

slows. Insect entrails spatter the glass. Little Walter in mono. Skid marks angle off the four-lane. He shifts into fifth, sucks a cut on his finger, tastes her sex. The uniform green of the soybeans shredding in long mud spokes as they pass out from one life, into the same life.

OZARK LOG

33

revival The ritual clatter of keys hitting the dresser, Evan Williams and a water back, hideous snake-egg moon, a house hung with broken awnings; dust and acacia; someone you do business with last seen carrying a refrigerator-box on his head along a stream where hogs are rooting.

34

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

hand held shot with mirror When for no reason a pain snubs itself out in my chest, and I think of my death, I think of this moment, how the wind is soft as skin around a horse's nostril. The convent's shutters open and the windows are naked. A waiter explains the cut of meat by lifting his own shirt, demarcating with the chop of his hand. It is impossible to believe in what goes on without me, that sky does not draw shut in my leaving. The world, boasted one man, is my imagination. But the world remained unreined at his departure sucking water from its barrel, its balls two charcoal lumps, nails rusting out of hooves.

OZARK LOG

35

untoward Mandibles chewing blades. A fiddleback in the attic dark. Ozark notions, hand-made in Japan. Doe carcass, tall grass, and wind. Tailpipe flanged like a coot's claw. Thimblefuls of rain on tin.

36

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

amorous While she spoke I felt drunk behind the proscenium of curiosity. We ran naked on the road with a hen's egg in each hand. I told her Arkansaw is a Quapaw word. It means handsome man.

O Z A R K LOG

37

hellbenders Moments that suggest to us an absolute value wherein we call to us those lost of us. Let them return with shining things in their arms, cut from shadow, from their malignant stars. Let them approach in socks, unlean from an oak trunk, come clear in the stygian mist stepping over clumps of jimson and nightshade under twin brothers and the waterserpent.

38

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

red shirt Where rain moves out from your shoulders. Where your friends love you love you not. Nightcrawlers refrigerate, and John himself is out back sugar-curing a ham around the shank and aitch bone. Where animals retain migratory instincts— dogs wake up shake their coats at 3:15 trot down driveways toward the bus stop. Where it is possible to remark on the sudden appearance of the commonplace, fireflies. Where we find ourselves changing everything around us. Where one of love's forms is fascination before and at the end of language.

OZARK LOG

39

This page intentionally left blank

The Second Presence

FOR JACK GILBERT AND THE MANYOSHU

This page intentionally left blank

When the red flying squirrel hits The far oak, starlings explode In chatter. Fall Again. Acorns pop under my soles.

Cranberry bog in flame. The dog Sighs, comes in wet, curls Into the desk Dark, nose between her thighs.

The curtain conveys both: the warbler's Scribble at first profile Of pine and the broken Chalkstrokes of last crickets.

THE S E C O N D P R E S E N C E

43

Pulse of crickets Over distant highway's Bandaged sound. Beyond That, tugboats Hounding the harbor.

Woodpecker: a sound Wobbling The wet trunk around.

The full oaks Fold Into lake Light.

44

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

The boy treats his dog To milkbones with one hand, Pistols water from the other.

Dead floating on the stormWater in the child's green pail: Her tethered June bug.

The choices Of infidelity multiply Death. Quickened breath. Motel air Conditioner, octaves Of electrical appliance.

THE S E C O N D P R E S E N C E

45

In back seats, children crowd The window, mime, Crook their elbow Up to make The truck beside them blow.

"b.j. call Dan" and A phone number. In different Ink: "Your queer."

What he remembered of twice being hit Working road construction by cars Were the two premonitory seconds, his gaze Drifting off to the widening field Before the utterly quiet treeline.

46

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Past blue-tipped spruce, Rastafarian pines, a lean Light spilling Like batter across the dew Into this Bed of sageScented newspaper.

With the authority of one Who stands leashed before children To a three-legged dog.

August undresses men In the park. A low-shouldered cat Traverses the rail fence. Panting Dogs withhold their bark.

THE S E C O N D P R E S E N C E

47

Spits on a rock Hiking, dragonfly Lights on the spit.

My lower lip numbs, Rondure of wineGlass at hand Bouyant on the voices' drone.

From his watchface A spot of light, arhythmic Among tree shadows Hewed across the road.

48

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Putting my son to sleep: An hour passes, when my eyes flicker Open, his flicker open.

THE S E C O N D P R E S E N C E

49

This page intentionally left blank

Librettos for Eros

FOR FRANK STANFORD, POET, 1948-1978

This page intentionally left blank

Land Surveyor And came home with beggar ticks in his pubis And the light syrup stink of urine on his jeans, Godawful b.o., sat on the bed unlaced his redwings And lay back on brown blood stains in the unmade Sheets and the ferruginous odor of her period, saying Holy holy holy, I do not feel kindly To the copperhead in the copple-stones and the brown Recluse making its nest in my underwear, I hate poison sumac poison ivy poison huckleberry. The ganglia of blackened liana And the bowers of meshed kudzu trouble my step. From spraddle-legged dumps, the fissure blooming between my cheeks, I said the degenerate itching of my locust-leaf-wiped butthole Only increaseth among company. I have pointed my sweatblind face Through tents of webworms, I have lava-soaped striped leeches From bruised ankles, I have brushed the hair Of outrageous arachnids and their eggsacks burst and crawled Every slake and chine of my sopranic skin. Placed my unwitting palm on dead things nailed to fenceposts, Imagined bodies and parts of bodies in the footsucking weedlots, Startled at the crack of limbs in wheezing copses, And I have grown strange. But thou oh moon backsliding coolly from blue slips of cloud Over bare semi-dark autumn fields where the stars smoke dimly for anyone, Restoreth my peace.

L I B R E T T O S FOR EROS

53

Photo: Sixth Birthday in the Levee Camps Two white children out of nine. Squirrel-headed at one short end Of the long fold-up table, Frank; his chubby Stepsister at the other. Shadow Inside what looks to be a revival tent; A warm light made by pollen, Dirt, and dust indrafts through an open flap Across the dirt floor. The children are wearing cone hats, they smile, Half of them craning for the camera Bug-eyed, glad-assed to be here, camp kids, Dam builders' kids, gone with the flash Into derelict cities, slender oblivions, Suicide. For Frank's Adoptive father, the contractor, Darker fathers shovel dirt daubers, Unswamp cottonmouths, graveMake next to the St. Francis Banking her wiles and curved spine in ridges of muscle, levees Looming through perpetual dawns in the nap of Mississippi, 1955.

54

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Patterns of Unsettlement Couldn't sleep in the heat and went outside But the moon was ochre-ringed like an asshole, And I passed silently in company of black four-footed shapes, Liquid fugitives from an alienist's parable, Toward the city's disturbed light And came up short where men were welding Industrial stacks above the highway. Tanzanite blue sparks run-through with orange Poured down across the building's roof And laved the uncanny spectres with their torches. I breathed the faintly burnt air Drifting from forest fires uncontrolled in Kentucky.

L I B R E T T O S FOR E R O S

55

The Provinces of Saturn This blue paper I ordered by catalogue From Barcelona. Do my words get crookeder? So they do. All I have eaten Since Saturday is Wild Turkey Which imparts an omnigenous sympathy, Makes me blind as William Tell. Listening to opera. The soul is a kind of sound: Maria Meneghini Callas, ava dolce e serena che regnavi. . . In gioia pura. After Dame Joan Sutherland first heard Callas sing Envy so whelmed her She felt constantly nauseous And feared she might be pregnant. I won't change the sheets, or sweep Your longsome hairs from the pillow: remembrance Of things past, perdu, Lost. Where are you. There Are wide ice fronds at the bedroom windows, A different paleontology for each. I am unmanned without you In this inconsonant dark.

56

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

A Table Laid With Horrors I AM G O I N G ON A J O U R N E Y AND I W I L L B R I N G :

flour and sandals, a fine-toothed comb and sourballs, this fish hook and silt in my pockets. I take fibula and sternum, your false pregnancy, a slip knot. Filtertips and soup du jour. What I leave— all things visible, light of the body, total number of my days— are field notes and sheep's eyes, Fahrenheit of sexual love, foreplay then your spotting, frost heave and sugar beets, the foster moon, twilights soughing. I let my face to the screw worm, my flesh to slugs. There is a river the streams wherof. . . . Fair copy to second readers; to the fire ants my sputum. I tender fire opal to slop jar. Fill my feather pillow with skunk cabbage. Forgive me unfinished manuscripts, the burnt skillet, the burthen of my passing. I bequeath fellatios to scarlet tanagers, fanfaronade to my silent partner; in the flood plain, signs of the cross. To my funeral bring spikenard. Place four scabs on the first saltlick. A fait accompli in standard time. The fire plug among sego lilies. I only want this footstool and my sign manual, fascinating sideburns. I take fingernails sprouting; from our kitchen floor the sole prints. The front page plus my shaving kit. I leave like a felon with a sparring partner, famished and slakeless. Like four horsemen and their snake oil. Farewells in a saxophone. A flicker, a sputter, faggots for Savonarola. Final stopgap. My coming in my going out. Fresh heart and salt. L I B R E T T O S FOR E R O S

57

Final Testament Lick the dust from your feet and come to me. My hand is not shortened. See This stinking fish? Your fish. Close up your eyes child much loved And familiar of cruelty. I, who will not arbitrate, have purposed it. Didn't you put on my voice? Then slake yourself on this trembling, My breath in your nostrils. And who are you to be afraid? I said, Lie down so I can walk over you And you have laid your body like the ground. Behold, it is I. Dark but lovely. Like cedars blown flush on the cliff. Look at me and be broken in pieces. While the land goes on full of horses.

58

DEEDS OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Repeating Dream Early blue evening, bats whicker Through thin isosceles Streetlamp light. In one impulse, Both solutions and signs: She looks up. A block away the ice cream van Curbs, ding-a-ling. A world familiar By consensus shifts On a hairline crack. The dead man parks in the driveway. She looks from the threshold While behind her a television Animates a wall, the opacity In which she lives. She considers How he has driven himself home From the cemetery, hunched over, His face immobile Against the wheel. How limited the possibilities Of our reaction To the inert past, the hardened mud, The day's demonstration of pure phenomena. Frozen at the screendoor, she stares At the figure who sits grotesquely Still in the parked car.

L I B R E T T O S FOR E R O S

59

And nothing more remembered of this dream, As if to say, Here Is the world. You Do not even know How violently you are involved.

60

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

The Faculty for Hearing the Silence of Jesus

Your hurt is incurable and your wound is grievous There is none to uphold your cause no medicine for your wound no healing for you

FOR NINA ISKRENKO & ILYA BRODSKY

This page intentionally left blank

A woman reading beside a white, half-hooded pram. Before her a field of colorless weeds, just behind her the birch forest glossy and impenetrable as the eyes of the dead. There is no path to her bench, no path visible through the weeds. Her calves are thick, though when she stands her skirt and coat, of equal lengths, will cover them. Her hidden face tilts down, obscured by thick hair cut in the shape of a winter hat. In a language whose very letters I fail to recognize, she spends the morning reading.

THE F A C U L T Y FOR H E A R I N G THE S I L E N C E OF J E S U S

63

Moscow Baths Perceives two naked men— vermilion benchmarks splotch their buttocks like folded valentines— close the steam room door behind them.

When again the door closes, odor of wet heat reams our noses, a birch forest breaking wind,sweet human sweat. They do penance, whacking twigs against our stinging backs, we who cannot breathe and leave to wind ourselves in sheets, standing erect before mirrors touching our hair. A boy's candydrop genitalia. I stare at a man in the cold tank submerged to his hat.

64

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

The Silence of Gorky Park Perceives a species of black and white crow, executioner's hood and wings, rocking down from naked trees to eye us on bended backward knees.

Thus have we been made. Gargling from a puddle, birds crouch and spring into up, penitents croaking from birch limbs: nor can they sing for their supper.

THE F A C U L T Y FOR H E A R I N G THE S I L E N C E OF J E S U S

65

Alexandre Eremenko is lighting a match for Katya's cigarette. The muscles of his brow contract over his inner eyes, his eyebrows flatten and descend and a fold cleaves above the bridge of his unremarkable nose. Head listing sidewise into hunched shoulder, eyes nearly closed. He is saying to the match, Ok, last chance, his mustache drooping as though disappointed greatly in the failure. Fingers too, one set holding at their tips the small light blue box, the others pointed into a wooden stick, seem to be arguing, coaxing. He holds them up again toward Katya's face, his hands together in a gesture of prayer. Striking sulfur into air, Eremenko disappears. Becomes Failing-to-light-the-match. Is waylaid, enchanted, absorbed into the privacy of an old conversation, even the smallest failure looking familiar, having that nostalgic aura, connected in its tiny way to the vast network of failures that sustains him. Then the match hisses into colors. Then Eremenko returns to find himself extending it toward the proffered cigarette.

66

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

The Conversations Overhears syllables of welcome, speeches yielding the milk which is the milk of speech itself. That he says this much to the ear: "Do thou sing out for me?" "Yes,: sayeth ear, singing such:

Around the walled KGB, a sound of such big-mouth dogs "their mouths hung down from their mouths." The guide claims to recall screaming underground, where penance committed Mayakovsky.

THE F A C U L T Y FOR H E A R I N G THE S I L E N C E OF J E S U S

67

Tendencies Perceives a penchant for beet-red hair dyed across generational zones: on the metro, Red Square; the performance-poet's violinist. Everywhere in a population prone to natural dark and blonde, with eyebrows unremarked.

With high eyebrows and remarks, we turn on subway stairs sneezing tear gas, heads lowered as if for prayer. MEMORY thugs arrested for punching a Jew. And so they do penance, whose wives' red ear-length coiffures did not keep the men at home. Outside the station, lipsticked glasses in "Drink" machine: press to activate and tke glass swirls nearly clean.

68

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Beside a lopped off sycamore, this triptych of small monuments marks the end of a lineage. Fixing the eyes of tour group strays, a photograph mounted on the stone to the left: a clean shaven man in his late fifties whose serious countenance, were he not wearing a dark military uniform decorated at the breast with dozens of butterfly bars and ribbons, would be called unhappy. On the stone to the right, a photograph of his wife registers her worn face twisted his way, stricken with loss, her hair short and thinning. While his photograph renders the wide shoulders and chest, all that is visible below the woman's throat are blurry, narrow lapels, the bow of her dress. The three dead share an caster lily. Its glossy deeply lined leaves graze the photograph embedded in the center stone, that of the daughter whose face in profile uplifts toward a soft light, whose dense curls brushed back from her lovely high forehead, softening to a fuzz in front of her ear, collect thoughtfully at her shoulder. She must be in her twenties. The dates are obscured. But it is the sequence of their deaths that is inscribed most legibly in their faces: daughter, father, mother. As though to suggest to those who have come to brush leaves from monuments under which friends and parents lie, a greater grief.

THE F A C U L T Y FOR H E A R I N G THE S I L E N C E OF J E S U S

69

The Silence ofGoom In the famous shopping mall perceives no line (and gawks— Is this the store out of liniments? No, this store's out of woolen socks—) twisting the corridor where yesterday herds slogged. Trapped inside, twittering, a few birds.

We enter among scores of curses and tarry fumes from the roadcrew's kettle machine, its exhaust spewing toward the doors of Goom's limegreen hall, a further distance than breath can be held, past elaborate window displays— The store out of liniments is across the hall— to well staffed shops of gaping shelves.

70

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

The Silence of Red Square As though in penance, the guards flinch at Lenin's red and black granite tomb before the hour perceives its crowd: all eyes beholding the huge clocktower.

Thus, lock-kneed, strut two fresh guards, one sergeant to choreograph. All five freeze as the tower bell tones.

Afterwards, an old man sweeps crushed butts from cobblestones.

THE FACULTY FOR H E A R I N G THE S I L E N C E OF JESUS

71

In his last apartment, Dostoyevsky turned the desk in his writing room toward the window. He rolled his own cigarettes and drank thick tea, glaring out toward the building across the street. There is a face in the wall of that building, above the second story window, the bust of a woman recessed in an ovular frame like a huge concrete broach. Difficult to make out her features. Most prominent in the failing light that must leapfrog Dostoyevsky's apartment to splash against this wall: her hair, parted in the middle, and something that slants across her decolletage—the frilled upper edge of her dress or a loose braid. Her face in the shadow of her hair. To the right of the bust, the building has suffered some trauma, the long rectangles of grey concrete are rubbed away to reveal brick and patches of creamy mortar. Nicotine and caffeine bracing him upright, Dostoyevsky must have stared often from his desk toward the face in the grey wall across the street. But because he worked at night, because the street is unlighted, his gaze must have stopped short at the window and returned like a dog on a leash, carrying his own visage back to him, the bearded lamplit face and pisshole eyes, the racking cough, the napkin crumpled around burls of bloodspeckled mucus, the furry tumescent digits of his hand re-inking the pen.

72

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Toilet Springing through poorly lit backroom penetralia, he posts his massive self at the cafe's single toilet, turning malignantly at us to block it. Apodictic and threatening. We turn and file back like a pack of wolf hounds, each dog clenching the tail of the preceding dog in its mouth, as priests are said to do in Zagorsk, to the south.

As in Zagorsk, thus is everything woven woof and warp in water. Which continues to rush into the sink our translator washed out his bloody mouth in, after fighting. He did penance to unstoppered musical guttering toilets. Down— drip from the pullstring.

THE F A C U L T Y FOR H E A R I N G THE S I L E N C E OF JESUS

73

The Silence of the Leningrad Subway Perceives the mendicant glance of a four year old, her blackened palms offered, a boy's broken posture: the living bundle at his back, swathed. A crowd reads the wall of taped paper. Below, the begging children's mother: exposed paps, her infant eyeing up at.

Thus, we too look up: the exit stairs slick with rain a country woman begins to curse as she claims a space against the wall, her coat dripping onto her wares, green apples in an open blue purse.

74

D E E D S OF U T M O S T K I N D N E S S

Coda See the small park, a sand path lined in birches and perimeterized by wrought iron fence. And within its oval a second magic circle of standing mutes fire off their fingers, one canting his face violently to hack. Teenagers sitting close on the park bench, perched on its backrest in jean jackets, long hair, bandanas, an intimate pocket of themselves in softest tones. At other benches, overcoats and black boots contain women ogling their canes or pigeons. The coughing mute stalks in and out of the park meeting friends in a street lined with parked cars whose hoods radiate heat. The women's soft hats slantwise on their skulls. At the path's edge, on a crescent of grass, cries a boy stamping red sneakers. Early evening September gentle pigeon-colored light of the city. Through which, in black gloves, one crone continues to read aloud the paper. Boy crossing from park hand in hand with mother, his right eye, the one distant from her, bandaged with a tic tac toe grid of white tape. Puppy pulling the leash in its mouth. Further along the block, children ride their hats down a playground slide, whooping. Her breasts behind a red folder of papers, she escorts her reluctant daughter and bicycle from the park, wrists baring themselves from dress sleeves and open sweater— toward what apartment of these surrounding, what man strange and common to her. Where are his visible scars, what stories does she maintain to explain his body. The dinner they will have tonight, each dish picked up with her fingertips. Their clash underwater. His breath in bed, the solid warmth next to her, her own long body white as meat tugged from a shell, barely touched. Papers in her red folder scattered across a table in the dark.

This nearly conscious tenderness with which the park relinquishes each animal to space. Distant thwop thwop, diastolic THE F A C U L T Y FOR H E A R I N G THE S I L E N C E OF J E S U S

75

and systolic tones, the spanked child muffling its cry. See how the limbs move but barely, the sparrows' collective chirrup rising and falling off. How the friends stand together already moving, together, dyed red hair long and knapsacks and purses. Open-winged pigeons settling into fresh absence. Audible current of fricative leaves. White-scarfed old woman displaying her tremendous white cat like a nursing baby to two benches of shapeless matrons whose heads incline toward each other in pairs. She begins to leave with her cat but at the edge of the park halts to get better grips on cat and purse, a little hop, and goes on.

76

DEEDS OF UTMOST K I N D N E S S

This page intentionally left blank

U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS OF NEW E N G L A N D publishes books under its own imprint and is the publisher for Brandeis University Press, Brown University Press, University of Connecticut, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College Press, University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island, Tufts University, University of Vermont, and Wesleyan University Press.

L I B R A R Y OF CONGRESS C A T A L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C A T I O N DATA

Gander, Forrest, 1956— Deeds of utmost kindness / Forrest Gander. p. cm. ISBN 0—8195—2209—0. — ISBN 0—8195—1212—5 (pbk.) I. Title. PS 3557-A47°4 1993 811'.54—dcao 93—17845

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Forrest Gander is Associate Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. He is author of Lynchburg (1993) and Rush to the Lake (1988) and editor of Mouth to Mouth: Poems by 12 Contemporary Mexican Women (1993).