Ecotone | Articles

Poetry by Elizabeth Bradfield.

Simple question in a morning’s e-mail: “Are you happy?” Why do I freeze up instantly, feel like I’m lying before I’ve written anything back? Or is it that I feel if I were happy in the way I’d like to be, the way we’d all like to be, I should be able to answer resoundingly Yes! as opposed to merely, after a pause, yes, that second yes coming out sounding more like “I suppose.” But “I suppose” also carries a tone of distractedness, a kind of “Gee, I’ve never asked myself that” surprise, which has to be counted a lie, because of course at some level everything has to do with finding or holding on to happiness, or what was once long ago formulated as happiness, though I sometimes wonder if that’s a word that can be used by anyone over a certain age—thirty, say. So, I throw out both the resounding and the suppositional, which leaves me what? It leaves me the cutting board and the qualifier knife, the thousand ways to slice the question up in the interests of honesty, but no way to make a meal of the results.

Photo: Loimere via Flickr

At the Cultural Ephemera Association National Conference

Bill

In those first few moments I have to confront my name. The moderator introduces me to her as “William” and she has eyes the color of blue ice and I can’t remember the last time I cared about my name, though for some years, as a young man, I did. But now I care once again. I shake her hand, and her eyes seem restless upon me, but we are turning to our places and we sit behind our name placards. Two other scholars of the Cultural Ephemera Association separate us at the table, and before us are blank legal pads, an untouched pitcher of ice water and four glasses, a few dozen sleepy-eyed scholars in Naugahyde hotel chairs. Everyone went drinking last night, deconstructing the texts and designs of the pulpboard beer coasters, by the end laughing crazily over obscenities only they could see. I sat apart. She was not with us. I did not know she existed. No. I knew her name. I’d read a paper or two of hers about Cadbury chocolate cards as artifacts of British colonialism. But I did not fully understand how she existed in a body until her extraordinary eyes were told to see me as “William.” What are my choices? My mother called me Willy from the start and I carried it through grade school. In London or Liverpool a willy is a penis. Will? A confrontation with the ephemera of a life left after you’re bound for worms and dust. Bill, of course. It’s what I settled on long ago. A bird’s beak. A demand for money. But I accepted that it was me. Not William, because that name has always felt too formal, passionless, disenfranchised from a body. I accepted Bill with the wish to keep some informality about myself, hoping that it registered as personal warmth, though I am William to her from the start, and when I meet her I am indeed William, having lived in my body and my senses as all of us do but in some deep way never having lived in my body at all, never having truly touched anyone. On the morning I meet her I am William.

Ad cards: courtesy of the author

Auto Parts

1
The best auto parts store in, say, the galaxy, is in Guadalupe, California. A couple hundred miles up the coast from LA, it’s where you want to be if you have the urge to buy a fan belt, new headlights, various oily fluids. Or you can just wander the aisles, like I did, and discover what you can’t live without, maybe a sponge-squeegee combo like the one I use to thwart my windows’ coastal grime. When you’ve finished shopping, you could offer to leave some little thing, testimony of another world—a bill in foreign currency; a campaign button for a battle now forgotten; a theater program culled from the floor of your backseat, particularly if the stars are known. A paw the size of a car engine, made of plaster now weathered—who left that?

2
North and west of Guadalupe, down a walkway raised above Oso Flaco Lake, past a sign warning of mountain lions and their preference for children, through dune scrub of native leathery-leaved plants, past the roped and sign-posted snowy plover nesting grounds, along the wild-waved ocean shore, across the inches-deep mouth of the Santa Maria River, I walked into the dunes. Although it was cool that April day, I trod barefoot, my soles massaged by sand. Coreopsis gigantea, a strange, cartoonish plant—thick trunk, three feet high or higher, rubbery leaves sprouting from the top in carrot-like proportions—dotted one hill. The blooming time gone, I saw a lone aster flower. The leaves, a brighter green than most drought-tolerant plants, had already begun to wilt and turn brown, as if paying the price for that color. Veering north, I shoe-surfed down small craters and crawled up the opposite sides, my legs moving just faster than the sand slid down. You can come to the edge of larger bowls, not knowing until you’re there that below your next planned step the sand drops several feet. It feels wildly dangerous, though maybe it’s not.

Autopoiesis for the Common Man

I was dating two nurses at once. They were both older than me by a good margin. All they had in common with each other was nursehood and microbiology. But really there was very little difference between us. All autopoietic beings, after all, chemically maintain their identities despite constant environmental perturbation. Joan and Marci taught me that trees and people have common eukaryotic roots—we share mitochondria, Golgi bodies, and sperm tails—and that the ultimate ancestor is a DNA-containing microbial cell. The genome trapped within the plasma membrane of eukaryotes is an entity capable of indeterminate growth. It is immortal. Which is not to say it is flawless. Indeed, to err is more than human, it is biological.

Joan was wiry and charmingly goofy. She lived in a trailer park. Her hair was long and red, frayed like antique textile, sexy because it looked old. She almost never wore underwear, only tattered bras or briefs when she did, and she played bass guitar in a band of failed minstrels. She once plucked out a song for me in her nightie, bobbing her hairy head and biting her lip as she strummed. She was forty.

Marci was the ex-wife of a university law professor, and lived on a hill in a Victorian with a dozen rooms and a semicircular driveway. She was pretty and petite, cropped hair dyed a sleek black, but for all the time I knew her she had a blemish on her cheek, a wart that said all she herself would not about what it was like to have your husband leave you for a student. Marci kept busy in community cleanup groups, had three darling sons, and was proud of her kitchen. She was forty-two.

Joan was a home health aid. She darted through town in a clunker, a bag of syringes on the seat next her, and gave injections to people who needed them but couldn’t do it themselves. She made more as an LPN, she said, than she had as a secretary. The injections, which were generally painful, were gratifying to her because she didn’t like most of her patients.

Marci was a full RN, but only volunteered at the local hospice, caring for terminally ill children who arrived one month and invariably died by the next. At first, she said, you cry for them. You cry for every damn one. But before long, there’s one you don’t cry for, either because he’s not there that long, or because you know he’s better off dead. That clears the way. Pretty soon you’re not crying for any of them.

Élan Vital

Where did we come from? Where are we going? These questions are like an itch between the shoulder blades, near enough to scratch at yet unreachable no matter how far you stretch. While we don’t know the answers in the profound sense we yearn for, we do know them in the most basic sense. Apart from test-tube babies, we all have our origins in a particular sex act, and we’re all headed for the dirt. Philip Roth, the American writer who brings sex and death together most often and most credibly, reminds us in his novel The Dying Animal that sex is “based in your physical being, in the flesh that is born and the flesh that dies.” What is the result? “Only when you fuck,” he says, “is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself.” He grants that the power of sex is limited and counsels us never to forget death. But far from being “just friction and shallow fun,” sex, for Roth, is “the revenge on death.” Sex is the middle finger to death. “Tell me,” he insists, “what power is greater?”

Baba Yaga

A poem by Larissa Szporluk

Back Where You Came From

A poem by Camille Dungy

Baghdad Before the Occupation

Poetry by Amal al-Jubouri

Béti Leaves:Cultural and Political Borders

I unload her laundry, and stack it neatly to the side, where she’ll pick it up to hang on the line. It is late August, and the sky contains scarce moisture in its evaporating horsetail clouds. Flirtatiously, the monsoon arrives on cool breezes that come from the mountain updrafts and the Sea of Cortez. They lure me to the north side of the trailer. I aim to get chores over with by mid-morning, to be inside and do absolutely nothing but sit on a chair that won’t stick to my thighs and leave behind two shining ovals on the wooden seat. The twins of those wet flat eyes on the backs of my thighs, the soft, nearly invisible hair there doing what evolution meant for it to do—provide a way to cool my limbs, the silken hairs providing an evaporative cooling apparatus that triggers upon contact with air and instantly sets off a mini ventilating scheme in each pore. One of the beautiful little miracles of the architecture called the human body.

I’ll take off my shirt when everyone else is outside working in the gardens thirsty for water, though they get a deep soak every other day and thrive under thick mulch and complimentary legumes and plentiful canopy of mesquites. We encourage the volunteer mesquites wherever we can, a way to reclaim the once healthy and herbaceous northern Sonoran ecosystem on a three-acre demonstration farm, yet the salinity and nitrates from years of chemicals, contributed by previous farmers from the post-war era through the present, challenge our most skilled organic and biodynamic methods to reclaim the soil—and the soul—of this land.

I put my gloves down on the floor next to my chair; my neck and head rest on the bony back of the thriftstore Shaker replica, with a few more months left in its rickety frame. Not a plush recliner of my fantasies, but it will do as I close my eyes by the nearest swamp cooler vent, languishing in its promise of mental transport to a cooler clime, say . . . Glacier National Park, or Anchorage . . . I’m not picky. Just one or two breath-filled moments before the kids burst through the door
wanting lunch.

Beginning

My oldest sister has a dark spot above her lip. It is black against the brown of her skin, and she carries her fear in her eyes. As for my second sister, she carries her fear in her stomach, hunching as she ages, her back curving as if in a storm of thick wind. My sisters were born in our mother’s youth and I in her middle age. Between us there passed many rainy seasons and children who died young, either in the womb, stillborn bloody and blue, or later on, falling from a high branch or lifted by the jaws of something terrible.

I remember, in my earliest youth, gray dust frosted my sisters’ outlines against the stream before we all dipped our hands in and cleaned ourselves, cleaned each other, hair lacing through fingers and toes as we removed the fleas, nettles, filth. Our mother would part the hair at the center of our backs and lick at the dry skin to heal the itch that settled there. We’d shiver on the bank, dampened, and lean against each other for warmth—my small form between the two almost-grown forms of my sisters—until the sun could dry us.

Birding the Border

The Aztec thrush isn’t much to look at. Neither big nor small, purportedly. Nor does it possess any curious anatomical features (bill, check; tail, check; wings, check—but nothing to get excited over). It’s a fairly drab specimen, by almost any criterion, lacking even the sunset breast of its close cousin, the American robin. “Male is sooty-brown above,” says the National Geographic Society in the second edition of its Field Guide to the Birds of North America. The thrush would strike the layperson, I imagine, as pretty much a generic bird.

What the Aztec thrush has going for it is its scarcity, at least north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The first reliable U.S. sighting of an Aztec thrush was in 1977, in Texas’s Big Bend National Park. There have been a handful of additional U.S. sightings since then, mostly in southeastern Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains, whose steep precipices and yawning canyons form abrupt interruptions of the desert floor below. Here the thrushes have appeared sporadically, and only for a mid-August week or two each sighting year. They have typically been spotted in small flocks, foraging amid chokecherry branches. Birders worldwide, hoping to fortify their North American life lists, flock to these mountains along the border yearly, armed with binoculars, hiking boots, sunscreen, and mosquito repellent. They come to welcome this tiny avian immigrant, hoping to avoid—or simply oblivious to—other immigrants from the south, the thrushes’ human counterparts.

I refer, of course, to the thousands of undocumented Mexican immigrants who attempt, at great peril, to cross the border into the United States each year. The odds are stacked against them from the start. Unscrupulous human coyotes in Mexico strip them of their life savings with a promise of guiding them across the border, typically under inhumane conditions (e.g., the strenuousness of a clandestine march made worse by the brutal desert heat and nighttime cold and the meager allotment of food and water). If these immigrants are lucky enough to survive the crossing, they face likely capture by U.S. Border Patrol agents and local authorities, who monitor the border with sophisticated surveillance equipment and great resolve. Beyond the licensed authorities, undocumented immigrants must also now evade members of the Minuteman Project, an armed band of private U.S. citizens who organized in 2005 to monitor the border and defend it against illegal immigration. Finally, should undocumented immigrants from Mexico overcome all of these cumbrances, they face an increasingly unsympathetic, post-9/11 U.S. populace swept up by the nativist rhetoric of these minutemen and an increasing number of mainstream media hosts, most notably CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

I’ve birded the border in Texas and Arizona several times, and like countless other birders, I suspect, I haven’t given much thought to these non-avian immigrants. I go on these birding trips in large part to escape the confusions of the social realm, to immerse myself, if only for a brief time, in the more essential and animal rhythms of place. However, my recent trip to the Arizona-Mexico border, to find the Aztec thrush, exposed the fatuousness of this pursuit and shattered my complacence.

Photo: Andrew Furman

Bittersweet Nightshade

Poetry by David Wagoner

Black-and-White Dusk at Limantour Beach

A poem by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Blinded by the Light

Born under a bad sign
I been down since I began to crawl
If it wasn’t for bad luck
I wouldn’t have no luck at all
—William Bell

Who said you should be happy? Do your work.
—Colette

I keep imagining a bright light going off like a bomb inside his head. Why, exactly, I can’t say, since that isn’t really how he describes the feeling. I must confuse him with the Apostle Paul, struck down on the road to Damascus by a heavenly corona (there’s that famous Caravaggio where he’s prostrate and clutching at his eyes). But I’m speaking of the hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole and of his first mystical experience, which he explains thus: “Suddenly I felt within me a merry and unknown heat . . . I was expert that it was not from a creature but from my Maker, because I found it grew hotter and more glad.” Rolle, a fourteenth-century ascetic, is considered by a number of theologians to be the father of English mysticism. What’s his bearing here? He also happens to be the person credited with introducing the word happy into the lexicon, in 1340, in the book-length poem The Pricke of Conscience, written for the “unlered and lewed,” namely, the lowbrow folks who understood only their Northumbrian brand of English.

Borrowing Life: Berry Morgan’s “The Hill”

Berry Morgan—does anyone in the reading community recognize that name? But though now nearly lost to the world of letters, she once conducted a flourishing career. In 1966 Houghton Mifflin published her novel, Pursuit, and awarded her a Literary Fellowship for it. Walker Percy called her “the most exciting novelist to come out of the South since Flannery O’Connor.”

During the next two decades Morgan published twenty-five stories in the New Yorker. Many appeared in her 1974 collection, The Mystic Adventures of Roxie Stoner. After Robert Gottlieb replaced William Shawn as editor of the New Yorker, in 1987, Morgan’s work ceased to appear in that magazine—or anywhere else, for that matter. She died in 2002, in a nursing home, still writing.

Photo: Jon Sachs

Boys

When we come into town for a gallon of strawberry ice cream and a bag of Doritos, the Lazy JC is all closed up, so my brother and I jog over to the Sportsman Bar, where we know we’ll find Thad Basset, who keeps the after-hours keys.

The Sportsman is one of Melstone’s last grand brick false-fronts. Forty years ago, you would have found a whole high-shouldered row of them. First, the Antlers, whose little rooms on the second floor were still littered with the silk stockings of whores, then the Wilson Hotel, Herron’s, the Grant, the Sportsman, and the U.S. Post Office—though all but the Sportsman and the post office have been torn down or boarded up, and weedy lots and busted windows line Main Street now. The Snakepit, the other bar in this town of less than two hundred, is along the highway in a cheap prefab building that also houses the only café with regular hours between Roundup and Forsyth, a hundred-mile stretch of Highway 12 that cuts right through eastern Montana’s Big Dry. The café serves the usual flash-frozen fries and preformed hamburger patties, and the Snakepit is the kind of bar where a shot means schnapps, and light beer and wine coolers fill the fridge. Not the Sportsman. Beer comes in a squat can there, and a shot means pick your whiskey. The house special, one of the few things besides peanuts you can get to eat at all, is a grease-soaked paper bag of hard-fried chicken gizzards.

So it’s something to be just fifteen, still a boy, really, and be stepping up to the heavy wooden door of the Sportsman Bar. Though you can drive now into town with your brother, and though you are allowed to stay up late and eat ice cream and Doritos and watch reruns of Night Court and M*A*S*H and the half hour of music videos they show every Friday night on Channel 4, it’s still something to be pushing that very door open.

Photo: Rennett Stowe

Breathless

Poetry by David Kirby

Broadax Inc.

My old champ and pal “Frederick” Duk Nuhkmongamong simply appeared at my office—first sign of trouble, no phone call. Marie allowed him past the reception desk because I guess he was so beautiful in that suit, so clearly belonged in the corporate suites. When I looked up from the telephone there he was, determined, but something else, too: diminished.

I stared at him bluntly, kept talking into the phone to one Ann Spray from Hartlee Commercial Properties. I was thinking how tender Ducky looked, how blue, and my stomach rose into my gorge with self-blame, but I was saying, “We can’t pay that kind of footage for satellite warehousing, and I think your man must know this, no? You certainly know this, Ann.” Harsh words gently delivered. And my friend did not crack his usual smile or make the usual word-mouthing fun of my business style. Still talking to Ann, admonishing her, still looking at Duk, I so calmly said, “Get back to me at nine thousand plus zeroes tops and we’ll talk more.”

Ann Spray’s sprightly voice piped faceless: “How did it go with your mother?” and I hung up without an answer—let that stand as expression of emotion, and to hell with those who asked after dead parents in order to sugar their fuck-ups. Broadax Inc. did not need what Ann Spray had, always a pleasant position.

I thought a minute, jotted a note, only then looked to my friend. I said, “Ducky,” fond as I could make it.

And he said, “Broadax.”

We were the fellows who were roommates at Stanford, but twenty years older. I said, “One-nine they want, out in Bethel.”

He said, “One-nine in Bethel? Har. They heard deep pockets.”

“Why so grim?” Again, my stomach, normally steel, clenched. The guilt had gotten to me. To me, Mike Broadax, certified shark. They’d find license plates in my gut when they finally croaked me, whole propellers from ships, the skeletons of many a creature great and small, and guilt, whatever that looked like: slag, I pictured, great crusty lumps of formless, poisonous, weighty lead-smelter slag.

He looked away from me, first time since he walked in the door, looked back, and out with it: “Jilly and I have split.”

“Oh, no, Ducky, no.”

“It’s a bad marriage, Ted, nothing to get sad about.”

“I’m sorry, Ducky, I’m terribly sorry. And don’t make small of it. This is terrible news! This is rotten news. I could cry! I am crying! It’s . . .
nuts.” And it was nuts indeed, if he was initiating it: Jilly was brilliant and lovely and rich, too, a predator herself, and from what I had seen, kind, devoted to causes, eager, hungry for life, intensely, um, sexual. A perfect wife as seen by the man who had nothing. I dried my eyes—they really had started in tears, though with that remark about crying I’d only been trying for a smile. “Nuhkmongamong, you idiot, I care about you! Have a seat—please, let’s talk.”

Duk did not sit, but leaned, leaned over my desk, and I saw he’d been crying, too, that in fact he was all cried out: there was that dewy kind of redness at his eyes, his black, deep eyes. His tie that day was orange with the thinnest red diagonal stripes—no concession to sadness there—narrow knot pulled up so tight that his Hong Kong collar was a suicidal garrote cutting his thin neck.

Burning Bright

Marcie listened to the noon weather forecast, then turned off the TV and went out on the porch. She looked at the sky and nothing belied the prediction of more hot dry weather. The worst drought in a decade, the weatherman had said, showing a ten-year chart of August rainfalls. As if Marcie needed a chart when all she had to do was look at her tomatoes shriveled on the vines, the corn shucks gray and papery as hornets’ nests. She stepped off the porch and dragged a length of hose into the garden, its rubber the sole bright green among the rows. Marcie turned on the water and watched it splatter against the dust. Hopeless, but she slowly walked the rows, holding the hose just below the metal mouth, as though it were a snake that could bite her. When she finished she looked at the sky a last time and went inside. She thought of Carl, wondering if he’d be late again. She thought about the cigarette lighter he carried in his front pocket, a wedding gift she’d bought him in Gatlinburg.

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