Asylum Read online

  2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

  PITT POETRY SERIES

  Ed Ochester, Editor

  Asylum

  Quan Barry

  UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

  The publication of this book is supported by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

  Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15261

  Copyright © 2001, Quan Barry

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 0-8229-5769-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-7931-9 (electronic)

  for my parents Tom and Ingrid Barry—with love and laughter

  CONTENTS

  asylum

  child of the enemy

  The Glimmer Man

  If dy/dx=4x3 + x2 - 12/ 2x 2 - 9, then

  intercellular aubade

  intermurals

  Job 42:4

  kabuki

  Kaiserschmarn

  lullaby

  lunar eclipse

  maleficium

  masochism

  Meanwhile, Back in the Relative Safety of a Ticker Tape Parade, Buzz Aldrin has a Moment of Epiphany…

  night soil man

  oracle

  plague

  post-partum

  reading

  Snow White

  some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked

  studio audience

  synopsis

  tradition

  triage

  “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land”

  vigil

  visitor

  Whitsunday

  Whitsunday

  Whitsunday

  Whitsunday

  woman in love/Agatha, doubting

  Zeitgeist

  epilogue

  acknowledgments

  I've lain with the devil,

  cursed God above,

  forsaken heaven

  to bring you my love.

  —P J Harvey

  asylum

  The fish are the first to return:

  the moorish idol, the black surgeon,

  the trumpet and lesser scorpion, the angel

  seemingly radiogenic, the goatfish

  with its face of spikes. Whole phyla converging:

  the devil rays in fluid sheets, the leatherbacks,

  hawksbills, their shells reticent as maps.

  On the atoll: the golden plover, the kingfisher,

  egrets and honeyeaters

  nesting like an occupation. And the flowers:

  the flame trees, the now forgotten, the wait-a-bit

  all drawn to what we desert, a preserve

  where the chinese lantern's elliptic seed

  is bone-smooth, cesium-laced.

  child of the enemy

  I've seen thousands of Amerasians, and I have two Amerasian [children] of my own. Amerasians are willful and stubborn. They have serious identity problems. They have no discipline. Down the street at the Floating Hotel you'll find Amerasian prostitutes plying their mothers' trade. I think there's a racial thing here, something genetic.

  —an American ex-soldier as quoted in Vietnamerica

  I. NIGHT TERROR

  It started when I was four.

  Vacation. Door County, Wisconsin.

  The alewives rippling on the rocks

  like a flock of birds, the sudden knowledge

  growing like a toll. Then

  I couldn't have articulated it, but I knew.

  It wasn't the beached fish that frightened me.

  It was the ones that got away, far away

  under the wreck of water. The ones that survived

  by fleeing, kin left rotting on the shore.

  II. TWENTY YEARS LATER

  Someone who had been there

  (and now incidentally is serving

  a natural life sentence)

  told you it wasn't all

  about killing. Don't ever believe

  you weren't conceived in love.

  You take his word for it

  like an imago splitting the shell,

  each wet wing a voice

  purged and steeling.

  III. CHILD OF THE ENEMY

  a.

  I was born with a twelfth hole. Instantly

  the floating world carved its shame

  on the dark meat of my face. A love child, child of perfidy, allegiance

  split like a door.

  I was born a traitor in the month of Cancer, the white phosphorus

  pungent, knowing.

  b.

  1973. The rice winnows out like shrapnel. Before it's over

  there are fifty thousand new hostilities, each birthed face inimical

  as our fathers stealing home.

  c.

  Think of the places women dilate. Beds. Barns. Saigon's streets.

  No good Samaritan comes forward and only the moon like a platoon

  treacherously approaching, its extended hand like a speculum, the better

  to illuminate, disgrace.

  d.

  Or more importantly

  the places women leave. An unsuspecting caretaker. The bacterial streets.

  Or

  perhaps the unspeakable pitch into burlap

  and water. A gulf off the South China Sea where another sinking form

  is anyone's guess.

  e.

  That time Tet fell in the year of the snake. As in reptilian. As in

  no turning back. As in when I became

  a child of containment. As in how like a monetary policy

  I was loosed to an existence feral as a raised bayonet. As in

  what the serpent might say: knowledge for knowledge's sake

  is both industrial and complex.

  f.

  At birth

  I was swaddled

  in a blanket. Pink

  wool. Threadbare.

  Like everything else

  moth-eaten.

  Man-made.

  g.

  Before the last vertical bird lifted like a gurney out of April

  and twenty years clotted to a tumor brilliant as a stuck fish

  and the dreams began in which you saw yourself as the killer

  of trees, before the army finally said it was something in the water

  and orange came to be the cloak of mourning, tell me soldier:

  who taught you to love like a man, you with nowhere to go

  but tacitly free?

  IV. THE EXILED

  I liked it in South Vietnam.

  —Lieutenant William Calley

  Later when the black

  and white photos came in the rice

  sinking in its makeshift grave at the right

  of the picture three children wound

  about their mother like meat on a spit one eye

  rolling loose amazed in the dead

  silence of the frame the freshly dead

  posed hastily each wound

  breaking open like a smile each eye

  cocked as if winking under the black

  hood of hair the stalked rice

  a backdrop nobody wanted to write

  the story after all no american in his right

  mind would rise to this black

  mission 109 civilians dead

  gunned down in the eye

  of the hunt it was never about them the rice

  lush in ways their children could never be wound

  so tightly to old wounds

  the chinese the french now this blue-eyed

  christ seated at the right

  of the throne coming to save them from a black<
br />
  plague that left so many dead

  rotting in fields like unharvested rice

  this is where it began in the rice

  paddies of vietnam my mother her right

  hand gripping the earth's black

  pillow the night bleeding like a wound

  the soldier digging into her with the dead

  weight of his lust every star an amazed eye

  rolling loose in the night nine months i

  had just one picture taken in saigon my black

  hair sprouting toes wound

  in knots mouth like a fist the rice

  paper riddled with figures my right

  foot inked marked like a prayer for the dead

  listen you don't know me eyes wild as rice

  like wounds scarred black

  lieutenant if revenge is a rite of passage i need you dead

  V. OUR KAMIKAZE

  semper fi

  Next time they won't be crazy.

  They won't stand in My Lai laughing at the split throats, the humid spring

  pitted with shells.

  They won't drop down on the darker places, a gun in each hand, beguiling:

  Here and here. Come and live.

  They won't cry out when the doors throw open and they stream like teeth

  into the sky's blue yolk.

  They won't forget the children, the undeveloped girls they seeded,

  shredded.

  They won't enter the cities on foot, arms outstretched

  to bring the disciples their blood.

  Later

  they won't not have enough gas to make it back.

  VI. FLASHBACK

  Every night Achilles laid down to this: how he roped

  the breaker of horses to his disfiguring wheel, Patroklos

  a boy in wolf's clothing. Then

  when the arrow in its thirst arrived, this hero,

  tired of living in two worlds,

  let it plant, forgiving seed et al.

  If only my father could do the same.

  VII. OBITUARY OF A BIOLOGICAL MOTHER

  She was born upon a time.

  In what became. The defoliated.

  Congenital. Occidental. Out of order.

  Everything. She knew she learned

  from rape. Involvement

  in lieu of war. In the bladed years. She conceived.

  End of ever after.

  End of happily.

  She is survived by one. Who lives.

  As though she were dead of childbirth. Consequently.

  She must have. Done

  some things right. Mother of a bastard.

  Who died on whom.

  (VIII. A CODA

  Now belatedly

  I see

  the moon's dry surgings

  for what they are.

  Newton

  believed the Bible

  hides our names

  in its pages, our deeds

  printed like receipts.

  I didn't know

  I could need to know

  like this,

  the moon

  cutting her indifferent

  recessional. And you,

  you,

  my once-met,

  tell me

  who gave the world

  free will?

  Subsequently

  who made

  the fifth dimension

  mercy?

  It's rhetorical.

  Mother, I never

  didn't believe.)

  IX. NAPALM

  I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree

  rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling.

  Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled

  like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map

  pinned with targets, where I'm raging even now.

  It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies

  and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries,

  I won't only bloom where I'm planted.

  The Glimmer Man

  “Seagal told acquaintances that he believed he had been a holy man in a previous life.”

  —Esquire

  “I'm not supposed to fight—it's against my religion.”

  —Steven Seagal in The Glimmer Man

  He has a memory of begging, of shaving his scalp

  smooth as an alms bowl. On the fourth night,

  in the dojo behind his eyes, he waits for the songbird

  to visit him again, open the wheel. He believes he is found

  in the old ways—dreams, a shaman pitching silks

  into a lake, waiting for the reflection to settle, disclose

  where the soul replants its light. To him his last life

  explains much—the reed-like timbre of his voice

  whittled from the thin mountain air, his taste for black

  traced to his immolation in white. “I am a refuge

  from the three worlds. My path is love.” He receives

  his title in the year of the wood bull, his one act

  of choosing the dead man's conch proof enough

  to name him revealer of treasures. Cloaked in gold brocade, the joss

  sticks' fragrant sacrifice, his body shimmers quietly, illuminated

  by butter lamps sconced to the walls. A tulku,

  he knows from this life what the right role can do,

  how some lights last only until push comes to shove.

  If dy/dx=4x3 + x2 - 12/ 2x 2 - 9, then

  you are standing at the ocean,

  in the moon's empirical light

  each mercurial wave

  like a parabola shifting on its axis,

  the sea's dunes differentiated & graphed.

  If this, then that. The poet

  laughs. She wants to lie

  in her own equation, the point slope

  like a woman whispering stay me

  with flagons. What is it to know the absolute value

  of negative grace, to calculate

  how the heart becomes the empty set

  unintersectable, the first & the last?

  But enough.

  You are standing on the shore,

  the parameters like wooden stakes.

  Let X be the moon like a notary.

  Let Y be all things left unsaid.

  Let the constant be the gold earth

  waiting to envelop what remains,

  the sieves of the lungs like two cones.

  intercellular aubade

  inspired by The Matrix

  As if the maker didn't know where to begin—

  diastole or systole, the warring symmetry of closed circuits,

  the zygote's rapid spoking into other.

  Like everything that shoots grappling hooks, say

  the lacewing with its compound eyes, its thousand thousand brood

  oviposited to beat the odds. And for what?

  A toehold? Dominance? For the right

  to determine the helix, the how

  things know to differentiate—

  the fetal calf's multi-chambered stomach,

  the distinctly cooling planets, the stars

  zodiacal, seemingly white-hard? The why am I

  I and not you? The reason we come into being?

  O poor Tom! O flesh which bleeds air!

  O how everything wants to generate something!

  O there ain't no life nowhere! O judgment coursing

  through each particle of an atom's weight!

  O the sea's green platelets! O the sky's nitrogen grace!

  intermurals

  The first time my mother decided to come

  somebody lost an eye. Almost, besides,

  valedictorian, ivy league-bound, Lorie Ardiff had no right

  being on the field, the fifteen fibrous seams

  basting her eyelid together

  a consequence of this. The
second time

  it was Zoë Burbridge who leaned into it, jumped back

  like a dancer with the spirit, her cheekbone split,

  fresh as an oyster. After that, my mother stayed home

  four long years, not even trekking to the Berkshires, NESN

  and the state championship where I made

  that incomplete pass out of bounds, hands numb

  with December, the ball hard as an explicated tumor, pillaging

  free at last. She said she didn't spend the sixties

  bra burning so her daughter could master the subtle art

  of bloodletting in a kilt. Suit yourself. Like marijuana

  field hockey led to harsher things—

  lacrosse, two semesters of collegiate rugby

  where I learned to take it like a man,

  dish the dirt, wrap my arms around the enemy's knees

  and snap, the contact inflicted with affection. It's only now

  I remember the one who didn't get up, the girl

  they carried off the field in a fireman's stretcher, leg cocked back

  like a carbine. It goes without saying

  that I was exultant, frenzied with the power

  to cripple. Who wouldn't be?

  All those years my mother stayed home

  determined like a conscientious objector

  to blow this wall tumbling down.

  Job 42:4

  Forget all you've seen,

  bird, old woman, cage…

  —Osip Mandelstam

  Like a telegram

  announcing your death

  two months too late.

  An exile

  to the disaffecting—

  the snow, the river

  pouring endlessly

  over your death-wound,

  the cruel hinge.

  Nights

  the guards warm

  vodka in their throats,

  the Urals anonymous

  like a tourniquet,

  like famished hands,

  like the blue flames

  of corpses.

  Where the silence goes on

  like a horse

  after the rider falls,

  where man

  is the only god,

  you are manifold.

  It is our right to ask.

  kabuki

  Why his father taught him to bite the corners of handkerchiefs, pout

  as they had done for the last half millennium, his father's father and others

  passing it to their sons—onnagata., woman-like—each generation perfecting it,

  switching from lead-based paints that left them dumb to shellacking their eyes