Elusive Mysteries

Again she is gone, Kore, the maiden who held a sheaf of wheat in her hand, a flower. Cold fogs the yard, the dog barks at hoarfrost.

Once more she has been abducted— how cold she must be, beneath the earth, shivering, her room so small it could be a grave. How many seeds will she eat?

And yet I remember her singing, empty-handed, playing at being pretty. I remember the feathers in her hair, how soft the green trellises of trees knitting themselves into willows above her head. As if it were yesterday I recall the sound of her name in so many languages.

All the mothers calling, searching their cellars, looking for stairs down into the earth, and she already complicit with the underworld.

She the go-between for a hare, a golden dog, a sick woman on a thin mattress, and twin owls whose yellow eyes hold prey in oval pupils.

The blue trees of winter stand at intervals with naked branches.

Even when the sun touches them like the third circle in the archer’s target, their burnt cherry twigs hardly flinch.

A train passes in the distance, carrying its cargo of smokers in black jackets.

How seldom, the moments when anguish lets go its hold on the little chlorine pool, the trellised courtyard.

And it must be so for me as well.

My break with the past will be taken customarily, as a crust of bread or a few flakes of snow falling surreptitiously into my mouth to sever my tongue.

Lengua

They called it, after it was boiled and skinned, the pink and gray moss cut like a banner from the rest.

Because they—happy, healthy, ran to the plank— a wooden table like the talking dreams I had the night before,

I ate the pick-thin pieces on my straw plate. Not too hot nor cold, Mediterranean, roomtemperature. There’s a certain conceit in holding a fork so small. Once the fingers touch the lips, a bit of grace comes into the body. Sometimes heavily seasoned. Other times with mushrooms and watercress picked just hours earlier from the creek— like a salad perched atop an island.

A woman is the same in another language, and also a man with his knife. This organ of many names, a bit tough, harsh with the Polish horseradish, I could say it never melted. But that would be facile—for a complex problem such as eating a cow’s tongue far more argument is required, more discretion, a pinch of salt, a salt lick or a lame horse, all the ways lies stick like feathers to the back of the throat.

from Kafka’s Shadow

Every limb as tired as a person from Kafka’s “Conversation slips”

You must understand, for the time being, that I am without flowers. The Viburnum outside the window sways. Its throbbing keeps time with the wind and the ravens.

Here and there yellows turn brown, rust as if with illness. The doctor has found no cure for moods. I used to like to walk downstairs into the world. There a family ate and drank. My sisters’ cheekbones high, their eyes bright and well slept. I was punished for not being an entrepreneur—for wanting to write. You must remember me now.

The stories waited to be born. Labor after labor between bouts of illness.

I ask my awful god for an appetite! I lift a bowl from the wooden table to the cupboard fitted with glass panes. My arm weighs more than all Mama’s fine china gathered in the low boy, hemmed in. Father was handy with his hammer.

Would that I might sense a little passion. I’d take up the charcoal stick, shave thin rounds from its black tip, and sketch this famous tree whose arching stems hold snowballs.

When will Kafka’s father step in one of these piles? When he walks home from working at the Jackdaw, his meal will be waiting. He’ll be fed and warmed even as he satirizes his son.

You’ll find him cursing as he enters the rented flat, two stories, and hardly enough dowry money to pay the servant girl.

His wife’s standing over a pot large enough to hold all the earth the mole has heaped up in Prague. Instead of dirt: carrots, noodles and strings of meat.

Hermann, the father-monster, sits in his chair at the head of the table drinking a mug of beer, nodding off until, with a little prod from the skinny boy, his mouth turns foul and blasphemous.

If this is Kafka’s mole, perhaps it is yours as well. It could be you’ll recall, among the fecund scents, that incident from a childhood long ago forgotten.

Toward sunset it bleeds orange, plums, and wine. His father always at table with mug in hand. How long must a son allow the city to unwind its long avenues, branching rivers full of walkers insular with autumn. It’s true the blade took garlic cloves from their little white coats, so pliant, the stems beneath that fat knife wolfing into the core of the matter.

It’s true there must be a mother in the story—her stringy hair, her roast burning inside the oven. He sees the clock tower in the square, glances up to find a rim of moon. At least, for now, the hole’s been bled of what it holds. As far as a man can walk the shops stretch, their signs reversed. Closed for another, longer night. Withholding exactly that porcelain— that Jan Becher Karlovy liqueur cup one needs to clamp between finger and thumb. He’s learned one lesson. This wound must be purged each day. Else the stench of what it carries comes from his mouth, and others turn away.

Hermann Kafka stands at his son’s door. “Franz, we are late,” he says. “We must go—you are to be sacrificed today.”

“But father, two other sons died in my place to spare you the need. You must be mistaken— it is I who live here now, in the flat, among the cabbage roses and the little sisters.”

“I was told by God to sacrifice you, and I must obey,” replies Hermann.

Together the two begin a journey of years, months, and days. Remarks are exchanged, bitter innuendoes hang in the air like smoke.

This land, candle-lit by the moon, full of dust storms, hardly resembles Mt. Moriah.

Father and son walk the path that winds around a hill toward the altar where the son will be bound and burned.

When God cries out—

“Stop! Hermann, I was only testing your faith! Your son is spared, slit the throat of a young ram and go home,” the older Kafka, his hands around Franz’s neck, replies, “Too late.

I am far more obedient than that clown you took me for— the other, named Ibrahim.”

“And everything around me is subject to you. The table presses against the paper as if in love with it . . . and the clock strikes like a bird.”

—from Kafka’s Letters

He misses the fur coat she wore that summer because in winter it may turn cold, misses her agitation, her not so sotto voce murmurings about returning home when they walked that last time through the square in Triesch.

Now she will come to visit him: . . . you will be in this damned city. A pendulum swings whether one wills it or not. And bars of music, time measured out in quarter and half notes.

Imagining the presence of other suitors at her side:

(At what time did you arrive, how were you dressed)—his pique borders on illness, cheeks wear high coloring of the artist who lives with every time at once.

What’s wrong with this simple girl who comes to bite the hook he’s dangled with exquisite delicacy into the waters that separate them?

Will she, in white dresses and sympathy put herself in front of him and force the issue?

—(it takes more courage not to hope than to hope).Yes, she’s fallen for the bait of letters, and will come the night before to jangle the puzzle of time and place.

He goes to the station twice in two days, waits the extra hour, watches as she does not descend, her hand lacing the porter’s arm her luggage carried by the attentive steward.

. . . a little frustrated expectation put me to bed for two days . . . I wrote a dainty fever-letter to you . . . The letter he later ripped up while leaning on the windowsill.

I could think of nothing better than to go to bed. Who does the Fraulein dance with? How does this play within a play mimic Felice in Berlin, the wrestling away from, the pulling towards.

Didn’t he always lean towards the quadrille, one of those figures in which couples bow so much they do not come together, who always make the same final decision

In my empty room in which two flies against the window are making noise Yes, in this, his labyrinth where he loves the bird more than the clock, he writes: I close my eyes and kiss you.

Father’s in the room. Here, living, breathing, listening to the opera—

The Tales of Hoffman, where another sad man sings sorrowfully as if the worms in his heart ran amuck through his intestines.

Jacques Offenbach’s Fifth of May becomes only another plaintive cry from the street, where an animal lives on garbage pulled from the farce of a bin. Now three seasons make a year and the invalid’s arm rots.

“…when in spite of everything the late-afternoon sun comes out and casts my long shadow (yes, my long shadow, maybe by means of it I’ll still reach the kingdom of heaven)…

—from Kafka’s Letters

Late summer, he lies for hours on a vineyard wall, staring at rain clouds, he chews a stem of grass, looks out into the fields in which no message is written, no letter comes flying like a bird nor is one given to the hand that would take words.

Last night he sat at his desk, kept silence even when the maid came in to lower the blind, which was heavy, unwieldy. He helped her without talking and she went away. Another hour of sitting, of pecking and scratching. A few words written and scribbled out.

Late summer. He rests for hours on the wall in the vineyard, wanting his footprints to matter. Admires Goethe, dares himself to grow, even as doppelgänger, into the specter that kills what it perfectly imitates.

He drops to his feet like a cat and starts across a field, the late sun lengthening his shadow—the same rawboned twig his child-self assumed under the scrutiny of the father, whose weight blots out the sun punctually, each curse a blow to lift another pound from the papery boy who must remove layer after layer, peer farther into the text of himself until it too disintegrates and rises like mist into the joke of loving or being loved.

Acknowledgements

House of Burnt Offerings, Pleasure Boat Studio, 2014; Angles of Separation, Glass Lyre Press, 2015; Kafka’s Shadow, Deerbrook Editions, 2017; Premise of Light, Tebot Bach, 2018; Came Home to Winter, Deerbrook Editions, 2019; The Truth About Our American Births, Shanti Arts Press, 2020; A Landscaped Garden for the Addict, Shanti Arts Press, 2021

Thanks to the following journals where these poems first appeared:

Bracken, “Avenue of Birds”

Descant, “Incunubula”

New Feathers Anthology, “Demolition”

Nocturne Magazine, “For a Delirious Child”

North Dakota Quarterly, “Any Hospital, USA”

One Magazine, “A Portrait”

Plainsongs, “Forty Years”

Poetica, “Diaspora”

Sage Cigarettes Journal, “Silver Years,” “The Five-Fingered Root”

Short édition, “Ophelia Afloat”

Tar River Poetry, “Palmetto Bug”

Terror House Magazine, “The Frost,” “All We Took,” “Sandpipers”

The Poetry Box, Poeming Pigeon: “Subterranean Address”

THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays, “Sunday Afternoons”

Voices Israel, “Great Northern Fur Seal”

With gratitude to my colleagues in writing and the arts: Christianne Balk, Janée J. Baugher, Lendy Hensley, Sharon Hashimoto, Tina Kelly, Susan Lane, Linera Lucas, Kurt Olsson, Anne Pitkin, Michael Spence, Diane Ray, Joannie Stangeland, Mary Ellen Talley, Ruthie V., & Lillo Way.