Among the incurables (and other poems)

My Mercurial family, today I will share some important poems from Scott Harney, Kythe Heller, Oksana Sabuzhko, and Peter Balakian, recently published by The Arrowsmith Press, an impeccable and reliable publishing house founded by the celebrated writer Askold Melnyczuk.

We can, apart from reading them here, listen to their voices in a collection I uploaded on Spotify. I personally know Peter Balakian, whom I interviewed at the Miami Book Fair when he presented his book: Ozone Journal, 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner. I have recently met Kythe Heller, whose work in the arts is broad and attention catching. I would also like to bring your attention to Scott Harney's remarkable book, curated by Pulitzer Prize Winner Megan Marshall.

I hope I can endear you to these names.

Scott Harney (1955-2019)

Scott Harney was a practicing poet who, aside from a few early publications in the Somerville Community News, did not publish during his lifetime, leaving a significant body of work to be discovered by readers after his death. He grew up in and around Boston, graduating from Charlestown High School and Harvard College. His literary influences include Robert Lowell and Jane Shore, with whom he studied at Harvard in the 1970s, as well as Richard Hugo and Philip Levine.

AMONG THE INCURABLES

Sealed behind a window in my air-conditioned
room, I can see across
a courtyard to the early name,
Holy Ghost Hospital for the Incurables, engraved
above a doorway flanked by columns of crumbling
cement. The nurses tell me
nuns still haunt the empty wards,
the only ghosts I might believe in.
A dozen wires hanging from my chest,
doctors striding in and out all day
yet no one knows what ails me.
Chronic disdain, says one; acute regret
says another. The chaplain sees no
sickness of the spirit or the soul.
Only the night nurse understands. At three a.m.
she rubs my shoulders with a salve
of Vaseline and nettle and finally
I can sleep an hour or two before the light
consumes the blessed dark again. I want
to say internment here has left me
with a love of life, and that on discharge
I will walk the street embracing strangers
and hold back tears when viewing sunsets
but I love this life because there is no other,
the way I loved a girl who took me down an alley
and let me press against her by the light
of kitchen windows. She was “special,”
my junior high school teachers said, meaning
in a class for slow learners. I should stay away
from her, they said, because I was on the college
track and she wouldn’t be a fitting mate for me,
on the road to glory, which got me here,
among the incurables.

Kythe Heller

Kythe Heller is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar completing a doctorate at Harvard University in Comparative Religion and Arts and Media Practice. She is also a practitioner of Sufism and a student of M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. Her published work includes two poetry chapbooks, Immolation (Monk Honey) and Thunder (WICK: Harvard Divinity School), the philosophical monograph “An Ethnography of Spirituality” (Cambridge UP), the essay "Living Backwards" in the anthology Quo Anima: spirituality and innovation in contemporary women’s poetry (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics), and poems and essays published in The American Poetry Review, Tricycle, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.

A FLOR DE PIEL

Inside me a girl is kneeling, but I do not know her. Touching and not touching
the shroud of roses she sews petal by petal
on the floor.
As if what her fingers touch could tell us what we have lost— How everything will be lost.

I can hear her sharp keening
as roses disremember into a new shape.

As if what is absent speaks through us.
As if we remember everything that has yet to happen. And the awkwardness of the shroud
arranging itself without the body.
As if only being dead were fragile enough for what the earth has to say.

Inside me her eyes grow darker. Blackened needles sewing a spectral garment she remembers and forgets.
My body gets smoky, she says. Gets holes in it. A country I can no longer tolerate,
precarious as space and time,
two forms of motion as a cross. The body is
a metaphor, its desires nails to be removed ...

The mark a needle makes as it appears disappears between the folds.
Her body sutures the dark border between the roof and the moon.
Things that enclose me and things I cannot touch. They are so near.

Inside me a girl was kneeling. She returned home after a long journey but home was never there.
(Something sobbed in her all the time, all the time.) The small flame in her shivered like an eye.

Did she climb in?
Part her shattered chest and lick at the rose petals flowing over her bones?
What did they have to do with her happiness, or grief.

She was that last, unspeakable thing: the body like a field
stripped to bare ground, then burnt—
Only the spirit kept searching the ground; no one knows how to comfort it.

It’s like the moment a stranger,
say, at dinner, asks you: where’s home? and you hesitate— then lie, and tell him you live in Brooklyn.
What you see in that moment is what the spirit sees:

Why should I lie? Is my voice
like the blackened earth, the voice of cinder?
Who do you think you are spirit skipping from lightworld to lightworld

like a stone through its smeared reflections—

A bird flew through my body! Incapacitating joy?

The wound had happened before. Joy—before
I knew it was mine—
soared through the blackened field

a bandage inside my body torn off from separateness—

O messenger!

Never knowing the difference

between your own heart pumping 1,640 beats a minute and the heart of the world into which you fly.

What trust.

That must be why birdcalls are
beyond loneliness,
so intimate and wild they glide right into the depths of you and disappear there—
so completely your own you hardly know what is singing in you at all—

I have crawled straight through the mountain. Straight through the block of brightness that was
your body, Love—that bewilderment.

[ ... ]

Now there is no amazing scent of musk
rising from your skin when I lift the bedclothes—
[ . . . ] for a moment, I hold the night sky to my chest and all its fragility.
In that heart, what point is there in dying or being born again?

Oksana Zabuzhko

Novelist, poet, and philosopher, Oksana Zabuzhko is one of Ukraine’s best known and most important public intellectuals. Her controversial novel, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, is widely regarded as a contemporary classic and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her most recent novel, Museum of Abandoned Secrets, explores the untold stories of Soviet life in the second half of the twentieth century. Zabuzhko has been a Fulbright scholar, and has taught Ukrainian literature at Penn State, Pittsburgh University, and Harvard. Her book Notre-dame d’Ukraine is a cultural study focused on the work of the fin-de-siècle writer Lesia Ukrainka. Founding editor of Komora Publishers, she works at the Hryhori Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine.

A DEFINITION OF POETRY

I know I will die a difficult death –
Like anyone who loves the precise music of her own body,
Who knows how to force it through the gaps in fear
As through the needle’s eye,
Who dances a lifetime with the body – every move
Of shoulders, back, and thighs
Shimmering with mystery, like a Sanskrit word,
Muscles playing under the skin
Like fish in a nocturnal pool.
Thank you, Lord, for giving us bodies.
When I die, tell the roofers
To take down the rafters and ceiling
(They say my great-grandfather, a sorcerer, finally got out this way).
When my body softens with moisture,
The bloated soul, dark and bulging,
Will strain
Like a blue vein in a boiled egg white,
And the body will ripple with spasms,
Like the blanket a sick man wrestles off
Because it’s hot,
And the soul will rise to break through
The press of flesh, curse of gravity –
The Cosmos
Above the black well of the room
Will suck on its galactic tube,
Heaven breaking in a blistering starfall,
And draw the soul up, trembling like a sheet of paper –
My young soul –
The color of wet grass –
To freedom – then
“Stop!” it screams, escaping,
On the dazzling borderline
Between two worlds –
Stop, wait.
My God. At last.
Look, here’s where poetry comes from.

Fingers twitching for the ballpoint,
Growing cold, becoming not mine.

Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian is the author of eight books of poems, four books of prose, three collaborative translations, and several edited books. “No Sign,” is the title poem of Balakian’s forthcoming book of poems. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Black Dog of Fate, a memoir won the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir; The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize. His collaborative translations include two books by Grigoris Balakian: Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide and The Ruins of Ani. Among his other books of prose is Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

NO SIGN

(Segment)
1.

He: Is it night already?
She: No.
He: Did our house fall down?

_____

She: What happened?
He: Is it you?
She: say it: sanji bushugi

2.

He: yes.
She: why should I believe you?
He: doesn’t geology put us in our place?

*

He: we appeared in the age of fission:
vaporized bodies, ionized dragonflies, shadows printed on stone
She: Japanese cities burned in my dreams. I saw the newsreels in class
decades later—
He: back here—on the Palisades cliffs again—staring at Manhattan—
remember when the Sauternes was liquid gold.

3.

She: In the beginning there were alpha particles and gamma rays.
We always see daylight through the kitchen window near dusk
We can’t forget how dusk turns the hydrangea deep blue.
We can’t forget the glowing dioxin sun—the no-gaze,
morning bright blue agent-orange sky—even now—after all.

4.

He: Godard called Hiroshima Mon Amour Faulkner plus Stravinsky—
She: Remember: at the Angelika September smell of light rain
warm sidewalks shop awnings late summer.
He: the noren curtains opened, the noren curtains closed
We stared at kanji, birds, sketches of roofs, a tree
the lovers walked through the curtains either way
time shifted like a breeze through eye sockets
She: they said good-bye and the noren curtains opened
and the past was a burning city
seen in silence, just images on screens
He: What did Hiroshima mean to you?
She: the end of the war, fear and terror that it could happen to us,
then indifference—astonishment that they dare do it—
then it became an unknown fear—