Literary Cafe:Published AlumniLiterary Cafe showcases recently published works from our MFA graduates in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Elizabeth Bradfield received her MFA in Poetry in 2005. Her first book of poems, Interpretive Work, appeared in 2008 (Arktoi Books).
The six poems below are from her newest collection, Approaching Ice, by Persea, 2010.
—for Vitus Bering
They've closed again the gap that you first sailed, Russian sponsored Dane, so cousins on the Diomedes
are in post Cold War touch. But you made the map
that made the border, sighting lands just guessed at between Kamchatka and America's west coast. And we write history from what's put down officially, maps
and logbooks made and kept by the survivors of your death, of your loss of ambition from years
line-toeing across the forehead of Siberia. Finally you set sail for
glory—or not for but from whatever pushes us beyond our birth-spots. What pushes us away? I, too, have left for some spot unknown by those who claim me, for
place unhooked from kin and story. I've fled the watched life of any hometown where if
you kick a dog, infect a girl, break a window
the girl turns out to be your mother's landlord's cousin, the dog a beat cop's mutt, and shards cut your sister's foot: Each chafed-at thing's a window
in your glass-house world. So the age-old lust for places we pretend are free of consequence. It's the same
now as it was with Oedipus, poor stiff, running to escape his fate
and running smack dab into it, an awful scene, a nightmare warning we need to keep repeating because, of course, fate
never seems immediate. For weeks Bering's crew feasted on the delicious bulk of sea cows (now extinct).
They played cards, anted up with otter pelts that promyshlenniki later
stripped from the shores. Foxes bit the men's toes at night. The land ate them as they ate the land, calling it need, worrying about it later.
Phrenology Were the earth a skull, the lump at its base would read to Victorian doctors as amativeness: connubial love, procreative lust. And where the peninsula
stretches up toward Patagonia a smidge of philoprogenitiveness, parental love, a fondness for pets and the generally helpless. Jules Dumont d'Urville,
man of his times, had his own skull mapped before sailing to map earth's southern blur. Were the earth a skull and someone with knowledge laid hands on it, felt topography
for expression of its psyche, would this answer what questions are asked in slog and observation, in sample and ice core?
Sub-Antarctic islands bulge at the spot of combativeness: self-defense, a go-to disposition and love of debate. Aimentiveness at South Africa and New Zealand: appetite,
an enjoyment of food and drink. Jules was pleased with what the doctor found, felt himself seen truly. But what judges our human descriptions of place?
Weather? Lichens? The transitory animals that touch upon it? Were the earth a skull shaped by humors. Were understanding so palpable, so constant.
Polar Explorer Salomon August Andrée (1897)
O, terrible—silence over ice— no panting dogs, no hissing runners, no footfall to break it. Just the crack and groan of its own awful straining rising up.
You warm your hands at the flame that lifts you. The balloon's silk is a second sun, unsetting. You're always in its noon, directly underneath its rippling light.
There's a red smear on one floe, white bear loping away from the seal's meat. There's a quick spout in a lead, the whale's back there, gone.
When blizzards, no ground to fix your boots to, just directionless swirl and the compass' doubtful arrow.
Who else has breathed air this clear, crystals of it hardening briefly in your lungs? Who else has so brightly risen above the dangerous landscape?
And when you find that you are losing height, when the earth calls you down to its own slogging, when it's been decided that you've traveled long enough as ghosts, silent and apart, you know some disaster of hunger and cold awaits —your bones' location to be a mystery for thirty years— you know your limbs may no longer have the knack of pulling, of recovery, of resistance, and you're glad anyway to be mortal again, and stumbling.
Leave your reindeer bag, damp and moldering, and slide into mine. Two of us, I'm sure, could warm it, could warm. Let me help you from your traces, let me rub what's sore. Don't speak. Your hair has grown long in our march, soft as my wife's. Keep your beard turned toward the tent's silk, your fusty breath—I know none of us can help it, I know, and truthfully I'm glad for any scent in this…
Hush. How long has it been since my mouth has held anything other than ice and pemmican? Your skin, though wan and sour, is firm, delicious. Yes, your shoulder, your hip. I'd not thought how soft a man's hip would be, how curved the flesh above the backs of his thighs—listen do you hear the wind moaning, the ice groaning beneath us as it strains?
Polar Explorer John Forbes Nash, Jr., Self-Declared Emperor of
He's a genius mathematician and insane which goes a long way to explain it.
But why hadn't I thought of this before? That someone might want a throne there, ruler of most of the world's fresh water,
inaccessible. Penguins his uncomplicated subjects, little history to surmount, and the ground's own pure and endless fractal variations—or permutations as it's all a rearranging of Hydrogen, Oxygen, Hydrogen—of white.
A land to quiet his mind's static, a slate for his huge equations, numbers scrawled across the faint sense of what was once expected there—tropics at the pole, Eve's descendants picnicking together, no apple bit and abandoned on the ground, no snake, Adam not fingering the soft arch of his lost rib— logic overwriting myth.
Coastline unmappable. Falling and rebuilding. Lost and unlost.
And the katabatic wind to howl out any unwanted groan nag whine mumble screech whimper. To overwhelm the clamor of his own dissonance.
But the heart of anything, at last, is only conquerable as long as supplies hold out. Brief forays and then
open wild white
On the Longing of Early Explorers
I would prefer one hour of conversation with a native of terra australis incognita to one with the most learned man in Europe.
Before satellites eyed the earth's whole surface through the peephole of orbit, before we all were tracked by numbers trailing from us like a comet's tail—O if only, they'd say in quaint accents and obscure sentence structures—if only the unsullied could be discovered, if only, once found, it could speak its own nobility and let us empathize. Poignant, the despair that itched beneath their powdered wigs, their longing to touch the unspoiled, their sense that the world was already ruined. The least movement is of importance to all nature. |
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