The Other Stars and unseen gasps of light

The Other Stars

by Rachel Wetzsteon

    I.

Tripartite schemes were all very well

for the builders who held their blueprints firmly

in hand beforehand. What did it matter

if the two vertical poles didn’t touch, seemed so

far apart, in fact, that no one who visited the site

could believe the architect’s arrogant babble?

Before they knew it, he’d bridged the two poles with a plank.

I have hidden under these structures of

synthetic comfort when the sky was

overcast. I have even hired a claque of

unemployed actors  to stand there with me. But speaking

for myself, I find their tentlike charm diminishing.

Over on the next hill is a line of poker-faced upright slabs,

their bases deep in the dirt, their function something else entirely.

    II.

I keep seeking this pleasure-giving eye mote;

you fill your pew and my view with

golden uncontrollable emanation

and the music surges in response,

a coded story of hope and disappointment

decipherable to the few. Is it wrong

to be overheated here, or not to have left my coat at the entrance?

The only crime would be not to swoon,

to see and ignore you, or brand you a brother

in spotless devotion. Beneath the bleeding windows

hearts must have heft, masses of skin become

human tremors, to feel the force of the organ.

On its own the rite is a starchy obligation;

add intrigue and the altar ripples and ripples.

    III.

Over the hub of the hill, a solid wall of

silver leaves. Underfoot, soil without

burrows. Blanketing soil and leaves, a scrim of

hushed and unpunctured blue. Then all of a sudden,

rumors of something about to happen; the night

restless with its own unkeepable secrets,

the very air strained and achingly electric.

Because you are not here, nighttime behaves

this way, calling for terms I’d long since put away:

susurration, intrigue, reverberant. It is only

in your magnanimous absence that stony surroundings

can sing your praises so; I curse even as I gape

to know that their raving requires your being

anywhere else. The evening hums in compensation.

    IV.

His beak is open as if in mid-worm or

mid-sentence, his feet impressively sturdy as they

straddle the street. What gives him away,

though, is the magenta pool spreading rapidly

under this otherwise unruffled stomach.

Something ended this bird so suddenly that

he never had time to strike a normal death pose.

It would be overdone and untrue

to say I am the bird, to paint myself in similar terms

as stunted, irretrievably downed, forever rooted

to unkind ground. It would smack of self-pity.

We are partners instead beneath a general rubric

of doom: an arrow descended and brought

him, startled, to death, me screamingly to life.

    V.

I loved a statue and watered it daily.

Sooner or later it softened and let me

break a vital part of it off;

with my hard-won prize in my pocket

I explored the streets with a secret,

but before long the plundered piece was

dust in my hands, and painful to look at.

Now another effigy makes me

shudder at its criminal threshold.

More than ever I entertain a

shameless urge to steal or caress it,

but the facts of history tell me

otherwise: you get what you pray for

and the statue dwindles to rubble.

    VI.

Although others lack the sharpened knives

to be villains, they do what they can with

blunter instruments. Sparring to kill time,

falling to fisticuffs when eloquence evades them,

they get their day’s entertainment from

instruction manuals bought at auctions; when one

utters his bored “Touché,” a gaggle of fans surround him.

How much deadlier is your collection of

swords with a history, scimitars that glint

even when strung up and inactive. Although I would gladly

lay a whetstone at your door for one blinding night of

thrust-and-parry, you have no need of

anything resembling aid: one twist of your weapon

outstabs the meanest ranks of dullard soldiers.

    VII.

The avuncular figure with grizzled beard,

the bearer of balm for the stricken and

abandoned, the craggy but spirited sickle-carrier

paces the page of a long-forgotten book of days

and never once frowns. There is no need to:

our days may be numbered, but . . . (and here his eyes

mist over with comforting thoughts of gold and rainbows).

His evil twin wants none of this waiting,

this starry-eyed torpor. Hoping to scare eternity

into submission, he too brandishes a sickle, but

everything goes wrong: he pierces his own leg and must go

on crutches. Before long, he falls into childish fits

of self-pity, proffering sickle and leg to hirelings,

saying “Lop it off, boys, and be quick.”

 

    VIII.

During the first stages of frenzy, a glut of

meaning descends on nature. As if to spite cynics

who call dirt nothing but dirt, terrific breezes

mere conveyors of pollen, something in the

sufferer’s mind seeks out and finds corroboration

in vast planets and puny insects; all are as prone to

nervous tics, all whirring with badly kept secrets.

Time passes, and the system turn on you. When

all is sacred, nothing is safe: silent lampposts suddenly

pipe up in irresistible  colloquy a tone too high, the sky

calls you but does not want your replies, and

water-bound birds decline pronouns in Latin. It is a hotbed

that cannot stand the addition of an offending

presence; it whispers until you are well on your way.

    IX.

Before you came on the scene and blasted

the image to bits, I thought of love as a

spacious courtroom where evidence was presented

graphically and up front, where deserving plaintiffs

got what they wanted legally, and where

judges beamed beneath picturesque wigs when they saw

happy verdicts amicably arrived at.

These days, law is something to be left at the door

along with galoshes; I spend my nights in sinister

mock-trial, playing all the parts. “Guilty or not?”

booms our pot-bellied, exquisitely bored judge. I answer

for you: “Not, your holiness; this harridan framed me.”

And then I object. And then, hunched over in a corner

of the courtroom, a juror suggests we all go out to lunch.

    X.

It was a run of the mill journey until the windows

seemed to have melted; outside the train,

the foliage of early summer received an

instantaneous drenching. Startled, I thought of you

like a lovesick heroine out of an old romance:

“Holding her heart, agawp at nature’s rages,

she would watch the storm from inside, and secretly like it.”

No longer dainty hand-to-the-head, the tragic

meaningful stare out the window. No storm buffets

alone; however stunningly leaves may shudder and

press against the pane, it is a wasted downpour if

nobody comes out soggy. Reaching my stop, I

left my cap and trenchcoat inside a locker

and headed for the wet jungle, hot on your heels.

    XI.

Our meeting is as stiff as a long-dead thoroughbred.

Like its former coat, we too are glossy and brief;

no frizzy wire springs up that is not

dutifully cropped; our every neigh is strictly

by the book; place us in a lineup of

similarly frozen stallions, and you will not know

one rigor mortis from another and another.

I could endure a salvo of kicking, a brutish uprearing

nag, or a vicious race to the finish, over this

wingless duo of moribund mares. I could even

stand it if you leapt up and started poking holes

in my horse metaphor. Anything other than the way

our speech resembles the two extremes of stunted growth:

gorgeous stillborns, cynical has-beens. This is no time for pleasantry!

    XII.

I have been dreaming you into the picture

when you bound, unseeing, past me. I tingle

onward with knees of jelly, glad

to be confirmed in my scheming: this walk

is no hopeless ramble, but a perfect way

of seeing and being seen. Fate, sensing

my hopes, obligingly guides you outdoors.

What rankles is the time it takes me

to realize that you are truly, tangibly here.

I have been holding so many secret meetings with you

that this brief encounter, this perfect opportunity

passes, doesn’t register. I see you in retrospect:

you were here, jacket flapping in the noon breeze,

and gone by the time I had presence of mind to grasp it.

    XIII.

Explaining camouflage: a useful way

of suiting yourself to your habitat so that

you steal its features more than it steals yours; in war,

a surefire method of avoiding skirmishes;

in love, a vanishing act that lets you watch the object

of your affection, in whose vagrant eyes

you might as well be a pebble, a flaw on the leaf.

Or, a ruinous self-effacement, brainchild

of the timid, deserving to be trounced

by the rustle in the trees which announces

a vital presence, the force which, storming a fortress,

subjects its tenant to a scrutiny of his most

cherished beliefs, the stunning hybrid

you look at once and cannot get out of your mind.

    XIV.

Hearing you praised is enough to make my

overbaked brain a warpath for feuding

goddesses. Only instead of swords,

their messages clash, each one a model of

what I might do. On one side, Silence,

stately in black, shows no sign of unrest:

her only response to the beaming crowd is to nod.

On the other side in see-through red, a goddess

named Outrage deafens her rival with laudatory

overdrive; next to her encomia both clean

and unclean, the excesses of the laurel-throwers

positively began to pale. It is her manner that

somehow filters out; the walls start to rumble, the floorboards,

feeble at keeping secrets, murmur “Swear it.”

    XV.

In the handed-down inventory of love’s habits

we find images of lowering: down at the mouth,

down on the knees, prostrate with the shock of the marvelous.

Contact more than shame-faced with the elevated figure

is therefore impossible; hazard more

than a bow, and a trapdoor opens beneath you;

offer a hand, and see love disappear.

There is never a mention of the sudden boost

the run-down ego receives when, flinging a jest

from toad-high levels, it witnesses more than

haughty approval. Nor is it told how the jest

(some minor impromptu line) gets told and retold

in the prolonged wake of the moment; seraphs laugh at it,

trees love it; you see your dullness shine in another’s eyes.

    XVI.

A dream straight out of a textbook: having been

tied up and pointed at the wall by a swarthy, hairy-

faced thug and her henchman, I hear the incredible shouts

as an old babysitter is disemboweled.

Severed organs flap to the floor like pancakes,

but I do not think, “Me next,” fearing instead

that it will fall on me to clean up the horrible mess.

What can I do, on waking, but clench my stomach

in sharp, instinctive need to keep it closed?

In wars between the hirsute and the nurturing, nobody

dares to cheer for the former, though her company, being

moody, is hellishly more alive. Will this day or

the next bring pearly surfaces to the brink of

spilling over? (Somewhere the babysitter screams your name.)

    XVII.

Once a day, you report to the resident loony

for clues leading to the whereabouts of

the author of a love letter you have received.

She is mad but useful, delving as she can into

alternate worlds; and as you grill her from the other

side of the bars, a strange bond begins to form

between you. She seems to have felt as you do.

Little do you know that this sibyl is also a relentless

self-promoter. She ladles out counsel (“You can tell

she wants to be tracked down”) and misinformation

(“I think I know where she lives”) like a watery broth

that keeps you coming back for the meaty pay-off

at the bottom. All this you realize and tolerate,

never suspecting that she’s the one you want.

    XVIII.

When you are within shouting distance it is

no matter, or next to none, what you say or

whether we speak at all. It is enough

to see, and covertly to love, your bright array of

colorful traits. They are no sooner parceled out than

stored up, secret accounts to be gone over until

the whole single-spaced ledger is memorized.

But when you leave, ledgers cannot contain you;

time passes and the beloved blurs, the riotous gestures

faded in substance, though not in force. I cannot hear

your voice if I try; and what do I do when

a free-floating affection outraces its

visible target? From your splendid outpost

that dazzles merely by being yours, send photos.

    XIX.

Abroad, you are a mass of extra shadow

falling on all you see. On its own a square

is stiff and formidable; walk in it and

the arches tremble, the smells from the canal

soften and linger. The red of the hills

at evening is fit for a postcard home, until

you step in the picture—and hand it back to the masters.

It is straight out of a shoddy French novel

to squeeze the continents into us/them

categories and chapters—mold here, fruit there,

stubble in places and wheat in others. Think me less

a philistine when I say how little the steps

of the journey frame you. It is you, torchbearer to

shrouded lands, who flood them with living color.

 

    XX.

When I call you to mind, you respond sluggishly

if at all. It is as if, being busy, you send

a very expensive mannequin in your stead,

a robot who dresses and walks like you but

cannot capture your puzzling essence. Memory

loves paradox: the more I require a stand-in,

the looser the seams, the phonier the puppet.

But I do not know this until the unexpected happens.

Sifting my horde of jewels and praising their cut,

I come upon a diamond that puts them to shame;

catching a glimpse of familiar patterns of color

in the street, I realize the cheapness of the household dolls

I have been thinking about, relieved that even now,

surprises like this put you fleetingly back in the picture.

    XXI.

It will be objected that in missing you I forfeit

a key to the room reserved for bona fide lovers.

There, an air of resolute calm prevails: it is always

“Our minds are as one, and that is enough,”

or “I saw him last night in the shape of a cloud,”

or, harder still to believe, “Look at the

useful machine I built instead of grieving.”

They may brace themselves and speak of the

salubrious sublime; they may grit their teeth and

bear it; their tourniqueted hearts are as

undone as mine. Away, you are no

homing compass or dove, but a roving, ceaselessly

altering scoundrel. To miss you is to miss

the loot you add to your repository of noises.

    XXII.

Horses, birds, babysitters and jails,

shadows, churches and trains; one would think

you’d sat up with me all night, filling out forms

on what images you preferred, or at least been

consulted in the matter. Failing that, one might suppose you

to have stood on the sidelines in mounting horror

as, one by one, strange pictures of you took flight.

But you stumbled into this mess of blocks

like the bumbling idiot in a screwball

comedy. Center stage contained in cardboard boxes

you tripped over before smiling and

wandering on, in your madcap way, to new scrapes.

Meanwhile, the whirligig thrives in your absence: booted cubes

swoon for their muse, a poltergeist in a bowtie.

    XXIII.

A spider loved a bee and, knowing that to trap him

would be to kill him, devised webs just flashy enough

to keep the insect guessing. And soon,

seeing in the spider’s handiwork traces

of his own flower-hopping, the bee came

closer. Arachnid vapors wafted over them as

the bee proposed to die in the spider’s service.

“No!” screamed the latter, tightening up her floss,

and the spurned bee flew on to more accustomed

turf—roses and lilies next to whom (he saw)

the spider was nothing. But she was not so lucky.

The web she’d spun for him got tangled

in her post mortem antenna-flailing, and finally wound

around her neck and choked her. It was the end of the fable.

    XXIV.

The more love grows, the bigger its sealed-off

palace becomes, and the more pinched and dark its

stoical keeper. Inside, sun breeds space: a ray

that snuck past the keeper enters a room and lights it—

only now there is not one room but many.

Beams bright as lasers but gentler give away

the safe behind the painting, the corridor under the rug.

If only the keeper, hardened by circumstance,

could learn from this endless illumination

and turn the room inside out. Light would then

seep through leathery skin, giving its secrets away

in a gradually spreading glow, turning skin the orange

of pure beatitude. But there are only two options for the keeper:

to be charbroiled all at once or eternally silent.

    XXV.

Then, any enterprise requiring new clothes

was privately hissed, if openly hailed;

too close to a floral militia thinking as one

were the standard frills, the required rustles,

and thinking myself a beacon among dark ladies,

I called the clothes by their hidden agendas:

ethical corsets, trusses of the spirit.

Now I cry out for the colorful front

of fancy dress, bow down in belated awe

before silk and organza. It is not the delusion

of being at my best, but the promise of further

secrecy that thrills me; these veils only make

unveiling all the stranger and wilder,

and under my gown claw ghosts you’ll never see.

    XXVI.

This sideshow of outlandish images

is nothing like the main attractions of

another time. Just after one picture clicks on

and the eyes have adjusted, another, altogether

different one takes its place, and another, and another.

What in the world is going on? Did the projector

gather together the uppermost slides on the pile?

Nothing could be falser. It is only that

the replacement of the reel calls for as many

tricks and turns as possible to be an even

passable substitute. Everything is its field;

its lens is a gaping hole with a passion for

things encyclopedic. This is the only way

it can capture your many angles—small comfort, yet comfort still.

 

    XXVII.

The next time our paths cross there will be

none of this shilly-shallying, this bondage,

like it or not, to fickle time, brute locale.

The crossing itself will slow down the march

of the passing moment with its own

unstoppable steam, its tenebrous and sultry

collection of vapors. It will be love in a bottle.

But there is always a screw loose somewhere,

a gap in the glass that lets in a limber

array of interlopers. From the mutual friend

who smells a levity and wants in, to the premature bonging

of the hour, to the false confines of the walls

of our houses, there is always a damnable flaw

in the system . . . and incoming elves who taunt “Excuses, excuses.”

    XXVIII.

What is it about this flame I label passion

that burns the world and its newspapers to a crisp?

How can I call myself hungry for the facts of one kind

but wince at another? The lover’s room may be an

all-white, tiny room with a view of woods, but why,

if a well-meaning friend slides a special report

under my door, do I look for tongs and a furnace?

Because the flame is not only self-infatuated,

given to burning documents for the sake

of flaunting its own reds, but also in a state

of permanent warfare; all worldly

flare-ups, all currencies not its own, remind it

that amid the worst incendiary horrors, it goes on

stoking itself for want of a proper spark.

    XXIX.

The catechism of the far gone: isn’t it too good

to be coincidental that our eyes have looked at that

billboard with the same unqualified disgust?

Can we ignore the fact that you happened

to witness the accident only minutes after I did?

Is there more than just a flimsy link in

a story jointly loved, a pastime avoided?

No, yes, and by no means. These are the very

traits which, observed in an enemy, get

shelved or denied by their once proud possessor.

I could pillage an igloo, travel to the torrid

antipodes and produce thousands like you,

featured like you, like you in raves and complaints.

I was bedazzled by a ray of fool’s gold.

    XXX.

Go, tyrant. In your heart will nest

no more desperate slaves. Come again, days

of productivity, nights of rest and no nightmares.

I have spent so much time under the shade

of your massive umbrella that I will draw it shut

for a minute to see what I once saw, and what I have

missed since seeing you. Eyes, look unchained around you.

It is a landscape of moldering stones and bones.

When the eyes are free to roam, they are not

so much free as useless—I see a sky of

fledgling clouds and do nothing to help them,

peer into the living record of a severed oak and can

decipher nothing. Return, dark glasses, come again,

morbid parasol; only in shade do mountains have features.

 

    XXXI.

In the final tally of divine overseers

who will be ours? Suppose we claim

the moon, whose bottomless bag of stardust

enchants a forest of two, softens and

shrinks the volume of venomous air

between us, and lovingly coats all former fears

with beams of forgetful, nourishing light?

Our watcher is the moon, but only after a brutal

shake-up is through with her. She has never learned

the knack of lighting two people at once; instead

it is always me illumined, you off in the bushes,

you posed in your halo, me waist-deep in darkness.

And she is a clumsy goddess for the reason

that she borrows (poor moon) what light she has from me.

    XXXII.

Though you are by definition a slippery freedom,

if forced to freeze you in a single image

I would call you a beam of light with hidden powers

to strike and alter forever. Here is a room:

regard its monotone grimness. Enter your

incandescent highness: gladly around you

objects sparkle, knowing a beam when they see it.

Next to your flawless arc I am a damaged

bulb in a fleabag hotel, clattering on to reveal

paintings on velvet and objets trouvés (but where?),

rattling off to plunge the run-down room into

dark desuetude. What if we pooled our forces?

Would we stand together like heartless neon sculpture

or deck ourselves in loving chiaroscuro?

    XXXIII.

Perfect, you say? It is enough to make me perform

operations on myself in order to test your love:

taking in the wreckage, you would be forced to say

“Yes, gouging out one eye makes the other shine

all the brighter; the smell of your fungus reminds me of summer;

your leprous stump is a modish charmer

since, after all, green is my favorite color.”

And yet, for all our tirades against deception,

how easily do we succumb to the lover’s flattery,

and with what treachery. If I am perfect, it is only

by being perfect that you, myopic, dependable you

can keep me; so go on, keep on calling me faultless, come on,

hurry up with my supper, leave me, and come back at midnight,

but don’t come back if you hear a noise in the room.

    XXXIV.

Still the inveterate skulker, the ghost

of chaos past, I have come back to the place

where it all began, where leaving, you gave me

leave to see you wherever I went—

in the home, in the wild, in the sky, in the gutter—

and where columns, scribbled on and abandoned,

took one look at my raving, and rose again.

Strangest of all is that, given the chance

to see my subject in the fabulous flesh at last,

I would flatly refuse. These barren days

when I heat my room by the fading coals of my goals,

this ache for an ache is as good as it gets,

so go on running; I will go on looking for you

as the willow bends, as the stomach hunts for the ulcer.

Rachel Wetzsteon, “The Other Stars” from The Other Stars, published by Penguin Books, Inc. Copyright © 1994 by Rachel Wetzsteon. Reprinted by permission of Sonja Wetzsteon.