Spectre and Emanation at JFK
Eulene's become a sort of walking
psychic waste dump.
She can't stroll through
the busiest airport in the nation
without drawing the flotsam and jetsam
of half the space-case earth—
panhandlers, suitcase
quick-change artists, muggers
serving their long apprenticeships,
boys just off the boat struggling
with outboard-sized floor polishers
as if adding years to their sentences.
With all the hangers-on these days
doing their hungry bees'-dance toward her,
Eulene has acquired new sympathy
for rotten fruit.
She tries to fend off
the young men in red tennis shoes
and saffron robes from Sears, scalps
shaved to the quick in holy Mohawks,
who aim carnations at her and grin
like Happy Faces in The Clockwork Orange,
while signs posted on the pillars behind them
guarantee their First Amendment rights
and airport cops tell everyone
Keep Moving.
Eulene dodges tables
selling pictures of the Praying Hands.
She ducks into the women's lounge,
and bag ladies look up from the plastic chairs
as if she were already one of them.
When she double-checks her tickets,
the woman guard beside the hand dryer
demands to know whom she stole them from.
Why not? Eulene's passport
has been crammed since the day it was issued
with other people's travels.
How will she make it past
the check-in counter, the screening lines,
the Passengers Only Beyond This Point?
She's overshot the luggage limit,
her bags bulging with gadgets
her friends overseas could never
sneak past the customs clerks and drug-sniffing
dogs, and she hasn't even started
her own round of under-the-table errands.
The TSA matron runs her Geiger-counter
nightstick over her, and lets her go—
Eulene looks too much like
the mug-shot in her documents.
But when they wave her down the concourse,
the metal detection sirens go wild.
Her thoughts alone are confused enough
to fog the film in security cameras.
Ah,
Eulene! With your lingering questions
and your great need to be shouted at,
your deepest feelings not yet crash-worthy—
how would you survive a year
in Mumbai, Delhi, or Kolkata?
Durga-Eulene (The Many Armed)
I
Dejected by the latest screening
of her in-grown film, that mocking epic
Love 'Em and Get Lost,
Eulene decides enough's
enough. Time to put a layer
of Tuff-Kote on her soul.
Better yet, in this land
of juggernauts and thousand-headed gods,
to be reborn beyond all these turns
and twistings of the heart.
A light goes on in her brain
like a bare bulb in a godown.
She boards one of those overloaded
bashed-in double-decker death traps
that pass for public transport in this city.
She notes its number—L ("Hell") 9—
so she can tell someone in case
she doesn't come back in the body.
She jolts and lurches
through streets with bomb-crater potholes,
diesel fumes enveloping her
like a vengeful demiurge's wrath.
Her final stop—Kumartali, the image-makers'
North Kolkata ghetto, to buy herself
her goddess get-up.
II
She picks out bangles, toe-rings,
the biggest nose-jewel she can keep
from sneezing at, a film star's
gaudy gold-streaked silks,
and a set of eight wooden
supernumerary arms
she hangs on her shoulder blades
like a dead-weight angel's wings. . .
Presto!
She's Durga the Terrible,
the Ten-Armed, with a coal-black fright wig
out of which snakes writhe, each hand
grasping discus or bow or flaming dart
the other deities donated as subscription
to the Destroyer-Goddess Fund.
(They sat in the splendor their Aryan-
warlord worshippers had imagined for them,
big-bellied bon vivants, nine-figure CEO'S
on the board of the Puranic pantheon.
"A dame's the trick," they'd thundered,
"to do the cosmic mop-up.")
And Durga, good daughter, took up
the cudgel they'd issued her.
Not Eulene.
She brandishes her palm-fringe
fan to winnow weeds
from chaff: the deadbeats from the losers,
drifters and Don Juans, and those
who'd never join a club
that would admit them as a member.
She scrawls her latest motto
in Bengali script so that no one
but a chosen few (who'd never
choose her anyway) can understand.
She mounts it on the lacey froth
of shola pith that fans out
like a peacock-tail of styrofoam
behind her.
She takes her trident-
headed spear to slay the demon Mahish—
image of everybody from her past
she'd like to do away with.
But Mahish is a clever con,
operating from a buffalo-skin cover
like the Mafia out of a church-front.
One of those dudes who's long gone
when the truth-spear skewers home
and spits the dumb-luck animal instead.
And Eulene's no avenging angel,
no theomorphic matador—
just a woman born of woman
with skin too pale for any latitude,
too thin for those who turn away
the minute they convince her to want them.
III
"What I want now,"
she thinks, staggering out
under her great weight of gew-gaws,
barking her towering tinsel tiara
against the Off-With-Their-Heads-
high bamboo struts of the thatch
and cardboard goddess shoppes,
"is a good stiff drink."
Stiff
as her fellow-goddesses, with their feet
(and arms and torsos) molded
from the same gray Hooghly River clay
unto which they will return
the day the chanting and garlandings
and sandalwood-paste adulation end.
Eulene walks away
to practice her one true discipline
and vanish into the throngs of worshippers
like an American into the suburbs.
IV
Fat chance. The cry goes up: "It's SHE!!
All hail!"
All hell breaks loose,
the crowd turns on her
for its theophanic thrill,
and the more Eulene protests
"I'm not your goddess!",
the more she flails her two true arms
and tries to beat a retreat
on her own two toe-ringed feet,
the more she gives the mob
what it's slavering for.
They hoist her into a rickshaw
above the crunch and splay and trample
of their passion, and pull her,
slowly and with ancient Sanskrit chantings,
to the river.
Eulene looks on,
deity doll in the Festival of Cars,
thinking of Joan and Antoinette and Mary
Queen of Scots in their tumbrels.
Her fifty fingers clutch their token
tin-plate weaponry, effective as pop guns
trained on the Pentagon.
Her scattered mind finally points
one way: to the Meet-Your-Maker interface.
V
What, in the next few tickings
of the minute hand, can she make
her life worth? Not her name
in lights across some hardcore loner's
lovesick sky. Just
herself,
her heart lost years ago
to solitude's harsh truths,
the break she could never force-fix
in this turn of the squeaky wheel.
No matter now.
The rickshaw on the stone steps
by the river, the crowd hefting her
on its shoulders, the Brahmin
in dingy dhoti and sacred thread
intoning the final slokas
before the reverential heave-ho . . .
. . . and Durga-Eulene sinks out of sight
to the bubbling of crocodiles' breath,
her final circle of admirers
closing in.
No Hai Ram
but a scrambled echo of Tagore
the last wavelength snaking
through her brain:
"Who knows
when Eulene's chains of fool's gold
will be off, and her soul's boat,
like the last glimmer of sunset,
vanish into the flotsam and jetsam
of this river filling up with night?"
Notes:
The Bengali script is transliterated English—"men are beasts"—one of Eulene's many befogged and self-evidently contradictory notions about the male species.
"Hai Ram" ("Oh God" or literally "Oh Rama") were Mahatma Gandhi's last words after he was shot by an assassin on January 30, 1948. Many Hindus believe that to call on God in their last utterance will ease the soul's transition to the next life.
For Paramita Banerjee
Intraludus Euleneiae
Benares, 5 a. m.
What now, Eulene? Your eyes blink open
on the dew-slick steps of the holy city,
mist drifting over the river before dawn
like the prehistoric musings of the Aryan gods.
What wisdom did you fathom
in the Ganges' sacred slime?
What knowledge or what powers put on
from the garlanded remains of sages
rowed out amidst the mournful chants
of their shaven-headed devotees
and dropped into mid-stream
from yellow cloths block-printed
with the names of God?
Not for you the harrowing of hell,
underwater halls of the afterworld.
Not for you the ash-smeared breast,
sandal-paste streaks on the forehead,
the matted hair and crazed eyes
of the Seers. Not for you the zero
at the center of the Sacred Word.
What goes under must rise again
say the apotheosophists, repeating
the sacrificial hero's thousand names,
giving the ancient story's prayer wheel
one more spin.
You, too,
have thrashed your way to the surface,
gasping for air in a language
not your own: its babble all around you
no more meaningless
than the trillion-year-old hum of galaxies
whirling in subatomic space.
Nothing to do but stand up,
still swaying like marsh grass
in the oily undulations slapping the steps
where you first clambered out.
Then stagger off, up dark medieval lanes
between cows and refugee vendors' stalls
and children begging among images
of the uncreated Lord—toward
something beyond either praise or blame.
Ready, at last, for anything.
Note:
In the sacred city of Benares (Varanasi) the bank of the Ganges River is lined with some of India's most ancient Hindu temples. The ghats, the steps leading down to the river from the temples, are used for cremation of dead Hindu faithful, many of whom travel to Benares in the last days of their lives so as to be able to die in one of Hinduism's most holy places. Although most Hindus practice cremation of their dead, the bodies of some priests and infants are simply wrapped in namāboli (cloth printed with prayers) and lowered into the river.
Eulene Meets Crow/ Eulene Eats Crow
I
Out of the estuarine crocodile's snaggled jaws,
out of the mud-colored snort
of the wild boar, browsing hock-deep in primordial slime,
out of the deadly chiaroscuro of sunlight
in thickets where the Bengal tiger blinks
and whole subspecies of foliage rearrange themselves
like silks around the throne of a potentate,
out of the miasma, the stunted
saline verdure of the Sunderbans,
stunned and sun-weary, flapped
Crow
that brackish-billed anathema,
on a weekend tour of the desperate delta's
last paradisiac standoff,
in a private launch doing loops through channels
where hand-adzed atavistic scows
groaned to their gunnels
with teak, mahogany, and pearls—
all the unprotected renderings of a preserve
the government has set aside for spoilage.
Where boatmen poled their slow-motion plunder
upstream to the nearest port,
and sang ballads in mournful modes
of honey-gatherers scraped up limb-
by-limb between the hives
after some stiff-jointed, superannuated man-eater
limped out of cover and sampled them
for the sweetness of their flesh.
Neither off-course nor off his feed,
Crow relished these legends of gore
and groanings wrested from the throat.
New additions to his repertoire.
He squawked and hopped up and down on the top
of his Port-a-Parrot carrier,
straining at his thin tin shackle
till it snapped . . .
. . . while his master, crouching at the prow
and peering through binoculars,
chatted with the aides-de-camp
and took notes on shadows flitting behind
the green purdah-curtain of the forest.
Ignored, Crow
spied his chances,
soared remorselessly off.
II
Meanwhile, upriver
in her ancestral watering-hole
Kukurpukur, her Dogpatch-on-the-Delta—
Eulene.
Begum Eulene, with teased and hennaed beehive
and Mandarin-lacquered claws,
swathed in some filmy, glitter-sprinkled thing
that revealed more than it concealed
but veiled her up to the eyelids. Begum
Eulene practiced in all the arts of entrapment
with eunuchs to do her dirty work.
She was plotting her escape to the capital,
away from this down-country duchess's
idler's life: nothing to do
but supervise the cook's boy
whacking at cabbages with a king-sized scimitar,
squabble with the sultan's wives
and listen through the lattice-work grille
of the women's wing to the hum
of the rice crop growing. Might as well
be Dubuque as Daulatpur.
She put on her see-through burkha.
With her favorite eunuch, Iqbal
"Sneaky" Siddiqi, she crept out
through the cistern window, dropped
like a black leaf to the road below
and hailed the nearest rickshaw into town.
Now she lounged under the rotting canvas canopy
of Hussein's Tea Stall and Kebab-O-Rama,
swatting at flies and smoldering in the sultry air
like some Thirties' cinema spitfire,
looking to the local oglers like a houri
from Hell.
III
Suddenly, out of the sun
blasting its jackhammer
through every shanty off the square,
exploded Crow.
What had he noticed below?
Tinfoil fringes shimmering on the handlebars
of rickshaws, bottle shards glinting
in trash outside the tea stalls?
Crow's belly rumbled,
thunder in a blackening sky.
Words like "Truth" and "Beauty"
corkscrewed through his brain: his appetite
dangerously close to melt-down.
He closed his wings and dropped
to a heap of used banana plates
glorified with a nimbus of fruit flies . . .
as Eulene whipped her seed-pearl veil
back over her face and stepped out
into mid-day's purgatorial blaze.
She met Crow
at the nadir of his dive-
bomb: a black hole colliding
with a neutron star.
They picked themselves up
and stared each other down—the recognition
instant: two zeros canceling each other out.
Crow unruffled his feathers and preened
his pinions, a perfect study in nonchalance.
Eulene too could do indifference
but for this show she hunched her hackles
and raised her burkha's anthracite-mesh wings—
the pose crows know as Raven-Feigns-Rage.
Could they gabble to each other, and from
their colloquoy across the species
cobble together a world? Not in this
stunned din, as the negative force fields fused
and all Kukurpukur imploded. . .
They'd tried their best to satisfy
the catastrophists, as the earth collapsed into random
gas and protoplasmic goo.
Eulene and Crow flapped off into the phlogiston
past the last tatter of the ozone layer.
The planet gone poof beneath them.
Note:
Ted Hughes was Guest of Honor at the Second—and last—Asia Poetry Festival held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in November 1989, a fète hosted by Bangladesh's then-President H. M. Ershad. One of Mr. Hughes's chief interests in accepting Ershad's invitation to Bangladesh was to visit the Sunderban, the forest covering the delta region of the Ganges River. It is one of the last remaining wild preserves of the Royal Bengal Tiger, which Mr. Hughes hoped to see in its natural habitat.
Meanwhile, Eulene had recently arrived in the guise of personal lackey and gadfly-in-waiting to an American poet and translator. Unable to remain peacefully in the luggage storage area of this poet's Dhaka lodgings, Eulene burst out and found herself in surreptitious attendance at the poetry festival, seeking Crow (who had also not been invited.) There, unaware of Eulene's (and Crow's) shadow-presences, the American poet met Hughes and learned of his plan to see the Sunderban during his stay in Bangladesh.
After Mr. Hughes's return to England, the poem began to struggle forth from the creative primal ooze, after Eulene stowed aboard the launch bearing the American poet on her own visit to the Sunderban. Mr. Hughes was in fact amused when Eulene informed him that she had plotted such a meeting with his poetic character since she had first read The Life and Songs of the Crow. She had bided her time, merely waiting for her occasion.
An early version of this poem, which Eulene sent to Crow in England a few months later, is among Ted Hughes's papers in the Special Collections Department of Emory University's Robert F. Woodruff Library.
For Ted Hughes and the original Crow
Evcharistoic Eulene
(with thanks to Wallace Stevens and Marvin Bell)
"Muchas gracias, Marvin and everyone," Eulene cried
over the roar of breakers in Whidbey Island's
ache-y break-dancing breeze, dashing into the house through
the herd of deer that grazed like goats on the front lawn's
ragged pasturage. They spooked and high-tailed it
into the swamp of alders and cattails,
veering with the red-wing blackbirds' warning whistles.
Eulene gulped the last of her croissant and Lemon Zinger
infusion, let the Wedgwood teacup slip from her fingers
into greasy suds, and hauled her bags to the car. A seaplane engine's
noise-cone dusted up a storm, and a string of Arctic-bound
snow geese skimmed the waves of the ebb-tide
beaches of Puget Sound. Who's Marvin? Who's everyone?
she quipped to herself later, as she stalled out
entering gridlock on I-5. She felt like Wallace Stevens'
paltry nude slinking back to the 60-hour week, or some
left-coast Persephone with her use-'em or-lose-'em getaway days
used up, rock-and-rollin' between Hades' headphones,
loosely plotting her next rendezvous with nudes
Of a later day even goldener than she. . .
Note:
"Evcharistoic" is a made-up word, a Eulenic contrivance: confected from "eucharist," which is derived from the Greek for "Thank you" (pronounced eff-har-i-STO); and "stoic," bravely enduring hardship without complaint. So, "Eff-har-i-stoic Eulene" is thankful (for the residency on lovely Whidbey Island) and also stoic—heading resolutely back to her regular life like Persephone (the paltry nude) returning from her spring voyage and wending her way down to Hades once her six months topside are over. All a quip, because Eulene loves Seattle, where her day-to-day life is utterly non-corporate.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
November, 2009
Poems
Carolyne Wright
Carolyne Wright's most recent collection is A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), a finalist for the Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and winner of the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Bronze Award for Poetry. Her previous book, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Eastern Washington University Press/Lynx House Books, 2nd edition 2005), won the Blue Lynx Prize, Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry, and American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A poem of hers appears in The Best American Poetry 2009, ed. David Wagoner (guest editor) and David Lehman; and she has also won a Pushcart Prize for 2009.
Poems submitted here are from a completed manuscript, Mania Klepto: the Book of Eulene (finalist for the Idaho Prize and the University of Arkansas Poetry Series Miller Williams Prize). Poems in this series have appeared in Artful Dodge, Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, International Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Malahat Review, Margie, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, and Willow Springs, among others. A few have been reprinted in an invitational chapbook, Carolyne Wright: Greatest Hits 1975-2001 (Pudding House Publications, 2002).
Wright has published a volume of translations from the Chilean Spanish, In Order to Talk with the Dead: Selected Poems of Jorge Teillier (U of Texas Press), which won the ALTA National Translation Prize in 1994. Other volumes of translation are from the Bengali, including The Game in Reverse: Poems of Taslima Nasrin (George Braziller), and Another Spring, Darkness: Selected Poems of Anuradha Mahapatra (Calyx Books). Most recently published is the anthology, Majestic Nights: Love Poems of Bengali Women (White Pine Press, 2008).
At the College of Wooster in 2003-2004, Wright was Special Guest Editor for poetry for Artful Dodge, and continues as the magazine's Translation Editor. She returned in 2005 to write and teach in her native Seattle, where she is on the faculty of the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program. From 2004-2008, she served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).