University Press of New England
Island Institute
2018
Friday, August 3, 2018
Thursday, August 2, 2018
Wednesday, August 1, 2018
LULJETA LLESHANAKU ~
Negative Space
TRANSLATED BY ANI GJIKA
1.
I was born on a Tuesday in April.
I didn't cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn't even mad.
I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude
inside the belly for nine months straight.
Two workers welded bunk beds at the end
of the delivery room. One on top of the other.
My universe might have been the white lime ceiling,
or the embodiment of Einstein's bent space
in the aluminum springs of the bed above
that curved toward the center.
Neither cold, nor warm.
"It was a clear day," my mother told me.
It's hard to believe
there were a few romantic evenings
when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina
and red-laced magma
decadently peeling off
a silver candlestick.
Infants' cries and milk fever
turned to salt from the stench of bleach—
abrasive, unequivocal.
With a piece of cloth wrapped on the end of a stick,
the janitor casually extends the negative space
of the black-and-white tiled floor
like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness
sieving out new human destinies.
2.
1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the East
dumped punctured rice bags, mice
and the delirium of the Cultural Revolution.
A couple of men in uniform
cleared out the church
in the middle of the night.
The locals saw the priest in the yard
wearing only his underwear, shivering from the cold.
Their eyes, disillusioned, questioned one another:
"Wasn't he the one who pardoned our sins?"
Icons burned in front of their eyes,
icons and the holy scriptures.
Witnesses stepped farther back,
as if looking at love letters
nobody dared to claim.
Crosses were plucked from graves. And from each mouth
spilled irreversible promises:
mounds of dirt the rains would smooth down
sooner or later.
Children dragged church bells by the tongue.
(Why didn’t they think of this before?)
Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly revealing
a myriad of nameless stars that chased the crowd
like flies on a dead horse.
And what could replace Sunday mass now?
Women brought cauldrons into the yard.
Men filled up their pipes; smoke rose
into the air, against gravity's pull.
Nails in worn out shoes exposed stigmata
that bled in the wrong places—
a new code of sanctification,
of man, by man.
3.
"Read!"—I was told. Who said that?
Angel Gabriel, or my first-grade teacher
who had dark roots underneath her bleached curls?
Language arrived fragmentary
split in syllables, spasmodic
like code in times of war.
"Continue where your classmate left off!"
A long sentence tied us to one another
without connotation as if inside an idiom.
Someone would get to read the noun, another the verb,
a third one a pronoun. . .
I always got the exclamation mark at the end—
a mere grimace, a small curse.
A tall cast-iron stove below the portrait of the dictator,
puffing smoke from its temples, enough heat for everyone.
On the blackboard,
leftover diphthongs from yesterday or the day before
rubbed against one another like kittens.
After dusk, I looked for another language outside the window,
my eyes glued to a constellation
(they call these types "dreamers")
my discovery possibly a journey into the past,
toward a galaxy already dead, nonexistent,
the kind of news that needs millions of years
to reach me.
"Read!"—the angel shook me for a third time
her finger pointing to an arbitrary word
a million light years apart from its object. (It didn't matter who
was first).
Negative space sketched my onomatopoeic profile
of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.
4.
Language is erosive.
It makes us recluses,
a wind through the canyons
carving our paleontological eras
for everyone to read.
Under the revised testament of my skin
bellows a gold-cast bull, an alluring object,
a need for attention.
Then comes the unleavened bread and a last supper,
which, remarkably, is repeated several times
between ice ages.
Lower yet, Sodom.
I recognize it from the stench of sulfur.
I hold my nose. Freud would have done the same.
And then Cain,
a crow taught him how to bury his own brother. . .
And at the bottom,
Adam’s gentlemanlike sin
under which scientists
discover earlier epochs of famine.
Between unidentified layers,
wanderings in the sand, the search for a new prophet. . .
I try to understand my people.
Their language is plain. Some words,
were actually never uttered, like pages stuck together
in a book fresh off the press
and long after it sits on a shelf.
This, too, lives inside me
within insidious bubbles of air, negative
spaces where I can find little historical rest,
but also where utter ruin may originate.
5.
Little left of the snow three days ago.
Its blanket ripped away, exposing
dog shit and the bruises of routine.
Negative space gives form to the woods
and to the mad woman—a silhouette
of the goddess Athena
wearing a pair of flip flops,
an owl on her shoulder.
It’s minus zero. The factory’s gate gnashes its teeth
behind the back of the last worker. Blowing noses, shivering,
mucus. . .
A virus circulates through the workplace,
secretly, intimately touching one person after another,
a current of sensuality.
It softens the tone.
But nothing unites them more than their frailty,
The one-sizes-fits-all shoes you must grow accustomed to
By filling the extra space with cotton,
Or curling your ill-fitting toes.
6.
In Halil’s yard,
rules were sacrilege.
His eight children entertained themselves
by carrying famine on their shoulders,
recalling St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin.
Starving, filthy, hazel-eyed—
three qualities that unexpectedly coalesce
in the bright light, strung together like sneezes.
One’s famine was another’s consolation.
“Look at them! It’s a sin for us to complain.
They’re even worse off than us!”
But even Halil found his own consolation
in the old woman Zyra, “barren and paralyzed,”
the root origin of despair.
This was our highlands landscape,
hierarchical, where each family
would make out a different expiration date
on the roof below their own.
Schadenfreude was the only river
that could turn mills.
But if this hierarchy shifted,
and our roof gave signs of ruin,
my mother would plant tulips in the garden,
white tulips, our false image,
a scarecrow to keep predators away.
7.
Nearly nothing was mentioned in the letters he sent from prison,
just two lines, on top of the page:
“I am well. . .” and “If you can,
please send me a pair of woolen socks.”
From them, I learned to read between the lines:
negative spaces, the unsaid, gestures,
insomnia that like a hat’s shadow
fails to shade your chin and ears.
And in the photographs’ white background,
acrophobia adds to the color of their eyes: blue,
green, gray, and ultimately, chesnut brown,
as, earthward, we lower our gaze.
I learned to read the empty spaces the dead left
behind—a pair of folded glasses
after the reading’s done and discourse commences.
Or the musical chairs game called "love,"
where there are less empty seats than people.
If you don’t want to be the last one standing
you must predict when the music will stop.
(Who, though, has really succeeded?)
Perhaps a little practice can be useful in this case.
I don’t mean squatting, jumping, stretching,
but listening to the same music every day from the start,
the same miserable vinyl record
so that you’ll recognize its cracks
before it recognizes yours.
8.
Midnight. Snoring,
meaningless sounds that stain the side of the wall
that belongs to no one.
So where are we? What dimension?
Who foots the bill at a time like this
without lambs or sinners,
when even angels record nothing?
The street’s clearly visible
under the neon 24-hour-service sign
above the funeral home.
There was a music shop next to it
that closed down a few months ago;
the shop shared a wall with the funeral home,
shared the same water pipes and the same gate to heaven.
But the coffins won,
the wide-shouldered coffins that narrow down
in the shape of a mummy, not a human.
Wood of the highest quality, swears the owner,
and pure silk inside, pleated like a stomach
that can digest even a bulldozer.
When asleep we're simply five limbs. Starfish.
If you cut one limb, it will grow back.
Even a single limb could recreate us from the beginning,
a single hope.
Negative space is always fertile.
9.
No one knows if it was simply a matter of mixed
or some other reason why I used to see
what I wasn't supposed to see—
the ending of things.
It wasn’t a mystical gift, but like a blood clot
in the darkness of a vein, I held on to reason,
as it circulated from the bottom up
and not the other way around as we were told.
I used to start from the edges
and with my left hand or a croupier’s stick
gather the balls and dice from the corners
and then watch the bettors
as neither a winner nor a loser.
There's nothing sillier
than watching a film in reverse
where after the climax, the protagonists
are replaced by circumstances,
and circumstances replaced by minor characters,
their tongues plastered behind a single, fatal smirk
Life and my short lunar calendar slipped away
like carbon paper sending off as much light as necessary,
skipping the details, the contrast and sharp colors.
Lunar time is short. Until the actual end,
there are years enough, the negative spaces.
What to do with them when the verb
has already been uttered, a conclusive sentence
with Latin syntax, or more than that:
didactic.
—————————
Luljeta Lleshanku
Negative Space
New Directions 2018
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Monday, July 30, 2018
RON DELLUMS ~
Rep. Ronald V. Dellums of California campaigned in 1972 for a fellow Democrat, Allard K. Lowenstein, in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. “If being an advocate of peace, justice and humanity toward all human beings is radical, then I’m glad to be called radical,” he once said.Librado Romero/The New York Times
STONE HUT ( 8 ) ~
28
The bottom story of the hut was done, only the windows and door to add. The roof was solid — I had spent half a rainy day chinking the interior walls with smaller stone — listening to the rain patter off the wood shingles. The shingles take on a reddish buff after the rain; some of that is the red chalkline left on the roof. The next stage is the gable ends. I’ve thought about building the ends in vertical rough lumber — it would be quick but wouldn’t mend the eye with the lower story of stone. If I go with stone, it will have to be padded with mortar to fix the stone in place — someday kids will be running around this hut, and I don’t want to worry about a high stone tipping away and beaning them. I am down to a few flat stones, mostly it is chunk stone, which I can make look okay but can’t promise it will sit in place. I decide on using stone and packing mortar behind the stone, trying to hide most of it so the stone gables will blend with the dry wall of the lower story. I work off a six-foot scaffold — deliver stone to the site and toss it off the Willys onto the scaffold planks — lay that up…toss more stone up, lay that, then use the stone left over from the side walls piled away in one corner of the site. Two 80 lb. bags of premix mortar is used for the front gable. The stone will be seen outside but not inside; I’ve built a plywood wall inside to form the stone against. Also, another 6" x 6" beam was added to run the entire width of the front interior it doubles up beside the main 6" x 6" support beam and provides a wider and stronger shelf to lay the gable stone upon. Now there are twelve inches instead of six inches to work on. It took a weekend to lay up the front gable and box in a small barn sash window. That was the first window in the hut. It was centered with the ridgepole and doorway. All the other windows were ready to set, each painted light blue. The windows had been found over the years from various places. I bought the two lower front windows, four-light sashes, from my father’s lumberyard for five dollars. The horizontal window on the west side wall was once in our cabin, and the scalloped window on the east side — a lovely window providing the hut with early daylight — was found after we bought our house; leaning in decades of grime in the upper shaft of the woodshed. Before our friend David Emmons moved away from this area — I remember the day he stopped by with his car loaded for Arizona — he dropped off the two small windows boxed into the gable ends. I imagine he figured I would do something with them someday. Eight years later has them looking out of stone.
 |
| A star-design I like to cut into my cedar shingles~ this one is on the stone hut eastern side roof. The original one. This roof was replaced, new star cut in, this time with red cedar. |
29
Jim and Leslie Koller and their two children Bert and Ida Rose visit us on Labor Day. The gable is complete and the rear gable is boarded for the same technique of laying stone against the boards from the outside. Since I will work on top of the ledge — the rear of the hut is roofed over the face of ledge — I can stone the gable without mortar. The barn sash is framed and hinged to open into the loft. The stone will be laid as I have the time in the fall. I have yet to build a low rail for the width of the loft. The loft deck is made of spruce and hemlock planks built onto doubled 2" x 6" crossties nailed to the rear bay of rafters. It is five feet wide and eight feet off the floor and plenty strong. When I was sixteen years old I built a loft in my first cabin away from home a half-mile in the woods behind my grandparents’ house in Cheshire, Massachusetts. Jim Koller was thirty-two years old and living on the West Coast and I was reading his poetry and a publication he edited named Coyote’s Journal. I never read anything like Coyote’s Journal before, and twenty years later, I still haven’t. Eight years after that first cabin I met Jim when he moved from the West Coast to Maine and was running a bookstore in Brunswick and raising sheep at home. Susan and I were returning to Vermont after a long week touring Newfoundland in a VW bug. I took an immediate liking to Jim. He has the animal gentle and wild to his eyes which has been mischaracterized as macho — it is better to align Jim with the title of one of his novels — “If you don’t like me you can leave me alone.” The bookstore job would only last a few years before he returned to landscape work, something he once did on the West Coast with fellow writer Bill Brown and the painter Jack Boyce. In Maine it was seven dollars an hour work, laying sod, trimming trees, mowing lawns. Coming home dirty and finding the time to write the poems picked up from the hands working all day. Jim Koller is one of the truest poets we have, and like life itself the poems read sky blue and rain flat. Few poets I know have put their hands as deep into the dirt as Koller. To appreciate the poems it helps to smell the same smells, hum to the old blues or folk song — from the highway or John Henry’s hammer. Live with it. Jim was visiting the stone hut and taking a close look. He is unpretentious as they come; sometimes he could talk more, but he walked around the hut, smiled at it, felt the edge of stone on the corners, then walked inside and let his eyes look. What he saw was a structure built for the ground, out of the ground. Naturally he understood.
 |
| A meeting on the Willys ~ James Koller, Ida Rose Koller, Bert Koller, Carson & Bob Arnold The stone hut in the background 1985 |
30
Remember the maple tree growing out of ledge only four feet from the hut? It was the first week of September and already its upper leaves were dying back a pale orange, making me nervous with the hut closing on completion. I thought to trim it, especially the heavier branches reaching over the roof, but it would be a gamble. Instead I decided to drop the tree when our friend Scott Tindall was visiting to give me a hand with the job. We had done treework together in the past — Scott did the climbing and I did the felling. Sometimes we wrapped a rope around the top branches and cut at the stump while pulling the tree by hand into a desired direction; especially if we had to miss buildings or electric wires. We always had a good time. Once on a job Scott dropped my limbing chain saw forty feet from a dead elm. On the ground I counted the saw flips in the air — one…two…then it stuck into the ground, bar first. Lucky. I took the chain off, washed it, scraped the dirt from the bar, greased it again and roped it back up to Scott. Near misses were having to drop a tree between the garage and the house with utility wires strumming the air — we would have our eyes on the house and wires and miss the garage by inches. Drop a tree like that for $100, saw it into firewood, and think we were rich. Like me, Scott worked with whatever equipment he could afford, or what was at hand. The day he arrived to take a look at this maple tree I had a ladder against the base just touching the lower branches, and he got out of his car and scrambled up the tree in a pair of those topsider moccasins L.L. Bean sells. A new pair. He thought we could fell the tree with no limbing; I knew he didn’t want to limb anyway. When Jim Koller was here he eye-balled the tree to maybe fall backwards. I thought it would tip forward toward the pond (now dry) but perhaps lean a bit to its right, which would have it crushing the hut. Scott had his nylon ropes. When we first started out he used hemp ropes, just like I once used a fourteen-inch bar chain saw to drop three-foot wide trees. You learn. With one rope in the top branches of the maple tied to the Willys to steer the tree as it fell (just in case) plus two ropes tied around the base of the stump and then fastened to a pair of trees fifteen feet away to alleviate a kickback into the hut. I cut with my Jonsered, long bar, sharp, and while cutting talked to the tree asking forgiveness since I moved into its territory with the hut. Sound silly? Do the work and watch how you begin to talk to yourself. And it forgave by falling nicely into the pond. Leaves sailed down in the air after the tree was on the ground. I waved to Scott who didn’t have to use the Willys. The tree gave us a cord-and-a-half of firewood stacked near the hut in the sun. Then I climbed up to the big stump and chainsawed a “chair” out of the stump. There is a photograph of Susan, with Carson in her lap, sitting up there on it.
31
All six windows of the hut are in. The two side windows downstairs are fixed, as is the front gable window. The window in the loft opens inward. The two windows downstairs in the front open inward. No screens. I’ve nailed narrow trim boards around each outside frame to hide the plywood and complete the look. Stained the trim the same smoke color of the beam work. Everything is stained except for the interior gable walls; I’ll do something with them in the spring after I think about it during the winter. Winter is a time to review what you did over the year and to plan for the spring…cut firewood for the following winter, order garden seeds, shovel lots of snow. The hut roof has six inches of snow on it. The windows are shiny black. Two coats of stain on the beam work has done well — no knots bleed through. At every other snowfall I go to the hut and shovel snow away from the door. There is a broom inside to sweep the floor. A bump of snow is on the maple stump chair. The split maple firewood is under black plastic, twenty-five feet stacked. Now and then I see bluejays land over there and crack sunflower seeds they have taken from the feeder outside the kitchen door. A squirrel’s tracks circle the hut in the snow. It has a visitor.
all photographs by Susan Arnold
Stone Hut
a builder's notebook
Bob Arnold
1988, 2013
a builder's notebook
Bob Arnold
1988, 2013
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