"love what is ahead by loving
what has come before."

-- the quote on the tag of Sophie's ginger teabag

Danielle Suite

"This is one of our First Folios. Of the thirty-seven plays, about half appear here for the first time. There are no surviving [manuscripts]. If it weren't for this book, we would not have these plays."
                                         -- Richard Kuhtra, of the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Warmly Inscribed by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone



1.

The real story is: that they
were making guttersqualling love (a fake,
asexual version for the cops: that they were sleeping) when a deft,
tiptoeing enterer raided the first-floor study: there went
his computer. And, without a backup disc, there went
a long three years of labor toward his dissertation on "Intergenerational Lines
of Association in Genesis." You'd think his topic would have taught him

better: The Antiquities of the Jews* assures us Eve and Adam
had a third son, Seth, the august head of a school of astronomers
who tried to crack the star-code and the language of the changing moon,
who wrote their deepest knowledge on a pillar of brick
and, "should this pillar of brick come to destruction, also
on a pillar of stone" erected "far in the land of Siriad."
A comfort, that the stone was there.

The people might suffer affliction of sundering flood
or of the sun without surcease — and yet the stone was there.
Affliction of festering boils, of the death of the herds,
of the lash and the spear of foreign hordes — the stone was there
in Siriad, inviolable. And let the rivers dry,
or let the minions of The Evil One Himself descend
— but the stone, the pillar of stone, was there.


2.

It made a minor irony that forced itself on Duane and Annie
only after the cops shrugged off any viable hope
and bid our heroes a brusque adieu. Another minor irony:
they were devout adherents of backup capability
— only, not on disc. They wanted a child,
a them in reserve. They flew "together" to a party in San Francisco
but on separate planes: in case. That night — the burglary night —
they were into their raw, rambunctious sex
below a vintage Edo period print of "Ukiyo-e" erotica,
imitating its ritual poses: there she was,
stretched into an arch, a decorated cloth
bit in her teeth as if to stamp it for the ages
with her passion, and her toes intensely rounded
like ten shrimp in the curl of her coming.


3.

The honey is sweet, but the stingers of the bees. . .!
This symbolizes her breast: a hive

of satisfaction, and its many little stabs.
She's going to make her songs
(about her loves and their consequences)
eternal — this poet, this Sappho. The wind
that lifts her hair and the hem of her gown,
and lifts our aspirations when it wants
and, when it wants, as soon abandons them. . .
the wind is eternal. The waters are eternal. And the pliant song
she creates as a gift to the wind and the waters?. . . eternal!
Yes — she feels it that deeply! And yet,
of course, it's mostly lost.

There was no backup. "Her erotic verse was thought to be
too scandalous by medieval scribes to save,"
and what we have — that snatch of tantalizing tatters
from "some trash pits near a branch of the Nile River" —
is dumb good luck. This, as opposed
to the earliest version we have of the Iliad
(still twelve centuries removed from its original composition)
— Homer's voice, turned into the first of the written versions. . .
and then a next. . . and then a next. . . until we have this
vellum manuscript from about A.D. 800, intact,
a surrogate with, by now, its own
earned aura of venerability. And so they had

their child — Danielle. She looked a little like Duane,
she looked a little like Annie. As these things go,
a perfect copy. Although for a sleepless week
she needed to be on life support: a curd of frail breathing,
in a robot tunnel of scanners and tubes. The second night there,
a storm muscled in, and the hospital's power failed.
What does eternity care, for any individual
grab-bag skin of us? What do the winds and the waters invest
in the flicker of protein structure that we call a life?
"Both Duane and I were in the ward, at her bedside,
when it happened. I swear: along with her, our hearts
stopped beating too." For a second. Luckily,
the backup electrical system kicked in.


4.

The history of the universe —
a dot. And then an everything

exploding from the dot. And then a field
of expanding possibilitytrons

and eternalcules, condensing and replicating themselves
into a stable system-state that's always itself

in every part of itself, and always
itself in reserve supply. It continues forever like this.

Eventually one arrangement of it is my father.
He's arguing, huff and puff, with a sixteen-year-old idiot

of a son whose hair is crazy long, whose life
is crazy friends and crazy music and crazy secular.

If only he could have lived to see me
fifty-six and staring into the mirror today

at exactly his face.


5.

And these are the intergenerational lines in Genesis,
after the Flood: Shem, Ham, Japheth, Meschech,
Gomer, Magog, Madai, Juvan, Tubal,
Cush, Tiras, Phut, Mizraim, Canaan, Eber, Elam,
Ashur, Lud, Arphaxad, Aram, Nimrod, and Terah;
for life is strategic and greedy, and it knows of the drouth
and the locust swarm and the sword, and it provides itself
with fallback DNA. And Terah was father unto Abraham;

and Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac, Jacob;
and Jacob, Joseph: who was sold into bondage in Egypt
and there became the counselor of Pharaoh. And he saw
how there would be a time of plenteousness
for seven years, and seven years of famine thereafter.
And so he gathered up the corn without number; and when the dearth
came over the nations, in Egypt they builded the storehouses,
and there was bread. Those granaries functioning

as a shield against starvation: what the pickled squash
and salt-haunch must have meant to a Puritan family
as the winter shadows closed in on their village
like two hands around a throat. And yet for all

of his success — and he became the most powerful
man in the land, after Pharaoh — his secret dream might have been
to return to the shepherd rags of his youth. The secret dream
of the granary as it towers so imposingly there
against the carnelian sky of the Nile sunset. . .
might be waking as a simple toy,
a "granary" only about the size of a wooden whistle,
modest and sleek
and responsible for the pleasure of just one child.


6.

They squabbled. She was. . . "metaliferous," that's the word
he most often relied on: "Really, you don't want to curl up against
somebody who's all ore." And he. . . was like
a generalissimo of marriage: the invisible mustachios
of a second-rate grandee, the silly little invisible riding crop. . .
And so Duane and Annie divorced. Of course by then
they'd each had other lovers stashed away
against this very circumstance — not unlike how
they'd stockpiled tins of vegetable slices and soup, and bottled water,
in the days when everybody feared "the millennium bug"
would blast us back to hands-on nineteenth-century modes of living.
And anyway, by then the beloved Danielle
had said "fuck you" in a hundred different inventive
and hurtful ways, and run off for Vegas. She was sixteen,
and her dreams weren't theirs.


7.

I met her unexpectedly, when she was twenty-four and working
as a docent at a high-buzz exhibition of Etruscan art
at the Met. I hadn't seen her since. . . well, since
she was sixteen, some night of sudden dishes-hurling vitriolics
at their house.
                       Now she was a woman of feline poise
and henna'd spikes. Inside, the statuary couples
on their sarcophagi lids accepted this revealing
twenty-first-century artificial light with a neighborly,
welcoming air. Outside, a block away, a hostage situation
had the cops blocking off our street. . . so we were stuck there
after hours, and could talk. The cops. . . reminding me
of that long-ago night when, probably, she was conceived. . .
"My parents.
                       What can I say? It was always my job
to look like her, to think like him, to be. . . like,
'Oh, we had a crummy day. But at least,
for a failsafe plan, we have Danielle tonight
to make us happy.' Right. The way you hear one day
we'll be able to harvest body organs from stem cells
— spares, like tires in trunks — to have on call
when needed. 'Oh, let's go get out Danielle.'"
                                            It seemed
unfair; and accurate — both. We talked
of other things too. She was charming. I wished to stay
in her company, and for three more hours my wish was granted;
outside, sirens. The cops had called
for backup reinforcement. (Sometimes it helps,
and sometimes it doesn't.)
                                            As for the "Danielle" part,
"I'm Starr now" — had been, eight years. "What I needed
was a total break." Yes, but even so. . .
"Last year, the directors let me assistant-curate a traveling show
on 'The Family Tree in Old Testament Days' — the way it turned out,
I knew more about the damn begats and the scholarship
than the big-freakin-deal emeritus fogeys in charge of it.
But of course. Go figure."


8.

I've seen them alluded to now
in so many poems. . . their candid, unrepentant sexual ease
and loving marital equity are qualities that seem to speak
convincingly across the gap of over two millennia
. . . these svelte and reclining Etruscan couples, shaped
to look as long and trim as otters sunning on a rock.
They seem to say that the olives are lush and piquant this year,
and the theater has never been better. They seem to say
that they were feeding olives to one another, fingers to lips,
just a moment ago, that the stone or bronze of their bodies
has a fluid, fleshy movement to it, and that we're invited
to join them, they who have been not only fortunate enough,
but conscientious enough, to be living in this contentedness
with legitimacy. Their perfect almond eyes and urbane smiles
surely say this. And the way their bodies fit the space
around them as smoothly as yolk fits white. . . this surely,
surely says it. But not their writing;
not to us. "This most elusive of dead tongues"**
is frustratingly untranslatable: we haven't yet discovered
a text that will help in unlocking the treasure. It's
as if (and I know logically that this isn't the case, but
it's as if) they've knowingly traded their chance to offer the world
translation backup, for this one
great golden moment.


9.

The cops succeeded, the street was opened, Starr adjourned
to her office. I was left alone in the gallery for a handful of minutes,
before security hustled me toward the coat room.
I was alone — but I wasn't alone. And they told me,
It's good to have it,
the ace in the hole, the penny saved for a rainy day,
the stand-in waiting patiently in the wings
for when the star falls ill,
the silo against calamity. The disc
with international (hopefully, intergalactic) symbols
being floated out past the rim of anything knowable. Otherwise,
the ongoing is lost; and what does the universe ask
of its human beings, if not to be
both individual moments of power
and components of a sequence? Now for us, in relation to you,
in terms of language. . . the ongoing is broken.
we will never perform that duty. And you can call it a dereliction;
or you can call it an integrity
we keep, here, in our lives that haven't yielded
to transmission. It's always so complicated!
You have to go now — they're coming for you — you have to go out now
into the complexity. One day you'll be inert.
Not yet, not yet, not yet.


10.

Somebody's good luck is often somebody's
bad luck. It's always so complicated.
A man is skulking through the night. He has a need.
He's not a bad man, but he has a need
and he's going to fill it, one way or another. From a house,
upstairs, he hears the sounds of sex, and those involved in it
are on another world for now. It's dark,
but he can see, in the yard, a perfect example
of one of those plastic rocks that thoughtful homeowners use
as a backup: inside is the duplicate key.

-- Albert Goldbarth

* Flavius Josephus, AD. 37-100
** Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters