Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all Gomorrah BY Tony Brinkley [I]n the debris were five eyes on a plank, looking at me. Just five people’s eyes… I said, “Go to sleep, I’ll come back.” But when I came back they were not there. [1] Durch welche Öffnung entweicht der Traum? [2] 1. Balancing the wind gusts — the gold pointless, ground to powder — Here in heaven on the border of a field a meadow where the stones grow tracing fire. The arrival of three guests. At first with diffidence and then insistence a slight hunger for the food you offer, and a reticence 1 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all of taste still satisfied with thirst and wonder — longing for water but at peace with thirst, with a pleasure that the taste of water moistening desolations will displace — the three guests resting — pausing, intent, waiting for the meal their host prepares, delaying destitutions. I am at a loss. We pause. I think of salt. I wonder. Later gold is turned into a powder. Then Gomorrah bursts the temples. 2. The cloth in strips, the peeling skin, the pavement curling at their feet, its fiery imprints. Listening for the future. Waiting for solace, the complement of anger. Three guests. Eager. Without speaking or enfolding, like a bell, a tongue, licking at the roots: “I will not erase you.” How hard it is to rest with such composure — the mind changing, the release of azure, of the inner face responding, the salt moistening, tincturing, cooling in the moisture, in a senselessness like kindness. Opening heavy curtains in a darkened room, my hands and knees were crying. Mother wrapped me in wet sheets, she kissed me and said, “Run.” The sheets surrounded 2 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all me with sails… …the likeness of an energy for which this is the leading wave — ignitions, midair, birds, the flaming moisture, washed with glancing tongues and settling in the glistening branches — but the gleaners’ eyes are calming — dawning, in anticipation cooling turbulent aggressions, briefly numbered, holding to the distance their calamities. Although my hands can barely tremble, she says, “Run.” But how am I to run when I can sail? I still barely remember — the hillsides blossoming with laundry, sheets as sails, the calm the strangers offered as compassion — cooling — nearing rain-clouds blackening remainders — eager swimmers wrestling in air. 3. Desolate children — random angels — piecing wings from fluttering tissue, membranes of porous anguish, gleaning currents from the heat, the burning. 3 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all Neighbors of Sodom, children of Gomorrah, somersaulting cinder and incessant thinking, tastes of cider and the pitch of swallows. Evening, in the summer, the imaginary orchards of Gomorrah — fragrance — and the pitch of swallows — simultaneous desolations of wild orchards and charred cedars. Gomorrah in my memory burned at dawn — but later bordering the Elbe, the Alster at her heart — this time burning in the dark like Christmas colors or a prayer flag’s, then in brilliant phosphorus dazzling constellations under the drone of angels. Carbon darkness, later on the morning, mixed with fluttering ashes, rain coats for the faces — dead or not, their bodies, clothed, undressed — burned asphalt — with black mud, the pitch like squid ink. She remembers eyes without their lids — she wants to go to sleep, but, looking back, the lidless eyes are blinking out. Their limbs detached from trees, they are afraid, they run and balance on 4 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all an edge, afraid of heights, of water, of the way ice melts as it turns gray — the sky turns gray — an owl waits while a gray cat washes — dawn-pink tongue — the gray fur glistens — traffic barely leaves a whisper while the angels settle, where they bear proleptically injustice, the destruction of the houses, the slow growing into disappearing structures of a burning that takes light years, now in conflagration. Gentle dissolutions of Gomorrah before morning — then my mother and the sheets in which I sail. 4. Protesting, an alarm on the verge of instability, a sharp bark, gaudy with morning, piercing harshly. What did you imagine? Distanced by sunlight, the darkening in a house receding through a window where the darkness glimmers. Rubbing my eyes to reopen 5 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all a word, Gomorrah, my love. Shedding fire, I make my way through water. I swim the way smoke spirals and arrive, I promise, here — where you survive, though not in fact — but waking, curled the way smoke makes its way among the sleeping faces of Gomorrah. A gray squirrel like an exposed heart. Cold among sunflowers. Desolate children climbing in the laundry-flowering hills — floating, the wind lifting the particulates of cloth like fluttering colors — and the valley where the angels are at work with iron brooms 6 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all — harrowing the ground — calling the children down like swallows into burning houses on the sudden clarities of air. 5. Strategies of angels — the familiar faces though their names escape me — aimless, chattering: “This will be forbidden, this will be forgiven, this will be permitted.” But I miss you! Swallows perched along a wire — gathering clouds — a closed book’s surfaces of glass. “This will be permitted.” Faces beyond ripening — transitory weather — like clouds the feathers hiding iridescent violet. Facing east — no gossip passes our lips, drumming like cooling metal. Quiet rumors. A river comes to take you for a walk, whispering gossip, finding its water on my fingers. Across a page of hills, even in my sleep, lying between my eyes, the quiet touches me austerely, my minutiae opening and closing. No one or someone. Mine or another’s. Mamre’s tree. Fingering my longing, even in my sleep, the scavengers of Mamre, moistening letters, laundering names, scouring Gomorrah from my lips. 7 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all Today we speak of cruelty: Think of Lenin’s brain, how it atrophied through years of civil cruelty, ossified, the calcifying arteries, the famished organ, how it howled from hunger, how it raged and issued dictums, cursing excremental adversaries, sweeping cities clean of human waste, the rage hardening, hunger ravening, barbering the fields for grains of wheat, accumulating salts that starved the brain. When he died, they found the arteries were veins of rock, the brain shrunk to a walnut. It has been preserved, you can see it, sectioned in an institute with other brains, a lesson in comparative anatomy: the more it calcified, the more he raged. The more he raged, the more it ossified until he cursed your beauty — curses were immaculate conceptions — desiccating every tender intimacy. It hangs on their clothes. It accumulates. Anyone who looks askance, who can not without further ado be happy not to be there, who can not bear the sight, who sits on a stool and weeps like a baby because no one resisted — how could they? the actions occurred without incident — anyone who can not be master or save what can still be saved, who refuses to hear everything, whose impressions of the day are blotted (the trees did releave, no one wanted to play the coward), in the evening, face down in a row, ashamed and besmirched — attempt this composure — quiet, unspeakable, astonishing — the defeat of a world enemy. 6. 8 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all In the dark I find you crowning the letters, softening membranes, the articulated lineaments. Sensing your fingers, tissues close upon themselves. Peace is deceptive, quiet fearful. Circling the invisible, combing through the cuttings, you are like a barber, canceling the stalks. A rabbi plants a small plant in the tangles and catastrophes of God. The cunning of a small plant — or a meal — defers solutions with a living space. The angels pause to eat, the valley almost breathes. Abraham follows the rabbis, the past, the future. The sun, half-risen, clambering from the well, emblazes strictures, hardening arteries to stone, but unsuspected kindness, even among angels, longs for the delay, the kinship that despite their murderous rigor leads to kindness. Flayed with iron combs, the rabbi celebrates the quiet names of life, the thirst and hunger they require, moisture, here at the end, kind friends, the flesh weighed at the market in the summer while the Master of the Universe is silent, iron combs are fragile, sight is fragile, 9 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all eyes on fire make a wall invisible. “Be silent.” “Listen.” “As I have determined.” Threshed with iron teeth, but choosing quiet, he finds he loves Gomorrah more than God. By day, enormous clouds of burning smoke. Scorching nights. My friend, I hear your voice but cannot find your voice. A way of longing intertwined with calling — a pervasive choice, an arching tongue. What shall we play? Among the raveneous intervals, my angels bring eternities to bear on quiet. If their kindness could outlast this offering, would they choose to be protragonists of ashes? 7. My angels have a gift for silence that refers all questions to the same extremes. I loathe their certainty, its rigor, their serene tectonics — the cruelties they impose but do not feel, blue clamor, green catastrophes, the yellow cancellations. Sleeping faces, hands full of water, wisteria colors, iconostasis — just as an ocean — a small plant your eyes burn open. In the pits of rainwater, 10 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all scraps of cloth, concretions, not a person’s, but unruffled smiles that someone misinterprets. Who’s behind this? Do not lose despair! In the dark, aimlessly alert — what are you really? — lurking in the dampness, like a heartening sun, a child the ground gives painfully to water. Sometimes not Gomorrah, but what happens happens suddenly — so much like the ribs of a house, so much like burning through the ribs. A new acknowledgment — a man who hides his faces. From Mamre, frightening, dusty roads — a dirt track choked into a basin, near the parched embankments of a vanished bridge, the scorched ground liquified, then cooling into lacquer. 11 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all From the hills above Gomorrah, displaced laundry patches dessicating winds — my prayer flags. 8. Arid cold, a residue of water. The primitive organs ache — they force us to be beautiful. A smile across the world, grinding the human salt. I know when reason fails your kindness helps. Angels aroused them: tired of landscape, mountains moved to overthrow the frame, the park, the quiet lake, the hills for which, as background, they were anchors, crouched to comfort our fragility, a kindness we assumed was ours by right. Then visibly their motion, the monumental way they seized the sky. Gomorrah has become a name, the submerged gatherer who collects the discards from beneath the underground. She was first, the spring seeds carried by her messengers to Sodom. Sodom was the second, easier to recall, articulated episodes attaching to her name. Gomorrah remained the speechless, tongue-bound, sum of knots, Sophia of the underworld, the night-light. 12 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all In a fetid sky, where men slaughter cattle, three circle a chalice. 9. A sense of bewilderment, babbling in tongues, roses from the heat, hurrying to catch up — the tree buds hurrying — vendors in small trucks. The softness is a sign they are alive, implausibly, a reflex, less than nothing, negative perhaps, beneath the sediments of deadness, apprehended as about to be on fire, vague because not yet… To enumerate by threes — three angels, gleaners, strangers pausing on the route to our destruction. Only two arrive to find us waiting at the destination. And two cities, one arrived at, one collateral — submerged without a word — a dove the Elbe turns to salt. When you grew up in the residue of flames, did you know you were Gomorrah, that the lindens 13 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all were Gomorrah, that the North Sea was the Dead Sea? Co-factor the rivers. Rationalize the fire. Water is water. Air, air. Rise in desolation. Texture the water. Gomorrah is a wave about to name its offering. In Gomorrah your mother protects you from angels, the posts of her bed are crocodile teeth. I teach you the game of holding your breath — breathe in, you are gone — breathe out, I am there. You practice the magic that hides in the dark and hide in the sheets that protect you from fire. In Gomorrah your mother protects you from angels. Gomorrah like a crystal seed accumulates its facets, vanishing assumptions, coaxed out of hiding. Angling mazes — waiting 14 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all for rain through the sun’s window — fraying the strings, returning our faces to water. Like widows, three angels fish through the faces, vaporizing color, hiding in its light. Submerged, Gomorrah offers its blessings, welcoming strangers who never arrive. 10. The way the room burns — you are here — if it were possible. Sit in this fire quietly, this flame’s reflection, happiness, my daring. Today I said your name. I named a feeling. Reeling in losses. At last what do I find — Gomorrah my freedom, in gathering. I did not know you in a way I could not know you. Not the temple mountain — Gomorrah’s moisture, not angelic incense but the saline taste before the sea died — breached from fires — how they loved each other. 15 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all If your love were like a blue dragonfly — and it is. Without weighing or thinking I am this way too finding because I am quiet it hovers finally. T he point of departure for “Gomorrah” was Andrei Roublev’s 13th Century Russian icon, the Old Testament Trinity. In the painting, the three angels who visited Abraham at Mamre are seated in a semi-circle around a table that bears a sacrament. In the background are bare indications of a tree (the terebinth or oak of Mamre) and a human dwelling (not a tent but a columned house, its window and door opening out into the bright sunlight from an interior that houses darkness). Roublev’s Trinity can be inexpressibly comforting. As the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky writes: “amid the restless conditions of his time, amid the strife and internal dissension, universal savagery and Tartar raids, amid the deep peacelessness that ravaged Russia, an infinite, imperturbable peace… was Old Testament Trinity, c. 1420s (Wood Tempera, 142 x 114) BY Andrei Roublev The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow revealed to Roublev’s sight,” the “inexpressible graciousness of the mutually inclined figures.” And yet for all this radiance, this incontestable grace, it is still possible to be shocked by an unwilled memory the icon does not picture — like a prefiguration of the savagery in Roublev’s day and every day, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for which the miracle at Mamre was the 16 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM Cerise Press › Gomorrah http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah?view=all prelude. The name “Gomorrah” means “hidden” or “submerged,” and of Gomorrah’s history almost everything is submerged. Of Sodom we know a little, of Gomorrah almost nothing. Abraham is justly celebrated because he bargained with God for the survival of Sodom: if there were ten just men in Sodom, the city would not be destroyed. Was Gomorrah included in the negotiation? By any reckoning, God did not keep his bargain. When two of the three angels arrived in Sodom and were attacked by a mob, they responded by destroying both Sodom and Gomorrah. Only Lot and his daughters were saved. Lot’s wife was lost because she looked behind her and was turned into a pillar of salt. The just were never numbered. The angels never visited Gomorrah. Later “Gomorrah” became a name for other catastrophes — in World War II, the 1943 fire-bombing of Hamburg was code-named “Operation Gomorrah” — but in Genesis, Gomorrah is never more than an afterthought. How to hold the eternity at Mamre and the destruction of Gomorrah in a single thought? I wrote “Gomorrah” because I was unable to hold eternity and the destruction in one thought, and because paradoxically this inability conferred a surprising freedom. I no longer knew what to think. For me, “Gomorrah” has become a name for this freedom that compels me not to know what to think. REFERENCES 1. Wanda Chantler, Hamburg, July 24, 1943. 2. Durs Grünbein, Nach Den Satiren (1999). Biography TONY BRINKLEY teaches at the University of Maine and is a member of the Flat Bay Collective. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, The New Review of Literature, and Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press, 2002). Printed from Cerise Press: http://www.cerisepress.com Permalink URL: http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/gomorrah 17 of 17 3/4/11 6:41 PM