Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

The Word

B A R B A R A H A M B Y The Word In the beginning was the word, fluttering out into syllables like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas, lovely leafy parts collapsing into atoms and cells, genus and phylum, nouns, verbs, elephants, orangutans, O Noah, you and your philological filing and filling of arks, gullets, daughters. In the beginning was the word and it was as big as Aretha Franklin after “Chain of Fools,” long as your mother’s memory of all your misdeeds, wide as Jerusalem, a fat-lady-in-the-circus word, a Siberia, a steppe, a savanna, a stretch, a Saturnalia, the party at the end of the world. In the beginning was the word and we knew which way it went: left to right in English, right to left in Hebrew, an orientation so profound that sexual climax is coming in all right-moving languages and going in those advancing left, though in the moment we rarely know whether we are coming or going. In the beginning was the word, and it was small and perfect. Like a Hans Holbein miniature, a dormouse, a gnat, a bee, a blink, a breath in the lungs of Jehovah, Brahman, the Buddha, Ra, because all the big kahunas of the universe surfed in on the crest of that first wave, and Thomas Edison said let there be light and the dinosaurs groaned in their graves, The 1990s ❚ 193 and there was Albuquerque, late-night roadhouses, blues, cigarettes, fish-net stockings, high-density sodium street lights that blot out the stars, cars, diners, the neon urban carnival before Lent, and Marie Curie said let there be more light, and there was radium, radiant thermonuclear incandescent explosions, Herr Einstein’s dream, Herr Oppenheimer’s furnace, London burning with Hitler’s fire, Dresden cremated in the answering flame, Hiroshima mon amour. I ask you, what is this world with its polyglot delirium, its plain-spoken, tight-assed, stumble-bum euphoria? Explain time, for I am fretting on the outskirts of Odessa, with Chekhov, with Eisenstein, with ten thousand martyrs of various unremembered causes, and we are cold, hungry, tired of playing Hearts. Where are you, my minister of informazione, Comrade Surgeon, Mister Wizard, Gino Romantico? Can you in your lingo ferret out the first word? Inspect your dialect for clues, my Marlowe, my Holmes, your patois for signs, your pagan vernacular, your scatological cant, your murmuring river of carnal honey, for in the beginning there was darkness until you came, my pluperfect anagram of erotic delights, my wild-haired professor of vinissimo and mayhem, emperor of Urbino, incubator of rhythm, blue-eyed Apollo of the late-night bacchanalia, and there was music, that heady martini of mathematics and beauty. For I am empty, I am full, I am certain, I am not, for in the beginning there was nothing and it was blank and indescribable, a wave breaking on the north shore of the soul, 194 ❚ The 1990s but as every canyon aches for its sky, I burned for you with a fever, with a frenzy, I was a woman craving a blaze, a flame, a five-alarm fire in my heart, in my bones, my hair red as a hibiscus, like a burning bush, I was Moses screaming at God, filaments of flame eating my eyes, my sex, the hard sweet apple of my mouth. The 1990s ❚ 195 ...