Claudia Rankine - Plot

PLOT

ALSO BY CLAUDIA RANKINE

Nothing in Nature Is Private

The End of the Alphabet

Claudia Rankine

The author is grateful to the editors of the following publications, in which sections from PLOT have appeared: Boston Review, jubilat, Pierogi Press, Poetry Project Newsletter, TriQuarterly, and Verse.

I would like to thank all my friends who read and commented on this manuscript. And for their undying enthusiasm and encouragement I would like especially to thank Sarah Blake, Calvin Bedient, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Christine Hume, Beverly Rose, Sarah Schulman, and, most especially, my husband, John Lucas. My gratitude to Richard Howard.

Copyright 2001 by Claudia Rankine

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rankine, Claudia, 1963
Plot / by Claudia Rankine.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-802I-3792-X
I. Title.
PS3568.A572 P58 2001
813.54dc21 00-051389

DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

01 02 03 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR MARGRETHE WINSLOW

PLOT

: inverse

Submerged deeper than appetite

she bit into a freakish anatomy, the hard plastic of filiation, a fetus dream, once severed, reattached, the baby femur not fork-tender though flesh, the baby face now anchored.

What Liv would make would be called familial, not foreign, forsaken. She knew this, tried to force the scene, focus the world, in the dream. Snapping, the crisp rub of thumb to index, she was in rehearsal with everyone, loving the feel of cartilage, ponderous of damaged leaves, then only she. singing internally, only she revealed, humming, undressing a lullaby: bitterly, bitterly, sinkholes to underground streams....

In the dream waist deep, retrieving a fossilized pattern forming in attempt to prevent whispers, or poisoned regrets, reaching into reams and reams, to needle-seam a cord in the stream, as if a wish borne out of rah-rahs rude protrusion to follow the rest was sporded. split, and now hard pressed to enter the birth.

In the dream the reassembled desire to conceive wraps the tearing placenta to a walled uterus, urge formed complicit. First portraying then praying to a womb ill-fitting, she grows fat.

The drive in utero is fiction-filled, arbiter of the cut-out infant, and mainstreamed. Why birth the other, to watch the seam rip. to roughly conjoin the lacerating generations? Lineage means to step here on the likelihood of involution, then hard not to notice the depth of rot at the fleshy roots. To this outbreak of doubt, she crosses her legs, the weight of one thigh on the next, constructed rectitude, the heavy, heavy, devotion of no.

Ersatz

outside of this insular traffic a woman in pink underlining the alias gender, who is she really? call her. could you. would you. call her. Mommy?

The hope under which Liv stood.

her craven face, it clamored. The trumpeter announced it. She stood more steady then, marveling at her stammering, hammering heart, collecting a so-invisible breath, feeling extreme, commencing, deeper than feeling was.

She wanted what he had been told shed want, what she was. expecting. Then the expecting was also a remembering, remembering to want. She was filling her mouth up with his

yet it was not. it was not. the sound of sucking on the edge of sleep, not soft brush of cheek, not the heat of the hand along the neck.

There is a depiction, picture, someone elses boy gorgeously scaled down, and crying out. and she not hearing, not having, not bearing Ersatz

She was filling her mouth up with his name, yet it was not. it was not.

Liv forever approaching the boy like toddler to toy. the mothering more forged than known, the coo-coo rising air bubbles to meet colostrum, yellow, to blue, to milk, not having to learn, knowing by herself. Come closer

in front the glare, pools in straining veins making Liv nervy, malachite half-moons on each lobe listening inward, the hormonal trash heap howling back.

There is dust from a filed nail, the wind lifts, carries it into available light: not monochromatic, not flattened though isolating, solicitous, soliciting. Come closer

Once Liv thought pregnancy would purify. You Ersatz effacing, her pace of guilt, her site of murmur.

Then of course, of course, when do we not coincide elsewhere with the avoided path? a sharp turn toward the womb-shaped void? now

Liv is feeling in vitro, duped, a dumbness of chimes, no smiles for every child so careful, so careful.

Ersatz

infant, bloomed muscle of the uterine wall, you still pink in the center, resembling the saliva-slick pit of the olive, resembling tight petals of rose, assembling

Ersatz

This, his name was said. Afterward its expression wearing the ornate of torment, untouched by discretion, natural light or (so rumored

(and it. once roused, caused ill-ease as if kissed full on the mouth.

Herself assaulting the changing conditions, Liv added desires stranglehold, envisaged its peculiarly pitched ache otherwise alien to her wildly incredulous hopes: Ersatz

Ersatz

aware of your welt-rising strokes, your accretion of theme. Liv was stirring (no. breathing the dream. She was preventing a trust from forming, still the bony attachment was gaining its tissue like a wattle-and-daub weave.

Ersatz

arrival is keyhole-shaped, it allows one in the assembled warren of rooms, to open the game box even as the other leans against the exposed from her freestanding, exaggerated perspective.

She is on her way in the corridor unable to enter this room and if she prays to be released from you. as one would pray to be released from tinnitus or welt, boy ridge of flesh raised by a blow.

imagine in your uncurl of spinal arch, her eye your eye. an apparition hushed to distortion, her heart unclosed, yet warped by dullness and pure feeling, her lips but a crease recrossing time, needing a softer tone.

Imagine the prayer itself

Ersatz

unswallowed. swollen within her lips, so grieved:

Ersatz,

Here. Here. I am here

inadequately and feeling more and more less so because of not feeling more, but stopped. For I am of course frightened of you, what your bold face will show me of me. I am again leading to regret. I have lived, Ersatz, the confusion in my head, the fusion that keeps confusion. Could it keep you? Could it make those promises to remedy tortuous lines, thickening encroachings?

Oh, Ersatz, my own, birth is the limiting of the soul, what is trapped with it already owns. I could quadruple my intent toward you, be your first protection; but I could not wish a self on any self as yet unformed, though named and craved.

Ersatz,

I am here. And here is not analogous to hope.

See past the birth into these eyes of yours, into what increasingly overstates resemblance, a semblance one might wish to tuck under, into the sweat of the armpit, into its wiry odor of exhaustion, remembering the self and any reflection thereof is never a thing to cradle.