Ciaran Berry

The N for Never

You step over a Jackson Pollock of pigeon

shit towards where, by the raised platform,

the line goes snap. Like Walter Benjamin’s

angel of history, you face backwards into

a future you arrive at stop by stop.

            You’re wearing khakis long after Labor Day

and these wide-collared shirts that say

“ready to party.” You bought them at the

Salvation Army on Steinway, where a rat

dragged its sorry ass between the racks

of everything long fallen out of fashion,

of everything mismatched and a magnet

for hair from the pair of cats you and

your wife have taken in—refugees from

a friend’s apartment fire, one named

the Russian for little bear, the other after

a New York Liberty basketball player.

You’re new to this place by the water

bought and sold for a handful of kettles,

axes, awls, a jaw harp, a bolt of cloth.

New and nowhere near cool enough

for the hipsters in their winklepicker shoes

as you sink under the foam of your headphones

            and then under the foam of the East River,

where it’s Gene Autry, then The Pogues,

Luke Kelly, and Nina Simone. You think

                        of Marilyn Monroe’s white dress rising

in the rush of air rising towards Lex

as she and Tom Ewell exit The Creature

            from the Black Lagoon, and of a sandhog

stepping from a man lock, as if stepping

out of a submarine—one of Emerson’s

                        immigrant millions with too much guano

in his destiny. What would he make 

of you in your orange seat, praised by

The American Posture League for how 

it fits the contours of the human form,

as, heart hepped up on too much caffeine,

you make your way to Credit Suisse

First Boston, where they pay you to answer

a phone that never rings while the actress

in the next cubicle tries out lines from

A Streetcar Named Desire? She wants

the part of Blanche, but who doesn’t?

You’re late again—the N for never lives

up to its name. It comes and goes like

those mole people rumored hereabouts

to poke their heads up out of holes,

or those old selves of ours that settle

in the second person, only to surface later

             as in a game of whac-a-mole. Down

at Federal Plaza, they’ve lost your papers

and so you’ll take a ticket and stand in line

            as if waiting for a quarter of Bologna

or Serrano ham. Your wife will call in a favor

from an old friend who’ll call in one

from a congressman the future

will remember for the photographs he sends

to a porn star and a black jack dealer

of his “man-bulge in boxer briefs,” and

all this flux will start to feel like home.

Doctor Zizmor has a cure for your acne

that comes ten years too late, ten years

before he retires to study the Talmud,

and there’s a 1-800 number for a lawyer

who’ll chase your ambulance at a

reasonable rate. That’s your reflection

in the glass, or someone else’s going

                        the other way. Go on, give us a wave,

as cradle-rocked or all shook up like

the gin in a gimlet, you get lost again

            between Ditmas and Mermaid.

Night of the Living Dead

(George A. Romero, 1968)

And so, once more, we end up here among the superstitious villagers,

something in the leaves astir, some heavy step that this way tends,

hoofed or steel-toed as the soundtrack skips from disco to dissonance,

and the moon kliegs a path through swamp or moor. Stiff of gait, this

grave creature, arisen straight-backed from the crypt of conjecture,

which in ’68 brings us the flesh eater, arms outstretched, tongue thick

with the grunt and murmur of what was once language as it draws

towards the TV’s bluish flicker, or tries a brick against the window

of the car. As “parable,” is how the director describes horror, and so

I wonder what he’d make of this plague year, in which some of us

take to the root cellar while others continue to risk it up the stairs.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte, someone suggests for an opening line

that captures the gist of the times, but my money’s on this brother

and sister who’ve driven from Pittsburgh to tend their father’s grave.

“You think I want to blow Sunday on a scene like this?” the son

exclaims, waving a gloved hand in the direction of the headstones

as YouTube counts down to an advert in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Later, he’ll return

without his glasses on, one of the undead, who come club-footed

or bandy-legged across the lawn. In a black suit ripped at the arm,

they come. In a bathrobe, a cocktail dress, a hospital gown, while,

like bog bodies, the culled mink of Jutland rise from their mass

grave and that ex-condo salesman, with the comb over coiffure

and spray-on tan, pens his love letter to Hydroxychloroquine. We

read the newsfeed as if it were tealeaves, or the entrails the ghouls

will soon scarf down—liver and kidneys brought onto set for the extras

along with boxes of pizza, kegs of cheap beer. In gingham or denim,

they appear. Buck naked, or in unbuttoned button downs, wanting

the heat of us, the sweet street meat of us spiked on its skewer

of bone, like this pathogen that turns the lungs to honeycomb, that

brings the night sweats and the cytokine storms. Our food supplies

are low, and behind the mask, the mouth and nose become obscene.

We stare into some mise en scène we have no context for, slipping out

round dusk to the package store, waxing nostalgic for all we did and

didn’t do in the before. “We urge you to stay tuned and stay indoors,”

advises the newsman on the radio, while on the TV an expert insists

the bereaved ought to forego “the dubious comforts of a funeral service”

to the accompaniment of another pop up window. On Blairsville they

bear down, on Willard and Latrobe, as the algorithm to my browsing

history tries to sell me Brooks running shoes, a Chevrolet, VRBO. 

Notes:

“The N for Never”: In his essay “Fate,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes “The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap and then to lie down permanently.” The description of the congressman’s “man-bulge” comes from a 2011 article in iPolitics.

”Night of the Living Dead”: George A. Romero describes horror movies as parables in a 2008 interview with the American Film Institute.  “Aujord’hui maman est morte” is the opening sentence to Albert Camus’s novel, L’Étranger. A report on the culled mink rising from a mass grave in Jutland appeared in The Guardian on November 25, 2020.