Christopher Kempf is the author of Late in the Empire of Men, which won the Levis Prize from Four Way Books and is forthcoming in March 2017. Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University, his work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and Ploughshares, among other places. He lives in Chicago, where he is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Chicago. ---------
Bindery
Nights that semester, the rest
of campus deep in its Baroque paintings
& trig functions above me, I milled
the spines from a stack of back issues. I slid
the loose ream to Mike, a man
who for half a century had stood
at a bench in the library's basement binding
the separate issues into one. The industrial-
gauged needle dropped & retracted, his stack
of acid-free paper punctured
beneath it. This, he said once, requires
of us the most devoted of care. I covered
the stacks with adhesive & sheathed them
in marbleized backing. We bound
the back issues exactly
& in silence, Mike
& I, while
on a TV in the corner the war worked
its way at last to the National
Museum of Iraq. We watched
together the vast catalog of loss. Lyres
of Ur, oldest
of stringed instruments. The earliest
mask of the face in fragments. I passed
the sewn-up, coverless book back
to Mike who mounted the bare ream
in its buckram cover—classics
in red, economics indigo. History,
on the late news, loosed
itself again into bedlam. Men
fled the museum heaped
with Sumerian jewelry. They moved
silently, guided
by the lights of choppers
in the sky above them, by
the burning oil fields the future
to which we were bound
would be lit with.
Best of All Possible Worlds
Elsewhere, then, the wrench engineering
airman George McDonald drops, August
1980, into
then igniting the Titan II
nuclear warhead does, in that world, result
in the largest domestic catastrophe—that
phrase—we can, we imagine,
imagine. Damascus,
Arkansas—all
of Arkansas actually, all
of the hot & God-forsaken South—shrouded
in fire & dust. In another
world, the wobbling SkyWest jetliner
that passed, last week, within
a football field of flight
92 from Houston to San Francisco clips
the wings of that plane & sails, face
first, into the desert
of Taos, New Mexico. No one, in one
world, pulls the baby from the well or will,
there, spare
from its sky the flight attendant scheduling
error spared in this one. In this
world alone, Leibniz
said, the best
our one God could muster comes
to pass. & that
appeased us for a minute. We did
live—didn't we?—free
of those great disasters modernity
would be ruined by. Leibniz
in the royal palace pawed
the ladies in waiting. The ancient
regimes of Europe turned
calmly to their affairs. Then first
the earth shook. The sea
drew back & gathered
there on the beach fleeing
the heat from the burning city, Lisbon's
stunned populace watched
a world long hidden, littered
with shipwrecks & rotting cargo, show
itself. & so
the wave came. Later, the living
with their sacks—the survivors,
to embalm the one-hundred
thousand dead, dredging
their bodies with salt. Which supposes,
that number, one
of every kind of death potentially
existing in this world—one
girl holding the severed leg
of her mother, one
man dragging his insides—
existed. There is,
Leibniz knew, true
calm after acceptance. Even the slightest
of atrocities could shock us
once, remember? He died
Leibniz, out of favor & alone
in the slums of Hanover. & homeless, roaming
the hills above his fallen capital, King
Joseph of Portugal swore
to his tired retinue never
again would he enter
a city & didn't. His village
of tents & pavilions billowed
all his life in those hills, haunted
there by the ocean breeze, that best
air possible, God's
breath, we said, salting
the face of the waters.
80 East, Nevada
& in the opposite direction, west
from Omaha & Independence, the settlers
of California traveled too
once, their wagons
loaded with buckshot & sometimes
with dressers even & ovens along
the same labyrinthine river, the Humboldt, the road
still to this day trails. A day
out from San Francisco, we know
the towns through which we pass—Nevada's
sad, forgotten gold belt—by
the massive hillside letters men
in those places arranged the rocks as. E
for Elko. O, there
is always for us the hunger
to inscribe with our own narratives
the wild, high-Sierra scrub of what
we fear. To form,
as couples before us have done here, hearts
of rock in the sand. Amanda
& Jason. Nathan
& Sophia. Through such
a sentimental landscape our little
rented Penske passes. In back
we have loaded what is mine
of the life we shared in California—
the folding chairs & floor lamps, the low
dependable bed on which
we too were a couple once. We,
who when it is over will begin
in our separate cities saying
we miss each other & what
is the weather like there & there
there. Then
is the highway a kind
of fuse too for us. Un-
settling. South
of this place, late one winter pinned
in the Wasatch Mountains, Margaret
Reed—her husband,
for killing a man, banished—begged
from William Graves for eight
times the going price a pair
of famished oxen. She watched
the children pick from their teeth even
the poor beasts' hooves & later, taking
care, she says, that no one
should consume a relative, they let
themselves at last imagine each other
as meat. We
understand now how
it is done. One
must loosen from the legbone whole
the hamstring. Strip
clean the deep fascia. That
was when, the histories say, Graves
came, the ache
of what he was owed low
in his gut & claimed
her debt in flesh. He fucked her
I mean. & we,
who have convinced ourselves
that when it is over even we
will talk, still, & be close, know
in our bitter, indigestible bones how barren
& uncrossable a continent
the heart is. How sheer
its cliffs. The cities
& towns along the highway here hand-
painted their geoglyphs red,
white, & blue in the wake
of the towers' falling. We watch
the C of Carlin, Nevada—flag-
colored outcropping—drop
away behind the Penske's insect-
speckled glass. We will pass
through many states still, you
& I, but we, we say,
were in California once & young.