Kate Braverman - Lithium for Medea

Rushing into slow falling tentative web of fragile velvety darkness halfway to the Arizona border, the possibilities, the fundamental and starwhirl. I am going farther. I will say it out loud and let it pour from my mouth. I am taking the goddamn bricks and thorns and plaster out. I remember when the world was mine. North to Mendocino, redwoods with a tapestry of moss and pine cone spokes at their feet. Holy. The path south a sacred gash into the liquid face, white tequila sun. Holy. The Arizona border at nightfall. Holy. I can say it. I can take the stinking bricks out of my mouth and say Salt Lake, say Taos. The earth shakes. It is mine. I will not tremble. I will grip the wheel and go the distance. I am driving, my face widening with the dusk coming down in sheets between spokes of sagebrush layered in dark chalks. Pale hills inching purple into night. Stubborn rocks curled tight while winds whip and ride .

Daddy, I’m afraid. The world is a six-thousand-dollar claimer for cripples who can’t find the wire. But I can barely see straight. A wind is blowing cold and hot. I’m shaking, trembling, spinning and needing a shot. Soon I enter Navaho lands. They thought the hills carcasses of slain monsters and the black spongy-looking lavaflow cliffs to be congealed monster blood. I sense a certain residue, a part of a process. The stones have faces. Is that what you meant to tell me, Daddy? Then won’t you be with me always, your face and torso chiseled into hills? In the beginning, the father. In the beginning, gneiss, granite, storm-clouds, steam, lightning. A sudden invention. And you are the father, fire. You made the stars from quartz chips. You hollowed abalone shells for the sky. It is your face in the lavaflow .

I will awaken .

I will begin again .

I will shed intricacies for the not yet known .

Last vestiges of sun hanging above me, a clean dry pink, chalk soft and possible. The blackpure desert, concrete stopped. And flametips of stars, rings within rings, the glorious eyes of frenzied prophets. Possibilities, quartz chips a canopy blazing, dazzling and not turning back. Out of fire and bloodnights into black night surging forward lit by twin globe automobile eyes. Silvery arcs, channels into scorpions and small things that scurry and glow. Some other time, maybe. But I’ve got to keep going, cross the Arizona border, an edge clearly marked, symbolic. South the white sands spread into Mexico, into waterfalls moss smooth and choked with ferns above warm harbors. Tequila sun, absinthe and mescal sun and sand crabs, coconuts, Bogotá, Lima. And east is the painted desert and mesas, lands of sheer purples and magentas, fathers carved into plateaus. And north is the Grand Canyon, solved equation of windlash, water and time. And somewhere the great mountains where forests branch infinite fir and evergreens, alwaysgreens piercing granite, the spine, substantial and possible, possible .

KATE BRAVERMANis a native of Los Angeles. She was an activist in the ’60s in Berkeley. A member of the Venice Poetry Workshop and professor of creative writing at California State University, she also taught creative writing at the UCLA Writer’s Program.

Besides Lithium for Medea , Braverman has published three other novels— The Incantation of Frida K., Palm Latitudes , and Wonders of the West — four books of poetry, and two collections of short stories. Her stories “Tales from the Mekong Delta” and “Pagan Night” are widely anthologized, and her work has been selected for Best American Short Stories . In 1992 she received the O. Henry Award.

Since 1995, Braverman has lived with her husband, Alan, and daughter, Gabrielle, in the Allegany Mountains.

RICK MOODYis the author of The Ice Storm and Purple America , among others. His latest book, Demonology , was published in 2001. He lives in Fisher Island, N.Y.