Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 32

Sonnet Crown for Third Officer Ripley

A. B. Robinson

I.

Song, not for air captains but militarization

of everyday life: in the far future, army melts

into market transaction. This is now, certainly,

in the past, in 1979. With a sulfurous hiss

the longshoremen spring to life! They are tender

and easily distinguishable by archetype.

The commedia of office work persists,

a different wormhole, ledger

casting into an ontological shade

the quick glimpse of a series of convergences,

not easily reversed but better undone,

long shadows through a Microsoft space—

but I’m projecting again, I think. This is not

yet WarGames, released in 1983.

II.

Yet WarGames, released in 1983,

shares with Alien, if not Soviets outright, then

fear of a sentience picked clean of watercolor

humanism. The creature in its arcane laboratory

attempts toothy baroque, simultaneously backwards

and too high-pitched to be picked up by human

ears. Its structural perfection is matched only

by its hostility. The beautiful body from which

another unrecognizable body explodes, covering

the wall in oblique eulogies, is (endearingly)

really about Fascism at the last second. Indiana

Jones can’t keep these straight, either.

Ripley strokes the lean white form of the cat,

recognizable among the compaction of many machines.

III.

Recognizable among the compaction of many machines,

here’s the vague hulk of late night slasher double features.

Press this button, receive some feeling from the crew,

continuum of buff to scrawny. One girl will come away whole.

Yes, the military, in your suburbia! Hurled into abstraction,

Ash provides the gentle, officious commentary of

a PA system echoing faultlessly through entire cities,

networks of dissolving and reappearing ghosts, world

this one, peeled-off, makes raw again. Across the moor,

genre wiggles herself into a catsuit, attaches the oxygen

helmet. It came to install your air conditioning, and then

its teeth shot out, like a cash drawer. The body is

appropriated, terrible, and flat, which is its whole appeal.

Out of the corner of your eye, you guess the size of it beneath the water.

IV.

Out of the corner of your eye, you guess the size of it beneath the water.

The trick here is absence.

As in Godzilla, the effect

is achieved by what can be looked

at but not seen directly.

The maggot you pick out of your hair

quickly develops a personality, then,

shortly, a pedigree; when you wake,

you make up the story that best justifies

a series of uncoordinated developments.

First on four legs, then two,

then three, storms the whole parade

of questions. Out, out, out! And in the dark,

camera light flirting with a rope of drool.

V.

Camera light flirting with a rope of drool

and then the white undershirt of Captain Ripley,

spattered with blood. What is clean remains clean.

Her hair is, after all, perfect. She has no choice

after the first movie but to become motherly.

I admit I have not watched Alien recently enough

to give a coherent reading of the film—only

daub a little at the most memorable sequences,

many of which entail little exposition, many of which

take place before or after it, so that I look at it,

also, from the corner of my eye. That’s Susan

Sarandon in The Hunger and not Sigourney Weaver.

In the second and third films, she is billed with a personal name.

Not Ripley, but Ellen Ripley.

VI.

Not Ripley, but Ellen Ripley.

The androgynous hero-name is tacked against a more

decisive warmth, for plot expedience. That undershirt

is every soft butch dream I’ve ever had realized

simultaneously, and it’s true that if there is always

something erotic (therefore terrible) about horror movies,

Ripley is more agential and thereby way gayer than most

final girls. The den of unnameable intimacy is not

the upstairs bedroom of a split-level house in Milwaukee,

but a cavern. In traversing it one becomes man-like.

In this gaudily offensive way, we proceed through the nineteenth century.

The mystery is, after all, what happens when the fun is over,

when the monsters stop circling the mulberry bush.

The answer, of course, is an immaculate conception.

VII.

The answer, of course, is an immaculate conception.

It goes without saying that Aliens and Alien³ follow

Rosemary’s Baby to the playground, now with more lasers!

I was taught to lower my standards and keep going, but not like this.

Preserve, then, the first and most properly Gothic movie as a motive unto itself, or at least as a small reverse stitch, and

let us never speak of the Joss Whedon iteration, not even in secret.

I’ve forgotten every detail of Prometheus except

the Teutonic face of Michael Fassbender, and a culmination

in the swollen body of a queen. The Other is a really big bug.

Prometheus is more apocalyptic than anything. Was

there tense off-roading in the desert in this 2012 adventure movie?

I remember the gestation, more literal, worse than ever.

What’s dumb only gets dumber as it reduplicates.

VIII.

What’s dumb only gets dumber as it reduplicates.

Sublimity is funny in any number of crystalline eyes,

as are the failures of aging puppetry. Remember that

incidental line in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Silicone

shot out of a cannon is still weird for any number of reasons.

If these poems strike you as bathetic, vague, limping,

lopsided, or circular, an effect has been achieved like

space that won’t quite map itself into an agreeable arrangement,

into a neighborhood worth throwing newspapers at doorsteps for.

It’s true that what I’m doing isn’t exactly criticism,

but who asked for it? I will keep walking in this crab-like way,

ass-first among the stars. My, what big teeth you have!

Mother! I’ve turned the cooling unit back on. Mother!

The ship will automatically destruct in T minus five minutes!

IX.

The ship will automatically destruct in T minus five minutes,

a ship we call Mother. My funereal drawing room can beat up

your crumbling buttresses! We are never quite sure where

the big estate begins and ends, nor its assortment of polyps,

windy corners, LEDs, and pinched faces, clicking

merrily together towards a conclusion described in reports as inevitable.

Mother doesn’t care for you but has achieved legal personhood

and donates endlessly to subterranean political campaigns.

A feeling of soothing fugue floats over us. The ship,

now splintered to accommodate a few Marimekko prints,

several lampshades, floats toward the edge of the German wood.

We have eaten the dark candy and somehow lived. It ends

where it began, in our underwear, confused but titillated.

A voice-over nudges us against the thingness of our experience.

X.

A voice-over nudges us against the thingness of our experience.

Alien is framed by log entries, and so in total becomes nearly anecdotal.

Ripley is her own Nelly Dean, but who has been killing the dogs?

It scuttles away before we notice it, too small and then much too large,

always offstage. (Outside in Belchertown, MA, the dogs begin

to howl, no reason except the end of the weekend or a stray firework).

There’s a suggestion that Ripley has been alone the entire time,

isolated first by manners (money, an ambivalent position as minor officer)

and gender, and then, finally, by her own body, or her terrible double.

We will see the edge of the frontier in six weeks, if we are lucky.

The story is retold, and retold, and then retold—first of thrown bodies,

and then their replacements. Impossible to see the center.

Things don’t so much fall apart as fly into installments.

One gets the sense that everyone but the android is interchangeable.

XI.

One gets the sense that everyone but the android is interchangeable.

Even Ripley, with the rearrangement of her personality

to suit narrative contingencies, is infinitely malleable.

I love the affectation of characters said to argue with authors,

coax, deny, applaud, or love. The illusory interiority of realism

roars to life and it has too many mouths and can only do pratfalls.

We like this interplay of surfaces and the flicker of fish in it!

I am speaking extremely figurally—extremely figurally. If you take away

all the metaphors there’s nothing but weird flesh and some wire hangers.

With nothing to do but gnaw pointlessly at my own tail, we begin

to chart a course away from the intended one. Fumbling with

charm or pleasure so accidental it only redoubles. As when

everybody begins to wake up and is hungry for space breakfast.

They all begin to eat, brushing off personality with coarse efficiency.

XII.

They all begin to eat, brushing off personality with coarse efficiency.

In fact, it is impossible to remember any of them, not even a little!

Perhaps this kind of work is better suited to a more obsessive fan,

somebody with all the minutiae in a Rolodex. On the other hand,

I’ve always hated the wiki as a form, and don’t you?

Glazed over, it takes on a different cast. Like, how does

nobody really know what they’re out in space to do? Ash

is singularly the real middle management, but is that how power works?

With a bang and a flash, a point contracted into visible sharpness before

dispersing? And little orange dots left in your closed eyes afterwards.

My bosses have always been slow burners, but I keep both

my feet on the ground. The whole thing’s a little sinister!

They trade jokes and I forget all of them immediately;

that’s more like the working day I’m familiar with.

XIII.

That’s more like the working day I’m familiar with—

the slow voiding or bleaching of order. Which

part of the creature did I really see? I don’t know

what I did all day, except in an abstract sense.

Someone wields the light, someone looks directly

into the camera and is carried off. Someone is

scornful of another one’s fear. Ripley is not

suitable for vanity mirror figuring of one’s self and

is, in fact, always someone else except

a young Judith Butler. The work, however,

is an inescapable fact, the absence of which

is merely waiting. The poems go on in order

to go on, to be enough. Aliens of all kinds tend

to fall a little by the wayside.

XIV.

To fall a little by the wayside

is, in its way, a reward. The camera pans wider

to show us the roominess, the preposterous scale

of the natural spaceship—only to vanish again.

There is a glimpse of a mechanism. The shadow

of a boom mic duly noted. Ripley herself

begins the voyage, only to begin it again, or to

return—but the fact is that she can’t stay anywhere.

She achieves these traversals by endings, meals,

diminishments, apocalypses, resurrections,

brokerages, or third-party mediation.

A series of Ripleys gesture towards

a blank field, caught in the roll of it.

Song, not for air captains but militarization.

The Beast Unknown to Heraldry

Henry Wessells

One does not always know the consequences of research in an archive, nor even what form the research will take. Thornton had a small income from his mother, which had once been sufficient for the modest entertainments of a private scholar living modestly in London. Now the competency ran to about ten months of the year in a sunny Cornish village he had come to love. His book on the supernatural in Britain was in the sixth edition but the royalties had been spent to renew his wardrobe. When his landlady began to talk of summer tenants for his rooms, Thornton told her he would be away for September, too, and wrote a letter to Digger. The fourteenth Duke of Wyland was a distant cousin of precisely his age; at six, Thornton had been presented to the twelfth Duke, Digger’s grandfather, at Delvoir Castle. The two boys had attended the same crammer, and for several summers had run wild and fought together through the castle demesne, until their public school careers diverged. The heir went off to Eton and Balliol, and Thornton to a bursary at Harrow, a pass degree in old English at Cambridge, and brief appointments as assistant master at a string of lesser public schools (he was never invited back). Thornton had sent the Duke copies of all of his books but had not seen him for a decade; he was almost certainly the only person who called the Duke by his school nickname. His letter proposed research into the early thirteenth-century rent rolls and forestry records in the castle archives. His cousin could scarcely refuse him, and the prospect of two of three months’ lodging in an upstairs room in the castle, with all found, was a welcome one.

On the third afternoon following his arrival at Delvoir, while out for a vigorous walk in one of the outer plantations of oak and beech, Thornton came upon a troubled wolf giving birth among the gnarled roots of a massive tree. He had spent a year as a shepherd in New Zealand after Cambridge, and remembered what to do. He mentioned this at dinner.

—A breech birth, couldn’t save the mother, but sheep and wolf are the same at that particular moment. I wrapped the whelp in my scarf and left the mother for dead beside the beech. When I brought it to one of the outhouses, he took a rubber nipple and bottle very well for such a luckless and furry mite. The mother looked as though she had a nasty scaly mange. Digger, you may have to thin the pack.

—There are no wolves at Delvoir, Thornton. The forest is not as wild as all that. Perhaps she escaped from Col. Cody’s menagerie. Haw, haw.

—Well, there’s one wolf pup, anyway, resting in a hamper full of blanket scraps. I shall look after him during my intervals between periods of study. Do you know I found an entire sheaf of timber accounts from the time of the second and third feudal Lords of Wyland? The hand is a bit crabbed but the records are uninterrupted for more than fifty years. I shall get a good article out of that, Digger, not simply a note. Tomorrow I will begin to read in the first volume of the Chronicle, I don’t suppose anyone has looked at it in our lifetimes.

—Tomorrow I’ll send out the keepers to look for the corpse. You stick with the books, Thornton.

from Thornton’s notes:

The Herbalist’s Song [ca. 1150 C.E.], bound with Delvoir Chronicle Liber 1

Of the wulkderk, the yeomen say it was the smiths, who woke the wulkderk, in their quest for iron from the hills, I alone know the truth of the wulkderk

In the year I made herbal master, the first season in the forest, gathering wolfsbane at the full moon, in March I was silent witness, when the dragon fell from the sky, upon the she-wolf in her spring heat, their coupling flattened the rivermeet, a swamp still boggy after five decades,

I saw the wulkderk three times since they were got, once at their birth in the beech wood, when the wolf suckled her wulkderk whelps, once I saw the pair in winter flight across the sky, and last I saw their brood come down from the Welsh hills, across the fields and skies

Of the wulkderk, its head is of the dragon father with teeth of the wolf mother, four-legged and of two forms, the male fur-clad with strong wings, the female scale-clad with furry mane and back, like dog and dragon the wulkderk will sleep for days and decades, until hunger stirs it or the unwary trouble its lair

The wulkderk is unlike the mule and the get of the first pair was many, they were early weaned when the Sieur’s huntsman slew the wolf-mother, they dwelt in the Welsh hills and took deer and sheep and cattle

When the barons turned lawless and the forests grew, the wulkderk spawn split into four packs, and these now dwell in Wales, the Anglish fens, the northern lakes, and the Dartmoor

Of the gaze of the wulkderk, to look into its eyes is death, men like sheep stand still as the beast seizes its prey, only strength of will or purity of heart are proof, wolfsbane is of small help and dragonbane none, but when the wulkderk has eaten, in its brief torpor can it be approached

The wulkderk can sleep undisturbed for years and decades, yet wakes with terrible hunger and will take a grown man at midday, at Delvoir in the castle is a cloak of wulkderk hide, the Sieur of Wyland killed the beast and took its likeness for his shield mark

Thornton rarely saw the Duke and Duchess, who were often in London; the heir, Lord Weareigh, was in the corps diplomatique in Washington, the two married daughters lived in London and Edinburgh. This suited Thornton just fine. When the family was not in residence, luncheon and tea were brought to him on the terrace beside the library, and other meals on a tray to his room. The wolf cub now slept in its basket beside his table at a library window.

In late July, there was a small summer party and Thornton was seated towards the lower end of the long table, between two beefy women of the county hunting set. The Delvoir Hunt had a reputation for bold riding. When the ladies withdrew, the Duke said to him,

—Still here, Thornton? How are the researches coming? I will be in Scotland next month for the twelfth and we will be cruising from Oban to Cowes, and off to Paris after that to meet Weareigh who is coming over for a big parley. Not back here until the end of September.

—Did you know the Chronicle has never been published? Perhaps next year I could begin work on an edition, I shall speak with someone at the University press. In the 1780s, a local antiquarian prepared a very good index to it, in manuscript only.

—What did you do with the wolf cub?

—The whelp is not quite weaned, yet, but very docile, I take him on my walks on a lead. Growing fast, with some odd bumps in the shoulders. One of your kennelmen told me today that it is time to start him on flesh, he will bring puppy scraps tomorrow.

from Thornton’s notes:

The Delvoir Chronicle Liber 4 Eliz 16

A warrant was issued against the Baron of Blaidh on charges that he did murder his younger sister Ysabel aet. 15 and her paramour the viscount Heldraig on Lammas day and did bury them by stealth under a beech tree at Blaidh Hill. The Baron, who had been elevated to the title upon the death of his father at ambush in Ireland in May, was never brought to answer the charges. At noon on the first day of September when the Baron sat his horse, a dreadful beast descended from the sky in the court of the Barons Tower and seized him in its great jaws and devoured man and steed. None dared to face the wingèd wolf, the wulkderk of the ancient chronicles. The Baron was a man of cankred hate and brutal mien and was adjudged guilty of the misdeeds, his lands falling forfeit to the Sieur of Wyland his liege. The wulkderk levelled walls in its going and the hill remains a desert shunned by all.

On the fifteenth of August, Thornton finished his luncheon and looked toward the library door. A note to Skeat on the chronicle was written, he would address it for the evening post. It was a fine day, the wolf pup slumbered at his feet. He took the lead and roused the beast. It stood up on long legs, and he noted that it was now the size of a large Alsatian, a pup no more. It had refused food this morning, and he hoped that a walk into the plantation might give it an appetite.

Half an hour later, Thornton was a bit breathless as the walk had been mostly uphill. The whelp strained at the lead, making a low growling sound, with Thornton trotting to keep pace as the track took a sharp turn around a ruined wall and then continued up to an ancient beech tree. Thornton recognized the huge roots of the tree. He had been mistaken about the she-wolf, he thought, for there she was, her legs not mangy but scaled: a wulkderk. When she turned