THE IMAGINED PLASTICITY OF THE VISIBLE
The body as sculpture. (Pageant, labyrinth.)
Wrapped like Central Park or Marin
in Christo’s silk, wiving into a future
of minerals and taffeta, hypocausts and gorse.
We have computers to calculate the rocket’s
rate of descent, its pure metaphor.
Everything’s a ruin, you said, at least
in embryo, by which you meant possibility
as seduced or displaced by time.
We were not talking about the body
and our kitchen was a delirious semblance
of all our commensal desires.
We weren’t talking about burying
your father, my father, anyone really.
Predicate: the mask with its fleshy
retinue, adrift over the fields
like so many mathematical kites.
Of course they’re burning, I say, turning
away from the window. What?
you counter. The fields, or the kites?
Aerial archaeology, cropmarks and hut rings,
ditches, enclosures—we place
our fingers in the grooved photograph and
the mind says Almost, the mind says
It is pleasurable to know where men have been.
Sleeping in the grooves at night,
faint musk of earth-nitre and defenses the mind
conceives, conjures, concedes to agriculture
and topography.
We sleep in the X-chromosome, the Y
keeps right on dreaming. Absent the body
it dreams another body, and another, man
into bull, bull into kestrel.
We are guests moving around inside a film
the dead are showing. Sure, you said.
I mistook you for a film, for a body in a film,
I said, when I woke up. Sure, you said
again, standing in our beautiful kitchen, sipping coffee,
crowded in among the animals and glass.
Porter’s seat’s small theater
of foxglove and rust. I almost wrote “trust,”
as in vowel, something even mortal
pain and grief believe in.
Along with the best gods, all the other gods.
When they tell you
“Step into the light,” it is not automatically
a sign you should step
into anything. Light. Language. Faith. History.
We study architecture
because we want to believe the material world
is more literate than this one,
the council estates with their tiny shops and cottages
and the great houses
slope-farmed into children preparing
for some future bewilderment, or something
more than “future,” involving glass and more styptic
chemicals. A rushing wind, renewable.
Dried husk of an abandoned station—
see, you can tell by the steps
leading up to what would have been
the platform, now vanished in a tangle of fox-
glove and some other flower I can’t name.
Language is no stop to the body.
Language is a choice, a bargain the body
enters into. In this not unlike sex.
Body chaining into body, generative, generational.
If we like the same things are we then
sculpted by that liking, that likeness.
A choice: the castle, the chapel,
or else the exploded gunpowder manufactory.
(It’s not much of a choice, you complain.)
It’s not that we wander about
looking for the pastoral. The pastoral wanders
about looking for us. Without us
the pastoral is nothing: metamorphic occlusions,
some “digestive and genital organs of plants.”
The sleeves of the cities suffer us.
The plackets of the countryside, the little farms:
they suffer us, buried
under this incredible weight of nitrogen
and the vapors nitrogen dandles.
Certain software can reproduce these and other
patterns. Some of them we call joy.
And you say, I am affected
by the verticality of it. You say, I am
afraid of falling, and, Would you terribly mind
switching places?
Now there are two of us.
As in the definition of that word, “liberal.”
To give, vs. to be the recipient of a gift.
Which is the less terrible opponent
is not a question that makes sense, in the city.
The moral imagination, you said.
It’s like some sort of kitchen gossip, isn’t it,
only nobody knows which kitchen she’s in.
Predicate, not to build but
to have built. So pretty, this little Latin
in its porcelain dressing gown.
Blink once for yes, blink twice for no.
Predicate, to have lasted long, or not so long;
to have lasted this long. Sustained
but in the legal sense, meaning
You are right, but only in this moment.
Small children “make poison”
from the most colorful, most disgusting ingredients
they can lay their hands on
(overlay of Grimm or Disney as appropriate).
Then they wonder what to do with it.
Part of the pageant takes place
in the labyrinth, yes. The light is better there.
I said, One of my few natural virtues
is loyalty. —Meaning you’re trustworthy,
you elaborated. Which caught me off guard:
History is an exercise in narrative,
in distinguishing between loyalty and trust.
What we liked best
about the gunpowder manufactory
was the enormous waterworks—dams, gates,
sluices—that survived, in part,
because they lay below the surface
of the explosion.
There were railings, to restrain the animals.
I thought, what soothing sounds
some of the animals are making
to some of the other animals. I thought,
Predicate: to have made,
to have chosen the right sound.
What enormous meals they must have eaten,
you said, another way of looking
at the same problem. What you fear most
has already happened
and subject to gravity, like a wine glass
at a party. Because they were like us. Because
we could see their faces in the water.
It is not, or not only, a function
of History (Faith. Language. Light).
We step into the dark, cramped
shop where the Bangladeshi woman
sells stationery, and we find it charming
but we don’t say so, not there, not then.
What you considered a lie
I imagined as misplaced geography, an accident
of mapping or of maps. GIVE WAY vs. YIELD.
Heartbeats wrapped in cloth, in milk.
How can we sell them
is what language is asking itself, and
isn’t the dystopia trying to utter something
beautiful and new,
bride material, honey-dusted?
Vestige, pronounced to rhyme with
Prestige, a brand of automobile nobody’s
thought to market yet
in this particular dialect, this alphabet.
When Queen Victoria visited the caves
they were said to have been hung in red velvet.
Predicate: to have hung, to have been hung,
to have visited, to have been visited.
To market, to pronounce, to have pronounced.
Perfect: per-fecto, to have been
completed, to have been made-through.
There is no mention of this event in her diary.
A bridal texture, something suffering wears
when capitalism calls gender out
and says “Hey, let’s go grab some dinner.”
You can record this in language or
you can ignore it without benefit
of language, without resorting to language.
Capitalism swaggers
outside language in the chrome shadow of
something like an enormous, gleaming motorcycle
we aren’t sufficiently afraid of. Not yet.
The body makes a living and we don’t
understand enough about particle physics
to come up with some alternative
preregistration algorithm for everyone
we’ve invited to the charrette
so far. The finches, the barberry bushes,
the silica, the honey locusts,
the geodes encrusted with amethyst are all
somehow outside the body’s plans,
its careful calculations.
Ventriloquy: at once hygienic and parturitive.
Myth closes one door and opens three others
without telling you anything
useful about what’s beyond the lintels.
You think you can see some lights moving
through one, but really you’re not sure.
You could stay here, the body suggests, sensibly.
But myth shakes one of its heavy heads.
Why does it always feel like gender was a house
you set fire to, in childhood perhaps,
only you don’t remember doing it, just some people
who told you the story later, claiming it was true?
The greater horror: speech is, after all,
redundant, that is, mimetic. I keep confusing
the words for “money” and “world”
in various languages,
starting with the German. Geld vs. Welt.
There must be a rib for this, the silence
keeps breathing in mankind’s
general direction. Take it out, take it out.
Your fortune, your lucky number,
LEARN TO SPEAK CHINESE.
Such a wealth of information,
we could have
made a gun from it, little fire-tongue
of intent vs. humiliation.
When I was eight a cousin
took me to a rough rock-and-roll concert
and left me there. A big man
with dilated eyes and a broken beer bottle
in one hand tried to edge past me
in the risers, fell heavily, cut my forearm.
No one has to “believe” in light.
It comes, as they say, with the territory.
It is not about love. —That might help,
though, you tell me.
I mean, if it were about love.
Correction: it has always been about love.
Little sand patterns, a jet passes overhead
and a dog barks.
The way you smuggle some words in.
I mean, ultimately they’re all
proper nouns, aren’t they? The symbol
remembers when it slept inside the symbol.
This is no longer only a matter
of language, of libraries, ingress and egress.
Or we were stones attracting other
stones. Out there among the animals.
See, their beautiful faces.
How they crush and crumble in our hands.
Waves of sound, images
of explosions, ripe fruit and pornography
are streaming through our bodies
right now, at dizzying speeds. Surely something
in each cell registers these frequencies
and dies a little, soldiers
unable to parse the slick surfaces
of vein and rut, lip and teeth.
It’s not magic to say I love you
like Roman Catholicism loves the Monroe
Doctrine. It’s not even alchemy.
Because one thing does not become
another thing. Because nobody is interfering
with all the little hats music wears.
You want one of those little hats
for yourself, don’t you, the dystopia
whispers, wearing its “silence” mask.
(See, there we are on television.)
It would be better, you said,
if we had a dog—any large dog—with us,
here in the castle. And we could pet it,
and sleep with it, and take it
for long walks,
when we wanted to. —If we wanted to.
We eat the ripe cherries from the arbor
and they are ripe, but also quite sour, so we talk
about what we could make with them
if we were far away, i.e. at home: pie, strudel.
In some versions the angel
placed at the eastern gate
bears a flaming sword. In some versions
not. Or she’s still there
but has lost the sword, pawned it, lent it out
in what she claims was an act of mercy.
In some versions it was all a trick
of geography, that is, of the light, of mapping.
A translation meant for the other animals.
But I slept so deeply that night, you said.
I mean, it was less rest than a perfect idea
of rest: somebody else’s idea, a Platonic rest,
something I read about in a book.
First you make the tools
out of nothing. And from the tools,
you must make nothing. Then, out of nothing,
you must remake the tools.
Somebody asks me
whether I keep a garden at home.
I lie and say I do. I have no idea why I’m lying.
I like any story with nasturtiums in it
is one way to put it, this truth about lying, this tool.
Making a movie is another way to put it.
If you have enough light. If you can pay for it.
Little interruptions in the light
is how the plants see us.
Minuscule ghost-explosions, combustible.
The city presents light as an interruption of light
which is why we go there.
And for the food, and for the cooing of pigeons
which reminds us what it would be like
to be wingèd after all, i.e. Icarus
was not the scared, ambitious boy we like to think
but rather some ancient concinnity,
a bit of skin caught in the projector, electric.
Season of mothers, season of Destroyers
and of the seas that bear them.
Is it any wonder, you say, and
I don’t know what you mean but I
say Yes, meaning the sea is a superior fidelity.
It has a shape, it has a motion.
Predicate: to have possessed shape, suffered
motion. The big gods and the little gods,
the ones we stroke, and sleep with, and take long walks
with. The ones that lead us into
and then back out of the castle,
that little bit we can see from the castle
that is not in fact the castle.
We write this down, and suppose something
by it, place it above
the desk, the bed, the sideboard
with its diminutive constellations of glass.
We think glass is another word for it
because glass is breakable and we can see through it.
I think, It is not that much like a movie,
after all. You add, It depends on which movie,
which curative herb we are talking about.
Digitalis. Abbreviate poison for the human heart.
My tongue, an ignorance. Little orchard
of brute senses. Starlings
fly through it and no, they are not like
the mind, mind’s hand grasping and ungrasping, rather
an artist’s conception of graphite
as a gas, something that expands to fill
any available volume.
(Light. Language. Faith. History.)
Half-dark the river, unchained from its mills,
how it pools and creels, pools and creels.
A scribble in a notebook from
what some dogs were doing, further along.
The songmark of orioles,
papermill phantom-whisper by the car park.
Now please read aloud from the strip of paper
you are still holding in your left hand.
Did I say strip of paper. I meant wedding garment.
There are leaves that recall the shapes
of human hands, tropism of some dynastic
paradiso. Just the same
we shave them from the land,
suits of clothes we never bothered trying on.
A trick of oxygen, this snuffing of candles
with one’s bare fingertips.
We believe what the scientists tell us
about the members of our bodies, their elemental
faiths, and then we use them.
Maxwell’s Demon, sorting hydrogen from
oxygen without benefit of clergy.
The traditional arguments about sound
moving through matter, hammer/anvil/stirrup.
Objects, things that can be seen
in their daily offices, tasted, touched, handled.
In a separate development,
a visiting Egyptian novelist explains
that the reason there are no good
Egyptian restaurants in New York City
is the peculiar Egyptian genius
for failing (or refusing) to self-promote.
It wasn’t as if anyone had lost anything,
any prophesied savior failed to show.
We were just trying it out, test-driving our notions
about mimesis and what it might mean.
It made pretty colors in the leaves and we
squandered them, and then we called that snow.
Viral, this severance.
As if all the planes had returned safely
from the mission except one
and we were waiting for it,
half-angry and half-terrified and trying hard
to talk about something else.
Ivy-leafed toadflax embroidering
a crown on the lip of an ancient well.
Is it art(ful) to see it this way.
We made such beautiful use of Latin
in place of the willow groves,
the high places. We were waiting, but
not with that look you keep giving me.
Because if we don’t, the crops will fail.
Because if we don’t, this time
the magician really will saw the girl in half.
War was a story
somebody was telling, and then
we were in it, I mean, we found words for it.
Abracadabra. Presto change-o.
Hotels built especially for constellations.
That is what he said, and lived as if it were so.
Yes, he sometimes baked the wood
in a kitchen oven,
in his mother’s kitchen oven, so that
it would achieve a certain texture, so that
it would look or feel a certain way.
Contemporaneously I quit speaking
for the second time in my life.
I cut up ripe summer peaches and threw them
away, over and over again,
bowl after immaculate bowl.
Breviary vs. aviary: who would win?
God-spiral of plot, makeshift genuflection.
Or: consider the exquisite geometry
of the calfskin glove.
You want it to stand outside History, but
somehow it keeps obtruding
into the story, a magic lantern
not meant for us. FIVE CENTS, PLEASE.
We want to touch without touching.
St. Icarus, restore a semblance.
What passed from hand to machine, and
back to hand; there was no
duplicity. (Invisible hand, invisible glove.)
And we were there, and talking it over
with the future, which seemed sincerely
interested, asking only
about the orphans, those other ones,
what would we do with them,
where would we find the proper clothing.
Restore to semblance. A minor
emendation, as tangency for intersection.
When you kneel into the hoarfrost,
even accidentally, your knees come up
wet. Your body’s heat does this much
on its own. For a little while.
May I introduce you to my topological
anomaly, which I call house. And
we broke it, and out of it, and called that pain.
If invisible hand, then invisible glove.
If invisible gym, then invisible
weights, the body’s capacity
for leverage. The cone of night spindling
inland, this far north of the equator.
It is always just a little bit about dying.
The buckles and stays. The flight-pressed estuary.
This is where gender comes in,
embroidered wedding tent set up
on the president’s lawn. Children use it
as their freedom, a video installation
without the capacity to offend
the ex-lover whose blithe envoi
we have now translated
into however many languages.
This isn’t one of those languages, you noted.
What is it then. A little bit of wind
in the projector’s mouth. Let yourself go
bankrupt, it’s easy, all you do
is pour your soul into as many
different bottles
as you can collect, and package what’s left over
as that mystery novel you’re always
threatening to write, and which you will never
otherwise complete, so that’s OK.
We can walk there, we can have a picnic.
Because film is already dead
when it comes to us, when we view the images
light produces, extruded through the corpse.
At the prom we had no time to test
whether all bodies fall at the same rate of speed,
so instead there was a lot of
drunkenness and dancing, and trying to figure out
which parked car was yours
vs. somebody else’s. Various urban legends accrued.
We were aware of memory as it evolved
from experience, even before
it evolved from experience. Pentecostal, precogniscient.
There are only eight conic sections, after all.
Something eros has to deal with.
My student wrote, A snake understands
a child bent low over his blocks
because a snake unhinges its jaw in order to eat.
I disagreed, so she took that
part out. Which ruined the poem.
I lay in the back, in the bed of a friend’s pickup
and watched the stars do their thing.
We did not assist in the investigation
of the theft. We did not assign pronouns.
We kept tripping over this enormous
sword one of us was carrying, as if it were on fire,
only nobody knew what fire was, yet.
The bunnies in the courtyards fled from us
in the direction of mathematics
and illness, the two things we hadn’t yet sold.
We didn’t have questions about
what made them human, and heterosexual.
We were still looking for evidence of the flood.
Later, many monographs on Bonnard
and some stencils we kept dubbing.
A mannerist ecology, Lisa Robertson proclaimed,
and we believed her, in spite of
what the painters were declaring, namely
that realist figuration was somehow
coming back
and would be responsible for
health care and pigeons and bombs falling
and looking up into the mouth of an exorbitant
wheeling paradigm of native architecture
we remembered neither
demanding nor building with our bare hands.
And we want to keep it this way,
we all agreed, as a province
of gender, plangiform, ambiplexured.
There is nothing so immediate
as the human wrist.
It keeps happening, as if it’s the history
not only of your body
but of all the other bodies your body
could be, or was, or could have been.
Predicate: all the bodies your body
could be, was, could have been.
“I heard.” “I saw.” Domestic interior
of the universal, the sea your stoup, your iron rail.
As if in fidelity to subjectivity
some—if not election, then release.
It’s you and me and all this city, separated
by a bridge with some carved figureheads on it
—Guess which body, History murmurs.
The flare of a match is produced
by the rapid oxidation of its chemical
outer coating, its pericarp
and we know we have to do something
quickly, communicate the process to some
other medium, some uninvited guest.
It is evening, approaching midnight.
The monuments of the city
kneel before the traffic the city wakes,
or seems to wake, from the shorn pavements.
If something goes wrong—terribly
wrong—we send out images
of the terrible wrongness, little flashes
of we-don’t-know-what, not-really,
only how it behaves when we
express it as from a god’s jug of milk.
The body as a museum for light.
It is not a book, it does not exist
in four dimensions the way a book does.
Time scars it in its cradling anger
and teaches us new textile protocols.
We bring candies to the patients
in the hospital, even though
they are too unwell to enjoy them.
The debate over whether light
is a form of fire, or fire a form of light,
goes on and on
and bores History so much it resurrects
planet we live on.
Watch us move so carefully.
In the museum, we encountered
a pair of human forms, anatomically correct,
sculpted entirely from telephone wire,
red yellow pink green and blue.
Slightly larger than life-size, which somehow
made us even more uncomfortable
but not uncomfortable in the way painting does
which makes us want to invoke
the Greeks, let the dog
back into the castle, into our beds.
This time, the surprise
was that the medicine actually worked.
We were able to see the city from inside
the city. And not just because of the fires,
though we saw them too,
jute music boxes someone left open too long.
Part of the history of the body
is that we used to own it.
Together we formed small companies.
Together we consumed the fruits of others’ labor.
As if something rode in on that, and we were
burdens, or beasts. Little shoe-shaped
absences where the bullets caught
some clothes we happened to be wearing.
How heavy these feel, you said. I said, Sure.
How to tell a remnant from a ruin,
for example. Built on absence
as residence, permitted by updraft and the kindness
of certain fungi, certain spores:
NO STOPPING OR STANDING HERE.
I release you, says the estuary.
I release you, says the moon, recombinant.
I mean, if you want them to. Tithe
and not-tithe, un-tithe
of strut from aperture. Your rosary—
I almost wrote bursary, suspended purse.
The body only meets us halfway.
What you are saying is that painting
was simply Not Serious. Ever.
and that inside painting a little man sits,
and he keeps the mechanism going, and we watch
and we gasp in wonder
as if it were something almost alive.
It was spring, and my friend asked me
(and others) over to his farm for a work frolic.
He wanted to tear down an old shed in his pasture.
It had been well-built, this shed. He should have
put a new roof on it and left it
where it was. It took us the better part of the day
to clean it out and remove as much tin
and other metal from the exterior as we could.
Fine, he said. We’ll just set fire to the rest.
Night was coming on. We doused the posts,
the beams and rafters in gasoline. Most were pine
and there was still a lot of loose straw inside,
a wealth of fluent surfaces. (See: TINDER.)
Growing up against the rear of the shed, so close
to the shed that nobody had ever much tried
to chop it down, was a wild cherry.
After the fire got going, somebody pointed out
that the tree was going to burn, too.
That was, my friend said slowly,
regrettable, but unavoidable.
We went inside and sang hymns for a time,
then went back outside, after the sun had set
and the shed fire was at its zenith.
The cherry tree, being alive—full of spring sap—
took some time to catch. When it did,
it burned like a torch, with an audible whoosh.
I’m showing you this film inside the film
the dead are showing, which is about gender,
I think, I mean from what I’ve seen so far.
That’s me, leaning against the pasture fence
at dusk, of course with my back to the camera.
—The branches, my friend said, suddenly,
pointing. They look like hair, don’t they.
They look like human hair that’s burning.