NOTES FROM A CITY SILENCE FLED
The poem as a disused work, an abditory.
Things hidden in plain sight.
The miners all work for the council now.
Getting inside the vibration
from which all matter depends:
as if work were an illness
from which art recovers, a long convalescence.
Or: as if art were the work, or the convalescence
outside of which matter lingers,
doubtful. We take its temperature.
We congratulate ourselves:
this mathematical problem, this persona.
Either you stretch forth your hand
to reach inside the black box, or else you do not.
All those voices coming from inside,
from the bottom of the sea.
Only some of them are human, and
we efface what we know, what they knew
in what we term their “last moments.”
Predicate: dependent upon copula.
To prick, assent, affirm, decide.
The evacuated airport. The money shot.
You cannot get “too close”
to a decision of this magnitude, someone said, and
It becomes a part of you, the you in question.
Narcissus to Echo to Shakespeare, foliate
astrogony. Something warms
inside the human body and we want to call it
by its first name, its original name.
Instead we listen to music.
We pass our children through the fire.
The curve of the plastic spoon
was so sharp I kept cutting the inside
of my mouth every time I took a bite
of my banana split, only
the cold so numbed the pain, I didn’t know
how wounded I was (until later).
Illness kicks a stone through an imaginary
opening in two-dimensional space,
which it calls the soul.
The space, the stone, the opening.
Ventriloquy / gender / nation / asylum.
I had forgotten what it was like
to watch a bee creep inside the velvet
calyx of a flower, any flower
(bluebells, in this instance)—to disappear
momentarily into that sweetness. Only
I had not realized I’d forgotten.
We ask our children what it’s like
to pass through the fire, on one leg or three.
Patrimony as a vertical motion,
something the whole body must make
out of mammals, from the flayed
skins of mammals.
Decaffeinated by order of the state.
This is not that part of the pageant,
fear’s Dopplered groove
and the business of fear, that is, biology.
When the car pulled up behind me
I expected a slur, or a threat. Or a shot.
I thought, I have money in two currencies
from two different continents
in my wallet. I thought, my wallet is
“genuine calfskin,” meaning:
more skins, more flayed mammals.
I thought, minor characters
are constantly being dispatched and
carried out of the narrative by other
minor characters and this
is the basis of the abiding, urgent appeal
of the sentence as a grammatical form.
From the peeling sill, the castle’s brief
phantasm: now a hand’s confringing breadth,
ecliptic, now horizon. Another movie.
What we wanted: to write, yes, but
with our bodies, like the bees or maybe frost.
Hence cutlery and parchment, vellum.
You write as if gender were one of many things
that had surprised you: private property;
an otter; —a sudden primrose; capitalism
decked out in its nautical throes.
The copula again, as a shorthand for hope, i.e.
stay tuned, dear friends, there’s more to come.
On its own, intransitive, we reserve
for aseity and its agents, the God or gods
we hang from hooks
in the kitchen. A god is not “to decide”
but “to have made a decision:” Per-fecto,
done, over and out, another argument
for photography, not so much bride as bridalness,
bridefulness: the act of briding, adducent.
The body has no choice in this matter of
“belief.” It is always observant.
In the castle, tea at 4, drinks at 6:30.
Fictions in a series, no I do not think it would be
a good idea
to “start over” with the purely
material because this would mean reinstating
weapons to their autobiographical places,
also the formal postures of 18th-century painting
by which we were taught not to see.
The note pinned carefully to the branch
is not for you. Even so, you remove it, unfold it.
The page is blank.
Incarnation as genre, astricted
in that same way. You cannot carry your wheat
to any other mill. The bones of egress
permit “sensual communication,”
another series of vibrations, only more slowly.
Emended trinity: eye, bee, flower.
Now you see it, now you don’t. Or: a unity,
effective momentary symbiosis.
Replace soundtrack with color wheel.
Blanchot: “Dying is the indiscretion wherein God,
become somehow and necessarily
a god without truth, surrenders to passivity.”
The real has many faces, and we stand
for a long time, trying to pick out the perp
from the lineup, the accuser from the accused.
To what extent is geography
itself a lie: Where I am, where “I” is
not, some story sleep was telling and then
the Pakistani sprinter passes you
on the council-built rail path
for the second time, the third, the fourth.
Predicate: to record this motion.
To have so recorded. Word as object, planet,
distal summoning. Rosebank at duskfall:
something in it. Something from it. Geometry
vs. geophagy, the eye rotating
against its field of vision, its embroidered vest.
Or an argument about surveillance
becomes entangled with Science, by which I mean
the confusion of science with choice.
Faith watches, faith listens
without which certain antique terms, “mercy”
and “charity,” become mere glyphs, pictographs,
pop music anomalies from Sweden—
faintly ridiculous, how quaint the natives were.
Look, you say, the policemen on television
are dancing. And I look, but now
there’s a cartoon of two dogs chasing one another.
I am no longer certain whether the hunger I feel
is my own, or someone else’s.
Empty handbag left in the lavatory
sending out truce signals. Is mimetic, then, but
not a code one can punch
into the keypad by the castle gate.
Language, then, being a plea
for scale, for proportion. The city
suffers us, and we sleep
beneath its leather awning, in our bespoke clothes.
Dearest labia, little death habits, the cosmos
whirs along in its delicate tracery and we
are the hair it’s shedding. Is one more way
to put it, you argue. I don’t disagree.
I couldn’t find the light switch
in the library. Rather than ask, I decided
only to read books in daylight:
compendiums of architecture, of the language
of architecture which is really
just biography in more perdurable form.
Incise the letters, filigree
as appropriate. The sun is so lonely here.
Predicate: to have known
where you were going, coldwater flats
in republican guise. Nazi graffiti in the crotch
of an elm or what looks like an elm.
Sometimes you strike the rock
in the wrong moment, or in the wrong way,
or while saying the wrong words, and this
is the result: deciduous papermill
over which language keeps flowing.
that others have known more (than we do).
We write stories about this, read them
at altitudes of 37,000 feet.
These are the untranslatable stories,
the Egyptian novelist assures us.
They read the same in every language.
What everybody wants is to see the movie.
Embrace vs. black box: obscure marketing
soliloquies in the vicinity of Bronze
Age earthworks. I hear the engine and look up,
but not in the same way as before.
If you unlatch a gate, relatch it immediately:
rule #1 of country walking.
Territory vs. responsibility, I SPY.
A brief history of the countryside:
We need sheep! (no) more sheep, (no) different
sheep, (no) more of the same sheep (Dolly).
Step into the light, we whisper
to the ancestors, presumably wrapped in pelts,
only they don’t hear us, or if they do
they don’t believe heat has anything to say
the body doesn’t already understand.
The animal research institute quit cloning sheep
or at least quit talking about it.
The King of Terrors imports maize to Britain
centuries ahead of Thanksgiving
and we call it Mystery, Satan bound for 10,000 years
in rope, upside down. It’s a good story,
so we set fire to it. Then we move the stone.
Song not corpse, but a body
without agency, a ventriloquist’s dummy
(insert obligatory Templar reference
here). Whether your tongue
is bloody or bloodless is your affair.
Through the trademarked glass
of the conspiracy: more labyrinth,
more Latin, more synthetic
plasma donors. More re-enactors in woad,
murmuring into their cell phones.
We sit in the large chair
thinking has vacated, stretch our arms
and legs. Such intimate clockwork.
You want to know what
the government is going to do
with the money you are paying in taxes,
you say. After all,
there’s a war on. —Spend it, I reply.
At some point we wash language
carefully, dress it up
and place it in a box. Then we can call it
Faith. (History. Light. Action.)
It speaks to us the way objects speak to us,
through shape, form, function.
Are you writing this all down, you ask.
Death is observable, except for the moment
in which the observer blinks.
Inside this moment a little more death
is waiting, as if for a cue.
It was high summer. I tell my students
corpses lay so long on the fields
around Gettysburg, after the battle,
that bees nested in them,
in their wounds and (especially) their lungs.
If I consider war an artifact
I can pick it up, then put it down again.
What does this do to the hands?
It renders the hands bloodless, i.e. song.
The skin is a conspiracy to keep the artifact
from breaking up, a language
of adhesion. Sound waves emerge from it
as light strikes, as the light
from the projector shines through.
Pretty little movie, this backyard barbecue.
In another dream, somebody I knew
(but had not seen in years) was all over the news
because she had developed a periodic
table for suffering.
All I remember is that it was very beautiful
and I wanted a copy, but when I rushed
up to her, after the press conference, she insisted
she didn’t know me, had never known me.
There are many resurrections, the guidebook
explains. Perhaps this one is yours.
The body retreats from the song
of the body. We study the other animals.
The sheep are stupid and dirty
and covetous and dull. They believe they have
two skins, one of which isn’t
memory, and that this serves them well.
This is why sheep are never lonely
and why their bodies make
such beautiful science, such beautiful art.
The Victorians had this much
correct, our sustained anxieties about how
the past keeps measuring us
against the scale language proffers.
Aluminum, brushed steel, silk fabrics
in the pastel registers: suspension
of feeling qua feeling,
language withheld by order of the council.
Another painting, another Platonic rest.
It makes some difference
whether this Icarus was a boy or a man.
It makes some difference whether
what we are really talking about is love.
SpellCheck refuses to recognize “Icarus”
as a noun. As verb, then?
As a rib, hooked into some flying buttress?
There were poems in the aftermath,
yes. (History. Light. Wood. Poison.)
As for the moral imagination
see it flickering over the great
Mary, the wooden Marys, the calcareous
Marys, the vegetable Marys in their
earthen casques, the chitinous
Marys in their leathery, translucent shells.
dancing, I want to see the men
in their white masks
(the white men in their masks).
After the hurricane. Spliced into the film.
In the Mardi Gras parade.
“Here are the sirens of not knowing
everything,” Carla Harryman writes.
Graves as earth-bullets.
We walk through them. Is it enough
that we walk through them, and don’t know
it, and in our not-knowing, know.
In the pageant, everybody is white.
Even actors who are not “white”
play as if they were, some in whiteface,
some finding other, less obvious ways
to model “whiteness.”
It’s a morgue emblem, money guesses.
Somebody makes your clothes, and
is it better to know who that person is,
or not? Children don’t request
specific sculptures in the sculpture park.
They haven’t grown that rib yet.
Because of blood clots in my lungs,
they sent me home with a 5-inch
gash in my abdomen.
At first a nurse came every day
to clean the wound, which wasn’t
healing (by design). Later,
I had to clean it myself. I also had to
give myself shots in the stomach,
twice a day. —Music says:
Set the audience to work tailoring
some new idea about
jurisprudence and the happy endurance
of brand names beyond culture,
in the memory of culture.
Then cut it into the wet plaster
of the basement walls, to remind us
of what we thought we were building,
before all that money ran out.
Genetics professes to show
not only how many of your Y-chromosome
ancestors are still dictating
the terms of your particular whiteness,
but also whether
you suffered the body in precisely
that way, as a stressor, a notational system.
The shots caused bruising, caused
the muscles and flesh of my stomach
to become knotted, gnarled,
hard, discolored little marbles of flesh
that seemed more active than my illness,
than any figure I had for illness.
A woman films herself
standing outside a wind tunnel
while explaining how wind tunnels work.
She’s lost her luggage, yes, but not
the ignition of consciousness
affixed to vapor, provection
of self into grass, spade, antimony.
DEAD SLOW read the road signs
near the animal research facility.
Predicate: missing rib as skeleton key.
(Something is on fire
inside your camera, I think.)
Predicate: to find or base (anything)
upon the stated facts or conditions.
Which are: paper, ink,
event, volition, and, by 1868, the carrying
of the final letter of a given word
into the voicing of the succeeding word.
Archive as prayer. The brain bathing
in its sweet serum, dreaming of dictators
it can address love letters to.
How many lives does gender have?
I mean, even their dogs smelled white,
you insisted, and I believed you, because
the toughs also all had dogs, they
were out walking their dogs, would a man
walking his dog mug another man?
With or without a dog? With
or without another man watching?
Railways wake up into nonexistence and
give us tests we fail.
All this egg strata, I thought
I heard you murmur in your sleep.
Is it any wonder physics keeps
the physical world
under surveillance at all times?
The riddle of the Green Man
in Rosslyn Chapel is that he’s
a substitute, a joker, randomly replacing
other sigils, emblems, images
throughout the filigree. Trick or treat:
You’re still human! I’m not.
Eye, bee, flower: trinity of mistaken
identities, the eye buzzing
around the svelte body of the bee,
bee around the lush orgasm of the eye
the flower wants to possess.
The end of nationalism is in sight.
In childhood, everything was either a test
or a pattern. Earliest memories:
light through crib bars;
watching a train; riding another, different
train; cousin, sister, dog, cat.
Other children played doctor.
I played barber. I told the neighborhood
kids that if they didn’t let me
cut their hair, the birds would have
nothing with which to build their winter
nests. These birds would die.
In the deep cold their bodies would plummet
to the ground, little feathered bombs.
I remember the last girl
to resist this narrative, the way I finally
coaxed her into my “barber’s chair,”
the tears in her eyes. I shaved her bald.
Velvet ropes in drugstores on Sundays.
What you want to buy
vs. what you can’t. Or is it the rope
itself you want, otherworldly
calligraphy, event horizon, your
dancing policemen, your border posse.
Another memory: being taught
that a flag that has accidentally been allowed
to touch the ground must be burned
and then, after having accidentally
dropped a flag, while on flag duty before school,
trying to burn that flag, quickly.
Either something that was supposed to happen
would not happen, now, or else
something had already happened and
the preceding events were a falsehood, a lie.
Have you discussed this with your mother
asks the doctor/your father/your lover/that poet.
You shake the doll again and again,
hoping it will say something
else. Its plastic eyes flutter epileptically.
Predicate: the lie made perfect,
hidden in plain sight. Index finger, rib,
this bit of holy wood.
There are lines you can’t see in the wind,
lines meteorologists reproduce.
This confuses and angers you.
You decide to think of the wind as God’s clone,
genetically identical but pre-aged.
It is not a question of genre.
The animals gathered by accident in the clearing
in the beam of the automatic camera.
Blame is organized thinking, to blame
is to organize the objects of thought
into constituencies. It is an electoral operation.
In America, presidential elections
are all, and essentially, about blame, about
who built the railroads and who is unbuilding
the essential truths, about Judaism
and progress, T-bills and global warming.
Practicing foreign languages is one way
of disguising one’s identity as a voter.
Requesting a record of one’s vaccinations,
going or not going to jail.
I have quit talking to you, you see.
Who is listening / not listening
is what the poem wants to know, and in this way
viviparous. Phantom limb syndrome:
How many lives does gender have?
The brain thinks you are whole,
and it tells you—the part of you that is “you”—
that you’re hurting, even when you’re not.
So you find a way to tell the brain
that yes, you were hurting, only it’s “better now”
and then it will be, the experts assure us.
Something moved is another way
of reminding yourself that yet another species
has gone extinct. While I type this.
While you read it. Give the box to Susan Sontag,
wait twenty years. Ask for it back.
Some of our burdens are for children.
Or, our children’s children.
A manuscript, a king, a severed head.
At an early age some grasp
their power to instill fear in others.
(You’re talking about yourself, you say.)
Red earth belongs to the devil:
scratch it and you’ll die.
That cloud formation means a tornado
is coming our way, now we’re all
going to die. (We are all going to die.)
Memory vs. shadow, concept vs. need.
We select a guest from the Book of Guests.
Deep in the earth lies something
we don’t want anymore, or not enough,
not enough to build houses for it.
The notes to the performance
are perfectly clear:
We are not to stand up while the actors
are away from the stage, changing costume,
sipping coffee. We are to remain
in our seats, rigid, at attention, quite still.
Faith as time’s marionette, as a more
trustworthy advertisement for sleep.
(Neurology: Geld vs. Welt.
The sour cherries in the courtyard,
by virtue of the senses and, yes, choice.
There is never only one transgression,
one tensile strength.)
Are you acting like a victim, you ask
(I am asking).
—What does a victim act like?
Skilled in needletrades we bind
wounds until we hum orchard, orchard.
Put your tongue
into the song of it, why don’t you.
You flying thing, you prince of the air.
This is a problem: money
only pretends to believe. We stand
outside, in the cold, watching
the puppets abuse one another, listening
to their epithets, their howls.
Swoon, then, as a foreign language
we don’t get older while practicing
because the body views swoon
as a singularity. Silence flees the city
swoon occupies, garments
sulfurous, phosphorescent in moonlight.
Pit of a cherry, pit of the stomach.
Clothes harden on the body
like papier mâché, something chewed
and broken. If we bend closer
we can still read the news crawl.
I don’t buy into this idea of ethnic
homelands, you said. I shrugged.
Resisting the draft is good
for the complexion and also
the vocal cords, a form justice takes
in moments of excavated will.
Statistics as a kind of follow-up
yoga. Let me get lost in your chi-square,
honey. Yes, I watched the video.
No, I did not dream about the video.
I didn’t have to dream about the video:
I kept reliving it in waking life.
You will know the mammals
by their dancing, Spinoza said, and
the many colors of their hair.
Also, we like to wear masks.
One of the best pageants
was Middle English, only we forgot
the combination, the open sesame.
Whereas before, merely a door-
cast space. Magritte-like.
We can’t see what’s on the other side
vs. there is no “other side.”
In the park, we all agreed
to let go of our balloons
at the same time. We even counted
(to three, of course). I say
you released your balloons early.
You said yours caught
the breeze first, flew higher.
Clay pipe, soap bubble. We tap
on the glass but nobody seems
to hear. No one lets us out.
If we put on the right mask,
we can’t even see the glass.
Language is helpful in this way.
We can tell a copy from the original
by its integument, its patina. Spectroscopy
becomes one of the more generous arts,
a domestic accommodation
(Light. Wood. Poison. Anima).
History is not like jewelry, you can’t
wear it, I protested.
You shrugged. Threading an oak leaf
into a typewriter, castle-issue.
Ductless eyework in the masonry
perpendicular to the heart. I wish,
someone keeps repeating. The ladies
of the DAR, corseted, borne through
the city on their velveteen phaetons.
Gender acquires a rib and wears it
proudly. Patron to the higher orders,
into the moneyworld Persephone rejected
as a consolation prize for myth.
Step into the painting, art whispers.
The moral imagination
grinds its axe, sharpens its accordion.
But then you wake up, and you’re holding
not a gun in your hand, after all:
something else. Accordion, femur, credit
card. Some trademarked journalism.
It is very quiet in the forest,
in this clearing just inside the forest.
You were meeting someone
here—isn’t that how the dream went?
The composer told me.
When you try to whistle, you make an ugly noise,
like a hawk that’s just sighted prey.
You brush the insects from your hair.
This can be a little unnerving
because some of them breathe fire.
Your hair wields them like swords.
Language is already skepticism,
Levinas maintains. Blanchot again:
“Writing, without placing itself
above art, supposes that one not prefer art,
but efface art as writing effaces itself.”
For there are structures of power
that defy capitalism’s monopoly
on all the major modern utilities,
gas, electricity, public transit.
For there are structures of power
that reinforce capitalism’s monopoly
on all the major cultural
algorithms: painting, sculpture,
music, dance. Photography, film.
We live inside the noise photography makes.
Like birds in Central Park
we’ve learned to make the same noise,
both to one another
and when nobody else is around.
We dust the economy for latents.
This is not science. It is detection, an art.
A little math, a little chemistry
with a story inside. Something large and real
and beyond all sacrifice.
You were wrong about power, is what
the noise keeps saying. You were
wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is not cynicism. It is triage.
The media broadcast the chapter headings,
first in black and white, then in color.
Things one forgets: the physical sensation
of pain. First love. The external
structures in which certain rooms were situated.
Things one never forgets: the international
telephone call you arrived too late to answer
(never to discover who called, or why).
The image of your sister entering the house
laughing, missing her footing on her first step
and shattering her teeth on the slate hearth.
Because things could have been different,
that’s why. Pain = inevitability.
Structure is archetype, i.e. we live with it.
A constant murmuration of event,
prognostifying. Dowse with skeleton key
from behind this curtain wall
of (Faith. Light. Substance. Mystery).
To write in bad faith: after the fact.
(Predicate: to record, vs.
to have recorded.) The body as copula
when faced with copula: copula to copula.
The mirror, shattered, renews itself.
“The body wants to be art and fails at it.”
Error is what sets the body free.
In the winnowing chamber,
I find myself using a rib as a flail.
Consciousness emphasizes
a break-even aesthetic, i.e.
We all need to be getting more sleep
as masculinist homily.
Our feet crunched on the walks
as if we were treading grain.
Or as if we were walking on fragments
from an enormous shattered mirror.
We keep pulling shards of glass
from our feet. If we don’t,
they will work their spectral ways
into other, more intimate places.
You said you liked the crypt
best, because none of the objects there
bore any identifying marks.
The grand jury rejected the artifacts
I presented. Do you have any
other artifacts, the foreman demanded.
No, I do not have any other artifacts,
I replied, under oath. Was I lying?
Why does Time have to be a woman, you ask.
All these interiors of soap and marzipan.
It’s not that almonds contain arsenic, rather
that arsenic smells like bitter almonds.
So the stories tell us, the ones
with the clowns and dinosaurs. We see bodies
as something frangible, interchangeable,
like roadways. Toll, the British term
for what we would otherwise call
a rotary, a roundabout, a traffic circle.
The moral imagination is not lacking
for pageantry: all those troops of secondary
angels, bearing flaming fiberglass swords.
They’re trying either to get into or out of a country.
Ask yourself: is it your country? Do you
belong there? Does gender? Do gods
step into God, into the idea of God,
and we pray to them the way we pray to a muscle
contraction, a broken arm, a broken rib?
We identify a weakness in the body
and we address it, as if it were a person, as if
the body were a separate person. What happens
vs. what might happen, should have happened.
We take our bodies out for walks,
to the supermarket or the travel agency.
One of my students writes and asks me
what’s just outside the window of wherever
I happen to be reading his e-mail.
I look up. I’m at a small library in Scotland
and all the windows are heavily blinded,
like horses, I think, stupidly, and blink a little.
I make something up for my student,
something about an old woman
with a walker, oncoming bands of light rain.
(But why does it have to be a woman, you ask.)
On the radio, a novel is a sheer surface
from which bodies try very hard to depend.
They’re failing, mostly, but everyone
pretends not to notice, because it’s so pretty.
If “the room in which one lives
anticipates one’s burial in a Christian plot,” then
the novel also, conceived as a sort of room
in which one lives. For a little while.
Are there more planets or more new planets
(cf. Piaget)? Are there more races
or more profiled races? Are there more
bodies, more bodies, more bodies? Are there?
I want to turn the noise upside down
and step inside it, the way one steps inside
a giant trash bin to tamp down
the garbage. Superimposition of body on body,
on the warm, aspiring body noise breaks.
If a body disappears inside noise,
does it simply become part of the noise—
now a larger noise, an augmented
racket—or does it simply cease to exist,
I mean as a body? Does it translate
into mere memory of a body
(i.e., dependent upon other bodies)?
Memory as a function of the body,
a little dance painting allows
inside the castle. The moral imagination
struggling to don its superhero costume,
form-fitting, skin-tight.
It’s not like that, you say, and I want
to believe you, because we’re here together,
in our glorious, refurbished kitchen.
We’ve lost the corpse, the angels cry, and
Whoops, there go the fiber arts.
Memory is an object, and the bodies wrap it up
in whatever lies closest to hand:
flesh, silk, parchment. Paper or plastic?
How speech works: the body co-opts
language and vamps a matinee performance,
i.e. the body holds language up
in front of itself, as if it were a mask.
Sometimes language, like napalm,
melts into the face, throat, chest,
genitals of the speaker. Unlike napalm,
this can seem painless. Some people
don’t notice until the performance
is over. Some people never notice.
Sometimes a mask keeps talking
long after the negotiating body
has retired, fallen away or disappeared.
(Call this literature.)
Sign language: merger of body
with mask. It’s why some of us find
the deaf so threatening, so Other.
A gender we haven’t sexualized yet,
a plane crash dooming an orchestra.
Here, listen to this, you say.
I take the headphones. It sounds
like a bunch of planets talking.
It is a bunch of planets talking, you say.
Sometimes the world impresses,
merely through superior fidelity.
Habeas corpus, meaning, we’re still here!
and having our share of authority issues
on the affective level. The Pre-Raphaelites
have been reduced to a costume drama
nobody is watching even though everybody
has an opinion about how campy it must be.
One body poses for a painting by another
and we can document this, e.g. deploy
photography or its more active cousin, film.
Language (Light. Faith. History).
waits outside the building. NO LOITERING
read the signs, but language doesn’t care.
Language has no problem with its own
superhero costume, which we call
gender—the idea that somewhere,
other than what you yourself are feeling.
Language has an idea of rest, but it can’t
quite find the words to express this.
Which is funny, when you think about it.
At least some of us long to be defeated
by the body or its agents, the angels.
Is gender, then, a lyric form, ventriloquy
of the body and its clastic fashioning? Or is it
just another prop, left over
from some other landscape, some other film?
Our story so far: we were planets, and
somebody made a movie. Either we were
or were not in it. People in it
had sex and wore clothing, some of which
viewers referred to as “costumes.”
Language was implicated, alongside
a god or gods. Predicate: to have made
a movie, to have been in a movie,
to implicate, to have been implicated.
Our story so far: a sign or map
of where ghosts have been, their proteins.
A painting or a sculpture. Icarus.
It’s not enough to believe in the body
so long as the body believes in pronouns,
which are a sort of angel the body wears
in lieu of some more tangible mask.
I don’t want to get boring about this,
because today—on this particular day—
I am otherwise busy mourning
someone I did not know well, but who
was nevertheless kind to me, once.
She died, far away from where I am.
Grief is a little church we don’t remember
joining. Say the angels of language
who do not, as I understand it, grieve.
In the castle, one of the British poets
suggests maybe Yukio Mishima had a point.
The other disagrees, almost violently.
If you surround yourself with the dead
then you worship the dead. What does it mean,
to believe in the dead in the same way
one believes in cheddar, oak, chlorine, things
that appeal to the senses?
An edge appeals to the senses
because it can be apprehended. We say
a leading edge, a floreate edge. We say verge,
we say ogham, we say
we want to get out more, get more exercise,
spend more time with the kids.
An edge means change, means we
recognize something. Possibly we’ve been here
before. Really, though, it’s hard to say.
If writing, then, is “thought’s patience”
then consider the Picts, the way their men
touched their women, the women
their men, cathedrals have
their own histories but genetics concludes
there is no common ancestor.
Writing as occult practice:
the living talking to the dead, or vice versa.
The tedious invulnerability of language
through six or seven dimensions.
We keep taking photographs of children.
It’s not just about capitalism,
air pressure, nostalgia. Tracking shots,
birthday parties, YouTube.
The army is a set of relationships
many of us have been unable to locate
inside the biological family: trust.
It is almost like love but it is not love.
I want to call out to you, but the intention
is all mixed up with blood and iron,
northwesterly tea of oxygen and lurid
expectation. The consecutive narrative
keeps picking up, breaking off.
Like holes in a leather belt, you said,
when the trains ran. Biology, fear’s staggerlee,
its amplitude and registry, swift secretary.
I begin to anticipate, that is, I begin
not to listen anymore, not to rely on the senses
but rather on hunches, superstition,
what we know we think we know we know.
Don’t worry, you’ll recognize the place
when you get there, when you see it.
I’d forgotten
you have your own Yukio Mishima story.
Sometimes we hide from the films
the dead are showing, because
we’re no longer certain whose side
we’re on, who’s up late at night
inside the museum. It’s safe to say
faith runs the museum, in the sense that
you have to believe in something
to want to go view the evidence
of “something” in the first place.
Its vapor trail, its enameled shell casings
scattered around the crime scene.
I’m no longer interested in the crime,
just the scene, the accoutrements,
the props and dust enmantling everything.
The body makes everything
a painting of gender, and it’s our night-job
to supply the thought balloons.
It’s not just about memory,
eye/bee/flower. Nor is it a story.
And yet it’s so comforting to think
about it: as a film, a painting, a story.
You can step away from the vehicle
and put the gun down. Narrative remains
part of this story, wears deep grooves.
a magic lantern show of the species.
It’s OK if you want to get up
and walk out. —You can’t walk out.
Archaeologists remain divided
on how much photography
can tell us about how other people
groomed their animals,
their public health administrations.
When I was in the hospital,
possibly dying not from cancer
but from septic complications
resulting from a successful operation
to remove cancer, I did not think
about West Nile virus. Not once.
The flaming sword sets fire
to the paper it pierces.
Blackdamp, slatefall. Tap-tap,
the miners beating out their mortal
semaphores. We will interview
the survivors: if not the miners
themselves, then their
loved ones and their neighbors.
Only the rectors were buried in
the chapel walls. Also, their wives.
Bits of skin, stand-ins for touch
in the mind’s eye, in the projector’s
flaring beam. Conditions of trauma
induce language, not silence.
But only in survivors.
We dedicate the stories to gender
whether gender wants us to or not.
The angels in the sconces,
in the roof bosses, in the capitals
keep playing their instruments,
holding their books to their chests.
Their expressions are wide-eyed,
breathless, as if they’ve come
a long distance, forced by a wind.
We haunt them, is what I think.
We are the ghosts they see.
They are terrified by our
imperfections. Among other things.
Poet as eyeclark. A disease
working its way through
language’s body, first the muscle
fibers, then the neurosystem.
A disability. Congenital.
I had hoped, by now, to be a father.
I had hoped, by now, to be a husband
and type from these two offices.
Can a ghost haunt a haunting,
I ask. Only on the head of a pin,
you reply, and turn the glowing page.