THIS MITIGATING HAPPENSTANCE
In the scaffold of the wound
love’s heart lies, many-throated messenger.
We are all hopeless idiolects, winter vowels
mute in the biceps. Carpe diem,
more petty inscriptions on the abdominal wall
drumming in its constituent dusts.
Where there was experience, let there be
experience. Race lengthens the distance
between the body and its
other, sleeping body while tightening
sleep’s scuttled cords.
or humanlike.” Houses clamber into
new birthing technologies
and lie there, panting, in the clock-dark:
Keep your head down, sister.
A sign in the old city center reads
Tell me the name of this new resurrection.
The doll, shaken (then forgotten),
leans into its floor-length
hunter-gatherer epoch, its plastic eyes
something that crawled out of a bowl of cherries
or some brochure about vacations of the future.
It is tired of sleepwalking and the men
and women who wear Michael Jackson
pinned to their lapels.
The archaeologists lurch and stammer:
this was never their free-trade enterprise zone.
To the doll, all things are doll:
horses, jewelry, our misplaced affections,
unmatched bonus socks from the laundry.
No one ever thought of setting a sci-fi apocalypse
in a Siberian nursing home
before Antoine Volodine did, and made it
an opera about Marxism, the end of time
and yes, misplaced affection. —Of course, nobody
bought his book (in English, anyway).
Away with you, Brigham Young, American.
There is war again in the world and you
are entirely too Emersonian
for this wound, this ghost flower, this iron chest.
You see and believe. Blessed is he
who does not see and yet, somehow, believes.
My Joseph Smith doll, my Brigham Young doll.
Ann Lee is still trying to save us
from gender, dear misguided soul that she is.
She incorporated dance into worship
(or someone did in her name)
and straight-backed chairs as spiritual discipline:
YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT.
—All right, my Ann Lee doll too
brooding softly over grammar’s enemy aircraft
installation. Do you have a photograph,
you ask. —Yes, but not of her, I reply.
give them a photograph, is the easiest way
to make faith work. Put your hands on your head,
put your hands in your head,
place your hand inside the puppet head
into his wounds. His wounds. Mr. Bojangles.
New studies suggest my conducting teacher
was wrong: memory holds seven
(+/- three) things at a time.
This should make for more and better music
among other, more necessary things.
What’s more necessary than music, you ask.
(Faith. Hope. Charity. History.)
Predicate: four graces in three acts,
with accompanying Dadaist defenestration.
Boneless calves glimmer
in earth’s rotational rent-a-tomb.
It is not like belief. Nothing is “like” belief.
Scientists hold glass slides
of the animals’ skin tissue, hair, bone samples
up to the light and see
light, interruptions
in light. We are judged by the quality
of the interruptions we make in the light.
A poetry of reflective silence, cyanotypes
of mussel shell and doily, the body
pressed directly into the reactive medium.
We spot them on hillsides, amateur mycologists,
ornithologists, lepidopterists
now looking down, now looking up.
Scar as ghost-wound, proud flesh
burning in the twin nostrils of the cooling towers.
Naphtha, borax, creosote,
all you inferior forms of radiance, listen:
hum vs. pulse, alternating current vs. direct
participation in the glandular Colosseum.
Place your bets ladies, gentlemen,
vicars, purveyors of nutritional supplements:
in the gym of the bone,
in the gym of the rib of the bone.
Incompletion, then. Insoluble
because any formal arrangement of elements
can be viewed as “complete”
on its own terms. Form brokers form.
Archaeologists suggest a second oval of standing
stones once stood outside the extant ring
and possibly there was a cairn in the middle.
Possibly something was stored in the middle
and possibly this something was a body.
To build vs. to erase, as protocol, ritual.
(Mandatory Rauschenberg reference:
SELF-PORTRAIT WITH ERASED CAIRN.)
Not even accounting for the cupmarks,
inscrutable little flagella of intent.
Intention perceives limit, imagination
none. To harry the intelligence,
sole intent. Form brokers form, and we fight over
the results, and from this a politics emerges,
leisure options, chestnut geldings on the beach.
And then what. And then what.
Petroglyph of a circus train,
that which convokes wonder, including loss.
We commemorate. My own (lone)
memory of the Mojave
green, in full bloom, of generative possibility.
Sir William Sinclair, who built Rosslyn Chapel,
had hounds named Help and Hold.
Each noun, each very, each imperative a myth,
something to hold onto, believe in.
Where do you live, the ghosts keep asking.
In the forest. In the castle. In the chapel.
No, in the desert (of the real, thank you
Jean Baudrillard, also Slavoj Žižek
for your guided tour
of celluloid, a film in which a white man
talks about other films. Infinite regression).
But where do you live, a tourist
(another tourist) demands of me in the chapel,
on the steel catwalk encumbering the chapel,
the sort of glove a tongue fits into.
I live in a film of the desert. Help and Hold,
my faithful ghost-companions.
I drove through the desert for hours
and came out at Needles, because Alice Notley
had been from there, was born there.
It existed, therefore Alice Notley existed.
Eye/bee/flower. That moire. Even here.
An unblemished skin: complete.
Or, incomplete. A wound in skin: complete,
an action, itself. An aesthetic mark,
a medical urgency. Eventually,
a scar: complete. There is no “incomplete.”
In one version, the only eternal thing
made by man is a wound.
(You don’t need me to tell you this.)
Photo-graphein, to write with light’s
brief history, etch into plate
with matter’s crude stylus, to reveal love
in the moment of loving, its emblems, its vessels.
The innovation of the Polaroid camera
was to bring the event
and the recorded evidence of the event
into almost-simultaneity.
As if there really were such a thing
as love, and we were just there, weren’t we?
In the passenger seats over the wing
we felt the swaying
as we accepted our meals.
Black box at the bottom
of continental drift, pinging out
its bell-like semaphore.
The aurora in the kitchen,
I thought I heard you say. No,
you said, nothing like that
maybe it is a little bit about gender,
completion’s incompletion
and maybe we invite it into the castle
where it flickers in the firelight.
A book enters a mountain
and doesn’t come out, is one problem.
Friendship is another, severed hand
in a painter’s portfolio:
It’s a dream of a painting
I can’t paint, she says, when asked.
The body exhales, relieves itself.
What is that, then, in the kitchen—
Another species trying to clothe itself
in some model of the universe?
Built to scale the legend read
when we walked on board the ship,
milk-slat, milk-lath, milk-lathe. . . .
To try by tasting, to touch
without touching, Mitwelt vs. Weltgeld
I told the animals, in the dream.
God visits a painting of policemen
and graphs sleep vs. advertising
(History. Language. Contact. Faith).
It is only a novel while you
are reading it, you tell me, gently
placing a hand at the back of my neck.
We give the colicky child a photo
to suck on, to comfort him.
It seems to work, most of the time.
—But where shall we wander,
my parents ask, hugging themselves
against the stiff desert night.
The final element in a series
accrues the value of all preceding
elements in that series,
the stewardess patiently explains.
What will we do when we get there,
inside the painting where God is?
Predicate: to have not yet
entered that picture, to have avoided
detection. To have excavated
the animals from their differences.
I can’t see the end of this
Venetian interior, you murmured.
We hear the animals breathing.
The signs read NO PHOTOGRAPHY
ALLOWED IN THE CHAPEL.
Outside the ghost, completion steps forward
into the clearing in the forest (Castle.
Chapel. Suburb). It is wearing its gender mask,
triple negation of this Western enterprise.
In some languages gender is intrinsic
to the mode of address, to grammar: words decline
in the masculine, the feminine, the neuter.
English is holding out, English reserves judgment.
Pathology of differentiated grays,
the map reproduced in every economy of solitary
persistence. The minister will now take
questions, says one animal to the other animals.
One: why this spirit exchange hoovering
all this existential lint from the carpet? Another:
what about the casinos, I know they suck
substance from the polity but I do like
the exquisite, inexpensive dinners they serve.
A third: when I woke up this morning,
I found blood in my urine. Will I die?
Yes, says completion, from outside the ghost.
Yes. and: Yes. Cadence, though:
music’s own stab at grammar, at detection
vs. ancient cultures bent on abreaction
within the parameters of fair market value.
Is cadence a scar or is cadence a wound.
Please tell me why I feel this pain inside my wrist.
You can blame it on technology if you like.
You can change names to protect the innocent
if this makes you feel slightly
taller, slightly better, slightly more in touch
with your vestal remnant, your binding-spell.
(In the beginning was the Word.)
Can gender be a lyric form? Completion: Yes.
Autochthonous with the state, biology’s
concertina wire. The musicians
shift uneasily in their stiff Velcro straps,
reach for their platinum instruments.
They are not thinking about the dead
or if they are, only as a sectarian
progression of mathematics, i.e. form.
From the loudspeakers, ragged sounds
of birds. Either somebody is broadcasting
birds, or they are nesting in the boxes.
Everything starts to spin into the grain
plucked ripe from the field. Tool/utensil/
instrument: I would do this, do that, I would
accomplish. This business of fear
which hides inside biology, germinant.
If I say, I do not believe in the living
dead. If I say, the dead are an imaginary
stretcher upon which the living are carried.
Long lines of the living waiting
to vote, in Knoxville, Wandsworth,
Soweto. Language is thirsty, you say.
I don’t know what this means.
Biology holds one end of the stretcher.
Who holds the other?
I ask completion: what does this mean,
that language is thirsty? Completion: Yes.
Transverse Mercator, so that we
can see the cities better. We had almost
forgotten about the musicians, anxious
in their bonds. Some of them are male
and some of them are female. Presumably
they call out: to each other, to absent
loved ones, to their instruments.
To their captors, also presumably, though
in languages we don’t understand.
They are neither blind nor blinded,
but they do not appear to see
biology, which moves among them, spooning
soup or blood into their open mouths.
The clearing is getting crowded
with all these animals, wold of undergreen
through which midnight sluices.
Some of the musicians are very young,
eight or nine. Their voices among the others,
calling out for their parents, perhaps.
To be so young, and yet—to understand
music. Time comes behind biology
and sprinkles a faint, almost imperceptible
dust on the bodies of the musicians.
When they cry out, the dust settles
in new patterns, which the animals study.
On the throat, and chest, and forehead,
wherever one tribe gathers. Is not
an altar, though one could call them that,
the places where the dust collects.
Would a new alphabet kill you, you ask.
A new painting, a new mask. A new memory
that grows outside of memory
like some sort of contagious paraclete,
a different or more sensual performance.
The animals are leaving the clearing.
Every key to the castle opens one particular door,
but some open more than one.
Not everyone can get into the library.
Fulminant memorial to memory
beyond memory, history is light interposed
between biology and time.
At certain angles it resembles a sword.
You do not have to believe in the angel
in order to believe in the sword,
history whispers. It doesn’t even have to be
a metaphor. It could be a real sword.
Only if it is a real sword, you have to
imagine it in motion, i.e. flashing
back and forth, as if someone were wielding it.
Who you imagine wields the real sword
determines the frequency at which
your cries are recorded,
the shapes they convoke (all over your body).
We have gone to war again. So
many patterns, so many shapes in the dust.
The mirror inside my thumb itches.
It has worked its way up, from the heel.
It is trying to close over itself,
to form a scar. It is tired of reflecting
bloodwall, sinew and bone.
Outside their club, the unemployed miners
play rugby. Many of them are bald or balding.
A vast flickering above and behind them:
heat lightning. Or, the aurora.
One team scores, the audience cheers.
I keep missing the plays because
I am paying more attention to the distortions
at the edge of this picture, this screen.
I don’t know you personally, I say,
and truthfully—but you mistake
my voice for a theater, and walk into it.
Inside the theater of my voice, you’re
getting comfortable, munching popcorn
maybe. The lights go up.
(Soldiers stationed near the original
atomic test site could see the bones of their
fingers through their closed eyelids.)
Literature is one skin on which
dust from the wars keeps settling.
Gender is another. We make masks
from the materials at hand.
I wish I could see the movie. Maybe
in this movie love falls in love with love.
When my friend died, he was on a bicycle
searching for a man he wanted to take care of,
whom he had been taking care of,
whom he felt responsible to take care of.
His heart failed him, literally.
His family buried him with his glasses on
and two or three ballpoint pens
in his shirt pocket, the way he used to wear them,
but otherwise in the traditional way,
i.e. we all helped cover the casket with earth.
When he appears to me in dreams
I listen very attentively to what he is telling me
although I know I won’t remember, later.
I want your words, and your voice
in the act of making those word-sounds.
I thread my flesh between the plates
of the projector. It begins to burn. A map appears
on the wall, carmine calyx, Penny Black,
ruby-throated hummingbird.
A new nation creeps into the gaps left
by existing nations. An imbricating intelligence.
We have all been cruel, language is singing, and
You cannot hide from me.
Let us call this love, for a little while, after all.
That’s it, hanging from the trees like hair.
This exercise in micrographia, i.e.
you could be working to end world hunger
RIGHT NOW rather than reading
or writing poetry. You could be marrying
or being given in marriage. (Predicate: to give,
to have been given in marriage.)
You could take pleasure in the highway,
in the pleasures gender confers.
The dead cannot speak. Ghosts can speak,
but ghosts are not the dead.
The dead can touch, as ghosts cannot.
History: child-touch of language
inside of which the dead keep crying out
for their vanished instruments.
The libraries multiply, proliferate.
Locked out of one library, we find another.
Wedding rings on soldiers’ hands
attracting subatomic particles, radioactive.
Shall we render up the instruments,
the tools, the utensils, the fossilized tangents
of intention? Ghost-lips, the fire
having telegraphed its message
to headquarters, hunches into its haunches,
its electric calefaction.
Fire as a translation machine
whoever you are, wherever you live.
This instrument in brass, with a hook at one end
and a bell tethered to the other.
This one, all glass except for one silver bit
that might be a tiny, decorative fuse.
Maybe you’re supposed to blow on it,
or into it. This one, of wood, almost identical
to this one, of clay. They occur in pairs.
We try beating them together.
Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons.
They’re men, she said, I couldn’t
even take them to a cosmetics counter.
Anything I say about God will be false
because I say it. Anything I say about God
that God already said about God
you will not believe, because I say it.
But remember: FALSE CLAIMS
OF ASYLUM WILL BE PROSECUTED.
I do not care for your humanlike
forms, mathematics is saying.
I have spoken too much about myth elsewhere.
The gun fires, the box is opened,
the wave function collapses. We record all this
in language, of course
(with the occasional photograph).
Music, being a wave function, collapses.
Ghosts, being wave functions, collapse.
Hunger, being an appetite of the physical body,
abides. You cannot kill it with light.
Light seeps inside hunger and illuminates
(though in our haste and greed
we mistake its presence
for [History. Habit. Faith. Language]).
The gun, being a figurative construct
and therefore also a wave function, collapses.
I stood in the road at dusk
and let moths alight on my chest and arms.
In the wing socket of capitalism a little honey
is waiting to be made love to, slowly.
The Egyptian novelist turns in his sleep.
He is almost lonely. He is dreaming
that he stands inside some large terminal,
waiting. He does not want to blame
anybody, not now. He does not whistle.
The British poets dream someone
is throwing a joint party
in their honor, only they’re somewhere else,
at a pub, maybe, drinking alone.
It’s one of their birthdays—
the other one’s, each keeps thinking.
The Irish novelist lies awake and thinks
about her day job, as a reporter
for Parliament. Something about her work
strikes her as transparent, diaphanous even.
She is trying to understand
what physics is saying to her,
its whickering thaumatrope still inside
its cardboard box, price tag affixed.
And you. I have not even begun
to speak about you. There is a little more
room inside the garage where
we store all the disused works, the mines
and hospitals and amusement parks.
War comes close to calling us
by our real names. That’s why we’re
afraid of it, and yet attracted.
In the apartment where your cat died.
In the apartment where you won that award.
In the apartment where we both
made fun of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, 2x2.
Four times, five times, the Pakistani sprinter
passes me on the village path.
It feels so unfair not to give him a name.