Document Window
Could I just show what’s happening. Not that shooting, civil disturbance, whatever it was. I’d like you to see how differently we’re all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter, how quickly things and people get replaced. How interchangeable it all could get to seem. Could get to seem … the kind of phrase we use now, avoiding the verb to be. There’s a sense in which, we say, dismissing other senses.
Rimbaud called for the rational derangement of all the senses in the name of poetry. Marx: capitalism deranges all the senses save the sense of property.
Keeping my back against unimportant walls I moved out of range of the confusion, away from the protection of the police. Having seen nothing I could swear to I felt at peace with my default. I would, at least, not be engaged in some mess not my own.
This is what I mean though: how differently we move now, rapidly deciding what is and isn’t ours. Indifferently.
Voices
Wreathed around the entrance to a shopping mall, a student dining hall, don’t pause for a word, or to articulate an idea. What hangs a moment in the air is already dead: That’s history.
The moment—Edwin Denby describes it—when a dancer, leaping, stands still in the air. Pause in conversation when time would stop, an idea hang suspended, then get taken up and carried on. (Then that other great style of conversation: everyone at once, each possessed with an idea.) This newer conversation: I am here and talking, talking, here and talking … Television the first great lesson: against silence. “I thought she’d never call and I went aaah! to my friend and she went give it a week, she’ll call you all right and you did”—“ And you went waowh! and I went, right, I went O.K., it’s only I was clueless? so now can we grab something nearby, cause I’m due on in forty-five?”
A neighbor painting his garage yelling in cell phone from the driveway: voice that penetrates kitchen-window glass. “Fucking worst day of my fucking life, fucking wife left me for another man, both on coke and, you know? I don’t CARE! thought it was only maryjane she was, do you KNOW the prison term for coke? Fucking dealer, leaves me for him because she’s HOOKED and I’m supposed to CARE? Do they know what they’ll GET?”
Private urgencies made public, not collective, speaker within a bubble. In the new restaurant: “Marty? Thought I’d never get through to you. We need to move quickly with SZ-02, there are hounds on the trail. Barney won’t block you at all. Just give him what we talked about.”
USonian speech. Men of the upwardly mobilizing class needing to sound boyish, an asset in all the newness of the new: upstart, startup, adventurist, pirate lad’s nasal bravado in the male vocal cords. Voices of girls and women screeking to an excitable edge of brightness. In an excessively powerful country, grown women sound like girls without authority or experience. Male, female voices alike pitched fastforward commercial, one timbre, tempo, intonation.
Mirrors
Possible tones of the human voice, their own possible physical beauty—no recognition. The fish-eye lens bobbles faces back.
Bodies heavy with sad or enraged feminine or macho brooding mimic stand-up comics, celebrities; grimace, gesticulate. The nakedest generation of young USonians with little intuition of the human history of nakedness, luminous inventions of skin and musculature. Their surfaces needlepointed with conventionally outrageous emblems, what mirror to render justly their original beauty back to them?
You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you.
Artworks (I)
Painting on a gallery wall: people dwelling on opposite sides of a pane of glass. None of their eyes exchanging looks. Yellow flashes off the rug in the room and from the orchard beyond. Houses of people whose eyes do not meet.
White people doing and seeing no evil.
(Photograph of family reunion, eyes on the wide-lens camera unmeeting.) “In fact I’ve lived here all along.”
That was them not us. We were at the time in the time of our displacement, being torn from a false integrity. We stared at the pictures in the gallery knowing they were not us, we were being driven further for something else and who knew how far and for how long and what we were to do.
Stranger
Isolation begins to form, moves in like fog on a clear afternoon. Arrives with the mail, leaves its messages on the phone machine. If you hadn’t undergone this so often it could take you by surprise, but its rime-white structure is the simple blueprint of your displacement. You: who pride yourself on not giving in, keep discovering in dreams new rooms in an old house, drawing new plans: living with strangers, enough for all, wild tomato plants along the road, redness for hunger and thirst. (Unrest, too, in the house of dreams: the underworld lashing back.)
But this fog blanks echoes, blots reciprocal sounds. The padded cell of a moribund democracy, or just your individual case?
Artworks (II)
Early summer lunch with friends, talk rises: poetry, urban design and planning, film. Strands of interest and affection binding us differently around the table. If an uneasy political theme rears up—the meaning of a show of lynching photographs in New York, after Mapplethorpe’s photos, of sociopathic evil inside the California prison industry—talk fades. Not a pause but: a suppression. No one is monitoring this conversation but us. We know the air is bad in here, maybe want not to push that knowledge, ask what is to be done? How to breathe? What will suffice? Draft new structures or simply be aware? If art is our only resistance, what does that make us? If we’re collaborators, what’s our offering to corruption—an aesthetic, anaesthetic, dye of silence, withdrawal, intellectual disgust?
This fade-out/suspension of conversation: a syndrome of the past decades? our companionate immune systems under siege, viral spread of social impotence producing social silence?
Imagine written language that walks away from human conversation. A written literature, back turned to oral traditions, estranged from music and body. So what might reanimate, rearticulate, becomes less and less available.
Incline
Dreamroad rising steeply uphill; David is driving. I see it turning into a perpendicular structure salvaged from a long metal
billboard: we will have to traverse this at a ninety-degree angle, then at the top go over and down the other side. There are no exits. Around is the Mojave Desert: open space. D.’s car begins to lose momentum as the incline increases; he tries shifting into a lower gear and gunning the engine. There is no way off this incline now, we’re forced into a situation we hadn’t reckoned on—a road now become something that is no road, something designated as “commercial space.” I suggest rolling (ourselves in) the car down the steep dusty shoulder into the desert below, and out. For both of us, the desert isn’t vacancy or fear, it’s life, a million forms of witness. The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon.
Mission Statement
The Organization for the Abolition of Cruelty has an air deployment with bases on every continent and on obscurer tracts of land. Airstrips and hangars have been constructed to accommodate large and small aircraft for reconnoiter and rescue missions whether on polar ice or in desert or rainforest conditions. Many types of craft are of course deployed to urban clusters. The mission of the Organization is not to the First, Third, or any other World. It is directed toward the investigation and abrogation of cruelty in every direction, including present and future extraterrestrial locations.
It is obvious that the destruction of despair is still our most urgent task. In this regard, we employ paramilitary methods with great care and watchfulness.
The personnel dedicated to this new program are responsible to the mission, not to any national body. We are apprised of all new technologies as soon as available. Hence we have a unique fusion of policy and technology, unique in that its purpose is the abolition of cruelty.
Ours is the first project of its kind to be fully empowered through the new paranational charters. In principle, it is now recognized tha
t both agents and objects of cruelty must be rescued and transformed, and that they sometimes merge into each other.
In response to your inquiry: this is a complex operation. We have a wide range of specializations and concerns. Some are especially calibrated toward language
because of its known and unknown powers
to bind and to dissociate
because of its capacity
to ostracize the speechless
because of its capacity
to nourish self-deception
because of its capacity
for rebirth and subversion
because of the history
of torture
against human speech
2000–2002
III
Territory Shared
ADDRESS
Orientation of the word toward its addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. … Each and every word expresses the “one” in relation to the “other.” … A word is territory shared by both addressor and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.
—V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
If all we would speak is ideology
believable walking past pent-up Christmas trees
in a California parking lotday before Thanksgivinghot sun
on faint
scent of sprucein the supermarket
mixed metaphors of food
faces expectant, baffled, bitter, distracted
wandering aisles or like me and the man ahead of me buying
only milk
my car door grabbed open by a woman
thinking it her husband’s car honking for her somewhere else
—and I think it true indeed I know
I who came only for milk am speaking it:though
would stand somewhere beyond
this civic nausea
: desiring not to stand apart
like Jeffers giving up on his kindloving only unhuman creatures
because they transcend ideologyin eternity as he thought
but he wasn’t writing to them
nor today’s gull perched on the traffic light
Nor can this be about remorse
staring over its shopping cart
feeling its vague ideological thoughts
nor about lines of credit
blanketing shame and fear
nor being conscripted for violence
from withoutbeckoning at rage within
I know what it cannot be
But whoat the checkout this one day
do I addresswho is addressing me
what’s the approach whose the manners
whose dignity whose truth
when the change purse is tipped into the palm
for an exact amount without which
2002
TRANSPARENCIES
That the meek word like the righteous word can bully
that an Israeli soldier interviewed years
after the first Intifada could mourn on camera
what under orders he did, saw done, did not refuse
that another leaving Beit Jala could scrawl
on a wall: We are truely sorry for the mess we made
is merely routineword that would cancel deed
That human equals innocent and guilty
That we grasp for innocence whether or no
is elementaryThat words can translate into broken bones
That the power to hurl words is a weapon
That the body can be a weapon
any child on playground knowsThat asked your favorite word
in a game
you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river
(never a pronoun never God or War)
is taken for grantedThat word and body
are all we have to lay on the line
That words are windowpanes in a ransacked hut, smeared
by time’s dirty rains, we might argue
likewise that words are clear as glass till the sun strikes it blinding
But that in a dark windowpane you have seen your face
That when you wipe your glasses the text grows clearer
That the sound of crunching glass comes at the height of the
wedding
That I can look through glass
into my neighbor’s house
but not my neighbor’s life
That glass is sometimes broken to save lives
That a word can be crushed like a goblet underfoot
is only what it seems, part question, part answer: how
you live it
2002
LIVRESQUE
There hangs a space between the man
and his words
like the space around a few snowflakes
just languidly beginning
space
where an oil rig has dissolved in fog
man in self-arrest
between word and act
writing agape, agape
with a silver fountain pen
2002
COLLABORATIONS
I
Thought of this “our” nation : : thought of war
ghosts of war fugitive
in labyrinths of amnesia
veteransout-of-date textbooks in a library basement
evidence trundled offplutoniumunder tarps after dark
didn’t realize it until I wrote it
August nowapples have started
severing from the tree
over the deckby night their dim impact
thuds into dreams
by daylight bruisedstarting to stew in sun
saying “apple” to nose and tongue
to memory
Word following sense, the way it should be
and if you don’t speak the word
do you lose your senses
And isn’t this just one speck, one atom
on the glazed surface we call
America
from which I write
the war ghosts treading in their shredded
disguises above the clouds
and the price we pay here still opaque as the fog
these mornings
we always say will break open?
II
Try this on your tongue: “the poetry of the enemy”
If you read it will you succumb
Will the enemy’s wren fly through your window
and circle your room
Will you smell the herbs hung to dry in the house
he has had to rebuild in words
Would it weaken your will to hear
riffs of the instruments he loves
rustling of rivers remembered
where faucets are dry
“The enemy’s water”is there a phrase
for that in your language?
And youwhat do you write
now in your borrowed housetuned in
to the broadcasts of horror
under a sagging arbor, dimdumim
do you grope for poetry
to embrace all this
—not describe, embracestaggering
in its arms, Jacob-and-angel-wise?
III
Do you understand why I want your voice?
At the seder table it’s said
you reclined and said nothing
now in the month of Elul is your throat so dry
your dreams so stony
you wake with their grit in your mouth?
There was a beautiful life here once
Our enemies poisoned it?
Make a list of what’s lost but don’t
call it a poem
that’s for the scriptors of nostalgia
bent to their copying-desks
Make a list of what you love well
twist itinsert it
into a bottle of old Roman glass
go to the edge of the sea
at Haifa where the refugee ships lurched in
and the ships of deportation wrenched away
IV
For Giora Leshem
Drove upcoastfirst day of another yearno rain
oxalis gold lakes floating
on January green
Can winter tides off the Levant
churn up wilder spume?
Think Crusades, remember Acre
wind driving at fortress walls
everything returns in time except the
utterly disappeared
What thou lovest well can well be reft from thee
What does not change / is the will
to vanquish
the fascination with what’s easiest
see it in any video arcade
is this what the wind is driving at?
Where are you Giora?whose hands
lay across mine a moment
Can you still believe that afternoon