In the film, a white face rides on a cloud of black, a sort of unattached mask, and it moved slightly at odds with the cloud as if they were part of separate, independent breaths originating in the minds of their creator. The black cloud had a mouth, but that was not interesting and seemed to be there at the whim of the plot. They needed something to eat something, and the poor hovering white mask was incapable, so they spawned a separate mouth in its garb.
If it were to visit, I suppose the mouth would eat the cheese and drink the wine, while the mask conversed about the weather. In late August, the storms brew up from the south, twirling destructive glamour.
Fox, quick enough to be almost illusory: you cannot quite know the space it inhabits. It marks a jagged desperate path and then leaps into the side brush. The half-moon appears in the color of the skin of a ripe peach, newly bruised.
Patience could improve your diction and perhaps your sleep as well. Never can tell. No point in the radiant suspended arc that sustains nothing. No point in sweeping the floor. Lifting the arm. Lifting the arm up to wave but not to reach either the arc above or the path of dust settling underfoot. Blow on it.
Blow: the arc will disappear.
THE IS NOT THAT IS (HÉLÈNE CIXOUS)
What is ist?
(hedgehog) (poem)
ellipsis evaluation
illegible thing
minuscule fortress suffering
absolute singularity
to the other’s keeping
that I am
a thing name beyond the name in a ball
animal thing
arrive ist ist
the hedgehog for example
Silkworm by heart a ceremony
silk of self being of promises bestiary
the hedgehog and the worm
wrap them up
woman in her sorrow scarf
blindfolded cathedral
fragment of skin
Cat. Why cat?
Cat takes the time to live (tact) (humility) (compassion)
Abraham the Ass the inhuman exile a creature of
inexhaustible creation (guest) (host)
Who is this?
Pardon me for not wanting to say
hanging in
air
it keeps its secret.
I apologize for not wanting to mean
not wanting to say
not making meaning foliated hilarious even if secret
it is ist ist
what is not
the grandiose makes toys of us
when you are not ridiculous you are most ridiculous.
LINES OF FLIGHT
Unequal distribution arbitrary float Jonah in jeansuncouth rampage Jonah in T-shirt peace refugee
and the dream with its wail implicit forbidden salacious cool the dream always cool to wake to the cool heat of dream retiring the name call it Jonah
call it the end of earth underwater call it the spider with her prey.
Cornered at the desperation of the field’s disastrous unction
see how Jim might respond to Jim
Harry to Lavinia, Charles to Jane.
Or, in the redundancy of defeat,
Hercules might quit the team to join another.
Cold and colder still
instilled so that dream and not-dream coincide
as a nearly perfect coil.
What was his nervous antagonism? A name?
And what have you to say about these flowers
late in the season, so desperate and calm.
The whine of hope perishes
in time, just in time, for the jackhammers
to build an emblem science, and the small figures
to move in its midst like so many futures.
Dry Sargasso. The rash-lit arm, the virtual shoulders.
Tendrils of the chive and of the nodding leaf.
City I never saw
its music drenched
with journals and floating beds.
Lazarus, sky hewn among the dark boughs.
Dry Sargasso, its diary of husks.
REALM OF ENDS
1.
Francis turns. He has something to say. He has an
announcement. He says, snow in summer and falls silent.
A single egg in the nest. Francis turns.
It is not metaphysical; it is merely distraction.
Time passes. The nest is empty.
The snow, bountiful. A girl dedicates her last weeks
to a show of force. She writes gracefully about force.
Francis turns. He seems weak and small and without volition.
Thus the bird lands on his head.
Thus there are radiant seconds.
Is it reliable? Not the garden. Not the bed.
The bird lifts up onto the bare branch.
The tree, an elm, is dying, almost dead.
Francis is indifferent but the bird, a cardinal,
shines on the barren branch.
Tit tit tittit tit hovers the weary pragmatist.
It is hoped, by Francis and the rest, that she
cannot know heartbreak, not
the melodrama of the nest’s margin of error.
2.
All day in the fir trees, night remains.
Time passes. Francis is immobile, bereft.
He has recalled the condition of stone.
He has resumed his incalculable origin.
And so the second comes too quickly,
follows too quickly upon the first.
Others, mobile and incidental and lush,
attest to the perishable variety at large:
shark, polar bear, other political incidents
having little in common with the immobility of Francis.
A fence and an alarm, a cat and a cradle,
these also are not acceptable, not progression.
3.
The day has become abstract; I cannot know it.
It spits and complains as if it were real
but it is only a matter of time.
How, for example, forgetting
becomes opaque.
As if, dark on dark, an inert stone.
Francis is only a sentimental stone.
Francis is impoverished and mute.
Francis is a fiction of the glare, turning
into the Tuscan sun, under the juniper, among flowers.
Doves perch on his head and shit on his sleeves.
This is an example of natural observable fact.
Yet the day is opaque
despite recurring flags in the graveyard
lending their gala strophe to the forgotten;
despite the fantasy of the saint
turning in his soiled robes
under the heavy lemon trees, the ornamental
beds: rose, lavender, creeping thyme.
Along the path the lovers come
through the thrash of sunlit leaves,
the heavenly scents of lemon and rose.
The day is a tide of sensual foreboding
in the salty sweat of their backs
riding on white linen
in a luminous small room
in the taste of cool wine on their swollen lips.
The day, for the lovers, heaves with potential.
4.
The reverie stalks the real; it stretches abstraction
to its limit, deposited at the feet of Francis.
But given the impermanence of birds,
the cardinal’s nest on the deck,
given the domestic and the spiritual
the utilitarian and
the forgotten, given
these cold mercurial shapes, arbitrary
hinges, islands, perpetual desires
and their advocacy among the least entitled,
given that one falls in love
with the condition of hope
and falls out of
love with its
cruel replacement, hope,
so that what is valued is not the same
and the shape of the body in the window
is foreign, the picture of the woman,
her body and face
at odds with their person, at odds with her
curiosity, her pertinence.
In a dream of the girl and the lover,
now forgotten as the day, inevitably, is forgotten,
there is a difference between being forgotten
and being among the dead, but
given these episodes,
their proof turns to night and stone.
5.
The ears are ordinary, the feet
distorted. The girl has a condition
not announced in the greenroom
but nevertheless leaked to the press.
Biography has its compulsions, its regrets.
It could be the materiality of opaque gold
and the severity of promises,
their promiscuous gift,
oaths made on pillows between lovers.
There, in the eventide,
a strangling usurps the petty comma,
staggers from rejection to confirmation to murder
institutionally foretold. O Francis!
Do you stand for the cold, the cruel,
the bargain between such desire and such trust?
Take no prisoners. Let the homily endure.
The holidays are adept at the spectacle of divorce.
They specialize in silence, gala silence.
Masterpieces of the still life
make their way onto tables of the celebrants.
Holy! Holy! Holy! intones the priest.
Things are given and taken away.
Here is a token of my affection.
Here is my child.
6.
Turning the figure away, removing it
leaves its replica shadow
to shift with the gloating wind.
Later, the sculptor
pieces together poor bits of fabric,
copies from memory the shape of the lips.
The original remains vocable,
escaping the dream’s
unscripted solitude, conceiving night’s
blind, its familiar embrace.
Francis is silent. He has taken a vow.
Suffering unfurls its performance,
elicits revenge. On a ladder,
the man turns to address the public.
He imagines strangling the woman.
He speaks of his future in a nest.
AFTER TOURISM
Disturbed over her marvel I heard her say
something nocturnal I saw
mystery as merely change I saw
envy and the illegitimate mile I saw
under the formal atrocity at the messy embankment
all these and vocabulary lagging behind its science
tramp unknown soldier cop
talking strange talk
under an altered light under daze
I heard her say tomorrow as if she knew
I heard her say come back
and I choose you
as analogue of the yet to be.
Do not foreclose
investigation, but come along.
I will try not to protract my look into
now I will continue as if
you were next if you will I heard a man say
on the radio the other day, well, yesterday
talking about headaches
if you will
and today I had a look at
a Chinese cabinet only it is not clear
it is Chinese it
may be from another country I took
measurements nevertheless
for my next life I am thinking of requesting librarian
although I am as yet not on a list
of possible survivors I am
thinking of erasing the word sorrow from
the world, hurting under an illusory pennant
master of ceremonies hidden behind its junk
I am thinking of coming back as
part of your coat as a tree is part wind.
FIGURES MOVE (SAINT PETERSBURG)
Back from the thunderous geist
bills to pay, grass to cut, fish to fry.
The spectacle of tasks
importuning, scenes
folded under scaffolds of lore.
Figures move
collapse of particulars
reformation borrowed from chapter
and force.
VIDEO CLIP
Para enters, carrying Doxa,
aided by her friend, Lysis.
They live in the City of Ancient Signs.
Para is thin, very thin, and Doxa is heavy, quite heavy.
Lysis is listless, fatigued. She has been idle forever.
Under the Golden Arches they see a winged horse.
Lysis says, “Mythos.”
Doxa agrees.
Para is fearful; she feels left out. She consults
Doctor Noid. Dr. Noid is annoyed with Para.
How many times do I have to tell you
to take your camera wherever you go?
How many times do I have to tell you
to record all events, sounds, weathers?
How do you expect the Real to return if you refuse
to obey these prescriptions,
to take these precautions?
Cat enters carrying an ass trophy.
END VIDEO CLIP
Morning cycles across night.
Almost enchanted by the light, almost annulled.
Were this the great bearing, were this merely
intrigue, or the architect’s
confidence in the small shop of curiosities,
were the bride less stymied
in her great dress,
were any of these accountable
to the surge of one thing, one thing, one thing,
addition in space, bridge after bridge, and
the known but not recalled,
its bitter appraisal, singular
as the image of a girl,
long hair down over a shirt,
intent to be seeing, to be present,
she, the girl, long hair, open shirt,
writing something else.
VIDEO CLIP
Whim and Truce enter the frame.
They greet each other with a small bow.
Whim jumps up and down, hands overhead, trying to touch
the ceiling. Truce turns to leave, a trail of blood behind him.
Whim slips on the liquid and falls down.
Laughter track.
END VIDEO CLIP
Breathe deeply. Exhale whim. Exhale truce.
Can there be history?
Is it there, behind us in the park, Peter on a horse?
Is it in that cathedral, among the quick flames?
In Akhmatova’s kitchen? In Mandelstam’s death?
Can the Real return as history?
Ruin floods into images of new ruin and disappears.
Again! cries the child, Again!
Once upon a time.
II.
Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?
—LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
ALICE IN THE WASTELAND
Alice was beginning to get tired
sitting
with spring rain
on the bank
in forgetful snow. She thought,
It is too dark to see anything.
Then she began to wonder
about the meaning of anything
and the meaning of nothing
and in what ways any and no
were alike.
She said to herself, I cannot see anything
and then, I can see nothing
and thought they amounted to the same thing