by Farid Matuk
exactly like a blind diver diving the bubbles and the cabinetry
pulling up and the keypad and clerk rising into the flat blue sky
now curving around my blind fingertips look there are bees
at the cauliflowers look at my hands you say far above touching
the deployments but I’m stuck on saying they keep circling and so on
to the point where I want to see you less than to see you out
and if I can’t I won’t ask you to tell me how to stay
in the long shade your hands cast when they get to their totality
before the sun that we know sits high
and the sky behaves itself around the things we are making
the forms and their compensations and by scintillas you are too
but if saying should fails art maybe our art
is where we should stay and what we should exceed
like Alice writing “but that’s not the ending”
No Address
In 1849 collaborators helped Henry Brown ship himself out of enslavement by hiding his body in a parcel crate. In 1850 Brown launched his panorama show, Henry Box Brown’s Mirror of Slavery, prompting Frederick Douglass to lament, “[H]ad not Henry ‘Box’ Brown and his friends attracted slaveholding attention to the manner of his escape, we might have had a thousand Box Browns per annum.”
In 2003 U.S. citizen Rachel Corrie, volunteering with International Solidarity Movement, knelt her white body between the home of Palestinian pharmacist Samir Nasrallah and an Israel Defense Forces armored bulldozer. Despite appeals to U.S. officials and a suit brought by Corrie’s family in Israeli courts, her death generated no judicial, diplomatic, or policy consequence.
Reportless Subjects, to the Quick / Continual addressed—
—Emily Dickinson
I want you to see the leaves are gone and white like winter
you said let’s make like a girl mean something amazing commercial
flickered in that dead patch today is where I saw
the cardinal’s glow you wanted to see me go first
to use a pleasure in seeing me “walk behind this man” the voice said
to Duriel so she could leave the train platform alive unbarred and unafraid
feeling actual having nothing to do with little moments the suds
in the sink lighting off workmen’s calls or how some of the Buddhist advice
bends air before breaking it
birds tonight and kids thread air into each other chiasticly
it’s not a word the voice said but a pressure to impose to feel the shape you’re in
tell me what to see when you can it’s a false spring after two days of rain
you splashed in little verbs if any use us loud without the figure like running
a voice’s grain is it a given its facts go in boxes whose faces we etch each shave a gain
moneys and birds settle by night in what formations on the reservoir lake
the roofs replaced leaves the hail brought down
flake in the sun and winds push and mound them into berms
there is no color in straw but fuel in nerves
your leg shakes and big planters hold trees
outside the stately houses around the water
I can make my bad teeth better and hang a little gold
at your wrist any verb could turn to a new feeling
waking glad to remain an owner
if whiteness or a people is a claim to life you slept through
the night in a house that stands
and our papers are filed with the state so vacationing
we can hike up in the mountain to see the ancient pyramid
above the valley of Tepotzlán honored a tax collector
bureaucracies precede us there’s a tribe somewhere we say
that trades in fear their names such a stab at beauty
we should assume they study our histories and our lyrics our gestures
and tones even if they don’t exist a people’s trade is fear feeling
a sudden drop of the floor when I’m far from you
and too such a picking at the earth’s curved surface and all laid on it
that I’m to hold a space and from it cast the gaze you’ve trained in me
onto the back sides of docking bays brake places parking lots and turnabouts
and above them the sky
a bigger more respectable more competent friend
maybe an aesthetic theory like two dogs same caramel color off leashed
to chase and echo one another in the green patch
by the metro stop gold-embossed grass-threaded streets
can I be in that picture one day with you
if what etches into your eyes leaves a small canyon in its trough
is there the chattering speech
I don’t think it’s enough to say images seen the still Aleppo pine needles
a tarp billowing at the lower winds are a weather how long could you look
in the foreground at a wet child who isn’t you
the two bits of peeling white light she tossed into us feel like a skein
a weight water falling down your back in the bath a salted
silver-edged negative pressing you to the steady light impulse
neither of us will absorb winking in it all the while by its known waves
the state’s cargo planes keep from folding into our street
having lost a few peoples running in superfluity the sky behaves itself
over bamboo that grows here wild or bedded with river stones hauled
come to rest their smoothing ends but not the infinitive daughter
gone to running away with water as one of her rhymes
hands on the water you call scene-setting hands on the table
water over the houses and hills swimming paint a picture of a boat
put everyone’s names in it all yourn standing up tall as your favorite bamboo
in the yard tell me again its leaves fold back historically materially green
over its pale shoots opening and dividing a day into rooms collected
in the picture encyclopedia any guest could see youth’s decades in montaged
trunk and bikini cuts all the soft blind fingers at the walls of a day
just a day folds back to look on you like an anchor serving its subjects
floating out on a water I couldn’t feel soaking into this valley of gravel
and clay five thousand feet thick under alluvial fans of boulder debris
across desert floors young volcanism made the rhyolite red that pulls the eye
into the core of mountain silhouettes “We see shadows of people” said drone pilots
“and we kill those shadows.” “That’s a kid there to the left.” “That’s what they were calling
the adolescent earlier.” “Yeah, adolescents don’t move like that.”
walking into a room with sadness made crystal touches me on the thigh in a brotherly way
I already know quickening flashes of teeth as people affirming a homeland are about to cum
but at any age you can tell your architect what color glass for the office park
low clouds reflected advance into their next sky next weather
let’s say our right to pleasure is a withholding
as a president lies in state do you wake in state as a medium screaming
I carry no one in my eyes not even a lane
I don’t know to where you can stretch your finitude a little
I can be your thing you scream you want in your night terror to bite my mouth
“Right side up with care” Henry “Box” Brown’s
Mirror of Slavery panorama show interru
pted whose idea of escape
the magisterial fields of the horse run dotting the rolling hills with char with effects
with bodies used for a whiteness from which Marina Abramovic´’s heroics
would further empty out with a voiding majesty I don’t trust Henry’s fields give the lie
to a tribe somewhere saying fear because it feeds
the gull by night wheels round its technology for falling
such a handling stuns the thing isn’t gentle to its otherness
be thou gentle to your animal
our finest sculptors charged with shaping a woman
Guanshiyin in her deified name means “observing the sounds of the world”
glaze her hand and leave it loose to turn or withhold
and call it a figure for compassion
the sun comes up through the planted trees a thing wastes not want
what will you in your time do with a white enough woman’s form
will its light make a word in the room so un-American in its humors
and hugging near death that we’ll try to say it’s not a real word either
so our anger might be civilian and yours
trying to outpace likenesses who sells the shadow
to dance only among spirit rappers in bodies where “women, negroes, natives”
it was said were acted out for Reverend Mattison they were “vehicles of impurity”
“my children too have learned a barbarous tongue, though it’s not so sure
they will rise to high command” wrote Tu Fu or Bernadette on New England
a boy tried to hang a dog in a playground she said you tried several spaces today
under a desk a nook bent to your body brought round
what about all the rooms the sky makes a faint blue expanse
a long far line of electric poles a mountain I can see dog yelps almost digital
maybe from inside a car parked at the Dollar General I guess anyone dreaming a state
could visit and detonate insourcing a kind of defense but the sky behaves itself
with just enough war over us as a family feast photographed frames time in our house
you made your first marks today on this page
to my empowered friends
I love your story
like the shapes we made in the things we said were demanding of us
now you ask me why the sky is a tank full of lemonade out back
all wet tonight and bugs call up a swamp in this desert in my story
my dad wrote all the wrong names for her on a brick that could lift
through my mother’s window came the words arrayed in glass
dusting San Martincito on her dresser cast in plastic with spaces in his robes
a home for the hen the dog made mild in the skirts of the mongrel saint
still lining a thin easy silence around me come the scenes all down our street
in someone’s car music each word lifted into its own space thumps in the moon’s
heavy sleep breath there are extensions we can read what we said
it’s such a simple printshop so mothers might tell us about what came
to be more known a pear tree in the commons and really
the words left idle beside if they could tell us about the forms
if these came to lift them if we could ask sin miedo y sin piedad
wouldn’t they never say there was a time what hovers turns behind maybe two feet up
from our scapulae a moon’s heavy heel in the water an Aleppo daughter in my line ordered
from a bride book bringing the wrong language to the Andes her new stepkids
taking her first stillborn by the heel far from her Arabic taunting I’ve seen their pictures
they were beautiful young people in those minutes did they feel in their mouths
there are spaces for the refusals but we’ve heard migrants carried cultures in their dough
little strains of living stretching back to outleap our generations with their own
collapsing days into what they’ve written for us socializing the mother function
a daughter in your mother’s line grew to offer her Englishless milk to strange babies
in a Newark tenement and once in the parking lot around an igneous intrusion
we saw a daughter searching the asphalt and her father screaming “If you lost it
I will destroy you” not unhinged but large stretching the wet outlines of his organs
to chamber the particular grain of his voice’s promise and here goes my voice
trying to fit opposite promises in relation for you would there be no address
if I try to tell it back to you what voice runs over gravel in the sentence
taking shapes on the gravel in the sentence a dead girl given to the likeness
of a depilated face made white enough or having hired hands to shape in their skill
or having bred some not overwhelmingly disposable features having been raised
in friends’ congregations in unaffected elegance taking a pledge of resistance
to kneel with International Solidarity into the stamp of that human shield
before someone else’s house besieged bearing shining hospitality we told you to
give your money to the poor kneeling before a partner state’s bulldozer working
a little harder into contested ground happens to flay the white from Rachel’s body
how do I mark the strata of attended things descended past where I let myself be
buoyant wanting nothing more just than to be traded it’s not the dusted hurt
already layered on what Trojan baby girl would bear me out of the future pre-Rome
but wanting a fraying of the lines ridden by a claim to life as a condition so we could play
only means in my hands those lines extend it’s no better wanting it in a doting way
just smile already I know into the sunny
grainy pear rising onto my teeth it’s like
some people you see by the heel
purpling held into the screen
in my pocket a position I would say
if sound was finding forms
stand in for us I hold the baby thing
pretend I didn’t know you ever and say the wrong
far words all around gild the air heel in hand
in the light going through its orange
and pink turning rhinestones in the story
sustains delay to let the familiar back
at once for you which pieces won’t we shed
peopleless who says what’s kin
who doubts cicada songs extend each silver green
bamboo into a whole firm canopy
who doubts the prophet groaned in the spirit’s self same
sure shot glory raising Lazarus out of the mountain
box into something real if I’m to believe my emergency
giving the type away to typos Henry emerged
on loop are you being seen in some old eyes
with care is how some headaches need to start “Embracing, the dumb
will speak, the lame will walk!” in such promises in so much
insistence there was this César all woke drunk up in some
white people’s republic rousing volunteers into freedom
bring me my horse my love my gold green pear
our general strike my gun whenever you read this what diminishment
will you know making words seem mostly signals of their own restraint
I guess yelling at you to survive doesn’t change the object you are
everywhere stealing my shit figuring and giving out rights-of-way
th
rough me like if parenting is a thing are you childing us who gave you a face
and if César was only right where bodies have to coalesce
in great numbers before the state hails with its infrasound rays
that don’t cut off the ear but shake the cochlear fluid bringing faces
onto paving stones or with rays that would excite water and fat
so the burning skin symptom can insistently affect one area or shift
the burning skin symptom can come and go rarely frequently or persist
then is that why some of us like to take pictures of so many serial things warehoused
or on docks waiting or we like to name the bougainvillea flowers
to linger in a timeless way we thought to crown you with possibility
and there isn’t a day I don’t hear a little circle of war storied out so I can eat it
on an oval orbit you say so even if I’m not before you alone isn’t a thing
“& someone who does not love you cannot name you right”—Aracelis Girmay
like when my mother died women she worked with tending the old brought girls to chant
out of the chapel’s bright plain walls a novena singing nine days into one niche
on a string their voice ran out of their voice and their voice caught up
with words they made a handling and it’s right to worry about losing oneself
to a stylized rank but I don’t think that’s it if we’re ready to fold unalone
into a voice the dead can leave love having been a casual service
casually volute mold and casting to one another in your childing way
don’t imitate my slogans in some fidelity to our line I won’t rise forever maybe
I’ll be near you a while thinking I need your breath to work for me where vague life
means even your blur claimed into a commons what Henry
would discontinue at each object a self same region of objects renders Israel onto Israel