Oculus
Page 5
Two: girl. Orphanage. Accident. Cryogenic sleep.
Black dog serenades rouse her from tides.
She doesn’t recognize the child on the beta
tapes—purple hair, white ribbons tying
her features together. Jupiter jazz crows,
her childhood, sleep until the earth disappears.
Three: woman. Always running. Always running
out of fuel. Always straddling a slow horse,
Red Tail, stranded in space with an unloaded
pistol. This is what night imagined when it imagined
a feral woman, jaw open and swiping. Windward.
Loose claw. Less sigh than scowl. The last civet
in the universe gnashes her teeth against the glass.
Four: questioning. Is there mercy for a mercenary
out there in the writhing galaxy,
where jetties disappear into harbors
drained of antimatter? Bounty hunters
lurk in the undertow. Evening larks afoot.
Five: conquest. Here’s her blackjack. Her torn
jacket, her din, her turn. Her ammunition,
her departure. Unrecognizable cities rise
from empty shuttles, husks for drones.
See you space cowboy, screams the Callisto
Moon. On nights when the wind strips
the highway bare, only the stars hunt her down.
Lavender Town
Don’t let the sour flowers fool you, child.
This town is a dead town. The tower tolls
to your trill, your heartbeat,
inaudible
to everyone except you. You listen. You hear.
Ghost notes, discordant leaves
clutter the earth, tin and rustle—
a lachrymose bird cries,
a graveyard glistens. When you climb the stairway,
don’t shield your eyes
from the pixels, 30 hertz heat—
don’t shield your awe
from the ghosts of pretty prey.
The ones you catch
when you’re alone and afraid.
Lavender Town, noble purple town, plumed, perfumed
dream of violet fields—can you hear
the killing machine sing? What secrets hide?
Why run? Why hold on?
You walk by the side of the road, biting an apple
as you wave your thumb—
blood sickles down, a rebel
you are, a hitchhiker, a tiny savant.
When you grow up, and the screen lights up
all your blind
spots, and you replace the dead
green cartridge
with a blank one of your making,
you’ll arrive, at last, at the final
battle. Maybe then you’ll find
that the game you’re playing
is a hack—you thought you were invincible,
and just like that, the boss
KOs you. And other times, you’re astonished
at your own breath.
Other times, you thought you were dead,
but your body was eternal all along.
The Death of Ruan Lingyu
Shanghai, 1935
In your role for New Women, you played Wei Ming,
a single mother, novelist, who dies as she declares
she wants to live. In your dream, Wei Ming lived,
kneeling at her daughter’s grave. You reach through
the celluloid to try and touch her, but the screen turns
dark, then bright with waves. Interrogate the Suzhou River:
why drown the shore? Why? Entire shorelines of new women
surge, ebb, turn to foam. You see their limbs in the water,
thrashing, with nowhere to go. You can’t save
them, touch them, make their feral grief any more
endurable. Instead, they vanish. Instead, they recede.
Laundry baskets scatter, upturned, laundry piles
on the rooftops, laundry in the snow. You subsist on spit,
spite, spotlight. You subsist on fright, moving
across your face like a freight train over frozen tracks.
Who carries you across the four-poster bed, the medicine
cabinet, the pot of porridge? All you wanted was the lie
where the beautiful disobedient ones survive.
Soon their absence becomes your own. Your cigarette
lights the frigid air, burning a hole in the landscape.
After Nam June Paik
Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984)
We wake up to the era of a doom tube. Save
us, save us, save us—if our suffering
is broadcasted, let it be known.
Let it be collective. Let it be real, let it be
the future real soon.
Opera of our nightmares, today is the day
the heavens have promised: the day we survive
ourselves, move forward and fast. Farther and farther
the sky rumbles over us—faster and faster,
the transmissions, boomtowns, bodies in space:
New York to Paris, Berlin to Seoul, WNET
to Centre Pompidou, we broadcast
our triplicate shadows, our robot politics,
we install our souls, our space yodels, our rebel kisses,
into your television set, your cell phones,
until the moon rises
in your kingdom
and drowns in the cove of our satellite waves.
Opera Sextronique
“In my videotaped electro-vision, not only do you see your picture instantaneously and find out what kind of bad habits you have, but see yourself deformed in twelve ways.”
—Nam June Paik
12 ways I see myself deformed—
shower: behind the fog, water, chemicals, dye, I die like suds, slip down the drain. I die like my own cells
to clean my whole self. if this really meant rebirth.
if this really meant change. or growth or vanishing.
2 movements: sprinting to fulton street, the A or G, nostrand, bedford hair all static electricity skull all circuitboard—
the windows on the trains like touchscreens
through which we breathe our anonymous breath.
subsistence on absence, or subsistence on substitutes. substitute part of a substitute whole.
we are all your substitute holes.
staring at myself in a mirror inside another mirror, entering these mirrors, accidentally scraping myself with these mirrors, touching myself
through these mirrors, a labyrinth of mirrors, a language of mirrors,
a labyrinth of chaos, yellow finches, finding no exit,
and there is no exit from the labyrinth of mirrors.
canceled TV show: errant body cloaked in wires. TV bra, TV cello, static, concerto, radio silence, rainbow
of a lost transmission.
your body is my search engine.
I want to question it.
on the LCD screen, I offer light but no breath. I author breadth but no depth.
catch me drawing a portrait of these deformities
on my tablet with my guilty fingerprints.
catch me drawing you.
to say I miss you: I can’t. my phone has buried my mouth.
I am afraid of instant messages. most times it’s unbearable.
I prefer the slow, gradual ones.
sex is the pulse of a burning screen wrapped around your body. sex is the living sculpture. with this video monitor appendage, you are a minotaur, buff
and brief. the video bra cages your breasts. the video penis makes you a machine.
monitor lizards crawl over the powerpoints.
then the bit about repulsion: about the monstrous static of sexual scripts. I don’t remember submitting to that. I sit with a man at a café table in central park.
he doesn’t see my story. he threshes i
t, bends it, sucks it in like a vampire.
pretty girls and money, the trouble with loneliness.
always the ugly suits, fingernail clippings. thirsty mouths.
I don’t remember tasting this tongue like a dead fish inside my mouth,
closing my eyes, scalding.
utopian laser TV station: I record myself reborn. I record myself unborn. I record myself a stillbirth.
(absence) plant your nightmares in the soil / plant your wounds in the dirt
(rebirth) they sprout into birds of paradise / they sprout into trees
love is the refraction, pellucid as bone. if I can locate the gleam on the other side of the planet. the one who sees me whole. the one who honors my narrative,
does not bend it, thresh it, obstruct or smash it. this I yearn. if I could plug my
senses into that socket. let there be light.
Li Tai Po
After Li Po and Janelle Monáe
You, robot-poet, hold four texts: pretext, subtext,
context, metatext.
O hexarchy of dead kings, the Monarch seat is empty.
I can’t see much through this stereoscope: only frozen
earth. A tundra, a wasteland, an orchard of scorched trees.
I wait for your poems, like baroque lasers.
I bring you offerings: yuzu, pear, mission fig.
Dear robot, dear poet: I long to meet you in a new world
where we can live our midsummer’s cyberpunk dream.
Can we write this text together, rewrite history, rewrite his story,
sneak past the auditorium of ruins—
your body of ten antique TV cabinets: antique radio cabinet / Korean printing block
Korean palimpsest / eleven color televisions
Let’s recite a cento: Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,
We suffered a rare, rare blue
I think that it is frost upon the ground.
So much hurt / I raise my head and look at the bright moon
On this earth / I lower my head and think of home.
Or two: Into a valley of a thousand bright flowers,
all the birds and the bees, dancing with the freaks in the trees,
watch the water turn to wine
with the willow-flakes, falling like snow, and the vermilion
girls getting drunk about sunset
outer space and out your mind
and the waters, a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows
Will you be electric sheep, electric ladies, will you sleep?
There is no end of things in the heart.
My robot, my poet, ancient and erstwhile and now
and f—ever,
the best mischief: to be stranded in this electricity with you.
Mall of the Electronic Superhighway
travelers in the night, united states of wanderers—
welcome to the fluxus department store, your end of the world stop for your road trip
you can wander these future stalls, where our hungry souls touch each other
you can buy makeup made of mica, android pixels, space vectors, HD display:
transform your face into a glowing orb
transform your face into a projection of the night
mall of the universe, mall of the multiverse, mall of wave-function collapse—
you can meet and greet with the holographic dead.
read james baldwin at the mall, he comes to life and whispers:
“the old survivals of my generation will be wiped out.
western civilization is heading for an apocalypse.”
if this doesn’t comfort you, whitney, michael, and prince
will sing in your ear. you will weep together. you will not be alone.
it really is a miracle—that the electronic mall can curate an apocalypse
into a beautiful, fashionable memory the texture of the silk
you can’t afford.
in 2005, a year before nam june paik died, the biggest mall in the world
was built in dongba, china, and now it is an empty megalopolis,
all the storefronts foreclosed, ghosts of dead enterprises
rippling the manmade dam. no one operates the machinery.
once I fell in love in an empty mall.
twice I fell in love in an empty parking lot.
the surveillance camera records our prettiest nightmares. silkscreen >
touchscreen > monitor screen > tv screen. dreams whose warm
light baptizes you. disbelief, disappear.
go ahead: believe in miracles. believe in beauty and the universe and the future.
our gear will transport you when you’re sleeping. somnambulating shoes
so your body doesn’t have to.
sprint a thousand miles in your future kicks, alison brand atom shoes.
ditch your car in a ditch, with its sad steering wheel, its sad locomotion.
you can travel from harlem to wall street in fifteen minutes with these tiny
atomic engines. you can be naked in the city, and no one
will see you through how fast you’re flying.
The Death of Robot K-456
The robot opera sends us to space.
We look down. We don’t miss our lovers.
Instead, we’re nostalgic for gravity.
Permutations of ground: cement,
grass, parquet, soil. Premonitions
of sound: crash, pow, shriek.
Down on earth, we saw the tragedy—
the machine cracked under slow wheels.
His cords and his bowels, twitching.
The machine defecated on itself,
spilling all its beans. We looked away.
In another time, we would mourn.
But for now, we hover, above patrols,
above surveillance, above the borders,
like migrants to a black hole, a Xanadu
where no one dreams of finding us.
Even if we cut off a limb or leap over
an edge, no eyes watch us. We are free.
Oculus
After Solange, “An Ode To”
May. Pale peonies on the sills.
From the steps of the New York Public Library,
we hailed a taxi uptown, past the lions—
past Patience,
past Fortitude,
to the Guggenheim, where we sat, lotus
style, wearing head-to-toe white
with a sea of others.
They checked our phones and cameras at the door.
All of us, a cloud condensing
into ourselves. Our forms.
All city, all air, all sugar, all brown,
all gold—have a seat,
this is a cause for celebration.
In many places in the world, it could have been
a funeral. She appeared and she sang,
descending down the spirals,
the golden nautilus—past
the skeletal Giacomettis, past the Duchamps,
past the Modiglianis, under the centripetal glass—
a single layer in the interior. None of our names
were there. But our bodies. There they were.
The most photographed place on earth
was where we sat
without cameras
except our eyes and our faces.
It was spring. I was still hopeful. In my chest, what beat
was cracked but still salvageable. Cherry petals
strewing my shoulders, a whir. Cranes
in the sky, cranes threaded on my dress.
Golden tubas warbled
as she danced. We looked up, and there was
a skylight, a dome—the oculus
at the center, through which all fears still burned
and awed.
Resurrection
In the autumn I moved to New York,
I recognized her face all over the subway
stations�
��pearls around her throat, she poses
for her immigration papers. In 1924, the only
Americans required to carry identity cards
were ethnically Chinese—the first photo IDs,
red targets on the head of every man, woman,
child, infant, movie star. Like pallbearers,
they lined up to get their pictures taken: full-face
view, direct camera gaze, no smiles, ears showing,
in silver gelatin. A rogue’s gallery of Chinese
exclusion. The subway poster doesn’t name
her—though it does mention her ethnicity,
and the name of the New-York Historical
Society exhibition: Exclusion/Inclusion.
Soon, when I felt alone in this city, her face
would peer at me from behind seats, turnstiles,
heads, and headphones, and I swear she wore
a smile only I could see. Sometimes my face
aligned with hers, and we would rush past
the bewildered lives before us—hers, gone
the year my mother was born, and mine,
a belt of ghosts trailing after my scent.
In the same aboveground train, in the same
city where slain umbrellas travel across
the Hudson River, we live and live.
I’ve left my landline so ghosts can’t dial me
at midnight with the hunger of hunters
anymore. I’m so hungry I gnaw at light.
It tunnels from the shadows, an exhausting
hope. I know this hunger tormented her too.
It haunted her through her years in L.A., Paris,
and New York, the parties she went to, people
she met—Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston,
Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein. It haunts
her expression still, on the 6 train, Grand
Central station, an echo chamber behind
her eyes. But dear universe: if I can recognize
her face under this tunnel of endless shadows
against the luminance of all that is extinct
and oncoming, then I am not a stranger here.
Notes
“Oculus” in the first section is based on the story of a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram in 2014.