Marbles, cordial glasses, soap bubbles reflect the sensual world, while around my navel there is concentrated a circular2 red rash. I am extremely interested in failure. The beginning of art lies next to the body, transitive fissure, with high waves immediately behind. Sun, sea, severance, and people in the street, she cries, what deviance from curved diameter and straightest line.
The intimate scale of childhood also attracts hourglass, clay pipe, and intelligent collaborators. Others may prefer columns of a smaller diameter,3 but a Mediterranean garden surrounds my Northern mind. I feel her tiny wet tongue licking my finger. The ocean, she cries, glare, wind, salt, scattered islands, limited income, it’s not encounters in cabins, but chains of logical relations that compel proof.
Most remarkable, the presence of the egg. In a sea so calm not the slightest tremor suggested the tides of sexual impulse threatening the individual. The fact that we dream night after night surpasses the most heated fantasies. What lavish, wasteful refraction of light, she cries, deserted planets, desperate obsessions, do I have to invent everything all over, and without auxiliary concepts like the curvature4 of a surface?
1 to define with accuracy, a story on shards
2 perfect, obs., unease
3 through the center, and you must feed
4 the invisible if it exists across my eye
Ice Box
He is fascinated by the parallel seams in the ship’s sails, the threads of the web. But I am not some kind of psychic casualty, I simply want to please.1 You know, in the winter of 1835, in Russia, Marie Taglioni’s carriage was halted by a highwayman? A barely perceptible, she sighs, an uncertain, and how he approached with bare feet along a line of perspective without being able to, without touching—and yet we stay on the surface and do not measure the real diameter through the inner parts.
If he dreams of a wooden ball with a long needle sticking through it no one in America knows more coldly accurate. The whiteness of the ship is everywhere, a short-time slice against tidal connotations. The enchanting creature was commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther’s skin spread over the snow. Intimate turn, the unmarried moon, she sighs, so foreign, stunned senses, I panic, take flight as if the third dimension alone could tell crooked from straight.
While fervently admiring healthier possibilities, I take my florid face out of the menu and feel my armpits growing dry. What is the relation between the large particles we call elephants,2 and the extremely small ones we call molecules3 or fading passage? This is the counsel of despair, snow between stars. And years later, she sighs, a disappointed smile, our eyes for a, as if his double, the feeling of it gone, and the ratio changed between circumference and diameter.
He had a special star-shaped box made the more menacing. I resented this and rearranged the napkin in my lap. The motivation of biological mechanism4 falls short of the Puritan plan. Severely ship-shape she placed a piece of ice among her jewels. First thought on waking, she sighs, dust whirling in slant light, the excessive whispers, the flight of time, but the curvature of space is the more flagrant structure.
1 the light of other days
2 elect: electrons, shimmering relation
3 feel deeply and a hint of atmosphere on sphere
4 atoms tropical, our fading passage
Jack in the Box
in memory of John Hawkes
The enemies of the novel are plot, character, setting, and theme, you said, but the marquise still goes out at five, and at the stern where we were standing together but separated, it was impossible to hear the engines of the ship. The alternatives of free1 will and causal determination do not exclude each other, though problems arise if we look for truth where definitions are needed. I heard the sudden hiss of urine. Fist through glass, you said, her legs straddling the railing, underclothes ravaged from an invisible clothesline, pollen, hollows of the body, such tension.
Everything is dangerous, you said, everything tentative, nothing certain, life jackets engulfed by crosscurrents, the thrashing of the great blades just below us and innocence in extremis. There would be contradiction only if a man could see through himself,2 which is as impossible as knowing if a measuring rod retains its length when taken to another planet. Suppose instead we enter a period of midriffs, of second skins. Ja-Ja-Ja, you said quickly, the eye, bodily, the despotism of the uterine, odorous, earthen, vulval, convolvaceous, saline, mutable, seductive.
Can you rivet your eyes on the close-by,3 we asked, and yet turn them toward hemispheric distances, can you crowd a spare sentence with absence and spare it? The question whether causality applies to actions of your own will is a travesty as pure and dark as a blackened negative. It’s dreadful, dreadful no one has yet seen a wavelength. Of speech or suffocation, you said, white cadences, cold fire, hair like a dense furry tongue, natural lace, beetle leg, scar, a field of blood.
The enemy of pleasure, you said, is the curve of probability and flat exit. And so science must acknowledge singing in the wake of pubic darkness. A different geometry would obtain if we had rigid bodies. No turning back of time, you4 said, unbearable sunlight, gunmetal ocean, Irish eye, glass splinters, a dream of flying and falling, a deep leap into, while the rest of us stand here, stabbed with sorrow.
1 Cf. fall, hold, lance, wheeling, dom, for all
2 and smoke five Dutch cigars
3 a single fly, buzzing
4 knife, daw, rabbit, straws, o’-lantern, in the pulpit, in the box
Letter Box
for Claude Royet-Journoud
To encounter anything fully is to touch its absence, but she could not possibly wish me to kiss her lips. There’s something physical about the middle of a book, a locus of hunger.1 Just as the passion for seeing survives on its own sweetness, defining reverses concepts to other concepts. “Transparency of nerve,” he writes, “smallness of talk, a green unruffled marble, obsessed with contiguity, periphery of language, grammar of margins.”
But the center is always dissolving, hole nailed through line, sentence, and the demon of analogy. The slightness of her body was brushing against all the bulk of mine. This coordination is not arbitrary and may be explained, like the erratic course of certain stars, by a dark companion with strong gravitational pull. “Mouth open to earth,” he writes (but will it nourish?) “obsessed with deviation, hand caught in a page, the body to come, got no tongue, will fall, the crack opens, abrupt obstacle.”2
Something to upset the balance: a negative dungheap, a beast dismembered on the spot. The smallest alteration in the world of physical objects, like this photograph placed on my suitcase, produces the severest and most frightening transformations of the infinite. Whereas in physical knowledge, concepts are coordinated with particular things in a testable relation.3 “He starts small,” he writes, “hunts for his tongue, daylight doggedly, takes the place of childhood, time at a loss, hitch in the language, leaves the boat, rushes into”
A different relation to knowing, the pursuit cannot define the object of pursuit even if the road is lit by a crystal cage, lighthouse, bright red plumage, high noon. I was not surprised to be alone.4 Certain coordinative definitions must be determined before we measure the indivisible. “I understand something quite different,” he writes, “moves forward in the dark, defines the margin, bulks large in what, as if nothing, to no one.”
1 “cramped sun”
2 “the native speech
of”
3 “he sees a spot coming closer to where he’s waiting for it”
4 “cold reaches its target”
love, like pronouns
from Impossible Object
Initial Conditions
If thought is, from the beginning, divorced from itself, a picnic may fade before the first bottle is pulled from the basket. If you ask: Do I know what I am holding? I will offer it to you.
If a father touches the neck of his son’s girlfriend, he’ll fall into a Freudian sleep. If he intends to, has his palm already felt her gasp?
If you think: A young girl’s a vacuum, you mean to rush and fill it. If you ask: Why? one whole chapter of life may close.
Perhaps we can’t ask these questions. The traffic moves too fast. We can only throw up our arms. As in a wind tunnel?
The question: Why? is most nostalgic. In twenty years of marriage one might be in love with one another. Or with another?
Can we utter sounds and mean: young girl’s neck? With one foot slightly in front of the other? Say: Come have a sandwich, and mean: best to slow down?
Could we say that listening to familiar words is quite different from a girl seen both full-face and from the side at once? Like Cleopatra? If we agree that “Have a sandwich” means “best to slow down,” can we separate marriage to her brother at eleven from being carried in to Caesar in a carpet?
Either we don’t move or much follows. The history of the universe predicated on ten seconds of initial turbulence?
If you ask: Where did it all begin? do I answer with a cry of distress, the tip of a triangle, a plan to picnic, a sudden toothache?
If in doubt I will offer it to you.
Object Relations
How differently our words drift across danger or rush toward a lover. Meaning married to always different coordinates. I married a foreigner, in one sense. In another, no word fits with another.
Your smile breaks from any point of your body. I need a more complicated picture. This falls among crow’s-feet and bears no fruit. What did it try? Replace your body?
My doubts stand in a circle around us. Like visitors around the well under the house. They advise to board it up. Dampness unhinges. And decay of fish.
It would mean all night. Hands scraped on rough surmise. Remembering I too am a monster.
The objective character of statements has shifted to relations. Boiling water and the length of a column of mercury? Or that you mean me when you say “you?”
When I say “we were standing close” am I saying: we were not touching? To replace a laugh. Which could be described as: wish, yellowish, fish.
What if there is no well? What if language is not communication? If facts refuse coordinates? Detachment vanishes, as if thinned.
Meaning you consists in thinking of your body. There are no fish in my mouth.
We Will Always Ask, What Happened?
Imagine a witch in the form of a naked girl. Now say her name. Is it foreign? Was the idea of the witch complete before you named the girl? Did you go down a passage that does not exist toward a well of dark water?
Your mind makes small rudimentary motions. Because the joke is against it? Because it does not know which way to turn and keeps reviewing the field of possible action? Aches? Actresses?
I hear you sighing. Intention is neither an emotion nor yet lip-synch of longing. It is not a state of consciousness. It does not have genuine duration. I say, are you alright? Can you have an intention intermittently? abandon it like a soldier paralyzed the moment before battle? and resume it?
Could I order you to understand this sentence? just as I could tell you to run forward? into the fire?
Would the understanding cast a shadow on the wall even though a premonition is not a bullet hole?
One symptom is that space is forced into a mirror. As if the event stood in readiness behind the silver. You move your hand, and it goes the other way. Then the earth opens up and you slide down your darkest desires.
Witches were killed by fire, by water, by hanging in air, burying in earth, by asphyxiation, penetration, striking, piercing, crushing in a thousand and one ways.
What was that name you gave her?
Isomorphic Fields
Thinking is not an accompaniment. The fluttering of eyes and long pauses of lovers. Your attention wanders with your hands.
Unhinges the confines, and your name, trembling slightly, turns membrane. No other space permits such a glow from under the skin. As in a Florentine painting?
If my idea of thinking is modeled on breath does it imply opening my lips? Moving with the wind?
We lean toward each other and don’t know what will come of it. Like an electric charge? The pull is toward loss of balance. The word “pull” already throws its shadow toward other uses, other possible attachments.
If you do not look at your feet you begin to sway. As in a gale? So while I push my image toward marriage, you stand with your legs apart and wear dark glasses.
My image, on its way to the thalamus, gives off branches forming a net. For further entanglement?
A high wind of thought? Particles with velocity but no location? Or is it geometry itself is altered next to a warm body?
The way you seem to hover above your seat. Like a hummingbird? And our gestures remain hanging, careless of the fact that visual evidence compels belief.
Is love impossible while we are in it? Do we hope it might be? Am I using words to say something quite different?
Intentionalities
My hand moves along your thigh. When we describe intentions, is the ventriloquist taken over by the dummy? Or pretending to be a ghost?
Instead of “I meant you,” I could say, “We walked through wet streets, toward a dark well.” But could I speak of you this way? And why does it sound wrong to say “I meant you by pulling away?” Like lovers caught in headlights?
If I talk of you it connects me to you. By an infinite of betweens, not by touching you in the dark. Touch is the sense I place outside myself for you to ride.
When I mean you I may show it — if we stand close — by putting my head on your shoulder. You can show you understand by describing the well under the trap door. What will you say? Don’t be frightened?
The feeling I have when I mean you draws an arc of strength between my hips and the small of my back. It doesn’t follow that “meaning you” is being exhilarated by terror. Of course not, you say: We need a red thread to run through, but it’s entangled with space, form, future. Is this true?
It would be wrong to say that meaning you stands for a forgotten part of myself, a treatise on labyrinths, a path leading nowhere. Am I living in a shell where the sea comes in along with its sound? And drowns us?
I was speaking of you because I wanted to think about you. “I wanted” does not describe a general before battle. Nor, on the other hand, a ship heading for shipwreck. There is no way to decide whether this is an autobiography or a manifesto.
Enhanced Density
Should it worry me that thought, in my sentences, seems never wholly present at any one moment? Let alone love, in my life? Even my skin has no precise shape, that is unless touched. By clothes?
There seems a brownish mist under construction. From forest fires?
My feeling for you seems to flow (like traffic?) under my skin. I want it to break through the pores and touch you. Inflict wounds so small you don’t know what’s killing you?
The way a word can pierce? Because of the use it has had in your life? Because it comes out of a deep well? Beca
use war follows the opening of mouths?
You are never in front of me, like an object. And if I try to hold you sideways the melody slips away leaving a single note. Like a reflection in a shifting mirror? A phoneme escaping between the sutures of my accent?
What can I do but let my thoughts roam in the field around a word. The way desire roams through my body? It’s called the meaning of the word because we cannot touch the groundwater in any other way.
Are we making an object when we make love? Do we hope it’ll stay in front of us and allow us to observe it?
It may not be enough to look at a surface I love. Or parts adjacent.
from Slowing Perceptions
Photo
for Alan Lebowitz
definitions
abbreviate your face
you walk into abandoned
reasons
directly, driftwood
some trick of the current
eyes strange
like natural processes
openwork
between balance and precarious
a dancer
off a step
Direction: Opposite
Gap Gardening Page 12