A dialogue
between Ammiel Alcalay and Kate Tarlow Morgan,
writer, choreographer, teacher, and author of Circles & Boundaries
KTM:On the making of a book: As a writer of books what was different for you about the making of this book as opposed to others that you have written? Why? How?
AA:The book consists mainly of poems written from around 1974 to 1978 with a very few later ones, going into the 1980s. And the visual work my photos date from the early 1970s, along with the notebook pages and other ephemera, also from roughly the same period. I think I've had a real tendency to be dutiful, perhaps not always to the same thing but as a quality. And because of that I've maybe left behind or not paid enough attention to other things I like to do. I was very involved in black and white photography from the time I was a teenager, developing, printing, the whole thing, and at a certain period I took a lot of photographs that just sat for years in boxes, envelopes, folders, and I wanted to activate them somehow since I think they express something very particular, both about me and the time they were taken. So the first thing different about this book is that I've been able to actually make it, shape it visually, and create a kind of journey through various materials that, in retrospect, were very primary for me the photos, the date books with events noted, the notes on reading or from various studies. So things go in two directions: I'm looking for the grooves in the paths I laid down more than 35 years ago, but hoping I've left clues in this new juxtaposition of those materials that might lead elsewhere. My work has always been very rhythmic, whether in poetry or prose or even scholarship, and the possibility of adding another layer to the rhythm, a visual layer, was irresistible and important for me. As far as the how, it involved continual sifting, a sifting that I've found is a constant process with me: looking through old writing, rereading it, moving it around, putting it in a different environment, seeing what happens to a fragment, and so forth. Once I added the notebooks and the photos this process got very close to my ideal way of composing, in which the inclusion of one element shifts the balance and I am, in a sense, trying to manage the tides, see which way I can sway something before letting it flow in one direction or another.
KTM:So in the rhythm of sifting, adding the notebooks and photos got very close to an ideal way of composing and the actual body of the book becomes the picture of the way that you work. Elements shift and manage the tides. I too have been greatly inspired by photography from my childhood connection with Diane Arbus to my work with Marvin Israel and Aperture publications to Walker Evans' famed Subway project in the late thirties. Like you, I was greatly shored up by a canon of poets that you and I encountered in the REAL during our twenties. These poets placed a kind of brand on us that preserved our impressionable natures and too, set us up for years of searching and wandering which I think is my version of riding the tides. Where we differ is in our work lives, but our aesthetic is the same. Deeply so. And might I add viz. Rhythm, that there is learned aspect of rhythm, something one learns early on, as a way of listening, especially.
What inspired you to write this book?
AA:A combination of many things: I know at root it had something to do with work that we did together on your book Circles & Boundaries (Factory School, 2011). There was something I felt in looking at your pieces from the 1970s and 1980s that suddenly made me feel like I was returning to a place I actually knew, that a lot of the writing I had
been reading from that period seemed almost imposed, or foreign to me. And suddenly here I was, like home. That sent me deeper into writers who had themselves become somewhat historicized or put in a context outside my very personal experience of them (I think of Charles Olson, centrally, but also Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Creeley, Niedecker, and so many others I feel akin to), and it brought me closer to my own education, my own upbringing, in which, for various reasons, Olson had been a close family friend, in which all those now coveted books and little magazines were very familiar to me because they were on our shelves at home. At the same time, I'd been working very closely with Fred Dewey on making out of a collection of pieces a more cohesive book of essays ( A Little History ) that combined my experiences in the cultural politics of other places with my very unique sense of American poetry and poetics. That was a very rigorous and exacting process which, again, made me want to go back to sources in my own work. I mean, I'm supposedly a poet but I actually don't write that much poetry. Yet it remains primary what does that mean? Working on Circles & Boundaries made me think about how your own work has taken so many different forms, and since the forms were so different (dance, choreography, painting), I think I got some parallel sense of what it means to locate myself in my own sources, and wanting to have my work take part in modes other than words.
TO BE CONTINUED
Kazim Ali
Portland Journal: 11/23/10
Craig over the table of light tracing so carefully stroke by stroke his calligraphed patterns.
By the window condensed air trickling down in streams.
Cold outside but not for me, raised cold in the Canadian north.
Portland: named for a city in the east, another city on the water. The last time I was here I was in the world of politics, not poetry.
Tonight my friends from those years and years past will join us.
To see them again will remind me of who am I now, who I was then.
Any difference in these is the same as the difference in the ground or the water in air unraveling.
Yesterday Craig took me the bookstore, a temple for us both, where we spent hours.
And then, drowned or high with pleasure, the most exciting part: an ordinary life: errands to pick up his jacket, to the bank, to drink coffee, to pick up ink from the art supply store.
Somewhere along our trip my bag disappeared, my new notebook inside plus my new manuscript of poetry, the one about the river cloud sutra, with all of my notes and corrections.
River cloud: the story of how the water of a river will condense into the air making a snaking cloud that runs along the length of the river.
How we all transform.
Portland: the flocks. Murder of crows perching angry on the car screaming.
My bag with its notebook of poetry and my annotated manuscript perches secret in the check-shelves at Powell's.
French for secret: caché.
The secrets I told and then the other ones, the ones I wrote on my skin in calligraphed letters, the wet ink licking me stroke by stroke.
Portland, November 1995: M. and I climb up the stairwell of the hotel and then out the window and up the little ladder to the roof. It's a full moon and cold. He lies back on the stony roof and lifts his shirt over his head, pulling his jeans off but keeping his black silk long johns on.
Skin on skin we warm ourselves, my dusk-dark skin hot with sin, his moon-bright skin cold and smooth against me.
An ache of emptiness in me the next morning when I turned on the television in the hotel room to see news of Rabin's murder.
Rabin remind me, remind me what light comes through me, what it seizes on its journey through the window, through the table, into the lines of the calligraphed letters, line of the horizon at the shore, line of light, lying across the table, lines in my palm.
And dead this morning to suddenly realize what's missing what's inside.
Last night there was a verse Craig wrote into the surface of the water, but looking in the Book it seemed one word was transcribed differently, a word we didn't know.
I wrote it in the condensed air on the pane of glass.
Am I cold inside still, wondering where M. is today, wondering how poetry came out of me, wondering how I will find my way through the streets back to the bookstore to claim my secret bag, the poems and notes written inside.
Sun yellow but still cold, the dusting of snow yet unmelted.
The woman on the bookstore asks me to describe my scarf and I can't because I haven't looked at it carefully enough.
The story Craig told about the past left out his sister. What do I leave out or is it just that there are things we haven't yet looked at, stories we am not yet ready to tell?
The leaves are nearly all fallen from the trees. Some will not fall after all but will freeze red on the branch.
Boulder Journal
Traveling down two thousand feet or more from mountains to mountains.
Mountains that themselves were thrust up from the ocean floor.
We are each one another and an other another seen and scene seen.
Afraid the air that thins and I reach to breathe.
Bhanu on the phone gives me a map and I wander.
Silence turning forty.
Was I a refugee in the stone house, wishing only to transform.
I was gleeful to be there, to have finally found it, past the great bone thrust in the earth, marking not death but eternity.
Beth told me about the town around the tragedy, who were the people who were left after the story was told.
I found Laramie a strange place but not as cold as I expected. In Peter’'s house a big church choir chair that used to belong to Craig Arnold. I stumble through some ridiculous speech about kismet .
Craig had eros tattooed on one arm and psyche on the other.
Aspens along the trail groaning in the wind.
On the trail, snow in our hair. The others wanted to turn back but I wanted to go on.
Bhanu sends Jarvis the maker of maps to pick me up from my hotel to walk over to the small Naropa campus, amid the metal shacks and buildings.
Strangely I am reminded of a military installation. The sycamore under which Allen Ginsberg taught; the courtyard above which the flat irons loomed.
Says Bhanu: the campus was placed here because Chogyam Trungpa wanted the mountains to reflect back to us everything about our selves we cannot bear to face.
What is it I cannot bear to face?
On the television talk show the woman asks, “"What is the one thing you hate about yourself?”"
And I immediately dizzy because I had so many different answers: my body, my mind, my smile, my mouth.
I could go on.
Mapped my way to myself, mapped my body and its weaknesses. Mapped the city up and down, by walking and then by driving. Every plane and hotel room the same but perhaps for one small element or another.
A city moves through time. George Perec disproved it though in attempts at exhausting a place in paris and in fact shows that cities are immediate, floating on top of the table of history as it moves.
A map has a somatic quality—ways of performing a map or performing a book.
Syllabus for a course on cities:
Paris France , Gertrude Stein
Paris When Its Naked , Etel Adnan
Bright Felon
The Perec book
Later Bhanu came and I had a headache and so went to the oxygen bar and the man put tubes in our nostrils and turned the tanks on. Bhanu blissed out, leaning back against the sofa while I got hyper alert, my lungs and torso and stomach and abdomen filling, filling, filling with breath.
Everywhere I walked with Jarvis I tried to take photographs of the mountains looming overhead to show this little town at the foot of the Rockies.
But some things do not translate, some places cannot be mapped.
Rae Armantrout
Remainder
String of empty offices,
illuminated, festive?
*
People exist
to attach importance.
I practice
high speed de-
selection.
The difference
between nothing
and nothingness
is existence.
My dead friends
don't visit me;
they say I didn't
know them.
You are cautious
indolent, stubborn,
skeptical, gentle, tense.
At sunset, pigeons
practice synchronized flying.
Thus "are" becomes "is,"
"is" becomes "ness."
Let the burning spill
extend
L. S. Asekoff
Horses Galloping in Their Sleep
Honey & smoke.
The redness of crows.
You shake a stick at shadows.
A snake shucks its skin.
Someone has black-boxed
The invisible hands.
Shocked
Out of ourselves,
Into the world,
We bend the knee before
The last I-don't-know --
God's God.
Three Break Dances
He practices his latest moves
In a mirror:
Techno-Cardia
Grand Mal Seizure
Morning Meltdown or
Mr. Coffee Goes Psycho!
Killer Concerto –--
The Nervous Breakdown
Of a Baby Grand.
~
Wendy Babiak
In Defense of Useful Poetry
I hadn't planned to be an apologist for engaged poetics, but after seeing a comment at Ron Silliman's blog calling the folks at Poets for Living Waters (a group I'm happy to be counted among) "loudmouths," and having heard reiterated ad nauseum the bromide that "poetry makes nothing happen" (a phrase well set in the jewel of Auden's poem, but usually clunky in discussions of poetics), and further having the opportunity to write something for -esque's ifesto, here I go.
The notion that poetry makes nothing happen seems to arise to counter the notion Shelley put forth that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And surely that's hyperbole. Not to mention too heavy a burden to take on, sitting down to scribble on a blank page. If any thoughtful person took it to heart she'd never write another couplet. But wait. Do we really believe poetry makes NOTHING happen? James Baldwin said, "You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world...The world changes according to how people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way...people look at reality, then you can change it." So it seems it might be worth a try to write poems that do that, that change the way people see their reality. As usual, the middle way between the two extremes, "poetry makes nothing happen" and "poets are the unacknowledged [and unelected!] legislators of the world," arrives at the truth.
That said, I have to admit, being the judge of a monthly poetry contest, that attempting to engage the big issues, the things a poet might want to change (read: enlarge) the reader's perspective on, like politics, ecology, religion or philosophy, runs the risk of making very bad poems. It's too easy to fall into didactic preaching, or ranting, or sap (mea culpa to all three! I should burn my notebooks). But lots of things worth doing are hard. And writing poems that attempt to be "art for art's sake" is no more a guarantee of making artful poems than any other approach. But the right chickens with the right wheelbarrows can get your message across. Which isn't to say a poet should be afraid to just say it. Auden certainly did. Just say it, that is. Witness the poem from which the above is taken.
I once wrote a poem that dealt with something that for me was occupying a lot of my mental space. Surviving on a resident's stipend, with two small children, I had chosen to buy the front-loading washer (to save something like 40 gallons of water per load!) even though it meant that I had to wait a while before we could afford a dryer to go with it. I installed, in the middle of a sunny spot in the back yard, a nifty collapsible clothes-line that met our needs so well I ended up thinking, who needs a dryer? Using all that electricity when the sun can do a fine job. Until, at a certain point in early summer, hordes of tiny celadon grasshoppers decided to try out their mandibles on my calves every time I went out to hang the wash. The ones that survived being brushed off --– they popped with distressing ease! –-- grew up to make lace of my roses' leaves. Pesticides were unthinkable, but tempting. So I wrote a poem called "Dilemma," trying to decide which would be the lesser evil, using the dryer or spraying the yard. Because to me, it was a dilemma. Feedback online included a comment from one woman who couldn't believe anyone would be so foolish as to take these things so seriously. So I changed the title to "Fool's Dilemma." And understood that it would be a while before that poem would make sense to most readers.
If one is a thoughtful person, considering the repercussions of one's choices, I don't know how one could not engage these issues in one's poetry. Looking around oneself, between ecological collapse, government corruption, religious misunderstandings leading to violence, patriarchy poisoning all our relationships, and pollution poisoning everything else, how could one NOT find these things bubbling up in one's poems? Whether or not any given poem turns out to be useful will depend on the craft of the poet and the receptivity of the reader. But let's lay to rest the idea that poetry doesn't make anything happen. It may not make the things happen we want to make happen as quickly as we'd like to see them happen, but that's not the same thing as making nothing happen. Poetry runs like a stream parallel to life, and it's there, always, for everyone to dip a hand in and refresh themselves.
So how best to offer them a drink that does that, that allows them to return to the challenge renewed, perhaps even better equipped? Craft, yes. And intention. Do the words flow from a loving place? Make of your heart a compass, and make north compassion, east, wisdom, south, humility, and west, courage. In another old poem, "Poetry: A Syllabus," I say, "Park your carcass right here and we'll chat/about poetry and how we can live it." To write a poem that speaks deeply from one human being to another (and I think all useful poems do that) one has to live fully as a human being, which means humanely. Isn't that the news we hope people get from our poems? It is for me. I guess I'm with the visual artist Hogarth, who, when chastised for creating what some called propaganda instead of art (his famous "Beer Street" hangs in my breakfast nook as a reminder), said that he'd rather lessen humanity's suffering even a little than have created the works of Vermeer. A little humor never hurts, either. I opted for the dryer, btw.
Time Contemplating Suicide
No, I don't mean I've been spending time
imagining myself hanging from the rafters
or my blood seeping into bathwater like red paint
no, I mean, imagine Time as a woman
who's just had enough of our suffering
her watching the millennia trickle by
and us never getting any better at seeing
that she'll nearly stop for us to witness
the flutter of a hummingbird, the breeze
through an old rose's petals, or how cottonwood seeds
can float almost suspended midair in the stillness
of a summer afternoon, and instead just bitching
about how she flies when we're spending her
fruitlessly, and the way near the end of our lives
we realize how much of her we've wasted.
And so the august lady contemplates her end
imagines the apocalypse, when she'll fold
in on herself, bringing the alpha to the omega
letting the great snake finally swallow
his own tail. And what will we know?
Her secrets will die with her, her grave
lonelier than anything on or under earth
no one to sing dirges or send prayers skyward
no sky left, even, just ashes, everywhere
and no living flesh to wear them.
Wartime Generations
In its watery language the bay intimates
the coming nocturnal dismay. A child
watches her grandmother press fry bread
between weathered hands while her mother
watches the girl's fingers obsess with the frayed
hem of her dress.
All the mother wants is for her daughter
to discover and become her truest self.
She can't imagine the defeats she will suffer
the dead ends that will lure her, but houseflies
on the curtain remind her of the dark forces
that impel the rising tide.
She knows stones at the water's edge are slick
with a century's scum. Dead leaves cling
to the wet roof and walls, the garden fence
littering the landscape with this dismal confetti
leavings of the clouds' parade. When did life
become a freak show in this
circus of the absurd? She wonders what is necessary:
the crab, the water, the stones, the wind, the scum. All
these vagrants wandering makeshift realities, and poets
playing with histories, brandishing dangerous vagaries
juggling language like so many burning batons.
Yes, she sighs, even those.
Aaron Belz
A Horse, Oh Gross
They called this a one-trick pony
As though that were a strike against it.
I said well it's only one strike against it,
And doesn't it kind of depend on which trick?
I have a horse that poops million dollar bills,
And that's really all it does, and you know what?
They called this beast Simon, or Sidoh; also
They called it Alice in Chechnya, which
I think was a reference to Alice in Chains,
And it was in this way that I began to see
The downside of having only one trick.
Man that reporter's glasses were thick .
And we as Americans really have no idea
What's gone on over there even lately
Just as we as adults have no idea
Who's who in Halo or Zelda. It's ongoing.
It's the price we pay, and it seems reasonable
When it's peace of mind that's at stake.
Badly Drawn Poet
Sky white; somersaults going on.
You open up a lemonade stand
and say, "I have pain
down deep in my shoe.
Is there nothing we could do?"
Clouds pass, earth turning—
I feel it, it's my heart that's burning.
You went to buy Tevas
while I stirred the stew.
Is there nothing we could do?
Houses flock the world's surface
as though our lives do have purpose,
but we don't know
what it is, so I ask you,
"Is there nothing we could do?"
I hear a crunch. It's our Honda
bumping into the neighbors' Honda.
Hard to distinguish
false from true:
You blow in, arms full of bags—--
I picture them as old sea-hags,
and who am I seeing
as their tired queen?
(Is there nothing we could do?)
Caroline Bergvall
About Foam
from Meddle English
A paradoxical pleasure is both solid nor liquid that can be wet, dry,
hard, soft, expansive, changeable. An intricate and hollow polymer
network is energy transport at its finest, a compound structure of
gas nor bubbles nor fans. Once hardened it can be tough to break.
What binds. A gel for instance can envelop like an elastic skin. It
can be prodded distorted pushed about, yet will bounce back and
hold its shape. Under greater surface tension, it breaks into liquid
starts to flow. A resilient responsive substance is mysterious, swift
to morph, ever present in all that is cellular and delivers a shake-up.
It supports the many invisible synthetic demands of industry-
dependent living from insulants to binding agents. It has naturally
assisted in the solidification of soap, the rising of bread, egg whites,
and soufflés since the 17th century. The old ponce pumice stone
works on hard callouses. Once exploded it can be hard as ash.
The skeletal containers of dead sponges were used by Romans
for brushes and combs, and for cups. Proust's memory work is
foamic in a foam-lined room. A sudden foaming from the mouth for
instance is the warning of miles of a thick sluggish matter heaped
along coastlines, or bubbling up, obstructing the flow of vast industrial
evacuation conduits. Matter turns unwelcoming, seemingly
unrecognisable. A persistent reactivity to events in its surroundings
acts on a profound imbalance, the sign of a system being worked
beyond capacity. Foams everywhere like the letter e, down to the
alveolar structure.
Julia Bloch
[untitled]
the cup was full of ash
a felt thing
the window full
"Your body is like an anatomy."
A holiness in packing,
a holiness in something dressed.
I held the cup and I felt the cup
long past the edge
something calendrical
a labour toward precising
this chaos of documents
a labour toward
I held the cup.
Julian T. Brolaski
western fashion
everyone knows air behooves a fire
where are my breakfast radishes
lazeabout who 'society' disparages-—NUTS!
sparrow pecking at begrimed gum
pigeon mucking up the woiks
everthing on the st. is gross in ny
it might have bedbugs
I learned that after being admonished
for picking up a stray western jacket
probably from the 60s and in good shape
off the st. or hanging off a railing
I'm western so I didn't know
bedbugs was just a nursery rhyme to me.
funny thing about a coat in the east
is that one day you stop wearing it for
a whole year. then you put it on again
& find a grocery list w/ 'taco fixins' not crossed off.
I think I'ma go out and get shitty w/ tha boiz
till all hours. $40 ear candling, quack shaman...
they clipped it, they shaved it in a way that
looked good for humans.
heirlooms pathetic and patheticker
ppl w/o the means to mend them
stapling their clothes. where are my breakfast radishes.
I wd do it for a grain of rice.
for a mere morsel of rice wd I effect it.
consider the matter done: I ask merely a bit of basmati.
my price is a segment of rice.
getting rid of these pants means admitting
I'll never be that skinny again.
against breeding
for CAConrad
garbage-gut humans should not continue ourselves.
it can only come a frightful cropper
hair bulbs what I mistook to be a form in nature
albatross w/ plastics crowdings thir gut
what julie patton is callin superfraja-lilly-of-the-valley
veronica heterophilia snapdraggon nature preserve
pulp them shropshire constabulary
quing of haven sailing for caracas sissy jesus-hag
point to the exact place where the fly shd go in the ballo underpants
just where the shapes come to a point triangularly
15 thousand fish dead at the mouth of tha mississipp
planes go sipsip saying to the poor people
walk fast! walk like yr on hot coals!
matisse had to get up real close to see that was a burd
turned that viol de gamba right fwds and added a noose
cd get more cliche than peaches inna bowl
curvy long pear stem and butterdish suspended
in air perhaps the stem is penetrating a clear butter dish
conrad suggested I knew I was being drawn
into a funhouse of mirrors but I cdnt stop
odilon redon roger & angelica
why I am against breeding
some say an army of horsepeople
some say soon the handle wull fly right off
only to be ambiguated by a single letter
who hath bespoke
wheelis flyan upright
who sat bolt upright in thir coffin
look it's victor hugo
the great poet
talking to chopin
who hath commandeered all tusks
only the particulate matter
the very follicles
yeh I have to leave you
alone and give you
your mouth back
the godawfullest thing
on this bleak earth
but I say it's—-
Sommer Browning
After Joe
I don't have a good grasp on my childhood. I read other people's memoirs and think they're lying about the dates, the details. I remember furniture. I remember hurting a girl named Claire. I remember my stomach in knots. At some point I read Rilke. I read Bukowski & Sexton & Breton, awkwardly they reside in the same messy memory pile. Really, everything does. A lump of experiences, smoothed of any sharp details, the knob of my grandmother's cane, beach glass or some such metaphor. I could have been 12 when my family took a trip to Yosemite, I could have been four. I could have read bundles of Beats when I was fourteen, wanting hard to be in Greenwich Village my whole life. I could have been twenty in '50. Reaching for, then passing the eternal jug of wine, part Neal Cassady part Tortilla Flats , Reaching, too, for my cock, why not, this was memory. I remember liking the poetry parts of misogynists. I remember dying to have sex. In Diane di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik , as I remember it, there's a quiz. I remember this quiz, while being only recently reminded the book is full of graphic accounts of risky, girl sex. A fill in the blank and I remember there being a me to write in. Girls and quizzes; a topic for at least a few gender studies dissertations. Which dance suits your personality? What type of a girl are you? Tomboy or girly? The wonderful date test. The ultimate maturity test. The hot babe test. The good girl/bad girl test. Should you start searching for a new boyfriend? Is prom night making you nervous? Is it love or is it infatuation? Is he obsessed with you? Diane asked me to describe my favorite kisses. I remember I did. I eventually lent this book to my mother, forgetting completely that I had answered this quiz in risky, girl sex detail. I have been embarrassed sexually in front of my mother numerous times: at the Waffle House, with the Polaroid, in the basement. This was one of the least embarrassing; I like to think because it was literary. A daughter lends her mother a book. A daughter says, I like this. A mother reads it and wonders why she doesn't like it. Then a mother reads that her daughter likes the tongue entering her mouth to work like a piston; I like to remember I was fourteen. I could have been eight when we moved from Venice, California to a medium-sized Virginia town, I could have been twenty-three. I remember confederate flags flying from pick-up trucks. I remember a high school friend putting make-up on me, undoing my top buttons. I remember this friend's mother picking us up from a football game and driving us to nearby Quantico Marine Base to ogle at soldiers, to fluff our hair, to lick our lips and roll down our windows, to shine our teeth and earrings out of our baby faces into other baby faces. Their baby faces had deeply, exciting eyes. The kiss I described was the only one I'd had. Just before leaving LA, I had been talking with Darius over the telephone. I can't remember how many weeks we'd been talking, can't remember what we were saying, can't remember the first phone call, how we met, if he liked Algebra II. I remember on the last day of school we kissed. I remember my first telephone number. I remember Mark Twain & Vonnegut & Heinlein & Dickinson. I don't remember the details of the kiss, but at thirty-five, I know nothing resembled a piston.
Julia Cohen
The Place We Worry About
A formation of water wheels
A formation of organs
Movement caught in the work
A house is easily checked
To pass by & ask "Will I remember
this?" then later to remember only
the question?
**
To work away from utility
I profiled through a paper fence
Blue lines, yellow paper
Color has me
I imagine
Plastic analysis
of a house rhythmically
in gardens
To shuck the silken
An accent misplaced
Slackness
In opposition to the place we worry
called violet
As evidence effects the afternoon
How real the object
remains despite all abstractions
A violet rash
Is It Hard To Count The Times I Am Deliberate?
I am visceral!
Just like you
The interplay
Just like paintings
The feelings
I crouch down
& spring up whenever
whenever anyone enters
There are plants you can
hug or hide behind
Mimicry should be deliberate
Love should be deliberate
& generous
Nothing peripheral
to the implied
We gaze at the mother-vine
What part of ourselves
are we sparing?
No! Love should not
deliberate
or you'll write the word wine
with ink
to attain permanent
wine
There is a foxtrot
in your march
Ryan Doyle May
Dénia
But I love you, word by word, I love you,
and though I am not yet capable of writing
about truth without destroying myself, I am
finding a way to reconstruct myself here.
Render yourself blank.
I am as featureless as a shadow.
Accumulate.
I am here, rest easy in the solace
my absence brings.
I wrote that line in a story I'll never finish.
You are writing against yourself.
I am building a prison, sentence by
sentence, I am exacting the margins,
stay with me.
But, I can't see you.
I am my own mask.
You prefer me blind.
No. I want us to see the same thing, finally.
I want you to be as invisible as I am.
You mean as indivisible as I
have made you.
I started disappearing years ago,
long before your infidelities, long before
that night in Denia
Denia.
A sick bloom.
Hemmed in sound.
Where are you?
Here.
The space between us it the space between
two grains of sands, I can longer distinguish
your presence from my own.
I am below you.
We keep shifting.
We are dancing with
our eyes closed.
We are dancing without feet.
We are making a hole.
I have taken the distance between
us and tied a knot
You are letting it surrounding.
Wait, something stirs. Do you hear it?
I am imagining a window .
There isn't one, not outside the presence
of language, not outside the frame of
this page that is not a page but a bed.
Ours.
I hear it is again, it is the ocean.
I am remembering our view
from our room in Denia.
I do not want a familiar architecture.
I am remembering the way you the
way you looked walking along the
Mediterranean at night, naked.
How do you remember my body?
In various shades of transparency,
shadowless, shadowless and moving
in the moonlight. From here your
gender is not immediately apparent
but as you pass beneath the floodlights
lining the beach like teeth the details
of your body sharpen, they sharpen
and then they disappear.
And the others, how do you remember them?
They are less than details, they are more alive
in your mind than mine. They have nothing
to do with us
Only us is not us but me pinned like
a butterfly in the specimen case of
your infidelities. If you look carefully
you will find me there, I am your
least exotic prize, the moth.
I do not catalog these men as you do.
No, but you have buried my familiarity,
I am over done with them, they are the
veil that settles over face and blurs it.
You are creating your own syntax.
How do their bodies compare to mine?
Without poetry.
Without clothes.
It is time to turn the page.
The page turns and there is a blankness.
The page turns and flint
of your words still echo
in the white.
White eye of the page.
In a dream that is
not a dream I wake.
Something has changed, the ocean,
it sounds farther away.
It is like a song playing in the