Gap Gardening Page 13
opened
and expected things
a first step
I suppose tilts the imagination
a first encounter:
love, blind two-ply whirl
asymmetrical equation
we travel
even in our sleep
separately
toward already different
deaf turn of in
and out the other
slopes
to a mass of water
with neither bridge nor coming to
Linguistic Archeology
for Marjorie Perloff
a man named Freud
is learning Chinese
a woman moves
through his genital zone
from this alarm
grammatical organization
*
take another man
(young)
whose language has broken down
he has gonorrhea
*
we take Chinese
for a description of the facts
the world is hidden by a veil
we know that metaphor
is beautiful
and, like philosophy, leaves
everything as it is
we must fall very deep
into our memory
*
a chessboard in a painting
a feeling of
sexual immobility
the world is hidden by significance
*
take a nearsighted father
you cannot tell him
Look at that tower ten miles away and
go in that direction
out of the world
*
a woman’s mouth
is a woman’s mouth
a woman’s voice is hidden in hair
*
he’s not so
inarticulate and gurgling
the woman must be on her knees
*
a man learns Chinese
Mandarin
is not the only fruit
*
a window
may open of its own accord
an eye
high in a tree
a woman’s body parsed
*
the young man shows his tongue
the clothes lie in heaps
on the floor
he climbs
out of a cramped position
into a
cramped position
the body is hidden
*
but you exaggerate
a couch
can’t lay a ghost
Disaster
1
Grief it began with. And disbelief. Went and looked and went and looked. For what was no more. Scrutinized screens and saw. Nothing. The papers in the land and. Took in nothing.
*
Nothing has room. For all. No ruins can fill it. No rubble. No number of dead.
*
Like a movie. Like a comic strip. Please distinguish between. Crumbling towers and the image of crumbling towers. The image, repeated, multiplies. Locks on the plural. Crowds.
*
Our morning was mourning. Our day, frantic. Our night, fear. Up to down we prefer. And right to left. But many movements in many directions are better than how crashes a wounded boar. Through the woods where safe in the dark it used to rest.
2
A hole is. A space for thought. We fill it with flags.
*
And in their flutter we look. When a foreign language we should be required to learn. Lest elsewhere’s bread give us pain.
*
We can think away towers. We can think away mountains. Once they’re gone we can’t. Believe it. We’re made to dream dreams of fear.
*
Empty our houses. Dried up tears and bodies. Numb we sit on our chairs. Dumb. Like little children. And astonished how yet glad there are moments amid great grief.
*
We try to see. By our outfits. By our machines. Surrounded we are. By objectives. Dreams hijacked. Incomprehensible.
3
Image of a hole. Locked into the plural. Where are the villages? Trees? Animals? The people on whom we drop bombs and afterward food?
*
Often we must work with holes. In understanding. Often we must set out without knowing where. Often we must distrust narratives. Never need struggle over the meaning of death.
*
The distance between collapse and the image of collapse. Has a life of its own. And on an adverb we build war. “Virtually assumed responsibility.” Someone has. It’s said.
*
Image on a screen. Image in the crosshairs. Image.
*
With “collateral damage.” As abstract as a percentage point.
4
Nothing is hidden. Therefore cannot see. Therefore a view of the world unimportant. Even though according to it. Every day. I brush my teeth.
*
To draw a black line. Was my intention.
*
The page is otherwise dark.
splitting image
The Thread of the Sentence
Etymology is one of the choices. The other, wearing your heart on your sleeveless. Cross my.
Even the straightest road conceals detours and forks. Thirst. For physical presence in tight succession. All week I concentrated on the hopeless accuracy of anxiety.
A line made to incorporate circumference. What the snow falls on. The very deep of a labyrinth, its poorly lit fortnights, its views without domain so like destiny.
Her beauty was called foreign. In relation to terms whose absence is felt. The foreign in one single thrust, absence felt elsewhere. Is self?
Not snow, but its blue shadow. Exchange of rather and disintegrating not made complex by the transfer of money. Thirst eddies.
Time is the invention of past snow. The thread I walk like a tightrope. The maze in the shape of a straight line.
Given to conclusions, I admire awkwardness in love. Open my clothes. To what stands outside my tongue.
The labyrinth is a ruse. Already passing into something else. The thread, swing, syncope life hangs by. My already share of nothing.
The Depressive Position
That the loved and hated aspects of the mother no longer intersect as cleavage. That after the war, segue to keening. That a choice of neuroses.
Badly drawn figures can nevertheless serve as proof. Just as inexact
images will permit strict logical inference. Your father stomps into the room and demands you listen.
To experience depression as sharper perception. To geometry according. To parts to play.
Each crossing of space vows us to chance. You could walk away from your father’s dirty old dressing gown. NO EXIT in the foreground introjects greed rather than solids. Could you feel in numbers?
You must not demand that the image itself be compelling, that it displace logic. That you feel strong or guilty, heat or cold, feel surface. Skin. Weaned suddenly.
Result: increased consonants of loss as have no cure and narrow compass. Each vowel akin to mourning.
To make reparation. Retracing your steps is without medical value. The depressive position: Destroy or destory. Today.
Concrete Behavior
Acquiring the phonemes of a language is not innocent. Coins in my purse. (Intent. To appropriate the dead.)
I knock over the basket and
the apples roll. Toward so many Adams. Along lines of perspective. Of lures for feeling. Of death instinct projected outward. The whole world red and yellow.
I reach for a word as if it were round and gathered the light. As if the shadow it throws were just shadow and I could step outside it.
Like money, phonemes have no reality. No weight, no color, no density of desire. An abstract value that makes possible language, lunch in a pub, and the roar of a mob out to lynch.
The apples slow down with dispersal of feeling, and eyes open. Is this called thinking? At the end of a long childhood. Taste of bruised suddenly remembered.
My words move toward you. The way my body moves toward its interrealm. Then cannot take back its panic.
Does my feeling change when it is put into words? Does it become everybody’s? How I hand you an apple is how words carry the weight of their use.
A system of color, a range of phonemes, the structure of the perceptible world. Formed by bones outside my skin. In the sweat on my face, the bread of phrases not of my making.
Potential Reference
What bevies of consonants, regardless of surrounding sound, the murmuring surf of the revolving world. However infantile my babbling, my confusions of time and place, I was out to drink foreign waters.
It’s on my mother’s lips the word was born. Vast possibilities deflated to difference. Including madness, chicken sandwiches and pox. Sound shift. Migrating stress. Water rift. Signification pulled in through the mesh.
Though I opened my mouth to take in what she said language has no organs of its own. Already witness to another order.
What muscles could hold this motion toward lack of body, this rush away from flesh? Could wrap (trap?) it in intimate honey, the attractions of inertia, cockfights or sirens?
Not fish. Not fissure. Not king. Not synchronicity or dialectic, not unemployment rate. I have premeditated sterility. Transparency of words.
Like “through.” I’m only traveling.
Through money, sentences, hypotheses that don’t hold water, a storm at sea, the shallow hours of the moon. The tide recedes. Toward myths of origins, remains of mammoths, a landbridge from Asia to alas poor Yorick.
From which I deduce the structure of the world and the depth of maternal darkness. Dissolves on my tongue the German for again-and-again, wave-after-wave, passage, disappearance.
The Body in the Word
for Christopher Middleton
It is not simple. It is opposite. Like revelation or dream. It does not lurk behind its signs. Full of fields, even when alone. Even if you rest all afternoon in a kingdom of caresses it engenders choreographies. And the voice goes deep.
Archipelagos, you write, where begin, armadillos, gloves, a cart with apples, song and pollen, rock wing, labyrinthine nests, a different game.
It is essentially. It could not be other. In the beginning absolutely. Not how the world is, it could not say. But that it exists, the word. Supreme visibility in deepest darkness. As children we kept our secret and grew old. With nudity exhausted.
As for birds, you write, beside me, abyssal glossolalia, soup, brass handles, too early in the day, formation of geese, grammar, not confession, landscape of possibles.
Nothing could be without it. It was made by us. But the nervous system speaks no known language. Roots burst out of the ground and we stumble, jolting the marriage of skeleton and flesh.
Mumblers all, you write, spit and babble, one-way sun, inch into the open, mirrors on string, scent bottles, black walls, black kitchen table, in Bamberg, touch everything.
It says nothing. It shows itself. St. Augustine was interested. Words, that is to say, no foundation. Variables crowd the lines of perception, brushing off flies, the time stolen. The body expands. Orgasm not certain.
driven to abstraction
All Electrons Are (Not) Alike
1
A view of the sea is the beginning of the journey. An image of Columbus, starting out from the abyss, enters the left hemisphere. Profusion of languages out of the blue. Bluster, blur, blubber. My father was troubled by inklings of Babel and multiplication on his table. Afraid that an overload of simultaneous neural firings would result in an epileptic convulsion. The explorers’ attention, like the foot of a snail, held on to the planks of their vessels, not communicating. Too intent on the physical fact, waves, whales, or poison arrows. Later, though, poured forth stories never dreamed of by the natives. As if languages were kidnapped as easily as green shady land profuse of flowers.
2
As Dante followed Virgil, so Columbus, Marco Polo. In those days spring came before summer, but the world was neither round nor infinite. Actual observations served to confirm what he already knew. True, clue, loop and thimbles, line up to the mast. If they did not, he rolled his eyeballs, duplicating the movement of the heavenly bodies. As if there were no transmission of impulse from cell to cell. Repair work is hard, of doubtful and intricate nature, as when a gap appears between two planks or the yarn breaks that was to haul you through the maze. What signifies? he asked. The temperature of the hand or that it held a scepter? Is it the nature of the mind to reach toward the future, to anticipate events about to happen? Stance, chance, all hands on deck. And though I do not understande their language yet I know their king offered me his island for mine own.
3
Triangulation: greed, religion, stunned surprise. Cabeza de Vaca “passed through many and dissimilar tongues. Our Lord granted us favor with the people who spoke them for they always understood us, and we them.” All electrons are alike, a sunny surmise, surf, surface. Not raked by interpretation. With a flavor of asymmetry. Like the electric shock from a battery of Leyden jars administered to 700 Carthusian monks joined hand to hand. Later. Under Louis XV. No note of bruises, blunt instruments. Do we need to open and shut the window when it is transparent from the start? Or a special organ for what trickles through the hourglass? Enough to stretch your hand westward at the right moment and pull down the sun.
4
Pigafetta in the Philippines. Antonio, the exception. Amid sharks and shattered masts sharpened his pencil. For if a man has not learned a language can he have memories? Pointed at parts of the body and shaped a body of words: samput, paha, bassag bassag, buttock, thigh, shank, the “shameful” parts, utin and bilat, as well as ginger, garlic, cinnamon. The natives stared at the document. Unblinking. Thinking, my father thought, to distinguish its parchment body from blemishes in ink rather than title, preamble or appendices. Perhaps rather troubled with doubt. Scorching air may refute grammatical relationship as much as movement from Vicenza to Mactan, though the speed of nerve signals increases if the organism gets warm, and the creature becomes excited, perhaps delirious. Yet when an object has never been seen back home what good is a word? You have to bring the thing itself and empty your bag to make conversation.
5
Absence of meaning cracks the mirror. Yet every shard shows Columbus unfurling the royal standard on October 12, while the wind blows from the East by authority, custom and general consent. Curls, fur, furbalow, furious, further. Whereas my father was disturbed by Being and Time, it’s in the face of uncovered nakedness Columbus issued the required proclamations. And was not contradicted. And named the islands. Was this the patter of administrative order with a gold standard? Or more self-interest than alternate fear and attention, wonder and universal grammar? Wonder is not registered in heart and blood, but occurs strictly in the brain. Hence it escapes moral categories, hatches heresies from the smell of lemons and fineness of metals. But does not leave a mark o
n the land, not even a patch cleared of plants not dwarfed by grafting or trained upon a trellis.
6
Take Diaz’ memory congealed in time as in a chunk of amber, ambush. This city where the sun rolled over the water and through gold and silver that outshone it. Display delirious as the lovemaking of flowers. Up the 140 steps of the great pyramid. To meet you by the altar where blood is blood. The supply extravagant for all the brain’s complexity. This splendor, says Diaz, of which no trace remains. Likewise closed ranks raked up to make a Spanish noche triste. Time does not cross precisely calibrated spaces. It flows across three months of siege. Irregularly like a river. Of blood. Noise noisome, nauseous, noxious to distant peripheries. Spears, arrows, stones, bullets, the clash of arms, the cries of warriors, war drums, conches, flutes and cymbals. Then when the pile of dead is higher than the ruins of the temple, yet does not yield electric current, when Spaniards, walking over the dead bodies, take possession (from “seat” quasi positio). The replete sun. At the same fixed time. Amid dead silence.
7
Merchants of language travel with paper currency. Columbus’ fleet had no priest, but had a recorder. Transactions with eternity less pressing than “legality” secured by writing. The power to name. When I was ten I read Westerns by Karl May and with him crossed the border between Mexico and Canada. Columbus erased heathen names like Guanahaní. Christened the islands to become king of the promised land. As Adam, who “called the animals by their true names,” was thereby to command them. San Salvador. Salvation, salve, salvage, salvo. The power to name is power. Especially when backed by guns.
8