Hydra-dowsed You
Our coming frequently fits
Currents, like fossil water found by a freshly
Cut branch, that is the origin, and end of
Outgrowth, a second estate for the next
Uninterrupted, conditional use of
Sex you have happened to take notice of--
Daphne,
For whom a century won't touch, your
Handwriting mimes hellbine to spell relief,
The word stems safety pin swoops
Summoning us to read this scrawl, a hand's
Wish for self-injury, yet one plaintive bark
Boils from it--cinnamon, sassfras, camphor--
Laurels lay in this casual falling off of leaves,
Gradually yellowing in the undergrowth
Beneath the blue-green murk of lichen,
Within the few square years it has lived
Dashed to wordy you, in you streams
Some wingless sterile ants, and their
Mound-making means the death of each,
Where you brood to broadcast yourself.
Our coming frequently fits
Currents, like fossil water found by a freshly
Cut branch, that is the origin, and end of
Outgrowth, a second estate for the next
Uninterrupted, conditional use of
Sex you have happened to take notice of--
Daphne,
For whom a century won't touch, your
Handwriting mimes hellbine to spell relief,
The word stems safety pin swoops
Summoning us to read this scrawl, a hand's
Wish for self-injury, yet one plaintive bark
Boils from it--cinnamon, sassfras, camphor--
Laurels lay in this casual falling off of leaves,
Gradually yellowing in the undergrowth
Beneath the blue-green murk of lichen,
Within the few square years it has lived
Dashed to wordy you, in you streams
Some wingless sterile ants, and their
Mound-making means the death of each,
Where you brood to broadcast yourself.
11 comments:
"Self Portrait as Apollo and Daphne" by Jorie Graham
1
The truth is this had been going on for a long time during which
____they both wanted it to last.
You can still hear them in that phase, the north and
south laid up against each other, constantly erasing
each minute with each minute.
You can still hear them, there, just prior to daybreak,
the shrill cheeps and screeches of the awakening thousands,
hysterical, for miles, in all the directions,
and there the whoo whoo of the nightfeeders, insolvent baseline,
shorn, almost the sound of thin air. . . .
Or there where the sun picks up on the bits of broken glass
throughout the miles of grass for just a fraction of an instant
(thousands of bits) at just one angle, quick, the evidence,
_____the landfill,
then gone again, everything green, green . . . .
2
How he wanted, though, to possess her, to nail the erasures,
3
like a long heat on her all day once the daysounds set in, like
a long analysis.
4
The way she kept slipping away was this: can you really
see me, can you really know I'm really who . . .
His touchings a rhyme she kept interrupting (no one
believes in that version anymore she whispered, no one
can hear it anymore, tomorrow, tomorrow,
like the different names of those girls
all one girl). . . . But how long could it
last?
5
He kept after her like sunlight (it's not what you think, she said)
frame after frame of it (it's not what you think you think)
like the prayer that numbers are praying (are they ascending are they
descending?)
He kept after her in the guise of the present,
minute after minute (are they ascending are they?)
until they seemed to quicken and narrow (like footprints
piling up, like footprints all blurred at the end of, at the scene of . . . )
until now is forever he whispered can't you get it to open,
present tense without end, slaughtered motion, kingdom of
heaven?--
6
the shards caught here and there--what did you do
before? or will you forgive me? or say
that you'll love me for
ever and ever
(is it a squeal of brakes is it a birthcry?)
(let x equal forever he whispered let y let y . . . )
7
as opposed to that other motion which reads Cast it upon the ground
and it shall become a serpent (and Moses fled before it),
which reads Put forth thy hand and take it by the tail
and it was a rod in his hand again--
8
That's when she stopped, she turned her face to the wind, shut her eyes--
9
She stopped she turned,
she would not be the end towards which he was ceaselessly tending,
she would not give shape to his hurry by being
____its destination,
it was wrong this progress, it was a quick iridescence
on the back of some other thing, unimaginable, a flash on the wing of . . .
10
The sun would rise and the mind would rise
and the will would rise and the eyes--The eyes--:
the whole of the story like a transcript of sight,
of the distance between them, the small gap he would close.
11
She would stop, there would be no chase scene, she would
____be who,
what?
12
The counting went on all around like a thousand birds
each making its own wind--who would ever add them up?--
and what would the sum become, of these minutes, each flapping
its wings, each after a perch,
each one with its call going unanswered,
each one signaling separately into the end of the daybreak,
the great screech of the instants, the pile-up,
the one math of hope, the prayer nowhere is praying,
frame after frame, collision of tomorrows--
No she would go under, she would leave him in the freedom
his autograph all over it, slipping, trying to notch it,
13
there in the day with him now, his day, but altered,
14
part of the view not one of the actors, she thought,
not one of the instances, not one of the examples,
15
but the air the birds call in,
the air their calls going unanswered marry in,
the calls the different species make, cross-currents, frettings,
and the one air holding the screeching separateness--
each wanting to change, to be heard, to have been changed--
and the air all round them neither full nor empty,
but holding them, holding them, untouched, untransformed.
Love must be like hand-rearing an owl, with its plans for the fated ends of thousands of lesser mice.
http://www.wesleytheowl.com/Barn%20Owl%20Photo%20Page.html
I feel a renewed cynicism for what I do here, not for the want of commentators. There is always this tease of a corner once again turned, and the lyrical disjunction I make of it...Hence, John Ashbery's "Private Syntax"
Private Syntax
The obligation I have assumed is an unprepossessing one.
I'll be glad to get back to the city of painted scenery
and horse-drawn carts, before resuming the mark toward
new standards of equality. Rain washes in the chimney:;
the immense task-force that drew us out into unwise confidences
repeats the crescendo in neon: this is about as sanguinary
as it gets, so why tremble on the edge? Leap, if you must,
only don't blame the processus for what you brought on yourself,
tarring others too with the brush of a rabid potential music
that cares for itself and dislikes oil-aureoled puddles
as much as it does human experimentation. Whose style degrades your
ruminating on it all until you think you've come up with something:
anything, don't share it. Don't be special, silly or civil.
In time grapes fatten. Waves accept one more chore, or shore,
and everything gets done, is distributed equally into your plan
of reducing the workload and actually making some money, for a change.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry%3Dge/nesis
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141023-virgin-birth-pythons-snakes-animals-science/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_fb20141024news-snakebirth&utm_campaign=Content&sf5409892=1
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/jorie-graham/thaw
https://youtu.be/ux0O0fqMhzk
"This time, it was not that occasion when He hesitated to tell me that I would no longer be General-of-all-the-Armies but Governor of the Secluded. He said, 'I have lived in indecision for many months, but it has come to an end. Tomorrow, you will begin to serve as Companion of the Right Hand of Nefertiri.'
[...] If word should come that I am dead, you have only one instruction: Slay her where She stands.'
"I bowed. The dawn was as lovely to me as the thought of my own life. 'That is the best death for you,' He said. 'You will be able to accompany Me in the Golden Boat '
"He was my King. So I did not dare to say that I might wander Khert-Neter and not be welcomed by Him on any boat. I merely bowed again Mailer, 568)."
Norman Mailer's Book V. The Book of the Queens
I thought of Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam's Arcadia (2018) as arriving tired with politically approved impulses and Paul B. Preciado's imprimatur on the cover...I did like this passage as a clear observation on why I dislike the majority of women, inside and outside:
"It's even comical, that contrast between Maureen's pretentions to strength, her affectation to brutality, and that smooth body that is all pallor, softness, and roundness [...]" (B.-T., 282).
Anyhow, the definitions one must problematize are too much work. One should want to flout convention, and not declare anything, like a sociopath or a feral animal, vouchsafing a few metaphysical mores. There is no purpose for some, but waving a banner; hence, the widespread projected interplanetary visitations in desolate terrains, where one's existence, and ones path toward differentiation, becomes irrelevant.
https://www.newsweek.com/man-explore-abandoned-farmhouse-built-1890-rotting-food-fridge-1601269
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YeKli79SJgQ
Nothing for It
by Anne Carson
Paris Review Issue no. 151 (Summer 1999)
Your glassy wind breaks on a shoutless shore and stirs around
the rose.
Lo how
before a great snow,
before the gliding emptiness of the night coming on us,
our lanterns throw
shapes of old companions
and
a cold pause after.
What knife skinned off
that hour.
Sank the buoys.
Blows on what was our house.
Nothing for it just row.
The enjambment was lost.
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