Miscellaneous Notes

To really understand, you painted the inner world, the arrangement of things. But eyes and mind and limbs are not enough. No color. You are going to collect firewood.

And a flower grew in your brain.

The cycle ends. Strange lands and separation. In the middle, irrigation. This back and forth. My heart is not glad.

Have you ever seen the skeleton of a bird?

I wish I had a real life.

The lake has evaporated. Hence the image of thorns. You wait to watch to gyrate as in sleeping.

One day you could find yourself reading on an airplane or in your kitchen in your bandeau. And you could wonder how you got there. But the captions are in Albanian.

Transitions. You took a trip to get away. Though it's well known you can't get away from yourself.

The men will whistle.

Are you going to return with curls in your hair? They will sprout into children and we will grow old and forget the names of cities.

I am more lost now, off the grid now. So I become your friend as far as you can take me.

Three Ruffled Sleeves

I wake at seven am on a Sunday, with little internet, but a dream lodged in my brain – a network of dreams, the purposive structures of the mind’s vague brilliance, its idiom of radiance, lost interminably in dialogues of self-analysis. The vacant door, the tower shadow, etc.

In the first dream, a movie star hearthrob clutches his arms around me in the doorway of my building, and then strips his shirt to show his alabaster abdomen and pecs. But the dream’s whammy pedal has been hit, and his body and face suddenly distort, instantly, without lying. He’s no longer an icon. He’s no longer beautiful. He’s suddenly heavy, and his face has aging scars, his waist stretch marks. (As he flexes nude, I can see his right arm is totally distorted: the muscles are red-raw and throbbing; there’s something infected and deteriorating about his whole arm. The chicken bones of his muscles stick out; the red endless rings of tissue are hot auburn and orange and sickly.) What’s worse is his personality: oblique but blunt, forceful and toxically attached. He forces his way into my bed and holds me down and just apelike holds me. Then an avenger comes in and locks him out. And he’s scrambling outside the door, and the dream changes.

In the second panel of images, I’m coasting and scattered with the breeze enjoyably over the groins of a hillside. The trees have Indians, and little delicate warriors in the bushes. All benign. A friend is there coasting like a plane, and is to be avoided. A series of people I know circulate around a bike path, coupled on a red path, like famous entertainers gearing up to enter Noah’s Ark. Then I disappear, and I’m in the bowels of a large white polyester-walled department store. (One from my childhood, I remember, in North Brunswick that used to be called Caldor, declaring bankruptcy in 1995 and closing all stores in 1999.) Lounging in the isles of this newly-furnished store, I enjoy the lazy idle wandering of browsing but not shopping, of looking but seeing nothing, of not absorbing the white but being absorbed by it. Idioretnal lamps, bleak ceilings, ashtray registers. Then a woman at the Help Desk eyes me up and I nervously ask for some books I know she couldn’t own, or couldn’t find, or couldn’t whatever. “Elizabeth Bishop,” I say. And she grins and plunks on her keyboard virtuoso-like and is calm and jittery in departmental rag clothes. “Yes, yes, now wait a minute, wait a minute.” And from her pockets she pulls out two rare vintage volumes of Bishop that resemble the little series of anthologies of English literature that Auden did for Viking or some other publisher many many years ago. Both books are identical copies of each other. “Which copy would you like?” she drawls with a souvenir smile. Both are Bishop’s translations of Helena Morley, the young Brazilian diarist who died young but left a supposed classic of Portugese letters.

In the final inner triptych, I’m in an apartment building that is also a school gynasium that is also a large chamber pot of corridors and park benches. I’m moving from tight space to tight space (pleasurably) (also frustratedly), and finally have set up in a small container booth a projection screen and feeder to display various lewd pornographic images (for my own private viewing pleasure). But the circus of people in the gym outside the hatch door causes me to scramble and find another stowaway spot (this all feels like being onboard a large seaworthy maiden vessel). Knock knock. The heavy circular door shuts without a chink. Setting up the projector isn’t going well; the settings are backwards; the streaming blue light of dust doesn’t cohere into the cut-out circus shapes I so desire. Knock knock. Different teachers from my recent life are on the other side of the door. The Russian. The Englishman. Even Frances. A whole assembly hall that announces my name. I sputter out on my heels and keep slipping sideways to the ground and quickly slip (in reverse re-wind effect) back up to my feet. Once again they mention my name. A large piece of ribboned paper with various inscrutable figures and designs is straightaway presented. I walk around the gym and the crowds are emphatic. I am swollen with pride and deference. I move to the appropriate seat for exit. The next name is called. “Sarah Whitmore.” And then I shout, “All hail Sarah Whitmore!” Strange, eh? I don’t think it was a Nazi rally, but who knows while inside the flushing sleeping colors of a dream. “All Hail!” “All Hail, etc.!” The shouts and chants and bursts of thunderous applause are unstoppable. Everyone repeats the new mantra. Sarah pops up in her smart Prince Harry outfit and moves gladfully to the isle to pick up her locust-winged diploma. Later, in the disconnected aftermath of the gym awards show (which has the post-hush of a ended coronal), she takes me aside and says “Did you hear the one person who was saying instead ‘All hail the tan of Sarah of Whitmore?” I look at her. She might look tanned. She is tanned. Or maybe not. “It was me, Sarah," I confess. She pauses. Looks back with suppressed grin. “No it wasn’t. It was me.”

And then I wake.

From the Naked Air

Early in life we moved in costumes,
and groomed the air, tidying
the gell of our smiles, cautious
not to appear out of step with what

I can’t quite say. Down the lobby
there were straw hats and clowns.
And then a lone wandering shore
approached us, sprawling, asleep,

washing up the unlucky guises
of our breath, the postscript
of having to be a stone, a rock,
a moss-covered thing or tomorrow.

Yet as a woman folds her hair, so
things changed. The wrinkled sun
is put into a purse. A cream comb
lost down a corridor of soda.

The result is gentle faces, gentle rain.
The casual mismatch of thorns,
linen, and the odd sense that you
turned out right as time told you.

From the naked air, a dream unfurls.
Obscene as a rose. I walk past.
On the tweed grass, pearls spill up.
With tears like laughter, funnily enough.

SLEEP

I wake you to say something I had forgotten. I don't know any better. You stole the sheets again. This is anxiety. Arms sleeping. The feeling's gone. Do you think I'm sexy? For how long? Morning comes and I feel better, calmer, making a spinach omelet. Good for the mind or something. It's deceiving. Bright and awake, the sun soaks the walls reminding me of a painting I haven't seen yet, waving, but not hello. There's pulp in my throat. Were you saying something? You must be tired. I don't feel sexy. This isn't me. Who are you? I haven't forgotten. Dinner at 7. There is something. I get back into bed and practice sleep. Various positions. You don't mean misunderstanding. But how can we be here again?

Less is more, which is to say we're disappearing slowly. But admire the vastness. What I want to say is stay for a while. We've only started. There are plenty of movies (mostly black and white) that turn me on. Now that I've told you let's begin. Wrinkles in the forehead are signs of life, in some cases death. I do adore you. Then again it could be food poisoning. I wanted to hear a secret then expose it, but you caught on. Anyway, the good secrets are never told.

Behind the Wind

The dream once again comes to a close.

From a small, weathered-as-wainscot book,

phrases of past hours recollect the passing

of coarse stars and chilled shopping malls.

Light, leaning on itself, half-bent, drives

the air, summarizing, adjusting its collar.

The fabric of the dream is real. And absent.

It occurs in a face, like yours, flanked

with leaves and thorns, a patio of shadows

that race along the living room, up into

speakered ceilings, down the young grass.

And now, my mouth is cherry with a kiss.