blue shift

In Tunis, we walked down the pebbly beach. After all, we have been beautiful in the past before. And will be beautiful again. On the farm it seemed to flow, the noon for example. But the afternoon would never end. Grain silos were streaked by tedious textures while the bristling tree frogs were getting out of hand. During volcano season this would not have been as strange as it sounds unless one is accustomed to sweating off ones intellect. I looked to my left and you had already receded beyond the terrace of palms.

When growing things popped up all over the place we figured we were safe. Imagine a thing like that: rays which could be left on tablecloths in smudges like bread crumbs or monsoons. Whole barrels of nightingales bathed you in their Petroglyphs. You came out like a glassy pool, a blue after image, and filled the water glasses. In the low lands the whole back side of the city slid into the sea. Now you bathe in moons. I said that I only want to hold you once without wearing out our elbows.

We felt our way across the dock. You thought the floor was a surface since you claim to have 'broken through' on many occasions. I supposed this was the effect of water droplets suspended in the atmosphere. Yes, it was the surface that consumed us.

liminal home 2

4.
A Back Alley, Minsk, Florida

Leningrad sways in the snow. The crumbling blocks are the sheer remains of what gathers at night. Everyone else apologizes: for what? That our empty closets smell like orgasm? That’s where I want to sleep. One is left, after all, smiling in bed, covered in sweat and saliva. And after the movie crew leaves, the whole town wants to see what remains. Some go begging. Some are found talking to themselves. It is not as if we were that famous. One simply continues in various tableaux, in whiles and outs: while we sit, sipping murmuring soup; while he licks her paws; while one eats bones; while another wears a dogie sweater; while I find you under my toupee; while he is found before entering her hair.


You are shown the door. I am cooking under the stars. We hold one another at the nape. We kiss. And now there is another sorrow.


5.
Suburban Living Room, Cairo, Idaho

How deep are the hieroglyphs I have turned off? How many times will I grovel in my sleep? The gold in his teeth weighs as much as a small moon. I return a few too many times instead of remaining in- doors. There are grayed pictures painted in coal dust on the windows. In these familiar vistas, highways ramp over hilly mounds into clover leaves. The place, after all, is husky. And we did construct one another from the transparence of the next hour, as urban as this is, or urbane. I slide myself down your tongue as I slide from my own throat. Outside: cars drive by. Lovers are totaled in love. As soon as I turn the key, I miss you.


6.
Secretarial Pool, Athens, Arkansas

Are you grateful to be licked clean every night by good-natured dust bunnies? An image works best when it is doing the backstroke. She toddles off to punch some socks. This is why her body shudders in unison. It is the difference between behaving and belonging. It is the same source of his dissembling. We are wholly unusable for anything else. Thus: I try to become completely entangled in what is left. I swallow.

liminal home

1.
A Hotel Room, Rome, Ohio

Lying over the satin couch, she reads historic novels. In the voice that she’d brought to her lover, she whispers, “nothing is either great or small.” Surely, no one has to explain this. We cannot be made to understand a thing when clothed or naked, at night or day, before or after, but only at dusk, with foam. Then I wake up and two butterflies are feeding from the milk at my breasts. In the shocking pink dusk the spires of a gray Cathedral dent the horizon. Curdle. The world comes after its husks. Distances may not be crossed. Yet the view always comes, even when we are afraid of the dark. This is how decisions are delicious. And each night is just a night: the nights the daughter hides in her socks.


2.
Old Age Home, Mount Olive, Minnesota

Inside them are the remains of rain. And these are as worn as what can be said. Someone once said: "If words are coats then I simply want to stay warm.” However, the thermostat is set too high for this kind of work, even when ‘work’ is an instinct which will not raise the roof. Remaining is all we can do. We cavort in the holes of darned sweaters while our ear lobes dangle as: loose ships, torn hems, minnow lures. The world, after all, is loose. And so is your breath. Then the sun rises in my blue throat like a cockatoo.


3.
Circus Tent, Minsk, Florida

Yes, I’d like to open and close your drawers while you are away in Minnesota, but the clouds smell. I’d give up mist stained blue birds if I were you: some surfaces are safer than missing years. It all depends on what one is wearing. Still, an apocalyptic starkness remains within earshot. “Time tell on a woman, particularly a good time?” Yes, I said, smiling to no one under the stars: and when space fits between specks of dust, we may mingle with their source.

jasmine

The first time I left the continent I was leaning over the railing of a steam ship.

Usually, I can stare at the sea the way I'd stare at bath water: taking in all the edges at once. When I was younger, I could sit and expand my cone of vision to include every curve of the lion clawed tub. This usually left me with the sensation that I had swum around myself knowing that I knew that I knew.

But what if these thoughts were a literature of shadows pursing the idea of literature? Like ruins, or like the unchained hermaphrodites of my childhood?

Once I chained a boy to the view of a cow and we counted our blessings. I seem to remember there was a pair of hoof prints we followed all night and day to a mountain where flakes could be lashed without whipping the snow.

When I brought him to my cabin, to the realm of endless motion, the ice bergs were floating out the cabin window again.

The sun had peeled itself down to a beach ball and I followed a trail of strawberries to a small basket nailed to the top of the mast where the stars could almost be counted. I thought: if counting is a way to crease the blankness, then beauty remains as dark as a yawn.

Clouds billowed over head, at least in the historic sense. It was not clear if I could ever fit inside the mists that followed, but I was the only one asking.

I dangled my leash overboard and thought about albinos: how could I brush them.

erasing dreamland (bruce connor remake)

(Bruce Connor did not want his films shown on the internet. This is a digital recreation of "Take The 5-10 To Dreamland" created by searching through the meta data associated with videos on YouTube and sorting through the resulting clips for bits and pieces that would sync in time with Bruce Conners's film.)

The Butterfly

After I put my sword back into its scabbard I took leave of the flotilla and headed back home. The ship had sailed for an alien land which turned out to be a strange mirror of Bucks County.

How could I have known that I would love a continent like a Ouji board or spend my life scribbling notes onto lands I'd never see? Sail in and out of the rain?

I reached my hand from behind the yellow pennant and released the canvas. The cranes few up, oils stuck to the storm. I rowed and rowed and rowed.

Did you know that the Bible is a wonderful place to stone a woman to death?

Everyone keeps asking me to make decisions, but pronouncing answers is ostrich business.

Inside the mouth of a second night, subjects brush past. I love this: yes, the pain and my own skin, cracked under the pressure of a flatness that revolves around small mounds, as in a Manet.

The next time I opened my eyes, I had a Romantic fascination with moss.

fretting medusa

Too often, the materials I use are as opaque as I am. As a result, I conclude that my work will never be finished. This has caused the town council to label me: 'the quitter' (or: 'the guitar'?)

I also believe that the world is flat. Its little nothings get caught in my teeth, especially during periods when the moon is slender.

Even when limiting myself to solvable problems, I become lost in the program of lines, in promises never kept, as I destroy the depth of field, and so, form dissolves in a confused muss of summer days and lilac.

Last week my body worried itself into space like a fly. The resulting holes were as useful as pencil trays.

I do miss the carefree days of my earlier pink and cantaloupe periods when I lost myself to Constantinople. Florence. San Francisco. I am always homesick for gardens, and the cities, where I was born.

And when I do arrive, I arrive too early to sway into the chiaro scuro of sunflower fields or brush away the sky above my head like a young Lorenzetti. And the sense of this has piled up against the lean-tos I once flushed from our little walk: something I must think about, now that the days stretch and floors take longer to build.

But there are no summer fools. All voices are lost in the details and rumors of months.

Yet I think I have enough of an ease about me, like a friendly 'hello', to continue working in this manner, despite complaints from underpaid employees.

So: it is almost April and I have been thinking more about mouths than the sounds they form. The mouths of those who have died are not left open. They are closed by hand like doors. Before rigor mortis sets in, they are wired shut.

I would rather mold a mouth into an Amplitheater than shut it for good.

daniel silver

frankenstein views the nike of samothrace

My gaze is trapped by my body
and I wish that all
of my weight could freeze.

This, I have learned, is a contradiction,
but I have also learned to sit on surfaces
to test my memory.

Once, when I was left too long
inside one of the critics greatest works
I had no understanding of how to record my thoughts.

I was left to interpret the sounds of the wind
pouring against rendered drawings
like so much broken pottery.

frankenstein: the edison film 1910 part one

spirit of the beehive by victor erice, 1973 (dream)

Winged Nike of Samothrace

enough room

". . . because there would not be enough room in heaven for the risen if they continued to defecate." William of Auverne

There isn't enough room to fit all the risen in heaven
even if there was enough room
the dead are asleep on your twig
so I tell the children to eat butterflies

even if there was enough room
the winged Nikes have trench foot
so I tell the children to eat butterflies
instead of playing Twister with The Swamp Thing

the winged Nikes have trench foot
and wander into Impressionist afternoons
instead of playing Twister with The Swamp Thing
the aliens from Pittsburgh, Pa

wander into Impressionist afternoons
where you have a shadow made of loose ants
the aliens from Pittsburgh, Pa
should not stick their fingers into electrical sockets

where you have a shadow made of loose ants
people who live in igloos
should not stick their fingers into electrical sockets
so hold up your rubber bottoms

people who live in igloos
will not receive manna from heaven
so hold up your rubber bottoms
because I fruited my jeans

will not receive manna from heaven
by sending absentee ballots to Valhalla
because I fruited my jeans
there isn't enough space to contain all of my shit

by sending absentee ballots to Valhalla
there isn't enough room to fit all the risen in heaven
there isn't enough space to contain all of my shit
the dead are asleep on your twig.

frankenstein views gericault's "study of severed limbs"

I have learned that sounds may be heard and not seen, nonetheless, I see them. What belongs to what is often confusing. Do sounds come from what I see, or does form play what I hear?

It makes me dizzy to try to collect myself into one mind about this, especially when I possess memories which could not be my own. I hear myself, as a child, torture and burn plastic army men in rivulets of gasoline. I go to sleep counting the evil brutes I've smitten.

I see a marble child whose voice is his own shadow.

I find myself listening more intently to what is around me as I remember these fictions.

Is the memory like a minnow that eats smaller fish before it is itself eaten. Or do those I have loved dwindle like slivers of soap each time I recall them.

It all comes down to a few decisions: where to draw the borders. Sometimes these blue towards becoming the work itself, only distinguished from the other pages by color.

And now I see the statue of the lovesick giant who fightened himself with the sympathetic groans which echoed through his bronze torso.

The truth is: I love mistakes that sound like crickets. And, in the face of everything, I become more and more attractive in my own mind.

Who knows why, but now I hear the sound of a man freeing himself from his sandy imprint to wring the water from his drenched hair.

The nymphs have made beautiful jokes about me in this regard.

judas speaks to himself at an 'awkward' moment

Spectator of Myself

by Brendan Kennelly (from 'The Little Book of Judas')

As my dangling carcass swayed in the breeze
Beyond indignation and rage
I wouldn't toss you tuppence for your thoughts
On the implications of my body language.
But since I am a spectator of myself
Even at such post-ultimate moments
I could see poems novels saucy dramas
Flow from my undulating bones.

And, bless the mark, I could see soap operas
Of a murderously bubbly kind
Spread from the Potter's Field

to all the lands of the globe

Taking possession of millions of eyes
With garish lies capsizing the minds
Of young and old

till my story
is a weary
joke.

fixed images unfixed

Just Ask

by Barry Schwabsky

Did he sing of
never see again or
meet again? Did he sing of
unknown journey which
or when or if
immoderate water
memories already
fading? A certain finality fluttered
shadows in hair
of a part-time animal,
unknown into which
they would not emerge.
Her hands are examples (1991,
oil, enamel, and sunlight
on canvas).

mushroom house (cincinnati, ohio)

floating castle (ukraine)

envy

Gaudy and delicate vision in his head, you flee mine. He has the stars and the animals of the earth, the peasants and women to make use of. The ocean rocked him, the sea me, and it's he who has received all the images. Lightly he touches whatever he picks up, everything goes his way and I feel my heavy head crushing the fragile stems.

If you thought, destiny, that I was able to leave, you should have given me wings.

Pierre Reverdy, translated by Ron Padgett

b horror: the brain that wouldn't die