cut off places

edited by

anja høvik strømsted

andreas vermehren holm

cut off places

1

edited by


andreas vermehren holm

curated by


karley knight

book des ign

maria se ipel

magikon forlag in cooperat ion with cut off places books

cut off places

5 cut off places emily wilson

nonesuch

You come from unquietcountry into rooms

the marshes empty toat low tide. Region

of seed kind. Its terracessecreted in rivers.

The implicate systemyou live in or that which is

all the while here unrendersitself, a civility

of capture and let run.You are wondrous

in a fundament of greens.Unknown but you are.

emily wilson 6

ars botanica

To bear you in mind.

To be jammed in your saffrons.

The abasement of these ditchesof your smolderings.

Of your abasement.

Follow this in:

we go weatherward?is this tenable?

The roothairs fusefor the openingsto shoot from.

You leafon the potentate’s dome?

You remnantin need of finishing?

You giltand swift execution?

emily wilson 6

green river

There is the mountainthat became the barren

of rudiment silt.There is emergent

instinct that stalled,acquainted then strayed

to what odds. Farabove the miniature

tamarisk-imperfectshore the sediments

burn in their curtains.You’ve taken so long

to come through.The archival exit

speech still stayedat the mouth.

relict

This is the oceandead-reckoned into

autumn estuarialgrounds in which drift

an aberrance of terns,the few barrier

cottages closed up.The small vowel-shifts

we have been through.This trend toward hometowns

that are evermorestrange. The textures

eccentric in mud.Not figuring your end.

You become the lone troveof whole kingdoms.

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monadnock

Sometimes the whole thing standsstill, residualribbed as the stratum isof the branchwork.You are given the gruff versusthe seams and you must drop backto recapture its strandedcloudcap.Fire, fire and fire, all toothedin the obelisk spruces.It seems to be listing,burled in the surface.The purple adheres to the backpivots, shunts overthe scotched hump.

No. It thrusts up burgeoningfiner-tined, the parts more mobile-like.

So the eye has no endgoing on outside its compulsion.Then the colors coruscate also.Then what does the bulk of it do.A rudiment-hoard.Then what.

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little gothic

We rode on a road through a woodThe wood itself rode along a riverSlow beige wade of mid-passageBetween regions of our unionIn the form of a forest of tulip trees

We rode on a road of seepagesBridged with viridiansSun took pause, low downWhat was almost gold

We rode crossed with roadsClosing in and paths that were moreLike pressuresWild harts. Soldiers.A far little stage stung with figuresA box with a breakdown at the bottom

Just that the road moved off sequenceThe forest bore out its own officeIts own kind of craftWe rode through the wood along the riverBeyond the mineralOver-richness that leads offAn inwardness

emily wilson 10

insular

spending off intothe blue groinsrocks scouringseaward of the dintedwild rosehips and the timelywinter berries there among themshingle allwe were bound toaboriginalunderpinningstumbling up the steepslake stringingflailed skirmishesalways redoublingnever notundoing the things done—knotted weedy wooly plasticinto the turnsthe volvelle isat rest in primeoutgoing you wouldhave to make yourself stop

the garden

Down in duskdown in the treadsthe garden tendsinto its ownuntending, the grown-out scrupulous detail,noxious deeds, the bowedlustrous willow’s busksdealt to the ground, allsmall detonations slungto the pathways, nonebut in the ruinedminiscule tellswhat will be done:the cedar disclosing longfrom the inside outin serial installmentsin the midst of its piquesin apposite internalrusts and browns:it keeps to itselfbending back intosomething elsestaggeringlykept up—it can’t be ended:the garden must be ended inmid-stride, inside the husk,in rucked or spiked addenda: sostrains the eyeaway from whatit wants: whatdoes it want?from resemblances?it has become too much the structure.of dark scutes.

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serial

Something isreeding and condensingtentatively almostsculpturallyverged onits rounds duskysuffering the tacitdepths a structureof scruffsup under thefog itstarts to take onmass withinpartitions ribs glumesrosing out from whereexposure has been piercedwith little shuntsthe light hasto thrust downsoglinting towarda center thoughtto be there

south pole

the stakes becomea strict archipelagofrom the knownscudded-over primaryplot but was Ithere was what I sawsea-birds onthe long icerunway someone saidabove the glitterruts rigorouslyheaved and torqued twinensigns ofa silent stemmingperipheral realoff the far endwhere the plane went downthen was laid inwith snowyou could crawl throughand just make out the gloomedpanels no one diedwhat could be donethe brittle rifts and windowsvents cutsmetallic stranded flockdumps depositories yields strewments

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23 cut off places ed skoog

mountain

Each mountain is a fool but together are geniusand what glacier they give shuts me up again.I climb for approval on dull trailmachined through fire soil turned ash

desire drives derides me sweat and rash.I am talking to my brother. I want to be seenwant the peak to turn and form a bridgebetween our eyes. I want the mountain

to discover, name, and exploit me, be cartographer to what in me has lifted from the ocean set on its side and left to relic.And be haunted by midday’s undressing

with winter and darkness fully shuckedfor the voyeurism of our nearest star.Bright pines narrow a route for pine marten following squirrel across a whole valley,

small lives pursuing hunger larger than high ground. What I follow or what follows me, I can’t say. Mountains are fools.My foolishness is so mountainous

I stop before I reach the summit every time.I quarrel with the script, glimpse the narrativein its heavy fur across the meadow, rootingunmindful for the simplest need, its tooth

a nail of ivory, and when I see the exodusburning in its eyes, I step backwards slowand navigate with the glare of my blind heartback to where I hang this face on its hook.

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photographing wolves

Them you’ll see when we get thereour van shadow on the shouldermeadow loathsome with moonwide earth wise to collared beeping

I who tagged the wolves seasons paststill chill to revisit this spring night howlingthey are ignorant of my science but notthat I’m meat, and taste my scent for miles

I prefer data over anecdote as any storydrives further either their scruff or our thoughtsovereign instead of all-burned face to faceclick camera shut and yet they persist

pour oil into river and yet some salmon returnpave the midwest and yet a puma turns upfrom the Black Hills into the breath of Manhattangovernor shoot wolves from heli and yet

snarl the midnight and pile the scat a hungry tongue that has never uttered modernismwill never speak and yet casts its oratorysilent into your lens and heart when we get there

island

Show me the raven that flies beneath the bridgethe silence of an unremembered name.When the bridge is out the mainland’s only newsthe island sends to the far city like a dissected astronaut

is a pearlescent shatter and a drooping way with ropeand the moon reproduces itself on waves.I play among the rocks, rough warts.Show me the raven that hides in the greenery.

My hometown’s name has become a harmonicablown into distorted forms by onshore loneliness.In the plot of the picture so far the shark’s eye is a blind lantern and for half my life I say I don’t know

down into green bottles that sometimes wash up.Show me the puffin that dives through the wreckit is no part of. Show me a wooden home underwatergrowing on this animal I am becoming.

ed skoog 26

times square

Nobody will talk to you here although you are worth lovingand forget in the crowd’s hidebound and sapping entanglementthe kiss you wait for in your town. Here, crush is--you have toadmit--better in its anonymity than the body that will not give

and yet know well, never more closely than among nobodiesher cheekbones, hands, clavicle, ass, the way she pushesround glasses up to the notch they have made on her nose,how her hair sways when she looks up from a hard book,

think of her the way, cold in the night sea, one overboard may embody in the last of his imagination rescue’s shapes,thrown ring that floats, or ladder rolled down from a heli,or sudden prow in waves, a green hand reaching out.

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lost valley

The tent dirty and my hands tremendous with dew.Ash now the firelight in which we removed our clothes.Sunrise starts at the rim and subsides. A fang of shadowback in the rocks where snow and rattlesnakes stay.

Here is the wingnut that keeps the camp stove closed.Here is me closing the camp stove, because we are donebreakfasting. Here is the canteen with the water, and herea red plastic to keep the soap in for sporadic washing.

The method for rolling up the sleeping bag is all methods.This is the putting away of things we will not have to useagain until we have exhausted our bodies on the trail againfarther into the untold, farther into our own untelling.

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39 cut off places emmanuel hocquardtranslated by rosmarie waldrop

xv

The rule says to see is an active verb. I change the rule and say to see is a stative verb( expressing state or change of state ).Which is obvious when one thinks about it.I see a leaf. I pick up a leaf. The two sentences are not equivalent.I draw a leaf is something else again. Giacometti sees a dog. The dog that he sees onthis particular day.He says: “I am this dog.”He makes a sculpture of this dog. Selfportrait. I see Viviane. Viviane is Viviane.I write the sonnets of Viviane.

a test of solitude

ii

October. Return of the robins. What’s in front ofmy eyes. Viviane is Viviane. Alone, evident. To tell you that I’ve seen her.How I’ve seen her, having only this name to goon. To show you that my eyesI’ve seen her. Viviane is Viviane. That is to say I construct a solitude. It’s you I’m thinking of. Unique smile. I’m telling you of my smile. Her mouth.

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sunday 16 november

Table burning in the dead angle. Its name is darkfaces. I’ll subject the unexpected and inconceiv-able to mathematical formulas. Life could be thisway. Stopped the music lesson, though. No, I say, there may be quite different reasons.Perhaps even an unanswerable question. Theobject of my flame? I see the stump burning inthe dead angle. In the rain. The messenger ofbread, overwhelmed by sleep. It is daybreak. Yes, her presence is persistent. Like the noise ofa machine. Open your hands in order to sleep. What is the matter? Oh. The noise. The wasps. The water. The yellow clover. The pale sea. Awalk in white espadrilles.


xxiii

There is the canale, there is the burnt stump.To pose the question of how to go from one tothe other is to suppose that one can do it.And to suppose this is to posit the rule that thereis only one space. That to go from one point to another point one

follows a line across one single space. This is how sentences connect in order to tell astory.Walking in my mind between the canale and theburnt stump, I find myself in that part of spacefor which the word is missing.The walker I am constructs a space made of atleast three pieces of different character.


xxxi

People can as it were come into being through theirnameis a sentence.What name to give to the space between thecanale and the burnt stump,a question.The missing word is this name, an answer. This name the missing word. Look at the missing word is this name as atautology. A tautology is not a sentence. Is utterance par excellence. An utterance is not a sentence.


( book ii )

ii

What empties a name of its substance. What kind of grammar would a grammar with-out questions beand what are the questions about. You are not a question, but surrounded by kindsof questions. It is snowing how do wolves howl. Yes, Viviane. Not answering any questioncould one say that yes and to be are one. Now yes. “I felt I understood.”Yescould be the missing word.

iii

Viviane is Viviane, yes. Tautology does not say all but yes. Yes and all are not equivalents. Every yes fillsthe space of language, which for all that does notform a whole. One would not obtain a sum by adding up theseyeses. What if we subtracted all from our vocabulary. Those wolves do not sing in chorus. The space filled by their scraps of voices is abroken space. Heaps of little spaces in juxtaposition singaround the points.


xiv

I am telling you of this silence. Finger on the index, the rings. The cut. This black mark in the space delineates thearchitecture of the landscape. On these too mild winter mornings the fish, redshading into green, put in timid appearances,and Pierre says that the penguins’ territory istheir song two by two to find each other amidthe crowd.A period of silence. A long period wheredivision begins. I am telling you of my silence and of the pain ofobjects. I tell of this solitude.

iv

To describe where I write to you, turning myback on my books, facing the computer. My writing table. My reading table under thewindow. Two table. Lamp seven. The window looks out on the stone wall on theother side of the impasse ( the myth of the cave )which reflects the light of the afternoon sun intothe room with the singing wolves. On my left, this light. In my right, my library ofAmerican poetry.The books nearest me are detective novels andvideos. On the right the files where I get lost. The screen before me.

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55 cut off places ke ith waldrop

communication

No sooner is the tea into my teacupand Rosmarie settled comfortably, acrossthe room, into Proust’s world, Ibegin this scratching around after somesemblance of elegance.

Does that mean I wantto say something?I don’t think so.

But I confess a hankering afterperiodic sentences. Evenwhile writing some other kind.

As for Earl Grey, whoever he was, we may assume he preferreda rough but aromatic brew.

There’s an elegant poem bySwift, on a bride who, unwisely, on herwedding night, has twelwe cups of tea.

The kind of tea not specified.

In experiments by Delgado andothers, miniature electrodesare implanted in the tissues of the livingbrain, and precise charges administeredby radio control. Sham-rage, sham-sex, sham-sleep are allavailable by command.

Charlus’s love-life, with sucha device, could have been straightened out. Maybe also Proust’s, and his asthma.

Everyone must have noticed – soit’s nothing much to be saying – how everythingwe drink turns into urine. Everythingflows, sooner or later, and the riversbeing, as they are, full of putridmatter and poison and whatever we’veeliminated, I suggest thinkingtwice before stepping in.

Otherwise, for the moment, nomessage.

ke ith waldrop 56

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to rosmarie in bad kissingen

I just squashed a fatfly who was buzzing me, but he’smore disgusting dead.

If we go by numbers, my oldzoology prof used to say, thisis the age of insects, more specifically: of beetles.

This is also the age of information.

I hope the churchbellsof Bad Kissingen aren’tkeeping you awake–though it’snice, hearing tones decay. Youwon’t let the bells chase you to church.

Somebody, just the other day, claimedthat you and I haven’tany roots (he thinks that’s bad). It’strue enough that we’ve fallen betweentwo generationsKEIT–one drunk, the otherstoned. The one hasinhibitions to get rid of (you knowwhat that means: liquor andanalysis); the other, a greatblank space to fill.

The wars of the young Ithink will be wars of religion.

But all this letter is reallymeant to say is that you shouldleave those Kraut Quasimodos at theirglockenspiels andhurry back here, because whatever wedon’t see together has for me alwaysa dead spot somewhere,

even though I know that oneplace is much the same as another,

and all the air we could breathe anywhere in the worldhas already, numberless times, been thebreath of a fern anda marigold and an oak.

ke ith waldrop 58

my nodebook for december

for Ihab Hassan

1

Closing the door is supposed to open someinward source–as with, for example, the prayer-closet: the text says go in and “shut thy door.”It’s a stroke of luck when traditionalwisdom so matches the turning of the season.

2

I’ve often thought of writing a poem of grotesquelength ( an epic, yes ) and setting the entire argumentthe instant after Gautama’s enlightenment, whileit seemed to him he would pass directlyinto Nirvana, while the powers of good trembledthinking man was lost. It was only aninstant, because of course the Buddhareconsidered.

3

Bulls for the bull-fight must ( this isabsolutely essential ) beinnocent. The very brightest are certainly, by human standards, stupid, butafter a few fights thedullest among them would learn not tocharge an empty cape but turn andmassacre the fancy-pants who dances therefor a bloody crowd. But, as Hemingwaynoted, the bull never survives. I can’t, myself, getexcited about “life and death, i.e., violentdeath,” and have never been able to work up sympathy forthe brute who runs with hishead down or for the show-off, whohas it coming. I’ll probably neverdevelop a taste for battle orget seven novels written or kill myself.

4

History is hard for me. I’ve nosense for it.

5

The world–and if ever there was a self-evidentproposition, here it is–the worldis a big fish. I’ve caught it inmy net. And now, long into the winternights, wearily, I study my net.The fish stinks.

6

A friend talks passionately in favor of silence. I listen to him. He says, “Silencedissolves the categories” and “Silence renewsthe potential of consciousness.” And it strikes methat I should say something.But I’ve never been able to argue. And whenever there’sbeen a choice between speaking and keeping still, I’ve kept my mouth shut. Well, usually. And only aftera certain amount of prodding I’veproduced the necessary conventional sounds, feeling the thread of words I spewinordinately fragile, certainly nothingto depend on. Whereas the craw ofsilence is vast and, anyway, already has us–it’s the scorching sunlightof a Nilescape or the wind across the GreatPlains, burying us. Friend, waist deep in dust orsand, maybe we’d contrive a gesture.


7

I passed the peak of my energy at he age of–it’shard to believe–twelwe. Since then, little by little, I’ve collectedthe furniture of my house.I teach meanwhile, and Istudy, but no one knowsmy specialty.

8

xmas [ after Pessoa ]

A God is born. Some other Gods die. Truthhas neither come nor gone, only the error has changed. We have now another Eternity, and the world is no better of than it was.Blind Knowing plows a sterile plain.Lunatic Faith lives a dream of worship.A new God is nothing but a word.Seek not. Nor believe. All is occult.

9

Time is molecular–so much forZeno–and each moment brings everythingout of nothing. In the beginning ( eachbeginning ) the universe is only apoint–no dimension–and thenit’s a world, for a moment, andeach moment is apocalypse. Continouscreation it used to be called, and nowwe say expanding universe, because ( Iforgot to say ) each moment is more. Whatever else it maybe, it’s always more. No wonder the poet cries“Oh, Oh,”or, on a higher level, lyrical verses. But don’tworry. I’m not violent. We alllive in a residue ofbright pulsations, a gobof time, an after-image.

10

How naive can you get?–Iwas wondering, when the GreatYear comes around to this point againand the next me sits signing his poems Keith Waldrop, will heremember back across the voidof Decembers to where I drift into thesespeculations? And a moment’sthought answers my stupid question: Iremember nothing.

11

When I think of the books you couldfill with what I don’t know, oof. The pressing need’sfor a phenomenology of ignorance. Everything hashorizons, and they’re not justout of sight, they loom. Yes, and they beckon.An open door is plain and simple, like awall. A closed door is an invitation. But ifthe knob is turning…?Well, I’m closing in, or opening up. I’ve been sobloody finicky the mysteries catch me sometimeswith my lids down. But I’m preparing. I needmany voices for my revenge.

ke ith waldrop 60


comfort in numbers

There was, they say, a time outside oftime ( but who are ‘they’ and howdid they find out? ) when man walkedin harmony with the whole globe, beforeweeds came to choke hisfood, before he earned ( how? ) theenmity of the animals.

But who is this ‘man?’

I see nothing but the naturalchanges – frost forming, snowfilling the air or, conceivably,signs of thaw.

Everything is infinite. By which I meanonly that everything is unfinished.

There are certain parts of my body ( thisis not altogether clear to me ) that my body itself regards as foreign, tolerates,that is, as a kind of alien. The lensof the eye, for example, can fosterantibodies – can, I mean, under certainconditions, be rejected.

I saw this morning, out akitchen window, the ordinary robin, Turdusmigratorius. Which may not strikeyou as unusual, in print ona page. But consider what arobin would be doing in Rhode Islandin January.

Most of my students have flown south.

I look for patterns, so of course Ifind them. As I gosniffling about the house ( it seems everywinter I come down with flu )I keep my eye outfor a cosmogony. But onlymy field is finite. The rest of creationlacks something.

You were right, Gertrude Stein:there is no repetition.

There is no repetition.

I breathe in bad air likea promise. I breathe itout like a debt.

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73 cut off places mona høvringtranslated by john irons

mona høvring 74

the girl from the mussel restaurant

We are attractively wretched, you and I,as thirteen-year-old girls when we wake up.

Late in the day we sound out the bare rocks, slip on the kelp, sit on the salt-white surface, and cling onto what could be called our house.

If we were stinging jellyfish we would possibly have a greater understanding of water.

And we think of the same thing, you and I,in cheerful disgust, in sucking shame –seductive and aromatic,leaning against a pinball machine.

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on dreaming biographically

I have lived many lives: When I was young the sultans loved me for my fertility, and because I only played with women when I bathed. When I was old I ate sweets and smoked opium, I was fat and lopsided and had bad teeth. Once I was executed because I fell in love with an eunuch who tasted like aubergines. It often happened that the young boys and I were poisoned out of jealousy. I have given queens acupuncture, I was the emperor’s chef and had my head cut off because the swallow’s egg soup did not increase his potency. When I died I became a bird that got drunk on fermented berries and fruit, I flew until I met glass, after which I sat with my legs crossed.

mona høvring 76

the transparent girls

We lived on a ship for several years, we chased the dust from the sea’s surface, we did not know how deeply anchored in life we were, we latched onto everything that convincingly resembled festivities: The strenuous hormones, all the burdens our small bodies could bear. Simplicity lay in a laced-up darkness where we spoke ungovernably. Were we playing the game, perhaps? We eagerly planned to acquire roots and substance. But time surfaced like dry husks, and heralded a delayed departure. We did not travel, except from when we travelled. On the tickets: our fingerprints.


happy seasons

The first time Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, the birds were easily visible, their feathers were covered with thistledown seeds, and above the surface of the waves the air was full of creatures that invited him out of his own time. For millions of years the lizards had chased the breakers, the tortoises had moved position, and in the growing darkness the insects changed biography. In Polynesia Darwin wed a small female willow warbler with pale legs. They read aloud for the algae that took lodging in them, and in friendly moments they borrowed each others colours. They rose in the light at ebb-tide, and sank in the sand when the tide came in. Thus everything they understood was sent back and forth in every single cell.

mona høvring 78

the black keys

I had lost something up on the mountain. Let’s go down to the sea, you said, let’s consume pickled plums, they protect against all dangers, and when you feel downhearted you must remember to look at the outside of yourself, and should you die, you will never have to die again, then you can sit in front of my house.

And I sat in front of your house, I dreamt that I was a child, it was like a punishment, I heard animals cough in the fog, and you looked like the small shepherd boy.

symptoms

A propensity for the ascetic – that I never got tointoxicate myself with nature.


the nymphs went their way

The girls that returned as flowerswoke up numb and thirsty in the forest,they made for the light, and light produced heatwithout demanding payment,light dwelt in the bulbs, the lumps of earth, the seeds,in the peace, and peace dwelt in the mountains,peace was vain, it had no enemies.And the girls swelled by the river, grew frivolous,all day long they hankered for apples,apples that were the basis of all sin,but there was no sin, sin had been abolished,it was mythical like the obstinate sheep.

the little church down by the sea

Remember how we wasted water, girl?We were careful, our hearts gently rippledwhen we imitated goddesses, the clouds melted,the months ran out of the calendar,all was mobile and wet.What were those day reminiscent of ?The nervous corals? That in us which breaks down?Remember when we knew the names of all the wavesand everything blissful?We were in the process of growing up, little girl,we asked for protection for our mothers,and for common sense.And later, when we got lost,it was out of pure obligation.

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89 cut off places qwo – l i dr isk ill

I crawl through a field of twisted bodies to find them I do everything Beginning Cherokee tells me Train my tongue to lie still Keep teeth tight against lips Listen to instruction tapes Study flash cards

How can I greet my ancestors in a language they don’t understand

My tear ducts fill with milk because what I most love was lost at birth

My blood roars skin to blisters weeps haunted calls of owls bones splinter jut through skin until all of me is wounded as this tongue

tal’-s-go gal’-quo-gi di-del’-qua-s-do-di tsa-la-gi di-go-whe-li - beginning cherokee

I-gv-yi-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-sgo-hni-ho-’i - First Cherokee Lesso: Mourning

Find a flint blade Use your teeth as a whetstone

Cut your hair Talk to shadows and crows

Cry your red throat raw

Learn to translate the words you miss most: dust love poetry

Learn to say home

My cracked earth lips drip words not sung as lullabies to my infant ears not laughed over dinner or choked on in despair No

They played dead until the soldiers passed covered the fields like corpses and escaped into the mountains When it’s safe we’ll find you they promised But we were already gone before sunrise

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Ta-li-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-ni-s-gi-li - Second Cherokee Lesson: Ghosts

Leave your hair at the foot of your bed

Scratch your tongue with a cricket’s claw to speak again

Stop the blood with cornmeal

Your ancestors will surround you as you sleep keep away ghosts of generals presidents priests who hunger for your rare and tender tongue

They will keep away ghosts so you have strength to battle the living

Stories float through lives with an owl’s sudden swooping I knew some Cherokee when I was little My cousins taught me My mother watches it all happen again sees ghosts rush at our throats with talons drawn like bayonets When I came home speaking your grandmother told me I forbid you to speak that language in my house Learn something useful We sit at the kitchen table As she drinks iced tea in the middle of winter I teach her to say u-ga-lo-ga-go-tlv-tv-nv/ tea across plastic buckets of generic peanut butter wonder bread diet coke Try to teach her something useful

I am haunted by loss My stomach is a knot of serpents and my hair grows out as owl feathers

Tso-i-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: A-nv-da-di-s-di - Third Cherokee Lesson: Memory

Raid archeologists’ camps and steal shovels to rebury the dead

Gather stories like harvest and sing honor songs

Save the seeds to carry you through the winter Bury them deep in your flesh

Weep into your palms until stories take root in your bones split skin blossom

There are stories caught in my mother’s hair I can’t bear the weight of

Could you give me a braid straight down the middle of my back just the way I like So I part her black-going-silver hair into three strands thick as our history radiant as crow wings

This is what it means to be Indian Begging for stories in a living room stacked high with newspapers magazines baby toys

Mama story me


She remembers Great Grandmother Rebekah Harmon who heard white women call her uppity Indian during a quilting bee and climbed down their chimney with a knife between her teeth

She remembers flour sack dresses tar paper shacks dust storms blood escape

She carries fire on her back My fingers work swiftly as spiders and the words that beat in my throat are dragonflies

She passes stories down to me I pass words up to her Braid her hair

It’s what she doesn’t say that could destroy me what she can’t say She weeps milk


Nv-gi-ne-i Tsa-la-gi Go-whe-lv-i: U-de-nv - Fourth Cherokee Lesson: Birth

Gather riverbank clay to make a bowl

Fill it with hot tears Strap it to your back with spider silk

Keep your flint knife close to ward off death and slice through umbilical cords

Be prepared for blood

Born without a womb I wait for the crown of fire the point where further stretching is impossible This birth could split me I nudge each syllable into movement Memorize their smells Listen to their strange sleepy sounds They shriek with hunger and loss I hold them to my chest and weep milk My breasts are filled with tears

I wrap my hair around their small bodies a river of owl feathers

See they whisper We found you We made a promise

This time we’ll be more careful Not lose each other in the chaos of slaughter

We are together at sunrise from dust we sprout love and poetry We are home Greeting our ancestors with rare and tender tongues

nothing like a love sonnet for greeley, colorado or

something like a love poem for greeley queers, 1993-1998

When I escaped, I smuggled the color of lilacs—the only sweet fragrance for miles—and the bruised and brutal work as we hunkered down for the next attack.We honed an insurgent mercy, dislodged gravel from mangled heartbreak with our love gnarlingdeep in my stomach. I can’t forget the stenchof methane. Maybe we don’t recover. Like a starlingpoisoned by Avitrol we always wonder Who they will lynchnext? Who snarls in the cab of that truck? What does he crave?I wish I could write this fear away, rigidas a knife’s edge along memory’s throat. Greeley, you left a concavetrench in my marrow, left my heart plaitedwith lilacs and broken glass slicing membrane.A labor of setting bones. The bloodstain.



for michael

chest hold beard cheek kisshot touch skim lip blissheal raw melt thank heartlaugh sweat soft face miss

birthday poem for billie rain

because the galaxy hums i spin towards you as light love like a sprout lace roots of a tree that holds usincandescent inside the emerald memory of everything

repair our ancestors tell usablaze with our oldest songsinsistent voices to remind us that we arenothing without them without each other

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tale

Perhaps there simply was no taleto return back to tell.No birds, three parish over, with human faces;no wolves with fingered handsthat had been taught our sign for beg,for prayer, that might shiver in the cold.

No stricken towns—just village after village,each with a slightly altered meal come evening. On and on; the word, its doggerel report.One time I almost fell on something worth giving this realm or road or route a name. but didn’t. Eventually I stopped with a local girl,inclined by the rumour of what she offered.

a nightmare as zhivago

The hundred miles of scatter weed,and a thinnest wood partition wall kept us from the uprising;our warm bed from the bed of snow.

Nights spent where Puskin was retoldas another version of our meeting—given new names, a higher caste,a devotion loud as valley rivers.

Then I go to survey how hidden our house is from the nearest road:the thin smoke; a path a tinker’s cartmight think to find a coin if followed—

but it’s hid well. Though by the timeI find the foot road back, the houseis dark, the war done, as I knockat our own door, it opens in.

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the apple

I grew suspicious when it didn’t rot,still red as the day it was given, possessedwith that enduring slap when caught, just right.

Secretly though, I began to weight itsure that if it was wax the few lost gramsof seeds and stones, would tell in the palm.

But they didn’t. And I could never risk a biteso threading a thin wick into the flesh like its own white worm, I flared a match—

only I didn’t, and I won’t. I’ll sparkno light. I’ll take the darkness, and the doubt.

reunion night

How difficult it is returning once more and again to this old well,all water-skin and sopped moss, the bowl dissolving from its nameand use—pulls up the thick siltof childhood, and the time when,and the place where, and long what if ’s.Drunk from, passed round the barroom table. Wearied, the sun drags down the day.I’ve nothing but grit on my tongue.

autumn, isle of eriskay

Down road, there’s a light in the windowof the abandoned house—

as if someone were trawling throughits inventory of old letters

and steel spoons, the tin box of unpaired earrings and cufflinks;

the things you can imagine being leftand then the things you just imagine:

the marks each passed moon didn’t leave in the floorboard dust;

upstairs, the ceramic bath, bored out,mimicking an upturned bell

even in its songlessness. Midsummer, and every hour

seems to slip off in practicingthe attitude of kindness, but not the act.

If only a lover were here, or that I had been the one to set that light,

open the long-shut door, and let those thingsmean something to an evening again, lent this scent of rust to the downwind.

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glasgow, nocturne

The last to make the last circuits of the day,these buses are always no more than empty.

Old tickets from previous journeys, tossed,lay scrunched up in their failing origami.

While talk’s as well passed over for a book or without a book a quick thought on travelling:

how homewards, windows dark, we know the lengthbut not the landscape of the journey; how hours

go wandering by in road sign, road sign, road sign,set down along the route like ellipses.

Counted up, how many days of a lifespan are spent sat between reflections of ourselves,

folding the tickets into our breast-pocket:their withered petal, their tattered swan or wren?

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wait

“Calvay, an island with no history of habitation”From a Governmental Survey of the Western Isles (1912)

Dear K-, what does it matter if, at some timesomeone piled together the thousand stones

in a square, and thought that inside he could scoreon the walls his enduring calendar

of water-rock and rain and kittiwake.And yet we’re here, men away from our wives,

searching for signs of a sunken gable-endin the thick scrub—touch on touch, the blind

amongst the blinding weather—a thrilled pictureof our tenant: grey beard, broad, a stunted posture,

an acolyte to the rough protocolof sowing, trapping, gathering, the practice

of easing back the weak calves to the dark;whose deity was blind and old and drunk; who found the pockets at the hip and breastuseful for nothing but a prayer’s storage.

This man away from other men, as ifthis remoteness were so awful in itself.

Dear, I spend the nights cursing him, the distance between the damp sand and your floorboard dust.

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the birds

There were deep hollows, leaves. The elements of air, water, earth, fire ornamenting the sticks, the stems extending matter out. Now it is an electric chair, a stripped foliate with wind scrolling through it, banners of air, birds moving ( threading, zeroing deftly ) inside the tree shape. The birds tighten a wire. Here to there, a lattice of tripped mines: arrivals, departures. A diagram: Recall the fruit that hung. Recall the blight. Recall the leaf. These birds are scavengers. They dictate the inner sanctum. They say: Now we are the fruit, we are the lifeblood, we are meat-eaters. Clocking mechanisms rotate in our cores. We siphon the tree for our devices, it is our backdrop, it is expendable. We revolve inside the stricken shape, memento mori made of living tissue, delineating passage through bare branches. If you eat us, we will taste poisonous. If you touch us, we will draw blood. Snap the wire: We have sewn the remnants upright into a semblance of a tree, detonating extinction.

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the book of nature

Look, here there is room: rock, air, fire, water. They have given up calling. They have given up their differences. Birds choir the trees in this boneyard. The crows come and go as if the air were leisure—free of grooves, free of routes. The birds fly a cat’s cradle of strings, webbing the element that is air ( that is breath, that is a conflagration of Souls ), revolving and revolving, turning the pages like a madman believing he is a book, furthering the elements (rock, fire), carefully turning the pages ( water, air ), turning night into day. Onslaught of days made of arrivals, departures. The elements shiftless as belief, turning into the next day and the next. The night giving back its differences (rock, air, fire, water) until they are all a backdrop of a single kind for the one hand the mind knows the mind is.

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the masks

Masks hang from trees latched by wires. The branches are scarred with crosses. Birds defecate a black, uninhabitable reef. The masks rotate on their strings, twisting, lying, masquerading as fruit. They hang nationless, godless. They were the voice box, the mouthpiece, the vehicle for the swift intelligence to whine through: iron lung, Holy Sonnet 14, a loudspeaker rigged to a balcony. The wind ( with its tongue cut out ) lifts the masks slowly, insistently, stuttering through the eye-holes, the mouth-hole. I see God in the making, the wind casting votes. There is nowhere to go, but to the physical evidence moving there, arguing Classical Truths. Does something speak in the crease where the mask eats the face? Here is the lie. They are not Souls—their wires snap undone. They are not Souls infesting these earthly branches. But O if the wind could be something other than wind, whispers some inalienable right…


the ruin theory of value

Watch the hand control the end. ( The architect Speer built the fault lines to comply. ) Hubris bends the natural law. ( Christ and his end ). These birds flying with thorned sticks build their nests in the dying trees. Outside the house, the trees are truly possessed by wind, by fire. The Poem ( the opposite of Ruin ) coheres inside the house. I watch two trees stirred from their centers turn every inch of surface into scorched earth: Let no stone go unturned, leave nothing standing. Recall the plans for the buildings, the outlines, the dotted lines delineating the massive stone steps, what the eye could see, and what was invisible to the eye ( a human hair woven into the bird’s nest ), a striation of human smell throughout that kingdom. What was invisible ( the wind itself ringing around each outcrop of branches, leaves, the wind noosing and noosing ) taking every last appendage down the stick.

monument of mind and matter

Leaves, seeds—the pavement studded with remnants, finery, details. ( Birds coalesce swiftly into the branches from the living ground. ) The birds are ornaments. They are sycophants. The tree is their idol. They cluster, teeming inside the sacrosanct tree shape. They are all instinct tracing the barren rooms, alighting on junctures, abandoning them for the higher atmosphere where the wind has blown itself visible. ( The birds inside scroll cyclic through this stronghold, turning revolutions. )

They sing songs of their devotion to the control box. They sing: We are jewels. We are idea. We are more than mind and matter. The air is cruel between us. We hover, a pestilence, supplicants to this division.

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song

A hummingbird burns its body-fat carving a rut in air. A hummingbird with a blood disease ghosts the flower head. I sit. I watch. It does no good. Trees catch a headful of wind and are swept to sea. From here the tin-seam roofs suck the sun home. No way out from the direct fire. Attain unto it. The On High burns brightly: mine downsitting and mine uprising. If I ascend to Heaven: Thou art there. If I make my bed in Hell: Thou art there. The birds do not drag an evening curtain down. They clatter inhuman sounds.

The hummingbird snags in the thorn bush. Panic drives the thorn points deeper in. Its neck goes limp. Its needle beak splits. Its eyes turn to milk. That bird drove rhapsodic through the clarity of the branches until it drowned in its own small reserves of lungwater.


birds ate the song and broke the light

Wild imaginings of clipped, winged things. Lord, a red cardinal. Look, Lord, your red bird. (Sparks burst from God´s jagged cuts: bright droplets of liquid love.) You reveal my mortal ignorance. In snow, a cardinal lands on a red twig, stuck through the bones with hunger. Mortal shock of the cardinal bright as blood in the ghosting snow—Souls’s bloody, rhetorical knot. I said: Dear heart. And so it flew.

Hung a seeded bell, watched them eat it down to nothing but its net. Birds ate the bell so darkness & wind passed through and emptied it. Birds ate the song and broke the bell. Birds ate the bell seed by seed, then flew upwards and away—Whosoever knows a common bird? These squeak and eat and still the waters rage: Around them the same “integrated atmospheres” in which hangs the net their hunger made.

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