Today: Anomaly.
A slight argument
with the prevailing aesthetic.
A realization that half the trees are weeds,
and many thoughts trail off before resolving.
Our house of many stations:
garden silence hunger
window corporeal water sorrel.
Dear the glorious bastard within.
Dear the negative capability of linoleum floors.
Inside the wife molted of lingerie and meaning.
It’s sad to have so many rooms and so little effect.
Nervous laughter oh dear you need a licking.
The kitchen.
The elusive feminine charms say heels when gardening.
Bulimia nervosa tuberose delight.
Because there are always weeds.
I sin upon the ideal body.
Because sunlight irritates.
We find ourselves in darkness.
When darkness fails, there are beeswax candles,
the triumph of tiny holes in the appetite.
A room for me a room for dolly.
Anomaly: structural smoke and mirrors.
Today: wrong project executed flawlessly.
In order to break with the past, we break.
When we are naked.
Things realign.
This forest.
This desire to create impossible interiors.
This conflagration of money and lack of affect
and no clear idea of why one does anything
means I lay me down among the marigolds
a child pulled out in frustration
and rub my hands against the ground
saying nothing to it I have wanted to say nothing to.
The road becomes a higher function
where the question of location
is a niche
besotted of purveyors.
The homestead of the automobile
and the recalcitrance
of back-country
make this Interstate America one long cool drink of ravish.
Everything a bit pillaged
a bit brutal
Across the quarry
Across the salt lick
In the floating flower beds of the dreamy Midwest
an insouciant storytelling.
Space limited.
House maladroit.
Midwestern demoiselle,
won’t you
run away with me?
Can we eat your lemon pie
as a trolley of nightingales?
Will you sit by the window
and narrate
the lovelessness
out there?
And dare we obliterate this obliteration
with your cherry lip balm?
But, wait,
this is no Midwestern lady.
I am
alone in a train station
a wrecked pastoral by which
mobility is both variable and constant to opportunity.
Up to the café counter lithely
two herbal teas in a cardboard carrier.
The counter boys are cruelty-free and kissing.
Their sticky sugars unbleached and unrefined.
And yet the vision falters
with the premise that stillness is a form of motion
My Midwest
will come back to me a thousand times
in my mind even stuck in the desert
in a health food emporium where concubines
eat almonds from the wings of the almond branches.
Those who are not allowed to sit still
are also not allowed to move
which doesn’t diminish the skill of the sitter
or the traveller
any more than the decision to change time zones changes the time.
The Expressive functions:
pronoun usage and the aggression
of genderizing re-presents itself.
Just as beautifully the television is moonlight
and
the small white debit amour cantata.
The reception of boys as a matter of culture.
Taking boys into one’s arms in the “moonlight”.
My boy a tonic, my boy a leap of fancy
my boy mortgage my boy television
my boy nonsense.
Let the line end there.
We are unable to make it meaningful
so it dwindles into continuance.
Television a severity of presence.
Shape it into something.
There are miles and miles of fire out there.
Flood fires earthquake.
This night was meant for travel.
Obsession was meant to be a process
in our
education was meant for calibration.
The moon that clear an icon.
The emptiness.
The sound of it.
We have no choice but to gnaw it off.
Cannibals.
He will sleep with the girls.
The gibbous moon.
The necessary obsessions.
“You stayed in that hotel called your daughter’s arms” (Bernadette Mayer)
At every turn is clarification and portraiture.
But we have missed it.
This is a transaction upon your entirety
by your fragmentation.
A chiaroscuro
by which we want to own
the random
as well as logic,
meaning the ordering of light by reason,
the estrangement of light by empiricism.
In some quarters, it’s called connoisseurism.
In some quarters, it’s called theft.
My quarter is available light
and yours is an aphorism
beginning with the assumption of lightlessness.
There in the absence of light, a grander purpose.
A climactic sense of value visited upon
the tableau, meaning
just beyond our reach.
That is a bowl of likeness.
That is non-representational enterprise.
That is a word for color visited upon
the subjugation of color into system.
The artist leaning against a wall.
Gently gently the light…
Wouldn’t you like to be forced into encountering
the process?
Screaming in the triptych like a banshee.
Wouldn’t you like the idea of light
to be revealed for the lie that it is?
Exchange is an exaltation.
Technique is a transaction across exchanges of light and color.
Clipped from the vine
detached from systemic constraint.
A subterfuge involving
light and its captivity,
an effort toward beginning
at the end of a process
we have no faculty for.
Fling open the doors
of mannerism. There
is the maneuver of light into shadow.
Or is it a repetition of “light shadow” “light shadow”
as if the desire for light
were so awkward a thing…