{"id":4471,"date":"2013-11-24T02:00:06","date_gmt":"2013-11-24T02:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sporkpress.com\/?p=4471"},"modified":"2013-11-24T02:00:06","modified_gmt":"2013-11-24T02:00:06","slug":"rhetorica-on-copiousness-frank-montesonti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisissporkpress.com\/archive\/2013\/11\/24\/rhetorica-on-copiousness-frank-montesonti\/","title":{"rendered":"Rhetorica: On Copiousness || Frank Montesonti"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rhetorica: On Copiousness <\/strong>
\n 
\n 
\nYvonne, pepper nor salt, lawyers nor laws, fire nor water, none of these things will reduce your beauty or pick up that spare.
\n 
\nA bowling alley is a synergism, something greater than its parts. The pins set up again.
\nThe polished lanes, conversation of clapping and falling, the little rail that pulls the mess back in. Machines make the greater machine.
\n 
\nTo list the personal effects of the moon: one silver watch, one basket of dust, one heart made of paralyzed gears, one ancient yacht powered by lightsails.
\n 
\nAnd now that I have sketched the twenty chambers of the heart, each with a single obscure symbol on the wall, shrinking and growing chambers, the chamber with only a single white chair. Now that I have described the various sensual moon people who arrive nightly to broaden the dictionary of seduction, I plead with you.
\n 
\nHand out, to ring your doorbell on your porch in Atlanta. The cloying hibiscus.
\nI closed
\nmy eyes
\nsaw
\n 
\n\u201cThe Peaceable Kingdom.\u201d
\n 
\nIn the pear orchard in the early spring we did not fail to enjoy ourselves.
\nThe light fell hard like it slipped off a roof.
\n 
\nThe design of love was endless; it cascaded upward like a double helix, through the orchard\u2019s branches, under the skin of the wind, and around the spine. In a parking lot in Indiana, I watch the bats dive through the lot lights, watch them, from the shock of sound only, draw a world.
\n 
\nFrom the Latin Copia, meaning abundance. To sing in ever-changing, every-varying ways, the same essential thing. To amplify this feeling through the skillful manipulation of tropes. To make it look easy.
\n 
\nAll night I dreamt, Yvonne. All night, I did the math of our love, Yvonne. I came up with huge, huge numbers.
\n 
\nNumbers that frightened me.
\n 
\n 
\n 
\nIn the dream, I began to run from the mob, the mob who so resembled myself, the mob who wore my hundred faces so awkwardly.
\n 
\nI want to go back to the hill, the fireworks, the humidity of the night
\nwhere I can feel my body move through abundance.
\n 
\nI\u2019m sorry. You are lovely under
\nyour skin as well,
\nlemon.
\n 
\nRomantics fear the faithless; dogs the odorless.
\n 
\nI feel unsettled by a completely washed down blackboard.
\n 
\nThe lights, a hundred watt, angry. The machine starts to tremble with its speed.
\nThe equations start churning in the walls. I see a Spanish galleon broadsided in my brain. Touched by too many salts, drunk on devices, awash with symbols, too many parts and too redundant. Even the cat a steel gray.
\n 
\n 
\n 
\n***
\n 
\nSamantha, down in unruly Florence.
\nHer love was temporary; her hair a permanent. She gave great graveyard.
\nWe described the moon in the sky copiously, against the sky, and for no reason whatsoever. \u201cDeath scares me little compared to creation\u201d she said.
\n 
\nIf it wasn\u2019t love it was in its wheelhouse.
\n 
\nBut in the shadows cast by the curtains, the dirigible descending through a cloud in heavy flack from the mounted guns on the Florentine walls.
\n 
\nA dream! What is consumed is called fuel. The night, fuel. The sky fuel for the airship. Text for the text.
\n 
\nI\u2019ve known it. I always have.
\n 
\nI want to confide in Samantha. To say, \u201cI am in the dark and I am climbing a rope, a rope that seems to have no end. And the rope burns after me as I climb.\u201d But she is asleep and wouldn\u2019t care anyway.
\nShe has a brutal thing in her that I fear I have in me.
\n 
\nI can\u2019t get back down.
\n 
\nCeremony centers the worshipper, love the romantic, footnotes the scholar. To open the footnote, go back to that night on the hill with the fireworks.
\n 
\nBut I wake in Florence, in clothes I don\u2019t remember putting on, the long scarf, the aviator\u2019s jacket, the flipped up collar and the watch fob. I storm out again. \u201cI become a storm,\u201d I scream, whatever that means in half-dream. I start asking myself the wrong questions
\n 
\n\u2013 why do I feel?
\n 
\nI ask– what is the machinery of feeling? Does emotion just pull through me like one big stitch? Then I\u2019m back on the dirigible, shoveling coal in the boiler room, devising ways to reach even higher into the sky.
\n 
\n\u201cSome study their feelings; I, my accounting,\u201d said Samantha, and I know she is right.
\n 
\nWhen Yvonne says, \u201cI ate my heart today,\u201d she means it in the sense of one god nesting in another. When I say, \u201cMy heart is a burning house,\u201d I mean it in the sense of home as fuel, of knowing as fuel.
\n 
\nYouth with the paper bag still around the heart, the pound of sugar in each moment, the pound of cream. I began stupidly and so I continued stupidly. The couch sat firmly in the living room and my fears swam briskly through my head.
\n 
\nThe leaves fell in central park. Each moment was pulled away by its hash tag. Yvonne and I, happy again, walking down 5th Avenue. We came across a little lighter can be read in two ways.
\n 
\nWhen I look at a bright juke box I think of little else but deletion. It remains for me to dry dock the boats and can the peaches. It remains for me to watch the wind vane turn frantically.
\nRemains for the oceans. Remains for the stars.
\n 
\nBut lovers are types of matchbooks, only lovers.
\n 
\nWe must fight here in the parking lot, passionately! Argue and consume the car, heater full-blast, the radio screeching like its baby was taken away, the filthy minutes covered in bliss.
\n 
\nSteeped tea and solitary studio, structure and stretch, theatre and thereafter, all of these I promise you in spades, Yvonne, if you\u2019ll just turn up the radio even higher.
\n 
\nThe people in the heart thrive when the heart is loud. We must from sound alone, learn to draw a world. Autumn is written in Cyrillic on a tiny scrap of paper. Should I take it out of my pocket and read it? Should I start the whole process again?
\n 
\nThe moon will support us. The fox tail wrapped around the heart is warm. The obsidian clarity each time we blink. Each heartbeat a Caribbean isle. White bird, I want to become you.
\n 
\nSound fills up all spaces.
\nThe cat slept in the warm patch of sunlight. I considered the gossip that I was gold.
\n 
\nOnce in Minnesota, in winter, heroism overheated the car engine, and so I walked out on the ice on the lake which was two feet thick. I looked back at the cloud the car was sending back up to the sky.
\n 
\nIf you were to strip it all away, would we be just some sort of wild power all blank and undone?
\n 
\n 
\n____________________<\/p>\n