Sep '03 [Home]
Poetry Dow Demo
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Sep '03 [Home] Poetry Dow Demo Between the Lines and Above the Gaze,
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| . | . | . | Emmett greets me at the doorWAY and gently circling in place says that the Knicks have won. Emmett means truth, means ant, and if you don't know whom I mean maybe you've already stopped to register the poet's tic of using private information as if the world would give a shit, maybe already put this aside or thrown it aWAY or thrown it aside or put it aWAY and what the hell is a poet nowadays anyWAY, well, he may be somebody tunneling on display or circling back around where he come from though the WAY in's repeatedly to float a WAYs. Funny how many poems open with doorWAYs but how few with Emmett, the truth, and an ant standing there in it, standing there circling in it, circling in the doorWAY or just to one side of it, maybe you think we just must make it all up as we go along or are one of us raised strongly strongly to believe the lines connect the dots already there. Therefore, in the egotistical vein, the obsolete if statistically sentimental strain, rag-and-bottled man, rattled, hostile take-me-over-easy, man, aware of you there in the fluttering wingbeats, deferring to your surer sense of making sense, muddied with your groundless obscurities, refreshed in your clear pause and pooled rushings, waters at the join of opposing tendencies encompassing selfishlessly until the idea of individuation, new world which senses and knows that it senses the old ones, idea outlined, circum-described until the thought's tactile, fingers articulate caressing the sanded edge of a new bureau, possibility, or shelf, one leaf nodding, quietly laughing into the ear-mouth of wind until, as in a bridge of ants, each one one and everyone, all the treefull shakes in delirious unsurprised recognition of the sawdust scent they see, I, a re-arrangement sling. Maybe you feel you don't think you know what believing in something can mean. What's most invisible's the main thing after all. Might you be the window and the being scene through it at once and between? In the beginning, after all, were creation myths one told oneself one overheard and yet was the primary recipient of. Even though it was odd it has lost its edge, worn thin in once upon a no time flat, dull and void although the deep's faces weren't undone with us yet. An unseen but reliably calculated fabric strings along to cover the heart, snug and sung, my universal unified theory of shadows more substantial than the trees, fence-slats, and polygonal-perimetered lightpost column-casings they're cast by, through, with the necessary help of, across the flagstone walkWAY, which, in a manner of speaking, ends, at a new chain-link fence spring's first butterfly, to this eye, zitters back or forth through as if it were nothing; its ungainly signature bears some relation to colors we can't even see; how odd; though we can see others. I can smell the oily butter trail it left lingering as it dissolves; that's how smell works. The butter means moving pictures, and the trans- lucent flicker as it melts, one sort of light inside another, and Delmore of the maudlin intelligence flees the screening, licking his lips of snow. The ether, like seltzer, is filled with bubbles that rise to the surface and burst. The most recent red-shift data seem to tell us Copernicus was wrong: the Chrysler Building is the center of the known and unknown universe. Frankly, Frank, I don't feel too good about the random inclusions which we are expected to value qua sore thumbs. Point made, time passed. Weave the whole net or stay home, set out to stay put and catch the infinite drift. One man's surface is out of another man's depth. I say this because the two can be confused and because I like the WAY that it sounds. Yes there's something almost staged here and or almost real, that's the convention we got together to perform. On the one hand, Bernini sent a flood-wave from the stage, and Milton himself — take my eyes, please — may have been in the audience which gasped with recognition and surprise, fear and relief, when the hidden moat caught the wave and kept them dry. A splash is of a different order, eye contact from an actor who sees right through you. On the other hand, having mended, the fisherman flings, the weights pull the mesh farther into its form as it morphs with dark wavelets pier-lamps catch the crisp edges of and sinks above a bottom-feeding shadow only the quiet expert saw, a ray-shaped liquefaction, shallow water's ether-ore, one or two hundred four-inch sardines which in an hour'll be floured and fried. Make room for the mystery, it's already here. If the bed is already unmade when I get in it, how will I dream of the sleep that is my own? The bubble of z's rises, is squeezed against the ceiling of my limited conceptions, of my unlimited conceivings, leaving its elastic boundary in the shape of the rectilinear frame, until the sleeper which this might be it, turns or tosses or gets a leg jambed gently between sheetrock and the invisible paralysis wall of doze: you knows how one architecture's disposed, echoes and conforms to what's in- and outside it. My living room unconsciously reduplicates the street, the clouds adapt my headcrown curls and are on their WAY, alarm clock buzz is a soothing electrical hum in the dream of sleep before daddy drives home to mamita curtailing his overgrown rug. Even what's seemingly self-contained can wheeze down into a lapse if someone trips across Ariadne's cord. We better get out of here. People say that sometimes because they're scared. It's nothing to be ashamed of. There's nothing to be proud of. There's lots of things to think of, but of all the things to think of of, there's none that's not a variation on the rest. The knotted thread via which I had hoped to escape is cut by the sight of a trampoline girl's sprung takeoff through the trees. Distraction. She's in another backyard. From this side of the front windows the planes climbing from Kennedy fly toward me, from this side of the back they fly aWAY. Everything can be oriented around anything else. I fail you again in failing to cease being the center the world and everything revolves upon. So wedge a lever against my callused toe and heave-ho. Ready? On three. There's got to be a WAY to get this thing down if somebody got it up. Go on and aim your own divining rod at like delights, delights the likes of which you'd like to turn the dark on in, seize the slippery eye of her intuition whose salty melting creamsicle no ice cream truck can hold a cone to. Caution: Children. Joy and Pain spot one another from a long WAYs aWAY off and in the closing-down distance as distant or close as rather long-lost-to-each-other relations, identical twins bearing not the slightest resemblance except that each one's essence, which eats you, lines the edges of its opposite's inexhaustible shape. Thus those moments or extended hours and years when the knowing and the not knowing, foam and shallow clarities, slip from foot-bottom and between your toes, rug out from under, one tongue of something else which is not you or else is, and which either loves you like itself or does not know your name or both. I had been picturing the liquid juncture where what's slipping aWAY, as we say, is one basis on which what's coming in over it rides. We're usually most oblivious to what we most depend upon. I know you know. That's part of what we do. Repeat. I know you know. That's part of what we do. Repeat and rise each day and so on. I had been picturing watery tongues in the special mouths and the expanding silence of sorts between arrival and departure, just picturing them inside of my mind, that's all. It's not so lonely here as it seems, only more so. Mike is the grillman, Lillian's looking to get laid, Gita is quiet, but shy? not quite, Bob's a former New York State Attorney General, Selene a social worker with a no-nonsense heart and small teeth, Deb will surprise you with a joke just as she goes, George is willing to be amused but he stays out of the picture, Patrick conceals great anger, Arieanne dances with careful abandon, Ahmad is friendly as well as flamboyant, Beth is not ill-at-ease when there's not much to say, Barbara's the other Barbara's tender instincts have hardened with her having something to prove, Anna is rejuvenated on meeting someone from her hometown and they switch to their native tongue to converse while Ron willingly waits, he seems to know exactly who he is, Jeff seems less certain, like Elizabeth, who is searching but not sure she is doing so, and the other Elizabeth turns sidewise, laughs softly and hard, straightforward in her under- stated beauty; as you can see, she has fallen for me. I'll see some of them never again, be some of them alWAYs. They are all people whom I have recently met, it was a crowded week to ten days, the world revolves around each one and here they are in adjoining rooms. The DJ threads persuasive segues, corridors of layered rhythms in which he surrenders to a version of the fact that the dancers as well as the bodies that happen to dance will find their own WAYs in and out of the doorWAYs. Across town, wall drawings in a corporate cave on 42nd Street create a nouvelle Cro Magnon milieu, less spon- taneity and more panache, as if we had forgotten how to have our pancake and have it, too, the border the great powers imposed without a whit of our consent, we who know from our evolving daily paths the natural boundaries' meanderings, how the downstream turn's higher velocity is precisely what accounts for fertile soil build-up there, which, aside from agriculture and civilization, causes the reversal of speed and of the meander, which is a continuation of meander, the doodling persistence of the stream from above dividing clichés from the deep idiosinkrasies we each share with only our twin. Once I had another theme, at least I think it was me, no doubt it will return when it sees fits. One I now leaves me out of this, is confident that, as a approaches z, not in front of everyone but off-stage, round back, but without breaking character in stride, that the map of it all based on a one-to-one scale of it all will, unlike in Lewis Carroll, completely unfold as it falls, increasing the darkness around us in between the narrowing gap, a reassuring blankity-blanky which we feel, feel comforted by, and think that in facts we can all almost touch. Once we get hold of it one of us will finish unfolding it while the other one drives. While the glove compartment is open against your knee, navigator, slip those precious digits, nicotine-stained nail-edge like amber-smudged pearls, back into the oblique corner, underneath the owner's manual the compact heft of which grazes knuckles, the wholly inadequate compilation registering as if in analog zig-zags the subterranean tickle brushing it aside, metaphorically speaking, slip 'em back there for those few coins which presidents of this great nation have grown greasy upon, put them back into circulation where they belong, where they'd been for so long, minted leaders conspiring in our pockets and purses, in whispering range of our family equipment and photos, respectively, male and female he forgat them, their messages dispersed across the palms of panhandlers and minimum-wage cashiers. Speaking of spark plugs, Gide observes that the gap between opposing tendencies that pull you apart but which you hold together by not being able to let go of produces the spark that drives you. Avoid corrosion, gauge the gap, nourish the spark. To know what someone is trying to say who has not said it, or, here's the comforting though against-the-grain rub, because you know it, has: that's all we need to know, that's all. Funny how the puzzle seems most disjointed when all the pieces are spread out in front of you. They'll find each other if a patient child or compulsive parent acts as the go-between for a while. No memories of the present and yet I close my eyes; does everyone fight something without form, something formless, I mean, something parsed into powder mistaken for nothing but meanwhile slipped above the radar and reforming itself on a wider perimeter, its formlessness notwithstanding, the destroyer at its center regenerating waves, or is that just me? There goes that buttered fly again. I have no idea what poetry is now that I've developed strong opinions about it. There are signs of hope everywhere, though, though they seem, I seem to say, to require a certain degree of interpretation. Yes, my lines may as well be almost arbitrary, no, I am not feeling one hundred percent. One of those people I met suggests my idea of imagination presupposes a gap between itself and the act; you should have seen how she rested her fingertips on the fine skin the cut in her sky-blue v-neck sweater revealed; let me give you some context since so many poems don't. It's a fat wet spring, in fact I just got wet when you said that. Drips of rain which almost stopped dropping but adhere to a woody vine which incidentally graces another doorWAY than the one you're imagining now, how presumptuous of me, except for their transparency they're indistinguishable from the nodes wherein buds nod thinking through the ramifications of making their first move. On the other hand there are the small vessels mass-produced with the individual's emotional needs in mind either overflowing or withdrawing self-importantly from prefabricated brims. Fuck their false humility and the hoarseness they rode in on. The few necessary examples whom I will not misrepresent by naming remain with us and worth reaching for, even if the impoverished academy has managed to kiss their ass and miss savoring the tickle and tang of the crinkly carnation, reddish clinkers and wild dilberries caught in the cross-hairs of the blissful eye of solitude. Don't let someone else tell you how to read. The culture's full of pat advice these days. Making sense of the poem is like making sense of a person, or of a world for that matters, the danger being you create an alternate ghost mistaken for the quote- unquote original, like subtitles by someone who knows the vernacular well but sometimes get lost, as if they were not even really there, against a white background, or simply say too compactly what the actors have gone on about for far too long and at a much greater length of. But enough about me. The rain in slanty e- longations is a just-this-side-of-visible scrim rushing down and down amidst the faint applause, and through it, in a shallow dip on a tarred rooftop which looked level to the jaybird-nekid eye until rainwater filled its imperfections, or let's just say unevenhandedness. In the roundish puddle ringlets ripple scattershot; too, in the impromptu gutter tributary, one motion reconsiders the street's slightly sloped spread, gist horizontal, while drops resupply the reservoir as if materialized inches above before impact, soft circles of landing anathema to gravity's louder intentions but insistent as the recurrence of now, also now, a kind of cognitive dissonance which our wider awareness of water will one day wear aWAY. Uniformity opens the doors to subtler gradations. I'll give you another example, but enough about moi. O next to the i, curve and line, Emmett circling just inside an open door. Better yet, chalk drawings in the park's afternoon sky, which are what what I'll call I have been meaning for some time now to tell. Olmstead's vision concerned illusion and clearings, or that's the superficial impression you get from his rep. It's like the boy what bang his head against a wall because it feel good when he stop. What is? Oy! The babbling one does to get back to that buried pause, that empty parenthesis wherein one truly FLOATs upon the mere idea, a gentle embankment of FLOATing like the meadow a glacier cut sloping in Freddy Law's park. Rising from Kennedy, a silver stylus slits the blue bowl, bowing its tight trail straight above the crisp-edged daylight moon one might say's brighter than the sun since one can see it. AnyWAY, as the vapor begins its visible dispersal, its chalky bleed into the sapphire sparkling all the more when flaked against the grain, which constitutes, perhaps, the visionary sheen of Crane, as the vapor trail starts widening, i.e. coming apart, it also FLOATs, or should I say sinks, downward, in front of the afternoon moon. The tiny blade or plane, more sharply lit with reflected sun, is farther west but still in sight, as if drifting of its own accord, just ahead of its tail, and silently centered in its own muffled rolling roar, as its enunciated past now exhales further, underlines the flat face, becomes an alto-cirrus at about 10,000 feet, another departure already exhausts a fresh brushstroke, more or less where the previous one just was. We picked up our conversation where we remembered having laid it down, we were different as well as the same, the both of us were, whatever the adults say, children make up the rules and mean it and change them as they go. It's because they don't stand out from themselves the WAY we do; it's just because. The Knicks have advanced but won't get past the Pacers. It's only a game. I don't hate New York, he said from the bridge, only Mars is in retrograde as Venus enters Gemini and the anniversary of the individual birth I share with my twin, worried lover, loving warrior, arrives. In other words, like one ant reacting to the trail is like one neuron and when we zoom out to the bridge the colony makes of itself so that it, the colony, can cross on over, is part of a brain, the ghost of which is a mind, a kind of spirit that senses the scent as it exudes it, following, which is obedience, but following itself, which is freedom, even if encircled, so I see the lower leaves of the elm melt in the twilight's steady orange nonchalance and beside it a woman's bouffant holds gold, and down the sidestreet our little star sets, dots the i, then seeps through the world as we know it, everything bathing as the leaves were bathed, the light being still, being what is shimmering, cemented-over brickwork bathing, dogs half-asleep on the sidewalks bathing, gazes across the grass unfolding and the traffic swimming, anachronistic monuments of eagles flagging solitary soldiers, announcements in bold letters and unreproducible tones, and the supernatural semaphores, greens even and reds and glassy ambers uncontradicted and glorified along with the rest of us in the freshening dusk-wash. I don't know who is who and find no quiet place to surrender. I had only been trying to say that one day I lay down and saw the moon, bright in the afternoon, and that a plane left a vapor trail above it which crossed in front of it as it dissolved and as another was drawn where it had been. Between philosophy based on cloudy premises, half-ass science in which the lab-rats mind the store, unrealized if continuous song, and steady watching amenable to sway until perhaps one disperses or is at least thoroughly bathed, I choose between. You know, there are people who know the notes they're aiming for and whose melodies you'd even recognize even though they can't carry a tune. Do you see what I'm getting at here? I wonder if I wish I could say it more clear. As you leave they will want to ask when you will return; I make this blanket generalization hoping it will cover a number of you, because I'm thinking about saying that this is not necessarily about being one place and elsewhere, though it's not necessarily not. It's not only windows that can be dense and re-worked but also transparent. Brice Marden's 70's triptychs, for one, recently shone uptown, windows on well-worked thick blankets of color covering color; the aesthete keeps his cool inviting us to narrow the gap between voyeuristic remove and the passions he's keeping warm under the covers, defiance melted to a safe consistency, evenly applied. On the other hand the older Rothkowitz refuses to outgrow insistence on the undisguised push and pull; for one, mama's smooth soothing frees the sheets to slip one into slumber, for the other the fussing fingers interrupt their murmur with stabs in the dark and unsure completing like Tourette's constant touch and retouching. Speaking of the masks which become us, try this one on for size. At the dash lift your eyes from the page — if you came back to yourself where had you been to, and are you slightly refreshed if somewhat unsettled? Is it possible or possible to believe we might have gazed out the same window, out of library, cafeteria, or home, or just out of our minds? What is that dusk-orange that drops down to particulate gold and is suffused and upholds and envelops not just us and these trees but all networks of reaching and the unforeseen embrace? What is orange, orange, orange, orange sunk down into gold, into gold, into gold? FLOAT a moment in tranquil propinquity, a melancholy rendezvous with something in the air. The existence of existence is almost too much to bear, yet as it approaches dissolution falls into place and is lightfooted if somewhat unconvincingly on the coalesced stepping- stones in the waters we can't help but keep missing in the sense of knowing they're there while denying ourselves the surrender to say so. I'm surprised to hear myself say so, but then what's to distinguish these words from the sound of yesterday's breeze, or was it the day before's? You can feel the arrival coming in more WAYs than one. Emmett is six and has six letters to his name. His father, with an assistant, made those wall drawings with dirt in the figurative shadow of the Chrysler Building which is both real and is a toy, solid and shiny, able to pierce day or night night and day, the heart with pure surprise. In which everything stops. Hovers. FLOATs a moment in its own glassy amazement and full surround, and then regroups and falls in without having broken stride, as if the projection had evenly slowed, even stopped but evenly returned to normal speed before one could even imagine the image of the celluloid melting aWAY to a hole which is the blank illuminated screen. But maybe there is no danger, perhaps the slowed-down frames are just that and not the result of projector malfunction which means of course that the slow parts were recorded at higher speeds. Now I see what the rabbi meant who is said to have said we have free will and everything is determined. The best WAY to explain the WAYs of God to Man is to leave God out of it. Pianist Alfred Brendel says Mozart's genius is to surprise us with the expected. I knew he was going to say that. Healthy organisms know what is outside themselves, that is, what is not themselves, therefore what is outside is inside, at least in its opener more negative form. If my logic is faulty, my women's intuition makes up for my senselessness of direction. I briefly lost my focus and the spring but summer-like air filled with insects and migrating seeds dallying and zipping throughout as if the contrast were just adjusted then the blink and return. Well I'm repeating myself. Living systems regulate themselves and know when it is closing time. Thank you for coming. I was born on my birthday, someday later I'll die; everybody. The loose ends are not, it turns out, lifelines, so why not let the wind lift them from our open hands, send them back into continuous flight from where they might be scattered at our feet. One last thing. A steely shimmer sees or is seen from a dreamed-of height; it's unheard of; I should know; some splendid smooth and gently jagged lullaby has kept me waking now for nights on end on end. (Mark Dow has poems forthcoming in LIT, Pequod, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Downtown Brooklyn. He has just completed American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (forthcoming, University of California Press) and is co-editor of Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime (Routledge, 2002). This is his first appearance on the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.) |