Separate

What remains is a wound disembodied.
--Chris Marker


Lying full length
On the bed in the white room

Turns her eyes to me

Again,

--George Oppen


I am trying to remember clearly Edvard Munch’s paintings of “separation.” Scenes of a man and woman occupying a foreground together, but not facing or recognizing each other. Not embracing -- apart. Together only insofar as the woman’s strands of hair seem to reach out and entangle themselves around or in the man, or paint will blend their figures through obscuring (smudging) brushstrokes. Brushstrokes that confuse these bodies as though paint had become feeling itself and did not merely express it: a difference between presentation and representation, the immediacy of mediation. This apartness of eyes that will not look at each other (the tragic gaze of many of Munch’s family portraits) is also an apartness of separate beings turned and turning away from one another. Not so much alienated as essentially or spiritually withdrawn. Intimate only perhaps with their own deaths as the intimacy of death indicates the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of becoming a destination for multiple worlds. This necessity both an affirmation of sadness and a sadness of affirmation.


To be apart the world.

The world
a part of you.

Of me
these blobs are not
of the eyes

but of the shapelessness
of things to come.

And things that never arrive.

Feelings for this regard.

*

That grasp us.

It must be
a very cruel god.

Or merely
the light
of day.

Standing still over the sea.

A red god.

When all that feels is gone.

And only the feeling of gone remains.

*

These inseperable blobs.

Foci of emotional certainty,

circumstance an economics
of approaching
the hand.

And touching the hand

hard

in its puzzling
brightness.

Its blankness
like the blankness

of waiting to be together.

And bright
when we can not
be here.

*

Paint will erase it
and ink
and the sun itself.

We will go
down deep
inside our bodies.

Hapless vessels
of certainty and
destroy.

*

The mood that certainty
was. We will find
voice in this. Discretion
of paint, to be the thing
paint was and wasn’t,
what paint expresses.

The time it was changing
then, from black to black.
Out the window of a
foreign brightness, sepa-
ration blacker, brighter
than “could be” could ever be.

*

Our second night
to ever utter
"Our" together.

To gather, to position
the voice our bodies might behold
above and below the printed
death, the portraiture of foreign
arms so beholden.

O 6th position,
O Paraclete altered.
The thing you almost were
but aren’t.

*

The differences between yourself
and yourself thickening
the bodies of others.

Voices you can not be
entirely separate from.

A he
of certainty and destroy.

*

A You. A Me.

Give me your hand.

Or something
somewhere
as blank as
it is.

This this
imponderable as it is diseconomic.

Loving as we are
without love. The time
this takes not yet.

Then brightness no longer
belongs to brightness.

The alone neither
to the alone or the with.

*

To great proportions
we grow

and become
resemblance itself.

Being too certain
like time entagled

the whisps
twist and smudge

the beloved’s neck.
One of many

the numerous disconnect
smudge as spirit

form from its hinge.
Concave places

of scrap and giving.
Generous as

at once we were
really. Again,