Blood Noise

after Kiki Smith
with Betsy Bonner

"intestines in eyelids [...] while still living"
~ Leslie Scalapino*

If we see this holography
"Intestines in eyelids"
As nothing less than being
Vascular or clawed to

We were a fault our own
Mothers of all types
Of wolves woman nearby
In this sense singing a lullaby

In blood *blood noise*
All this welling-up like we
Were here the heart
Exterior as *see* itself

Mould me to your claws
You who sing me out
Woman as far as we are
Known is me like a bird-

Song attached moulds
Distant the blood pumps
Like wax out of this
So we can see then circulation

Above & outside & on high
The tears falling from
Their outlines nothing wanting
Nothing but this body told

To look at while we were not
Here while a below
Animal is for not inside
Next sequence head cleaves

Penitent or sacrificial or witnessed
The black & substituted night
Of form the skin worn from wood
*Waxen and everywhere*

We can see while we range thru
Every wood sequence head
Where does the human come from
*I've come so far steeped*

Clearly we are from iron &
Wax and anywhere plaster
We make a pun on forms
Of the earth in the material air

Strike the frame to flesh
From figures blood
Out like sound
Outfits the wounded skin

Cells void just before without
Stirs a night of forms
Elongated simulacrum in shadows
Tears where jars are kept

What is left of us to fill
The animal fills as it sheds
Its own separate within
For whom this meant the little

Objects of desire
That make up the rest
An immaculate percept stained
To *sign* within *within*

Sounded the bone mimicked
That separates divide
Makes series because the word
Is a series of patterns repeating

Like body thinks its mind
Duration is this coupling Pieta
Act immitates nature
Nature immitates act

Acts replicate structure
And structure mimics caw
Given to shallow shade
Given to burst cells

Tears and excrement of wax
Of wax the wax scratched
By substance a distant idea
Of this what's that in your mouth

The failed absolute bird
String or song like a field
We can't enter my heart can't hold
All this blood my hands

Are a mould bejeweled for no one
Distance from whence we began
In blood monsters your ridinghood
Animal within wounds

We are foregone stamps
Of simulation & death masks
All the animals started dying
All we could do was continue

Drained of blood my heart
Can't hold it all my heart can't
Hold it all I've come so far steeped
What is left of us to fill.


*trascribed from Scalapino's reading at St. Mark's with C.S. Giscombe last Weds.