with Dorothea Lasky
Partial View of Self
I can’t exactly see the face of the woman in The Shining
But I can see Animal’s face dead-on
Thom, I can see your face in the mirror behind me and it is a good one
Self, I can see the partial view of you when I am not looking at the moon
Moon!
Moon, I can see your face you look like an old man who is kind and gentle
Father, I can see your face as I lay it down and it is old
Old, too, your brother
Father’s brother, I saw your bloated face after the accident so I forgot about it forgot about it
Somewhere your face is in my memory I do not want to know it
Lucy’s face I want to know it, it is coal black with white hair
And her brown eyes filled up with cloudy white, the clouds
Fly’s face, I looked deep into you
Your eyes were a landscape I flew over
Isn’t it strange how I flew over you?
I did not want to have such a big perspective on your life
But my size made it so, made me see it
The whole thing in an instant
And what a burden it is, to see you all in an instant
Love, I don’t want to see your full thing except in parts that I can take in simultaneously
Cut into me with these parts though, I want to be cut and deeply
And all at once as you lay me down
In a bed of tigers, the rushing
Partial self, I don’t want to know you except simultaneously
And all like the stars falling on me with gentle burning
I want to be gently burned in the dead of night
I don’t want to have to face the hot face all at once in the dead of night
To be surrounded by black and white and one strange eye
He is the Joker that one strange purple eye
But I do not want to know him
No no never let me know him
Never let me know his face entirely
Until I can somehow get away from him
Until there is no place left for me to go
*
Under a mask or some
blanket of substance that
face full of violence bursts
I am not really sure
what this means to see
things two women kissing
one young the other
old an enormous flag
wraps around itself the
wind curls like spirit
gives head behind a veil
of hair none can see
heaven through just the
colorlessness of our crying
Nothing was the thing you
Would save in those trees
All lit up at night with green
And wind the dead will tell
No tales from a point-of-view
Of your eyes staring down
The abyss of this world until
All worlds were until all
That possessed you was fire
Alone and the ‘No’ and that
Night everyone must refuse
To move away from too soon
Like a form of hunger your
Life that will never give you
Those things you thought
You wanted when only night
Can be saved every refusal
You made for the effort of it
And the survival of all efforts
Noontides the will was like
Those leaves you seemed to
See rustling above your head
The fires your eyes lit-up re-
calling their past detachment.
Face of my life you made
Me afraid there is some blood
We don’t understand some
Distance you were holding
While the view seemed to take
You in the sea and the clouds
The valley’s greenness what-
ever else made up the silence
Of your life at that moment.
Susceptible sunlight no soundtrack pans
Fact without music the slight trace of the
Nothing he was us the pressure in events
And wind that produces and chance peeps-
out from that world where the dead would
Go if they are not still in fact here graphic
Because there is always a war on elsewhere
Not a metaphysics but a war those heads
Sitting in the dark not one mind nor making-
up one nation take-up that “movie violence”
As if their oldest and most familiar wishes.
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