Love's Event* (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

You are beautiful

You are beautiful
But you are also heartbreak
Locked forever frozen in time
A cry I cannot get out
No matter how much I grease myself
With honey
Pink palette of grapefruit, the book on the shoulder
Of the room, the rose gardens
But I do not want you to be so
I want to be spilling forth with the acid yellow honey of the bees
O love, take me thusforth
Into your secret places
I will never travel
I will never wake
You are more than heartbreak, you know
In your fanciful suits and closing sighs
You are more than the shining blue room
On the afternoon of the date, the cold bite
You are the hot breath too I take myself into
The hot red fruit I take myself into
The living breathing thing I take in, I want to
Be a watery nymph in a wooded grove
With you
I want to be a cloud so full of honey
That there is nothing left of me
Until I throw myself into the fire
And am contained forever
I will be contained forever, a thing of beauty
Forever
I will be that thing forever
I don’t want to be beautiful with you
I want to be an ugly, wretched, bleeding thing
Poring out on the windmills
I want to be the locked tiger they can’t lock up
Until it murders and then rages through the fields
Of wild grasses
I want to be so wild they can’t lock me up
Put fences around me to pen me in
I will be so full of fire that they won’t be able to extinguish me
Before the beauty comes I want to be so full of fire
That they can’t tell me from you, my wretched angel
Sweet animal, they locked us in this life
But I think we still have time before we have to get out of it

*

--after Rob's *Disaster Lyrics* & Dottie's "blue room"

The limit that is us to
Reach out to it stays the
Understanding since
Nothing forthcoming
Should be understood

Our blank partition
That is the shudder
Separating our blood
Barely prophylactic
"When my soul starts

grow...ing" against all
Assumption and vanity
Not just standing under
All pricksongs nor a
Surety of what we were

So intimacy finds what
Refuge event couldn't
Think the body what
Breath is made up with
Not purely separate

From substance worlds
Whenever we begin to
gether and what we were
Before we began as matter
Was once a gas waiting

To organize these powers
"delay us, our certainness"
In patience these feelings
Never stop growing so we
Seem to float without them.*


I learned to read the letters they said
To me as someone fixed my broken
Teeth while I was learning to read these
Letters and their shape and likeness

Of their shape was like your body and
So that voice comforted me that voice
Of childhood pedagogy like anything
Else I could touch and therefore shape

To my wishes while they sealed my te
eth thru a veil of pain I saw physical
Pain should not be mistaken for grief
For a moment the grief you feel let's

Say when the world is not honey or the
Way we need when we need it not to
Be ironic your imagination wandered
Necessarily like an animal in this pro

blem just released to the wild from its
Cage crying out its eyes for all the blood
It must now shed to continue to be this
Is grief and more rarely a kind of guilt.


All the while that
we were
changing this room

didn't change the
furniture nailed
to the floor the blue

lighting that some
one designed
nothing matters

in that room ex
cept that we are
moved your hands

move to touch me
while the curtains
stay still

not even swayed
by a modest wind
or the air

conditioning
yet part
of what stirs us

what makes us
move I think
is a desire

to cross that
imaginary
line of all exhibits

sit on those chairs
so perfectly still
wrap those curtains

around us as if
they and we also were
on fire and this

also moves us
that to disturb this
stillness is taboo

and without taboo
we wouldn't see
the ways we were

moving behind
the blue of the
photograph

you took
at that moment
the gauzy softness

of that light like
our eternal tears
our lips impermanence.


That we are complicit
in evidence whatever
our economy gains is

not we with it not wh
en you say No again
to me to everything t

he tanks and their se
xual politics whatever
that is which was one

some lump or waste
left-over from being
recrudescences the ho

rror of sex in this eve
ry poem I confuse with
a poem about love lay

lyrics' condition of
possibility that it will
always be part of dis

aster that more parti
cularly it is the disaster
of the two becoming

one power unsubtract
able from what number
can't know and love's

body can only do in "re
al" duration because be
ing together in whatever

ways we are is always
immeasurable no one
can abstract or quantify

the tears we cry con
tinue to be like a ruin
or the remnants of

what subject we were
within not playing dead
but doing perhaps as

they do occupying their
eyes like a position
our weapons die into.

*quotes from Panda Bear and Sheila Donovan/Tallboys.

What We Were Into Was Willing… (Deadpan)

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.