Peace On A presents: Stacy Szymaszek & Sam Truitt

“I don’t do stuff for the dead. I keep promises.”
~ Jerome Caja

Peace On A

presents

Stacy Szymaszek & Sam Truitt

Friday, May 9th 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Stacy Szymaszek's latest publication is *Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane* (Faux Press). Her self-portraits, along with texts by Killian, Jarnot, Gladman and 5 others, written in response, are featured in a new OMG chapbook called *Stacy S: Autoportraits*. Her 2nd full-length book is *Hyperglossia*, forthcoming from Litmus Press in January 2009. There are no ships in it. She holds down the fort at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

My interest in Hart Crane began as purely physical. I saw a picture of him when I was a young boy that gave my confused desires a focus. He was wearing a Marseilles sailor suit, leaning against a tree in Mexico with a dark-eyed woman named Peggy Cowley. None of this mattered at the time. It was his hair, which was cropped close on the sides and combed up in front. I acquired this hairstyle slowly, each cut coming closer to resemblance. In my mind, something forbidden was happening. When I asked my mother to buy me striped shirts from the mall, she seemed pleased that I was showing any interest in fashion. Not knowing what else to do, I copied what I liked about him. It is remarkable that a Hart Crane biography ever made it to our little public library. Voyager was being discharged and sold for a dime. Its 831 pages, including the index, was written by a man named John Unterecker and published by Liveright, the same press that issued the trade edition of Crane’s magnum opus The Bridge. A previous reader had underlined a sentence on page 656, "Then in front of Orizaba everything suddenly begins to change. " Hart Crane had originally written this on a postcard."
~ Stacy Szymaszek, from Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane
Faux Press, 2008

Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of *Vertical Elegies: Three Works* (UDP, 2008) and the forthcoming *Street Mete: A Work in Vertical Elegies* (Palm, 2008) as well as *Vertical Elegies 5: The Section* (U. of Georgia, 2003) and *Anamorphosis Eisenhower* (Lost Roads, 1998), among other books. Sam Truitt holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently a PhD Candidate at the University at Albany, where he teaches, as he does at the College of St. Rose and Bard College. He lives with his family along the Hudson in a warehouse district.

from "THE SONG OF RASPUTIN," part 1??What began in confusion ended in a pencil-thin mustache??& 3 centuries have passed like a dream.?St. Petersburg stands, lovely & vast, at the edge of a sea on a marsh bristling?with fleas in a match-box dancing in the Gypsy Quarter where R sleeps? dipping tonight?to a dramatically low décolleté shaped with underwire cups,?hands black from tilling the soil boldly up the steps of the throne?to share the power, the bed & the Byzantine luxury of queens!?Huge enterprises had come into being. An epidemic of suicides swept? through the city?& the courts crowded with hysterics listening.?For everything was available. Vice was everywhere. Sensualists &? pessimists.?An insane, tremendous male vigor like an airplane?Nijinsky, the great male dancer, displayed to the world outside?But it is too terrible. I won’t do it again.?The particular charm of his person turned into a conviction arriving a?complete surprise by post afterward,?a typical story considering the vacillations and strange lack of?communication between the upper & lower portions of life? unbridgeable, even by good will.?Or what entered through one door fell through.?Or we have ikons, the Japanese shells.?Or T interned in the Peter & Paul Fortress soaked her mattress? in paraffin, lit it & lay down?beneath the moon beneath the stars the sod burning during the war in? humid August?as Moscow & trams were overturned.?& everybody was Kung-fu fighting they were fast as lightening? incinerating herself like love extending?continuous rays until the eternity of eternities receded onto a painted screen? of camouflaged figures.?Or the folds of an umbrella on an overcast afternoon tucked into a? shoulder bag & left in the carriage?this page, this blank page! this??England ! a corked jug & shaggy head braced in a vice mumbling scripture.?The hope is that somehow he gets his mouth to the lip of the jug to tear the? seal & jerk it, gulping, up?to spare himself thereby the grief of coming to.?Because across every page of the manuscript’s scrawled in magic gunk? “Exterminate the brutes!”?The water pounds the shore. The back of his head explodes.?The projector switch gets thrown. Everything is spun, inside or out.?What will in will out.?What happens here makes the spout?at the center of the fountain splash on the bare-breasted marble naiad?who configured with some dolphin is an aspect of the collective tug? yawning at our abdomen.?Though poesy, sweet rhyme, remains necessarily like politics an oral fixation? concerned with tracing a stain on the scrotum??Infringements of vice like lace at panty-edge? mumbling scripture??For in this emotion where these two sad seasons meet?I stand the blue ribbon of blood clots coiled around my feet,?vigorous & vast. The brush. The dirt clouds. The steam.?Bits of sad broken glass ground under a cloud perplexed.?Yet where hope springs water leaks?& shadow of leaf pattern on hard-packed earth,?Diotima, sound that fell to it humming the new pink lake in the middle of? New Jersey at the edge of the industrial accident.?Beneath the roof with the moss growing on it?opening our mouths at the dentist’s office, a cherub?plunging an arm through our genitals the stories?are re-emerging out of the technologies?as a brazen head wedged in a vice flailing in a formula of trying x what? fits which?like so many of her thoughts does into a ratchet-set?picked up off the ground overheard &?cranked to catch the thing as it spills still?out there. Though the thing remains an etude
~ Sam Truitt

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Link Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

EXCLUSIVE: The pub. date for Truitt's VE: 3 Works is June 5th. UDP's Matvei Yankelevich will be on hand to sell prepublication copies of the book at an extra-special, exclusive, to-be-announced reduced price.

Sam Truitt’s expansive sequences enact a “radical human recomposition of what we are or were or will become,” widening the frame of the human. See here how our many skins (language, world, self, the quotidian) are perforated with the senses. These forays into our various and secret registers help rip the holes wider, where sunlight floods in.
~ Eleni Sikelianos

O Coevals

~ for Rob, Myung and Stephen

Sovereign stumps make the shipwreck glitter

Being in the same place with you and calling
this coeval

Coeval enough to say hello not be
ing outside

What we would call event
to make a new sense I saw this city

Changed which lodged us how the past

Was once the past and the future
whenever we spoke

Anterior to any effect the present could hold

What couldn’t be
because we couldn't return from catastrophe


We witness bells that this was theirs
That shade equals sun in exquisiteness

Non-identities piling up like pylons
A physics without cars beings without

Impact move to what here to what
Their equated it I feel so much pressure

Around you to burn a discourse and not
Touch any time we were or event

Living us so live my life will never finish
What my death leaves unfinished this

Town never seems to work those sovereign
Stumps sing us into battle effects

Of power fires hymns even the sun
Forgot to burn so sing patiency which

Organs won’t be consumed what ex
Change won’t always be sung for being

Too far from off-shore what bodies we
Haven’t won’t account for limbs little

Substances Nature complicit with who
Gets to live grieves its contrivance.


like no one looped
their body in the d
ark this was mourn

ing to maintain an
identification with
that dark something

that was dug here
me and not me sou
nd and not sound

nor an understanding
stars account for a
place that won’t make

us live or die won’t
be consumed by the
violence of *our* voice.

2 after Courbet

with Dorothea Lasky

Dead Girl

In the face of value hers looks
In a mirror as if to not see
Herself instead a frame she keeps
Body paralyzed from the eyes
Down within the sound she
Makes not being active if not

For their labor a kind of prosth
esis darkened by the background
And their skin color complicity
Makes itself an object the living
Give themselves an alibi by play
ing dead or in seeming semblance

Says this origin the real thing
Sings without the frame to put it in
It must be fitted for us to be a
Spectacle it would resist reflecting
Pigment twists in vain to this
Like changelings can’t change

Proudhon’s mind bent to necessi
ties his smudges on spec and
Within the frame more than what
Spectralysis can show the thing
Before eyes were wrecked like
Little hairs dissemble night stars

Put flesh on flesh like pain appeals
To a cave the private was occulted
Brought to the light or origins due
Is what we produce when we work
Through the pane the pane of glass
That is our made worlds the folds

Of flesh of women uncontrollable
For all he seemed to dream them
Staggering before a way the sea is
Seen breasts spill out and foamy
Waves prove no realism preferable
To immanence denaturing touch.
~ Thom Donovan

We are from the moon

Courbet says we
Are lovers from the moon
I am glad that we are not anything
But the grand thing we were making that one day
That was bitten by sands, marvelous oceans
The tuber fruit rising among fishes
In a forgotten moon
Or we are lovers from the moon
Like the two girls all turned
But not lovers like the stag agape in the forest
We are two things in the whiteness
The black forest
I think we are soaring above anything else
I fight and walk, fight with everyone
I am full of fighting in my flesh
Courbet paints a woman so full of hair
Her flesh feels like nothing we have seen before
I rise and wake, I am a fish with broad lips
I rise and wander like a rising sea creature
In the rakish waves
I rise, I am purple fruit in the ocean among seaweeds
You pass and are drawn to something beneath
The ocean, and when you take me among you
I can see in you the things that I always was
~ Dorothea Lasky

from Presencing the (New) Disaster(s): some consequential poetics after George Oppen (Talk)

Discussing George Oppen with my friend Kyle Schlesinger recently, and contrasting his work with the collaboration of Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern, *Snow Sensitive Skin*, Kyle reminded me that the situation distinguishing contemporary poets from Oppen is not just a matter of generation and historical embeddedness, but of degree. When I proposed that the poetry of Taylor and Rob was a new kind of lyrical reportage, Kyle imagined the daily routines of the poets searching beyond mainstream newspaper dailies for indymedia sources, bringing to bear on these sources minds shaped by radical habits of thought, attention and action.

Between ourselves and Oppen I do not think we can say anymore that “All this is reportage” since when I read many of the writers of my generation I am reminded just to what extent an unprecedented problem of coterminous information explosion, implosion, saturation and occultation delimits what we can do as writers at the hands of a certain technology (the fact that we use word processors and internet search engines and multimedia software, rather than typewriters and printed newspapers as our parent and grandparent generations did/do). I would even argue that the situation of poets today, while many of us take up the mantle of Oppen’s lyrical valuables in relation to his ideological preoccupations, resembles as much if not moreso those of writers in the 30s such as Bertolt Brecht, Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, and the Louis Zukofsky of “A – 8” whose works embody problems of reportage as both the “getting down” of facts, as well as the critical reflection of those facts through formal discovery, filtration, and negativity.

Another matter of degree regarding a generation gap between those I am calling “my generation” and Oppen’s own (and *only*(!) 60 or 70 some odd years separates our births) has to do with catastrophe itself as a socially (and not naturally) inflected consequence. While The Bomb, WWII, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement, Totalitarianism, and the erosion of democratic superstructures in the United States are nothing to sneeze at in Oppen’s case, nor are the ways that such events and phenomena have telescoped since Oppen’s generation creating many of the geopolitical and ecological crises we now find ourselves in. While it might be futile to attempt to put ourselves in Oppen’s shoes, as it were, and while I feel an incredible debt among my generation to Objectivists, and Oppen’s objectivism in particular--a debt that often elides our parent generations--disaster is not what it used to be. Or rather, we must take-up new meanings of this term within a discourse for our present.

As Rob Halpern writes in his essay, "Post Disaster," from an unpublished manuscript entitled *Disaster Suites*, forthcoming from Palm Press:

*But what do we mean by disaster? Perhaps nothing more than the shape-changing confluence of state, police and capital, that old troika by whose logic everything we can’t see appears as if already calculated from within dominant regimes of representation—our democracy of total visibility—forcing into the light of language and law precisely what resists these violent operations. Lyric can only be complicit with it.

Or, one might equally locate disaster in the coercion of common sense truths about disaster, as in the media-driven identification of bodies lost in scenes of global conflict and other social voids—a dead boy in Gaza, a thirsty woman in post-Katrina New Orleans, or a transgendered person caught-up in the social disaster that is gender itself—as if such bodies counted, as if they really mattered.

My friend Thom suggested that I think of disaster etymologically, in relation to the stars. So I began considering disaster, as being delinked from stellar guidance, unmoored from the visible constellations, or dissociated from the horoscope and other forms of totalizing organization and whatever mythologies of fate, which nonetheless continue to determine who lives and who dies. Unlike the death of any one, disaster is what we hold in common as a community, despite its not being there for us to share as a site of communion.*

What does George Oppen mean by disaster? For me, the term can not be dissociated from that other term from Oppen’s poetics, “shipwreck,” which first appears in *Discrete Series* 30 years before its recurrence in tandem with *disaster* in Oppen’s poem from *The Materials*, “From Disaster”. In this poem disaster comes from shipwreck, and the objects of shipwreck are immigrant families living, or rather, surviving, in the tenement houses of American inner cities, and eventually among the lawns of American suburbs.

Scanning the pages of Oppen’s *New Collected Poems*, I can find no other use of the word disaster throughout the work though “shipwreck” and motifs of shipwreck will appear multiple times, and words close to the meanings of “disaster” and “shipwreck” will recur insistently: “danger,” “precarious,” “emergency,” “vertigo,” “failure,” “disorder”…. When Oppen takes up the term disaster and its synonyms I take him to refer to a situation of fatelessness and atelos (as the term’s etymology suggests) but also some sense of breaking-up and distance ensuing from this break-up, that the world should be disassembled into parts or entities which should never form a communicable or known totality.

I believe this is Oppen’s Diasporic sense of the “breaking of the nations” being a literal breaking-up of people (like the mythological breaking-up of the Sefiroth from Kabbalist literature, which in Hebrew means “enumerated” or “numerous”) into radiances nearly touching, but never doing so. These radiances presence the shards of a disrupted or interrupted substance: the substance that is a people substitutable for the whole of life, the universal, by their very particularity--their substitutablility in chosenness.

Following the last sentence quoted above from Rob’s “Post-Disaster”—“Unlike the death of any one, disaster is what we hold in common as a community, despite its not being there for us to share as a site of communion”—I would relate Oppen’s similar sense of a community only constitutable and locatable by its distances, however small; and the necessity of distance to enable a being with by which entities should not become subsumed by other entities nor by communal organization at large—that is *mediate* and not *immediate* as such. Oppen’s poetics may also allegorize a disaster or allergy of beings, as words themselves perform inoperativity/"failure” both through a caesura where meaning becomes indeterminate and multi-directional/bifurcative (what John Taggart refers to as Oppen’s “sliding”), but also by a visible cleaving of words through tabs and linebreaks in Oppen’s late books, from *Seascape : Needle’s Eye* on. There are also those palimpsestual distances of Oppen’s daybooks and working papers wherein construction itself, the worked-over-ness of the poem, yields an enigmaticalness of glue, pipecleaner, nails, paper upon paper….

In Oppen’s work, I also link disaster to a form of intentionality that induces inoperativity to make the poem an extension of consciousness, and thus activity. In the work of contemporaries I read after Oppen, there is a sense of failure and not mere indeterminacy that may account for the sincerity of forms—their tests of poetry. Where the poem does not fail, that is, where it does not produce an awareness of distance where distance equates disaster and intended shipwrecks, the poem fails (i.e., it fails by not failing). Through this failure to fail, the poem remains “mannerist” or merely “declamatory”. The poem becomes useful or useable where usefulness negatively implies the instrumental as the end of catastrophic humanist endeavor (plans, projects).

Such is Oppen’s Heideggerian recognition. That being shows itself where things break down or things disclose themselves in their thingness as historicity; that thinking occurs in dis-ability, where the habitual cognition/memory is disabled so that one must think through the origin of things, what they are, and their properties as they relate and echolocate one another in impermanent worlds. I believe Nonsite Collective’s draft proposal takes up this problem of Oppen’s work, and the ways this work is truly revelatory or ontologically purposive, where it states: “In a situation where resources of every sort are being expropriated, displaced or enclosed—the commons shrinking before our very eyes—the Nonsite Collective deploys its organizational and intellectual labor in an effort to make use of the world without using it.”

I think about this statement often, both in proximity to Oppen where he writes “Failure, worse failure, nothing seen / From prominence, / Too much seen in the ditch,” after his experience of surviving his battalion in WWII, and “’Substance itself which is the subject of all our planning’ // And by this we are carried into the incalculable” where Oppen tarries with his perceived Heideggarian affinity. It is this carrying into the incalculable which seems the principle ethical wager of Oppen’s work, as it may intend an ethics of poiesis to think toward the unconceptualizable, and therefore exterior—the infinite as it can be experienced in thinking. Such is one of Oppen’s many twists on the original thought of Heidegger.

“To make use of the world without using it”—a paradox—implies an act of use or useability that is no longer instrumental, and that therefore does not use-up or become anything other than part of an ongoing process of activity. Such a prescription relates Oppen’s own senses of incalculability and failure to problems facing our ecology as they involve a nexus of economy, law, politics, ethics and other cultural realms. This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Land artist, Agnes Denes’ selected writings at a bookstore, wherein Denes includes her statement from her famous 1982 work, *Wheatfield*, a work in which she planted two acres of wheat on a landfill in Downtown Manhattan’s Battery Park. The aporia generated by Denes’ work may touch what Nonsite intends by “making use… without using” in relation to Oppen’s poetics:

*My decision to plant a wheatfield in Manhattan instead of designing just another public sculpture grew out of the long standing concern and need to call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values.
...To attempt to plant, sustain, and harvest two acres of wheat here, wasting valuable real estate and obstructing the “machinery” by going against the system, was an effrontery that made it the powerful paradox I had sought for the calling to account.
It was insane. It was impossible. But it would draw people’s attention to having to rethink their priorities and realize that unless human values were reaccessed, the quality of life, even life itself, was in danger. Placing it at the foot of the World Trade Center, a block from Wall Street, facing the Statue of Liberty, also had symbolic import….
Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept. It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, hunger and ecological concerns. It was an intrusion into the Citadel, a confrontation of High Civilization. Then again, it was also Shangri-La, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures.
What was different about this wheatfield was that the soil was not rich in loam but a dirty landfill full of rusty metals, boulders, old tires, and overcoats. It was not farmland but an extension of the congested downtown of a metropolis where dangerous cross-winds blew, traffic snarled, and every inch was precious real estate. The absurdity of it all, the risks we took and the hardships we endured were all part of the basic concept….
After my harvest, the four-acre area facing the New York Harbor was returned to construction to make room for a billion-dollar luxury complex. Manhattan closed itself once again, to become a fortress, corrupt yet vulnerable. But I think this magnificent metropolis will remember a majestic, amber field: vulnerability and staying power, the power of the paradox.*
--from Agnes Denes' *The Human Argument*

In Denes’ work, a work shared by Nonsite Collective member Amy Balkin as well as other artist-activists after the Land Art movement of the 70s and 80s, to make-use is not to have but one end that is useful; but to produce the consequences and effects of processes as the artist deploys them tactically through her situational art. By presencing the multiple failures of a socius—to account for global and local disparities of wealth, and the discrepancy between real estate and land used for farming that foregrounds such disparities—Denes succeeds in her unusing of the world. The failure she produces is a success of her art: that she should yield wheat crops on a barren land-fill in a blighted New York City, and that this should draw attention to her work as a work drawing-out aporias and contradictions of cultural exchange. Dematerialized by its dismantling and conversion into real estate, what remains are nonsites—photodocuments, films and writing—that may be resited by future culture workers after Denes’ original intention, and historical situation.

*From non-site to site: As the negative term in a dialectic of social contradictions, non-sites exist in a process of ongoing relationships. As such, they can’t resolve themselves, just as they can’t exist in isolation. Rather, we might think of them as persisting in tension with their opposites—sites—while moving toward reintegration into living social ecologies. If the non-site is a constructed response to an illegible social process, how might we imagine or understand the conversion of non-site to site? And how would that conversion alter site’s meaning?*
--from “A Draft Proposal,” Nonsite Collective, 2007

--my carbon credits *public smog*
our outposts on the commons
being *waste* expands there
no limit to what’s left over-
time remains *say life itself*
where gulls wheel scout mark
mountains of what won’t decay
no future reference a bird-
filled sky affirms

--*what guarantees the working day*

--from Taylor Brady & Rob Halpern's *Snow Sensitive Skin*

Eleni Stecopoulos On An-My Lê's Small Wars at SFMOMA

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2008/04/25/small-wars/#more-120

Amberwaves in Negativeland (Nonsite)

We are not a camera obscura
for the world as was once sup
posed and this is not opposite
day after all you can do that on
television the way your smile
triggers something in my brain
waves an implosion makes yo
ur body disappear into the things
we have made keeps gesturing
but can’t explain the war away
nor this fiction they call nation

Like we was even exchangeable
there or able we must be a means
the fire must be our fire we must
own it as we write and read this
book erstwhile sprinkled with le
aves and dirt because we appear
in the world we are sites for sore
eyes we mean “X” as in wrecks
places became subsequent to this
urgent complicity this being with

Confused tulips and spring ca
me too early this year so actually
your mythology is outmoded
April is the cruelest month for
poetry can only break your hea
rt if it doesn’t persist in some
allegory of agency or love which
is a kind of allergy or actually
produce that world we would want
because that is what we feel
the words must say the city in
its springtime that is not our mu
sic yet not green wrecked enough
so we can see us surpassing it

Nor any ideas but in relation
to each other often contradiction
becomes this city we must live in
because it is nature more than
nature more than the trees were
nature when what flowered was
wheat too bountiful for the realty
so our “common law” is reality
contradiction became a quanta
for which we use for how we
are used land art and land use
art art of use not a useful art

The air was this quanta the privati
zation of our barest needs purifies
blame does not purify the world
every thing we seem to touch this
nation turned to shit long ago we
need a body for this endangered
consciousness made from the fail
ure of all this discovering some new
mode of gathering in what remains

Elka Krajewska in Filmslash

Check out Elka Krajewska, whose *Plany Mela* I reviewed last spring, interviewed by Nancy Rhodes in Filmslash:

http://www.filmslashmagazine.com/node/45

Dirt Eaters

for Brenda and Conrad

No one was the wiser
How much blood
There would be

No one seemed to care
Given to stenches
They can’t see

Offshore we must find
A means that is
Pure to gather again

We must shove dirt
In our mouth until
We taste blood

That blood occulted
Like the 5% who
Took all the wealth

In the meantime
There will be new
Uses in this eating

Of dirt this new re
membering which must
Remain our meaning.

All This is Discourse (Statement)*

Reading Oppen’s Daybooks and selected prose recently I was struck again by the diversity of Oppen’s philosophical sources, which include Neoplatonism, Jacques Maritain, Aquinas, Leibnitz, (William) James, Karl Jung, and of course Martin Heidegger. While there is no denying Oppen was invested in philosophical problems and discourse, he also realized philosophy’s limitations as they relate to poesis. For Oppen philosophy could never be anything more than a stimulus for the work at hand, if not also another object to be incorporated into the work, another set of words to be tested as things with which to think, to generate, to know as much as anyone knows. I wonder in fact if some damage has not been done to the reception of Oppen’s work by the focus on philosophy, as well as by such self-mythologizing accounts as Oppen’s own letters concerning his suspected “plagiarism” of Heidegger. Eschewing any rigorous analogization of Oppen’s poetry and philosophical concepts and systems, it seems more important that we, as scholars and poets, put to use our own experience about how philosophy and theory infiltrates our work, potentializes the imagination, and lends itself to poetry’s toolbox, if only to the ends of inoperativity (those tools breaking). For it seems, as Zukofsky notes in *Bottom: on Shakespeare*, that poetry and philosophy do not usually get along, and yet at the same time would jealously put on the mask of the other. Oppen’s work for me is proof that the poet may be every bit as rigorous as the philosopher in thinking one’s existence in relation, however the thing philosophy does not often do which Oppen’s poetry does is enact. Philosophy lacks action. And where philosophy becomes active, when it does the thing it would otherwise propose and systemetize, it broaches poetry. Poetry’s enaction (what Stein famously called “composition as explanation”) proves Spinoza correct when he writes “the eyes are demonstrations of the mind.” However I would extend this proposition to the poem’s movement. To read the poem as a kind of field of meaning a la “composition by field,” but also the wonderful event horizons of Oppen’s late-work, is to move with the line and into lines as lines intend meaning in their motions, the measure and sound and consequence of those motions. This “saying of saying” or “pure expression” exceeds conceptualization embodying what is perhaps most ethical about the poem as an act of meaning: that the poem exceeds what can be said and thus thought about it beyond its own reenactment. The way we make it active by reading it and thinking with it beyond any convenient recourse to criticism or theory per se.

*presented as an opening statement for The Shape of Disclosure George Oppen Centennial Symposium panel, "The Literary-Philosophical Spectrum," organized by Poets House April 8th, 2008 at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Two Inconsequentials (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

"Two inconsequential things can come together to form a consequence."
--Jack Spicer


Everything is important

Everything is so important now
The lilac flower growing up
From what seems to be a washbasin
The clouds
I remember the old leper’s lips in this moment
I remember the odd man in California
Who did not love his wife
But could not stop talking about her either
And so, maybe he loved her slightly
But yet had something like hate, not the full thing, his complaints
Echoed in me
They were complaints about me somehow
And what about the boy
Who was left for dead under the airplane?
What about him?
I cannot remember his name, although I want to
These poems are essays
Important ones
And everything else became important when I met you
Everything became important again
I had been called elitist by those closest to me
For trying to think that we had a shot
To come on and make this world right
I had my voice made fun of
I had died inside a million times by
The lack of anything, infinite resignation
Infinite resignation, Kierkegaard says
Is the last stage before faith
And you can’t have anything
Like a belief in the moon
Without seeing your own black night in front of you
Like some tempting ghoul, its ferocious eyes
Darling, we are the ghouls, but we are also tender
And when act upon the world in this way
The world cannot help but be happy at our choice
To not give up
I will not give up!
I will not give up anything til
They lay my dead head upon the ground
And smash it, take pictures of it
Do all the horrible things they had always wanted to do to it
Before they do all those horrible things
I will make one choice to be good with you
Let us be good, iced-bright one
The purest thing empties out of you
And I can hear it
The sweetest bird-like thing
Is what it is, is what you are
Its acid-yellow head
Infinitely tender upon us all
Otherworldly, tenderly enacting
The kind of actions that make the saint
But not a bad saint, a good saint
In front of me in these symptoms
In this age of doom
All my dying ideas
Alive again
Because you breathed the air that you did
Important air
That swirls around you
Everything
Every piece of air important
Because it feeds us and you
And our brothers and sisters
And the other people we love
Because they are living with us
In this important moment, this time of being us
So that we cannot help but rejoice that we are one thing
So God?
Yes God
We are all one thing in this God
We have infinite resignation to be God
Because God is the thing
After you have all but given up
Everything
The most important everything
But everything
My love
And yours
The children’s love
To breathe this air
The air of health
Which is in and of itself
With the black clanging in the distance
A version of a saint


That heart slowed by glass
That heart that is not mine
Not yours that heart outside
Which I can see no longer

Works floats there and is a
Resin for what once was li
ved what twice-dying breath

Slows within this resin there
Is a sense of effect in glass
How one got here to be so red
And not somewhere for the
Heart to stop time would be

Like this we will begin in
Allegory again demonstrati
ons will be a medicine for

Thinking and doing what we
Do the cause of all glass to
Frame this and exhibit a case
Of us encasement of our fact.


You’re dying O you’re dying
Into the stage lights and second
Lives reflections that are the

Lives of adult children not sure
What age they are yet living
Against that light of day what

Hardens us against it once ag
ain made the face soft you are
Talking and I am always tired

But two inconsequential things
Can become a consequence ba
cked by what life was impend

ing a stage happening at every
Moment we died of our dying
What women what men are we

What result of this that some
Time passes how the face beca
me hardened in this knowing.


How the people we are become
Us actually exponential powers
We became action before that

Light as a kind of action those
Lights feel hard we knew we we
re dying before we knew what

Hit us exactly some images of
Us seem to be more real for the
Fact that there are others we hold

Inside us other women other men
For the fact that we make pictures
We are “not me” we are them th

ese eyes blinking through us all
The identities we had to kill did
We really have to kill them to be

Any one and the curtain and the
Stage and the audience that is
Never one hearing these lines.


I think of Henry
James the way
his characters mo

ve like animals
with memories
remembering wh

at they did not do
what they could
not become be

cause truly time
is their master
and what we can

not imagine our
deaths as the stage
lights pour down

on our faces and
the sunlight pours
down like it were

this real light of
dying O we are
dying to meet ea

ch other there you
talk while I am al
ways tired resig

ned infinitely res
igned to touching
you in these dis

tances in them
fear almost seemed
like our friend.

I am angry at you, Death (Deadpan)

with Dorothea Lasky

I am angry at you, Death

Death, I have been angry at you
For such a long time
And I still am
So angry at you
For giving me too many things to take myself away from
Hollow out the time of them for the sake of it
Metal bowls I leave the fruit in, but they change eventually
I don’t want to ever not change, but I want something constant
Like the ocean
I don’t want the ocean to ever die
And yet, you steal the saltwater from it as a lark
You take the seabirds from it one by one
As you glance at them casually, a party
Of seabirds raining down
My breath labored
At the light of all my birds
Raining down on the ocean.
You know, one day, I will kill you
Before you have a chance to
Do anything anymore to the people I love
Leaving them awry in the summer sun
Or bloody on the pulpit
Leaving all the people I love bloody on the pulpit
And raining down with things I cannot contain
I cannot contain you but I will kill you
So swiftly one day in the morning
I will enter a room and there will be so much
Folding of the Spring that I have created and made
My life into it will be like you are dead once and for all
How will you feel to be dead once and for all?
All of it happening to you like you have no empathy
I don’t think it is that you have no empathy
But moreso that you are so wild
You cannot stop to consider our feelings
On the day I will kill you I will be so wild
That I will not have a civilized moment to consider your feelings
I will act upon you in a reddish smoky haze
Because I am more powerful than you ever gave me credit for
My limits exceed that of other men before me
And I have prepared for this strike
My whole life
And when the time is upon us
I will do the thing I have set out to do for this humanity
As you creak under me into the earth
A groaning, lepered thing
A fallen thing we will all learn to forget forever


I had one little book

I had one little book
Of a boy thrust in the snow
Now I will think of him forever
In his quietude, the warm December lights of the inside
And then January, the quietest month
With its green smokestacks
And the purple fog hanging over everything
I walked from the Green St. Station
To my house on the edge of the park
And no one knew
That I was that little boy
I never told a soul I wrapped myself
In reddish towels and laid down
In the middle of the floor
Til time came to me as a convincer
I was silenced only by own regret
That I had been born this thing
We all look upon
And I look upon
The many things
That are encased in glass
Dear Love, Friends, and Animals, like you
I do not want to be in glass ever
Instead, you can leave me in the snow
As you pour water slowly over my bones
Flowers will grow from me eventually
The flowers, they will grow from me eventually
If you finally learn to be silent with me
If you finally learn to leave me be


Deadpan 2

I don’t care if the system is corrupt
I will continue to donate my organs to history
Take my heart, my brain, my brainhole
Take it: veins, eyes
And legs
That have wrapped around the trees of summer when I was alone
I didn’t want to be this thing as clear as day
Anyway
Anyway, I wanted to be
The purest clump of sand in the palm of my love
Where is he? Where is that clump of sand where I am held?
I can feel the love of my soul surrounding me
But no hand upon me
And in that
I place the hand upon myself
Oh could I look upon myself
Sweet slumber of hands on me
Yellow seagulls above the olive green pools
Orange sandbars in the blue-green pools


Quote of the day: *Don’t shoot me please!*
Shining out in your wild sentences silences

Like a sin of these structures bursting an
Ecology bust every ought how will our

Culture survive without New Orleans one
Wonders there is no way to lyricize so

We disaster culture crowns its remnants
Revenants and ruins politics the hyper-

telic claims siphoning the dead for whose
Use a force no “nature” has seen that open

Which is us our subsistence while we keep
Fucking each other up the silence sentence

In this repeats a structure of every police
The maximuses of exiled wishes we are not

Sure what they have said those citizens the
Levees themselves in broken articulation a

Variation on a variation of a theme by Will
iams I’m sorry we didn’t reinforce properly

The levees of New Orleans the oil we suck
ed from the Gulf made us rich we suspect

The waterfront real estate of the 9th Ward
Will make us richer sincerely sovereignty.


Veritic in songs stars cycle
Disaster cuts the vision was
A distance we could feel but

Never know audience to the
Perception of words as we
Were hearing them float

In the lights that dream of
Distance the way tanks dreamt
Us blood flowed like crude

From a bird’s appearance in
That light under it a night of
Floodlamps and checkpoints.


Under it that night song permanent
Tanks don’t turn here and veins don’t

Bleed yet flesh vanishes from flesh
A proposition about fire the light be

fore a thousand arrows flew thru it
So it seemed Lear floated on those

Burning stairs a ghost if eyes were
Ever certain and they are not would

We see ourselves again in reflections
Of other eyes could this heart Cor

delia be true if eyes didn’t just take
In light but threw it out into world

What I alighted under it singing oth
er kinships in this dark under this

Dark lamp by which our straying
Says everything the dead who never

See me speaking for them won’t save
Us spirits what work I can’t intend.


How will we know anything
The snow that surrounds us
Like an endless color I knew

We are simply a diadem for
ced to rule ever forced to
Rule by these objects with

These objects like the body
Was an object you said you
Object to this that we should

Be cremated so that they ca
n’t do anything with us when
We're dead those collectors

Of curiosities and culture
Other experiments upon un
ruly bodies subjects all this

Makes me think of our dis
agreement about some lines
I wrote that “the dead do not

intend anything” though I
Meant this as a question ab
out their powerlessness.


What exterior was I felt
Inside it your patience
The blood folds these
Worlds were one single

Information the way
The sunlight hits us while
We are here in bed no
Subject but in this ob

jective no other outside
In the lips begin it is not
As if we are outside them
Or inside them merely

When they touch and
Feeling begins somewhere
Else the lips begin to kiss
Like mirrors touching

Making no reflection but
One we can’t see this is ca
lled immediacy so love is
What we subtract from.

Organs Without Bodies

We gave our limbs we gave our throats
We gave our eyes to it and this is not
A voice for the dead organs float with
out bodies I wouldn’t wish my life

Upon anyone like an impossible image
We were anything other than this yet
That song gets sung for the numerous
For the numinous we are wastes the wo

rld is laid waste in reverse when we
Imagine other uses for I and we the
Way they became weapons and speak for
What they shouldn’t what they are not

This gift unaccountable of what a body
Can do we know too much we do not
Know what use to put it to so this is
More terrible than anything we know.

Alone With the Alone

I am afraid
You are afraid
I am afraid not of this voice
You are afraid not of this voice
I am afraid of the voice inside the voice
You are afraid of the voice inside the voice
This voice pauses
This voice having paused has paused
I am afraid of chronos and kleisis alike
You are afraid for all time
As what I do gets in front of me and in back of me
As what you do can not be regained
Or numbered as such what I do
What you do will not be numerary as the stars are made from numbers
The stars are a disaster—operative
And yet steered by them we brighten worlds
Is there anything you haven't seen
I haven't seen nothing, not yet
You have seen too many somethings
All somethings being alike
And not alike
Like stars disastered by their source
Like night saved from these same stars
We are starlight
Chosen to no particular end
But the end itself neither near or far
And everywhere in between divided
Consequential
But never fatal
You are afraid of that light that leaves you alone at night
I am afraid it taunts me to climb it
It taunts you to descend
And wear the masks I always was
The things you pretended to be
Daylight and noontide coterminous
Our actual midnight
There is no our here
Only stars
Only our night saved from stars
Yours and mine
Yours and mine and nowhere
A concretion indeed
A pause in the heart
The deepest pause a heart ever did feel
The shudder of all beings
Hearing themselves
Hearing themselves hearing

*Undeserving Lebanon* Review in Modern Painters

I have reviewed Jalal Toufic's *Undeserving Lebanon* (Forthcoming Books, 2007) for the recent "Art and War" issue of Modern Painters (April, 2008)...

"The stakes of Toufic’s newest book are immense and emphatically stated, as the thinker identifies the task of a present and future Middle-Eastern culture to think beyond justice, commemoration, historicization and reparation towards the creation of original works of art, experiment, and concepts that may confront events which befell Lebanon during its civil war. For Toufic, to leave these ‘basic tasks’ to others might preserve in Lebanon’s Event the ‘conditions of possibility’ for a memory anterior to both psychological memory (the “working through” of individual and collective traumas) and collective-historical memory (reparations, commemoration of the dead, “settling of accounts”). This anarchic memory presents what Toufic recognizes as the ‘invocation of the Redeemer’—an ability to imagine the forthcoming of the Messiah as the event of a virtual existence in relation to social fact, actuality..."

To download *Undeserving Lebanon* as a PDF link here.

Richard Foreman's Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land (Review)

Here's a review I wrote of Richard Foreman's latest...

www.thefanzine.com/sections.php?s=art&id=228&a=articles

Oppen Centennial at Poets House (Ad)

Tuesday, April 8, 3:00-9:00pm
The Shape of Disclosure: George Oppen Centennial Symposium

On the occasion of George Oppen's centennial and the publication of his Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, poets and scholars gather to honor the life and work of this spare, powerful and original poet. Co-sponsored by Poets House, Tribeca Performing Arts Center at BMCC and University of California Press. Funded in part by the New York Council for the Humanities.

3:00pm Panel: Biographical-Historical Continuum
Moderated by Michael Heller
Featuring Stephen Cope on Oppen's diaries and journals, Norman Finkelstein on the late poems, Eric Hoffman on Oppen’s political identity and Kristin Prevallet on Oppen's response to World War II.

5:00pm Panel: Literary-Philosophical Spectrum
Moderated by Thom Donovan
Featuring Romana Huk on Oppen's relationship to metaphysics and Judeo-Christian philosophy, Burt Kimmelman on Oppen and Heidegger, Peter O'Leary on Whitman's influence on Oppen and John Taggart on Oppen's poetry as "a process of thought."

7:30pm George Oppen Centennial Reading
Stephen Cope, Thom Donovan, Norman Finkelstein, Peter Gizzi, E. Tracy Grinnell, Michael Heller, Erica Hunt, Burt Kimmelman, Geoffrey O’Brien, Peter O’Leary, Kristin Prevallet, Anthony Rudolf, Hugh Seidman, Harvey Shapiro, Lee Spinks, Stacy Szymaszek & John Taggart

George Oppen was born April 24, 1908 in New Rochelle, New York, and died in San Francisco in 1984. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Of Being Numerous (1968), Oppen was also the author of Discrete Series (1934), The Materials (1962), This in Which (1965) and Primitive (1978).

@ Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
$10/Free to Students and Poets House Members
Audiences may attend individual events or the entire symposium

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.

Deadpan cont'd

with Dorothea Lasky

Animal

I have lost my mind completely
Animal is in every room of this house about to walk in
He is turning the corner with his giant red, ghoulish head
What will he do to me?
I do not know what he will do to me
Darling, I am sitting here and saying goodnight to you
We can be friends if you would like to
I would like to
Be your friend if you will have me
Now I am leaving this room cause Animal is moving in
Making his way into the room, his eyes are on me
I am going into the bedroom that he can’t get in
Not one person who will do me harm can get in this room
I lay on the bed and everything is safe
And with the words of this poem I am thrusting Animal everywhere
I am putting him everywhere
He gets scarier with my every word
I am shining through my fear with the dreams that the lovers make
The dreams that the lovers make, I do not make alone
I make with two people, their twin heads fanciful and wise
And utterly blond
Gleaming in the sun with their yellow teeth
My twin lovers
The ones who will save me from this nightmare
Two-headed
Turning their heads towards me and then towards the ceiling
Unable to see themselves
This monster that escapes me

*

The matting in my mind
And the matting in yours
Records a place not qui
te here the ways the wor

ld possesses us and surr
ounds us with products
Of no known substance
This is what it means to

Make worlds and make
Them urgently our comb
ined speed is blood as the
Time it takes to form that

Definite idea clear as fuc
k when we breathing tou
ch and our breasts touch
And thus night interrupts

Our continuous burning
In which open flame str
uctures the breath and is
Far away in a mood of

Fear no brooding can ba
nish nor God apprehend
Even through our trembl
ing kisses veils are tears.


This weekend’s aeons reek
Of evidence wanting to take
Everything further worlds
Moon-signs and signs of blood

In alphabets always bursting at
Their skin with what life we would
Like to share but never can the
Lips born together to any satisfaction

Other than adequacy but then ideas
Like blood rush upon us love
Us more than anyone we could ever
Know when they touch no one

Is the wiser when they fill us with
This warmer feeling of knowing and
Not knowing somehow that you
Or anyone I love will not always be.


You sing of larger structures in me
Of rhythm still with monsters growing
Bigger into the sky scaring-off all

The guns and weapons we were once
Serving the night the servicing night
Using us up into the night that night

The human once grew to like a giant
Ear filling-up all we once were all
That was an empty head so that’s all

Hearing is and speech and music a
Function of animal vigilance a need
To hear the vowels these origins stink

Of blood before melody and motet
Dominated us with numbers with
That music militant in essence.


There was no sanity
But trails of resources and the

Soul given to money
A phylum written

On the backs of organic history
And women and slaves

And children we will resurrect
Them with our sounds

That are not music controlled
By a deadly logic of wise-

Schools and science and rhetoric
Hardly for any people

Singing into each other’s breasts
We must destroy those deathly

And insane songs of ratio
Singing the song we must sing


A crane fell this was all emblematic
Of the economy laboring to make
Of itself like any good soldier or cap
italist something more than it should be

Without a structure to distribute wealth
More fairly or enact laws that counteract
This fundamental unfairness of the human
Since we are human and we made those

Cranes they are part of us and when they
Break they are even more a part of us
An accident may be more meaningful in
Its effects than any cause it manifested

A militarized sky mocking our civilian
Domination by glass towers and glass re
flecting helicopters countless times over
When the sky should be one subject.

Strobos (Deadpan)

Strobos (Deadpan)
for Dorothea Lasky

There are things we live among
and there are things that make us
undead in seeing them or by
their very use of us I saw Dottie
the dead ones we would feign
on our adult screens scare me
"me and my shadow" where I go
nothing follows no one because
this not-following was us at play

in eternity there was no trace
had not been taken by our steps
our ands and buts and conjunctives
these real sweet-nothings pimp us
out like substance interrupted
a baby which grows from it
and doesn't have a name we
would like to say yet if a name is
like a strobe staggered in shiny
moments we felt its actual poses
as our impermanent movement

what we don't see as a duration
but only the semblance of when
you put roots here and name them
“desire” desire which made things
grow only sometimes which left
bite-marks like question marks
while we were still in medias res
birds swept down to catch us
and care for us before we really
fell back-to-life such recurrences

were real you say death is never
really fair like your life like our lives
when you touch me there and stare
out from it like it was always here
always before a guilt of caring I don't
want your roots & branches to ever
die this forest of meaning even if we
know their names even when love
knows the names it desires to be
called by to make a new subject from
this subtraction this being entity

where the sun’s often trapped like
bronze and outlives our lives the simple
animals torn limb-from-limb the things
we should be startling poetry for the
first time and make everything fear
we were finally We deadpan seeing
everything the sun involved as though
for the last time this sickness a cure

that can in fact have no name but
gravity given to teeth and pain all
the machine movements we ever make
like stop-action babies we can't ever have
the noonlight of that video which is you
in a way ready to announce yourself
an idea of your “bigger” self little ones
that go like big ones do the lumps meta-
physical lumps of the mind and actual
lumps materials as they are made by
no one can never be a shared child

can this be embodiment like bumper
cars only shocking when they stop
our techne a world of surprise and
blinking the eyes were so exhibited
for control and controlled us verily
they were convertible they made our
lives more real writing through riding
to make this last man suffer the dis-
tances the little huts of us a *domos*

the wind swept them and blew our
windows open disturbed the curtains
changed the mood of last things that
would come to touch us like a wind
or tears thru which we see the world
somehow corrected sex was true
the wind when we are coming (and
we are coming) complicit in evidence

no longer some excrescence or
stupidity of the sky like Williams says
herds and heads of men like armies
battalions of stumps men should also
sing joyous stealth what’s burnt at
least is seen and what isn’t seeing
a faction not entirely opposed to
force tingling where we might dis-
appear still within a trembling earth

under a torn canopy through the open
night before anything we learned was
useful or what we could see the blank
neutrality of those lips before me the
genital contact of the animal too close
to this color to feel it to feel anything
but a general dreaming that thoughts
were feelings too and sense an image
catching up to us totally desynched

from worlds in their prehensions of
what poses us what moves discretely
not as me in this detachment semblances
of “haunted” nature the quote around our
necks stubborn as our literal dreaming
preponderances of flesh mold this
crawlspace this airlock the sudden
dying-with-you how the shadows grow
and close in and are in us and become
us so we were their insatiable interior.