Or to Begin Again Read online

  In the film, a white face rides on a cloud of black, a sort of unattached mask, and it moved slightly at odds with the cloud as if they were part of separate, independent breaths originating in the minds of their creator. The black cloud had a mouth, but that was not interesting and seemed to be there at the whim of the plot. They needed something to eat something, and the poor hovering white mask was incapable, so they spawned a separate mouth in its garb.

  If it were to visit, I suppose the mouth would eat the cheese and drink the wine, while the mask conversed about the weather. In late August, the storms brew up from the south, twirling destructive glamour.

  Fox, quick enough to be almost illusory: you cannot quite know the space it inhabits. It marks a jagged desperate path and then leaps into the side brush. The half-moon appears in the color of the skin of a ripe peach, newly bruised.

  Patience could improve your diction and perhaps your sleep as well. Never can tell. No point in the radiant suspended arc that sustains nothing. No point in sweeping the floor. Lifting the arm. Lifting the arm up to wave but not to reach either the arc above or the path of dust settling underfoot. Blow on it.

  Blow: the arc will disappear.

  THE IS NOT THAT IS (HÉLÈNE CIXOUS)

  What is ist?

  (hedgehog) (poem)

  ellipsis evaluation

  illegible thing

  minuscule fortress suffering

  absolute singularity

  to the other’s keeping

  that I am

  a thing name beyond the name in a ball

  animal thing

  arrive ist ist

  the hedgehog for example

  Silkworm by heart a ceremony

  silk of self being of promises bestiary

  the hedgehog and the worm

  wrap them up

  woman in her sorrow scarf

  blindfolded cathedral

  fragment of skin

  Cat. Why cat?

  Cat takes the time to live (tact) (humility) (compassion)

  Abraham the Ass the inhuman exile a creature of

  inexhaustible creation (guest) (host)

  Who is this?

  Pardon me for not wanting to say

  hanging in

  air

  it keeps its secret.

  I apologize for not wanting to mean

  not wanting to say

  not making meaning foliated hilarious even if secret

  it is ist ist

  what is not

  the grandiose makes toys of us

  when you are not ridiculous you are most ridiculous.

  LINES OF FLIGHT

  Unequal distribution arbitrary float Jonah in jeansuncouth rampage Jonah in T-shirt peace refugee

  and the dream with its wail implicit forbidden salacious cool the dream always cool to wake to the cool heat of dream retiring the name call it Jonah

  call it the end of earth underwater call it the spider with her prey.

  Cornered at the desperation of the field’s disastrous unction

  see how Jim might respond to Jim

  Harry to Lavinia, Charles to Jane.

  Or, in the redundancy of defeat,

  Hercules might quit the team to join another.

  Cold and colder still

  instilled so that dream and not-dream coincide

  as a nearly perfect coil.

  What was his nervous antagonism? A name?

  And what have you to say about these flowers

  late in the season, so desperate and calm.

  The whine of hope perishes

  in time, just in time, for the jackhammers

  to build an emblem science, and the small figures

  to move in its midst like so many futures.

  Dry Sargasso. The rash-lit arm, the virtual shoulders.

  Tendrils of the chive and of the nodding leaf.

  City I never saw

  its music drenched

  with journals and floating beds.

  Lazarus, sky hewn among the dark boughs.

  Dry Sargasso, its diary of husks.

  REALM OF ENDS

  1.

  Francis turns. He has something to say. He has an

  announcement. He says, snow in summer and falls silent.

  A single egg in the nest. Francis turns.

  It is not metaphysical; it is merely distraction.

  Time passes. The nest is empty.

  The snow, bountiful. A girl dedicates her last weeks

  to a show of force. She writes gracefully about force.

  Francis turns. He seems weak and small and without volition.

  Thus the bird lands on his head.

  Thus there are radiant seconds.

  Is it reliable? Not the garden. Not the bed.

  The streaming elocution is more or less prosaic.

  The bird lifts up onto the bare branch.

  The tree, an elm, is dying, almost dead.

  Francis is indifferent but the bird, a cardinal,

  shines on the barren branch.

  Tit tit tittit tit hovers the weary pragmatist.

  It is hoped, by Francis and the rest, that she

  cannot know heartbreak, not

  the melodrama of the nest’s margin of error.

  2.

  All day in the fir trees, night remains.

  Time passes. Francis is immobile, bereft.

  He has recalled the condition of stone.

  He has resumed his incalculable origin.

  And so the second comes too quickly,

  follows too quickly upon the first.

  Others, mobile and incidental and lush,

  attest to the perishable variety at large:

  shark, polar bear, other political incidents

  having little in common with the immobility of Francis.

  A fence and an alarm, a cat and a cradle,

  these also are not acceptable, not progression.

  3.

  The day has become abstract; I cannot know it.

  It spits and complains as if it were real

  but it is only a matter of time.

  How, for example, forgetting

  becomes opaque.

  As if, dark on dark, an inert stone.

  Francis is only a sentimental stone.

  Francis is impoverished and mute.

  Francis is a fiction of the glare, turning

  into the Tuscan sun, under the juniper, among flowers.

  Doves perch on his head and shit on his sleeves.

  This is an example of natural observable fact.

  Yet the day is opaque

  despite recurring flags in the graveyard

  lending their gala strophe to the forgotten;

  despite the fantasy of the saint

  turning in his soiled robes

  under the heavy lemon trees, the ornamental

  beds: rose, lavender, creeping thyme.

  Along the path the lovers come

  through the thrash of sunlit leaves,

  the heavenly scents of lemon and rose.

  The day is a tide of sensual foreboding

  in the salty sweat of their backs

  riding on white linen

  in a luminous small room

  in the taste of cool wine on their swollen lips.

  The day, for the lovers, heaves with potential.

  4.

  The reverie stalks the real; it stretches abstraction

  to its limit, deposited at the feet of Francis.

  But given the impermanence of birds,

  the cardinal’s nest on the deck,

  given the domestic and the spiritual

  the utilitarian and

  the forgotten, given

  these cold mercurial shapes, arbitrary

  hinges, islands, perpetual desires

  and their advocacy among the least entitled,

  given that one falls in love

  with the condition of hope

  and falls out of
love with its

  cruel replacement, hope,

  so that what is valued is not the same

  and the shape of the body in the window

  is foreign, the picture of the woman,

  her body and face

  at odds with their person, at odds with her

  curiosity, her pertinence.

  In a dream of the girl and the lover,

  now forgotten as the day, inevitably, is forgotten,

  there is a difference between being forgotten

  and being among the dead, but

  given these episodes,

  their proof turns to night and stone.

  5.

  The ears are ordinary, the feet

  distorted. The girl has a condition

  not announced in the greenroom

  but nevertheless leaked to the press.

  Biography has its compulsions, its regrets.

  It could be the materiality of opaque gold

  and the severity of promises,

  their promiscuous gift,

  oaths made on pillows between lovers.

  There, in the eventide,

  a strangling usurps the petty comma,

  staggers from rejection to confirmation to murder

  institutionally foretold. O Francis!

  Do you stand for the cold, the cruel,

  the bargain between such desire and such trust?

  Take no prisoners. Let the homily endure.

  The holidays are adept at the spectacle of divorce.

  They specialize in silence, gala silence.

  Masterpieces of the still life

  make their way onto tables of the celebrants.

  Holy! Holy! Holy! intones the priest.

  Things are given and taken away.

  Here is a token of my affection.

  Here is my child.

  6.

  Turning the figure away, removing it

  leaves its replica shadow

  to shift with the gloating wind.

  Later, the sculptor

  pieces together poor bits of fabric,

  copies from memory the shape of the lips.

  The original remains vocable,

  escaping the dream’s

  unscripted solitude, conceiving night’s

  blind, its familiar embrace.

  Francis is silent. He has taken a vow.

  Suffering unfurls its performance,

  elicits revenge. On a ladder,

  the man turns to address the public.

  He imagines strangling the woman.

  He speaks of his future in a nest.

  AFTER TOURISM

  Disturbed over her marvel I heard her say

  something nocturnal I saw

  mystery as merely change I saw

  envy and the illegitimate mile I saw

  under the formal atrocity at the messy embankment

  all these and vocabulary lagging behind its science

  tramp unknown soldier cop

  talking strange talk

  under an altered light under daze

  I heard her say tomorrow as if she knew

  I heard her say come back

  and I choose you

  as analogue of the yet to be.

  Do not foreclose

  investigation, but come along.

  I will try not to protract my look into

  now I will continue as if

  you were next if you will I heard a man say

  on the radio the other day, well, yesterday

  talking about headaches

  if you will

  and today I had a look at

  a Chinese cabinet only it is not clear

  it is Chinese it

  may be from another country I took

  measurements nevertheless

  for my next life I am thinking of requesting librarian

  although I am as yet not on a list

  of possible survivors I am

  thinking of erasing the word sorrow from

  the world, hurting under an illusory pennant

  master of ceremonies hidden behind its junk

  I am thinking of coming back as

  part of your coat as a tree is part wind.

  FIGURES MOVE (SAINT PETERSBURG)

  Back from the thunderous geist

  bills to pay, grass to cut, fish to fry.

  The spectacle of tasks

  importuning, scenes

  folded under scaffolds of lore.

  Figures move

  collapse of particulars

  reformation borrowed from chapter

  and force.

  VIDEO CLIP

  Para enters, carrying Doxa,

  aided by her friend, Lysis.

  They live in the City of Ancient Signs.

  Para is thin, very thin, and Doxa is heavy, quite heavy.

  Lysis is listless, fatigued. She has been idle forever.

  Under the Golden Arches they see a winged horse.

  Lysis says, “Mythos.”

  Doxa agrees.

  Para is fearful; she feels left out. She consults

  Doctor Noid. Dr. Noid is annoyed with Para.

  How many times do I have to tell you

  to take your camera wherever you go?

  How many times do I have to tell you

  to record all events, sounds, weathers?

  How do you expect the Real to return if you refuse

  to obey these prescriptions,

  to take these precautions?

  Cat enters carrying an ass trophy.

  END VIDEO CLIP

  Morning cycles across night.

  Almost enchanted by the light, almost annulled.

  Were this the great bearing, were this merely

  intrigue, or the architect’s

  confidence in the small shop of curiosities,

  were the bride less stymied

  in her great dress,

  were any of these accountable

  to the surge of one thing, one thing, one thing,

  addition in space, bridge after bridge, and

  the known but not recalled,

  its bitter appraisal, singular

  as the image of a girl,

  long hair down over a shirt,

  intent to be seeing, to be present,

  she, the girl, long hair, open shirt,

  writing something else.

  VIDEO CLIP

  Whim and Truce enter the frame.

  They greet each other with a small bow.

  Whim jumps up and down, hands overhead, trying to touch

  the ceiling. Truce turns to leave, a trail of blood behind him.

  Whim slips on the liquid and falls down.

  Laughter track.

  END VIDEO CLIP

  Breathe deeply. Exhale whim. Exhale truce.

  Can there be history?

  Is it there, behind us in the park, Peter on a horse?

  Is it in that cathedral, among the quick flames?

  In Akhmatova’s kitchen? In Mandelstam’s death?

  Can the Real return as history?

  Ruin floods into images of new ruin and disappears.

  Again! cries the child, Again!

  Once upon a time.

  II.

  Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?

  —LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

  ALICE IN THE WASTELAND

  Alice was beginning to get tired

  sitting

  with spring rain

  on the bank

  in forgetful snow. She thought,

  It is too dark to see anything.

  Then she began to wonder

  about the meaning of anything

  and the meaning of nothing

  and in what ways any and no

  were alike.

  She said to herself, I cannot see anything

  and then, I can see nothing

  and thought they amounted to the same thing
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