Joshua Clover

They basically grow it out of sand. This is a big help because otherwise it was getting pretty enigmatic. Welcome to the desert of the real, I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen. I do not think the revolution is finished. So during these years, I lived in a country where I was little known, With the thunder of the Gods that protect the Icelandic tundra from advertising, Great red gods, great yellow gods, great green gods, planted at the edges of the speculative tracks along which the mind speeds from one feeling to another, from one idea to its consequence Past the proud apartment houses, fat as a fat money bag. I wish that I might stay in this pleasant, conventional city, A placid form, a modest form, but one with a claim to pleasure, And then vanish in the fogs of hypnoLondon. All are in their proper place in these optical whispering-galleries, The swan-winged horses of the skies with summer’s music in their manes, The basic Los Angeles Dingbat, A housewife in any neighborhood in any city in any part of Mexico on a Saturday night. Every Sunday is too little Sunday, A living grave, the true grave of the head. In one shout desire rises and dies. Composed while I was asleep on horseback I drift, mainly I drift.

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities, These pale window box poppies of the laughing class, Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight, Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’s foot, Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert It’s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel, Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing On its way out. Prince Valiant vowed to sew the horizons Into a single idea, to put on the blue dress of distance, Looping past rivers and mountains as one leaps from bed To bed to make loneliness lonely, the suburbs were for him A relief, a pageant of calm desire where he settled, All the king’s horses grazing on forsythia out back While the evening tilts back out of the night, a kindly drunk Uncle, and asks you to stay. Was this the end of traveling? Or just a change in the story over time, as for example how Tous les chevaux du roi become Josie and the Pussycats From one version to the next? So all heroes are deranged By something quite common yet unexpected, a constellation Redrawn and named again through the stars Above the porch don’t shift but seem to sink Through winter’s pitcher of noircotic ink, Leaving a single streetlight that burned happily, Thinking it was the sun, after all it was the day Of the night and turned the world around it, We were good sentences and forgot where we started.

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation. They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned to call this a nature show. Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for the face. Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed meditation. But the song was never familiar. Because this was the only room this was the only room where we undressed—: that was the plot. They moved across the screen across the room but it was not happening to us. The image burning in. Coated with hair & then a lighter area for the face meaning exposed skin. We have learned to wear the architecture despite the sky’s numerous advances. All these things—the speed & the music & the room—happened but not enough. We undressed in the room we could not take off where I handcuffed you to the story. This is the work of the brain—itself a bloody spring or electric wire wrapped in ripe gray gauze— you like it. (2 lobes resembling the holy tablets delivered into the veldt’s dry speed—the Laws prefigured in the neutral network’s burning thicket.) They moved across the screen howling but the sound turned down. This happened over & over again—the blue light leaking into the room like sand. Burning into the brain in a finery of filamental fire. The Laws which do not unravel into noise & make a kind of story of kinked plot which can’t be straightened like a motel wire hanger looped around your wrists. The loop like a computer simulation—the thought of the thought— the image burning in now. We began to understand what they were—: the Thou& the shalt& the not

In one version you must convince every living thing one by one to weep until he climbs back into the marriage-house, that earth about which it is said that bread is the glue of the earth. Certainly glue is money, the phrase “the tears of things” is money, the revelation of the Woman Clothed in the Sun is money. The lake is a disc of bright money buying a few plain birds down, they climb back nervously as you hurry through, plain birds like a plain song, that moment when four or five are around your knees like Zeno’s arrow, rising by halves, like Eurydice’s bread, & still the possibility they might intersect, you would be the one who was struck by a flying bird, somewhere between a blesséd fool & village idiot, the only one to persist outside the local economy, drooling at travelers, holding yourself, slinging incomprehensible advice, you would learn the trick with museum wire where you snap the heads off quiet animals in front of the store, tempted equally by science & dirty work. . . . I am trying to invent a way for you to buy me back—

I want to read at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house with all the pomp available. With celebratory music and all my beloveds watching. With Baraka and DiPrima and Roque Dalton behind me I want to read at the white house. I want to read poems at the white house wearing my favorite clothes probably a hoodie or perhaps my Belgian suit. Belgium is a failed state in the heart of Europe which is something to aspire to. I like Belgium and one day I might like to read poems at the palace of the nation but for now I want to read poems at the white house. I want to read poems and sing karaoke and I will probably tell a few nervous jokes. It will be like all the other readings. We will be there together. I want to read poems at the white house and then like any house reading we will all clean up together. We will clean up the mess we have made together. All that rubble and all those ashes. These are my conditions.

For 8 months he lay in bed over the difference between “the bell rings” & “he rings the bell.” Did those 2 “rings” SOUND DIFFERENT? The invisible disturbance which is the bell’s vibration beating at the air—a FIELD EFFECT—does it shift with the ringer’s will? This, he thought, was the smallest difference between things which the human mind could hold (or almost hold, the thought-of-it falling away from the thinking, a penny rolling to the horizon & so to sleep . . .). He couldn’t get up. It became clear that he was the murderer. Everyone knows. A man standing at a podium reads from notes. In the audience people nod in immaculate suits, women & men.When I am done someone will transcribe what I say into speech. It will not resemble my notes. He is just THE THING between his notes & his speech. This is only fair, that he be the air. Some of the women wear hats with feathers in them, wild, candescent. In the audience is a boy named B, not the letter, not the note. Another sound, neither letter nor note—

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out. Music: Known as the Philosopher’s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it. Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds. Paris: You’re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf. Music: The unless of a certain series. Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything. Fire: The number between four and five. Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have, it reminds you of of. Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out again without seeming to move. The false motion of the wave, “frei aber einsam.” Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your thought and your face. Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in Brooklyn at the time. Art: That’s the problem with art. Paris: I was in Paris at the time! St-Sulpice in shrouds “like Katharine Hepburn.” Katharine Hepburn: Oh America! But then, writing from Paris in the thirties, it was to you Benjamin compared Adorno’s wife. Ghost citizens of the century, sexual misery is wearing you out. Misreading: You are entering the City of Praise, population two million three hundred thousand . . . Hausmann’s Paris: The daughter of Midas in the moment just after. The first silence of the century then the king weeping. Music: As something to be inside of, as inside thinking one feels thought of, fly in the ointment of the mind! Sign at Jardin des Plantes: GAMES ARE FORBIDDEN IN THE LABYRINTH. Paris: Museum city, gold lettering the windows of the wedding-dress shops in the Jewish Quarter. “Nothing has been changed,” sez Michael, “except for the removal of twenty-seven thousand Jews.” Paris 1968: The antimuseum museum. The Institute for Temporary Design: Scaffolding, traffic jam, barricade, police car on fire, flies in the ointment of the city. Gilles Ivain: In your tiny room behind the clock, your bent sleep, your Mythomania. Gilles Ivain: Our hero, our Anti-Hausmann. To say about Flemish painting: “Money-colored light.” Music: “Boys on the Radio.” Boys of the Marais: In your leather pants and sexual pose, arcaded shadows of the Place des Vosges. Mathematics: And all that motion you supposed was drift, courtyard with the grotesque head of Apollinaire, Norma on the bridge, proved nothing but a triangle fixed by the museum and the opera and St-Sulpice in shrouds. The Louvre: A couple necking in an alcove, in their brief bodies entwined near the Super-Radiance Hall visible as speech. Speech: The bird that bursts from the mouth shall not return. Pop song: We got your pretty girls they’re talking on mobile phones la la la. Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on the kingdom of the visible. Gold leaf: The mind makes itself a Midas, it cannot hold and not have. Thus: I came to the city of possession. Sleeping: Behind the clock, in the diagon, in your endless summer night, in the city remaking itself like a wave in which people live or are said to live, it comes down to the same thing, an exaggerated sense of things getting done. Paris: The train station’s a museum, opera in the place of the prison. Later. The music lacquered with listen.

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks. The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love. In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in Across the bluing evening. It’s the hour things get To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet. Yikes. It’s fine to be here with you watching the great events Without taking part, clinking our ice as they advance Yet remain distant. Like the baker always about to understand Idly sweeping up that he is the recurrence of Napoleon In a baker’s life, always interrupted by the familiar notes Of a childish song, “no more sleepy dreaming,” we float Casually on the surface of the day, staring at the bottom, Jotting in our daybooks, how beautiful, the armies of autumn.