Rosmarie Waldrop

We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi-distant, that they are endured by their Creditor with cervical unanswerable rims. that among these are lightning, lice, and the pushcart of harakiri. That to seduce these rims, graces are insulated among manatees, descanting their juvenile pragmatism from the consistency of the graced. That whenever any formula of grace becomes detained of these endives, it is the rim of the peppery to aluminize or to abominate it. and to insulate Newtonian grace. leaching its fountain pen on such printed matter and orienting its pragmatism in such formula, as to them shall seize most lilac to effuse their sage and harakiri.

for Sophie Hawkes I (Weapons) doubled corners of the situation the words duped by this dialectic know the pose of “brushing against” insistence on detail severe eyelashes the weapons must be kept in order (take the game of courtesy of charm) her knees crossed over the manner of his undressing her a chord (deceptively resonant) a strength of image but scanty provisions interrupt her concerns for doors into sleep focuses the story can be carried in two hands finale: I have turned on with shifting strands of light

nature’s inside, says Cézanne and frightening I do not like the fleshy echo even so, it is after this close proof vision is made of matter another mirror it’s possible the eye knows even where there should have been a lake this optic an illusion look at the cat, his changing shapes a habit light color composition the subject more than meets the situation, always looking at our own eye

I have no conscience because I always chew my pencil. Can we say white paper with black lines on it is like a human body? This question not to be decided by pointing at a tree nor yet by a description of simple pleasures. Smell of retrieval. Led to expect the wrong answer. An arsenal without purpose but why yes please. There is no touching the black box. The tree not pointed at lives in your bringing up the subject and leaves space for need, falling. The white ground. The waning heat. I’d like to say the history of the world. Or that grammar milks essence into propositions of human kindness. The difficulty here’s not true or false but that the picture’s in the foreground and its sense back where the gestures link so closely to the bone the words give notice. The application is not easy.

got up early left the house immediately tore out grass bits of leather in his pockets hit fences with his handkerchief answered yes and no to his own questions lies under grass wilted flowers in his pockets at the fence I pull my handkerchief he liked to say no “I’m no longer the same man” and “nothing is happening to me”

I. Separation Precedes Meeting The cat so close to the fire I smell scorched breath. Parents, silent, behind me, a feeling of trees that might fall. Or dogs. A poem, like trying to remember, is a movement of the whole body. You follow the fog into more fog. Maybe the door ahead divides the facts from natural affection. How can I know. I meet too many in every mirror. 2. When I was little, was I I? My sister? A wolf chained, smothered in green virtues? Slower time of memory. Once I’ve got something I lie down on it with my whole body. Goethe quotations, warm sand, a smell of hay, long afternoons. But it would take a road would turn, with space, in on itself, would turn occasion into offer. 3. For days I hold a tiny landscape between thumb and index: sand, heather, shimmer of blue between pines. No smell: matchbook. Sand as schematic as Falling into memory, down, with my blood, to the accretions in the arteries, to be read with the whole body, in the chambers of the heart. The light: of the match, struck, at last. 4. Concentration: a frown of the whole body. I can’t remember. Too many pasts recede in all directions. Slow movement into Distant boots. Black beetles at night. A smell of sweat. The restaurant, yes. You’ve no idea how much my father used to eat. Place thick with smoke. Cards. Beer foaming over on the table. And always some guy said I ought to get married, put a pillow behind my eyes and, with a knowing sigh, spat in my lap. 5. The present. As difficult as the past, once a place curves into Hips swinging elsewhere. Castles in sand. Or Spain. Space of another language. Sleep is a body of water. You follow your lips into its softness. Far down the head finds its level 6. Tropisms Inward, always. Night curls the clover leaf around its sleep. Tightly. The bodies of the just roll, all night, through subterranean caves which turn in on themselves. Long tunnel of forgetting. Need of blur. The air, large, curves its whole body. Big hammering waves flatten my muscles. Inward, the distances: male and female fields, rigorously equal. 7. The drunk fell toward me in the street. I hope he wasn’t disappointed. Skinned his sleep. November. And a smell of snow. Quite normal, says the landlord, the master of rubbish, smaller and smaller in my curved mirror. I have un- controllable good luck: my sleep always turns dense and visible. There are many witches in Germany. Their songs descend in steady half-tones through you. 8. You’ll die, Novalis says, you’ll die following endless rows of sheep into your even breath. Precarious, like Mozart, a living kind of air, keeps the dream spinning around itself, its missing core. Image after image of pleasure of the whole body deepens my sleep: fins. 9. Introducing Decimals A dream, like trying to remember, breaks open words for other, hidden meanings. The grass pales by degrees, twigs quaver glassily, ice flowers the window. Intimate equations more complicated than the coordinates of past and Germany. The cat can’t lift its paw, its leg longer and longer with effort. A crying fit is cancelled. An aria jelled in the larynx. Nothing moves in the cotton coma: only Descartes pinches himself an every fraction must be solved.

a sense of his thirty-third year takes his elbow * any kind of he says sniff must be allowed to mature * an accident leaves him and finally the swallows * by way of curiosity he is no hand by no means to depict a woman * often he knows a crowded room * just out of his mother he falls between the pursuit and a case he’d sooner forget * he has a female muscle camouflaged for impact * streets enough to welcome snow * he knowingly succumbs to the brown sitzbaths * his wife touches a foretaste so vivid that the sheen of timber upsets * in going this sort of persistence * difficulties of a heavy body placed in alternating gestures

After bitter resistance the river unravels into the night, he says. Washes our daily fare of war out into a dark so deaf, so almost without dimension there is no word to dive from. Body weight displaced by dreams whose own lack promises lucidity so powerful it could shoot a long take to mindlessness. Fish smell travels the regions of sleep, westward like young men and the dawn. Then I return, too early to bring anything back, unsure of what I want, terrified I’ll fail, by a hair, to seize it. We talk because we can forget, she says. Our bodies open to the dark, and sand runs out. Oblivion takes it all with equal tenderness. As the sea does. As the past. Already it suffuses the present with more inclusive tonalities. Not orchestrating a melodic sequence, but rounding the memory of a rooster on top a hanging silence. Or injured flesh. Impersonal. Only an animal could be so. An avatar of the holy ghost, he chuckles. Or the angel of the annunciation beating his wings against a door slammed shut. Behind it, love already plays the organ. Without the angel. He is invisible because we have rejected his message. On the old photos, she says, I see a stranger staking out my skin. As if an apple could fall too far from the tree. Yet I call her “me,” “my” years of furtively expanding flesh, with almost-certainty. It’s a belief that seems exempt from doubt, as if it were the hinge on which my doubts and questions turn. Still, I may seem the same “I” to you while I’ve already rolled it through the next door. From left to right.

I sit in my own shadow, she says, the way my mother gave birth to it. In artificial light, blinds drawn against the darkness of power.  I think of you as if you were that shadow, a natural enclosure, a world, not a slight, so I can wander through your darkness. Has our contract inverted time, made our universe contract, a cramped bed for two? And when I say your name, do I draw water, a portrait, curtain, bridge, or conclusion? Place there is none, he quotes. Not even to hang up our archetypes. Let alone Star-Spangled Banners. We go forward and backward, and there is no place. Therefore it is a name for God. My eye, steadfast on traffic lights, abolishes the larger part of the round world. I should look at my feet. Space sweeps through us, a hell of distances bathed in the feeble glow of emptiness. Outward mobility, unimpeded. Suddenly we’re nobody home, without any need of inattention, imposture, or talent for deceit. The wind whips my skin as if it were water, she says. My skin is water. For wind read wind, news, sky falling. Is it a mental disturbance or the higher math of love if I hear you talking under my breath and from the torn fragments assume the sun is far away and small, and a look can cause a burn? Superstition, too, is a kind of understanding, and to forgo it may have consequences. Clusters of possibilities whiz through our head, he says. Electric charges, clogged highway, screeching brakes, a house too full of guests. With grounds for disagreement and miscarriage. The light rushes in dry, screaming. But the opaque parts of the nerve oppose the noise and void the options. Then the project must be prolonged in terms of lack.

I step into my mother’s room, she says, and though a woman’s body is a calendar of births and injunctions to death, time disappears. Only dead enough to bury could prove sound to silence or the anxiety I know by heart and lung. In my mother’s room. The tie between us anticipates any move to sever it. Terror and lack of perspective. The river runs clear without imparting its clarity, whether we step into it or not. Deep in the bones, he says. If a butterfly fluttering its wings in China can cause a storm in Rhode Island, how much more the residues of radiation, family resemblance and past rituals. The stove glows red. Thin apple trees line the road. You think you are taking a clean sheet of paper, and it’s already covered with signs, illegible, as by child’s hand. The heart has its rhythm of exchange, she says, without surplus or deficit. Mine murmurs your name while conjugating precise explosions with valves onto the infinite. I take it down with me, in the body, to develop in a darkroom of my own. They way the current elongates our reflection in the river and seems to carry it off. A death without corruption is the promise of photography, he says. Focus and light meter translating a cut of flesh into a tense past laughing its red off. But the film’s too clear. Even if smudged with fingerprints. Even if the light falls into the arms of love.