Crash Course in Semiotics

1. “Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way to start the poem. But would she mean anything devoid of her context, in this case a lushly late-August deciduous forest, some maple, mostly oak? She carries no prop—for example, no bike chain, which the cops could be sawing from the tree trunk that she’s wedded to her body. But let’s start with her pure, and untranslated, as the famous cartoon of the door is a mystery until we post the word LADIES at a point that would be four feet up from the ground if this door were not drawn two inches tall—it’s us, you see, who make believe it corresponds to a “true-life” human door. Does it help if I say the naked woman is “really” my true- life friend, she of the tangled dago surname we don’t need to get into here? And if I say next that she has been swimming—in Lake Tiorati— 2. you can see how straightaway the tangling subdivides into (a) where the hell is Lake Tiorati? and (b) why naked?—to the last let me answer that it’s 1978 and she is twenty; at college she’s been reading Simone de Beauvoir and learning words like patriarchy and oppression. And these have been Mixmastered into her thinking even about swimsuits—i.e., that not to wear one is to rip the sign off the door and stomp it underfoot. When she lies on a rock the last thing she expects is the tingling she feels now against her wrist, from a guy peeing brazenly at her perimeter. This is an impasse whose bud she thought she had nipped by aggravating her muscles into interlaced mounds so her body resembles a relief map of the Appalachians. In whose northernmost range this story unfolds & hence the much-delayed answer to item (a), above. 3. “Naked woman dadadadada police”: not a story but words at the end of a chain whose first link is her realizing that the Puerto Rican kids across the lake splashing and whooping are not having fun— though this is the sign that she’d stuck on their door. No, there’s another word for the kid slapping his palms on the water: Drowning. Even the urinater abruptly stops his stream and stumbles back from her, ashamed. And because she’s the one with the lifeguard build and because all the guys are much too drunk, without even thinking she finds herself paddling toward the spot these kids are now screaming Julio! at, where she draws a mental X upon the water. Of course, it is a fantasy, the correspondence that would make a drawing equal life, and so you understand how amazing it is, when she dives to the bottom and her hand happens on the child. 4. Perhaps what she expected was for the men on shore to pay her no mind, as in Manet’s Déjeuner . . . : the naked woman sits among them, yet she is a ghost. But the kids keep yelling Julio! even after she’s hauled the wet one out, the one she points to:Julio okay. No, they shriek, Julio otro! words she knows just enough Spanish to know mean there’s another Julio in the lake. Whom she cannot save despite her next round of diving, which lasts until the cops come hiking down the trail in their cop shoes. Then she comes ashore and stands shivering among them, telling the story calmly enough until she ends it with: for Christ’s sake can’t anyone give her a T-shirt? They’re staring as if somehow she’s what’s to blame, seeing a naked woman, not the miracle. Which is, of course, the living boy, that with these words —Julio otro!— we manage to make sense to anyone at all.