478 Identity poems

Manatu, 2013

“I want to understand the joy I felt as I was letting him go.” —Hwang Jini As I listened to the fabric of his jacket assume the casual shape of leave-taking. I learned how to unhinge form from breath unbind & unknot the numinous black, so that again I was a woman & an artist whose ravens fell onto the ondol floor like cords, not a suicide’s hair floating in a village well & souring the water. Callus on my finger, cushion for the kayabam, we shall pluck the string to forget triumphs before royalty taxing us for a celadon barge, shall sweep princes’ names into a crevice where we store besotted & sudden proposals to suck a jujube’s succulent orb, as if we required their directions to resist the stone in which a waiting life will crack a rooting. Tendril of song, evening calm, guide my sense of use across the instrument transforming my desire for vengeance into forest hearth smoke from which I fled as a pretty child, selected by the king’s men. Help me never to forget the elation I felt when my first patron swore by the river’s force his love for me, & I understood its swelling to rush & breach could teach me to survive it by emptying myself to play a perfect note.

Michael Basinski creates visual poems that are colorful cacophonies of text and shape. His handwritten poems, which often serve as scores for equally exuberant sound poems, are filled to the margin with broken lines of text that curl into one another, read from different directions, and are often filled with nonsense words of his own invention. "Labile" is a good example of a visual poem that defiantly spurns convention. It is a neo-Dadaist poem intent on shaking the reader out of quiet acceptance and somnolence.—Geof Huth More About Visual Poetry >>

He worked years on the tablet, deciphering the pictographs. He knew it was a kind of language, those images. An eye. A bird, maybe a crow. A basket of wheat. A ladder. Did the order of the images matter? He cross-referenced similar texts. He studied the history of the region and satisfied many hours in the tablet's service. In a cousin language, a ladder was the word for happiness, to rise up, to be lifted above the ordinary. After years of work, he sorted it out. It was poetry, bad poetry, adolescent: "Today, I am happy, happy all this day, today."

When Americans say a man takes liberties, they mean he’s gone too far. In Philadelphia today I saw a kid on a leash look mom-ward and announce his fondest wish: one bicentennial burger, hold the relish. Hold is forget, in American. On the courts of Philadelphia the rich prepare to serve, to fault. The language is a game as well, in which love can mean nothing, doubletalk mean lie. I’m saying doubletalk with me. I’m saying go so far the customs are untold. Make nothing without words, and let me be the one you never hold.

T HERE are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance. It is a river, this language, Once in a thousand years Breaking a new course Changing its way to the ocean. It is mountain effluvia Moving to valleys And from nation to nation Crossing borders and mixing. Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped round your tongue today And broken to shape of thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now. Sing—and singing—remember Your song dies and changes And is not here to-morrow Any more than the wind Blowing ten thousand years ago.

based on photographs from Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary /afloat two boats with no riders still moving on water the hulls barely touching each with a single oar safely propped so it won’t fall /lotus leaves close into themselves at night on their wide folded backs water beads inside, their sleeping flowers /inside do the carp just below the water’s stillness see the pines /fall daikon just pulled from the soil these pungent roots hang from bamboo poles their white tubed bodies bend as if slightly aroused each ripe radish will be drenched in salt then eaten raw all winter /lone pine ancient tree with so many tongues how long this throated stem this stillness before rain

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

Regla lesbia: Flexible rule that may be adjusted to any body to be measured. Compare regla fija: standard. —The Velázquez Dictionary I. In the garden, it’s there. Even when you’re inside you feel it, as though it were you standing naked among the weeds, the tips of the bougainvillea bursting into flame, your nipples ruffled like the skin of a lake by a breeze. You worship the invisible body like an old-fashioned lover, from afar, loving the specificity of space between you. Sometimes at night it stretches out on the empty side of the bed, stares at you with the length of its invisible surface. Every contour of your body not filled by you is molded by the attentiveness of the invisible body, whose breath surrounds you. It’s more than prayer it wants—more than language, with its conditions. The invisible body demands you invent new senses to receive it, new places on your body to marvel at its subtlety, like the eyes of the deaf percussionist that perceive sound. II. The invisible body wants you to become a satellite dish, tuned to what exists only because your body calls to it. Like the woman who had her kitchen remodeled to make room for the microwave she’d entered a contest for. Then won. III. When asked whether falling in love was about acquisitiveness, about the ego, the seventy-five-year-old poet responded that the ego had nothing to do with it; it was the need for union with the beloved. Rumi asks,Who is it we spend our entire lives loving? IV. How, then, do you measure the invisible body, which resists commitment but is faithful? Is it clear who the beloved is, when no clear body exists that can be measured against a standard? V. The invisible body sometimes acquires a body—it’s so convincing, it takes you a while to figure out it’s really the invisible body. Like someone who has been reading your journal, it has decoded from your petty, daily complaints the open sesame that slides the stone from the hidden cave’s opening and cleans you out while you sleep, leaving a sarcastic note. It wants you to know it was doing you a favor, besides, how else did you think you’d discover the cave’s precise location? When Aphrodite sharpens you, you sacrifice a little of yourself, willingly, as a knife does, so that you may become better at it. VI. This is the point at which the invisible body speaks in italics, the Ouija board of poetry. In my mind, says the invisible body,that time capsule shuttling through space, I hold, in all the languages of the world, your love, rushed like holographic platters to a table, steaming into the future long after you’ve ceased to shine, the silver faces of your beloved bobbing out of the darkness, the black velvet pillow of your life on which you offer them for view. VII. The invisible body is created out of your longing, your longing compressing invisible molecules together into an absence you recognize. That is the way one blind man sees the world—after the fact, in photographs he took, once he had passed through it.

Before dawn, on the street again, beneath sky that washes me with ice, smoke, metal. I don't want to think the bullet pierced my shoulder, the junkie's rotten teeth laughed, his yellow hair froze. I'm careful: 1 smoke Turkish tobacco cigarette butts, 1 drink a lot to piss a lot, I fry the pig in its own fat, eat the knuckles, brain, and stomach; I don't eat the eyes! Always four smokestacks burning bones, somewhere tears that won't stop, everywhere blood becomes flesh that wants to say something. It's not me shouting at no one in Cadillac Square: it's God roaring inside me, afraid to be alone.