When I write The girl is dying I do not mean to enter the girl nor deconstruct her state of abstract goingness.
It’s a figure beyond an open window in a time of plague.
Disemboweled skywriting or the family name forgotten in water.
Which is to say: Vicious mercy becomes the uncountable gallop of the ruddy horse forging the sandy horizon.
Let the creature offenses stand in beauty among their rare pigments.
Honeycut, should I fail to mention light — What kind of poet is this? — but here!
Look!
Cherry and evergreen ring the moon like a bell unrung, you see them or don’t.
These next few moments of balance determine your eligibility for brief happiness.
Remember first to crucify the middle-ground; translucent, gathered up, mercurial, for modernity.
Mobility.
Into sun-sucked ink, oil, platinum, I vandalize form.
You, widely recognized as a modular prophet, briefly part the asbestos curtain.
Who, among these long-ago minted currencies, profits from the quietus of pulped paupers?
Ultramarine, of course, picked up and deposited here at my feet like seed, forms the reticulated reach of your life.
They do.
When they’re gone they’re gone.
Something else, especially if this chaotic rest goes unexamined.
Time lays a recursive trap in which most get caught.
From the Old English for eye-hole.
The skin that threatens to scream in from its triangular sleep, vanishing from the fog of natural history, just as quickly as it had long-ago been shed.
You suddenly appear vaulted and the sun is beautiful.
My favorite spot across the entire desert.
I am describing the man who offers the creature, spoken into long-to-go life, a bucket of sewing needles.
Mostly I see your bones and saddle.
Faithful reader, a sharp splash of light on the cheek come, potential space for potential space.
“Somewhere someone is sleeping, / somewhere the lady of the house / puts the alarm clock in a drawer / where she cannot hear it / then tells the children to be quiet / and stands there listening / to its tick.”
‘Lightly, Very Lightly’ by Mary Ruefle
It was raining. I could hear the rain taking the pins out of her mouth. Soft rain became hard rain so that hard things became soft things. The wet leaves under the trees became heavy as diapers, the book left open on the grass could finally sink in her bath without a word, the way, after a hard day, I rest my head on the edge of the claw-foot tub and my mouth falls open, empty at last. Actually I saw that in a painting when I ducked into a gallery because it was raining. It is always raining somewhere, somewhere the wells are filling from above and from below. Somewhere someone is sleeping, somewhere the lady of the house puts the alarm clock in a drawer where she cannot hear it then tells the children to be quiet and stands there listening to its tick.
Source: Ruefle, Mary. “Lightly, Very Lightly.” Dunce, Wave Books, 2020, pp. 52-53.
Photo: Gerace, Joe. “The Lady of the House Puts the Alarm Clock in a Drawer.” Nov. 7, 2020. JPG.
200! the old mutt says hallelujah and forevermore the rats of us keep banging on that drum if the sky has his way if the shy sky has his way frank o’hara blessed me early in my career — he blurbed my christening i’ll pray for you says the well intentioned divorcee really where would we be without soft scrub the bathroom would be the barn no other poet should mention prokofieff you’re setting yourself up for failure it’s like last tuesday when the martians arrived and locked all the inmates in with the guards and burnt the whole penal colony for fuel — i know it’s cruel. you’re not telling yourself anything you don’t know he blurbed my christening he read radio but spelled it the old russian way i remember something now about my grandfather but can’t find a reason to type it — i’m not the showboat All week long I trudge fatiguingly i couldn’t name a damn thing the inanity of it would crush me like a slug beneath a heel in hell he made me come close i’m in no condition a man is a man is a man we think we can do anything and then anything comes face to face with self-recognition and the whole national book awards go ka-boom how do i get out of this promise me you’ll find a scholarly way to shuffle off how? i listened and i didn’t like what i heard another bug in another field of heads unrecognizable except for it turns around — means of rotation unknown — and shouts backwards into his spinal column: 200! bark bark rough rough etc etc and out of the eye’s corner a dune buggy accelerating cliche-first into the azzurri sunset
Photo: Church Street, New Paltz; Nov. 6, 2020; Joe Gerace
“Ono no Oyu (?-737) was a Japanese bureaucrat and a poet. He served under Ōtomo no Tabito during the Dazaifu administration. He rose to the rank of Assistant Governor-General (daini). Three of his tanka poems have been preserved in the Man’yōshū.” Wikipedia
“the fiction of Time destroyed, / free from love, from me.”
‘Anticipation of Love’ by Jorge Luis Borges
Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day, nor the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike, nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence, will be so mysterious a gift as the sight of your sleep, enfolded in the vigil of my arms. Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep, quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory, you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own. Cast up into silence I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being and see you for the first time, perhaps, as God must see you— the fiction of Time destroyed, free from love, from me.
with no ill intention to the artist what the fuck were you thinking the mangy dog and the electro- magnetic implant fine! but replacing the u with the v? what a braggadocious pile of staten island’s finest piled up to intellectual affidavits — i once asked allen ginsberg should i be scared when the polish barrister holds a luger to my temple and demands fried bananas he said you’ll never move to krakow don’t fret my pet i pianeti della fortuna no ill intention to moloch or the electromagnetic swing the dog abundant and widespread in hungry this abandoned city in the days since the airing of ruth bader ginsburg coordinated inauthentic leaderless lurking evil the writer goes down the one true rabbit hole a meeting of senior government officials four cholinergic cherubs armed with radio poles lit upon the roof of the confident wannsee manor unclear if these birds are gripped fast to the edge of indivisible azalea branches or synaptic clefts between bit and byte cast totally aside countervailing rights — unclear unclear
In the evening of a brightly unsunny day to watch back-lighted buildings through the slits between vertical strips of blinds and how red brick, brick painted red, a flaky white, gray or those of no color at all take the light though it seems only above and behind them so what shows below has a slight evening “the day—sobs—dies” sadness and the sun marches on. It isn’t like that on these buildings, the colors which seem to melt, to bloom and go and return do so in all reality. Go out and on a cross street briefly a last sidelong shine catches the faces of brick and enshadows the grout: which the eye sees only as a wash of another diluted color over the color it thinks it knows is there. Most things, like the sky, are always changing, always the same. Clouds rift and a beam falls into a cell where a future saint sits scratching. Or a wintry sun shows as a shallow pan of red above the Potomac, below Mount Vernon, and the doctor from Philadelphia nods and speaks of further bleeding.
Source: Schuyler, James. “Greenwich Avenue.” Collected Poems. New York: Noonday Press, 1998, pp. 169-170.
