“Star of Araby” has reached an interesting point, a question or problem—think of it as a landing I am paused at. The movement up and down the ladder of Sefirot has allowed me to touch on a range of ascent/descent motifs. One is related to a tension I think of as related to different between a poetics of light (ascension) and shape-shift (descent). I found myself struggling, as I stepped from Yesod to Hod, understanding a movement upwards. I've been noodling on the landing of Hod since. Here are the notes:

!. At Hod’s Well Stopped

I

triangle of sense sequenced hometown like I
dream it, this time lions with my earphones on
only Gram Parsons fills the second tray we
normally find by an half-opened window to
mix sun and shade//that’s the trouble a series
of clouds does not dispel more than dipping my
hand into the water so I suspect I am too deep
in the well again to see the third star make
sense of this constellation of limbs bend her face down
over the dark water I am slept in still reflection

II

stars beg for us, and nights
equally numberless days pass by
wind in prairie grass
and furrow

why sing of old dead things
in old dead words, lift stick

wind, again
is not leaving us,
nor sky

last harbors
fox-hole death
at any time

***

is abandonment the only answer
to all prayers, what is realized
by more intensely saying the sun?
not “throwing ourselves farther”
but alone, a late winter light,
some spring we do not know
near off—to be abandoned

heart’s mistaken instinct
folded in each breath we take
a lover’s perfumed note

lost, after all mooring

III

what light shows we are here about to shift,
sift yellow, a sun taped to stage flat (he said bar)
written Keys of the Sun come slant wise
what Blake didn’t (that time)

dusty paramour here at the tor’s topple steep
vista vista in grey grape distance (think Italy
document from among availed) winter edge
off north, we climbed, some below

ferret mountain a bit to say era proper & hem
foot—he became air which was not light
blue, red shirt edge, or just white Joseph
put your hand into a dream to get it

white was said we mean changed like coins
to translate it meant a shift not yellow but
a foot in the air I suppose he hung there
see that

at the same time avenues under Saturday
under red sun he said Friday, expect it,
desolate factory eternity edge Whitman
was painting, at the same time

Elijah sand & Moses reed grass a step like
on billows of Gobi rock, aspects blooming or
asters I meant slipped lock moored
no sky order to it

sweet grass was burnt in May he said because
transfigure there’s Alice you could say
this above to aside—all the clues are there
you want to listen

lights full what changes to dusk
frogs bullet a Kore, rushes and fringe
what’s full changes to back
we are to die, you too

bend it blue baby blue each day slight
breaks you we are flowers and sky
oh honey-white, star-stone misgiven
I can’t stop your turn

I am white thrown could be nothing spirit said
associate cluster necessarily mis-read I
put in your pocket
fold it there pat your heart take it


2. Ascension and Descent

Ascent is pressure towards sublime and production of affect weight left by finger touch of what’s only light. Towards thin horizon, light, water wicked off.

Joe writes about Sobin and thinks about motifs of ascension, stones that become words become light. As alchemical restoration or fulfillment. Recapitulation.

The first time I saw Ram Das/Richard Alpert he told this story about a guy from the North Woods who’d brought a sick bird to a guru. The guru held it in his hands, maybe turned it over and then threw it over his shoulder to someone inside the hut saying, “more water”.

I have always thought of myself as alighting in this life, that my task was to get into color and form, to get something into form, to fall, to step down. Landing.

I remember the song on Patti Smith’s “Radio Ethiopia” that I really hit on was that song that goes “Landing, When will you be landing?” I’d dance around small basement room Bruce and I lived in in Charlesgate Hotel when I was still thin and graceful.

Not as against ascent, but that I am over here doing this thing here. Stepping down into the grass. Like stars that are metal arrows in autumn come flashing down.

Like La Jete, there’s a file of guys on the esclator, think like Brazil, some atrium interspace, they are going up. I am going down. I miss them, going up.

Not that they should be going down, but that there is this going down and landing too. This step that makes place. Work to do.

Listen to it or not I suppose. I am only saying it continues this rhythm, this snap.

All that ascent, the sun goes down, doesn’t stop at Brookyn Ferry or Friday Afternoon in the Universe, drifts to dusk.

Light in you bends down anyway, prism, a bowl of fruit you hold Rilke into death.


3. That “Being Put to Death” Thing

My friend Candy climbed through a long, maybe mile-long cave complex to caverns associated with a Mayan death Cathula (now tourist location you pay to see) where prisoners had been taken to be sacrificed.

Wind (which means “heart humor”)
in bitter leaves//I was dreaming but then
that tobac slipped off my tougue//drifted
bubbles collage//a day//no
dream as indirect and thin light//left in a room

guilt and amusement have a stubborn hold
I’ll throw the I-Ching about why it will
talk about watermelon leaves I tug at
the wet cloth of this dissatisfaction I once
killed a man// now have to write

or throat-cut before God.

***

required infolded sisters at the ribs would make lungs we walk among
(at the last corner, by the last house, night was pushing I was gathering
my feet beneath to push harder a stone weight cut once the blood flowed
unevenly in I throat disjunct am splay//history of this my back
you don’t see it white she recalled a cave they’d taken hours
to go through narrow fat snake under root to mansion lime
trees without sun under a canopy of dyes—our eyes open them
wider are the only light white to the edges we see

throat cut this way smell of grass as arm opulent pellet carvaggio
sicsors back flesh flap down a cut between colors
cubist difference you feel folded between two worlds death
peeled Rembrandt back to reveal bloodstained rock and stars
mute beauty in soil, bedrock, toil and leg

we’ll leave flowers in your smile May 5th, crocuses and marigold winter
seen around that door jamb that door jamb full of the hand of the sky

***

I do have dreams in which I suddenly remember that maybe twenty years ago, I killed a man. So powerful is the feeling, the memory, that it takes a bit when I wake to convince myself it didn’t happen.

4. Salt Woman

The Opponent Inside takes a George Jackson voice a sec

is angel.

***

salt woman nurses along shores of bleak I am autumn find her there among brown rushes don’t you a solace, star, stone of she is suppurate

replete afterwards she leans down difficult star blue grief shawl succor, dipped in such dye we are day

one change, flocks of bright ladies silent from the prairie grasses what changes to become pheasant sudden as wings, her hair put back

***

as women one side as men mascu-light all-color sent shadows in their so Hercules eyes, we record what sloth he re-languished

one side all gowned in stones and stars, the other a flame pillar or loss, doorway we sit before as tax

***

bowl of congregants and morning wash//through rain as scent//his shoulder rides

ill wit among Ivy her downcast & tears make arcade//wrought, willow and store affords a chance flagstone

circlet as device to call her landscape, ragged flag//how far down I bent//If you are not here by the river when I come

nothing to report we often must wait, wither, time undoes never does


Salt Woman is a Navaho form of feminine sacred I feel a strong relationship to, difficult solitary but benevolent or just gal.

Star of Araby: Drafts and Notes

The following are drafts and elements of a new piece “The Star of Araby” commissioned by Jehanne. One of the sweet things I call her is the “Star of Araby”—I think she first used it. Her father is Egyptian (though her heroes when she was young were both Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Sctos)—and she’d asked me to write a poem to/about her, which has become the starting point for me for a new take on a lot of old stuff that I suppose is really, as usual, about me.


Threshold (or “Before completion the young fox gets its tail wet crossing the ice”)

saint wood be ash wind
thus strong
would be eight by fire
her falling leaves
her book unopened

***

there was an, unsettlement

can I say that to somehow justify those
possible sunnier passages in a time
among others I might have met whose
presents I may have had

***

and so also here is an among
and then, through what imagines
an atrium, a second among,
the passing street just beyond,
that passes in quiet


***

deep in my memory is a girl
white dress with rabbit my
sister I, whose ash unsettled—place
smeared sky after rain
torn a leafen oak
hole in the sky

(years later in a different life I
would come on El Greco’s Toledo
and recognize that sky said)

***

I remember what it is like to be dead
watching the wind the way things changed
also trouble I could not stop that voices

syntax cannot describe it impart


Star of Araby

First Descent

I

Cargo lights out north a bay then sea
sparkled islands swept black, sky
cranes in autumn mixed the way
we say “marsh” or “Cairo horizon”

I’ve never seen so imagined
her father one wadi streetlight with
page turned traces planes that
stars become a threat just rumors

we scuffed white cement—played jew
and nazi & Hamburg where stars
fell I was listening perhaps

the cloud close to summer’s moon
was what was left of last decades
apartment wood stairs & fire.

II

Dutchman turned liner Atlantic
haunted her what Murmansk & Oman
mourned acres—sunk metal at piers
Eliot said was a third barren

river or war—which was it?
Her torn pharaoh & necklace steamer
ricketed we know longer see
whispered black and white sands.

A colonial then, perched by the inkdrawn Charles,
Masacomet drawn sheep in fields
sleep wood stars shawdows

worn down his shoulder he slept
she was saying Sahara, there is no
God but God, roamed.

III

Sounds picked up between Ipswitch
did Alexandria a long leant hour,
somewhere between a high wire
and orchard, a century rememberd

remained dead, peaceful August graves
his was, among what sold, what had
become solid, a soup con the way Pierre
would say we were forgetting.

“We came out of the roaring into bright
Aegean sun bright Elysian radiators”
ill radiant luminous wickery

as saddles and John-John ribbed stairways
a bedroom above, parents adrift in
armchairs, drifted steeples

V

Not yet America aslant in fog shoal
“we went back and forth between
Kiev and Berlin, Paris and back to
Munich our cloth and cardboard bags

Klee drew nights in coal, smudged
violet or crush, whatever dragon
not shtetl gnosms but world rue
climbed cracks in the kitchen

overhung what was spreading
soup, boots clumped fellaheen
the fallen would be wheat so much

chaff and Cologne river, white
cathedral marked skeleton
by a still, anger not Whitman’d”

VI

Echoed Douglas firs I was hiding
beneath the floor casement boots
overhead on Denman Isle east
off Vancouver, there was nowhere

she wouldn’t follow me to like dawn
turned a page candle down, leaned
at window ran oak fingers through
curtains sky rain hair milk

below the eves I stayed
hidden but awoke after Dachau
“all my remains” the shaman

whispered to the sky, here on
an American rock that smoke, human?
ship? papermill?

VII

What’s far off across a decade’s Sundays?
I am climbing steadily into an air,
after the rain we found Guadacanal in
a sandbox, red, ruined, once painted

litanies of battles made sequence by
Time-Life pages in study turned to
memory I was a decade after where crows
still knew, didn’t they? Pine, grenade, scatter

fields fallen from sky in waste
wings all a break not unlike
what memory resists or a stream passes

to see is washed and alit, stumbled
almost. Here and there, winter &
black water, further back.

VIII

Was Jewish once perhaps at night were
stars collect, a sister or bear in midrash oil
drip or house creek snap of ice
broken necked starling she would peer

through August rosy French doors her
loom, strings of honey locust shadows
in half angled across a table I first read
between a darker room and light

each weight must be tested I said
“dirty jew” his name was David with
white cowboy hat and gun belt

a basement or laundry room these
places were not there but remained
among menorah or branched pale green.

IX

She’d sit by my bed she was gone
and would talk in German as polite
in my ear what everyone had
was lost in photos of a strasse

written glass I’d walk across in-dreamt
an Iron Brigade regiment my brother
he’d seen bent over a comic book
of Jean d’Arc we’d think her ashes too

my sister’s autumn mirror in years. moths,
camphor in the ceder closet
close the door and hide beneath

grandmother’s red fox stole, soldiers I was Jewish
looked at me, then started away
tall tress on either side.

X

To be shorn bitter Han’s sores
his hand bites—on either side of
an artic urn they drew back skirts
to say “he didn’t like children,

we hid in old books like clay
or paintboxes our remains a
muddye blue, groan index of
no world spelt but gone”

All a-grow, pastures rain split and spelled
two sisters a dance Celan sang
Blacksmith and Cather blonde

cobbled “oh myth, oh myth’s time
oh shorn oh stone granted throat”

wish was broken aura’s flame.


First Ascent

Nosegay on a sill as pale paintbox
mixes the storm in its accents

as what remains is left as images
we must draw, depict sadness as grate

his pearls were to recall, dim sewer glint
as a sister’s eyes—the other stacked rag corpsed

a fingered moon folded several pages across
a girl in a wooden window above a wedding

you can almost hear the newsprint establish its
orientations, not fiction cluttered by history was

we know that’s gone, this other story its harder
to say, which we mourn, which we prefer would stay?

her arms stacked like kindling she was Amsterdam lifted
steeple sky, a day’s sunlight like any other

how the sun is good, is close armor and as little as we are
here, which needed a comma to be said right, after being,

hung over us its branches and star she was watching
though a grate, how many times.

Was I reborn between the fire’s approach, a serial
she’d lost, as torch, a sky sent scrolled?


Second Descent

Was I reborn between the fire’s approach, a serial
she’d lost, as torch, a sky sent scrolled?

Bodies burn, grey in heaps I seem a brick arch as
symbol, the design for it, somewhere, overgrown

to have buried this card, in among others, a linked thread,
girl I was a dance, joy, we make, we are for, to be said.

Dad’s sister Mary was dead dead he’d rather man fell from
the sky saw it later dark, not Kansas, dirigible ropes adangle

a long way is linked, all the words were exploding in
my brother’s dreams, Darger numbered, supermarket “K”

ground a tremble & spirits arrow in the air aspy
“we’ve been watching you a long time” she shut a window

I am not laced in birth her many leaves of muslin to be
safe but also, thrown to the fire, stone thrown further

born yellow sea dream-buried stone she said, “say the
way breaks between lives I am still you, sister”

folded Berea sidewalk this time membered, sun, black
birds, establish we are tied.


Malkuth

1. Dad’s sister Mary died I’d say 1930 not in China where he was born (at the Navy compound in Tsing Tao, but maybe Philly) I see a white nightdress, a baby rolled over in her crib. No one knows why & so a mystery I suppose. What he remembers is not this, but an air show he went to at that time at which a dirigible broke free, lifting up and away with men hanging on the lines carried up and then falling. [A newspaper report from 1932 suggests it maybe was in San Diego, when the USS Akron attempted to land.] Each of my siblings and I had a Teddy Bear—my younger sister Barbara named her Teddy Bear “Mary”. One morning she woke up to find the bear gone. No one knows to this day what happened to it. Simply not in the room. I’ve always associated this memory with a memory of a dream in which I see a large bear hug my sister on our front lawn.

2. My brother Bruce and I became completely enthralled by Jean d’Arc after reading an Illustrated History comic book bought at Schugel’s Drugs up on Pearl St. Discussed going to France to find her ashes (I’d always think they’d melted into the Seine, but perhaps some had fallen on land, mixed in grass) or the bones of her horse. Later I write a short little fable called “St. Joan and the Bear”.

3. I have had some dreams that suggest I was a Jew who lived during the Holocaust. Was I a boy or girl. The first time I read about the Kabbalah, I have a strong sense of recognition, though it was a Christian Gnostic “White Lodge” kind of thing by Dion Fortune. Maybe a boy then, or maybe not. I seem to have had my throat cut at some time.

4. I am not sure I believe in sequential reincarnation. I’ve certainly thought about it given my study and practice of Buddhist thought. The phenomena of recalling past lives or other memories appears to occur. However, Buddhist accounts of mind, death, and transmigration just don’t work if you treat the process as a serial or sequential process. In fact, the only way you can really explain the relation between one event and another is to abandon time as an inherently real structure. Very briefly, the problem concerns how karma (a causal potential) can endure through a series of sequential moments in a latent state given the Buddha’s insistence on impermanence. And, especially, how does it get from one life to the next. Thus, far easier than sequence is simply to post a relation which expresses itself in some form. Hence, where linear time exists as a difference, a given relation could be posed in those terms. No problem with duration and sequence, since time is bent or folded anyway.

5. Hence, not so much that, in a prior life I was killed in the holocaust, or survived it, or was imprisoned, but that in some very direct way I recall someone else’s memory somehow—we could say haunted—and have an identification confusion because I am remembering two tracks (at minimum), there is a stereo affect, birds startle, there is a fold in the sky, and , in the basement or attic, or in an adjacent room, pages are shuffled I have some relation to.

6. When the Ganden Tripa visited Amherst, he talked about seeing Niagra Falls from an airplane and thinking that life passed just like that. He was talking us through the three-fold analysis of the unsatisfactory aspects of death, and I had a sudden get that “I” wouldn’t be reborn, no matter what was happening. Even from a sequentialist perspective it’d be someone else. Death ends this bloom, even if it relates, touches, impinges on other lives.

But also that, in this life, I can be visited by the dead quite easily.

7. A common narrative fragment in yogic mythemes from about 1100 CE is the motif of the yogin who is trapped for some reason in a well. There is an echo of this of course in St. Juan de la Cruz “Dark Night” descriptions (and of course, he was in prison). The relevant pieces to me are a) that the yogin is awake, alert in the well, b) that a small section of sky and stars is visible above the well, perhaps the moon drifts far enough north to appear, c) wells involve water and containment, hence a holding/cistern, d) the I-Ching says “A city can be moved, but not a well”, so that a well, is, in someway, necessary or requires something of us. The yogin’s ordeal in the well is not utter misery, but it is a bit like the part of a story where the hero is under a spell, perhaps forced to wear a bear’s skin. Stuck there until he or she finds a rope, or a spirit guide assists. A detainment or detour.

8. I have sometimes thought my life involved just such a detour.

9. A dream I had as a teenager (fallen asleep reading in my Dad’s chair) of fighting in Czech resistance in sewer systems under Andover MA (and thus suspiciously close to the underground sections of the Snake’s Castle, just 10 miles away along the Merrimac, perched up on the hill over Lowell) and, on the way back, coming to a house on the long uphill from the Shawsheen River, with dutch window’d door, where I meet the Anderson Sisters. Thus, the Anderson Sisters I’ve decided here are maybe Hans Christian’s sisters, Hans Christian who didn’t like children.

10. I was terrified and stricken by the story of the Little Matchstick Girl who freezes to death watching the Christmas star.

11. And the terrible death of the little tin soldier. Thrown into fire.

I don’t think the Anderson Sisters are really Hans Christian’s sisters, but its fun to think on it. Anderson is a name from the north, but its also a Civil War kind of name. So it is hard to establish. Perhaps it was their voices I heard calling my name when I was playing on the swing, or later, when I slept out for a month in the back yard of an anti-nuclear activist’s house in Tempe Arizona.

12. Anslem Keifer’s beautiful work attempting to visually recall the Nazi years and Volk Myth. Brick kilns, and wooden beamed halls, with torches. In Atlanta, in one painting the constellation Draco steps down across the horizon/shore. One of the few artists whose tried to say anything about WW II.

13. Celan’s beautiful poetry, his Shulamith, his Catherine. Glinting grates, and silent pockets of snow. As testimony.

14. In the Kabbalah, the descent of the Shekinah into form to become the crown of the king is likened to the birth of a daughter, or, a jewel which ornaments and thus established the crown. Elsewhere, Athena springs fully armored from her father’s brow. In the Luriac Kabbalah, this descent or movement is the result of a catastrophe by which the vessels of creation were broken. [But what kind of a lyric moment is a catastrophe, and which of these stories is the more patriarchal?]

15. I’ve composed a number of poems based on structure of Sefiroah, a lattice of ten topoi one must descend and then climb four times. Thus a lyric that involves fall and rise, and a weaving of these—Orphic descent and return, his daughter’s footsteps on the stairs.

16. In the early 1990’s, I had a dream that the current Dalai Lama was on stage playing a guitar and then took the form of a 3 or 4 year old girl, with black eyes, full of that striking and amazing charm girls this age have, the mastery of feeling, attention and pride. An old monk complained we were all dancing, and so the girl told him to get a book from the attic. After he’d left, she laughed and said, “that will take him awhile” and we continued to dance, I leaving the hall, walking on my hands.

17. Just north of Montague Center in Western Massachusetts, there is a small community that was perhaps a vacation community at one time around a small kettle pond called “Lake Pleasant”. Since the early 1900’s, a spiritualist community has lived there. They hold regular fairs, where one can get a psychic reading. In the foyer, there are books that explain that the current community split off from a different branch over the question of reincarnation in the 1940’s. I’ve been twice. The first time I was told I had a “joy spirit” that was my companion, a curly black haired girl. Also that my father’s father, who I never knew or thought of much, spent a good deal of time watching me.

18. Henry Darger’s epic narrative “The Story of the Vivian Girls” struck me as a recognizable, though fictionalized, account of a secret narrative of the 20th century I occasionally have had a part in.

19. Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing was often triggered by the news of the death of a young girl. This is particularly true of the storm that broke in 1922 with the conclusion of the Duino Elegies and the sublime “Sonnets to Orpheus”. A decade earlier, he and his patron, the Princess Marie von Taxis und Turin, went to visit a garden he’d played in when young. He’d had a friend, a little girl, whom he met there to play. The two of them had a code; if one of them couldn’t meet, he or she would leave a small nosegay of violets or such on a bench, so the other would know not to wait. Rilke had heard that the girl had recently died young; he and the Princess went by the bench, and there was a small nosegay that had been left there. By someone, or by the hands of children following what had become, perhaps, a custom, or by the girl, to say he shouldn’t wait.

20. In grade school, I had an active fantasy—I guess erotic—in which several girls from my class had been kidnapped and were missing. (I would carefully chose the girls I liked the best.) I discovered they were being kept down in the sewers beneath a manhole that was in the center of the playground field. I’d go down and rescue them, though I’d be injured. And then we would recuperate together in a hospital ward. Another time, I dreamed that, after a bomb drill, the field was full of empty planes and ships. There were no children anywhere, and only a silence, and I played among the ships and planes, climbing them like playground equipment.

21. In the same story with the one about St. Joan and the Bear, I created a character who made statues of Pluto, rising up from the ground to take Persephone. The sculptor herself disappeared one day, caught in a spell in which, at night, in her dreams, she lived with Pluto, dreams that, upon awakening, she’d forget. And, each morning she’d wake up into a different life, slowly search about to find its clothes, go off to her job, be absorbed in the days work, until, as the sunset, she began to remember her dreams in snatches, riding home on the bus, or in her car on the arcing paths of her commute home.

22. The woman’s husband then suffered a decline, gradually spending more and more time with his studies of the Civil War, until his son found him one day completely unresponsive to the sense world and endlessly reciting the battalion commanders of Union and Confederate Armies as drawn up at Shiloh, Gettysburg, Antietam…


Yesod

the problem with the object is that it makes three
thus never an object not thought I prefer to accept
as limiting condition this near wall (a tow-hair with
cowboy lunch box and I along the lunch hour
sidewalk in search of clue, behind us the boys
flipping girls skirts with long sticks back by the
fence) I say too much about—division as fact we
thus separate which makes it possible to kiss behind
the garage or upstairs if we’re allowed to be there
then you leave I have to digest that we can work along
the rows of apples trees this way, each pulling a bag
ordinary dirt the sun also goes its way and thus
shadows tell change (near Little Big Horn, another
guy and I slept on hay bales after talking half-way
across Montana as to whether things were in constant
change—my position pointing at the highway berms
and cut hills—or permanent and unchanging at depth,
a Upanisadic yogic or guy from Plato despite the
long hair) an argument I keep up today being faithful
to light

star off in the distance not a plane a second thing I
am thinking is to mistake the first as thing instead
of synesthesia we do okay with anyway—it is not
confusing not to know, later you learn how to
arrange these moments of longing into a reason
or perform a prior arrangement conveyed by
continual performances bird calls really not reasons
but tests or stakes

it is actually possible to be in love and not bad script
duty once acquired I mean it is not all about you he
said who else am I worried about I thought there is a
piece missing in this unit despite apparent function
and I have to care for it anyway

lunar aspect as drift we are subliminal
feel it slide into your side a coin in the slot
your chance to disappear and become surface for
Astellas Pharma tickertape or depth we call
tradition in America, weird because unwritten
and primarily about siding and other exterior
finishes—Sherwin Williams covers the Globe
after all, old Chevys or Oakie women are studded
with the results, reflect some kind of sky and
future its hard to say

probably the nine of rods

somewhere this libidinates or transpires we say
sublime we mean gases off or leached
her old music in leaves by the black walnut piano
the roof gone all sepia or broken into thus
not aspected or forced to say “yes a cathedral at
Tours was ruined and potato black earth rutted
bore nothing & slick rain, ago, it was ago &
the constant, the constant ever going leaves
“La Claire de Lune” my next hour she was not in

***

often as a teenager I would awaken unable to move and once got up from my bed and tried to hit the wall unable to do so as if I had an energy field six inches or so outside my body she would sit on me this way as a suggestion that is one way to say it, a language for it, you might have another I bet it didn’t include the way we were folded where our edges touched

Notes today on inhuman other & interest in this as a mode of being or subject to imagine.

Not really my fantasy which runs to rescue and is tedious a shore. But sufficient as I understand passion for others could be care.

Not ironic that this belongs here filed under gender.

Durga, like Athena, sprung from a man’s mind.

We are after what we put our desire into, be it a daughter or slim; to make artifact fetish is the same porn business is one suspicion that’s hard to shake. Ponge or Sartre after the war trying to become before reflection thought to be thing and thus among instead of stained… a grain in a photo of murdered peasants. I could be field. I could possibly recover, somewhere, among all this wheat, there might be a coin, the carpet hid.

Once walking in the Blue Hills I turned left away from Grimm trees into a meadow and first step shot through my leg “We are with you forever” I said “Sometimes I am permitted to return to a meadow” in the open lea between houses, a place to slip between clothes line and hedge Peter Rabbit wise into the open field tossed.

And since that happened.

Think fields are oil-stained or sepia in hunched a place a man could hide an hour in the sun between roads, perhaps alone an hour under the sky. Took that from the war the years put it in my pocket. Keep that with mine, folded up love letter.

A field sprang out of his forehead, no feldspar in mineral leapt and so still daughter I am imagined: energy in things levitates. The old story about owls and this not so different & in between sheep rocks thrust what’s more beautiful chalk.

Forced out like antlers she was in the ear. See? The same move makes shells, husks and awns.

Dogon said mountain has mind, mill has mind, smoke has mind, talk has mind, winter has mind, all weather as mattered or thought makes peace hence projects a where to be considered. Must moon and snow. Deep cold creek.

Makes mind in-human knot. Inked relation as what same reduces echo.

***

Alongside Lecture on Feldspar and other Sardine Cans

no-human.
gives weight to intention/desire
Sartre arguing
the non-haunting exists as a rational possibility
absolute difference of Pierre and his objects

is repetition

non-haunting as a need given the absolute weight of the war

solid object as way of showing materiality of difference (I am not my fountain pen)

co-relation—we never have access to either thinking or being outside of their relation to each other

pre-critical idea? posing categories without being overwhelmed by problem of mind or mediating consciousness

divergent series marked by inanimate object where Eve is mediating form

attribute of a thing that is not material; thinking of a second order as an actual mode of being

difference between object and thing, where thing is outside the mode of positing

***

what is weight I give truth, walking into world to say, listen to whom. born among the priesthood I spend to long attempting to resolve their problems, which are theirs and not mine, and not the sky’s or skies

what weight to give grasp in sense we are saying back and forth knots in the cloth takes me back I am also oh depth I cannot bring s heer

so many times s typed instead of a and drift to misspelt wood or were and as aster I say star a starte.

***

interest is in non-existent orders—a true reading—and not vitalism or relations of power

***


Before the Notes

to understand self as thing (monad) that emerges in relation to other things, to critique the author, to write so as to efface the author and or allow something else to be author, to be interested in displacing authorial relations…

there are different aspects to this… a desire to evade responsibility—so understandable in the post war era, with heavey weight of terrible responsibility and we did this to each other… but as a practice, a self-mutilation, an overly violent self-regulation, a dysfunctional regulation like the catastrophic rheostatic structures built by children to control desire when they grow up in a world bereft in some way…

but also a desperate narcissism in this, and a bad mimetics, since a mimetics would find the difference and say it, allow it to be across… a narcissism in the sense of wanting to be a thing instead of being with a thing… a false egalitarian… if

in this century things become interesting, or we begin to notice them as such, if a real consideration of an other requires we also understand things, or relate/perceive thematize things in relation to us as something other than our desire, wouldn’t it be nice to cross that threshold into just being a thing among other things, wouldn’t this be a way of becoming what it appears we love,

to be what’s loved then, and still a narcissism…

when Rilke writes the sonnet about being a flower with the other flowers, he is saying this hope… and its so dear, it says so well our desire, and yet its just a page among a series of poems and feelings, and perhaps even that creschendo says our love but is still narcissistic

and if we decide not things but machines, if we decide the other is also a machine, perhaps also because we recognize that to be an other is to be part of a system beyond our interest, if we decide not things but machines…

how do we pass beyond narcissism? not into things, not into machines, but in relation?

Freud and Kristeva want to make a place for narcissism, a kind of primary narcissism that is necessary to project self

how does one project self without this? not by becoming thing or in a theory of egalitarian, proletariat monads arising as protean wiggles…. that is still narcissism writ so large like Stalin’s face across the sky

Akhmatova, Rilke turn to things in some relational way to ladle in a sunset or ghostly goldleaf tracery, like slipping sheats of paper into a surface and turning it slightly as a result and thereby building up a layered, rich surface and depth.

so to chase this thought out, something about being a machine, about the loved other that is the machine, the android in Blade Runner or sleek homoerotics of steel, something about this then as well a kind of narcissism

we so need this attention to project ourselves, to prosper; and in the post-war era, since our parents were trying not to look too close, were shutting their eyes (hence Jehanne’s grief work and work with Gulag) this became a broad condition… all slouching Gap Ads towards orphaned Bethlahem

the desire to be something other that does without an apparent author is still under the twist of positivism, the thought there is an actual other out there, a place where I am not. It is what Buber calls an I It relation until I am at stake in the object, not just by loving it, but by allowing its difference alongside me (a difference I want to gender by saying sister, but could be brother, hides under the trope of the mixed sex twins & thus is buried in the African material Mackey draws from about a series of same sex twins and their making, they who are arranged or in a family relation of tensions and firsts and thus could be laid out sephiroth)

***

There must God, which is a fissure done.

****

Rilke turns to the dead, because this is what it means to be a thing. When we are dead we are things, just things, and so our hope, our longing to be what’s liked has led us through the portals into death…

Orpheus as story of the effort to walk into death, into the other signing, but can’t bring back love who leaves forever lost…

thought parallel instead of an issue of depth and return, he walked across the hall, she stayed behind

and so also, the machine is a thing “come to life”

***

among the dead I am just a thing and all egalitarian finally be

that’s the hope, there resolved, I could be what’s loved, we love the dead at least (or last)

***

then dead I’ll be

***

seen there effigy I am at last visible, know I am seen gone wood

am seed gone would am salt

***

we are of course present without witness and make a press on passing
altered craft but still departed abject

trust does not equal


Still Waiting for the Lecture

I am thinking that to have an object is to have a relation to a possible self and that what we think about as “other” is a self we are imagining somewhere, even in the depth or still of stone.

Or it is a way of tying self down, each object like a knot on a prayer cord or a twist that makes barbed wire. Twist prick and spur.

Obsessions tangle as shrines to Pluto, God of undistributed wealth. Each knot an image in a sequence suggesting depth that is a reminder of the way back. The look over the shoulder she disappears back down the stairs.

What the Chinese call stagnant blood I suspect is left by war. Here and there we want to be like as a best theory to finding even temporary solutions. Hence old men grow increasingly like half-lit, morning, ally garden walls.

When Daphne became a loom it was already dark. He became a Mill Wheel in the same way that Hercules became a set of summer stars. Many people are just cars since love makes self we begin to theorize.

***

Machine makes repetition and doubling the same duplex
whose order becomes coyote to say a fat place
small engine of eddying wind lays a palm over a north ridge shadow
its absence later still lit by sun as it lasts—it’ll be back.

***

I build up a tonal resonance that says stays knot keen I keep
arguing back to—hung on what star or sky hook is fire—

Promethean chora

***

Machine aesthetic as a means of keeping up with and/or at times leading the “spirit of the times”. Hence, tied to a notion of encapsulation in a time and a reference/accommodation to taste and power (since “spirit of the times” can be a way of indicating a new fashion).

In this sense, Benjamin’s sense of the loss of an aura is relevant as a narrative, a story, that bodies out a line that’s been crossed, a light dwindling in the rear view mirror.

Or Chaplin critique of machines where pastiche requires a glove. A sense of a new totalizing form of power. Hence to be wrestled with.

A curious folding, like the top and bottom of an airplane wing, that seems to rend subject at terrible juncture.

It is a mistake to take threat prophesy as condition/limit of the real. To take the aesthetic staging of machine and aura in Benjamin as a descriptive rather than a projection of a loss.


***

What is behind the censure of the subject? Sometimes it seems to me it’s a desperate desire to deny a being at stake that involves us in conferral. Our long complicity in the rule of kings alongside a fantasy of some different open. Freedom in absolute negation writ Cobain.

Abstract notion of special interiority/hence designation as subject to (emplaced) is rough topic for an ethic of care not written in norms but specifics.

Allied to Marxist utopian materialist self no longer needs a mind or subject-to as shelter of a flock—hence allied to terrible rending of subject as progress I dispute.

On shape-shifting


A poetics organized not in relation to light or precision but in relation to shape and change.

Shape & not image per se, or image as wave.

Shape from Indo-European roots for scraping, sketch, scratching, cutting (Sanskrit klp) gone cut

or figure from dheigh, dough—go figure, riddling fingered shadows.

In my dim hands not a stained glass of your body, but palpate. Rhythm in breaths and
rhyme of hamstring to patella shin—your deep wells of essay

Which rises in fluids.

A sentence or poem that wanders along a trace in the arm, a stir hid. Part of our best suggestions.

Body is after-all dream. Slips left and wakes. Endless surfacing and surge.

As foot, body tells dream we are steeped in. Step in and out of worlds.

What surprises in dreams are occurrence and resolution or solution as figure, space, room—and the insistence of narrative.

I have been altered as bird, turned to boat-wood, made small inside a book’s spine, gone upstairs into deserts, been bear, returned to ever changing homes I am still managing.

I’d write poems that whispers this drift, marks change. Deep currents and deeper. Structures of heart and sun’s circle and breath and light—repeat and deep inflect.

In precise relation to shadows, blackbirds begin to rattle—in the last weeks, I’ve noticed a sudden peal of nostalgia among my 30 year-old friends for a childhood that wasn’t theirs. This sudden haunting that descends like a cold front, sinks wells and circulates along paths scried in the airs.

Habit is both grass, small knell cupped north into the darker sky and beyond immediate sources of warmth, and what dreams between haunts grass that some call aura.

What changes this way is fast.

***

A poem thought this way runs angled shorelines suffused
aught between “knot” and “was” and nevertheless strung
deflate form flows fill forward, fury
aspect assonance leant bell
mouth incident to domed carapace or chalked
as echoes test this cupped vocative to your yoked chalice
as resonant suggestion of affordance, a room you could
borrow, ask after weddings slit sun
as all air these slim once was I can’t say
acre acre

***

to bend sound to make it slip where meaning almost aspirates

already transport, this lace in you, her needle


***

Some musing about gender (about which I am already displaced):

° Gender is a relational/transactional factor. It is not a property. That said, it is hard to talk about gender in ways that admit this transactional status.

° Our behavior is structured by organic factors but also by transactional dynamics.

° Human beings use the difference between male and female as a way of managing a possible violence given when relations occur and an order is essayed.

° Not sure why we order or sequence relations, but we do. The ability to order and sequence relations appears to be a necessary adjunct to all kinds of skill sets. May also be hard-wired feature of cognition. Order and sequence appear to be meaningful features of the appearing world and not simply an effect of our attention. But, it might be that order and sequence are an effect of our attention.

° I don’t know if the biological differences between men and women are sufficiently significant such that desire and affect are necessarily different. There is perhaps no way to say what that difference could be.

° Human beings appear to have multiple interests—in power, in care, in being touched, in truth—at stake in our other-relations. The dialogical status of interest is generally masked by the thematization of one interest as a master interest. The error here is much like the error that occurs when one attempts to model all five senses on sight.

° We regulate each other by the assertion of gender expectations. This goes on inside same-sex groups and in mixed-sex groups. Boys jostle each other into being proper guys and, at the same time, doing this, make little performances of what a guy should be. Gals do the same thing.

° A given person’s behavior may or may not reflect gendered norms. We cannot assume that because “x” is a man, his emotional behavior is a function of his having been gendered in normative terms. People get oddly gendered by their families all the time, and gender norms do not work for every person. Rather we read that person to the norms or against/away from the norms.

° Like all normative structures, gender patterns are both deep and shallow.

° Gender structures give men and women different kinds of access to social power and organizational affect. It is difficult to say if this is strictly unequal since the kinds of access are different and may occur within different topoi.

° Gender is one of the ways in which human beings regulate desire and interest.

° When a person says “you are acting just like a girl”, they are making a regulatory assertion.

° Despite utopian fantasies that human beings can function without regulation, we need regulation. [Think of the end of the Third Elegy where Rilke says “restrain me”.]

° It is always appropriate to review and adjust regulatory stances.

° It is not clear that supposed gender types reflect natural kinds or reflect the only adaptations possible for natural kinds. Gender is a cultural construct, however deeply patterned or evolutionarily reproduced. It is a writing across what occurs at each generation.

° Because cultural constructs always have an element of play (think “play in the wheel”), there is a certain amount of play in gender patterning from generation to generation, and, it will be possible to “play” with gender.

° I find I want to pursue a gender critique or draw attention to gender when I sense a regulatory apparatus is in place that is not being examined and/or whose relations involve an indirect assumption of power. Gender is a social mechanism by which the violence of ordering is hidden/deferred or suspended by the performance of gender codes. That is, the performance of a gender code/norm performs “an order” as a social fact. It is harder to protest unequal allotment and ordering in the face of this fictive display of a false order. One is supposed to play by the rules.

° When a person says, “you are acting just like a man” they are making a regulatory assertion.

° Making assumptions or speaking in gendered terms is reflexive and pervasive. The thought of the other is rapidly inflected in terms of gender. In conflict, is this because conflict leads us to draw boundaries and to polarize? If so, gender is just one of a range of terms we might use as we attempt to get a grip on the other.

° It would be useful to tease apart any bifurcation of interests as characteristically feminine or masculine. Not doing so allows us to ignore the specific ethical dimensions of our own interests.

° The thought that a person has both masculine and feminine aspects/dynamics may be a way of attempting to recover the full range of interests at stake in our other-relations. This might be what Jung was getting at, and might be why Jung is, after all, a Freudian.

° The hysterical, slender femme-fatale of the twentieth century whose anger erupts and who, alternately appears as Mary on the fields of genocide, might be a desire/interest being said a man says.

° Getting her a chance to speak is not as simple as passing the mic around. It is a more difficult demand that we break back against our love of power. Gal or Guy.

After Rilke I Try to Change into Laurel

And so here again talking in veils, as if this were the only thing permitted, struggle as I do to say “pineapple” (do you see how the daily already slips away?) “coffee”, “yard” (again). Do you see how the day is interrupted by its facts, displayed like merchandise in this era, stapled to the sky in others?

despite thrashing about, wrestling with the quilts, having to talk in quilts, having to let these fall over me, having to talk sideways, or in stars, masked, not among you

we get brief glimpses of the sky perhaps, certainly we can follow logics’ path to imagine it must be something we all share, a common business in veils and touch, but I say it falls again, there is no shore, at best a hem

her skirt, perhaps a wedding gown (or a flag, that falls over us, July fourth, a girl of ten with her younger sister, disappearing under it, circa Robert Frank)

****

solution = quilts and veils again, as explanation for what to do with desire with voice

equal sign as knot (nautical), perhaps a means of measuring the sea, a parse like moons

or bites—I believe in facts, but their relationship to us is less clear; we repair the daily according to one strategy, whispering, “gentian”, “cord”, “pineapple” (but already our grip is slipping)—day interrupted by facts, displayed like merchandise in this era, stapled to the sky in another (Hegelian) waltz

even this can become a tent in the open, since surely shared, we both swathed in yards of silk, Draupadi, who cannot be disrobed, veiled face who makes a real sign

covered in marigold dye at Holi or a drone, are we equally ever//there’s no shore, though there appear to be hems

her skirt, perhaps a wedding gown (or a flag, that falls over us, July fourth, a girl of ten with her younger sister, disappearing under it, circa Robert Frank)

sea, why do you seem to leave me on the shore? since my desire must be said, would woo, I will always be drawn further into your waves

***

and the boys called her “silence,” or spouse if they wanted

to imagine fucking her

as a way to remain unwilling

and apart

****

boy-self that speaking unsays

no wonder you imagine language a virus

or consider it bounded (oh Saussure, oh chiefs

trading women, oh sign we are stained by

that already leaks) your skin

****

skin mottled by the moon

the way she drove or looked out a window

we are just able to endure

being so different

****

because if its silence

because if its mind (listen)

we can displace these stains

write them on walls

GET THEM OFF US

****

just grammatically feminine (a little torture of

the facts) means we can identify

are not abject between

sea and sky (two firmaments

****

the way the I-Ching puts it, equal to sky and earth

and between them, and linking,

a foot and this supplemental dream

****

too too masculine subjects worn tight-wired

De-Kooning girl-phase—she slips birch white

out of the owl’s fright—image of shame,

anemone arm too ever flung to return

why do you say these things about my sisters?

****

we can perhaps marry what we already wear

this means many fences and scenes behind

the billboard arras, and seeming difficult, and

putting ourselves aside, the way dogs

are animals, so naturally

****

stained fright I am spotted by, mall

touch my mother had to whisper

along with stars, and the sun

Emily cut from paper,

to tell truth,

her inevitable love

despite hate

****

I’ve been wrestling for some time with the notion of a hard/clean/steel/spare poetics—a poetics that emphasizes clarity—and some more elaborate, bulky, flaccid poetics that this is contrasted to, as well as with the use of “masculine” and “feminine” to describe these.

Part of what I have wrestled with is the tension between the simplicity and clarity and power by which an image can be established and my satisfaction with this, and an ethic or posture of the hard and spare that simply and mechanically attempts the simple and spare in a crude flattening or attenuation—in other word the difference between a close practice and a rule or vector that becomes tyrannical and, like all rules, brings with itself a set of secondary performances required to make ritual witness of the preference.

I have nothing against close practice and am always looking for it, and I militate in different ways against any rule that’s become a fashion.

Surely the use of masculine and feminine to describe this difference is a sign that the conversation has shifted to fashion, for gender is precisely a very old rule that we perform and are ordered by. And so, a sorting out that returns us to the same old.

Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking about a different set of terms—still incomplete—by which something new could be said about the issues at stake in taking about clarity or elaborate and cluttered, and I am trying out the difference between what I call a lyric attention to light, and a lyric attention to shape-shifting.

A lyric attention to light is attentive to what light does, which is clarify and still, make real, reveal, shine, shine across the top of, glint off of and so on.

A lyric attention or impulse to shape shift I awareness of change/dynamic and unfooting that occurs and clear things change and become something else.

From "Orphans"

Alan sits out on a bench down by the saw mill. He is watching the long line of cars from the shift change make their bull-like way out into the street, pressing for left turns...horns honking. The sky is lightly overcast, white-grey. Gulls circle squalling ove the massive piles of ceder and pine. Alan likes to look at the piles of wood, to smell the mix of pine tar and oil, like a black adhesive acrylic smeared on the wood.
In an hour Alan is due at the frame shop. He likes the work, so different from painting, and yet so similar in terms of focus. It’s like balancing a light workout with a heavy one. Working on the frames, his mind has time to wander as it never does when he paints, time for strange connections and memories to assert themselves.
He likes the juxtaposition of the smooth wood and detailed judgement with these airy condensations; its as if he had caught sight of the double-sidedness of the world, and, rather than pulling the two sides apart, rather than burying one or the other, had rather waited for a moment and allowed the possibility of co-existence to flower, he had endured this, felt a poise in motion, the true artifice of life. Worlds combine and do not collide, the doubling like a roiling, chaining kiss, a breath that doubled condenses as the hour.
He can almost taste the clear air pregnant with possibility, sometimes wants to push his hands into the surface of it to seize peaches, fruit, fish. Later he will try to stretch what he’s feeling over his canvass, but its hard. He is always hungry after work, spends far to much money at the gourmet Natural Foods store, buying with his eyes, and afterwards, he is often dissatisfied with the food. The apples are hard, or the bagel more yeasty than he had been thinking, than he wished.
On the bench beside him is a folded newspaper, just the sports section, and an empty paper cup with coffee stains. These have been forgotten, as many things are, have begun to slip out and away like blowing ash. Even Alan, who pays attention to the vast detail of life, can’t check the constant tendency for things to lapse into brooding shadows; its as if he, like anyone, is falling asleep constantly, as if there were a vast narcalepsy stirred by words, sleepwalk words sent out to stalk what has gone.
Alan is looking at the sky, trying to forget the visions that have surfaced around him, into which he has been thrown. He strains against them just as he strains against the social memories inscribed on billboards and TV images, as if he had ever sat at a table looking at a goddess wearing a diamond necklace, or had swept away through a European city in a long luxury car, as if his life had the banal narrative crises of a sit-com. He strains against them out of a habit adopted after his 300th bus ride between the North End and Cambridge, out of the instinctive reaction to protect himself by imagining himself somewhere else. He strains against them just as he strains against his own eyes and hands, the eyes that see the skeleton poverty and blasted, crumbling, facades of 1930’s buildings vanishing from sight like the buffalo, the eyes that see clusters of black men in coarse clothes in front of buildings with plywood doors, the hands that feel the vibration of the bus as it stumbles across Longfellow Bridge over cracked concrete and the subway depths and deep channels and sewers and deeper water table, a surface of pipes and decayed bricks laid down fifty, a hundred years ago, and already turning to marshy, thick substances some future race might use for oil in a far distant time. Its too much to see and feel this, so he’s got a habit of sitting and looking at the sky as if he wasn’t taking all that in, as if it weren’t turning his sky grey, as if it weren’t rising like a cloud of grackles around him cawing and scratching, this New Jerusalem America with its black face shuffle, saying, “nothing happ’nin’ here, boss, don’t blame me, I just work here.”
Alan is so busy looking at the sky and the wood and waiting for the hour to pass, he doesn’t notice a woman sit next to him. She’s dressed in a short brown dress, its made out of a muslin, and she’s got a page-boy cut, dark brown hair that’s thin and’ll fly in the wind. Her face is gaunt, but she’s got bright black eyes, and she stares at him fiercely.
When Alan notices her, what he notices first is that her bones are thin, that she has retained the bird-like proportions of early adolescence. There’s an almost serene and supple quality to her skin. But when he catches her eyes, he stops short with what he later knows as fear, for her eyes reflect layers of intrigue, as if she and no one else had been watching as the sad ports and cities of America lurched out of the middle of the century like battleships so quick into obsolescence, as if the days were pages rifled by a breeze, shifting back and forth in the liquid dream of her gaze.
She nods at his recognition and then says sweetly, “We’ve been watching you, Alan. Watching a long time.”
His heart jumps at the familiarity, the implied comfort of long aquaintence. To have been watched, and by her, by Them! He knows the moment she says this that it is true.
“It is time for you to come with me.”
Alan is thinking about an old patchwork quilt he had when he was a child, the mix of fabrics and prints. He suddenly remembers how it felt when his legs only stretched halfway down the bed, how it felt to go to sleep. His hand is in hers and they are walking back up from the sawmill towards downtown. She dances lightly as she steps like a cat. And then, like a car, she suddenly pulls Alan down an ally. Its a narrow ally between a warehouse and a large apartment house. The walls are high and the shadows deep. They come on an old rail spur that ends abruptly beside a concrete pier. Alan steps up onto one rail and begins to walk along balancing. He can see now that at the end there is a tunnel of some kind where the rails ran under a road. It is into this tunnel that she leads him, hand in hand.
The tunnel is short, only fifty yards, but when they come out Alan finds he is disoriented. He is no longer anywhere near the sawmill, not even in Washington State maybe. He looks up at the sky which is a clear bluebird blue. They are on an urban street, it looks like Cambridge, and she is hurrying him towards a small wooden building at the corner of a small square. There is an old weathered sign that reads, “The Red-Star Bookstore”, but the windows are dark. If there were ever stores here they are now gone, though the square might once have been full of stalls and local produce.
When she reaches the door, a tall black oak door, she stops and touches his hand, as if to see if he was with her. And indeed, he is suddenly alarmed, as if just then it had struck him that he had no idea how to find his way back to the sawmills of Bellingham.
“Wait,” he says, “What’s your name?”
She smiles like an emperess, and touches him on the brow, “I am Lady Liberty, Alan. Come, do not be afraid.”
Alan is still caught up by her recognition, but when she says her name, he suddenly is aware of some contradiction, as if she had other names, a discrete history in another life, a place where he would not be recognized.

She has opened the door and over her shoulder Alan can see a vast hall, far larger than the small wooden shop. As he steps across the threshold behind her, Alan suddenly catches the faint scent of olives and thyme as if blown from Portugal.
The space is huge. Alan cannot see the far walls, and in the distance he can see what look like rolling hills. The floor is earthen and even close at hand there are small gardens and many paths crossing and turning. The roof towers some thrity stories above them and is made of stained glass, and there are long cathedral windows the stretch down the near walls letting in a diffuse yellow-grey light and sometimes the sun in spectacular angled rays.
Alan stops to look up at the stained-glass ceiling. He is first struck by the pure colors, then begins to notice the images—women kneeling beside river banks with laundry, the black-tar rooftops of an American city stretching away into 1940’s distance, and then a white country church with a preacher standing on the lawn, his hand laid on the nose of a large brown bear, his coat a straight black line, his pink face smiling the hopeful, sturdy charity of doing good works. And then Alan’s perspective shifts and he suddenly sees that all these images, and countless more are like a patchwork pattern making up the long gown of a woman whose body stretches out over them as if she had been flying, but had turned to see them standing down below. And then Alan sees that the pictures change, that the gown ripples as if in a wind, and when he tries to catch sight of her face again, it is turned away pointed out into the vast reaches of the room.
When Alan looks down he sees Lady Liberty has gone on into the room, down a short flight of stone steps. Her muslim wrap stretches and slides as she walks, and she brushes small shrubs, tapestries, a small end table as she passes. Her hand lingers across a book case, a steam radiator with flecking peach-colored and selant green paint, a hot plate, french windows. She stops, one hand against these, waiting for him to hurry close before stepping out into a small garden. They are closer to the nearest wall now and Alan can see out through one of the great windows. He sees an oily black horizon with distant scaffolds, and closer wheeling gulls. The sky is an urban brown-blue like old yellowed napkins and stained. Night might be coming.
Lady Liberty sees where he is looking and lightly points over a series of walls—lamposts, canopies, small flowering trees, lampshades—towards the next great window. Alan immediately sees that it is night out that window. He can make out Orion’s belt and a thin moon.
Lady Liberty begins to climb over a wooden rail fence when Alan finds his voice, “Wait.”
She turns her eyes back on him, “I always wait.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the zoo.”
“But...”
“Alan, you understand all this, you couldn’t be here if you didn’t.” She sits on a steamer trunk plastered with pennants and decals. “But we can sit a moment if you wish.” She looks up at the ceiling as if checking the position of the sun. “We’re a bit early.”
After a moment, Alan asks, “What is this place? Its like...like Wonderland.” He does not say, “and like a cathedral too”, but he is looking up at the vaulted ceiling and the great windows, and this thought is in his mind.
“This is my land, Alan.” Lady Liberty pulls a small cigar from the pocket of her wrap and carefully lights it, puffing at it until she is content it is lit. Then she waves her hand, about the space so that the glowing end makes a brief circle. “See the things of the world—the darkness beneath beds, the way the soft lamp lights a corner, a set of french doors from a house in Omaha...so many things...and hills, lakes, delicate flowers, words, books, handshakes...a rail fence from a suburban yard that a young boy and his friend used as a horse when playing cowboys...the corner of a grarage where a large black radio stood...but here things are taken for themselves and find their own order.” She adds almost immodestly, “There is no economy in this land.”
“Like Plato...”
She turns so quick towards him with a cuff at his shoulder he almost falls over. “No. not like Plato at all...it’s not that what you see are the essences of things or their true forms...its not this at all. The brush you painted with yesterday is here somewhere, out there, the half painted picture, those awful men and their charts...all of this is here somewhere. The doubling of worlds does not add a whit to the stuff of worlds. But where they touch there are veils. Here you are inside the veils.”
She is silent a moment, smokes her cigar with relish, then laughs, “Inside the veils at last, Alan. Better hold on to the skirts!”
Alan is so caught up he doesn’t notice the jab. There’s something else he is wondering, so he asks, “What did you mean by having watched me? Why did you do that?”
He’s really asking, incredulously, “Do you really love me?” and Lady Liberty can see that sure as she sees every reason anyone’s ever had for doing anything. She likes to say, “When the will condenses you can always see the hand.” But its not time to talk of love, certainly not time to say it is a constant asking, or to explain the way liberty and love twine about each other but never touch. And so she answers from a different perspective.
“We watch for signs of doubling, Alan. I have no effect on the day and night save when there is a doubling, and where there is a doubling there is a door I can go through. You’ve been doubling Alan, doubling for some time. And so we watched you.”
“Doubling...?”
“You will see that you know. This is why we must go to the zoo. Come, we can sit no longer.” With this, Lady Liberty carefully tapped the cigar out and wrapped it in a clothe before placing it again in her pocket. Then she sprang from the trunk and over the rail fence in a single lithe movement, dropping lightly to the grass beyond, and, for a moment, Alan felt as if he were six, playing in the yard with a friend in the grass and towering sky. But then it passed, and he leapt after her, already disappearing down a hallway, now a shadow outlined among the red geese on a Japanese screen.