MATERIALS FOR A POEM

Waldeinsamkeit: the feeling of being left alone in the woods.

The everpresent Mind/Body problem--mostly the body part, and how much longing can I pour into it? Until I'm heavy, until I'm full. How the last thing I need is another displaced love. And let there be and let there be and let there be. Light, or Flight.

A necklace made out of clock-hands.

The ghosts of blind Blues bards coming to me one by one in a mournful procession. Fast-forward to the part where my sight is stripped away and I make love to a boy by playing spiderwork on his spine like a twelve-string guitar. What sixth, seventh, sacred sense. Dreaming especially of Blind Willie Johnson, whose sight was burned away when his mother threw lye into his face at the age of seven. How the fire kept on burning and followed him through the unlit corridors of his lost vision until it burned his house down in 1945. Having nowhere else to go, he lived in the burnt ruins of his house until he died two weeks later.

Learning to play Chess from the Boy Who Wouldn't Give Himself to You.

A wily professor assigns a class of fourteen awkward college students to describe a kiss in 250 words or less. And read them to each other. Awkwardness is amplified interminably.

An argument over whether or not cheating on a lover is justifiable. The question posed to me: "All right-- supposing you find yourself in the strange situation where you may or may not sleep with multiple women. What is the most important thing for you to do, in the face of these potential encounters, what is the singlemost important thing for you to do?" I hesitated. I was about to answer Be honest in everything you do when he said, "Affirm life. Whatever you do, whatever the moral implications, you can't deny life. You must-always- affirm life."

Kronos castrating his father Ouranos. The Furies are born out of the spilt blood and Aphrodite emerges from the sea, into which Ouranos' genitals had been haply tossed. The Furies and Aphrodite conceived in the same wound. How very much alike they are in their heat and fever. Such swidden creatures.

What I read aloud in class:
A kiss is the most improbable thing. Your mouth against my mouth—the strangeness of having bodies at all, the strangeness of heat turned poetry. We undress old rhythms and take up new ones. Teeth and tongue and Linden trees taking root. I search singly I I I slowly succumb to new symmetries. Everything’s a hand, everything’s a bird. There’s something of the old world in the act: Isis transforming herself into a kite and fanning breath into the broken body of Osiris. These mythologies roosting in the incorrigible fruit of our hearts. What of me that is honey, what of me that is milk. My eyes spilling pomegranate seeds. I do not have a god; I only have a gesture. And so one subsumes the other. We are animals born of stone and burdened with symbols. We come to each other mutely for the place where language ends (and stories begin) is hiding in the hollows I move to fill. The roof of your mouth a dromedary home. The hook of your hip where your secrets lie dormant. “Kiss” is too light a word for what it is. The word does not betray the warmth or violence or perpetual movement. A better word would be river. A better word would be reckoning.

All Hedonism aside, how do you argue with an appeal to affirm life?

The theory that your vocal chords are reacting even as you read silently. That your inner voice is actually speaking to itself. Says Dechant: "Speech traces are a part of all, or nearly all, thinking and probably even 'silent' reading. Jacobson found that the muscles controlling the eyes contract during imagination as though the individual were looking at the object...The muscles in the speech tract (lips, tongue, chin, larynx, throat) did in fact move during reading...Recent analysis of brain wave research indicates that when the brain decides to speak, the Broca-Wernicke area of the brain sends out the word waves a fraction of a second before the word is vocalized, telling the vocal chords, the throat and the mouth to form the words. The interesting point is that the brain sends out the word waves even if the person does not speak the word but only thinks it...The Greeks used the same word, logos, for both thinking and speech."

Lately I've been extolling the virtues of bicycling in the rain. It's an inescapable fact of my college to-and-fro, so I figured I might as reconcile myself to it. It's instinctive to think of rain as a source of discomfort. Rather you should ride about and laugh and think on Leopold Bloom's suggestion of a sky-collander that organizes all the raindrops. Also, think of how many incarnations this water has undergone just to fall on your face and bead in your hair and eyelashes. If you can't go to the sea, let the sea come to you. Of course--what with my luck being my own-- my first bike crash since I was a small child is the result of a rainslick sidewalk.

After reading my meditation on kissing to my creative writing class, there was a significant pause before my professor asked: "Does anyone in this class know what 'dromedary' means?"

Everyone shook their heads.

"Amanda, tell them what it means."

I smiled and shrugged, "It's...a camel."

BODIES OF DUST & STONE

Tuscaloosa's overtaken by mist and I'm planning out an independent study in paleontology. Come next semester, I'll be sending all my free time in the Museum of Natural History and the paleolab. I met with the director this morning and spent an hour barely breathing, examining the bones of ancient whales, prehistoric birds, mythic creatures and monsters of the deep. As it were, fossils really upset my allergies. What inhalations, exhalations, dust-of-lost-time... I just kept thinking: Dinosaurs are tickling the inside of my nose! I'm breathing prehistoria!

David Howard, long-lost Midland ghost and UnFather, has found out about everything. He wants to get in touch with me. What do I say to the man I've wondered after for so many years? Especially since he didn't even know that I thought he was my father? Sorry for the misunderstanding, I hear my stranger's voice say, I wrote a poem about you once and read it before a crowded lecture hall. How foolish.

On a lighter note: I am cat-sitting for my professor while she is in Arizona. The cat's name is Swordfish. I read Oscar Wilde to her. I am always amazed at domesticated animals. Creatures that might have hunted game in a past life now chase red ribbon.

Of course the first thing I did upon entering the director's office was knock over a fossil with my purse. I felt like my life was ending for a brief second. It was a little crab encased in stone. He said, "Don't worry. You'd be hardpressed to break that guy." I thought about making a Bringing Up Baby joke, but decided it unwise. I swear to god I am the clumsiest person in existence. I'm in my head so much I forget I even have a body.

Cait, Sydney, and I made a tent in the living room. We strung bedsheets from a chandelier using simple red string. Scarves and newspaper birds. Slept beneath a sheet of pink and black flowers, someone else's sewing.

I feel less myself than ever.

Oscar Wilde sez: The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

While peering into boxes of basilosaurus vertebra, I pressed my hand to my shirt and felt my own bones just beneath. Skeletons make for such strange architecture. Foreanimals broken up like puzzle pieces, labeled and pinned and inventoried. I love the neatness of it all, lost bodies meticulously dusted. Bones tell you what you are. Bones are noble things. There is something of time in them.

On Losing One's Pet [& One's Nerve]

[image: Bukowski & cat ]

I keep having dreams where my feet are on backwards.


Chatwin writes of the nomadic imperative.
If this were true then an essential side

of ourselves, this need to move,

would be eclipsed by notions of culture or home
or perhaps just buried so deep that we would not recognize how much we wanted it. It would explain a lot as far as human distemper goes--the mind & motion of moving persons. Denied.

I sometimes wish I was a man.
So I could swim inside my lovers.
Because what's this skin, really?
This cursory knowledge of hands?

Mother called last week.
First time I'd heard her voice in six months.
She sounded small & young. Like a lost
15-year old girl. A drunk one.
I asked about my cat.
There was a significant pause
before she said, "She
had an accident."

No animal is so capable of self-delusion as the human animal.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

said Dorothy Parker.

Things We Think Separate Us From the Lower Animals:
Possessions, surnames, mailboxes, souls, engorged breasts, language, "reason," selves, the ability to invent, alphabets, mathematics, fire, extended memory, first& second order desires, wristwatches, original sin, circumcisions, shaved bodies, horrible tools, beautiful tools, necessary tools, orgasms, internal dialogues, cognizance of the absurd, epiphanies, indian food reheated, magazines, panic attacks, methodological skepticism, aesthetics, mid-life crises, fetishes, recorded histories, lyric poetry, years recorded on paper sheets, a box of vinyl records from a father, euphimism, declared majors, foresight, metaphysical projections, nostalgia, makeup, caste, class, precious jewelry, this thing they call despair, this thing they call hope, arguments for and against free will, first loves.

(things which do not really separate us.)


Cait's ex-boyfriend thinks I'm meek.
He says, You're a passenger. You just get that far-off look in your eyes all the time. I know people who are always moving, always doing, but they don't care about much. You care so deeply about so many things. But you don't do much. You're just in your head.
How can I explain to him that I am not meek?
That inexplicably, I've just always felt as though I am permanently on the outside of things?


What bothers me most about my cat is that my mother referred to him as a "she."


Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep moving.
But looking around, there's just nowhere to go!