HOW IS YOUR INNER LIFE NOT YOUR LIFE?

Robert Motherwell

Everything it touches...

(maybe you would be happier without a body)     (and 
not so strict with others)                (having less hunger 
for what they fail to impart)(a body is         a winedark 
tedious little house)            (you are fearful of windows
uncovered at night)(you are full                        of holes) 
                            (when the rain gets in you welcome it)

If I had three wishes I would wish for a beautiful singing voice. Instead I write about beasts (beasts who are really people) and talk to myself. I love a boy who says less every day. If there were too many words I could quell them. But how do you treat a lack? Having no tourniquet for what isn't. 

We seem far away from that day on a bridge in the treetops. The wood swayed 
and I swayed and he did not. He had a task to finish and that task was me.

I love a bottle that hurts me. Wine and a vial of my mother's perfume, who I have not spoken to since Christmas 2010 and whose whereabouts no one knows. For years I dreamt I disfigured the parts of me that resembled her. Now I dream of lost teeth and a fishing boat that fills with water but does not sink. 

I don't mourn anything but reverence is a crying sport. 

Mark Rothko

In a letter to a farmer-poet I admitted my severity. I am not one of those storied girls who keeps herself soft and lovely. I am ordered and quiet. I weigh the risks and squeeze a lime between thumb and forefinger. Ice in a glass renders me calm. Sometimes I bite the glass to test it. When I am calm I am writing myself.

I fight the urge to be your secretary.

What does that mean? 
He was driving so he could only spare a glance.

Oh, I don't know.

You think I'm a mess?
No.
Then what does it mean?

I wanted to say: I like doing things for you. Precision is a kind of love.

But instead I said I don't know again.

In a letter to a farmer-poet I started to write I am nothing like the earth! 
But I hesitated. How can a woman on earth be nothing like the earth?

Lee Krasner

Lapis is the place I entered to leave the room I was in.

A house without furniture, rooms without doors.

With the words Worse things have happened 

to other girls, you can close the conversation.

When you fail to be precise you make a fear ubiquitous. 
A decade has passed. Exactitude is a method I cannot shake. 
People think I am a poet but really I am at war 

with the very common ruining 

called forgetting.

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."