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.

LETTERS FROM NOWHERE

I convinced a boy that I had a glass eye. We lay awake until daylight, drinking gin and listening to records in his bed. He tried to introduce me to opera. I found it innavigable but sweet. When he put his arms around me, I shrugged it off as inevitable. I purred under his weight, under his charm. And I said: You do not belong to me. Because I refused to kiss him, he asked only that I put my fingers in his hair. My resistance is without sternness. I understand the petty things that bodies demand. But I'm done with those curious exertions for the time being. Put it away, comrade. I don't know what kind of girl you think I am, but I appreciate tranquility.

I have been reading the Kolyma tales. Wondering at all those ghosts that the Siberian permafrost keeps. My love of history is turning me into a collector of macabre characters. Scurvied phantoms trekking in foot-rags across hills that shine blue like sugar. It occurred to me that one does not usually recount tales of deranged and emaciated political prisoners gorging themselves on puppy meat in polite conversation. However, this occurred to me only after I had already done so. History--there's no shortage of horror.

Lacking the discipline to write seriously, I have taken to taming my body. The only stain on my bedsheets is one of ink. Meanwhile every other nineteen-year-old goes gallivanting off to reconcile their mutable wants and wet mouths. Hankering, pang, throe. I sit in my room and try to write a boy worth undressing for. Sometimes I feel the need to close myself off for ever. Why not? Why not?

Because no words will come, I am building a new body for my poem. Separate from my own, which has been playing obdurate. So far this body is just a trunk, meanly formed from chickenwire. Ribs like dulcimers, shoulders like ships. I spent the afternoon bearing skin for the bookwork. Flour, water, newspaper flesh. When finished, the skin will glisten with decoupaged poetry. Rilke too. There's a vacancy in the chest, where the heart will go. An accordion book of red tissue paper. We'll see. Flirting with exorcism. We'll see.

I ran away to New Orleans for a weekend only to run into an ex-lover. Lover being a convenient term. He belonged to the school of impassable boys I would not undress for. He and I walked along the Mississippi River and it was oddly comfortable. I almost told him about the poem I wrote about him, but thought better of it. It took a year of not speaking (coupled with the astounding coincidence of having found each other in the Crescent City) for us to forgive each other for the discrepancy between nudity and nakedness.

I wish I had something to talk about besides bodies I couldn't love. But I don't.

I fear that my entire college education will be one of kissing the wrong people and writing poems about it.

Then there's the part where I greyhound bussed to Chicago and back. Crossing through the Midwest at sundown, I saw so many magenta haystacks it almost made me want to be a realist. Almost.

My hometown has been buried in pollen for the last two weeks. The streets are colored with absurd splashes of yellow. Everywhere I arrive, someone reaches up and brushes flowers from my hair.

I am an uncouth and unreliable narrator, spitting gin fictions.

Ten times, count 'em ten times, that boy asked about my glass eye.

WEEKEND GLIMPSES

Business venture: Heironymus Bosch's Burlesque. Who's with me?

me: you know what's the best ars poetica?
him: what?
me: people.
him: people. i guess they make a pretty good ars poetica but i don't know that they're the best.
(silence. i try to make out his expression in the dark.)
him: i'm sorry. that sounded mean. people---i like it. i do. it's so simple.
me: you kiss like a poem

Friday night: I-and-three-others jumped a fence, scaled a wall and wandered into the as-yet-unfinished skeleton of the new dormitory on campus. The paint was cloudy, the fine wood-dust unswept and blanketting the halls like ash like snow like the stuff of salt flats. Only some rooms were lit--it was a veritable labyrinth of a place. The strangest part was that the power boxes were all exposed with the words BRIGHT FUTURE spraypainted in yellow on the front. So as we walked the halls, it was just a receding horizon-line of totems promising BRIGHT FUTURE BRIGHT FUTURE bright future. Made me feel remote. I pretended the winding halls were nervous pathways, that we ourselves were nerves traveling electric. Lately I'm all impulse. Then again, everything is.

Different night, different boy: Joe tried to teach me how to waltz in the alleyway while the party raged on inside. Beauty of squares and synchronized steps. He told me that God works in three-quarters time. His gaze was so intentional I had to look away.

My band's next act of meaningful vandalism: we are going to make murals in the parking decks with sidewalk chalk. I am going to draw an L in front of all the ONLY turn symbols on the ground. So that drivers will see the truth as they descend down the ramps: LONLY, LONLY, LONLY.

Forget standard seasons. You know it is summer in the South when the mosquitos take over. Little vampires.

Also if you have never pied your best friend on her birthday, well, you should.

As for Saturday night/Sunday morning:

I rearranged him into a poem with ease.

Scar shaped like a sickle. Mannerist hands&feet.

A boy in the act of disappearing.

What to do. What to do. What to do.

What kissing What roughness What.

Imagine a boy turning to you in bed and saying, "I am not to be trusted."
What game of Cowboys and Indians and Poets is this?

The Figure of Woman: HOW NOW?

The same questions are following me around. Just finished an extensive analysis of the female nude in art. In South Asian lit, I'm learning about Hijras and the third sex. A whole paper on the femme fatale. Back at home, I'm reading up on Tiresias: hey pal, no one ever made duality look so sex-y. And then there's the fact that I'm dating a girl without even knowing if I'm straight or not.

I'm feeling especially ambiguous lately. The questions are piling up in the backroom of things-I'm-avoiding-coming-to-terms-with. Lately, my head's populated with women: distinctions like devoted mother/devouring mother; an estranged best friend in Chicago for whom I feel real heartbreak; this mean girl that Stephen may or may not be seeing; this girl whose bed I keep waking up in without any of my confusion answered.

Staring at department store mannequins and seeing classical nudes.
Staring at piles of bones in anthropological digs and wondering what's a mother.
Staring at one girl's naked body and noting the dissimilarities to my own.
Staring at Serra Paylin clad only in the American flag.
How now how now how now?

Simone de Beavoir: Do women exist as a natural kind? Is it desirable that they should exist?

Last night, I went to my seven-year-old cousin's birthday party. Some kid's mother froze when I walked in. She just stared at me with big, wary eyes. I know whose child you are, she muttered. You are your mother's clone. I couldn't help but be disdainful. I practically spat my reply ("Not. Quite.") and left the room. Nothing gets me so angry as being compared to her--even though this woman only meant for a superficial comparison. Even though my mother's beautiful. In my dreams, I disfigure the parts of me that look like her. I think it was also the way this stranger worded it: "I know whose child you are." No. She does not know whose child I am. That's the problem. No one does.

As for the Body of Woman, I'm cutting away my origins. I'm stripping the fount. I lay my head on S's breast the same way I used to lay my head against my mother's chest as a small child. But that's all done with.

So what with studies of transgressive sexuality, ongoing practice in bicuriosity, and more than a few instances of hot-and-cold rage---it would appear that ambiguity's my thing.