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."

Four: Beauty & What-is-Its

i. WRITING

I began writing for the first time in months. My work is dense and different from before. I now speak in four voices. It's my favorite thing about writing: I cant always tell where it comes from. Is it channeling, creating or both? Who are these people, where are these places tucked within me? When I walk out of my mind, the world's the same. Yet I'm carrying these others with me, my heart's cleaved into quarters. I'm the seeker Sargasso, the runaway maverick, a disfigured chinese songstress, and the Ophelia of the south. There is something of time in it. The fallacy of names. Travel by train.

ii. RAPTURE

We could not see the Perseids because of an excess of light and a blanket of clouds. It is quiet because he and I still do not know how to talk to each other. I convince myself that this silence is a comfortable one and that it is good to share silence. I am teaching myself to speak with my eyes. He looks at me and my words break. He says: Do you ever think about the Rapture? I say: I try not to. He thinks about it all the time--how beautiful it would be to be left behind in an emptied world. He invites me into his vision. There, we steal cars and sleep in museums. Plants take back the earth. We forget what it means to own things. We live according to astronomy. So long as those fiery horsemen stay out of it.

iii. LOSING

My mother is lost to me. My lover is lost to me. My friends are being scattered all across the country and I am stubbornly stoic about this thing called the future. Somewhere a door has shut inside me and I refuse to feel much of anything. I shrugged time off a long time ago. I turned eighteen and hated myself for it because it required the leaving of younger things. I eat less because I need less. Or maybe I need more and I'm ashamed. Everyday I remember something that was left in the move. It is even worse to recall these things: to lose and lose again. It's not that I am sad. There are remains to be sifted through. It's just strange to see how much you can live without. Soon I will be an ascetic.

iv. RECURRENCES

In the argument of order versus random chance, I say nothing. I have this silly little theory forming in which everything exists at the mercy of overlapping circles. Those circles are years, eras, transformation. They are little vacuums of time and space, little currents into which we get sucked. You are what you are according to what whirlpool you are swimming in. Then you are spun out into a new orbit and that is your life. However, because of gravity, it is possible to return to the old worlds. That is why life feels like one big coincidence: because everything recurs endlessly until it is tossed into the next time-mouth. Pockets of deja vu. Einstein says: "Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."