UNIQUE FORMS OF CONTINUITY IN SPACE


1899. Henry Bliss, real estate man,
steps off a streetcar and is promptly hit
by a taxicab. Is promptly crowned
Premier Holy Martyr of the Road.
The first man killed by an automobile
in the New World.

111 years later. My fate rubs elbows
with the ghost of Mr. Bliss. I did not
think of Ford or Gatsby or Ferlinghetti.
Strangely I thought of music,

that some overwhelming orchestration
would take reign,
that we would flirt past the other car
like jazz notes swallowed
by city poets.

Instead we hit like steel-breasted bulls.
A sound rose up—No it was not a train No
it was not a storm Quite simply it was
the sound
of two-ton bodies
hurtling inexorably
toward
one another.

1909. The Futurists insisted
that a motorcar was more beautiful
than the Victory of Samothrace.
That we are all reeling birds, yes.
A raven painted Model-T black.

Clouds in the car. Clouds in the chest.
Mushroom balloons blooming
at 100 miles per hour, loosing smoke
like a wineskin, striking my heart dumb,
burning a sickle into my right arm.

All those blinking lights on the dash. Like so many eyes watching.

Something brutal, something lived through.
I climbed out of the crushed shell
of that movable self and into the crosshair
of downtown streets.

“A poem is a machine made of words.”
Said William Carlos Williams

A poem knows there must be blood in ore.

-----

I was in a car crash last week. Though my wounds are minor, my thoughts have not recovered from the big noise. It seems impossible that I could be driving along, thoughts meandering, about small things, and then suddenly be spun into violent Erlebnisse. The accident report reads 99, can't say which of us ran the redlight. It is hard to talk with insurance agents over the phone. They want all the details of my claim. Among the things I don't say to them: I am scared of cars now they look like monsters and roads look like lifelines; so many people keep saying "The important thing is you are still here" I do not know what to make of it what an unthinkable sentiment (the alternative ineffable) and yet the politeness strikes me absurd-absurd; the powdery smoke that filled my car was like gray snow; my father did not answer when I called him from the wreckage and that wrecked me further; I am ashamed that I could not show some humanity to the other driver that I just knelt on the sidewalk and cried like a child.

Something in this trauma seems distinctly American--but of course, it isn't. O how my Song of the Open Road is perhaps forever blighted. I have been riding my bicycle to school, fighting nervous breakdowns and feeling ridiculous. Though my only conspicuous scar is a shiny pink crescent on my forearm, I feel marked. Every traffic light bears a green beacon, though East Egg remains far off.

Car crashes are so common that they almost seem meaningless. The worst kind of death: accidental, could've-happened-to-anybody. We do not like to think our undoings will be arbitrary. That this life, lived so long, could be so succinctly seared shut. As it stands, the car is dead and I'm alive. Can't say fairer than that.

I attended a reading by the poet Paul Guest a few days after the wreck. I was not especially acquainted with his work. In fact, I'd only ever read one of his poems. In high school a friend showed me "The Resurrection of the Body and Ruin of the World" and I was moved in a pristine way. While that poem stayed with me, I hadn't read anything else. I certainly hadn't known the poet was quadriplegic until someone mentioned it offhandedly just before I entered the lecture hall.

His reading was beautiful. He read from what looked like a Kindle, using his mouth to direct some makeshift stylus across the screen. At one point, he lurched forward and pecked at the screen with his nose. Like the most charming bird ever. I left the reading enamored and a little haunted. I can't accurately express how it felt to ride my bike home when it was a bicycle accident that paralyzed that brilliant poet. That the night air felt charged and eerie and yes, sadly lucky. I do not mean to romanticize misfortune--be it mine or someone else's. I am always feeling sad and lucky. But Paul Guest ranks high in the list of strangers I have loved almost. His words are well-lit, vital. Days after and still I feel gifted.

When he signed my book, he asked if I was a writer. I always get shy at this question. Unsure whether I have earned the title or if I'm still fumbling around in the literary gutter. When I told him I was just an undergraduate, he said, "Oh, so you still have time!" And that was impossibly reassuring.

I wanted to ask him how he actually pens his work. But I didn't know if that would be offensive. I am always chasing after words as they race off and always fearful that I have lost them. And I still have use of my hands. I wonder how Guest arrives at his lines. With what lariat.. Lately I have been writing by hand almost exclusively. Meaning gets rangey enough on its own. Sometimes the abstraction of my latest poem is compounded by the abstraction of virtual space and and and I start to wonder what this whole luckless labor is even getting at. Paper, like skin, reassures me. The solidness of an instrument hooked in the hand, not just typing away into mechanical light--there's something to be said for that too. Not to mention the little birds' feet of ink staining the fingertips, spidering out in wales. Evidence of weight in words even if they seem aery when spoken.

Not just Spirited but Bodied.

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."

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?

STRANGERSONG

I'm writing poetry again and dreaming about Dante Alighieri.

(In my head, he has a certain someone's sovereign mouth, with an elegant gap and glassy dark eyes.)

Last Monday: I was waiting for the bus at four A.M. on my last morning in Pittsburgh. Streets were cold and mostly empty. Dawn's unlucky--full of dead starlight. Hannah and I were sitting in the bus shelter. Too early to speak but a goodbye was imminent so I tried to use our last minutes well. It's strange how a city is its own entity. The best thing about talking to Hannah is I never have to worry if I'm making sense. She understands the suggestions in things, she knows that ambiguities are seams. While being understood is not the same as making sense, I am comforted. I looked at the sleeping buildings in which a few scattered windows were still lit. My mind scrambled to make a pattern out of the randomness, a constellation or key. None came. It's strange how you can think you know a city, and even come to think you own it somehow. I've only been here a week but now Pittsburgh's something else. Before it was just a name. Now it's a place I went once, when I was eighteen, to see a friend and it was cold. . .

There was almost no one on the airport bus. It made me feel like a nighthawk. How silent and spare is the city bus at Four in the Pittsburgh A.M. How sad and rare. I toyed with the idea of living the rest of my life in verse. The ways in which an old, romantic form could rearrange my modern heart. Something an ex-lover once said about form poems: that they were closest to real life, that you can only work inside the constraints you're given. That despite our best efforts, no one gets to live in free verse.

Still deliberating on whether or not a poem is a livable space. If there is light and corners and blankets to stay warm. There's a wooden house in Pittsburgh that is graffitied with Chinese poetry. Known simply as "House Poem." So maybe. Just maybe....Still wondering about my professor's offhand comment that fact and fiction come from the same etymological root, which does not denote real/unreal but merely "a construction." A Factory.

While on the bus, I thought about the night that C told me I was a passenger in my own life. That's been weighing heavily on me ever since. Sitting on a quiet bus in a gray town, I wondered if it could be true. I'm almost positive it's not, but I can see where he'd get that idea. I guess I can forgive him for it. The truth is I like being a stranger to things.

Lathe biōsas.

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

Dreamt again of candlelit dinner with Rimbaud. We ate dust.

(Dust which is the crystal-fine ruin of everything,
even Rimbauds)

Meanwhile, Oneiroi with the heads of dogs
sat at the kitchen table, manipulating
the room, the light, the swell
of black-and-white checkered floor.

Rimbaud sulked in his chair, arms
crossed and a shadow over his brow.
Still mad that he had to die after all.
It's some game--life,death, good and
bad dreams in the middle.

Even as a ghost, Rimbaud's sleeves are
too long. He scowls as I handle my silverware
with what must seem like an aggravating deftness.
(Naturally, his poet-phantom hands pass
through everything)

Another defiance from unknowing, waking life.
How rude we are to barge in
on this other realm,
unannounced and ostentatious
with our show of blood
rising to skin,
flushed with
living color.
It's some game.

What's so great about bones? He grumbled. You didn't even earn them.

Somewhere off, the dogs howled
an Appalachian folksong.

ON DREAMING IN MIDDLE ENGLISH

Last night I dreamt I had to swim across Lake Tuscaloosa while carrying poems on my back.

It was a competition. Backstroke, breaststroke, all these bodies laughing and trying to keep the sealed envelopes from getting wet. We weren't allowed to read the poems until we reached the other side. I did very poorly because my poem was so, so heavy. That's fitting. Lately: all my heavy intentions leave me tired all day, everyday.

In other news I wrote a story about the man in the moon. Whose name is Charles. And I guess it's about more than that. It's about bones and questions and my mother. And sex. Inevitably.

I have had a cold for two weeks. This is no good. It is very hard to seduce a boy you like when you're all sniffly.

When I reached the other side of the lake and opened my envelope, it was the Canterbury Tales. That's why it was so heavy.

ON KEEPING EVERYTHING IN STAR-ORDER

So I think the only thing left to do is to follow Tom Waits' cue and move according to the stars. It would be misguided at best, but at least it wouldn't be arbitrary. For one year I saw maps in everything. I traced the veins up and down the forearms of my friends. Treasure maps, I told them. I dreamt of benevolent globes that children could hide in.

Now I'm in the doldrums of formless-college-insubstantia. Unmappable regions. Terra incognita. Hic sunt dracones, I would've said in my previous incarnation.

So with my maps all withered, the legend all askew, I guess I'll just trust in the stars. It puts me in mythic company: First-World explorers, Underground Railroad, Tom motherfucking Waits. The stars are not man-made. So there can be no deceit in them. Right? Right.

I made a constellation projector out of paper and a touch-light. Stars as simple as pinpricks.

retrieved notes from 1 August 2008:

"Thou shalt not disregard the Irrational."

What do I mean by 'Poetry is the most important thing in the world' ? How presumptuous of me, how naive, how self-aggrandizing. But it is just this: stargazing on an empty night; a stranger called Father; cats watching; a broken typewriter; a man who lived biblically; Cepheus is the husband of Cassiopeia. There is order in that. There is light and water and poetry, the three essentials. I don't know the names of the constellations. Cait does, she took an astronomy class at a community college. I don't know their names. There, there, there are things there are no names for. Cait & I run as if there were still urgency in the deadened world of sleep, as if the sky might leave us. These short, staggered breaths, my ribs aching in time-- it's not epiphanic but it's the closest thing I've got. I lay on my back on the pavement. There's that same old dream of leaving. How far can I walk? As far as I am lonely.

Upon reentering Cait's bedroom, I go to each of the four walls. She confirms with compass in hand. I put the edges back, I give the corners back to the room of my mind. I take a black marker and write on each wall: BOREAS, NOTUS, ZEPHYRUS, EURUS.

There is order in that.

Last night, I stood with familiar-strangers/strange-familiars at a bonfire in an empty field. My ex-best friend was drunk and sullen because I'd snapped at her about something. She started apologizing, crying, wouldn't let go of me and kissed me several times on the mouth. It's the kind of scene where everyone looks hard into the fire, pretending not to see. And I couldn't think of anything to say to her. Not one thing. I just rolled my eyes up to the big grayness of something-and-nothing. I looked at her face, knew there was no chance of grace or placation. She told me she loved me, which was embarrassing. I just looked up and said: I wish the stars were visible.

Then there's the other lost friend. Sometimes I fear that Hanan will never get out of Saudi Arabia, despite our elaborate escape plans. I asked her how she felt about the stars. She said that they were beautiful, but that she still loved the moon. She told me about the last lunar eclipse that happened during Ramadan. She said: In Islam, they say it's a sign of God's wrath. But I'm not sure I believe that.

What I don't tell her is this: the Man in the Moon is not wrathful. He has absolutely no anger in him. Just whitewashed, bleached-bone sadness. He longs after something, we can't know what. Maybe it's a girl or something more celestial. But he's loathe to let go. The Man Who Navigates the Moon moves in (n)ever-increasing circles, kids himself that he's leaving, only deviates a hair's width. Still lingering despite the show of going. They say the moon's moving further and further away but everyone knows he won't go through with it. You see the sad display all the time. I've read about it in books and ex-husbands.

The Moon, I don't tell her, is no one to follow. The stars, though---maybe. Maybe.