Day is late; it is too late. The latte evaporates,
dry coffee grounds lie in the cold mug. The
thump when the car hit your body remains, as if
the echo effect is broken and repeats, thump,
thump. Metal, soft tissue, bone splinter.
Concussion of my heart.
When antelope dance over rock, smudges of
charcoal. In the cave day and night, and I
wouldn’t come out.
You were alright. You walked away, a bit
bruised.
I bled internally in my dreams, the pillow, the
sheets, under the car tire grown large as a
ferris wheel. My blood sometime ran like
Van Gogh’s wheat fields, the residue of burnt
souls. The ferris wheel ran day and night,
even in deathly winter when everyone
was absent.
Each day the sun comes later; no, earlier.
The green fury of spring is nearing like a
virescent bush fire. The sumacs are pregnant
with multiple birth buds.
Who is reading me on this day that is later than
all the other days slipping under the wheel
as the tire drags on.
This woven bone, these smudges
of burnt wood,
these buds of spring.
We draw back,
it is not easy but there is no other way.
White fire spills from the cauldron of the night.
A pregnant belly of illumination where spirits gather before they arrive and after they return.
Moths against the lantern, our scorching hearts. Clouds skein like silver wool. Earth and stars spin falling into the vortex of whitening and darkening.
The moon is a rock that flew from our oceans and seeks to return to her womb within us.
Stark, startling, as I round the corner of a busy street. A spotlight in the charred sky. In the moisture of my eyes, squinting, a gleaming halo moon.
A barren rock of mountains and dried seabeds up there, dragging the oceans with her, her dress of tides. A queen of debauchery, a mythos of dark permissions. Or the purity of a white goddess worshipped by the skyclad among the trees dancing in naked circles drawing her power.
She is a pearl like a grain of sand in the oyster of the night that opens, a mystical lamp for the mutterings of poets and visionaries and the crazed in a world of forgotten harrowings. In the perigee moon what is untamed reigns.
Wear white paint, my love, so we may dance savage across the stage lit by the moon in the night sky.
Wear white paint, my love, so we may dance before the dawn draws us away.
A crystal ball for seers, the beginning of time crumbles into the end.
And as we sleep, faint and far apart,
we guard the moon in our dreams.
Where time clots, a stillness whirling
in the motion forward. Points
of condensed age in the meridians.
I look to see
a dissolving mirror
bones, skin, neurons
the self-image.
This is not a poem neat as intact
fishbones, mysterious as dinosaur
fossils. The poem writes through
me. Rises from ruminations, dried
flowers on my spine
bursting seeds.
Are memories nomads wandering
our minds? Seeds of recollections
reflecting whole scenes from our past,
or partial images in the distorted ways we
compose and re-compose our lives?
Is memory how we narrate the stories
of our lives? Where we describe
our experiences to ourselves...
Do some experiences burrow like
bulbs in the network of capillaries,
memories memorizing themselves,
knots in the ganglia?
Replays of moments we've lived
that change as the story changes.
We are forever changing our stories,
aren't we.
Is that the river? Our blood
of experience?
Our collections of images,
re-iterating ourselves,
recalled, recollected, replayed.
Memories are slowed time,
knots in the Chi of
our neurocircuitry.
In the forever now, memories
where time recoils and coils slow eddying
resisting the rush.
Who I am is my memory of myself.
I remember you remembering yourself in me.
Wandering Nomads Bone Image, 2011, 19cm x 16.5cm, 7.5"x6.5", mostly archival inks, sepia, black, red, orange, and oil pastels, Moleskine sketchbook. Fishbones, dinosaur bones, ivory piano keys of the mind playing its strange music, I don't know. When I sat to draw an image for this poem, a vertebrae emerged. Click for actual size.
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Big Tent's poetry prompt this week was to use the "stories or ideas" of science "as a metaphor for something in your own life or a made-up life. The odd mix of fact and fiction is poetry in the making." I've kind of combined a physics of time - suggesting that, like time slows down in black holes, perhaps it also does in the creation and maintenance of longterm memory in the onrush of the present - with a neuroscience of non-localized (nomadic) cerebral processes where memories might be compared to pockets of stillness in the constant flow of cerebro-spinal fluid, the sparking of chemical pulses. And then I did a drawing where a vertebrae emerged. It was all as strange as any Science Fiction. Ultimately, my piece becomes a philosophical poem about the nature of memory, of subjectivity, of the self. For other responses, see here.
(Picasa's a bit strange these days. Below a thumbnail for services like Facebook to read feed readers)
(Readings of the poem didn't, um, didn't, and need more tries, but the afterward, which is more like a pre-amble, was kind of fun.)
For a backdrop, I slung a rich, red Chinese satin cloth over a room divider, pulled my iMac up close, and recorded a recitation of the poem ten times in PhotoBooth, each time adding more jewelry, a swath of orange beads across the neck and shoulder, a rhinestone dangly tiara. The excesses of perhaps too much expression decreased as I became tired and the speaking of the poem emerged more clearly as it rendered through me.
Besides preparing for a performance piece, I used a number of techniques and filters in the editing of the videopoem. In PhotoBooth, Apple's fun camera still and video program, I used a spotlight plugin, which was cool; unfortunately Photobooth's resolution is low. The video was imported into Final Cut Express where I layered it in curious and idiosyncratic ways, adding a vignette to the base layer, and color emboss to the other one. Both those layers also received a maximum de-interlace flicker filter. The lens flare title and credits were done in iMovie and added as tiny clips to the timeline. I used FCEs scrolling text option for the poem, adding a light rays video filter to it. Finally I added a caustics render video generator track to the whole piece.
Kristeva did a lecture at the University of Toronto in the late 1990s on the question of 'Who' that I attended, but didn't connect then to the 'who' of the muse. Blanchot's 'The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me?'... is my particular inspiration here.
On the 'coded' "unconscious" of the Freudian/Lacanian school: I, too, incline towards a phenomenology of consciousness, whatever that may be. How often do I access my own personal symbols to write? References that might be opague to others. From Célan I learnt much on interweaving the personal myths in such a way that my symbol stream is only hinted at and whose full meaning remains just out of reach.
Kristeva is where I first learnt of the 'speaking subject,' the 'speaking voice.' Can we take it further to the 'writing subject,' the 'writing voice'? Though I don't want to get trapped in semiotics either.
John Walter wrote, in response to the poem, and it is worth quoting: "You ask the hard problem that Beckett asked throughout his entire oeuvre, especially the trilogy of novels Malone, Malloy Dies, and The UnNameable as well as his classic one man play, Krapp's Last Tape: "Who is the voice speaking within me, if it is not me, and it speaks when I don't, all my life, up until my last breath."
You pose it in a variety of fascinating ways here."
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Poem, written in 2006; videopoetry performace, 2011.
