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  Gossamurmur

  BOOKS, CHAPBOOKS, AND COLLABORATIONS BY ANNE WALDMAN

  On the Wing

  O My Life!

  Giant Night

  Baby Breakdown

  Memorial Day (with Ted Berrigan)

  No Hassles

  The West Indies Poems

  Life Notes: Selected Poems

  Self Portrait (with Joe Brainard)

  Sun the Blonde Out

  Fast Speaking Woman

  Journals & Dreams

  Shaman/Shamane

  Sphinxeries (with Denyse Du Roi)

  Polar Ode (with Eileen Myles)

  Countries (with Reed Bye)

  Cabin

  First Baby Poems

  Makeup on Empty Space

  Invention (with Susan Hall)

  Den Mond in Farbe Sehen

  Skin Meat Bones

  The Romance Thing

  Blue Mosque

  Tell Me About It: Poems for Painters

  Helping the Dreamer: New & Selected Poems, 1966–1988

  Her Story (with Elizabeth Murray)

  Not a Male Pseudonym

  Lokapala

  Fait Accompli

  Troubairitz

  Iovis: All Is Full of Jove

  Kill or Cure

  Iovis II

  Kin (with Susan Rothenberg)

  Polemics (with Anselm Hollo & Jack Collom)

  Homage to Allen G. (with George Schneeman)

  Donna Che Parla Veloce

  Young Manhattan (with Bill Berkson)

  One Voice in Four Parts (with Richard Tuttle)

  Marriage: A Sentence

  Au Lit/Holy (with Eleni Sikelianos & Laird Hunt)

  Zombie Dawn (with Tom Clark)

  Dark Arcana/Afterimage or Glow

  In the Room of Never Grieve: New & Selected Poems, 1985–2003

  Fleuve Flâneur (with Mary Kite & Dave Kite)

  Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble

  Outrider

  Femme Qui Parle Vite

  Red Noir

  Nine Nights Meditation (with Donna Dennis)

  Martyrdom

  Manatee/Humanity

  Matriot Acts

  The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment

  Soldatesque/Soldiering (with Noah Saterstrom)

  Cry Stall Gaze (with Pat Steir)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  First published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © Anne Waldman, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions.

  Excerpt from “Book 1” from Gunslinger by Edward Dorn. Copyright 1989 Edward Dorn. All rights reserved.

  Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn.

  Excerpt from Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu, translated by David Hinton

  (Counterpoint Press, 2000). Used by permission.

  Page xi and 141 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Waldman, Anne, 1945-

  Gossamurmur / Anne Waldman.

  pages cm

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59277-9

  I. Title.

  PS3573.A4215G67 2013

  811’.54—dc23 2012040614

  Designed by Ginger Legato

  what are the limits of the body?

  for Akilah Oliver

  poet, teacher, catalyst

  (1961–2011)

  Nevertheless,

  It is dangerous to be named

  and makes you mortal.

  If you have a name

  you can be sold

  you can be told

  by that name leave, or come

  you become, in short

  a reference, or if bad luck

  is large in your future

  you might become an institution

  which you will then mistake

  for defense. I could

  now place you

  in a column from which

  There is No Escape

  and down with The Machine

  will always recognize you.

  Or a bullet might be Inscribed

  or I could build a maze

  called a social investigation

  and drop you in it

  your name

  into it—

  Please! I implored him

  you terrify me.

  What then, I asked

  is my case? looking into

  the Odd toed ungulate’s eyes

  who had his left leg resting on my shoulder.

  The mortal can be described

  the Gunslinger finished,

  That’s all mortality is

  in fact.

  —Gunslinger, Edward Dorn

  The valley spirit never dies.

  It’s called dark female-enigma,

  and the gateway of dark female-enigma

  is called the root of heaven and earth,

  gossamer so unceasing it seems real.

  Use it; it’s effortless.

  —Tao Te Ching, sixth-century BCE translated by David Hinton

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Gossamurmur

  Pivots

  Audio Lines of Poetry

  About the Author

  Penguin Poets

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With gratitude to Peter Warshall, MaelstrÖm reEvolution, the Tamaas foundation, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Bhanu Kapil, Ambrose Bye, Pat Steir, Alexis Myre, Elliot Colla, Sawko Nakayasu, David Gitlen, Apsara DiQuinzio, and Gina Maher, who in her generosity gave home and shelter to this writing. Making up a small portion of the work are lines from Entanglement (2009) and The Value of Small Skeletons (2011), movies by Ed Bowes and several pages appear in The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality. Also, sincere gratitude to my editor, Paul Slovak, who has supported my poetry for many years.

  Gossamer is not used by any branch of biology

  but there are phenomena soft, sheer, and gauzy

  light and flimsy

  delicate, tenuous, and airy

  Gossamer means summer goose

  The time the goose plucks winter down

  and lines her nest

  and the down caught

  in the tundra sun and breeze

  sails off glistening

  In Sanskrit: ghans-sem

  Probably a time some humans

  collected either the goose or

  down for themselves

  For other species, gossamer is always transient

  turns more tensile

  pliant

  or rigid

  That’s the fabric of inner bones and muscles

  and arteries

  Moth cocoons, caddis fly catch-nets

  Woven with a protein called collagen

  The gossamer bodies of plants—

  dandelion fluff or cotton—

  are of cellulose

  Cellulose is a complex sugar

  A way pliancy can supplant stiffness

  The way tensile strength prevents fractures

  Some gossamers ha
ve extension

  (distance divided by original length)

  And the questions

  stretch until you break

  stretch until you cannot snap back

  stretch until you reach some threshold of safety?

  Poem as lute string.

  plot rescues sanity.

  recuses identity its floating world….

  and allegory tests calamity

  resilient or under siege

  Once how delicate the gauze that adheres to and flicks off identity. Flips it. Becoming cartography. Gossamurmur occasions a transgressive vein, a body poetics with a bifurcated protagonist indicating two simultaneous and alternating realities. Often alarming. She and She. By way of a mundane duplicada experience (I noticed her she had a funny dayglow wig on she said my name when asked hers) I discovered my credit union had another client with my exact name. At one point our accounts had become transposed. I thought of Borges and his “doubles” and Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads. I fantasized about this meticulous, oddly coifed other and how she might spend my money. And then how I might spend hers. Bodies in a materia infinitum world that levels down to charnel ground. Where all detritus grinds down. Sing you there, my duplicada. I will find you there. We will spend our phantom money. We will meet without name without body without debt but that of past action in nominative karma. Who did what to whom. I will be your other, wisp of consciousness…and you will be mine in token of our name, a rare coinage.

  And she was the trigger, the apparatus, of my composite allegorical destruction or rather of all I cared about in the mundane world which was the survival and oral archive of an excellent poetry and record of a temporary autonomous zone from which it emanated, close to a high-altitude Divide. And she was a grand infinitum, a robotic tool of the fits and starts of the dread Deciders who in a trajectory of willful ignorance and anti-art psychosis wrought their weird embryonic magic on my person and psyche and the fragile cassette and song files of a fleeting transitory poetics….

  I spent her account on medicinal herbs and lozenges. Items for longevity. I spent her dollars on salvation, on books of remorse and redemption, on a complete revelatory encyclopedia, on the health of another, on a ticket to the opera—it was Wagner, it was Parsifal, it was on a night of full moon, he held me, and we wept. I hate it! he said. I hate this spectral life! I wish it would all disappear! I said, I love it! And I donated to numerous causes including those toward the well-being and salvation of many endangered species. Whose sounds and cries and metabolic thrum and hum might soon be silenced….

  The Sulawesi Dwarf Kingfisher, Ultramarine Lorikeet, Stump-Tailed Macaque, Sulu Bleeding-Heart, Tristan Albatross, Tehuantepec Jackrabbit, Zoe Waterfall Damsel, Zingis Radiolata, Zhou’s Box Turtle, Yellow-Blotched Palm Pit Viper, Yellow-Breasted Bird of Paradise, Mozart’s Frog, Old Narwhal, Marbled Malachite, Lesser Dwarf Lemur, Patzcuaro Stream Frog, Moluccan Cuckoo, Wild Asian Buffalo, Hyacinth Macaw, Hyaline Fish, Holy-Mountain Salamander, Pearly Parakeet, Javan Shrew-like Mouse, Ozark Cave Arthropod, Fiji Crested Iguana, Mexican Blindcat, Firethroat, Little Spotted Kiwi, Dwarf Tinamou, Esmeraldas Woodstar, Cuban Crocodile, Cordelia’s Crow, Chinese Pangolin, Dalhousie Hardyhead, D’Abrera’s Tiger…

  I gave her money to organizations aiding the lives of plants, and of innocent victims beset by the tragedy of the New Weathers. Tornados occurring here and there should not be occurring there and here. Surprise of tsunami, shock of hurricane, earthquake, and fires prone to these extreme drought zones. I bought hashish and other elixirs. I spent carefully, I spent wisely, I spent with a sense of grace. I traveled to a jungle and washed my world away with a bitter vine. I had anthropomorphic visions. I saw demons with metal mandible parts, I saw impostors everywhere that resembled the people I knew, but if you look more closely at her ring, that is not her gold ring; it is not a gold snake ring with ruby eyes…look more loosely at the stone around her neck; that is not her onyx, her face suddenly unglued, askew…that is not her eyebrow. I saw myself transformed and disembodied and disentangled, then reconstituted. I heard voices. I invented a new name for my publishing company: Sayonara. I was confused.

  She spent my hard-earned working-cash on dining out. Taunting me as if to say, You are poorer than you will ever be. That was it. She raised the ante on dining out. She was a classic, addictive carnivore.

  We crashed. Or rather she crashed.

  I kept writing checks on our twinned account. I spent hers on salvos. On political campaigns. On candidates that furthered the existence of literature. On death and a birthday. I spent hers on an exit strategy that almost worked. I died a little. A part of my identity chipped away. I did not mind and then I did.

  What are we worth? I mused. What is our exchange value on this vast meddling market?

  I left my marriage. I left multiple lovers. I abandoned the rock star I had served day and night. I walked home late and thought again of our finite coinage, our value as a minted “thing.” I saw she-who-carried-my-name on Patchin Place. Not far from the credit union near where I lived. There was a moon hung low in the sky. I encountered the djinni of Djuna Barnes whom I had seen frequently in this place decades before, aging…. Djuna had morphed. She had crashed. She was restricted in her motion.

  Her eyes had the glow of smoldering cinders.

  The double is always present in our psyches. I follow her. What is hidden responding to what is revealed is the binary axis on which the investigation pivots. I hide behind the screen of my own investigation. Still longing for my shadowy, more flagrant, more casual other cause. The double writes books on desire and the need to colonize the host bodies of the Deciders.

  Long fascinated by the stories of “double women,” I pick up the tale of the two Lilas, which presents us with the woman’s view, and that of a double or shadow. In one story the woman has two husbands—a demonic husband whom she loathes and an incestuous lover whom she adores. Both women share a single lover in the other story. He is cunning. In older variants of the tale of the shadow woman, the shadow “other” serves to protect the woman from any defilement or stain at the hands of the demonic husband. The shadow also keeps the “pure” woman of the real world separate from the lustful, passionate woman of the subterranean world. The shadow woman seems to be more like a shard of a dream. I study types of dreams described by Cicero in De Divinatione lifted from Philo Alexandrinus’s De Somniis: night apparition, oracular, enigmatic—horama, oneiros, chrematismos. There is also a sense of double universes as time and space are both mapped separately in a Vedic cosmology, although the two dimensions are parallel. This mythology tells not only of double people at two points on a spectrum, but of double worlds that provide two layers of the spectrum of space-time. The doubles in myths or dream or illusion make possible a process that seems to protect the presenter-in-this-life from the dangers of complete solipsism. Or you might go mad.…

  The Deciders kept interrupting the narration. They controlled the Base.

  The Deciders create their factotums; they create Impostors.

  What might they do to interrupt progress? They were bound in that—interrupting progress. Was it just a suicidal death wish for all humanity? They were in on the ruse to circumvent the machinations and desires of lovers of language, of linguistic fun and folly, of non sequiturs or where you write a poem without knowing where it would lead, where the poem was like the mind of the poet, stopping and stuttering and starting. Indeterminacy—how language pushes on you, and if the relationship between word and concept is arbitrary, then the attitude toward language must change. Instability of logic, ad hoc forms, delete every second word…might…do…interupt…they…bound…that…progress…it…a…death…for…humanity.

  They wished to interfere with the desires of the Original Anne, she who writes this, who struggles in real twenty-first-century agon to warn the world of the impending collapse of generative language, of the Deciders’ impulse to control or destroy the narratives that are anything but master. That are
anything but fascist. That are anything but gloomy. That are anything but manipulative. They record heart and breath and tongue and pause. And rest in analogues of thinking one thought instanter upon another. And the New Weathers? Take heed of them in our endangered orality.

  Spool the tape. Rewind. Digitize. Listen. Good a thousand years?

  In many mythologies a sexually or psychologically assaulted woman is permanently transformed into a plant or an animal. Would this transformation preserve the resources of future revelation that she carry this seed underneath her inchoate identity? Circumvent deciding in a human form.

  Deciders resent an upstart woman with upstart larynx.

  Consider:

  Minthe the spearmint

  Leuke a white poplar

  Side, pomegranate

  Lotis, the lotus tree

  Daphne, laurel

  Philyra, the linden

  Kallisto

  Io

  See: Versipellis

  and therianthropy

  Notice the ways they morph on you.

  The Decider stood hovering over me with menace saying, “I thank you for your passion, Original Anne.” He was making a list of all the Deciding Categories the Original Anne would be excluded from.

  Original Anne looked deep into the eyes of this Decider, I would almost say lovingly, into the eye-pools whose shapes within turned mosaic, congealed to bits of colored glass.…She then saw within the finer particles more blocks of menacing form relaxing then realigning to shape and position, to the posture of the troubling things of this world.

  A car with recliner, chauffeur, a screen on which played a Decider fantasy of Decider himself, suave and buff at the top of a stair exuding an exquisite control and lauding it over a servant at the bottom bustling along with a tea serving and vial of cognac to fire the drink:

  “Up here, you idiot!”

  Kagero Nikki (The Gossamer Years) is the name of the novelistic diary of a noblewoman in Heian Japan. The diary is in some sense a protest against the marriage system of the woman’s time. Conjecture ensues, but Kagero might mean “gossamer” in the usual sense, as in “a film of cobwebs floating in air in calm, clear weather” (Merriam-Webster) or “the shimmering of the summer sky.”