Gossamurmur Read online

  I add this “murmur” to you, suggesting a register of underlying voices, fond reader, perhaps “gossip,” sometimes rising to a state of cacophony. In this reality the Heian woman rarely ventured beyond her own veranda; “life moved indoors,” the translator notes, and often to a murmur…But her diary was lush with descriptions of robes and tear-strained sleeves, of lovers’ faces and wiles and other accoutrements of a restricted social world.

  Will you meditate upon the coolness of floors? Sit by a viewing station and wait, shift in a fold of a summer night dress, folded light, or light plays off the pool’s water, koi fish shimmer, and what is ascertained of uncertainty, of delay, glints of aqueous fish light, scales like shiny pennies, dressed-up illusion. Agitation. Tear-stained sleeves. Will you meditate upon a tear-stained sleeve?

  I see my own gown here, wet with tears of frustration and longing. What to do in rescue? Night after night, collapsed into tears.

  Had no certainty of the days ahead.

  Identities true and false, romantic and sexual love, seclusion, the duplicada, witchcraft, social and gender hierarchy, divination, as well as a contemplation of the multi-universes “out there,” as one gazes into the double helixes of night sky from a restricted vantage point. Entwined, entangled. Two new planets have been named today.

  And then I thought through doubles, through other names and forms in which I could transcend the earth without moving.

  A vow, a promise at the deathbed of a beloved poet, elder to this clan, then assured and commanded me I must be cohesive, that I must be synchronized and strong. I must guard the Archive even at this many-leagues distance, at all costs, under threat of psychic murder and dissolution. I would lock myself in the mind of poetry, in the library within the library of that mind of poetry. Delight in the monastic Arkheion, a house, a domicile, an address, residence of the archons, those poets who command…and preserve.

  She studied allegories and what within those constructs would muster courage. How a small idea may expand to gianthood. How big is imagination the Deciders would never understand. She entered a chthonic castellum, a physic prison, at the instigation of others, those Deciders who would use her to advantage, steal her secrets, and—threatened by her power, her sharp tongue, her stylus—attempt to keep her “inactive,” while a simulacrum donned her identity in the phenomenal world. Poetry was a threat in the phenomenal world.

  She wrote I thought through doubles as a goad to stay rooted, which was, of course, as she attempted, impossible. She was pushed into being in the in-between.

  Transcend the earth without moving. The fish were on their own sleeves tonight.

  The writing itself of this what-you-call-it, of weaving of elongating of investigating of cannibalizing of cherishing of what one might learn from this in doing it this tale became difficult. She once lived on a street named Goss. Or the release she might experience from the doing of it the “it” became harder. We called our poetry “works” back then. You built a work in your mind of architecture. Works in the shapes of mastabas, pyramids, stupas, of protracted wars that required sophisticated artillery, matériel, cybertech designs of infinite and obstructive methodology, works that worked their way into your private psyche, “works” that are sentences and secret rhythms and senseless. Of the music inside singing outside on sleeve of herself. She lacked confidence in the ability of logic to persuade others what was at risk. It was as if she was being drained by circumstances around her metabolism, the project she had worked on more than half a life, a moisopholon domos, a house of the muses, a community to house and sustain imagination was in jeopardy. It was a dark castle she inhabited now, surrounded by a forest of negative mind-sets. Eager to extract slices of intelligence, to dumb and numb the wild mind out of the guardians of Archive, wanting to cut up and trash the experience that voices now disembodied existed, haunting voices singing, sighing, imploring you to listen your way through consciousness. There had been fires, flames whipping at the edge of her experiment, an alchemical thaumaturgic linguistic zone, surrounded and occupied and compromised by the dangers of Deciders and Impostors. There had been floods. Why did they wish to take over and inhabit her Utopia? De-story it. Destroy. Why did they resist and seek to subvert a metabolism that could carry us into the future glorious Archive? When the earth would be so denuded, bereft of idea and poetry. There had been a drought, long in the making, spread now coast to coast. A culture-drought.

  Her Double was gaining in power. In a plot that would keep her Ever-the-Original Anne on edge. All eyes went to the new Anne. She had become a household word.

  Impostor is also con is consummate concomitant con is cardboard is false convivial, cunning con. She shouted out to whoever was listening, You know who you are.

  She wrote her message on all the convivial networks. You know who you are.

  What was in the Archive?

  It held a slice of belletristic time, radical and political. It held multiple discourses on the limits of the body, on unlimited and de-limited consciousness. It held Sprechstimme and performance, and high talk and sacre conversatione. It held a new poetry and beyond

  The other Anne stole into the room

  She lived on the other side of the wall

  The other Anne was a succubus

  She bled the true Anne

  She wanted to acquire the ideas and stratagem of the Original Anne,

  the blueprints for the Utopias and zones Original Anne labored to create in her frenzied defense of poetry and Archive and prosodiacal discourse

  She wanted to acquire the root conversations of the Original Anne

  She wanted to hack into delicate twists of language and torques of intuition that graced the corridors of the conversations of many of

  value to the Original Anne

  who spoke in twilight language, who spoke in runes, whose enigmas of tone and gesture

  were magnetizing

  The Impostors wanted to be those many, those voices in the corridor

  or they wanted to own them

  They abhorred beauty, beauty terrified them, but actually they wanted the power of beauty

  The other Anne wanted to acquire the lovers of the true Anne

  and sleep with all the lovers of the Original Anne

  The other Anne stole half the things in Anne’s world with impunity

  She usurped her words, her tone

  She usurped her poetry

  She wanted to acquire the tissue and neurons of her past lives

  She wanted to go back that far

  To visit the larynx of the original Anne

  And she made extravagant claims for the love of others who had loved the Original Anne

  She mouthed the words of the others who had been mouthing words for Original Anne

  She mouthed philosophy and she spoke of binaries

  She mounted the many things that related to Anne she announced,

  I am Anne

  A school was under siege

  Poets held in aporia, a space of waiting and stasis

  Dead poets whose voices waited to be resuscitated

  whose words were locked up in time, in a dead zone

  needing rescue

  needing care, attention

  Original Anne held a small cassette of John Cage in her hand,

  magnetic tape fallen off its cheap plastic sprocket

  held it as Buddha might the human bone

  wondering—if this, then that…

  birth, old age, sickness, death….

  She took out a bobby pin and scrolled the tape back on its tiny wheel

  We will keep this sheltered, and listen

  …while out in the choppy elemental world the Chacaltaya glacier melted away,

  melted away in a repetition,

  continuous repetition melting, subsiding

  water upon water drop

  weather was changing

  Respiration came to mind

  Breathing with weather or breathing-in-weather had mo
rphed

  There were persistent rumors of the demise of predictable weather systems

  We had many re-coded names for the origin of whispering

  We had—our tight poetry clique had:

  Hwisprian

  Murmare

  Khwis

  Wispelen

  Hwispalon

  Wispeln

  Wispern

  Hviskra

  Hwistlian

  We had one another, poets on the altiplano

  We played some games near zones of silent mutation near the centers of our own ambition

  …whistle or beckon, seek…hide…

  The street she said always comes-with-a-poem

  We were confident language might be in love with us

  We fortify her we said she will not abandon us let us down

  She is with us everywhere in the streets and valleys and tundra of her poem

  Try to compose in a streetwise way Archive whispered

  land is compromised,

  rivers are stressed,

  beauty still exists in relation of that time

  fresh out of sleep

  and glaciation, a tongue

  finds way in in beauty

  this is our cause and to notify the others

  passersby bid witness here (because we protested always in public space)

  DNA’s empire economy: “sound the decibels” and bid witness

  as you approach Camino de las Estrellas a place for walking

  under faint stars, bid witness and in the narrow straits

  of the medina

  where moon awakens, bid witness

  and from my eastern pavilion, moon is like a scimitar

  I would dream of Parsifal a woman

  play the part of seeker

  write a feminized version under metabolic planet and stars

  seek the sacred vessel to hold these phones and phonemes

  raise the golden dagger to strike out against their abuse

  Holy Grail a blank check for these times

  what is your treasure what remains, Scheherazade?

  She was wanting to possess manna

  map redividing coalescing

  that civilization could get smarter

  recidivism, what is it a chance operation?

  Original Anne

  had lived and traveled with the grand old poets

  with the grand old poet-mouths

  she lived in their homes

  she ate their food

  she ate the vegetables grown from their gardens

  in a paradisiacal valley with the scent of cherry blossom

  she labored at the desk of elders

  in a room with gaslight….

  dim restless desk of Archive

  mor-mor

  Sanskrit murmurah

  what is it but a crackling fire

  syndicates of samsara abuzz

  mormyrein = to roar to boil

  murmlenti

  softly spoken (hidden) words inside the castellum

  expression of discontent by grumbling

  mordant sound awash everywhere

  in collapsed intellect

  does a stone giveth sound doth it rend and break

  surpass us, down-low

  >>rive<<<br />
  what are they saying about originals, artifacts of poem-bodies

  that we are too risky in two-faced diplomacy that we go hidden and in exile?

  “poetry a Socialist enterprise!”

  “smacks of elitism!”

  “who cares?”

  “you know what the Poet said

  ‘poetry makes nothing happen’”

  risky in liability, that our originality is irksome and dangerous

  she is mine or she is like me

  this is how the world gets at me, “me” says we’re equal in our micro-world, contentious conglomeration of pronouns

  or is she taking me over

  or in what manner in what bondage is she

  they decided on this and other important grammatical matters

  a kind of lower-case theft:

  steal fire

  steal salt

  steal agenda of one who was struggling inside an organization of art

  a words-only school finding new words for “containment”

  A very first Decider of the First Rank of Regulation

  was striving to ascend a ladder in a workplace like a corporation

  a corporation where Deciders wrestle with “packages” and

  “redundancy” and “assessment” and various means and methods of power “relaxment” created so that Deciders may decide

  He was privy to a range of lightly inclined enhancement and free-association infusion practices which help Deciders decide

  “library” : “closet”

  “poetry” : “wastebasket”

  “rhizome” : “in the drawer”

  “metabolism” : “marketability”

  “experimental” : “pencil”

  “metaphor” : “paperweight”

  “biosphere” : “curtain”

  “curtain” : “library” and so on….

  But the first Decider of the First Rank faltered in a conference call

  enraged that he was not getting his way on a crucial decision

  about “accessibility” about “partnering” about a once-in-a-lifetime “merger”

  He broke down trembling at the end of a long mahogany conference table

  “Am I not a Decider?” he whimpered into his soft manicured hands

  The Tenth-Rank Decider decided to join in, weeping and trembling

  a strange symbiosis among Deciders

  they could feel one another’s frustration and pain

  Not having the power to fully decide was a hell realm

  They pushed through an agenda with cajolement and duplicity

  with corporate advancement

  with cynical advantage

  closeted rage and hope of ownership and revenge

  What is poetry to the robotic-drone dreamworld

  rash of noise hum nonsense syllables

  Talky entertainment boxes you can’t control by land or by sea,

  in the air in sky that was unconditional once, and vast

  A taxi pulls up and you get in, subjected to the squawk box inside,

  deadening emblem of end-time in incipient dark age

  This is fascism you mutter into your muffler

  Take me to the next extreme

  storm clouds gather on the horizon

  “What’s a poetry portal?” the Third-Rank Decider asks, sweating into his uncertainty and possible loss of control

  A window onto the whole world. . . . listening back at you

  The Deciders took Anne apart organ by organ, sinew by sinew. And they copied these parts into the husk of the new Anne with skill and dark intent. As they did this they would pause, mewling into their sinister Autopsy:

  “Little organ of Original Anne, what can you do for us now?”

  “Little eyes of Original Anne, what will you accomplish now?”

  “And you, sinews that bind operation of motion, where walk you now?”

  “Tongue that composed many ballads and odes for your time, how will you sing?”

  They gloated in their desire to reveal the nothingness of all things, and to murder poetry.

  They could not remove or mutate her consciousness, which stayed intact in the retreat and isolation of the Original Anne.

  They made their copy, a mockery of the Original Anne, undoing the manna of Original Anne, who they cast into a virtual prison while they went about their plot of alienating humans from their linguistic natures. Language would become separated, torn from its vital dwelling place. Humans would be living out history and a life of unrelenting State without poetry. The Archive of the multiple voices was endangered, years in the making, to preserve breath and intellect, imagination’s other place, as psychic inscription and to let hu
mans of the future know some of us were not just killing one another.

  “You would never guess,” they said, “look at our creation, a perfect simulacrum.” And they looked to a time of acquiescence where the populace would be silenced. Where the attention span of humans, ever-waning, would ride the waves of mediacrats, and hear tell endlessly, monotonously, the slow drip of the undulating fortunes of celebrity worlds and become even more accustomed and inured to the beat and thrum of war.

  And more in lockdown. And more and more in lockdown.

  There was a Decider of the Fifth Rank of the State of Rectilinear Space as it applies to a subject’s metabolism

  Decider of how many gold stars on a bonnet

  Or for one entering the room of major decision-making feeling diminished, there was a Decider sitting behind a massive desk of protocol and power

  Facing windows of gray light in sad anemic offices over which more Deciders preside

  Deciders of who leaves or stays, who gets laid off, who must be demoted

  Who closes rank

  It was not a happy world.

  Original Anne mumbled in her prison/castellum:

  Yes, you could lose your mind

  And in captivity: pray if all else fails

  And read all books while you still have privilege

  in the library-prison world

  Rimbaud you are source on the original list