Gossamurmur Read online

  dream double combats solipsism

  by providing a second person to serve

  working her way out of nothing

  as a corroborating authority

  but that person is another aspect of the dreamer and does not

  combat the logic of solipsism

  impossible to surmount

  her arm an arc of water air earth fire

  face-to-face combat

  bootstrap logic? pull her up out of the watery mirror

  and we have our magic replications

  duplications’ reflections

  the wise text says:

  sorrow will not bring enlightenment

  the sage will try scripture

  the sage will try illustration

  the sage will transform into a new woman

  to mouth these words

  I went to play my lute for Decider Vishnu

  and found him engaged in erotic play

  with wife Lakshmi

  and when he saw me he had her vanished

  I have conquered illusion

  but you can’t say this you can’t say I have conquered illusion

  no one, not even the gods

  may conquer illusion

  I beg you Vishnu show me what illusion is

  he took me to a beautiful pond and invited me to bathe in it

  I entered the pool as Vishnu instructed and became woman

  this is illusion, he said

  a master of erotic skills

  made love to me night and day

  lost all sense of time

  drinking wine

  rapt in pleasure

  twelve years a single moment

  I forgot my former body

  and life as a sage

  eight sons many grandchildren later

  I was happy—no—couldn’t name my sorrow

  lot of a woman

  I bred I bred

  estranged not-come-to-joy

  reads-many-books

  went to know the world as a woman

  ask a woman, ask others

  women had tenderer thought?

  is it not a gentler feeling for the world?

  one day an enemy attacked

  family all dead I rage wept I fled

  lot of a woman they said

  weaker weaker woman

  Decider Vishnu came to me

  why are you so sad?

  remember what I said

  this is delusion

  who are you and whose bodies are these strewn about?

  perform the rituals for the dead

  you are not what you seem

  this is not what it seems

  in the allegorical dimension of your struggling text

  went to the lake called “Male-Ford”

  glanced in, saw a text of light

  (pumtirtha)

  It said:

  You had millions of sons who died in

  life

  after life

  millions of husbands and fathers too

  for whom you grieve

  it is all a mistake and arises in your own mind as a dream

  I entered the ford and instantly became a man

  with a lute in my hand

  I remembered I was a transformer in the Patriarchy

  I sang:

  as a woman I experience the misery of worldly existence

  as a man I create more suffering

  om ah ah

  experience in the illusory world is a nightmare from which one wishes to escape

  [Preservation metadata is a subset of administrative metadata aimed at supporting the long-term retention of digital objects. It overlaps with technical and administrative metadata, detailing important information about the digital file, including any changes in the file over time and management history. The object meant to be preserved by preservation metadata is the preservation master digital object itself. Preservation metadata need not be created for the Analog object or derivative copies created for access purposes. In the case of complex digital objects, one preservation metadata record will be created to describe the entire complex object.

  The management of the full range of metadata is through the Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard which provides a structure for encoding descriptive, structural metadata…etcetera.]

  The spectacle under suspicion. The gaze under suspicion. Orality is feminine.

  The Deciders abjure feminism.

  sorrow enlightens, they say

  sorrow knows no boundary

  sorrow: an acerbic archival wilderness

  sorrow penciled in red

  a direction in my book of prayer

  apocalyptic vehicle

  interstellar vehicle

  intertextual

  intertidal

  intertwined

  but I would intervene

  and call myself intervenient

  an intervenient vehicle

  convenient in sorrow

  a lurid interruption

  someone who lurks

  waiting to spring to life

  prognostic,

  and needing escape

  tears that splash and are a running mate in all endeavors

  but this illusory world is also sensuous and joyous and intangible

  as a woman I drank wine and ate forbidden things

  intoxication to distract the Original Anne

  a plot on imagination, a romp through time and gender

  as a wifeless sage,

  or wandering singer who carries a lute

  another version:

  the sage emerges from the water

  on the occasion

  of his transformation

  from woman

  into man

  he still holds his woman-hand above the water

  it remains the hand of a woman holding a succulent fruit

  he dives back into the water immerses his hand

  turning into the hand of a man holding a lute

  when the sage leaves the world of illusion,

  a perishable memory turns a hard enduring lute

  who decides reverie in the russet castellum

  can force your dreams in their time/space machine

  as I went to bathe in a lake I morphed

  I came out on the bank as a woman among women

  when they asked me who I was I said, woman

  I think woman among women

  who I am where I come from and how do I have the form of a woman

  I have no idea

  I left my male form but woman I think woman among women

  is deception a pronoun?

  Vishnu picked up my lute and went away

  I forgot my former body

  a king came by he married me

  “she whose face is her fortune”

  down with kings who decide magic

  flavor my desire

  a twist where we talk

  we joke about language modules

  and make love on the road

  I could be created out of twigs and dirt

  as he puts in the mechanical apparatus

  the world is full of Deciders

  I’ve always felt and say it such again

  the world has to change for true identity (love) to burn

  she sent a message to the Base, whatever you do to me know this

  I know this from Derrida

  Archive is shelter

  Archive is the disembodied voice of a palpable consciousness

  Archive is a jumbled dream

  Archive needs poetry you must never forget

  Archive is inscription

  Archive is aspiration

  Archive tells many stories

  I am archon

  and a mere inscripted postcard is Archive

  when we return to our speech

  and start our own country

  take this as directive:

  memory of an animal is also yours

  Archive all opposable thum
bs we have record of

  and many wisdom identities

  Archive’s murmur circulates around the room

  Archive lets originals breathe

  you can’t tamper with Archive

  it’s a strange cosmology

  Archive is antithesis to a war on memory and stealing of poet fire

  Archive is the tender footprint

  Archive will not tread on the footprints of the most vulnerable

  Archive is a trust

  let Archive record the names of those going out of this world

  Tristan Albatross

  all disappeared

  all suicided

  Archive listens into the margins

  Archive is a privileged topology

  Archive exists as a map of the future beyond the exigencies of electronic media which has transformed the relative reality of Homo sapiens sapiens

  if you are good at this, please memorize

  are you good at this?

  memorize Archive

  Archive could be safe from composite strife

  [Gain Intellectual Control of the Collection.

  Consider cassette tape life expectancy.

  Water pipes run through storage space: materials are housed in a100-year floodplain with environmental swings, no climate control.

  Security: multiple keys to storage exist, the space is not secured—walls that leave space at ceiling height can be easily breached.

  Digital collections on CDs which are at risk themselves due to disc failure and equipment obsolescence….]

  Archive is housed by, and reanimates sentient beings

  Archive is nest, is house, is reverie

  Archive will hold you

  “And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath…”

  Archive is aubade, is alba, is Tagelied

  is seduction

  is Mnemosyne

  Archive is dying and Archive is not dying

  who lives to push the buttons to install the implants of Archive?

  a far agent, a forest, a mountain to climb, an orange sunset, a cloth for the body

  strong ropes to circle and carry

  dynamite with an App for soil content, an App to read constellations in the sky

  moon a fingernail above you is a modest proposal

  sometimes a wildebeest on the tundra remembers a former life

  and an albatross crossed your shadow at sea one day

  Tristan whose name means sadness quested the Grail and drank a love potion

  This is the sublimated test of future identity

  always felt a brain to be

  fluctuating syntagma

  a syntactic/semantic processing

  semantic as in being brain-and-consciousness-awake

  syntax as sister to succession, a superstition

  do I have control in scenario? do I love my mission in life?

  scenario: where they lock me up and take my poems from me

  and make undue mockery and travesty of Original Anne

  and control her life span

  maybe she’s object of jealousy

  open surgery in a theater of observation

  scalpel coming down

  I feel like the scream of a cyborg

  as I watch my archival consciousness threatened

  as the spirit struggles for survival

  whisper that would cause a drop in the water table

  no single river flows to the sea

  whisper that traverses the braided river

  as a tribal uprising might clash your civilization again

  no leisure from the Deciders who take up so much of your attention

  getting into the airwaves again

  what brain will access that dangerous frequency?

  no leisure from deciding

  the worth of everyone

  the dollar value of intellectual property

  try to love within a system

  survive the within: of being within system

  gap in the charts,

  life force dipped down yet still within itself a system

  acts of marauding identity theft

  will threaten life span of poetry

  by gossip you get the story

  a cautionary tale, amnesia

  include: Lycaenidae

  About 6,000 species worldwide

  whose members are known as the “gossamer-wing’ed butterflies”

  The blues (Polyommatinae)

  The coppers (Lycaeninae)

  The hairstreaks (Theclinae)

  And the harvesters (Miletinae)

  all still extant because well hidden in planet-life

  Some larva are capable of producing vibrations and low sounds that are transmitted through the substrates they inhabit. They use these sounds to communicate with ants.

  Adult individuals often have hairlike tails complete with black-and-white annulated appearance. Many species also have a spot at the base of the tail and some turn around to confuse potential predators from recognizing the “true head” orientation.

  Ants have their own systems but receive survival “calls.”

  These are signals to be collegial

  she thought about her station in life.

  did she understand the metaphorical duplicada

  and the philosophy as crepuscular which is fragile by definition?

  ruse or trick of time to use her body and form as…Poet?

  she would visit Chasm Falls

  climb East Desolation Peak

  she would scout for a safe haven to house all hope and fear

  or did she aspire beyond station what she’d been born to…

  flicker of it,

  “place”

  out, out of it

  fragility, the joke about past lives

  the hunting of the golem, stick and mud effigy

  as when she first looked at a corpse

  someone she had loved

  wanting, watching as his body flamed

  to smear ashes over her own body

  ashes that were once steady arms

  held her fast

  sturdy legs of a body

  twisted around her

  a flame coiled at the center, below

  as he enters her

  dare speak of a face?

  they were exceedingly young

  she said, becoming one together

  like a cargo cult of magical thinking

  dark curls

  saliva

  l feel like a suttee widow

  long hours at the Ganges

  looking out on the water

  devotees come to bathe

  collect the drops of polluted water now

  still sacred in the imagination

  lineage of sacral tears

  thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air…

  watch the flames on the ghats

  dart like insects to the sky

  a night sky this time

  smoke coils like dragons,

  sea serpents, or seeing the skeleton of a phantasmagorical airship

  ascend through clouds

  she put the ashes of her mentor in the duplicated river Tirta Gangga

  spectacle of death

  a phantom skull at the breast

  gleam, did she kill her shadow?

  polished bone—color of raven’s wings—turned

  to blackest coral—at the breast

  might still gleam

  or the hollow sockets once his grand old poet eyes

  wasted in spectral identity?

  co-opted in a ghoulish meditation

  how an impostor might coalesce

  and enter when your mind is weak

  turn away from it

  but you know

  how demons enter

  backward

  facilitating the extinction

  of the Zoe Waterfall Damsel

  she might set it down, all extinctions

  would they be of any use in her prism
r />   bringing events to order? backward

  she saw masses of fabrication in the stories others tell

  saw through claims and exaggerations

  saw through protests of love, fealty

  way a daughter might, skeptic

  of “history” might

  especially “his” or rather a “his” might

  or big sister or mother or “hers”

  being ahistorical

  see spectacle as separation, spectacle as end of our linguistic aid

  a “mistress narrative,” you might say, perhaps preferable

  subtle persuasive

  insistently oral

  most melodious tone

  studied other languages on foreign language tapes

  spent time in the prison library

  an auspicious time

  up against uncertain worlds

  shrinking

  where human is finite, an invention of recent date

  time that we say our fantasies are controlled by propaganda

  born too into the middle of a century before

  we are “gone”

  or when the mores changed and

  favored women who were set up against each other in jealous rage

  that too passes…will pass

  may allegory speak of unconditional love?

  I want to amuse you, my doubles, hasty beloveds

  come wash all your thoughts upon me, a seed-vault sanctuary on a remote sea

  a living casket Porsephina keeps of Archive

  old romances, antic lore, and scrutiny take over,

  considered the centuries she had been born to cross

  in crossing of millennium

  twin broken vertebrae

  interminable time, it seemed

  growing

  to archonhood…

  what she was willing to part with

  let go of

  who lets go of

  shed more skins

  why she would go out as one one day

  go out as another one the next

  looking into the darkness of her own time

  with congruent vision