Gossamurmur Page 6

  Never

  remembering a time when she would have said this is dream

  this is rook

  this is crook

  and thought of the others—those voices—and of the things in that shoe box on that site in that shed on that floodplain

  or in a room without climate control in a room with walls not up to the ceiling on that floodplain

  fires licking at the fringes of town, coming up over mountains onto that floodplain,

  evacuation orders in hand

  is there a plan? I’ll make one

  the periscope not meant to be, its serial number rusted because it

  had fallen in a pool of water

  you catch the drift, “feverish red mist”

  something numeric to escape from

  Original Anne in her continuing bondage now floating above

  the Distraction World

  they let her out on a short leash, assuming she would lead them to the

  original Archive

  fathoms deep in her and in the ground

  she claimed ignorance

  she strapped on her Byronic clubfoot

  hoping to be well hidden inside a life-form resembling

  a ring of daisy, a ring of mushroom, ring of aspen, ring of stone

  examine slice of tundra under a microscope

  how to surpass wind and bitter cold if you were Archive of paper and magnetic tape

  artifact awaiting transference to the multiverse

  analogue or digital or

  unobtrusive subtle trace—implant—in the brain cloud.…

  I digress…

  In retrospect, she was and is always mentioned by someone or other I love or made love with as someone I resembled, and as I took this into account in my technology of inscription, in my technology of audio implant as I had questions, many questions, questions of her life, her life-in-mind and her life as one-who-played-so-many-others, as if in entropy of a death drive one might say she kept the roles coming, so many to keep up with, so many others of myself as I resembled her. So many troubled Poet others. “I” as phantom or “function,” I as “factotum,” or I as poet in my anterior, subversive, poet-structured activity, and many possible ulterior roles inspired by hers. Think of them. Count them, many to keep track of. Conglomerations of seductive tendencies, dangerous tendencies, where paper, cardboard, and ribbon is not your game. Rage. Heartbreak. Edgy. A sob-sister not your game. A heartbreaker might be. A gun, a dagger, three furious volcanoes inside. A confused movie persona inside. Emanating a specter of myself that fills her show, fills her screen, fills her shoe—I ask what size is she. That was my first question. Eight, eight and a half, narrow, I’d guess. They look—those bodies and parts of bodies we project so much upon—larger on-screen than they naturally are. And it’s interesting to guess when you see a body in a doorway, when you see a body in a street, when you see the body in a market in an open doorway in liminal space walk across a room and sit down or open a door, hand on the brass doorknob, what is the measurement of the rest of the architecture to that hand to that body to that face not to mention the dimensions of the room itself to body. Angles of relational strife. Someone figuring it all out behind the lens. Or stand-ins. They have to be similar in size. Especially in bed or naked, slaughtered on a floor. They might be creating smaller furniture for this very purpose. False props. Simulacra. They might ask the leading man to stand on a box to lift his height to proffer a kiss. And of her dress size I wonder. Not a twelve, which I have been now and then and sometimes eight, but tall and thin, an eight I’d say, an eight but tall eight. Or six, definitely a six. A narrow bust. Yes, six. Walking down a sandy beach, narrow hips, and she over sixty, that’s what I like, I was confessing just now, sexy over sixty. Another question was, Were there any Mongolian epicanthic folds in her genetic history? A Capgras delusion, a doppelgänger syndrome? Comrade. Interlocutress. Mover and shaker. Poet. Create institutions and watch them dissolve. As a djinn might.

  not your game not your game

  a strained stalemate or a computer of lesser advantage

  not your game

  a destitute metabolism

  or empty mummy cartonnage,

  not your game not your game

  not your gain

  but scorching Fire?

  All my life ones I love as I was saying comparing me to her and just last week one saying again when I had been in public space and done something publicly, oh you look so much like her do you know that? Your eyes and neck. And he had seen me in private space, and said that before, some years back, like her, like her. Your back, that was it, backing up now. A tattered tux, a uniform, a glamourous Italian wife of a terrorist, or plain young wife. Acting them out, sometimes with her neck in my mind. Rotten to the core, a girl with a George in her title, a young woman with Oz in her title. Boyish. Someone impish, someone testing you, provoking you to do some damage, or you might be someone (this is a difficult role now) who is with someone who just walks away. Disappears. Why? He had said, another he-I-loved-once had said—you resemble her neck, or perhaps I wasn’t hearing it right, or “what a neck, so much like hers—” as if he knew her. And he said, “Your hair, your hair resembles hers.” Another he-I-loved-once had acted many roles and loved many actresses; that’s what we called them in our early years, “tresses.” And then he married one, a real one. There was a role now in memory to absorb and as I sat there thrilled, I was her neck, I was her hair, her slanted eyes, I was the color of her hair. I was not alone, a woman-alone-dreaming-of-stardom, because I had stardom, her acting the roles for me because he said, “You don’t follow the money”—was he implying that she did? A different klieg light and a pace, a voice, the way she lights the cigarette. I close my eyes now and visualize her. I know her. She does not follow the money.

  Another question has to do with sex, the story of her real-in-life ménage à trois. I’ll back off here again. I’ve never exactly lived in a ménage à trois, although there was a very close friendship or would you say entanglement with two men at once and one had a crush on the other the one who was with me and maybe I had been with this one before I was with the one I stayed with many years. We were what you might say carefree. We lived in the country where new mountains jut up from primal matter. Where tundra was ocean once, you may collect shards of seashells fourteen thousand miles above the sea. We drove together in an old truck. We all took peyote in the woods in an act of sympathetic magic ritual for a friend in a coma; and then because of that more psychic inscription and I am still wired after all these years. He’s dead now that one I have mourned most of all my dead ones. How you might mourn:

  with a whisper

  with intended circumscribed solace

  on premises with rare and active books,

  with other visceral documents

  with care, devotion

  you take the person’s former light in your hands

  you pour it over your face

  you stir your being in the richness of ashes of those you love, loved, will love

  and to death that is evaporating as a murmur is

  I was discreet wanting not to know much about her private life, and I didn’t or it would spoil the illusion of she as other, as double I might get my psyche in trouble

  She was going to take me over perhaps,

  From the other side of the wall

  you dedicate yourself as literary executor, as archivist

  you read every word as a sign as a “light in your hands”

  you became more famous as you die

  you plan to rescue all your favorite words from oblivion

  lappet radiolarium thallophyte quiddity

  this explains, expands, and foliates a temper for your time

  the public case grows…glaciers melting

  Tundra once was ocean. These lush meadows you see where the buffalo roamed and prong horned antelope gamboled now shift in their identity. Could be a future spectacle for the State to muse up
on, as citizens hoard candles and water for what they call “The Metabolic Long Haul.”

  Simulacrum. I didn’t call the exorcist. Simulacrum, I didn’t call the Thought Police. Simulacrum, I was happy in her aura in her diadem in her orbit. Taught me distance, taught me humility. I might retaliate on myself some injury accorded by an act of shame or frivolity. I don’t want her to be frivolous. I want my fabricant to read deep in literature and she plays that writer maybe my favorite role of hers the one who…yes, I’ve already hinted the plot. Urgency and rescue and subterfuge and hide and retrieve. Obviate and destroy the regulations of the Deciders. Let’s try to be creative. A writer of novels. Page 1: How did she type that very first take of the scene when she was eviscerated? That was another question. The circular aspect of what she was writing was straight enough, but how did the character the writer behind the movie decide, or did she as actor decide and had the leeway to type whatever she wanted, or with pen. Please don’t say poetess. I don’t mind actress. But poet is my life. Not right now. Because one has that freedom of tresses, of abandon. Ess activates in stress and the movies I appear in. In The Edge I play an introspective but ignorant woman who walks by the beach and whose husband is an activist, maybe even qualifies as a terrorist, part of a plot to assassinate a president. This character does not know what is going on. I, wife, never take my clothes off—shy?—when we go to bed in the scene in our little home by the ocean in Deal, New Jersey. There was taking my shirt off, my breasts are naked in Brand X opposite you, the one I played this scene with who was one who said earlier I resembled her. But I don’t think you had met her yet. Then. Had you? That was another question. Then you went away and eventually married another one who plays roles, one of her best being one, a glamorous one, who cracks up—it’s a biopic. Another connected to those who travel to outer space. Once she the true one, my familiar, my other who lovers say resembles me, she the object of my obsession and she the object of their obsession and their attraction to me-as-her obsession and doppelgänger (and I have to ask, do they visualize her when they are with me?) who I address here, the one on whom I focus my attention to eyes and neck and back who ramps up the tension in real life or movie life said, “To discover what is normal, you need to surf a tide of weirdness.”

  Simulacrum, the next level. She should be more beneficent. If she has money she should help others in the allegory.

  [Jamaa el Fna was saved by the grace and lobbying of Juan Goytisolo; that’s another story and his. Our night on the town, Marrakech, the other double wore a wig to be like me. The men around us thought she was my daughter.]

  Or when I would mount the stage to perform. And she was on the other side of this, performing as well. How did her rhythms resound with mine? Someone might do a graph of our voices and perform “voice recognition.”

  Would we ever know? [There is no way to search for information quickly; it is unwieldy and out of date.

  A dedicated, purpose-built studio space would be ideal. Barring that, a small, office-sized room can be adapted for this purpose. The room should be quiet with no obtrusive external noises. Leakage of sound from the studio to adjoining spaces is also a consideration…The room should not be square. A rectangular room, with the ceiling height different than the wall lengths, should be used.]

  On a mission to scan what she considered valuable to poets, Archive of exploration, and of course let’s call out all doubles, the copiers, those that digitize the originals…

  Or those that usurp poethic power.

  Sitting here in a quiet house far away from a city. I do this too occasionally, get away to write. Like the lady novelist. Border line of prim cover and seething sex underneath. Was it all three of them, she the duchess and one a model and one a…what was she? I digress…

  A plot to save the world.

  Many identities blur in celluloid. Many others also had questions of her. I only wondered because we were close in age and of that time. Her father was a NATO commander; that interested me. Fathers-in-war, daughters-of-the-long-ago-heroic-war. And then I was in the ladies-of-the-night scene in another movie filmed in Quebec with its red silk wallpaper and brothel vibe and playing it in red bra, a feather boa and my line—I made it up, unscripted as it were—was “I’d rather be home reading a good book,” and something about my red Tibetan Buddhist protection cord. “What does it protect you from?” “One’s own ego”…did I say that? And later that same time when we were alone he said it too—“What does it protect you from?”—he another I loved—and also he said, You look so much like her. I was sure he had met her by then. He lived near Hollywood and was one of the most famous people in the world.

  stardom, stolen?

  stretch until you cannot snap back?

  I had come to her rooms waiting a shape to investigations

  I, twice of impetus

  and the things in her world so much like mine, intervenient

  maize and pulque

  firewater and couscous

  large photograph of a seashell, djinn in the corner,

  Arabic alphabet primer on the desk

  a double I, twice of emphasis

  distant friends…it might be easier seeing them in their elements…or thought so…

  have you walked the tundra yet in this protest?

  so we look compelled

  or canceled and build the vault for our oristry

  catacombs become a choice & enter

  Islam Istrokan Xtian and long Byzantine tomes in defense of icons

  walk through walls, as Djuna does

  saying how love becomes the deposit of the heart

  like tidings in a tomb, bow down

  the dead can do this in their bardo, travel through walls

  and guide their voices in fierce orality

  One of the Deciders sitting in a big boardroom down below:

  “It’s all about impermanence anyway, so why the fuss?”

  Then this one room for elegizing, mourning fallen icons, emotional color, disengaged but vital enrichment…voice…metallic…

  shine…band of light…mica-light…granular…clone that lies here…other side of wall…chamber…separation…

  bend…eyes aside, or turn right at you caught aside…now…cloth…texture, inner thinking…

  of you you might fold under can’t put a label on it…as we hope…alas I hope, meant because you can have your modesty you can have me too—so I look…cinematic

  a rabbit’s foot, Rosicrucian cross, a vial of Ganges water, ashes of the celebrated poet in an oatmeal can

  and we look

  over all the clutter and shot….…shot….…shot

  through.

  of artificial machination

  dislocation of a twinned body, extensions,

  ashes are remnants of our auspicious time shot shot through with heat

  sprinkle here, anoint my own corpse

  double girl, bury your artifacts here

  the Original Anne on the runway

  the Original Anne “such promise” the Original naive but

  awakening to her purpose

  Original Anne down for the triple count

  Original Anne on the lam

  dying to revive

  (Anne Only took over all the engagements of the Original Anne

  she intercepted her mail, accessing her own demise)

  she had sprung her out of the dark castle

  now lead me to the tundritic Archive

  and commanded: now write this down, your adventure,

  your confession for all to see

  But Original Anne felt her perspicacity her stamina her purpose return as the power of the Deciders weakened, and she was fully reconstituted. There was an archival tape with aboriginal sticks from Fuji playing in her head, accompanying a poem of terrific orality, and as it played, she felt herself “shaken back” into being.

  She stared down the false Anne, a fierce tiger light emanating from her eyes, piercing the deceptive One’s resolve. A
nd this diminishing fabricant disappeared, like gossamer, fleeting ephemera on the horizon.

  horama…oneiros…chrematismos…

  that too, a piracy

  her eyes had the glint of Djuna’s mind

  tortoise shells, sawfish teeth, rock salt, octopus bones, panther skeleton

  skulls and hooves…imagine

  that they lie at the surface, almost violent

  exoskeleton of self’s selves

  support

  and age and Deciders

  in contractual…

  and death

  as antlers do a

  shot shot shot

  a simplification is as a war cry

  “don’t ban poetry from this room!”

  from this body!

  we arrive in the shape of investigators to the final rooms

  Deciders have at day’s end to explore these matters

  in contractual machinations

  and death-to-the-poem corporate styles

  and become inseparable from them

  women called into the room

  in a power arrangement where they stand before a Decider

  decidedly at disadvantage

  feng shui decidely off for the women

  eyes roam around the room, an array of Deciders behind desks without much on them like prefab newscasters

  and shiny surfaces like fortresses, reflections of Deciders’ features coming up at the women

  one Decider at a desk before a woman raw and exposed

  another flanked on the left with a trophy of counting coup

  invoking regulations in a weak and whimpering monotone “it’s the rule”

  patriarchs demand your silence where monosyllables stress the company out