Gossamurmur Read online

  squint in light

  glare seeping in from between slats of the blinds

  By the shape of false governance came this shape of looking

  The low-level Deciders were frantic when they heard of the escape of Original Anne. A seventh-level Decider was caught in the dilemma and wouldn’t admit his weakness. The message from above was never admit a mistake, never be accountable.

  You had to keep decisions blamed on the lower-level Deciders. They were not quite ready to handle the cinematic world the world of reflections and double mirrors a fallen world might sputter off its reel and die.

  But this was metaphor.

  There were scant reels in the New Deciding-Way.

  Had not Chief Decider created a hell realm for prisoners?

  Had he not voted to close the progressive library where thoughts of freedom festered?

  Libraries that might breed archivists?

  He was swiftly demoted in the “new accountability.”

  “And now the tapes gone missing!”

  “They’re in the business of hell-on-earth, madrassas for anarchy”

  heard how a poet gathered the fragments, wrote and rewrote…erased

  started again…little woman upstart

  because when you write out a line with your body—structure it—move it—

  it gets free

  that is what I wanted to see…how atom by atom your sentences replicate beyond one another

  I, poet, wanted a shape of her as a free agent before she dissolved

  I wanted to catch her, un-canceled

  And to let her know she could be missed

  Even if I harbored dark thoughts toward her, dark lady of my shadowy DNA

  for she was the antiheroine of this tale

  this is what happens when my singularities are alone

  they want us to express their selves in triplicate

  and steal or mingle among one another’s texts, and double helixes

  and appropriate and glorify themselves in the texts of others

  but we see them and they are glad of that, enjoying exposure

  the imprints they make in what are deceptively empty chambers but none truly empty of ghosts, spirits, sense impressions

  they come in mind trailing on willowy gossamer

  sample: cartilaginous

  sample: backbone

  what they were on about…that they could plunge or fall in language

  whose job it was to classify

  but if you study smaller ones and their textures you may appreciate the balk of similarity

  loneliness of classifying others in an outcome of the study of duplications

  loneliness of erotics, may any two primates be truly alike?

  but she is steady and outside time, ennobling it

  and roots to be a scientist of illusion as she copies the originals

  when you consider value of a shape of a form a genome barks me too me too

  which is plural and suggests a way to behave with accoutrements that are symbolic, the skins of these trembling lines

  classifying items of possession, of poem-objects, exquisite corpses, and the jangling aces and pentacles, and voices that speak into machines

  if she may consider her relation to the formerly alive parts of formerly alive poems she will cheer up and be formally alive

  she might stroke what is lonely and cold and listen to disembodied voices

  might push further into a void of identity

  angels and savants fly in and out

  messing with your Decider Radar

  that they would be concentrated as well on the same kind of

  machinations

  or inventory or tone, but for darker control

  countenance of an artist rising above others in her public cause

  we might think of study…anecdote…fantasy a scenario

  duplicity as of original poet mind to save it

  we might think of stealing into a heart

  crisp and figural is a description

  in so many insomniacs

  that fixes the face

  we faces have use

  when we can’t sleep

  it’s like a wax museum in here

  Heart of Archive, or storage units of rogue plutonium

  as public pressure closes the bomb factory down

  peering-in faces the archons take charge

  to face an event of poetry enacted

  before a crowd of suppliants facing arrest

  rewind, we must hear that dulcet tune again….

  mega mega mega death-bomb enlighten

  ideas in the event with masks

  allowing of beauty and insomnia on a rocky divide

  that was a title for something because I also have beautiful thoughts when I can’t sleep—

  you too, as I say this facing you

  these were the ideas of a nuclear-free zone

  had in the event of facing off with police and other authorities

  in the sure information a face would give beauty back to the world

  as tundra derives from a word for “treeless”

  up there to feel this business of lack of shadow, of tall things

  “without trees” or “above the tree line”…an amphitheater of

  summoning objects

  or these living things back to themselves

  come back! come back!

  of struggling outside

  and limitless, as of space

  Archive hidden on a tundra, who would suspect?

  one of the most uninhabitable places in the world

  are you less grounded without a tree that’s to consider and if you are, why, how cruel yourselves often seem to trees in the rugged landscape. Not cruel, negligent. Are you fighting for them in all the ways they are captured and slaughtered?

  seeing them, yes, but understanding?

  not mistaken in all the selves you face daily, in the

  face you face daily, and living with complex self that is a face-off

  who speaks underneath your skin,

  for fragile life-forms

  that become institutionalized…or not

  A map working its way through a body

  Survival cartography

  Chasm Falls: Original Anne half felt the jagged water drops

  East Desolation Peak: Original Anne fell to her knees

  Build the vault inside the Tundra, and she did, hands clawing the hard inhospitable ground

  green lipstick of a Heian mentor

  back up, flash back

  she who tamed the tiger

  on a climb to the monastery

  shook the demons out of her hair

  lustrous

  long as my doppelgänger shadow

  long

  as long a walk a long long way up here

  New Deciders were organizing another war on a comparable Utopia

  demolishing stacks in a library of powerful gnosis

  tomes to guide and replenish imagination

  artists would climb out of their foxholes

  rounded up, exposed, and demand conservation

  the ploy was “space,” like nuclear power

  who has the most capacity to make money off “space”?

  nothing new, destroying books

  a rogue state of small import had become refuge

  pragmatic leaders were nervous: where to put our money down?

  Deciders had Fear but saw Opportunity

  were things looking up in the Deciding-Way?

  you could be unabashed

  Decider of what you might want to destroy

  ask it of other Deciders and they surely rally

  the weather was changing and New Deciders seemed happy

  they would welcome the Drenchers and Wasters and Arsonists

  they frolicked in their charnel ground of more deciding

  but poetry was being planted in soil kept by women in robes of sleep and utopic dream

 
Escaped and what she observed: What you are having here and must be careful not to step upon is fragile in so very delicate ground-obeying and earth-preserving forms and very most very sisterly soils. You might see dwarf shrubs or rosettes or mat or cushion plants. Very sisterly sounding and receptive if you are considering something about a guardian female. And gossamer the delicacy of life here, fragile endangered dwarfed. Here you have long long and cold winters and strong and very strong driving systirly winds. And very sestraly thoughts abound and even snow would help as an insulating swistarly layer for those plant and animal realms that seem to want to live here. We could try it being sororial as it is a place where a thin membrane exists between living and dying, and to go on living—if you could—you would be useful and sweostorly—if it wasn’t prohibitive—you would be seeing that this form that is delicate even wordless but not antisocial and even raging to live—and like a newborn—seems to be struggling very hard.

  could Archive be dwarfed, Original Anne mused

  like the creatures of Tundra who struggle, becoming miniscule

  could it be condensed?

  condensare,

  the Poet admonished,

  look to the little ones

  slaughtered, saying of something so small being slaughtered not so

  reckless as a couple of humans

  humans standing reckless or contained

  how to present thought and actions and deeds and words of the humans

  our Troubled Time

  maybe not so close but vulnerable because they speak in silent

  walking

  those who are troubled, those who bend

  six weeks to grow to live to continue, delicate life forms hide under

  our speech holding them

  someone walks someone exits someone escapes the rule of others

  someone leaves you mustn’t follow

  rosette or mat plants or cushion plants underfoot be careful

  the landscape reels back and forth stop a moment and capture an

  image of a youthful guardian

  how now in dotage furrows worrying the future desecrations of poetry

  veins bulge in anxiety of survival

  shoe boxes of tape ready for transplant

  ungrounded voices rising out of the floodplains of Samsara

  afloat in New Weathers

  long winters and cold and driving winds and

  unpredictable weather fires and floods of Troubled Time

  thin membrane between death or life or life in death

  my sisters, you better know

  Original Anne had repossession as she reentered the factious world

  Original Anne had proprioception’s stealth and glide

  Original Anne might now reclaim all the receipts for the years

  she was possessed and on margin

  her papers were in order

  she could prove identity

  she had been exonerated for the symbolic murders of Deciders

  who were exposed in public sessions of confession and shame

  Deciders of low rank and lesser culpability were thrilled with the

  humiliation of the higher-rank Deciders

  Poetry piped into their cells night and day

  “Not us! Not us! It was those other Deciders did it” (they claimed now in cage, many of them sick lying there in cage, weak in their Deciding-Way)

  not as guilty being less exposed, they were under orders

  to revile poetry but did they really

  when they ransacked the Quonset hut on the tundra they found

  nothing to connect Deciding with Poetry

  yet sublime orality would hamper them forever in their Deciding-Way

  and for the exposure of Impostors

  Original Anne drove stakes through the hearts of Impostors

  their disguises had dissolved, wigs came tumbling off

  makeup ran with the torrent created by strong waterfalls

  they held their last meeting at the trial that was called to hear the

  crimes of the Deciders

  decisions now often went in favor of the whims and egos of the

  Deciders, they got off too easy

  and more importantly the wealth of the Deciders

  who decided on ways to extract more power from the inner sanctums of planet earth

  who would exhaust the resources of planet earth and exploit the New Weathers

  and more disturbingly (and this showed their hand, that they were clearly insane) the strange perversions of the Deciders

  who wanted to make decisions for all mankind about love

  about who may or may not love another

  who may or may not touch another, experience ecstasy with one another

  who wanted to define rules for the care and control of all bodies

  who would blame extreme weather patterns on lack of control of bodies

  hurricane, tsunami, flood, tornado

  “they have no control of their bodies”

  “they love one another”

  “cosmos out of joint”

  “let them not love one another in this terrible way”

  “it is not the Deciding-Way”

  Original Anne stormed in and demanded retrieval of her memory stream

  she charged in and reclaimed the essence of Archive

  she had wrested Archive from the master-plan of the Deciders

  she would not close her visions to the difficulties in North Africa

  she would keep on the study of language and culture

  but she had to let go of anything that did not tally with political reality “on the ground”

  she did not compromise her involvement with crimes of terror and radical religious fervor

  her name and the names of the subversive classes she taught were removed from the lists of the lackeys of the Deciders

  she felt keenly the disinheritance of her institution which appeared now as a russet castle inhabited by enemies of poetry and imagination inhabited by the pervertors of the teaching, con artists who

  preyed on the ignorance of tender supplicants

  she had distance and she kept her distance in the hallways of archiveless night

  the castle evaporated or rather disappeared from one world system

  “it’s all an illusion”, said Decider Vishnu

  while drones with their manic evaporating sounds of danger and violence retreated into the distance, the little child deaf to the machinations of power but feeling the vibrations

  of a lighter time a future time

  Archive buried in the frozen tundra, a treasure to last a thousand years

  intonations of poets and of their fragile impermanence…

  pity the New Deciders, she said

  they will not inherit this earth

  leave that to the slime molds, the protists, those who inhabit the power of symbiosis

  pity the Deciders pity their obsessions

  pity their sick fixation with gender control

  pity the lovers and mistresses of Kaneie and Genji

  Deciders who frolic about the Shinden-zukuri mansion

  while the women write of them

  in subdued yet passionate tones

  rain on tiled roofs

  women rarely venturing beyond the veranda

  receiving gentlemen callers from behind curtains

  in their giant heaps of clothes….

  hiding a diary under a pillow stained with tears

  Archive is not a portfolio.

  This is my poem for now and future lovers, scrolled in my pillow book at dawn:

  Start from a murmur of persons and rise up not like a veil of unsanctified tears; a work in love is never unsanctified enigma if not but pure flow and consent or rip in the veil which is sanctuary for persons be they same or other. As a waterfall never falling in the same sanctuary twice. An abode for our bodies, of union, of persons stepping up to the altar of ancestors together who were union who wer
e civil who were convivial behind a veil. Step up, step it up, convivial. Show them, and rip the veil off the eyes of the enemies of veil. See it another way. Declare the space to be an abode of bodies. See through the waterfall to those behind a veil that was protecting the face of other, same-face same-base same-trace same-pace same-grace same-lace marriage. A civil veil. Or it is my vow my vowels and vocables to be this same which is never that same one in gender-constructed eros. Eros-faced marriage. We are never the same in same-sexed love. But law is civil and protects the abode of bodies. A body abode, a body abides. Say it: law is civil or rival is civet is civilized is civilians is not chilling. Gone is the time of boundaries of veils or tears of borderlines of separating cascades of enigmas and hiddenness. Gone is that chilling time that does not witness the desire to be seen to be witness of this union. Beyond a boundary “same” or “reciprocal” or “solidarity pacts.” It is over, gone and done with, that violent time violent divide. Over, of hiding the shape of a bed, the shape of a clearing in a forest where you lie down, soft and mossy spot, and you might come together there, the ancient dark green moss and secluded spot you come to, again. Same and same and not same and sane. Decide our own bodies. You of former hiddenness and sorrow and lie down and come together and making do in the secret chamber sought that place you walked there you found a secluded spot below the Tundra where deer bedded down where deer waited and you stepped there and sank there on knees in a very hot devoted love where you rip the veils from the fear of prying eyes and welcome the presence of a natural world. And say something like “as sky is my witness…” “as earth is my witness…” Come here my weeds and remove these weeds to our sameness. See our sameness. And remove the borders to our sameness, “as weeds are my witness…” Come my hands to your natural weeds and remove the fear of our sameness and see the beauty of our sameness and not sameness. Touch the gossamer body of our sameness that you know, and hiddenness you know. Intangible. Clothing that waits by the side of bedding down and eyes you know in hiddenness. Fields of eyes not prying not hidden. It was natural and very natural to do this to be this to bed down in a clearing away from prying eyes and metabolic strangulation who said unnatural this contract a vow against perpetual wiring of denial. “as wilderness is my witness” “as wildness is my witness…” Take the vow in the wilderness. It is over, it is gone and done. It is over and done with being behind the shadow cloth of the marriage veil, behind it a valance, a balance, and what is the essence of this poetry as in music which knows no boundary. Rip the boundary that is veil. Where it tunes to the body of beautiful sameness but never the same music. Consciousness as in music and civil it is civil and civil it is a demand to be civil. As a cascade is civil, as from the tilling of fields and this world is a cultivation of new things in civility it is a sure thing to witness.