postcard from
[edge of dawn]
Boulder, June 2002
you
-- wove rivers in your hair walked rocks
with hard feet --
you
would be at home here, Sappho
among mountains
and their fragility
tribes of girls with long hair sandals
poems
but Sappho
river nymphs have no place
here
there's no Echo caved
no pool for poor Narcissus
Why, then, do I trust your language enough
to enter it? I trust it because it is both watchful and fluid, allowing
the variants of yourself to have voice. Am I who you hear?
the girl with no door on her mouth drives
an SUV down Canyon
singing
"like water after rain"
I trust your contradictions
river and rock liminal
geographies of
vanished people whose caves we enter
whose bodies
we imagine
from handprints
You
live on an island away from the voices of men. Their echoes. Like Calypso
you have your -- I have fallen for your -- enchantments
and I'm learning that they have theirs, rock and river words. I design
a curved alphabet to vein my wrist, ink for a ghost tattoo. I have lost
most of my Greek, but not what
it taught me. It seems to me however many times I read that poem, echo
and triangle, inked bodies
of knowledge I desire. Landscape of the flesh as text, enchanting.
Sappho you are here.
Dressed in torn scraps. Echoes unexpected
broken
mouths unlocked or smashed
and in the cave of voices clay of your words
returns to river mud
silt of history
a phrase for dirty books libraries
lick their cracked lips for you
Echo
your silence
<trans.>
I find myself in that godboy
tonguing her
to laughter
tied in my skin tattooed with you
who
skinned yourself
senseless at the rose of her
petalshed
left nothing
nothing for us
to do
but belated
he has the words
she leans in
for whispering bodies is the god's
last laugh
you steal his fire
hide it
under your skin
inked blue songs are like tattoos
you know i've been
to see before
eyesburn you shimmer numb
and pulsing
trace
------------ ECG your ------------ venous flow ------------ lumen of
the vein
you hear in my stutter
through
claim
my translations
from
each science exact
alchemy of the mouth
alembic
i. systolic
annotate in pencil. diagram. map
of the human heart. with its river valleys. red gulping
mouths. the heart a hungry little
body sucking us in. and crying in pain. broken. firing on
all neurons, crazy with. ischemia
is marked by an imbrication of localized and
viscero-somatic pain. damage
by any other name. you keep running from. footsteps in
sweat across each page. rivers of
sweat wearing you into canyons of broken. making
electric mountains of echo.
for 'echo' hear 'experiment' not the Alamo
or Los Alamos
hear experience
hear mouth unlocked by
thefting words repeated
from red cave of body
ii. diastolic
your pulse through me in words/transfusion
i refuse/your definition of the heart rework
the muscle into sinewed/prose
preventing
reflux into the ventricles reflects in peaks/and
green heart flashes this hot/this
high altitude playing hell with my heartbeat/cave/ear to
chest you hear the doubling
word heart/blood heart beating each other a diptych
hinged/on an open book contracting
with papillary muscles in the ventricles secured by
tendinous chordae tendineae
music of heart-strings beat it/echoes against these peaks
growing/green with pockets
or terraces...seeps...ravines and gulches... liquid in interstices
impossible/spaces between
echoes
where I shelter my variants
your various scalpels I take to (my) task
opening the flesh like a door
vena cava
pericardium
[what is around the heart]
iii. symbolic
The topography is diverse and
often characterized by strong vertical relief. Five...
physiographic provinces make
up most of the fiction of landscape subdermal and
sinuous, seductive possession even
here in the margins, ventricles we annotate, pulse
and flow into, riparian as bodies,
moving through love heart becomes a metaphor,
becomes the river we drown, in this
dry season unchanneled by scrawl does love exist
as fiction or rivers, the heart
that contains them in green traces, tears in the muscle, water
flows uphill, vertical relief running
in the echo of our breath, the shadow of peaks that
throw us back on ourselves like
doors hinging open, my tongue hinged open to make up
this landscape, to lick caves and
think such rivers, transformed into metamorphic rocks
these words press against glass,
echoing
these echoes of our work
in each other
find upwards in us
sheltered in the liminal
safe harbour of voices
impluvium
iv. apostolic
reflux in -- time for -- tricuspid
valve on the right -- seconds in we -- break time break --
muscle -- in running you pace i'm
-- heartgrip the handles for -- seconds and counting --
striations red and -- pulsing against
-- skin pour sweat -- out as learning what -- loses from
us -- skin fat muscle -- what builds
-- up in as -- sweat strokes us down -- Most human
intervention leaves mountains
fundamentally unscathed... be the more tenacious in
your grip -- i hold -- on this second
repeating -- pulse of keeping feet -- going -- blood
going -- crazy -- to keep -- Impulses
travel the internodal tracts through the atrial wall -- i
hit it wet -- sheltered in swift
-- inbreathing -- upward deflection of the baseline voltage --
gradient stepped -- brilliant in
green and -- electric grip -- of dizzy of -- absorb this -- fluid
from mouth to -- mouth ear heart
over -- mountains of -- high breathing -- gulp -- air
chills as it rises, and water
vapor condenses to form rain... This is called orographic
precipitation -- writing
-- skin rivers -- shimmer as breath -- Echo
rain's writing collects
in us
alembic
and we echo in glass words
deflection
an experiment in wet
handprints of red who
fluid (I hear)
experiment:
refusal depth
They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum,
everybody paid a dollar and a half just to see 'em.
Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone.
hypsithermal in such gestures, you
lacemake this
place
around me
tracery in heat and red and this
refractory imaging
wave after wave
leaves a landscape
a
ridge and swale topography
a steep bank, swift current
slippage
the river's lip
and the taste of it,
lacustrine
your algae skimming
my surface
luminous and necessary
so
say
we are all
colluvial
embraced in arms whose
lateral accretion ----------------
our meanders creep up on us
and shift
leaving
curves
abandoned
throwing snakes of our twining
across the floodplain
and it is rising
you tongue the murk of my mouth
sands finding upwards to silt
each kiss
into archaeology
I wear rivulets of deglaciation
into the ages of my skin
this
trickle your fingertip
flood
and in this pooling
is saturation
in your
element
sink again,
surface to refusal depth
slick with splinters
paleoindicators
excavating our anecdotal evidence
for how this began
circumstantial
but for chemistry
with glass fingers
reaches in/spins us around,
mouths the river's name
submerging us
in whispered
(hear)
again
Photograph: ------------------------
Above / These narrow ecosystems represent a transition zone between
aquatic and terrestrial
Lecture Notes
[Field Composition]
between us
Slide: [you
click]
speak
technical staccato, heartbeat
carried
like
buried pollen in the clay of lakes i
learn your words
Riparian ecosystems occur along the margins of rivers, streams, and
other bodies of water
your lips are riparian
I write
your words are like kanji rain writing stone
If the desert is reminiscent of a woman's
back then this is you, river beds dried out to gulch your sandy taste.
Crop circles open pores under tongue's lick against plane window, thirsting
for this topography
is your territory, your fine-grained epistemology of rock. I cover you
with paper, applicable words I swallow and chew. Digest this. Press into
me as petroglyph and I will keep this geography
compressed into haiku
this early on a Saturday in the shade
of mountain
writing
Orographic [click]
Precipitation
your words your graphs your
mouth occurring like mountains
(insur)mountable elements
we taste in Latin written as history by water
I shelter the scrawled landscape
flighting under me, as -- fingers in the valley of my spine -- you make
this world for me in the tale of its making, how the valley is all accrue
and attrition. Elision of frames: the swift window like photography
holding and letting go its fist of seeing. Each clench: some fields, riverbeds
I splay across -- valleys of your veins -- my fingers touch your tongue,
addressing desertification. In the ecology
of this oxbow of this
poem cut off from the river and waiting
for water
is late this year
swallowed and waiting
in the mountains
[click]
Where streams remain unchanneled, flash floods
are common during periods of intense rainfall
water wrote these valleys
in sinuous [click]
kanji of glaciers
of seeing, the invisible seeps away, the glacier melts into rushing stream
into wild rice into the people who walked here and left no footstep in
the failing fields and forest fires. The controlled burn of biology
red-written at our neck and wrists, pocked by valves "formed from the endothelial
layer. These valves are paired and point in the direction of blood flow."The
body's riparian topology
formed huge bowls called cirques at the heads of valleys and widened
the valley bottoms. They carved
and so you take nature for
art hearing the words from my rivermouth
I run
[blood ink tattoo wet
blue in this light shaded and]
silty these days
[click]
transformed into metamorphic rocks (gneisses and schists)
pressure
pairs us, such words our shaping of the floodplain, a muddied history of
molding under excavation. Find me sharded and retrace, a history of sediment
and shatter, your calm fingers of archaeology
breaking ground to tender the riven. Riverine, I course and (of course)
whisper confluence: come together, all ears. You listen to sand's
old news of hurricanes and I hear theory as a spade, psychology
smudged in my margins
inky shadows paper
dry as lips at this altitude
a life out of bare
slickrock
without rainscript
"the
trouble with water is
she'll leave you for gravity"
and all your Latin will
[words on the tide] not bring her back again
as ------------------
as fingernail to scrape the palimpsest, to flick the veins and begin with
words. Our disciplines are spectacles, magnification of the evident, but
(discourse in hand) I decline glass some days, unframe ophthalmology,
knowing the world for the blur it is, all movement liquid "flash floods...
common during periods of intense"and even now, in drought and at this distance,
we bear witness to morphology
if you spell
lacustrine for me and I
tell you it means :
shining lake
mother-of-pearl puddle
set in the gold of land
neck
lace of peaks wound
with streams
of -- picture it
[click]
Mountain riparian ecosystems form long, sinuous, discontinuous bands
of the water channel circulation of the blood our comprehension of whispers
of distance making waves. Record this in what finds upwards into us: eyes
mouth heart clenching open, each word a cardiography
I read for hidden pulse. Tectonic. Love.
in scattered kanji
cloud-brush we fall to scribbling
ourselves on the ground
We have changed the colour of the sky and made water flow uphill
[slide]
you have changed the water
of my heart made sky flow uphill through
me into
haiku
sinuous meanders tongue rivers
[click]
alchemy of echo
End. Notes
Postcard
"Why, then," Kathleen Fraser, 'Notes
re: Echo'
"the girl with no door" Sophocles,
fr.; quoted in Anne Carson, 'The Gender of Sound.'
"like water after rain" Ani Difranco,
'Hour Follows Hour'
"songs are like tattoos"Joni Mitchell,
'Blue'
Trace
"lumen of the vein" Anatomy
Coloring Book
"ischemia is marked" Michael McGillion,
Ph.D. thesis, unpub.
"preventing reflux"& "papillary
muscles" Anatomy Coloring Book
"pockets or terraces"& "The
topography is" From Grassland to Glacier
"tricuspid valve" Anatomy Coloring
Book
"Most human interventions" From
Grassland to Glacier
"Impulses travel"& "upward
deflection of" Anatomy Coloring Book
"air chills" From Grassland
to Glacier
Experiment
"They took all the trees" Joni
Mitchell, 'Big Yellow Taxi'
Photograph
"These narrow ecosystems"&
"flash floods" From Grassland to Glacier
"formed from the endothelial" Anatomy
Coloring Book
Lecture Notes
"Orographic precipitation"&
ff. From Grassland to Glacier,
except "the trouble with water"Ani
Difranco, 'Hell Yeah'
|
Liminal disciplines