9
If I can write all that I have written, surely I can start and complete a little portrait, the burnishing of each step out of the prior, the grand abandonment that is stepping forward into lines, the stilt-legs so tall and putting one so far up as to be unrecognizable by anyone one knows, anyone who could spot anything. But instead up the stilts twine the pubes of heaven, for the stilts up and all over the legs and all the way to heaven are covered in pubes. Unrecognizable! In whose wandering is a following closely too, like the guided blind whose guide is everything that shrouds in, amorously, about him.
9
A newcomer in town at a holiday party of a friend of one of my best friends, I, an unemployed universal architect who had never worked or even sketched a party, approached a silent man with jumbo sketch paper and a few twigs of charcoal, to make portraits of each other. Almost as soon as I began I burned out and was done. At the same time his eye trained on my face so steadily, never lifting it actually, for almost twenty minutes while his hand busied its intricate transmissions with the charcoal, a technique I recalled as my middle school art teacher’s recommendation to the serious student of life-drawing. That he would produce a too-expert portrait and feel short-shrifted and dishonored by mine panicked me and I awkwardly imposed a sudden “time’s up,” with which he complied instantly, only to reveal that he had been, all along, rendering my face as a black hole.
For a decade this portrait of me, which I had reproduced for my best friend, sat framed at eye level at the foot of our beds, so that upon waking we could enter the same contemplation of ourselves.
And what I have been trying to make of this portrait—its subject, the conditions for its visibility, and of the language it has borne of friendship, the insideness of the inside joke or the language of friendship and where they end and poetry begins, or neither begins nor ends.
9
Regarding the portrait that is never made in The Idiot, Dostoevsky’s portrait of Prince Myshkin as he remains a force totally immediate and yet inaccessible to the other characters, whose joke about him blooms and blushes within a cave just out of reach and draws its language from Pushkin’s poem “The Poor Knight.”
The scene in which this inside joke is spread around the Prince, who is kept outside of it as it brushes its one destination, and at the seeming expense of (for the Prince is that rich!) his whole being:
“Well, have you finished your silly joke?” cried Mrs. Epanchin, “and am I to be told what this ‘poor knight’ means, or is it a solemn secret which cannot be approached lightly?”
But they all laughed on.
“It’s simply that there is a Russian poem,” began Prince S., evidently anxious to change the conversation, “a strange thing, without beginning or end, and all about a ‘poor knight.’ A month or so ago, we were all talking and laughing, and tossing about ideas for a subject for one of Adelaida’s portraits.”
The energetic balloon inside their joke that gets passed around him also passes in a form less threatening, to themselves, as when they feign blame at one another, and keep the joke going:
“If it were not for Adelaida Ivanovna, we should have known long ago who the ‘poor knight’ was.”
“Why, how am I to blame?” asked Adelaida, smiling.
“You wouldn't draw his portrait for us, that’s why you are to blame! Aglaya Ivanovna asked you to draw his portrait, and gave you the whole subject of the picture. She invented it herself; and you wouldn’t.”
“How could I paint it? According to the lines she quoted:
“‘From his face he never lifted
That eternal mask of steel.’
“What sort of a face was I to paint? What should I paint—a mask? An anonymity?”
9
Now it really is a fact that any scene such as a landscape can sometimes be more clearly and freshly seen if it is seen upside down. There have been landscape painters who adopted the most startling and pantomimic postures in order to look at it for a moment in that fashion. Thus that inverted vision, so much more bright and quaint and arresting, does bear a certain resemblance to the world which a mystic like St. Francis sees every day. But herein is the essential part of the parable. “Our Lady’s Tumbler did not stand on his head in order to see flowers and trees as a clearer or quainter vision. He did not do so; and it would never have occurred to him to do so. Our Lady’s Tumbler stood on his head to please Our Lady.”
G.K. Chesterton, above, in his biography of Saint Francis, goes long to show the French medieval parable of a dispirited court tumbler, “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame,” or the Tumbler of our Lady, is a key to understanding who and how Saint Francis became.
In the parable, the court tumbler, dejected and questioning the worth of his tumbling, takes into a cave a portrait of the Virgin Mary, where he daily offers up before her, his tumbling practice, tumbling and weeping on his hands, that in his inverted jig “his feet in the air were moving joyfully while his eyes were weeping,” until one day Mary swoops down from the painting to embrace him (imagine it’s an upside-down embrace of his feet) and his dedication is restored.
St. Francis, Chesterton explains, also endured a profound period of uncertainty when he could no longer see himself as the troubadour poet he had been, nor as the conventionally cloistered monk he might become—something related to both but as yet painfully unknown. When St. Francis emerges from this struggle, Chesterton explains, it is reflected in his decision to call himself and his brethren the Jongleurs de Dieu.
Coming to terms with the worth of one’s sense of having none, of not knowing one’s way, that is, the worth of one’s entirely own way of being, of one’s entirely own way of not knowing. I see this struggle reflected throughout Granny Cloud—in the high-hung pea and cloud portraits in the cave of my own process; in my own greater appreciation of what is dashed and written off in my notebooks; in my life while I was writing it, in foregrounding for readings those poems I had fished from the trash and toilet; in the capacity to recognize more depth of experience in the surfaces of my play; and in developing a lighter but also more flexible capacity for taking poems to their end. And above all and inextricable from all this above, the achievement of the book is its depiction of the impossibility of finding a form of writing that would release me from my own challenges as a poet—the struggle for my own freedom in formlessness—many lonely doubts, a morbid sort of modesty, painful contortions, inversions and more!—
9
Now here’s a forgotten freewrite recently discovered by chance on an email thread from 2020, written in Filip Marinovich’s class, Poets by their Sun Sign. We must have been in Leo because I remember Filip prompting us to write from the Ashbery line, “Thinking not to grow up.” (“Soonest Mended.”) I would have kept the freewrite mostly as it was because looking back at it, I was surprised that there was so much in it, which is what I mean to say in the revisions below, about Granny Cloud being different from my first book—in reflecting an ability to look at what I have written and see more of what’s there.
Patience first—our knight in regurgitated armor has arrived…
J.K., ’twas I made him proudest who never met him,
in the slowly filling surgeon’s amphitheater, under the vast shade
of a green mummy, his ferny underthings finally unfurled..
I sat in velveteen seats, nipples slightly alarmed, because I wrote it.
I remember because I had coughed a hypercolor
hairball which noon struck through and served back
through light’s tears, which I was trying to suppress
in the hushed shades of the theatre, thinking not to grow up.
Till death do us fart, en route,
between my legs... I was bowling
because i remember, my lane of ten luminous albums
filled with stillborns—abalone shells were their bassinets, which I paused
to top off with Hypnotique—
because the sea… I wrote exactly this much of it.
And I remember because the sun was about to set, thinking not to…
from the centerfold of this book, dead, the sea.
I rolled back my shoulders in a wave, then a cape broke
at my back, its energy unmistakable.
The waves were flames centerfolding me with one leg, for dancing, conducting,
self-synchronizing, a leg which kicked up furiously a whale perfume as if to multiply
waves of alarm.
Someone right then asked me what my problem was, that is they asked me
what it is like being unable to rid myself of that exact moment’s substantial bent for agony,
and then I found myself so full of energy and I told about it,
to this poor knight named Snop.
I was this knight, a beautiful one, convinced of my beauty once by a dog, and once
by a stranger at a holiday party who agreed to do my portrait with charcoal,
as he listened the dark began sticking his head out of the walls, along with poetic or religious thorns coming out from the frame’s length and expanse. This he did
somewhat flirtatiously, as if he wasn’t confined at all, by either my words as he listened to them or the symbols around himself,
as if having observed my process, he was about to ask if there were not
a different approach altogether
but he could see my relationship with the so-called rough things I had made
was changing already, from his first question.
And that what I had left behind, untouched, like my life in time, was free, and that what I was striving for, was also.
I remember because I returned there
and on top of black hole’s head there was “a book” but it was barely a book, it was more like a sperm-soaked skullcap, or a crack in a bell of cream, it was something like a stop in space that you would hold your hand hovering on the air in a vow raising itself in place of place, in the place of all meaning.
Because my most velvet-seated fear was of a crowd, of poets and non-poets alike, mocking and pecking at the mass of my unrealized writings, posthumously,
like a ritual exposure of what remained, a free-for-all, because I had wasted my soul so prodigiously.
If only I could find a mode,
or a form, like other poets, conceive of projects or muster any conscious evidence
of a will, then I could be more “prolific,” because I did really feel something in me
was more “prolific,” but where are the poems then, why can’t I see them?
Yet these agonies about some elusive form—as if form were a home—that would prevent my live poetry burial, in their very haunting and nagging, released me, or guided the writing already
exploding of its center everywhere,
impossible to travel anywhere else. I remember because I returned there and
on top of the black hole’s head there was a book it was barely a pube-bound book, but it was bound and
free of the frippery of order.
Till death do us fart.
9
Often I feel that I am a posthumous writer not because I feel that my work will be celebrated only once I’m myself no longer alive, since it is unlike my work to be celebrated without me. But that is precisely the matter that makes me feel posthumous. My work is posthumous for having in it something so much more alive than myself that I will remain dead to its force so long as it contains me as its vessel. It is for this reason that I live as one who can’t see her own work celebrated for no degree of public celebration would ever bring me closer than the impossibility itself brings me. Why torment myself with the praise of others who seem to speak to me as through me, to someone else, of some joy being denied to me then and there? And yet that is what their celebration consists in—speaking to the dead. If I could see what they claim to see, I could not be the one to whom they were speaking—best not to show anyone what I cannot see. Such are many authors though—taking into the public the blindness of themselves and being seen by their work, feeling their vision restored, by praise or by criticism, both of which they will take as signs of their own living. But not me, no such sign is forthcoming, for as I continue to live, my blindness is only set to expand, to dilate, like an ecstasy or a rapture that will finally forsake the work, the worker and the reader alike. It will travail where it must, where eyes roll, on some higher blank, just a bunk above, just one sheet over this body above.
9
R.I.P. FARTS
“Till death do us fart” is the tagline of a company my best friend and I would like to one day start and which has been gathering force for over twenty years since we first learned that the body upon expiring forever—farts. And that along with ashes, why that last fart might be something someone would like to bottle and save. Whatever keeps this idea for R.I.P. FARTS alive also has already realized it and need not realize it in any other form in order for it to live forever. Now take comfort dear poets who cannot would not succeed as professionals!
9
Still I think I am more of a posthumous poet than a living one—I don’t mean that in terms of posterity. The poor knight—the bullied idiot—and the sense in which he is really a prince! The revolving portrait, of an irrepressible, unjustified goodness. The jongleur of god—in the dark—the lowly, the black-hole self-portrait.
I was reading Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis in Rio de Janiero, masquerading as a Thomas Merton scholar in search of lost correspondence, in order to make contact with the discalced nuns of Santa Teresa. I was admitted by means of my supposed crush on their fortuitously hot gardener. My meeting with the head nun at the top of a narrow turret, who from behind her bars spoke of the bars between us as JUST poetry—symbols that stood in for her work, protecting it, so she could busy herself with her dedication to see God’s face. I remember the long wave back from the smiling gardener as I walked away—sticking his head out the convent wall, the walls with thorns coming out of them—as if out of and back into the gardener—as if he were onto me, growing—was he laughing? flirting?
9
Letter (Thinking Not to Grow Up)
Patience first—our knight in regurgitated armor
has arrived… J. K., ’twas I made him proudest who never
met him, in the slowly filling surgeon’s amphitheater,
under the vast shade of a green mummy, his ferny underthings surely unfurled.
I sat in velveteen seats, nipples slightly alarmed, because I wrote it—
I remember because I coughed
hypercolor hairballs served back to me flambeed
by noon’s monocle, through light’s tears, which I was trying to suppress
in the hushed shades of the theatre, thinking not to grow up.
But this is penance, I know, said Mummy. I wrote it (then quoted it)
on old people in onion rings on beach day
when the sun was just about to set. And I was bowling,
because I remember my lane of ten, luminous albums
filled over with stillborns—abalone shells were their bassinets,
which I paused to top off w/Hpnotiq—
because the sea... I wrote exactly this much of it.
I remember because the sun was about to set... thinking not to…
as if there were another place, a centerfold
in the sea’s diary, somewhere unattainable by technically advancing or paced flirtation
with candle and nostril, dripping both beneath the blackhole self-portrait
made by the knight, sealed by the eel, kissed by the rose on the gray—
but rather was arrived by a readiness for implosion,
one so unregistrable it seemed the sudden readiness might be the implosion,
being traveled to and reached ceaselessly as it was by everything else that was wanting to mostly leave it as was with just some light change in the initials of light and a bird dropping beside it.
So I rolled back my shoulders in a wave, a cape broke
at my back, its energy unmistakable.
I remember because the view from my monocle… and my nipples’ concern grew
and in my ring every wave was scrambling to copy from every other in the terrific light
and the whole sea seemed to be working together—not cheating. Cheating and lying
and the teacher’s breath in the dark
cornfields, and the mummy’s sunburned lip turned down.
This much I have attempted… though I was always very ready to use the rainbow as a handbrake
during any of the more tenebrous flashes of the heart,
Grandmaster