They just want to watch the food network. And when it's not that it's the home and garden network. Which is fine because that's all I want to watch, too. He wants to be an interior decorator when he grows up. And she is too young. I mean, “What I," she was saying at lunchtime to the other accountants and billers and Medicaid assessors, “want to learn are the tricks. How to make a life easier."
Half a million chloroplasts can't be wrong!
;;:::MOMENT, la separatione …now these are the moments, somewhat like poses, I've been telling you about, moments out of Fassbinder's Katzelmacher, which I saw in the fall of my awful, descending near midnight lunatically to platforms beneath Varick Street, those poses: obtuse anima mimicking the world we inherited, silk-screens stretched across the instant where the leg meets the pelvis, carefully tended by a guru—I sent you flowers on your first day of yoga teacher training—wry, studious positionings full of callouses and loafing, dragging along fences and coping. O the fauna of the universe shined its bright light on my face for one de-la-moment, the first maybe, and I felt shy and exposed, like the free angels of the Old Testament must have felt, able to scan and source earth at will but only to be caught in a handful of stories.
Half a million chloroplasts can't be wrong!
;;:::MOMENT, la separatione …now these are the moments, somewhat like poses, I've been telling you about, moments out of Fassbinder's Katzelmacher, which I saw in the fall of my awful, descending near midnight lunatically to platforms beneath Varick Street, those poses: obtuse anima mimicking the world we inherited, silk-screens stretched across the instant where the leg meets the pelvis, carefully tended by a guru—I sent you flowers on your first day of yoga teacher training—wry, studious positionings full of callouses and loafing, dragging along fences and coping. O the fauna of the universe shined its bright light on my face for one de-la-moment, the first maybe, and I felt shy and exposed, like the free angels of the Old Testament must have felt, able to scan and source earth at will but only to be caught in a handful of stories.
Yi should thus precede Qi. Yi should thus precede Qi. Yi precedes Qi. (These are the first thoughts of the bone method, explained Catharcius, leading Alexandrine among the olive groves. Lote-Feute approached with his lyre and sang of the seven minths.)
So you spoke softly of how reading Wallace Stevens on the bus back to New York reminded you of visiting your father's grave in southern Virginia. But when you said it reminded you of the films of Fellini, too, I sort of stopped listening. And you said, “No, the parts where…and they're with the family member with the developmental disabilities, and they're travelling through the brown and the dust and the humid shirtsleeve trees, toward the old family home. That part. And that feeling. The whole thing, like the actualization of sepia. Not like the preciousness of it. What it brings to mind, in reality." One of us, which one, fell asleep sleeping.
in this blue tent catacombed in blue they leap with bare legs and eyes blegging heaven, in wild, passion-maned flutes, the women and the men too, queened in red bulbous cells, quavering, translucent; I can already feel the dog days without being able to slow the early hours of summer, to catch even a moment or approach it in real terms like I planned to all winter, all winter cold in coffee shops with stale smoke from some scarved devourer of the New York-minute taking stock of subjective thought in the caged-in portico; the summer has already, though so irreducibly, gone efferent; it is like theater; it lacks seriousness; fools you as it ushers; embitters and rivets you in camp vagadingdongs…and vivacious, my dear, yes it is…lucid and particular and weeping. …I must set my sights. I must set my sights on it…next summer! Or the next! But any longer and this asthma will overtake me, the smooth muscle of my bronchi—sounds Greek, my dear, sounds so Greek—
like the seven heaving Thebes—but it's just me gasping for air…oh you say craft follows reason while art flows directly from particular understanding yet what doesn't function less as a usable vessel and more as a limit for transgression? …What is the style of taking a bullet? How can it be to feel gifted? What kind of genius throws a life away taking a bullet in a studio, in performance, what struggle, what denial, what radical otherness? Whatever brutality and desire erupt as? Even if only formal? boring? disappointing, but for Duration and Presence? Or stray selfish choices, humiliations—loss—just loss—repetitious attempts at jostling; to morph one's self into an object of desire. Maybe it is all about Presence and Duration. I'm speaking of the artist who had herself shot during an exhibit. Like, I was here. I did this. My era and my relationships made me do it. My body; it was bodular. It was, wasn't I; I was it.
© 2012 Works & Days Quarterly and Eric Bland