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from “Geopathy”A cure would consist of learning to tune out
a portion of the notes
as a violin extends the arm to hold it
a hair away from
the human,
drawing an extra body across me
like a bow for dissimilitude
The drive for art
is this embodiment
and disembodiment
or paresthetic,
the nerve block
that beats voice onto xylophone
arm into anchorite
the defense
against autoimmunity.
*
Brother I wanted to lie in the meadow, you wanted to charge up the hill.
Yesterday I moved into the guest room on the other side of the house,
away from
telephone and cable, remotes, clocks, alarms, all of which increase the
frequency of
signals I can’t ignore.
Music is different: I had an intuition that keeping my ears occupied with
orchestral detail
might create neural diversion and lessen the pain—eighteenth-century
laughter, a furious
requiem at my back.
But this humming is insidious; it conspires with our nerves. Planes crash
unsure of
instruction or echo. The search itself becomes suspect, the body the crime
which sustains
conscience. As once, long ago, I dreamt the autopsy of a knife.
Pain is the public secret we are animated by power lines. Artaud’s
emotional athleticism
would exhaust our remote control of the monster into utter sympathy.
Art seeks to distract. Even attached to my head my ear was dedicated to
you.
In the culture of narcissism, ritual sacrifice becomes internalized. So
we have to keep
killing and reviving, and that takes its toll. Documenting the sacrifice
is the distraction.
As I said, I moved out of the room surrounded by cables and filled with
metal.
Electromagnetic fields can interfere with nerve conduction. The last time
I slept there I
had the recurring dream: trying in vain to leave on a journey, or down
in the subway
searching for Frame Street. Those wrong numbers you get all the time aren’t
random; the
government calculates the frequency to increase your sense of despondence.
We send
planes on eavesdropping missions. Frequently the code is misunderstood,
but without
poetry would diplomacy have any sense of purpose?
Immigrants are always searching. Where or what home is becomes uncertain;
the
individual body must now function as home. But one uses so much energy
in resisting the
gravity of assimilation, finally there are no resources, no home-land
to fall back on.
Because she was never fully embodied, she was vulnerable to viral infection.
Artaud terrorized language into the xylophone it pretends not to be.
*
Thumos, thyme or incense, theros, harvest, therapia, the art of heat.
As they tended their husbands’ graves, a Greek and a Russian heard
the same warning in
their respective ears.
Whenever two women speak, the Devil is always there between them.
(In the garden of Eden onomatopoeia the ultimate ballbuster
Small circles over my cheeks and mouth, between my voice and the fingers
of the violin,
to play in that field.
It is the job of the linguist to simulate intimacy.
My grief is like my hair
The women who listen along my body carry messages.
A metallic sound. (They act as if someone is standing beside them
Like a song without a tune
When two women speak a body is there between them.
I strangled my body so my voice would climax higher
psilent
(What is this frequency that batters
us till we give up our sympathies
this language that flys on suicital wings
so far from the sun.
I tolerate thoughts of death only as a simultaneous whisper of all poems
in all languages
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