Anatomy of a Dress

1

The truth is this had been going on for a long time during which
they both wanted it to last.

You can still hear them in that phase, the north and
south laid up against each other, constantly erasing
each minute with each minute.

You can still hear them, there, just prior to daybreak,
the shrill cheeps and screeches of the awakening thousands,
hysterical, for miles, in all the directions,

and there the whoo whoo of the nightfeeders, insolvent baseline,
shorn, almost the sound of thin air. . . .

Or there where the sun picks up on the bits of broken glass
throughout the miles of grass for just a fraction of an instant

(thousands of bits) at just one angle, quick, the evidence, the landfill,
then gone again, everything green, green . . . .

2

How he wanted, though, to possess her, to nail the erasures,

3

like a long heat on her all day once the daysounds set in, like
a long analysis.

4

The way she kept slipping away was this: can you really
see me, can you really know I’m really who . . .
His touchings a rhyme she kept interrupting (no one
believes in that version anymore she whispered, no one
can hear it anymore, tomorrow, tomorrow,
like the different names of those girls
all one girl). . . . But how long could it
last?

5

He kept after her like sunlight (it’s not what you think, she said)
frame after frame of it (it’s not what you think you think)
like the prayer that numbers are praying (are they ascending are they
descending?)

He kept after her in the guise of the present,
minute after minute (are they ascending are they?)
until they seemed to quicken and narrow (like footprints

piling up, like footprints all blurred at the end of, at the scene of . . . )

until now is forever he whispered can’t you get it to open,

present tense without end, slaughtered motion, kingdom of
heaven?–

6

the shards caught here and there–what did you do
before? or will you forgive me? or say
that you’ll love me for

ever and ever

(is it a squeal of brakes is it a birthcry?)

(let x equal forever he whispered let y let y . . . )

7

as opposed to that other motion which reads Cast it upon the ground
and it shall become a serpent (and Moses fled before it),
which reads Put forth thy hand and take it by the tail
and it was a rod in his hand again–

8

That’s when she stopped, she turned her face to the wind, shut her eyes–

9

She stopped she turned,
she would not be the end towards which he was ceaselessly tending,
she would not give shape to his hurry by being
its destination,
it was wrong this progress, it was a quick iridescence
on the back of some other thing, unimaginable, a flash on the wing of . . .

10

The sun would rise and the mind would rise
and the will would rise and the eyes–The eyes–:
the whole of the story like a transcript of sight,
of the distance between them, the small gap he would close.

11

She would stop, there would be no chase scene, she would
be who,
what?

12

The counting went on all around like a thousand birds
each making its own wind–who would ever add them up?–

and what would the sum become, of these minutes, each flapping
its wings, each after a perch,

each one with its call going unanswered,

each one signaling separately into the end of the daybreak,

the great screech of the instants, the pile-up,
the one math of hope, the prayer nowhere is praying,

frame after frame, collision of tomorrows–

No she would go under, she would leave him in the freedom

his autograph all over it, slipping, trying to notch it,

13

there in the day with him now, his day, but altered,

14

part of the view not one of the actors, she thought,

not one of the instances, not one of the examples,

15

but the air the birds call in,
the air their calls going unanswered marry in,
the calls the different species make, cross-currents, frettings,
and the one air holding the screeching separateness–
each wanting to change, to be heard, to have been changed–
and the air all round them neither full nor empty,
but holding them, holding them, untouched, untransformed.

Jorie Graham

It is no accident Marguerite Porete calls her book Mirror. To be a writer is to construct a big, loud, shiny centre of self from which the writing is given voice and any claim to be intent on annihilating this self while still continuing to write and give voice to writing must involve the writer in some important acts of subterfuge or contradiction.

…Nor I think will any prudent writer on matters of God and Soul venture to nail things down. Quite the contrary, to leave us in wonder is what such a writer feels compelled to do. Let us look more closely at how this compulsion works. We have said that telling is a function of self. If we study the way these three writers talk about their own telling, we can see how each of them feels moved to create some sort of dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the centre of the work and the teller disappears into the telling.

Anne Carson

How do I tell it, Mister Long Dark Day?

I have little patience and no geometry so do what you do best – show me –
where is that line that makes two points into plot?

Is this it—you and I in the throes of agony over waffles and bacon?

A dress, a funeral dress, two dirty panels affixed with dental floss,
do not say: a shroud?

Two more rooms discovered in the human house; when I won’t
get with your program, when I adjourn to the bearded yard?

Two hides with the sweat swivelling between them?
One hand to hold two over the head? but still

Hands cannot complete a line without a length, without fiber. And even
With nimble hands the tongue is stilled and dull
ego submits, she likes it, fingers in her cleft
And watching you across the room,

Through a lighted window, that inner hub
Swelling and gracing while she stares,
remembers jacarandas drowned
In a pool drain, a stand of them where she can crouch
And bury what the body rejects

Lines drawn as in we were always walking toward (each) other.

A hewn moss, a stranger’s body becomes
A garden whose soil is too valuable.
Why am I always trying to bury it between my legs?
Who’s never seen a jacaranda, who can’t
Name what she pictures, who always
Picks up checks.

O November, there is nothing left of this ribbon, or your mettle, but you knew that, and so. O intractable silence of the mouthless living.

Farren: I love baby Jesus. He’s the only one I’ll really talk to.

Forest: I don’t really like any of the other ones either. Bloody wrathful Jesus? No thanks.

Farren: What about teenage Jesus? The one that went missing and turned up later, when he was thirty? …Acne Jesus?

Anna: Tween Jesus?

Forest: Dude, scurvy jokes are–

Farren: Always funny?

Forest: Yeah, and in too short a supply!

Basically.

Dis girl wishes a good clean freeze would come and kill whatever flower dust is making her sneeze into glenlivets and wish herself dead today.

From “After Prologue”, the final essay in The Wedding Dress:

For instance, I once knew a man who was a poem.

He had no convictions, was a mass of contradictions, a pathological liar. If he said he was going to do something at a certain time, that was the one thing he was guaranteed not to do.

Time for him swung from side to side and never went forward like a progress, but he collected pain-inspiring memories to nurse along with his addictions.

The only reading you could give of this man was a surface reading. There on his surface was his whole charisma. A close reading would end up in ever-evaporating signals like old subtitles or watermarks. Strangely this only made you more determined to make the narrative work–as a series of acts in which the missing parts were the coherent ones.

When the man who was a poem held me, he held me like the mother I had never had. He spoke aloud in the dark–long, embellished but credible stories poured forth from his childhood and late youth. This was his essence. The light bars from moving traffic outside slipped across bare walls and in the next room Arab music played, and intermittently the Muslim call to prayer. Gray light at morning and soon after he would be on his way.

There is a pool between knowing and believing. Whatever I did know about this man who was a poem–something that could clear up my perplexity by giving me an actual fact–I didn’t believe. I didn’t choose not to believe. I just didn’t.
What does belief mean in such a case? What does it ever mean?
You can know all the facts about a situation, you can even have an acknowledged intuition about how bad it all is, and still you believe that somehow the facts will pool their resources and reveal their ultimate worth.

You can know that someone doesn’t love you and believe that they do.

If you are turned away by someone inscrutable whom you nonetheless love, what do you learn?

She wandered unfamiliar streets and couldn’t find her way back or forward. She was lost on earth. She loathed herself and blamed herself for his rejection of her–her sarcasm, her jealously, her doubt, impatience. Self-evaluation is what he taught her.

She had thought she was the good one, and he the reprobate and loser, but when he left it was the opposite. When she fell on her knees begging him to let her stay with him, it was God she was imploring not to kill her belief.

The audible response was, Don’t harden your heart.

Fanny Howe

Farren: Ooooh! Can we go BOWLING?

Anna: In the immortal words of TI, we can do whate’er you like.

Applications received and complete at Virginia, Wash U and Minnesota.

Have been reading articles about CSF’s demise and watching Miami Rhapsody which I would have sworn (until I looked it up on IMDB) was directed by Woody Allen, because of its characters’ precocious neuroses. Oh, and reading Dracula, because I left The Intuitionist and The Wedding Dress at work on Tuesday.

I’m feeling a little rootless and orphaned today.

Has anyone ever heard of Marie Corelli? One of my regulars brought me a gorgeous bound copy of her collected novels and stories?

This weekend is going to be nuts: On Friday we’ll be hosting the Nomad Art Show where hilariously awesome band Holy Diver will play. Nomad Arts put on a show last month and I absolutely fell in love with

I desperately want her but can’t yet afford her. So far the artist is holding onto her for me. So I’ll get to check in with her as well. Then Saturday, another Burlesque show. They are always completely wacky (Darling Nicky for the WIN) and lucrative, but late, crazy, exhausting nights. Sunday Sleep Day will be sacred, then on Monday we’re having family party: everyone from work will take a tour of the Franconia Brewery then come back to the bar (which will be closed all day) to get drunk and be merry together. For the first time in a loooooong time, I absolutely adore my coworkers. We are going to pull down the projector screen, play Scene It, and get trashy on good European ales. Basically? I can’t wait.

Oh, and then on Tuesday morning I am getting up at an ugly, unforgiving hour to fly to Santa Fe for Awesome Holiday Redux with my best friends in the whole wide world.

Facebook message from Anna Katrina that made me spew tea all over my laptop’s keyboard:

“OH MY GOD, how come everyday is going by SOOO slowly? Just effing get here already-the anticipation is killing me!
p.s. I have to work on Tuesday so I have dispatched my husband to come get you-have fun talking relational aesthetics way too early in the morning!”

I am scared about how tired I am going to be but happy. It’s beginning to look a lot &c.

I can haz holidaze?

Dude, I am making a mustache ornament RIGHT NOW

You’ve been thinking of me? Is it because Britney’s launched her attack on America? I know how your mind works momma.

tommy can you hear me?

Thankful for you, your shadow, your space

Hey, Helen Keller.

Baby, Benadryl and beer are an awesome combo!

Why are we more like fruit than books if we’re more about story than food?

Congratulations, Terrorist Lover.

I am just a lady. With a simple lady mind.

There is a CRAZY craggy-voiced drag queen at this sports bar screaming really knowledgeable things about football.

You are my favorite person to go to art museums with, EVER.

I miss you lady. All the damn time.

Dada. Dada. Dada. Dada. Dada. Dada. Dada. (Enticing yet?)

Scrello!!!

Duck nuggles.

And who couldn’t love an existential cat?

Everything’s fine here. You should know, however, that Mama Cass has started reading a lot of Nietzsche, and Mack found my Kierkegaard somewhere. So they’ve been arguing a lot.

I KNOW I-BANG

Overheard at Half Price books from a table of grown men playing an RPG: “I’m going to drink the potion of endurance.” I don’t think he was talking about Red Bull.

Holy Crap! It’s the year of the Rat, and I’ve been writing Monkey on all my checks.