Two works: _IN A FLASH_ and _CORNELL BOXES_.

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IN A FLASH

      for Cole Swensen



1

There were fragments. I was born.
It was not justified. I
learned: the impenetrability of bodies.
But a penetrating look? To "surge
before." To haggle ill-equipped.
And "that other" opposed to.
Desire. I was calm between my selves.




2

Touch, on the other hand, "on the
bridge, swaying."
The point
where sight sheds
the river. Or
a wider sense, but still
restricted by grammar. Becomes
a muscle
in the light of metaphor. In
deep clear water sun.




3

"A single point" of light.
So we begin to see, to "interrupt."
There's always physical. Were once
our limits. Fields, in which
burrows of the young.
To interrupt a concept of desire. A contradiction
in germ. What folds of fabric.
It's not a measure.
"Nothing is."




4

Millions. Of fragments. They
veer, and pyschology begins.
A local sign in detail.
Red rock, on a roof. Evening
trimmed with red hair.




5

Milk weeds my sleep.




6

Night. Night. Advancing slowly.
Swimming deep in dreams. In clear water
the previous.
Kites, fierce birds
of prey.




7

Distance falls over distance.
And milkweed and thistles.




8

"If you stare long enough"
six inches
history's legal sundown. No, again.
Of course if cruelty. But
smiling. As you stammer,
many. The peaches, the nuts, this wicker
basket, this cup, this bottle.




9

Landscape curiously white. The train
sways as if a boat. Over easy.
And the slightest arrangement
of things in the slightest
fragment of space.
Defines the eye.





10

It snows inside my body. Field after
field on dusty tables. I hold
my nose to steady myself.
Not quit.




11

I've stopped dreaming. Tags
on all items. The letter you
neglect to post as in.
Images come every day until
they hold no more mystery. Light
in a lamp-shade, land-shape.




12

Whatever line of record. Also remember.
There, uncertain.
What is a look? I should
have felt.
Touch at a distance?




13

Not just a child's perspective, but
hundreds of flies.
Can one pity an angel? Cut me. "Over and
over." Whatever at hand. The sand
wet, the heavy ground. "Where are you
going, my complete
accidental body?"




14

Who wakes here almost
"similar." Voices in the head
the chest
rose and fell. Or sounds to that effect.
As I've heard others.





15

Fabric unfurls weeks full and long.
I saw you from both sides.
After a delay
climbed my own shoulder.




16

I long
for my body. The insides
of work at it.
You too without ceremony.
The sky is hard.




17

Disturbed. My body follows
me around.

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Rosmarie Waldrop


CORNELL BOXES



ENIGMA BOX


Am I caught in the stare of a Medici Prince or do I hold him in the cross
hairs?1 I myself have always been quietly alert. In my dream I both stood at
the stern and struggled under water, but a gun is another story. Don't step
on the shards, she cries, not with bare feet, so frightening the smart
missiles, the limits of time and space, the implicational character of
mathematical demonstration.


Marbles, cordial glasses, soap bubbles reflect the sensual world, while
around my navel there is concentrated a circular2 red rash. I am extremely
interested in failure. The beginning of art lies next to the body,
transitive fissure, with high waves immediately behind. Sun, sea, severance,
and people in the street, she cries, what deviance from curved diameter and
straightest line.


The intimate scale of childhood also attracts hourglass, clay pipe, and
intelligent collaborators. Others may prefer columns of a smaller diameter,3
but a Mediterranean garden surrounds my Northern mind. I feel her tiny wet
tongue licking my finger. The ocean, she cries, glare, wind, salt, scattered
islands, limited income, it's not encounters in cabins, but chains of
logical relations that compel proof.


Most remarkable, the presence of the egg. In a sea so calm not the slightest
tremor suggested the tides of sexual impulse threatening the individual. The
fact that we dream night after night surpasses the most heated fantasies.
What lavish, wasteful refraction of light, she cries, deserted planets,
desperate obsessions, do I have to invent everything all over, and without
auxiliary concepts like the curvature4 of a surface?


----------
1. to define with accuracy, a story on shards
2. perfect, obs., unease
3. through the center, and you must feed
4. the invisible if it exists across my eye

ICE BOX


He is fascinated by the parallel seams in the ship's sails, the threads of
the web. But I am not some kind of psychic casualty, I simply want to
please.1 You know, in the winter of 1835, in Russia, Marie Taglioni's
carriage was halted by a highwayman? A barely perceptible, she sighs, an
uncertain, and how he approached with bare feet along a line of perspective
without being able to, without touching-and yet we stay on the surface and
do not measure the real diameter through the inner parts.


If he dreams of a wooden ball with a long needle sticking through it no one
in America knows more coldly accurate. The whiteness of the ship is
everywhere, a short-time slice against tidal connotations. The enchanting
creature was commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther's
skin spread over the snow. Intimate turn, the unmarried moon, she sighs, so
foreign, stunned senses, I panic, take flight as if the third dimension
alone could tell crooked from straight.


While fervently admiring healthier possibilities, I take my florid face out
of the menu and feel my armpits growing dry. What is the relation between
the large particles we call elephants,2 and the extremely small ones we call
molecules3 or fading passage? This is the counsel of despair, snow between
stars. And years later, she sighs, a disappointed smile, our eyes for a, as
if his double, the feeling of it gone, and the ratio changed between
circumference and diameter.


He had a special star-shaped box made the more menacing. I resented this and
re-arranged the napkin in my lap. The motivation of biological mechanism4
falls short of the Puritan plan. Severely ship-shape she placed a piece of
ice among her jewels. First thought on waking, she sighs, dust whirling in
slant light, the excessive whispers, the flight of time, but the curvature
of space is the more flagrant structure.


----------
1. the light of other days
2. elect: electrons, shimmering relation
3. feel deeply and a hint of atmosphere on sphere
4. atoms tropical, our fading passage

STAR BOX


Orion, the hunter, high over my head; the Dog Star follows him through the
night even though his legend is different, monstrous, two-headed. Victorian
dress no safeguard against excess or waning empire. Nor can we be sure the
story accurately represents the underlying power lines. A single pigeon
cooing on the roof, a phallus in the void, I didn't know, she whispers, what
time of day, already dark, and if my feet went to his house all by
themselves.


When history is emblematic,1 the course of ruin can be put in reverse or the
sky. A frantic innocence: a flock of doves: the virgin Pleiades. Though the
abolishment of capitalism is not inevitable, fireflies next time. As if he
couldn't understand, she whispers, heart in my throat, seafoam, feather on
the floor, foot fetish, common sense skin, owl or measuring eye.2


But the gridwork is fragile, the constellations a trick of perspective, the
idea of sleep replaced by sleepiness. I prefer local intervals in ideology.
And if not innocence, at least the taste of clear cold water as it comes
from under the rocks. The encounter with Einstein never took place, she
whispers, throat constricted, head tossed back toward the dark green
feathered beauty, brought compass, sea salt, licorice, solar set, and the
layered pink of the untitled palace, but forgot the question must be stated
exhaustively.


This compulsion to connect the dots into story, meaning, and insomnia. The
body says "I" all by itself, and history's a mishap in the statistics. Yet
the obliteration of constellations by the same act that formed them is
almost as radical a shock as the invention of "realism."3 Complex, the
relation between social fact and and after-sex beauty, she whispers, painful
secret, unusual effect, the eye in the peacock feather wet with tears, is
"real"4 a meaningful concept?


----------
1. with utmost nakedness
2. partition particles
3. the dial turns, the yellow painted sun has set, a single pigeon on the
roof
4. no known address





LETTER BOX
             for Claude Royet-Journoud


To encounter anything fully is to touch its absence, but she could not
possibly wish me to kiss her lips. There's something physical about the
middle of a book, a locus of hunger.1 Just as the passion for seeing
survives on its own sweetness, defining reverses concepts to other concepts.
"Transparency of nerve," he writes, "smallness of talk, a green unruffled
marble, obsessed with contiguity, periphery of language, grammar of
margins."


But the center is always dissolving, hole nailed through line, sentence, and
the demon of analogy. The slightness of her body was brushing against all
the bulk of mine. This coordination is not arbitrary and may be explained,
like the erratic course of certain stars, by a dark companion with strong
gravitational pull. "Mouth open to earth," he writes (but will it nourish?)
"obsessed with deviation, hand caught in a page, the body to come, got no
tongue, will fall, the crack opens, abrupt obstacle."2


Something to upset the balance: a negative dung-heap, a beast dismembered on
the spot. The smallest alteration in the world of physical objects, like
this photograph placed on my suitcase, produces the severest and most
frightening transformations of the infinite. Whereas in physical knowledge,
concepts are coordinated with particular things in a testable relation.3 "He
starts small," he writes, "hunts for his tongue, daylight doggedly, takes
the place of childhood, time at a loss, hitch in the language, leaves the
boat, rushes into"

A different relation to knowing, the pursuit cannot define the object of
pursuit even if the road is lit by a crystal cage, lighthouse, bright red
plumage, high noon. I was not surprised to be alone.4 Certain coordinative
definitions must be determined before we measure the indivisible. "I
understand something quite different," he writes, "moves forward in the
dark, defines the margin, bulks large in what, as if nothing, to no one."


----------
1. "cramped sun"
2. "the native speech of"
3. "he sees a spot coming closer to where he's waiting for it"
4. "cold reaches its target"

JACK IN THE BOX
           in memory of John Hawkes


The enemies of the novel are plot, character, setting and theme, you said,
but the marquise still goes out at five, and at the stern where we were
standing together but separated, it was impossible to hear the engines of
the ship. The alternatives of free1 will and causal determination do not
exclude each other, though problems arise if we look for truth where
definitions are needed. I heard the sudden hiss of urine. Fist through
glass, you said, her legs straddling the railing, underclothes ravaged from
an invisible clothesline, pollen, hollows of the body, such tension.


Everything is dangerous, you said, everything tentative, nothing certain,
life jackets engulfed by crosscurrents, the thrashing of the great blades
just below us and innocence in extremis. There would be contradiction only
if a man could see through himself,2 which is as impossible as knowing if a
measuring rod retains its length when taken to another planet. Suppose
instead we enter a period of midriffs, of second skins. Ja-Ja-Ja, you said
quickly, the eye, bodily, the despotism of the uterine, odorous, earthen,
vulval, convolvaceous, saline, mutable, seductive.


Can you rivet your eyes on the close-by,3 we asked, and yet turn them toward
hemispheric distances, can you crowd a spare sentence with absence and spare
it? The question whether causality applies to actions of your own will is a
travesty as pure and dark as a blackened negative. It's dreadful, dreadful
no one has yet seen a wave-length. Of speech or suffocation, you said, white
cadences, cold fire, hair like a dense furry tongue, natural lace, beetle
leg, scar, a field of blood.


The enemy of pleasure, you said, is the curve of probability and flat exit.
And so science must acknowledge singing in the wake of pubic darkness. A
different geometry would obtain if we had rigid bodies. No turning back of
time, you4 said, unbearable sunlight, gunmetal ocean, Irish eye, glass
splinters, a dream of flying and falling, a deep leap into, while the rest
of us stand here, stabbed with sorrow.


----------
1. Cf. fall, hold, lance, wheeling, dom, for all
2. and smoke five Dutch cigars
3. a single fly, buzzing
4. knife, daw, rabbit, straws, o'-lantern, in the pulpit, in the box

CINDER BOX


Virtuoso of fragments, master of absences.1 Was she about to smile or
replace the glass slipper with the notion of variables? No sharp line of
demarcation2 between organism and environment because blood in the shoe.
Warning cry, raven, more in my head, lunar eclipse, she cries, not stored in
the brain but spread throughout the body, rewind of nightmare to single out
the actual kingdom among possible untitled.


The variable demands that we think both the stable and unstable, the
invariant within the variation. Her lashes, like the physical sensation of
the I. Do not assume the a-logical core of the world is a pumpkin at
midnight or stepmother. His look sharp like a camera, barely blinking, she
cries, were there cinders in the cellar, were there mountains, other
daughters, was it possible to measure the space in which we do not
understand?


A spiraling watch spring, the fullness of time,3 knots, neighborhoods, snug
fit. He should not have revealed his loneliness, distaste for travel,
ambiguous feeling toward women or the intense activity within the atom on
which its mass and other prophecies depend. Stop muttering in Italian, she
cries, images stored in my head, doors not properly balanced, it all always
vanishes, as if to prove I have not looked, just taken pictures. With due
respect to losses (slippers) we must return to the slot machine.


Is the prince's ritual magic or the tacit reign of the tactile? A saxophone
barking in the distance, the stable measure of the foot replaced by
seven-league-boots. Fur-lined. Utilitarian delusions,4 she cries, unusual
effects, moss and oak leaves by the Roman temple, nest of nymphs and
swimming moon, is it meaningful to assert geometrical diffidence?


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1. raven more
2. too vast too barely blinking
3. possibly untitled
4. examples of

BOX CAMERA BOX


The film opens with bookstalls along the Seine (fig.13) and the spontaneous
firing of neurons controlling face and tongue. Hippocrates knew it is in the
brain that the dazzling white seafoam crystallizes into a pipe though the
Ancients held that we ponder things in our heart. Solid bodies change little
when subjected to subtitles, sound shifts, snow drifts - I mean, a ballerina
is not just a metaphor.1 Such slender projections, she moans, calligraphy,
plaster lions, rhymes, crab canons.


The young man leafs through the books, with the smile of a fin-de-siècle
soap bubble and cold feet. Even with skin boasting the latest nudity, the
brain is our messenger. Their relative stability is not ground enough for
prefering solid bodies to the shape of thought.2 Heard a call, she moans,
vertigo, spasm, the milling crowd, cuts, angles, fleeting suddenly,
dovecote, snow flakes, sprockets.


The still comes to life: a flock of pigeons bursts into flight toward
Southeast Asia, while he punches his hand through the screen toward
childhood.3 Hippocrates came to his conclusions by listening to epileptics
while the photographer folded his tripod. His overwhelming preference,
though, was for solid bodies in vehement, shortlived motion. Vertigo, she
moans, drop in temperature, alarm, loss of balance, feathers on the floor,
words, foam on lips, no voice, book out of print.


The speed of stop-motion photography outstrips our most graphic
expectations, yet it was in a sled, wrapped in fur, scared by the swift pace
of the pony, that he had his first ejaculation. Epilepsy shows how the brain
backstrokes against its own current. Even if color is solid it cannot equal
a body in mute ecstatic abandon.4 Towering firs, she moans, spirals, excess,
last year's cuckoo, gold ring, readymades, left ear, tender tongue, tears,
wide open eyes, hypnotic, unreal.


----------
1. engram of snow flat within the brain
2. that he, staring at
3. hilariously
4. the way to see me is to touch me

TOOL BOX


The gaze she knew even as a child envelops, the way velvet surrounds antlers
in the period immediately preceding sexual aggression and mating. His
attitude toward repetition casual -- so many roses to suggest compulsion.
But the definition1 of terms like "attraction" or "palpable" depends on the
enjambement of closed systems. The time you took, she wails, to open your
arms, grow a beard, have rings under your eyes, wear a raincoat, swollen
tongue, sigh, eyes downcast.


As a mature woman, Godiva knew all but one of her subjects would turn their
eyes away from her humiliation, but my interest in the entire range of
sexuality is genuine, quite genuine. If two or three cell bodies are
gathered together they build suburbs of gray matter.2 The whole system
vibrates with red sky in progress, like sailor's delight minus part-time
labor. Luminescence, she wails, mysteries, phenomena, sprouting likenesses,
mirrors rampant, sunrise, porous color, out of phase gaze.


A naked little girl on a horse,3 long tresses cover her body. My rash is now
an unremovable garment covering my belly, buttocks and genitals in a wet
flush of color. Here lies the difficulty: a closed system can never be a
mattress. My eyes, my voice, she wails, the deep spiral of the stairs, the
small sea shell you'd brought me, snail house, bone color, sound in my ear.




A child Godiva would fulfill the most exhibitionist Emperor's fantasy, he of
the New Clothes, but where is he? I found myself admiring the
chocolate-colored trousers and yellow shirt which, irritating my gray
matter, caused an explosion involving many cells at once, like lightning or
an epileptic fit. And while physics does not explicitly define the body as
rigid,4 the whole system changed from rain to sleet. Panic, she wails,
lilies made up yellow, garlands, wintergreen, palm leaves, seasonal emblems,
splinter of red stone, open sky.


----------
1. useful if inadequate
2. like chronic abnormalities that irritate
3. poorly fed
4. I'll never forget the mechanical chess player in his turban

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Rosmarie Waldrop