BOOKS & PAMPHLETS BY ANNE WALDMAN
On the Wing
O My Life!
Giant Night
Baby Breakdown
No Hassles
West Indies Poems
Life Notes
Self-Portrait (with Joe Brainard)
Fast Speaking Woman
Memorial Day (with Ted Berrigan)
Journals & Dreams
Sun the Blonde Out
Shaman
Polar Ode (with Eileen Myles)
Countries
Cabin
First Baby Poems
Sphinxeries (with Denyse Du Roi)
Makeup on Empty Space
Invention (with drawings by Susan Hall)
Skin Meat Poems
The Romance Thing
Den Monde in Farbe Sehen
Blue Mosque
Shaman/Shamane
Tell Me About It: Poems for Painters
Helping the Dreamer: New & Selected Poems
Her Story (with lithographs by Elizabeth Murray)
Not a Male Pseudonym
Lokapala
Fait Accompli
Troubairitz
Iovis
Suffer the Mysterium
Kill or Cure
guardian & scribe
“Thee?” Oh, “Thee” is who cometh first
Out of my own soul-kin,
For I am homesick after mine own kind
And ordinary people touch me not.
—EZRA POUND
A Note
That bird—that sounded nearly human—what was it? Or who? And bend your ear, poet, to the rain forest jungle ground as well, all the rustlings, gestures, motions of life, contrasted to rough-weathered stone-hewn pyramid, elegant you could say, and noisy. Surely you hear the architecture of it, climbing to the stars? The aspiration of it? For it was important to understand the calendrical cycles, the comings and goings of Venus, yet noticing Venus was the same object, evening and morning, morning and evening. Noticing his or her (for Venus seems not male nor female in this version of influence) slaughters, discontents, eclipses, ellipses, changed & fixed mood in the ebb & flux of internal weaves, machinations, conquistador conquest, surprise. A rude awakening for those who inhabited the dream.
Could I ever “let” my blood as they purportedly did? I wonder. Literally, no. Drawn from the tongue? But you pour that blood symbolically onto the virgin page, scribed with brush or turkey feathers dipped in black or red paint contained in conch-shell inkpots. And then bind those pages with a jaguar-skin cover. La Ruta Maya.
This codex is never lazy. It wishes to be a mere script of and for a dreamer who dwelt in a prosperous/desperate turn of century, torqued by doubt, fear, imagination, passion. Let it be said she was a raging insomniac.
“Kill or cure” is a psychological nexus of negative capability, an old Tantric notion. To hold simultaneous thoughts, often seemingly contradictory thoughts, in the mind, without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is the battle cry, the underpinning of a tragic age as well as going way back to primordial cellular reaches of how things move. It is, in the whispered oral lineage, kill and cure, which seems cruel for relative quotidian action and implies power little understood by this writer. Kill ego’s greedy grasping, its whine and agression. Ego’s self-perpetuation is the sacrificial victim, the corpse you stomp upon. As it dies, you are simultaneously cured and live on, transformed, rewired. An old shamanic trick. Isn’t that enough task for one planet’s aggressive nature? You kill or cut out like the surgeon what’s unnecessary, all those toxins, cancers, dark attitudes, shed the endometrium, then heal the rest. To survive. You get the picture. But because we live in a dark age beset with dualities and because time is precious, one makes a choice. Kill or cure. Against or for. It is ethos that beckons. Stuff of poetry? Ha! You might laugh. Words may either kill or cure as well, who hasn’t felt their deadly sting or balm? As a further note and pun, the Tibetan word for mandala is kyil khor. Kyil means center, and khor means fringe or surrounding area: gestalt. It’s a way of looking at situations in terms of relative truth. If that exists, this exists; if this exists, that exists. Center and fringe are interdependent situations. Killing or curing are interdependent situations. You can’t have one without the other.
As grizzled cracked-voiced Andy Devine would say in quaint grainy celluloid Western over a tin cup of cowboy coffee laced with homemade hootch, “It’ll either kill or cure ya!”
Jade eyes of the jaguar
the last thing you saw
or
wall of skulls
& which of these
out of all of these
something (one?) startled awake
Chac needs blood this century too
Venus conjunct
cat-like tongues & penises
spurt (“let”) onto bark
it is written
it is written
This book is a composite of journals, travel pieces, vignettes, political rants, credos, manifestos, love songs, dreams, meditations, visitations from male-writer-ghost ancestors, homages to the great women poets, and other states of mind and occasion. As such it is a body of both quotidian and imaginary realities. It is a cento of my mind and mind’s musical making. It’s also what’s on my mind. . . . A sampler. A patchwork of day and night. The book is organized through the basic instincts of tone and impulse and runs not always parallel to linear time. Rather moves randomly yet to great purpose from the Yucatán to Bali to Quebec City to Tehran to Managua to Germany to Toulouse to New York City to Oslo to Hawaii to Miami and Dallas and many spots in between, ending somewhere near May 1993 scattering my father’s ashes over a lake in southern New Jersey, USA, followed by another Maya meditation. The book spans a world of attention.
A.W.
August 11, 1993 / Cobá, Quintana Roo
Table of Contents
Suppose a Game
Suppose language is a game
whose rules are dreamed
by an agreement of players
Once broken, the speakers are tossed
& know no rude tongue but their own
no (fixed) meaning in solipsism
But always in a process of being stranded
are spectators of solipsism
stuck with themselves, empirical data
Theirs is private demon language
obstruction, ownership, demand
Is the door open?
Rain here yet?
Have their ideas entered all heads?
Is this the end of the game?
They quickly become the ex-modern
and you, poet, enter the arena
an animating principle to a touch of words
Seduce them to your page
caress plosiveness
beat them a fine shapelessness
Or sentences are for the first time stark & clear
not untrue to what flaunts style:
webs of cloth, a mirror you hold
The players conjure nihilism, their only way
to be curious, vain, a waste of strength
as confusion weakens the vocal art
Cybernetics is the exchange of their news for yours
Yours is: However abundant the nectar,
the bees stop dancing as the sugar drops
They tell you nothing, their lips are sealed, you keep dancing
Was the agreement that words shine like sun,
or glint as weapons in moonlight?
A Name as Revery
Ate the bare limbs of words
to find my name:
of fevers, of trees it’s made
Choice out of jugular to be born
Centuries of solar flowers gone by
Belle, where ya born? Moi? Moi?
Verdict: tens attend to
doubt all doubt as
La Self errs in revenge
Then ravages in a kind of honor umbrage
Although American
to a haute parentage we swing
John of the Hands & Waldemann’s was my father
LeFevre, my mother, exposed in sandals & silk
Her Night
Out of an eye comes research
Her night: portrait & a description
A night of knowledge was plainly hers
Two ways of writing explain this
There was her night
And then there was her night, a repetition
A night in a quarry in Helena, Montana, was not anticipated
Or at dusk before the night had started:
The Lavender Open Pit Copper Mine near Bisbee
Everywhere she claims it as hers: purple, dark, starry
Buffalo: spring snow
Amherst: Emily Dickinson’s night, what was that?
Night is anyone’s guess
Naming the stars & planets: Saturn still extant after all this time
So I went on with an idea of the night
Djuna’s night
All-American nights
Recesses one has one’s program for
She dreamed her clothes were like Spanish ice cream
She dreamed a moth arrived to convey a scarlet secret
It was a female moth
The mosquitoes protested they were female too
She had the desire to include a shawl & Kleenex
She walked where there had never been a mountain
Can you be sure?
Can you be that sure?
She would think about walking to Sanitas Mountain at night
If any thought about night or place with night inside it is left out
she’s sorry
For she can’t even begin to remember the rooms:
El Rito, Bellevue, La Quinta, the old man’s stuffy sitting room
She was lost in the abstraction of the girl’s perfume
Nights in front of a shrine prostrating to her potentially
luminous mind
Sleeping late
Literature is being written at night
The couchette rattles into Trieste
A plane jets across the continent
Now I am above the clouds & the moon is up with me
Seeing what someone else means by night is another option
There was her night, and then there was her night, a repetition
She picked up the telephone while, she, the other,
walked toward a mountain
There was her night and then there was her night—the other’s—a
repetition
She suspends all preconceptions and forgets the concept “moon”
It could be frightening if you were a prisoner
Or, a relief
Her night is of no importance really
But there has never been another one like it
Moonlight: hear the amorous cats
Moonlight: the South American map lies on the hammock
exposed to the elements
She did not “drop by” at 1 a.m. as supposed
But made another night call
A bird called
Confused by jet lag, time went out of her control
She shrugged & went to a party
Her escort parked the car near Coit Tower
In between lovers
Between textures: silk, velvet, cool cotton
Throw back the bedspread!
Out of the eye comes the moon
Out of the eye: seduction
What does it really matter what anyone does
There was her night
And then there was her night, a repetition
Minnesota is just like that
She wouldn’t give out her address in Oregon
Her coat was made for a night like this
Her night: where was it leading?
None knew
Display her zeal hour by hour
Opium would change this dream
Her nervousness was a blind
Talk about something like: “We in this period
have not lived in remembering” or
“My excitement is my open eyes”
Her clothing is of a daily-island-life variety
A line distinguishes it
She almost traveled to Tent City out of love & honor
Everything will have to be repeated in the morning
Listen: hum of typewriter, Jacqueline’s loud refrigerator & clock
Listen: a long line of thoughts bargaining to enter in
One thought: the time is 3:15 a.m.
Another thought: there is only one way to phone her
And another: night is long to her & short to us
Not at all
She is ahead of herself but behind every action
Concentration was like having the night inside her all the time she said
She said she’d go to any length to stay awake, imbibing controlled
substances as well as caffeine
She said this because she was excited about making double time
It was her night and then it was her night a repetition
This is an ordinary great deal to know
Of Ah Or
I cannot be but
fierce
My tongue—is it so?
& liaison of that tight
pact of
this to that
A bargain
rises
swells
reigns
sends darts North
when it is you,
iced over,
I thrust
in my heart
to consider
All the vowels
sing how to
melt that glare
or
stare into
doubt like
words in a
bubble
Can’t back out
now
but sing to you
a fire across
our divide,
my tongue is forked!
Flesh language!
We fall into
pieces of
the painting
to be
put
in motion
Splash or Freeze
of Ah or
Whelp
Tell to
old Greeks
who knew
to stress
(pounce)
stretch out
as you your limbs
the statues tell us
Move it! Move it!
& the Ode
got danced
Tell it to poet
whatshername
Heliodora?
who sang
& shook her ankles,
swallowed honey
to make
a sweeter sound or
Ah, Macabru
I tune your lyre
Stomp on the page!
Speech you are golden
Speech you crack ope my skull
Speech you lieth not down a while
but even as I dream
you rouse me
Rock bed!
Break into babe increments
prick ear awake
Spit juice in my face
Fricative magic excites
every corpuscle
Implode & regroup
Assail me with
all yr plans
to consider
the length & shadow
of vowels
American wags listen
The West is underdeveloped
I want to ride you out here
under Big Sky
Rail ’gainst acid rain,
cruelty, weird belief systems
Insult those who do you
no good in their squawk & bite
Who serve you poorly in
their bid for glory
condemned
’fore they
even sputter forth
What goddess will abide a dull,
ignorant tongue?
I speak it
You play me
that forms it
Quote Captive
New sleep uptorn,
Wakeful suspension between dream and dream—
—LAURA RIDING
Orbits of intertextual modern talk
now poetic, now skeptical,
now written down for human hands to hold,
or sensibly dropped, or squirm and die
now rise again. What do you do?
And to deserve them? Night goes down . . .
What do you choose? An object for my verb . . .
Who let you in? The mysterious animal . . .
Who are you rooting for? A dream . . .
Born to talk? And sing and write this down . . .
Wait for the place to be abounding in decision
or shaft all strategies. Scratch them?
Conversation isn’t cheap here, it’s looming,
precious, sacred, clumsy, inept
Wait for them—the words or concepts is it?—to be
newly minted then strike. Terrorize the terminology
Lunar, linear, arch, lingering under cover of bed
They could be my sisters, those buddy thoughts
They could be addressing the new populism
or undressing old idioms
Cluster round. This is the clutter
of mind I offer an argument to
Singular masters take heed the goad’s unstoppable
or make your way clear to surrender her light
A woman rises in Houston, sets in Michigan
and never sleeps. Oh tempt a strapping mind . . .
A thought is mangled in the wrong hands
because it oversteps a sleep-boundary
Necessary to speak although you might
never know the mastery of sleep
Now sing and write this down
Jack Kerouac Dream
He’s talking speedily about the evil of the feminine but he likes it. O bitter tones of the demon feminine. He’s in a repressed New England winter room, but oddly it’s like the old whorehouse in Eldora with bats inside the walls. There’s peeling wallpaper of gold fleur-de-lys pattern on green on the far side. And his “coat of arms,” or rather “his mother’s arm coat (arm chair?)” is close by. It looks like a shrunken deer’s head, size of a rabbit’s foot with French letters crudely scrawled on a wooden plaque beneath, “est peur” (translates “is fear” but cognate to, or sounds like, “espoir”—hope). He’s shivering in an old camel’s hair coat, smoking—Chesterfields? Old Golds?—in front of a raging fire. He’s wanting to “hunt and gather,” he says, but it’s too cold. Where can we go to forage now that “all the skies are broken”? I am thinking if only I were born earlier I could love him, take care of him. Close to his face now, I see its raging corpuscles in the dancing firelight. Intricate aborigine designs tattooed on a remarkably pristine visage. “It’s a drift, flesh and bone, mortification, deadpan, life’s a raked field,” he mumbles. I’m part of a Buddhist plot to get him to be reborn to “liberate all sentient beings.” I’m inviting him to give a reading at The Academy of the Meticulous Future. But what may I offer? “I tried calling your phone was dead was why I came.” “Ummm.” He’s off somewhere else, his eyes moist and glassy.
April Dream
I’m with Frank O’Hara, Kenward Elmslie & Kenneth Koch visiting Donald Hall’s studio or lab (like Ivy League fraternity digs) in “Old Ann Arbor.” Lots of drink & chitchat about latest long poems & how do we all rate with Shakespeare. Don is taking himself very seriously & nervously as grand host conducting us about the place. It’s sort of class reunion atmosphere, campus history (Harvard?) & poetry business to be discussed. German mugs, wooden knickknacks, prints, postcards decorate the room, Kenward making snappy cracks to me about every little detail. Where’s John Ashbery? We notice huge panels of Frank O’Hara poems on several walls and Kenneth reads aloud: “a child means BONG” from “Biotherm.” We notice more panels with O’Hara works, white on red—very prettily shellacked, a la Chinoise—& translated by Ted Berrigan. Slogan-like lines: “THERE’S NOBODY AT THE CONTROLS!” “NO MORE DYING.” Frank is very modest about these displays and not altogether present (ghost). Then Don unveils a huge series of additional panels, also painted on wood, that he’s collecting for a huge catalogue-anthology for which Frank O’Hara is writing the introduction. They seem to be copies of Old Masters, plus Cubist, Abstract Expressionist works, plus Jasper Johns, Joe Brainard collages & George Schneeman nudes. Frank has already compiled a list or “key,” but we’re all supposed to guess what each one is or at least the source of each, like a parlor game. The panels and list are both like a scroll covered with soft copper which peels back.
I wonder what I am doing with this crowd of older men playing a guessing game. None of us are properly naming the “sources,” Kenneth the most agitated about this.
Then the “key” is revealed and the first 2 on it are:
I. Du Boucheron
II. Jean du Jeanne Jeanne le Boucheron (wineglass)
“I knew it! I knew it!” shouts Kenneth.
We are abruptly distracted from the game by children chorusing “da da da du DA LA” over & over again, very guileless & sweet. We all go to a large bay window which looks over a grade-school courtyard. Frank says, “Our youth.”
June Dream
I am a three-dimensional map for Doctor “Sneakers” Burroughs. The Doctor is examining the map closely with a large eye glass. It’s projected above, over his head. I am pointing out the veins on the map, saying, “Look there, look there . . .” (King Lear’s dying speech) very slowly and majestically. The word “spreadeagled” appears in my head to define the map. The veins are oddly feathery, delicate, & a luminescent blue-green peacock color. Presently I notice from my position above there are others forming a mandala around the Doctor.
“Sneakers” is checking them out as they offer themselves as 3-D maps. Allen Ginsberg is “just a bundle of nerves”—like a big ball of heavy-duty-wire cable. Gregory Corso represents lymph. There’s always the subtle detail that makes these recognizable to real life: Allen’s gaping eyes from paralyzed side of face (he’s had bout with Bell’s palsy), Gregory’s Rembrandtian hair & ruddy cheek, Philip Whalen’s buddhabelly. Steven Lowe & James Grauerholz are more opaque and illusive. They are the smallest bundle, meshed together, and are summed up in the phrase “billysboys” (they are Burroughs’ secretaries in real life). I recognize my own left vein under the Doctor’s magnifying glass. He’s making sucking sounds as he walks, slightly bent, around the mandala studying each bundle laboriously, a big blue animal-like (insect) eye enlarged behind the glass. The glass turns into a full-blown miner’s mask. These bundles of people are now like boulders which make me think of “bones” and I wonder Where is, who is Bones? Burroughs himself? Words: disemboned, disemboweled, disembodied. I am attracted toward the skin bundles to protect my veins. Doc “Sneakers” is saying “Well, yes, well, hmmmmm, sure, take a broaaaaaad general view” in a withering tone, as he circles the mandala. The boulder-people-bundles are now pulsating in their respective spots, like kinetic sculptures. Allen is writhing in a most terrifying manner (turns black & blue with red sparks flying), Gregory is a sculpture of green neon, I’m a tangle of blue wires, Philip is quivering jelly, while Steven & James are fluttering like silk. My heart chakra is imploding with all this activity. There’s the pressure of blood coursing through my veins and I feel a tremendous gushing toward the whole situation, physically & emotionally. Now the “spirits” of the boulders like me are hovering above. I can feel their presences, but no longer see them. The phrase “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love” also from Shakespeare and spoken in same King Lear dying voice as before startles the Doctor who now sucks himself away like a black hole and disappears at the exact center of the mandala—down a trapdoor! This whole scene has been taking place on a stage set for “The Magic Mountain Movie.” I think to myself: What shall I do down there, at the Remember Some Apartments? I awake with the task to go boil water, for coffee, for tea.
Old Dream Ritual
We did this in several dreams in our twenties I remember to find the
origin of “book.” Remember?
Sister Bernadette is heckling me
No, my sister, support me
And my sister raises me up
She plays the piano,
Her music accompanies my life
We’re on stage
Bright spotlights on us
Sister wearing the dress I gave you
On the stage of our lives
“Etonne-moi, sister,” I cry
I have the book! I have my book!
My book, this one,
the one in the black binder, you remember
Remember, sister?
The book of our life
Infuriating black binder, never binding enough
Pages, texts, works, poetry, her heartbroken
family lineage stories
Old drama, the story of you
The story of you & me, remember?
We fell in love to change the world, remember?
A book book book book to change the world, remember?
Middle English beche from Old English bēce, akin to O Frisian bōk,
OE and Old Saxon bōc, bōk, Old High German buohha (G Buche)
Old Norse bōk, beech
Old Slavic bŭzŭ, elm
L. fāgus, beech
Gr. phēgos, edible oak
The OE variant bōc, bōk became ME bok, book,
English book
Gothic bōka, letter of alphabet
pl. bōkōs
documents, books
Originally beech-wood sticks on which runes were carved
(repeat these origins after me: beche, bēce, bōc, bōk, bouhha, etc.)
On stage:
A theater carved like the Entermedia
Made of women bones
Enter the media
We are ready for them,
We can make up the stories of our lives
They will believe anything about wild-speaking women
We were there once
All the women performers carving a circle around William Burroughs:
Laurie, Patti, Bernadette, Anne
and then one (you are that one) become my sister
and then it’s my turn
Break out of the circle, go to my book
It’s as big as the world
“I am blinded by a fiery circle”
for James Schuyler
It is summer 1970
You’ve “gone mad”
You’re washing
dollar bills
in the bathtub
& hanging them out
on the clothesline
in Southhampton to dry
You write to me
“money is shit”
Your handwriting
is angry, stubborn
Then you send
another note:
“I’ll support you” &
“don’t worry”
This is puzzling
Then
one point
at the board game
(with Kenward & Joe
in Vermont)
head split in
my hands sore
with your suffering
O Jimmy
Which breakdown
later
Payne Whitney:
venetian blinds
willfully shut
Your fingernails are
long, bent as a witch’s
Tufts of
blunt brow hair
leap
above your eyes
which roll back
cunningly
Breath comes in
clumps, “medicated”
Tongue-parched
demon inside you
great poet,
rages
What’s his fear?
“How is it outside?”
you ask
This will help
I go to open
the blinds thinking,
this helps
“No, don’t do it”
(desperate)
“Too bright!”
A Guston
homage to Philip Guston,
1913-1980
a skeletal guardian, a hungry ghost, a mafia man, an old implant,
weathered shoes, the stockmarket crash of 1929, mural eye,
narrative you could say like his dream, Moses’ tablets,
commandments of a lightbulb, deity of the street, the kitchen,
pay dirt, hit the pavement, gone, ricochet of time,
nostalgia for the-morning-after, what ring of Dante’s hell?
ring of sweat, odd laboratory, desire and villainy, sainthood
not about niceties, proper shoes, wanted to lie down with the
setting sun, wanted to be one with the place, Samuel Beckett
stopped here, this was a childhood, this was a nightmare,
this was what the World War could do, a man stood up,
a man stood down, a man stood up, a man stood down, a man
holier than a tree, holier than a mistake, holier than food,
barrenness, wantonness, the glee of the comic book, it was
a movie, a motion picture show, a matinee, it was the bites
in his life, it was rhapsody, it was solo jazz, reminder to sleep,
it was the insomniac’s revenge, it was his own mind talking,
the sun came up, the earth stood still, the paint at the tip of
brushes? implants? eyeballs? a wink, a stare, a bald lie,
dramaturgy, the paint was talking to you, hungry ghosts
in the bardo, an eggshell light, a warm tangent, a litany
of disasters, were they, the mob, responsible? who snitched?
celluloid is speeding up life, someone still smoked a cigar,
in the center of his life all the details showed one heart-risk.
Love of His Art
for Joe Brainard
I have not mastered cinematic intelligence
Screen gone,
Each little mannerism aspen shuddering:
the storm is here! the storm is here!
Keep even smoothness spread out
like the eye keeps track of sun going in
& out of clouds. Then 2 clouds crash.
The world is going at a nomad’s pace
its face you find routine
& then, surprise
none other than I experience
finding you. This is what does happen
beauty ringing the ear,
vernacular
I hope you see how crucial intrusions are
for what I mean may be clearer more insistent
because my eyes sigh in debt to yours.
When the World Was Steady
No matter how hard I try
to forget you
you always
come back to my mind,
and when you hear me singing
you may know
I am weeping for you.
—NOOTKA LOVE SONG
Blazing cinders Blaise Cendrars for my sake excellence as from a
daughter for my sake uxorious for my sake not dogmatic he
not to be confused with he a father he a gentleman Alice Aurora Alice
allay my fears Alice afterbirth The Star The Victim &
The Poet now there’s a theory appointed to be up all
night appurtenance
the Man-Who-Instills Laughter & Tears
talking forever then rolling over talking will take forever then
we’ll weep behind closed doors on occasions or rather
occasions such as expanding aging eating pick up & hold the
babies hold them close we’ll take forever Alice Albacore
we’ll take & steal for that baby we made a movie called
A & B not easy azure it’s all over borealis & it’s all over
aquamarine tropic so let’s call this Daylight & all vote the
social line We Went Out Laboring
in times of stress—red
for tyrannous authority & drowning floods, storm, she holds
fire glass jewel red color & blue against wars & enemies, carrying
in the left hand wisdom blades and I give you green,
fears of space so now you know so know you now and don’t
turn it around I mean let’s use this
I am not grass I can’t come to her calling
the waters rise for her I am not water to come for her
wailing forever talking We Went Out Laboring
& everyone & everyone should experience the ease of the
Broadway Ltd & have a friend who shares adversity distraction
insomnia dreams sigh a white woman sigh hats on hats off
hats on little bright blue towels toast & butter & jam & coffee &
The Inferno the world has oftimes been converted into chaos
are you ready for this? love time & drowning floods,
flashed out a crimson light I saw a fire which conquered a
hemisphere of darkness
lights & shadow on the page of you I’m reading We write I’m
adding this what dwelt in my dome to those domes and for my
sake howl in jurisprudence
Bring me my sister
she understands
Bring me my sister, my scribe
she is the
singer who
understands
the song
About the Author
BOOKS & PAMPHLETS BY ANNE WALDMAN
On the Wing
O My Life!
Giant Night
Baby Breakdown
No Hassles
West Indies Poems
Life Notes
Self-Portrait (with Joe Brainard)
Fast Speaking Woman
Memorial Day (with Ted Berrigan)
Journals & Dreams
Sun the Blonde Out
Shaman
Polar Ode (with Eileen Myles)
Countries
Cabin
First Baby Poems
Sphinxeries (with Denyse Du Roi)
Makeup on Empty Space
Invention (with drawings by Susan Hall)
Skin Meat Poems
The Romance Thing
Den Monde in Farbe Sehen
Blue Mosque
Shaman/Shamane
Tell Me About It: Poems for Painters
Helping the Dreamer: New & Selected Poems
Her Story (with lithographs by Elizabeth Murray)
Not a Male Pseudonym
Lokapala
Fait Accompli
Troubairitz
Iovis
Suffer the Mysterium
Kill or Cure
guardian & scribe
“Thee?” Oh, “Thee” is who cometh first
Out of my own soul-kin,
For I am homesick after mine own kind
And ordinary people touch me not.
—EZRA POUND
A Note
That bird—that sounded nearly human—what was it? Or who? And bend your ear, poet, to the rain forest jungle ground as well, all the rustlings, gestures, motions of life, contrasted to rough-weathered stone-hewn pyramid, elegant you could say, and noisy. Surely you hear the architecture of it, climbing to the stars? The aspiration of it? For it was important to understand the calendrical cycles, the comings and goings of Venus, yet noticing Venus was the same object, evening and morning, morning and evening. Noticing his or her (for Venus seems not male nor female in this version of influence) slaughters, discontents, eclipses, ellipses, changed & fixed mood in the ebb & flux of internal weaves, machinations, conquistador conquest, surprise. A rude awakening for those who inhabited the dream.
Could I ever “let” my blood as they purportedly did? I wonder. Literally, no. Drawn from the tongue? But you pour that blood symbolically onto the virgin page, scribed with brush or turkey feathers dipped in black or red paint contained in conch-shell inkpots. And then bind those pages with a jaguar-skin cover. La Ruta Maya.
This codex is never lazy. It wishes to be a mere script of and for a dreamer who dwelt in a prosperous/desperate turn of century, torqued by doubt, fear, imagination, passion. Let it be said she was a raging insomniac.
“Kill or cure” is a psychological nexus of negative capability, an old Tantric notion. To hold simultaneous thoughts, often seemingly contradictory thoughts, in the mind, without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is the battle cry, the underpinning of a tragic age as well as going way back to primordial cellular reaches of how things move. It is, in the whispered oral lineage, kill and cure, which seems cruel for relative quotidian action and implies power little understood by this writer. Kill ego’s greedy grasping, its whine and agression. Ego’s self-perpetuation is the sacrificial victim, the corpse you stomp upon. As it dies, you are simultaneously cured and live on, transformed, rewired. An old shamanic trick. Isn’t that enough task for one planet’s aggressive nature? You kill or cut out like the surgeon what’s unnecessary, all those toxins, cancers, dark attitudes, shed the endometrium, then heal the rest. To survive. You get the picture. But because we live in a dark age beset with dualities and because time is precious, one makes a choice. Kill or cure. Against or for. It is ethos that beckons. Stuff of poetry? Ha! You might laugh. Words may either kill or cure as well, who hasn’t felt their deadly sting or balm? As a further note and pun, the Tibetan word for mandala is kyil khor. Kyil means center, and khor means fringe or surrounding area: gestalt. It’s a way of looking at situations in terms of relative truth. If that exists, this exists; if this exists, that exists. Center and fringe are interdependent situations. Killing or curing are interdependent situations. You can’t have one without the other.
As grizzled cracked-voiced Andy Devine would say in quaint grainy celluloid Western over a tin cup of cowboy coffee laced with homemade hootch, “It’ll either kill or cure ya!”
Jade eyes of the jaguar
the last thing you saw
or
wall of skulls
& which of these
out of all of these
something (one?) startled awake
Chac needs blood this century too
Venus conjunct
cat-like tongues & penises
spurt (“let”) onto bark
it is written
it is written
This book is a composite of journals, travel pieces, vignettes, political rants, credos, manifestos, love songs, dreams, meditations, visitations from male-writer-ghost ancestors, homages to the great women poets, and other states of mind and occasion. As such it is a body of both quotidian and imaginary realities. It is a cento of my mind and mind’s musical making. It’s also what’s on my mind. . . . A sampler. A patchwork of day and night. The book is organized through the basic instincts of tone and impulse and runs not always parallel to linear time. Rather moves randomly yet to great purpose from the Yucatán to Bali to Quebec City to Tehran to Managua to Germany to Toulouse to New York City to Oslo to Hawaii to Miami and Dallas and many spots in between, ending somewhere near May 1993 scattering my father’s ashes over a lake in southern New Jersey, USA, followed by another Maya meditation. The book spans a world of attention.
A.W.
August 11, 1993 / Cobá, Quintana Roo
Table of Contents
Suppose a Game
Suppose language is a game
whose rules are dreamed
by an agreement of players
Once broken, the speakers are tossed
& know no rude tongue but their own
no (fixed) meaning in solipsism
But always in a process of being stranded
are spectators of solipsism
stuck with themselves, empirical data
Theirs is private demon language
obstruction, ownership, demand
Is the door open?
Rain here yet?
Have their ideas entered all heads?
Is this the end of the game?
They quickly become the ex-modern
and you, poet, enter the arena
an animating principle to a touch of words
Seduce them to your page
caress plosiveness
beat them a fine shapelessness
Or sentences are for the first time stark & clear
not untrue to what flaunts style:
webs of cloth, a mirror you hold
The players conjure nihilism, their only way
to be curious, vain, a waste of strength
as confusion weakens the vocal art
Cybernetics is the exchange of their news for yours
Yours is: However abundant the nectar,
the bees stop dancing as the sugar drops
They tell you nothing, their lips are sealed, you keep dancing
Was the agreement that words shine like sun,
or glint as weapons in moonlight?
A Name as Revery
Ate the bare limbs of words
to find my name:
of fevers, of trees it’s made
Choice out of jugular to be born
Centuries of solar flowers gone by
Belle, where ya born? Moi? Moi?
Verdict: tens attend to
doubt all doubt as
La Self errs in revenge
Then ravages in a kind of honor umbrage
Although American
to a haute parentage we swing
John of the Hands & Waldemann’s was my father
LeFevre, my mother, exposed in sandals & silk
Her Night
Out of an eye comes research
Her night: portrait & a description
A night of knowledge was plainly hers
Two ways of writing explain this
There was her night
And then there was her night, a repetition
A night in a quarry in Helena, Montana, was not anticipated
Or at dusk before the night had started:
The Lavender Open Pit Copper Mine near Bisbee
Everywhere she claims it as hers: purple, dark, starry
Buffalo: spring snow
Amherst: Emily Dickinson’s night, what was that?
Night is anyone’s guess
Naming the stars & planets: Saturn still extant after all this time
So I went on with an idea of the night
Djuna’s night
All-American nights
Recesses one has one’s program for
She dreamed her clothes were like Spanish ice cream
She dreamed a moth arrived to convey a scarlet secret
It was a female moth
The mosquitoes protested they were female too
She had the desire to include a shawl & Kleenex
She walked where there had never been a mountain
Can you be sure?
Can you be that sure?
She would think about walking to Sanitas Mountain at night
If any thought about night or place with night inside it is left out
she’s sorry
For she can’t even begin to remember the rooms:
El Rito, Bellevue, La Quinta, the old man’s stuffy sitting room
She was lost in the abstraction of the girl’s perfume
Nights in front of a shrine prostrating to her potentially
luminous mind
Sleeping late
Literature is being written at night
The couchette rattles into Trieste
A plane jets across the continent
Now I am above the clouds & the moon is up with me
Seeing what someone else means by night is another option
There was her night, and then there was her night, a repetition
She picked up the telephone while, she, the other,
walked toward a mountain
There was her night and then there was her night—the other’s—a
repetition
She suspends all preconceptions and forgets the concept “moon”
It could be frightening if you were a prisoner
Or, a relief
Her night is of no importance really
But there has never been another one like it
Moonlight: hear the amorous cats
Moonlight: the South American map lies on the hammock
exposed to the elements
She did not “drop by” at 1 a.m. as supposed
But made another night call
A bird called
Confused by jet lag, time went out of her control
She shrugged & went to a party
Her escort parked the car near Coit Tower
In between lovers
Between textures: silk, velvet, cool cotton
Throw back the bedspread!
Out of the eye comes the moon
Out of the eye: seduction
What does it really matter what anyone does
There was her night
And then there was her night, a repetition
Minnesota is just like that
She wouldn’t give out her address in Oregon
Her coat was made for a night like this
Her night: where was it leading?
None knew
Display her zeal hour by hour
Opium would change this dream
Her nervousness was a blind
Talk about something like: “We in this period
have not lived in remembering” or
“My excitement is my open eyes”
Her clothing is of a daily-island-life variety
A line distinguishes it
She almost traveled to Tent City out of love & honor
Everything will have to be repeated in the morning
Listen: hum of typewriter, Jacqueline’s loud refrigerator & clock
Listen: a long line of thoughts bargaining to enter in
One thought: the time is 3:15 a.m.
Another thought: there is only one way to phone her
And another: night is long to her & short to us
Not at all
She is ahead of herself but behind every action
Concentration was like having the night inside her all the time she said
She said she’d go to any length to stay awake, imbibing controlled
substances as well as caffeine
She said this because she was excited about making double time
It was her night and then it was her night a repetition
This is an ordinary great deal to know
Of Ah Or
I cannot be but
fierce
My tongue—is it so?
& liaison of that tight
pact of
this to that
A bargain
rises
swells
reigns
sends darts North
when it is you,
iced over,
I thrust
in my heart
to consider
All the vowels
sing how to
melt that glare
or
stare into
doubt like
words in a
bubble
Can’t back out
now
but sing to you
a fire across
our divide,
my tongue is forked!
Flesh language!
We fall into
pieces of
the painting
to be
put
in motion
Splash or Freeze
of Ah or
Whelp
Tell to
old Greeks
who knew
to stress
(pounce)
stretch out
as you your limbs
the statues tell us
Move it! Move it!
& the Ode
got danced
Tell it to poet
whatshername
Heliodora?
who sang
& shook her ankles,
swallowed honey
to make
a sweeter sound or
Ah, Macabru
I tune your lyre
Stomp on the page!
Speech you are golden
Speech you crack ope my skull
Speech you lieth not down a while
but even as I dream
you rouse me
Rock bed!
Break into babe increments
prick ear awake
Spit juice in my face
Fricative magic excites
every corpuscle
Implode & regroup
Assail me with
all yr plans
to consider
the length & shadow
of vowels
American wags listen
The West is underdeveloped
I want to ride you out here
under Big Sky
Rail ’gainst acid rain,
cruelty, weird belief systems
Insult those who do you
no good in their squawk & bite
Who serve you poorly in
their bid for glory
condemned
’fore they
even sputter forth
What goddess will abide a dull,
ignorant tongue?
I speak it
You play me
that forms it
Quote Captive
New sleep uptorn,
Wakeful suspension between dream and dream—
—LAURA RIDING
Orbits of intertextual modern talk
now poetic, now skeptical,
now written down for human hands to hold,
or sensibly dropped, or squirm and die
now rise again. What do you do?
And to deserve them? Night goes down . . .
What do you choose? An object for my verb . . .
Who let you in? The mysterious animal . . .
Who are you rooting for? A dream . . .
Born to talk? And sing and write this down . . .
Wait for the place to be abounding in decision
or shaft all strategies. Scratch them?
Conversation isn’t cheap here, it’s looming,
precious, sacred, clumsy, inept
Wait for them—the words or concepts is it?—to be
newly minted then strike. Terrorize the terminology
Lunar, linear, arch, lingering under cover of bed
They could be my sisters, those buddy thoughts
They could be addressing the new populism
or undressing old idioms
Cluster round. This is the clutter
of mind I offer an argument to
Singular masters take heed the goad’s unstoppable
or make your way clear to surrender her light
A woman rises in Houston, sets in Michigan
and never sleeps. Oh tempt a strapping mind . . .
A thought is mangled in the wrong hands
because it oversteps a sleep-boundary
Necessary to speak although you might
never know the mastery of sleep
Now sing and write this down
Jack Kerouac Dream
He’s talking speedily about the evil of the feminine but he likes it. O bitter tones of the demon feminine. He’s in a repressed New England winter room, but oddly it’s like the old whorehouse in Eldora with bats inside the walls. There’s peeling wallpaper of gold fleur-de-lys pattern on green on the far side. And his “coat of arms,” or rather “his mother’s arm coat (arm chair?)” is close by. It looks like a shrunken deer’s head, size of a rabbit’s foot with French letters crudely scrawled on a wooden plaque beneath, “est peur” (translates “is fear” but cognate to, or sounds like, “espoir”—hope). He’s shivering in an old camel’s hair coat, smoking—Chesterfields? Old Golds?—in front of a raging fire. He’s wanting to “hunt and gather,” he says, but it’s too cold. Where can we go to forage now that “all the skies are broken”? I am thinking if only I were born earlier I could love him, take care of him. Close to his face now, I see its raging corpuscles in the dancing firelight. Intricate aborigine designs tattooed on a remarkably pristine visage. “It’s a drift, flesh and bone, mortification, deadpan, life’s a raked field,” he mumbles. I’m part of a Buddhist plot to get him to be reborn to “liberate all sentient beings.” I’m inviting him to give a reading at The Academy of the Meticulous Future. But what may I offer? “I tried calling your phone was dead was why I came.” “Ummm.” He’s off somewhere else, his eyes moist and glassy.
April Dream
I’m with Frank O’Hara, Kenward Elmslie & Kenneth Koch visiting Donald Hall’s studio or lab (like Ivy League fraternity digs) in “Old Ann Arbor.” Lots of drink & chitchat about latest long poems & how do we all rate with Shakespeare. Don is taking himself very seriously & nervously as grand host conducting us about the place. It’s sort of class reunion atmosphere, campus history (Harvard?) & poetry business to be discussed. German mugs, wooden knickknacks, prints, postcards decorate the room, Kenward making snappy cracks to me about every little detail. Where’s John Ashbery? We notice huge panels of Frank O’Hara poems on several walls and Kenneth reads aloud: “a child means BONG” from “Biotherm.” We notice more panels with O’Hara works, white on red—very prettily shellacked, a la Chinoise—& translated by Ted Berrigan. Slogan-like lines: “THERE’S NOBODY AT THE CONTROLS!” “NO MORE DYING.” Frank is very modest about these displays and not altogether present (ghost). Then Don unveils a huge series of additional panels, also painted on wood, that he’s collecting for a huge catalogue-anthology for which Frank O’Hara is writing the introduction. They seem to be copies of Old Masters, plus Cubist, Abstract Expressionist works, plus Jasper Johns, Joe Brainard collages & George Schneeman nudes. Frank has already compiled a list or “key,” but we’re all supposed to guess what each one is or at least the source of each, like a parlor game. The panels and list are both like a scroll covered with soft copper which peels back.
I wonder what I am doing with this crowd of older men playing a guessing game. None of us are properly naming the “sources,” Kenneth the most agitated about this.
Then the “key” is revealed and the first 2 on it are:
I. Du Boucheron
II. Jean du Jeanne Jeanne le Boucheron (wineglass)
“I knew it! I knew it!” shouts Kenneth.
We are abruptly distracted from the game by children chorusing “da da da du DA LA” over & over again, very guileless & sweet. We all go to a large bay window which looks over a grade-school courtyard. Frank says, “Our youth.”
June Dream
I am a three-dimensional map for Doctor “Sneakers” Burroughs. The Doctor is examining the map closely with a large eye glass. It’s projected above, over his head. I am pointing out the veins on the map, saying, “Look there, look there . . .” (King Lear’s dying speech) very slowly and majestically. The word “spreadeagled” appears in my head to define the map. The veins are oddly feathery, delicate, & a luminescent blue-green peacock color. Presently I notice from my position above there are others forming a mandala around the Doctor.
“Sneakers” is checking them out as they offer themselves as 3-D maps. Allen Ginsberg is “just a bundle of nerves”—like a big ball of heavy-duty-wire cable. Gregory Corso represents lymph. There’s always the subtle detail that makes these recognizable to real life: Allen’s gaping eyes from paralyzed side of face (he’s had bout with Bell’s palsy), Gregory’s Rembrandtian hair & ruddy cheek, Philip Whalen’s buddhabelly. Steven Lowe & James Grauerholz are more opaque and illusive. They are the smallest bundle, meshed together, and are summed up in the phrase “billysboys” (they are Burroughs’ secretaries in real life). I recognize my own left vein under the Doctor’s magnifying glass. He’s making sucking sounds as he walks, slightly bent, around the mandala studying each bundle laboriously, a big blue animal-like (insect) eye enlarged behind the glass. The glass turns into a full-blown miner’s mask. These bundles of people are now like boulders which make me think of “bones” and I wonder Where is, who is Bones? Burroughs himself? Words: disemboned, disemboweled, disembodied. I am attracted toward the skin bundles to protect my veins. Doc “Sneakers” is saying “Well, yes, well, hmmmmm, sure, take a broaaaaaad general view” in a withering tone, as he circles the mandala. The boulder-people-bundles are now pulsating in their respective spots, like kinetic sculptures. Allen is writhing in a most terrifying manner (turns black & blue with red sparks flying), Gregory is a sculpture of green neon, I’m a tangle of blue wires, Philip is quivering jelly, while Steven & James are fluttering like silk. My heart chakra is imploding with all this activity. There’s the pressure of blood coursing through my veins and I feel a tremendous gushing toward the whole situation, physically & emotionally. Now the “spirits” of the boulders like me are hovering above. I can feel their presences, but no longer see them. The phrase “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love” also from Shakespeare and spoken in same King Lear dying voice as before startles the Doctor who now sucks himself away like a black hole and disappears at the exact center of the mandala—down a trapdoor! This whole scene has been taking place on a stage set for “The Magic Mountain Movie.” I think to myself: What shall I do down there, at the Remember Some Apartments? I awake with the task to go boil water, for coffee, for tea.
Old Dream Ritual
We did this in several dreams in our twenties I remember to find the
origin of “book.” Remember?
Sister Bernadette is heckling me
No, my sister, support me
And my sister raises me up
She plays the piano,
Her music accompanies my life
We’re on stage
Bright spotlights on us
Sister wearing the dress I gave you
On the stage of our lives
“Etonne-moi, sister,” I cry
I have the book! I have my book!
My book, this one,
the one in the black binder, you remember
Remember, sister?
The book of our life
Infuriating black binder, never binding enough
Pages, texts, works, poetry, her heartbroken
family lineage stories
Old drama, the story of you
The story of you & me, remember?
We fell in love to change the world, remember?
A book book book book to change the world, remember?
Middle English beche from Old English bēce, akin to O Frisian bōk,
OE and Old Saxon bōc, bōk, Old High German buohha (G Buche)
Old Norse bōk, beech
Old Slavic bŭzŭ, elm
L. fāgus, beech
Gr. phēgos, edible oak
The OE variant bōc, bōk became ME bok, book,
English book
Gothic bōka, letter of alphabet
pl. bōkōs
documents, books
Originally beech-wood sticks on which runes were carved
(repeat these origins after me: beche, bēce, bōc, bōk, bouhha, etc.)
On stage:
A theater carved like the Entermedia
Made of women bones
Enter the media
We are ready for them,
We can make up the stories of our lives
They will believe anything about wild-speaking women
We were there once
All the women performers carving a circle around William Burroughs:
Laurie, Patti, Bernadette, Anne
and then one (you are that one) become my sister
and then it’s my turn
Break out of the circle, go to my book
It’s as big as the world
“I am blinded by a fiery circle”
for James Schuyler
It is summer 1970
You’ve “gone mad”
You’re washing
dollar bills
in the bathtub
& hanging them out
on the clothesline
in Southhampton to dry
You write to me
“money is shit”
Your handwriting
is angry, stubborn
Then you send
another note:
“I’ll support you” &
“don’t worry”
This is puzzling
Then
one point
at the board game
(with Kenward & Joe
in Vermont)
head split in
my hands sore
with your suffering
O Jimmy
Which breakdown
later
Payne Whitney:
venetian blinds
willfully shut
Your fingernails are
long, bent as a witch’s
Tufts of
blunt brow hair
leap
above your eyes
which roll back
cunningly
Breath comes in
clumps, “medicated”
Tongue-parched
demon inside you
great poet,
rages
What’s his fear?
“How is it outside?”
you ask
This will help
I go to open
the blinds thinking,
this helps
“No, don’t do it”
(desperate)
“Too bright!”
A Guston
homage to Philip Guston,
1913-1980
a skeletal guardian, a hungry ghost, a mafia man, an old implant,
weathered shoes, the stockmarket crash of 1929, mural eye,
narrative you could say like his dream, Moses’ tablets,
commandments of a lightbulb, deity of the street, the kitchen,
pay dirt, hit the pavement, gone, ricochet of time,
nostalgia for the-morning-after, what ring of Dante’s hell?
ring of sweat, odd laboratory, desire and villainy, sainthood
not about niceties, proper shoes, wanted to lie down with the
setting sun, wanted to be one with the place, Samuel Beckett
stopped here, this was a childhood, this was a nightmare,
this was what the World War could do, a man stood up,
a man stood down, a man stood up, a man stood down, a man
holier than a tree, holier than a mistake, holier than food,
barrenness, wantonness, the glee of the comic book, it was
a movie, a motion picture show, a matinee, it was the bites
in his life, it was rhapsody, it was solo jazz, reminder to sleep,
it was the insomniac’s revenge, it was his own mind talking,
the sun came up, the earth stood still, the paint at the tip of
brushes? implants? eyeballs? a wink, a stare, a bald lie,
dramaturgy, the paint was talking to you, hungry ghosts
in the bardo, an eggshell light, a warm tangent, a litany
of disasters, were they, the mob, responsible? who snitched?
celluloid is speeding up life, someone still smoked a cigar,
in the center of his life all the details showed one heart-risk.
Love of His Art
for Joe Brainard
I have not mastered cinematic intelligence
Screen gone,
Each little mannerism aspen shuddering:
the storm is here! the storm is here!
Keep even smoothness spread out
like the eye keeps track of sun going in
& out of clouds. Then 2 clouds crash.
The world is going at a nomad’s pace
its face you find routine
& then, surprise
none other than I experience
finding you. This is what does happen
beauty ringing the ear,
vernacular
I hope you see how crucial intrusions are
for what I mean may be clearer more insistent
because my eyes sigh in debt to yours.
When the World Was Steady
No matter how hard I try
to forget you
you always
come back to my mind,
and when you hear me singing
you may know
I am weeping for you.
—NOOTKA LOVE SONG
Blazing cinders Blaise Cendrars for my sake excellence as from a
daughter for my sake uxorious for my sake not dogmatic he
not to be confused with he a father he a gentleman Alice Aurora Alice
allay my fears Alice afterbirth The Star The Victim &
The Poet now there’s a theory appointed to be up all
night appurtenance
the Man-Who-Instills Laughter & Tears
talking forever then rolling over talking will take forever then
we’ll weep behind closed doors on occasions or rather
occasions such as expanding aging eating pick up & hold the
babies hold them close we’ll take forever Alice Albacore
we’ll take & steal for that baby we made a movie called
A & B not easy azure it’s all over borealis & it’s all over
aquamarine tropic so let’s call this Daylight & all vote the
social line We Went Out Laboring
in times of stress—red
for tyrannous authority & drowning floods, storm, she holds
fire glass jewel red color & blue against wars & enemies, carrying
in the left hand wisdom blades and I give you green,
fears of space so now you know so know you now and don’t
turn it around I mean let’s use this
I am not grass I can’t come to her calling
the waters rise for her I am not water to come for her
wailing forever talking We Went Out Laboring
& everyone & everyone should experience the ease of the
Broadway Ltd & have a friend who shares adversity distraction
insomnia dreams sigh a white woman sigh hats on hats off
hats on little bright blue towels toast & butter & jam & coffee &
The Inferno the world has oftimes been converted into chaos
are you ready for this? love time & drowning floods,
flashed out a crimson light I saw a fire which conquered a
hemisphere of darkness
lights & shadow on the page of you I’m reading We write I’m
adding this what dwelt in my dome to those domes and for my
sake howl in jurisprudence
Bring me my sister
she understands
Bring me my sister, my scribe
she is the
singer who
understands
the song
About the Author
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