Andalou

As if a Curtain

I

The theatre's central section was filled
almost to the seat; I sat across the right aisle
where people languored in coats & portfolios
reserving a nest of several seats' width for their own
expansive privacies: the space
of a cinema is to be trusted
(on a train to Charlottetown
I sat awake at 3 a.m. & the sky finally
was like us, touristic eye
closed in on its self-image, for an hour
or two; & people softly
dropped arms alongside their torsos
groins pumped lightly by the chuff
chuffing over rails, open to each other's
groin and prostrate arms
& dry throats coughed, snorted quiet,
murmured monosyllabic escapades, 'crystal,
cry-stal harp,' the moon involved
in such trusting haircloth, lapels of musk
I might have caressed myself to their chorus, gotten
lost in chuff, in breathing then
within a small cloth diary
travelled the desiccated forest lines
outside St. John, & gone on to imagine
a tunnel, the drawing-back of a lofty curtain, airborne
static & ahead, music like civilization's lightboard
blinking one by one then, people
waking to hurry a palm over the warmth
the abeyance of their mute, drowsing groins
and to investigate, to their left, & to their right.


II

Remembering movies
is like disbelieving a dream
whose eye moved across the bleak
outsideness of a parking lot, moored
somehow at the brick barrier, paused momentarily,
& slowly listed upward to a window
underscored by venetian metal; advanced then
between matte strips (glass
atomizing as you forget
to accommodate it) through to an interior,
your one eye wincing at neon glare, sudden,
and crystal, the crowd of young
executives who welcome you, not once
mentioning your other, missing, eye
who embrace you with velvet commentaries
on your health and perpetual tardiness -
'the train, or my children ...'
- & beneath it, your one sweaty, tallow
breast, the teetering, unpartnered heel
tactfully unremarked-on
amid the latest raquetball gossip;
until your lop-sided, soon forlorn, hipbone
falls silent, sloughing to a darker corner
muttering alone about last week's adventure
to the theatre - the clever arm close around
your rhythmic, meandering waistline, the wind,
& behind it - row upon row of bronze-
moistened dashboards, doubled in wet pavement
for good company, the lot full now, but just next to it
remembered darkly, your second
leaning-forward breast.

_________

I can't be dissociated.

Lilith guide me.
Medusa hold me firm.
Je t'embrasse.

The blade and softness discover each other
because they are young and curious observers.
Light bulb shatters, self-propelled
circumference ruined to rent a peasant's strep.
Glass under eyelid 'shards delivered
from ovaries in the guise of a natural
itinerary.'

Knife splits the eyeball.
Knife extrudes self-image.
Lilith guide me to clinics by an ocean.

I storm the eyes of an ugly man.
Alone for the ambush I firmly grasp your hand.

The eyes are parents themselves, have work to do. Their lateral motion suggests the slicing, the planed metal edge of a businessman's tact. Mechanical arms with sharpened steel discs waving nice day hmmm the drone canvassing in taut, prescribed pathways. Where the eyes are. White childish globes.

The eyes which have never seen their own spine imagine themselves everywhere. In all directions they sit, passively, attackable, these white nuclei. The filamented iris with its pupil squared like a nail-head is only drawn onto the bulbous white surface, and has no jurisdiction in the cervical core. Vision is whiteness, is Snow. Fields and fields stricken repeatedly by the blades of rusted tractors. And suddenly the eyes are caught up, choking back fear in an actual throat, in red red clarity there is the eye intact and rent, a woman kissed unambiguously on the lips by her brother.

The woman who ...

(after Yvonne Rainer)

As if to cut myself off, to interrupt
a particular address, pictures of blades
float up. float up through water
which is my clear element, my sentient issue:
should arms, the knots of shoulders, mill
like wooden hinges, their circular hunching
repetitive millwork divert me, loose cement
into the garden's subconscious; make it dream
'lake,' 'mother forge,' 'glacial
melt,' or simply 'pool' with laps of frenzy?
Substitute logs, their smooth brown buff,
for slit-sides of change
for this is what it is now clearly
like water, the edges of upheaval / subversion
razorquick within me
metallic in the iris are 'ways in which
I allow myself to be passive or accepting'
these thoughts of clash, of attack, blindings I
wash myself in waters of pure thawing snow
eyes closed inside the clear dissolve
as if to cut myself off, to
float clear

Note: In her film 'The Man Who Envied Women,' Rainer inserts the eye slashing scene from 'Un Chien Andalou' as the male protagonist starts to consider his privilege of subjectivity in western culture.

Recalling the cord

for mom

You are signalling for my
synopsis. easy words. song titles
I should know the tunes to go with
focused on a nuclear future.

being Not a term of family. I have come
to love you because finally
we look alike, clear helical
voices moving cost-per-second to self-recognitions
care of Bell.

The kids I'm meeting nowadays
call their moms Lucy and Nancy.
this, face to face with fruit leather spunk then
their square gazes dismember, Stop
Telling Me, knocked over the shoulder
like pieces of hair. mid-fray, the newborn
has still to absorb shock of immanent
separations. telephone birthday hopes.
Being 'missing' to someone, her small agenda.

You know the house's layout now,
understand why I sleep
where I do. My city
multiplies compacted brick, stone, aluminum
facades, the optical nuisance of green
metered all around the size of a stove
to suggest the safety of thousands of young
expecting couples. You are brisk
walking the synaptic route home
over an agreed-upon hill
to pale warm food, then your head nods
fighting a little, down, this frustrates
you most and you warn me, Sleep now,
sleep and eat well, Sense a balance
of the body, the mind, enduring
impatience.

I still get thrums of main energy
at one or two a.m. Then my passaged mornings
are aborted, speaking afternoon
like a practical sound. calendrical
memos dispatched with an immediate
bluster of terms, the time,
I can't believe, hourglass latitudes
collapsing over into me like your strange
disorder of the inner ear.

We will live forever with
our eclectic panics, our difficult
health. So much to do, this cord
between us, spiralling, we
each feel, inward to ovaries
dissipate now like watercolour
representations of rock

wondering over the distance
Why we came from here
all alone, when it's birthdays
stringing these voices to a single echo
echogram

September 19

Seven weeks to the day, I held
Her or him like a branch.
Like a tipped word. Through the window
Is another window.

September 12

Architecture seemed important because our passion identified with the forest. Trees then becoming a bracelet for the lake, a kind of fence as if our distance from their relation destroyed our knowledge that the tree's structure is kin to our own. You felt of wood when I most loved you. The body continually gives up its ash, at work, or sleep, I connote how we were patient and remembered, then, the wood.

A bridge was positioned like memory above the gorge. Through a complex of shrub and colourless trunks, I left you, my dress chronological with blossoms trailing to bud. Your valediction like untasted water swirled in the pink rockface behind; but my view past choppy registers of posts angling the bridge's recession breached the rock) you) the bridge) my dress) I blink on stern fragments. This is when I most want the snow again.

When I desire the beauty of snow I recall windows which displayed its temperament. As if traversal became an act of filling which was redundant after snow. Your companionship introduced a solace, making love the slow avalanche curve exactly a glass filament and then into darkness. Supplanting above in hip-level, my capacity for colour.

The bannister ripples now like whitewater. Implies an abstract deeper than the gargoyle flooding of my dreams within a drowned heart.


a woman in her own way, incoercible (liquids
stubborn in memory) leaves the hardwood surface
its four struts, the denser air around it

tactile; point of pivot can be drawn back
or forthwith, petrified wash
of ocean - or is it door, a way of walking

oust (sss

October 25

Retour

The walls are plaster and resonant as snow. My centre introduces herself as a swirled, mammal-like clitoris: a pulse amplifying to plush cubic barriers, each with interiors mysterious on the surface, where I
write out of being
an erotic place.

December 26

The window, because she is part of an architectural construct, has no implicit sexuality. Most objects in the room reside in celibate solitude. This is the darkness. Yet certain surfaces turn their full porosity for her perusal. She is affable and provides transmissions of moonlight. Despite the desires projected back from many small objects the window is preoccupied in measuring how deeply the moon has privileged itself in her body. Now, there are strategies of infiltration she can no longer stomach, regardless of the trees? lucid acceptances and beauty, both of which she holds in plain view.

May 24

Released from between silver prongs the hair gestates hopefulness for a safe and fluid delivery. An infant miraculously combs its wet scrawl clear of the unbound threads, imagining brown water, italian mud havoc, my thoroughfare caresses. These sensations

are ghostly and called up as well for scrutiny. My hair leans into elbow crooks and plays like fingers at the edges of cushions. It has few other postures, save the likelihood of wind. But my brain moves along the length of dark filaments, experimenting its blind births.

The branches out back today were crosswoven as deep foyers. Kids like fat stars divested their snowsuits and pretended to fly naked through tunnels. My hair kept masking their passage, insisting the forked detriments of what is present, now here, enmeshed

in prongs of wood or hair or silver. And through nights of a dreamed pregnancy,

The flowing locks
The flowing locks

December 29

The sweater folds into purple and red selvedges, its neck stitches queued still on the sluggish needle. After the fact of christmas, my fingers retire from contingent knot-tying, couched in snow drifts and the now-rooted future: her expanse of fitting parts of humour like months along one well-meant thread. A year has counted itself off and separateness, coined for ambition, is splayed like an ostrich-meek neckline, ragged, clearly (who says) half a heart. What have I lost of body or focus, by writing past the annum, into closures lapsing on kisses? Untying the knots on everything! Our phonecall became your body unrigid in crescent shadows, the flat lake uncollected, white snow riddled with the wants of moon. We keep speaking though declension should move to release, just as I wore cynthia's dress, black as echo, deliberate to the year's last table.

January 1

The blue snow moors in darker blue. As a rooftop it recalls elevated, breath-short steps I took on the moon's private field last night. Dreams of intergalactica and later wearing three-inch ivory pumps ? - Is the moon white Establishment?! Ski slopes were designated with flags on her lucid side, as if intelligence had sets of white peaks disconsidered by the shaded prairie where I walked. Still I felt a massive ecstacy, not at all weightless, but one active on her bluish body, smiling.

January 2

In von Trotta's film sisters construe themselves in each other, ingeminate mirrors as the silica maquette of a camera. Inside the eye is a long-haired synopsis of looking: the self redoubled, her back to your inquiry.

So tonight we go to the local mall to find a black or grey skirt for you, your efficiencies. I keep bringing up the moon dream, cream-coloured furrows in an amphitheatre of diminishing access. Concede leaving tomorrow instead of at midnight, the bus will go either way; or not at all if I conjure usual mishap from a smooth and necessary transit. Somehow the last rack of dresses revolves and stops, silver as a dime, host of small costumes alongside my torso ? you buy me a swish black outfit pretending July,

my birthday disjunct and declared: today. Even though you are capricorn, celebrated by ice & snow, here tropes the polyester palace, Towers of Sudbury, all glittery with fluorescent tracks, benevolent as solstice, or sisters.

January 2

Pere II

Again I am equidistant from you all.

At Pointe-Fortune ridges of bush veer into rock as the bus moves ahead to Montreal. The overpasses implant themselves above our long root, fog-softened like organic portals of puberty. Always I feel awkward, choosing another city for my life's design as if the leisure of snowshoes and late mornings were equitable only with childhood. I told you: I don't want to do interesting things when I'm fifty, meaning somehow this bus moves faster than denominative traffic, onto shapes emergent from a white glaze and the currency of desires. So my belly is empty, unpregnant and without dowry. Trees seem physically fit as my figure, thin in the middle. You still slip me money for heating bills and dire wishes, though I have just a few. Now the road streams me closer to an ambidextrous highway where my choices are apparent and pursued. Your granite clock, batteries wrapped for later, rocks anyway like a metronome above my head, the rack creaking. Time has been my big worry too long. The country ahead is bleached graphite and a well-travelled hourglass, snow settling in the lower cone of vision, collatable nerve for wistful riders.

January 3

Not Egypt

Pulled, rallied, interpolated by the cord and its manner of temptation. I speak to you once and my thirst for this conversation, your blood's thinking, blooms in me like red wine. The field with its churning preparedness (for bed, for sleep) siphons you. You are a farmer. A farm.

A diesel convoy is driven past, steaming lights first. The sky behind concentrates to darkness. From Cornwall, all is unhanded, as in movies when the affronted heroine pouts 'unhand me,' then is shirked backwards. Despite the truth of her wanting this leavetaking, she is rejected and it stings like the thin concave fingermarks pressed in her forearm. She aches in the off-centre panorama of the saloon, her clothes fall away as if they have been eaten by fire. She notices the involution of pores of breathing of the pinstraight road streaming in curlicue to Montreal. Ache, she feels. Sky sediments. Always a sieve this wall after the complaint is voiced - 'you had no right to say such things' - the first thread of morning stiffening her spine upright from their bed, her half-jog then dressing again spanking the door against its jamb so he wakes to this signal. This ache. She is swift to the gravel's velocity. Whatever happens to the sky happens in her mouth. He flails after her, sleepwalking but faster, panic's dream. The highway passes itself under the bus's timetable like a garden of hands. Mid-week between palm sunday and easter and after Cornwall, the other side of farmland Ontario. His boots are slaked in clay-pale muck. They smell. She can smell his body so musky. His fingers shoved deep in her vagina, like her lover of last night but more enduring, still in her. The driver rattles a tin the pepsi drunk and sickeningly sweet in its fizzy after-presence. Everyone on the bus occupies some part of the smell, the shared naming and turning away from it. Her hand moves like a hurt cat or the ripped-off reconnaissance of another woman, same age, stripped of all she owned by an apartment blaze. 'A new beginning,' she consoles the other. Earlier in the afternoon her arranged lunch with a new-desired man, stroking (lightly) his arm before parting. It stung. He was not in that arm. The bus zooms through underpasses, it multiplies in all its windows a self-conscious tab kept by the unasleep (all faking) passengers. Alexandria not Egypt. The arrow-flight purveyor of borders, soon anyway, a series of crossings. The heroine just lying there prone on a track, ankles and wrists smarting for bondage so she can deal with something material. She aches in her vagina from the ribbon-thin fingers that coil up inside her like a highway. How to get to New York from here she says out loud, her tongue open, a tar-dry valley. Palisades of transport lights, they sting too in her eyes, wanting out, wanting borders to cross.

Mercure

Your mind moves along the train rails. It flees my body and the rills in the field's commitment to you. How the earth acquiesced to your hand plunging, pulsing in it like a text. And then was apprehended again like the same text, internally. So your cock-shaped mind is the weight I feel dropping suddenly, unpacking its pontoon to taxi along the silver track.

What I always forgot, what I remembered, were the churning machinations of the air conditioner and the chaos underfoot, the jolting bass tirade, like cow tissue ricocheting under the train. My body's absorption was so much louder. But en route to Pembroke

the movement was a cataclysm at my brain. Then reason took leave, subdivided into multiple privacies, and sat hunching in overhead luggage racks. But. I wanted its perverse weight back, to fill my intestines. Instead leapt to a thought of snakes floating

in me, goaded by flagrant upholstery. Then even snakes were inefficient, produced no effect. Fear, and revulsion, ADVENTURE, came from other places now.

The young boys ahead used their boredom like slot machines. We differed. I put one of my eyes on the moon projected outside the window. An aluminum bridge, three seconds in length, trisected the one eye, the one I kept, just as the lid slid over it. My skull flashed like a metal negative. No one in the car said a word. The left window moored all the passengers to it like an underwater video monitor huge before bulbous faces. Victims unsure whether they slept or dreamed or confessed caesarian traumas. Did they? This screen was a projection. It was where my travelling eye met the other one, recently unpacked. I am sure. Together they were watery, not livid but stern. My name was Christina. Was it? Stop. I stormed through the mid-Ontario reforestation, its walls of lush growth in grisaille, and thought how my name suited the cut frontier, these meadows, every other eye on the train better than it did my floating snake-infested body with its tutelage packed above in suitcases. Come now. Then I slept.Him, sitting, wordless, beside his grandmother - endlessly respecting her. In two dimensions, of course. His face is clean-shaven but always when I image him he is blond around the jaw. He is always imagined with softer edges. The small street floods back to me. Bookstore, liquor store, ruddy chicken at the viennese café. Air spanning out. Country air. Stickiness in the nostrils outside the hog barn, his squinting eyes. Respecting me endlessly, then, too. And why not. Before his sexism, or something he was taught unrelentingly crowed out inside him, flooded over him like a dark field. A cracked psyche. Fucked tractor. Black black black sky tinged with white orchid wings crashing into one another. All this I saw when he looked at me a last time at the station. We both feigned a certain polite intensity. As black overhead the sky shattered. Blue tenement blue. I rolled past my patience, onto the stem of his silence. My tongue went alongside it, impositioned me, my whole body, there. He became like cord, or driftwood - lean, ridged - or sun-hot, what, stone? Nothing other feels like his penis. The sky, maybe, as its peninsula broke pouring down all those birds. My tonsils under this pressure gurgling, wordless with respect to an ending.

In relation to?

There is an orange light in the test-house window. It extenuates in an orange beam bridging its leprous yard, indicating the track, the bluish field. In the train's wake the glow ignites, shroom like spilt baskets of garbage, exhuming the house's carcass.A silhouette, a character named Rudy Mercure, crouches in the interim space cupping his nostrils to the astonishing smokes, the fumes. Suppose he is paid thirty-five bucks on each welfare cheque to run surveillance for the fire marshall, to stay on this way after the lab squad has removed their grenade shells and cans of olive oil. The significance of each chemical inferno is Mercure's combustion of it to text. As soon as his report becomes separate, official, the toxicity of what he's breathed guarantees his amnesia of the entire transaction. He is the convenient character actor. From his point of view he is still a witness. From my position his face is dressed again and again in fire synched exactly to the structural erasure of his service.

From the train I see his blond face shorn and steady. His skin synthesizes what is appalling, what taunts then recoils, the infestation of treeroots choking small caves of field mice, a zenith beetle. He floats alongside the slow journey like gristle. I swirl my tongue in the apparition, I touch my clitoris. The sky breaks in two pieces. Then the train's bulk metal is sucked onto water. At the shoreline the field starts again.

A skinny low storage building near the tracks with fifteen loading ports. Aboriginal trees hacked out to be penetrated by beautiful telephone wires. The earnest fleet of the Belleville Flying Club distinguished by silver like the building, the bark on branches, the highlit wires. A tinny memory of cutlery. Together with her sister she made all the meals after the age of eleven. She was a child and a mother. She can cry if she wants to. The plane is a pitch black military silhouette soaring west while I'm gathered east. Clutches of his vicious passion.

With respect to.

You circled the group of women, pushing your hands back in your hair. You had a machete which you swung at their legs. You chased one woman into a pool where she drowned. You slit twenty stems of grass. You circled the group of women, pushing your hands back in your hair. You had a machete which you swung at their legs. You chased the second woman into a pool where she drowned. You slit twenty more stems of grass.

The grasses fed the earth by growing from it. Tongues. Langues. It was her lexical field. She saw juices, his, smeared down the wedge of each stalk, saw them clogged. A horn went off. Its bleat advertised an oncoming diesel, the sturgeon shriving of a piece of machinery in chase; a man. Pushing past even the field's negative motion - buses in convoy, and then drowning what they imposed, a train. The grasses began to itch at their pores. To sway in the earth's probation. Crazy. He inculcates hierarchy by his words, slaked on every stem, words she spits up out of that field. She spits onto the train's passing, all his words, his tone of ordering, its thick sludge and the rank smear of his invectives. The train's passengers, laughing, catch this wind in their throats. It crusts. Snow earth a representation ferried in their throats to Vancouver.

In the Orbit Room your arms lift, pumped by the round impulses with the music and other bodies nurturing you. Your shoulders fall and lift entrusting me with their image. It feels like you are a tongue, with a tongue in your mouth, like water throbbing.
A cold wind takes back this image. And darkness; seals the muscular pact in your neck. Then when you move your cock thrusts up back up orthotropic and obscures the soft pulse of our walking. Stars. Crust. Urine. Downtown. Pieces.

This had been your huge self with its fears and unblocked delight balanced on the tongue of each of your palms: in the smoke and rhythm your arms display their petrographic angles and you admit her as your speculum. Your torso softens, and each side like a column rolls inward to the split that joins you to your shoulders' architecture. She sees in the long join, she finds herself, her body, discomfitting naked with lovers at night, searching the entranceways back to her child self, that body she rocked desire in and out of, that soft skin she touched every night to locate self in a household of contradictions. What are the things she places alongside those lips, what are the memories she reproduces in this adult bed, this new ridged vagina she finds in her, me, in you, these structures. In whose name does she order what of it was pain, and what pleasure or nurturance' Her imaginary casts a dark room, chilled night-bed with covers, a floral bedspread clustered on her outstretched body, terse spine; and ears aching like satellites for a final story which might clarify the blackness, a rupture. Why not. An explication for their blockages, silence, seeking an embargo of rage even spit anger collision in which to repair their tonguelessness. And her bed, her raft of panic, and of orphanage, and of seizure. This place her body she knew as the incised stump-language that split them, unhealed. A wound in darkness touching itself, and in this she had to locate pleasure, her pleasure in touching, but always the site of the wound which could not convince love and abhorrence from each other's spasm.

A woman who has no memory. No long-term memory, or just none, no memory. Her repetition of stories. A schedule of self-questioning. To what end. As a result. Myself as I sit to write. Is it the onus of inscription or a self-erasure? Mercure I love you. The anger spills up. It is an inversion like this spilling-upwards image. Tell me again? I am in the process of ending one reality and beginning one reality. The pain enters at chest level always. Voice suppressed. Voice transmitted through concrete. Crashes out of the mouth, smithered crystal.

Birth which occurs in the heart of the beholder. It has. A track. Language has. Language has to do with this. The Kingston café is weird Nevada desert porcelain, I'm in the global province of mochaccino, converging on a mustard-coloured formica tabletop. A chubby boy in sweats and his father cooling soup invent memories for the year 1999 when this boy will be twenty. Will he? Can I? What train? Do you believe man is a farm, or that his heart plunges me through to the pulp of text? And fire is there vestigial flame from the church that blazed Christmas eve in Sudbury bleeding the grief of reconciliation here? My answer is a fake blond man left at the turnstile. Another blond man so much sweeter pouring a bath. Mercure in my eyes remembering one day the house in the act of burning.

The train moves along the concrete rails. My view moves up a hillside and the next hill I reach breaks out onto a distant panorama. There is a ghetto and a palace. Some skeletons and a new baby with her cord tied just moments ago. There is blood still in the aquamarine river, and since this is a north, it is starting to snow.

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