Want to be punished like this.

I was such an idiot. I didn't know anything about mystery or majesty. I didn't understand how plants worked & wasn't interested in learning. None of the food I liked to eat was good for me. I hurt people, I didn't know how to open up to them. The word "love" was as blank a thing to me as a butterfly was; and that latter I'd just as soon have killed as photographed – that is if I were ever even to notice one, which I never did.
Happily, though, my crianza played itself out in brutal Bucks County, where one is not allowed to go on for too long without being made to account for oneself.

Recordar

To remember;
from the Latin re-cordis,
to pass back through the heart.

Žižekniks bloggling

Things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. What we call creation is a cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe. [...]
Love is a cosmic imbalance. I have always been disgusted with the idea of universal love. Love is an extremely violent act. It's not "I love you all." Love means "I pick out something," it's a structure of imbalance. Even if this something is a small detail, I say "I love you more than anything else." In this quite formal sense love is evil.

TANTRAMAR

Les foins qui nous ramassions dans nos doris –
salt hay like down Plum Island where the Merrimac dumps –
midst clamor of waterfowl, Akkadie!

Someone took this picture of me ten years ago at that Vienna kaffeehaus (whose name eludes me) famous for having been the first place in "Europe" ever to serve the stuff, back in Ottoman days. I was there to celebrate the release of my cousin's first record. It seems like I was much younger than I am now. Her record was great, we all loved it then, and it's since become a classic throughout Mitteleuropa. Massy tides of memory. I hadn't seen the photo for some time: it surprised me last night coming out from between two pages of a volume of Βιζυηνός that I've been revisiting. I like the affection I feel for myself when I look through this little window across a decade's distance.

The floor shakes under my belly for a minute and a half as the Odessa train hauls itself past our house. I'm on the parquet most of the morning, my torso propped up on its elbows to effect a slight back-bend (countering the ache resultant of too far a walk on pavements last night with heavy bag of new books & no arch-supports) and to free up my hands for the sketch-work spread out on the floor before me. Sketching the several interesting varieties of flowering shrub that hang so insistently, so independently, so immediately in the dense silver-washed air of the world captured by the collection of Crimean War photographs my brother brought home for me from Jassy. I'll show my sketches to Pavel Durgeyevich who is sure to be able to identify them.

Thin paper, weakened by the wet of a drizzly run of days & a crying jag, parts against the slight tug of Beard Street's cobbles like the jib sheet of a Gloucester schooner struggling against gales up the Gulf toward Βοστόνη. Voice gives to gulf of silence, inscription eclipsed by the hollow behind it. Day blooms.

Awake too late, three calls already having come in for me to the phone that my brother and I use in the house next door and we're all out of pu-erh till he (my brother) gets back from Jassy. Make do with a mate (Ilex paraguariensis). Scrambling my morning body all over the empty house. The days go quietly, by evening-time my ego relaxes and becomes "self", I harmonize the chaos of cosmic forces in me: then I go to sleep. Morning poses the entire question again. Beautiful, deciduous lives of consciousness.

Love Tārā

I am Yeshe Dawa, the moon is on me.
I sat in mahāmudrā for ten million years:
शिव's throat burned dark blacking-blue
my milk came and went, tides of κέφι
and the suffering of many millions of creaturitas
passed through the open chamber of my heart.
I was approached by monks & told I was a great buddha
& should consider maleness as a form of birth
with perhaps greater potential for further attainments.
From then on I resolved always to be born a woman.

In orbit between the high crypt of the windowless 5th floor (better now, less toxic, but still a space of deprivation) and the cold shuffle of home: from bed to blanket-bunkered couch with stack of books, to bathroom, to changing clothes directly in front of heater (the one shot of heat in our otherwise parsimonious corn pellet usage). A 3rd stop added in later days: SWIMMING!: the mini orbit of lapping, the attention to tile patterns, the enforced breath rhythm – a retraining (recently having gained awareness of a habit of unintentionally holding the breath). These patterns are punctuated by the thrill of excavated winter limbs, flesh flushed pink underneath all skin colors, drippy, shiny, rubber headcaps, foam, the exciting activity-specific equipment of goggles, echoes. Finally, the quick and pleasurable shock from cold pool to hot shower before wetheaded biking. STAYIN' ALIVE!

RIP Lapidaria margaretae.
I trust: lithops energy is underground in winter.

meat is flesh the morning was
zero degrees fahrenheit snow dry
& powdery sky clear but with a brief
bluddy smudge for a sunrise the piglets

all huddled up shivery against their old
ma and the next morning same time the
sky was dark and blowy and it was fifty
degrees with the snow almost rained out
and the runt was pretty much dead

Out of this hardened block of sugar,
I carve you a sugar egg.
I detail curls of frosting: green leaves, red ants, blue bats, white whales, black ink, brown dots.
I leave them to cluster and dry in the aphasiac insides and I paper you another egg.
I paint one eye, leave a circle for the second, leave an open mouth, whiskered, shellack it bright red, and scent it, voluble.
It attends to the space, the gaps, and gathers the past.

fireplaces urinals woodstoves tombs the air was so agitated little winds seeming to cross one another and go all ways at once and the custom in that country had a little framed photo of the dead on each slab sarcophagus with a glass plate covering it and the way the panes fit loosely into the grooves of their marble frames they rattled like all the bones in bardo

visible: textile becomes not a clothing/piece of cloth, but a collection of yarns, and then of fibres
invisible: we inset a strap so that an object becomes something, itself, out of its parts; we hide the labor of attaching the strap, this book is just held, simply, and has always been this way

[woven fibres (textile) ragged out & pulped, set in pasty soup to screens & booked, struck undumb: text]

the pages themselves of the book are invested with mycelia Willie
the pages themselves are wrapped around the columella
the pages struck by inked lead become intelligent
present spore material for furtherance of algal proto-organism

(columella cups and stalks in mess of lichen harvested out of the hunger-organs of an arctic hind & eaten with whalefat & sealflesh, the only wegetable we ever had)

Poca. VA

appletrees grew on either side of the steep street offering every year late summer/early fall their good seedling fruit to our pleasure and we had a kind of proprietary feeling about the particular character of their stripings and russetings and their sweets and subacids and big Spicebush Swallowtails kept the qi moving gently or restoratively up and down the hill even as the coal-owners began to spit us out after so many years of chewing and the pavement cracked up and people started to move away

When one thing leads to another and the first thing dries up, peels off, flakes away; thus with fruit, thus with follaje, thus with wind. Le deuxième oeil, bleu-blanc, voit du vent. Not the agitated contents of the wind but the wind itself. Why the air is moving, why the blossom-end goes punky, why the heart withholds its presence: questions.

The flesh of the fist of my heart,
the distance between me and whales,
the space between my skin and yours,
before,
flames!