SPANSE 4

Source
time elapses
before the mind’s

eye
goes blind.
The instruments pull

at
their cords.
Down, the tide

goes
down into
the irresistible warmth

of
a body.
“Imagine staying one

person
after this,”
taking de Sade

for
a lunatic
saint & Zizek

for
an animation
character rationally placed

in
a Japanese
movie. It tears

at
the eyes;
it carries water

into
the thinness
between air and

vacuum,
wringing something
like signals from

the
noise, unconcerned
about the water’s

purity,
like something
gone past on

a
highway of
heads and beds

of
swollen creeks
and theories and

coils.
A being
of smoke inscribes

me
as erasing,
rising albumenescently. You

gather
momentum &
scatter it everywhere,

through
the rotating
blades. What happens

when
the distinction
between a true

world
and an
apparent world falls

away?
I have
asked the promoters

and
people who
have brought me

to
this city.
Since I’m not

conscious
why I’m
crying. In Morocco

it
is thought
to be good

for
warding off
the common cold

in
damp winter
weather and is,

indeed,
more effective
if taken with

large
quantities of
hot mint tea.

Euphoria
and brilliant
storms of laughter;

ecstatic
reveries and
extensions of one’s

personalities
on several
simultaneous planes are

to
be complacently
expected. Almost anything

Saint
Theresa did,
you can do

better
if you
can bear to

be
ravished by
an ‘un évanouissment

reveillé’.
“Don’t back
away helpless, eyes

fixed.
I’ve simply
ordered a box

of
maniacs. This,
this is my

task:
to imagine
no whole.” Our

rice
pot is
so full. There

are
pines that
are tall enough.

Wow,
or “pouf!”
We ought to

say
a feeling
of and, a

feeling
of if,
as readily as

we
say a
feeling of blue.

Will
any silence
fit? Into that

cloudy
hole? A
screaming comes

across
the sky,
as if you

didn’t
know, silver
half freezing in

day,
moon’s elation,
an aperture or

an
aporia, go
forth prettily and

miscalculate.
One. One.
Three three three.

[Note: 1st interpolation. Sources: stuff I found on the web by 10 of the poets in the SPD Spring 010 Catalog, Poetry, Prose, Cross-Genre, W-Z. Starting with the last Z and working toward the first W. Then I went back to use the skeleton of FCF 4.

Steven Zultanski, Christmas Future; Rachel Zucker, “Welcome to the Blighted Ovum Support Group”, at 42opus v.8 no.3; Lila Zemborain, Mauve Sea-Orchids, as quoted by Eileen Tabios, in her review of same, at Galatea Resurrects 9; Maged Zaher, “my software mission”, at Jacket 29; Joseph Zaccardi, “The Nine Gradations Of Light”, at Joseph Zaccardi.com; William Slaughter, SPD blurb for Alexandra Yurkovsky, Wanting; Alexandra Yurkovsky, “Nocturne”, at Caveat Lector, v.16, no.II or 11; Matvei Yankelevich, “Far After Five (Deposit, New York)”, at 3:AM Magazine, Nov 02; C D Wright, “Floating Trees”, at Poetry Foundation.org; Sam Witt, “The Face in a Hospital Bar”, at Shampoo 5; Dara Wier, “Land of Steady Habits”, at Salt River Review, v.12, no.3, “Little Black Tangrams”, at Poetry Foundation.org; Martin Heidegger, epigraph to Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism; Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology; Alice B Toklas/Brion Gysin, a recipe in The Alice B Toklas Cookbook; Charles Bernstein/Brian Ferneyhough, Shadowtime; Sylvia Plath, “The Arrival of the Bee Box” (this, and the Toklas/Gysin, are for Rebecca Loudon); Frances Chung, “winter festival”, in Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple; David Giannini, Others’ Lines (Series I and II) (his source is Donald Justice); Anselm Hollo, “30”, in rue Wilson Monday; William James, as quoted by Ann Lauterbach, epigraph to And For Example, and Lauterbach herself, “Not That It Could Be Finished”, in If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000; bp Nichol, “Clouds”, in The Martyrology Book 2; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; Leslie Scalapino, “It’s Go In Quiet Illumined Grass Land”, in It’s go in horizontal: Selected Poems, 1974-2006; Nicholas Manning, “On The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography”, and Tabios herself, as quoted in Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, “Eileen Tabios, Dredging for Atlantis”, in Eileen Tabios, The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys]

Comments

[rebecca loudon]

I was so hungry for a poem this morning. This is the one. Thank you.
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