The beautiful dream that we unfold and extend,
ruined, in the course of a sublime mockery;
beauty defeated by the measure of a sobering glance,
reflected from a bitterly earned truth.
You, aubain, you trace, cross the unlivable place,
distraught, crack it, move it,
lift it up high, spin like a water wheel.
And your goods can be taken away.
Between letter and body, an analogy exists
more than an allegory, an identical signifier:
one like the other signifies presence.
And when the body and writing show themselves
(on dull walls, along dreary
corridors) they don’t speak only of their own
instability, the bitter solitude that slips
from an exhausted glance, they speak of the instability
that belongs to presence in and of itself.
Between letter and body, there’s another
analogy that raises this one to an identical
destiny: shunted, transferred, moved
from one word to another word, from one place to another
place, one like the other is conceived only
when the pieces are brought together: as the letter begins
to sing, as the body is set abuzz.
Ripped body, ripped letter, letter that grips,
trashed body, torn, trampled, body split
you’re tripping, spell an alph’bet
yelled names, called bodies
rung by rung, step by step,
bodies you stain, you step,
you screen under letters you shell,
you spell, body we grip, rap, trap,
trip, ha! Sick. Check it out: go on.
Turn, forever going to your other side,
turn your body on the space, even there,
on the trace, the work itself that it bestows, the infinite,
the invertible place that it brings everywhere,
the shock in this place or on the other side:
disappear into the face of the sun.
Face opposite Your Face, holding me upright
next to You, shaped, my body
as the unuttered letter, arched in desire,
back against the void. Behind me the world is raised:
songbirds, smoke rings, lush ferns, gangrenes,
haltings, inordinate embryos, all that makes,
unmakes language, builds it up, and, at the same
time, refutes it, offends it. Here lives meaning, and there
meaning does not exist, in what is named
and what cannot be named, in what
mixes, muddles, shows itself; in what
hides, obscures, illumines, disappears.
The eye riveted to the gap in the dark room:
the room is walled in by gazes,
oppressed. Gazes that know, surging back,
ruined, refused; gazes that don’t
know, undamaged, pushed away.
Misplaced bundles thrown down pell-mell after
what senseless voyage, in the depths of
what defeat, for what end detached.
The unavoidable, ostentatious sofa bed, suffocating
with blooming presence in the middle of which
we sit down for the pose, taking care to stay
on the edge of white exile.
By which the distance between body
and Text is shown, a distance that is, truth be told,
infinite. There, in the feeling-of-life, acceptance
transfigures, starves, pain mixes
with joy, then, in ecstasy, abandons it for what’s higher up,
for the solar, makes the ground shake.
Here, the Text subjugates, instructs, corrects, pulls
the gaze downward, softens the body, arches it,
ruins it.
Nothing, all, fasti, brief menstruations,
one, the devil, who stays, says again, permiso,
fasti, strength, virtue, respect, the tree,
the hurdle, cursed cobblestone grinds, equinox,
graft the transformation, Vel toto.
Sidelong glance, captured in the blink of an eye.
On one side, behind the statement of identity on
display, dependence on the new
idol, on the new bible, on the new text,
resignation to what is. On the other,
the distance that says, in body and gesture,
distinction as much as difference,
as soon as the clear pleasure of performance
is satisfied with a vindictive and
vehement mimicry.
To put a hand on the other, on his body,
grasp him, seize him, constrain him,
resembles the act of “placing a sign over,”
just as a certain language operates,
entirely oriented toward mastery and marking,
a language toward which the tag fittingly
thumbs its nose.
Each is equally hallucinatory,
one like the other, devoid of modesty.
The opposite of the approach, full of
consideration, which consists of going to
encounter the other, of signaling
toward the world, to call it and welcome it.
This Tang poem, from the night of time (three
millennia), signs carved on tortoiseshell and buffalo
bones:
Mind’s mirror bright, reflection without obstruction,
silent translucence surrounds sand-grain realms.
Ten thousand images tangled between shadow and showing,
but a pearl of light, with no inside or out.
What the hand seizes thus, what speech cries, this verse that the word signifies, this one, is at the same time made visible and hopelessly obscured. A tree there, simple presence exposed, held, against the backing of sky; the hand, in grasping, imposes, disposes, elucidates, decides about presence, re-presents. The thing, henceforth, takes on meaning only in relationship to the hand. But the hand, in turn, can no longer define itself except in relationship to the thing. Eventually, the hand is so subjugated that its texture transforms to resemble the thing itself.
This bias of vanity, of ostentatious pride, of modesty, of unsettling elegance, (these long wise hands, one tightly holding an immense blade over the abatis), all this that acts, doesn’t work sometimes without the intention of residing with virtue, in an unheard-of way.
In the end, which to fear the most? The scorching sun, with its great drought, that cuts your necks. The cane that minces your body, invisibly. Or the machine whose wake splits your heart? Whichever it is, here I am now, all stained without any of this having been settled.
That the vast sky would come here in its entirety onto the cutting edge of my saber. I keep immemorial protections about me, a place where I can preserve myself in the body’s crossroads.
To turn your body onto something, just the same, in the in-between of a world where to make, with hand and speech, even fettered by irons, was identified with letting presence blossom and collecting it; and from another world where to make now signifies manufacturing. The pale crystals the factory discharges illustrate, furthermore, the state of man joined to machinery: crushed, steamed, pulverized, the body turns toward its own misery, worn out, ghost more than shadow, wandering in labyrinths with blind, abrupt walls, in the hoarse air lit only by a skylight, such a long moon.
The hand is a “thing apart.” Joined, the two hands assemble all time’s fragments; they gather subterranean memory and silence. They bring us back, turning to speech’s other side, to presence’s other side, to all places of clairvoyance and protection.
Unlike speech that spends its time running after itself, the hand that opens will never sink into bitterness. At the most, by force of grasping and fashioning, perhaps in some ways it will ruin itself, exhaust itself. The hand is always placed in the main-tenant, the now, the hand-holding, of time, but not the fleeting moment that sees future time vanish into the past: the main-tenance of time, in the interview and conversation between memory and the to-come that it welcomes. And so, this perpetual interview is, in an essential sense, a recollection.
From hand to hand, armed with the password, like this everything goes forth and arrives at its destination. Time turns its millstone, spatters the air: what has happened is nothing more than a rain of stars. The newly sharpened blade in both hands to splendidly begin again, leave everything in pieces.
From Visible: Text + Image by Two Lines Press, 2022, as part of the Calico Series. Reprinted with permission.