Body as the Integral

In j/j hastain’s poetic exhilaration myrrh to re all myth, hastain has realized a cosmic endeavor.  The introductory image and text deploy the sexual processes of the jellyfish, how it “…replicates itself with infinite capacity/rendering the jellyfish organically immortal” and in that we are introduced, amniotic, the dark, visceral cataclysm of beginning.  But the beginning doesn’t end there in blind awakening; we are posed the question: “what are the places you’ve never been touched?” which immediately brings this reader to the once-virgin wanderings of my own fingertips, the groping closets of adolescence, the writhing, uninhibited thrust of confident underpinnings, and then at once to maturity.  In maturity, we may find that our fingers have not wandered as deeply as they once did, and that we (still) long for the slight grate of nails, tongue wavering above pubis, the feelings of loss in where we have not been touched, or have not been touched in some time.  “You are making them in me,” hastain states of these places, the places untouched, which simultaneously arouse youthful hope and dire misdirection.

“This is a romance of fractals”, one of conjoining and disintegration where “an endless prothalamion” meets “vigorous holograms” giving us the impression that love/weddings/gender identity/form/content are illusions, temporary calibrations of flux emotion without the soaking ruptures of experience awe.  When desire is pendulous, and knowing

that I came back into
form
in order to feel myself
refusing
frame

it is difficult to feel anything but distraught.  Wrought from “a paper cornea” from which interpretation/projection seem ultimately penetrable, fallible, utterly manipulated, to an “amniotic marionette” in whom it seems we are all puppets in love, lust, in the disintegration of self.  What is there for us if we are all strung up/out on genetic limbs, hoisted by social predetermination?

But when all seems hopeless, a rose dying in static water, hastain brings us back into confidence, realizing that

it is so much about how
you belong
not what you belong to

differentiating between the real body and the given body.  We are all given a form, an identity, a self, but what happens when you outgrow the flesh, the pronoun, the title, the masculine/feminine social obligation?  What does it mean to be a man?  What does it to be a woman?  Are we inside each other any less when we ignore our sheer sameness?

Yet, even in our independence from each other, there is an absolute need to be touched, to be welcomed into arms:

you are curled so tightly into me
that there is nothing else
but this sense
that I am yours
that this is what I am
designed for

softening the borders between desire and satisfaction.  hastain writes that “only through the body/can form experience form” crystallizing further the notion that drawing lines between ourselves, our experiences, is a violation that requires blending, in order to perhaps transform into a new self, one that is everything and nothing—converted by a kiss.

My experience with this text was one of great humbling; hastain’s vocabulary is both scientific, poetic, and profound forcing readers to not only learn and relearn themselves, but to dissect their preconceptions of poesy, of others through intimacy, alienation, and the radiance of undiscovered territories we so ravenously invent and, as hastain writes:

perhaps it has always been
that I don’t want to be
a perfect
but I do want to be

________ ever-changing, the conditions in which we exist.  So, in defining these identities, these preoccupations, we are in essence limiting the extraordinary, the boundlessness of our own humanities, imperfect, (un)original, raw, pushing and pulling you inside me, me inside you, unencumbered by the restrictions of flesh: become the transmutation of loving expression, “electric”, “immortal” “to become a thing/that would never need to second guess”.

As hastain writes, “this is how/I becomes we” “so much like inserting/waves into waves” a finding and relocating that requires of us a willingness to contort, to use our “interior retina” to locate a “venerate peace” where we “love in countless dimensions”.  “You must meet me with the vow that I will not ever be the lace/that you wasted”; the lace, the latticework, the delicate intricacy of romance, human relationships, love, and how truly sensitive they are regardless of flesh dimension.

Whether myrrh here is used for its medical purposes, its fragrance, or both, we readers are guided through a distinct biological endeavor to not only understand, no, to inhabit our bodies, but to realize that our flesh, its costume, its sensory delivery is defined perhaps more conclusively by our relationship with what we touch and what touches us.  hastain leads us into the mouth, the fleshiness of tongue, the rough abrasion of teeth, and swallows us down and from there we are given a choice: find our way out, or succumb to the transformative nature of all beings.

a very dark god

            nearer then farther, thinning and thinner still farther urging intently. is showing darkness nothing else than nothing and not more particularly signaling lights below than parallel to music is clear.

1.

This space is occupied only by bodies in motion.

The former is not unrelieved; a correct picture of the psychic norm, the history that I know did not allow my senses time to wake for others.  It is the essence of modernity, the yet unnamable glimmer behind your eyes, those seemingly abstract and arbitrary signs still igniting controversy. 

Define language and writing elsewhere.  Remain enigmatic. 

A few words next about translation, and then we enter the text. 

Body, rupture, loss, I must, surging with cadence, experience time and distance I wrote my name in red ink the various ethical systems shudder to contain.  I have followed you as far as I can, the planets closed to your bray blazon I’m going to find out what love is.  

Whether it’s explicit or purely embodies

Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition
a tiny spasmodic thrill that is the end and the beginning of jouissance
one tells of her insomnia, another of her migraines, and others of her nervous rash and her nervous tic
all born with a taste for pleasure
a kind of clawing and biting to clear a path
through the irritated swelling of pulled hair
to silently take up residence in our bodies and minds:
the province of the animate
follow their course euphoric
at the first seminal drop

Almost every day, you tell me, you are forced to run in sudden panic
before launching into narrative
an affirmative outburst that immediately fades
burning the back of your hollow throat and irradiating the barren combustion of thought
in continuous conflict with your head, skin, bladder and bowels

It is tempting to assume that the images of rampaging felt an undeniable relief
in ceasing to be beautiful
pulsing and shimmering like an animated painting
of a bleeding, literally headless body of its queen

mumble among ourselves

hush sunflower confess one thing.  You are everywhere partial and entire.  Nothing moves no words appear.  Wake a short narrative the hunger which finds a way to deal with a recurring and unseemly position.  The first phrase corresponded with need to form condemned to depend on something other.  Love song poetics but what do most know of windblown curtains carefully deliberately and wholeheartedly stolen.  But to be left with names translated into screams someone else’s country but this landscape gaping with holes restless birds dislodged the body brims romance through repetitive action.  Unbound complete—each brushstroke speaks sweetly of home.

of all the forms it has taken interrogations consultations autobiographical narratives letters recorded transcribed assembled into dossiers published and commented on

I’m sure that love will be our revenge the summer evenings’ considerable importance.  Though we have only love of the sea in common swallowed in a moment we had hardly begun.  I think that in loving you I might leap over becalmed seas that will never be the subject of a thousand poems.  This current stitching together the disparate imprisoned in symmetry.  Bear down until it almost breaks.  We are constantly submerged in almost touching.  I am writing because it is raining the patient suffering of forgetting the sound of rippled pages suspicious of spontaneity in first person.  Any romantic notions one might have of the word diary depresses our resemblance.  Gush restricted smile.

the voice of Shakespeare

leaping like sparks from synapse to synapse the drama of the baffled embattled clasping it and yet thrusting it off realizing the thing the terrible thing sublimely catastrophic and expansive.  We are willing the sacred body of psyche and soul all but forgotten inwards then outwards reveling without a pulse.  Secrets collide and this is called desire beating us into synchronized surge.  It may be that the last scene is too violent if we really do love impersonating agony the most destructive bucked and spun into darkness.  The decision I should have made struggles and tightens the knot.  Madrigal song mercifully as quick as it was awkward I’m not going to do anything but tug and rip quicker.

for an instant or perhaps forever we find ourselves lying on a timeless beach a ribbon or a road or a line shaping the tempo of our heartbeat and breath

faced again with what’s gone hideously to a quieter place the channel that shows the fog moving into your arms.  From Jack Spicer’s gutted radios as if sound were perfect motions roving the interior body the duration.  Beat warm dimensional kneeling on air.  Somewhere in static tapping feet to a half-spoke rosary however badly love will go looking for the many masks of its hundred faces.  Its plastic mouths waiting to whisper devotional poems with toad for tongue I still love you or wandering through the ether from ear to ear years after.  Become someone else’s empire.  Become cosmic hostage.  All sphincters contract at the gush of verbal lava.  Synchronize alarm.  Breathe heavily.

even though we’re hung over and have to work in an hour or by describing to you what you can be someday you conceal everything until

on some level we still prefer our invisible devils and their personal malevolence never born again in the same shadow absent from photograph.  I love you which does not mean I know you.  Nameless desires singed the lining of our hearts the deformed body we carried.  I need to know if you are anything more than the remaining pages of popular fiction.  You are no simpler than primitive touch the sudden total withdrawal pointing at a closed door in a dark hallway.  These evil emotions seem to enter us unseen naked exhausted worried.  Try to hold onto something to link long afternoons walking on mirrors and there is no word more beautiful.  You should really put some ice on that.

the outline is supposed to resemble

a tongue tip incapable of coming to light a brash song’s delicate remains.  Nothing that I have done nothing that you have done borrowed intention a part of this does not want to be here.  The tension between abstraction and violent physicality the faintest tap of ash no post- has been more prudish.  Come back coma back each of us knowing I love you.  I am erect with horror and vacant spontaneous community.  Take me but do not tell me enough to make us strangers.  Original and enchanting the birth of utterance is camera shy. Overrun and crushed the most conspicuous example.  The words which appear to you in this way have changed their names.  Go down on love.

as to appear neither offering

from which unceasingly moves sliding between raindrops and the night because there is courage and danger in leaning out your eyelids without desperation or to sing patiently removing thorns fairly given.  You cannot take me with a look full speed of oncoming cars care that no answer could be found among the words.  Acts of breath or constriction through misty chimerical air dare to speak without daring to tell.  Move secretly among us.  I want to live in someone else’s dream and walk to the edge of the pier.  In front of me is a glass of water the small room of a cabin rescued from the person I loved most in the world.  This world suddenly wrenched from metronome. 

I.

I measure my confessions
etching an imperative topography
through disquisition
tongues volatile lick ignorant
love contesting end
an impossibly simple fury
but soon the tongues begin
intersecting reaching
shorter distances until
they become
dots markers references
location place
as in you are
here

yet no image is decisive
as the fog moves in
and the creek rises
we have our own wounds
in this geography at nightfall
I thought I heard sirens
the wet streets
my abandoned city
speaking to me
babies contesting mother’s milk
suckling a classic love story
two desperate entities
wailing through the strenuous
outline of a cleared throat

we have been here before
you and I—but now as day breaks
we are constantly changing I am
reminded of false closure
our best impulses disembodiment
speech through glass throats the light
rises suffering at its roots
opening a window entering your tongue
touching my tongue
tasting the space between words
dimly lit lips lunging
love smothers I am
your blank face
dismantled by clear-cut chitchat

there is a story
I never spoke about with you
come into this cold room closed consciousness a flat blackness
trail marks cut in salt
I was you
earlier tonight a convenient and communicable form anything
to make ends occupied
by the questions of light
the long annihilation of another
the procedural grammar of the supernatural
that unbroken thing
limited by the edge of the page

the quietest and most intimate
grammar left behind lyrical
disruption a fragmentary belief
shutting the finally struggled out
contemplating convergence of old forms darkness the disconsolate and powerful
one modality transcending narrative synesthesia its occupant—a life
the untimely beautiful
dwell as randomness speaks
the poet unobtrusive echoes
confused by prose
sound converted into image
the vain gorge

we have made a brilliant chronicle
deception
the darkly autobiographical
ongoing mystery measuring your tongue and my tongue this intensely progressive labor
we all inhabit we district—elastic surface
if you recall anything
syncopated—untranscribable
a dense juxtaposition of life lived
partially cut open
intimately yelling—shaken vigorously
into writing into vision
the accidents of attention
the sound of falling alone in an open city

the collisions of unshackled tongues—bathe language bad mouthing the stutter: compulsively salivating
spasmodically aphonic—catastrophic love
a kiss and what more is there
to say than this:
I hesitated before undressing your hands
on my body followed the sound of birds wings trapped in a narrow chimney
the anticipation made you hold your throat and squeeze wanting to dissolve into noisy dreams far from here and here and for a moment uninterrupted constricted endlessly eroticizing ingestion
 

as a poet contemplates another
intolerable present
the speaker approaches a clearing
disrupts the irreverent blend
highbrow and lowbrow dictions
noted by the author intimate elusive wild unbearable and beautiful—
its summation you are magic
darkness is magic the need
to extend beyond the personal
I thought both disconsolate and powerful
pot on a stove in a house
cracked claws of an old crow
dreams torn just short of the pillow

when I think of sleeping
with you I am no
more conflicted than
when I paint you into the corner
of a picture the air
you’re breathing the cold clear night
the great drama of your breasts
nipples the base of your spine—us
shoulder to shoulder
smothering the goddess
blocked speech pillaged and disgraced
deceived a wish
an hallucination of the poet
a sexy conversation in the dark

something is happening here over the hills your body the string uncoiled
easily at first and then you took off
your clothes and I can remember
thinking I am not yet tired of loving you
the space you occupy I am
not seeking softer shapes roads and radios fake tragedies your mirror
my mirror pushed into the road
pushed into the house formed
an impressionable space conformed
by the myths of manhood
the distinct qualities of autumnal night

I have to place you there in order to find you howling for tongue
and mirror you are the voice
not yet tired of loving me
calling for dynamite and thunderstorms
kissed on the lips just eat me
call me cut/throat I’ll call you deconstruction’s masquerade
long ago and far away
we remembered singly—love staggered
through speech despite our speculations
this urge is latent
in any text
open your mouth now

we must lie to our tongues
before they are rendered
unquestioned faith a damaged head
a torn off arm an open belly the sunlight
the narrow streets the city covered
in blood the brilliant
ease of assertion the imaginary contest
the meta-narrative
plotting to expose
a crowd on a hillside
darkening the fields
an imperfect hell
dancing singing waiting somewhere
in the lines without measure or words

the night before you
fell asleep I
had a fantasy in an almost perfect pattern
for harnessing the body
in pain that’s what I look for now
I bleed you
and so on down it’s true
these poetics
ripping and tearing often
for many years easing
their manifestations into your soft
resilient form inflicting incredible
damage language
subtracted to meat

eating how one eats
metaphor the body dissolves
shamelessly into benign context
our best impulses mangled
once upon a time imagine the bandages
your throat the love notes
the center of a burning city
exposed to the last
accidental smile
I know it is
only cloud darkening
those fields eternally losing you
the letters of your name
constantly rearranged

in the false dream of composition
combustion
composite
my name is self-betrayal
and I am the distance
between the torturer
and the body
the difference
between light and reason
the goat tearing
your auburn hair
when you decided
to die an intolerable present
an unexplained periphery

so much of what we say
to each other
is untrue you will vomit blood
and tell me it’s you translating me
a way of wounding
the ceaseless
and self-announcing
pronoun I
undifferentiated this worry
so deeply postmodern
you make the unspeakable and restive
speak in a constant
loud volume
crushingly present

these screams are the machinery of disingenuous narrative a noun
wounded into possession
forced into action becomes its own annihilation intensely felt
your motives remain mysterious
until the very last page
I wonder how that can be
when one and the other
are completely the same though
the exercise itself removed
from its generic grammar
the shattering of its seed
far more aware of flashbacks

recursions
nonlinearly fluctuating
a wire
a phone conversation
a coincidence
a highly unstable place
intertwined with a world-circling traffic jam
in this novel the results are enticing
the mouth is now the body forever
those of you outside the situation
play an important role
peeking inside the body
as agents of agony
self-committed to failing structures

and I have these moments
where I hear your voice
and I think
the reader is stealing
from me
and then I think no
I am the thief
the tempest
the unavailable background
wished into preservation
and all your radical simplicity
that you would ever understand
a hunk of skin
even more apparent than its pink gospel

a journey to love uncollected
before now you say love is this—
this plot of ground
receding and dividing
and yet there are
lovers and lovers still
that hold you from behind
as if God were willing
to defy your fear
draw strength from the earth
the truly memorable distinction
between your heart complete
with flutter and flaunt
and the beautifully wrought love poem

like the weight of your coffin
like a farm wagon
with masses of white flowers
like water at a shore
like nothing
in my life—
the ugly legs
the protruding stomachs
the sagging breasts
the new television station
watching me
watching you
my fingers lifting your young
face into another medium

I remember when you
were so strong
old chicken
wire turned to ashes
I remember when you
were so strong the world
was too much with us
I remember when you
were so strong no one was lovely
but you alone
and how will I describe
the contents of the poem to you
if not to say
opera!