I Had a Name in Blood's Absence

Five years old, there was a day that I bled
and told no one.

I squeezed my finger into a paper towel,
soaking it deep. I was a painter’s daughter
cleaning a brush. And I was red cinnabar.
The stain was a portrait of myself. I tore it
out of the cloth
and, pressed in glass,
made it into a slide.
I had a child’s microscope,
and in it saw myself
as an image. I saw my insides.
I could have written my name in silent blood then,
awed. The word in my own hand.

I have since tried to write
in images. At seventeen I squeezed red
cinnabar onto my palette beside a pile of yellow ochre.
A painter’s daughter,
I cleaned my brush on a paper towel, careful,
but never made a canvas.
Sealed shut, I wasn’t menstruating.
I couldn’t even
prick my finger then, so my guts stayed within. I held myself tightly
and searched for the truth—nothing
else warranted being written in blood.
Nothing else could touch my open hands
without profaning them.




A long time later I noticed that I had been in pain,
a child that had chosen to look at herself
magnified 10,000 times
instead of crying.

Dialectic (Hive)

You are weak and tired.
Did you hear me? You are unfed.
You may ride out your loneliness, but
I give in to desire.
And I am happy.
I live in a garden and I grow my own sweetness.

You want arms wrapped around you?
Go harvest them. Go honeymaking,
wear your lust like a beekeeper's mask
and visit the apiary of drones,
of heartless work.

Spend the day wandering
listlessly through smoke
and heavy-lidded, prick yourself
again and again
on the abdomens of the dying.
Venom is an aphrodisiac
and you are empty. Go sex yourself
fuller, force something to bloom
in the black soil of your chest.
Chew on legs and stings if you like
and glut yourself from the pollen sac;
collect the powdery semen
of dandelions on your lips.

Come, my garden is for the bees. Find me
here in the grove, resplendent
in white and covered in failing bodies. Witness,
smell the damp in me and know me
as I am, standing here
hollow and spoilt.
Feel the nectar congeal
inside even as it lands.

*

I know you, but you won't find me
near your garden
or the pale bloc of bees;
I self-taught the evils of domestication
and value careful slowness too well.
I have no veil of lust
to thin the heat of alien hands,
and I am shy of being further altered.
I content on liquid smoke and stay far--

for through cultivation
the keeper became the other: amended,
scorned and stung enough without request.

Works and Days (For Hesiod)

I am a terrible gardener, and yet
I know what constitutes the seed of Love
I know what conditions it needs to grow--Love
is a shade plant in loose soil,
a succulent with night-grown flowers
and a vast network of stunted roots like a lattice
or a fisherman's net for stones.
I know that I must plant love
in the southwestern corner of my garden,
water it sparingly at the start, and always
turn my face away while doing so,
gluing my eyes to the rising moon.

I have read Works and Days.
I know the rules must be kept
if one wishes to appease the gods.
I know that I must rely on the divine hand
in the tending of my crops.

So I must never spit in the Garden
and ever reap only half of what I've grown
in a blindfold
with a scythe. It can't be known I sow to glean.

And last, to glut the seed of Love
I starve myself;
I live on chaff
for the first three years of winter
and content myself with weeds the rest.

Yet Love is older than Hesiod
and to live
requires an even stranger
arcanum of tasks:

To yield desire one must work
while knowing
that Love, once harvested, cannot last.

This night is a coda to a summer,
to a city in equilibrium.

With britches dropped in the wet grass
on the Oak's Bottom lookout,
I am pissing downhill in joyous abundance
at the lake, at the amusement
park's dark stars, singing
with frogs in my ears and and naughty soft
touches from the high marsh reeds
and the cool wind.

Everything but the lake
is reflected in the lake,
and tilt-a-whirl screams roll
across its sheeny surface like excited ghosts,
mingling with the peepers and the moths
as they climb the cliff where my ears
breathe the shaking spirits in like smoke.

From up here the carnival is cradled in mountains,
but I know its illness and delight in the lurch
of the careening evening.

The crematorium sits to my right,
its dread face blankly
overlooking the rites of the median strip
and the ghoulishness of neon
at midnight. Soon I will rejoin its dead world
and clamber into a dumpster
to scavenge bread like a raccoon,
but for now I am content to time the roar
of the screaming lights
to the leery frogs
in darkness,
my words made equally visible
by the street-lamp and the stars.

tongues

I am filled with purpling desire
that expands like a bloom
of vermillion ink in a clear bowl of water
sublimating the fullness of experience
into my light body,
seasoning it with the gravity of helplessness.

I am full of sex as Medusa
is of snakeskin.
The vermillion tongues of serpents
are what comprise the ink of lust
and the lucent water of my guts
roils as it is rippled through, vainly trying to keep time
with the flickering hypnotism of snake handling.

In excreta, in another world I draw the line of life
from the blood of these red tongues in me
and use its languid flux
to connect create the constellation of eggs
that will someday become my daughters and sons.

In lust I become a constellation of ashes
in the dust of ashes, the constellation of mercy
drawn onwards towards benediction
and the sinewy noose of God,
the circle in red blood,
the ova and the love.

In hunger I touch you gently
for stalking is the province of the silent
and only in the limblessness of snaky desire
can I hush.

anarchy long form

you believe that private property is theft
and you believe that your body is only yours
so perhaps it fits
that i can only have you
in a dark cave
and i can only have you
when i steal you from yourself
and in the dark carve
into your flesh
on the hunt for bones and your skin
totemizing you when you're gone
stringing your ivory on sinew
memorializing you in song
and hoping that my misdemeanors
will call you home
that my imitative witchcraft
will call you home
that my petty magic
will call you home
that my song of your stolen body
will do what I cannot
that my defilement of you
will do what i cannot
will call you home
will tug at your heart
strings til they blossom with longing
for my mystery
and full-throated themselves
respond
in song
in a love song
til they respond
in a longing of their own
to that which has gone
until in a longing of their own
for that which is gone
they respond.

I hope you know that because
i've done these things
because i have carved you into song
because your long bones are holed
under the lost island of my bed, in my home
your body is no longer only yours
and I have committed a most natural act in theft.

for in loving you
i steal from coveters
and redeem the poor

for in loving you
i liberate the property
of your form.

all light is the moon

you told me that moths follow moonlight
and so moths fall into flame
because in their minds it's always nighttime
and all light is the moon

"what if i held out a match?" i said
"what if i was light?"
"what if my body became covered in moth bodies?"
"what if my eyes were covered by wings?"

you said "well, when they settled onto you"
"they'd think they'd found the moon,
and they'd never leave you.
no, they'd never leave you."

"and if they got too close?" i said
"if they flew into my flame?"
"then they'd circle you afire," you said
"become disasters - wandering stars"

so i said: "then, your light is a candle
your light is a flame
for i know it only as the moon
i know it only as the moon

and i'll never leave you
no, i'll never leave you
i'll wrap my wings around you
and i will follow only you"

"then i'll burn you with my fire," you said
"and i'll eat you up in flames"
"for i am a disaster," you said
"i'm a wandering star"

Inténtame

Por dos semanas,
no preguntes a nada.
Por dos semanas, les da
al amor animál y la proximidad caliente.
Por catorce días, me revela
desnudo y vacío,
sus costillos arcados y extendidos
sobre un piso de lodo.

Permíteme entrarte
por un momento, por un verano.
Permíteme lécher a las gotas que constelan sus caderas
como una fauna extracta el agua de los helchos oscuros
con su lengua húmeda.

Permíteme cantar alrededor de sus hundos
como el viento, permíteme saltar
los diezmil oídos de sus labios separados.

Permíteme nadar hasta que me cego en sus cavernas--
permite mis ojos (que el mar ha blanqueada)
terminar buscando,
rodeado de su oscuridad y su piel.

Finalmente, permíteme quemar en éxtasis temporaria
y permite que mis llamas léchen a su suavidad.
Permíteme espirar como una pluma de humo desanimado.

En todas maneras elementales, te quería.
En todas las maneras que pasan las tormentas, pasaría eso.
Permite que nuestra estación termina--solo
no preventes su empieza.

Por un momento, por un verano
permíteme entrarte,
sus costillos arcados y extendidos
sobre un piso de lodo.
Desnudo y vacío, por cuarenta días,
me revela en el amor animál y la proximidad caliente.
Por dos semanas, da--no preguntes nada.
Por dos semanas,
inténtame.

Neruda Translation Project

I've been translating a lot of Neruda lately, in my free time. It's wonderful. Here are a few of the better results:

Poem Twenty

I am able to write the saddest verses tonight.

Write, for example: “The night is starry, and
they shiver, blue, the stars, far away.”

The night wind turns and moans in the sky.

I am able to write the saddest verses tonight.
I desired her, and sometimes she also desired me.

In such nights as this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her endlessly beneath the infinite sky.

She desired me, and sometimes I’d desire her.
How could I not have loved her large, staring eyes.

I am able to write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I don’t have her. To think that I have lost her.

Listening to the immensity of the night, so much vaster without her,
verse falls from my soul like dew falls on the pasture.

What was so important that my love couldn’t chasten herself?
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is everything. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul cannot contend with having lost her.

In order to draw nearer to her, my gaze searches for her.
My heart searches for her, and she is not with me.

The same night blots out the same trees.
We are no longer who we were before.

Now I don’t have her, it’s certain, but I desire her so much.
My voice searches the air hoping to reach her ears.

Another. There shall be another. As there was before my kisses.
Your voice, your radiant body. Your infinite eyes.

Now I don’t have her, it is certain, but still I desire her.
Love is so short, and forgetting boundless.

Because, during nights like this, I had her in my arms,
My soul cannot contend with having lost her.

Although this will be the last pain she causes me,
And these will be the last words I write for her.

Naked

Naked, you are as simple as one of your hands,
Smooth, earthy, minimal, rounded, transparent,
You have lines like the moon, fissures like an apple,
Naked, you are slender as a bare stalk of wheat.

Naked, you are blue as the night sky in Cuba,
You have vines and stars in your hair,
Naked, you are enormous and yellow
As summer in a gilded church.

Naked, you are small as one of your fingernails,
Curved, subtle, and rosy until day breaks
And you lay yourself in the vault under the earth

As you lay yourself in a large tunnel of suits and tasks:
Your clarity exposes itself, dresses, and expires
And yet, later on, it shall return to being your bare hand.

I like when you are quiet

I like when you are quiet because it’s as though you’re absent,
and you sound as though you’re far away, and my voice cannot touch you.
It looks as though your eyes flown elsewhere
and it seems as though a kiss sealed your mouth.

Like all the things that are full of my soul
you emerge from those things, filled with my soul.
Butterfly of dreams, you look like my soul,
and you look like a melancholy word.

I like it when you are quiet and seem distant.
And it’s as though you’re complaining, whispering butterfly.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice can’t touch you:
Make me such that I can be quieted me by your silence.

Make me such that I can also talk with you in silence
clear as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, quiet and constellated.
Your silence is like the stars, so distant and solitary.

I like when you are quiet because it’s as though you’re absent.
Distant and painful as though you had died.
A word then, a smile suffices.
And I am filled with joy, joy from somewhere I do not know.

Homes

All people walk around carrying
inside them, homes.
Within, their couches,
their living rooms, dinette sets
all organized in a concentric circle
around the hearth,
like courtiers around the throne.

And in those homes wherein
there no longer sits
a gargantuan, gaping mouth
a fiery hole in the plaster wall
there is a television.

Eternally, supportively, for all, always
there is this focal point on the wall.
And it either holds the heated, flaming god,
conviviality and jollity and a secret,
or the vapid empty
blue-tinged;
the silent song
of an empty sun.

Exploratory: Comparing the Confucian Analects and the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung

This is a short paper that I wrote in response to two readings that I did for my Chinese religion class. It's pretty conversational and a little disorganized, but I think that the last two paragraphs do a pretty elegant job of summing up the differences and the interactions between spirituality, religion, and "ethical" or political thought.

The sets of lists at the beginning of the Ta Hsueh that fade into and crescendo out of one another display not only a religiosity (as Ken commented on in our reading maps), but also an order that is nothing short of staggering in its impressiveness. I began doing the reading before looking at the reading map (for shame!), but in this incident I actually appreciate the result of my inattentiveness: I came to an understanding of the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung as being quasi-religious on my own, and as a result it is slightly different from and therefore contrastable to the perspective you provided. The qualities of the Hsüeh neatly exemplify the hazy line that exists between “religion” and “spirituality.” Drawing the Analects into the comparative mixture only strengthens the broth in the melting pot of ethics, politics, religion, and ritual that the three texts in concert create.

The first two characteristics that one immediately notices about the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung is their attention to linear organization and the texts’ focus on the individual. Especially in comparison to the Analects, the personal level of propriety is quite stressed and detailed; as is explicated in the diagram on pages five and six of the Hsüeh, the openness and flexible stability of an individual’s mind is the necessary and primary cause for, ultimately, world peace. In comparison to the emphasis placed on filial piety and ritual propriety in the Analects, the deeply personal advice of the “supposedly” ethically-focused Hsüeh seems much more spiritual than the “religious” Analects.

It is very frustrating to me that, so often, ethics, spirituality, and religion become so polarized from each other. As a person who unabashedly refers to herself and identifies as spiritual, it makes me really uncomfortable when people a) accuse spiritual practice of being “religious” and b) assume that because spirituality is an integral part of the religious experience for many people, that the spiritual cannot be present in the moral or ethical, as the latter two are supposed to be “rational” and ideologically neutral realms. Letter “a” addresses the first question on the reading map; I think that it is inappropriate to call the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung religious. Although the tone of the works is certainly transcendental and the content prescriptive to a realm that most people access only through deep intuitive focus, the advice in the Hsüeh fits into the Chinese system of ethics as ascribed by its context more than it fits into the religious sphere. I say this for two reasons: first, that Chinese ethics are clearly grounded in the perfection of the individual, and such work can only happen vis a vis the advice given in the Hsüeh; and second that, as is shown in the Analects, personal, spiritual enlightenment is clearly not the prerogative of the religious realm. Ritual practice and the ancestral cult combined make up the keystone of Chinese religion, and as is written in P. 1215 of the Analects, “if there is filial piety in serving one’s parents and obedience in heeding orders and these are set into the world, then everything will get done.” Clearly, ritual and ancestor worship clearly serve the purpose of teaching and maintaining filial piety, which is itself the cornerstone of Chinese social cohesion. Thus, it would appear to Western eyes that the Hsüeh and the Analects serve one another’s purpose, and are thus improperly cross-catalogued with one another; that the religious text serves to teach about social conduct and ethics, and that the ethical text serves as a guideline to personal spiritual growth.

My response to the above statement is: and what is so wrong about that?! Reading a corrupting “religious” bias into a text that espouses personal enlightenment and the “cultivation of [one’s] own character” is the Western knee-jerk reaction to centuries of tension between the Western Church, which serves to instruct personal morality, and the State, whose primary function, via the Law, is to prescribe guidelines that engender social organization. When one truly analyses and compares the respective social functions of religion and ethics/morality, the characteristics of the Hsüeh and the Analects actually start to make a lot more sense.
In a very widespread and popular social setting, as is noted in the Analects themselves, order and the collective become very important. As we discussed in class on Friday, people who are attempting to function successfully in large groups need to operate like individuals gears in a vast network of emotional machinery, constantly checking and redirecting themselves in order to match with the rhythm of the whole. Thus, the importance of ritual; having a prescribed and set way of doing things is pretty much the only way to guarantee social cohesion when you’re working with a large mass of individuals. In order for the rules of the ritual to be followed, they must be esteemed as very important, and it is at that moment of endowing severe significance to ritual practice that it crosses over from the quotidian province of the handshake to the awesome and mysterious realm of religion. However, because the alchemical process that transforms ritual into religion is often non-linear and definitely not obvious, the two can often become almost indistinguishable. The common trait that ritual and religion always have in common is personal involvement, and hence personal investment, the ritual and the religious often end up being characterized together as being inherently “emotional,” and thus irrational, disorderly, and therefore not applicable to politics.
The extreme order of the Ta Hsüeh in particular clearly shows that the path to emotional transformation can be anything but erratic. The wisdom of the Hsüeh, however, lies beyond the order that it espouses. As evidenced by the great emotion that religion inspires, rules are best followed when they hold personal appeal to those they attempt to sway. Thus, it makes good sense that ethical systems should also be rooted in personal conviction. It’s true that when left simply at that the door is left over for all sorts of types of crazy fundamentalism, religious included, but when personal emotional involvement is prescribed, as it is in the Hsüeh, it becomes completely possible for the political sphere to encompass the personal. Indeed, regardless of how messy the outcome, the personal and the political always intertwine; making space for emotion in politics actually seems to be the most peaceful and productive way to allow the two to coexist.

In sum, the “spiritual” (a silly term which, at this point, can act as shorthand for the deep, emotionally involved and intuitive state that the advice in the Hsüeh seeks to engender) and the “religious” (which, in this context, refers to the active, collaborative social enactment of the order created by doing “spiritual” work) are separated by their form much more than their function. The same is true when one compares religion and politics in China. Due to the role that filial piety plays in both religion and politics, political action can be seen simply as the result of what one learns from religious instruction: how to properly engage with one’s family. Ultimately, the “spiritual” and the political” in Chinese society are almost indistinguishable, as they are related on every level; “the cultivation of one’s individual character constitutes the core of all attainment” because it s successful development allows the individual to operate on the “correct conceptual grid.” Thanks to the Analects, we know that the mental state being referred to in the Ta Hsüeh is that which espouses filial piety; it is the incredibly reverent, respectful, open, and sincere countenance necessary to approach the ancestors in the shrine. Finally, proper filial piety is the key to maintaining order in the state, as the family is the guiding metaphor for Chinese government.

In conclusion, (and in the context of the Analects and the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung in particular) although spirituality, religion, and politics superficially appear to engage radically different parts of the human psyche, such is not actually the case—as is brilliantly outlined in the Ta Hsüeh, the three are actually just building blocks that work off of one another to ultimately manifest as the same unified and contained whole: personal, familial and, ultimately, political peace.

the antipodes

I am concentrating, furiously, all the time. I get so frustrated and distracted by interruptions and minor details because every moment is a holy moment, or at least I try to make it so. I am so tired because I'm always in the process of making the Kirkegaardian leap; I am always on a quest to one of the finite provinces of meaning, in hopes that I can learn something there
out of the reach of this watered-down reality.

I realized last night that I need to re-discover the grace of being alone. I realized that I have been left so untrained in morality that I (along with so much more of the world) turn simply to the whims and mores of the collective to proscribe what is and is not right. I realize that I have to stop. I realize that it's going to be the same mountain over and over again. I will become hopefully sisyphean in my quest for self-knowledge and self-defined thought. Learning morals is to become a battle eternally fought and seldom won. But I will push my way up the hill. I will become my own hive-mind. I can no longer be tossed around by a mutant and nameless system of thought. I am not a scrap of paper on the wind. I am a solid body. I am a physical presence. My actions have consequences, and I want to be taught.

Alone

Somewhere, there is mud without a boot-print.

Somewhere, there must be zones that
get tracked only by small muskrat
pawprints and doe-hooves.

Somewhere, there is still a wild
and a secret--a hidden shade plant
loamy and dark.

Like a rolling drop of water to a well
will I be there, becoming groundwater;
adding to the yellow spring
that permeates the quiet soil.

I will grow a wood-ear.
I will board up my bellowing mouth.
My body will sleep silent
and glory in the feeling of being alone.

Truth or Consequeces, NM

There are places that still have two names



The first may be starchy
and ill-fitting like a paper gown, made
for the figure of no one.

The other is earth-brown,

left over from when,
as if before birth,
the land still bore the placental name
it wore while lying
un-touched
under water.