My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  He writes poems, pitches baseballs, fails us whenever we have a nerve to need him. Button-molder too, he grows in us like the river of years.

  Chapter VII

  The Hunting of the Snark

  Whoever shares in the chase deserves the prize. Each wagon edges towards the clearing where the fire has already been lighted by neighbors.

  These animals distinguish us by our smells. This one has a red smell, this a green, this a purple. They are all alive. They have no ambition to destroy us.

  We sit around the campfire and sing songs of snark-hunting. One of us has been to Africa and knows the dangers of what we seek. Our colors and our smells glisten in the smoke toward the waiting flock.

  What we have said or sung or tearfully remembered can disappear in the waiting fire. We are snark-hunters. Brave, as we disappear into the clearing.

  Chapter VIII

  Back to His Genitals

  To rise in pleasure is to fall in agony. What counts is the only opponent.

  Back to what? Back to back. They and him. Sleeping good dreams.

  These instructions call him back from his ache. Plaster his mouth with words. Rimbaud sixteen or thirtyseven and dying. They don’t matter.

  Like painting a person’s cock and his heart. Or her cunt. They don’t matter. A mobile. A construction.

  Back to what? Back to back. They are sleeping back to back with him. His genitals are alarmed.

  Their history.

  Chapter IX

  Certain Seals Are Broken

  The first seal is the name of President Buchanan. He is there because he is there unashamed in his role of building the post office.

  The second seal is love. It has not been known to include the neighboring countries.

  The third seal is boredom. It is called history or politics depending on the context.

  The fourth seal is Jim. A private image. A poet demanding privacy in his poem is like a river and a bank unable to move against each other.

  The fifth seal is the eternal privacy words offer. Making them human.

  Rimbaud. A cry in the night. An offer. What the words choose to say. An offer of something. A peace.

  Chapter X

  A Piece of Marble

  Rimbaud is 106 years old. Meanwhile everything is going on. A style creates its own context as a river has eels in it.

  A piece of marble got lost when they were digging the quarry. His face when he was 86 years old or 104. The mystery of why there is a beauty left in any of us. Human beauty. In marble or in age.

  These mysteries are real mysteries. It is I that proclaim these mysteries. Playing leapfrog with the unknown. With the dead. It is I that proclaim this history.

  Look at the statues disappearing into the distance. They have space to disappear. Rub your eyes to see them. It is a strategy where we miss what we hit.

  I mean that the reader of this novel is a ghost. Involved. Involved in the lives of Rimbaud.

  A TEXTBOOK OF POETRY

  1.

  Surrealism is the business of poets who cannot benefit by surrealism. It was the first appearance of the Logos that said, “The public be damned,” by which he did not mean that they did not matter or he wanted to be crucified by them, but that really he did not have a word to say to them. This was surrealism.

  But even the business of ignoring the public is the business of the poet and not the surrealism of the poet. The surrealism of the poet could not write words.

  To be lost in a crowd. Of images, of metaphors (whatever they were), of words; this is a better surrender. Of the poet who is lost in the crowd of them. Finally.

  2.

  To define a metaphor against the crowd of people that protest against them. This is neither of our businesses.

  It is as if nothing in the world existed except metaphors—linkings between things. Or as if all our words without the things above them were meaningless.

  “Personify,” you say. “It is less abstract to make a person out of a sound.” But the Word was the Word not because he was personified but because he was a personification. As if he were human.

  To proclaim his humanity is to lie—to pretend that he was not a Word, that he was not created to Explain. The language where we are born across (temporarily and witlessly) in our prayers.

  3.

  “Poor bastards, trying to get through hell in a hurry.” Pray for them bastards who are not patient enough to listen. The flying leaves of a moving tree, a bleeding tree. In a crowd of imaginary images.

  Pray for them poor bastards who are too crowded to listen. An angle cutting off every surface to the prayer, the poem, the messages. An angle of the mind. Meaning to do this.

  They go through life till the next morning. As we all do. But constantly. As if the shimmering before them were not hell but the reach of something.

  Teach.

  4.

  Taught. As a wire which reaches. A silver wire which reaches from the end of the beautiful as if elsewhere. A metaphor. Metaphors are not for humans.

  The wires dance in the wind of the noise our poems make. The noise without an audience. Because the poems were written for ghosts.

  The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of the poems. We have it second-hand. They cannot hear the noise they have been making.

  Yet it is not a simple process like a mirror or a radio. They try to give us circuits to see them, to hear them. Teaching an audience.

  The wires in the rose are beautiful.

  5.

  The motion of the afterlife. The afterlife of the poem—

  Define ghosts as an India-rubber eraser created to erase their own past.

  The motion of the afterlife. And you will think immediately of a photograph. The ghost of it defined as a blob of ectoplasm—an antiimage.

  An anti-image as if merely by being dead it could make the motions of what it was to be apparent.

  An argument between the dead and the living.

  6.

  The poet thinks continually of strategies, of how he can win out against the poem.

  Seeking experience for specific instances, drawing upon the pulp of the brain and the legs and the arms and the motion of the poet, making him see things that can be conveyed though their words.

  Or disbelief too. Seeking experience for specific instances. And in the gradual lack of the beautiful, the lock of the door before him, a new Eurydice, stepping up to him, punning her way through his hell.

  They won’t come through. Nothing comes through. The death

  Of every poem in every line

  The argument con-

  tinues.

  7.

  Nothingness is alive in the eyes of the beloved. He wears the clothes wherein he walks naked. He is fame.

  Sounded ahead by the trumpets of unreason. Barely accounted for by the senses. He is what he is because he is never where he is.

  I cannot proclaim him for he is not mine. Eros, Amor, feely love, his body is more abstract than all the messages my body sends my brain of him. And he is human. I cannot proclaim starlight for it is never in the same place.

  I can write a poem about him a hundred times but he is not there. The mere numbers prevent his appearance as the names (Eros, Amor, feely love, Starlight) for his fame is as the fame of What. I have not words for him.

  8.

  Descends to the real. By a rope ladder. The soul also goes there. Solely—not love, beyond the thought of God.

  I mean the thought of thinking about God. Naturally. I mean the real God.

  Disregards all other images as you disregard the parts of words in a poem. The Logos, crying to be healed from his godhead. His dismay.

  Disappears within the flatiron of existence. That smoothes out all the words in the poem. Imparts them. Makes them real like the next day.

  And as the words heal, I did not mean the real God.

  9.

  If you see him everywhere or exactly nowhere, he becomes as it were the circumference
of a circle that has no point but the boundary of your desire. Coming to a point.

  And the human witness of this passion is rightly stunned by the incongruity of it. Lifting a human being into a metaphor.

  All that we do in bed, or sleep, or sex is limited by this circle which can only be personally defined.

  On the outside of it is what everybody talks about. On the outside of it are the dead that try to talk.

  Once you try to embrace an absolute geometric circle the naked loss stays with you like a picture echoing.

  10.

  The Indian rope trick. And a little Indian boy climbs up it. And the Jungians and the Freudians and the Social Reformers all leave satisfied. Knowing how the trick was played.

  There is nothing to stop the top of the rope though. There is nothing to argue. People in the audience have seen the boy dancing and it is not hypnosis.

  It is the definition of the rope that ought to interest everyone who wants to climb the rope. The rope-dance. Reading the poem.

  Reading the poem that does not appear when the magician starts or when the magician finishes. A climbing in-between. Real.

  11.

  Boredom is part of the Logos too. You choose His word instead of someoneelse’s because you are bored. Meaningless words stick in the throat and you cough them up as an abstraction of what you are trying to cough up. A green parrot that was talking away that was lost and no one could find it.

  An argument with the dead. That is what these pauses are mainly about. They argue with you that there have been no beauty, not even words. They speak out of the right side of their mouths.

  See them in the distance not understanding their destiny as we do not understand ours. Making a metaphor inhuman as hell. Standing under the shapes and forms that play with us like a camera selecting.

  12.

  Being faithful. And you are only being faithful to the shadow of a word. Once lost, once found—in the horny deeps below finding. Once cast ashore upon me like the heart’s cargo.

  And this is a system of metasexual metaphor. Being faithful to the nonsense of it: The warp and woof. A system of dreaming fake dreams.

  Being faithful to it. All the ache of remembering the past, what the body doesn’t know—the ache that isn’t really there.

  Sorry for themselves, the Words beckon terribly to me. They wave the past out the door: “Goodbye, I love you.”

  Being faithful. I pray hope to it. Not them. Not even the words.

  13.

  Built of solid glass. The temple out there in the weeds and California wildflowers. Out of position. A place where we worship words.

  See through into like it is not possible with flesh only by beginning not to be a human being. Only by beginning not to be a soul.

  A sole worshipper. And the flesh is important as it rubs into itself your soleness. Or California. A division of where one is.

  Where one is is in a temple that sometimes makes us forget that we are in it. Where we are is in a sentence.

  Where we are this is idiocy. Where we are a block of solid glass blocks us from all we have dreamed of. But this place is not where we are we are to meet them.

  14.

  It is not unfair to say that a city is a collection of humans. Human beings.

  In their municipal trust they sit together in cities. They talk together in cities. They form groups.

  Even when they do not form groups they sit alone together in cities.

  Every city that is formed collects its slums and the ghost of it. Every city that is formed collects its ghosts.

  Poetry comes long after the city is collected. It recognizes them as a metaphor. An unavoidable metaphor. Almost the opposite.

  15.

  The city redefined becomes a church. A movement of poetry. Not merely a system of belief but their beliefs and their hearts living together.

  They are angry at their differences—the dead and the living, the ghosts and the angels, the green parrot and the dog I have just invented. All things that use separate words. They want to inhabit the city.

  But the city in that sense is as far from me (and the things that speak through me) as Dante was from Florence. Farther. For it is a city that I do not remember.

  But the city that we create in our bartalk or in our fuss and fury about each other is in an utterly mixed and mirrored way an image of the city. A return from exile.

  16.

  It does not have to fit together. Like the pieces of a totally unfinished jigsaw puzzle my grandmother left in the bedroom when she died in the living room. The pieces of the poetry or of this love.

  Surrealism is a poem more than this. The intention that things do not fit together. As if my grandmother had chewed on her jigsaw puzzle before she died.

  Not as a gesture of contempt for the scattered nature of reality. Not because the pieces would not fit in time. But because this would be the only way to cause an alliance between the dead and the living. To magic the whole thing toward what they called God.

  To mess around. To totally destroy the pieces. To build around them.

  17.

  —A human love object is untrue.

  Screw you.

  —A divine love object is unfair

  Define the air

  It walks in.

  The old human argument goes on with the rhymes to show that it still goes on. A stiffening in time as puns are a stiffening in meaning.

  The old human argument that goes ahead with our clothes off or our clothes on. Even when we are talking of ghosts.

  —A human love object is untrue.

  Screw you

  —A divine love object is unfair

  Define the air

  It walks in.

  Imagine this as lyric poetry.

  18.

  When the gas exploded the ghosts disappeared. There was merely a city of chittering human beings.

  What had seemed long losses in the air, on the ground were trivial. What had seemed to be words were merely reflected in the air as heat waves.

  There was a tremendous loss of substance when the gas exploded. Things that were there took wing. Flew to the farthest corners of whatever sky had been above it. Keening.

  This was supposed also to be the story of the creation of the universe. The pieces of the explosion coming afterwards together breathless. Coagulating whatever truth they could muster.

  When the heart explodes, there is a tremendous loss. But when the gas explodes the ghosts disappear. There is merely a city of chittering human beings.

  19.

  “Esstoneish me,” the words say that hide behind my alarm clock or my dresser drawer or my pillow. “Etonnez moi,” even the Word says.

  It is up to us to astonish them and Him. To draw forth answers deep from the caverns of objects or from the Word Himself. Whatever that is.

  Whatever That is is not a play on words but a play between words, meaning come down to hang on a little cross for a while. In play.

  And the stony words that are left down with us greet him mutely almost rudely casting their own shadows. For example, the shadow the cross cast.

  No, now he is the Lowghost when He is pinned down to words.

  20.

  He at the only thing we dreamed of. Golding words—finer than all the metals you enclose things with.

  John Dee with his absolutely fake medium E.K. (who later wrote the Shepherds Calendar) trying to transmute letters to metal all the way through Bohemia. Later, in the 19th century, becoming a theosophist and dying.

  They tell of a love that is beyond heat. A chemical formula. Sulphur combined with darkness and a piece of the moon. Then say “I love you” three times and turn around.

  Magic, which is trying to hold onto people with your own hands, is funny while surrealism is not funny. There is a place where we can talk and we cannot talk. Both of us.

  Heat.

  21.

  Hold to the future. With firm hands. The future of each afterlife, of each ghost,
of each word that is about to be mentioned.

  Don’t say put beauty in here for the past, on account of the past. On account of the past nothing has happened.

  Stick to the new. With glue, paste it there continually what God and man has created. Your fingers catch at the edge of what you are pasteing.

  You have left the boy’s club where the past matters. The future of your words matters. That future is continually in the past.

  That pathology leads to new paths and pathfinding. All the way down past the future. The words go swimming past you as if they were blue fish.

  22.

  Don’t you have a sense of humor? Can’t you take this calmly? All the words they use for poetry are meaningless.

  Postage stamps at the best. Surrealism a blue surcharge for Tchad. This is an imaginary African kingdom which will never gain independence because it does not exist and is not merely an act of the imagination and did issue postage stamps. This is the poest and the poem talking to you.

  To create the beautiful again. It is as if somehow the lovers of postage stamps had created an image of themselves. A red wheelbarrow or a blue image of the unknown. And each stamp we put on the letters they send us must be cancelled, heartlessly. As if its delivery, the beautiful image of it, were a metaphor.

  23.

  Wanting to explain. It is wanting to explain. And all through it burrows of rabbits hover like mice in chimneys or metaphors in the middle of a ginger bread cake.

  The poet wants to take up all the marbles and put them in his pocket. Wants marbles. Where the poem is like winning the game.

  It is so absurd that the rats calling, “Credo quia absurdum” or the cats or the mountain lions become a singular procession of metaphors. Each with their singular liturgy.

  These are words and their words holler hollowly in the rabbit burrows, in the metaphors, in the years of our life.

  24.

  St. Elmo’s Fire. Or why this will be a textbook concerning poetry for 20,999 years. Almost a lifetime.

  I chicken out at the edges of it and what doesn’t come through to me at the edges of it isn’t as if angels met singing or any of that business.