Sandra Simonds - Further Problems with Pleasure

The one trick Ive always fallen back on is to make a man think hes the one rejecting me But it was so quiet in your room even if you had long books written by evil men at your bedside and in your possession that deep desire to hurt and thus in my head scrambling between kissing you and trying to maneuver how I would leave unharmed the way a woman has to manipulate both mind and body I dreamed I was in a car and a man hit me over the head Please dont tell me the story of the graduate student who put a mouse in her freezer just to see what would happen It was quiet though if even for a moment I drive around Tallahassee to find one quiet place The way I love you is not as a sheriff searches for a walnut Its more violent and I cant stay in the moment of this poem long enough for the feeling to unfold I owe the therapist $80 The woman wearing a fur coat with her six kids on a leash who showed up to the South Georgia poetry reading in her stretchy jeans I was proud to have been the host to that the way one might write a hallelujah ode to a black hole with roses and tulips shooting out of it Oh the grotesquerie John Keats, you dont have to say mother anymore This is my quietness I am the bride and also the urn and you are my foster child as I make you sit here and listen to my prayers are sweeter than any rhyme sprouting out of a dogs skull Beautiful bud on the cold stone When Walter Benjamin is all high on hashish, thats when he finally understands Poe or the lazy grass that grows along this lake that fakes every orgasm and takes delight through deception Take these irretrievable zones of stupidity which are the little wings that grow at the end of my smile which is I dont know Zumba? Power yoga? Smoothies? Breakdancing? The Anthropocene is a disease that affects the heart lung machine is tripping on the setting day dazed like the end of disco I know how to waste the mellow hour glides like a swan into the future (so long, future!) turns into swans gliding across the ice in Florida Some cursive tongues or calligraphy made of pure value the mood descending like soft rains in the tropics Every day is the dream of the desiccated Virgin Marys head who hovers above my body to mock the lush plants, the megaflora, to capture the line vanishing, the threshold vanishing, the apartment vanishing, the vanished rent, to connect one vanishing point with another, how deeply one delves into each side of the moment, how deeply the sentence turns into the caf, the spirit world, a loud, drunken discussion about politics or the aversion to certain foods, farewell, material I have plunged into it and the spirit world splashes around my form so how can I resist the demons who insist I seem to be so much their semblance? The red walls of ice lasted about an hour falling from the sky my son said, That is weird. I have never seen that before. It is the end of the pterosaurs, the end of machines, the end of marching bands and particle accelerators, it is the end of Diet Coke, the end of chai tea, or Darjeeling and the lavender calming aromatherapy mist (for room and body) Day is already whats in the wake of the irretrievable and for what, Horatio? Cones, pyramids, squares, bricks of pills, the sunset breaking harsher and, in more elegiac tones, in crude relief like monotone set against monotone or the obscene silk dresses flowing in the sugar-scented air that I wore in Paris with my cousins eating lemon ice cream along the banks of the Seine you were already crashing straight into my history of days swelling like a bad book thrown into dirty water and you knew it even though it was smudged like the dream of carbon breaking into fossils, ideology and the smell of fat roots in the forest The relief is so transient Get me out of here! But I felt faint or weak or without the will or without hope because beauty does this to her sufferers making a kind of lucid Maserati of the heavens The mock-heroic event horizon Maybe Im the ruthless one, the bad character in one of those novels by your bedside, the one who lies, cheats and steals but theres no way to know for sure honey when youre given so little of the plot and all the other characters are probably very seedy but stay silent (at least for now) as if we are all in the middle of a large body of signals, a silence of aqua that has these high pitched sounds like metallic birds perforating in rings of cloud We could be sitting in a coffee shop drinking tea and holding back our life stories Each history a long stay in the spiral staircase of libraries and burnt gardens and I cant imagine why anyone would feel the desire to hurt a woman who thinks about suicide every day But hey the lines are drawn and this oblong lake is much more than an acquaintance Maybe the way pain in public is so demonstrative and humiliating and also so affectionate, a giving that turns our cells into something more than mere technology so that theres only ever some superficial layer of the epithetical light I like the feeling of not crying but still wanting to Its like prolonging the orgasm Some tantric impulse to the comets Or maybe better to burn some incense because it is Saturday and the house is cool, calm and quiet like a plant I like the build-up, the way its like a short story or maybe short stories are like the breasts when they are hard and full of milk and the baby is never gentle with what he wants and the sore nipple is also not gentle with her giving I dont understand how anyone could have abandoned you, much less your mother and for what? To have made you this creature forever stalking the evil light of a pool of blood fixating on the ring of flowers at the bottom as if that ring could bring you back your mother or any narrative that made sense One may scroll endlessly through a picture gallery of flowers: anemone, autumn joy, allium and to imagine that there are twenty-five other letters of these ready to be planted, apple blossoms or azalea, and none of this you recognize the Virgin Marys desiccated, sepia-toned eyes floating so close to you trying to find water so plants might bloom into the lush forms of volition, the complete face of compassion we must feel for our enemies which is why I dont even understand why anyone would abandon anyone in our cold pastoral of rain, dirt, art, the stage set of the Anthropocene gets all shot up like a gas station the way we watched Martha, Andys mom on TV And I looked down and I realized it was his liver and Andy and I laughed at the way his mother said this but how awful is it really, a trained nurse, just getting some gas and coffee and then the whole thing descends into a wet liver on the horrible tiles of a CONOCO station in New Orleans, so now I wonder about Jason, the geologist, who kept threatening to kill himself and no one cared until he went to Billings for work and got black out drunk and shot a woman for no reason he said, Look at what you made me do! which is what they all say From Florida, he had few ties to the Billings area Some things have no reason and thats why they are so hard to understand How did you get away? I cant say for sure Its kind of a blur I endured it I gave him what he wanted I was very afraid I knew he could kill I promised that he would get something later Because every story from the South has to end with some theft, lies and betrayal and if its a romance like Im sure this one is even though it is unthinkable to say so the moon will take the shape of the face of that disaster looking back on itself in disbelief