Waldman - Gossamurmur

Excerpt from Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu, translated by David Hinton
(Counterpoint Press, 2000). Used by permission. constitute an extension of this copyright page. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Waldman, Anne, 1945 Gossamurmur / Anne Waldman. pages cm ISBN: 978-1-101-59277-9 I. Title.

PS3573.A4215G67 2013 811.54dc23 2012040614 Designed by Ginger Legato what are the limits of the body?for Akilah Oliver
poet, teacher, catalyst (19612011) Nevertheless, It is dangerous to be named and makes you mortal. If you have a name you can be sold you can be told by that name leave, or come you become, in short a reference, or if bad luck is large in your future you might become an institution which you will then mistake for defense. I could now place you in a column from which There is No Escape and down with The Machine will always recognize you. Or a bullet might be Inscribed or I could build a maze called a social investigation and drop you in it your name into it Please! I implored him you terrify me. What then, I asked is my case? looking into the Odd toed ungulates eyes who had his left leg resting on my shoulder. Gunslinger, Edward Dorn The valley spirit never dies. Gunslinger, Edward Dorn The valley spirit never dies.

Its called dark female-enigma, and the gateway of dark female-enigma is called the root of heaven and earth, gossamer so unceasing it seems real. Use it; its effortless. Tao Te Ching, sixth-century BCE translated by David Hinton ACKNOWLEDGMENTS With gratitude to Peter Warshall, Maelstrm reEvolution, the Tamaas foundation, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Bhanu Kapil, Ambrose Bye, Pat Steir, Alexis Myre, Elliot Colla, Sawko Nakayasu, David Gitlen, Apsara DiQuinzio, and Gina Maher, who in her generosity gave home and shelter to this writing. Making up a small portion of the work are lines from Entanglement (2009) and The Value of Small Skeletons (2011), movies by Ed Bowes and several pages appear in The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality. Also, sincere gratitude to my editor, Paul Slovak, who has supported my poetry for many years. plot rescues sanity. recuses identity its floating world. and allegory tests calamity resilient or under siege Once how delicate the gauze that adheres to and flicks off identity. Flips it. Flips it.

Becoming cartography. Gossamurmur occasions a transgressive vein, a body poetics with a bifurcated protagonist indicating two simultaneous and alternating realities. Often alarming. She and She. By way of a mundane duplicada experience (I noticed her she had a funny dayglow wig on she said my name when asked hers) I discovered my credit union had another client with my exact name. At one point our accounts had become transposed.

I thought of Borges and his doubles and Thomas Manns The Transposed Heads. I fantasized about this meticulous, oddly coifed other and how she might spend my money. And then how I might spend hers. Bodies in a materia infinitum world that levels down to charnel ground. Where all detritus grinds down. Sing you there, my duplicada.

I will find you there. We will spend our phantom money. We will meet without name without body without debt but that of past action in nominative karma. Who did what to whom. I will be your other, wisp of consciousnessand you will be mine in token of our name, a rare coinage. And she was the trigger, the apparatus, of my composite allegorical destruction or rather of all I cared about in the mundane world which was the survival and oral archive of an excellent poetry and record of a temporary autonomous zone from which it emanated, close to a high-altitude Divide.

And she was a grand