There are many things about you that people dont notice because you are pretty. Like that you are quickest to anger with people you love and that you are a perfect mathematician. Tell me who gave you that ring that swirls into its silver self. A shotgun wedding without a shotgun and a shotgun wedding without a bride are still excuses for two people to stand beside each other. In the morning I will lie beside someone that I love and you beside someone that you love, but when the day comes each person goes where they have to go. Im not as beautiful as you are tonight, I say, but only when I cant stop myself, my veil askew. It is god that makes someone a saintall the church can do is recognize that person. Who am I to know the methods of something holy?The first thing I noticed about you was your lips and you were speaking.
A herd of gazelles will often measure five thousand. During mating season, the throats of male Mongolian gazelles swell as they bellow long loud bellows. Gazelle fur lines Meret Oppenheims Object: a teacup, saucer, and spoon, suggesting a feminine sexuality present in every common object. She called her work an enormously tiny bit of a lot. Sometimes two objects become one object, not as a hybrid or a duality but as a new thought that consumes both. In Mongolia a herd of gazelles numbering a quarter million runs across treeless fields, throats filled with the sound of desire. They are so numerous, the scientists say, that it is impossible to tell if they are dying and should be considered endangered. I found a way to give and take at the same time and with that new thought I approached you.
When you came to the mountain farm my legs were rashed red by chiggers and the sun slipped quickly behind the ridge. Soon, your tent was empty and you were in my bed, the hills cupped around us like hands taking water to a mouth. Water trickling down forearms. These days, at discos with my whiskey, I dance to hip hop like a riot girl and am never taken home. It was while dancing that I met my last boyfriend. Dont you know anything? he asked, sincere with frustration. Youre supposed to give me your number. I cant decide if it was all scripted, if you hopped the train that brought you south so we could meet. Ive learned this lesson so many times before but it still seems as unheard as the birds, high and imperceptible above us.
By describing something we place it at a distance. My body is a fleshy thing, my body is tall and filled with citrus. I want everyone I have touched to send me a postcard on which they describe their fingers, but mostly I want them to do this before I have the chance to ask. At night, my eyes are unable to understand depth. When I was young I climbed a tree playing flashlight tag. I sat in it so long I forgot how high I was and leapt to get down, the earth like a flat punch as I tumbled to my ribs. I write down 102 words that say what I see when I see you, how it is a flat punch to look at you. How does it feel to know you are something I look at? In the morning, dress yourself in the clothes I removed last night.
Dim snow. Light tower. Peninsula. Skyscapes before skyscapes. You say a ghost is an impression, like wet paper in our hands. The white and blue of winter. The white and blue of windows. An arms distance as far as I can see.
I am having trouble living somewhere, or anywhere. After only a month has passed, I find myself on the side of the road again, walking to the trains. I have been so many places I must be sunlight. I have been diffused by clouds. To hike to the top of the mountain, I must spend the afternoon facing the steep slant of earth, my hands in brambles. Only once I am high enough can I turn and see the tin roofs and straight beds of flowers, dropped to a Euclidian flatness. Where have I been?Listen, I have been diffused by clouds, by everyone who has touched me, and just like you I am a radiation destined for the earth.
When I am not in the country I am in the city, so why not your city, after all?A girl I sometimes date lives here, three friends from college. Everyone is speeding beneath the pavement, a rumble in tunnels we trust not to cave in. I walk around with a basket of apples, unaware that apples are out of season. I am suggesting that you bite the loaded image, am calling myself a witch, a snake-devil. Its not tart because of poison, its just a tart apple. You dont have to trick me into hanging out with you, my friend claims. Just let me know what time. They say you have to live here for ten years before you live here, so really this isnt any more your home than it is mine.
See through mesh. Of all the Cells Louise Bourgeois made, I stood before Cell (Glass Spheres and Hands) the longest, a date at the Guggenheim ending. It is a cage of square glass. Inside, large crystal balls sit on wooden chairs and hands rest on the table. The walls announce an outside and an inside, somewhere that I am and somewhere that I am not. Touch is the conclusion of sight, and so Bourgeois places the folded hands there, behind the glass. Your clavicle dips so slightly down, then up again. A cage also suggests danger, makes the natural curiosity of looking a risk. To see an object, to consider its surface and texture, is to ignore all else. What does your boyfriend say about me? I turn to face you and ask.
It must have felt, after you won the tiara, like someone had slathered you with papier-mch. Lets use your form to gather rain and the rain will deflate the form. If you go to see the ancient drawings in the Lascaux caves, you will instead see identical drawings two hundred meters away. Someone enters once a month to undo the damage our breath, rich with carbon dioxide, has caused. Ask her if there is any difference between one bull and its twin. What makes the images impressive is the use of movement and perspective, the possibility of sky charts. The point where two railroad tracks come together is the point where they vanish, one new thought that leaves our sight. I could see you better if you were to lie down and touch your fingertips to each other like an arrow, your form a flower trough.
Your boyfriend and I are going to mingle, to cross-pollinate and appropriate. You are going to flit between us until I say his Oh boy! and he bites his lip like my bottom lip. And the King ordered you cut in two, so that one half could be given to me and one to your boyfriend. And I said I wanted the half with your firm butt, which was just as well, as your boyfriend wanted the half with your pretty face. In mathematics a knot is different than the knot on a sail or shoelace because it has no ends and so cannot be undone. The string of the trefoil knot spins around itself forever, three loops in one form. Three people holding hands can dance and dip, taking turns being held, leaning back without falling. Severed, the trefoil knot becomes a line that ends, a segment.
Spirit catch of breath. Appellations tumble off your lips. You tell me and you tell me again. I still want to talk about it, the ice breaking and water seeping out. The pain in my lungs. Your lips.
To be honest, I dont find your boyfriend attractive, not really, although I wont tell you that. I find something very small, you say, and make it to be something very large. The lens of the projector and the bodies on screen, like the difference between who he could be and who he is. Leaping to touch the light (shadows). Proximity offers a certain beauty, makes the glass orbs be more than crystal balls. Its a given that youre desired, the way you pull off that flannel shirt. Me, I have to pin a tulip to it. Me, I have to study the part in everyones hair. I throw a crystal ball into the air and still some light shines through, obscures the screen. She must do something right if hes dating her.
