PLACEFULLNESS
Karen Weiser
Ugly Duckling Presse
PLACEFULLNESS poem for Etel Adnan
Karen Weiser
Tell me appear and fold into a self, a map: notice the violent mark of the pen, a black ink dot, what form is my memory inside You an I an eye an ocean of little combs and the yellow of warmth in flowers another circumference of a moment as biopsy of a self you contain in your currents is it the organization of love as subversion like the day leads to other days and the invisible routine of newspaper, coffee, doorways disperses out of a wakefull forgotteness is my proof of being. Your desert within is already clear by the end of the line. Over there, wandering becomes a map-like hover. Last night was the thing you are telling me the sky was a desert measure of distance I am not sure what if I am your You but the soul is not a single-entry room
In your field bloom opposites, between is articulation visible? Crystalized in image or painted as light in dreaming. You say the soul can be carried. I admit to believing in innocence. Your disappeared hometown: the image of a map folded in on itself. I have lost the idea of hometown in this intricate folding. The trail leaves off its clues to gather in simple forms. Her legs enter & fold separated by two empty fields. Sky is a measure in common. A measure is a moment of time between two points creating a field. You see love’s weightlessness; a hopeful moment with glued hair.
When light disappears shadow does too curved fields of dark between our shapes the Nile has entered I say sailed narrow and narrow the felukah, river, horizon has entered. The river moves a trance like day pieced together from moving I WORRY I am locked into your antlers my own head discovers daughters folding into the page another map of disappearing locations fragile with violence cracked with limbs another failsafe system of debris divorce. I live in New York, not in my soul where we met when we married words. You asked who’s an enemy, an enemy hears you wonder mouthing a flattened horizon.
Yes the messiah heals the split, collapse between inner and outer; love and justice distance and identity—inseparable. The poet folds the map in on itself finds the shape of a heart in the desert underneath the sun, another measure. You are finding lost children among the questions, there among the blossoms. I SEE you a little girl and the tree for me a weeping willow with no bridges. We must anticipate the sudden stretch into the interior without a treaty. When the war broke up I was taking on homeland for an inheritance. So connected with the threat of being wiped away. Still, there is humiliation in simple ways of being near, how can we stand it? Ghosts are who we need to ignore, their absence is what draws the lines even those we don’t know. What is this talk of indigenous? Who wants to eat from the family tree—eating ghost fruit too bitter for a future?
He/She condensed water. Everyday villages expanded. Everybody listened to the rain. Your actions address releasing all comfort under the self. All comfort is there, gathering force, air still, moon holding place. When your hate for me appears, eyes closed under my wakefulness, messing my soul with answers, unprepare yourself. Not all funerals hint at the miracle of the animal kingdom, giving up its death.
There is a place where outside the sea You and I are separated by other light planetary limbs spinning through the colorless luminescence of not being. The last romantic pictured us both light years from now separated by the veil of your eyes have been transplanted, mine too. The ghosts question where— I can not recognize the core, the bird in a cage of bone shakes its chemistry; will my immune system be repressed, will the horizon burst if war and combustion steal air from this new old memory? Falling forward in the dark. Before birth was no paradise only now, livable alive time is moving I wish no evil on anyone my eyes are a cauldron on fire.
Each location—a roaming field: encapsulated experience runs words thru, internal space becomes public, alive, simultaneous canvases of enacted light, light holds the holes in them. Without guns I wish the sea were a cover solution inside the blue of a meadow run through with a sound of turning away. My limbs are sane seeing the few trees among you there; not one of them pictured a field of relations shifting over land as a definition of heart, fuel. But alive is possible, shapes move about, rage pulling lines around our parallel pasts, memorialized along the voices. Through the landscapes, borders open out diffused space, the valley of the dead is history, opulent with shared graves.
I blurred through the landscape with a sense of being where I am supposed to be, but the question is who hangs the source of trees, bundled inside of them I took out the image that represents you without you which is the stand-in for the room I have purchased with old curtains and a mouse that is prevented from visiting. The poor are not gathered here, my block’s one man’s living room, a permanent fixture; walking through feels personal, a face that reads, collecting dust and centers. The suspended gardens are full of an aura, or radiating distance. Which is your god, and together with mine are they plural? Which moon is your moon a measure of space is she female These actions: rising, entering, landing, trusting the reef, boat, captain, you extend a motion of vision out across the smallness of a cross-sectioned sobriety: To hell with it. To see more like you, past these tangibles onward to terror and a part of the day that forms togetherness, separates the imagined divides. There is more than a shore in between us the cooling beauty of a lingering heat in the body of words.
Color forms around and inside, a moment of intake or drowning in iridescence, the river contains mutating life as well as anguish, the kind I ignored living alongside it, a city in the distance gray movement and a pink eyed horizon! Dreams contain my desire, in them my body comes between itself and a bright unmuffling moment free from memory. I wake without moving the universe, still in the opening doorway looking at things that I can touch while I walk by them. This is my voice, I have not yet written a will; see sky in plate glass squares of stilted directions. Angels have never appeared to me in my dreams, and I can not guess their flight patterns. Undersea in the dead sea were you the one holding me up? My own body kicking myself under... The mist is me around you I hope it does not blur the outlines of too many familiar green expanses pinking beach curvatures. A figure coheres when the clouds move together it says the war is approaching. Between us is a ghostly memory tugging apart the measures of sameness, we push sand architecture; the mountain of time takes apart the entire city as a sea envelops its inhabitants. Are we invisible?
Space moves as you move through it, every sound a broken register another motion of line or horizon melting into an original form release time into this body, a round box and round the room you can here a sparrow while my domesticated bird eats “perhaps� in his foot listening and watching the colors move around the day a foghorn of it beyond an ocean of apartment space in America the real of ovoid closeness is traded for boxes rectangular distance nobody walks the bored plains of it. When is not the question, is always the answer through windows the ocean used to be waiting at the bottom of the hill drive over it suddenly lightning! The moment the alphabet between us writes love letters to our conscripted hearts we are both done in rosetta stones in cities of the interior, like glass, translated and broken, lines fizzle to become snow and light. In space’s blue soggy dreams melt we are not there for long, steep folds in on us the night is crystallized in its benevolent handshake kindling dawn to waken us.
Is static beautiful? What if it is the street containing it in prostitutes, corners, garbage, police: a motion of expanding toward vanishing? Finally things passed down take on my character standing in for the disappeared whose names float in these rooms; “perhaps” my only or most important possession to possibly ignore, then I am not hiding the places I keep my perimeters growing from our bodies’ own waters— the me who you sweat from, with my own face and cover. I hear you knew people in Jenin and my moments throw listening into the sea. Who can I believe and about what? Images of your questions form the body of a static in currents of the same sea, where we and our questions lose cohesiveness to meet in sleep’s motion. A voice is putting out wars inside my head dismantling the mud of tranquility attached to the skin. The larger space is quiet when comets pass by in fire. You can locate nothing but the moment before memory and the terror of its beauty, orange and loose.
After swimming through the city my tired sun sets past the doorway, momentarily igniting the place for inquiry behind our bodies. Words stretch from humidity‌ Is the past a border we need to locate in order to find a water source large enough? The statues are waiting around them landmarks reroute I am running to leap through your transitions, dreamy syntax still pulls out the heart’s mud & blood. In the middle like the end we can not locate the moment as present; last century is unavailable but breathing still exists in growing things. Orchards used to fill my hometown but the map bent back, they disappeared. You touch water without holding it; what do we do with the things we are given to possess? I worship my father’s picture without secret, but his ghost speaks out against you. Is your family history erased, broken, let go? The sun destroys sacred images preserves another kind of linking empty. The ocean is too large to understand; infinity is a concept to protect us from our own incomprehension. So many things are, pulled out of the sky to build an inner architecture we can control. Projected outward living creatures fill zones of it grass there is like no grass living on its own; the act of mapping binds us.
I have myself walked ahead, courting a gender that lagged behind, my own, losing it in the way one steps onto the curb. The cold New York night is clearly a cover story for the underground lost city. They will find one of us and claim us as royalty, descendants of an original civilization. I am wearing tobacco flower, which smells male. Is a father something one can find returning in a smell? I have been waiting‌ Anxiety has taken over my excretory organs while beauty smudges its way through our dirty windows. Who forgot to drink their glass of water? Have I been visiting you lately? The wind pushes the curtains aside in a pattern too minute to graph. If every poem is a room can a kind of house be nailed together in the way your sea moves in roads and nothing pushes out a colorful edge? I have entered and lain down in your word furniture, pulling the clouds over my folded-in mirage. More than that rest is the dream inside, where the water both holds the body up to gaze at the shore and drowns with its unceasing nature. So are questions. To become another is what it is to be oneself, but you are too far away. Today, my lost self cracked back up to the surface momentarily. I pushed her back down, another dead to wonder and tally, to remember the proper way to fold the map, the lost and still losing places. There is only one direction to travel. Returning to the past is impossible; you are moving forward when you visit it, even in memory. The facts shift uncontrollably. Each time the frame changes and so does the light, gentle in parts, in parts hard to tell.
History appears to flutter—your words rise over refugee time, the book’s spine cracks war. How can your written house be prophesy? Lurk behind the outline of place— doorframe opens a shared crowd of selves in the garden I do not know which is mine alone, to picture a single one running from the shaping fields of power spillover drowns people then drowns the encounter nothing except recognizable forms alternate with light’s undercurrent pulling where you are away from where you are. Is it safe? Invasions make portraiture breathe soot thread black clouds onto a necklace of “here” over there.
Looking one way I am concerned. Another way it is larger than dreaming. Then I am outside it. Now a body is next to mine in pleasure of nearness. The street fills me with interior hum, matching many sounds to many sounds as my steps move forward into sound. Bits of space knock me out. My sky is steady. Sky is outside the frame, is the frame. First knowledge of composition; weight of landscape against a heavy air. When the sky is a wound the soul is an amputated music. There is a place where I know when not turning away, scattering matter to understand and not give up my gravity of container—of skin, of dreams. I stepped out on the fire escape to hear the instruments of living: practice scales, appliances, voiceboxes, moving vehicles, horizon still there. There is enmity filling the sky but I am closing my intuition to it. Who is real if their story is unknown? You are cementing the built trees back into substance. Like a gentle pulling hand to the chin saying place. It is where you are: space and time our first understanding.
Are you placed next to the language of your palace a green miasma cartographically transposed? A moat prevents the light from escaping to another country; harbor as an act undoes the windy harbor of the dock although both make sense of borders, between countries and elements water and earth. Range is wideness within the filtering of memories. An animal eye is a subject to examine; a diagram of consciousness, but instead of seeing what’s in there I am losing recognition. How can you eat the octopus after one reacts so strongly to your presence? We were already enemies before we were born. The shutters opened to a specific us, a sense of time we thought we had contained, understood, but we were made into it. Woken in a shape. It has gone everywhere without us ever I have been laying down a concrete shadow next to the opening you made placing yourself in relation to your language like that. Like that, or there, the place of it folding in icons and weather systems harboring too much night
“This” place changes with every new hand. It is the sentence that breathes out of a continuum. Turn the knob and shut off temporality, it groans with the mechanical rigor of a timepiece. You knew its impossibility before we were even born. Before we were woken into shape, the left-overs of History ground out the basest sort of rhythm. High in the trees the mountains hold up a luggage of air. When you carry your present with you, the trappings of place are attached. In a web our shapes light up with decay. Hereness. A seasonal trap lets the air out. I am aware of hereness only in my body, only in certain places. It’s the reconfiguration of “home” that always gets me swept up with desire. A metal hardness under the loss of connective tissue. Between family, a luminous grouping of water containers. Redemption in the desert is folded over like a place dusty with sitting. Haunting me with our empire that smolders to a muted red. What is new for us when we love? Does it uncover the lineage of language’s balconies? Like string theory the intuitive vibrations posit music as part of stepping out to observe the view. A universe of balconies to look from. Move from one to another and the view creates a new you. This is place, combined with us hungry animals. The corpses don’t leave shadows or ask anything of us. They are kept in the back pocket of everything empty we know.
Place
Woken into reaching for it I look back to no longer shelved inside action, suddenly, part of me contained within the boiling part, there, rooms of definitions open out… “the mind is a place”
Mythologies spin out from a starting point: land. Consider pushing aside boundaries and mother-tongues to contemplate it, whole continents of it. Without armies, jurisdictions, certainties. The sea is propelling, an opaque origin stirring past culture, past mountains who have shadows, more immense than substantial. Walls pile up around the image. A horizon stops its pull with tilt, you are no longer stretched across it. I do not know about victories. My own is empty, or built on lack. Can you push me into the box Country and call it Nature? Between here and there is story, one you tell, one I bury under potted plants on the windowsill. How do you count the nations you care for? Convictions are radiant. You say that thunder comes before lightning, and hearing runs from it—there’s no backtracking once the naming process has started. After all, Eve also named the living inhabitants in the garden, weaving hands under a sadness that only came later. My blanket of memory is keeping identity warm‌ It is failure the cards read right, the lesson hardest to accept and admit. Mountains hold up a luggage of monuments; from heights water moves downstream carrying more than a motion we can see.
An entity like conversation’s pause, part rhythm and drowning, visits with items on the sinking horizon you can list: a pathway opens to a sucked-out space. I am not sure of the doors or the edges of memory but light falls in and washes it out. Both your past and civilization leave off amplified questions: breathing needs miles of answers underneath the breeze or white curtains hypnotic in the lack of sway. Surrender is a bodily function until you open it to exterior logic; a stairway to future relations of enemy. Who is not tragic holding out for the lost answers? Or paths to being in a disposable personhood. Confrontation is framed by a fast of words. I can’t swallow anymore and the windows are closed to keep out invaders. The result is disappearance of the place, making it impossible to be rescued. Seasons and space ply us.
This series was written in conversation with Etel Adnan’s book There, In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other (The Post Apollo Press, 1997). Thank you to the editors of Magazine Cypress 3 and transverse, in which sections of Placefullness have appeared. My thanks to Anselm Berrigan, Dana Ward, Ammiel Alcalay, and Anna Moschovakis.
Placefullness Š Karen Weiser, 2004, 2010 ISBN: 0-9727684-8-3 (Print edition) This book was originally designed, printed and bound in an edition of three hundred at the Ugly Duckling Presse workshop in Dumbo, Brooklyn, in June 2004. The first fifty copies are signed and numbered by the author. Text is set in Cochin, titles in Optima. Cover image by Jonathan Fisher circa 1800. Letterpress plate made by Boxcar Press, Syracuse, NY. Paper supplied by Limited Papers, NYC. Electronic edition produced in July 2010 and made possible in part by a grant from the New York State Literary Presenters Technical Assistance Program.
For other UDP chapbooks and books please see our Web site: www.uglyducklingpresse.org