La Casa Azul
for Frida Kahlo
Your father exhausted himself into your mother and you were born. The blue house is there and the dirt at the
foot of the door from the street pregnant with headache, heartache and bone. There is nothing special about 1907, or any other
year, or the bullets, or the wind. Nothing special about being born, or polio, rage, or people learning to crawl after learning
to walk, or the monkeys, drunk on fermented fruit, in the trees above the raw sewage from the market spilling into the jungle.
The bus collided with the streetcar, and every bone in your body, in ’25, ending the possibility of becoming
anything like your mother, your sisters, a woman, or your name. You were invented, again, from meaninglessness, from collective
memory where we fall down and gain enormous power by understanding, not expiration, but insignificance.
It’s hot. The bed is wet. A crow’s shadow across your lips makes them part and there is nothing
in your mouth but thirst and a number of days in the shape of a strangled tongue. Incredulous, you open and close your eyes
and find no angel, no mercy, no ghost, just your body screaming and twisted without your consent, terrified, peaceful, and
committed, you becoming your own family in a village with only one season, where everyone looks just like you, and you embrace
yourself because no one else can. Eventually, you hear your sister calling your name, because she does not know what to do,
so you smile and she says something stupid. You say “Yes,” and she dresses you like a doll and you begin.
What is there left to become when you are forced to be conscious and terribly human with pure will and no possibility
or desire for the simple life?— A nation, an idea, a politic or a function as pure as lightning, a mother, a knife,
a lie? Art is born from subtraction.
You listen to the water in the mirror and keep painting yourself but there is nothing in the mirror but props,
ashes and heat. It’s funny, I didn’t find or see anything there either, just the sad gifts of everything that
put us here in the first place—stop the music, here comes the wind.
PORNOGRAPHY, HISTORY, GRAVITY, WATER (ULYSSES)
A different
war
lovely
wither
where
quilted wheels
are beasts
pausing
nostrils
pawing the air
to record
the grapes
the romans
left to wilt in france
special
the friction
is
when the
hat moves through the air
lands
like a 2 x 4 in the water
you land
simultaneous
fall to
the ground
no one
is there but the camera
the lovely
contusion
and the
skull behind the ear
denying
the grass its desire to absorb
and the
landscape its contrast
you throw
yourself to the ground
because
you can get up
distance
isn’t in the equation
everything’s
born in the exhale
the minotaur
sleeps miniature
in your
ear
you reach
for the hat
ridiculous
in the field
the field
contains the camera
and nothing
else
inside
you throw stones
at the
water
to diminish
the horizon
because
everything moves
here we
are again
without
soldiers
or people
to begin
again
gravity
is a breast
she’s
got no milk
but she’s
got milk
you want
to touch her
you’ve
outgrown your clothing
you voice
synchronicity
to the
dilating excrement that is between stars
named
before you were
by no
one
no words—
erotic
the wood floats
nothing
falls from above
but the
sleep
the waters
rise
in the
dream
where
everything is numbered
and belongs
to the past
there
is no need for appliances
nothing
is made
there
is no sleep
nothing
rests
you draw
her to you
there
are no habits
beasts
hunt
animals
love
chemical
release in the blood
moths
move to the light
you put
a nail in the wood
lovely
environment floating
appropriating
undressing
again
you call
her to you
you fall
right into her bed
Arson
for J.
Bellmer’s
Paris torsos in your mind like the galaxy they were meant
to invert—
riddle
of light, a plague of stars in the half empty room where you stretch
out your
skin to covet the tan map you inherited—
There’s
no one left in the underworld
no wolf
to slaughter the moon
&
the absence of the voice in the dark
has become
a fly in the mirror—
a rose
made of bone
the insects
gnawing at the door to your light
I want
to pummel your flesh—the light in your sex,
to pull
the feathers from the angel,
to demean
us, to dampen that drum in the womb,
to wound
& take down that language in your mouth
spitting
matchsticks at the empire of surrender in the floating world
I want
you to exist
to wrestle
my sweat, my night
to lift
your tongue from the soil & the damaged clock
to shit
out the gassed butterfly in the holocaust
to scream
at the terror in the imagination until the snow turns black—
to fuck
you until we pause creation to observe—
&
here the corpses & impossible names are fatigued into ghost, into water,
into sublime
love & the skeletal frailty where we are at last alone & bloated
with the
immense & disobedient nothingness, crawling like a snake the alleys, corridors, & puddles for rats & cats &
mice.
I want
you to stop analyzing what is torn—
to abandon
implication, its culture, its cities,
to open
the scabbed delta, to seduce vanishing & the sugared ants—
bruise
my mouth, open me
to the
humanity we have not yet become & the fire-pit beneath your breast
still life with young
girl, oil on wood (1942)
after Balthus
young girl
draws a curtain back exposing the room to what was already witnessed
still life
as cautionary ghost
of fetish
& culture
apples (pretty
bait)
as artificial
a signifier as a garden or description
cannot be
eaten or torn
just like
her
or the cut
bread with the dull blade
a half glass
of white wine makes a trinity
the image
is a prison
the color
of tobacco & champagne
her face a
plague of attenuation
she is theft
rape of knowledge
wraps her
sleeper with an enormous bandage the size of departure
& music
the dream
is between her legs
she pulls
the curtain away perpetual
awkward in
the posture
the hands
force you to imagine the shoes you know are beyond the plane
her little
breath falls like a solar system
onto the offering
she contains
her appetite in order to keep her autonomy
to avoid the
cruelty in her mouth
what she acknowledges
becomes part of her hammer & hypnosis
the carcass
falling away from the memory
she counts
backward from 10 to 0
as if it were
a game
but there
is nowhere to go
except erasure
her gaze circles
definition like humidity
passing over
& over the peculiar sliver through which one passes from perfection
to stain
it’s
the adolescent genius
where there
is no wilt in a dream
only rouge
& bloom
with its inheritance
of clothing, of fleeting & affectation
embracing
all her nether and ontology with the curl of the open petal
affection
& habit an experimental forest with a crisis
& fondle
girl as covet
of premonition
erotic moth
Timaeus &
spring
she is a repetition
loin-seed
filament &
bridle
her future:
an erasure
of the maker & his longing
(the egg in the intent)
& the
staged magnetics
to be accomplished
to become
funnel, syllable, echo, legume
& every
daughter
without stutter,
soot or entrance
an envelope
full of dust
Waiting
I mispronounce everything with authority. Radio comforts with the punctuated talk
of California fires burning down the dry hills, flames moving
horizontal as if led by their own gravity; the war, the other war, its financiers, the casualties, doubt. It’s almost
soothing, this campaign against evolution, imagination, change; a catalog of errors with its own religion. This anger toward
life that we are born into; this jealousy of the intangible that animates us; this need to damage the donor for its generosity
and the gift itself as if its water were not enough. There are names we are forbidden to pronounce, to produce, that would
shred a mouth, that bring us to the awful sleep, to dream, to fire, when we abandon them. I cut my hair from time to time
to ignore them all. The red leaves fall as if embers from an enormous fire, dictates my age and what must be forgotten; a
climate in me deepens, a perfect red. It’s no longer restlessness that scars but stillness.
Crows
and turkeys litter the woods with asymmetry, their sounds cut across my skin with thick black ink as if I were a crude map,
or a vice; coyotes paw the wet road. My son is small in his bed, screams out
the names of colors that disturb his night: first green, then blue. I imagine a small red cloud falling out of his mouth.
His body is a trigger. He sleeps for me.
I build
things in myself from ash where the wind is terribly strong¾faces, vacant towns¾nothing
pleads to speak. She is bleeding in her sleep, her scent: blood and cinnamon, elderberry, lavender, earth¾warm on me
as the moon and its math crawls up my feet, blunt like a spoon, across the solar system of the bloated orange fruit of the
miniature Panamanian tree in the other room, where I bend time when alone, where I can’t hurt them, and empty myself
of everything but this.
