Gossamurmur (10 page)

nothing new, destroying books

a rogue state of small import had become refuge

pragmatic leaders were nervous: where to put our money down?

Deciders had Fear but saw Opportunity

were things looking up in the Deciding-Way?

you could be unabashed

Decider of what you might want to destroy

ask it of other Deciders and they surely rally

the weather was changing and New Deciders seemed happy

they would welcome the Drenchers and Wasters and Arsonists

they frolicked in their charnel ground of more deciding

but poetry was being planted in soil kept by women in robes of sleep and utopic dream

Escaped and what she observed: What you are having here and must be careful not to step upon is fragile in so very delicate ground-obeying and earth-preserving forms and very most very sisterly soils. You might see dwarf shrubs or rosettes or mat or cushion plants. Very sisterly sounding and receptive if you are considering something about a guardian female. And gossamer the delicacy of life here, fragile endangered dwarfed. Here you have long long and cold winters and strong and very strong driving systirly winds. And very sestraly thoughts abound and even snow would help as an insulating swistarly layer for those plant and animal realms that seem to want to live here. We could try it being sororial as it is a place where a thin membrane exists between living and dying, and to go on living—if you could—you would be useful and sweostorly—if it wasn’t prohibitive—you would be seeing that this form that is delicate even wordless but not antisocial and even raging to live—and like a newborn—seems to be struggling very hard.

could Archive be dwarfed
, Original Anne mused

like the creatures of Tundra who struggle, becoming miniscule

could it be condensed?

condensare,

   the Poet admonished,

look to the little ones

slaughtered, saying of something so small being slaughtered not so

reckless as a couple of humans

humans standing reckless or contained

how to present thought and actions and deeds and words of the humans
   our Troubled Time

maybe not so close but vulnerable because they speak in silent
   walking

those who are troubled, those who bend

six weeks to grow to live to continue, delicate life forms hide under
   our speech holding them

someone walks someone exits someone escapes the rule of others

someone leaves you mustn’t follow

rosette or mat plants or cushion plants underfoot be careful

the landscape reels back and forth stop a moment and capture an
   image of a youthful guardian

how now in dotage furrows worrying the future desecrations of poetry

veins bulge in anxiety of survival

shoe boxes of tape ready for transplant

ungrounded voices rising out of the floodplains of Samsara

afloat in New Weathers

long winters and cold and driving winds and

unpredictable weather fires and floods of Troubled Time

thin membrane between death or life or life in death

my sisters, you better know

Original Anne had repossession as she reentered the factious world

Original Anne had proprioception’s stealth and glide

Original Anne might now reclaim all the receipts for the years

she was possessed and on margin

her papers were in order

she could prove identity

she had been exonerated for the symbolic murders of Deciders

who were exposed in public sessions of confession and shame

Deciders of low rank and lesser culpability were thrilled with the

humiliation of the higher-rank Deciders

Poetry piped into their cells night and day

“
Not us! Not us! It was those other Deciders did it”
(they claimed now in cage, many of them sick lying there in cage, weak in their Deciding-Way)

not as guilty being less exposed, they were under orders

to revile poetry but did they really

when they ransacked the Quonset hut on the tundra they found

nothing to connect Deciding with Poetry

yet sublime orality would hamper them forever in their Deciding-Way

and for the exposure of Impostors

Original Anne drove stakes through the hearts of Impostors

their disguises had dissolved, wigs came tumbling off

makeup ran with the torrent created by strong waterfalls

they held their last meeting at the trial that was called to hear the

crimes of the Deciders

decisions now often went in favor of the whims and egos of the

Deciders, they got off too easy

and more importantly the wealth of the Deciders

who decided on ways to extract more power from the inner sanctums of planet earth

who would exhaust the resources of planet earth and exploit the New Weathers

and more disturbingly (and this showed their hand,
that they were clearly insane
) the strange perversions of the Deciders

who wanted to make decisions for all mankind about love

about who may or may not love another

who may or may not touch another, experience ecstasy with one another

who wanted to define rules for the care and control of all bodies

who would blame extreme weather patterns on lack of control of bodies

hurricane, tsunami, flood, tornado

“
they have no control of their bodies
”

“
they love one another
”

“
cosmos out of joint
”

“
let them not love one another in this terrible way
”

“
it is not the Deciding-Way
”

Original Anne stormed in and demanded retrieval of her memory stream

she charged in and reclaimed the essence of Archive

she had wrested Archive from the master-plan of the Deciders

she would not close her visions to the difficulties in North Africa

she would keep on the study of language and culture

but she had to let go of anything that did not tally with political reality “on the ground”

she did not compromise her involvement with crimes of terror and radical religious fervor

her name and the names of the subversive classes she taught were removed from the lists of the lackeys of the Deciders

she felt keenly the disinheritance of her institution which appeared now as a russet castle inhabited by enemies of poetry and imagination inhabited by the pervertors of the teaching, con artists who

preyed on the ignorance of tender supplicants

she had distance and she kept her distance in the hallways of archiveless night

the castle evaporated or rather disappeared from one world system

“
it’s all an illusion
”, said Decider Vishnu

while drones with their manic evaporating sounds of danger and violence retreated into the distance, the little child deaf to the machinations of power but feeling the vibrations

of a lighter time a future time

Archive buried in the frozen tundra, a treasure to last a thousand years

intonations of poets and of their fragile impermanence…

pity the New Deciders, she said

they will not inherit this earth

leave that to the slime molds, the protists, those who inhabit the power of symbiosis

pity the Deciders pity their obsessions

pity their sick fixation with gender control

pity the lovers and mistresses of Kaneie and Genji

Deciders who frolic about the Shinden-zukuri mansion

while the women write of them

in subdued yet passionate tones

rain on tiled roofs

women rarely venturing beyond the veranda

receiving gentlemen callers from behind curtains

in their giant heaps of clothes….

hiding a diary under a pillow stained with tears

Archive is not a portfolio.

This is my poem for now and future lovers, scrolled in my pillow book at dawn:

Start from a murmur of persons and rise up not like a veil of unsanctified tears; a work in love is never unsanctified enigma if not but pure flow and consent or rip in the veil which is sanctuary for persons be they same or other. As a waterfall never falling in the same sanctuary twice. An abode for our bodies, of union, of persons stepping up to the altar of ancestors together who were union who were civil who were convivial behind a veil. Step up, step it up, convivial. Show them, and rip the veil off the eyes of the enemies of veil. See it another way. Declare the space to be an abode of bodies. See through the waterfall to those behind a veil that was protecting the face of other, same-face same-base same-trace same-pace same-grace same-lace marriage. A civil veil. Or it is my vow my vowels and vocables to be this same which is never that same one in gender-constructed eros. Eros-faced marriage. We are never the same in same-sexed love. But law is civil and protects the abode of bodies. A body abode, a body abides. Say it: law is civil or rival is civet is civilized is civilians is not chilling. Gone is the time of boundaries of veils or tears of borderlines of separating cascades of enigmas and hiddenness. Gone is that chilling time that does not witness the desire to be seen to be witness of this union. Beyond a boundary “same” or “reciprocal” or “solidarity pacts.” It is over, gone and done with, that violent time violent divide. Over, of hiding the shape of a bed, the shape of a clearing in a forest where you lie down, soft and mossy spot, and you might come together there, the ancient dark green moss and secluded spot you come to, again. Same and same and not same and sane. Decide our own bodies. You of former hiddenness and sorrow and lie down and come together and making do in the secret chamber sought that place you walked there you found a secluded spot below the Tundra where deer bedded down where deer waited and you stepped there and sank there on knees in a very hot devoted love where you rip the
veils from the fear of prying eyes and welcome the presence of a natural world. And say something like “as sky is my witness…” “as earth is my witness…” Come here my weeds and remove these weeds to our sameness. See our sameness. And remove the borders to our sameness, “as weeds are my witness…” Come my hands to your natural weeds and remove the fear of our sameness and see the beauty of our sameness and not sameness. Touch the gossamer body of our sameness that you know, and hiddenness you know. Intangible. Clothing that waits by the side of bedding down and eyes you know in hiddenness. Fields of eyes not prying not hidden. It was natural and very natural to do this to be this to bed down in a clearing away from prying eyes and metabolic strangulation who said unnatural this contract a vow against perpetual wiring of denial. “as wilderness is my witness” “as wildness is my witness…” Take the vow in the wilderness. It is over, it is gone and done. It is over and done with being behind the shadow cloth of the marriage veil, behind it a valance, a balance, and what is the essence of this poetry as in music which knows no boundary. Rip the boundary that is veil. Where it tunes to the body of beautiful sameness but never the same music. Consciousness as in music and civil it is civil and civil it is a demand to be civil. As a cascade is civil, as from the tilling of fields and this world is a cultivation of new things in civility it is a sure thing to witness.

She put her dictum on the validity of love in all directions and buried it in a corner of the tundra:

for a joining that is not easy but is a joining work in love

Dream of duality in the phenomenal universe

veil of maya, a memory of rescue

illusion’s dream

a false dichotomy?

MA = not

YA = that

I’ll tear it off, pierce it

rend the veil from the other face

A gossamer web but not a trampoline

that will bounce out a Spider Woman’s prey

Not a rubber band

Another word for strain-energy storage

might be resilience

A virtue of the movers and shakers of this shimmering world

Thinnest strains so they cannot be seen