Gossamurmur (3 page)

Original Anne looked deep into the eyes of this Decider, I would almost say lovingly, into the eye-pools whose shapes within turned mosaic, congealed to bits of colored glass.…She then saw within the finer particles more blocks of menacing form relaxing then
realigning to shape and position, to the posture of the troubling things of this world.

A car with recliner, chauffeur, a screen on which played a Decider fantasy of Decider himself, suave and buff at the top of a stair exuding an exquisite control and lauding it over a servant at the bottom bustling along with a tea serving and vial of cognac to fire the drink:

“
Up here, you idiot!
”

Kagero Nikki
(
The
Gossamer Years
) is the name of the novelistic diary of a noblewoman in Heian Japan. The diary is in some sense a protest against the marriage system of the woman’s time. Conjecture ensues, but
Kagero
might mean “gossamer” in the usual sense, as in “a film of cobwebs floating in air in calm, clear weather” (
Merriam-Webster
) or “the shimmering of the summer sky.”

I add this “murmur” to you, suggesting a register of underlying voices, fond reader, perhaps “gossip,” sometimes rising to a state of cacophony. In this reality the Heian woman rarely ventured beyond her own veranda; “life moved indoors,” the translator notes, and often
to a murmur
…But her diary was lush with descriptions of robes and tear-strained sleeves, of lovers’ faces and wiles and other accoutrements of a restricted social world.

Will you meditate upon the coolness of floors? Sit by a viewing station and wait, shift in a fold of a summer night dress, folded light, or light plays off the pool’s water, koi fish shimmer, and what is ascertained of uncertainty, of delay, glints of aqueous fish light, scales like shiny pennies, dressed-up illusion. Agitation. Tear-stained sleeves. Will you meditate upon a tear-stained sleeve?

I see my own gown here, wet with tears of frustration and longing. What to do in rescue? Night after night, collapsed into tears.

Had no certainty of the days ahead.

Identities true and false, romantic and sexual love, seclusion, the
duplicada,
witchcraft, social and gender hierarchy, divination, as well as a
contemplation of the multi-universes “out there,” as one gazes into the double helixes of night sky from a restricted vantage point. Entwined, entangled. Two new planets have been named today.

And then I thought
through
doubles, through other names and forms in which I could transcend the earth without moving.

A vow, a promise at the deathbed of a beloved poet, elder to this clan, then assured and commanded me I must be cohesive, that I must be synchronized and strong. I must guard the Archive even at this many-leagues distance, at all costs, under threat of psychic murder and dissolution. I would lock myself in the mind of poetry, in the library within the library of that mind of poetry. Delight in the monastic
Arkheion
, a house, a domicile, an address, residence of the archons, those poets who command…and preserve.

She studied allegories and what within those constructs would muster courage. How a small idea may expand to gianthood. How big is imagination the Deciders would never understand. She entered a chthonic castellum, a physic prison, at the instigation of others, those Deciders who would use her to advantage, steal her secrets, and—threatened by her power, her sharp tongue, her stylus—attempt to keep her “inactive,” while a simulacrum donned her identity in the phenomenal world. Poetry was a threat in the phenomenal world.

She wrote
I thought through doubles
as a goad to stay rooted, which was, of course, as she attempted, impossible. She was pushed into being
in the in-between
.

Transcend the earth without moving. The fish were on their own sleeves tonight.

The writing itself of this what-you-call-it, of weaving of elongating of investigating of cannibalizing of cherishing of what one might learn from this in doing it this tale became difficult. She once lived on a street named Goss. Or the release she might experience from the doing of it the “it” became harder. We called our poetry “works” back then. You built a work in your mind of architecture. Works in the shapes of mastabas, pyramids, stupas, of protracted wars that required sophisticated artillery, matériel, cybertech designs of infinite and obstructive methodology, works that worked their way into your private psyche, “works” that are sentences and secret rhythms and senseless. Of the music inside singing outside on sleeve of herself. She lacked confidence in the ability of logic to persuade others what was at risk. It was as if she was being drained by circumstances around her metabolism, the project she had worked on more than half a life, a
moisopholon domos
, a house of the muses, a community to house and sustain imagination was in jeopardy. It was a dark castle she inhabited now, surrounded by a forest of negative mind-sets. Eager to extract slices of intelligence, to dumb and numb the wild mind out of the guardians of Archive, wanting to cut up and trash the experience that voices now disembodied existed, haunting voices singing, sighing, imploring you to
listen
your way through consciousness. There had been fires, flames whipping at the edge of her experiment,
an alchemical thaumaturgic linguistic zone
, surrounded and occupied and compromised by the dangers of Deciders and Impostors. There had been floods. Why did they wish to take over and inhabit her Utopia? De-story it. Destroy. Why did they resist and seek to subvert a metabolism that could carry us
into the future glorious Archive? When the earth would be so denuded, bereft of idea and poetry. There had been a drought, long in the making, spread now coast to coast. A culture-drought.

Her Double was gaining in power. In a plot that would keep her Ever-the-Original Anne on edge. All eyes went to the new Anne. She had become a household word.

Impostor is also con is consummate concomitant con is cardboard is false convivial, cunning con. She shouted out to whoever was listening,
You know who you are.

She wrote her message on all the convivial networks.
You know who
you are.

What was in the Archive?

It held a slice of belletristic time, radical and political. It held multiple discourses on the limits of the body, on unlimited and de-limited consciousness. It held
Sprechstimme
and performance, and high talk and
sacre conversatione.
It held a new poetry and beyond

The other Anne stole into the room

She lived on the other side of the wall

The other Anne was a succubus

She bled the true Anne

She wanted to acquire the ideas and stratagem of the Original Anne,

the blueprints for the Utopias and zones Original Anne labored to create in her frenzied defense of poetry and Archive and prosodiacal discourse

She wanted to acquire the root conversations of the Original Anne

She wanted to hack into delicate twists of language and torques of intuition that graced the corridors of the conversations of many of

value to the Original Anne

who spoke in twilight language, who spoke in runes, whose enigmas of tone and gesture

  were magnetizing

The Impostors wanted to be those many, those voices in the corridor

or they wanted to own them

They abhorred beauty, beauty terrified them, but actually they wanted the power of beauty

The other Anne wanted to acquire the lovers of the true Anne

and sleep with all the lovers of the Original Anne

The other Anne stole half the things in Anne’s world with impunity

She usurped her words, her tone

She usurped her poetry

She wanted to acquire the tissue and neurons of her past lives

She wanted to go back that far

To visit the larynx of the original Anne

And she made extravagant claims for the love of others who had loved the Original Anne

She mouthed the words of the others who had been mouthing words for Original Anne

She mouthed philosophy and she spoke of binaries

She mounted the many things that related to Anne she announced,

I am
Anne

A school was under siege

Poets held in
aporia
, a space of waiting and stasis

Dead poets whose voices waited to be resuscitated

whose words were locked up in time, in a dead zone

needing rescue

needing care, attention

Original Anne held a small cassette of John Cage in her hand,

magnetic tape fallen off its cheap plastic sprocket

held it as Buddha might the human bone

wondering—if
this,
then
that
…

birth, old age, sickness, death….

She took out a bobby pin and scrolled the tape back on its tiny wheel

We will keep this sheltered, and listen

…while out in the choppy elemental world the Chacaltaya glacier melted away,

melted away in a repetition,

continuous repetition melting, subsiding

water upon water drop

weather was changing

Respiration came to mind

Breathing with weather or breathing-in-weather had morphed

There were persistent rumors of the demise of predictable weather systems

We had many re-coded names for the origin of whispering

We had—our tight poetry clique had:

Hwisprian

Murmare

Khwis

Wispelen

Hwispalon

Wispeln

Wispern

Hviskra

Hwistlian

We had one another, poets on the altiplano

We played some games near zones of silent mutation near the centers of our own ambition

…whistle or beckon, seek…hide…

The street she said always comes-with-a-poem

We were confident language might be in love with us

We fortify her we said she will not abandon us let us down

She is with us everywhere in the streets and valleys and tundra of her poem

Try to compose in a streetwise way Archive whispered

land is compromised,

rivers are stressed,

beauty still exists in relation of that time

fresh out of sleep

and glaciation, a tongue

finds way in in beauty

this is our cause and to notify the others

passersby bid witness here (because we protested always in public space)

DNA’s empire economy: “sound the decibels” and bid witness

as you approach Camino de las Estrellas a place for walking

under faint stars, bid witness and in the narrow straits

of the medina

where moon awakens, bid witness

and from my eastern pavilion, moon is like a scimitar

I would dream of Parsifal a woman

play the part of seeker

write a feminized version under metabolic planet and stars

seek the sacred vessel to hold these phones and phonemes

raise the golden dagger to strike out against their abuse

Holy Grail a blank check for these times

what is your treasure what remains, Scheherazade?

She was wanting to possess manna

map redividing coalescing

that civilization could get smarter

recidivism, what is it         a chance operation?

Original Anne

had lived and traveled with the grand old poets

with the grand old poet-mouths

she lived in their homes

she ate their food

she ate the vegetables grown from their gardens

in a paradisiacal valley with the scent of cherry blossom

she labored at the desk of elders

in a room with gaslight….

dim restless desk of Archive

mor-mor

Sanskrit
murmurah

what is it but a crackling fire

syndicates of samsara abuzz

mormyrein
= to roar to boil

murmlenti

softly spoken (hidden) words inside the castellum

expression of discontent by grumbling

mordant sound awash everywhere

in collapsed intellect

does a stone giveth sound     doth it rend and break

surpass us, down-low

   >>rive<<

what are they saying about originals, artifacts of poem-bodies

that we are too risky in two-faced diplomacy that we go hidden and in exile?

“
poetry a Socialist enterprise!
”

“
smacks of elitism!
”

“
who cares?
”

“
you know what the Poet said

‘poetry makes nothing happen’
”

risky in liability, that our originality is irksome and dangerous

she
is mine or
she
is like me

this is how the world gets at me, “me” says we’re equal in our micro-world, contentious conglomeration of pronouns

or is
she
taking me over

or in what manner in what bondage is
she