MxT. Sina Queyras
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is exhausting; in death have we let yearning go?
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I read Mary Oliver’s poem about angels dancing on the tip of a pin and I kept thinking, She is writing about a penis, Mary Oliver is really a gay man and everything is about AIDS, which made me want to carry Mary Oliver in my pocket.
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How many shapes will you visit me in, Death? How many gestures – each a stitch in the belly. The entire woodland echoes with your filthy mouth, the neon tree, the leaf flickering a sequin in green velour, my flickering rock, my soft bowl, my leafy gasket, you bring me thoughts of the purest vials of amphetamine. You burn like the skin of a spider, laugh with the bounce of a rabbit, and yes, I do remember Spanish Banks, the city a diorama in Le Creuset, and later, burning your prescriptions in a cucumber mist, that heron appearing suddenly, so casual in his faded Chelsea coat, his prehistoric beak and yellow eye watching as I burned enough OxyContin to tile a small bathroom.
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Sappho says in the house of song there shall be no mourning, but all song is mourning. All shapes reflect absence; I have collected all the bits of soap, every trace that can still float, and strung them from the rafters.
I am here with my flesh and my thoughts, trying to let go of you.
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I see you in the Carolee Schneemann, banging the floor with a broom. I see you in the black, stacked shapes of Louise Nevelson, I see you in Andrea Zittel’s Escape Vehicle, we are floating from island to island. I see you in Metro Pictures, there are endless reels of you moving stones from one side of a field to another. Who would you have been had you understood realism? Blood pooling in fur cups, boardrooms filled with hundreds of babies? A screen the shape of a jellyfish floating through a park? You can give a girl a cleaver but you can’t make her swing.
Under all that rage, joy, big as the pills in Damien Hirst’s mirrored cabinet, a caplet so huge you could parasail across the bay.
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Good attracts good and so on.
The emergency of women is the emergency of the world. We say, What good is history if we have not felt it? We say, Don’t let the dead go until you have tasted them.
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How does one see? A thing in movement, a pail attached to a tall spiky wood, snow, spring, light? What is the beetle carrying? How banana a slug? What temperature mist? How glisten the leaf tremble?
Judith Butler at Princeton on the ethics of violence. The ‘I’ cannot tell the story of how it came to be – we may only become self-knowing by engaging in non-judgment. The self that propels the narrative is no longer, but the narrative goes on.
Who is that narrative?
Who is I?
Who is happy?
Who is singing? Who are we singing to? Ruth? Shulamith? Solomon? Son of Samuel? Buddha? Mother? Is it the man with no hands on the subway floor? Is it the last iceberg? Is it Dada? Is it you, my love?
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Fuck you, you say, fuck art, fuck cancer, fuck your empty gestures, fuck every way we are contained, every way we are numbed, fuck your female heroes with their trembling lips and short tethers.
Fuck the way you see me as a fence post, fuck fence posts. Fuck the way you rely on women’s work. Fuck the way you absent us from your conversations. Fuck Bellow, fuck Olson, fuck Berryman, fuck rhetoric, fuck you.
Take this anger; wipe your face with it, take your career and douse it in kerosene, walk away from it, you do not do, you do not do, grief, in your pointed shoes.
Everything has been critiqued, everything has been photographed, Diane Arbus took advantage of the freaks, Lee Miller finally turned the tables on the gaze, but she photographed more death than she made surreal masterpieces.
My love for you floats across architecture, lets the wind lift its skirt, refuses to be tamped down.
I am not angry – what smart person wouldn’t want to fuck art? Or fuck in art? Or be fucked by art, her clean lines so hard and bright?
I call you from Matthew Marks, from Gagosian, tracing the lines of a huge Richard Serra curve. I have seen so much thinking gleaming, I want to roll it too, make it big, manly, I want to ride it through Manhattan, but mostly I want it solid, a deep root tethering me, an unflappable sense of calm. Are you calm now? I see you in the Arbus retrospective, furtive glances at the journals, you want to be angry but you can’t stop looking and when you look you love and when you love the entire world unfolds around you, you are so bright you make the security guards flinch, lurch, pat the mics on their chests.
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The future at a hundred miles an hour, mouths stretched like windsocks. I hate your seamless layers, you know that, but you scratch by, and I am thinking of all the Trojan horses this bay has seen, eleven of them now, bobbing in the harbour, containing who knows what army of product.
Unbelievable views, never did take them for granted. There is a spot just outside the pillar and glass where, when you stand in the pea gravel and whisper to me, standing where I am standing by the totem at the edge of the continent, we can hear all the dead ones singing.
DIRECT
MOURNING
Direct Mourning is the gold standard of consumer grief. The first line above measures time, the second line measures current. With direct mourning there are no surges of feeling, no outbursts; it is unidirectional, a consistent, even, unconscious current.
Dear One, the future has crumbling infrastructure and more rain than ice, but there we are, peeking out like the tiny flowers that appear in the cracks under sills. Dear One, I am struggling to be in my body, struggling to stay where I am; I want to be closer to my memory of you. I am adrift without it.
Here in this city that does not love me, the sky falls like sheets of concrete, my days are a loud vertical assembly line of grey, crowding out the loops of pinks and purples, but no longer joy. The gentle men of my gym line up at the window on Papineau, shins in hand, heads turned momentarily away from the hockey game to the trees still trembling from autumn’s threading.
Dear One, I can’t shake you. It’s my fault I am unhappy here. I am the only tree on the block refusing to let my leaves fall. I ride the light; I ride the future thinking of crinoline and cold white wine.
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