Recognizing the Body

i.
“Because poetry isn’t testimony—it doesn’t seek
to trap the moment
of memory, but rather the substance with all its trembling carnal
complications, not the great
calculated conspiracy—
but a great desire to never exist.”

1.
In my life I aspire to be delivered into
diminishing. Love’s scarcity, some might say,
the one moment in which man is uprooted
from the world’s rage, refusing to sleep with the past, night stealing into organs
that the moonsplatter axed, gazing, an eternal
wink.

ii.
“Here and now was forever
a breath that already
has no shape.”

2.
What connects her to this heartbeat in which the past turns
to memory? This year she
had again discarded the skies’ outrage, a reminder
of light from delicate Edens.

In the wedding pictures
the thin chasm of standing close
is widening.
“We’re experiencing,” her eyes measuring the distance, her husband
at the door, escaping into prayer, “the more common
lows
of love.”

A boy can’t comfort his mother. Even the summer
in separate beds, in her sleep, brutalizing
her like the body
of a stranger.

iii.
“Because the body’s moment
isn’t
the soul’s moment—
it has no memory in which to linger
beyond the touch.”

3.
“This is love,” from the porno magazine centerfold, breasts
stapling her to temptation, “This is the closest thing
to love. Learn to contemplate a moment in which the body
is peacefully dismantled from its rigid desire, drawn mercilessly
out of the mechanism
of reproduction. Windows don’t
tremble from this electricity, no
birds merging into cooing. Jaws clenched, only
a web of exhalation. Only.
So what.
The world wasn’t made for poetry.
We, who is this we, you’d ask,
bumping and grinding in the grooves.”

iv.
“Evidently the body, its only connection
with time
is an extermination that can’t be documented.”

4.
Then a bird’s voice bubbles up. I am
on the balcony. The wise thieving
of the sunset, a final blow that is still
possible. Heart to heart I’m still telling you some kind of rustling. Let me
speak while I’m scared enough
to deliver a poem. In the air whetted to a molecule’s tip, April
kisses May, spawns an evil June, the trees
hived with foliage, through
a chain of words threatening to wake the world. I think
that I know how the sea
appears, brandished by the congealed cloudiness, between Morocco and Spain,
on the Gibraltar of my girlhood, a watery scratch in the land’s
flesh. I am
going down in ships of blood, spoiled
from return.

v.
“This is the way of prayer: to weaken, and except for
the delusion, the memory of
poetry
has nothing.”

5.
I break down through the stars, from the darkening
in which you are nailed, divine and knowing. Beneath
the moon’s wheel I am dying in bed, in this summer
that you decreed with all your mercy,
night downloads itself
bit by bit through the modem of the window, on the radio
an unkissed woman wants
to live like the living, to die
like the dying,
not like this.

vi.
“I am indeed already in motion
toward
the ungraspable constant—
flesh.”

(From The Essay Against Photography)