Poor Species

I feel increasingly distant from you. Your weak attempts at birdsong. Your dominion, which was enjoyable, warm and cozy, while I was young. But more and more the frayed sweater of the DNA. We pick at it on the television news. The sound of gunfire in the streets. But still: Poor Species. I wonder if the search for expression will end. The search for expression will not end. It is the search for expression which is Guernica and that which Guernica depicts. And how long ago was Guernica painted? Do you feel that slippage? Today, nobody would attempt to paint it. Irony is lifeblood. But the secret is encoded in the art itself. That there is pleasure in the forms which quote pain. If they are imaginatively conceived, they are a distraction, an invitation to play. Guernica was such an invitation presented as a raw scream. Infantile and dark. Shelter of speaking or drawing. The people come out of the bombed theater speaking. The film still plays.The lovers are on the screen in black and white as the rafters fall. They are toying with each other. Their faces the size of the entire screen. It is only the childhood of the work of art. The work of art is eternally at play in a form of childhood. We feel like shadows, like shades, when faced. 

A Muted Parade

I went walking in the fog of morning before morning. A voice told me to look for living things or — finding no living things — look for pieces of living things, parts of their bodies and body loves. Of course, the trees were all alive. The children below the trees, ferns and weeds, they are alive. Green spurning things. I saw a dragonfly wing. Glinting on the asphalt. A desperate iridescence signaling. Everything was wet with dew as the inside of  a very old man’s wrist watch. One tall cold one. A black umbrella going  to a black car funeral somehow like an umbrella. The first birds called, then, to the space before time. It was black and weirdly swaying, dappled, blotched with holes like an old Super-8 film-leader. We were all on it.


A breeze through trees whispered it was only passing through and inhuman. The BLOCK PARENTS had died, but the yellow blocky sign was still in the window of their empty house. The photograph of this is of everything, that spirit of guardianship in photos taken for unknown reason. It floats like  a summer dirigible’s shadow on the nape. Time says things behind a photo’s back. That feel of father, wet beer kiss of yesteryear on a naked knee. Oh, it’s just the breeze again. You carry your father’s camera and inside the body the fog. The sense that hands are superfluous only leaves the body slowly, slowly as the morning, many hours and loops later.

The Sound of a Cat Getting Shot

The sound of a cat getting shot before morning. Let me give you a paragraph on that. I will need thousands of baths and it won't be enough. See, it cried out. As if the death was not instantaneous, no, not as if, the death was not instantaneous. Somehow (the bullet must have entered the hindquarters) the body could be a vortex of consciousness, so the pain was allowed to enter the universe. The pain beat the annihilation, the void, not only to the nerves but the neurons. And I hear all these things as living textures, as if this were my own skin grown in a Petri dish, somehow still a phantom limbness in a little glass vessel. The space tumbles over and over itself. The horror. Though I know he had a gun, I ran out into the night of the morning. I stood there in my pajama bottoms and accused in my blindness. I wanted the fucker to know there had been a witness. The witness was an ear. I wished him dead so bad. The cat lived out there and was harmless. But the cat also belonged to some kids. He hid, the fucker. Somewhere in the green that sheltered in darkness, he pulled back. I couldn't find the animal. The horror if it lived. This is all paper, see, everything alive becomes paper. I went back in and murdered him. Over and over I murder him. Then I heard the car start up. The awful sounds of that engine that's nearly dead. It sounds like a car engine made out of tin foil. He drove off way too fast. He shot the cat because of the sound his car engine makes. Also, he's white and they're black, the kids, the cat is black. I will do drawing after drawing, the sound of the cat getting shot.  As I draw, I will relish the murder, his scrawny neck crushed between my two hands like melting tangerines.

If

If the shadows of trees are upon me, if the shadows of the leaves of trees and the shadows of the needles of conifers are dappling my face, the shadows of humans are probably not upon my face. If this condition is true, there is probably less, possibly nothing, to explain. But the thought occurs to me that there is nothing to explain. And I have just put this thought down in words like green leaves in shadow. Why does the thought occur to me? To exonerate myself?  It is a parasite like a caterpillar. The trees themselves do not care for solitude. After all, they are all together. But we believe it is solitude. Probably they are communicating, possibly they even comment on my passing through their shadows. They look down on me in the literal sense. Possibly they do in the other sense too. But I don't worry about it, since they are sworn to their green silence. They talk when the wind picks up, they sound disturbed, but possibly this is an erotic moment for them. Though they lose the most leaves then, in wind, you always lose something in erotic moments, don't you? That's largely the point. Now I feel I have intruded into their secret lives, even if only at the level of speculation. Speculation is an intrusion. I look up and shadows pour down on my face. It is the money shot of darkness. It is cool and smells like nothing. Shadows are the money of the forest. Shadows are the money of trees. I come here to steal and pretend I do not steal.




---after a photograph by Marta Bevacqua

She Turned Her Nose

She turned her nose up at it. IT COULD BE the meat was rank. The beasts of the field or beasts of the sea's magnetic fields. It might have been rank. It could be that she hasn't filed her teeth lately. I felt a slight in the night. For it is a risk for me to go out there to put the food out. There are shadows that become beasts very quickly, if one is not armed at all the cardinal points of the body. It has become very hard to explain my life. I saw a shadow through my legs when I was bent over to release the food, out there in the night, where there is also gunfire, and it could have been the end for me right there. And would you have cared, would you have written the epilogue for my poor form? I doubt it. The shadows I see between my legs looking backwards are like the shadows of people who died in plane crashes. The shadows of people who died in plane crashes are like drawings by Nancy Spero. It becomes harder to explain my life, which no longer has a doorbell. She turned her nose up. It was all a drawing of the night. Even the absence was a drawing, so I drew it close, in dearness. The beasts of the field or the beasts of the sea's magnetic fields are sex. They are sex and they are drawings of sex. Let's face that. I don't know what to say. I was preparing to do some paintings on these blue tulle circles. Little feminine tondos. You can see right through them, they're thinner than eyelids, thinner than paper. When I bend over, the shadows I see between my legs are a sea. The sea has no epilogue and neither does she. I could go back out into the night with a file and offer to fix her teeth. If she comes back. If she smells the food and thinks twice. Her body is a terrible armature for something I like to think of as her soul.