by Jenny Boully
The page is artifact to poetry, that is, to what has been.
Can you give to someone else what has been? That’s the task of the poet. Over six thousand light-years away, almost one thousand years ago, a supernova explosion occurred in the constellation Taurus. When it happened, that was poetry. The Crab Nebula is artifact. We can wonder at its explosion because of that artifact.
Poetry should allow others to wonder at explosions.
Did something explode inside of you? Did something recently die? Is there, today, enough poetry to confront the page?
The line will break; the line will break, and you will need to answer why. Can you answer why? I came upon an answer once, and it was too true; so I stopped with all the line breaking because it frightened me too much. You should know why the line breaks; you should be able to say why. If you don’t know why, then you should face each day, not the page, but the break.
Because things will break, and their breaking will make you a poet.
Are you generous enough? Have you enough to give? Or have you lost trust and, as a result, cannot give enough? Sometimes, a poet loses trust. A poet often does not give enough. Giving takes a long time to learn. Giving may not be something that’s taught.
When life filters through you, and it has given you a gift (and you’ve already been gifted as a poet, that is, with the swift ability to conjure language), will you be poet enough to return this gift on the page? Life will filter through you and deposit gifts your way. You must be astute enough to see what each thing has to say.
Poetry is an instant. It is an instant in which transcendence is achieved, where a miracle occurs, and knowledge, experience, and memory are obliterated and transformed into awe. The instant passes quickly, so quickly, and then you are just your regular self again. This instant is what has been; the page is artifact to that.
Is it love that you’re after? Immortality? Friendship? Acceptance? Fame? I want to know what your motives are. You should have no motives. Your communion should be wholly sincere.
Sincerity takes time. Sincerity doesn’t come easily. The addressee still evades, eludes, escapes you. Is your addressee somewhere enjoying life without you? Or does your addressee flitter somewhere between two clouds? Your prettily packaged artifact: I want to know for whom it is intended.
These things can be learned: rhythm, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, form, synecdoche, line. The tools of the poetry trade are there; they are given easily over to you. But do you know what use there is for metaphor or what form is for? What equivalents exist of these tools in the stars?
So nice of the ancient Greeks to have left us Draco and Scorpius, Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, arrows aimed finitely toward infinity.
They knew that artifice is what we use when dressing the artifact.
The page is where we turn to resuscitate that.
Between Cassiopeia and Perseus
I thought that if I approached late enough, then perhaps it would be sparsely populated and dark enough to allow me to sever a sprig of ivy without having any witnesses. If it grows in a park, then it is public; if a church grows it, then to take it is a sin, although this is not true of sacraments. All summer, I wanted the outdoors in, but the ivy, the other severed flowers, the roots of grasses, and budding potato plants all wizened and wilted, dying from some other original sin.
What causes sadness is living in a different place each August, and each August having fog and rain instead of the Perseid meteor shower. Look toward such and such constellation, and such and such constellation is not there.
Despite the heat wave, what made me want a hot shower was my thinking of Medusa. My last love looked at me and turned to stone. What is feared takes the shape of a serpent. He was afraid, so he had to kill it; while I fear I am not beautiful, and patiently wait and inspect my ivy for roots each morning.
If I have a love story, it exists in the bowl of my breakfast. I don’t know how they do it, the ones who drink milk from their bowls when the cereal is all gone.
Every day, something dies: when there is a breeze, it scatters the dead flies on the windowsill; the mouse has been caught; a moth did not find its way out. I think of Elizabeth often, her Man-Moth confusing the moon with a way out. The misprints of the past gather like newspapers waiting to be turned into something else.
For him, I was the only brunette, I know. I was (what is the term for rocket ships that blow up and crash back down to earth?) an anomaly. Not that it matters. There are some weaknesses that reveal themselves only if you wait long enough, that is, if you look diligently for the roots.
I want to know, in the end, what will get set in stone, because what gets set in stone is, of course, final: someone’s name, the year of his birth, and the year of her dying—these things unarguably, do not change. I want to know how quickly the quickest of flora grows. As a child, in science class, I remember my teacher saying to take pity on the plants—rooted, they must depend on what is immediately around them to survive and cannot flee those animals that crush or bite. Why is it then that I have feet and yet still refuse to flee?
This place is your private part. When I was eight, Chris lay on top of me and the next day asked for his stuffed duck and toy tugboat back. What is private, what is hidden, should be one’s heart, as it becomes more and more diffi-cult to show. All summer, I wanted the outside in; to take that which grows in sacred places is a sin.
August 13 and last year, a bridge in Austin, overcast, high in the upper nineties and zero percent chance of rain. The bats leave the bridge at dusk and return at dawn. The Perseids do not fall here. I think of Elizabeth, of cuttings of newsprint. I don’t know why some people want their water so cold, why they ask for ice. It pains my teeth, is so diffi-cult to drink. The way out of an affair is another affair, a misprint for a misprint. I want to know why it is that I have feet and yet still refuse to flee.
Kafka’s Garden
January 31. Gardening, hopelessness of the future.—Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks
The string beans embracing the lattice will strive toward some sort of heaven, for in every physical being there exists the imaginings of some spiritual equivalent. If the Beautiful, if the Good do not take root in this life, then they sprout in the life that plants itself directly perpendicular to this one. The lattice for the string beans will serve as some sort of ladder, if not for Jacob, then for the small insects that know nowhere else to go.
It is not so much the gardening that surprises but rather gardening in the dead of an already dead European winter. What I see that F. B. cannot, although she is in perpetual leave, is the frost-formed dew, the minute icicles that cling with blue fingernails to the stiff leaves. What F. B. cannot see that I can is how, weeping, I too cling to something long-since dead.
Instead of the Tree of Life, a silver ash and the poor wren that hobbles there. What of the frozen fruit? If anything is tempting, it is not this, not this garden of grasses that shatters underfoot. Perhaps it is not so much the promise of paradise but rather the promise of not paradise that makes me want to uproot radishes, smash the just-buried spring bulbs. A thousand different specimens of lichen have hatched, are roosting upon the stone by the icy gourds. In the mornings, what I see that F. B. does not: myriad red chicks, a splattering rainbow of sitting eggs.
Dreams again of carrots and the red devil claws of rhubarb stalks. Evil must, I know, also have its roots in the garden. I have witnessed the splaying of petals, the curving mounds of earth when new life shies before breaking through. Dreams again of F. B., her white handkerchief fluttering by the frozen fountain, and a snow veiling her visage from me. Evil, I know, must live underground like the badger, the mole, and other animals that take, one by one, those beings I love. Dream of F. B., her frozen mouth, her frozen heart.
It is not the planting that keeps me alive but rather the fear of breaking through the winter ground. How odd that nature too must develop a thick skin in order to survive the cold. Yesterday, a few rocks unearthed and a few p
otatoes to replace them. Today, a boulder threatens to keep me mad: my shovel impaired, my ungloved hands worked raw. It is not the unearthing that keeps me alive but rather everything that gets substituted, the promise that for every subtraction something living will take its place.
The seed casings remind me of the perplexity of life, how it exists within another perceived life. Come spring, the string beans will, because of my latticing, climb toward infinity; I, possessing the idea of Knowledge, will try through my studies to reach heaven in similar fashion. The perplexity of this life, existing within another life: Hamlet’s nutshell and the almond, not eaten, but to be planted to become a tree. What F. B. cannot see that I see: no matter her leavings, we will be united again whether in this life or the next. What I see that F. B. cannot: the ice-covered moss, the rhododendron’s hidden fire, the pond iris all ashiver.
Six Black-and-White Movies in Which I Do Not Find You
1.
Caught in the belly of a whale within a turgid sea and among me the sorry remains of little fish. There is no color for blood. (You see, the island will be full of strange foreboding.) Even from the inside, I still do not know the structure of this animal’s bones or the location of ambergris. I do not believe that holding the uvula will save me. Already, visions of loneliness, somehow drifting ashore to islands, where I do not find your footprints; already, a yearning for palm leaves with which to build a little shelter. Among me, the sorry remains; high up, the spout, through which I may or may not espy heaven.
2.
This one, a dream: in this movie, they are filming a movie. The church is one whose bells sound the hours, just down the street. Autumn again, and whatever looms, looms large—the passing plane, the overhead crack of poplar trees, the day all drizzle. I think the director wants to convey a scent of chimney smoke and sin. I keep looking back, thinking that I have stolen something.
3.
Your farewell attached to my pillow and the curtains are eyelet and the quilted coverlet is eyelet and the pillowcases are eyelet and the bedding is similarly of an eyelet trim; nonetheless, there are no spies outside the window looking in. The dawn comes in like a grave starling.
4.
Sometimes, it just happens like this: the turning of the doorknob suddenly a symbolic event, the shadow becoming the manifestation of impermanence, the soup can a sorry heaving, a suggestion of false fullness. The camera catches whatever sways in the wind: an abandoned swing, the last leaf shaken free from the bare tree, a rope so knotty and veiny that it serves as evidence that the dead indeed rise again. The drawn bath is only an excuse for compassion, a substitute for the letter that does not come. I grow fearful of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon.
5.
The diner and the lone woman sitting over her coffee have become such a cliché that, considering the summer blockbusters, the director decides instead to frame the absence of love in a dog pound. You see, abandonment does mean certain death.
6.
This last film is scientific and is being shown on a rickety projector to grade-school kids. The commentator of this film explains that there exists such diversity among organisms, such distances in space that, given evolution and progress, we can never know at any point in space-time the bulk of everything in existence. I love you and fear that astronomical discoveries eclipse me; nevertheless, I keep on morphing and rearranging the scenery. (I alone know that the cause of plate tectonics is humanity’s collective yearning, the desire to fit in.) We cannot see atoms, the voice-over insists, yet they exist. If you develop an instrument that is highly sensitive, you can locate almost anything. I am not portrayed as the last survivor of a rare orchid species, nor am I a legendary cowslip possessing miraculous medicinal properties; rather, I am a leaf-cutting ant that, although oblivious to its object at the end of the trail, follows nevertheless with faith that it is being led to something somewhere. Then, I am a speckled spot projected onto the ceiling of a planetarium; now a dusty gypsy moth; now as interstellar gas and dust, I am thirteen million light-years away from you. The film concludes by discussing the power of nuclear fission and fusion and then the redemptive promise of reproduction—in the color of lifeless planets, the color of dust: bright pollen, beauteous butterflies.
Moveable Types
Omissions and errors
Before Gutenberg ever thought to carve the alphabet into wooden blocks, he trained in gem cutting. Perhaps it was his lapidary’s eye—looking into cut and polished precious stones and discovering inverted pictures of reality—that caused him to imagine the possibilities of mirror images. He carved the reflections of letters and words into wooden blocks and then later, as his father had trained him in metalwork, cast them into metal. In the mid-fifteenth century, he would invent a printing press that utilized moveable type, a system that allowed one to use and then reuse a finite number of text blocks, thus permitting a seemingly infinite arrangement of letters. When the first arrangement of blocks was inked and pressed into paper, it would change forever how we lie. To tell the truth is to be a printing press with non-moveable type; it means to produce thousands of replications of the same message: omissions and errors are the fault of the machinery, not one’s own. To admit the truth means to no longer own one’s faults but rather to hand them out in pamphlet form.
A warning sign
A warning sign that things will end in a way that will leave you forever in a state of missing: you begin by discussing books. Inevitably, as the talk of books demands, you will say, “Oh, really, you haven’t read such and such?” and “Oh, you must!” and “I’ll lend you my copy.” As one book will lead to another, and as one author suggests yet another author, you find yourself in bed again, pressed inside new covers.
A different arrangement of words
Sometimes when I say something, I begin remembering that someone else has said it before, but maybe with a different arrangement of words; when I say something in a particular manner, I begin remembering that someone has said something in the same way before—only with me the subject changes. So too whenever I kiss someone for the first time, I begin remembering someone else who has kissed me before but in a slightly different way; then it happens that the only thing that stays is the pressing of lips; someone else becomes someone else, all kissing in a way that makes me liken saliva to ink, and this makes me think that there is no longer any need for speech, everything already having been said before. I think, I am thinking a thought in the manner of a certain author; I begin to think of ways to describe an orange fish by emulating the style of this author when I remember that my subject is love; I begin to say, “I love you,” but begin instead to talk about an orange fish.
Never committed to memory
The invention of moveable type can be traced as far back as 1041 in China. Credited to Bi Sheng, who fashioned his blocks of type out of clay, this press possessed over five thousand Chinese characters, which it could manipulate. Given this range of possibility, one must choose carefully when to replace bat with willow leaf, when to say open instead of downstream, or when to await dusk or darkening trees. If the bedroom can be likened to a meta-textual land of signs and symbols, then I should hope to never rely solely on only twenty-six characters with which to move and manipulate, meaning: I only desire one lover, yet I also desire to have infinite possibilities with this lover. Bodies arrange themselves next to one another as if on a printing block, awaiting the turn of the screw, the downward force of a lever to cause the meeting of ink and paper. In the act of lovemaking, two bodies link to form infinite ideograms and phonetic possibilities that are invented only then and never set into type, never committed to memory.
Replication made easy
With replication made easy, one loses the need to commit oneself to memory. The lover with many loves has no need to commit, to treasure over and over again one story among others: it is as easy as visiting one’s bookshelf, entering one’s library, purchasing titles from one’s bookseller, borrowing a b
ook from a friend. With so many possible loves and so little time, one begins to assure one’s self that these possible loves exist somewhere, will come sometime into one’s life. There is little panic, therefore, concerning beginnings; there exists much distress over completions. It is easy to begin an affair; it is difficult to tell your lover, “I no longer wish to read you.” Frank O’Hara wrote, “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like the final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.”
Only two possibilities
In reading and in lovemaking, only two possibilities: the first time and remembering. The professor envies his students one thing: that this is their first reading of Tristram Shandy. The professor admits then to pitying himself and his students one thing: that the book is not being read in its original: meaning, the black, blank, and marbled pages are all reproductions of the idea of those pages but never the actual pages their significance begs them to be: meaning, Tristram Shandy no longer exists, and the only way to prolong its life was to transfer its significance into a simulacrum’s life. The used one envies the new one: the new one has yet to come into the rite of her first opening, unveiling; the used one admits then to pitying herself and her lovers one thing: that the book is not being read in its original: meaning, it would be lovely to live serially, to await patiently the next chapter instead of acquiring a book completely bound, its ending already fully dressed and departing before the completion of the love act.
The manner in which the cosmos revises
The advent of moveable type meant that the world would slowly become more and more forgiving. If words are not etched and set to be changed nevermore, then mistakes, if discovered, are easily corrected. When someone leaves me too early, I console myself: the cosmos opened a leaflet not meant for me, and departure is the manner in which the cosmos revises. Omissions are often the act of a hand higher than ours; seals set in wax signify that the sender can be tracked; moreover, seals ensure that the enclosed documents or correspondence are authentic. To ensure that one remains authentic in the act: never reveal one’s signet, never stamp the proof of “I love you.” Omit words that find their tongues touching in the darkest and dampest of places; blame it on an oblivious typesetter. The first products of the Gutenberg press were penance pamphlets. Mass reproduction, coupled with the ability to change, produces forgiveness in massive amounts.
