The Real Horse
Page 2
are we called winnowing sieves when hauled across land
I mean friends and local ghosts could pass through us
they want to see yellow flowers in the desert
and boys on their dirt bikes going in saturated shadows
and light-sensitive paper solutions invite allegory at every turn
like if you’re walking any of your faces at the encounter into paper
emulsified for pictures in silver salts or bitumen it’s at least 1841
when settlers would minister a seduction pressing you into silver nitrate
along a vast sheet can you see your hand in the sky behaving itself
each wrinkle on the paper claimed into a new type
table salt to silver nitrate making a sensitivity to light
gelatin in iron salts the cyanotype calotype platinotype
in pigment gum arabic with potassium dichromate oil
and bromoil prints will you be closer to the falling away
of the gaze of things choosing the process
a daughter Juan Flores or a real outlaw daughter
curled onto my chest looking doubled exactly like us
does it matter our decorations can’t help themselves
stepping out ahead in a horizon line’s bands of purple black
every night stacked on this unlit town over young heads
crowded by a bubbling upsweep into something like a curio
from each glass nook watch what friendly air may come borrowing Flores’s eyes
said to be “neither black gray nor blue greatly resembling those of the owl”
listen for chaste nouns in time some mercury silver mylar
little verbs if any “that were ever set in a human head”
transactions being forms that change what’s to see
not how to move through the mirrored rooms of the dead restored
to a fresh churned smell after my hand stained with outside worries an inner wall
no collapse a turning over greed for the picture archive I lose my place
but stamped on the tin frame of our mirror
two long-tailed birds kiss a flower between them
it’s like some people you see
proud with their daytime running lamps and metals in the sun a posse
can think it comes home to flashing eyes of señoritas they say little lady lords
out West a land dotted with practitioners full of old commercial surf pop echo
that wants nothing but projection seas awesome trees
in the wind archive wanting the voice-over the sun ghost Los Angeles a clean
way to hug the young ocean salt on desert air ghosts the cool
expanse of the hour ahead we’d try not to show our eyes until they passed
bright white light these days better than a day searching eyes could so easily interrupt
at least you’re in it is that the success when trees shake over sisters
or brother trees make shadow pools for drone traffic the record doesn’t say
Sheriff Barton’s posse was a white as cute as eye shadow as a model plane the men
take to the quiet depth so well dead they said cuz “La Chola” mishandled their guns
Boeing Phantom Ray shadows the record in its truth and beauty kinsmen
go down nattering stir the bowl into a reservoir moon little one our water
if there’s already an archive in the noise where you’re the outlaw
we’ll bring you messages in the willows in the citrus fields
high bright flowers reek a spice for free and if the sheriff drops his big voice
on Sepulveda making a show out of being a thing with you when the cymbals go
echoing in the finger bells sibilant into the fan sways the hills
at his yellow heels when he asks about the desperate
like it’s not everyone’s name says it was your fault that Predator
engine hum always stored under the stairs so what if you signaled your men
with a lit cigarette in a house by night we could still play in the sunshine
all orange marker we’ll draw a box seen from above keep decorating it
with stickers Christmas-themed presents and glittering Christmas-eyed
mermaids is what a people are saying about him
no history no figuring no I mean really
if we could gather thick as these stickers about him
never suiting what we make to a commons that needs a “shout pouch” fashioned
from “a fact of a most beautiful necklace of human ears on a rawhide string”
even if your names open beneath you intimate as your next thought cymbaling
on the shore arranging all those grains of sand mica in the mosaic of the bank portico
what lived and storied coordinates that you’re young that you won’t be blank for me
or for the cluster of antennae the remaining Barton men make of themselves
listening between understandings along the yellow fire hills of California just one
surfeit ridge could tin the wind out ringing for the ears of the twenty
arrested since the sheriff’s killing left alive in custody and I had the nerve to look
at pictures when buildings echo one another across the office park
draw doors on everyone a sound can break space or enfold it cut through the sea
as a twelve-sail clipper I said or be the sea to eel virus and gaze swirl the reservoir
of what was said our shoulders remember themselves from whose impressions
grass then air then Coloma then San Diego then unspecified
sweat straw smell heavy stage curtains not what was said
in the nose or the good foot settles on the plastic bits cheap pretty bright red beads
loosed this wind rolls the dead lean into a parade above our roof carry a disaster
this way unspecified Los Angeles Bodie unspecified Shasta
toward my stepping off the strain of new thought if one day we’ll be in a state in a lost place
in a tent city will you be left to talk for us will you see the tree of yellow flowers
the vinyl sheet pitched for a roof water in gasoline cans hurried across hands
but today along our row of cubicles a sun staff in the blue recycle bin shows its walls
as a slight blue coalescent plastic place a horse’s jawbone on our piles give something
to the nuns to hold have them weave your sheets then burn us
indiscrete with your words but for now do I keep telling you
it’s not that easy to step off the dock manic babies in sulfur and mercury in stars coming
for us let artists be curious
let them be alive in work
A Daughter the Real Horse
In 1861 Adah Menken started her long run playing the “breeches role” of the Cossack hero, Ivan Mazeppa. Navigating the theater houses of the United States and Europe, she used the press to alternately circulate and repudiate rumors of her mixed European and African ancestry. Each night on stage she covered her skin, though not her shape, in a pinkish white body stocking to play the culminating scene in which Mazeppa is stripped nude and bound, against a scrolling panorama, to a runaway horse.
what’s my work
what I thought our shadow
on the distaff side
lined out women gone out
either way from you
pulling thread out of flax from the staff
writing
anything we want
depilating
or setting hair
if each dimension in time is also another
already folded in or stacked on top
our work might fall off the display
but maybe we don’t
during th
e war being a reliable thing to say
what metals went into the sentence
into the tack and spurs if iron was cheap
let’s say iron with what vigilance the books say
was in the air
everyone came to see the rebel
hero sent away in Adah’s body
a thing she mastered onstage
until it was a room she could leave
shavings of metal on her fingertips
animal grease in her teeth in her century
no edits or quick takes outside of a train
or strapped to a horse onto that externalizing love
machines call up
like when it rains
drops shine slow in our desert
air threaded
about the water tower
and eucalyptus grove
like stage curtains
heavy until they’re not
like any of the videos that assume one day
you’ll join those of us still looking
the curtains lighten
but never fall off the little swarms
Napoleon Sarony’s publicity pictures
lifted and split Adah into
“a New Orleans baby”
“I will create a new sensation depend on it” Adah promised
that shudder in a long sequence where sides fold in time
in edits in the eye she put herself there and gone
in a dummy’s place tied to a real horse
riding four stories up a narrow ramp a new feeling
off a great horsewoman wolves on the run Inca doves fog the stage for an ideal man
of refinement taciturn was a woman seen in their thousands
conical retina tunnels layering each other’s looking so many times
did it feel like they slapped space red to its surface then a fine
ash in the wrinkles it’s not a space for details that fall away in words
clean blood where no one steps in the reservoir you can see it between us
seeping in degrees crusting or draining into various attitudes rendering
feelings her busy arms would strip the air
clean of critics saying “She poses better than she speaks”
what of it reaches home hot wax pulling my mother’s hairs leaving her
made smooth where she made herself white having looked like a man
at her I could seem one more thing shared across the light
“artifactual” anything could be a mirror coupling
the stripped robes was a shining copper flower clip in the aspect of a nipple
the Cossack hero didn’t care in the work of raising her shield
in her hair in the shine of her toes dipped in oils from the dark horse hide
are we a successful people putting your wilderness
in the wide eye of the horse for you imagine the smallness of a European room
beyond stylized tendrils of whipping mane as long as we’re looking the mirror
was supposed to pass for our eyes my daughter Glaucon the negations
were supposed to open as gates an immigrant California baby like me or a local
made white enough to not begin exposed had to first pale beside someone like Laulerack
Adah’s “Indian maiden” then beside “the African beauty” French producers
threatened to cast then beside the horse’s shine we were supposed to fold edges
to look full on into an expanse of edges
where our trot could achieve whose particular speed the horse might say
engorged my tongue escapes its mouth but in sympathy
the world will increase a color on the walls
the backs of your knees open to drink in
or maybe the horse would say there never is a stage
much less the sand in which the theater sinks
there is the dove and its shadow over the hero and her horse
and the shadow is dense with its turning iterations
and wet with its water and light with their light
so if we have to realize generations
of recorded advice like “Go find some spectacle
where your pretty face will show”
we can try it on loop and when the metals
go loose of their tape
they can light out for the Territory
“a vagabond of fancy”
“the interest is painful in its intensity”
“When the animal affrighted by the glare of fires and goaded”
“the trail winding up between jagged rocks”
“above a roaring stream to vanish on heights unguessed”
“Born a dweller in tents a reveler in the tented habitation of war”
the whole country gorgeously illuminated
say it’s not your shame because it’s our shame
or we’re left available that’s us
blue sky behaving itself and two long-tailed birds
on the frame of our mirror draw sugar refined from a flower between them
the horse and the high ramp are givens
to both cold and warm lighting schemes we bathe across the rooms we document
by video some of us came here to be the real rider
or the real horse the real hero whose real white skin
picks up dirt water can wash and return to the ground floor of the purpling valley
“terrific cataracts tearful precipices” work to be a given
in the folding if I could be one of the rooms
you pass through on your way out of you
but how do I pull from that proposition a place for you to turn in regard
if in the story of a thing I say there was a place
it’s because the placed look back
on us with this feeling face I’ve been reading
we could match to a green aspect in Kathakali’s color-coded
system of theater where actors younger than you
learn a closed set of precisest faces and feelings
something like Adah learned hers so what finite resistances
of mountain planes did we make in your face
we came here holding on to a stake in artifice
Emily’s butterflies
plashless in the coined word swarm close
then settle articulating the glam out of our echo would you
even want to run as fast as a high-end line we could trust
spinning the against movement equine of blur a...”
“...lights flashing and panorama painted of drum
what does my pale sister want thy pale sister is named Adah laid soft upon your breast Adah
would write we’ll be concubines the maiden Laulerack explained where dust on the floor lifted
on a breeze broken off its current upon the stand of eucalyptus outlines where their bodies
were they filled with grayed leaves vertigo Adah would write what word there was to be said
when the eyes of a dove led her to a clearing having darkened so many sidewalks animals
get tired but dirt sparks in the traveling or I just want to be around you I just want to see us
bound folds sumptuous in exposed skin hose white legs her on feet pretty hero’s A
.outline own its into running horse real this of back the on freight as
in a pool she’d write opportune your pale sister called to a party of white men a white woman
is in danger so they were flushed toward soldiers ahead of startled men in the chief’s party
who pierced Laulerack letting her fall upon Adah already in the wagon Adah would write I
settled her dark curls touch she would say to white journalists who would write of the channel
on Adah’s thigh where a tomaha
wk grazed her while your dad banged at that door in the song
I was wearing your colors to California coming to consciousness all heroines said where am I
so consequently did I come to love them for twinning me while important reviewers amateur
face sitters perch so far aside whiteness I can’t even believe in the theorizing we offer them
like reaching running toward and alighting from extraordinary points in sound and space
creates new pathways to a future for sophisticates who decipher semantic crosscurrents
of despair and a brief tearing at the veil of racial division makes a frontier where desire
is improvised through and across coursing histotextuality a method marginalized writers
use to braid historical allusions that contextualize and radicalize their work by countering
the putatively innocuous generic codes they seem to have endorsed a site of self making
for bodies in the cultural imaginary singing an anthem of simultaneity in a continuous space
of renewal that repeats dissonance and lack of closure as a strategy of performative
rigorously oppositional identity production or as a predicament bodies find themselves in
whose momentary solutions we call dance imitating with a vengeance calling attention to