Blackacre
Page 2
to deaden.
Some surfaces
cannot be salvaged.
Leave them
to lose function,
to exist only
as armature,
holding in place
those radiant
squares
of sensation—
the body a dichotomy
of flesh and
blood. Wait here
in the trellised
garden you
are becoming.
Soon you’ll know
that the strictures
have themselves
become superfluous,
but at that point
you’ll also know
that ungridded
you could
no longer survive.
QUINTA DEL SORDO
Saturn Devouring His Son (Francisco Goya, 1819–1823)
how can I
ask you to
absolve me
my fingers
still greasy
with envy
gaudy oils
still smearing
the dim walls
the quiet
chamber of
my mouth
LANDSCAPE WITH DEODAND
a road
in the trees
from the sound
of it
a milky
shift
in the water
where the silt
shelves down
and the wet
branch beating
for its life
against the pages
of that book
EPIPHYTE
Ficus urostigma
This is an allegory
for what has been discarded
but not dislodged;
what sifts down
from any new avowal—
And already you’ve paused,
(wary / testing the air).
Your hands trace tentative arcs—
anticipating a familiar
tension, some unseen strand—
but encounter nothing
(no imperative syntax)
(no webbing of ownership / blame).
Because the tree cannot hear,
this cone of sunlight
is all the bugle it knows
(an answering flicker / a flare).
What alternate insistence
could muster itself
against this upward rush,
this eager branch
exposing its throat
(irreproachable)?
It was not your hands
that smoothed
new bark
over the hectic light
(its coruscations / blades and jags).
It was not your hands
that pulled
the grain of the wood
into this simplicity.
As must happen with any
ardor, the outermost
layer of the new branch
hardens into a wall.
Such indifference
does not trouble itself
with seamlessness,
but to find a lapse there—
to find a hold in it—
is not to gain permission,
is not enough.
(Even in this wet air,
it is not enough.)
One green pane
of a leaf drops down,
an ant’s detached
antenna—
a seed falls
from a bird’s
unappeasable body.
A little twirl of air
guides them down the trunk
as if down a glass staircase
(not to a room)
to a landing,
a crevice
(not a cradle).
Tethered to its perch
(its purchase)
the seed will starve,
will be absorbed into the tree
that is not its parent tree—
(no respite)
it must wrest
its attention
outward and downward,
toward sufficiency.
And the roots go
ribboning down
(prodigious)
and at ground level, a feast
that is inexhaustible,
so that its mode
now shifts
from hunger
to celebration
(the excuse of survival
fallen away).
It is almost unseemly—
this exulting—
the maypole
the seed has made of its body.
And you would claim
a stake in this:
your hands sketch
buttresses, spires
(phrases from the gestural
vocabulary of triumph).
As if your hands
could hasten
the host tree’s withering,
the growth of the hollow column.
As if, by sweeping outward,
your hands could draw
(subsistence / substance)
from the horizontals of the ground.
As if these motions
(touching nothing)
were still enough to feed you.
III
The rhizome is an anti-genealogy.
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi)
GREENACRE
Annuit cœptis
But what if a given surface is coaxed into fruitfulness wrongfully?
For instance, this lushly verdant plain. Imagine it dialed back to featurelessness, each spiraling stalk retracted, each filigree rosette slow-blinking shut. Dialed back to bare promise, to smooth-napped expanse—the forehead of an alien princess might convey such tranquility: she surveys her ranks of suitors, shakes her exquisite green head, in scarcely feigned regret.
So thinks Cadmus—hand still outstretched in a nation-building gesture—as if to freeze in time this instant: scatter of seeds still aloft, arrayed like little dive bombers in formation.
Not yet puncturing the land.
Not yet rooting, not yet sending up terribly thin, ambitious tendrils toward the light.
Not yet trained onto wire-frame espaliers, not yet combed into bombastic pompadours, not yet extruding seed-pods resembling pale grapes, resembling pearls.
The root of “remorse” isn’t tooth—he recalls, abruptly—but to bite, and then stoops, groping for the biggest rock he can find.
BROWNACRE
After the clear plastic sheeting has been pulled back, folded away
After each woody rhizome has been pried loose from the soil
Each snarl of roots traced to its capillary ends
Twigs and pebbles tossed aside, worms reburied elsewhere
After the soil has been rubbed through a sieve
After the ground has been leveled with rakes and stakes and string
No need for further labor, further motion
Nothing has been sown
Nothing is germinating in the raw dirt
The light strikes each granule the same as any other
A windlessness rises
Becomes a precondition
Why is it hard to admit you couldn’t live here
No one could live here
This is not the texture of the real, lacking attachment, lacking event
This is neither landscape nor memory; this is parable, a caricature of restraint
But why does this shame you
Even now you’re trying to hide that your gaze is drifting upward
This plainness cannot hold your attention
You’re searching the sky for some marker of time, of change
In a cloudless sky the sun beats down
But if you observe that the sun warms the soil, you must also concede that the soil wil
l grow colder
The sun stains only the body, and the body is what is simply not at issue here
GOLDACRE
digitize
from the Latin “to finger
or handle” as if
to sink your fingers
deeply
into this
flood of light
hard not to grip
hard not to shape handfuls
loaves
for the hooded basket
something to store away for later
something to place upon the slab
the light
a richer color now
wrong to regret
the reddish undertones of day
wrong to regard them
as a kind of ripening
the young morning
grommeted
with minutes
threaded
with wisps of wool
no signs of resentment
furrow
the infinite
amenability of dawn
no sounds
suggesting discord
from the songbirds
tethered
to their wheels
WHITEACRE
You probably have noticed if you’re in a brightly lit room filled with white light, it is difficult to see colored lights. That’s because those individual colors get masked by surrounding white light. In the same way, … [o]ther sounds will get masked by white noise so they become less detectable. TM Soft White Noise Player
Proleptic flinch
of whiteness—
the hunch
of shouldering
into it, stoic
glitch zipping up
its jacket of static—
knit fabric
of interlocking zs.
The apotropaic
as abject, self-replicating
reflex
of self-defense.
Vain camouflage
that functions
as neither shield
nor shelter:
the canker’s milk
nourishes nothing;
the ice rink
exudes only
its own doom.
REDACRE
“What is it you fear?”
Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
couldn’t stop / himself picking
his red / lest it
pinken lest / it pale
itself into / mere proudflesh
mere scar / new skin
makes a / smooth mound
hurt hungers / for rebirth
the mouth / that eats
everything then / eats itself / raw
GOLDACRE
We have seen claims that Twinkies … aren’t baked, the sponge cake instead being “a pure chemical reaction” involving something that “foams up”; the deception is made complete by coloring the confections’ bottoms brown to make it appear that they’ve been baked…. As always, the truth is far less exciting than the lore. Snopes.com
as if
you were ever wide-eyed enough to believe in urban legends
as if
these plot elements weren’t the stalest of clichés: the secret lab, the anaerobic chamber, the gloved hand ex machina, the chemical-infused fog
as if
every origin story didn’t center on the same sweet myth of a lost wholeness
as if
such longing would seem more palatable if packaged as pure nostalgia
as if
there had once been a moment of unity, smoothly numinous, pellucid
as if
inner and outer were merely phases of the same substance
as if
this whiteness had been your original condition
as if
it hadn’t been what was piped into you, what seeped into each vacant cell, each airhole, each pore
as if
you had started out skinless, shameless, blameless, creamy
as if
whipped, passive
as if
extruded, quivering with volatility in a metal mold
as if
a catalyzing vapor triggered a latent reaction
as if
your flesh foamed up, a hydrogenated emulsion consisting mostly of trapped air
as if
though sponge-like, you could remain shelf-stable for decades, part embalming fluid, part rocket fuel, part glue
as if
you had been named twin, a word for likeness; or wink, a word for joke; or ink, a word for stain; or key, a word for answer
as if
your skin oxidized to its present burnished hue, golden
as if
homemade
BLUEACRE
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)
The hotel room window is large, seven feet tall by five feet wide, extending down to the floor. It opens inward, two casements with four windowpanes per side. The window opening is nearly a foot deep, painted white, stucco over cinderblock.
A grille of wrought-iron bars protrudes outward from the frame as if to allow for a window box. The bars feature the occasional decorative touch—finial-like ornaments where they intersect, and a scrolled-iron flourish at the sill. The lower bars may once have been a Juliet balcony, but at some point, a second set of bars was clamped on top. The bars of the top half don’t line up with the lower half.
The wooden sashes of the casements have been painted a dirty cream, backed by faded, pink foulard curtains.
The window looks out on an old arena—perhaps a bullfighting arena—about a hundred feet away. Yellowish mud bricks with a foundation of rougher, darker beige stone and bricked-in Romanesque archways. A faded red wooden door is visible to the right, with a Moorish-inflected archway, framing a blue round of sky.
Little flakes of birdsong, blunted chisel-strokes.
Between the arena and the window, a motionless expanse of gray-beige dust. The glaring sunlight hits it flatly, as if to subdue it further.
An old man in a gray shirt and pants slouches in a chair against the arena foundations. A small black-and-white dog lies near his feet.
A high-pitched voice—a woman’s or a child’s—scolds someone in Spanish.
The dog gets up, looks back expectantly at the old man, who fans himself with a newspaper.
A man’s voice, speaking Spanish.
The red door opens, and a man walks out, carrying something bulky over his shoulder, perhaps a folding chair, perhaps an umbrella. He props it against the wall next to the old man. A brief exchange.
An engine chugs softly like a toy train.
A rounded, pale-blue car crosses slowly from right to left, not raising the dust. A blue L sticker adheres to its front bumper.
The second man returns to the red doorway and pulls the door shut.
The dog moves left, sniffing the ground.
A shadow to the right, thin as a spear. It is your lover who walks diagonally away from the window, dragging her sandals through the dust. She stops about twenty feet away, looking back. She swivels to face the window, her eyes tautly focused as if in defiance.
A tinny fanfare from a distant trumpet.
Your lover turns, and, with conspicuous slowness, continues walking away, head and arms hanging down.
The little blue car crosses close behind her, the red word ANDALUCIA now visible on its signboard.
Your lover passes out of sight to the far left.
A murmur of far-off voices, metallic as if amplified.
A small boy in a red shirt runs in suddenly from the left, stops in front of the old man. He bends down, picks up something, throws it—toward the old man? toward the dog?
The old man begins berating the boy in Spanish.
The dog emits a single, muffled bark and runs away.
The gravelly rasp of an approaching car, which the boy turns to face.
A lozenge-shaped, pale-green car cross
es from left to right and stops abruptly. Only its rear bumper remains visible to the left, bouncing with the suddenness of its braking.
The boy runs off.
Two car doors slam shut.
A black man in a tan suit and a white man in a gray jacket emerge from the green car.
Three muted chimes from a faraway church bell.
The two men look toward the hotel window, confer briefly, arrive at a decision. The man in the tan suit walks toward the hotel, smiling affably. The man in the gray jacket walks off to the left, toward the car.
The swish and slam of a car door opening and shutting in quick succession.
A woman in a red tank top, flounced miniskirt, and red platform sandals suddenly jogs across the square from left to right.
The man in the tan suit, startled, turns to look at her, then continues toward the hotel.
The green car pulls away.
The church bell rings five times, pausing between each knell.
The creak and thud of a wooden door cautiously opening, then shutting. Its latch engages with a gentle click.
The small dog returns to the old man, still sniffing the ground.
A shadow is reflected on the window, subdivided by its panes.
Your lover comes into view back by the arena. She’s staring toward the window. She walks, still hesitant, toward the hotel.
Offscreen, the car door opens and shuts again.
The man in the gray jacket reappears and begins walking in a decisive manner toward the hotel.
He pauses to look in the window, raises his right hand in a gesture of acknowledgment, then walks hastily away toward the arena.
He notices your lover and briskly intercepts her, speaking quietly, his words drowned out by an amplified Spanish voice from the arena. He puts his hand on her shoulder and turns her back toward the arena. They walk away together, as he continues talking.
An engine turns over, upshifts to a high-pitched whine.
A muted bang, like a tin box falling to the floor.
Your lover pauses by the arena, and the white man leaves her standing there.