“Things congeal as fragments of that which was subjugated; to rescue it means to love things.”
—Adorno, Negative Dialectics
Because Everyone Has Things They Still Need To Move Past
The day after Heinrich Schliemann discovered the ancient city of Troy, all the she-goats came down from the mountain and announced that they refused to be inseminated ever again. Like a man who proposes, but
Then refuses to eat any of the jumbo shrimp at his own wedding reception. “In the game of language, there are no real winners” he tells his mother-in-law right just as she reaches to cut the cake.
A footnote here reads in part, “Must be cross-referenced with the series of lists I made when I was in Split last February. The usual things. All the prepositional phrases used in the hotel bar menu, the five etymologies of the
Word “cicada” I picked up from the man who offered to go down on me when I stopped at a laundromat to ask for directions.”
Whenever I’m in a new city I study what I can of how the women in town go about making a straight line. I write down a few loose phone numbers on the back of my hand. This is my ribbon work.
The small bit of wallpaper that’s come loose in his mother’s dining room. Plates piled high in boxes downstairs. The ones the Nazis used during Occupation. He’s on the phone so I go down and pull back the flaps.
A different kind of grammar. One that gossips but can never hold.
There’s no point being subtle about it. The house is large, easy as cold weather. Obscene as those one or two words Homer always insisted on leaving in the past tense.
The tap water here is oracular.
It’s a Monday.
There’s a worn strip of carpet from the first bathroom to the second. Sometimes the erotic is like that. Endlessly polite, but insufferable.
His toddlers wouldn’t sit still. Not until he took off one of his shoes and pretended to throw it overboard.
When they had finally run off to the back of the ship, he got out his laptop and finished reconstructing Proto Indo-European.
It had only been going on for about a year, but once or twice a week his wife would ask him to duct tape her hands to either side of the refrigerator while the babysitter, Helen, vacuumed upstairs.
The ferry would dock in less than an hour. Later that night I would sit at the hotel bar and record as much of the sound of water running backwards as I could.
This is the part of the story I had originally planned on calling “Hoarfrost.”
“If I’m reading this correctly, and I think I am, then the deal fell through because the curator couldn’t remember anything about what it had been like to make a pay phone call in Paris.”
Said in the passive voice. Followed by a description of one or two incidental sex acts from the night before. With a man who told her when they first met that she
Looked exactly like a young Hannah Arendt who hadn’t yet figured out how to get out of the bathtub.
In the small navy blue notebook I’ve been carrying around everywhere for the last week. Yesterday, I spent the morning sizing up a plastic container of imported German cream cheese.
And the fistful of non-dairy creamer that just fell out of that woman’s pocket. The small, yellowish containers are scattered all over the street. And not one person has stopped to pick them up.
At the not quite beginning of the military Junta, three goats made their way up a small hill on the island of Paxos. A feelling like layers of old linen or waiting it out for longer than you know you should.
Paxos was formed when Poseidon struck nearby Corfu with his trident. Since I was a teenager, I’ve told everyone that I’ve ever sat next to on a train that I’m psychic. “Psychic” comes from ψυχικός, “of the soul or mind.” The opposite of which is σωματικός. Psykhe was the lover of Eros. And then there’s always something slightly “turned orange” about the New Testament, Saint Paul.
A certain kind of metallic hum. Possibly coming from the small fridge someone plugged in next to the sofa. The psychological sense of “mind” doesn’t appear until 1910.
“Libido”, or the psychic drive associated with sexual instinct comes into English, untranslated, of course, from Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis.” In 1909 it was used in Brill’s translation of Freud’s “Selected Papers on Hysteria.”
Some young boys love to gather pieces of wood on a shore. The strawberries are just ripe enough for it. Some winters, yes, come at you like a stutter.
Down on the floor I make a list of thirteen recently discovered Roman drinking songs. The memory of a glass house.
When she was a child, everyone always said she was the one who was greediest for fish eggs.
Every time the body turns to geometry. Every time it becomes an elegy. These,
They said, were the last of the three Aphrodite heads left to be removed to the British Museum. It’s been ages. Ages and ages of burnt toast, listening to men on buses, all of whom insist they know the best way to keep really good wood from splitting. “Praktikós, na apotefrósei, ekfylisménos.”
I’ve been nervous my entire life. And that is only the indecent part of the story.
Without proof or memory
The porch that overlooks the sea
In the off-season, all of the
excuses are your own
Yesterday it was on the tip of your tongue
That swimming space between
poem and hand. After the phone rings
And he answers. Just before the
last cup of coffee has turned ugliest spring.
According to the Greeks
erosion was an end to performance
The tragedy just a suggestion in time
Etymology a clean exercise for
understanding the world, daffodil light
I can’t have it
And that leaves me feeling moist
Followed By Three or Four Original Olympic Odes
It must be four am
because the two
recurring phrases are
“washing each
other’s bottoms”
and “as if
he had been, in
some way, gagged.”
There’s no
excuse for
Modern
Greek keeping the
middle voice. Erogenous
is the slant
beginnings of mind.
The warm
yeast of a thing is
what you remember
long after the sex has
gone out of it.
Packets of Lipton
soup mix in her jacket
pocket. A ruby
ring she stole when
the woman
next to her on the
morning Air
Canada flight from
LAX to Toronto fell
asleep. Two
plastic glasses of
tomato juice perched
on her left
thigh. Hovering
between nothing
and nothing is a good
way to go, she
had said.
The Canadians
were doing a series
of sound tests
35,000 feet below.
These days
there’s so
little time to sign f
or a book
you ordered from a
shop in Athens.
My feet dipped in
someone else’s milk
Your desire
to always
escape by a false exit.
Everything is
customizable. I’m very
comfortable with my
transparent face.
To reach the northernmost tip of the island you have to follow a narrow gravel path that only somewhat overlooks the sea. That is why there are no goats here. Just a slight repetition of surface. The itch on my back that’s been there for the last twelve years. Language can never be found in a vertical column. A pulse, maybe. Centuries of thinking, certainly. But that’s really just nothing other than talcum powder and semen and little bit of salt.