Читать книгу Atopia - Sandra Simonds - Страница 6

Atopia

When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air—

So what is there

to be afraid of?

A cage of air. Baudelaire said

Poe thought America was one giant cage.

To the poet, a nation is one big cage.

And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air?

Try to put a cage around your dream.

The cage escapes the dream.

I see it streak and stream.

Night is the insane asylum of plants—Raúl Zurita

Everyone dreams of the apocalypse, they are barfing

into their grief but I, love, dream of you, and I am old enough

to know this is not the apocalypse, and I am well-read

enough to know all of this was set in motion long

ago, plummet of seashells, the visions loud,

obnoxious even, yes, I try to ignore them, but to no avail,

the dead workers stream through my body, out my finger

tips towards the moon’s underlying reality, trumps, keys,

some move into hysteria then collapse or perhaps

this is a vision of souls surrounded by black clouds, layers

of breath, to close one’s mind to extraneous events,

life streaming from chambers, music as event and so,

love, I enter the scene before me, as many poets

have before, walk through the gates of the imaginative

space I have to create Dante, Milton, Plath, Lorde,

leave the body, leave the comfort and pain of the body,

enter the inferno, enter on the day of the Oakland

fire when thirty-six lives are lost, one life for each year of mine,

put my head to my knees, whisper, chant, sing, suggest,

rip up the text of my hair, the alephs of my hair,

my long black hair is a text and I will not cut it, my hair

is a parable, a fantasy, a stage, it is burning, turning

to snakes, witches, elves, it is an enormous

Frankenstein on fire and the warehouse went up in its mass,

and the body politic bled down, the dead queers, dead artists,

crisis of landlords and evictions, midwinter, I leave

this body behind, I had to see, I had to see what

was behind the mirror’s arrangement of energy

and madness, had to see through this furious parabola.

I am a terrible American

So suicidal

I am a terrible, suicidal American

who throws herself into your desiccated bank vaults

Yet I do not want America to kill me before I kill myself

I can’t stand my positive acquisitions

I throw them to the dogs like marrowless bones

I can’t stand my drinking

I hate the fires of money

I feel no nationalism

I feel no nationalism in my heart, my hands, my brain, or my pussy

I myself am worse than a rogue state

I feel peeled away from society

I will never leave my bed

I want to die in my bed with the covers over my head

The books I have written for other people sicken me like plague

The books I have written for so little money like a ghost tripping on the pavement to get to you

I will be forced out of my enemy’s hands like sweaty nickels in the wavy grasses

America, I am the moors you lack

My voice crosses you like some bleak financial awareness

I crash like a bombed-out calamity

I am no good for anyone

The vines of my thoughts are the cries of all the people and animals you kill

I am the home of the birds and that’s all I will ever be

Inside my heart is a boat of Noahs

The animals are cacophonous

I am the town washed away

I starve myself every day

I am the downed power lines of your literature

I spark up from the pavement like the jolting of a corpse

I am that corpse who jolts up and goes on a long walk

America, I am a long walk in your dying wilderness

I cross the bridge hopeless.

Give me back my dream of the swarm of bears

I cry to the pollution brigade.

“What did the bears do to you?”

“Nothing, my love, they were indifferent.”

I am a black diamond from the asteroid of visions.

Furious, I have splattered my loot into the earth.

The thing is that I look gray

and gray things look half-dead.

The moon is the half-dead body of noon dredged

from those furiously remote acres of myth.

I wanted resplendent queer sex.

I pulled the hair from my head

like a Greek lament.

My head was a giddy gyre.

No one could do anything about it.

Out of the depths

of the stanza tragedy,

I cried for my body.

Wanderers, servants, maids, slaves, baristas, singing

with the dust cough, singing into the signing of books,

caught in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,

Ivanka Trump’s blonde hair swishes in this gyre.

We were banned through small administrative steps—

Cookie woke up from her AIDS death, my colleague laughed,

“the scene where Cookie is at the Catholic Church and pulls a rosary

out of Divine’s ass,” things would need to get so bad

before the uprising, I have to write poems for people

so I can remember what this human thing is, but even

then, the protests might not amount to anything.

Louis, I drove around aimlessly to find you, the four

days without my children crushed the sun and I meditated

on one card (the Fool), read the warning from the university

that said I couldn’t teach the books I was teaching,

“The clitoris is too sexual,” and “Why did you bring your kids

to the protest?” The police at the back

of the gathering. “Move faster! The problems we’ve had with the police

happen when people are outside the group.” Lacey says, “Move forward!”

Regina in her orange vest, twenty-three years old, children

chanting, one little girl on the shoulders of her dad,

my kids’ small legs moving faster than the adults,

everyone knows they kick the poets out first,

climate change deniers, and Chris’s love in the pew,

I remember you, what you said spoke to me, the idea

of sanctuary, I am not religious, but I have been

broken, Lord, I have been broken

and, thus, am allowed to speak for the dead.

Feel the pain that grows

out like a nettle

from injustice,

and take that thorn

out of your paw, little one,

and keep walking north

through the snow.

Look at the people we have on our side:

Walter Benjamin is on our side

Hannah Arendt is on our side

James Baldwin is on our side

Sandra, they are all dead

But they are on our side

The other people,

the capitalists, who do they have?

They don’t have anyone

All of their ideas are shit

Listen, we have Brecht

I was going crazy

I picked up my phone

I was talking to Maged

Utopia Utopia

Utopia Utopia

Utopia Utopia

Maged is moving from Seattle

to Atlanta to be closer to his son

I dream of the New Jerusalem of love,

an Eden of sparks from the mouth of the rose cult

The rooster of Midtown cockadoodledoos,

crest shivers Floridian, last bit of cold

in these parts; I am the bold-hearted one.

Tallahassee on the “Dead Mall” Wiki page,

stock market up, earth crash, crypto-mining

the numeral seven like the delight of the godhead.

I smoke and ask my neighbor what he would do

if the government had him on a list of dissidents.

Demon of the windstorm, demon of talons and beaks,

I know you hear everything I sing, two children

huddled together, under the moon,

baby falling from a chariot of wildly shaped light.

What do we make of him? Wander the earth

in search of your brother. Brother, what would you do?

And something stupid takes over him,

“Well we are all on a list anyway,” as he backslides

into his drunkenness, restoration of the neo-Nazi’s

Twitter account and a 2:00 p.m. consciousness-raising

session, I wish I was high instead of inside

my body dragging itself to another action.

First National Women’s Liberation meeting

in Tallahassee, but now I’m drunk, high, and smoking

a ton of cigarettes with my neighbor, the one

who saved me from Hurricane Whatever’s 3:00 a.m. rainwater

pouring through the wolf-eyed tree holes of the ceiling—

then a MRSA infection on my elbow. No one knows

why a hurricane reddens the night sky, no one knows why

the ER doc says, “It’s the dirty water.

It comes from farms, factories, collects

and then dumps down, so here is an IV antibiotic.”

Sat in the ER, cried, but called no one,

emotions intensified like a Sabbath.

The handsome nurse talked

about surfing in Costa Rica while

my blood disinfected and outside

the hospital a Ouija board of plants

made a foreign language out of the night.

Man in neon coat walks uphill through the crows.

Reddish glow of the hurricane horizon

creeping toward the heart. Oldest woman

at the meeting talks about 1960 and ’61.

“We were organized, we had an action.

They told us what to do and we did it,

then we’d go to jail and it was on to the next

action.” Woke up—eyes puffy as windmills.

Thought of Rotterdam. That fucking poet

who didn’t ask if he could hold my hand,

just grabbed it on the teeth chattering bridge

and then yelled, “We are poets! We are here!”

right into the river. And we walked into the spaceship

I mean hotel and in my room, I ordered

a panini and ate it on the white sheets, crumbs

on the white sheets. Mirrors everywhere.

Rotterdam, the last place I ever felt sexy.

I rise before everyone, kids at their dad’s.

No commotion, rivers of clearing

eucalyptus mist in the aura factory

like pictures of Norway, her glaciated

remove languishes in a think tank

of food security, to want that kind of coldness,

to be surrounded by a swarm of bears

or love affair so north of here, but the winds

were shoved into the stone mouths of lions,

their rhymes tourniquets of counterfeit ideas.

And Rotterdam standing like an inquisition

of ships sloshing the metallic waters.

See, the thing is, Poet, you’re failing.

You’re failing at capitalism.

You’re failing at “self-care.”

You’re failing at feminism.

You’re failing at activism.

You’ve fallen deep into your addiction.

Your despair spreads everywhere.

None of this is your fault

but it’s still happening.

The failure is the fracture is the opening

like that infection that started in your elbow

and moved to the depths of your being.

So maybe you should jump into it.

You spend the night reading about a god

cleaved in two so the dream demons come true.

Capitalism is shrinking and the rich

have gotten more violent. Capitalism could fail

and win at the same time.

Poet, this is called “crisis.”

The swans and the trees and the birds are buzzing.

They don’t care.

They hum.

Capitalism won.

I went on a run.

I am dumb I hum on my long run.

A series of demons dressed as birches

tripping on the waterline of the riot.

The leaves and birds of the riot.

The twigs of the riot

dispersed as demons disbanded

to the center of the horned wreath.

A quickening like dust or lost resources.

Some red dirt cries for Ra.

The resilient ones rise and fall

as categories of storm light,

as instruments of the godhead

spoken in a spiked language.

Crowds flee their emblems at dusk.

Away with her

Away with him

In the morning you see someone

stretching against the Gulf of Mexico.

The graves are the faces of striated flowers.

The musculature of the urban landscape

ribbons like some vague concept of gasoline.

In the morning, you are in love.

The material and its shadows unify

to doves. Everything you doubted falls softly

into an aubade of rainwater collected

by strange and singular animals

that roam the toxic dump.

You sing into a grave because it is there and apparent.

Maybe it is a window or the wooden frame

of time crisscrossing the seas.

There are still purple ships and people still board them.

You pick up a green comb

and comb through your long, wicked hair.

The coffee is good here. It is good here.

To scroll past the body of the dead baby,

the baby that looks like a form of dust,

the baby of the desert is the baby of the sea

and the atrocities are piling up like hyperventilation.

They will build cities for themselves

and contain portraits of themselves

in the gemstones of their terrible philosophies.

They will be whimsical about genocide

and the pride they will feel in this volition

is like a brand of coffee or cereal

(nothing more or less).

I ran so far into the greenery that I saw

the purple rose that once grew in the blood

of the love garden, I saw the Jericho

of my tombs disseminate like the neurotic

spectacle of rainwater and then I vomited

like the queasy tides of history not

on our side and felt guilty and told no one.

The managerial class will punish us

with their monotonous, grueling blue eyes.

They will paw at our gates

and the houses will split open

as they go further in their quest

to forge digits, hemorrhage data.

Their constituents concentrate

on numerals as if their codes

were constructed by nuns.

Their unfailing power turns on itself

like love poems of pure possession,

like troubadour fantasies they tie

weights to your body and push you

gently into the blood river.

The factories in the background

are only imagined. They pump

and huff to transfix mimesis

like the face transplants of memes.

Flocks and flocks of stars

constellate the barbed wire

borders of the nation state.

This is where they plant cheap pine.

These kinds of trees don’t communicate with each other.

This is not the ecology of the forest,

it’s the ecology of a tree farm.

They create and destroy themselves for us

with no tie to the future or the past.

They used to make turpentine here.

A lot of workers tortured

in the convict leasing programs.

The company store was the only place to buy anything.

You worked all day in the swamp,

then you got yellow fever and died.

Rollover hedges all the way to the horizon.

I flipped through the pages of the Star Wars Journal

I bought my son. All the pages blank.

This is not a dystopia, it’s wreckage.

“Should I bleach my hair today and shave part of it off?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not? I need a look as drastic as the world we live in.”

The Garden of Eden in sculpted information.

“My love, your hair is long, wild, and beautiful.”

Speculative cobwebs embroidered with flowers.

Back in the love garden of eternal truth, I am

as unhurried

as the smallest

creature left

to revel in its own zigzag.

Take the fucking wine away! Its red center,

the Saturns of my splendor and my emotional

landscape is cured for a day or a daydream is turned

into the vicious news cycle reeling in pain.

Destroy my body, take away the wine and the drugs

and the centers of my thinking

so naked before you.

Take away the music and the car and the job,

take away my body

and, once and for all, fuck riddles.

There is nothing mysterious to do here:

I am just goose bumps and nipples.

That hail is rare in South Georgia

That once my colleague saw a twelve-foot alligator on 319 before they divided the road

That that was twenty years ago

That I regret reading an article on what it is really like to have Trump-supporting parents

That I feel bad for saying that

That my kids are eating toast for breakfast this morning

That when they don’t eat what I think they are supposed to eat, the guilt is overwhelming

That I am a single mother