call it freedom or Sunday morning
the perfect day
at a click past art and thoughtlessness
enemigos, canayas recline into the public hillside ready whenever
I read the poem, pee opens up and out
one drop at a time to stay inside
the blind’s slat light touching paper, a bottle
the smell of the laid upon by foundations, the steady wide sunlight cut through
at the bottom with busy diesel routes and your thin, intimate skin
the beheading and its outrages – to make a story out of technology
a perfect day iteration of the sky if we’re going to talk about it
the white sheets turning dry
this small building, the acrid
citrus tree, a way for dust
and everything to know now
of our reliances, to settle beside
what the German says – history is life
even if dust describes the space it left
rising and shuffling down our good street
empty street
on a valley without layers
we snap pics, slide back the window
for the gray wind
but it all stays in place
not heavy but simple on the ground
like the allegories are about you
whose grown bed soar touched paper body
would you wrap in how many bodies and what husks
would they chant soft
da-da-da
da-da
da
like a team of Head Start workers was real
trying to put freedom fighters into little Mississippi kids
maybe this gaze is an iteration of whiteness guaranteed by saying
the sky is empty
but for a mother used as a vector for race
in a way that rounds space into a nest
wet paper
or bodies are soaking in feelings
we could make stuff up
or just keep talking
like a friend who stayed just enough away
I feel we’re getting there
our books orchestrate a day, this block
the polyrhythms in space unnoticed until the parts
take up a purpose displayed with the glow of just being there
that was exuberance even without the h
in exhuming the moon’s ashes or slight fronds
from this species of obsidian sap letting mesquite
one toe nail grown long enough
to catch at the callous under the other foot in a perfect balance
organize themselves in an array of types
they don’t want to leave
keep talking the German meant
the mistakes
like Place said to the Russians after her talk
“I did a reading once and some woman in the reading became hysterical because, again, it was one of these long rape piece, and started sobbing, and left the room, and had to be gotten out of the toilet like an hour later. And she came up to me later and asked, ‘How do you feel about doing that to me?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t do anything to you. You know, you had an experience with language and it was a very powerful experience. And one, when was the last time you had such an experience just out of language, and, two, what do you want?’”
One wants to spin in the computer
Chair spun sick not enough food thrill
Sick over sharks in the water
One’s green nylon flower hair tie
Centers their circling in
The grey dusk here about this room
One has made and the dusk’s late arrival
In the seat beside the ones
In the planes overhead
Learning to gesture tons
Of public good along
Paths that are true one’s specialized
Builders say of something without
Flourish or deviation
Fixed to one’s honor one’s
Rumor hearsay
And wishes to the things one a
Weedy thing says right at
Their edges seventeen
Is a circle a minute folds space and
Death work like that by quantity
Or proximity so that Kamau
Brathwaite may say the unity
Is sub-marine while the weather
The calendar and the bamboo
Stand in a desert spring
Grey and green and turn in time and
The heat it brings a new or first
Welcomed fear this is a difficult
Sentence to stay inside but it
Makes a room and puts one in it
Where one looks up to address the
Space the room is
A neutral kind of shame in a
Scene and its awareness lays
A gentle hand on one’s sternum
Receives or takes?
It’s just a hand.
One guesses one is asking
about the hand’s verb.
One can’t know
what the other one
does under one’s hand.
Does one want to know?
A little simple pornography calms
One down takes up the space well enough
So the chanted fucking is
Perfectly formal transubstantiation
A chunky piece of Latinate
And so is emotion and
The verifiable white princess who
Says into the record she cut
Her thighs and arms and from behind
Her bangs looks up a perfect
Moment in which her words make
A room where the windows trill
A little with the voices in
One’s voice saying search out some
Sensational spectacle in
Which your fine figure and
Pretty face will show will
Seduce a minding distance whereas
Animals stay after one dies
Marking one’s absence by their committed
Routines the dog at the Japanese
Train station the bees who settled
Across the flowers and tarps of their
Keeper’s wake one had a princess
Who looked at one looking on one’s
Way to belief and on one’s way
Back something parts from one an arm
(new stanza)
Grows toward the office park
While one is walking into the desert
Together in a crisis of
Belief that starts the hovering
Something to do one’s big royal
Eyes open as a laugh is the
New car’s gorgeous turning speed
Rendered in sound if the body
One is told is a year in falling
Water one knows that now or time
Knows it for one lots of water
Turning all around one
And the sun insistent
Calling ones home to the record
Almost all of voices
Saying one was assaulted
Or one did not is available
Is placed as poetry
The infra thinnest so
One gets over one’s feelings
Finally arrives at the words one
Poses better than one speaks
Making a room in a very small room
One thinks of where unweighted by
Flesh one may be an ornament
To one’s sex and after
The telling the ears admit things
Again the sounds of breath
With the ghost always of the ghost body
From which they came think of a place
Without reading the words when at
Nine the sex was coming out of
The body to say that one was
Leaking some release of
Responsibility into the water
Falling down the year who is talking
To whom in order to talk in a room
It is very small no feeling
Need be there with one putting
The words in someone to look
At as one is looking
To be where one makes the room
a few layers in from the street breaking
a code simplifies the things used up the stories
or the ghost a meter makes its rolling hills and speedful spread
like our forces populating a management sketch
but maybe there’s a way to speak
into one so one has to speak into another
having been after them in this room we can pour what you said
what did you say
on TV after the riot?
ambitious, don’t worry
take no notice of the living we can walk ourselves
learning from the dead these are for those
partners ring the firmament bells
we’ll look there for a commonness
did they shoot your mother and feel these thoughts’
horizon turning in L.A.’s turning dress
or did they listen there for the grammar of your babble
making proximate
places to extend
what did you say over this street
pile hunting vectors of long-nosed bats
and the evening on top
holding on is the most embarrassing thing
turn about your surface quick
as rain they’d say of the trend toward metal tables
a utility a mortuary
smell one wants to have just left
and if the aloe full of water turns away
in the grammar if not the words of your turning
and the gullies run with metal dust scraped off our break pads
the tropic wind hustle hustles some weather over the dry mountains
don’t they look tired
improvising jumpy, complex revelations of rock faces
under all that sun caring after
faithful iterations, seamless folk
beheadings, retired lab apes, so long armed
sequestered on an island with our HIV turning inside them
a distance from the mainland shore not so great
healthful, at ease one guides a long canoe Tuesdays and Fridays
to their inscrutable style
what does one take
and where were you born before that?
beast cast past a likeness
something to move toward
“…a mode of intramural depressive positionality” Muñoz set as landmark, “that gives us the ability to know and experience the other who shares a particular affective or emotional valance with us”
move this hollowface rest
a last bearing under a vintage gorilla coat
distinguished leathern and long silver hairs at your wrist
turn away from the naked shoulder cast
golden in honey poured or coffee grounds wrung
gelatin in your eyes
brotherly network cast out
the white boy comes to me to be increased
and is feeling laying there an escape
look at us
presiding yet
birds take yards call out a business
Inca doves in league
with the alley’s outside
trench and parcel mothers
I am lost the white boy
comes to be increased
and is feeling
laying there an escape
gelatin eye
and light’s hollows
impeded in
barred effusiveness
upon bar
mothering him
a pith inside
good identities to use
happy and comfortable, taken to with the balance point of intention
and reception lucid dreamers might have
the sun in the dream was setting as in Los Angeles
with a long, thin band of orange between purple plains
as if only a thought ago
we’d been carefree under the vastest of honesties
a mother, tall and full of nose, a handsome woman
cooks the white rice seething in herself the push
of being driven through her shift
along the bank of the lake
on a computer two white men
suck each other off for a camera
and another white man fishing
a ways off looks, edges closer
let’s not wallow in the particulars of their work
sad or happy and dignified for everyone
those aren’t
feelings but political categories
diffuse and determining
“… people who live in those circumstances,” Padgett said of Brainard, “do see the world
as somewhat of a threat because you’re on the edge of economic oblivion at all times
and so yeah, you create structures around you that make you feel happy and comfortable.
Joe was extraordinarily good at that.”
any child
be our flag
above boy and girl cadets
of Davis Monthan Air Force Base learn to fly
heaviest cargo planes, the slightest jets
things used
can quicken the heart
all those public gallons per second
a tip of the throttle
a heaven of steel pennants
above the released
whose accent flares the mouth saying
certain succulents are sculptural on a neo-liberal terrace
grow enough immigrants behind you and you don’t get too precious
things are very small really
they just turn over and get lost
across several versions of the portrait
ragged edged, the moth, the useful mercury
sonorous, almost a return
before first light assembles the blue
then what can we say? bred outside a radical tradition
having lost a dialect that ranged only as far as the mountains
we know how to get thin and turn with tact, saying
I’m not really interested in my affect
however mannered
uh-huh, the poem says back
into the sky behaving itself full
of paddle leaf flutter
thing flattering
light will come
unannounced trees
clean people
flattered at our fortitude
in art conveying us out ahead but
thrasher and goldfinch, the lesser will pull their calls
out of the noon, leave it
wordhusk and deader happy on the heels of its ensigns
NOTES
Da-da-da da-da da is chant and song performed by children and Head Start workers in the Child Development Group of Mississippi. A recording made of the song in 1967 is available through Smithsonian Folkways.
Vanessa Place gave the talk “Conceptualism is Feminism; Feminism is Conceptualism” at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia. A video of the talk and the subsequent q&a was posted to YouTube on Jan. 15, 2013.
Édouard Glissant cites Kamau Brathwaite’s phrase “The unity is sub-marine” as an epigraph to Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Shakespearean actor James Murdoch said, “Search out some sensational spectacle in which your fine figure and pretty face will show” to Adah Isaacs Menken, a stage actress and poet whose career spanned from roughly 1855 through her untimely death in 1868. She routinely told conflicting stories of her parentage and proclaimed inconsistent attitudes toward the issue of slavery. Most sources suggest she was born in Louisiana of mixed European and African ancestry. Of her acting, one English critic commented that she “poses better than she speaks.” Both of these quotations appear in Daphne A. Brook’s Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Duke, 2006).
On Nov. 20, 1995 Princess Diana gave an interview on the British television program Panorama in which she shared that she cut her body as a way to deal with the stress of living in Britain’s Royal Family.
The quotation from José Esteban Muñoz can be found in the essay, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” originally published in Signs, Vol. 31, No. 3, New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture (Spring 2006) but widely available on the internet.
Ron Padgett appeared on the podcast Bookworm to talk about his biography of Joe Brainard, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Coffee House, 2007) on Nov. 22, 2007.