Gazing at Plums
Though the reasonable man
does not have doubts, the condition of woman is perhaps less certain. A
question of where
A box of pens, a wooden
bowl, desk littered in open books: the uncertain truth of propositions
Light penetrates the
shadow of night jade. A hawk rending the black-flecked back of a bear. Can we
rely on our senses?
A prescription of
dialogue. Such talk gets it’s meaning from the correspondence between doubt and
longing
Explanations signal: a
book of fables, illustrated herbals. The interchangeable nature of service
and servitude demands precision, the roots, red and potent as the flowers
Scheherazade’s inventions.
She prepares a tisane of chamomile, dried quince flowers. Though it is not a
matter of seeing
An open field, a page of
writing. To confirm an hypothesis, again and again
Does she have a body?
Married to interrogation, herself predicated on the firmness of flesh, her
teeth tearing through it, the sweetness of its juice
A place she enters into
At the feet of the king,
her body “less and worse than nothing”
She incites the space
around her
Blue walls of the
bedchamber border the chronicle she narrates
Fragment and calyx: he
takes her to bed
ش
In response to such
bluntness, we must enter by force of imagination. The heart of the rose opens
Like wine poured from a
silver ewer
Dizzy with delight, we
wonder, what was she saying?
Threaded texts of the loom
lining a room, master and slave abandon their accustomed roles. In a certain sense invisible
Her finger traces the
circumference of his eyes, his lips, curve of an ear
Whispers, like a muezzin’s
blessings. He will not
Woman and scheming
inseparable
Narratives bend upon
themselves, refusing source and closure
ش
No teleology, “A cup of
wine, oh beloved?” He cannot answer, his
grief manufactured and reproducible
She dips her fingers into
the cup. “I shall tell you a story”
The immodest splendor in
which she subsists. Beneath such petals he does not, or cannot, speak
A tailor, a hunchback, a
bite of fish, a cunning wife. Displacing the traumatic thing, night jasmine
enters through an open window. He can no longer control the foci of his
attention
Still he is caught,
neither inscribed nor spoken. Yet
ش
Dawn rescinds night’s
license. Another code, another bed, proposing temporary reprieve
If he must have her, what will she do with him?
A jew, a muslim, a
christian, a king, the possibilities apparently endless. The thirteen versions,
each verse more fantastic than the last
Language nourishes a lack for which it is the only
recourse
What
will happen this time? You never can tell. Let’s see how it begins.
‒ Italo Calvino
a disclosure, silk’s
transparency
how can he contain himself
though the invitation into
the text is conditional
curiously preemptive
the king and his bride in
the dark
manipulating continuity
more
elaborate and more ornamented
inducing a state of
disequilibrium
her
leitmotif
she reappears
tarot cards: Calvino
unable to begin
she unable to stop
her jeweled bodice
her flowing trousers
Ars combinatoria
or
thematic rubrics
her laughter adduces a
lyric analog
four notes of a descending
scale
coherence a matter of
repetition
waves growing and
retreating
Lento
then Allegro molto
no obvious point of
arrival
her true genius
deftly tying everything
together
will you write this down?
a jest
yet in the pas de deux, he ravishes her
calligraphy haunting the
text
the delicacy of her limbs
the probability of his
embrace
a woman in possession of
her head
enumerative
plays upon your memory
“eager to know”
she swoons expectantly
“what comes next”
an arbitrary convenience
that much we were certain
of
absent from both the frame
and the framed
not a narrative
an occasion :: gravitas
and ego
what music, what frame?
her Shariyar
subdued and tormented,
into the interstices
“you turn the book over in
your hand”
gesturing at certainty
themes and variation
beyond doubt an oriental narrative
Scheherazade
her stern husband
:: an ordered repetition
[note. Of
the preceding poems & of the
work as a whole, by way of a poetics: “Engagements with
the Thousand and One Nights, gender, narration, and Sir Richard
Burton, as well as other writers’ takes on the story-cycle, the collection is
marriage of several impulses, coalescing upon the nature of narrative
and Scheherazade as narrator. The original story cycle posits
Scheherazade as redeemer of not only herself and her sister virgins of the
kingdom, but of just rule and King Shariyar’s humanity; the poems explore
tropes of gender and of the seemingly powerless (women, slaves, blacks) to
erode and challenge the status quo.” Scheduled
for publication later this year by Lavender Ink.]
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