“I’ve always known my true life would begin
and end in a garden like this, my will not free,
my breath not Word, everything: bloom—
but the bloom the wound of a pupil
overtaking the eye.”
Christopher Hennessy, from “Gethsemane”
“But slowly, abruptly—the thought occurred to me that this story had no witness: I was there—the ‘I’ was already no more than a Who?, a whole crowd of Who?s—so that there would be no one between him and his destiny, so that his face would remain bare and his gaze undivided. I was there, not in order to see him, but so that he wouldn’t see himself, so that it would be me he saw in the mirror, someone other than him—another, a stranger, nearby, gone, the shadow of the other shore, no one—and that in this way he would remain a man until the very end. He wasn’t to split in two. This is the great temptation of those who are approaching their end: they look at themselves and talk to themselves; they turn themselves into a solitude peopled by themselves—the emptiest, the most false. But if I was present, he would be the most alone of all men, without even himself, without the last man which he was—and thus he would be the very last.”
Maurice Blanchot, from The Last Man, tr. Lydia Davis
“Tennessee Williams once visited Manhattan where he celebrated the Broadway success of A Streetcar Name Desire with a leather purse. She called him, ‘Len.’ That night, Len and the purse sent cocktails to hookers on 42nd street. Girls sipped so-called dirty martinis with white rubber gloves. For the clients’ pleasure they sipped quickly.
Quietly, the other day, I found an ad in the Miami Herald that read, Tennessee look alike seeks farm hand for companionship. I left a message wondering if he looked like the State or the playwright, never mind the possibility that Tennessee could be a woman, or a transvestite looking for human liver. Nevertheless, the impossible news headline was true—Dog caught walking owner off bridge. Plummets to death, owner not dog.
Father John once said he got cold spells when he entered the church, or something like that. I told him to wear mittens.
Mittens, he said. Are for boys!
Father, I said. You are a boy.
A glass menagerie, glass menagerie, menagerie of steel, stainless steel, I’ve stolen my lines from the great Herodotus, or Hercules, I can’t remember which was Assyrian. Istanbul is a city with great glass walls, erected with the sweat of tigers, lions, and bears. The mighty walls, like the skin of cats, are see though. I see through, you see through. I can’t see through, you can’t see through. I am done with this cat business, the 9 lives of Nineveh, or 9 Visigoths, or Vishnu nude bathing on porcelain countertops with margaritas in both hands.
A list will be my final attempt: a horn, clobbered, musk, alabaster, gloat, Los Alamos, credenza, last night, a dry hump, a parakeet.
When the edict of Nantes was declared null and void girls bought hot pink lipstick. Abolition is freedom if you can’t read. Reading is ______! But only if you close your eyes when you do it.
Madness, you say. Madness, I say. Say, do you understand the function of that squiggly line in calculus? The one that looks like it wants to be infinity. That’s the function of madness.”
Neil de la Flor, “T. Williams Talks to Birds or I’m Talking to Birds”
“Who now would think of sweetness as a noble quality? I have only the
testimony:
the first encounter, the first born. A face has power on my tongue.
[…]
First eyelids and lips are closed, then open. Now, open eyes appear
unseeing. A kind of dreaming.
For thousands of years people have carried their faces this way, one by
one, only on their heads.
Under these conditions nothing is harder to control than reason. You
babble without speaking,
march into the desert without water. We will die tomorrow, the day after at
the latest.”
Adrian Lurssen and Susan Tichy, from “Dear with Extremes of Thirst and Pain”
“I feel the softness of forgotten words.
***
This hour does not exist, this city does not exist, I do not see these poplars, their geometry in the dew.
Doubtless, these are extinct poplars, my childhood vertigo.
Oh gardens, oh numbers.
***
I have no fear or hope.”
Antonio Gamoneda, from “Still” tr. Donald Wellman
“I see a light under the mist and the sweetness of error makes me close my eyes.”
Antonio Gamoneda, from “Still” tr. Donald Wellman
“Forests are where you hear the trees—
a foreign film murmuring.
Undercover life forces tunnel, restructure
the strata of decay, fumbling the wet & bronze & rosewood needles,
nudging & moving down & into
hidden homes.
Some dusks you think you see stained-glass windows
& brackish, inland pools fill the eyes.
Part of the winter forest’s strategy is transparency,
but that makes it feel known.
So the subnivean zone forms—
under-snow rooms, or unconscious zones
in which you feel no hunger
& curl deaf & blind
in apparently meaningless passages.”
— Miranda Field, “Oneiric Theory”
