phoenix {rising}
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Parallax & Parataxis
<<2005-03-28 - 1:40 a.m.>>

I keep trying to write the poem, and it keeps coming out wrong: it keeps coming out about something, or rather, about something specific: holding Ken's hand in the MoMA, or sitting at the Glisan roundabout, or seeing Julia Jarcho's play and running into Abigail and the pipes and Asta's open face, and that doesn't seem terribly specific, but I have gotten it into my head that it is possible to describe in some parallactic paratactic way the state of consciousness (to surround the silence). For example: right now: here on a bare mattress laid down on my floor for my sister who has been sleeping in my bed with me since Thursday night, and still in Lex's little car with Emma piled cheerfully on my lap (but no, and here is one level of splitting, because I am not trying to split the physical) and remembering (again: no: I want to place myself there, "remembering" implies a central locus which is here and sometimes I am more there), and also riding the bus/riding the bus/riding the bus at night/waiting for the bus in the cold and then getting on it to find Ana/sitting in the back of the M20 down Central Park West the saddest days of high school, watching women's legs move, trying to keep the tears toward the window/waiting perched on a traffic divider for the M20 at two-thirty or so outside Penn Station not last summer the one before after Long Day's Journey for Chloë's birthday and feeling sweetswollen rising and loving the waiting/walking past Penn Station long strides and no waiting, not waiting for the subway with Chloë and Arthur and Ken and Charlene the night I met Ken and Charlene and really Arthur too (he was intimidated by the fluency of language between me and Chloë, its second significances). And this is wrong too, because I don't just mean streamofconsciousness.

Hopefully I did not arrive at this idea by reading Ulysses. Hopefully my influences are more obscure. More twentyone-years-old-and-turning-her-face-upwards than James Joyce.

But see somehow I can't make this into a poem because I can't make it fit right, can't make it layer or level or swirl or surround or something.

The Slaves of Architecture, I tried to call it.

The Slaves of Architecture is a piece at MoMA, printed on a long white wall, and The Slaves of Architecture is maybe the poem, surfacebound, structurespoken, and The Slaves of Architecture is in a very private sense Ken, too, because, well, yes, and The Slaves of Architecture is maybe if you want to get grand some sort of metaphor for the human condition but don't tell anyone I told you so.

Or: collage. (A useful medium.) Sarah. Can I write about Renfrew? Not for public (Reed) consumption. But collage: the issues of National Geographic from the mid-70s that I found at the Bins—the ice storm that welcomed me to Portland—where did I go when I left, what did I wreak beforehand?—no, not back again, no doors reopening—see, here is a potential flaw, not just with this: internal referentiality, and even though I'm no longer a liar I can't always explicate.

Café Mozart. (Logical leap.) New York late at night. Late at summer night. That freedom. Late at winter night. Opening my coat to let the cold in, walking fast—what freedom is that? Café Mozart late at night with Avi, or the Hungarian Bakery late at night with Max, or Max's basement late at night with Max and my mother wondering where I was and not believing me when she called to ask and I told her because she'd already called Max's house. The clean broad strokes of the Upper West Side. Columbus and Amsterdam.

Is it fair to write a poem that you mean to be a whole life whole world everything long? Isn't the whole point to condense? Luminous detail? I just keep talking.

You use smaller words when you speak more personally, John once said to me, and what I know I am waiting to say is something silent, something propulsively flowingly silent, holdingly silent, pulsingly silent—

and I can neither say it with my words, my mouth words, nor with my eye words, head words, hand words. Which makes perfect sense, really, because what I am trying to say is there are no words there are no words.

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