Six from Thrown

Poems by James Wagner to a Painting by Bracha L. Ettinger

 

Bracha L. Ettinger, NO TITLE YET, N. 3 (EURYDICE, ST. ANNE)
oil on canvass, 54x29 cm. 2003-2009. © The Bracha L. Ettinger Studio


                                                


                                     XIII


Swam and answered with innards:

The hooligans

the night’s inside.


By implication: remember him

red and waving,

her knees near the thieves,


desiring

nothing

non-particular.


A torso

will hope

you forward.


                                     

                                     XIV


Eyeglasses and penises,
lost walkers.

Look there:

her sex versus traces later

remembered. Is this the sky I know of?

Was it ever so spoken for?

What is this red man an omen of?

If we are mutating fragilities, always

askance, wallowing, then this

under of how come is breeding

sequences,

without order. So one must

say to no one to
laugh to.

 

                                           

                                     XV


Aliens carrying

a licentiousness,

the legs lifted, the

asses expressed.


Jazzmen, without

instruments,


a whiteout

astutely removes

remorse.


No need to fake

the abstaining

deliberations,

or hide a sky away.


Here are the

apparencies,

those sought

over years.

 

                                           

                                     XVI


Photograph of a corpuscle. The itinerants in us.

What white light on the albino giraffics,


where the childhood waited in red,

covering elders in specks even as they moved


seemingly out of reach of it. A nuance in the blue,

a fear of impersonating one’s self, a self absurd


or intermittently aghast at the hurt one can never

name. Mingling triplets in the middle?


Of roads in the mountains. There are nexuses

in the left threading, but not a one notices.


“As I was saying, as I was saying...” calls

into the spaces that separate these dreams—

 

                                           

                                     XVII


In the sleep of beliefs,

in the misunderstandings

masquerading, the


blur of the persons and the dabbling

vacuums on the margins


bracing fragments in

meanings //// the undigested

the formlessness pours from


these three winds finish in

the ars poetica of the ants...

 

                                     

                                      XVIII


These creatures seem lost in white trees.

A semblance of sayings supports them,

opening their loneliness outward, so

when the shadows cough their blacks

at them, they will maintain their shapes

in the deluge.


This trickery of winter welcomes in

the breezes of missing in the houses

they are leaving. A kind of kinky

electricity jaggedly and vibrantly

encases. A love, from the crimson

blue, absolves all


who might whisper and wait for a

meaning to remember. No

coding, no gateways, no findings

of unkindness in the hazefields.

One eye watches for sympathy, drifts

of it, in us.


And what of the kids, prim, faceless

at the knees, being led into a new

oblivion, unaware as the others?

One only knows the wordless glow

in lark sounds there, beyond the small

omens of men.




Bracha Ettinger B&W photo by Ania Krupiakov_2014_4438_3sm.jpgBracha L.Ettinger is a visual artist, philosopher, and theoretician of French Feminist psychoanalysis. Recent solo exhibitions at: the Historical Museum of St. Petersburg, Peter and Paul Fortress (2013); Museum of Fine Arts (Beaux-arts), Angers (2011); Tapies Foundation, Barcelona (2011), Freud Museum, London (2009). Recent group exhibitions at: Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2013-2014); Pompidou Centre, Paris (2010-2011). She is the author of Matrix. Halal(a) -Lapsus, MOMA oxford (1993) and The Matrixial Borderspace, University of Minnesota Press (2006).

 

James-Wagner.jpgJames Wagner is the author of Thrown (There Press, forthcoming),Work Book (Nothing Moments), Trilce (Calamari Press), the false sun recordings (3rd bed), and several chapbooks, including Geisttraum—Tales from the Germans and The Idiocy: Plays. His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in The American Poetry ReviewThe BafflerBoston ReviewFence6x6Zoland Poetry and elsewhere. He lives in California.

Tell me, Reykjavik

Cannon_Frances_Tell me Reykjavik_illustrated01.jpg


In the museum, a cavernous gallery
with floor to ceiling windows, white walls,
and a constellation of black paintings—
five opera singers weave their voices
to the fingers of young pianists
in gratitude to Art, the Healer.

The writers arrive, rubbing away crystals
of sleep with coffee-stained fingers,
inhale stale doughnuts to delay conversation.
Desire, moony faced, interrupts the banquet.
This rude guest meanders, a witness
to elation through a glazed window.

Insomniac Matilda frets about a date
with her publisher, an older man
whose longing—near visible spectre—perches
atop his sand-trap bald spot,
poised to leap into a nest
of hair more vital and luminous.

Supper: a picnic of rye bread,
salted black licorice in sardine shapes,
and salad carried between two bowls
into the old cemetery of Holavallagardur.
Will ghosts sweep our crumbs
into their lonesome maws at midnight?

The sky still glows at night
like aluminum reflecting lamplight or flame.
We all pause at the gate
to catch a strange bird’s call,
hearing now a choir of voices,
midnight mass? We follow the song

into a stranger’s garden, to find
dozens of art students, twenty-somethings,
singing in unison by candle and moonlight.
They welcome us in, and sing
three songs just for us—interlopers,
aliens in this city of music.

Who, then, played the piano—forte!
late into the night and morning?
Was it our hosts, the judge
and the historian, both retired, deaf,
windy in the head? Melodic trolls,
hidden people from this island’s sagas?

We escape, trace the dirt road
which slices into the lava cliff,
step quietly past a goat family,
squelch through the luminous moss bed,
and climb towards a grass mound
shaped like a mountaintop fisherman’s ship.

Why, then, are we here? Why
fill a notebook cover-to-cover
with the names of dead voyagers,
sketches of local flora and fauna,
esoteric quotes from professors and novelists—
do these notes prove me a poet?

We ask the grass ship why.
We ask the historian, the judge,
the poets, novelists, students, opera singers.
They tell us not to worry,
“You’re young! Go for a swim.
Go to the pool and soak.”

One dozen geriatric Reykjavikians bob, drift,
swirl their arms and blubber bellies
in the shallow, salted, geothermal pool.
Edith Piaf croons from the loudspeaker.
Wooden chess pieces—tall as vikings—
hold morning rain in their helmets.

I make accidental, unnerving eye-contact
with a withered swimmer-bobber woman
wearing a cap of plastic flowers—
licorice black and strawberry pink. Hush,
her eyes tell me, be still.
You possess all I desire: Time.