Rosmarie Waldrop
The Senses Barely or The Necessities of Life
for Sophie Hawkes
I (Weapons)
doubled corners
of the situation
the words duped by this dialectic
know
the pose of “brushing against”
insistence
on detail
severe eyelashes
the weapons must
be kept in order
(take the
game
of courtesy
of charm)
her knees crossed
over the manner of
his undressing her
a chord
(deceptively resonant)
a strength of image
but scanty provisions interrupt
her concerns for doors
into sleep
focuses
the story can be carried in two hands
finale:
I have turned on
with shifting strands
of light
§
PRE + CON or POSITIONS + JUNCTIONS (6)
If a bird if
up into the air
if cold if
we must if adhere if
a road if renamed by
if each if traveling
more than one set
if of darkness no angel
no annunciation
deeper yet if
the singer’s
voice if
borne if by grief
as if a bird
if on wings
§
Excerpts from THE REPRODUCTION OF PROFILES
You told me, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself.
•
I might have known you wouldn’t talk to me. But to claim you just didn’t want to disguise your thoughts! We’ve walked along this road before, I said, though perhaps in heavier coats not designed to reveal the form of the body. Later, the moon came out and threw the shadows of branches across the street where they remained, broken. Feverishly you examined the tacit conventions on which conversation depends. I sighed as one does at night, looking down into the river. I wondered if by throwing myself in I could penetrate to the essence of its character, or should I wait for you to stab me as you had practiced in your dreams? You said this question, like most philosophical problems, arose from failing to understand the tale of the two youths, two horses, and two lilies. You could prove to me that the deepest rivers are, in fact, no rivers at all.
§
Excerpts from LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE
3
I put a ruler in my handbag, having heard men talk about their sex. Now we have correct measurement and a stickiness between collar and neck. It is one thing to insert yourself into a mirror, but quite another to get your image out again and have your errors pass for objectivity. Vitreous. As in humor. A change in perspective is caused by the ciliary muscle, but need not be conciliatory. Still, the eye is a camera, room for everything that is to enter, like the cylinder called the satisfaction of hollow space. Only language grows such grass-green grass.
5
Because I refuse to accept the opposition of night and day I must pit other, subtler periodicities against the emptiness of being an adult. Their traces inside my body attempt precariously, like any sign, to produce understanding, but though nothing may come of that, the grass is growing. Can words play my parts and also find their own way to the house next door as rays converge and solve their differences? Or do notes follow because drawn to a conclusion? If we don’t signal our love, reason will eat our heart out before it can admit its form of mere intention, and we won’t know what has departed.
12
I worried about the gap between expression and intent, afraid the world might see a fluorescent advertisement where I meant to show a face. Sincerity is no help once we admit to the lies we tell on nocturnal occasions, even in the solitude of our own heart, wishcraft slanting the naked figure from need to seduce to fear of possession. Far better to cultivate the gap itself with its high grass for privacy and reference gone astray. Never mind that it is not philosophy, but raw electrons jumping from orbit to ready the pit for the orchestra, scrap meanings amplifying the succession of green perspectives, moist fissures, spasms on the lips.
13
Words too can be wrung from us like a cry from that space which doesn’t seem to be the body nor a metaphor curving into perspective. Rather the thickness silence gains when pressed. The ghosts of grammar veer toward shape while my hopes still lie embedded in a quiet myopia from which they don’t want to arise. The mistake is to look for explanations where we should just watch the slow fuse burning. Nerve of confession. What we let go we let go.
§
“The Senses Barely or the Necessities of Life” is from When They Have Senses (Burning Deck, 1980); “Pre & Con or POSITIONS + JUNCTIONS (6)” is from Split Infinites (Singing Horse Press, 1998); excerpts from The Reproduction of Profiles (New Directions, 1987); excerpts from Lawn of Excluded Middle (Tender Buttons, 1993).