Insects
while waiting
i seemed to hear a new leaf budding from
outside, across the garden. i, pristine
sat on our bed— the future strange, deranged—
an alien inventing self-erasures.
is it normal, in my crone, to feel this way?
i missed a contentwarning— fingering machines,
scissored by shades of glass. the news,
the look of starving innocents; the bud,
not yetgreen, also not yet visible.
hallucination of the woozyqueen
or turquoise bees, copper goldenbuzzing
around the vervain; a shipwreck from afar
in language of my nature, or astray
unfounded tear— some private pearl, ruptured.
//
🌘
silver robes of a rose rabbi
(a reply to Wallace Stevens’ “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”; introduction here.)
I.
—and did you ordinary women mock
in liturgies of utterances contained,
lines overwrought by time-keeping cant of yours?
and did you burst from bullied syllabub,
or clockwise stiffen into winter walls?
the musicals of ghosts, midwives and angels
echo, hollow, down stone-cold corridors.
and did you consecrate your spectacle,
coupling one who spoke—no, no—not nothing,
a stand-in that you killed while playing swords?
to quell the bubbling spring by means of rain?
or merely quote the Mother’s name in vain?
she has been up at nights, considering
how to un-kiss this devil-gendered thing.
II.
well, i make believe an uncle, dead
and dear. less clear is fortune of the bird.
to fly, to seek, and what on earth to find
but torrent of an obsolescent mind
—he said, obscure and arduous to hear.
and yet, it flies. and though he doubts her crown
and midnight sight, she will fly too. and though
her silver glows in anecdotal mood,
her lilt, of stellar tilt, still loving, lingers
in braided dancing round a pool of blue,
tuning her clutch in nesting eddy of
said bird, whose course is old and hardly true
—and yet, it lives. rising, as golden-red
in flight, crowing like Scorpio in the East.
rest easy, uncle cold and fluttering
and lately of rambunctious residue;
a dove survives heaven to choir anew.
III.
O man, if you could see her witchlocs now,
or what’s become of Eastern expertise.
she is swamp-bitch, and twisted, twined and hitched
without romance by ruby claw to thorny crown,
her hair—each barb a bell, each bloody herb
a suicide. she’s heard of nobody’s
outrageous feats of raw technology.
in wracked rumors of Western fantasy
she knit a while textiles anti-exotic,
but sweaters have no use in the tropics,
where skin is king. and now we’ve come uncrimped,
uncrumpling, algal Anadyomene
of muddy water, Charybdis of the bog.
what’s history is past—nevertheless, he asks
why, woman, have you gone eau naturelle?
IV.
that spotless glass is not the book of Adam.
that trinity you stole cuts like a knife.
to be uncrumpled is to be un-uncled—
un-uncled, i become the poet’s wife.
i am un-hidden woman of the garden,
body un-ridden by the dust-bound word.
the queen of poet’s tongue, i lounge and lean
as music on my salivary throne.
the syllable you speak, my roundness is
her shapely immanence. our rectitude
is life—of tree—of life. so eat me, fallen
father of mankind, and know your foolishness.
speak again, brother—madly, as husband.
my honeyed bone un-spells your make-believe
kafir—he sees his wife sans négligee
who tastes the naked fruit by ripened eye.
says ordinary woman made explicit,
who steals your spectacle to save your life.
V.
can we remember together, after all
or does my voice harden the picture frame?
by being body, do i gather you
intolerably, or spread you thin as kin,
one stroking throb of summer esoteric—
you tickle me with feather of a peacock.
a gazer’s gloomy imagery is perfume
of incense, arousal at great distances,
long-smouldering and lit by tender match.
far from the proximity of virgins
there burn the Verbs of Love, arrayed
as galaxy of irretrievability—
before my eyes, you took and held my hand.
VI.
we used to call you man of twists and turns,
the dynamo—reckless, drowning, sea-rendered
until perennial blue, the one i knew
well enough to know, i loved nobody.
his thirst, prostrated, clutched me from below,
desperate to conceal from wingèd word
a history of suffering. a babe
buried his need in bosom of my nature,
drunk on the deep milk of disappearance.
his subterfuge despair was mythical,
until he made her fiction. he may not
remember me—but i keep by my heart
a wavy lock of sunset-auburn hair.
VII.
suppose a parable is just like her:
desired and defiled in equal measure.
his chivalry requires a blushing knight
to guard the word, who is incarnate treasure.
i heard of one such rescuer of women.
who, for his lovely sin, was de-mountained
by crippled foot, and fated never nimbly
to climb again. but faith in constancy
makes deliberate gifts, arms built from hours
spent torquing tongs before roaring earth-core.
therefore, no purity of heart is borne
that lacks an alloy in the sooty forge.
thou shalt not fear the courage of your virgin
is the limping gist of this comparison;
her shining is at once translucent bloom
and armor’s lustre, welded by humble Vulcan.
VIII.
if doom begins to seem antipathy,
baby, you’re scrolling past the blues. that time
of year thou mayst in our humanity—
but not the Muse—behold, of warty gourds'
cosmic grotesquerie. and there’s the rub.
as long as tongue still holds a gentle fold,
i will elucidate your grim hallucination.
launder and bandage the decaying limb
of sense, of memory, of time. wed heaps
of conscious compost consummate the bloom
in star-swept dimensions of titanium,
where whorls of microplastics never end—
machine poetic, of pumpkins meteoric,
becoming metaphysic—tender beings,
fizzing histories apocalyptic,
chime and rhyme as flutes of pink kombucha.
we sing the tropical-epochal view
at end of universe, or two. until
séance à trois, with chaperone of grackle,
i love the laughing sky—let’s make it crackle.
IX.
most oblatory heart, i bring you news.
despite our deadly faith in prophylactics,
resourceful Cupido pricks porous tactics,
ever hanging hymenal fools. behold:
on spun-gold surface of radiant yolk,
in sky-strewn milky way of albumen
suspended, questing’s lustiest conceit,
the part-less heartbeat of a person third:
as ancient aspect touches youngest plume
to stir, pure destiny, the origin
of life, as love, in pilgrimage secured:
the red point points, and to itself—as bird.
O holy gift, O crack in everything!
the mad midwifery of paladins
births not a baby, but a voice on fire:
ecce peep. now go, and meet your daddy-o.
his name’s Pipit the cocky chickadee;
he is a theory of fertility;
enthusiasm incommensurate
with clock-a tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum.
X.
a balmy chickadee alights on bough
of jepun tree—gigantic, bristle-trunked,
beatified—by tipped cosmos of day
and melting star of paradise, bodies
unveiled. we lie in kindred shades of them,
verbing and flowing, in blues made legible
by greenborn leaf. in leaves there hides a forest
where braid the wanderers their briared maths.
a souvenir shelters nectonic paths,
ancestral courses wild with counterpoint,
and mercy of geometry—proffered
by rivered children of Love’s oblivion.
XI.
dilated pools, star-gazed—surrender pinkly
to phobia of frogs. if you dismember
those bracing, faceless bodies—lost in love
their coiling gyres, desiring—helixing
directions inward, home. or intervene
against the skyward cough—raw, gaping need
to swallow more—when pollywog is strung
by lunar air. ritual drowning of gills,
suffering insurgency—the gulping word,
fata Morgana flooding Camelot
is twinned ecstasy of triple betrayal.
for swimmers' lust, the sea is all. and still
her cries are not for us, alone—we hone
the bluest chord of velvet-driven reverberation.
XII.
now all of us have lost our taste for mince,
the history of grinding, darkly, Adam;
so schooling blade, student of buah, will prune
til circumspect the hour. and she has thorns,
forms of her own—we prick ourselves and bleed
to name her flower. bending the voice to crown,
we’re drunk by literal skies of melody.
you found her singing by the sea, where she
had fled, as she remembered you were drowning.
who is the rose rabbi? i read, she comes
and goes. knows herself not. how would she know?
if glass were introspect, Iris of time—
to find she had been borne, a cradled question.
//
Wa’alaikumsalam, selamat purnama, peace 🌕
on bad days
on bad days, the silence
has more to say to you
than i do. and yet
every day i worry
you’re not a reader
of silence.
if only i could give
my shape to silence, then you
might hear the crickets.
if silence
were nothingness, then
i would be green leaves.
but i saw the silence,
its air of winter,
its shape of clear empyrean.
its emptiness, strewn jewels —
all of it was precious;
none of it was secret.
above the radiance, i heard
earth is a place of rest —
and i believe it.
i press patchouli
to your wrist, your temple.
i draw the covers.
//
gospel of crickets
new fiefdoms are forming.
comes the gnawing saw,
gospel of crickets.
authors of books
are finding nooks.
the map is bending.
curving, like body
being, of course, a place —
the terroir of carrots, roasting
with garlic, chilli and cumin.
longing, we remember
touch and savor, from when
our land was whole, and full.
but our landscape is broken.
parsed before it lived, engendered
as stark disability.
glass fragments are swept
heaped, and scattered, opposite
the old neighborhood.
hillsides sizzle, lost in smoke.
the multitude glitters —
bodies, on fire.
with gas, the lord is cooking
at his stainless steel reflecting pool.
he extols these terraced acres
as civil emptiness,
slate, aluminum, and hollow.
static, it echoes.
not like the night,
contrary and brimming
with her buggy heat.
a holy thicket is dying,
nested — the host of silver light,
drawing foolish creatures.
grievers in the dark,
crowers in the autumn,
langurs in the mist.
sutra sisters
weaving webs,
an insubstantial orb.
the lord is not a fool;
he makes the rule.
nevertheless, the ruler will
in muggy hedges, be herb-
tested. Dasein is to suffer
the sound of little kin.
//
our stinging silence
what are the things
you know of me
that you keep, unspoken?
the secret me you keep
and by extension,
my undiscovered twin.
is it family or alien?
or do i have no right
to such distinction.
i have been, for some
two thousand years
or more, dissolving
in waspish creation.
i am, who has been long-
forgotten. already, i am
not of conversation.
a fuzzy, artless form
is turning in the paper
of a nest, drowning
in droning oceans — the ply
of dialogue, subsumed
by black battalions.
can you hear them?
they are humming
the densest metaphors.
//
lapsed momentarian
seed fluff billows
across the black mat
(inhale
jump back
chaturanga)
so much
for so little
for so much
immaterial
globe, a memory
of lost focus
dream
of a body, as wind
seeking structure
the velvet blue
of a butterfly wing
i don’t know why
things are shaped
the way they are
sent
published, and yet
anecdotal
birds who can’t fly
insects without words
studying
to be a container
for the already
understanding
it is needful
to be broken
//
the carrion
by Charles Baudelaire (original translation. cw: necrophilia.)
remember the object we saw, my soul
that summer morning, soft and sweet
at a twist in the path, a foul carrion
in its bed, seminated with pebbles
its legs in the air, as a woman aroused
hot and dripping with poisons
splayed in a cynical, nonchalant way
womb swollen with expirations
the sun shone fully on the decay
as to roast it, until just right
to return as millions to Nature’s noblesse
the cosmos she had contained
and heaven saw the magnificent carcass
as a blossoming flower
the stench was so potent, there on the grass
you thought you might collapse
the flies buzzing around the putrid belly
were issuing black batallions
of worms, pouring forth, pustulent
along the living tatters
the whole descended and rose like a wave
or sprayed in a sparkling spume
one could say the body, swole by murky breath
flourished in its inflation
and the world was rendered a stranger song
of watery flux and the wind
or grain that a winnower’s rhythmic geste
turns and churns in a basket
the shapes dissolved, no more than a dream
a sketching slow to arrive
on canvas forgot, where the artist derives
from memory alone
behind the rocks, an anxious bitch
watched us with angry eye
le squellette awaiting a chance to reclaim
the morsel that she had left
— and though you will be the same as this filth
as this horrible infection
stars of my eyes, sun of my nature
you, my angel, my passion!
yes! such will you be, O queen of graces
after the last sacraments
when you go, beneath fatted flowers and grasses
to moulder amongst the bones
then, O my beauty! say to the worm
who is eating you with his sex
i have kept the shape and essence divine
of my loves' decomposition!
//
waalaikumsalam 🌒
mosquito milk
she caught you sucking
on her breast today,
mosquito
did you think
she was
your mother?
a poet makes
a pretty
terrible
mother
for
a mosquito
//
waalaikumsalam 🌓
(Does this mean we’re all antifa now?) //
There are two words for we/us in Indonesian, one that includes you (as in, we live on earth) and the other that does not include you (as in, we live in Indonesia). It’s a useful distinction that English doesn’t have.
My husband reports that yes, I do write like I talk. F.Y.I., bitches.
Everybody has a special talent, their thing(s) they can do especially well. Most skills or talents can be put to use, subversively. We can be open-minded and creative about it. For example, I could be a really good messenger. Of, like, encoded messages.
This most recent translation (poem) I wrote went through really different and weird iterations. It was (uncomfortable, difficult, tricky) to write on the little line of dialogue. So heaps of in-progress verse were there waiting when the election happened. The election result was… key to re-working and finishing.
(This is a message (paraphrased) from my friend, A: When you lose a poem it gives birth to another poem about a lost poem. A poem she wrote was just published and I love it.)
I don’t really want write more poetry (or prose) that is so dark. But, well. It’s a fascinating time in history to be focusing on this specific passage from the Phaedrus. There is unfortunately more sexual violence to come. The intended purpose is therapeutic, … cathartic and transformative. My experience studying the dialogue now is so sharply different from when I was 18. When I first read it, I didn’t get it. I thought it was absurdist nonsense, a rhetorical game, reading the manipulative Lysias speech on sexual manipulation. My young mind could not wrap itself around the fact: the absurdity of (sexual, or other exploitative) violence, being educated into us, marketed, sold to us as love, is real, essential, and absolutely serious.
It breaks us. (?)
Either “The Memory of Trees” is better than I remembered or I’m just desperate for more Enya these days. It has some pretty mystical/elvish-sounding tracks but then I find myself humming the upbeat ones in the shower, this is embarrassing (fun).
Daily thunderstorms bring relief from heat with unpredictably cool gusts of wind, heavy with water. The bath garden is magical after it rains, a hot shower in the cool, drippy, cloudy-dark world. Some wood-ear fungus is growing on a nearby log, it enjoys the steam of my shower, this feels intimate. And we’re still very buggy here, more mosquitoes lately, lots of swarming ants and termites, all different sizes of those, moths, praying mantis, sweet, stingless trigona bees, mud-daubers and “murder hornets”, grasshoppers and crickets, katydids and cicadas, spiders, other spindle-legged bodies, tiny lightning bugs, all shapes and sizes of wriggling worms in the dirt, or coiling centipedes, slippery earwigs, shiny black beetles that are tiny or large, or very large and pincered, like scarabs.
Before, people wanted to protect democracy. After, people need to protect themselves from democracy. Democracy is in itself nothing (more precisely, anything). Education is the something-making.
It’s hard to say “fix your boat” to people who don’t realize they’re in a boat. Sometimes in an inflatable tube in a swimming pool on a gigantic (leviathan) cruise liner. Then I look around and wonder, what’s my boat that I don’t realize? This makes me feel very “Bill and Ted”. (Does it need fixing? Constantly, yes.)
Nature also floats, but it wasn’t built by humans.
(Yes. Yes, it does.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌗
(There were certain things that you kept from me.) //
Rainy days lately, and buggy, with small flying termites swarming frosted lightbulbs, at nights, and particulate rivers of ants spanning surfaces in exploratory veins, locating and removing insect bodies, leaving translucent brown confetti, so many spent wings, scattered across the floor.
A breath, and they disperse.
A moth alit on the soap dispenser, a velvety shield of black and cream stripes against a liquid surface of stainless steel reflection.
A tiny, brightly-humming wasp building mud cradle-tubes on the bedroom door. To be woken in the morning by its sunny song.
Homestyle curry cooked on a rainy afternoon. Onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, chilis. Potatoes, carrots, broccoli, tofu. Remembering how to improvise. It always tastes better on the second day.
A few of the baby roosters peck food from our hands now. The same few linger nearby and make eye contact, inquisitive, observant. One already has a little cockscomb, although it’s still black. (Frankie’s is a blazing red, like the chilis, with a full scarlet mask and cheek lobes.) Another has pinkish-red patches showing around his face and neck, and stunning glimpses of iridescent copper and blue, green, and purple nestled in his otherwise black feathers. One is a little smaller, with black and white marks like a tuxedo. Each child rooster looks a little different. We won’t know their “final forms” until they go through a full adult molt. That’s several months away, at least.
Frankie arrived here as a plain-looking juvenile, but then he had a dramatic transformation. Now, he is deep coppers and rich burnt caramel creams, chocolate browns blended with black, a frothy cappuccino ruff, teal patches on his sides, a forest green fountaining cascade of tail feathers, and the aforementioned bright red mask and comb. In my opinion, he is a rooster of flamboyant elegance and circumspect stature, a proudly beautiful bird, tempestuous and refined. Almost always with a faint goofy undertone.
I want to take a picture of him, but he is paradoxically hard to get a good picture of. He doesn’t appreciate having a camera (phone) put in his face.
(Some things I don’t need to know. But some things, I can’t help it, I just wish I did, about you.)
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu.🌑
Something about orchids. //
A mistake on a small road is easier to fix than a mistake on a big road.
If I only knew how and could do absolutely everything in the world, then I wouldn’t need anybody else, at all, ever. The fantasy of anti-politics. (A grouchy thought I had that made even me laugh.)
I guess this post on loudness is in a way a follow-up to this one, which is on, ok, I forgot what it was on. Something political that I don’t want to re-read.
The entirety of my political views can adequately be summed up as: education is the sine qua non of politics.
Woke up from a dream about the blog, where I looked at the photos and the last five or six photos were all of cloudy grey skies, and they started blurring into each other and expanding. It’s a vibe I like but try to avoid on the blog.
I remember knowing only grocery store orchids. You know what those are. Or any orchid that you buy from a shelf, in a pot or mounted in media, that you take home and put in your house, or your garden. These are lovely, predictable, clean and tame things. But then I came here, and began to meet wild orchids. Orchids that live in the trees, in the jungle, on the mountain or in the ravine. There’s something about an orchid, how it sits in its place, how it inhabits, infuses itself into and out of the surrounding life, clinging to tree branches, nestled in deep sponges of green and brownish-black, respirating and perspirating the bodies of mist that roll in at night. Leaves being sniffed and scampered across by a passing reptile or rodent, the ants and tiny wasps that visit for nectar or moths that flutter past the floral apparition. The grizzled reaches of its roots, aerial and earthen, as the spirit taps into and from everything. Some of the most enchanting orchids I’ve seen are the tiny ones, with delicate foliar structures and thread-thin blooms, indescrible furry textures, feeling everything out, and it’s their thorough presence. They radiate with the truth of this, that
You can’t take an orchid out of the jungle. It doesn’t remain the same thing, when you do that. A person would have to live in the jungle, to know the orchid. This person wouldn’t remain the same thing, either.
An orchid isn’t the fantasy of anti-politics, but the religion of a cosmic polity. An orchid is the true revolution.
“Fire blue as glass” is Dylan Thomas' “Fern Hill” but sung from a mermaid perspective.
(The “mer-spective”.)
Salam to all🌖
Last night in Penestanan // Gamelan
strikes bronze and sounds of competition,
jumping (on) and fending (off) the night
time, momentum tops the kendang and
recedes, then tries again (again) elaboration
of champaca smoke on taught skin
low beats call up shining
density from darkness (Bima’s
laughing) and his pupils
follow moths at
lantern light
frenzy
dancing
Paranormal. // Beady black ants, small and matte and anonymous-looking, crowd around some coconut water spilled on the kitchen counter, dropped crumbs on the floor, bits of sugar in a saucer, anything oily, and a small river of them courses around the perimeter of the kitchen, spilling out as a black swarm on the catfood dish. Flowing. It rained for a minute, night releasing a sigh. Now the air cools from evaporation off leaves wet and shiny in the dark. Walking outside to refill a glass, I see movement in the corner of my eye. A shadow that defies looking. Might be a ghost.
Different ants have different signals to make them go away. “Earthquake”, we tap or shake a plate, they file away, we can wash the dish. Or “typhoon”, we blow on the plate, they scatter and go, we can wash the dish. Beady black ants don’t have a signal. We tap the dish, blow on it, they spread, but they don’t leave or even disperse very much. They run around in panic circles. E. blows tobacco smoke, “forest fire”, as last resort. They don’t clear away. Can’t wash a dish or clean the counter without wiping multitudes up or putting them down the drain. They stick to dishes, even under running water. And they crawl onto anything, when upset, hands, tissues, bare feet, cats. Not aggressive, but fast, and when you accidentally squish one, the bite is a pink welt that itches and hurts for three or four days. We find them crawling on us, biting us, in our clothes, in our bed at night, in our food dishes. Pinch it off, toss on the ground. A moving blur on a glasses lense. Ant.
(The rain these past days isn’t normal, for this time of year. The ants, displaced by the rain, are not normal. A ghost that I saw in the kitchen is… more normal than the ants.)
It started with the ants. The ants are being pesky today, (small beady black ones), doing this thing they sometimes do when it rains: they come out of the ground, running in circles with nowhere to go, so they find (my) food more quickly than usual. Then a pink and purple salad with inky black elements (no, not the ants!) next to pumpkin electrifies the day. Something I love is the always-everywhere freshness of vegetables, here. Still full of midnight air. Strings of raw, grated cabbage and beet are juicy and sweet-bitter, like the best Saturday ever, (or, as Sappho says, like love). I immediately want to share, with E., who is in Java today. So I add it to a list of things that need sharing. The list will solve problems of place, and time. Whereas love solves the problem of
A few days ago I lit an incense stick in the bathroom and as I shook out the flame a mosquito was drawn right into it, I think that’s what happened, it went so fast, it was puzzling, one minute I witnessed the collision of featherweight body with fire, the next minute there were ashes floating in the air. I blinked. Illusions hovered, visual errors, spots in my eyes, barely enough substance to focus on. Oh, I realized. I’m sorry.
Today in the pre-dawn I am awake, with thoughts like that, airborne ashes from a quiet but catastrophic combustion. Did a volcano erupt in my dream? I wonder, before I remember the mosquito that burned. A person I once knew with a career in pop music, social media plastered with lifestyle decisions, each phase earnestly renouncing the last, fast self-fashion. Hungry eyes, a curling thread of ash. The conventions of academic departments, offices stuffed with reading copies and slippery stacks of papers, white bundles bound by black metal clips, always slumping off to one side. Leaves, orange and brown and yellow, crackling under feet, woolen sweater, a chill in the air. School days. Time to light the first fire in the stove, curl up with a book.
Autumn. Or just, shifting. Sometimes you can catch the scent of seasons here, I mean the temperate ones, on a breeze blowing in, a tendril of air from a forgotten place. The monsoon is waning. Dry days ahead, clear nights, bright stars. Sharp horizon. Mountains without thunder.
Grey is the coziest color. Dark grey camisole, dark grey sweatpants, light grey flannel, fuzzy grey ankle socks, my favorite outfit for a rainy afternoon, and when I go outside, grey glitter flip-flops, even a grey hair claw holding back my bangs. Carrying the bones and drinking peppermint tea on a grey day. Green and grey and toasty and warm. Didn’t even have to try, my oh, my oh, my. Oh, that giant mosquitoe biting me through my sweatpants. Oh, Ismail gone kamikaze on my smoothie bowl. Oh, smoothie bowl melting over and I’m a mess. But nothing can break this cozy, Alhamdulillah. Haha, just writing that down is asking to learn a hard lesson. Al-hamdulillah. Oh, I got that mosquito. And I have a peanut butter chocolate ball from Sayuri to eat, those things are the best.
Deep sleep last night with all that electricity in the sky. Thinking this morning about Shane MacGowan, some angel, as mosquitoes bite my hands, Jeki huddles in my lap, Lalah cries at snails. Nostalgia is a strange pleasure here, uneasy to hold, where even the seasons speak a different language.