Under the Sign Read Free

configured by ghosts
    and night’s arrival
    marked by force,
    a vicissitude, pun,
    or a chronic tryst
    felt slowly between
    lovers, bequeathed
    and the essential veil
    inward as soil
    bitterly tossed
    is thinly deceived
    as mud and seed
    not ever to capture
    or recall but
    to send again
    the bliss quotient
    also undetected a new
    molecular dust
    to open
    now culpable
    now nude now bare life
    and emancipate
    pictorial restraint
    from veracity’s cave
    and the recalcitrant
    disembodied
    by silent advent
    day’s vigilant stare
    flared into voice
    and the bright air cries
    for the street’s permission
    to liberate and revive
    the conjurer’s trick
    among phantoms
    blinded by fears his
    enigmatic touch
    drawn into wet tracks
    another will attest so
    the dissonant lament
    lifts the prey
    risks the broken
    finds miraculous.
    to Nathan Lee

II.
TASK: TO OPEN

TASK: TO OPEN
    1.
    I miss New York, a sense of living inside a rational plan—the grid—given over to spontaneity and complexity without measure. When I go there now I am sometimes overcome with a sense of abundance and familiarity; faces I pass seem to belong to persons I know, or once knew. The city seems to keep the past in play as active, uncanny material palimpsest. Passing the building on East Eleventh Street where I went to grade school. Footsteps. The dead.
    Abundance of constant noticing, old practice of city life, before everyone looking at, speaking into, machines.
    Now I live where flaws and ghosts are abundant, moving about in the winter air. Snow, and the heightened radiance of snow-clad branches: knowing that they are transitory, without meaning, without consequence. Why try to capture, in words, in pictures, to still or distill what vanishes even as it is being noticed?
    Now it seems without point even as the word spill is close to tears: forgive this, I know we do not approve tears. The cat, dying, brings me to tears, a creaturely embarrassment similar to the augmented beauty of the snow-clad trees. Emily Dickinson:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â  We introduce ourselves
    to planets and
    to flowers
    But        with
    ourselves
    Have     Etiquettes
    Embarrassments
    And awes
    2.
    American mandate: be at once the same as and different from —conundrum at the crux. Be all that, better than, more than! Be normal, ordinary, unafflicted, unaffected by difference. My students thrashing through these contradictions, trying to decide what to keep and what to give up. To what does one belong? Political discourse stymied at the threshold of adamancy.
    Language on this tightrope.
    The idea of having something in common, the Commons; the singular person and the crowded arena, village green, agora; Plato’s Republic ; Times Square. Social media blurring these temporal-spatial distinctions. We meet now in Nowhere.
    The Strange approaches, ill-equipped to bring forward a method to ease difference from the contagion of the same.
    An obligation of art: to allow for these conditions to be fruitful, contested.
    3.
    From Emerson’s journal about his visit to Malta, February 1833:
    A few beautiful faces in the dancing crowd, & a beautiful face is always worth going far to see. That which is finest in beauty is moral.
    Did Emerson pause between the first and second sentences? Did he note the beautiful faces in the crowd—not petals—and then get up and take a walk before adding, “That which is finest in beauty is moral ” ?
    4.
    Reading Roland Barthes’s The Neutral causes awe at the apprehension of his inquiry; notational array, thought-sparks, marginalia, arising from what seems to be the functional generosity of doubt: doubt as engine of curiosity; the merging of skepticism with something akin to the structure of belief, but not in anything absolute or specific. So that belief is part of what it means to be affected by thought? the very terms of thought? That we can know.
    Writing as the