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This piece is about 5 printed pages long. It is copyright © Andrew Mossin and Jacket magazine 2008. See our [»»] Copyright notice. The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/36/mossin.shtml
A bloodless blue sky.
And a velvety breeze.
— Lorca
There is sunrise
at least in the opening
hours there is the increase
of light the curtains
that open out to you their intimate signals
depriving you of the ability
—astonishing really—
to say this or that
is true…
When each night begins like a cylinder
without sound. Spinning
on top of your palms.
What is blunt. What is ripped out. In a month
it will be five months since you returned
sheathed in winter light you said
it was like returning
empty-armed the hands
already consumed by the weight of days turned over
turned against your body’s unclosing.
Who could imagine its entropy the way the wind
comes up & passes for something in the mind of a stranger
light then no light the realism of its broken cadences
black Spanish pool in your arms –
esta mirada que tembla desnuda por el alcohol
a field without memory
a woman half in dream half in waking
you said there is longing
there is a city is in my skull crushing me the city
on the edge of sensation I am at last able to get out & into it
the city entirely black & still like sheared moon
light pulsing through the anemones
& my hands encircling reaching for it
just below ground level making contact
as if for the last time a window were
opened & my voice traveled a line of sight straight back.
¶
‘I was having the dream when you came into the room
and you took me into the bed & brought me soup
& you called up to me I wasn’t ready I said the
dark you said is a scent you can seal yourself in
my lids were so heavy I didn’t talk I didn’t offer
anything the memory is blurry now that you were
parsing my language for me passing it back over
a line I could have called you my son I could have
completed the sentence there is so little I can tell
you of my condition that passes for knowledge I am
almost ready to lay back down and let it
carry me back over to where you and I once
arranged flowers & let the March air
pour back in let the light flood the room.’
¶
The motherless child
obliterated by signs. Pero el viejo de las manos traslucidas…
You have written on other occasions there is no day
left there is no sleep inside the day you are taking sleep by the hand
& leading him down the hallway again & again.
Content to let
fatigue absorb you –
‘I am envisioning a day will come
my body won’t be in pain anymore the way
you imagine a room in silence
populated by voices from outside
& cling to their reality
threaded through untold
days & nights
a tangled knot of strangeness
as if one could make belief
out of pure nothing.’
Can you read this voice without despair. Can you read
these words in the voice you are the voice inside what is it
you meant to say.
Pity just before the bend, just after the bend, the road
is a road into the bend of your arch, your hand
that makes the sign of water inside my palm
‘Everything you proposed awaits in readiness… ’ (quoting
from a letter you sent in early February)
‘Getting very sleepy I am almost unable to read anything anymore you
sent me something in the mail it was in a white envelope with writing like mine I said –.
To that end I see how you could have thought I began speaking to someone else.
The baby before –
I meant a baby I saw in my mind its shadow half of my life in its spell
& sometimes it occurs to me how she has already passed back the lines of her face
I am certain now that we were all dead once & have it
in us to return’
A city of occult shadows comes apart under the lids.
¶
Repeated in its language moonlike
enwebbed you could laugh you said at so much
where was empathy where was the spirit of your
former years…
In the streets of Ciudad Oculta
the crystals fill the palms until they are
like black cells
like coral stone
blood-red in the eye of
paco
‘I feel like you a tangle of arms inside the fence the woman I am starting to see her
is bound to her destiny like those you describe… ’
For 10 reals… .
moonshit corner
you can’t return what it is
doing in the system the way it mimics
death or the first crawl toward granite
heights you can’t envision
In Ciudad Oculta I saw the woman
like myself I saw the one standing without a care
in the looping darkness of it I saw her inscription
like a white line drawn across my chest I
gave her some cash she was only
14
What can we get
what can we buy
we don’t want to get
we don’t want to buy
There is a woman standing on a corner in the Oculta
she is 43 with blonde hair a denim skirt arm like a straight wire
her skirt is denim she is blonde with a wrist of wire & in her hand
a cigarette a piece of chalk
writing it into the wall
the occult decrepitude of a body
written into the wall
yo sur
¶
Blood inscribes dreams talker
to cut her losses a speech beyond dreams
where the dreamer encapsulates visionary escape
mortal knot of wire & wax
She mothers blue chalk she cups
malita barren scoops of paco
grain in the hand she is screaming from the shadows
while the marvelous light from the mountains
un luz maravillosa que viene del monte
passes over veined carnival rock
rod of amor in hands
butted & backed
against the wound of crystal.
y la luna
con un guante de humo sentada en la puerata de sus derribos
And the moon like a bitten ring
like a colon of dust
quivers bites breaks into the doorway
like a wrecked insect
in foam—
A creature waiting to be consumed.
To Lee Charleston
23 March-25 June 2008
Andrew Mossin
Andrew Mossin’s poetry collection The Veil, was recently published by Singing Horse Press (San Diego 2008). He has completed a fictive memoir, The Presence of Their Passing, and a book of critical essays, Masculine Subjectivity and Poetic Form: From the San Francisco Renaissance to Black Mountain, forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan. He lives in Doylestown, PA with his two daughters, Mia and Isabel.