READING WOJNAROWICZ (after Carr)
It would take a separation from the normal levels of existence
Sagging docks and railroad cars rusting in the oily rain
He wanted to explain his feelings on the voice within the body
To put together a collection of voices
Like a passage coming to an end
I give my life up to it
Out and in the night
Sometime soon
I’m with my notebooks
Both before my eyes and behind them
Scribbling
Writing a letter on the back of an envelope
Taking place in that bird within the chest
Writing on a poster for the fuck to lie me down in bed
Underlining the following in red
One long breathless sentence
He could hear the music in the trees
My hands, my arms, my thoughts and all I do is write
Going back to the apartment
That is all that he can do
I just never mailed it
And he took a bath
The descending into night
The horse that gallops into russet dusk of seas
Vision is less elastic now
And its sounds
A tiny room is formed
Finding a way to remove my self from all internal strictures, rules, constraints
It’s like a bolt
The vision behind the eyes
The stuff of paint
He was having many dreams of the American west and wanted to make another cross country trip
He missed the wildness of New York
The distances of a forest in the eye of a fish
And down dank hallways dripping pipes
The skylight with one broken pane He slept
Writing with no cross outs no words added
I felt such a harsh love
Rising in the throat
Thick fists
And the subtleties of weather shading green
His lips tracing lines along the belly
Lent a drawing lent a poem a collage
The silence of the floorboards
Something from the street
The maze of hallways wandered as in films
And on a small paper bag he made some notes
Only a faint smell of jism
Something directed toward the lens
Blistering blazing bones Honesty
And he could go inside
He’s in some really private space
Going out in the world alone at the age of nine
Light coming through the holes made perfect circles on the floor
He always said that he was nine
He was in the midst of compiling some two thousand pages of notes
He says that he was nine or ten
Not to be flirtatious but to maintain distance
Except that home was unstable
Broken asphalt and a few ailanthus trees
Broken down seating scrounged from the streets
To celebrate the squalor and the poverty
The dirt road that leads to the lake
The place behind the barn
The linden trees, the room, the bed, the heat
The pipes running down the wall
The cheap curtains
A very strong and low intake of breath
Stillness the body of a friend
on the bed
All I want is a sort of grace
He’s in the wind, he’s in the air, he’s all around me
Speaking into the tape recorder
The rain roaring through the trees
The body of a friend
on a bed in a box under feet
He moved into his loft on Mary Street
But he did not go back to making work that he could sell
Climbing a tree without branches
Pounding out the pages for these words
Sitting on a chair the light from the window upstairs a working mouth
He’d become interested in diagrams
The image of an elephant
He seemed obsessed with garbage
Something he discovered at a zoo
He sketched (in black felt tip)
He worked on the mock up of a square
Finding out how light will act on paper
The thirty seven pages of a book
They are journals. They are diaries. No, they’re notes.
But the harmony suspended hell the invisible or variously
divisible flow
Lantskips now or showre
On what he called the self
on rhythm and music
portrait, film, or note
This is more than a song about myself
A series of fragmented views might take you as a cloud
slowly covers the page and it goes
The photos held in place
The carvings
Fragments
Rough notes
He had made for himself a kind of shrine
Better something quiet that cannot be touched
The yeti on a trike The yeti on a trike
Or something else
CHINESE TREES (after Hujar)
Trees must be well-proportioned and possess force. They should not be too tall, or else they will lose their vitality and their strength. They should not be too short, for then they will become vulgar and confused.
In painting tree roots, those trees which lean and rise at river banks have roots which seem to rise and fall as they push the earth away.
In painting withered trees and branches, one must simply pay attention to their sunken cavities and hollows.
I see white light, fix my eyes to the plowed earth. He’s in the wind and the air behind me. He covers fields like a fine mist. He’s in his home in New York City. He’s behind me and it’s cold and wet, the way it numbs my fingers, makes the knuckles red and white. The trees are uprooted and the grave is fresh and it is time to leave.
I see candles on a table and I sit down and I read. The wind and the rain and the words. This is a storm they announced on the radio and it is confusing me.
Erect in bearing, tall, pine trees, and superior, aloft they coil into the sky. Their branches spread and hanging down. They will not bend to shade me after the storm.
Reading I am mumbling the companionship of mists and vapors. The window is bespattered by the rain. The light is on the table. It is spring.
The form of a mountain and I see his face. Water as blood, foliage as hair, haze and clouds as spirit. The arteries run low and the base is solid and wide. I feel comfort.
Thick and pointed like a needle, I will write this using ink, burnt ink, ink that has been keeping overnight, receding ink as fine as dust. Ink is sufficient, very like a porcelain bowl, a piece of earthenware, a brush.
Strokes, staccato strokes and I will fill the page, leave in gaps. Layers have been soaked. Texture stroke and scrubbing they will dot the page and scrape the layers down until it’s just a pattern of indenting lines, nothing of use, only the imagining of color where the ink had made the trees and then the words. Colored snow.
To delineate. Spacious and secluded. Waterfalls.
Painting stream after stream. Going to bed.
Animals and their wishes. Rearing and they cannot be suppressed. Follow the landscapes then the dogs. Mentioning birds. A portrait from inside the head.
Cool gusts when I awake. I record my voice beside my tea. It is overindulging. I would rather eat. This is not haste.
Making such a longing scroll with both my eyes. The bowl it swells. I can appreciate the way it thins. I am delighted by the pale and the hue. It is sitting on the table. I will trace it.
Brush and spirit and bamboo. I suggested and the floors are soft. Noiseless walking. Only my breathing and my breath. Leaving a mist on the glass. Wiping with this cloth both moons, and then adjusting. I can see.
The park outside. The kids.
Chinese trees.
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