Unidentified Artist, Henrietta Hollingsworth, ca. 1842
Dayton Art Institute



For Henrietta Hollingsworth: Infant Couched in Reds and Greens

Why doesn’t the smock fit? What exactly is holding it up and what has she been eating? From whence that luminescence? One gets the sense that she is larger than she ought to be, that she is merely visiting from those dreams where something takes human shape because it knows no other way to communicate. Is this something we should hold against it? Should we, perhaps, flee? I imagine what we see here is not flesh, so much, as years, time taking the outline momentarily of shoulders and ear. Speaking, as best it can, in that format we demand, but which is so alien, ultimately, to it, the sentences come out in lilt and fragment. They sound, frankly, obscene. If you read this on your way to Sweden, please disregard the bitter passages. They are not meant to indicate any particular emotion stronger than love, though they might be remembered some day by the experts as, in their own way, exhibiting allegorical tendencies that were not part of the conscious plan. You don’t believe me? Then what about the venison? The way I used to call you on a plastic phone, a child’s toy? Something that had no more hope of working than does the alarm clock without batteries. or a power source, that glow in the evening sky that might be the result of coming storms. Or cities we didn’t even know existed. Still, we overcome the weather on occasion, making it retreat, even disappear altogether, at least in those tales we choose not to collect, those that escape the editor for some reason. That wind up fighting for their lives among the detritus of civilization itself – shower curtains, trading cards, aluminum foil. What I wouldn’t give to be knee deep in the garbage in some strangers basement and be able to read the opening scene of Cardenio, imagine the wind-swept plains, the sound of trumpets like those you might hear on the radio at night when you can’t fall asleep and an add comes on hawking used cars or toothbrushes. When the announcer suggests you are not right even after purchasing the product, that there is, in fact, no hope for you at all.              






The First Whence and the Last Whither

Your first instinct might be to go back over the correspondence. To see if you can pinpoint where exactly things turned sour. Maybe secure a foothold in that future that isn't real or even probable, but simply invented for the purpose of making us feel at home when we are no longer at home. When we are rushing headlong into territory that has been abandoned even by the cannibals. That has lost its identity by virtue of the bland things that occur there. If we wish to remain, the climate will make that decision difficult, but it won't be the sun or the wind or the rain, or even all of them together, joined in conspiracy like the Masons or those children who have a beef with strangers in a Mishima novel. It will be the interval in between. Those miniscule stretches of time when there is no dominant pattern, no temperature, no moisture. No movement of the air of the sort that makes, in a separate context, the noise we recognize as a flute concerto. We capture it on disc and give it to relatives when they decide to stop chasing attractive members of the opposite sex. They devote themselves instead to the arranging of their living rooms, the making and transportation of pasta salad on those Mondays when they don't have to go to work because someone decided to make a holiday, and who are we to complain? Who are we to suggest the warm, wet snap that lasted ten thousand years wasn't the reason the Natufian people enjoyed themselves so thoroughly on the forest steppes, boring holes in beads and gnawing on antelope bones? All of which just goes to show you must work when you have darkness too. Otherwise, you'll begin to wonder if you haven't done everything wrong. From the planks laid one after another across the shallows so the ladies can exit the boats without getting wet. To the sounds you make in your throat when the experience borders on the unendurable. Something so intense, the right to experience it is bound up with the right to forget it ever happened. And yet, we habitually pull at the seams that separate the one from the other. Until it all comes loose in our hands. And then where are we? Not back where we started, exactly. But not far from it, really. If you believe what they're saying in Iquitos.

-- first appeared in The Iconoclast.




Animated by Something Light

The obsession with inked objects – oriental fans, tattooed arms on the lady who lives upstairs, manuscripts composed by the founding fathers when they were in the mood for something light, like satire or biography – will get you noticed by those who already have their affairs in order. Who pretend the Earth is one great big chaise lounge someone took to the curb. But such blessings as they claim are in all actuality as irregular as Addison’s heartbeat. Things that wait for the moon to phase in just right or the waters to rise above the flood wall before they’ll make their appearance, stick their heads up just long enough to get shot at. Or sketched by those who make a living without a camera as a way of commenting on the modern world itself. You see what it is you’re missing, they seem to say as they parade about in the most outlandish garb or duck under train trestles just when you thought there was nothing to duck under anymore. Only white hot deserts where one may bleach bones. Assuming one brings them along, of course. In a burlap sack. But there’s the rub. We have no more need of solidity, of the firm undercarriage and the primeval design than a man has need of ontological speculation when his toaster won’t work. And that‘s why we squander every trip to the marsh, why we pursue one another like jackals. And then there is an interlude, a catastrophic pause that seems at first like it was written in intentionally, placed there by someone who knew what he was doing. But on closer inspection turns out to be an accident of the grammar. Of the rules that make such composition possible in the first place. Strange, brittle things you may look up in the encyclopedia if you feel the need. But are really best left to operate unnoticed and unmolested, just beneath an otherwise perfect surface.

-- first appeared in 580 Split