Excerpt from the book Want
TWO VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
The elephant in the white room
is told to play dead, and she falls
to the gray floor, rocking a little
before going completely still,
only to wake again, rocking again
a few times to find momentum
and push herself onto a splayed
position on the floor, her legs
spread like a skirt, and then
the methodical lifting of each leg
so that each gains its footing,
each lifting her a little until she is
fully up, wholly still once more
until some voice in the room
tells her to die again, all of her
wrinkled bulk made blank canvas,
wet stone for an eye, the camera
moving around her as though
she were the center of a carousel
around which the other animals
galloped and leapt up and brayed.
On another screen, one man’s
rapture of grief is told in a face
gone blurry as paint sliding
down a wall, a woman’s crying is
an open mouth black with depth,
a woman prays, her hands knotted
into white roots, while another
man standing behind the others
cannot decide whether a howl or
a laugh is what’s needed in this
moment after they have been told
to think the worst thing they can
remember, the moment then slowed
to sixteen minutes of quiet film,
so that even the thoughtless blink
of an eye takes a few minutes
to satisfy itself, the pixels changing
like cells under a lens, the last
woman an opera of disbelief about
what has come to pass for them
in the dim room, her face a metal
of rage, the voice somewhere
demanding every form of sorrow
from them, and, having been asked,
this is how they had to answer.
THEORIES OF THE VISIBLE
1.
Marble nipple that no tongue or fingertip
can make come alive: I love the deliberate
chiseling accorded even to the brailled
texture surrounding the stiff eraser-like tip,
one Greek’s careful attention poured hand
and eye into the torso’s unharmed white,
standing now for what was there, what must
have breathed and warmed just beyond
the sculptor’s touch, the prerogative no
of the youth something I can only imagine,
no worked into the cold sinew, the utterly
soft cock. Like a Hermes on winged
2.
feet, the boy of one summer is rollerblading
naked in the house, all summer singing
with the stereo’s rutting synthetic thumps,
the two neighbors glaring at our door
greeted by the boy who was wearing nothing.
Every night, one of us always left without
sleep, amphetamine-strung, opening
books, doors, and drawers whose cool air
was awake in their dark. I’d watch his eyes
in their sleep, crimped like a poppy’s
petals, reeling from their own black seeds.
In the codes of passion the Florentines
3.
held during the Renaissance, it was nothing
for a man and his friends to raid another
man’s house and take his wife, the deaths
acceptable enough a price for that one love.
In that city of architecture, of strict theories
of the visible, perspective made a science,
I love how emotion unraveled matter
into metaphor, the mouth a star, the elbow
a kingdom. Writing of his mistress’s pale
beauty, Lorenzo de Medici likened it
to the delicate white fat condensed around
an animal’s kidneys, as though seeing had
4.
to pierce that far, with its pen or its scalpel,
to know itself. That summer, we’d walk
to the nearby park and look at the acres being
restored back to prairie, their blaze of dried
grasses and reeds, the mice running out
from the edges, and then back. A mile away,
the baseball stadium at dusk would roar
with people and light, a spaceship landed
on the prairie’s ghost expanse. I knew
to steal against what would be lost: the sugar
dispenser from a diner’s table, his fingers’
taste of dirt, the bats separating from the tree,
5.
each a manic franchise of the gloaming black.
For the painters of Lorenzo’s time, flesh
was a lie. Trusting the improbable alchemy
of things, they first applied the layer of green
on the drawn body, then the thin layers
of red. In the end, the blossoming flesh
of a face would appear there, lit like a pear.
In the oldest paintings, you can see the green
and blue in their cracked faces, the cold
origin just beneath. What little they needed
to make the miraculous: red clay, sulfur,
gold powder, egg yolk, mercury, marble dust,
6.
and salt, each thing ground down for another
purpose. It was a rented summer’s house.
We were going to walk away from each other.
For a week he had a fever, and what I knew
was his sleep, a body and its breathing.
And already I understood the blue current
that would extend from where I was to where
I would be, ignited with that life. Days after
his fever, we saw a crow slowly take apart
a greasy paper bag on the grass, holding
down the bag with a foot as it ate each ripped
dirty piece. What is it to be here but to want?
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