Lisa Samuels

Iconoclastic relationship to suffering

there is no clean verso to crawl under, anyway nominal

           crisp devolution into status angles, mine and yours
             and the terminal pathos in between

   wrecked integer of head modules, the ones we saw and
      sawing, made wooden
                                                 in other


               words
                    gone bad in their fidelity, construed according


                                        shaped as armlessly as this
                                        one

    for when the parachute falls, it's no descent at all
    not kin, not dementia-held


                               but when I found it striking, you were

                    not in the air, not plugged in the outlets

entirely unlit schema



                 and the wonder was, the wonder was invariable
                     upon the limpid projections, none made faster
                                         then


        immobile in the useless air, the floated body

                 and what clings to it

                                                          you missed
                                                          your lack
                                                          fell on the
                                                          back of
                                                          tensile

      many a wraith fell upon her eyes
         wholesome diction joining

                    held and abated


through the interstitial paring off of soul-parts,
welded exponentially together target-like
      hear it declared

            'mine ore, mine sole, shoe-bar ache
              went missing through the hole set up for him
             err and sight and glory stench
              mattered on the follicles'


      when she sings

                                      birds die for lust

a most unfit ontology


 where nothing makes, and making bifurcates
pronoun suits, top and bottom

                   in other

                                      words, she is a he with s's
                                      opportunity
                               no grief spent shouldering


               most of all
          no finer penetration than such fall



A light less dreamed (play for creatures)

   A lightbulb crusted in a spider's web at night is no more real than
the light whereby one cannot see it. I said this to the heretic and he
giggled. She spoke then up in the rafters, dying, and her inimitable
crumbling words fell down piece by piece: 'I never saw a man as dry
but snow would make him crippled -- I never saw a day descry what
nature couldn't see -- I never made this place specific, you neither
saw nor adumbrated me!'
   Such glissand where the walls perched, tellingly.
   That voice dropped fathoms down the by-light.
   I listened for the ordinant reply. He said: 'I am trying to
discover what it means to be clear. These years are like buckets of
water arranged along the crescent-descending floor. Into each one each
day I drop one drop of the water that is me, and they collect and
drain and dry and I drip in and am replenished. You wouldn't think a
simple stance was so difficult to maintain.'
   This was all at variance with knowledge. The heart is stacked into
stacks, and photographic suddenness distempers. It hasn't been so long
since I was moving.
   Lodged like a firefly amidst brambles, the light creates a forlorn
distribution. Not meaning to, not meaning. Constantly apologizing for
the unbidden falsity. A figure of oppression stands against the light,
unseeable but for the displacing outline. To communicate the approach
of predictive capacity, he never opened his mouth. Not to be seen, not
to be listened to, but knowledge like a sticking star brambled in the
cloth upon his head. All unawares, unclear.
   Undulating around the cloaked pleasantries, she whistled down from
her cave: 'all is immediate. Mediated all. Call for him and he will
answer in indistinct motions, moving even now along the pavement.'
   This presupposed position, place, lighting, movement, portions. The
denigration of the authentic into dark wires. He held the unabated air
and sensed it back to me, tight and tucked as silver-sheen.
   I keep on waiting for the dream to return, though I know it is in
the sand outside now. They take their places and begin.