Karen Kelley

CONSTELLATIO

     I.

     Imagine in a burst of tenderness. To make (oneself) disappear
     or fade from view is a game of solitaire. There's a constant
     associative quality to such despair, but no one knows
     what so small a thing means to me he pulled it out

     from under the bedclothes. it was wrapped in two plastic baggies.
     But what can I do? Everything becomes intense, it's seven A.M.
     and you are sitting at my kitchen table,
     a lifeboat, dream boat, [drawing of the ripcord of a parachute].
     We'll see what is wrong,

     right? But for now
     we confront each other in implied narrative: my heart missing you
     includes spiders, tape, snap-lines and makeshift straightedges,
     repeated strokes that accrete to form a shimmering field
     (pliable flesh) (suspended
     in the light rays for a long time) (both impenetrable and sumptuous),
     allowing "ghosts" to bleed through.

     "Spider" refers to legs, pearlescent,
     and dark oily stains suggesting random constellations
     in the night sky, or windows, doorways and stairwells,
     river scenes, quarries and woods,
     a kind of body, an enormous physical envelope
     for ventricles and chambers.

     Then I looked up towards the ceiling. There, on the windows
     and even on the pillars, I could see the same red flowers.
     They were all over the place in the room,
     my body, the entire universe.

     Intricate, endlessly proliferating patterns
     cover this world that sometimes looks vegetal, or like sea-washed
     bottle glass, or a single handprint
     (your strange certainty still keeps)
     at which my eyes see movement as momentarily stopped
     rather than continuous,
     but frozen too briefly
     to form a stable image.

     Chaotic phenomenon of natural light: my heart,
     your thigh, dripping water, thunder, a ringing telephone,
     a dog's bark: objects want to spill over and flood
     the world.

     Their meanings, however,
     are far from self-evident. There is something hectic
     and unsettling in a man buried in the desert
     or Christopher standing on a flaming bed of coals.
     Once you ran into a tree and broke. That's how you discovered
     that you were a boy. It started with memory and loss,
     which evolved into a landscape. In this landscape,
     everything is part of the text
     which is destroyed by an earthquake,
     a movement or a gesture,
     the light, whatever.

     Everything matters: snake-handling, fellatio, crying
     and various ecstatic dialogues, open
     secrets, a green door in a blue room,
     that I'll be your mirror, your bed. In and out of focus,
     at times the bowls of fruit and bouquets of flowers emerge clearly.
     There is no diagram, no brochure and no catalogue.
     I'm surprised at how much motion
     --usually I can stabilize the image more.
     But your picture ISN'T clear. High-chroma reds, purples, oranges,
     greens and blues.

     This distilled, detail-hungry realism is different
     from the possible human responses:
     incomprehension, defiance, resignation.

     My heart is still shaking.

     How come I was just sitting here and
     you came and took hold of me? My right side
     was susceptible; my left, a compass needle,
     or a stain, a purplish-black fruit,
     or the wounds that I've talked to you about: the longest one
     goes through my body from hip to crotch,
     and there are two of us.

     But my heart did not flee,
     my heart stayed here with you. My heart
     is lying down, perhaps;
     perhaps it has even fallen asleep.
     There are a few drips and spatters and an occasional
     pencil line. Now, the flowers and leaves
     seem barely scratched into the scumbled surface. This landscape,
     beloved and despised, continues yielding delicately drawn birds
     whose ultimate messages are ambiguous and multifaceted,
     urgent: Where the Expression of Love Will Be Encouraged,
     or: Project for the Day You'll Love Me.

     Dominated by intricately drawn ships
     and spidery drawings of birds and flowers astonishingly transformed
     into 40-foot-long charts running the length of the walls,
     we, tangled, elusive forms
     in bodies that are, themselves,
     temporary phenomena, irregular traceries
     of tenuous lines--some dotted, others continuous,
     add complexity to the surface.

     Dressed only in a slip, at a table covered
     with a floral tablecloth, in a room covered
     with floral wallpaper, my hands, too,
     are covered with flowers. The darkness, smears,
     and whirlpools of light
     suggest confusion or velocity, a hand
     making an animal shadow on the wall,
     the unstable line between things real and depicted
     resulting from the physical compatibility of flesh-
     and object-based beauty
     with their shaky black contours.

     I keep these thoughts in my heart,
     I still think my thoughts.

     Two bowls of fruit and a bouquet of flowers, among other objects,
     can be discerned. Whittled wood, bits of broken glass, slate, putty,
     ball and socket of the radial bone, intricate hinges
     of the finger bones, the way the eyeball moves
     in its socket: it's as if messages are buried in innocuous objects,
     and one must uncover the true meanings.

     Tonight a cold rain falls on Tucson.
     A fragment of steel placed against a dark blue background
     becomes a vision of human frailty. You as a subject
     are a propeller form, precise
     but free.

     A shaft extending from left to center is barely visible
     but is an essential aspect. Pushing the propeller into the rear
     while seeming to scatter "seed-circles," you are a figure built up
     of ocher, gold, brown, and gray
     laid over a creamy ground dappled with pink (me).
     Color becomes a means of differentiating between one figure
     and another, between figure and ground.

     I had to lie on comfortable mats on the floor
     and look at (flowers) projected on
     the ceiling.

     Tissues, cells, follicles, organs, veins
     and fluids: symmetry and individuality add up
     to a propeller/flower.

     Now, give me some
     that I can put inside my mouth
     to taste.


     II. Lost Image

     Silvery cellular constellations on a blood-red ground.

     The resemblance of cells to heavenly bodies
     forms a necklace shape flanked by dandelion seeds, winged
     insects, the passion and delicacy lavished on the hem of a gown
     --the without seen from within,
     with tiny black circles
     for eyes.

     Tell me everything you see. And what you think it means:
     sections of the playing field bizarrely colored in flesh tones,
     furniture, baseboards, mirrors, blinds, light bulbs, doorknobs,
     a pale blue sky, dry-brush lines and edges, a jet of water.
     It is with a feeling of deep sadness that I do not find you:
     your human figure, your head and face in particular.

     Sheer material hangs in vague shapes
     with large cut-out areas (translation: we are bound by
                               beauty and delusion, a
                               silvered-gray luminosity
                               evoking the soft pictorials of
                               19th century photography. no
                               doubt you'll be a muse for
                               me--your unwaveringness
                               makes you so different from
                               me, so much easier to see.
                               actually, it's not "you,"
                               so much as you in combination
                               with the IDEA of you & the
                               FACT of you (as an object).
                               and how that instigates
                               language-composition(s).
                               because the driving force and
                               the subject of poetry is
                               hearts, wings, devils,
                               scrawled words and blooms
                               galore in the blazing
                               hothouse called Desire)
     made of images: one a spinal cord, one a diamond, one a spill of
     semen, one a mat of hair somewhere between erotic and ethereal, others
     looking variously like a horn or a horse's hoof, a pinkish spotted
     flower, a harness or a strap, torn into rough oblongs representing the
     Eye of the Glass Blower, the Eye of the Non-Combatant, the Purse
     Stealer's Eye, and glued with a central blob of very thick glue--

     We lovingly call it: FLESH,

     which is a word that refers to three-dimensionality, and not to the
                       words "Fragile Life" that shimmer in the enlarged
     damage & desire   pattern of your fingerprints like a complete
     damage & desire   statement (rather than a wall or door, shouldn't
                       we imagine a net, an object which is filled with
     holes, which is composed entirely of holes, and which at the same time
     imprisons and confines) on my femininity.

     Consider the material. Consider that I am under it all: knees rubbed
     and washed with rain or my own spit, the sheets an arrangement of
     dolls and birds and effigies overflowing onto the walls. There is no
     message, but there is beauty in abundance in the space between desire
     and fulfillment. My hair is wet; my skin papery, peeling, open really,
     afloat. My whole body becomes tiny and I am pinching the flower. What
     is it in fact (in the act--)? Venous tissue (Venus--). A blotter. Very
     lovely. Hold me, hold on. A smeared bud. A little life in my head,
     woven out of grasses, branches and weeds, with the added freedom of
     not being functional, of being completely permeable and the whole
     front is open, my body transparent to the opacity of the world, myriad
     images which will now be seen to float before me. I wanted an opacity
     which conveyed the
                        folds of a sleeping woman's dress. And
                        a web is a net, and a net is a trap. These
                        thoughts are difficult, if not impossible
                        to think. Hair in my face and I am still in bed,
     why not?

     Shaped and positioned like your mouth:
     Curtain to Heaven.
     Halos shift from orange to reddish
     orange to rose to purple to red
     all day long;
     the only change is in ink on scraps of white paper--


     III. One night, like a halo

     divided into sections that name and describe qualities: flesh, wood,
     wax, Male Torso That Has Left
     Its Path, haunted foliage,
     fish, birds, metals,
     one silk blouse, a net of holes,
     a web of cotton thread, a group of sheep
     huddled together in a restless world (suddenly it all makes sense)
     somewhere between "real time"
     and the time of history or memory (a visual smear, reddish)
     (its continuity no longer maintained).
     I can just make you out: immense funnel of instances delicately
     adorned with molars, foliate forms, balls of black threads,
     cut-and-brushed thick-gauge steel, brown and black globules
     floating within a single shape.

     The cumulative ultimately becomes the point--
     very lush, of flowers and shadowed woods,
     eel skins, gull mummies.

     My mind is broken and tries to remember only a few things:
     a ceramic bowl and what it holds,
     all the marble that isn't part of the statue,
     a bird I hear but cannot see
     spreading out and taking on a V shape,
     colored fruit against dappled foliage
     that varies randomly in luminosity--
        __________

     Colored fruit: a skull, a bowl, a jug, a massive arrow,
     bells, stars, silhouette of a familiar figure,
     picture, or picture within the picture.

     Language of Nouns and Questions, I see something
     but don't see what it is (maybe scrap iron,
     maybe Heaven).
     Language of Love and Loss, I see
     something
     but can't say what it is:
     wax, pigment, vaseline, chalk, crayon, charcoal.
     In and of themselves, they are not adequately sensible.

     The room is a container,
     as is my body;
     the walls are my skin, an externalized blueprint.

     There are small waves and you are a noun,
     my hand on your waist a thick, unmanageable bundle.

     ...to look from toe
     to anus to navel
     is a kind of lure, inclined,
     with fleshly arms
     and a nozzle pointing down...

     The heavenly void seems endless, loneliness
     abounds as a metaphor for my female body
     that might be a shell, stone, egg, stick, leaf, pod, artery,
     spiral or cord,
     a coming-of-age ritual or tamped-down mound
     of ash, a kind of granulated
     language.

     slip...

     This girl bends like tulips
     or pink roses. The slip dangles
     from the bathroom faucet, some
     of my interiors appear to be slowly
     revealed. Behind me, red dahlias,
     dried gourds and a newspaper on a table
     eschew narrative.

     Red: Rug. Female Nude, Lying--No Birds.
     Each time I move, different fragments
     appear and vanish, encouraging me to circle the triptych
     in search of the complete image. I thought it was solid,
     but it turns out to be red and black threads
     just barely perceptible,
     horizontals and verticals (ventricles)
     wobbly with the imprecision of the hand-drawn.
     The imperfect is our paradise: razorshells, sandflats, rotting fruit,
     a cricket.

     Everything is green and muddy and labelled with the names
     of the five senses. More happens, but I keep forgetting
     as tattered flags and beautiful canoes
     merge into the "little windows" I am trying to show. Now I see a bird
     of rubber, leaves, flowers, gold and steel.
     To the left: flowers, entrails, liver and spores;
     to the right: snakes, infants and stained glass.
     This which appears to be a triptych is actually a diptych
     with the center motif being your human figure clinging to its neck
     like a mound of claylike substance,
     or a desk with half-opened drawers, or a winged nude
     "shooting" a mottled heaven of muscle and bone.

     This is the trap, the architecture, the appliance, the food, the tree,
     the fruit.

     It ranges in size from pieces I can hold in the palm of my hand to
     snaking 20-foot-long configurations. There is a kind of excess that I
     am compelled by. But forms get made inadvertently, against the wall,
     directly into my body. I am thinking about arms and legs so tiny that
     even though I use a magnifying glass I can't see all the details. I
     wonder if this sadness is in any way readable? A willful, fucked-up
     person is making this thing up, it isn't just happening on its own. It
     is about a certain kind of emptiness (curtain). I leave it open
     on purpose.