Christine Stewart


CLAMOROUS


Writing is the exile genius of language. Twisted in its opposite

consequences, the abstract of beautiful wrists. What age opens it to

each floundering skin, what impatience leaves open the noise of

thought capsizing, worn thin in risk, beyond entrenchment, beyond

mimic, to lip.





Guides


I am only invading flesh in a consequence.


Neither waking nor blooming, but thin, dark, and under fire.


Like the rest of my animals molten and distinct, this living furrow

shifts beneath the empire's bellow.


These balms, these inward lips carry, bodied and reluctant, necessary

refusals, details, glorious nipples, cold water, no storage, god and

its stench.


The body in its way is light drawn. It smacks of pattern.


Its space a fictive reign over a chapped shadow.


Chaffing, clearing, dying this structure de-rails the bent war burrow.


Its heart is dissident.





Retinas I


Sometimes it is absolute to imagine a story that is a small tear in a

tiny fold so widely ashamed and invisible that one's epoch appears

only like a tiny stitch in endless wooden cloth. God is composed and

leveled. Flesh rots while it's still on their feet and eyes fall out

their sockets and hands raise against hands. Local altercations still

enact an original event and begin by writing and repeating language in

startling places and also by calling attention to this event and

extending outward or going forth where the movement of extending is

the lap of a different kind of startling place.


This is not the surface of the hand but the concept of the wounded

human animal, the wet and glittering wound, the material plague, the

wind, the arrow, the storm and atom. Here are the mutilates and the

imperils where angles are kindled and people weep through their

eye-holes. Language is their fear, their exhaustion, their longing for

melons and fruit and sufficient wounding. It is an organized scene of

doubt apprehended in the identity of its stain. It is the vocabulary

of punishment: Swallow me for I have the incontestable reality of an

unfeeling of emptiness. The failure of disbelief is covered and hard

stuff: I know that you are obstinate and that your eyebrows are of

brass.





Retinas II


Earlier a plague of frogs would have designed this passage,

withholding a body, closing the ears, turning the shoulder; but this

voice hovers on its neck and our lips bloom like fire. A massacre will

always be followed by another in a cultural web of leaves and wholly

reveal its fragile interventions. The verbal impunity of eternal life

comes from eating the final sentences of eviction. It takes root in

the separable categories of a body where necessity flowers its own

texture.


Here, absence is ladled with ambiguity. Lashes to lashes execute the

body's position in abbreviated lines such as these: a scurrying

category in the wilderness; eaten by people; burnt to fire; ground to

powder; scattered to water.


Visual centuries of hours have made this their central conduct.

Erratic arms depict the neck.


Just as a gate predictably allows us to enter into a field of vision,

centuries strand from one another, created but homeless. Holes and

nests are unthinkable and wet has a growing darkness about it.





Argument


You smell of wood and stone. And Shall will write in her hand, these

startling places: this deep crisis, calf kissing, emphatic lonely

tabernacle. But part shapes the force that facts your mouth,

glittering blood: Objectless.


It has no body, this narrative arrow, this half twine. It is before

the stunned mind like beautiful sheep--all blue, all purple, all

scarlet stuff. Ten curtains, wind and trail. Our eyes are woven.





Instrument


Nature languishes, and tears straight from the mouth of mouth's

clatter. It's an old anarchical soul trick, crushed by the head its

own metaphor. Severed by the vapours of its own body, lost between

dusk and divulgation. Bread sucks from the principle of situation.


In the darkest hour, barely considered, bored with the heat, digging

silent wide places, stacked with matter--there are no works of

Voltaire (for I never intended these sly burned stitches)--but instead

a love carnal, instead a head perfect, and a pore bigger like the 

anthropology of soft parts, like buttocks, breasts and flesh; like

skull, snout and subject.





Coda


The artifice is alive in its disintegration and life coils around it

in imaginary gestures as if the view were embodied, as if the view

were real. I could swallow its fiction to the extent of my flood, to

the extent of our delicate deficiency. I could send it out of nothing

except my voice. The artifice states against the background of my

clamour. I imagine its taste, its full tilt as if fullness was

representation, was alien. Its crystal precipitates the precision of

its swept-out dryness, its lush pull: we are silently oceanic, we are

secretly alive.