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.