Gossamurmur (8 page)

Only had a public voice

Anne the Only gave an opinion about forgiving and forgetting

Only was tongue-in-cheek

She was being photographed

A dynamic spread on the entire discordant culture of the 20th and

early 21st century

with references to works of art and photography, to the memes

of dance and theater and film

There was still some interest in the bygone days

which continued to stagger along

Her many surrounding assistants took care of this,

shuffling around her, huffing and puffing around her

and arranging all the artifacts of the last century around her body

the body of Anne Only

And when she was photographed Only concentrated her gaze on something very small but very close at hand

with particular eaglelike scrutiny

What could that something be?

It was an exceedingly fine and miniature replica of Original Anne.

She held it in her hand, it was a doll a totem, a hologram

It came to life, aging forward and de-cohering backward

Only Anne had control

check those items at the gate

and be sure to compartmentalize all they decide on you

be sure to secure all your ointments in plastic

be sure your relics are quite in order with the proper documents of

provenance

Only Anne was quite decidedly a deciding one so there was no desire for Original to speak or remotely consider deciding

you could be a simulacrum that becomes Only and Deciding too.

Only sent Original into the arena to represent her as spectacle

where she could be enlarged at will, touch the icon on the screen.

The way the famous artist had sent a doppelgänger as a stand-in

to a faraway port in a faraway city where they were not accustomed to impostors and they had rarely seen photographs or copies of the original.

wanted to tear it all down…

give way

   the fortress less claustrophobic now in her mind

escape artist in a hatched plan cooked up by all the advocates, helpers in the uterine castellum

The Stay and Sees and Listening Ones, eyes and ears of this and future lives

at standstill her heart but run quickly now they cautioned

time going in an opposite direction in all disguise

toward another body, your shadow running amok

and to skies?

1. sail directly before the wind to safety

2. do not offer identification but keep

valid in a given area a run of notes away from captivity

3. you can quickly leap forward or climb upward

4. give up all ambition in your identity captivity narrative

they had “allowed” her to escape out on the route of Archive

“
go see, go see the destruction of your poetry world

all its rhizomes, autonomous zones
”

“
put out your memory
”

never she said,
never

with this trove in my ear

Never

remembering a time when she would have said this is dream

this is rook

this is crook

and thought of the others—those
voices
—and of the things in that shoe box on that site in that shed on that floodplain

or in a room without climate control in a room with walls not up to the ceiling on that floodplain

fires licking at the fringes of town, coming up over mountains onto that floodplain,

evacuation orders in hand

is there a plan? I’ll make one

the periscope not meant to be, its serial number rusted because it

had fallen in a pool of water

you catch the drift, “feverish red mist”

something numeric to escape from

Original Anne in her continuing bondage now floating above

the Distraction World

they let her out on a short leash, assuming she would lead them to the

original Archive

fathoms deep in her and in the ground

she claimed ignorance

she strapped on her Byronic clubfoot

hoping to be well hidden inside a life-form resembling

a ring of daisy, a ring of mushroom, ring of aspen, ring of stone

examine slice of tundra under a microscope

how to surpass wind and bitter cold if you were Archive of paper and magnetic tape

artifact awaiting transference to the multiverse

analogue or digital or

unobtrusive subtle trace—implant—in the brain cloud.…

I digress…

In retrospect, she was and is always mentioned by someone or other I love or made love with as someone I resembled, and as I took this into account in my technology of inscription, in my technology of audio implant as I had questions, many questions, questions of her life, her life-in-mind and her life as one-who-played-so-many-others, as if in entropy of a death drive one might say she kept the roles coming, so many to keep up with, so many others of myself as I resembled her. So many troubled Poet others. “I” as phantom or “function,” I as “factotum,” or I as poet in my anterior, subversive, poet-structured activity, and many possible ulterior roles inspired by hers. Think of them. Count them, many to keep track of. Conglomerations of seductive tendencies, dangerous tendencies, where paper, cardboard, and ribbon is not your game. Rage. Heartbreak. Edgy. A sob-sister not your game. A heartbreaker might be. A gun, a dagger, three furious volcanoes inside. A confused movie persona inside. Emanating a specter of myself that fills her show, fills her screen, fills her shoe—I ask what size is she. That was my first question. Eight, eight and a half, narrow, I’d guess. They look—those bodies and parts of bodies we project so much upon—larger on-screen than they naturally are. And it’s interesting to guess when you see a body in a doorway, when you see a body in a street, when you see the body in a market in an open doorway in liminal space walk across a room and sit down or open a door, hand on the brass doorknob, what is the measurement of the rest of the architecture to that hand to that body to that face not to mention the dimensions of the room itself to body. Angles of relational strife. Someone figuring it all out behind the lens. Or stand-ins. They have to be similar in size. Especially in bed or naked, slaughtered on a floor. They might be creating smaller furniture for this very purpose. False props. Simulacra. They might ask the leading man to stand on a box to lift his height to proffer a kiss. And of her dress size I wonder. Not a twelve, which I have been now and then and sometimes eight, but tall and thin, an eight I’d say, an eight but tall eight. Or six, definitely a six. A narrow bust. Yes, six. Walking down a sandy beach, narrow hips, and she over sixty, that’s what I like, I was confessing just now, sexy over sixty. Another question was, Were there any Mongolian epicanthic folds in her genetic history? A Capgras delusion, a doppelgänger syndrome? Comrade. Interlocutress. Mover and shaker. Poet. Create institutions and watch them dissolve. As a djinn might.

All my life ones I love as I was saying comparing me to her and just last week one saying again when I had been in public space and done something publicly, oh you look so much like her do you know that? Your eyes and neck. And he had seen me in private space, and said that before, some years back, like her, like her. Your back, that was it, backing up now. A tattered tux, a uniform, a glamourous Italian wife of a terrorist, or plain young wife. Acting them out, sometimes with her neck in my mind. Rotten to the core, a girl with a George in her title, a young woman with Oz in her title. Boyish. Someone impish, someone testing you, provoking you to do some damage, or you might be someone (this is a difficult role now) who is with someone who just walks away. Disappears. Why? He had said, another he-I-loved-once had said—you resemble her neck, or perhaps I wasn’t hearing it right, or “what a neck, so much like hers—” as if he knew her. And he said, “Your hair, your hair resembles hers.” Another he-I-loved-once had acted many roles and loved many actresses; that’s what we called them in our early years, “tresses.” And then he married one, a real one. There was a role now in memory to absorb and as I sat there thrilled, I was her neck, I was her hair, her slanted eyes, I was the color of her hair. I was not alone, a woman-alone-dreaming-of-stardom, because I had stardom, her acting the roles for me because he said, “You don’t follow the money”—was he implying that she did? A different klieg light and a pace, a voice, the way she lights the cigarette. I close my eyes now and visualize her. I know her. She does not follow the money.

Another question has to do with sex, the story of her real-in-life
ménage à trois
. I’ll back off here again. I’ve never exactly lived in a
ménage à trois,
although there was a very close friendship or would you say entanglement with two men at once and one had a crush on the other the one who was with me and maybe I had been with this one before I was with the one I stayed with many years. We were what you might say carefree. We lived in the country where new mountains jut up from primal matter. Where tundra was ocean once, you may collect shards of seashells fourteen thousand miles above the sea. We drove together in an old truck. We all took peyote in the woods in an act of sympathetic magic ritual for a friend in a coma; and then because of that more psychic inscription and I am still wired after all these years. He’s dead now that one I have mourned most of all my dead ones. How you might mourn:

Tundra once was ocean. These lush meadows you see where the buffalo roamed and prong horned antelope gamboled now shift in their identity. Could be a future spectacle for the State to muse upon, as citizens hoard candles and water for what they call “The Metabolic Long Haul.”

Simulacrum. I didn’t call the exorcist. Simulacrum, I didn’t call the Thought Police. Simulacrum, I was happy in her aura in her diadem in her orbit. Taught me distance, taught me humility. I might retaliate on myself some injury accorded by an act of shame or frivolity. I don’t want her to be frivolous. I want my fabricant to read deep in literature and she plays that writer maybe my favorite role of hers the one who…yes, I’ve already hinted the plot. Urgency and rescue and subterfuge and hide and retrieve. Obviate and destroy the regulations of the Deciders. Let’s try to be creative. A writer of novels. Page 1: How did she type that very first take of the scene when she was eviscerated? That was another question. The circular aspect of what she was writing was straight enough, but how did the character the writer behind the movie decide, or did she as actor decide and had the leeway to type whatever she wanted, or with pen. Please don’t say poetess. I don’t mind actress. But poet is my life. Not right now. Because one has that freedom of tresses, of abandon.
Ess
activates in stress and the movies I appear in. In
The Edge
I play an introspective but ignorant woman who walks by the beach and whose husband is an activist, maybe even qualifies as a terrorist, part of a plot to assassinate a president. This character does not know what is going on. I, wife, never take my clothes off—shy?—when we go to bed in the scene in our little home by the ocean in Deal, New Jersey. There was taking my shirt off, my breasts are naked in
Brand X
opposite you, the one I played this scene with who was one who said earlier I resembled her. But I don’t think you had met her yet. Then. Had you? That was another question. Then you went away and eventually married another one who plays roles, one of her best being one, a glamorous one, who cracks up—it’s a biopic. Another connected to those who travel to outer space. Once she the true one, my familiar, my other who lovers say resembles me, she the object of my obsession and she the object of their obsession and their attraction to me-as-her obsession and doppelgänger (and I have to ask, do they visualize her when they are with me?) who I address here, the one on whom I focus my attention to eyes and neck and back who ramps up the tension in real life or movie life said, “To discover what is normal, you need to surf a tide of weirdness.”