Gossamurmur (9 page)

Simulacrum, the next level. She should be more beneficent. If she has money she should help others in the allegory.

[Jamaa el Fna was saved by the grace and lobbying of Juan Goytisolo; that’s another
story and his. Our night on the town, Marrakech, the other double wore a wig to be like me. The men around us thought she was my daughter.]

Or when I would mount the stage to perform. And she was on the other side of this, performing as well. How did her rhythms resound with mine? Someone might do a graph of our voices and perform “voice recognition.”

Would we ever know?
[There is no way to search for information quickly; it is unwieldy and out of date.

A dedicated, purpose-built studio space would be ideal. Barring that, a small, office-sized room can be adapted for this purpose. The room should be quiet with no obtrusive external noises. Leakage of sound from the studio to adjoining spaces is also a consideration
…
The room should not be square. A rectangular room, with the ceiling height different than the wall lengths, should be used.]

On a mission to scan what she considered valuable to poets, Archive of exploration, and of course let’s call out all doubles, the copiers, those that digitize the originals…

Or those that usurp
poethic
power.

Sitting here in a quiet house far away from a city. I do this too occasionally, get away to write. Like the lady novelist. Border line of prim cover and seething sex underneath. Was it all three of them, she the duchess and one a model and one a…what was she? I digress…

A plot to save the world.

Many identities blur in celluloid. Many others also had questions of her. I only wondered because we were close in age and of that time. Her father was a NATO commander; that interested me. Fathers-in-war, daughters-of-the-long-ago-heroic-war. And then I was in the ladies-of-the-night scene in another movie filmed in Quebec with its red silk wallpaper and brothel vibe and playing it in red bra, a feather boa and my line—I made it up, unscripted as it were—was “I’d rather be home reading a good book,” and something about my red Tibetan Buddhist protection cord. “What does it protect you from?” “One’s own ego”…did I say that? And later that same time when we were alone he said it too—“What does it protect you from?”—he another I loved—and also he said,
You look so much like her
. I was sure he had met her by then. He lived near Hollywood and was one of the most famous people in the world.

But Original Anne felt her perspicacity her stamina her purpose return as the power of the Deciders weakened, and she was fully reconstituted. There was an archival tape with aboriginal sticks from Fuji playing in her head, accompanying a poem of terrific orality, and as it played, she felt herself “shaken back” into being.

She stared down the false Anne, a fierce tiger light emanating from her eyes, piercing the deceptive One’s resolve. And this diminishing fabricant disappeared, like gossamer, fleeting ephemera on the horizon.

horama…oneiros…chrematismos…

that too, a piracy

    her eyes had the glint of Djuna’s mind

    tortoise shells, sawfish teeth, rock salt, octopus bones, panther skeleton

skulls and hooves…imagine

that they lie at the surface, almost violent

exoskeleton of self’s selves

support

and age and Deciders
in contractual…
and death

as antlers do a

shot shot shot

a simplification is as a war cry

“don’t ban poetry from this room!”

from this body!

we arrive in the shape of investigators to the final rooms

Deciders have at day’s end to explore these matters

in contractual machinations

and death-to-the-poem corporate styles

and become inseparable from them

women called into the room

in a power arrangement where they stand before a Decider

decidedly at disadvantage

feng shui
decidely off for the women

eyes roam around the room, an array of Deciders behind desks without much on them like prefab newscasters

and shiny surfaces like fortresses, reflections of Deciders’ features coming up at the women

one Decider at a desk before a woman raw and exposed

another flanked on the left with a trophy of counting coup

invoking regulations in a weak and whimpering monotone “
it’s the rule
”

patriarchs demand your silence where monosyllables stress the company out

squint in light

glare seeping in from between slats of the blinds

By the shape of false governance came this shape of looking

The low-level Deciders were frantic when they heard of the escape of Original Anne. A seventh-level Decider was caught in the dilemma and wouldn’t admit his weakness. The message from above was
never admit a mistake, never be accountable.

You had to keep decisions blamed on the lower-level Deciders. They were not quite ready to handle the cinematic world the world of
reflections and double mirrors a fallen world might sputter off its reel and die.

But this was metaphor.

There were scant reels in the New Deciding-Way.

Had not Chief Decider created a hell realm for prisoners?

Had he not voted to close the progressive library where thoughts of freedom festered?

Libraries that might breed archivists?

He was swiftly demoted in the “new accountability.”

“
And now the tapes gone missing!
”

“
They’re in the business of hell-on-earth, madrassas for anarchy
”

heard how a poet gathered the fragments, wrote and rewrote…erased

started again…little woman upstart

because when you write out a line with your body—structure it—move it—

it gets free

that is what I wanted to see…how atom by atom your sentences replicate beyond one another

I, poet, wanted a shape of her as a free agent before she dissolved

I wanted to catch her, un-canceled

And to let her know she could be missed

Even if I harbored dark thoughts toward her, dark lady of my shadowy DNA

for she was the antiheroine of this tale

this is what happens when my singularities are alone

they want us to express their selves in triplicate

and steal or mingle among one another’s texts, and double helixes

and appropriate and glorify themselves in the texts of others

but we see them and they are glad of that, enjoying exposure

the imprints they make in what are deceptively empty chambers but none truly empty of ghosts, spirits, sense impressions

they come in mind trailing on willowy gossamer

sample: cartilaginous

sample: backbone

what they were on about…that they could plunge or fall in language

whose job it was to classify

but if you study smaller ones and their textures you may appreciate the balk of similarity

loneliness of classifying others in an outcome of the study of duplications

loneliness of erotics, may any two primates be truly alike?

but she is steady and outside time, ennobling it

and roots to be a scientist of illusion as she copies the originals

when you consider value of a shape of a form a genome barks
me too me too

which is plural and suggests a way to behave with accoutrements that are symbolic, the skins of these trembling lines

classifying items of possession, of poem-objects, exquisite corpses, and the jangling aces and pentacles, and voices that speak into machines

if she may consider her relation to the formerly alive parts of formerly alive poems she will cheer up and be formally alive

she might stroke what is lonely and cold and listen to disembodied voices

might push further into a void of identity

angels and savants fly in and out

messing with your Decider Radar

that they would be concentrated as well on the same kind of

machinations

or inventory or tone, but for darker control

countenance of an artist rising above others in her public cause

we might think of study…anecdote…fantasy a scenario

duplicity as of original poet mind to save it

we might think of stealing into a heart

crisp and figural is a description

in so many insomniacs

that fixes the face

we faces have use

when we can’t sleep

it’s like a wax museum in here

Heart of Archive, or storage units of rogue plutonium

as public pressure closes the bomb factory down

peering-in faces the archons take charge

to face an event of poetry enacted

before a crowd of suppliants facing arrest

rewind, we must hear that dulcet tune again….

mega mega mega death-bomb enlighten

ideas in the event with masks

allowing of beauty and insomnia on a rocky divide

that was a title for something because I also have beautiful thoughts when I can’t sleep—

you too, as I say this facing you

these were the ideas of a nuclear-free zone

had in the event of facing off with police and other authorities

in the sure information a face would give beauty back to the world

as
tundra
derives from a word for “treeless”

up there to feel this business of lack of shadow, of tall things

“without trees” or “above the tree line”…an amphitheater of

summoning objects

or these living things back to themselves

come back! come back!

of struggling outside

and limitless, as of space

Archive hidden on a tundra, who would suspect?

one of the most uninhabitable places in the world

are you less grounded without a tree that’s to consider and if you are, why, how cruel yourselves often seem to trees in the rugged landscape. Not cruel, negligent. Are you fighting for them in all the ways they are captured and slaughtered?

seeing them, yes, but understanding?

not mistaken in all the selves you face daily, in the

face you face daily, and living with complex self that is a face-off

who speaks underneath your skin,

for fragile life-forms

that become institutionalized…or not

A map working its way through a body

Survival cartography

Chasm Falls: Original Anne half felt the jagged water drops

East Desolation Peak: Original Anne fell to her knees

Build the vault inside the Tundra, and she did, hands clawing the hard inhospitable ground

green lipstick of a Heian mentor

back up, flash back

she who tamed the tiger

on a climb to the monastery

shook the demons out of her hair

lustrous

long as my doppelgänger shadow

long

as long a walk a long long way up here

New Deciders were organizing another war on a comparable Utopia

demolishing stacks in a library of powerful gnosis

tomes to guide and replenish imagination

artists would climb out of their foxholes

rounded up, exposed, and demand conservation

the ploy was “space,” like nuclear power

who has the most capacity to make money off “space”?