So that your word ‘face’ creates it’s own blue eyes.
They used to be called physical appearances because they belonged to solid bodies / without the disappearing there would perhaps be no impulse to paint. “Working a material that is stronger than words.” Found in necropolises / visibly and infinitely handmade. “Against the great defeat of the world.” Painted to remain here after / destined to be buried. I throw my shovel on my shoulder in silent rejoicing / not a human voice to be heard anywhere. “This would give me something that would be precious to me.” Great silence like a god asleep. Sitter alive, sometimes dead- waiting-to-be-seen like a footprint or a deathmask: a trace of the real / stenciled of the real. SONTAG “They have just tentatively stepped towards us.” In traditional Egyptian painting no body was seen full-face because a frontal view opens the possibility to the opposite: the back view of somebody who has turned, and is leaving. BERGER The face can make a present of what it could leave behind of itself, equally distant from all the countries in the world. You are not inside of houses and how then to recover meaning in the appearance removed from the flow of appearances, because it is always a question of a scene with a picture- the picture is the open door we must go through and spend our lives not seeing what we saw, what we know when we are small, when we know everything in a childlike way. CIXOUS “Writing now to find the primitive picture, again.” “His likeness- one of the race of fathers: earth sea air.”
II
Where was my sign, you gave no sign to say: “soon you will cry.’ or ‘I shall die soon. Sit next to me.’ Now I bind your signs together like a paintbrush and touching a similar wound in a similar way / this space with its contours is the likeness / in my search to find what is left behind invisibly there, to trace what has happened to the face. Steadfast like an engraved rock / the specific emptiness. Pain sharpens awareness of such spaces. No longer peering, you shut your eyes. “The one-who-waits.” “The fatal identity of the lover.” We must relinquish our dead. Let go of them in the water. DIDION I leave from within my own house and I don’t return. You begin to make a portrait of what the sitter has been, left behind in your head / vision shortened like a tendon, distorting the bones- the recollected face has come inside. Two years without the right to correspond. The wound hurts as it hurts. Memory radially working / your face growing starshaped in my head gradually gave a difficult joy. “It is called joy.” The sitter leaves, you begin again / the pain experience of testing reality- the slow process mourning KLEIN embodiment of the passing states interaction between sorrow and distress.
III
G-
Transmuted (when something changes and does not return to what it was) she explained, I knew that was what had happened to you. It was obvious. The rest is abiding present memory. They closed his eyes / the gaze of statues / and he kept the custom of not protesting: was a brave dead man unmoving (Silence makes it like a dream / red puffer jacket / snow rock. Soon before he left us / before we knew he was leaving). Your son can bear to be without his father if he does not stop writing it down as a prayer to a god who only exists while the prayer lasts / at work on the suture I made for myself, it reads: there is no concord possible for G- and I. “We close the mouths of the dead.” Hands over the eyes where rationally incompatible beliefs so easily co-exist. So his terrors can mix with water and rot and end! GELMAN Did you hear, I read another book? It did not liberate that only image; bruised and dressed / beyond stillness lain down.
“Stillness preconditions movement.”
IV
The third year has come gird with courage, many things have been happening / deadly enemies are in front from whom we cannot retreat, learn to keep watch at the door of your senses. Mourning is a cruel country, and you are still afraid here. “Rendezvous and transfer the dread.” The appearance of truth like a seam of grit / their theirness, painted as if they were face, remains with the portrait artist BERGER facing upstream alone where disappearance fields expression like hundreds of women, lined up with parcels in front of prison walls. “And so they gaze on us, the Fayum portraits, like the missing of our own century.” “Death-painter.” “Begin with a cloth over the mirror.” “Eternity’s painter.”
And out of the bronze image of The Sorrow that endureth for Ever he fashioned an image of The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment. Oscar Wilde
*
Working on New Reservoirs
Shaped when stirred, and running then before the wind the dead with the no-form of sails fold / sometimes relentlessly swelling and thrashing flock the dark with their longing little aims like torch beams but nothing enters like clouds the sob-less throat dreaming of him. “I live in you like a country where we can never meet face to face.” There's nobody out there. It's just the wind-chime against the weatherboarding- “Another non-fiction attempt at realism.” Inability to retain the voice of the dead, even inside, is the greatest mark of dying. Substituting the appearance of truth for truth itself, VERTOV listed among forbidden techniques of the documentarist. So unto separate ships you were carried / I walked while in Despair on the shore Saint Eulalie stood unsteadily, patroness of landless sailors / prevailing disorder- the tumult and stir of embarking. Blood and musculature disordered by the events of falling. Looking back / leaving / arriving. A documentary work is an attempt to recapture someone something somewhere looking back. HOWE Arrested in his falling by the handle bars with all real thoughts’ hiddenness in place / “If anyone thinks of how sad they think of these scrambled signs.” You’re going to rainy mist-shrouded mountains in the company of birds / the stone womb safe under blackbirds & water in trees, wild sheep. You and I are a mountain of grief. / You and I will never meet on this earth. AKHMATOVA It is in your name that I refuse to let go of cleverly deceiving people. (Orpheus / Lot’s wife) Face to face you are unpredictable. I follow you. You act.
I would make visible all his real thoughts while falling. Clear the threshold live on into it, to yourself, wading the Subsequent transparency of death with the detachment of astronauts. Lead, by the tenderness of love, to inhabit him like the imprint of buildings / every threshold point of contact with his bodies space now torn down.