Aught No. 6 - Shelley, Letter to the Interior

Aught, no. 6 (2001)

Andrew Shelley

country of
provenance
dispossessed
discountenanced

double-agency
of this turn-
taking

fear eases
a little with the
light dimmed
and words are
safer to show
their cheek
-turned other
faces

insulting equally
as that false
distance
would be
to prism
through you to
a place
unattributable
to you
or me

not to misuse you
by disusing you
immured to
slogan myself
across your
walls now silent
with that mythic
silence of
starting or
ending places

nor
use you as
instrument to
get somewhere
that turns on you
but rather

turns thus
always about
you
fromto

speak out of the
distance that
(closed by a
phone call)
props up the
walls of
sharp card-
houses

words traced
backwards on the
glass you read or
not reading you
see through to that
outer stance of
whispers – breath
hushed to ice

you must blank them
to see through to
what lies beyond them but
that's a space their
shape not meaning
clears to say to the
seeing eye and so seeing
they're just a contrast with
haze or different shade
of grey dark takes to
speak with light

only sections
of the scene outside
they're written into,
signs you read or not reading
you see through to that view –
green grass under snow –
which they pretend to hide

and perhaps they intend
that you see through
yourself to where you
are not you and where
light needs you to reside

nor dispense
from a space
I hitch the
bootstraps to
and pull up
attic ladder
closing the hatch

falsities of
proximity
disallowed

nearness of true
distance haltingly
suffered to
remain –

being unable
to do without
you what's
there to do
with you ?

(Dispensary
of hard cold cone-
truths swallowed as
pills to
contraceive
what we can't
understand

place of
dispensing
widens the
jackbooted
stamp-gap
for adoration

a mouth
opens as a
marching-boot
tramps down
the orifice of distance
at each step
of dependency

those cones
it takes fire
to ripen, ripen
us to fire, bombs
demolish all
to rubble around
their secret cores

cores of inner
compacted
doctrines
in time bring
world's end
near being
beyond time

jewel incinerates
the body that
swallowed it
so we can
thievingly
get to it

or we lie /naked
in beds of /thousand-
pound /notes, keenly /
tossing them
in handfuls

contract
the world to
this little
separate,
joined point.

what
other term?

ends that
tendril-dangle
down here
beneath your lily
as water-weed
I grasp as roots
just because
they're below
the surface

face that floats
on water
innocent of
what lies
under

I card your
long hair and
knit it to
textile
(textfile)

what's this
to do
with you ?

it's not
extracting spells
from the pain
which, solid,
incant-
ated
(off by heart)
rise from page
to mind to
swear-vow the
demons down
leaving nothing
behind but over-
taking something
taken over

(but for blood
getting harder
is healing)

this
to do /with
you
could do
with you only
because it could
be without ?

what's there in
me for you to
rely on if I
depend totally
on you
(you mop him up
every day
Charvenus)

but what if nothing
of me depends on you –
do you want –?

if part
of me must dispense
with you so that you can
need me not to need you

– the jackboot is sure

it more than
needs you

Rather third turning
thing that
          shuttles forth
and back to stitch a
mesh that doesn't
spider-trap
                  Thing
about which we can say
ours it being neither
stolen from you
                          nor
gifted back to you
as if it could not
afford the phone call
or flowers
                 (it can't)
or ripped off to
premise itself on
forgetting you in
domains of pure
force.
                  But this
third thing –
(corrupt virginity)
that personates –
persephonates you
hymenating
                  Dismembering
itself (exfoliated rose)
to remember itself
as you

not to think
forgetting
is knowing

but turning from you
I turn to you into me

to say whatever you
think I am I'm not is
to say I'm that too

symbol unspun
spins back

head serving this
bending-back

if not
shatters

does
everything so
have to be the
opposite of you
that you can
only be you by
resisting it
more than a kiss
that crosses you
could do?

so                     spread
       shelley6.jpg (1240 bytes)
far                    apart

trembling
in and out
back and forth
wedged up against
the prow of
nightwindow