Farnoosh Fathi
UGH Day 5
Left my will on a hill, left it all to the hill—
winnings, innards, everything already the poem, and this
“I can tell because I do not feel a debt, nor a dread, I do not turn
from it or to it, like a devastated person.” Same goes, “I can tell a
person because I do not feel a debt toward them, nor a dread, nor
do I turn from it or to it, as a devastated person.”
Instead, everything I am passing is already in the poem I will
write, the green, the trees, the fat of the world and I inching and
spelling it out the belt taut like a rope.
My ear coils, hardens near the beach’s underthings, the triceps
bulging of each wave, flexing blue, nearly bursting at the crest,
pushing one silver vein over the crest, the waves, the claws like a
triptych in the mirror,
the maypole of the octopus, wrapping itself around itself and
finally its mouth, gushing
knows the ink and all the clouds back,
and gushing throws the ink and all the clouds back.
The octopus, that carries over the ceremonial sash of each arm
across itself and tightens, a little too tightly, so that the purple
body bleeds a little under its own ceremony, a ceremony whose
purple only makes the background seem made to deepen and suck
down some future into the greater green.
In this way each arm of the octopus suggests not only its roping
off of itself, but its facelessness, as its front and back lessens,
cinches in as it cordons off its boundedness, its girth becomes
more the sea’s, like the wave weaves its veins out of the apparent
stillness of the majority, the rest of the sea pulled taut so that this
one wave should be perfected in its apparent distinction from the
massiveness of all else prepared for it.
In that way the octopus is not roping itself off, nor hanging itself
by a wave’s crescent (in case you were so curious)! nor saving
itself for a burger bobbing in purple on the surface of the raw cow
branded sea.
DIVINE ULTERIOR MOTIVE!
I suppose I continue because I know without continuing there is
really no hope of anything to command, to come, I meant, and
what’s more, I suspect I cannot see much of the value of what I
write, spurring me on as the disappointments seem to function to
do, and in this way, I am not likely to be satisfied with the divine
ulterior motive of this experience, instead my disappointment is
to be lightened just enough, as I said, to continue.
But to the octopus, where there is hope in so many arms, and yet
never enough, as each one seems to be wrapping itself around the
main being and yet never quite convincing the others sufficiently
of the embrace, and so everything starts to feel like a love for no
one, and if for no one, than all these arms, they hang as if
expressions of an idea of abundance only, a symbolism made of
the living that entraps it, but it is also symbolism that only the
living can recognize and fall for, too.
It seems I’m being beckoned back, by the coattails of the octopus,
to think myself less free than I was, so that I could see that my
former lack of freedom was also not what I thought it, and so on,
all this balancing activity that seems to be a vacillation, a back and
forth, that prevents one from feeling any sort of certainty, any
fixed way really, and which I take to be (momentarily) to be a sign
of the living, the guided blind. Guided to my blindness!
Time to break for lunch, but I consider this to have been warmup
for today’s “free write” which I pray will be more FOCUSED and
reconnect to the PEA, the planetary, plein-air drawn pinholes “in
the” and comprising in its density its flying apart togetherness
PEA
Day 5 resumed
If I can write all that I have written, surely I can start and
complete a little poem, the burnishing of each step out of the
prior, the grand abandonment that is stepping forward into lines,
the stilt-legs so tall and putting one so far up as to be
unrecognizable by anyone one knows, anyone who could spot
anything. But instead up the stilts climb the pubes of heaven, for
the stilts up and all over the legs and all the way to heaven are
covered in pubes. Unrecognizable! In whose wandering is a
following closely too, like the guided blind, whose guide is
everything that shrouds in about him.
Not the etude that lives on and leaves my crotch and which in
leaves have crocheted the words, “enter” and “leave.” Out the
same narrow chink in the grass, which blade is like the slit pulled
out of the closed eye of the leaf, which is like the spine of the leaf
pulled out and growing quite independently, among the millions.
WHEN WILL I BEGIN THIS FREEWRITE?
Why do I feel so far from focused? Let me try FOR EXAMPLE
To breathe as the dead I love, or, feeling my lips melt and drip
between my legs, go kicking in the spray and think to myself that I
will one day leave this life, which I have loved—who can
know?—as no other life than this one. Which I have filled with
itself, myself, that music. WHEN WILL I FOR EXAMPLE BE
ABLE
To sit near her, as a piano in the keys, on a book bench, which is
sanded down to a shorter width by our both sitting on it, and
shortened ever more by my being inched out of my own, my
inching myself out over the edge in ecstasy as is appropriate. I sit
near her, as near as you, here. I feel the wide green gait between
the keys is ours, and I feel the interlacing of arms over arms and
hands over legs, ours too, I feel a weaving in the grass that is ours,
and the field! I feel her spirit fielding mine, hers which is so sweet
in the face and spaciously free in it too, such that my pauses in
describing it are full of the feeling and my writing only traces out
what I felt in them, this face that is on either side of what I say.
With things as gay in rhyme as in error, in fumbling and in each
other’s green sleeves. I wear this, but I do not assume a greatness!
Nor is this an exercise. I begged for focus and ended near her, and
here I am alone in these great sleeves. But her presence is all the
assistance of pins in the mouthful, ready to laugh. UGH is the end
of laugh. UGH is the mouth pursed with pins only capable of UGH
sleeves, these sleeves which turned around could HUG the UGH
themselves. Then a guffaw, among other terrible, additional,
lowered in fogged, legal glasses, “clauses,” and here comes my
daughter, in the swiveling chair, arm behind her back, as lithely
natural any being has ever been, in a green ribbon with her name
on its sweat, pulled a pube from the sheet music as its tent rose
higher over the clown entrusted and tousled with saving the bee:
Galine Antigone Karnazes Fathi.