Patterns, Language, Sass;

Patterns, Language, Sass;
The Phenomenology of My Beloved-Other
© 2006 Alley Greymond

How do we know there is someone there before us unless we look?
~Merleu-Ponty

1.
Because nothing, really, is solid.
Because everything is composed mostly of emptiness.
Because so many things are easily broken.
Because humans come slow to the fix.
Because humans imagine a fix.
Because all borders have pores—doors—gates of access.
Because we lack understanding
and lack knowledge of that lack.
Because we are parts of a whole
yet think of ourselves as wholes, apart.
Because I don’t know yet what I can’t construe.
Beloved, I put forth my hand and am not quite sure
I find you there.


2.
The point of the sphere
is contraction—self protection.
Like the way we sleep, curled alone or curled
into each other, our bodies
instinctively seeking—yes—
the kinesthetically remembered warmth
of the womb, also
the generative flame of desire.
How seemingly black-cast metal the sphere
that Pill bug rolls when I touch it.
Too much sunlight, too much rain,
the persistent irritation of aphids—and tomato leaves curl,
minimizing contact. We sleep sphered
enclosing so valuable a thing
from a world we conjecture is harsh.


3.
Bottoms down on a field of patchy grass that in turn
was abutted by Elliot Bay and above us
a layer of wind, a layer of blue, high clouds
until it was clear we lived between ceilings and floors.
Our talk took untried twists and turn-arounds
Illuminating inner horizons and private planes,
and I suppose we felt like we were stretching
into an indefinite but curved surface,
the way our eyes caught light,
and skin leeched each others pheromones and it tasted
just like photosynthesize, and how easy to rush home
to continue spreading out under flat sheets
and to know at once that together we created
a luminous vastness. And it was good.


4.
Nature selects for binaries and selects stamen
and pistil and nature selects mammalian egg cell
and sperm suitors, for pairs of chromosomes
and nature selects double helix in DNA strands.
Nature selects relationship and selects juxtapositions
of tubes and spheres.
Nature selects form and function; the thing and the relation.
To know the thing is to freeze the form
and to know the function is to observe its pattern in time.
As nature selects I select the intimate pair,
the on-going tension between being and being undone.


5.
Is it that rain stops and starts
that the nature of rain
is to stop and start, to fall
or be held, the nature of earth
is to absorb then reject, is it
the character of man to grow
then grieve, to reach one hand out
and pull one’s heart in, is it that
the external world comes and goes
not of my accord or wishes
that I can almost accept
your overblown gestures, roses,
an abrupt start and stop as if
we live in the grip of impossible dreams?


6.
Forgive me for alluding already to a future
we will neither attend—birthdays celebrated alone,
roadside attractions I drive to see with someone else,
for picturing my furniture rearranged to accommodate your guitar.
Come morning all my fantasies disassemble.

It isn’t necessarily you I want—
I want order: the body of the story beyond the hook
and before the end that leaves me reaching for a new book.
Order is a ruse. It feels certain, my splits fused,
as if the full force of my obsession slung across your face
could illustrate a stratagem I might actually pull off.
Or as if order will save me from hurricanes and earthquakes,
from rainstorms that beat through my ceiling and ruin the walls.

I am aware at this first kiss
that just as you are being shuffled into my life
like the wild card you may soon enough tumble from the deck.
If I know the order I can surmise just how happy the story might end
or if I have to start stockpiling water and Kleenex,
call the National Guard to roadblock my body, barricade my heart.
I must have order so that when everything falls apart again
I will know exactly how far I have fallen
and whether or not you fell, too.

Even order comes in neatly packaged order:
there is the beginning, the birth, of course, rife
with possibilities and projections that cannot conceivably come true.
The honeymoon, such sweet order, jars abruptly into marriage
where all possibility sinks beneath a ceiling of suds.
Even the bedspread fades like one lost promise after another.
Suddenly there is so much inexorable order,
only the strongest and most clever can lift themselves back
into the centrifugal force of amazement.

I curse my heart its rapacious lust for order,
for what empty illusions it clings too.
And I know too, the exact duration by minute of my self
imposed loneliness, so forgive me already
for making you my own personal ground-hog day.
If I can’t see your face behind my shadow
I’ll find my own way home.

There are days I wish for disorder and nothing but disorder;
sirens all day, accountants leaping from skyscrapers,
Financial analysts gone feral, down on fours howling.
My adamant seclusion re-populated with mayhem.
I want that too—the energy core cracked open,
music to dissonance to chaos, if for no other reason
than I can watch the magic invisible hands
draw it all back to order again.


7a.
I am giddy as a school girl and one dictionary
shy of ecstasy when my professor comments
that I sound like I’m delivering apologetics
rather than exegesis, for I may not have a clue
what he said, I could tell it was important,
and even better, he credited me with an intelligence
I plagiarized when I quoted critics saying
they saw Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy

as a middle-road between empiricism and traditional idealism,
and as an attempt to elaborate a philosophy of ambiguity
through a kind of empiricist-idealist dialectic
which continually oscillates between those two poles,

and frankly, I could have been speaking Greek,
not just trying to re-organize his perception through deception.


7b.
In the sixth grade daddy berated my miniscule vocabulary.
How dare I not know the difference between

ophthalmologist, ophthalmic, ophthalmalgia,

and I didn’t even wear glasses!


7c.
If one cannot understand a language
without understanding a culture,
and if one cannot understand a culture
without knowing the language,
then it was cruelly pointless
how daddy mandated we possess a large vocabulary or else
we’d never amount, never clamor from working class,
to the middle class he aspired.

Didn’t he know we’d need to watch our dialect,
and syntax, need to pay attention to our phonology?
We needed the current cut of cloth, the hairstyles,
a luxurious delight in idle topics, familiarity with
the cutest boutiques in France.

Still I suppose, the first step is simply to speak.


7d.
I can’t fault Daddy his repetitive use of nouns.
He thought the world could be cut in two,
the haves and have nots,
republicans and democrats,
good and bad,
men and women,
the things to own and the things to destroy.

He could label every part of his cars engine,
yet not delineate nuances of interpersonal.

That I blame upon his limited use of verbs,
a Freudian illumination; perhaps,
of fear he’d ever be held accountable for any action.


7e.
As though there is some link between
the acquisition of language
and one’s place in the family
my brother and I practiced carefully chosen words
that we paraded out to show Daddy

God forbid one mispronounce
in front of Daddy.
It wasn’t poe-ta-toe poe-tah-toe
It was guy-necologist, gee-nacologist .

“Ah, the kitchen is delightfully odiferous”

I said, thickly sarcastic, mocking magnamanity,
Humorous only because mother was a wretched cook.

I discovered with a judicious use of

insouciance and obsequieious

that I could quit researching new words,
could finally repeat, much the same as when I perfected
the opening six bars of Moonlight Sonata
so when Daddy complained
none of his children loved music they way they should,
I’d sit, stretch my fingers, and play those six bars,
then abruptly stand, disdainfully,
as though finishing the piece were beneath me.


7f.
In my two decades away from the church
transubstantiation and redemption
have lost meaning and patina.
Rapture and salvation have become secularized
and Heaven and Hell, hold a combined geography
within my heart.

Perhaps I have learned too many jargons.
I can’t remember which role I step into, who I speak to
about past participle
or principle and par.

Language that is not shared is lost.

These eons waiting for my Other to appear,
will I lose, too, the gesturing jargon of lovers?.


7g.
I suppose this is a casual analysis—
nonetheless, this is what I believe—
when a man’s language is vague he is weak—
and uncompelling discourse indicates an apathetic society—
that the loss of communication reflects a loss of community—
and without community we no longer communicate deep truths—
that unable to communicate deep truths we lose our self
to a crisis of loneliness.

I believe that assumptions about definitions
does not create communication—
that reliance upon the exactitude of words leads to violence—
that while we speak out of what we have available,
we communicate best with our bodies and our breathe—

when I speak, I don’t want you to imagine
maybe I am communicating something important,
but clearly, no doubt, only god and I know what—

when I speak, I want to display synergy of relations,
meaning, purpose, ours.


8.
Let us make a history together.
Let us write it down on our skin
like paper with our tongues as pens.
There will be rough drafts, false starts,
and lines that won’t live up to their promise.
We’ll throw those sheets to the fire.
Let us grow a body of memory that is sweet
as wild clover, root it deep.
Hold me in your mind
like I am your last cup of good water.
I will picture you essential as air.
Let us amuse and amaze ourselves
with wonderful new stories, substantial
and fierce. Let us shelve our past
sad epics far from reach.


9.
The body holds memories of its own
and this moment has not gone unnoticed.
It is encoded somewhere deep,
your embraces retrieved in future savoring
when we are apart, or just distant.
If too fatigued to conjure your face to mind
my arms will recall you, my fingers
their soft twining in your hair.
But what of your gaze? That probing
that pierced through the constant ambivalence
of my own desires—clear to my heart
so that in your gaze I was whole.
Where will that image be stored?
In my temporal brain or in my mind
that alters meanings and memories both
to suit some whim or erratic need?
Will that gaze repeat anew for years
so that it takes permanent residence
within my heart—that subtle, irrational thing
that quietly informs my life?


10.
Fix on a point, you said,
then went below to nap.
Clouds and distance—moving into
moving away; that horizon was mutable.
Islands, peninsulas and the land mass beyond
toppled over and over each other
like a game of three-card Monte.
To the untrained eye the wind,
the way North can look like south,
no matter where I looked I was deceived
by my trust in flat surfaces while beneath us
the earth threw its own curves,
the rudder feeling meaningless.
Until the sea and land became indivisible darkness
until Light itself became destination
I was unable to find absolute markers—
neither on the horizon—nor in us.
It was too soon to consider you home
but briefly I had imagined you as a marker.

I have been thinking about this for days:
About whether the destination is the point,
or whether it’s the journey.
Maybe it isn’t even the journey,
but this leg of it, the space between two coordinates
of today and tomorrow—
if tomorrow is the next coordinate—
and whether how we will fill the space in this leg
together or not at all,
will fix the next set of coordinates…
I don’t know—I don’t know what is destination
and what journey--we double back though, don’t we?
And double-back and if I think about it hard enough
I can see you are the kid who tagged along in Junior High,
you are my roommate in Pasadena,
and there on the stoop waiting for popsicles,
hiding with me in a wheat field:
you resonate everything I have ever considered home.

(My mother once told us kids about lanterns strung
on a rope stretched from the house to the barn
although perhaps it was only the rope itself
that mattered at four a.m. in a Midwestern winter
when cows and pigs needed feeding. The gusts and gales
would not have allowed any lantern to stay lit,
but it is that fire, lit, then unlit
that I find evocative, not the humble functionality of the rope.)

You sailed us up to a spit where we sunbathed,
flicking and pinching bugs off us like cracker crumbs,
until I couldn’t take those wretched little murders,
and wandered off alone.
Ahead of me was a well gone dry decades ago,
with two fawns gazing beside it.
To keep from startling them
I kicked loose pebbles on the road,
then sat to watch; they barely shifted toward the opening
in the now wild rose bush they had stepped from.
I watched them the way I’ve begun watching you,
waiting to see if you transform
into some mood I can’t placate or handle.
Will there come some time
I’ll have to scoot away or need to freeze
like a little girl in front of headlights.
These fawns turned, oblivious
of my capacity to harm,
oblivious of my humanness.
How can they be so trusting?
Didn’t their mother teach them anything?.
Twenty yards on and the crow gets it right.
It screams intruder from the tree top
And dive bombs my head.

Even we, in such a short time
learned how quickly distrust and disillusion set in.
My dear, you have mentioned destiny too soon,
as though destiny were frivolous,
as though neither of us had learned yet
that everyplace offering itself up as home
fails in it’s promise.

When you surface, when the light is our marker,
we will weigh-in with effusive embraces, making promises
beyond what either of us could keep, ignoring
that an argument, other dreams pressing in on us,
some unplanned accident, and our handiwork of love
will be destroyed…yet for now, for this moment,
it is true, and we both feel it extend
beyond our bodies, beyond time, beyond
who we are.


11.
When I feel amorous, I curl up and say

Is spirituality spherituality?

When angry I like to yell at him

You may know my conclusions
but you know nothing of my techniques!

And when I am deep in it, I wonder
what the distress call of plants sounds like.
Then I remember that time in botany
when the microscope showed me
a pin-prick pint of a bug. I squashed it.
Its anguish jolted through the instrument, my arms,
reverberated like gunshot in my head until all I could mutter
was jesus

When my beloved irritates me, as is frequent, I tell myself

Memory is a vast continent.

If I can pull “what is” off of “what seems to be”
if I can leave the room and count to a thousand
if I can get my footing, re-center, integrate my mind and body,
then when he says something non-linear and perhaps un-related like

Newtonian insight worked well for several centuries
Though it led to unclear results when extended into new domains

if all these, then I remember
that our responses and retorts refer
to how we felt about something else,
a long time ago,
something else that overlays it’s own meaning
upon our current discomfort

such that we are both the deceivers and the deception

and frightened at the clarity
of seeing ourselves distinct, and fully estranged.


12.
“Aver Plu Anni d’un serpente.”

One has a kind of a thought about thought,
it could be philosophical: you think, therefore I am;
or grounded in one religion or another:
you think you witnessed the thinker behind the thought,
you think “Satan” made you think that!
Consider thought as a cognitive synapse dance:
is Mind a thing or a process?
Does the brain end at the brain? Is it all structure?
And if we are all one, why do I feel so fragmented?

Suppose on the day I was born
the earth did not stand still. There was no
lunar eclipse. Stars maintained their normal
collage. Clouds, lacking reverie, revealed no
Fata Morgana. Nothing was magical
about the day I was born. What music played
was adagissimo. If anyone danced it was a simple
two-step clunked in some cheap motel room
by one beer-drunk laborer and his new-in-town
country girl, neither of who cared in the least
that there was nothing angelic about me.
I was pre-conscious, pre-personality, neither
subject nor object, born in sin
into a world that knew god only by rumor, ignorant
of my mortal, death-smirched fate, unaware
that like the snake I would slough skin
each step of the way through an underworld
of neglect, my only reward to emerge
small calibrations further from home.

Our existence is nothing more than the sum of memory,
yet is it objective memory or subjective?
Are the facts factual?
On the day I was born my own mother was asleep.
My father could have been doing anything:
he could have been dead-lifting ten pound barbells.
He could have been replacing amps in his faulty
radio or bleeding brakes on the De Soto, some small
tasks he could perform without my interruptions.
My father could very well have been in that room
as well as nowhere nearby; his attention forever focused
on his own conceit. With forceps the doctor yanked
me out and a nurse towel-rubbed me from out
of one dampered world into this:

Memory version One: My mother, once revived,
that depressed frigid woman who found no pleasure
conceiving me, found even less holding me,
she begged the doctor to get rid of me.

Replay: Version Two: We are imbued
with a sense of understanding, but what is it
we imagine we understand?

On the day I was born eight hundred suicides
took place across the United States. The Roberta Martin Singers,
who I must admit, I have never heard, they were wrapping up
their recording of The Great Judgment Day at Savoy Records.
I was born during, but not at, the Harvard Law School lecture
of The Unification of the Christian Church.
One week later, and the lecture was The Cuban Revolution.
I would have liked that possible-memory better!

On the day I was born couples were marrying, panty raids
were taking place at Carolina University, the Cardinals
were playing baseball and what suffused this web of the world
was not simply suffering piled onto suffering.

At the same moment I was born
across the continent—the ocean—in England
co-joined twins were born, sharing their umbilicus,
their abdomen and pelvis. They died two days later—
but who here can not feel some envy.
Those twins spent their entire lives
lovingly held in the arms of another.

And while President Eisenhower gave his prepared toast
to the President of Ireland at the Washington National Airport,
the Pan Africanist Congress was being founded
to fight for majority rule and equal rights in South Africa.
Perhaps to be human is to exist in thought and language,
but is language just for expression,
or is it so we can evolve to better cooperate?
Does the trajectory of our lives depend on the kind of questions we ask?

On the day I was born I suppose
I should have thanked someone, but I’m not sure who it was
who stayed my mother’s hand from suffocating me with pillows,
from accidentally rolling over or just simply
abandoning me to the cold hospital basinet.
Who convinced her to at least give me the bottle
when she refused me the breast? Who persuaded her
that my awful normalcy was an adequate reason
to keep me if not cherished, than at least alive?
And who do I thank for forging in me drive enough
to seek out that thing I once thought was missing the day I was born—
so that I could end up here,
with cognition that I could eventually differentiate
into a more sympathetic world
even if one I would never fully transcend.


13.
All of my lovers are gone, and whom among them
If they were to return, would I love again?
I never learned to play guitar. This one laughed.
Never wrote the great post-modern feminist fiction which
I assure you, would have been brilliant in its analysis.
It was this one and that one distracting me, insurgents
at my unprotected borders, siphoning my creativity,
taking more than they can ever give back.

And so I’m at the bus stop reading Strand, and at his line
“the days have lost their luster. The miles I’ve gone
keep unraveling,” I realize with painful luminosity
god, even Strand has subverted my destiny.
I don’t know how, for I have never met him,
yet somehow he has managed to write
the poems of my life, the very lines I had not drawn,
all those kisses and obligations
until there were no bulwark between my thoughts and his,
and his and his. From here on out it will all be mediocrity.
Because of my own fears and desires I have lost even the last
Opportunity to grow into the greatness I was born for.
Success will elude me. Side-stepped by Prosperity and grace
in the hallways. Separation and connection.
Separation and connection. Oh god.
Who among my lovers had I ever even loved?


14.
Once one has named it, it is gone.
And yet I keep naming and renaming you,
my Beloved-Other.
You are as much man as you are my imagination.
Always one block ahead, forever reminding me
that you are almost gone—your evening shadow
closer to me than your face—how beautiful,
how evocative, like you are more my shadow,
created solely out of my unique need and meaning.

I put my world together, and as soon as you love me
you complete the idea of being joined, and the idea
becomes obsolete, and what I loved
abruptly lives in the past.

You bring me your flatulence, your filthy laundry,
your dependence, and you want me to hang
your failings on my ice-box like a treasure trove
of children’s drawings, and I say

I don’t mind this annoying text,
so long as the subtext is loving,

but I keep seeing my self in a story,
not my self separate from the story,
and I prefer you as an subject

or is it as object I prefer?

I cannot survive the disillusionment of romantic truths,
and I always reach the end of my strength,
unable to hold illusions up,
finding reality is not necessarily worth the work.


15.
It seems, more and more, love presents itself
like a condo placed on the market
before it is ready to show. I traipse around
gallons of paint, tarps, my soles sticking
to gum and tar on the thread-bare carpet
and the seller, stripping woodwork, kicks back—
knocks the ladder down from before the window
to afford a better look at the neighborhood park.
Underneath it all is a sense of marble and old-world
charm, some arches that seem architecturally sound.
Still, I struggle to envision this ever ready for move-in.
Even the bathtub is missing hardware, the wall
ripped open, because something essential is always missing.
Where do I even start with the questions—will this stay—
will that go—and lord, can we white-wash it?
I don’t even dare go over the financing because I know
I can’t afford to own this thing on my own;
I’m not sure if my partner will follow through with his half
or leave me so deep in debt I’ll starve and die.
Love’s market: sometimes a risky offer
you just might take to your own ruin,
sometimes an opportunity that slips away.


16.
If we have reached disequilibrium,
our energies charging inward, skyward,
out, and deep into the earth,
defined neither by function nor form;

if not in static equilibrium
where opposition withers,
curiosity ends,
where we might as well pack it in,
park in front of the TV with a case of beer;

if we are a vibrating exchange,
a field of waves and gravities,
tension on the brink of chaos;

then I may not need to point out
we have reached bifurcation,
a crossroads, so to speak,
where the future is wide open,
any change is possible,
even transformation
into a brighter, better compound,.
even death.


17a.
Language is maternal. We learn it
with one ear against our mother’s heart,
her milk in our mouth—
if we are fortunate—
our childhood ideal.

You would say you speak Spanish,
a language of love,
and I would declare I was dealt English,

and even though I can only understand Spanish
from an English-viewpoint

and understand your maleness
from a female perspective

and even though I speak to bond
while you to classify

our mother tongues remain rejection

and so it is no wonder we forget
we constitute a single drama,
saved or lost together,
and continue mouthing our syllable
as though they were lifeless in the air.


17b.
Once, there was you and that gave rise to me..
And once too, when you raised your voice in anger,
my words took a rougher turn,
and when you stamped your foot I slammed the door.
When you caressed my cheek, I kissed your hand.

We weren’t bound by causality, after all.
We weren’t of the same substance.

There was you,
and now there is—here—not you.
Like clouds, we distend, the distance
between us effects our vanish and banishment—
even of memories.


17c.
Somewhere between LaValle and Cordoba
it occurred to me that just as Borges had
a nearby street forbidden to his step
so had I. I was not in Borge’s Buenos Aries.
I wasn’t even in mine,
but a tourist in yours, Alejandro.

On Tucamun we drank Caffé Con Leche
and I fell in love with you.
By the next Con Leche, it was gone.
You liked too much, my dependence
upon your translations and directions.
You forgot that beyond my anxiety, beyond my poems,
something inexhaustible waits,
I do not think that it should be cruelty
nor be it acquiescence.

This is not the time for us.
I do not know if we will recur in a second cycle,
Like the numbers in a repeating fraction.
Alejandro, I believe we shall never arrive.