JUAN GRIS AS A DARK ROSE IN JUAN GRIS

Sometimes I too feel the entity of blood caves in my flesh, the whole face a little embarassed, and darker like a heart moving towards opening discontinuity. It makes me dizzy. Black roses and fragrant tobacco leaves. French tins with writing in orange. Spaces that become deep pockets of passion; hands go into on cool disconcerting nights of gardenias, and then snap back into pattern. More a masked ball than a discipline.


When I
reached my back porch a cedar waxwing cried in the ligustrum, I thought someone was in pain and I winced. Wayne to his surprise caught it, brought it in and I teased it with whole green grapes over its open bill. It swayed like a little circus seal in a plastic man mask. It watched me warily with its deep eyes and squirmed its chinchilla and clay colored body away from my fingers. A gift from Juan Gris. There are six small vermillion feathers at the tip of each wing: matchsticks, secrets. It was an almost exact copy of the southern cardinal and yet the color made the speed of it and the mood of it entirely different. There began to be a dance with the tips of my fingers and the dark crescent mask of the bird's eyes. The waxwing is called gregarious.



Rows of corn when I was a child, a green wave as far as I could see, then golden, then stiff silver bound tight with small blue morning glories, which had seed like psalters. Paranoia. Wallpapers in a hall. The flowers were a scream of lines of pink in tickled blue. After morning they returned to snake heads but before that they opened. I circled and squatted, looking. You can see corn as dragon tongues hanging from a lance. Packs of children, very psychotic, ran into the corn to chase me. They would tear my clothes if they could, they didn't like meek well loved children, they hated the security. Once in the maze of corn I was gone. Sometimes white tongue oil blossoms with sepia centers rained down into the black rows. There were always a rush of watercolor flowers inside, blue daisy, mimosa clover, blackeyed susans. I could sit on the ridge where the roots raised the earth and the corn would wave over me like motley.




You told me Joan's Nothing Story, I understand, the lyric of little openings, egg cups my mother painted, in them you imagine for dear life

A collection of possessions, footstool, curling iron, papers, bedflounce with flat violets put into a suitcase..

"Evasiveness might well be the source of Gertrude Stein's highly stylized and reduced narrations but we can also look at her as beginning again and again . . . ."

I have never liked to look at anything distant. I liked to look close, so close that what you saw was totally alien.

William says "the authority of the poet". He doesn't like the adrenalin field, ripped and tentative excitement. He is a purist I imagine him like a gendarme arranging a field of numbers, holding wild images out. A field of black morning glories rises to attack. Geese of the florist, she let them loose in the fields. June brings in a poem with vistas in the image but then she lets it slip and it becomes strangled like plans held under a tight net. There is no need to catch her, since she is still on the earth. I think of china inlaid with grains of rice, blue bowls. Pressed into the heat like maggots the rice becomes fragrant under pressure, becomes drops of rain.



plans held under a tight net. There is no need to catch her, since she is still on the earth. I think of china inlaid with grains of rice, blue bowls. pressed into the heat like maggots the rice becomes fragrant under pressure, becomes drops of rain.


plum or apricot or almond you bring in for a jar. You can not tell at once what the pattern you can not point to where the limb will grow although it is the very pattern whereby you recognize the plant. It's done in silent calculation. This I associate with Kant. These particulars both break away and keep blooming.

I like to watch her set the table, how she takes in with oblique eyes, the color of the squash, the shape of a spoon. Soon everything decorated with triangles of watermelon.

There is no sound like the sound in the eye. So much more than sonority. Lifespace, not a cold angel bird to climb to. My hand is a pattern in which blunt ovals mean fingers, mean clutching and circling, a chamber concert of round forms. Closure and peevish meekness. Pushed really pushed away from, off, many forms of purity by over use.








Quick city made of









"Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change. It shows that there is no mistake."
Moments before I sleep when the red sand tumbles
like
dry pomegranate powder back into my eyes and then changes to giraffes and slides down my sleep and changes to crabs to castles to a close teal blue I feel in it the motion of many animals or many particles that are wild to become animals but then just slip and become again, pearls, blood drops, tentacles on a starfish. Falling with no gestures I enter, enter, enter from the red and blue never was. Schactman used to say draw the texture the way it would feel on your eyeballs. A day of time like that broken perspectives like little bits of string sewn in the eyes. A broken egg shell, a piece of blue willow paint, the atmosphere of the Gulf.
The joy not only of being an animal but of being sewn up in the broken consciousness of animals. The dog Shadow is now trained so that he rolls over both legs up in the air for the word jouissance. His legs are like the legs of Bonnard's wife, being what they are not because of what they are as objects but because of forsythia light. Frisson. Being many. Images as speeds of breakage and shuttering.




You feel joy when the light breaks up and casts itself along the lake front like tiny mirrors, fracturing but what if the dark fractured like that. When you are bitten by an animal you can not see what bites you, your eyeball breaks open into tiny glances.





Yes it is right, that jealousy is deeply involved in calling anyone tragic, it's meant to bring her to a stopping place.
She writes a poem. You get your soul back but it doesn't fit you nearly so well. It is good but he wonders why she quit writing.

He gives a writing assignment. He asks that we start with joy in the poem and then end in sorrow. Or go the other way. But I can not do it. The hints and shades of one in the other won't iron out. When I perform surgery I am left with limp garments. The way things move is more for me. "The change of colors is likely and a difference, a very little difference is prepared."

I could pleat a wall like a dress or make
it into a fan
with gardenias. In Cuba when I was fourteen a young man fell in love with me, Ochoa was his name, a very, pretty name I could feel his heart risen in his neck and yet his
face was composed. I supposed he was giving his passion over to his body. Behind him the walls were marmalade bougainvillea. This warm aqua center, this counter hell of passionate orange. His feet were like small black roaches it seemed they would fold out wings, and fly off the decorated tiles. The passion I felt was not for him but for the machine set in the dark for what was going to happen.

Honor Johnson