Norasror

As she recedes, living still,

first lung, now liver,

I am turning to

“The everlasting eyes of Pierrot

And, of Gargantua, the laughter”

               her
laugh

Ohio Gothic, bass

swoons, a booming of merriment,

     we lay in the dawn
road pickled

while others dropped salt into our mouth.

To wake and to think only of the wine to come,

the wine of the work of drawing,

to need only this wine, to live

in near obscurity, happy

within the frame of imagination, this word

we mob,

it is our only refuge.



                                                [7
October, 1994]

     the wake an elegy
stirs… something to be listened to.

     I find you everywhere,
mainly as voice echo,

     I think of you, then
hear you before I see

     entoptically a blur of
your face…

the unheard voice then resilences. The silence

opens out, chimes of Habilis, Erectus…

     the wake of elegy,
dirty churn of what

               the
voyage rejected,

standing at the stern of what life might be,

it keeps you pinned in me, as I pine,

semi-conscious unplugging of a bathtub

in which the water used doesn’t want to leave …

Most just, I guess, to find you

in the flux of realization and grief.

As ash, you are a complete whatever,

and it is hard to comprehend that anti-force.

I string it on my feeling for you

to go overboard with you,

to honor your rich void.

I am gaining this word by word,

for the loss is at odds

with something curdled in praise.

The grand “So What” flicks by,

at Miles Davis with my need to bulge an

absence/ presence.

Sadness once meant “solidity,”

“steadfastness in faith,”

but nothing will support my sadness this week,

               a
wandering distraction, as if

Nora’s death were a jellyfish box

     adrift in my
atmosphere.

Death has four sets of eyes, no brain,

one set for each side of what we call direction.

Death’s mouth is over its eyes…

     my sadness is
layered, pillow-like, or tarps

          with
pillows pressed between,

     moistened but not
drenched, stranded

               adrift…
as all senses of her

cancel, recompose,

               “Procession of the Quick”

The upward piling impulse of eternity. Cloud-like,
rock-like, forms, jostling

against — here it comes again — absolute absence.

A leg, thigh and calf, bent, lower left hand
corner, gets me interested in the

physicality, the eros? of the painting, now I spot a
male back lunging up-

ward, whose head disappears in a kind of window of
winter trees. His right

arm droops, leading me to a woman — it’s Nora
herself! — eyeballs rolled up,

hair stark black and funnel-like swooping up into
the upper right corner.

The work now looks draped, an upward piling,
weighted, with loose, body-

like forms, detonated below, into floating, bumping,
somewhat phallic blocks

— on which the rest of the painting “stands” — it
doesn’t really stand, it

wobbles, tectonic, as if on plates? (suddenly the
buttocks of the upward

lunging male look like an amazed lion!)

The form argues, wrestles with, the punctilio of
human desire salted, as

ground, for a realization of the form to grind
against. Nora Jaffe depicts

herself under a roving, blank cloak of men, as they
surge around, across,

and over her. The procession of the quick, being
overwhelmed, as the quick

(and the dead?) pile into paradise, over the body of
the painter —

Cocks abound, but as often in Jaffe they are
syntactical eels, the patriarchal

thrashing in the net of an imagination that instead
of practicing political

correctness prefers, demands, the re-leasing of the
obsession. Coils of rape

are here bounded but not dismissed —

     the
out-of-in-balance of the painting amazes me. I’m
stuck

     with the use of the
female (Nora) body overlayed by blankets

     (lacunae) of
quasi-phallics. Now I lay me down to sleep.

     The garment of the
world: stitched peni. O

mother: where? As the garment out of which the cocks
are stitched.

O father: why? Isn’t it wonderful how semi-abstract,

charged and essentially formal works dump our psyche

upward? My father made me a blanket out of my
mother, ay!

then withdrew it, leaving me with my first tooth!

oh! and it is around this tooth that I have weaved
my poems,

weave, woven, sploven… the spindle bursts,

yet a King now appears at the crest of “Procession of the Quick”

— the winter landscape is his crown,

his body that of the lunging man,

willynilly covering the now double female body

(two heads, Nora’s and what I took to be another
man’s)

and he is kind of dancing, as he fucks,

lifting a Subcommandante Marcos leg, as an insult to

all fashion, as a shark form noses in…

But why two women? Why both at once?

We are in orgy at every moment (too many unused
parts)







         
This sadness is without edge

or forcep, it is weighted with total absence,

which is the difference

between Nora’s ashes, and Nora, it can be

     weighed in mind, it is
fractal

and thus not without contour,

it is the toothed heart of a black hole,

what the star feels in its inexhaustible
extinction…

Sadness, then, is a protection,

                         a
kind of Covering Harem,

it is sweet, as “The Wild Rose” in Budapest is
sweet,

nostalgia mired in cool fat, a piano player

whose elderly foetal head, with stuff oozing onto
the keyboard,

smiled at us, the eaters,

                         jellyfish
box abob…

     Our
friendship was blessed with an erotic lining.

     My eyes turned off
before Nora’s art

     and something else
turned on —

     a glade would appear,
compact male flesh

reorganized, penis shifted to armpit,

thigh used three ways, as stalagmite, Long Island,
floe,

libido frozen, on the trail of her hand

finding its way through a Black Forest of male

     joy and imposition.

               Seeing
the extent to which

she had imagined her masculine-fraught destiny,

I knew male force was grasped, and that she was
free

— for a moment. We can deal with nearly anything

— for a moment. In miniscule time,

a stroke, or an image, is paradise,

darkness a chrysalis of unharvested stars.

She had reorganized the male tentacles

and glimpsed what Bosch envisioned

— while she smoked.

In her breath, steel doors began to rot.

          She
hurt herself

as who does not who has glimpsed the other as

“Dear Fellow Particle?”

It is very transpersonal, never private,

how the pylon figures of our lives

rub open scars and palpitate the antique

     feeling under,

another flesh, which the pylon detects.

Nora is Egyptian,

a gorgeous baboon

in whose slender figure my language

is hived.

     To learn to love
your death.

     Is this not the
requirement? not to love death,

     but to love you in
death,

     to learn
nourishment from your absence.

Dear now ancestral spirit, you feed me

as do the spirits of poets dead but for the
page,

or frame, of chaos, white

for these ant legions.

Is it not the chosen dead blowing

energy into these lines? Yes, I have good
energy,

but it is nothing compared to

Nora as ash, the microscopic gale

     in the thought of
her,

billowing, these dead who make life-in-image
possible,

we all work at a single world poem,

     a hybrid exchange,

I become pregnant with Nora’s soul,

I swell at night, cannot rest, I sleep

          but
do not rest…

how beautifully herbs break in, fumes and

     filterings, by
which her presence is

swarming, micron by micron, with the jest of
absence,

          like
tiny wine flies…

Nora’s spell, terrible to be a speck in this
exchange.

As she rises, or seems to hold,

while rising, the anaconda

tree trunk, writhe,

rise, it is the sound of whiteness,

as she pulleys up, her right

hand spider-walks the trunk,

making a lingam: combined

arm hand trunk,

                         as
she rises

in place, out of the fern

white, her rising is

white infested,

                         mascara

no pupils

(work this also in:

work her hood in, her head

held to the tree, to

anaconda white

speckled

bark,

          the
phallus was

what she could put inside her of

the tree, up inside her

the bandaged

anaconda, I under-

stand now,

               it
was the trunk

she loved, the sap

in its bark helmet, the serpentine.

………………………