Issue 1: Geoff Gilbert

Schrifte an den Dritten

Escaping a rational tradition

I stepped outside to think,

to smoke, and to denounce:

There we were, me and my shadowy pre-cursor,

divided just by time into my solitude with him.

I want to smoke and the error smokes me.

In that body pressing at my back, I find it:

the smoking gun where the outline will be painted

white as a further error. I thought out of my

belly which caused me just to feel and then

was not my belly. Dance between

attraction and desire; do not fall on

those difficult Viennese steps.

Consider good and bad as things that mean

there in the body, as you dance,

between attraction and desire. All

those bad things in the stumbling blocks, while

the desire pushes on,

and we give rise, hard up and on, a smoking

spinach, painted round in white.

How are they born, giving way?

becoming the good of morality, and

failing and falling, not there against nature

but burgeoning ripe. I want to know

what you can do. And then I dart away to wonder

why that man is having so much fun, the fun

of god in man, of god with man, sending swans

to slaves and sending, always sending down

through the smoke I make as I soar away.

Don’t stop me doing what I can do, for

you would like this, really, Orson Welles

emerging from the shadow between attraction and desire

where we have left our life. Those sad Ottoman passions,

my feet trailing on the floor as the music in my mind

just races on. Let me tune that binary piano and then

I’ll waltz that drag of a body up towards

the fundamental problems. Here is the shape it takes

if you would let me be, or better do.

Adam Smith doesn’t know what a body can do,

though Henry Ford has carefully taken us through

several examples. What a body can do

in freedom does not grow the common stock, where

our concentration is rich, where we are caught

and browned by the spectator. It’s toast to

our shared soup, I think, and that, not Nietzsche’s, is

the new image of thought. Fingers are fingers is truth,

if you touch me with them, or take the question up

on my piano. Dance, fingers, but don’t go down that alley;

don’t think you’d want to pay that much for truth,

you have better things to do, go out to smoke

and ease away from her bad faith, touched in the water,

and after that immersion

just fooling us all.

I would let them.

I like that, but don’t ask me to want it.

Which one, vital, shall I can it do, what?

I just leaped

like a salmon, needing something. Not like

you need a spirit to walk out of a lived-in thing,

but like you need to learn to smoke,

as Frank O’Hara says and Orson Welles just shows us,

or like you need to learn to dance away from

being sad. Being sad is not something

the body can do. Let me come down

with you to us, to the politics where being sad is not

something the body can do. I have learned to weep

in the time it took to paint around the body with a line,

and my head is drooped over you, down with you, for

I have been surprised again by joy, and

I will have to step outside to think

and smoke over the Deleuzean century.

I will eat my fill if you can tell me what my shape is.

Don’t send down another of your swans; don’t ask me to

take on more of all that nature that you say I have. I would

love to be more me, but not just for today. All of this feeling

is calling for a box to get in, out back with the body,

thinking sad that knowing is a what I can do.

Notely

dollar at him, why bother too few oaths

of the season, fragile key.

Previous to the wallet, merchandise had made me

a nest, made from the slash, the suntext,

guardian rathead, dark poison do you know?

Buy my poison dead on a mattress,

more loss. Your name is a reduction

an abacus had; there are wings, there is a float,

I must have known. I alight through your soul,

softness, my health his hibiscus, I am only pollen,

only your wings a human event, no outroads.

Pollen without white hair comes apart,

pollen too, coming apart. Ruthless flower oil

need more, he left her pods, squirrel hawks and

these things don’t you dare. Luminous white

to pale new organs. You are the death

I see not me, the ruthless flower as possible,

dirt roads, sunflower, my childhood on my own

turns in the shadows where I breathe angels.

Carve green hills, don’t care, the hospital, because

her soul could not leave the man in the bed with mine.

You were fair. I could not hear the register. Who

no more poetry, the abacus had, this land old owl

your poet. Its needless search for the soul can

leave me alone faint. My relations would not

become one of them. Their loss would live.

Door calling outside in, far away, defective door:

‘Where did you lie, pine? high bed soul’? Where life

old function forgotten blind, he was moneyless ward,

old poet. Your wrong genes, wrapped up pollen

with Jack Davie, cold in his arms you know. You’ll make

heavens. Who serve needles barren wrapped. Gazing motion

the abacus had. I see movement, had not walked. Baby

pine shoes, shameless lie. Made the words

pretty, want it, forsake the tree.

Geoff Gilbert teaches in the department of Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris.

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