Perverse Pleasure

Poem
by Alice Notley
Issue no. 56 (Spring 1973)

       The havoc-caused
        soul occurs not
        recovers yet the
        treatment bought
        with submission
        fiddles and
        caricatures contains nothing but
        heal intoxication
        (courage is in-
        toxication) wide
        & embedded
        stalactite and
        fall of snow... so

He winds a sheet around me
which must be sarong & song
He asks can I protect myself
I say I'm aware of my self-
inviolability he says
he means can I grease a car
for everyone must run a race
in the body's own running place

Running's itself's pure pleasure
I begin to overtake myself
and suddenly I was first
at the end of the race
along with everyone else

For we are all in college to learn to Marry:

        the winding dragon of night
        and horses of day and humming-
        birds motes of light and the
        dragon of the night:

        in black dress will be the lady
        in a silver vest or it's black
        against which looms the lighter
        black tree loom.

   One steps
   on a rusty nail, disbelieves
   in lockjaw one thinks forever without a thought

   telephone poles & railroad tracks
   the same and the same and the
   same silver clack telephone wires the
   luminous lines of the world
                                       on which I walk

   bare feet in fog
   foggy-footed spider     See
   the spider toe-dance on its
   tender tendril legs across
   my hand shimmering mote
   with room comfort room service
   silver artifice & uprightness
   an arrow's a lily a lily's an arrow

   blank blank yellow & red blank

   ...I weep I read novels
   Someday I'll count all your freckles
   bagatelles of transient experience
   A different one always dies
   whose name seems forgotten a sacred
   thread blows away
my rags of righteousness

            are all your heroism your social charm your
            wit your victories on land
            on sea?
            Style he says is the ultimate morality
            of mind
            Stick cinnamon is 84 cents

O Turmeric
of use in mustard chow-chow piccalilli
sauces where the color the COLOR
yellow is thought desireable!
for that is life, to blaze with color.

One ignores the gossip
rounds the turn
dances & ducks & jabs
& Bites the Blade. Pleasant days.
There's a tone-free bullet
Someone cycles away

                something strums
                not tree not airplane
                not seen
                       I stop
                not entirely to pieces

                       I flow
                 in litter of sunflower seeds.

"The whole path of a material particle
between any limits of time must achieve some
perfection worthy
of the providence of God"
Everything I have has an earwig in it

which will make light of sacred things,
a genuine form being seen

                 a light and things

                                                   some kisses being exchanged
amid the whirl of the maddening dance.

Joy now is high-wire joy.

Perverse Pleasure

The Great Confinement

By Sandy Solomon 

Year of sighs, year of planning ahead—
how to acquire food or meet friends
for afternoon talks in the outdoor air.
Of planning nothing. Whole days washed clean
in the round of known rooms, known chores.

I followed forecasts to calculate when
to walk down the alley, around the block,
the same dogs barking, recycling bins
bursting with cardboard. I envied people stuck
in the country amid trees, beside a lake
that took in sky. And people, I presume,
envied us, with our covered front porch
and back garden, its sloping tangle of leaves.
We'd thrown ourselves down wherever the music
stopped, in a place we planned to stay a season
at most, until a hidden hand could hit the volume.

Year of stories—of books, recorded voices
through the night, faces on screens: familiars
holding cocktail glasses, jam jars
into view to toast . . . what precisely?
happy hours? Of meetings, of classes: click
to speak, click to mute, click to leave.

Year of household tasks. Mold that grew
because we used the kitchen so hard:
the endless sponge-down—meal after meal,
day after day. Dust that gathered
like thoughts of Somewhere Else, Another Time,
Other People. When I set two plates for dinner,
I could imagine my mother on her daily walk—
careful, stiff-hipped, alone—to the mailbox,
silence at each elbow, around her throat.
When I searched for new ways to cook kale
or tried baking bread, as oven warmth
and savory smells revised the room in stews
or casseroles, I could imagine mothers
trying to stretch their kids' milk between
food-bank trips. Year of feeling lucky.

Year of forgetting in the days' drift. Then
abruptly remembering: sadness sensed
in a jolt, the way when I opened the kitchen bin—
just emptied, just cleaned, it seemed—
a rotten smell hit me, knocked me back.

Year of sighs, year of sighs, names
of the ones gone away, their faces appearing.
For months, as afternoon light grew long,
I thought, Must call Mom. Even after.

I thought of Hélène—years ago,
when we stood, she and I, before
a painting she'd made, its colors shifting
as the oil she'd rigged behind the canvas
face shifted inside its frame,
and I thought, I like your art, your stories:
her story's end in plastic tubes,
white edges, machine thrums
and bleeps, room mostly bleached
of color against the blue hospital
gowns that hovered then disappeared,
Hélène, inside her great struggle,
the suffocating, persistent,
solitary smell of alcohol.

Year of distance upon distance. I thought
of candles in the Hall of Mirrors when, one night,
I'd walked its length after a concert—light
echoing as lights regressed from sconce
to mirror to mirror and back in Versailles, the flames'
flicker—presence, movement—enclosed in infinite
space, each candle point insisting, here,
here, smaller and smaller, left and right,
as I passed through, passed among them.
What is the point? Here is the point. What
is the point? Here. Thrilling, a privileged sight
as I moved down the Hall, as down the year,
toward the night air, the dear dead
ones receding, drifting further back,
in reflected, refracted, lovely multitudes,
and then, at the end, no point, no point at all.

Kolkata Dreaming

Missing my annual trip through Kumortuli bylanes, missing home

Perverse Pleasure

"How long will the pain last?" a broken hearted mourner asked me.

"All the rest of your Life." I have to answer truthfully.

We never quite forget.

No matter how many years pass, we remember.

The loss of a loved one is like a major operation.

Part of us is removed, and we have a scar for the rest of our lives.

As years go by, we manage.

There are things to do, people to care for,

tasks that call for full attention. 

But the pain is still there,

not far below the surface.

We see a face that looks familiar, 

hear a voice that echoes,

see a photograph in someone's album,

see a landscape that once we saw together,

and it seems as though a knife were in the wound again.

But not so painfully.. And mixed with joy, too.

Because remembering a happy time is not all sorrow,

it brings back happiness with it.

How long will the pain last?

All the rest of your life.

But the things to remember is that not only the pain will last, but the blessed memories as well.

Tears are proof of life. The more love, the more tears.

If this be true, Then how could we ever ask that the pain cease altogether.

For then the memory of love would go with it.

The pain of grief is the price we pay for love.

– Martha White

Perverse Pleasure

Cruising 99

BY GARRETT HONGO

for Lawson Fusao Inada and Alan Chong La

A Porphyry of Elements

Starting in a long swale between the Sierras

   and the Coast Range,

Starting from ancient tidepools of a Pleistocene sea,

Starting from exposed granite bedrock,

From sandstone and shale, glaciated, river-worn,

   and scuffed by wind,

Tired of the extremes of temperature,

   the weather's wantonness,

Starting from the survey of a condor's eye

Cutting circles in the sky over Tehachapi and Tejon,

Starting from lava flow and snow on Shasta,

   a head of white hair,

   a garland of tongue-shaped obsidian,

Starting from the death of the last grizzly,

The final conversion of Tulare County

   to the internal-combustion engine,

Staring from California oak and acorn,

   scrubgrass, rivermist,

   and lupine in the foothills,

From days driving through the outfield clover

   of Modesto in a borrowed Buick,

From nights drinking pitchers of dark

   in the Neon Moon Bar & Grill,

From mornings grabbing a lunchpail, work gloves,

   and a pisspot hat,

From Digger pine and Douglas fir and aspen around Placerville,

From snowmelt streams slithering into the San Joaquin,

From the deltas and levees and floods of the Sacramento,

From fall runs of shad, steelhead, and salmon,

From a gathering of sand, rock, gypsum, clay,

   limestone, water, and tar,

From a need or desire to throw your money away

   in The Big City,

From a melting of history and space in the crucible

   of an oil-stained hand—

Starting from all these, this porphyry of elements,

   this aggregate of experiences

Fused like feldspar and quartz to the azure stone

   of memory and vision,

Starting from all of these and an affectionate eye

   for straight, unending lines,

We hit this old road of Highway Ninety-Nine!

Perverse Pleasure

May 1, 2017 The New Yorker Issue
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/saturday-night-as-an-adult

 

Saturday Night as an Adult
By Anne Carson

We really want them to like us. We want it to go well. We overdress. They are narrow people, art people, offhand, linens. It is early summer, first hot weekend. We meet on the street, jumble about with kisses and are we late? They had been late, we'd half-decided to leave, now oh well. That place across the street, ever tried it? Think we went there once, looks closed, says open, well. People coming out. O.K. Inside is dark, cool, oaken. Turns out they know the owner. He beams, ushers, we sit. And realize at once two things, first, the noise is unbearable, two, neither of us knows the other well enough to say bag it. Our hearts crumble. We order food by pointing and break into two yell factions, one each side of the table. He and she both look exhausted, from (I suppose) doing art all day and then the new baby. We eat intently, as if eating were conversation. We keep passing the bread. My fish comes unboned, I weep pretending allergies. Finally someone pays the bill and we escape to the street. For some reason I was expecting snow outside. There is none. We decide not to go for ice cream and part, a little more broken. Saturday night as an adult, so this is it. We thought we'd be Nick and Nora, not their blurred friends in greatcoats. We cover our ears inside our souls. But you can't stop it that way.

Taraxacum (Dandelions)

Photo by:  PHILIPPE HUGUEN/GETTY

disappearing into nothingness

 

have you ever had the feeling that you are being torn to shreds?
that your existence may no longer be a reality- that you will cease?

there is a strange restlessness as i feel the diminishing, the daily cutting away

there is no fight left in me

only salt tears which seem lacerate as they slide down

i don't even know what i am mourning

because isn't it my deepest desire to stop being?

perhaps it is what comes after that scares me

the great unknown?

or perhaps nothing at all? 

Perverse Pleasure

Requiem w/ Eye Roll

JAY HOPLER

No minister mild of manner, moon-

    Faced over his tab collar,

    My grandfather; rather, a gambler,

An embezzler, a loan

    Shark, a con man, a womanizer

W/ booze on his breath & both feet on

    The gas of whatever

        Jalopy got left unlocked.

        He even borrowed the gun he shot

            Himself w/, the smartass.

        Of course, he conked

    In a cornfield in Winchester,

Indiana, so that joke was on

Him—. Oblivion.

How's that for a punchline?

It's not you anymore

I don't know why sometimes old obsessions fail to die
The hurt still hurts and the tears still prick the back of my eyes
As I wistfully gaze at where life has led

Across continents, datelines and a whole milieu of feelings in between

Now, that you have someone to call your own...

And I have my hand to hold 
I sometimes wonder what it was all about and what I still try to hold
It is that me that I miss
The innocence and the angst and the wide-eyedness
The blushes and the desperate hopefulness
Everything washed away in the summer rain
The pain, the pain of the stabbing words

The final cleanse that ended it all
Not just a relationship but also a phase of life

When I was happiest of all