Acid Virga by Gabriel Kruis

Author:Gabriel Kruis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

REGRESSION

“Cold winds blowing

And life looks like some malignant disease,

Viewed from the heights of reason

Which I don’t believe in,”

Bernadette Mayer

“You murmur your magic (what help is the past?):”

Lorine Niedecker

LIKE LIFE

After Visiting “Like Life: Sculpture, Color,

& the Body (1300 - Now)”

On the other side of the curtains

that divide up the rooms, indistinct,

if only briefly, the silhouettes

of statues & patrons seem to blend—

as if both were made of marble,

as I must’ve seemed to them.

Like the painting of the saint

praying to a statue of a saint:

reverential, silent, they face

one another, and the material

so slight between us, a breath

or the barest gesture, disturbs

the air. They seem almost stalled

here, never having known death,

yet lingering too close to life—

as if there were a sympathetic

magic in the materials used.

A slight blush, an animating

glamour in the slush wax flesh

of the anonymous, anatomical

venus; in the gold-leaf & velvet

queen. A song as much in Salome’s

demoniac eyes of shell & amber,

as in the écorché of the day-

laborer’s life-size red frame

of papier-mâché & painted plaster.

And how often through wealth

& ease, & how often through need—

or whatever was ready-to-hand—

seemed legible not in craft or lack

thereof, but in this more elemental

grammar. I must have been still

under that same spell as I paid

for The Autobiography of Alice

B. Toklas at the outdoor bookstore

on the corner of the park after close.

I must’ve needed to see your face,

because there you were, two years

gone this September, standing a

few tables off, in the figure

of a stranger,

REGRESSION

fall

for Carolyn (1990-2016)

“Relinquishment,”

At least that’s what they say,

When the haggling’s done, the act of opening

the hand, But if it ever truly ends,

in between are phases the experts

will never recognize, Interleaved with disbelief

and fury, delirium, glossolalia,

hysterical nostalgia, etc.

Or the stage in which one eats too much

Xanax, gummy bears, and caviar

from the bodega around the corner, “takes a nap”

facedown, listening to the neighbor’s

old soul records

filtered through the floorboards,

As for me, I keep attempting

rational sentiments despite myself, Cold comfort,

an architecture of tics in rhetoric,

Like, “It’s no good hoping for accuracy

from the flowcharts that mark grief’s progression,”

“The swamp after all is not the map,”

And, “And yet, one longs for an argument

nonetheless, The ‘In which’

in which the plot is laid bare,

as in Paradise Lost or other

arcane texts,”

What comes next,

Savoring almost nothing

before grief resurges, what remains is the tension

of the chiastic structure

and its spillage, As if it were an accident,

when describing the origins of good and evil,

that a hero was made of the fallen one,

How “elegiac” rolls off the tongue

with an unacknowledged hush at the beauty

of others’ sorrow, The Devil in the details,

or the accumulation of velleities

so many I know and love

would ascribe to God’s catastrophic hand,

Over coffee in L.A.,

having dreamed away the night beside each other

as chaste as brother and sister,

you said you felt the opposite when I tried to recall

the taxonomy of mediocre poets

possessed by evil spirits, How the Devil guides

the worst poets’ pens, Angels,

the best, etc., But I never had the chance to ask you

what you thought the difference was,

Like me, you were appalled by angels

you didn’t believe in, yet still knew what it meant

to be brushed by the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.