Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space: Poems by Catherine Barnett

Author:Catherine Barnett [Barnett, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644452875
Amazon: 1644452871
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2024-05-06T17:00:00+00:00

Critique of Pure Reason

With him pressed so close beside her,

she couldn’t sleep. Perhaps it was his skin,

or the rain. It kept raining.

She lay there trying to remember

exactly how many thoughts she could have.

Was it 30,000 or 70,000? Per hour?

Or was it per minute?

She’d heard from someone

who’d heard from someone

who heard the number, whatever it was,

from an HVAC specialist.

She placed his hand back on her chest

while another fifty thoughts leaked out.

They’d both been reading César Aira,

who said that for every sentence you write

there are many implicit questions.

She was surprised to find herself still wearing

the shirt he’d pulled down from the neck

to reach the rest of her. The shirt

was like a second skin, color of her nipples.

Pale burgundy. It held her together,

kept her from flying right out of her body.

His T-shirt had a hole, a tear near the hem,

which she only later remembered noticing.

Fingering.

How many other thoughts had she had

while her body was responding like that?

She didn’t know if pleasure counted as thought,

or were they separate categories.

The smell of someone lingered.

Or was it cilantro? The insoles

of the red shoes in her bedroom?

Secondhand. They were like ballet shoes

though she was not a dancer.

The fact of the shoes elicits hundreds

or thousands of thoughts,

and if she could just keep writing

at top speed she’d be able to count them.

She can type 120 words a minute,

and let’s say a thought averages fifteen words:

she could type approximately 480 thoughts every hour.

With a pen she writes more slowly.

To whom is she writing?

Over a small glass of whiskey she’d asked

what was the most debauched he’d ever been.

“Dropping acid with a friend,” he said.

She didn’t tell him about lying on the floor

half-naked with the red ballet shoes beside her

in an apartment not far from the cathedral

the night someone drove a truck at high speed

down the crowded sidewalk.

Those shoes—those thoughts—

How quickly they move

across the 90,000 miles of neurons

packed into her head. How long

had the shoes been worn by someone else

before she wore them?

Isn’t there something morbid about that?

Or is it like taking psilocybin,

you realize everyone is connected,

the near and the far?

Even if it all ends tomorrow,

she’ll have been grateful he awakened her.

She’d come to expect a life without much pleasure

other than rain and sleep and solitude

and whatever she could make in her notebook

and in the narrow galley kitchen buffeted by cabinets

filled with glass jars and oils and a canister of propane

in case of emergency.

The overhead light has been out for years.

Why? Why can’t she climb the ladder,

unscrew the bulbs, fix the wiring?

She found him sitting quietly at the kitchen table

where she could smell the basil she’d watched

him tear into small pieces the night before:

basil and sun and man: and then she wiped

a few grains of coffee from the counter

into the other irreducible qualia of morning.

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.