With My Back to the World, 1997
This year I turned my back to the world. I let language face
the front. The parting felt like a death. The first person ran away like a horse. When the first person left, there was no
second or third person as I had originally thought. All that remained was repetition. And blue things. This year I stopped shaking the rain off of umbrellas and nothing bad happened.
The terror of this year was emptiness. But I learned that it’s
possible for a sentence to have no words. That the meaning of a word can exist without the word. That life can still occur
without a mind. That emptiness still swarms without the world. That it can be disconnected from the wall and still
light up. The best thing about emptiness is if you close your eyes in a field, you’ll open your eyes in a field.
On a Clear Day, 1973
Song, 1962
Even though I could multiply 48 by 8 to get 384 rectangles, I still counted them one by one. The first time, I counted 383, the second time 386, the third time and all the times after, I couldn’t count past my age. Once in a museum, with my face an inch from Modigliani’s portrait of Beatrice Hastings, a man ran up to me so fast, I only remember the way his hair smelled like incense. Stay one foot away please, he said. He was breathing so hard that I thought he knew that I had wanted to die just that morning. And that his hand touching my arm was meant to keep me from jumping off the balcony. When he left, I looked at the painting with the elongated thin nose, the distorted almond eyes, the orange-red cheeks and saw my own face, in fragments, on a pavement, looking up at the sky. And then it rained all the rumors off my face. And then the wind blew everything but my expression away.
Untitled #3, 1994
Our souls walked ahead of us as we passed Calder mobiles and twisted metal by Picasso. I couldn’t tell if the lights in the ceiling
were shining on us or the paintings. Agnes’s painting wasn’t on view. We had wandered the whole museum trying to find it. By
the time we found the area, we had divested ourselves so we were nothing but our desire. Depression is like this, how we
wander while trying to locate it but how the wandering itself is depression. When we finally found the room, a velvet rope
kept us from entering. I stood behind the rope and felt the melancholy of the room come out to greet my melancholy. I
was tempted to take its crudeness and divide it into rectangles. But the attendant told me that I needed to keep my depression
separate from the room’s depression. I realized that I needed to return on a day when I too could rope off my sadness.
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