Going back will not save you, it’s a rope around your neck, from your point of view the rope helps you remain whole but I see the strangulation marks. It will kill you. It will keep you on the verge of profanity. Grief is an echo chamber, silent and screaming I know you want to hold this body, unclean, unwashed, its hands artifacts of heresy but even the feet of Christ had to be washed sooner or later. To reach for this thing, this screen of a body you will have to fall in the pit with it or you can come back to the surface, not unscathed but not destroyed.
I’m sorry I have to pick Jennifer’s body ! No matter how long it’s been I just can never forget the camp of it, the allure of sex only a bear trap, desire sticky and red swarming with flies. A coming of ®age, becoming hunger ect ect
I do talk about this simultaneity in a variety of poems within the collection. In the poem “Buffalograss,” I talk about the Diné word for eye hardening into the word for war. I learned this from my father after he was talking with me about the word anaa’ and how it can be translated into eye or war. He said your eye becomes a shield against the evils that we see in our lives. I then asked the question about desire and imagined a speaker seeing a man naked for the first time. Is his eye-shield protecting him from this? What about this desire turns into war? What needs saving in this situation? The energies of war and desire swirl around this speaker and this man. The poem being in couplets only thickens this tension within this moment. This moment where desire can turn into destruction so easily because men desiring men is seen as evil, as wrong.
I wanted to find ways to talk about brutality and beauty not as binaries but as energies that surround everyone. Masculinity is such an interesting energy to dissect because it has the dead weight of violence chained to it. I think the poems use energies that exist within the land to match the energies of masculinity: beauty and brutality, body and land, boyhood and manhood. They also use the body as a way to negotiate desire, pleasure, aggression, and intimacy. Again, it came back down to storytelling. I needed a way to tell the story of this place and the spaces I inhabit daily. I realized during manuscript creation that the fields where I went to learn desire are the same fields where men often lost their lives.
we lay each other down in the burr and sage bottles jangle us awake cirrhosis moon for eye memories cough our young fists up trying to set ourselves on fire dressing ourselves in black smoke just as our cousins did one by one after the other rising pure blue in June let drunktown rake up the letters in their names lost to bone let horses graze where remains are found and you kiss me to shut me up my skin bruise dark in the deep come morning the leaves will replace themselves with meadowlarks names shiver in the bottle jangle still cockshut in larkspur you will see your cousin and uncle lying next to you every time I blink we become ghosts bottle-dark and white-eyed among the grasses horses probably still there
What’s left behind of the field reminds me of this body. A wounded horse which must suffer in order to live. Rubble fresh and set apart from the disaster. The body is fighting with the spirit inside it. What would the flesh say? Nothing, it says. It says nothing. Now I touch its skin, the cream of being alive, in decorum, after three lives four countries in nine decades. The present and the present against what comes next. Sweetly or briefly, the impressive cruelty.
“Stop fearing and worrying and fussing. Feast on the flesh that only you can eat, that you will eat. They want us to fear death so much, but we can inhabit it like vermin [says Land], it can be our space … we can knot ourselves into the underworld, communicate through it, cook their heavenly city in our plague.”
You are evil. A diseased missionary, you want the world to hear what you say, take your words as truth, all the while infecting it with what you are, with what you are really like. That is what is actually published – to the universe. Sorry. It is that simple. Flattering yourself with scientistic wonder that we – whoever that is – are star dust while your invisible life spreads everywhere its subtle slime. Nothing but you are at the centre and the periphery of the cosmic malignity. Will you at least have the decency to stop hiding the horror of yourself? (Behind critique, behind the object, behind hyperchaos, behind immanence, behind becoming, behind difference, behind the real, behind whatever.) Will you come out into the open?
Nicola Masciandaro, “Absolute Secrecy: On the Infinity of Individuation”
