First, I must make a confession. When I first read Donna de le Perrière’s TRUE CRIME I went into a jealous rage. We were both writing about trauma and true crime, although Donna wasn’t fixated formally. She had fluency and variety as she reworked the subject in each piece, and I needed to be opened up. She gave me permission, as they say. Or I thought she did. Either way there was no crime. We had shared interests—oblique forms of repetition— narratives that depended on the holes in them. I simply borrowed the images or phrases from her work and bent them around, punctured them, spilled paint, and held them up to a lit window. There was plenty of loss, plenty of trauma some quotidian some hard to size. Donna’s subject can be refracted through displacements, parts for wholes, unfinished projections. I wanted that. And the ludic elegance. If I couldn’t have elegance, would I put it all in a file and I put the file cabinet under cement. Until Aspasiology approached me. This series is for her. It includes lines of hers from work in this issue. I include bits from TRUE CRIME as well as a journal I was keeping when I first read it. I think of that book and these collages with their shifty, broken-nosed tones both as poetry of detection.
DISSOCATIATED INVESTIGATIONS
(for D de la P)
Wine to the forehead, trauma and crime
What peaks
Or what hums behind the foam in your eyes?
Silence ghosts the fumes of the surface
and below it one night one night
you all along, and above it all
precinct Space Boy blood type Oblivion
you all alone cleaned the hallways
while the river smothered its bed
Metaphors speed up and mingle
to clarify the unraveling hollows
of the room
The bed is just furniture with crickets in the foreground,
telling who you are, telling who you’ll tell
prompts, Donna, prompts, lend us your tears
all I’ve got is the tape hiss
and a cursed protagonist
“No, blessed backward” says the ingénue.
Except the photograph shows her
screaming, and the tape shows
how we never have slept, how we simply can’t sleep,
how we can never stop sleeping.
How we open another just this once
Let’s open the other as a way of saying no
No, let us just this once star, stir
What we could have been had we not been
found stuffed with bodies
* *
That’s just the case as it came to us. We don’t write the reports. You will write
the report.
You will write it with flashlights on fish-skins you find drying in the park. You will
write everything in flashlight meticulously and then you will forget it. Off hours.
Darkness will be your alibi.
In the morning, you will write about a shadow two floors up that never had
breakfast or how the box got left out over night on the step or how a woman two
floors up having no box went to see a man two floors down about a box who told
her straight-up he didn’t have one. All he was certain about was “Tigers do not
burn bright.”
Write this--
Vigilance incites noise--
Sight was just a flaw in the music. The rest was starlings crashing against the
horizon and what the aura cordons off.
* *
You speak of the body parsing light as it deteriorates into nothing
I speak of a part or cell out past the islands
Not where, how it was I remembered how to smile
Space mutinies mimesis
The ingénue tells us context reveals no known interactions
Not a part nor a cell nor part of a cell, big rooms excluded
A simple matter of finding the verb for
of each
into the other
with what was done
A verb that conveys dreaming as a form of flight
in which we become willing to pay for storage
when we are written into the escaping surface
and through with writhing through
up against it especially a bright floor
but what has passed through
corrects the reflection
heat broken into pools
sharp orbits of affect and after image
until the mirror is a fluid lightly suffused
with what passes these days for occasion
* *
Shiva the diva of Oakland tamer of obelisks,
numb from the ghost up
Dreams of being a book, superfluous
to any level of substitutions,
displacements, gaps
“that within you that surpasses show”
containing only what’s missing from the other books
Excluding the melodrama of the concrete
especially the scene
What the body has always resisted.
Even cats
And fog.
“Against the refusal of the world to respond to its scandal—“
she wrote— “a failure to differentiate”
That’s just the case as it came to us. We don’t
Write the reports. Sometimes we just say things.
* *
All we had to do was get the body to its numb state
We had only inhalation for a head.
Police yelled disperse and we fogged up
Let me start again
Another lion in the continuous
Headless roaming, serial arrangements
Mother hovering, fog of police
Let’s start with what the stunt man said to the woman boxer
“Serves me right to shuffle.”
“Police”
Fog dispersed over the city
Before sinking into the stitches and seams
She was making short building from thread
Stretching fabrics into vapors, towers that disperse
* *
Forehead to the moon so many times sworn off
Still agreeing to the case
“My wife left me over and over just so I could write with such sensitivity,” wrote a
poet of the incident.
He gave the same answer as the last interview when asked how he does it.
“The sputter becomes a spot, a pop in the image you reach beneath. Grab the
sound of it by the neck, crack it like an egg and let flies buzz out. People love
you.”
The island had been an invention and he had invented a system of signals on the
island that when replicated conveyed no one talking either way--
The place was filled with white-enamel appliances
There was no other way out
Downhill what had been soil was music from broken propellers,
tiny stars
Uphill favored no outcome
but stares
Grandmother’s deerskin gloves
Worn white in the area around the knuckles
Sometimes I do remember holding the railing
Patent leather. Tires, inflated
Now depthless space— after several minutes of anything physical
It becomes vaguely beautiful. Gum comes right off shoes.
Smile, pedestrians.
DISSOCATIATED INVESTIGATIONS
(for D de la P)
Wine to the forehead, trauma and crime
What peaks
Or what hums behind the foam in your eyes?
Silence ghosts the fumes of the surface
and below it one night one night
you all along, and above it all
precinct Space Boy blood type Oblivion
you all alone cleaned the hallways
while the river smothered its bed
Metaphors speed up and mingle
to clarify the unraveling hollows
of the room
The bed is just furniture with crickets in the foreground,
telling who you are, telling who you’ll tell
prompts, Donna, prompts, lend us your tears
all I’ve got is the tape hiss
and a cursed protagonist
“No, blessed backward” says the ingénue.
Except the photograph shows her
screaming, and the tape shows
how we never have slept, how we simply can’t sleep,
how we can never stop sleeping.
How we open another just this once
Let’s open the other as a way of saying no
No, let us just this once star, stir
What we could have been had we not been
found stuffed with bodies
* *
That’s just the case as it came to us. We don’t write the reports. You will write
the report.
You will write it with flashlights on fish-skins you find drying in the park. You will
write everything in flashlight meticulously and then you will forget it. Off hours.
Darkness will be your alibi.
In the morning, you will write about a shadow two floors up that never had
breakfast or how the box got left out over night on the step or how a woman two
floors up having no box went to see a man two floors down about a box who told
her straight-up he didn’t have one. All he was certain about was “Tigers do not
burn bright.”
Write this--
Vigilance incites noise--
Sight was just a flaw in the music. The rest was starlings crashing against the
horizon and what the aura cordons off.
* *
You speak of the body parsing light as it deteriorates into nothing
I speak of a part or cell out past the islands
Not where, how it was I remembered how to smile
Space mutinies mimesis
The ingénue tells us context reveals no known interactions
Not a part nor a cell nor part of a cell, big rooms excluded
A simple matter of finding the verb for
of each
into the other
with what was done
A verb that conveys dreaming as a form of flight
in which we become willing to pay for storage
when we are written into the escaping surface
and through with writhing through
up against it especially a bright floor
but what has passed through
corrects the reflection
heat broken into pools
sharp orbits of affect and after image
until the mirror is a fluid lightly suffused
with what passes these days for occasion
* *
Shiva the diva of Oakland tamer of obelisks,
numb from the ghost up
Dreams of being a book, superfluous
to any level of substitutions,
displacements, gaps
“that within you that surpasses show”
containing only what’s missing from the other books
Excluding the melodrama of the concrete
especially the scene
What the body has always resisted.
Even cats
And fog.
“Against the refusal of the world to respond to its scandal—“
she wrote— “a failure to differentiate”
That’s just the case as it came to us. We don’t
Write the reports. Sometimes we just say things.
* *
All we had to do was get the body to its numb state
We had only inhalation for a head.
Police yelled disperse and we fogged up
Let me start again
Another lion in the continuous
Headless roaming, serial arrangements
Mother hovering, fog of police
Let’s start with what the stunt man said to the woman boxer
“Serves me right to shuffle.”
“Police”
Fog dispersed over the city
Before sinking into the stitches and seams
She was making short building from thread
Stretching fabrics into vapors, towers that disperse
* *
Forehead to the moon so many times sworn off
Still agreeing to the case
“My wife left me over and over just so I could write with such sensitivity,” wrote a
poet of the incident.
He gave the same answer as the last interview when asked how he does it.
“The sputter becomes a spot, a pop in the image you reach beneath. Grab the
sound of it by the neck, crack it like an egg and let flies buzz out. People love
you.”
The island had been an invention and he had invented a system of signals on the
island that when replicated conveyed no one talking either way--
The place was filled with white-enamel appliances
There was no other way out
Downhill what had been soil was music from broken propellers,
tiny stars
Uphill favored no outcome
but stares
Grandmother’s deerskin gloves
Worn white in the area around the knuckles
Sometimes I do remember holding the railing
Patent leather. Tires, inflated
Now depthless space— after several minutes of anything physical
It becomes vaguely beautiful. Gum comes right off shoes.
Smile, pedestrians.