Caroline Crumpacker

 

 

February 14: Valentine's Day and Blizzard-like Conditions

           Link to Weather Underground

 

What fathoms of ice are there           unspoken       endangered:

 the quiet of the hiding places spreads out      into      change mechanisms.

What strange occluded landscape this         interrogative imagines for us:

 the variable diverted into constancy and the constant unforeseen.

 

That white expanse is in your head:  that meeting of the minds is a primordial smudge.

You, who would envelope the mountaintop, redouble yourself a moment.

 Remain within the confines    of pleasure if you will (and you will).

You, who would touch all that is involved in this equation: split off a moment:

 clamber out of the multitude briefly   apologetic     for your delirious one-ness

     and then scamper back in.

In the mountainside, an illusion of silence.   In the silence a scream at the point

 where tonal unity propels formation.

 

Take support where the inference is supple. Earth community a small sign on the train route.

I prefer the TGV's brutal vivesection of landscape. High-minded vixens of cosmology: it is

impossible when the variable is this degree of unknown. What degree? The enth.

 

The rate of expansion is related to the dimming of the light by what amount –

that in which the factors rest is not closer to known than the giving up of power

 the giving up of power to love          the giving up of power to Con Edison

the giving up of power to the dream of the long cool landscape      the various backyards we

have thrown into our bodies.

 

Chalky candy heart universally loved and detested. The bag of cards from school a minor

trauma. What a dormancy this planetary filter. The illusion of activity. "Lake-effect" snow is

not precipitation. The neatly chambered seasons climb out of their vast network of formation

and stumble off as minor characters. I will climb into a volcano, love, and from there the full

moon will fill me with lesser gravity.

 

You who would beat up the skyline of human romance.

The vehicular anti-taxonomy.

The congruence       of quantum physics     and children

with heart-shaped      envelopes         trotting out the ceremony.

That white tablet of hunger.

That filthy faded sky.

That ice.

That ridiculous lunar landscape outside and its vague awareness of barbarism at the edges.

As if reaching for the telephone and introducing oneself to gravity. As if receiving that email

from the interloper you had hoped would remain anonymous. As if the melting down. As if

the static vibrations. As if the many brainwaves. As if the dark energy. As if the brain's

reliable old filters. As if the microorganisms and the anti-bacterial scrub. As if the boyfriend.

As if the children. As if the typing away. As if the country didn't. As if the rising tide. As if

be mine were an answer to all the falsehoods and all the screening and all the ravishment, and

were welcomed largely as such.

****

1. The Parliament of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer is perhaps the first St. Valentine's Day poem ever written:

 

A gardyn saw I, ful of blosmy bowes

Upon a ryver, in a grene mede,

There as swetnesse everemore inow is,

With floures whyte, blewe, yelwe, and rede,

And colde welle-stremes, nothyng dede,

That swymmen ful of smale fishes lighte,

With fynnes rede and skales sylver bryghte.

 

March 16: Endless Seductress Resources: Late Blizzard in Northeast

 

Endless Chalky Vista.

Almost feral where wild looses consequence:

 

The catastrophe threshold needs an update. Matter enters matter and transforms it

briefly.

 

Small acts of thievery and     bourgoise pleasure     a small barbeque at the foot of the river

amuses the attendants.

 

We are guests of nature.

 

The glittering remix of detritus into objet is a kind of downward mobility that critics love,

hungry for dystopias to exalt. The call-and-response gesture of the birds wavers on the

bandwidth.

 

The season's largest snowstorm is not in season.

 

Equinox two feet under:         Behave.

 

Behavior was heir apparent to God    but we could not commit to it.

 

We prefer to host     than to enter the conversation as a guest.

 

Snow white was born as a drop of blood on a field of snow. Rose red was the sky and the sun.

One was a devoted wife. The other ravished.

 

Narayana, blue as the earth.

 

When lying down, the female form extends   itself   .          Madame De Chatelet undressed

in front of her valets, as they were not, to her, men.

 

Spring is a formality undone by this renegade snowstorm.  The day a rage of snow, an echo

of our summer air-conditioning: if you want me, come and get me. Naked before the

mechanism.

 

If we will not behave, it will behave us.

 

 

January 6: The Un-Fashioning (60 degrees)

 

Opening arguments    a predicate for         dissolution

into full conversion disorder               a freezing of the global face a humor

fallen flat.

 

Congealed grease on the hot tins of    chicken remind me of something

I have been meaning to avoid            a pointless attracted island of malaise.

 

The lichen are out, the crocuses,        to everything an early death.

The phone rings         staccato           and we break apart.

Affiliation is over-      appreciated       as a mechanism.

 

I come into the office           distanced          from the action        and yet.

 

What we need is a deep freeze.

 

Death is coming in all wrong.

What we need is        a new way of   understanding our cyclical relations.

 

Abandonment seems worse   but it isn't.

Use it up or wear it out         find a new way or go without.

 

I come into the office            enamoured     of its redundancy:

    the routines themselves          devour.

 

It is 60 degrees out in January:          Her arm is swollen from a tick bite.

The balance is always shifting             but now the shifting is shifting.

Toward a blue            morass:            you, reader, are there too.     In my journals. Besieged.

 

The maladroit            reportage          of this rapacious extermination

as located here on this pinpoint:         Fragmented    at the sum of its parts

talking to        whomsoever will have it.

 

I prefer desecration he says    to the pabulum           of healing.

Your happiness           I in the office              am in the process of

a profound capitulation           crawling out only long enough

to avoid          the      exit route

 

How to condone relations around it?

 

Karl Lagerfield in powdered hair and skintight jeans reminds me somehow of the chicken tins.

 

Something I have been staring at all my life.

 

The opening argument would have to include trains:           The loss of public transport,

the rise of the myth of home.             Clifford Pynchon says that the brilliance and speed

of the railroad will overturn stale         ideas of home and hearth, making humanity nomadic

again.              .

 

My materiality is in conflict.

 

Karl Lagerfield chooses models so thin they are disturbing  excess of plastic not flesh      his

 nano ipods flow over the 18th century apartment like colourful birds.

 

Perversion like everything else dissipates with exposure     he calculates this as a fashion.

 

The difference now is not the duration of fame but the incestuousness of cause and effect.

 

The warm Spring day in January         a radiowave the bandwidth of our instinctual desire

to settle in all senses.           Suddenly death precedes the appearance       of mortality.