I fabricate a day, a poem from nothing, nothing except
the earth and everything in it, the universe and everything
in it. Backdate the poem to yesterday. My backswept hair
and the swept-back wings of swifts. I have thrown but never
caught a boomerang. This morning I tried to downshift,
temporarily forgetting I drive an automatic, still haven’t
gotten the hang of being employed or the hang of small
talk but to be continued. Between you and me, I choose
the void, which has room for everything, for the misused
materials and labor of a day. The neighborhood cement plant
minus glasses is impressionist and birdsong, some partially
bloomed trumpet vines. Light industry in the heart of empire,
heavy industry in the peripheries. That’s still a question:
I’m not sure how political it is for me to wind copper wire
around woven dried daffodil leaves, to be marginal in
the center. In the 90s the European Union was just becoming
a thing and I tried to slum my way through college, fired
from my first work study job. “How many of these book orders
have you processed?” “None.” The task was unreal.
Who wanted to acquire these books and why was I
inside on a sunny autumn day? After college I’d yell
in the apartment building fire escape before walking to work,
scheme to get ill or have any reason to sit in Dupont Circle
watching the beautiful man in denim cutoffs skate around
the fountain. Dupont was a portal to something other
than the usual convos about high-tech missile coating
or U.S.-China relations or earnest discussions about
civil society in Taiwan as if civil society in Taiwan were
just emerging. In the late 90s I thought the economist with
the EU umbrella was sexy. I wandered
around Malaysia thinking about how to leave my boyfriend,
definitely not thinking about British colonists. Judith Butler
wonders “who desires when I desire?” “I may try to tell the
story of myself, but another story is already at work in me.”
Have you ever fainted or been under anesthesia? The dis-
encumbering of a singular, bounded self, the poem as doing,
the speaker as bio-ing. I didn’t want to talk about missile
coating but can’t stop writing about it, the admiration-adoration
for the technicians of death and the experts who can discuss it.
I made it up, this occasion for self-transformation, no school
bus to pick up or drop off your babies. Bookshelves in the
basement, I tried to explain, are lonely, the nation-state
is in decline but not empire. The eclipse is partial. To care
for yourself and others you must change your life.
