To be explicit without confessing, this antipsychotic I’m on makes me shake,
this poem I’m in makes me shake. This poem does not support the dualist ontology
in which all finite beings are implausibly divided between people and everything
else. What does the ontology say about desire? Does desire pre-exist its activity
rather than being created by it? I mean did our kiss exist before we kissed?
The limits of language are the limits of the body, the smell of jasmine, tree roots
pushing through sidewalk, a walking poem, walking ontology. Immaterialism,
not materialism. We have seen that desire often gains the upper hand over its
own constituent pieces, and can even abstain from any action at all. Failed objects,
but never failed desire—an object is better known by its proximate failures
than by its successes. Proximate desires that are not forgone conclusions,
but offer endless counterfactual speculation, not all of it worthless. I mean
the imminent desires that were not abjured presumptions, and by presumptions
I just mean kisses, the possible kisses that did not occur but still actually exist
as objects, and minor objects become, by slow subsumption, a theory of us.
But subsumed into what? I lit three candles and prayed, failed to visit the graves
of my ancestors but must have walked close to them on the tour. This mild
panic is one type of modal reasoning, all of it worthwhile for near-world imagining,
proximate-world thinking, dreams of the otherwise unrealized action. But the object
remains while also managing to leave the atmosphere, or maybe it was never here
exactly but somewhere in the imagined alternative I keep trying to talk about.
There is no poetics I can reclaim except the poetics of lying, maybe. “Yes
I did brush my teeth,” says Desmond, wanting it to be true, knowing it will be
true in the future, a lyric of untruth. I’m sorry I lost you after the pool party. I’m
sorry I didn’t send more messages when I was away. I’m sorry we didn’t connect.
If this were a madrigal, fa la la, we’d have encountered a sheep instead of a rooster,
and the shepherd would have said something important. “Yes I did brush my teeth!”
said toward the future, until it holds. Forgive the missed crossings—the unsent,
the unjoined—desire persists, persists—love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew
back, guilty of dust and sin and dualist ontology. Lorraine, you are a top candidate
for this creative content director position, and more. What if the object waits inside
desire? The job inside the application, the application inside the resume, the un-cohered
poem inside the book and the book inside the kiss—as if it were just one kiss—ha!
As if it weren’t part of an entire kissing repertoire: Un bise, un smack. Des baisers
subsumés. As if my life were my life and all this exhaustion and misdirected energy
were already the poem, the kiss, the job, the partially drafted email, the scheduled
social media post. Desmond’s teacher calls to say Desmond is distracted and bored,
doesn’t want to do his schoolwork, and I realize this poem is partly a way of avoiding
the now, the now that is not a point but a field of intensities including distracted, bored
offspring, kisses, springtime and work. The present tense is crowded with counterfactuals
that do not disperse, with all the things that happened without expectation.
(I’m back from the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I did a lot of poeting but not much writing)
