Nightboat Books encourages you to calibrate your text size using the line of characters below:

“Lorem ipsum dolor eros amet, consectetur adipiscing ac magna”

Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

Emporium

Aditi Machado

Emporium

Aditi Machado

Nightboat Books/New York

Copyright © 2020 by Aditi Machado

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

Print ISBN: 978-1-64362-029-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64362-093-0

Design and typesetting by Tiffany Malakooti

Text set in Portrait, Baskerville, and Caxton

Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress

Nightboat Books

New York

www.nightboat.org

I came along a silk route. I came low like low things. Slow, farcical

leaves rimmed the trees. Some chic birds. I came along a long way,

bolstered by merchants and prophylactics and an obscure shade

that became my practice.

Sometimes I’d stop

to confer with magnolias and find the writing on the margin

creeping in. Or I’d look up at the archive wandering hysterically

like a womb. I’d stop at markets where rank matadors offered me

coins.

   Magnalia! Magnalia! I heard those bards, I loved

those shops, little bourgeois vessels of amnesia and maybe

lockets. And sometimes

I’d stop at theatres

and watch the facsimile faces twatting by, the customary graffito

on a restaurant tile. I’d forget my resistances, small wrists, and gussy

up my deadlocked tongue. Nothing to see here, I’d say, but

virtuoso shrubs.

Along the silk route upon which I came came

the very neat devices of a memoirist or politico. The silkiness

of the route was of an old time, colored like old, color

photographs, with seepages into the corners of sight.

Silk either

wore me down or bore me out of a series of vacancies in which

I scanned beaches. I was ‘caught.’ Who ‘caught’ me

but a phantom certainty, ‘certainty like a quality of gems

and cautious doctrines’? This was my distraction and

having to tighten my belt and all that. And yet

I was arriving,

words appearing on points of fact. Prickly or vine-like, I proposed

this and that. I was told nation or rhapsody or wear simple clothes.

I heard those statements as limpid fugues, traumas wandering

out of musical bars. I had no purchase on those points.

For a while

it was impossible to wear silk. I’d look up at the ruched sky,

I’d consider the Jesuitic races, the long lines of vox sniff-sniffing,

the climate refusing to change, the clematis reminding me

I was to pursue a sound. I was to steal

along, I was to barter

my socialisms for some mastic or gâteau slaked with rum or

a velvet speculum or any sort of very erudite and algebraic,

any sort of very telluric sort, a sort of, any sort, a sottise,

any sort of sottise. So

I bartered my socialisms for something

hierarchic, something hemorrhagic, hagio-cratic, her-metical, hell,

helical, her-heretical, hire, hire, hieroglyphic, had her, hatter, heter-

onomous, hire, hair, hairy. It was a hairy time.

And my bush

was a mulberry bush. It occasioned silk. Silk was a duration. I

unpacked it. Finally arriving, tender glissade. Lowing in the fields,

rennet skies. Up ahead, the emporium, up ahead. All those

haptic divinities. All those sounds I came to quell,

asking,

questioning, comment, comment, comment, quel, quelle

laine, quel lin, quel coton, quel satin, quel crin, quel chanvre,

quel cachemire, quel velours, quel tweed, quelle flanelle,

quelle dentelle, quel calicot, quelle mousseline, quel

serge, quelle jute, quel jacquard, quel brocard,

quel cuir, quelle soie, quel soi, quelque soit,

quelque soie, quelle soi

Social Gesture

First I agree to look upon the city.

There is a rhythm properly incensed.

A church rings clear through my doubts.

I decline all things in respect to how I see them.

The dative reigns. I like that pileup

like ornaments of queens. Then I look again

at the heap, then I struggle to see

how each body is separate, no precision

that isn’t imprecision.

First I agree to touch that treeline, measure that

awesomely obtuse leafiness, the way psalms

build height into it. First it measures me

across a distance. A treeline internal

to somnolence beyond which could not grow

any more obtuse my reason for being.

Then there’s a shift in the treeline.

Then I look again upon the city. Somebody’s body

is unlucky in that precise manner by which is meant

plainness. Somebody else’s thinking is in gutters

or nervous systems. What’s the matter, I ask,

as in what’s a matter.

A þing, a throng.

So she has a þing with her and thus a body.

And they have a þing with them and thus a body.

A volume of sound accompanies the rites.

Amid the failing narrative I go to the movies

and can’t say where in the mob I’m not,

the film so draws an endlessness.

Outside the poet cries, spell me!

Spell me out, weather, I got

the whiplash you got!

First a word, then an idea. First a body,

then an idea, then a word. First touching,

then more touching. Touching as the precision

of bodies delving into imprecision, ‘this strange

affinity.’

First an organ senses. First ‘sensation

not sense.’ First singing

as affinity for trees or skylines

scales a territory. First a refrain

grounds as an ossuary grounds,

then she leaps, ‘first then.’

First ‘the sea indents the universe,’ then my body is

a beach from which I look into foam, an inquiry proceeds

a simile along its likeness.

Then my bodies are ideas. Finger them.

Then I hedge, I stalk a highway.

Its terror turns the landscape round.

A new history, I think, a new territory,

I’ll plant a flag that dies perennially.

And so on it’s gone, thronged. In medias res

as in that apparition of faces. These are flourishes.

And outside the poet cries,

look at juniper

and make gin,

that’s my skill.

The city enjambs

the forest, how

triste, how truant.

Emporium

As if I could simply pass through

the carts, hand myself over to some notions

piled on a cart, trade away certain desires

amid the silk & squid, certainty

like a quality of gems & cautious doctrines,

trade away myself—wouldn’t be

too unlovely, in derivative light, lamps all

succulence above the general meat, would it,

butchers?—for tartan weather or any gridlike

complexity of time & back to square

home,

the sugar makes a mound there

as once bright pyramids & the smells here

are superlative, all brine & depth as though

one upon the other we effloresced. &

the tapestries descend & wouldn’t we

endlessly such velvet landscapes buy?

As if I could simply

stay here with

the provocations.

& if I did

what would I

sell?

& would I look at the mongers & hooks,

would I love these men, I would.

Love now is not so corralled & distance dreams

itself out of longevity.

Bowie strings a violin.

A neat bird suggests the littoral.

The limes settle into excellence.

Come on, eros arrowly. Why not

the emporium?

(The chief comparison is to a quality of light. The people have not poured in as light, won’t pour out. The poets stall. Vending short texts & long texts, scarves run through bodily fluids. We live in the clusterfuck. The chief definitions are here now. The chief epics are of markets spinning, carnival eyes. Pastimes replete with blinds. The chief binaries fold & unfold. The garden in the kitchen is in the street. Sweet herbs & cow patties. Sweetness the provocation & chief style of the poets. The extent to which history inscribes industrial products is perfume, one writes, cupping silver. Petals, petroleum, idioms profuse & tangled in the neck, a goblet. History paves the emporium &porous the gemlight.)

& says the purveyor, best not study such shapes

but silk, to me of silks, of the brushing of blouses

against silken nipples, of between her legs the stolen

red, & even money isn’t quite like money when silk

buys me or have I, it, or has it

blended in the fabrics of, when there was a room

for me to try on the, there was weather then

& now too, it’s silking my mind, & the ‘qualities

as they continue are the silk under the hand,’ reads

the libel, silk, that’s the dual error & shock

of new precision, an involuntary, not involuntary

exactly, but desired, frisson, I’ve pulled the brocade

off the rack.

Accents ascend the soundfield, bonny

suns climb the vaulted ceiling; magnets.

My senses, cursive, seek an angle;

sensing danger, name an enemy nylon.

Or did I mean history? Did I mean shale?

& of what is it collaged? How does it cohere?

Sudden queries, sudden as vendors, do they sell

fruit, sell textile? I’ve been so exact

I’ve cut corners. O obsolescence, o light brain

sifting the accidental tree, I desire cinema

in a sense all factories sense

the dilemma. Ought I

shove off?

The emporium moves by shift of wind.

Shuffles its constituents. Atomizes

in concept, not material, yet how suggestive,

how like a pleasant sea, that fine spray.

“nation”

Steady.

Steady now, a sense is pealing out the surface areas.

Observe here the fit expressions, as germane as botanic.

Here a faith in images still, and moving, you observe nothing quite proves prosody but people feel rhythm in their bodies.

The body is pronounced bawdy.

And here a faith in materials I too cagily profess.

And then ‘the sense / faints.’

Fold this.

Steadily you discover exteriors. Fold them.

Continual and cheapened light of the electric kind suffuses most areas in which you remain.

In some sense you are reporting on a country.

What do you observe?

You observe observation, its obstacles.

Forms of envy.

Narrative growing out the landscape constrainedly.

A seasonal negation inducing absence.

A relation blooms in this landscape full of abuses.

The people aren’t errant, they’re erratic.

Terror takes them.

The air is filled with amazing becomings, Marquezian butterflies.

Fold this.

This is not a truth but a way, a movement—simply—moving futures into fuchsias.

“rhapsody”

Let us exercise our vocal cords.

Let us draw them out

limbs.

Let us say there is always a longer or shorter

tress, always congruities, blissful, bitter

rhythms, sprung onions splitting, violins in

harmony that is harmonic, chaos that is chaotic,

in sense that is sensible, in here it inheres, out there

rapid rabbits. Let us labor under these notions

as under the cantus planus factory whine.

Let us stumble around, humming, stumbling, humming.

Then something in the shape of leaves,

something in the touching of ‘red.’

Is it subversive?

Let us hesitate with ‘red.’ Let us feel it out

with the feeling which we are. It is a panic

in the full field. This outward loping, is it

making it?

Is it filling it? Is it making it

explicit?

/ x x / || / x x /

A kind of horror at tubers.

A tipping against, as though I against

clement green, appears symmetrical

from way off in the distance I devise.

Do you know this desire? It’s a bit like

leaning into something. Sometimes

experience is like that,

nutritional. The thing is, I’m developing

an accent. I don’t like it.

I try to narrow it, I hesitate. I try to sing it,

I hesitate. Everyone is about to kneel,

pyrrhic. I mean, the congressional tune,

it seduces my agnostic body. So I’m a little

late to it, but I’m there. I get the bells

orchestrate law. I get the centaurs

are asters. Their conglomeration

awaits our easter gathering. Sunlight

comes through the heightened bulbous

assemblage. In a second I’ll commune,

but there is in me a little antinomian

flecked desire. So I hesitate a second,

then go out with them. Into quite the

sunlight, spreading sort of around

very lackadaisical. Very like a floral

spigot. Someone opens the countryside

that opens the aural. Against

the church on the hill.

To which the faithful voluptuously

turn. Which, if they lose, to what

will they genuflect? A deck

built slowly of atheism in the mossinduced

decoalescing sonic

purpose someone decolonized?

It’s like innocence way off

in the distance, distorted.

I don’t believe in lapsing,

but it’s like that.

Like I’m shifting out

of one desire

into another,

asynchronous.

And the things that carry me back

do not carry me back whole.

I try to rest in the depressions,

landscapes under duress, as by eros

eroded, the guttural roses spring

forms familiar and foreign, thorns

iambic, limbic the rows.

It does not flatten out.

And broken lies the golden vox spilling रस ರಸ

filling it रस ರಸ making it explicit. Rust rings it.

And says Donatvs, the stem is air stricken sensible

to ears, in so far as their power to hear is.

Wistfully I say each stem

is wrought from the clipping and the air is stricken

with it and is worked into a stem. The stem is

conspicuous or it is fuzzy. It is conspicuous

when with meaning it is clipped: I herald

those weapons, I herald that man. It is fuzzy

when without it is: cows lowing, horses

neighing, hounds hounding, trees

bristling, ET CETERA (Ælfric).

/ x x / || / x x /

Let us make it lovely again. Let us make gardens and lakes

a variorum of some eternal para-

nomasiac, some perfect para-

dogmatic, perfect para-

dise.

Let us stumble around

this place that’s humming,

humming. Counting

the stems and the

howling, hollering,

the refrains, o

the terrible refrains.

We’re in a musical, thinking.

/ x x / || / x x /

Rhapsody—or rhubarb?

Scant difference between some flowers

and the heads of cauliflowers the fingers get

herbaceous rubbing against. If I could get

ecstatic I would by the low soft

weeds, the hard oracular orifices of tree bark.

Some landscapes under duress

predict this atonal sky.

Scant difference between flowers.

The canned cool metal slightly

curves, of trash receptacles.

meadow interregna, strange

fanciful flights, toward toward.

Where the rhubarb field is not so bright

red as you would think, not so precise

or fulminating, too much green sticks

out, stems and leaves like a fuzz

of voices, watery incarnadine,

here where the sounds so simplify

the milieu into that wetness there,

here I stumble

to approximate the durations of others, to appear

of the same time as though of space,

I worry terribly, I hesitate, I lose my measure, a juice

trickles down my side,

रस ರಸ

Like

I get I’m out of tune.

/ x x / || / x x /

Let us think.

In the speaking of it,

it eludes.

Is it—a lark?

It fills it. It makes it explicit. It does not flatten out.

Is it

just spin?

Like origins.

Tender regress. Celestial pablum.

I like this myth.

/ x x / || / x x /

Something somethings.

Purified something

exerts pressure

on the sometimes vital

organs.

Some systems proffer

all vowels alliterate and in all

prose a prosody. I think proclivities

by which ordinary speech becomes

vibratory pollinate such systems.

I’m only looking for a little

homophony. Others, honey.

Ever since the accent I find my mouth

in places unforeseen. I’m given to

the understanding of others. It’s not futile,

but it is strange in the dark to speak the dark rolling

the gilded rowels, the stars of blood catching on

the dank-ytressèd trees. Against my nature

stand all possible drones.

Origins: sovereigns:

oranges.

For in the beginning there was a sound and the sound

was good. I licked it. It made sense. I milked it.

But you see the war unsettled it. A clean historical

break right down the landing strip of it. I licked it.

Something in the shape of it, something in the

touching of it. The music went out of it. And my desire

for it, a widening gyre. Lyre? You sense it? We lost

our measure. I licked it. This myth.

A Receipt

spuds

raffia

iodine

rock crab

fiduciary

limes

pansies

quinine

flecked

gum

persimmons

fenny

rack of

lamb

deck of

mortuary

cards

rags to

stuff up

yr red time

12 annas

  Q   U   O   D

V U  L  G O

G E L A T I N A M

V  O  C  A  M  U  S

Experiment with Aspic

It commences. Here

it is endless. Mostly

poverty. Parallel to

the railway track.

Manure, procession,

conniptions. It is crisp.

A labyrinth. It is here

it commences. Lac,

it is said. Or albumen.

Gourds, chikus, com-

prehensions of ripeness.

What’s fresh, what’s

not, under the same

feckless auspices.

Luxury, it is said, moves,

sometimes, at midday.

Mellow the light cast on

such euphemistic striations.

On the goathooks

(up ahead), on the garlands

(up ahead up ahead).

The muffled scene of death

to which the lines proceed,

curved. Citrus curling up

the light, so tart it is.

But here, here where it

commences, here, from where

the lines, endless, proceed,

here the voices, here

the prices. Lacquer on this

produce, surreal photography,

tainted reverie. Nothing clean

yet, presence implied, not seen.

It proceeds, an extreme

intelligence can be held

in the hands, is. Slight burn

from the citrus, slight build

from up the ground. Euphemism

for shanty. Euphemism for

indigence. Skinny body,

slender bean, sturdy drumsticks

snap. Nothing clean, yet

the causal knives luxuriate.

Lone jackfruit, abandoned

beehive. Nightshade in terror

of being shook. The lymph is

anxious. The child rears her

ugly head, slow capacity

for memory. Lacquer, she says.

Lacquer on this. This kind of

traffick is difficult to curb. Her skin

is light, her mother’s translucent.

This is how it begins, the acts

of comprehending things, softening,

into the basket, plastic,

the voiceless hellos, a

tendency, hushed.

An impossible sculptural

aspect her eyes laminate.

Things mature along

this aisle that’s endless.

And she too, in the town

called Fraser, opposite

the police station and the

pork shop, parallel to the

railway track, she too

developed symptoms,

hysteria, depression,

a deviant sexualized

mesmerism. She told us,

not without resistance,

that she had had an

education. Her mother

spoke the apt languages.

She said nothing but lacquer.

Lacquer on this. The brain

like a jelly, something trapped

in it. She views it

with her double-eye, its

glittering mound

of curvatures, lipid-rich

broth. We call it in the vulgar

gelatin. We will return to this point

later. For the child rears her head

to the sound of community, which

she hears as tribe, later mafia.

She appears to comprehend

but does not the sorrow

of haggling. Whether she might

come to say it, let’s not insure.

But it is here it commences.

The thickenings of lymph, the

persistent shyness, the passions.

It is endless. As symbol, luxury,

she finds, and poverty are the same.

She listens prodigally. Correlatives

appear, disappear. She lacquers

them. But poverty, she finds, is,

in act, in thought, a word, to her,

not otherwise permitted, real.

Articulacy then was of elbows

and knees. The spirit never quite

levels between her mother and

the woman on the blue tarp,

but they touch hands. The mother

communes with nearly every one.

The child rears her ugly head,

quizzical. Recrudescence

that’s luscious, shutting down

institutes. Speak, she says, speak,

my heart is gelatin. If anything luxe

is, it is this severe

unthinkable audio. Palatial,

she says. In futures glorious

and systematic the word ATELIER

will come to describe this

pure fragment, this collapse of lines.

Curvatures, she thinks. Conniptions.

The dusty, colloidal elegance, she

thinks, of air. She views it with her

double-eye, sculptural aspect.

A powdery substance overlays things,

steady music. It is here she comes to

comprehend, tender,

later, smell it. We call it in the vulgar

money. Speak, she speaks. The humors

reside not in but a quarter of an inch

away from her, settling sometimes

as sweat. She was extraordinarily

vulnerable, with not even a

rotten core. What might coerce her

to nostalgia. Hot tea chilled jelly

dissolves. No quality here. It is

nothing and the saw. The recrude-

scence is luscious, shuts down law.

It began as tendency. Petty crime.

Delirium of touching. Passion of

the silk. Subjective correlatives.

Desire, dark wishes, ossifications,

and abbreviations of sound. The

refusal to dance, the turning away

inside the apostrophe. Meditative

processional. It got heavy. She

lacquered it. She viewed it with her

vulgar eye. She lacquered it.

No delicacy obtained. She put it

away in its pure future, glittering

mound. The opposite of hot tea

and a biscuit. Lacquer on it.

Endless, mostly. Difficult to discern.

The conniptions. Cognitions. This kind

of traffick is difficult to curb. But no,

it did not affect her. No one was

spirited away. This was not the meadow

in which she grew. No one haggled,

no one withdrew. It was as a lacquer

on her.

Billboards

You Have Aged

Dream Cake

Snug Guns

Preening Machine

Comparable to Sunrise

Don’t Peel

like an Onion

& Reek

Museum of Shapes

Purity Is There

Read Him & Weep

Blessed Drones

Turn Toward Your Symptoms

Be the Concentric Mind of Trees

Come, Disperse

in Our Coliseum of Loss

Sing! Sing!

रस ರಸ

Meaning I Have Held You

Silken Child You Appear to Be

Unraveling

Pins & Needles

Etcetera

Meadow Interregnum

It is the skyward glance that begins.

Begins to look upon the wind chimes up on the tree.

In the tree, medallions. Jade medallions quivering correlatively.

Color flashing into the feet commits a stirring effect upon the loins.

This feels good.

This feels so good … that the back should rest …

and the legs one had too long been upon … and sinking in the dun earth feels good on the ear … the ear shifting with the head hits the bicuspid grass … now it is the bicuspid grass that

begins the ear … meaning downwardly corresponds its deep wet riot the back bites the deep dun earth yer get shook about for the late few pennies but it just feels so dun … good … so good to be given … pause the eye and ear somewhere in tow … and somewhere the foot … the foot that came in a pair goes one then the other the ear grovels in the mud the knee twists toward the sky … are these

the postures? … the cunt that lies among the reeds … is this?

Now it is the cunt that begins. Now it is the skyward glance that stunts thy canny lingual dream that instituted the lying under the tree … and is this the posture? Doubt has this surface to it

like the skin of milk but on the sea … the sea that the plain eye and the plain ear observe from their heartland seam … is this possible

from this body? Doubt has this pleasure to it

like the skin of milk but on the sea and now it is the song that is alveolar now it is the womb that wanders now … a cloud … now

it shall rain … are these the divisions? Feel these ribs, are these? Feeling has this question to it like

the skin of milk the ear falls to the ground and listens … coral reef, receive this … like the male of the species, receive this …

Epistle to the Efficience

Dark night. Amazing air. I am held back

under the heat lamp. Before the green tea, I

make the positional statement, I render the fat.

There is a thin line beyond the pale.

In the quiet times, I dine frequently,

elsewhere glimmers as sensory overload, more

acid, more acid, please, fold this as I

report on the recession, the long lines

forming onerous, prismatic hedgerows that fatten

on the rib of neighborly divisions, property

perimeters, icy

brinks all the way down to the corner shop,

the honeyed provisos of kind preachers, changed

execs, sweet peach sellers, long textured

lines, heavy, inalienably

aromatic, as newsprint, as so much

writtenness, it is getting out of hand, my own hands

simply fold.

It gets darker, though it be a metaphor

that is darkness,

and it gets still, though it be a molecular deception,

and it gets ever more fragrant, though it be ineffable, and

the sequencing gets shook up,

the conclusion wishes to assert itself but is

concealed,

and so I under the starry metaphor, I inside

the pregnant description, I amid the tenable scents,

I feel simply feelings. Under the arbor,

I sniff the arbore-

scent, I enter its porous wisdom, the crackling in

cinema equal to kindling, for

in some sense

I am reporting on a country, peeking over the fence,

shrieking, look! look! an interiority! look, such a

private, green

articulation! what a potted frond of despair, this

man speaking his silent monologue, face screwed up

for expression. A camera studies him, lingers on him,

lingers on his objects, whence refracts the whole

of his psychosoma. The room reverberates with this

‘curation’ of being.

In the film of this man’s life,

which is cavernous, all angularities commiserate.

His ennui is stirring, his rage renascent.

Method and méprise are his calling cards.

The camera is deft, so I am dire.

I look into the mounting of desire,

into the diminutive, the moon-dependent

feeling, o that he has a feeling, o that it opens out,

opening out an old sense, system-

atically uncoiling along the soundtrack,

the appropriate record

from the appropriate decade of his youth,

which shaped his interior, as though from this,

surely, the darkness, metonymic, shall

proceed.

I fold this.

I fold all the cinema

I ever grazed upon, bovine, five thousand daisies

pushing senses out of my skin, for although they

showed me the thin line between being and not,

my steady hand and unsteady heart, quote unquote,

when it is my turn to look ‘inside,’

every hesitation that might hesitates me. I write,

‘Solace is tainted, nonplussed.’ I write, ‘No

precision that isn’t imprecision.’ I observe

the housekeeper

is an erotomaniac; pixel density and contrast ratio;

multiple refrains and a sort of pulling against

the consensual seduction; thin lines

meaning hesitation is a certain theory, ‘certainty

like a quality of gems and cautious doctrines.’ Every

theory lingers in the cavities

as I lapse from it, prosodies are faithless but

divine. In some sense then, according to a source,

the reports have gone awry. The prolix lines,

the keen sight. And the night is savage, somni-

feral. I remind my oriental mind.

Tomorrow morning, I recover,

take dictation from a swallow or whatever passes

for it. What does it observe? Saline waters,

lines drawn in mud. What do I? I sort

the idiolects.

‘Everything can be studied,’ I posit. ‘O be obsessed,’

they counter. ‘O I will.’

Then a microphone falls into the trenches.

Then animals gaze into the eyes of other animals.

I try to see people for

what they are. An infant. A man. His facial symmetry,

his thinness, his liquid crystal leucoderm, the papery

fullness of his psychology. Thin line going somewhere,

one day perforating …

I am a little terrified now.

I look up toward the sky.

I see these lovers on a balcony. They lean

against the hard facts. It is argument that tilts them.

I look up the science in the sky.

What do I see? I see lovers on a balcony, bent over,

isosceles. Then what do I see? The gladiolus?

The eglantine? Prissy mouth shapes? A postcard

with a Klee on it. I fold it. I feel the crease. It is ugly

and imprecise. I feel the wrongness, I forget absence,

forget presence, in the light of day: séjour, cæsura.

It is said, ‘A kind of malignant mind

creeps through the earth lit only by the light

of the movies.’

In the recession, an easterly mind

is unable to give up its ideas, accordion

sea. In a forest of pines, sap pools,

reports go awry, fold this.

I am reporting on a country.

There appears a corrosion on its hills.

Birds are winding its landscape,

using it to tell time.

The report goes awry.

Again.

I am reporting on a country.

There appears a buzzing on its sills.

There appears a digital sort of graininess.

A thin line appears, dividing estrangement from

habit, lupines from tentacles, ‘a spasm, / a psalm.’

Again.

I am reporting on a country.

Traffic is a lovely lingering sound. Shops are

open. I neglect what neglects me. Feel a bit petty.

I drink a wine, I dress a vegetable, quick kimchi,

slow down!

Again.

According to a source, I am reporting on

a country. I am learning some skills, I am wielding them

as others do. I am feeling things as I am wont to do.

What do I observe? Bald classicism. Fallen

romanticism. The stained glass of basement revivals.

What do I learn? Nothing sensible.

‘Will you,’ she says, ‘try not falling

in any Ballardian pools?’

Dark night. Dark theatre. A love

of subtitle files fills me. Narration, speech, voice.

Timestamps secrete a music. When I watch a film

I explore a time ‘that is not mine,’ ‘that is mine,

it is so near to the heart.’ The film is a fold. The fold

lies at one end of a woman’s body. It lies

murdered in a field. In the gorgeous rolling

country I love the merest christ figures. I love

the thin blades of thin grass, the scurrilous winters,

doxy doxa, o be still, my senseless intel,

be still, o night

that is metallic, o meticulous human

in the window next door. I’ve been watching your

interior grow. Roseate

in the roseate light. Not like the rose’s shabby

inscape and not like the ball gowns wrinkling

from memory, sartorial

paysan, you are dressed most simply, ruddy

and complex only ever inside. I fold you.

Against my bed you make an impressionism

like a fossil.

In the recession, away from all

edifications, nasturtiums,

I am stopped from the couplet

or at the border of a country.

As ways and truths go,

I am more or less deadened.

My effete mind rests upon

an effete divan.

A crocus occurs a.

Darkest of nights. Smell of cyanide.

Cruel jokes circulate. Here are some definitions

of sex, here some anatomies of money.

An impecunious fluid routs my flesh.

‘Everyone,’ she says, ‘everyone

is doing the work but what does the work

do?’ I observe the cheap light turn slowly

gibbous, why not. ‘The terror,’ she says, ‘isn’t,’

she says, ‘we’re fragments.’ ‘The terror is,’

she says, ‘we’re whole.’ The copse witnessed

through the opera glass turns into a guess what. Fold it.

Dank morning. ‘I cultivate a primrose’

that is cryptic. An impresario, I unfold its petals.

Method, méprise. Nostalgia for a condition

gone by, when ‘Silk was a duration’ and ‘I

unpacked it.’ A rich, quotidian engagement,

whatever that is, too much of it, too much presence,

too much absence, fold it. Thin line

between vellum and blunt instrument.

Fold it.

Late afternoon. Aspic quivers.

Birds shed their descriptors.

Hopkinsesque accents

equip the air with plain joy, then torqued

pleasure. The imagined cottage, the oblique

approach to which is a romance, sits pretty.

Why a quivering aspic?

This slightly outlandish window into my

—no interior, we said—sensations, the way the

alleged storm affects the globe on a dish upon a

table in the somewhat inclement outside turning

to hell, it shivers

totally.

A quaint time of day even the streets glisten

a dark sort of description. It’s all right, don’t come.

I’ll just ‘decay with imprecision.’

The experiment in stillness isn’t death, it’s

an attempt toward season.

‘These prosodies,’ she says, ‘of hesitation,’ she

says, ‘are spasms,’ she says, ‘of inquiry.’ The analysis

wings about the room, aquiline. In some sense,

I have been reporting on a country.

‘An alien,’ she says. The strain marks a hesitation that

grows more resonant as we go on. According to a

source, the source will never appear. ‘What have you

learnt?’ she asks.

On a square on her wall a meadow of cows

lisps.

‘Violence,’ she says, ‘is not the answer,’

perforce.

Wind dissipates mind seeds.

Things I have said return odd.

The future, I said, ought to be the new ‘time

lost.’

The sentence, I said, is torqued, I said, at times

to defamiliarize, at times to attain sublime doubt.

The experience is so wild any path you cut through it

cuts through you, so said I

once, on a carousel.

In the recession, it is white.

Alchemically slack, the fruit on my toast.

Dark, gelatinous. Unusual, bejeweled.

Beveled?

My head?

Thin line.

‘There is,’ I say, ‘inside you

an absence.’ ‘There is,’ I say, ‘inside you

a presence.’ I watch your interior grow.

BANK NOTES

‘Social Gesture’ quotes Szilárd Borbély, tr. Ottilie Mulzet (‘this strange / affinity’); Bruno Dumont (‘sensation / not sense’); Geoffrey Hill (‘first then’); and Edmond Jabès, tr. Rosmarie Waldrop (‘the sea indents the universe’).

‘Concerning Matters Culinary’ is a spectral Easter egg.

‘Emporium’ quotes J. H. Prynne (‘qualities / as they continue are the silk under the hand’).

‘“nation”’ quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley (‘the sense / faints’).

‘“rhapsody”’ quotes Geoffrey Hill (‘red’) and translates a portion of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary.

‘Notes on the Passions of Patient M.’ adapts Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault’s Passion érotique des étoffes chez la femme.

‘Experiment with Aspic’ & its epitaph quote and translate Platina (‘quod vulgo gelatinam vocamus’ + ‘we call it in the vulgar gelatin’).

‘Epistle to the Efficience’ quotes Ray Ragosta (‘A kind of malignant mind / creeps through the earth lit only by the light / of the movies’); Geoffrey Hill (‘a spasm / a psalm’); Robert Duncan (‘that is not mine’ & ‘that is mine, it is / so near to the heart’); The Hindu Crossword 11779 by Aspartame (‘I cultivate a primrose’); and T. S. Eliot (‘decay with imprecision’).

MILLES MERCIS

To Marty Cain & Kina Viola for Prologue | Emporium (Garden-Door Press), and Brian Teare for Rhapsody (Albion Books); the editors of Apartment Poetry, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boston Review, Lana Turner, Poem-a-Day at poets.org, Seedings, The Rumpus, The Spectacle, & Western Humanities Review for publishing many of these poems, sometimes in different versions; Mónica de la Torre for the Mountain West Writers’ Prize in Poetry 2017; Gillian Conoley, Fady Joudah, & Cole Swensen for recognizing Emporium with the James Laughlin Award; the English Departments at University of Denver and Washington University in Saint Louis for institutional support; the Evan Frankel Foundation for a dissertation fellowship; Carla Gullichsen and the Varda Artists Residency Program for three weeks on the extraordinary SS Vallejo where I was able to complete this manuscript; Kazim Ali, Lindsey Boldt, Tiffany Malakooti, Stephen Motika, & all at Nightboat for this; Donna Beth Ellard for Old English, Latin, and so much more; Graham Foust for musical thinking, mentorship, and reading these poems a hundred times; Mary Jo Bang, Rachel Feder, Laird Hunt, Jennifer Kronovet, Nithin Manayath, Jennifer Pap, Carl Phillips, Bin Ramke, Selah Saterstrom, Eleni Sikelianos for your teachings and guidance; Kanika Agrawal, Zack Anderson, Mildred Barya, Teresa Carmody, Carolina Ebeid, David Hernandez, Brandi Homan, Poupeh Missaghi, Jeffrey Pethybridge, Allan Popa, Niel Rosenthalis, Michael Joseph Walsh, and S. Yarberry for friendship, kindness, and sustenance; Kelly Caldwell for her unforgettable beauty; Julie Carr, Don Mee Choi, Johannes Göransson, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Ted Mathys, Joyelle McSweeney, & Divya Victor for gifts that cannot be named; Patty of the thousand names and faces; my family, especially Sid & Suman, and my parents François & Min, I am utterly grateful.

NIGHTBOAT BOOKS

Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries. We publish books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk. Please visit nightboat.org to learn about our titles and how you can support our future publications.

The following individuals have supported the publication of this book. We thank them for their generosity and commitment to the mission of Nightboat Books:

Kazim Ali

Anonymous

Jean C. Ballantyne

Photios Giovanis

Amanda Greenberger

Elizabeth Motika

Benjamin Taylor

Peter Waldor

Jerrie Whitfield & Richard Motika

In addition, this book has been made possible, in part, by grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts Literature Program.