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2. ! I!
The following is submitted in fulfillment of the senior essay for the English major at
Wesleyan University. Thomas Sayers Ellis and Elizabeth Willis—who read the words
first. Thank you.
__________________
“A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a
university education, he may steal the whole railroad.” – Theodore Roosevelt, 1907
W e s l e y a n U n i v e r s i t y
S p r i n g 2 0 1 5

3. ! II!
C O N T E N T S
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… III
Modern Clothing Begins with the Buttonhole …………………………………... 1
Playing Poker in Moscow ……………………………………………………….. 2
Plume ……………………………………………………………………………. 3
The Good Nature of Thieves ……………………………………………………. 4
Och Vad Syd Det Är: And What a Shame It Is …………………………………. 5
Life and Work and the Terrible Face ……………………………………………. 7
Italian Poppies ……………………………………………………………………. 8
In the Pickwick House …………………………………………………………… 9
Tiny Kids Can’t Eat Love ……………………………………………………..…. 10
From this Platform ……………………………………………………………….. 11
Jackson Pollock’s Liver ………………………………………………………….. 12
The Phones were Usually Empty…………………………………………………. 13
White Girls in Bed………………………………………………………………... 14
Learning to Paint with Milk………………………………………………………. 15
Waiting Between the Lions ……..……………………………………………….. 16
This Week was Exceptionally Cold for Late April ………….....….…………….. 17
Notes ……………………………………………………………………………... 18

4. ! III!
Most days these days are spent figuring my way around intention—my own, among
others. It was just the other day that I left a turkey sandwich at the kosher deli. I do hope
someone found it, but as it is the turkey appeared dry and the bread was too thick. There
seems to be something fabulous hiding in the routine of it all, but I am stuck here again
on these silhouettes. Lovely objects that push and pull in every direction; it used to feed
me but now I’m hungry all day long. Where walking and talking seem to be anything but.
Seeds, seeds, seeds that are only now beginning to shake. At least I realize no one saw it
until they saw the modernists, the surrealists, the poets, the mailmen, the cubists, the
dead. Only named animals receive headstones. Human tendency to constrict and release
on the narrow way to comfort, or nirvana. The strange space between objects exhales to a
different kind of perfect.
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The Blood Moon is seen for the first time in California, hours after a condor—think,
black phoenix—thought to be extinct, is found nesting in redwoods. On that night, the
sky casts bark into shadow and no one cares to look. From this apartment, little feels
inconsequential, but that might just be luxury talking.
Ask and someone will tell you their location, body temperature, the outfit they were
wearing the day Michael Jackson died. Like you care to know. You’re more interested in
the fact that his son, Blanket, takes a blanket everywhere he goes until he is 10 years old.
Once I was scared poetry might feel like that. Thriller, do stay awhile longer.
In 2012, Cameron has an art installation, Those, in Riverdale. The night before,
pronouncing above ripe Miles, tells me he will cut his afro the day after tomorrow. In the
morning, he explains to candid crowd that each installation has been constructed using
only weave adhesive. For a moment, think about what Cameron might look like with bare
scalp. On the wall, each thin piece of paper looks like it’s hanging by a thread.
Illusion, he says, is bullshit.
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5. ! IV!
Moving has me thinking about placement but at least for today, I’ll hold off
displacement. I say, it’s too damn hard to think about it before it’s happened! Ron
Padgett says the same, where he delivers to us in the sun-filled room years and years of
arriving here. “I really did like the sound of words together, so I made them do just that.”
Someone asks what it was to grow up New York School. The student wants to be heard
by all the right ears and Padgett laughs and laughs. Schools of tiny, tiny fish that learn
something together and call it family. He laments that sleeping on Andy Warhol’s floor
was a rare convenience far from intention. Only the future museumgoer, the dog-walker,
the poet, the yet-to-be-born would call it just that. Think about how this old house will
look from down the road. Laughing at myself here and now.
__________________
"Time is no straight line. but rather a
labyrinth. and if you press yourself against the wall, at the right spot,
you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking
past on the other side" - Tomas Tranströmer, “Reply to a Letter”
__________________
Last spring seemed to map, if nothing else, the intimacy of strangers. In passing, rebirth
seems only a convenient, petty uncertainty. Philip Seymour Hoffman, February 2nd
.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez, April 17th
. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, April 20th
. Figuring my
way around men I’ll never meet. Beneath these dogwoods, traffic feels like blasphemy
might feel—far, far, far from the middle. Only in passing can it wax and wane poetic.
The newspaper and all those people who talk about people tend to make time their
business. Delivering moments like the mailman, the cubist, the doggone priest. Your
story is waiting in the week before last.
__________________
Among other great feats, Spanish actress Rossy de Palma’s nose has made her famous.
The face that shoots to fame is callous. When Rossy did it, everyone yelled New Culture.
The Cubist painting come to life, Picasso’s accidental masterpiece, she couldn’t help it
even if she tried. Almódovar cast her in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown,” where she is reborn the virgin Marissa: masturbate all day long in this green
velvet chair. Culture. “‘People with no noses,’ sniffs Robert Altman, ‘that type of person

6. ! V!
is the person who doesn’t find her beautiful.’”1
There is the type of person who loves
women so much he makes them. Taking and taking until it isn’t taking anymore, it’s just
breathing. A very exacting kind of love.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1995, Rossy shouts to a room of reporters,
“Fame is what you get if you do your job well for a long time. Popularity…the woman
who cuts off her husband’s penis is popular!”2
Falling in and out of focus, the daytime
finds telephones that ring this kind of empty. On my own time in Spain: coming to
writing feels itself a revision and history is important! Making my way around the
museum and all its tiny, tiny benches— an accidental aperçu that doesn’t matter much.
The small room before Guernica exhales where Picasso picks up the brush and entertains
color, if only for a moment. Of 1995, Rossy says: “And this year specifically, I want to
do only things I really like.”3
If it were that easy. It might be. It was.

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MODERN CLOTHING BEGINS WITH THE BUTTONHOLE
Cento after Guy Davenport on American Gothic, 19304
European in origin and common as the farmer's spectacles consider:
that he came out of China by way of balloon-frame house small
as the buttonhole that rolls up like the farmer's wife
Held as assertively as a minuteman's rifle
she is product of the ages when
The workingman had nothing to lose but his chains
with a life scarcely different from that of an ox
The first portrait of a person wearing specs
buttons themselves are prehistoric
A nineteenth-century pinafore
vegetable ivory passing for horn
machine-made substitute for lace
The primary meaning of title—
their achievement together
Modern life begins

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PLAYING POKER IN MOSCOW
In Russia a man writes about the aliens in Paris and Nevada
comfortable in circumference, I wax and wane around
they’re starved in Area 51, he says
as I kick the dust out of my Persian
the fire department burned and burned while
commuters moved like fish on rock salt
Try to intersect wherever feels right
Last year, the comet came so close they thought it might hit Moscow

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PLUME
an homage to “This is Just to Say”
Bowl of iced plums on perfectly-dirtied
counter beneath mellow shades
this plume of pigeons
this bowl of plums
They were taken from the icebox
before (unimportant)
the plums are so cold and this past,
it is frivolous
Effortlessly slips pit beneath tongue—
sees the seed’s stopped growing now
This was just to say,
she is running late again

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THE GOOD NATURE OF THIEVES
On stealing bread, rouge or
what wasn’t mine before it was given
Out of breath at seventeen
still locating neutral, the
blue eyeshadow neither of us
wore in the backseat glare is unbecoming
on anyone
Of Picasso’s Old Guitarist, Wallace Stevens says
The day was green5
Pinching glitter at the wheel is tactless palindrome—
Only now I see why lovely cosmetic verse yells
stench at the wrong temperature
The poet strumming, strumming from a distance

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OCH VAD SYND DET ÄR: AND WHAT A SHAME IT IS
I imagine the head and the doctor must get lonely
no really, different kinds of
loneliness and suffering, they’re all here
Stuck all day in bodies that want to speak
Och vad synd det är
I’ve been told I might be a concert pianist
or hand model
or anything for long fingers
that make a strange gift, they say
Och vad synd det är
At 97, my grandfather has developed
an affinity for maps and for chairs
Acceptance and denial, maybe
Though certainly dignity finds
different silhouettes
Och vad synd det är
Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer
won the Noble Prize in literature in 2011
Upon learning of his 18 year nomination—
what a frivolous truth it seems
Och vad synd det är
After stroke, Tranströmer
reintroduces his left hand to the piano
when a composer writes pieces
for an ambidextrously retraced working draft
that might be better than his first
On 100 Years of Solitude and on renditions, Marquez
cited Gregory Rabassa’s English translation as better
Och vad synd det är

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Often I worry about not wanting
All this time it seems
I am struck by an immobilizing weakness for old men in
paperboy hats
Something about deep, deep intention is, for today,
what I can reconcile best

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LIFE AND WORK AND THE TERRIBLE FACE
Cento after Jacques Dupin on Joan Miró6
Bird on the blouse is
Lozenge-type motif in suffering
pattern incorporates flowers
white stripes of Ricart’s pajamas
The catalogue of nudes, endured as primitive
pupils are hatchets on
young lady’s head, shoulders
a sort of degraded purple
Uniformly, another nude in the series of wallpapers

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ITALIAN POPPIES
In Dorothy’s fields, this:
where jaw meets right ear. headstone moves left with
the rain
terra firma
nails claw at uterus wall after just seven weeks
[THIS IS SIX FEET]
Are you standing?
You can now, and you should
It is pouring rain and this earth is soft
Italian poppies often refuse to grow alone

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IN THE PICKWICK HOUSE
For Philip Seymour Hoffman
The priest and the pig farmer are not unlike
psychologists: say proximity is at the root of all relation
Characters present in presence, imply in absence
Pigs and religion demand strange hours
Philip Seymour Hoffman died yesterday but
Truman Capote was only fat once and he looked damn good
Gay men hide sometimes but
a hiding actor is useless to everyone, least of all himself
To state feels wrong here, and there sometimes too
figuring my way around the close, close proximity of strangers
This house heaves on February 2nd
Finally, he’s getting fed

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TINY KIDS CAN’T EAT LOVE
After Director Billy Walsh
Even Marty Feldman might be impeccably-silhouetted
canyon, woman, drive-in flic
Long roads that wax alone by day and night
it’s not so remarkable but
Stay up there until you can’t stay any longer, when you
put the roof down slow to trapeze and laugh and lament
about where you began
Your governor was naked in the beginning and you stayed to watch
Give up porn to think:
“We could live on love, but tiny kids can’t eat love.”7
No one’s licking anything now

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FROM THIS PLATFORM
On the platform she comes to sit at 125th
where
I am happy you are woman just because and because
I jump at the truck and at the grasshopper
on the handrail
when the telephone rings look
to my book and rise
as if you’ve been asked
but here it is still and I certainly
was far from reading much
Take it, take it
push your hijab to the left
where it wrinkles again and where
your mouth gleams
to the perfect frown
I think—it is yours
this platform and much more

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JACKSON POLLOCK’S LIVER
Pollock dies alone in a car crash
sour taste of father’s name en-tongue-
en-route to the slapdash masterpiece
where highways end
but these scattered paint chips are nonsense!
and dry, dry, dry
The empty church is what they are talking about when they
talk about storms
Daddy falls hard this winter and his masterpiece is marbled-
perfect right down to David’s tiny hands
Jackson Pollock’s liver on the pathologist’s table
Think: whiskey served wet

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THE PHONES WERE USUALLY EMPTY
Cento after essays on the Chicago Art Institute by Willa Cather8
and Stuart Dybek9
1.
Common people of Chicago
I would open my eyes in a room of pastel light
Two sunburned Kansas boys
George Inness
Growing old
on the smoke-smudged Saint-Lazare station
buying pictures and getting people to look at them
2.
Prairie Fire on Michigan Avenue
George Innness (1825-1894)
Work influenced by some sort of old master
[This paint is wet and the prairie’s burning. Excuse me bystander,
but your canvas is dripping]
Think: something better with the money
The building on free days held
The ugly little peasant girl standing barefoot
A man with a telescope
The phones were usually empty
with successful tycoons

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WHITE GIRLS IN BED
After Hilton Als
I can’t help but think of burning
not myself or loins or books by the infidels
but the place between strike and
glow, glow, glow on
Daddy says to do it closed
legs and doors and matchbooks
it’s the reason the hotel burns fires in late August
howl at this like
Wolf and Allen and Franco
who sleeps through Columbia class as
I saw the minds of my generation just outside the window
Los Angeles, fire on and now it’s Ferguson because
all these lines smell something like flammable might
It took instructions to build the first fire
but I stop smoking alone when the curtain above
my bed cinches— legs wide open,
it’s coldest when only the wind comes knocking

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LEARNING TO PAINT WITH MILK
If April is the cruelest month
May is the wasteland we painted green
Your kitchen is where I paint with close-to
but not yet sourmilk
The view from here:
where painters begin to trademark color
Stuck somewhere far from the middle
I’m vexed about taking too much these days
computed tomography is
black and white diptych of
Fifty things that kill us—
certain types of cosmetics
microwaving popcorn, etc.

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WAITING BETWEEN THE LIONS
Cento after Saul Bellow on Claude Monet’s Sandvika, Norway (1895)10
Umbrella, rolls, marmalade
and two dollars
the powerful twisted bridge of his nose
waiting between the lions for
Claude’s Norway
and his hair in the Directoire style
the pink of the house
the powerful twisted bridge
the distorted nose and leopard eye that
mounted the Impressionist collection
the only change was in
the points coming down over his forehead
the whole weight of snow
our meetings were always fabulous

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THIS WEEK WAS EXCEPTIONALLY COLD FOR LATE APRIL
After Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Rubin “Hurricane” Carter
When the Colonel first smelled ice, he said
the death of water
Years later, firing squad provokes memory of
distant afternoon with father to discover
before Carter was a hurricane, he sold ice
Obituaries are crates sans shadow but
the blind man sees color and so it goes like this
Here comes the story,
breathe into a fire and it grows

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N O T E S
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1
Cobo-Hanlon, Leila. “She's Changing the Face of a Supporting Role: Movies: Actress
Rossy de Palma has added her unforgettable quality to Pedro Almodóvar and Robert Altman
films.” Los Angeles Times. February 8th
, 1995.
< http://articles.latimes.com/1995-02-08/entertainment/ca-29479_1_supporting-role >
2
Cobo-Hanlon, Leila. “She's Changing the Face of a Supporting Role: Movies: Actress
Rossy de Palma has added her unforgettable quality to Pedro Almodóvar and Robert Altman
films.” Los Angeles Times. February 8th
, 1995.
< http://articles.latimes.com/1995-02-08/entertainment/ca-29479_1_supporting-role >
3
Ibid
4
Davenport, Guy. “Excerpt from The Geography of Imagination.” Transforming Vision:
Writers on Art. Hirsch, Edward. Chicago, Illinois: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. 60-63.
5
Stevens, Wallace. “Excerpt from The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Transforming Vision:
Writers on Art. Hirsch, Edward. Chicago, Illinois: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. 69-71.
6
Dupin, Jacques. “Excerpt from Joan Miró: Life and Work.” Transforming Vision: Writers
on Art. Hirsch, Edward. Chicago, Illinois: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. 48-49.
7
Billy Walsh, Entourage Season 2
8
Cather, Willa. “Excerpt from ‘On Various Minor Painters’” Transforming Vision: Writers
on Art. Hirsch, Edward. Chicago, Illinois: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. 12-13
9
Dybek, Stuart, “Killing Time.’” Transforming Vision: Writers on Art. Hirsch, Edward.
Chicago, Illinois: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. 14-15
10
Bellow, Saul. “Excerpt from Humboldt’s Gift’” Transforming Vision: Writers on Art.
Hirsch, Edward. Chicago, Illinois: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994. 16-17.
Cover Art:
Original painting (without photographs and text) by Philadelphia-based artist Rachel Bliss
http://www.rachelbliss.com/
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