OVERCAST
'I'm building a time machine made from
parts of the past, for when I might return'
– Brenda Coultas, 'The Tatters'
You wouldn't recognise me
if you saw me today. I'm grey
like the sky and rain outside
and prone to hiding away.
I've been splashing and
drawing colours in a book
without reason or title
as a way of doing something
but it doesn't mean much
and I've had to let it dry.
I've listened to music
and tried to read but
my eyes skate across
the page, even pictures
of art won't stay in focus.
Everything's misted over
and open to interpretation.
I want me back where I belong,
have wandered far away from
the light shining into the dark.
Overcast -- Maya Kulenovic
'I'm building a time machine made from
parts of the past, for when I might return'
– Brenda Coultas, 'The Tatters'
You wouldn't recognise me
if you saw me today. I'm grey
like the sky and rain outside
and prone to hiding away.
I've been splashing and
drawing colours in a book
without reason or title
as a way of doing something
but it doesn't mean much
and I've had to let it dry.
I've listened to music
and tried to read but
my eyes skate across
the page, even pictures
of art won't stay in focus.
Everything's misted over
and open to interpretation.
I want me back where I belong,
have wandered far away from
the light shining into the dark.
Overcast -- Maya Kulenovic
Looking at the ground, the tatters of the nest I destroyed, but how else could I know the nature of physical objects, and of my body?
ReplyDeleteI, a physical object, ask what’s inside the body? The Mutter Museum and its collection of swallowed needles, fish hooks, and pennies.
For a long time looking in, gazing, trying to know
The nature of the physical, like the man who could balance jagged, sea rocks, one on top another. He could know an object and if those boulders could be stacked as steady as plates or as delicately as a house of cards.
I, a physical object, reading "Anatomy," 1924, colored plates, diagrams with overlays. It is good that I saved these thick books, each one a doorstopper on female anatomy and child care, from the time of paper and print, colored plates to lift and reveal. Each plate, like a candy pop, taking you further, dissolving layers until you reach the baby soft center.
Diagrams, like this one. See.
A man told me of finding the foot pedals of a sewing machine covered in dust on Mott St., about how he put his foot to the pedal and the flywheel turned although the rest of the machine was extinct.
Flywheel, I like to say it and see it.
Alone with paper, or reading from paper, in a room
It’s quiet. Me, a noun, an animal from the time of the animals
I write and I eat with my hands.
Working late and decoding secret writings from the tatters (read once of a wealthy young artist who slept in nests he made out of bedding in luxury hotel rooms. I thought a nest should be made from discards, and humble like a quilt.)
The feather again (the blade). This time on the street.
First quietly in front, then as I move, cocks quietly towards the 10 o’clock position. Later in the day, silently soaked with winter salt.
Too, same roach and rat.
Regulars.
Can’t recall the center, only the fury with which I tore it, then a drop in the blood at realizing what I had done.
Paper at my feet.
Bodies.
Stillborns.
What little I know of other lives.
from "A Critical Mass for Brad Will," in “The Tatters” [2014]