The Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia Presents
I don't know if any of you live in or around Portland, OR; I think if you did, I would know by now, but maybe not. But if you do live in or around Portland, OR, you should come. On Thursday, March 19th, Rauan Klassnik and Ariana Reines will be reading at the WorkSound Gallery, 820 SE Alder St., at 7:00pm. Not only are they both fantastic, I am also fantastic, not like they are, quantitatively or qualitatively, but in the way where you know of a person and what kinds of things they like but have never met them and might like to, for a laugh, and with my collaborators I am hosting this event, which is free to attend. There may be wine, which may also be free.
Ariana Reines, from Mercury
You girls. Your knees
And waists in my mind. Your common sense.
You look weird and you know what you do.
Something is remembered and held in store.
Something is protracted and inferior
And it covers something private that has to be.
The population of the world is willing to live only and completely on its outermost skin.
Full lips obscure the birthmark.
An angle of the grandfather in the knees. Something baroque and lascivious even in his dismay face.
Two taupe eyes are beautiful because of the oblivion. Because of the attention.
There will be some to come to harm, and others to learn to be what they possess, to learn to possess at all, to enlarge and after a long time to see
Poplars shimmy like Liza Minnelli.
Steeples up in the air like what you want.
Their verdigris like what I am.
Students are slimmer now; their pills are better.
We two are faster, as fast as one another, just slightly faster than a moment before when we found out something about one another the sun was butter and we knew it and it was melting the fat of the world and we were it.
We became slow. We grew tolerant and sad. Mothers. All at once we knew. We knew the depth of our capacities. We became equaller to them, more and more.
This was our art.
When I am on all fours and I have to pee and he has to pee and he fucks me the tension in our bellies and the blood in our middles makes us have to be what we are.
Tits in the mirror like the bulges under the golden fleece.
A face doesn't have to mean anything, everything is too much and whatever it breaks is where something true will have had to have happened and will have.
Unified substance
Of all things into which the sun installs burrows and launches the first accusation.
Saying like is attaching one thing to another in this atmosphere that offers no resistance. Or the word wants to be the drop of mercury in the silver dollar sized plastic labyrinth.
Lonely and incapable and poisonous nevertheless. But the word is not this
But sometimes it almost is.
Ugly buildings immure themselves in the distance.
The woman with heavy buttocks knows how to handle the folds in her dress. Rushing, she is visibly aware of and dependent upon her dignity, she is totally believable in her self possession and in her reality.
I in the enormity
Of this interiority
Become her.
My prayer.
The time of day is now felling some loose light from out of those trees. They are becoming bluer and more solid. The satellite dishes are clear and there.
* * *
Give up the habit of weeping for yourself, says the woman to the man with the malady of death in the novel by Marguerite Duras.
The sex parts of good books are usually the worst parts, that is too bad about good books.
Some bad books have good sex in them. And sex that I can see is somebody else's.
I want to have the sex that's mine, the sex that I have, okay.
Time to tell the difference between what's emitted and what's left over and what was there in the first place.
Everything else far off in the distance, far far ahead.
The hills decline like several dromedaries slowly sitting down.
Rauan Klassnik
In a Time of Drought
Under the table tree the elders have gathered to discuss the
color in the voice of the ruling lion's eyes. They know how to
endure the heat and the dust and the voice they hear is the
voice of a woman whose body is so filled with pain she lies
on her back staring out into the sun looking for birds and
fish in the rain that does not fall.
My Poem on Death
Five girls competing for prizes and cash take their turns on
top of an elephant. I am naked here again in a hotel room.
Five sets of knives. Five sets of tits. Their nipples are burning
and I'm upset: this doesn't help my poem on death at all--
elephants drudging up into snow, my heart heavy, my heart
in my cock. One of them's climbed up on to its trunk and the
grey beast is lifting her up! For five minutes, more or less,
she stands on its head, blowing kisses out over the river.
And I'm incensed.
The Ride
A flock of canaries cruising south. The world’s glowing. The song of one
shot-down glowing. Lifting us up. And I can feel you scratching: silver & gold,
bronze, pewter, porcelain, like days gone by, Once Upon a Time, etc, etc. A
giant, crawling beauty. I’ve spent my life in it. Hold my hand. Hold it.
All the Stars You Can Swallow
Have you seen what’s done with geese? Let’s take a week off. Drive. They collar them. Latch them on to a wheel. And when they spin it, it shaves each head off. The swallows are feeding their babies. Like mice. Or moths. Paintings of rabbits hanged in pantries. Suddenly the sky’s divided. Stop. Get out. Spin round with your arms spread wide. The wind just takes you.
Now
Wiping you crawled into light and come back out. Girls with huge tits swaying.
White as geese. Like soldiers in their millions. The human heart--and all its
medals raining down. So grin. Hold out your hands. And grin.
Ariana Reines, from Mercury
You girls. Your knees
And waists in my mind. Your common sense.
You look weird and you know what you do.
Something is remembered and held in store.
Something is protracted and inferior
And it covers something private that has to be.
The population of the world is willing to live only and completely on its outermost skin.
Full lips obscure the birthmark.
An angle of the grandfather in the knees. Something baroque and lascivious even in his dismay face.
Two taupe eyes are beautiful because of the oblivion. Because of the attention.
There will be some to come to harm, and others to learn to be what they possess, to learn to possess at all, to enlarge and after a long time to see
Poplars shimmy like Liza Minnelli.
Steeples up in the air like what you want.
Their verdigris like what I am.
Students are slimmer now; their pills are better.
We two are faster, as fast as one another, just slightly faster than a moment before when we found out something about one another the sun was butter and we knew it and it was melting the fat of the world and we were it.
We became slow. We grew tolerant and sad. Mothers. All at once we knew. We knew the depth of our capacities. We became equaller to them, more and more.
This was our art.
When I am on all fours and I have to pee and he has to pee and he fucks me the tension in our bellies and the blood in our middles makes us have to be what we are.
Tits in the mirror like the bulges under the golden fleece.
A face doesn't have to mean anything, everything is too much and whatever it breaks is where something true will have had to have happened and will have.
Unified substance
Of all things into which the sun installs burrows and launches the first accusation.
Saying like is attaching one thing to another in this atmosphere that offers no resistance. Or the word wants to be the drop of mercury in the silver dollar sized plastic labyrinth.
Lonely and incapable and poisonous nevertheless. But the word is not this
But sometimes it almost is.
Ugly buildings immure themselves in the distance.
The woman with heavy buttocks knows how to handle the folds in her dress. Rushing, she is visibly aware of and dependent upon her dignity, she is totally believable in her self possession and in her reality.
I in the enormity
Of this interiority
Become her.
My prayer.
The time of day is now felling some loose light from out of those trees. They are becoming bluer and more solid. The satellite dishes are clear and there.
* * *
Give up the habit of weeping for yourself, says the woman to the man with the malady of death in the novel by Marguerite Duras.
The sex parts of good books are usually the worst parts, that is too bad about good books.
Some bad books have good sex in them. And sex that I can see is somebody else's.
I want to have the sex that's mine, the sex that I have, okay.
Time to tell the difference between what's emitted and what's left over and what was there in the first place.
Everything else far off in the distance, far far ahead.
The hills decline like several dromedaries slowly sitting down.
Rauan Klassnik
In a Time of Drought
Under the table tree the elders have gathered to discuss the
color in the voice of the ruling lion's eyes. They know how to
endure the heat and the dust and the voice they hear is the
voice of a woman whose body is so filled with pain she lies
on her back staring out into the sun looking for birds and
fish in the rain that does not fall.
My Poem on Death
Five girls competing for prizes and cash take their turns on
top of an elephant. I am naked here again in a hotel room.
Five sets of knives. Five sets of tits. Their nipples are burning
and I'm upset: this doesn't help my poem on death at all--
elephants drudging up into snow, my heart heavy, my heart
in my cock. One of them's climbed up on to its trunk and the
grey beast is lifting her up! For five minutes, more or less,
she stands on its head, blowing kisses out over the river.
And I'm incensed.
The Ride
A flock of canaries cruising south. The world’s glowing. The song of one
shot-down glowing. Lifting us up. And I can feel you scratching: silver & gold,
bronze, pewter, porcelain, like days gone by, Once Upon a Time, etc, etc. A
giant, crawling beauty. I’ve spent my life in it. Hold my hand. Hold it.
All the Stars You Can Swallow
Have you seen what’s done with geese? Let’s take a week off. Drive. They collar them. Latch them on to a wheel. And when they spin it, it shaves each head off. The swallows are feeding their babies. Like mice. Or moths. Paintings of rabbits hanged in pantries. Suddenly the sky’s divided. Stop. Get out. Spin round with your arms spread wide. The wind just takes you.
Now
Wiping you crawled into light and come back out. Girls with huge tits swaying.
White as geese. Like soldiers in their millions. The human heart--and all its
medals raining down. So grin. Hold out your hands. And grin.