can’t help myself!
You return when you feel like it, / like rain. And like rain you are tender, / with the rain’s inept tenderness. / A passion so general I could be anywhere. / You carry me out into the wet air. / You lay me down on the leaves / and the strong thing is not the sex / but waking up alone under trees after.
- Linda Gregg
The artist doesn’t need to be present on-site, physically. Instead, you rely on an agent to carry out your will. This is my agent. It has limitless endurance.
- Sun Yuan on “Can't Help Myself” in the Guggenheim Museum
i.
and i’m sorry but it is blood. i’d like to tell you
dying is mere ritual or at least water will return
in the aftermath. we are all regurgitation but you sweat so much when
we touch– your body, buffer-like. i always come back– i build new languages for you–
hydrophobic animal. i own so little. lying alone, i feel
my calf against my other calf– in the morning, your knees twitch like
an insistence. the closest thing to freedom is dumb habit–
it’s easy to be a hermit, a prokaryote– to love joints, not people. my hip cracks again like
a gear shifting into place. i mourn all our time spent kindling. asleep, i drain.
i.
purity is a hoax. you might as well be kind as swear off water. a few thousand
miles from you, snowflakes wriggle their way out of snowmen. it is not like
clay whittled to a pyre– more like life, pilling out from the primordial ooze. the grain
of you is unsearchable– if i were a knife i could not start. you
hug your legs on the far side of the bathroom while i shower. stare.
i want to be the one still point in the universe. you are so tender,
with the rain’s inept tenderness– you watch as i scrape myself bloody with
your washcloth, then crawl to sleep so gently that i never wake. i writhe
dry. i wish we were more like our art. like the rain’s
inept tenderness, my symbols are spread-eagle against the glass. we are inept
at symbolism. i raise my arm and my arm raises– don’t tell me this isn’t tenderness.
i.
do not want me. i do not want a comma
wedged in me as you lay me down on the leaves. in passion
i elbow, i subtext, i imagine what it is to be you. i assemble for you and also
watch how i do it, how i become so general
i could be anywhere. i make the splatter– the i
reflected back on itself in the viewing window. if i could
choose, i’d be want, i’d be
as general as the space i’ve covered. if you like blood, look anywhere.
i.
you suggest that i stop using blood in my poems. try setting instead. you carry me
onto the hardened snow– my blood on the snow– even worse. i’m a washout–
i need framing mechanisms– ways in. going out into the wet air,
you ask why bend, why gouge the itch, why bring up poetry again. you lay me
flat on my back. the artist is never present on-site. down on the leaves,
i am mere endurance– i spend whole blizzards shoveling. and the strong thing
is that i only kiss as rain does– sputtering and raw for this wasteful life. it is not
the movement you make of me. you don’t know the reason for the sex, but
arrive hairless to the scene, your skin almost alive. while waking up,
i decide not to write about my youth– the branches, the intolerable heat. alone
in this viewing box– in this self-referential liquid– every reflection was blood. under
museum light you ask if i have walls up and i decide to love you. there are no trees
in this poem. spread on the wall, i am no center. i won’t wake up alone– under trees– after.