Vines

Infinite milestone and the threads of a spiderweb once used

for money; twin shiploads of north wind; etymologies

of rain and fog. Oh, hard-surfaced inhabitant, she took the

beer out with her, which was later your sweat. In a way

the vines acquired a late bus ride home lost in an armadillo

high, in a make believe patched sail. Rope stretches over water

in the apartment of your memory, and the old one replies with oak,

pine and sycamore. The candle-stained road scraper, its cargo hold

of modern shells, comes to the end of a short stretch of pavement,

the end of a whistle drawn to its last halt, its last two-cylinder

monoplane parked in the yard. It’s what mistakenly gets put on the

page wind dampens with its criticism, with its nowhere to live,

nowhere to even shake a hand. Work withdraws to its repair, its

shelf of oyster shells reminiscent of red tile roofs. Tomorrow,

morning will place in your previous letter the shared ends of a

saddle and flashlight.

Anatomies: an Apocryphal History

The discontinuous fan-spokes of a freshly coined dream: fistfuls of fruit-flies—the last embers of an impenetrable dialect of lower Missouri Comanche; gift of an ancient sort, yet so specific as to fold up into its own narrative without acknowledging contrasts between the thing as parable and the telling of it, like fictionalized battles in the air over missile-silos of interminable cloud-mast—the  differential precipitates of wind; the coda, like the peak of a surfboard cutting through paradoxical wakes of icy tarmac, preceded by an otherness so radical as to seemingly justify its projection onto another’s well-earned daily allotment of malaria. We, the accumulated Parthenon’s of Paleozoic viruses, sown into anachronism.

Everything eventually overcomes itself as fact, through the banal fakery of trompoleil, the hidden urethrics of 3^rd floor post-Reichian fantasies; 1,000 years and all you ended up with was a recipe for German potato salad and a Hummel dairy-cow figurine. The essence of kitsch is in never being properly grounded in the Iowan black-dirt of proportionality; those tiny big eyed waifs whose feet hardly touch the floor at the bottom of one of Margaret Keane’s canvases, bur spiral like tears of nostalgia into leafy lawns of a mild Fall without legislation; itself just a longer circumventing of the magnetic boundaries that attach themselves like a corona of miniscule cleaner-fish to the fraying shark-skin of the original word: roots clumped in dry-rot.

Hundreds of drosophila buzzing around spools of banana rinds inside kitchen garbage bags—the outer hull of a rusted transformation borne of distasteful but purposeful activity, bloated like a neuron shaped mandrake.

Kitsch is one fruit fly, cartooned a thousand-fold; photographed and framed next to the downstairs guest bathroom mirror, into tremendous opticals and fluttering wings—a sentimental shrinking of nature and precisely why half-truth makes a likeable companion. It’s dragonesque derangement of its own insectized anatomy now too small to be seen; its otherness occluded and reduced to the apostrophe’ of a musical trilling from invisible propellers, like the far away plane-engines of a romantic Lindbergian crossing over the 1920’s Atlantic—a world that one can never inhabit directly.

Fantasy is partially built from the inability to imagine something within the domain of its actual proportions, necessitating a redefinition of context that creates the need for an accompanying legend, or the Humpty Dumpty circumference of synecdoche, to reduce a story to measurable shape; re-growing the yellow-corn-fed fat of myth at the expense of innumerable particularities, like the erasure of lithospheric narrative through subduction into fresh mantles of undifferentiated lava.

I should balk at being asked to consider such a price for the preservation of an already unreliable memory, without which history would be a thin soup indeed, bony and insubstantial, like the hooves, spines and skulls of an emaciated herd of self-repeating bovine discontinuities. Faded maps landscaped with an endless chronology of unreadable names. History can never be painted entirely of fact, just as experience cannot dis-embed itself from subterfuges of core ideas cross-pollinated by insights hardened into dogma.

The sturdiest boats are grouted with the impunity of myths, whose cargoes of refractory hatchlings only survive their inevitable wreckages, reconstituted as coprolites in sunken worlds strewn like conjugations from barely forgotten languages: the endless midden pile architectures scattered across indecipherable beaches of amnesia. Politics, the last artifact of expired selves mineralized into armatures pregnant with stale air.

J Zackary Rothstein   12/27/2017

Through Scrapes on the Math

Crisscrossing moonlit bellies, fractured suits built

up around what began as an ambulanche,

as a cinematic existence scrawled upon the wall.

The original gristle is now capable of writing

in everything, and the bright yellow murmuring

elevation of the studio

renders patterns obsolete between lip and cloud,

between thirst and flower, armor and cutting

flesh. Withdrawn from miscast and spiderwebbed

retreats, from plumes of smoke

hanging over a welded table, over a heightened

sense of a shared awareness brought on by the cold.

What is in itself an object split down the middle

of a newly reclusive Condylarth standing in the bones

of a gallery, of a presence? Figures in tufts of grass memorize

the spinning scene, the headlights and holograms, unstructured

though tidy and fast. The step-by-step melding of hatch marks

escape the brushstrokes of a new installation. The two or more

acceptable metal gates remain open to what’ll come through the door

next. A moment of celebration, of pages turning through the square

and distant form knitting in the welcome sleeve of the Greenland

shark. It’s the surge from a pair of dry leaves, from the restful

summing up of that red cord of chance, that rattle

of lip and cloud. The yard hidden behind the two

gates heals up in plumes of smoke incurring Jack

Skeleton on the trademarked chalkboard. Two crisscrossing moonlit

bellies and an older way taking off through separations of coast,

crash, and ambulanche. The ingredients rebound through scrapes

on the math in the leading of an innumerable stumble.