We took the book at its word: idols were bad. Down came the asherim with all their blank leaves marked up by larvae. Then the high places had to be brought low & paved over, & the flesh had to be mortified with whips & hairshirts. We found we still itched in unaccountable ways, but the book couldn’t be wrong — everyone knows that worship & degradation are poles apart. Desperate now, we tore pages from the book & chewed them into a paste which we applied as an unguent to all the burning places. Such cooling relief! The book emptied like a chrysalis until nothing was left but the cow hide. When the wind caught it at just the right angle, you could hear it moan.
Notes to/on the plagiarist
“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form….” ~ “The Solar Anus,” George Bataille
The senator takes to the floor and makes another speech. The birds must know something: they tremble the branches of all the trees, and ripples move through the entire assembly. What is that nervous tittering in the gallery?
If, as Bataille says, the world is all parody and copulation is the principle of all things, then the senator is fucking with himself, his mother, your mother, our mothers, the president’s mother who was also a president, his father who was also a senator, also assassinated like Robert F. Kennedy though in different circumstances and in another part of the world.
You know of course that this is not just word-play. In more than a hundred tongues the world over, this is the most grievous insult a man might give and/or receive.
Which is not the same as saying women cannot find a suitable equivalent.
But, returning to the topic at hand: what is the punishment for the crime of extended plagiarism by copulation or related means?
It is at the very least bemusing (which is very different from “amusing”— though not at all surprising) that a man violently opposed to the idea of women exercising sovereignty over their bodies and reproductive health, could have been so ignorant about where women bloggers write about that sort of thing.
We all think we’re so cool, taking those long silver skewers and spearing chunks of bread, chunks of meat, dipping them into the gooey communal fondue pot that is the internet.
Here is the text I am reading tonight. The lesson is to differentiate the paraphrase from the precis and to write an example of each. The next lesson is proper citation, using page references within parentheses. There is an appendix which tells you how to do this for electronic sources.
One passage reads: “…lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator.”
Which is to say, no amount of alchemical manipulation can change the outcome when you have made a colossal fool of yourself.
The man in the mountains playing a bamboo kubing in the fading light could tell the senator as much.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
The woman calls from the window that it is getting dark. And as if her saying so makes it so, night descends upon late afternoon. How will she keep her eye on that sparrow, as the song instructs? The evening is inkier than the underside of a wing. If she hesitates and doesn’t turn the lights on right away, she has only the tips of her fingers to tell the lintel from the post. There is more than flour and oil and water in her house. There are sheets and comforters and coats. Across the city are several warehouses brimming with food in boxes and jars, cases of water stacked on wooden pallets. There is always more than one mouth to feed, each with more than its share of hunger, each saying give, and give. She remembers her grandfather arriving from the farm: how swiftly he worked in the kitchen, deboning a fish or butterflying a chicken, not getting a drop of blood on his white shirt; his mouth puckering as he recalled the war— We were lucky if we had salt, if we found husks of grain that we could chew. He asked, Have you ever had to eat the peel of a banana? Peel off the wing of a roasted beetle? The flame on the stove gutters. The year draws to a close, and here we are, sliding around in its maw, listening for the rasp of implements adjusting.
In response to small stone (174).
The Empress of Malcolm Square
Who was that woman who painted her cheeks with flowers, her hair in disarray?
She walked unabashed in the plaza, passed shopkeepers who hid behind their wares.
We never knew where she slept at night, how she spent the other hours of the day.
She’d disappear during the monsoon months like mist dissolving into grey;
then when the weather turned warmer, we’d hear her shrill cries pierce the air.
She smeared flowers on her cheeks or wound them through her hair in disarray.
She had a name I can’t recall; I only know it reeked of solitude. Fey,
unabashed, her tattered skirts swept plaza stones with eerie flair—
Who knew where she slept at night, how she spent the other hours of the day?
Who didn’t tremble a little at her approach? And yet her eyes— steely, grey,
sharper than the chiseled moon— it seemed could size you up, intuiting your despair.
They say she knew the future: her painted cheek, a screen for our own disarray.
I thought I knew who she once was: an artist’s model, an ingenue, stylish, blasé—
There was this talk: of course a lover, a jilting. (What we don’t know, we embroider.)
We never saw where she slept at night, how she fed the other hours of the day.
She’s her own fable, fantastic narrative: lucid in survival, she laced
hibiscus in her hair, placed unashamed bid for what was due: her share.
Gypsy with flowered cheeks, with tresses in ravaged disarray—
Love’s still our common dream, imperfect to this day.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Project
Gray, ugly, already starting
to crumble. What the project’s
planners had meant it to say
was: The future is here.
What the residents heard:
You do not belong.
Fortunately, it was possible
to pry the windows open.
On any given night,
you could stand on the street
& watch the litter sail out:
Happy Meal bags, cigarette butts
leaving trails of sparks,
yesterday’s paper.
This year-round autumn
blanketed the courtyard,
& was only swept aside
when the police needed
to outline in chalk
another occupant who’d vanished
through the one good door.
Dear Naga Buddha,
how still, how still you sit
beneath the ticking of the seven-
headed tree; it’s hard to understand,
but just like ours, those tongues
have foraged along the ground
for leftovers, for milky drops
of immortality. O careless and
forgetful gods, you’ve crowned us
with accidents, spiked our appetites,
littered the way with detours
and false starts. No warnings issued
about sharp blades of grass that split
the ligaments in the mouth: and thus,
in dreams, the restless body turns
and hisses, even in brief repose.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Valediction
We didn’t say goodbye
with our hands but
with naked branches.
(And anyway it was
more of a hello.)
You undid me the way
a fire plays a harp,
the strings singing as
they snap. (Each note
can only sound once:
an excellent discipline!)
They are still together,
your smoke & my fog.
(I feed them wood.)
Unraveling
She thinks of a former teacher who, running into her at a conference, blurts out: I hear your writing is as exquisite as ever, but that your life isn’t. What does one say in the face of such a stupendous welcome? She could have said, Let me start from the beginning; or— no, the beginning before that beginning. Which thread would you like to follow? But then again, it doesn’t really matter, does it? The ball of red yarn might tangle in the bushes, catch on thorns; but always, it leads back to the beast that slumbers in the center. Sometimes there is one beast. Sometimes the one beast is many. It’s grown fat on the gristle of the past and its bedroll of stories: pity, fear, the hurt from a pebble in a shoe. It never spared a thing, lover or child, parent or sibling. In remembering, she remembers too how myth is perhaps the baddest habit, the hardest one to break. Who said she couldn’t lay that tightly wound mess at her feet and simply walk, finding the way back by instinct? Who said she had to pick up the thread, retrace the steps she took before? She wants to leave it, leave it where it is; the signs say it’s time to unhalter her story.
In response to Via Negativa: Helmsman.
Helmsman
“For years, I thought I hated children’s laughter.
I had no idea I was just hungry.”
—Healthy Choice ad
No children of my own, I thought
they all laughed that way—
teasing, cruel. Some poor scapegoat
forced to ingest god knows what.
Cleaning the dormitories, scrubbing
the blood from the shower walls,
my stomach contracts like a fist
around a blank coin.
Tomorrow, the soles of the state
inspector’s shoes will squeak
against spit-shiny floors.
He’ll hear nothing else. But today
I move backwards down the corridor
with the mop steering from side to side,
its wet locks dragging
an endless river of filth.
In response to twisted rib: “Secrecy imposed on the exposure of alleged child abuse”
Oh November,
oh week after the rather disastrous
midterms that didn’t get cancelled
despite the hurricane school closings;
oh agonizing stretch before the next
holiday break, what will I do with you
and with the two who plagiarized
their essays despite submitting them
on SafeAssign? Tonight has been
particularly trying. Only the same
four or five students with any energy
to recite; meanwhile, the rest sit silent,
some sullen, indifferent, slunk low
in their chairs at the end of a long day.
And I’m their last stop, last three-hour,
once-a-week literature requirement put off
for too long, and now it is the final
semester before graduation…
Narrative arc, verisimilitude, conflict
and epiphany are the farthest things
from their minds; but I press on
into the winding corridors of story,
feeling like a guide who’s lost
her troupe somewhere near the cafe
or water fountain or the gift shop
(for sure the gift shop): that too
has been foreshadowed. Once in a rare
while, it almost seems that a word
I’ve uttered has somehow pierced
the veil; as if a small domestic
animal has burrowed close then
suddenly nipped the tender flesh—
and then it is as if a brace of wind
has flung open a window and we
can see the coming snow, sped
by wind, above the trees.
In response to small stone (176).