“Drawing life / from life / so that nothing remains / but content.” The poems in Beautiful Methods range across various terrains of skeptical apprehension and doubt—the uses of technology and reason, the unifying illusions of media, the meaning of daily experience, the images of memory. This movement is by contrast or opposition, both within the poem and in the relationship between poems. Or this movement is virulent mutation.

In allowing interiority to fracture while holding together the things of perceived experience—whether a magazine cover, a scene from the Discovery Channel, the recorded stuff that stands in for what memory is—I hope to personify a related whole. This for me is the ideal of the poem: a resolution in paradox—resolution in that it is an attempt to hold together, within the logic of the poem, the sense of being individual, and paradoxical because this experience can never itself be the whole.

A resolution, that is an attempt to hold together, within the logic of the poem, in the absence of anything to believe in.

Ranging over—towards what? Keep moving. Keep moving.

Self-Portrait with Arm Twisted above Head

for Chris Benedict

Framed by the lover’s lipstick of irradiating heart

on the mirror in a now abattoir of abundance,

I am brilliant assays, solus ipse.

Again on a floor of tiles or tessera hospitalis

I am astonishing eels, ipso facto.

I am potent factotum, solitary

programmer of objects, subjectivist

for one and all and temporary

adjectival madness incised around personality

of tall vessels empty & full.

 

I am one of the big blond unhappy ones

from the north where

blond = gold and gold = silver

and the only value in this economy

is the gift, but it looks good on you Uncle Garrett.

 

I am, like you, Norwegian, yes

we talked about it, Will or

“the only Teutonic contribution to European culture.”

I am Irish and my flag is

green white and pink and kiss my boyfriend.

I am Catholic or cathectic or the Pathétique

hence universal. Which is why write.

I am Protestant thus say too little and too much.

I am Protestant and Nonconformist or

con artist of pretense and in really top form.

I am Protestant, yes thrice the mixture being

3 to 1, I told her, corazón

so my manias are incorrigibly serious.

I am bad and I am good, I told her

and I am very very bad,

this is your last warning before I love you to death.

 

I am American, well, more about that another time.

 

Let’s just say now I’m on the increase,

I can fill you as well as you can fill me,

empty vessel,

I can obey & command to be obeyed in equal measure,

empty measure

where trust = we hold these truths to be

like onions or tongues hence many-layered.

 

I belong to

and so own up to myself

giver of this quality or

property of myself

and so sole possessor

solus ipse

of all my faculties

namely Tooth and Tooth and Nail.

 

Still beautiful?

Still beautiful? like I saw you yesterday.

Still tough as nails? like we thought we were.

Still sharp, yes? still expert

in the sagittal splitting of hairs? like that time

in your bathroom with Ockham’s razor

practicing the edge localization of the emotions,

as if that would do it

until the whole being came to

days later. I’m sorry. Came to what?

 

Once I was looking for something in

An Illustrated History of Brain Function and

days later, fed pea soup and

given new powers of healing I would show you

 

these the last anatomical figures specially prepared

for a printed book

including the author’s self-portrait,

 

a Disease Man with halo of disease names

and hence holy.

 

 

 

 

(“Self Portrait with Arm Twisted above Head” was originally published in Crowd No. 7, Fall Winter 2006.)