Dead Birds and Other Poems
Bardo
Sometimes, when the origin of ideas of the sublime and the beautiful
are struck by lightning, I root into the hail of stones
at the precise center of the world
and sink into that dust.
The trees
maintain their erectness through the reciprocity of sight. Somewhere below,
the rhythm of a body continues and continues. I close my eyes
between two figures meeting in a kiss
my fins, my rhomboids open themselves
to a continuously precarious verticality, the constant
making and unmaking of union
a line that describes,
smooth surface of multitudes
Dead Birds
1.
Is there a difference between inwardness,
this narrative thread, any other
explanation,
a sleeping woman?
Is where we are an argument
and can I apply my self
to specific contexts?
Is there material enough
that we should wait for interpretation
despite being consumed
by wild beasts in the dream?
Can I use small black squares
to signify cross-references?
Should we pray on the gap between expectation
and fulfillment? The abyss of loose gestures
and broken hearts wiped down to their traces?
Why is it winter now, the inner boulevards
littered with bare facts? Why
is the immutable so cold?
Why am I sweating?
Were there roiling vistas
of deciduous alphabets?
Was it executed
in reverse perspective?
Whose voice curls around the variables?
Folds up the wishes like sheets on a line?
In rain can you hear my lack of resolution?
Has it always been too late
to die to myself?
***
In the beginning, when she was released from the body of a fox, there surfaced sheer occurrence — a sadness, a desire, like a willful self attached to explanation, pale but intricate, monochrome, flipped on its side. Isolated, snowbound figures gazed up into the distance, hopping up and down in slow motion, an array of hallucinated passengers attempting to hone a more precise incarnation.
***
If I were to handle the monstrous — smears, drips and scratch marks —
temporarily unaware of boundaries and intent only on the unfolding present,
would animals die from sharp blows and knives?
Constructed, repeated,
undone,
positioned as variation
alongside the original referent.
Cut open, bisected <cleaving gesture> collapsed,
warm, consciousness shuttled
between emptiness and form.
Adherence and accumulation
of meat, fat, bone seems to stare out
with mismatched eyes
until it comes off like a glove.
Hiroyuki Doi, Untitled, 2015. Ink on Washi. Ricco/Maresca.
Open Hand
Here we have a mouth, in spite of itself,
detached. Its blurred attentions can read many ways.
Here we have the experience of corporeal
weight within a gravitational field.
Food flowers plants rocks shells drinking glasses books jewelry coins pipes swords
in this hyperrealistic fashion
owing to the slow drying a broken
of illustration and classification hoof
the great diffusion of animals
the choreography of gesture is not intended to fool us
into thinking this is an actual perception (edged
with a slight skirt of fur)
—we expect to be deceived.
-
snowing into the ocean
white
and along his belly
and back between his legs
Samsara
Moons and a river rise vertically
Dark to light (scribbles) culminating
in a shiny black core of
nearly continuous
The birds are an afterthought
In horizontal rows that line up
to form a square, a sequence
of blurry shots titled
Over and over, featuring shining, watery
bands along the near reaches
It isn’t menacing, exactly – it just isn’t
any of our business, our
surfaces slightly inflected with moonlight,
so many human documents of curved handholds
in shapes that look like containers
vessels with wings
We bring gesture and surface, figure and ground
into airy equilibrium
The gravitational pull is untitled,
a mix of insomnia and the pleasure
of looking
like snow mixed with water,
like three leafless trees,
or underwater reeds and extracted teeth
The act of seeing and making
elaborates the five fundamental gestures:
they are rare and we should be thankful for them
bow down and touch his feet
there is no prescribed way of going about doing it
other than that, it is knowing where the fulcrum is
you can not enter into them, you cannot go through them.
The discrete object dissolves
into that which is experienced in time
The bundle next to you
is a sleeping man
Bow down
Touch his teeth
Hiroyuki Doi, Untitled, 2017. Ink on Washi. Ricco/Maresca.
Vow Of Silence
absolute pluralism of forms
coming closer
framed to resist
they will move closer if they choose to
investigating from within
*
substances such as sand are combined with fragments
of figuration – silhouettes of body parts or common
objects such as facts, repeating motifs such as
spider webs or window panes
grid of existence
her penchant for filling the rectangle with incident,
abstraction and figuration; it’s all just
eyes, torso and shoulders at close range
an inability to name the unnamable
I stretch my arms and wonder where my fingers are
the verbal cannot be separated from its material
representation
*
heavy, medium heavy (or perhaps medium light) and light
one is a thin line, the other thick
*
the submission to a chosen rule
becomes a way of freeing oneself from the burden
of one’s own identity
I then proceeded, not to translate, but to curl and entangle
and reverberate in the multiplicity and proliferation:
syntax, displacement, projection, shield, penetration
however
we are made of different stuff: dense,
asymmetrical, without specific center
but rather a proliferation of centers, no real
program to offer, no themes beyond inescapable themes
of obliquity into which all identity is lost
beginning with that very someone I – the seemingly simplest molecule —
creating an opening
who absorbs into one and the same field
all traces of interior, vestiges, margins
where the subject endlessly
disappears
my collector
Hiroyuki Doi, Soul, 2013. Ink on Washi. Ricco/Maresca.
