Read Online Gossamurmur by Anne Waldman - Free Book Online

corporate styles
    and become inseparable from them
    women called into the room
    in a power arrangement where they stand before a Decider
    decidedly at disadvantage
    feng shui
decidely off for the women
    eyes roam around the room, an array of Deciders behind desks without much on them like prefab newscasters
    and shiny surfaces like fortresses, reflections of Deciders’ features coming up at the women
    one Decider at a desk before a woman raw and exposed
    another flanked on the left with a trophy of counting coup
    invoking regulations in a weak and whimpering monotone “
it’s the rule
”
    patriarchs demand your silence where monosyllables stress the company out
    squint in light
    glare seeping in from between slats of the blinds
    By the shape of false governance came this shape of looking
    The low-level Deciders were frantic when they heard of the escape of Original Anne. A seventh-level Decider was caught in the dilemma and wouldn’t admit his weakness. The message from above was
never admit a mistake, never be accountable.
    You had to keep decisions blamed on the lower-level Deciders. They were not quite ready to handle the cinematic world the world ofreflections and double mirrors a fallen world might sputter off its reel and die.
    But this was metaphor.
    There were scant reels in the New Deciding-Way.
    Had not Chief Decider created a hell realm for prisoners?
    Had he not voted to close the progressive library where thoughts of freedom festered?
    Libraries that might breed archivists?
    He was swiftly demoted in the “new accountability.”
    “
And now the tapes gone missing!
”
    “
They’re in the business of hell-on-earth, madrassas for anarchy
”
    heard how a poet gathered the fragments, wrote and rewrote…erased
    started again…little woman upstart
    because when you write out a line with your body—structure it—move it—
    it gets free
    that is what I wanted to see…how atom by atom your sentences replicate beyond one another
    I, poet, wanted a shape of her as a free agent before she dissolved
    I wanted to catch her, un-canceled
    And to let her know she could be missed
    Even if I harbored dark thoughts toward her, dark lady of my shadowy DNA
    for she was the antiheroine of this tale
    this is what happens when my singularities are alone
    they want us to express their selves in triplicate
    and steal or mingle among one another’s texts, and double helixes
    and appropriate and glorify themselves in the texts of others
    but we see them and they are glad of that, enjoying exposure
    the imprints they make in what are deceptively empty chambers but none truly empty of ghosts, spirits, sense impressions
    they come in mind trailing on willowy gossamer
    sample: cartilaginous
    sample: backbone
    what they were on about…that they could plunge or fall in language
    whose job it was to classify
    but if you study smaller ones and their textures you may appreciate the balk of similarity
    loneliness of classifying others in an outcome of the study of duplications
    loneliness of erotics, may any two primates be truly alike?
    but she is steady and outside time, ennobling it
    and roots to be a scientist of illusion as she copies the originals
    when you consider value of a shape of a form a genome barks
me too me too
    which is plural and suggests a way to behave with accoutrements that are symbolic, the skins of these trembling lines
    classifying items of possession, of poem-objects, exquisite corpses, and the jangling aces and pentacles, and voices that speak into machines
    if she may consider her relation to the formerly alive parts of formerly alive poems she will cheer up and be formally alive
    she might stroke what is lonely and cold and listen to disembodied voices
    might push further into a void of identity
    angels and savants fly in and out
    messing with your Decider Radar
    that they would be concentrated as well on the same kind of
    machinations
    or inventory or tone, but for darker control
    countenance of an artist