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The Middle

By Lisa Robertson

I had thought
To be a woman breathing
Through the door of my body 
I would begin to bark
In order to violate my preferences

I began to bark through the door of my body.
Its future’s untenable.
Now I have extra organs.
I got lost here to transform myself.

 


 

bending over them greedily from above
I mumble elaborately to my bankers, dear
malleable enoughness of anything known
only recumbent governess of the 
minimum, dictate what
what spiritualized everliving cut 
roseate genitalia etcetera transcendent
light pouring all over the volute part of the ship
the circumference of the ship being ridden
rebreathes, overdroops
to draw into the body eagerly everything about the minimum
is why I fuck spirit

 


 

Cease what comes from ships
Rats, Grain, Hunger and Death
quite terrible partial fructification in armfuls cease 
the feral sorrow incubating in money
spectral aura of the booties cease
cease eveningness and floral dandling or nibbling
and pabulum of the love-gouged domus
begetting begetting begetting
cuticle of silence and self-lip 
cease

 


 

What can really begin?
Because time in the body is awesome
and skepticism fragile
this would be a wealth:
with supple amplitude
to breathe impersonal 
in hormonal forest
not discriminating as to the cause
the rain making a tiny draft of coolness 
which fans the problem of solitude.

Within the problem of solitude
there is often a small meadow in the distance
and in the meadow a tree
tightly woven and with a luminous sheen
where politics are incomplete.

Had I only been able to write a quarter of what I saw and felt beneath that tree 
Sir, of imperceptible movement, the baroque description of number, broken
vase of European psyche scattered 
randomly through the style of the period:
Noon was populous with the figures of an arrested desire

Fresh and solid came the light
In expressive range too, the atmosphere branched out
Whence arose perfunctory women
As the image of a new conception of language
To leverage emotion.

But I don’t see that there should be separate words for politics and nature. 
Both are at once free and fixed. They move according to recurrent attractions
to make the earth appear
to build a sparring floor
to fill a cinema:
Duration isn’t singular
and only beneath its tree a politics
the thuds and groans of wrecking balls dominating the soundtrack.

 


 

Materiality is always in the way
where materiality is trash anything

and I lick its speech, spit up
defunct pixels, disbelieve

any image not lived as commodious
where image is a nilling

to continuously explode the psyche in this excess

This would include the total refusal of each existing narrative of femininity
I explained to the dog.

 


 

On this porch
Equivocity is the semantic
brindle-throated bird, beads of damp on bracken
to conquer, to bind, the thought inflecting 
muscle enters the socius so 
directly, spreads a causal digression
as a deliberately tousled concept.

 


 

I put my hands into an idea 
I had to do it, laying across the
hotel bed near the shears or sitting in 
the corner chair observing

I’m getting the feeling of all those rooms
now, the rooms that were entire structures and
the rooms that were parts of structures. First I
had to choose, and I chose these words and staying

Now my idea of time 
keeps changing, and that’s what this is about 
the time in rooms becoming my body 
near the window. What I want to say is 
I’ve been the transparent instrument of 
certain chemicals and it’s excellent, 
being written into a potency 
with any budget at all, the way 
suddenly the script stopped and there I was, 
getting voracious again, still writing in 
a notebook, loving my city like a stranger

Now I’m thinking only time is style, all 
those leaves opening as bodies specific 
to themselves. People ask why are poems 
green and this is the reason

Next I realize that all along it’s been my body
that I don’t understand. 
I just have to describe what it means 
supernatural, negative and sexual
and blooming on one side. It’s fierce and then
it’s tired. The dog lies on the lawn
eating apples, me crouched in the 
luxurious secret, whatever 
I have been building, vena cava 
threading to atmosphere, psoas 
ruffling, everything quiet
rocked only by love, hazard, fate, sleeping 

 


 

Like a weak church flung across the matter that they scarcely are
each dandy stands prepared to dispose herself
stands sutured to her animal mortality
to make philosophy say
the hummingbird

 


 

The work will be called the linguistics of the hormone.
As for the completely human and dandiacal gland, trans-corporeal and trans-historical
it became literature 
And the body is impersonal, in contradiction
which is form.
And then the experience of loathing

The lust of the eyes
Rarely obeys anything. Archive of the cinema
Of the present, including poverty, illness, death and brutality
Building and action interpenetrating in courtyards and stairways
Then the superabundant concept lapsing into notoriety, she dies

Four mirrored panels adorned with flowers rest on the floor and lean against a wall upon 
which is projected a time-lapsed video of sunlight moving across the same wall.
What is has to do with sentences:
It is the general system of the formation and transformation of borders.
It is simultaneously an aesthetic of perception and an ethic of conduct, these being 
inseparable

 


 

Sometimes to make some female documents
analogy must be applied. 
Sometimes I feel excited to be choosing.

I say I would like philosophy and housework
to frame the beautiful machine that contemplates us
as I think in these letters.
If I go home to this one emotion
in axis inward flung
what with scrunched-up stinky day
to lovingly read obedience
in liberty improvised
—specific spiritual liberty that is—
between sexuality and friendship
I hear weakness speak in
the material bodily lower stratum
the entire system of degradation and travesty
the relation to social and historical transformation
the element of relativity and of becoming
the extreme difficulty in separating out external compulsion from the experience of desire
the deafening panting of desire where
masquerades, orgies, processions, allegories 
dissolved

 


 

I offered my substance to an interpretive convention.
I was a girl so I could experience their luxury
with my one-sided headache, my dark relationship to nature, my lack of whatever
in the acoustic gland
in my own phonographic experience
in 1994 in a different layer
in order to become exchangeable
in Christian Latin
in a passive sense
in an act which is both penetrative and a seepage in the western lyric
in a sentence
and into the game of morning
between wood and water
in a fair meadow by a river
sit in a shady seat.
This is indexical work.
Error becomes
the body.

 


 

Minute perceptions speeding along a dirty surface
will say something else about the way
every pronoun is absurd.
One puts up her hair—
she makes sound
to treasure her body’s
unsynthesizable remnant
then the city can dissolve 
in the scale of her accident.
And if I think in these letters
to substitute, to distribute, to fuck
universe of the undiscussed
as in myth and ritual and politics
this is a very old tradition.
Because of the fact of the structure of the human mouth
the festival of idleness is speaking in signs through my body.
I do this because it’s valueless.

 


 

There’s been a mystical emptying here so that it’s truly empty. A range of impossibilities opens.

What I thought of as luck was the elsewhere girls fuck in their lovers. 
Those gauzy little tops we used to buy when we were inventing sex—the past is not 
estranged there. 
We dragged the image to the right: it became nostalgia; we dragged the image to the left: 
it became critique. 

Image: Some dissipate, some resolve, others offer a density. Ceaselessly, invisibly, they unwind from things, rippling and radiating towards somebody’s skin. In turn, the surface of the body fountains impalpable emanations. What tininess! Excellent! Next to this riot, most human love is so wrong and stupid.

Sometimes I want the death-like ceremonies of money and sometimes I don’t. 
I always thought heresies involved love and discontinuity but now I see that continuity is 
the revolution. 

The psyche of the limbs gesticulates thoroughly, more fervently, from the weak outpost.

 


 

What I witnessed was
complete frothing openness
a 3-D maquette of estrogen
coils of black cable in wet leaves, rusting hubs
and sex and animals and breathing
the swampy puddle by the tracks
it didn’t change anything and it wasn’t enough. 
If it was performed outdoors, a paper blew in the wind, and so a page from the lecture 
would be missing.
It was never performed.
There were packs of boys running
highly fragile
they discovered their names.
This is being noted here because there was something particular about it, something unlawlike and exceptional.
I really miss her radiant obscenity

 


 

Slow factory
bad pride
Aphrodite had tired
I lie in bed and read Marx
because an obscure object lives in me
furling and furling with no irony
so here I renounce my obedience.

This year I am sick of language.
Cunt radiant gentle and frank
little angle of dissolved rhyme
who sires the flagrant exemplum
what if language is the suppression
of vitalist vocal co-movement
by the industrial military complex?
What if language is the market?

 


 

Now the body gestures
now the body conducts
which isn’t changing the body itself
it’s only changing the activity of the body
but it’s also changing the body
like a sensitive shrub with eyes and blood
its act is precious form
and it is no good and I continue
leaning on trees for rest.

I call this the immaterial material.
Its cosmological fluttering, its infra-red infinitude
refuses dumbed-down instrumentality.
Its scale is a world.

Fear, it’s because there are consequences.

 


 

I am standing dressed in the skin of a sheep or a cow.
My name shall be she to them.
It is a shame.
It is velvety, voluptuous and odorous
Like fear who guzzles slowly
The communal saliva
I think we talk about their ancient secret glowing like a money.