First Winter

My mind is pure

Of heart

I escape     my alias

On the back of a mule

A stiff     glittering thread running

Through it

Beyond danger

The desert being anywhere

Where nothing is

I have often been

Stolen from




Columbina on the Outskirts

The landscape doesn’t change

It dreams to stay the same

Hell

Love makes you believe in hell

You have long red hair like hell

I love you like Nicole Kidman

Hell leaves you everywhere

Hungry      desperate and dead

In a black Buick

With four five hands

Behind your back

A Bohemia of distance

Across the tiny garnet flowers

And everything slow moving

Walking after Watching Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

One way of living is mercy

A movielike beauty

Made of hand-drawn eyes

Many times you’re in a place

Where you don’t want to be

No one comes out of their grave

You will go your whole life

Without seeing it

Everyone     has thought of something

In the afternoon

I have made myself ugly

Exactitude is cruelty

Whim     satisfies endlessly

We are going to hell

For reading this

Before bed

Men are playing chess in the park

Fathers are notoriously hard to forgive

Chess is a great muscle

Against the

“What is the future?” question

It’s hard to do just one thing

To sing exactly

What you are

In the tension of the morning

Commute     a clean sexual energy

Comes through in the details

The demonic finalist

Of material culture

Is love

There is paraphernalia of life

All over

A woman

Endnote 

In the foggy origins of Carnival, the possible genesis of the commedia dell’arte, thinkers like James Frazer and Mikhail Bakhtin discovered echoes of the Roman festival Saturnalia. Saturnalia honored Saturn, god of seed-sowing and time, in a week-long celebration of hierarchy inversion and moral freedom. All work and business were suspended, masters waited on slaves, public gambling was permitted, and a mock king was appointed by lot to preside over the festivities.

Columbina is the young, cunning servant girl in the commedia stock cast. Scholars sometimes regard the anglicized “Columbina” spelling as a distortion of the original “Colombina.” And so when Rudlin and Crick write “certainly not ‘Columbina’—who never existed anywhere,” they conjure two things: the disfavored spelling, and a sense of disappearance in the figure herself.

A source whose origin is unresolved remains inexhaustible. Saturnalia was itself origin-seeking, conjuring a mythic age of innocence and spontaneous bounty under the rule of Saturn. It was also statecraft, a social safety valve. The comedy of Saturnalia is a melancholy memory-image: the slightness, revealed in exception, of an unforeclosed possibility of liberation.

Commedia dell’arte imagery has often been revived. The eighteenth-century painter Jean-Antoine Watteau famously reanimated commedia tropes in the Rococo period. Of Watteau, Walter Pater wrote, “He was always a seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.”