The Phallic Corpse Flower and the Mirror of Eros

August. The air is snarling. From the carrion maw of the subway station entrance issues the bad breath of the beast. Breath of the dog-star. All wet tongue and hot panting wind and exposed teeth. I see my reflection in Le Pain Quotidien.  Submarine loaves of air-conditioned boutique bread submerged behind a cool vitrine like sea sponges, fruits de mer glacés, next to an elegant barista in a blue apron, afloat like a mermaid at a cherry-wood bar, embellishing a menu with colored chalks.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: “catoptric tristesse,” the sadness of being shut out of a mirror. Definition of eros.

(Science of catoptrics. Study of reflected light. Reflection. Refraction. Bending. Breaking.)

The New York Post barks at me with the voice of Cerberus as I descend onto the subway platform, swallowed by  furnace heat. Rare flower at the New York Botanical Garden. Another entry in the taxonomy of sadness.  Thank you, taxonomic poets, for Amorphophallus titanum, or “corpse flower” (titan arum). Its name and perfume capture the titanic amorphous phallic sadness of human life, its tumescence, its evanescence, its stink of death. (A name is like a dog’s humid breath, or a weed’s rank scent. It permeates your skin, even coats your eyeballs with glue-like meaning. You can’t stop seeing what the name names.) Human life. The phallic corpse flower.

Soiled Macy’s ad, cast away on a subway bench next to the Post. Little girl in fringed buckskin leather mukluks, slender naked legs disappearing under a short dress of see-through dentate ivory lace. Sherpa vest, pompom knit beanie, cute hedgehog mittens. Back-to-school sale. Delirious with the heat, I see her materialize under brisk October skies near the seventieth street children’s playground on Central Park East. As she walks she seems to straddle a slender pink cord of immature vaginal flesh, invisible under her clothing, as if she were scooting on her crotch along a tightrope, a carnal violin string whose high-pitched, squealing music only a pederast can hear. Like a katydid, making stridulous music with her thighs. A moist highway of illicit sex. Schlitterbahn. Pissy little darling. Cold as a fish. Wiping the sweat out of one ear, I flip through the ad one last time and toss it into a bulging green trash canister with a white “recycle” logo printed on its phallic lip.

Tumescence. Evanescence. Stink of death.

(The subway, where dark, disturbing dreams incubate, and large machines burrow phallically through the urban substrate like maggots through a corpse, enriching the soil. Lady, whilst the machine is to him. Like father like son.)

Like a reptile in the desert heat I seek the cool shadows under your skirt, where pale pastures glimmer in the dark like the cheeks of planets. I lodge myself rattle, fangs and all in the chasm of your charm. In a fury of anger, desire and pompous rectitude and lechery we pounce upon artless innocence and rape it, like shoppers at a Black Friday sale, and then out of shame at what we’ve done we murder it.  Because it is really better off dead anyway, we reckon, seeing as how it is now defiled and all. We rapists are very considerate cowboys. Return it for a full refund. The mirror of eros, sealed portal to a mystery beyond our comprehension, slides open like the glass doors of a suburban shopping mall retail outlet as we rush past the security guards and trample the merchandise. But the “merchandise” is our own skin. Mortality is self-inflicted punishment, we realize with awe and gratitude, like heroic aid-workers in Ebola countries who self-quarantine. We must not carry our disease into the mirror world, so pristine and serene, and fragile as an alpine pool stocked with clouds. Intangible in the strict sense of the word, and incorruptible. So we trample our own skin in the rush for bargains, self-reflexively, in a process some call “aging.” Murder itself is murdered in the great shopper’s stampede we call “death.” Our skin is imprinted with immortal characters, campaign ribbons, medals of valor. Tokens of restraint and perseverance. (And, yes, liver spots.)

Vintage clothing. Items marked down for liquidation. Soiled and damaged merchandise. Bench-crafted leather. Hand-tooled cartography of time. Weathered pigskin. Scarred scorecard. Ominous lampshade. Translucent beauty.

Old people probably make better lampshades than children. Their poor, punished pelts display more velvety grain and velum than the milk-fed latex bubblegum skins of pre-adolescent children, those pampered darlings—deliriously supple and radiant in life, dull and featureless no doubt when stretched on a wire frame—ever could. The skin of old people is not chalky and dead but seems to glow with the intense inner diffused lamplight of their senior years. They are already licked within by flames of the lower world, the distant fires of Acheron. They look like they could burn your hand if you touched them, as if age was a communicable skin disease, like scabies or a fire rash. As if life was an ancient parchment defaced with obscure characters, already burning in the fires of purgatory. Hot as a New York subway platform in August.

Human life. The corpse flower.

                                      
                                   Amorphophallus titanum, the phallic corpse flower

Boy and Earth: An Environmental Love Story

                                                                 
Children, a musician once said, are born wordlessly imploring their mothers to sing to them. The human body is, at its core, an instrument of song. And so, of course, are celestial bodies, though we hear them only in our sleep.

Melting blue marbled earth breathing wordless music in vast throaty syllables of lung-tissue softness. (Somewhere east of Samoa, the heaving bosom of the ocean swims under her see-through negligee of clouds like the detachable blue lung in the transparent chest of the scale-model manikin you built as a child.) Touched by felt hammers of darkness, her velvety vocal cords are stretched to the circumference, parallel lines of force that begin from nowhere and intersect there, on infinite arcs, somewhere beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. Deerskin pelt: Arabia seen from space. Tawny suede. Softer than under a blouse, or a skirt, which she shimmies to her ankles with an electric rustle after unbuckling her Van Allen radiation belt. Wriggles out of her Doppler shift. Humid, dewy gem. Naked to the heavens, caressed by the hand of the void. Waiting for a solar wind to lick her moisture off. Poised to strike astronauts mad with her beauty, as they hover weightless, peeping like boys through a Pyrex porthole on the international space station. In sleep we wear the earth like earmuffs, tête à l’étau, as if she sang with her thighs. Leg-locked in the music of the infinite. (We all know the music women make when they’re pleased.)

                                   The blouse of clouds that hide your beauty’s form
                                   Obliterated by a summer storm
                                   You stand nude to the horizon: this is what
                                   Set all things stirring once in a boy’s gut.


We all have skin in this game. “Human” derives from “humus,” earth. Our nostrils are never totally disencumbered from the soil of our birth. We imbibe her essence, the mother’s essence, through our nostrils every time we breathe, like craft cocktails. Sex On the Beach. The Slippery Nipple. Eye of the Komodo. (Jörmungandr, the old Norse World Serpent. Our olfactory bulbs are close to our reptilian centers, two regions connected like the East Side and Williamsburg by the Canarsie tube of the mind.) La Puesta Del Sol, vermouth and red grapefruit juice. Her drowsy fumes make the sun sleepy. To breathe mortal air is to be always more or less tipsy on her sunset perfume. We would constantly lose our heads if it weren’t for the stars to guide us. The stars are our principles, our conscience, our mathematics and our Last Judgement. Constellations are our tea leaves, parliamentary rules of order and city council by-laws. The sober man wakes before Phosphorus, to feel his flesh shrink and skin harden and sting under a cold shower of stars. But with her arts of seduction the earth eventually invites every man under her warm, mouldering blanket of human compost, giardino delle delizie terrene, which at this very moment sticks to the soles our shoes.


Rocks tower in the distance, seem to float in the blazing blue sea like volcanic dumplings. Black Sea. Black dumplings. Sweet as honey, a child kneels on a pine bench, hair in a pirate’s kerchief, elbows propped in front of her on a mahogany yacht railing, her little bikini-diapered derrière protruding backward like a sticky bun wrapped in pastry parchment. Russian plutocrat’s daughter. Made his money from God knows what environmental obscenity. Vast salt basin where the Aral Sea once stood. But his daughter is sweet, with her sunburned nose. She is the earth. Every outrage to the virginity of the sea, the forest and the mountains seems to render her more intact. “I will bury you,” she seems to say to her industrialist father as she smiles, like Khrushchev, with apple-cheeked serenity at peaks in the distant Caucasus, whose snows streak the air like clouds.

Chilean Fruit: A Parable of Globalism

                                                                     I

March 15, 2013.

Bodies in freefall. Levitation. Resurrection.

I know what everyone is thinking. Not another essay on suicide.

You dine on fresh fruit flown at extravagant cost from Chile. But you know you have become enslaved to a new global economy of produce, and so your fruit smacks of slave food. You want to buy it from the Amish farmer down the road, but there is no such farmer, and the road is a freeway, and heavy chains rattle and gall your flesh. What to do?

A woman from New Jersey stopped her black Dodge Durango in traffic on the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge, vaulted two guardrails and leapt—complete with handbag—200 feet into a surprised swarm of soft gray chill March water molecules, aguas de marco, “waters of March,” babbling in divine Português to the accompaniment of some non-existent Jobim soundtrack.

Needless to say, the water molecules presented a united front against the assault of this alien body hurtling 122 mph in freefall (terminal velocity—look it up on Wikipedia). A solid body, moving at great speed, tends to liquify in contact with stationary water. Splash.

Moral: Walk softly over the earth. Carry a parachute. (Sometimes awkward in the subway.)

The steel architecture of the George Washington Bridge continued to laugh and soar. (“Here steel architecture finally seems to laugh” said Le Corbusier in 1937 of “the world’s most beautiful bridge”—again, Wikipedia.)

In truth, the great GWB can stretch your heart on a rack. It makes the sky seem monstrous blue.

One feels impaled on harp strings, like the unfortunate in that curious painting by Bosch. One’s body ascends face-first to heaven on an elevator of twisted steel cables, which sing in the wind. There is music in the bridge.

Swan dive off the George Washington Bridge. I arrived at 2:05 or 2:10 pm, on my triathlon-rigged carbon Pinarello, bound for a training run in the untrammeled freedom of the New Jersey Palisades. The Palisades: curtains of towering purple granite that fence the mighty waters of the Hudson for twenty miles upriver. The sky was like a huge blue lung that seemed to breathe, collectively, for the entire human race, even for my mother, recently dead of lung cancer and emphysema. Hence the bromide  “breath-taking.” Spectacle to revive the dead. Two police officers, already on the scene, shielded their eyes against the inhuman, superhuman glare of the merciless, mineral-blue waters, which spread out like a palace floor—a sea of agate trod by Thetis’ feet—beneath the bridge. Thetis, Greek sea goddess. Clutching the guardrail of the bike-path with one hand, the near officer swiftly released his visored hand from his brow and extended it down-river in a pointing motion like a military salute, mouthing the faint word “There.” “There” expanded deafeningly in the awful vacuum of azure space. A police radio chattered. A police boat raced upriver. A helicopter hovered frantically. Two attractive joggers eyed the policemen shyly. A sharp March wind kissed my face eagerly. It was like passing a funeral cortege, only “closer to life” as art connoisseurs say. Death as exhibition. Blue ruin.

But what lovely behavior of silk-sack clouds! Skittish, colt-like, curvetting effortlessly over heaven’s blue ballroom floor. You would have melted in blue admiration for those mild, melting, nursery-school behaviors.

I wrote a poem to the Hudson’s merciless beauty, dated Valentine’s Day, 2013 (one month before you jumped). I now dedicate it to you.

                                                      Hudson River,
                                                 George Washington Bridge

Unraveled from your rain spool, O mist-spun
River, a smeared jewel  in the noonday sun
Crowned with a feast of aether! Stray clouds pass
Locked enthralled in your high tower of glass

Like parsley flowers strewn on a hillside’s crest,
Spars or ribs in Jupiter’s mighty chest,
Florentine tresses plaited with wildflowers,
Worlds on a dial of planetary hours

Enameled with celestial animals—
Flora and fauna that a light wind mauls.
Crushed like unwrinkled water I fall too
Prostrate under this avalanche of blue.

Thus the hours of day dream on the water,
Night-scales and day-scales of the ocean’s daughter,
And as time creeps toward his lightless deep
Under her steel-gray dragon mantle sleep.

                                   ( February 15, 2013)

Sleep well in the coils of the dragon, purse lady. The ghost of your Dodge Durango, dressed as if for a funeral, keeps watch for its mistress beside the guardrail, its passenger-side door still open in stunned disbelief (and no small measure of hurt feelings). I pass it three times a week on my way to the Palisades.

                                                            II

Strong and weak forces. Gravitation (die Schwere).

“Sons of the Earth” (Söhne der Erde) like the Rhein and the Hudson—said Friedrick Hölderlin in his hymn “Der Rhein” (1808)—are “alliebend” (all-loving) “wie die Mutter” (like the mother). “So empfangen sie auch mühlos, die Glücklichen, Alles.” So they bear their burden of happiness without effort. Mortal man, by contrast—der sterbliche Mann—“when he bethinks himself on his burden of happiness, and the sky he has heaved on his shoulders with loving arms”—

                                Wenn er den Himmel, den
                                Er mit den liebenden Armen
                                sich auf die Schultern gehäuft,
                                Und die Last der Freude bedenket—

is “terrified” and “dismayed” (“erschröckt” and “überrascht”).

                               Denn schwer ist zu tragen
                               Das Unglück, aber schwerer das Glück.

For happiness is a heavier burden to bear, says Hölderlin, than unhappiness.

The Thirteen Colonies

July 4th. Noisy, incandescent bouquets of explosive lithium salts (hollyhock red) and barium compounds (chrysanthemum green) bruise the sky, already bruised with toxic greenhouse gas emissions. Bombs bursting in air like liberty’s aneurysm. Paroxysms of public anxiety masquerading as celebration. The great national stupor. Eyeballs hammered with explosive percussions so loud you can’t see. Windows to the soul. Stiff breeze rattles the shutters closed. Take five. Rationality’s snooze. Good for the national psyche. Cudgeled brains soak up more patriotic music. Mallet for tenderizing the meat. Like Ariel, I drink the air before me and depart. Goodbye, anxiety, says America. Don’t bother to write. We never liked your cucumber vinaigrette. And the twee silk socks you wore under your tailored suits.

My name is anxiety. I fled your feast to lighten your festivities. Small thanks I get, or expect. I am designing a new Independence Day. My musket is propped beside the drafting table. But first I must assemble my thirteen colonies for review. Parade ground, march!  À nous la liberté!

From the moment explorers and navigators discovered a new world—me—I have been intent on colonizing this virgin continent (though I blush to say “virgin.”) The explorers and navigators published their findings in the poetic tomes and novels of my youth. But I have always been a careless reader. And the progress of colonization has been, I confess, painfully slow. But I intend to let it proceed under the strictest ecological principles. I approach the whole problem of colonization like a naturalist, not a planter. I embark on a study of the wilderness behind the curvature of my own cheekbone, where splashing rivulets of blood course through rugged channels of bone and cortex. Special emphasis will be directed to avian specimens of imagination and memory, lurking in the vegetation of time. All of it will be written up in a special calf-bound box set, available only by subscription. Reserve yours now.

There is a pool called the Eye of Time. A stone pitched into its center slides with a gulp down a long gullet of water and disappears into another world. Around it are ranged the thirteen cavities—I mean colonies. Here yeast cultures flourish in humid clefts of rock. One yields the wine of courage (really more like a seasonal artisanal beer). Another breeds the strong milk of retrospection. One sweats a fermented concoction of enlightened desperation and hope. Beads of icy sangfroid collect on a cold stone curtain of granite obscured by ferns. One cleft echoes with the laughter of knowledge.

Here fortitude, a master free-climber, wedges two chalky fingertips in a minute crack, on a sheer rock face thousands of meters below the spongy forest floor. In one dripping crevice a lone salamander bathes in royal perfume. In this chink, a visitor sniffs inevitability. In that one, top notes of demure sadness steeped in revery, disenchantment and remorse.

Pain luxuriates in another recess, with its children. This one reeks with the good old barley malt. A third gives off poisons of ratiocination. Finally, this one stinks like a female orifice.

These are the thirteen colonies in which I nurture cultures of freedom. Out of them flows the serpent of freedom. Divided by seven cervical and five thoracic vertebrae (the ones directly between the shoulder blades) like the tail of a rattlesnake, it coils like incense through the hole at the base of my skull to blossom like a fruit tree. Unite, or Die. Don’t Tread On Me. Burnished apples blaze like eyes in the dark.

Summer Rain

Copper flue. Middle-school honey. A lick of flame. Things that glow in the dark. Things that glow in my mind. Boyish breasts too. In a girl’s lacrosse-team locker room somewhere north of my medulla oblongata. An indecent daisy chain of floating aquarelle images. With this ring I thee wed. Wear me when you spray yourself with the warm rain of the bath (Ovid). May my excitement not get on your clothes.

Does every adolescent boy dream of stumbling into a girl’s locker room?

Globally, hundreds of species of coral engage in primordial rites of mass spawning tied to seasonally warming waters and the lunar cycle.“It’s like an underwater snowstorm,” said Emma L. Hickerson, a veteran diver and research coordinator at the Flower Garden Banks, a coral reef 100 miles off Texas in the Gulf of Mexico.

The bizarre details of coral reproduction. The bizarre coral-pink details of girls’ reproductive anatomy. Both tied to the lunar cycle. Trillions of eggs and sperm that swarm once a year nocturnally in the ocean and in my mind, leaving both awash in pink flotsam. Like floating petals from flowers that bloom in the night, under a streetlight, under a plaid skirt. In June, amid the sweet stink of lindens.

Sometimes I wish I could see around the corners of time. Because everything is there. Just not in the window frame. The copper flue in the dank locker room etc. The ocean of pink molecules swarming behind a smart blue lacrosse blazer slashed by a copper braid, or under a woolen skirt, dark as the sea, warm with the stink of linden trees in bloom. I know the trick is to realize that nothing is “in your head.” Your head is in everything and sometimes you wonder if you can bear the wonder. A glass buoy borne up by the mystery of girls in flower. And the scent becomes stronger as I decline into age. And sometimes I feel enveloped by one of their kind, on the street or on a subway platform, like a warm summer rain. Shouldering a bookbag. And I walk carefully so as not to break off branches of coral. The moon in the cavernous darkness of the subway station, which is tiled like a bathhouse (“86th Street Station”) and glimmers with aquarium light, is about to signal a momentous event. The subway doors slide open all at once, and excitement swarms the platform. Thank you Emma. Thank you moon. Thank you pink coral flower mystery. I feel drenched. I will peel you off, one day, as I peel off wet neoprene, along with all my other memories. After a bath in a girl. After a summer rain. Under a blanket of wet leaves, garden mould in my nostrils.

6/24/2016

On a Pedestal

“All girls cannot be perfect 36s, with bodies of mystic warmth and plastic marble effect, colored with rose and a dash of flame. Of course not,” said Audrey Munson, model for the gilded statue of Civic Fame atop the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan, installed 1913. She lives on as Columbia Triumphant in Columbus Circle, in the Fireman’s Memorial on Riverside Drive, in the figures of Brooklyn and Manhattan now flanking the entrance to the Brooklyn Museum, and as the personifications of Asia, America, Europe and Africa on the portico of the Alexander Hamilton Custom House at 1 Bowling Green. She began as a chorus girl on Broadway and appeared nude in a 1915 film. After attempting suicide with bichloride of mercury in 1922 Munson was committed to the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane in Ogdensburg, upstate New York, where she died in 1996 at the age of 104.

Cry In the Dark

Campaign 2016, cry in the dark # 487-1 (recorded in my daybook): “Paige and Meredith. Your thighs are soft and supple, your bosoms rosy. And you, Mallory, with the marshmallow skin. And Megan and Chloé and Madison and Skye. From Boulder and Portland and Loveland and Champaign-Urbana. You volunteer for Bernie Sanders and debate whether to deface your snow-white bodies with fashionable tattoos. Do I count for nothing? An agéd Hillary supporter with delusions of martyrdom by snowfall and rose petals, a political youth avalanche that buries my mouth and nose under idealism and college-age female flesh. I scent victory! Yet at the same time I suffocate in the rarefied air of dreams. Where is the beef, Bernie? Show me your toolkit for breaking up the banks. Are you a carpenter or a chiseler? Is the motor that drives your “political revolution” more than just a turntable spinning platters at 45 rpm in a 50's jukebox, in a sweetshop where coeds jitterbug after school to the groovy sounds of the latest protest song? Political showman and youth-revolution impresario, generator of campaign contributions and fake crowd electricity, stop teasing me with your cashmere-sweater chorus line! I have work to do. I must write, I must write another letter to the Times. The planet’s ecosystem is failing, crumbling about our heads like an avalanche, like an avalanche of college-age female flesh. God save me from the coming electoral storm.”

I weary of such pathetic cries in the dark. Board of Elections, deliver us a nominee!

(Written on the eve of the New York State primary.)

Beaver Pelt Gulch

Moist, damp, rainy in your thighs.

What a shame. All earth’s brown, earth-smelling sex shorn off. Beaver pelt. Her florid bottom. Moist ravine carved in the earth. Tangled thicket down under the railroad tracks. Smell of brown water, brown tadpoles, brown catfish. I condemn the defoliation of women, clear-cut hillside, despoiled and pillaged wilderness of sex, development, progress, razor burn, fashion police, totalitarian new-age mammals, hairless, bloodless, without milk.

Latin vigere: to be full to bursting. Of young persons, high-fed horses, etc. To be plump, fresh, vigorous, in full health and strength. Weedy, unkempt, reeking of sex. Flowing, stinking, sprouting from every crack. Unlicensed unregulated nose posies. Outlaw seed, a rusted trestle, No Trespassing riddled with bullets. Sally Mann. Gelatin silver print. Wet plate collodion. Old South decrepitude. Death lurks in the timbered foothills, carpeted pleats and valleys, steamy folds of dirt. Earth’s tired seams where life is foaled. Bald elevations naked to the sky. Armpits and snakepits of the world. Dark tufted recesses inaccessible to man but pleasing to the gods.

Tuck yourself into a crotch of the earth, soft beaver pelt of dreams. Let me nestle in your death cushion. Bit by Betty's big brown beaver.

24 Viral Events That Testify to the Boundless Ravishing Wonder of the Universe (Delivered to Your Inbox)

1. The first teleprompter to be used by a U.S. president (Dwight D. Eisenhower).
2. Inside a cotton candy factory.
3. A closeup shot of a snail consuming a water droplet.
4. A space shuttle flying through the air while being carried by a 747.
5. Ivy that grew on the side of the building into the shape of a tree.
6. A packet of Japanese Kit-Kats that are meant to be baked.
7. Long hair that goes past her feet!
8. Several crabs everywhere.
9. What a cruise ship looks like when it’s still in construction.
10. A man achieving a headstand on a frozen lake.
11. Flowers frozen within ice.
12. The inside of a dissected Abrams M1battle tank.
13. A ball made out of binder clips.
14. People crossing bridges in India at the Maha Kumbh Mela.
15. Amazing sculptures made out of drywall.
16. The stalk of a tomato grown out to look like a headless human.
17. A mushroom growing on top of another mushroom.
18. What a soda bottle looks like before it’s blown out.
19. The residue of black paint mixed with white paint ended up making a tiny black forest.
20. An airplane nonchalantly on the road.
21. A wind so powerful that it is affecting an entire tree.
22. A haunting imprint left behind after a corpse was buried in the same spot in the sand (?).
23. A school of tadpoles swimming underneath lily pads.
24. What underfloor heating looks like.

Boy and Earth

The blouse of clouds that hide her beauty's form
Obliterated by a summer storm
She stands nude to the horizon. This is what
Set all things stirring once in a boy’s gut.

Imogen Poots

Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots. Imogen Poots.