Spa

Medicine for ailing bodies. Novel neurotherapies. Spa treatments.

Basted in luxury, I feel my skin thicken and coagulate, alligator over with knobs and leathery excrescences. Nothing disturbs my sangfrois, my pluterperfect imperturbability. Not even the outrageous charge on my credit card. Are all spa attendants in New York City East-Asian? The Moonflower, 8 East 41st Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison in Midtown Manhattan. Subsidiary of Syzygy Therapeutics, biotech asset acquisition fund. Phoenix Biogenic. Genetic alterations and rejuvenations by appointment. Skin and face transplants. Peel away the years to a new you. A livid, pocky-faced Filipino manicurist in a lab coat ushers me from a stenciled glass-front lobby with Poland Springs water and airline magazines to the gleaming Pompeian splendor of sweaty marble spa amenities in the bowels of a corporate high-rise. Off-key scents lurk like exotic zoo animals in artificial rainforest settings. A soupçon of wet plaster and tile grout impregnated with mildew and Lysol hides like a shy pacarana under scented paraffin. “There is mold in the saunas, the Jacuzzis malfunction, there are rodent feces, insect pests” said former Spa Castle employee Joon Yung Lee off-camera to Channel 4 investigative reporters. Member of PacPlex, a sports and recreation complex. The hot basalt rocks on my vertebral prominences form a sensory keyboard, a ganglionic archipelago of stepping stones that carry me over the babbling brook of my distractions to a calm lake of stagnant river ooze in which I sink and wallow. Wie nackte Mädchen kommend über Steine (Rilke).  As though the water were talking with pebbles in its mouth (Derek Walcott). You know how submerged stones in a talkative brook are covered with a thin slime of translucent algae, like the epithelium inside the cheek?  My pulsing senses quicken into Nilotic mud amplifiers. I flatten myself bellyward in crocodile-crowded spa linen, alert to the panic of crazed wildebeests.

Rilke. Probably the best poet currently tattooed on a pop singer.

August 2014

Nightjar

Mystical June night swarming with sweet linden-and-locust scents, fireflies. You can almost hear the soft sighing fairy moans of insects in love. Celery, parsley and kitchen rue crowd the shadows where yard meets fence. Meet Master Cobweb and Master Mustardseed, quaint locals. Chalky clouds of spirea glow dim, choke the breath.

Whiskered nightjars, dusk’s whirring bull-roarers, purring, square-eyed beauties the color of charred wood, unscrew their lids, release spook, charm, a child’s captured junebug on the scented air. θελκτηρία: charm, spell, enchantment. Zone of stars. I hereby proclaim a new constellation: the girdle of Aphrodite, celestial goddess. (“Therein are fashioned all manner of allurements” says the Iliad of Aphrodite’s θελκτηρία, her “broidered zone”—“therein is love, therein desire, therein dalliance, beguilement that steals the wits even of the wise.”) Stargazing as lingerie fetish. Look up and all will be revealed. Experience the midsummer night’s enchantment of Aphrodite’s diaphanous garters.

What is “dusk”? No one can say for sure but it has a voice you cannot localize—the plaintive whimper of a nightjar, like the mew of a kitten hungry for milk—but can nevertheless feel on your exposed flesh as if it issued from a cardboard toiletpaper tube. The brush of nightwings against the skin. It flies on marionette wings like a crippled spider, as if double-jointed. Its spindly, bent pinions are marked with white moon-squadron insignia. It manages astonishing feats of spatial agility in aerial love-dance with its prey, small winged insects. A quite extraordinary chicken dance with broken oars. I call it by its European name “nightjar” because at dusk the barky fingers of the trees unscrew the lid on something magical and nightfall comes out. A mere can of whoop ass is a can of derision in comparison to this consummate performance. Night itself issues from the nightjar. Isn’t beauty always jarring, queen of smoke and darkness? Nightfall is no novelty gag. Bust open another can for us tonight, inky darling. Hold still till then dear, on a gnarled branch, in your blanket of scorched-bark feathers.

July 6, 2015

Once Vermeer

                                                      Let the light
                                                      Pour out the door
                                                      Linoleum floor.
                                                      Find the night.

                                                      Once Vermeer
                                                      Polished the floor,
                                                      Measured the light,
                                                      Drove it hard
                                                      Into pearl ear-studs.

                                                      Now it floods
                                                      Out the kitchen door
                                                      And into the yard
                                                      Where it scales the ash
                                                      To disappear
                                                      In his summer-green sash.

                                                      July 4, 2015

Le scaphandre et le papillon

Review of Le scaphandre et le papillon. (“The Diving Bell [sic] and the Butterfly.”) Theme of the movie: we are imprisoned in the murky depths of a hostile element in our flesh-encased diving suits (i.e. our bodies).  French scaphandre: old-fashioned salvage-diver's suit with copper helmet, air hose (lifeline to the true world of imagination and memory) thick rubber skin and leaden shoes. Not a "diving bell." Cocooned in the present within these clumsy “diving suits” (bodies) catastrophic illness—a massive stroke for example—forces a rare few of us to find our butterfly "wings," our past and future. That is, to emerge from the chrysalis of the present into the past and future and transcend death through imagination and memory. This is what happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby, managing editor of Elle magazine, and this movie is his story. Julien Schnabel's cinematic realization is uncluttered, from the painful recreation of Bauby's post-traumatic awakening in a hospital in Berck, Calais, in 1998 to the closing credits, which feature planetary ballet on an epic scale: triumphantly upward-leaping glacial ice filmed in reverse motion to the singing of Joe Strummer and Tom Waits.

2008

On Hearing a Musette in a Rameau Opera

Prancing ponies! High-kicking cancan girls! The skip, step and cha-cha of things! The choreography of time. Space furnished like a wardrobe with cumulus clouds, frilly knee-high petticoats and marching boots. Making a fool of distance, which collapses like an accordion dresser screen painted with Chinese landscapes! O landscape of time in a Rameau opera! From whence did you import your measures? And the stamping, sliding, tumbling objects of the earth, silly creatures of the forest, sky and workshop waiting in a long line at the backstage entrance for an audition—how much did you pay those clubfoot jesters, those upstart hooligan extras to portray time intervals in your opera? And the marble nude in the shrubbery showing her derriere: even she seems like a distillation of quotidian time in a moonlit operatic garden. The seldom-revealed, still backside of time. Her stone buttocks make your optical glands throb with the imminence of motion. Frozen in time, commanded into stillness by a poised orchestra conductor’s baton.

The garden of movement. When did movement coarsen, become false? When did it lose its luster and become dingy? Behold motion, new-washed by music. Plunge your body into freshly-laundered space like an arm through the sleeve of a crisp white Sunday linen shirt. I am here. Presto! Now I’m there. It’s as easy as music. Or dancing. The thing in motion is matter daydreaming. Mind made flesh. Wanting without remorse, hungrily, as a petal lunges to the earth, gracefully falling through space as a dancer hurls herself through time from one sequence of movements to another, always falling to a new height which overlooks all the previous history of the dance.

O sound of musettes in a Rameau opera! Sounds I never heard before until now! (Or maybe I heard you in a former life—eighteenth century France, par example, since even my present life feels decidedly ancien régime.) Why has it taken me so long to hear you again, unknown familiar sound? Whose voice are you? To which of these moving things, these gallant moving things stampeding like circus animals through the sky, along the sidewalk, down our department store aisles and tumbling off our desks and out of our kitchen pantries and from the top shelves of our closets, do you belong? Must that thing not stop in its tracks and channel all its energy through its nose in order to make that sound, the sound of a musette? It seems to twist all the diffuse strands of life into a metaphysical circus act. It bristles with obscene chalumeaux. “Some men, when the bagpipe sings in the nose, cannot contain their urine” said the slandered Venetian. It waddles, the vulgar French musette, like a bawdy-looking brown leather duck into the blazing center ring and draws a reedy, whining acrobatic high-wire out of its nose along which an absurd assembly of goofy cartoon characters slide in pompous, stately procession, with heart-breaking precision, solemnity and nonchalance. Like Philippe Petit between the World Trade towers—which no longer exist (like Rameau). Suspended in time like a conductor’s baton,

6/12/2015

Trees

Are trees bodies? Or merely nerve synapses, sky sutures, marshy river deltas with no defined geographical boundaries where night flows into day? Portals between dimensions? In the roots of the elm, earth plants her feet, reaches upward to the sky. In its leaves, the sky palpates with tender fingers the mortal flesh of the beloved, showers the earth with gifts of light and rain. There are no “trees,” only the wedding feast of the marriage of heaven and earth.

Lords and ladies in attendance. Vertumnus and Pomona. Vertumnus has sturdy limbs, split, crackled seams under his knees and smooth, silver, livid-blotchy bark with assorted lesions, knots, burls, cankers, butt swell and minor girdling at the soil line caused by root weevils. Pomona is graceful-limbed, purple-shaded, polished  bronze, with tarnished bosses, light verdigris and a speckled bole. Ruddy-skinned pamplemousses glow like orbed lanterns in the glade. Amid the darkness at the center of the fruittree, the lemon glow of unblinking gapefruit (grapefruit). Wedding in the orchard. Lords and ladies in attendance. Pre-school flower girls in festive leaf, dressed in orange blossom cambric. Tall willowy bridesmaids in peachskin satin sway over the assembled throng, the verdant multitude of earthly foliage.

To Carla Coneely

                             "These are but wild and whirling words, my lord"—Hamlet.

                             My words, they whirl. Now let the whirlwind thresh
                             The kernel from the chaff! I stand the test,
                             I find the center of the storm. My best
                             Monstrous congested nimbus, towering, fresh,
                             Inseminates the cloud-folds of your flesh.
                             A cushion-push, the tremor of a breast,
                             The flutter of a plaice or pilchard pressed
                             Within an ocean trawler’s nylon mesh—
                             Caught in the meshes of my twisted nets,
                             Alive and bound by finger bonds it frets
                             And flounders in the strict embrace of love.
                             Consider yourself warmed! And glisten up:
                             These words that clink like tiddles in a cup
                             Are space debris and lethal miles above.

                             1/16/2015