Thursday, October 18, 2007

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Cornelius Eady


Your eyes can’t tell plumb from plums.
--Cornelius Eady, "Handymen"

And whose can, Cornelius, for both are so joosy and glaucous!

I made it through the surgery alive, I grudgingly admit, and both dentist and dental assistant confirmed my suspicion that those teeth were as huge as an animal's. I was allowed to keep them and they are powerful talismans, but I will not sell them to you for even hundreds of dollars.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

TRICIA’S CLOSET

Methinks ’tis the dirndl of a harpy
Who’s rejected her foundational
Undergarments so breast dexter
With its bathtub drain eyeball
Of a falsie or portable titty dentata
Has slid southwest from its original
Poignantly cleft nipple still visible
Under the second claret sauce ripple’s
Ultimate hump, a belly-button
Indentation in its solar plexus
And a ravaged vaginal slot
Indicative of clitoral mutilation
On its eastern pelvis, this
More commonly a masculine
Fantasy, cunt as a sidearm holster,
(Cf. Kafka’s “Country Doctor”)
The horrors of absentee implicitly
Castrated genitalia impossible
To face head on without paralysis

Of revulsion instantly and indelibly
Conveyed to she who thought
She was baring a treasure, a gift
(Kafka situates white worms in it
Angling blindly toward a dimness
Of light, says the axe accomplished
Its task quickly and clumsily
High on the thigh, where Jacob
Got anointed when desert-wrestling
With God’s angel, receiving on his hip
A burning scar passed on to Joseph
Whose brothers so notoriously
Detested him with his rainbow toga),
While two strange holes appear
Clawed in frenzy by a bear
Who didn’t pause to draw
Between them the line of a perineum,
Which continues, in amused revenge
For some, across the scrotum.

Anonymous said...

:)

Glad you made it through OK. I also have a wisdom tooth that I wouldn't sell.

Patricia Lockwood said...

Jilly, we should trade! I am always looking for good ways to fuck things up on the Resurrection Day.

Anon, that is what you took away from this? Huh. Well, yeah, I guess I see it.

Anonymous said...

A HAT AFLOAT ON A LAKE

What was her garment?
Her heart’s cruel truth.

What was her armor?
Her eye teeth, her wisdom.

What was her basis?
The gaze of the abyss.

What was your excuse?
I was anonymous.

Patricia Lockwood said...

Not really anonymous, though. I mean, I know who you are.

Anonymous said...

May I change my excuse
In honor of Wallace?
Higamous-hogamous,
I am pseudonymous!

Anonymous said...

APOLOGIA PRO VITA MIA

1.
Being from birth a sort of moon calf
Without a clue, I went perusing
The scheme of things in quest of a place–
For what? Not merely robust, in-your-face
Smut, though that too, always. Smut
Is a key ingredient in the etiology
Of a moon calf doomed to dwell
In the hell of its own unshared lurid guffaw,
The idiot bubble of its stupid laughter.
But also, and primarily, for folks
Who explored a gloves-off, unorthodox
View of Wallace Stevens, when, lo!
I came upon The Emperor of Ice Cream
Cakes via Google, and Poems Are Jokes!
Holy smokes! I thought. A church
For collecting and enshrining contemporary
Equivalents of the Grimm Brothers’

2.
Peasant-minded tales which create,
For lonesome morons like myself
A communion of proof that Mother Goose
Had filthy appetites as well as remedies thereof,
Or she’d never have grabbed that gander
By the neck and straddled the poor thing
So her mind could wander. Remember
Pantagruel from Rabelais, and the elongation
Of the goose? In the greater, healthier
Community of well-socialized
Adults and adolescents, no one needs insist
That hey diddle-diddle means
Hey diddle-diddle, ditto, the cat
And the fiddle, ditto, the cow vaulting,
Wagging her pink velvety boobies
Over the moon? Didn’t that ransomed
Buchenwald survivor who wrote,


3.
THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT
Kill himself? Wasn’t it partly for shame,
At being such a spoil sport, such a latter-day
Georgie-Porgie? Tricia had written,
“Throw a fucking party” for poetry,
Replete with energetic desecration
And one of her archives cited some lines
From Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”
That knocked my socks off! I leaped
At the bait! I clicked my moon-calf heels!
Happy, as they say so enigmatically
In Maine, as a clam! A greater writer
Than the Croatian, Miroslav Krleza,
Was Mesa Selimovic of Sarajevo,
Bosnia, who wrote, “Intoxication
Seeks no meaning.” Love is blind,
Say we Americans. My grandfather

4.
Put it more bluntly and explosively,
A dubiously cherished and echoed propensity.
Enthusiasm, however, is a different story.
Enthusiasm believes it possesses
The full meaning and just can’t wait
To explain it all, which begets discomfort,
Tedium and the suspicion something’s wrong
With the brain of that calf bawling
So stridently at what it thinks is its mother,
The constantly altering, vanishing moon.
I thought anonymity was a mode of altruism,
Neither a veil nor a secret identity,
But on the Mobius highway of self-
Knowledge and deception, it was probably
An inverted vanity. Tant pis! Tant pis!
Yet if we didn’t complain or explain,
Where would we be?

Patricia Lockwood said...

What a poignant apologia indeed! I am not sure if you will ever find such a place as the one you describe. However, you are welcome here forever, and you can tear away your bloomers of anonymity whenever you like, if it would suit you better.