Thus
In the avalanche of shameful livery assembled from colonial centuries
it is necessary to undress —
I remove my mother’s ermine-trimmed coat, my brother’s sugarloaf hat, my grandmother’s
pomegranate gown with the gold-embroidered sleeves, my father’s suspenders and blue jeans, my
ruched veil, high-tops, and striped wool socks.
To detonate this ode, this pain in baroque fog
I unlace my bodice —
__
We stand naked before a warship sprawling on dry ground.
You begin to dress (white silk slip, white cotton shift), telling me about a distance (of centuries,
continents, blood) that ruffles thought as if tickling it. Then pricks and burns it.
I try to think of a way to organize distance not as time or desire or will, but as a style of living we
might call elation or damage —
You wear white, honour what distance dissolves.
__
Eternal whim, lurch monument, the avalanche exposes the mechanics of rejection, devaluation,
dehumanization —
Dehumanization is an ugly word for an ugly concept.
Ugly has its own necessity. Like existence.
__
Like the cold, which renews itself when morning’s paramount pleasure disappears, hammering open
the absolute, splintering it into acts of being —
__
As the world arrests the world. A sentence that means almost nothing.
Almost interests me.
Like how, despite history, we keep falling in love with the world.
Edited by Laynie Browne