Leslie Scalapino
From:
The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom
Introductory note and chapters 6–12. Each title is a chapter.
The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom was written by leafing through Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary choosing words at random by process of alexia, not as mental disorder but word-blindness: trance-like stream overriding meaning, choice, and inhibition. The intention to bring about an unknown future was offset by this action of alexia making as it happens sensual exquisite corpses—leading to the discovery that there isn’t any future, isn’t even any present. Such an exquisite corpse, read, is in an instant yet not even in ‘a present.’ Outside’s events unite gluing to each other a single object. That which had already existed is by chance.
The exquisite corpses are physical as if one such is flesh-butterfly-other-occurrences (real-time events such as the exploding of Mumbai), each event-cluster internally hybrid rather than being separate presentation as idea. That is, the writing is not the idea of the whole framework of occurrences after without its existence ever being.
That which had already existed is by chance: not only includes events in real-time but visual scenes existing before the writing was created—Jess’s collages, Kiki Smith’s prints, a painting by Masami Teraoka. These are not illustrations of the writing, nor are they the inspirations or the subjects of the writing; rather, the visual images were later (after writing) linked to passages of text that show the same reality, in randomly discovered composite actions (in the case of Jess’s collages), thus seen in the outside. Teraoka’s painting of an octopus sucking a woman’s front is linked to the same event in the text; a memory of his image was simultaneous at the instant of writing the first passage that has this image: seeing our memories making the present.
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Float
Out of which the silent dactylology from emerald wastes little girls crossing the roads arriving the green meadows full they do the cakewalk and are celebrated with cakes for their most intricate steps. Either reinventing or reading. Those arriving cakewalk everywhere others having perished or escaping locked dorms for the workers in mines and factories live in camps by cities edges. Some live in trees by the stream of girls stretched lying on the limbs at night girls pull plums from the trees “Give them to us” the Secretary had said (“rather than kill them,” was her meaning), announcing the opening of a single orphanage the first to be for the millions the female infants and children killed each year so obviously there’s overflow of the dazzling white streak small white wolfdog wolfwhitedog streamer-aura of them in the sky above floats. Outside the one orphanage mothers with caked breast having turned them in the other little girls are harnessed and given dog-tags, those not in the orphanage who are on floats through the streets. Have the dog-tags. The little white wolfdog Distaffer’s avatar is that of many children who play the shape of it left in the air as their (each child’s) shape is left there many are above the rose horizon Venus is resting red and brown crisp curled huge flowing leaves millions deterge by Venus resting that fallen from trees hurl vomiting the blue sky of the car flowing toward the leaves (flying that vomit the car’s blue sky coming hurtling to them) through the coursing flow of red-brown leaves a man skateboards crossing toward/and the skateboarder is before the windshield of the car’s flow overflow elation at brim or rim without horizon color or sides. The powder monkey jockey finds the orphan living with her in a tree before she’s lost again. To each other the floats move slowly parade yet the white wolfdog streaks playing at once each as briefly each shape has a manifestation in the rose and blue. Little wolfwhitedog having learned this like variation like touchless 4 blue weather is dysaphia. without senses
“Float” is paired with Jess Collin’s collage “Midday Forfit: Feignting Spell II [Spring]”, 1971
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Soft Green
The notion of their being as young in its openness that all the while distich contained ending only in one alive at the same time seeing in them their reactionary being curtailing the Collective—none—the reactionary through distichous bright green leaves sees from the perspective of the eternal child. ‘Then’ becomes the subject of the other’s hate, no more than everyone.
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Soft Green
The soft green meadows composed new blades of grass that rose. That rose grew in the midst of the baby blue sky growing from the meadow a bugout walking night then midst the meadow by the time a drone shoots over operated from outside soldier on its way to kill some people on the road they’re conjectured as terrorists by evidence not yet heard or assembled yet the cattle in the meadow’s swatch of floating black they are that, are in blackness as crowd and not evening or light while sky there undulant fever all the cattle passing as by line-of-sight looking at each other but no contagium other than their being alive there pass contagious abortion between them and begin to spontaneously abort the slick forms. The bugout doesn’t produce. Everything does? Is the katabatic wind that flowing downhill coming from the meadow of soft green—inferior vision in a dream reading, a man correcting oneself dreamer a woman reading as luminous green words appear—so the reader has to consider himself to be a woman fetuses of the cattle floating before their eyes part of them so that knitted to them permanently as disseminating in the wind in blades of grass the fetuses snagged beside them. Theogony, cattle not dictating ever hear and turn in the wind. A Dicktest named for G. F. Dick who devised it was for scarlet fever though, useless to them. The daughter the deb having learned to spit out others become Artemis is in hard joyous bounding a gentle deer kite by her side going into the war-torn regions. The reader who’d had the dream in green had been a brownie for only a short time when a little girl, but the only photo of her in her brownie uniform the bugout had not run retreated from combat or been in it yet is now permanently bound to the cabbagy fetuses of cattle as kites oar machine drones in a sort of dielectric at once a dielectric loss similar to—and the woman as it—the butterfly blood-reef (Chrysanthemum dyslogia), wrath deity/ Chrysanthemum does not see that she is separate from the butterfly blood-reef—ever, at any time.
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Deterge character
The butterfly blood-reef had been—is—the woman encased in the whirring red chrysanthemum in being it can never be peeled away or pried out of her or from it for it is her is death-fan the purple forest creating limbs outside and plants doing so—dysphoria, she’s by being opposite of creating—its pair at once. Isn’t a dream though eminent rather fact emittance of her character—where there is no fate except people’s character, a person’s fate is their character emission nebula already in place? no, one resists this—no one, a sort of delay screen phosphorescent one does not deterge as or senses causal/while delay has the same effect. The horse rearing also is the petaline red Chrysanthemum whirring emergent for an instant. Insides coincide. Insects the emerald green crickets at night sing before the tramontana wind.
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The
The Distaffer had come down gently (the plane) in the black flowers in black beds landing the plane lightly where all around lines of the orphan girls the main industry migrating coming up through holes of the underground petroleum and lines of them crossing the vast black beds could/can be seen. She had deposited her cargo/she deposits her cargo then, undetected by the scouts the jets.
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The
Straying from her route in cloud beds the time she’s detected by the jets come close almost touching her flying plane flying above and below two zoom as a pair fire on her plane. The time over the ocean she sinks coming in the legs the center that hump of the avatar pink octopus spreads onto her sucking her middle the pudendum the girls separate slowly swim beside fins in the ocean. The fins glide beside them sunlight glancing off of the fins everywhere the lines of swimming girls go forward unseen from above in the sun [unseen by the jets their/jets and girls on the surface almost touching and blinded by it] giving her head air lying on the bed of sunlit waves the hump like cephalate on her front coming the jets go over blind as they’re reflected in the glints of waves.
“The” (if given permission) is paired with Masami Teraoka’s woodblock print titled “Sarah and Octopus/Seventh Heaven.”
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Plane
Man ruffled in wind and motion of his back seeming to be flying forward of blown back (away) ascending blackened backlit in halo of the illumined high sun it is seen it’s his front moving forward ruffling descending to light on the ground angelic. WHOK! of the ball from him slamming as he lights on the court again. Birds speaking come to one where zooms the small white wolf-dog in the air comes up. One first dreamed petting it now is. So it’s back wards and illumined.
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Author of 30 books of poetry, poem-plays, fiction, and criticism, Leslie Scalapino’s most recent books include Day Ocean State of Stars’ Night published by Green Integer in 2007, It’s go in horizontal/Selected Poems 1974-2006 published by UC Press, Berkeley in 2008, and Floats Horse Floats or Horse Flows, by Starcherone Press, 2010.
Photo by Charles Bernstein, 2006
