Essay

after Bernadette Mayer

I guess it's too late to live on the farm

I guess it's too late to enter the darkened room in which a single light

illuminated the artist stripped from the waist down, smeared with

blood, stretched and bound to the table

I guess it's too late to inhabit a glass-fronted, white, box-like room,

dressed in white, against which the menstrual blood was visible

I guess it's too late to start farming

I guess it's too late to start struggling to remain standing in a

transparent plastic cubicle filled with wet clay, repeatedly slipping and

falling

I guess it's too late to buy 60,000 acres in Marfa

I guess it's too late to begin appearing on the subway in stinking

clothes during rush hour with balloons attached to her ears, nose, hair

and teeth

I guess we'll never have an orgiastic Happening

I guess we're too old to carry out maintenance activities in public

spaces, during public hours

I guess we couldn't afford to simulate masturbation while President

Josip Broz Tito's motorcade drove by below

I guess we're not suited to "I am awake in the place where women die"

I guess we'll never have a self-inflicted wound in front of an audience now

I guess entering a sex cinema dressed in a black shirt, jeans with the

crotch removed, and a machine gun slung over her shoulder is not in

the cards now

I guess Clive wouldn't make a good photographic montage in which

their male and female faces became almost indistinguishable

I guess I can't expect we'll ever have a selection of photographs derived

from images produced by the beauty industry now

I guess I'll have to give up all my dreams of being seen, clothed and

unclothed, being systematically measured by two male 'researchers'

who record her measurements on a chart and compare them with a set

of 'normal' measurements

I guess I'll never be waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly

We couldn't get tied together by our hair anyways though Allen

Ginsberg got one late in life

Maybe someday I'll have the foreshortened barrel of a gun pointing

toward the viewer

I guess joining our hands around the base's perimeter fence into which

they weave strands of wool is really out

Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops

I guess examining women's working conditions is just too difficult

We'll never have a, never-really-a-collective, a group of women who

came together to work on a public mural

Too much work and still to be poets

Who are the simultaneously-the-beneficiary-of-our-cultural-heritage-

and-a-victim-of-it-poets

Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient loss of certainty

Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks

And Wendell Berry has raised large-scale spirals of rusted industrial

materials in incongruous natural and commercial spaces

Faulkner may have spent three days in a gallery with a coyote, a little

And Robert Frost asked a friend to shoot him at close range with a .22

caliber rifle

And someone told me Samuel Beckett lay hidden under a gallery-wide

ramp, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies

about the visitors walking above him

Very few poets are really going to the library carrying a concealed tape

recording of loud belches

If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too,

If Yves Klein could be an artist, and Jackson Pollock too,

Why not a poet who was also dying of lymphoma and making a series of

life size photographs, self-portrait watercolors, medical object-sculptures

and collages made with the hair she lost during chemotherapy

Of course there was Brook Farm

And Virgil raised bees

Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of the meticulous

chronicle of the feeding and

excretory cycles of her son during the first six months of his life

I guess poets tend to live more momentarily

Than life in her body as the object of her own sculpting activity would allow

You could never leave the structures made of wood, rope and concrete

blocks assembled to form

stocks and racks, to give a reading

Or to go to a lecture by Emerson in Concord

I don't want to be continuously scrubbing the flesh off of cow bones

with a cleaning brush but

my mother was right

I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat

Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve

That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes

Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing

Or on as little as one needs to survive

Steadfast as any person's glottis, photographed with a laryngoscope,

speaking the following

words: "The power of language continues to show its trace for

a long time after silence"

and fixed as the stars

Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly

Source: Ursula or University (Krupskaya, 2013)