McQueen Is Dead. Long Live McQueen.

There were seven colors of mourning,

one was lilac. That kind of blossom

always has its crowd, fanned out, surrounded

by crushing likeness, smell of itself.

Not knowing how to grieve can poison

like a directionless dart. And although fabric

To hug the body: a swath, anathema,

magical, seventies lace and spacedust,

to truly love. But to twist it, to learn

to hate-want. To sway, tear, burrow,

To float like water seeking its own,

stampede like buffalo, seeking its hide.

Face painted on torso on horsehair

on chesty silk it’s a deathmask

I don’t think I understand what studying is.

I listen, I read, I remember, I absorb.

I let myself be moved and changed.

Is that “studying?”

When concept perceived — a womanly gist, let’s say,

or a curve of mind — is more than itself (surpassing,

all maw) I make it part of me. I take it in,

drink a corrosive. I let it overtake me,

My eyes just drink the fabric that covers

each surface of this world.

Everything’s inspiration: trees reflected

in windows on buildings, distorted buses

and once you start to see things this way,

vision’s a performance, shocking

and true after all these centuries,

a Shakespearean volta, like nectar

Everything actually is blurred,

not just how you see.

Glasses and shoes are solutions

to problems that are real problems,

A glass corset for the heart

to see out its chest. For without

glasses, the eye better sees

the wind, by feeling it and closing

For without shoes, my feet become

shoes. When I am really feeling,

I get very tired, I fall asleep

for the seventeenth time

I experience the world as infinite

invertedness: no wholes broken,

just potential fragments straining, skull-like,

at the seams. Anything could give.

I’ve been trying to write the words,

“I cried. Cried really

and wetly, and for good.” Old-fashioned

writing with intense excitement:

What is beautiful, what is terrifying,

what is absurd in me?

Every possibility that colors

are believable, various,

and can be held apart as unreal,

too exterior, distinct from each

other wildly as sparks to seaweed

or flower to meteor.

There is no color but what’s already

inside the eye, no power

or invention or new way to wake up

in the morning

our own orbs. Yet I can’t see myself.

I can never see you again.

I can only see from inside my skull

and when I look down

I wrap my own tender nether flesh

in calfskin leather so buttery,

like so: a newborn softened

in its own mother’s milk.

I awoke in a panic (no ma no ma) to the smallest day yet.

I dreamed I already

dreamed all the dreams I’d get.

This morning I dressed

fit only for a genteel gothic

murder, covered up well — airtight,

would only fit the stabbed one,

after bloodlet.

Who wears it and where?

I will, from the bed to the chair.

Headrest, clotheshorse.

Designer and model: mutually orbiting

the best metaphor for bodiless idea.

Amorphous, amorous, amoral,

Hindquarter-gauze with silver face clamp

and sickened ears pulled,

Broken backpiece. Shadow sensible

by other than sight. To smell a shadow.

To strike it. To trace it later,

to measure a body by its line.

You’d think its cuttings, its edge-hole,

those mousy children, would squeak

at least a bit. They run like a stocking

down the leg of the mind.

There is no body without life.

There is no mind without body.