Justin Taylor
N u d e S e l f - P o r t r a i t s T a k e n t o O v e r c o m e A n x i e t y
R e g a r d i n g S a m e
for Friedel Fisher
I.
Desire is not cool and tactile like a surface
of a photograph (except some times it is.)
Desire is a variety, a plenitude of one—it is
form and content both; the egg
shell and the jell of thickening things held
there—desire (moreover) is the thickening,
the incubation, the/a breaking-
out into first light.
II.
I fill on a supper of lamb vindaloo and dal soup. I order a honey cake and Turkish
coffee.
At the next table a professor and student (later revealed as actually mother and
daughter)
discuss liberation
theology—it is possible, they eventually conclude, to be oppressor and oppressed
at once.
There's no good transition to my thinking
of the photograph I found on the bookshelf
when we were cleaning up to move away.
Pressed between a moldering dictionary and a twice-loved collection
of something that wasn't Anne Carson, but should have been and if.
Desire is excess manifest as essential, there-
fore desire is an agent of transubstantiation,
is holy.
III.
Sometimes, while I'm with my lover, I dream of other lovers
I've had or might like to have: a haze of first times and agains.
A rough uncomfort laps like green-black waters
banging buoyant garbage against a seawall.
I try
to remember you and times when you said love is not a starvation
economy and how you meant every word as a balm and a salvation.
I draw
back toward the warmth of my lover and love her
for what
She is and I am or we are and aren't—all the rise
and fall of being with any body…What I mean is
that
desire can be a rough sea; sometimes you are a life raft, a preserver.
IV.
Coconut shavings garnish the honey cake. The soaked sweet is so complete
I am driven between bites back to the bitter coffee, liquid floating on a thick of
black
sludge that barely budges even when I tip the cup way up for a big sip.
Desire is more than the knowledge that balance is the clash of opposites.
Desire is that knowledge as action in the world.
V.
Your old loved SLR occludes your face, its strap sliding or slung over your pale
shoulder and down your back to the bottom of the blade; your left hand steadying
the camera so I should see the brown shrub of your armpit but your right hand is
working the focus, forearm blocking the sight line; breast flattened against bicep as
you arch back, as desire desires; right thigh edged forward just enough for us to
know that the poser has struck the prostrate pose only because it is her preference;
up from the wilds of your pubic hair a shadow line: the upright in a shadow
crucifix come courtesy the windowpane, it scores your belly like an imperial crest,
quarters your rise and slope; just off-center your button a notch where the sun,
were it a jewel, might be stowed for safe-keeping and display.
VI.
What are these little verses? Who
are they and what (who) are they
of? Am I correct or mistaken; can
I be said to have erred?
Yes or no. Yes
and no, perhaps, perhaps
if lucky, if blessed.
VII.
As with children, names
for poems articulate desires to
create that which will be other
than what you wanted or meant, but you know
that when you start, before, and you go with it:
through, ahead, on—not despite but because.
Desire becomes enlightenment when it, upon some landmark
satisfaction, reflects on what it wanted and thought it wanted,
on what it sought, got, and what
it wants or thinks it wants
next.
VIII.
Desire, figured as projection of self, is at least as much mirror
of same: an exhaustively exacted world in perfect reverse
(the spell-checker wondered if I meant 'perfect reverie')—
Articulation is a way of limiting desire. An untidy fencing
of pastures, cropping a photograph's edges or the edges
themselves, but the solipsism of limits should be rejected,
rewritten as advent of space and place to: play, live, swim,
drink, pay, breathe, leave.
You shot your nudes in a mirror, you had to—Desire
is a fixed point shifting, a common minimal distance,
a magnetic field, a thing always among other things, that
hunger which roars as loudly when
you are empty as when you are full.
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