Aditi Machado
The Emporium
As if I could simply pass through
the carts, hand myself over to some notions
piled on a cart, trade away certain desires
amid the silk & squid, certainty
like a quality of gems & cautious doctrines,
trade away myself—wouldn’t be
too unlovely, in derivative light, lamps all
succulence above the general meat, would it,
butchers—for tartan weather or any grid-like
complexity of time & back to square
home,
the sugar makes a mound there
as once bright pyramids & the smells here
are superlative, all brine & depth as though
one upon the other we effloresced. &
the tapestries descend & wouldn’t we
endlessly such velvet landscapes buy?
As if I could simply
stay here with
the provocations.
& if I did
what would I
sell?
& would I look at the mongers & hooks,
would I love these men, I would.
Love now is not so corralled & distance dreams
itself out of longevity.
Bowie strings a violin.
A neat bird suggests the littoral.
The limes settle into excellence.
Come on, eros arrowly. Why not
the emporium?
{The chief comparison is to a quality of light. The people have not poured in as light, won’t pour out. The poets stall. Vending short texts & long texts, scarves run through bodily fluids. We live in the clusterfuck. The chief definitions are here now. The chief epics are of markets spinning, carnival eyes. Pastimes replete with blinds. The chief binaries fold & unfold. The garden in the kitchen is in the street. Sweet herbs & cow patties. Sweetness the provocation & chief style of the poets. The extent to which history inscribes industrial products is perfume, one writes, cupping silver. Petals, petroleum, idioms profuse & tangled in the neck, a goblet. History paves the emporium & porous the gemlight.}
& says the purveyor, best not study such shapes
but silk, to me of silks, of the brushing of blouses
against silken nipples, of between her legs the stolen
red, & even money isn’t quite like money when silk
buys me or have I, it, or has it
blended in the fabrics of, when there was a room
for me to try on the, there was weather then
& now too, it’s silking my mind, & the “qualities
as they continue are the silk under the hand” reads
the libel, silk, that’s the dual error & shock
of new precision, an involuntary, not involuntary
exactly, but desired, frisson, I’ve pulled the brocade
off the rack.
Accents ascend the soundfield, bonny
suns climb the vaulted ceiling; magnets.
My senses, cursive, seek an angle;
sensing danger, name an enemy nylon.
Or did I mean history? Did I mean shale?
& of what is it collaged? How does it cohere?
Sudden queries, sudden as vendors, do they sell
fruit, sell textile? I’ve been so exact
I’ve cut corners. O obsolescence, o light brain
sifting the accidental tree, I desire cinema
in a sense all factories sense
the dilemma. Ought I
shove off?
The emporium moves by shift of wind.
Shuffles its constituents. Atomizes
in concept, not material, yet how suggestive,
how like a pleasant sea, that fine spray.
Idea
First I agreed to look upon the city.
There was a rhythm properly incensed.
A church rang clear through my doubts.
I declined all things in respect to how I saw them.
The dative reigned. I liked that pileup
like ornaments of queens. Then I looked
again at the heap, then I struggled to see
how each body was separate, no precision
that isn’t imprecision.
First I agreed to touch that treeline, measure that
awesomely obtuse leafiness, the way psalms
built height into it. First it measured me
across a distance. A treeline internal
to somnolence beyond which could not grow
any more obtuse my reason for being.
Then there was a shift in the treeline.
Then I looked again upon the city. Somebody’s body
was unlucky in that precise manner by which is meant
plainness. Somebody else’s thinking was in gutters
or nervous systems. What’s the matter, I asked,
the same as what is a matter.
A thing, a throng. And in the streets lovers
said, I’ve built this grammar from the ground
up but I’ll make an impossible conversion
to yours. I stripped them of their taxonomies.
And they had a thing with them and thus a body.
And she had a thing with her and thus a body.
And he had a thing with him and thus a body.
A volume of sound accompanied the rites.
And amid the failing narrative I went to the cinema
and couldn’t say where in the mob I wasn’t
and the film drew my endlessness
like three dimensions pressed in two.
And outside the poet cried, spell me!
Spell me out, weather, I got
the whiplash you got!
First a word, then an idea. First a body,
then an idea, then a word. First touching,
then more touching. Touching as the precision
of bodies delving into imprecision, “this strange
affinity.”
Your bodies are ideas, finger them.
As “the sea indents the universe,” so my body was
a beach from which I looked into foam, from which
an inquiry proceeded, a simile along its likeness.
Then I hedged, I stalked along a highway.
Its terror turned the landscape round.
A new theory, I thought, a new territory.
I’ll plant a flag that dies perennially.
And so it has gone on, thronged. In medias res
as in that apparition of faces. These are flourishes.
And outside the poet cries,
to look at juniper
and make gin,
that was my skill.
The city enjambed
upon the forest,
how triste, how truant.
“Idea” quotes from Szilárd Borbély (translation by Ottilie Mulzet) and Edmond Jabès (translation by Rosmarie Waldrop).