Reading Notes

“physicians of the empiricist school insisted on the distance separating the anatomical definition of the pulse and the actual experience of the fingers.” 

“How do pulse and palpitation differ?”

“Basic to this divorce was the new perception of the body defined by dissection.”

“transform…from a vague occasional oddity into a vital sign”

“systematic anatomy”

“The earliest evidence of systematic anatomy appears in the animal dissections of Aristotle”

“Phlebes, moreover, stretched the length of the body in routes that cannot be directly matched with anatomical blood vessels.”

“Praxagoras also took an interest in both dissection and pulsation.”

“physicians of the empiricist school insisted on the distance separating the anatomical definition of the pulse and the actual experience of the fingers. What our fingers feel, the empiricists contended, is merely the sensation of being struck.”

“no necessity dictates the pulsetaker’s approach. There are other ways to cradle meaning at the wrist.”

“roughly mirrored the spatial organization of the body”

“All approaches took for granted that the meaning of what the fingers felt, depended on where they felt.”

“its grammar was topological”

“Greek diagnosticians evinced little interest in, or even awareness of, the differing feel of the pulse in distant parts.” [in different parts, different places]

“one inspects the wrist because the pulse there can be felt clearly”

“he conjures of the image of their frantic panting”

“No major blood vessel matches these meanderings from ankle to eye.”

Running Away

"I was a guest at my own youth"

"I was a hunter whose animal / Is that dark hour when the hemisphere moves"

"Her priest's mouth the green scabs of winter."

"Through darkness on the knuckles of / A woman's glove."

//

20th Century Invalid

"that I am stricken / And anonymous on city nights"

//

Bedroom in an Old City

“That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we’d only met with chaparones before marriage; rather because I didn’t know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would morn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.” (77)

“abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.” (94)

“It’s obvious to us, now, that that is a squirrel and that is a fish and that is a bird, but how was Adam supposed to know that? He wasn’t just newly born, he was newly created; he didn’t have years of life experience to support this creative enterprise [of naming the world], or anyone to teach him about it. When I think about him, just sitting there with his brand-new fist under his brand-new chin, looking vaguely perturbed and puzzled and anxious, I feel a lot of sympathy. Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.” (134)

“‘By elevating physical violence over the other facets of a battered woman’s experience,’ law professor Leigh Goodmark wrote in 2004, ‘the legal system sets the standard by which the stories of battered women are judged. If there is no [legally designated] assault, she is not a victim, regardless of how debilitating her experience has been, how complete her isolation, or how horrific the emotional abuse she has suffered. And by creating this kind of myopia about the nature of domestic violence, the legal system does battered women a grave injustice.’“ (138-139)

“you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal” (142)

“Afterward—when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies on Yom Kippur, and when people do not believe what you tell them about her and the Dream House—you’ll wish she had hit you. Hit you hard enough that you’d have bruised in grotesque and obvious ways, hard enough that you took photos, hard enough that you went to the cops, hard enough that you could have gotten the restraining order you wanted. Hard enough that the common sense that evaded you for the entirety of your time in the Dream House had been knocked into you. You have this fantasy, this fucked-up fantasy, of being able to whip out your phone and pull up some awful photo of yourself, looking glazed and disinterested and half your face is covered in a pulsing star. That is, as you said, fucked up: there are probably millions of people on the blunt end of a lover’s fist who pray for the opposite, daily or even hourly, and to put that sort of wish into the universe is demented in the extreme. You will wish for it anyway. Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything.” (224)

“What is the value of proof? What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?” (226)

“When it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me—a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet—was detailed in books and reports, in statistics.” (232)

Give Me This

"a liquidity / moving"

"waddle-thieving"

"She is a funny creature and earnest, / and she is doing what she can to survive."

//

Drowning Creek

"solitary, stocky water / bird"

"People were nothing to that bird, hovering over / the creek. I was nothing to that bird"

//

Invasive

"Bury the broken thinking"

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Stillwater Cove

"we had no time for the waiting / that was required"

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Banished Wonders

"Mistral writes: I killed a woman in me: one I did not love. But I do not want to kill / that longing woman in me. I love her and I want her to go on longing"

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When It Comes Down to It

"where have you gone, / good flourishing?"

//

Calling Things What They Are

"with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean."

"Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn't know then that it wasn't even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain."

//

Open Water

"the other ghosts"

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The Hurting Kind

To Francisco X. Alarcon

"Some Mesoamerican elders / believed there's a fifth direction. // Not the sky or the ground / but the person right next to you."

//

Lines Written at Federico Garcia Lorca Park

"Beneath my palm the wiry fur of lust"

//

Black Water

Some Trees

Sonnet

"Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits"

//

The Way They Took

"That is how I came nearer / To what was on my shoulder."

"That you might care to crave that"

//

Answering a Question in the Mountains

"The foxes followed with endless lights. // Some day I am to build the wall / Of the box in which all angles are shown."

//

A Pastoral

"But, hating and laughing, risen with animals"

//

The Tennis Court Oath

America

"The pear tree / moving me"

//

Rain

"Cupped under the small lead surface of that could you see you are"

//

April Galleons

Vaucanson

"It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension / To life, when life is precisely that dimension. / We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk / And people come up to us, or listen / And then move away."

//

Unreleased Movie

"There is so much we know, too much, cruelly, to be expressed in any medium, / Including silence. And to harbor it means having it eventually leach under / The spiritual retaining wall that so commends itself to us we can never / Be other, and become a different habitat altogether in which those transactions / Are the brittle sounds of insect wings, robbed of the solid clink of something / Like the reality that now accosts one. It is all, we see too late, a question / Of having the knack, but he knack is as universal as the wind that now protects, / Now buffets, and is not ours."

//

Savage Menace

"And though you and I can never catch up with / Everything thoughtful that happens / To us, we are bold to say: / I like it. This is, after all, why I came here."

//

The Leopard and the Lemur

Huitlacouche

how many of us have them?

“sometimes it just catches up in me. love / & ghost get caught up in us like wind & birds / trapped in a sheet just the same.”

//

dogs!

“he’s up there / alone all day, making noise must / be the only way he knows he’s not / a ghost.”

//

self-portrait as ‘90s R&B video

“i have all this / house to walk through, all these gowns to cry / on, all these windows to watch the rain.”

//

my bitch!

“we look terrible / when we’re the most beautiful girls in the world.”

//

say it with your whole black mouth

“days filled flinching thinking the sirens / were reaching for me. & when the sirens were mine // did i not make peace with God?”

“they murder us for the crime of their imaginations”

// 

undetectable

Self-Portrait with the Ashes of My Baby Blanket

Vines

“I am present and useless like a nose torn / from a face and set in a bowl”

//

The Miracle

“Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill—with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise—and imagine them gone. What’s left? Whatever you aren’t, which is what makes you—a house useful not because its floorboards or ceiling or walls, but because the empty space between them.”

“You brute, cruel pebble.”

//

Ghazal for the Men I Once Was

“Now watch / these hands through your blood—jealous moths. How do they heaven, upset like that?”

“In the beginning was the eye, and the eye was wet like that.”

“Like a pin pushed through a pane of glass. Like life lasting longer than you can bear. Like a sundial gone bad. Like your own name. Dead set like that.”

//

Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997

“my father who wore only black even / around the house whose umbrella / made it rain whose arms could / cut chicken wire and make stew and / bulged with old farm scars my father my / father my father built / the world the first sound I ever heard / was his voice whispering the azan / in my right ear I didn’t need anything / else my father cherished / that we were ugly and so being ugly / was blessed I smiled with all my teeth”

//

There are 7,000 Living Languages

“There is something terrible / beneath all I am able to say.”

//

Pilgrim Bell

“Whatever happens happens. / Loudly. All day I hammer the distance. / Between earth and me.”

//

I wouldn’t even know what to do with a third chance

“like a clay bird bouncing down a well”

“In what world does any of it seem credible? / God’s word is a melody, and melody requires repetition. / God’s word is a melody I sang once then forgot.”

//

My Empire

“My empire made me happy / because it was an empire, cruel, // and the suffering wasn’t my own.”

//

In the Language of Mammon

[backwards text] “Don’t judge him / by the first thought to enter his head. / Judge him by the second.”

//

There is No Such Thing as an Accident of the Spirit

“Verily, they sent down / language, filling us with words / like seawater filling a lung.”

//

Cotton Candy

“the reward / for goodness / is just more goodness and sometimes / not even that”

//

Pilgrim Bell

“Doing. / One thing is a way. / Of not doing. / Everything else.”

//

Pilgrim Bell

“Every person I’ve ever met. / Has been small enough. // To fit. In my eye.”

//

An Oversight

Introduction:

“a new tendency of ordering began to gain favour”

New God of an Antique War

Together and by Ourselves

“In the water you are a child without eyes.”

“There’s a small animal lodged somewhere inside us. / There are minutes of peace.”

“we must have been lonely people to say those things then. / But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at. / In the perfect field someone has left everything / including themselves. You. You should stay here.”

“Why does the sea hold what it loves most below?”

//

Always

“I’m an adult and feel less urgent every day.”

//

Champagne

“There is fog by the bed and house weather I live in. / Then by dawn I’m a fold in the fabric’s small play.”

// 

Cocaine

“When the car you steer best is not yours; or the body.”

//

Chance Visitors

“People change their lives, people change their lives / and the world stays the same.”

“It’s human to want the sky with you everywhere.”

//

Affairs

“Is it lucky to live or embarrassing?”

//

The 25th Hour

“Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées. / I could not have been anything else. It was this.”

//

The 13th Month

“Who you were underneath the umbrella.”

“Part of it, he kept thinking, is to try and say something / of what everyone brought instead of themselves. / Like that hour you were more of a person than had been in years.”

“And while not entirely about us, we attended our lives.”

“What I mean, where I went; we’re all missing. / You’ll understand if I write it all like a postcard. / I have nowhere to send it but here— / written for you—and too soon.”

//

Poem with William

“Our mouths were small gifts in the distance.”

“It’s possible to get the news from poems, / impossible to say what we are. / Every day on the way to the last one / I think: description is useless. / And still someone had to describe it. / To make it less cold, to unmake what was already there. / Without photographs. Without headlines. / It’s difficult to see the world from the world. / And it’s true. We were in it. / With these partial and unlikely days.”

//

The Hall of Mirrors

That Which Cannot Be Stilled

“Four fat quails making a campanile of the mesquite tree. / Four hands of shuttling nighthawks along a loom / of electrical wires.”

“I sorrow for silence: motion the dunes soft with my hands / and Please, which is no invocation for peace.”

“I feel the junk of it all in my body—a rising wild. / I can’t stop the happening. The rusting is in me, // like how a deep wound heals—glimmered, open.”

//

The First Water Is the Body

“What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.”

//

I, Minotaur

“There is no god here in these flesh-hours, / though your jaw is a temple and your hips / strike like an axe— / the labrys I injure myself against.”

“What question canI ask of the thing I am? / All I have done and failed to do.”

From Molly McCully Brown’s “Pollux Considers Life As A Constellation”

“Imagine, for a moment, there is your body & an arm’s length away there is your body again, but it is on horseback, but it is calling your name, but it is built to leave you.“

//

from Jos Charles’ “Two Poems from October”

“The shoreline has regressed pleasantly   Some hair fallen since, a dozen egrets, out my shrifting face”