Free Gossamurmur by Anne Waldman Page A

together and making do in the secret chamber sought that place you walked there you found a secluded spot below the Tundra where deer bedded down where deer waited and you stepped there and sank there on knees in a very hot devoted love where you rip theveils from the fear of prying eyes and welcome the presence of a natural world. And say something like “as sky is my witness…” “as earth is my witness…” Come here my weeds and remove these weeds to our sameness. See our sameness. And remove the borders to our sameness, “as weeds are my witness…” Come my hands to your natural weeds and remove the fear of our sameness and see the beauty of our sameness and not sameness. Touch the gossamer body of our sameness that you know, and hiddenness you know. Intangible. Clothing that waits by the side of bedding down and eyes you know in hiddenness. Fields of eyes not prying not hidden. It was natural and very natural to do this to be this to bed down in a clearing away from prying eyes and metabolic strangulation who said unnatural this contract a vow against perpetual wiring of denial. “as wilderness is my witness” “as wildness is my witness…” Take the vow in the wilderness. It is over, it is gone and done. It is over and done with being behind the shadow cloth of the marriage veil, behind it a valance, a balance, and what is the essence of this poetry as in music which knows no boundary. Rip the boundary that is veil. Where it tunes to the body of beautiful sameness but never the same music. Consciousness as in music and civil it is civil and civil it is a demand to be civil. As a cascade is civil, as from the tilling of fields and this world is a cultivation of new things in civility it is a sure thing to witness.
    She put her dictum on the validity of love in all directions and buried it in a corner of the tundra:

    for a joining that is not easy but is a joining work in love
    Dream of duality in the phenomenal universe
    veil of maya, a memory of rescue
    illusion’s dream
    a false dichotomy?
    MA = not
    YA = that
    I’ll tear it off, pierce it
    rend the veil from the other face
    A gossamer web but not a trampoline
    that will bounce out a Spider Woman’s prey
    Not a rubber band
    Another word for strain-energy storage
    might be resilience
    A virtue of the movers and shakers of this shimmering world
    Thinnest strains so they cannot be seen
    UV-colored to lure; great train-energy storage;
    efficient protein manufacture
    Gossamer with binds to the more rigid:
    branches, walls, twigs, grass stems,
    the edges of roofs
    all architectural structure
    Lycosid spiderlings in a velocity gradient
    of breeze and currents
    There is the lift of gossamer
    and the glide
    The scramble of spiderlings
    to the highest point
    for a better launch
    The drag-to-lift ratio
    enough drag to engage the breeze
    enough thin delicate strands to glide
    and not parachute too soon
    Gossamer mostly as seen floating in air

PIVOTS

    Archive, Archeion, Archon
    See Jacques Derrida,
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
(University of Chicago Press, 1996).
    I know this from Derrida
, as written in the poem.
    Archive Fever
is a salient text, useful in a meditation on the overreaching
arkhe
, naming commencement and commandment as nomological principles. The contradiction, as Derrida explicates it, is the irony of an archive that shelters itself from this memory of
arkhe
, and also forgets it. We grow fainter in our memory and for the purpose of memory (versus erasure) require residence and command for our archives, and for a particular kind of concealment. Archeion is the domicile, which moves from private to public. Archons are those who command, who guard the documents. Poetry is by nature self-secret, but it is also fragile as document, and when recorded falls even more victim to decay and the unknowable technology of future guardians, if there be such. And who will be present to establish “voice recognition”?
    Argana Café, Marrakech
    Parts