[excerpt]
latinate inside a dream i go to my grandfather labouring over his words at the university whose name i carry in a small porous carrier bag / lixiviation the language solvent percolating through a solid art official age (‘the body’) / whose name i carried first as a fiction some foreign neat thing / kotlar / easy to pronounce, occupational name for a boiler maker or coppersmith / kotlar / as in the american poet liza, then later longer embellished & returned / kotlarczyk / returned, me, to that suffix, classed a ‘patronymic’ / patron saint of / being one of three categories in the polish art of naming alongside ‘cognominal’ being those surnames / slur! / created from a nickname, usually based on occupation. i read cog, nominal, existing in name only, the animal laborans pawing away to disinherit a lingual trap a heap a bush turkey mound in the clearing of my recollection of dad screaming, cutting sick at the vertically composed thicket, nature’s shifting pyramid scheme. the other, ‘toponymic’, being those names derived from places / lixiviation a molasses sleeping a rocky outcrop / returned, me, to the suffix that means ‘son of’ not ‘daughter of’ having travelled to the kujawy to discover now just how many of my relatives are cops, returned, me, home to the fluidity of my gender expression inside a context that does not feminise its suffixes as in kordziak father, kordziakówna daughter. no! this place does not know how to handle a foreign suffix in any gender in any given gender, here we are gender obscurant though expectant, expectant to be seated in an orange plush thing a worn thing threadbare thing on the train to becoming someone else’s cog most nominal cog…i refute! i refuse! i slow the mechanism of the train down outsource the thinking to another plane of consciousness altogether.
pollinate inside a dream i think of antoni in wadowice in gorokan in quakers hill who i recall as having lost his ability with words at all, mostly we played cards to the end of his days played to numbers queens jokers not letters, i think of him don’t think of him labouring his words studious to their origins their structure the way they cosplay badly at wiping a history clean of itself, the way they speak to his god the university, jagiellonian, kraków, a gaggle of young guys in the philology department before the gestapo swept them up most of them up in 1939. i think of him my grandfather all grand in his righteous youth being swept up by the gestapo being taken by train taken away from his activities in the underground, a young man experimenting with the acting of words in the theatre the university the underground the place of the rhapsodic the rhapsodic theatre ‘teatr rapsodyczny’ ‘our theatre’ the clandestine the ‘theatre of the word’, the theatre sparse of props of embellishments, the theatre of the recitation of poetic texts, the theatre his cousin mieczysław (mietek) kotlarczyk founded with his lifelong friend & mentee karol (lolek) wojtyła, later known as pope john paul the second, the haecceity of ‘pope’ also of ‘theatre’ the haecceity of the tones of the spirit also the / monotony is one of the tones of the spirit1 / or is that just a bad translation? the monotony of risking your life for the theatre the theatre that must be carefully staged inside peoples’ homes during the occupation, the monotony of hiding as a way of speaking to god of speaking to your culture to the poets to your heritage of speaking back to the monotony of occupation.
a parent my father’s great aunt would darn the pope’s torn socks before he was pope when his name was his own not his own. a friend would pass letters between them / mietek & lolek / across the green border formerly the point dividing third reich wadowice with general government kraków / the coriolis force is not a force at all but a pseudo force forcing inertia at the equator where no hurricane can form / now the green border is a belt of ancient białowieża forest housing a game of people ping pong in the belarus-poland refugee border crisis / the crisis that is of the border no matter how green. european bison (the ‘wisent’ / the ‘zubr’ / the ‘european buffalo’) first scientifically described by carl linnaeus in 1758, once extinct in the wild now gather in their thousands inside a dream of non-hegemonic borders, a green bloc, they gather at night where / the forest borders on a cat sanctuary funded by new order2 / they gather with a coalition of migrants to discuss the philosophies of antonio gramsci, they wake to sifting dappled sunlight through primeval forest eat cud of białowieża conifer broadleaf oak hornbeam spruce pine, displace genes to consume poems / with the pessimism of the intellect of nation states & the optimism of the will to survive them / with the whisper of sentient beings that are genderless in the pines at the border in the theatre of the word. we visit białowieża visit lolek’s the pope’s maybe mitek’s old house maybe visit the bridge in wadowice named after him all of it visited inside the dream of memory meeting time as a device to be walked across, the stream of the skawa river of the past that twists distorts our view into beneath our feet where we lay antoni his ashes to rest to churn as newly formed world / the theatre of the newly formed world.
that cloister of forest where the cabin that was (was named) philip larkin or was it philip levine in the dream is a haunted corridor, a paralipomena, the elliptical bustling inside the arcade beneath an eponymous canopy of convolutes, the forest convoluted into which michael farrell’s poets search their fear in king lear quotes3 / the coriolis the pseudo the force (its lack) / the lack that my dreamer returns to in the leading edge of the property its entry point / a virgin forest, tangled, pathless, in each4 / along the driveway, neither of which are ours, they belong to the neighbours as they sift their deeds their names their proprietary dreams / the plant is terrestrial as regards its root5 / not ours none of it ours / cosmic as regards its stem6 / not even the dream of the sexing of the cherry of the stem when coming when cut at the throat. psychically this place occupies a smear an insecure foothold in the dreamscape that i grapple fumble with mumble like the caul of names, philip as if trying for ex-ray vision beneath a morass of lantana weeds palms trees trying to undress it / the amniotic the close-fitting headdress hairnet of the mother her earth / to know it like trying to decipher but not actually making any effort other than in the train of the subconscious to know the biographical uniqueness of larkin versus levine, there in the imagination of the dreamscape where nationalities as to name variations mean nothing, the trying to understand that haunts us like first love revisionist history in the sweaty outtakes of the early inside the cherry of the mourning.
despite it all / mrs. jones catches her train. mr. smith mends his motor. the cows are driven home to be milked7 / i moo at the cows the kids metaphorically i thatch the metaphysical roof, grasses seeding at the tip that brim a wet elsewhere & the paws turning to brooms, masks, droopy garlands for the security door all dressing the cloistered place / take a rock, put it under your head, & let the dream ladder grow. it grows down / toward the depths8 / & / the root grows in the opposite direction from the shoot, thus showing its affinity to the earth.9 among it all are we planting little saviours are we seeding our own salvation are we where / there will be some green isle for the mind10/ & the borders will bleed until they / lags & drags & prys11 / little prairie fags alighting the bounds to become.
oneiric beyond the dream i think of antoni leaving his beloved home his cleopatra her begging her anthony not to go, him silently affirming / the bud is a contraction12/ silently affirming in his many tongues / of the plant into a point13 / silently affirming his deep passionate love for her but leaving eventually leaving all the same / where all future possibilities lie dormant14 / leaving to the pacific prospect of a better life knowing / a closed flower bud hides the interior15 / knowing he must risk the pirates knowing he must / of the blossom like a secret16 / & he does.