Kill or Cure

BOOKS & PAMPHLETS BY ANNE WALDMAN

On the Wing

O My Life!

Giant Night

Baby Breakdown

No Hassles

West Indies Poems

Life Notes

Self-Portrait (with Joe Brainard)

Fast Speaking Woman

Memorial Day (with Ted Berrigan)

Journals & Dreams

Sun the Blonde Out

Shaman

Polar Ode (with Eileen Myles)

Countries

Cabin

First Baby Poems

Sphinxeries (with Denyse Du Roi)

Makeup on Empty Space

Invention (with drawings by Susan Hall)

Skin Meat Poems

The Romance Thing

Den Monde in Farbe Sehen

Blue Mosque

Shaman/Shamane

Tell Me About It: Poems for Painters

Helping the Dreamer: New & Selected Poems

Her Story (with lithographs by Elizabeth Murray)

Not a Male Pseudonym

Lokapala

Fait Accompli

Troubairitz

Iovis

Suffer the Mysterium

Kill or Cure

guardian & scribe

“Thee?” Oh, “Thee” is who cometh first

Out of my own soul-kin,

For I am homesick after mine own kind

And ordinary people touch me not.

—EZRA POUND

A Note

That bird—that sounded nearly human—what was it? Or who? And bend your ear, poet, to the rain forest jungle ground as well, all the rustlings, gestures, motions of life, contrasted to rough-weathered stone-hewn pyramid, elegant you could say, and noisy. Surely you hear the architecture of it, climbing to the stars? The aspiration of it? For it was important to understand the calendrical cycles, the comings and goings of Venus, yet noticing Venus was the same object, evening and morning, morning and evening. Noticing his or her (for Venus seems not male nor female in this version of influence) slaughters, discontents, eclipses, ellipses, changed & fixed mood in the ebb & flux of internal weaves, machinations, conquistador conquest, surprise. A rude awakening for those who inhabited the dream.

Could I ever “let” my blood as they purportedly did? I wonder. Literally, no. Drawn from the tongue? But you pour that blood symbolically onto the virgin page, scribed with brush or turkey feathers dipped in black or red paint contained in conch-shell inkpots. And then bind those pages with a jaguar-skin cover. La Ruta Maya.

This codex is never lazy. It wishes to be a mere script of and for a dreamer who dwelt in a prosperous/desperate turn of century, torqued by doubt, fear, imagination, passion. Let it be said she was a raging insomniac.

“Kill or cure” is a psychological nexus of negative capability, an old Tantric notion. To hold simultaneous thoughts, often seemingly contradictory thoughts, in the mind, without “any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is the battle cry, the underpinning of a tragic age as well as going way back to primordial cellular reaches of how things move. It is, in the whispered oral lineage, kill and cure, which seems cruel for relative quotidian action and implies power little understood by this writer. Kill ego’s greedy grasping, its whine and agression. Ego’s self-perpetuation is the sacrificial victim, the corpse you stomp upon. As it dies, you are simultaneously cured and live on, transformed, rewired. An old shamanic trick. Isn’t that enough task for one planet’s aggressive nature? You kill or cut out like the surgeon what’s unnecessary, all those toxins, cancers, dark attitudes, shed the endometrium, then heal the rest. To survive. You get the picture. But because we live in a dark age beset with dualities and because time is precious, one makes a choice. Kill or cure. Against or for. It is ethos that beckons. Stuff of poetry? Ha! You might laugh. Words may either kill or cure as well, who hasn’t felt their deadly sting or balm? As a further note and pun, the Tibetan word for mandala is kyil khor. Kyil means center, and khor means fringe or surrounding area: gestalt. It’s a way of looking at situations in terms of relative truth. If that exists, this exists; if this exists, that exists. Center and fringe are interdependent situations. Killing or curing are interdependent situations. You can’t have one without the other.

As grizzled cracked-voiced Andy Devine would say in quaint grainy celluloid Western over a tin cup of cowboy coffee laced with homemade hootch, “It’ll either kill or cure ya!”

Jade eyes of the jaguar

  the last thing you saw

or

wall of skulls

& which of these

out of all of these

something (one?) startled awake

Chac needs blood this century too

Venus conjunct

cat-like tongues & penises

spurt (“let”) onto bark

it is written

it is written

This book is a composite of journals, travel pieces, vignettes, political rants, credos, manifestos, love songs, dreams, meditations, visitations from male-writer-ghost ancestors, homages to the great women poets, and other states of mind and occasion. As such it is a body of both quotidian and imaginary realities. It is a cento of my mind and mind’s musical making. It’s also what’s on my mind. . . . A sampler. A patchwork of day and night. The book is organized through the basic instincts of tone and impulse and runs not always parallel to linear time. Rather moves randomly yet to great purpose from the Yucatán to Bali to Quebec City to Tehran to Managua to Germany to Toulouse to New York City to Oslo to Hawaii to Miami and Dallas and many spots in between, ending somewhere near May 1993 scattering my father’s ashes over a lake in southern New Jersey, USA, followed by another Maya meditation. The book spans a world of attention.

A.W.

August 11, 1993 / Cobá, Quintana Roo

Table of Contents

Suppose a Game

Suppose language is a game

whose rules are dreamed

by an agreement of players

Once broken, the speakers are tossed

& know no rude tongue but their own

no (fixed) meaning in solipsism

But always in a process of being stranded

are spectators of solipsism

stuck with themselves, empirical data

Theirs is private demon language

obstruction, ownership, demand

Is the door open?

Rain here yet?

Have their ideas entered all heads?

Is this the end of the game?

They quickly become the ex-modern

and you, poet, enter the arena

an animating principle to a touch of words

Seduce them to your page

caress plosiveness

beat them a fine shapelessness

Or sentences are for the first time stark & clear

not untrue to what flaunts style:

webs of cloth, a mirror you hold

The players conjure nihilism, their only way

to be curious, vain, a waste of strength

as confusion weakens the vocal art

Cybernetics is the exchange of their news for yours

Yours is: However abundant the nectar,

the bees stop dancing as the sugar drops

They tell you nothing, their lips are sealed, you keep dancing

Was the agreement that words shine like sun,

or glint as weapons in moonlight?

A Name as Revery

Ate the bare limbs of words

to find my name:

of fevers, of trees it’s made

Choice out of jugular to be born

Centuries of solar flowers gone by

Belle, where ya born? Moi? Moi?

Verdict: tens attend to

doubt all doubt as

La Self errs in revenge

Then ravages in a kind of honor umbrage

Although American

to a haute parentage we swing

John of the Hands & Waldemann’s was my father

LeFevre, my mother, exposed in sandals & silk

Her Night

Out of an eye comes research

Her night: portrait & a description

A night of knowledge was plainly hers

Two ways of writing explain this

There was her night

And then there was her night, a repetition

A night in a quarry in Helena, Montana, was not anticipated

Or at dusk before the night had started:

   The Lavender Open Pit Copper Mine near Bisbee

Everywhere she claims it as hers: purple, dark, starry

Buffalo: spring snow

Amherst: Emily Dickinson’s night, what was that?

Night is anyone’s guess

Naming the stars & planets: Saturn still extant after all this time

So I went on with an idea of the night

Djuna’s night

All-American nights

Recesses one has one’s program for

She dreamed her clothes were like Spanish ice cream

She dreamed a moth arrived to convey a scarlet secret

It was a female moth

The mosquitoes protested they were female too

She had the desire to include a shawl & Kleenex

She walked where there had never been a mountain

   Can you be sure?

   Can you be that sure?

She would think about walking to Sanitas Mountain at night

If any thought about night or place with night inside it is left out

   she’s sorry

For she can’t even begin to remember the rooms:

   El Rito, Bellevue, La Quinta, the old man’s stuffy sitting room

She was lost in the abstraction of the girl’s perfume

Nights in front of a shrine prostrating to her potentially

   luminous mind

Sleeping late

Literature is being written at night

The couchette rattles into Trieste

A plane jets across the continent

Now I am above the clouds & the moon is up with me

Seeing what someone else means by night is another option

There was her night, and then there was her night, a repetition

She picked up the telephone while, she, the other,

   walked toward a mountain

There was her night and then there was her night—the other’s—a

     repetition

She suspends all preconceptions and forgets the concept “moon”

It could be frightening if you were a prisoner

Or, a relief

Her night is of no importance really

But there has never been another one like it

Moonlight: hear the amorous cats

Moonlight: the South American map lies on the hammock

   exposed to the elements

She did not “drop by” at 1 a.m. as supposed

But made another night call

A bird called

Confused by jet lag, time went out of her control

She shrugged & went to a party

Her escort parked the car near Coit Tower

In between lovers

Between textures: silk, velvet, cool cotton

Throw back the bedspread!

Out of the eye comes the moon

Out of the eye: seduction

What does it really matter what anyone does

There was her night

And then there was her night, a repetition

Minnesota is just like that

She wouldn’t give out her address in Oregon

Her coat was made for a night like this

Her night: where was it leading?

None knew

Display her zeal hour by hour

Opium would change this dream

Her nervousness was a blind

Talk about something like: “We in this period

   have not lived in remembering” or

“My excitement is my open eyes”

Her clothing is of a daily-island-life variety

A line distinguishes it

She almost traveled to Tent City out of love & honor

Everything will have to be repeated in the morning

Listen: hum of typewriter, Jacqueline’s loud refrigerator & clock

Listen: a long line of thoughts bargaining to enter in

One thought: the time is 3:15 a.m.

Another thought: there is only one way to phone her

And another: night is long to her & short to us

Not at all

She is ahead of herself but behind every action

Concentration was like having the night inside her all the time she said

She said she’d go to any length to stay awake, imbibing controlled

   substances as well as caffeine

She said this because she was excited about making double time

It was her night and then it was her night a repetition

This is an ordinary great deal to know

Of Ah Or

I cannot be but

fierce

My tongue—is it so?

& liaison of that tight

pact of

this to that

A bargain

rises

swells

reigns

sends darts North

when it is you,

iced over,

I thrust

in my heart

to consider

All the vowels

sing how to

melt that glare

or

stare into

doubt like

words in a

bubble

Can’t back out

now

but sing to you

a fire across

our divide,

my tongue is forked!

Flesh language!

We fall into

pieces of

the painting

to be

put

in motion

Splash or Freeze

of Ah or

Whelp

Tell to

old Greeks

who knew

to stress

(pounce)

stretch out

as you your limbs

the statues tell us

Move it! Move it!

& the Ode

got danced

Tell it to poet

whatshername

Heliodora?

who sang

& shook her ankles,

swallowed honey

to make

a sweeter sound or

Ah, Macabru

I tune your lyre

Stomp on the page!

Speech you are golden

Speech you crack ope my skull

Speech you lieth not down a while

but even as I dream

you rouse me

Rock bed!

Break into babe increments

prick ear awake

Spit juice in my face

Fricative magic excites

every corpuscle

Implode & regroup

Assail me with

all yr plans

to consider

the length & shadow

of vowels

American wags listen

The West is underdeveloped

I want to ride you out here

under Big Sky

Rail ’gainst acid rain,

cruelty, weird belief systems

Insult those who do you

no good in their squawk & bite

Who serve you poorly in

their bid for glory

condemned

’fore they

even sputter forth

What goddess will abide a dull,

ignorant tongue?

I speak it

You play me

that forms it

Quote Captive

New sleep uptorn,

Wakeful suspension between dream and dream—

—LAURA RIDING

Orbits of intertextual modern talk

   now poetic, now skeptical,

now written down for human hands to hold,

   or sensibly dropped, or squirm and die

now rise again. What do you do?

   And to deserve them? Night goes down . . .

What do you choose? An object for my verb . . .

   Who let you in? The mysterious animal . . .

Who are you rooting for? A dream . . .

   Born to talk? And sing and write this down . . .

Wait for the place to be abounding in decision

   or shaft all strategies. Scratch them?

Conversation isn’t cheap here, it’s looming,

   precious, sacred, clumsy, inept

Wait for them—the words or concepts is it?—to be

   newly minted then strike. Terrorize the terminology

Lunar, linear, arch, lingering under cover of bed

   They could be my sisters, those buddy thoughts

They could be addressing the new populism

   or undressing old idioms

Cluster round. This is the clutter

   of mind I offer an argument to

Singular masters take heed the goad’s unstoppable

   or make your way clear to surrender her light

A woman rises in Houston, sets in Michigan

   and never sleeps. Oh tempt a strapping mind . . .

A thought is mangled in the wrong hands

   because it oversteps a sleep-boundary

Necessary to speak although you might

   never know the mastery of sleep

Now sing and write this down

Jack Kerouac Dream

He’s talking speedily about the evil of the feminine but he likes it. O bitter tones of the demon feminine. He’s in a repressed New England winter room, but oddly it’s like the old whorehouse in Eldora with bats inside the walls. There’s peeling wallpaper of gold fleur-de-lys pattern on green on the far side. And his “coat of arms,” or rather “his mother’s arm coat (arm chair?)” is close by. It looks like a shrunken deer’s head, size of a rabbit’s foot with French letters crudely scrawled on a wooden plaque beneath, “est peur” (translates “is fear” but cognate to, or sounds like, “espoir”—hope). He’s shivering in an old camel’s hair coat, smoking—Chesterfields? Old Golds?—in front of a raging fire. He’s wanting to “hunt and gather,” he says, but it’s too cold. Where can we go to forage now that “all the skies are broken”? I am thinking if only I were born earlier I could love him, take care of him. Close to his face now, I see its raging corpuscles in the dancing firelight. Intricate aborigine designs tattooed on a remarkably pristine visage. “It’s a drift, flesh and bone, mortification, deadpan, life’s a raked field,” he mumbles. I’m part of a Buddhist plot to get him to be reborn to “liberate all sentient beings.” I’m inviting him to give a reading at The Academy of the Meticulous Future. But what may I offer? “I tried calling your phone was dead was why I came.” “Ummm.” He’s off somewhere else, his eyes moist and glassy.

April Dream

I’m with Frank O’Hara, Kenward Elmslie & Kenneth Koch visiting Donald Hall’s studio or lab (like Ivy League fraternity digs) in “Old Ann Arbor.” Lots of drink & chitchat about latest long poems & how do we all rate with Shakespeare. Don is taking himself very seriously & nervously as grand host conducting us about the place. It’s sort of class reunion atmosphere, campus history (Harvard?) & poetry business to be discussed. German mugs, wooden knickknacks, prints, postcards decorate the room, Kenward making snappy cracks to me about every little detail. Where’s John Ashbery? We notice huge panels of Frank O’Hara poems on several walls and Kenneth reads aloud: “a child means BONG” from “Biotherm.” We notice more panels with O’Hara works, white on red—very prettily shellacked, a la Chinoise—& translated by Ted Berrigan. Slogan-like lines: “THERE’S NOBODY AT THE CONTROLS!” “NO MORE DYING.” Frank is very modest about these displays and not altogether present (ghost). Then Don unveils a huge series of additional panels, also painted on wood, that he’s collecting for a huge catalogue-anthology for which Frank O’Hara is writing the introduction. They seem to be copies of Old Masters, plus Cubist, Abstract Expressionist works, plus Jasper Johns, Joe Brainard collages & George Schneeman nudes. Frank has already compiled a list or “key,” but we’re all supposed to guess what each one is or at least the source of each, like a parlor game. The panels and list are both like a scroll covered with soft copper which peels back.

I wonder what I am doing with this crowd of older men playing a guessing game. None of us are properly naming the “sources,” Kenneth the most agitated about this.

Then the “key” is revealed and the first 2 on it are:

I. Du Boucheron

II. Jean du Jeanne Jeanne le Boucheron (wineglass)

“I knew it! I knew it!” shouts Kenneth.

We are abruptly distracted from the game by children chorusing “da da da du DA LA” over & over again, very guileless & sweet. We all go to a large bay window which looks over a grade-school courtyard. Frank says, “Our youth.”

June Dream

I am a three-dimensional map for Doctor “Sneakers” Burroughs. The Doctor is examining the map closely with a large eye glass. It’s projected above, over his head. I am pointing out the veins on the map, saying, “Look there, look there . . .” (King Lear’s dying speech) very slowly and majestically. The word “spreadeagled” appears in my head to define the map. The veins are oddly feathery, delicate, & a luminescent blue-green peacock color. Presently I notice from my position above there are others forming a mandala around the Doctor.

“Sneakers” is checking them out as they offer themselves as 3-D maps. Allen Ginsberg is “just a bundle of nerves”—like a big ball of heavy-duty-wire cable. Gregory Corso represents lymph. There’s always the subtle detail that makes these recognizable to real life: Allen’s gaping eyes from paralyzed side of face (he’s had bout with Bell’s palsy), Gregory’s Rembrandtian hair & ruddy cheek, Philip Whalen’s buddhabelly. Steven Lowe & James Grauerholz are more opaque and illusive. They are the smallest bundle, meshed together, and are summed up in the phrase “billysboys” (they are Burroughs’ secretaries in real life). I recognize my own left vein under the Doctor’s magnifying glass. He’s making sucking sounds as he walks, slightly bent, around the mandala studying each bundle laboriously, a big blue animal-like (insect) eye enlarged behind the glass. The glass turns into a full-blown miner’s mask. These bundles of people are now like boulders which make me think of “bones” and I wonder Where is, who is Bones? Burroughs himself? Words: disemboned, disemboweled, disembodied. I am attracted toward the skin bundles to protect my veins. Doc “Sneakers” is saying “Well, yes, well, hmmmmm, sure, take a broaaaaaad general view” in a withering tone, as he circles the mandala. The boulder-people-bundles are now pulsating in their respective spots, like kinetic sculptures. Allen is writhing in a most terrifying manner (turns black & blue with red sparks flying), Gregory is a sculpture of green neon, I’m a tangle of blue wires, Philip is quivering jelly, while Steven & James are fluttering like silk. My heart chakra is imploding with all this activity. There’s the pressure of blood coursing through my veins and I feel a tremendous gushing toward the whole situation, physically & emotionally. Now the “spirits” of the boulders like me are hovering above. I can feel their presences, but no longer see them. The phrase “Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love” also from Shakespeare and spoken in same King Lear dying voice as before startles the Doctor who now sucks himself away like a black hole and disappears at the exact center of the mandala—down a trapdoor! This whole scene has been taking place on a stage set for “The Magic Mountain Movie.” I think to myself: What shall I do down there, at the Remember Some Apartments? I awake with the task to go boil water, for coffee, for tea.

Old Dream Ritual

We did this in several dreams in our twenties I remember to find the

   origin of “book.” Remember?

Sister Bernadette is heckling me

No, my sister, support me

And my sister raises me up

She plays the piano,

Her music accompanies my life

We’re on stage

Bright spotlights on us

Sister wearing the dress I gave you

On the stage of our lives

“Etonne-moi, sister,” I cry

I have the book! I have my book!

My book, this one,

the one in the black binder, you remember

Remember, sister?

The book of our life

Infuriating black binder, never binding enough

Pages, texts, works, poetry, her heartbroken

family lineage stories

Old drama, the story of you

The story of you & me, remember?

We fell in love to change the world, remember?

A book book book book to change the world, remember?

Middle English beche from Old English bēce, akin to O Frisian bōk,

OE and Old Saxon bōc, bōk, Old High German buohha (G Buche)

Old Norse bōk, beech

Old Slavic bŭzŭ, elm

L. fāgus, beech

Gr. phēgos, edible oak

The OE variant bōc, bōk became ME bok, book,

English book

Gothic bōka, letter of alphabet

pl. bōkōs

documents, books

Originally beech-wood sticks on which runes were carved

(repeat these origins after me: beche, bēce, bōc, bōk, bouhha, etc.)

On stage:

A theater carved like the Entermedia

Made of women bones

Enter the media

We are ready for them,

We can make up the stories of our lives

They will believe anything about wild-speaking women

We were there once

All the women performers carving a circle around William Burroughs:

Laurie, Patti, Bernadette, Anne

and then one (you are that one) become my sister

and then it’s my turn

Break out of the circle, go to my book

It’s as big as the world

“I am blinded by a fiery circle”

for James Schuyler

It is summer 1970

You’ve “gone mad”

You’re washing

dollar bills

in the bathtub

& hanging them out

on the clothesline

in Southhampton to dry

You write to me

“money is shit”

Your handwriting

is angry, stubborn

Then you send

another note:

“I’ll support you” &

“don’t worry”

This is puzzling

Then

one point

at the board game

(with Kenward & Joe

in Vermont)

head split in

my hands sore

with your suffering

O Jimmy

Which breakdown

later

Payne Whitney:

venetian blinds

willfully shut

Your fingernails are

long, bent as a witch’s

Tufts of

blunt brow hair

leap

above your eyes

which roll back

cunningly

Breath comes in

clumps, “medicated”

Tongue-parched

demon inside you

great poet,

rages

What’s his fear?

“How is it outside?”

you ask

This will help

I go to open

the blinds thinking,

this helps

“No, don’t do it”

(desperate)

“Too bright!”

A Guston

homage to Philip Guston,

1913-1980

a skeletal guardian, a hungry ghost, a mafia man, an old implant,

weathered shoes, the stockmarket crash of 1929, mural eye,

narrative you could say like his dream, Moses’ tablets,

commandments of a lightbulb, deity of the street, the kitchen,

pay dirt, hit the pavement, gone, ricochet of time,

nostalgia for the-morning-after, what ring of Dante’s hell?

ring of sweat, odd laboratory, desire and villainy, sainthood

not about niceties, proper shoes, wanted to lie down with the

setting sun, wanted to be one with the place, Samuel Beckett

stopped here, this was a childhood, this was a nightmare,

this was what the World War could do, a man stood up,

a man stood down, a man stood up, a man stood down, a man

holier than a tree, holier than a mistake, holier than food,

barrenness, wantonness, the glee of the comic book, it was

a movie, a motion picture show, a matinee, it was the bites

in his life, it was rhapsody, it was solo jazz, reminder to sleep,

it was the insomniac’s revenge, it was his own mind talking,

the sun came up, the earth stood still, the paint at the tip of

brushes? implants? eyeballs? a wink, a stare, a bald lie,

dramaturgy, the paint was talking to you, hungry ghosts

in the bardo, an eggshell light, a warm tangent, a litany

of disasters, were they, the mob, responsible? who snitched?

celluloid is speeding up life, someone still smoked a cigar,

in the center of his life all the details showed one heart-risk.

Love of His Art

for Joe Brainard

I have not mastered cinematic intelligence

Screen gone,

Each little mannerism aspen shuddering:

the storm is here! the storm is here!

Keep even smoothness spread out

like the eye keeps track of sun going in

& out of clouds. Then 2 clouds crash.

The world is going at a nomad’s pace

its face you find routine

& then, surprise

none other than I experience

finding you. This is what does happen

beauty ringing the ear,

vernacular

I hope you see how crucial intrusions are

for what I mean may be clearer more insistent

because my eyes sigh in debt to yours.

When the World Was Steady

No matter how hard I try

to forget you

    you always

  come back to my mind,

and when you hear me singing

  you may know

    I am weeping for you.

—NOOTKA LOVE SONG

Blazing cinders Blaise Cendrars for my sake excellence as from a

daughter for my sake uxorious for my sake not dogmatic he

not to be confused with he a father he a gentleman Alice Aurora Alice

allay my fears Alice afterbirth The Star The Victim &

The Poet now there’s a theory appointed to be up all

night appurtenance

  the Man-Who-Instills Laughter & Tears

talking forever then rolling over talking will take forever then

we’ll weep behind closed doors on occasions or rather

occasions such as expanding aging eating pick up & hold the

babies hold them close we’ll take forever Alice Albacore

we’ll take & steal for that baby we made a movie called

A & B not easy azure it’s all over borealis & it’s all over

aquamarine tropic so let’s call this Daylight & all vote the

social line      We Went Out Laboring

in times of stress—red

for tyrannous authority      & drowning floods, storm, she holds

fire glass jewel red color & blue against wars & enemies, carrying

in the left hand wisdom blades and I give you green,

fears of space so now you know so know you now and don’t

turn it around I mean let’s use this

I am not grass I can’t come to her calling

the waters rise for her I am not water to come for her

wailing forever talking We Went Out Laboring

& everyone & everyone should experience the ease of the

Broadway Ltd    & have a friend who shares adversity distraction

insomnia dreams sigh a white woman sigh hats on hats off

hats on little bright blue towels toast & butter & jam & coffee &

The Inferno the world has oftimes been converted into chaos

are you ready for this? love time & drowning floods,

flashed out a crimson light I saw a fire which conquered a

hemisphere of darkness

lights & shadow on the page of you I’m reading We write I’m

adding this what dwelt in my dome to those domes and for my

sake howl in jurisprudence

Bring me my sister

she understands    

Bring me my sister, my scribe

she is the

singer who

understands

the song