She is (Here)

A hot hot Labor Day weekend, our malaise the lack of any substantial rain, the temps soaring and searing the undersides of this cool house, a nagging insanity ... Sunday afternoon, my wife putting more wares into her booth as the store she’s located in readies to close in October -- so sad to see her so defeated, having worked so hard and well. -- Cats dozing all around the shadows, lizards sprinting on the pavement, my neighbor across the street hammering down a new porch, the sky like this bronze bell that just won’t stop clanging.

***

Beginning to read into Jacques Lacan’s “On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge,” and what he says early on helps articulate a poetics I’ve been reaching for for some time:

***

I am going out, and once again I will write on the door, so that, as you exit, you may perhaps recall the dreams you have pursued in this bed. I will write the following sentence: “Jouissance of the Other,” of the Other with a capital O, “of the body of the Other who symbolizes the Other, is not the sign of love.”

That is why the unconscious was invented -- so that we could realize that man’s desire is the Other’s desire (eds’ note, or “that man’s desire is for the Other’s desire”), and that love, while it is a passion that involves ignorance of desire, nevertheless leaves desire its whole import. When we look a bit more closely, we see the ravages wreaked by this.

Jouissance -- jouissance of the Other’s body -- remains a question, because the answer it may constitute is not necessary. We can take this further still: it is not a sufficient answer either, because love demands love. It never stops demanding it. It demands it ... encore. “Encore” is the proper name of the gap in the Other from which the demand for love stems.

-- “On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge,” Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, transl. with notes by Bruce Fink, p. 3-4 passim

***

So the Beloved is a fiction of consciousness, and the unconscious is Her bed, Her bower, Her shadowy aquaean souterrain, the place where all of my womb water-spilled, from where my devastating thirst for return is maddened and drenched and never quite quenched.

My desire is the Other’s desire, or for the Other’s desire: Always there is a hard, childlike need for acceptance, which has behind an unprovable certainty that my desire can only be hers, surely must be hers. That goading need and certainty ghosts all of the unconscious projections and fantasies that have dogged my waking hours, and acts like a lucent jetstream in the endless reels of masturbatory immersion into insuperably hot unions.




SHE IS (HERE)

September 3

Who knew my Beloved wasn’t
out beyond my dark unlovely
nights but the dark herself,
that otherworldly princess
the sun will never find
in his bright and knowing
ways, not ever, though
he plunder every shining shore
to door love’s wildest main.
Who knew how much wreckage
all my raptures would leave
behind, a rubble of Iseult
nonsense fallen precisely
in that rupture
that only widened each
time I almost found her.
Beware the riptides
of your bliss; they
will haul you from her bed
with such viciousness
you’d think all wombs
were siege engines tearing
down our very souls,
tossing whatever we
hold dear down cold
thralls of infinite farewelling.
She’s gone so far away
now that were I
to knock on every
seeming door in hell’s
drowned cidatel, I’ll not
name that fleeing angel
who welcomes all sons
home. Beneath the awkward
turrets of my life there’s
an ocean of blue nougat,
the yolk of dragons
and mermen and
dorky poets, oh my.
You cannot build a castle
on the sea unless you
first plunge your child
in its lees, mixing
his hot bloodings into
the rigor blue of mortar.
The house of love
rides on a fish
from here to Avalon
and back, singing his
beloved’s name on
every empty shore
full crashing with sweet foam.
She’s never far, though
ever here, too dark even
at this hour, this dank
black 5 a.m. Ah, but listen
to her sigh and whisper
in her dream
inside the pulsing insects,
beneath the dark garden
just outside this window,
inside these groping
words which trace
her absent welcome
with a sense too
viscerally airy to
touch with any more
certainty than a
curved glissade of
a smile of a softly
ebbing wave. She’s
pressing up against me
from that buried mere,
her sex dowsing with my
own dark pen
for words of her dark world.
Each morning we hold
converse before the
real world wakes up,
a colloquy which recconnoits
our every gap and lack.
We’re repeating Love’s name
through all our echoing lacuna
so that Love may understand
our faithfulness and surrender to
a kiss we lost forever when
she and I began, on that
white shore long ago
when my mother cried
and released us to
this tale we can’t outgrow.