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FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA Uncollected Poems 1995-2009

Eileen R. Tabios

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Copyright 2009 by Eileen R. Tabios All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the authors permission, except for quotations in reviews.
Book design by Geoffrey Gatza Front Cover Image: a tattoo on the arm of John Bloomberg-Rissman entitled Secret Life of Angelus Novus (Skinglyph/Twombly View) (Tatt #1). A photograph of the tattoo is part of the anthology 1000 Views of Girl Singing (Leafe Press, U.K., 2009) featuring responses to, or translations of, Eileen R. Tabios poem The Secret Life of An Angel. The tattooed text is from Walter Benjamins ber den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History), Thesis 9. The background is a detail from Cy Twomblys painting Autunno (no. III of his Quattro Stagioni), taken from the cover of the catalogue to an exhibition at theTate Modern. First Edition ISBN: 9781935402046 Library of Congress Control Number 2009932640 BlazeVOX [books] 14 Tremaine Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 Editor@blazevox.org

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Pressed Petals Mon Ami, you want to make a memory: You write Dear John to the over-the-top sun for going over the top: Cherie, you want to listen to Bon Jovi because you love their name: They are giving you a memory (I want to give you a memory by writing to you): Somewhere, a hyacinth blushes to pink, violetdies as white You want to be a moment of ecstasy by becoming part of a moment of ecstasy when you remain alone by choice: Evening. Desk lamp blooms The page ends and you made a blossomingmemory you cannot remember: You want to make a memory:

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Maid of Honor If I fell off a tree, would anyone notice? Would anyone cut down the forest? Would you still publicize global warming? Would you still look beyond mortality? "I would never consider a parrot for a pet as it would live longer than I, being human, could muster..." Then bury me please under a canopy of red roses never mind the flock of white doves A dozen canons synchronized will do For, somewhere on this planet, an acorn is penetrating sodden earth there's no need to apologize for dancing from one's hipsroundly! eyes closed and taking up as much space as one wants from the dance floor at someone else's wedding

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Pygmalions Embrace
One man, Pygmalion, who had seen these women Leading their shameful lives, shocked at the vices Nature has given the female disposition Only too often, chose to live alone, To have no woman in his bed. But meanwhile He made, with marvelous art, an ivory statue from Ovids Metamorphoses

1. These are my last words before I become stone the same color as the ivory virgin known as Beauty defined by crumbling pages gasping, Her name is Galatea 2. A god stopped playing (for once) to manifest mercy A god blinked long lashes for a statue to step down from a pedestal also carved by my withered hands The statue blinked long lashes She whispered her name: Galatea 3. Her mother was her father was my instrument carving her curves Who could have foretold she would transcend my grief
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over the women shethat is, I emulated through ivory and stone 4. She reddened her lips into roses She revealed her breasts for moons She opened eyes fearlessly at the sun She laughed as she spread her thighs 5. These are my last words before I sculpt myself into limestone a chateaux as moonwashed as the ivory whose purity I formed into the virgin I desired. But I accept her departure from my opened hands as the price for tasting human lips before they now proclaim Poems make stones breathe. Within my eyes poetry, nature, art and wine converge for a life beyond stone. I live beyond stone by immortalizing her within my fold an embrace formed by stone walls as white as she on a pedestal mythologized as the perfect woman even as her flesh wrinkles, then cracks, for living in the world, becoming of the world, forming the Real.

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Aurora wake to a scent of the woman you never were one proactively believes no memory is false yesterday, the sand shimmered with black diamonds once, you opened eyes and still loved me tomorrow, the world will form one black diamond once, I loved you back with much helplessness and fear was only as real as a black diamond

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Birthday Poem, 9/11/2008: A Re-Vision


written after and during Heaven and Earth in Jest in Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Wind remains terrified rejected breath of unblinking sun Those days of perfumes hollowing throats evaporated now into terrified winds There, a branch knots itself into the darkness of your eye (as well, yours) futile against what unblinking sun reveals Dust clouds keep recurring in the East, in the West heaven, earth and all in between as men battle each other not in jest although Allah in the Koran once raised the possibility of creation as a joke What exactly is the redemption found in the canary singing atop a skull? Whose emptied eye sockets became polished to ivory by these terrified winds? Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain, says the pilgrim at Tinker Creek Still, that infernal canary sings The mockingbird can suddenly plummet but just a tic before earths brutal kiss it saves itself by unfurling wings Does it mock the terror of winds? Yes, I think it does. Yes it mocks me into stepping back another step to widen the landscape fighting my blindness. Until I finally
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see beyond the fires and tinder whose future will be sparks, then flames: the planet, this molten planet with its ever-terrorized winds, remains mostly water, inescapable water, and will remain mostly water until we can believe once more lightning is benevolent. Without the image of cracked skies the Ancients would not have known to carve lightning marks, long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. Then, the canary shall punctuate its song: Eat! Eat! Eat! Eat! while the wind continues blowing, terrified, while soldiers continue dying on dusty roads. The canary shall sing, hopping from one skull to another, for some of us are still struggling to remain infants who have just learned to hold up our heads. So we stare about us in honest bewilderment aiming sincerely to learn. We want to explore the neighborhood, view where we have been set down so precipitately. We still lack the cocksure air of squatters who have come to feel they own the place, and through this fakery become politicians. We are still able to track blood, hew to our original intentions
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We still know better than to write the poem as a solution. The wind and mockingbird are not human But we are all birthed with a certain memory still undiluted by the same living that leaches poetry from the truism: We are all poets. We arrived with the primal memory of certain angels choosing to fall and refusing to unfurl wings in order to become Human. Thus: the fearful strategy fearful but, unlike with cruelty, not a waste of paint for every day, a Why?

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Candle No boats burn here nor birds drop nor do waves abort here from oil slicks deadening water Only the sky burns here and only from receiving the sun liquefying into satin ribbons as it descends But as above, as below here there where the ocean fringes its hem here where Golden Dragon stands on one foot by the water's edge the sword invisible over his closed eyes burning their gaze into mine to light as the sun ascends the votive candle now flickering within my navel
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Montana: A Novel This is the worst country for extremes. Fortunately, I love weathers swiftly cruel changes. They make me feel this country isnt just flat placid landscape that its as violent as dark Doone country or any wild Cornish coast you read about in English novels. I feel you listening, listening breathing scent of black earth dampening

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The Artichoke Heart


(April 2009)

Artichokes are growing in my garden I harvested one prematurely if one is to believe the boiled result (I think it was the eagerness not my lack of culinary skill) Perhaps I'm eager for summer to bloom fully to be sweating out sweating out! recent troubles through the hundred-degree days of Napa Valley summer

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Anti-Winter: The Double Life Of An Angel


after Eileen Tabios' "The Secret Life of An Angel" after Jose Garcia Villas Girl Singing

Girl singing. Day. Winter's old man reaches for immortality with a lengthening shadow despite my skipping away. Girl singing! I insist. Day! Cheerfully chant to keep the clouds from dimming the sun, from milking skies of their cobalt gazes bespeaking purity. He has worn many guises, and I have let him: the original angel who fell and fell"glorious ride,
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he has whispered for his spell. This is a game of poker I have lost, but no longer wish to play, I reply. Girl singing. Day! I proclaim: You cannot scoff, my secret demon. For I played with high stakes while you merely watched. Girl singing. Day. I risked everything while you hedged. I sang notes only virgin boys can

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muster, only fearful dogs can hear. I lost myself in everyone's "valley of evil" but my wings unfurled to make me rise. Unlike yours, mine did not betray. Girl singing. Day. Beloved wings unfurled as I changed my mind for Heaven nearer than mere breath away. Girl singing: Day...oh. Daaaaaaaaay...oh. Girl go singing Daaaaaaaaaaayay....oh!

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Poem Du Jour
Poor Rimbaud didn't know how to live but knew how to act from "Practical Water" by Brenda Hillman

A dream counseled (as it has many times before) I can create a poetry collection entitled "Divorce" and it would be a marvelous thing, that creek But my marriage would not survive its poetic process I know how to live: Muse: Go to Hell.

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Grids
written while reading Michelle Naka Pierces Beloved Integer

1. wasp nesting in screen door reminds I am in celsius, you Fahrenheit 2. Physics posits two objects cannot inhabit the same space. Thus, I writeUS 3. Are specifics the origin of us? How is love counted (for _______)? 4. An unknown percentage of forgetting I miss YOU 5.
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How did we come to this finding each other through writing poems? Not to say I find myself H/E/R/E. I do find that portion of myself who occupies that SpaceWeCallUs. 6. CONCLUSION MASQUERADING AS POSTSCRIPT Barry shares an April 6, 2004 article from The Guardian which partly says Scientists examining what they thought were Petrarchs remains discovered the skull belongs to someone else. And they suspect it could be that of Eve
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the nickname for every woman designated by history to be Miss Anonymous. 7. You read a poem to make everythingWHOLE I, ergo, write poems fragmentations of shadow

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Mountain Mom
for Zaheras birth mother

Everything about life can be taught by mountains: it is easier to walkrun!up than to descend as when you raped in a dark (of course, dark) alley gave up your daughter for a movie star's in-progress family The sun kisses its message: Regret will not be your only legacy.

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Dark Chocolate Valentine Roses gettin' rabid Violets vomit rue Mouth me some chocolate Or I'll cannibal you...!

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Eggs: A Pulp Fiction "The vulgar boil," proclaims Alexander Pope in The Second Book of Horace, while "the learned roast an egg." The ancient shepherds ignored the Pope, cooking their eggs without fire by hoisting them into a sling they whirled so rapidly over their heads air friction heated the eggs to hard. This nugget comes from Soyer Shilling's Cooking For the Poor published in 1854. Peg Bracken, in her memoir A Window Over the Sink, suggests modernizing Soyer's impoverished title to the text of a sign hanging over a gift shop's door: Shoplifters Will Be Happily Beaten To A Pulp!

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Jeopardys Secret Ingredients ? Afterwards, you must temper it with a widows peak. ? Then you lasso the whelps left ear if you can. If not, freeze the mutt in a vat of milk. ? Concurrently, you cannot privilege the chaff. ? Next, store it for 45 days in a dim, cool cupboard to force the suns rise. ? Dont forget to exhale as you stain the cuffs with the juice of pressed alabaster. ? After two-thirds are set aside for slum tenants, you can attack the olives with sugar. ? Never allow the ingredients to collude despite their shared bowl carved from an endangered species of mahogany. ? The secret is to deliberately forget what I omitted when its slip of paper dropped through the hole in my scarlet velvet pocket.

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Please Match The Question With Its Answer

Question

Answer

1) Who betrayed the butler with mother-of-pearl cufflinks? A) atolls in the South Pacific 2) What sets milk aflame? B) pastilles de leche

3) Where did the burglar hide the white-on-white painting? C) bon mot 4) How will you make me Sublime!? 5) Why did the King choose the porcupine? D) pootietang E) being attached as only an orgasm-less woman can: with a vengeance (e.g. Simone de Beavoir to Sartre) F) silk hems

6) When will you concede to my blindfold?

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