an alien's portrait of her in the world

my fellow aliens:[1] these strangest mammalians bulge out of every artifice; as we watch them at their precipice.

look again, inside, and hear for so much they have forgot: the first telescope did not gaze high up but down low, could watch a mind unfold so that lives untold were finally known : with deep and inner eyes :

assigned to me, the humxn folk (and one of them in particular) became my study, as it were. this portrait thus I made of her:

to find her now – in her rippling image – these strokes arc red and amber:[2] the summer of her own peace,[3] where her facets are her own design[4] little bladed avenues as every contour crossroad on her open palms said it would be so.[5]

her song lifts off subtle lips the texture of water, a chirping timbre when the inspiration takes her, a croak when exasperation makes her. and all her words pour out of books[6], the column anchoring her form is that which binds a spine in time for all her dreams and most of mine[7].

her predators fill their phalanx: bright white thighs in bright white shorts pistons chugging fierce on that equestrian quest for glory: panting their pants off, ruining the fields. the goalposts hold us all apart and everyone yelling lies, bored deathless with their fists raised, as usual.[8]

hers is no such dissonance, though it has cost her rain and shine.[9] knowing that their world describes near all of what they feel inside.[10]

a private liveliness in her wit she barely shares unless she dares, a self-directed giggle which haunts every surface a fresher colour,[11] what a grin bisects her sheer, pinwheel cheeks gleam green and spin me free. shoulders hold her sober head, her torso: tapered like a bell, rooted like a tree.

she twists into her selves, kaleidoscopes from ear to ear unravels all these petty flaunts whose charms they fished from plasticine. a child’s style grown tender sharp whose playful tops gel-match with not a single fathom of pretence as honest as a purse of cents – no nonsense; in any event.[12]

but hers is not that bloated sensitivity, but a million moments when the ocean inside her [13]spills out in waves; hers is not that courage kitsch, but a fortress of nerves she has always wielded with her naked hands: the only wands she has ever needed.[14] her eyes see empty places being filling, all those busy negative spaces: fences now embracing vines, faces new windows into worlds, streets as tethers not tragedies.

her words revive that living language of storms,[15] an ancient tongue of all our gifts[16]. she grew out of their shelf, you know?[17] their library’s ceiling sang it so:[18]

a sky without bounds cannot hold her.[19] and does she matter in any such realms?[20]

in her, the night is always young, the dawn is always close; the future like a fountainhead: priceless, shared.[21] I go on painting.[22]

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[Yet another poetry assignment from my professor. I’ve inscribed bracketed annotations along the way.]

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[1] “My fellow [insert nationality here].” No phrase ever feels more estranging.

[2] It is the season of wildfires, perhaps as much a description of our politics as our ecology.

[3] Rather than the winter of our discontent, another sort of season, another sort of temperament.

[4] Elizabeth Bishop in “The Imaginary Iceberg”: “This iceberg cuts its facets from within.”

[5] Palm-reading symbolises a biological determinism so intimate and provocative; yet it yields an irony, in that hands also symbolise agency, action and solidarity. That badgering paradox.

[6] Donna Haraway in Simians, Cyborgs and Womxn: The Reinvention of Nature: “A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine.”

[7] Hannah Arendt writes in her chapter on Rosa Luxemburg in Men in Dark Times: “If two people do not succumb to the illusion that the ties binding them have made them one, they can create a world anew between them.”

[8] Chomsky reminisces: “Professional sports are a way of building up jingoist fanaticism. You’re supposed to cheer for your own team… I remember… when I was… a high school student a sudden revelation when I asked myself, “Why am I cheering for my high school football team?” (2015) Sports simulate senseless conflict, unthinking allegiances and rivalries without conclusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sX1H9FxMms

[9] Noam Chomsky: “… we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe…” (pp. 8) Necessary Illusions: Thought control in Democratic Societies (1989) Laurie Penny remarks in Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, 2017: “Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.”

[10] Scottish political scientist Mark Blyth asserts: “I think it’s incredibly patronising for anyone to tell someone else what they think should be in their interest… You may not like the way they see the world, but they’re entitled to see the world that way.”

[11] Timothy Morton describes architecture in general as a poem about time. Interiors – surfaces – change as they are filled with new people. We might think then of people as factories of architectural meaning – giving life to what is lifeless. Sensibility as design. Subjectivity as a kind of inhabiting of space.

[12] Roxane Gay: “Dressing like a womxn means wearing anything a womxn deems appropriate and necessary for getting her job done.” (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/19/roxane-gay-clothes-workplace-female-employees)

[13] Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History”. A gravity saturates the image of water, denser than air, holding in it the evidence of our actions – our pasts. A personal history is precisely so.

[14] Timothy Morton suggests “the whole is less than the sum of its parts”, as an ontological truth. If the biosphere, for example, matters more than coral reefs, losing coral does not matter in the grander scheme of things. This is radically counter-intuitive since we make ethical judgments on entirely local levels: we defend the coral reef for the animals, for the ocean, and other parts. In some sense, sensitivity as a tendency is secondary to each disparate instance of compassion, contemplation and concern.

[15] Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, pace Marx, writes: “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.” In she, however, an honest aesthetic melts away (“into air”) this marketised culture, an authentic person.

[16] Peter Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread: “Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of humxn riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present. By what right then can anyone whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say – This is mine, not yours?” The past is a list of gifts we’ve received from ancestors, some unwanted, but many useful: language one of them.

[17] She always says to me, “Everything important I ever learned came from a book.” We are what we read. The phrase fits the paradox: we consign womxn to ‘the shelf’ – that perpetual background of all those outside inherited notions of ‘attractiveness’, athletic ability and temperament – yet in bookshelves we find such freedom. “Their”, in this case, is in the first place, the parents’: both the buyers of her books all these years and too the forefront of her socialisation. She is shelved by them, but unleashed by bookshelves. In the second place, it is the shelves afforded to outliers by conformists – bullies of every flavour.

[18] Langston Hughes in “April Rain Song”: “a little sleep-song on our roof”.

[19] Langston Hughes in “Dying Beast”: “the last glance / Of agonised eye / At passing wind / And boundless sky.”

[20] Nick Laird in “Glitch” (2015) describes the bliss he felt in the momentary fantasies after hitting his head, as if traveling to a world he “was valuable and needed there.”

[21] It’s about time we reclaim the image of the fountain from Ayn Rand’s Objectivist punditry.

[22] Ted Hughes’s “Wodwo” blends over the boundaries between Self and Other/Environment with such ease, ending with exactly that meditative pause: to linger on what is both the I and not.