All right.
So this is the last one from the book
before we talk about current work.
And again, same, I mean, I could almost
say if it wasn't in the book, I wrote this particularly because
of our topic tonight.
But it's in the book, so you wouldn't believe me.
But it is totally about seeing, about looking, about spectacle,
about violence, and in some ways, I mean, in the way
that all my poems are about sex, also about sex,
so but it is about beholding.
So "How to Draw A Perfect Circle."
I can imitate the spheres of the model's body,
her head, her mouth, the chin she
rests at the bend of her elbow.
But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral
from her gaze.
Everything the eye sees enters a circle.
The world is connected to a circle--
breath spools from the nostrils and any love to be open
becomes an O.
The shape inside the circle is a circle.
The egg falling outside the nest the serpent circles
rests in the serpent's gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.
In a blind contour drawing, the eye
tracks the subject without observing
what the hand is doing.
Everything is connected by a line curling and canceling
itself like the shape of a snake swallowing
its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,
a man circling a railway underpass
before attacking a policeman.
To draw the model's nipples, I have
to let myself be carried away.
I love all the parts of the body.
There are as many curves as there are jewels of matrimony,
as many whirls as there are teeth
in the mouth of the future--
the mute pearls a bride wears to her wedding, the sleeping
ovaries like the heads of riders benched in a tunnel.
The doors of the subway car imitate an O, opening
and closing.
In the blood, the O spirals its helix
of defects, genetic shadows, but there
are no instructions for identifying
loved ones who go crazy.
When one morning, a Black man stabs a Black transit
cop in the face, and the cop, bleeding from his eye,
kills the assailant, no one traveling to the subway
sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone witness.
The scene must be carried on the tongue.
It must be carried on the news into the future where
it will distract the eyes working lines into paper.
This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.
At the center of God looms and O.
The devil believes justice is shaped
like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum,
of fist or gun barrel, a barrel of ruined eggs or skulls.
To lift anything from a field, the lifter
bends like a broken O. The weight
of the body lowered into a hole can make anyone
say, oh, the onlookers, the mother, the brothers
and sisters.
Omen begins with an O.
When I looked into my past, I saw
the boy I had not seen in years do a standing backflip,
so daring the onlookers called him crazy.
I did not see a moon as white as an onion,
but I saw a paper plate upon which
the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat.
An assailant is a man with history.
His mother struggles to cut an onion preparing a meal
to be served after the funeral.
The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced,
a volatile gas stings the slicer's eyes
like a punishment, clouding them until they
see what someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees--
a soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat.
The onion is pungent.
Its scent infects the air with sadness.
All the pallbearers smell it.
The mourners watch each other.
They watch the pastor's ambivalence.
They wait for the doors to open.
They wait for the appearance of the wounded, one-eyed victim,
and his advocates, strangers who did not
consider the assailants funeral appeasement.
Before that day, the officer had never fired his gun
in the line of duty.
He was chatting with the cab driver
beneath the tracks when my cousin circled
him holding a knife.
The wound caused no brain damage,
though his eyeball was severed.
I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps.
In The Odyssey, pink water descends
the Cyclop's cratered face after Odysseus drives a burning log
into it.
Anyone could do it.
Anyone could begin the day with his eyes
and end it blind or deceased.
Anyone could lose his mind or his vision.
When I go crazy, I am afraid I will walk the streets naked.
I am afraid I will shout every fucked up thing that troubles
or enchant me.
I will try to murder or make love to everybody
before the police handcuff or murder me.
Though the bullet exits a perfect hole,
it does not leave perfect holes in the body.
A wound is a cell and a portal.
Without it, the blood runs with no outlet.
It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops shaped
like the symbol for infinity, the Latin infinitus,
meaning unboundedness.
The way you get to anything is context.
In a blind contour, it is not possible to give your subject
a disconnected gaze.
Separated from the hand, the artist's eye
begins its own journey.
It could have been the same for the Cyclops, a giant whose
gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion could fit into it.
Separated from the body, the eye begins its own journey.
The world comes full circle--
the hours, the harvest.
When the part of the body that holds the soul
is finally decomposed, it becomes a circle, the hole
that holds everything--
blemish, cell, womb, parts of the body no one can see.
I watch the model pull a button loose on her jeans
and step out of them as one might out of a hole
in a blue valley, a sea.
I found myself in the dark.
I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell
or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.
You must look without looking to make a perfect circle.
The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid
until the drawing is complete.