mystery poem

I found this poem in a 2014 email to a dear friend who is also a poet. I think I must have written it, but I have very little memory of doing so, though I remember this preoccupation with outsider art.


For Anne Carson

For Jasmine

Boot on the same foot:
Darger, Carson –
same long A.

Maybe
it’s just a question
of being lucky
in your obsessions:

paper cutouts, tracings,
figures of mythology, jointed
language split / grafted,
thread of spittle that speaks
from the windowsill and turns
aside the father/ogre.

Ariadne/Arachne. Always
mix those two up. Skein
of birds/words.
Hair, thread:

paths for other people, or
enough rope.

A story you're telling yourself
in public, same as the guy
who called from the dark hey brother,
same as the woman with a page
in her scrapbook for every day
of the last five years—

There's a true discipline,
Each day its own colour.

Essay/elegy. Get them
confused. The Berlin what is it.
stories/diaries. Never
remember.

Red spider
blocks the path.
That tapestry
will have to be torn down.

Rivera's mural stood
in the way of American self-regard.

Find an out-of-the-way corner
to spin your glass thread:
janitor's closet,
classics department.

Spindles dropped
at the crossroads—
the ogre delayed.

A forest springs up
like a comb of flames.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

References

Both Darger and Carson have some transgendering elements in their work. I've seen more theorizing about this re: Darger than re: Carson, but I haven't been looking lately.


Henry Darger


Anne Carson -- not an outsider artist in that she has mainstream success, but her recent work seems to me so swallowed up by its own preoccupations that it feels almost sealed against me as a reader.

I no longer remember who the guy that called from the dark / hey brother is supposed to be.