Rhapsodomancy with Nicky Beer & Jason Koo

Rhapsodomancy: divination by a book of poetry.

My heart must have been wearing an oxygen mask, because when I read your poetry for the first time I felt it snatched off. & there I was choking & gasping, trying to swallow all the words I could, until I steadied my breath & realized that I had already lived them. So naturally, I decided to mummify your books. I wrote down one line from every one of your poems, made them into small paper balls & put them in a jar like preserved organs. One by one, I pulled the lines out & unveiled a love story. It is about the distance between two lovers & how all that space leaves more than enough room for "others" & the interchanging of pronouns. & I still don't know what this love is, I think even prophecies can't define something that is so consistently fluid. But the next time it slips through my fingers, I'll know that somewhere these words are printed, like hieroglyphics telling secrets only to me.  

 

Materials:

Beer, Nicky. The Diminishing House. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010. 

Koo, Jason. man on extremely small island. Chattanooga, TN: C&R Press, 2009. 

& paper, pen, jar

& the prophetic poem: 

across the aisle, "You look like Paris." 

closing in physical space, expanding in memory

    everywhere. He couldn't keep this secret any longer.

Let me go home.

O little Purgatory, the necessary expanse

Every night, I watch. 

I understand now the function of this sequence

                        to equate that misery with comfort

And what kind of love: 

is the memory of his ankles and wrists

likely some poor fucker like me. 

but you may have suspected: 

The stars measured him for a box. 

and the electric thread of his heart

what remains now is a pale, pitted relic

marooned in their living rooms

and as you slept I listened to the semis sighing

that shudders like a weak heart

it's nothing

    I am running out of tinier messages to send you. 

remember that we dreamed our radiant dead

            bight

bedsheets that imitate your body

are the first human artifact

take on the pain of sunlight in your eyes

the moment when its spine splits and erupts

            she looked to you as if to say, "what's wrong?" 

we could be torn, crushed and blocked. And we learned how to despair

at her mother's breast. Imagine the woman as a girl. 

Will you promise me that?

(and yet how his heart beat still

until you've written a three-thousand line elegy 

with gaps in my knowledge of family history        

    lover knows to heal 

in bedsheets. But this didn't stay long either, and eventually there was 

between tenderness and fuck you. 

Q. Why can't you sleep?

Up close? They're horrible, ugly, and magnificent 

When the catastrophic thing happens you can throw yourself in to space. 

somewhere I was missing. There, in the street

shocked to learn that she still wanted him. How can anyone turn from

passing through a place of borrowed shadows. 

Today I'm thinking of all the people not in love: I'm with you! 

    that was usually when you'd roll your eyes

make the cut a half inch wide

Every death claims a small dialect. What I have not told you will go with me. 

vague dreams of "hitting bone" during intercourse. Of course

Hilarious. I'm dying here. You kill me. 

one blamelessly lost in a street bazaar

    an excision of all these things

I couldn't stand? People who act as if they've never had 

no time for repairs and no money 

enough i will jump off of the roof 

and you have no terror 

and fled the earth 

but oh my love consider 

to break her heart. And then, right there, I broke her heart. 

The night brought haughty ghosts 

I wanted to break apart like ice cubes from a tray. 

This man will be your phantom limb. 

                The permanent elsewhere of fathers―

Notice where I sink into my own flesh