Matthew Pfaff

Anxiety

half-crescent lens: a cinematic device. we could say it recreates

the phenomenology of vision. the idea of a heart

in my chest, like an automaton or mollusk. 

There is a second paradox

behind the first; anxiety is the drive

to master the automatism 

of the body; that is the first paradox.

The second is much like the first: behind anxiety’s horror

at its powerlessness to control the heart

Is the further horror

it recognizes in its own compulsions as

unwilled: Gazing longingly 

at its own grotesque 

reflection.

 

COLUMN

Piercing charred, tooth

Barrel gun-black – stutt-

Erring bullets braced for

Tongue, staggered, re-

Leased: tongue to teeth

To lips to breathe: word

Centered, ground-work,

Corner-stone sound of:

Ringing through throngs 

Of bleach-black building,

Cemetaries of molten g-

Ray, sun decay, dust-ache

Dirt-bark, sound: these

Leaves of breath break O

Ver me, this branch (syn-

Tax) this song (dip-thong)

This beam (morpheme):

A gray arch of particles a

Particular wave of sound:

Decays, decay: the curv-

Ing line of stone horizon,

The bulbous dome of me

tronome: a clock is struck

inside a truss: a plastic fa

ce erased in space.

 

The Ghost in the Machine

Tangerines, take three. action—

 

i.

 

inside the shroud

of ribmeat beating

tight with chest

and sheets, the sweat

between the breast and heart

that bleeds aloud

in sleep:

 

inside the central

meadow, ringed by archaic

towers:

 

inside the blue-white

rage of the temple’s

core, the nuclear

pulse of cosmic

fire, the heat

of invisible

iron:

 

sleep, sweet fire:

                           holy and echo.

 

ii.

rage-white petals tight

in a stamen-drum:

             inside an ear-arch beating in time

with fire:

  

my shapely body-

hearts, my love that bleeds

on the carpet – my shush-

white whirrings

of clutter, my odd hat-

like eloquence destroyed

by the fact

of the mutter:

 

word-shaped and

invisible, you smash apart

an apartment.

 

iii.

 

gurgle-turn to the center

of nerves to the pop

of pleasure and the synaesthetic

number:

 

nine times nine, a time

and times and a half

times Time:

 

clutch-stutter strapped

to a lemon, a fur-

 

shaped petal

of longing: tooth material, 

                    spirit.         

 

a hard white bone of

animal substance:

 

iv.

 

anxiety-

chested heart stem, stamen-

ripe furnace

of blood:

 

you open me

with fullness, you peel me apart

with the rain.

 

v.

 

there is a darkness

that knows

no lips

 

passages of sand, ache-white

gurgles of prose. 

 

vi.

 

dark hole, darling soul, into which

we flutter:

 

vii.

 

these shards of

lines that stick

in me, these pieces

of the page (and

 

all we

are is

creatures

 

of a day)

 

viii.

 

your skin-and-bones

is all alone

 

your skin-and-

bones is

all

ix.

if my whisper could rush out

to you, and return, a ghost,

to me (like the shuttle whirs

through threads, or the tiny finger

through the machine)

or if i, from within this mouth

of fire, from between these blood-

bright electrons of

teeth, or through this lattice-

work of ribs and 

meat, could reach—but no: 

this body, dark, too

dark to ever

breach.

x.

cut

waiting for rain

i’m waiting for a white hot bright 

that carves apart, or for a gun like 

violent cherries to burst apart my, 

snowflakes in the. snowflakes in the. 

my in the angel of my . 

again again again again again again:

a burst of rain settles on my head where a lot of stuff is breaking apart in the waters where the city waits and sleeps like a giant cow. a giant water sings in the rivers and waits in the giant lake where .

my desiring-machines want candy. “that was a 

moses to my

mother,” said the

man with socks to

oprah. 

ok then finally go to sleep already.

i’m waiting again for the .

always i am waiting.

will you ever finally come to me?

or will you leave me here with nothing?

when i break apart for you,

when i flutter apart in spheres, through milky light,

and through the petals of your dew, 

when i come to the black, pitch place where space waits,

when i at the edge stare down at you,

and palpitate in the doorway – 

then will you rise up / in me, a testimony of fire? 

then will you give me a rock that no one knows? 

then will you finally write my name?

there is something terrible

in your presence. there is an awful

tic in the throat, the hands a nest of pinions,

my ribs a cardboard canister. 

when i burst in you will your fire

explode in the tenseness of space? 

in this bright-white place where time

is tangled around my fingers?

i stretch them out but they snap back /.

will you explode in an emptiness of /

black dew where a heavy rain

is up, and up, and away?

when i condense in a striated black and purple marble,

when my entire being is a blossom of flame,

where time waits,

tangled in my fingers?

when my fingers are a fan of purple fires,

and my face a spark of amber,

when the tenseness is finally

an exploding purple ladder

and the monotony of 

Being hiccups in a bright-white, a spherical slash of ice

and the ashes crash apart my mouth in waves of violet

sunshine, then will your / 

lovely / then will your  

lovely radiance cut me? then will your

fire, a face of rain? –

will your face is a / burst of/ ?

will then your, / lovely –?

will then your

a bright white burst of =  

M. Pfaff is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature, currently completing a thesis on “postmodernist classicism” in innovative verse, titled “Strange New Canons: Classical Reception at the Margins in 20th Century Poetics.” His translations of Greek lyric poetry received the Platsis Prize for Work on the Greek Legacy in 2009, and his poems and translations are beginning to appear in publications such as RHINO, Prick of the Spindle, Counterexample Poetics, Otoliths, and indefinite space.