Karla Kelsey is the author of four books: Knowledge Forms the Aviary; Iteration Nets; A Conjoined Book; and Of Sphere. With Aaron McCollough she edits Split-Level Texts and with Poupeh Missaghi she edits Matters of Feminist Practice. Her website is www.karlakelsey.com.
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Difficulty: A Spillage
To honor being’s complexity requires, of necessity, a fray along the edges of the known, a jostling of the lens of representation, a discharge of difficulty. Difficulty: resistance, a refusal to compress or cauterize excess according to received form. Or according to received relation, knowledge, sensation, thought, utterance. Because in what overflows the easily recognizable body, object of thought or material we find vivacity, living tissue, incandescence powering syllable, word, sentence, line, text. And thus to reinvent what has been given, to make and be made new, to bathe in the thrill of what transpires beyond ease.
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A Folio of Poems by Karla Kelsey
THRALL
Enthralled to the buzz of neon we yield to instruction we stare
at the gallery’s sole object a red square of light projected on the wall
source invisible. We yield, I yield inhaling 1-2-3-4-5 exhaling 1-2-3-4-
5 mind sky-blank and you, you stand beside me a solid object,
steadfast in Yves Klein Blue. If you yield I do not know because
surrender is individual is sole my body, my I, my mind, my
me abandoned to mystic red, scarlet red, coquelicot red and I cock-lee-co
I red-corn-rose I wild-poppy-poppy, do you pulse with this, you, next
to me, you blue, you International Klein Blue? The square pulses
me poppy source invisible, with the same questionable status of
objects revealed many years ago by a boardwalk psychic off-season
air crystalizing just before snow. Holding up the nine of swords
she had said this is you as you believe yourself to be, facedown and
pierced by these swords. But notice the flat sea, the rising sun and so
pull will you pull-pull who will pull-pull tucking a greasy strand
of hair under a purple turban, yes, she wore a purple satin turban
those swords from your back? Whetted blades hilts of hammered gold
the psychic said cigarette, sweatshirt with rhinestone-studded cat my time
us nearly up they need to come out. The cat’s emerald eyes flash
in candle light. Petals crumple in the bud then bloom, showy
before flattening and radiate out a perfect red disk before falling away.
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The swords had needed, I need, needed need mystic scarlet
coquelicot red corn roses coursing through my body seeding, blooming,
tissue-heads shuddering in wind. I need because under fabrics and
plastics we are exposed, vulnerable to impression and it is exhausting
this pretense otherwise, exhausting to wake early, make coffee, shower,
dress advance into the day with formal hello and yesyes as if the moment
wasn’t all around us vibrating green and shimmering and spitting
gravel like sparks, like stars. As if we didn’t ourselves vibrate star
spark. And after noon the vibration becomes inner violin, tremolo up to
a high pitch, tremolo down and at night the sea, violet lashing lashing
leather wealing skin. And the wounds singing until the salve of
sleep, mugwort and sage, ravensara dabbed on in dream. Or here
before the gallery’s red square of light, stigmata vision, biochemical
aria of photons through pupils igniting photoreceptors at the backs
of eyes. Pulse triggered along the optic nerve neurons fire and fire
a sensation of color simulating the body where the swords had been
until one day the plant body awakens to stigmata not wounds
but pollen collectors, little flicking tongues glandular tissues emanating
viscid secretion as, for example, in the orchid the offering of orchids on
each side of dying. Their bright mouths and soft exhalations sticky
with ontological clarity. Here in the gallery the body pours with stained-
glass light and I vibrate, you vibrate I-you vibrate, our photo-
receptors discharging nerve impulses such that Monet’s Les Coquelicots
or Poppies Blooming, 1873 flashes onto the screen of my mind.
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Red square of light a breezy day the bank of poppies like stigmata
blotted a boy in a sailor hat and a woman in blue woad blue or indigo
blue not International Klein Blue, but yet she is your mother, perhaps
she had once been brighter, and the small boy, the small boy was
you. You prior to full expression, prior to standing here in the gallery
next to me in the twenty-first century, the small cake of ultramarine
lodged inside your abdomen not yet awakened you and your mother
walk broken brushwork and divided light. You walk in
1873, in Argenteuil, suburb of Paris, an agréable petite ville despite the
tanneries, silk mills, ironworks, gypsum mines producing plaster of Paris.
Producing statuettes. Enormous iron forms. You and your mother
Camille Doncieux, impressionist muse with halfmoons of dusk below her
eyes, she is so Camille such a Camelia imported half-rose this Camille
Léonie Doncieux, Camille Donciex Monet, Camille Monet, Madame C.
the First. You and your mother walk or are pushed by incline and
wind and even this pushing is gentle, easy, in Argenteuil 1873,
Are-jaunt-oy, Argent-euil, from argento, silver silvery, shiny gleaming
surface of the Sein and from -ialo, clearing, glade, place of silver, place
of shine quickly rebuilt after the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War. Just
fifteen minutes from Gare Saint-Lazare, the Sein widening to permit
regattas, banks forming a graceful promenade where mother in her hat
where you with your small dog take each day the air. Argenteuil’s decline
in agriculture a pity, yes a pity but wonderous the advancement of
industry, modernity say the painters, say not only Monet but Sisely,
Renoir, Manet, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Degas, and Cézanne lighting their
cigars in the shine, adjusting the brim of your mother’s hat so that her
face dapples, her petit fils, her pink dress dapples and large stone
houses, gardens, are to be had for a song. Monet will paint 180 canvases
here immortalizing sailboats and regattas, train trestles and towpaths,
gardens and factories, picnics, idylls Camille-Camille wanderings.
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Or you not in the painting, but as you were, aged five in auto-bio-
graphical life, you on your stomach in the living room with your
mother’s Jansons’s open to Les Coquelicots or Poppies Blooming, 1873. You
point to the woman in woad blue and say mother and your mother
lights another cigarette, points to herself says mother mother, I am
mother, your only mother the Arizona ranch house bathed in the grainy
ambers and ochres of the Super 8 your mother dexedrine-thin and
locking your father out of the house. Again and again, but here in the
pages of Janson’s you and your Camille mother walk or are pushed away
from the incline of poppies down into the lower right corner of the
canvas. You and your Camille mother will be out of the frame soon,
walk-pushed off canvas and standing on the river bank waiting,
women and children were always, then, in the Europe of the 1870s
waiting for someone to come home from the War of 1870 or, for
example, from Algeria and the 1871 uprising which had been as your
uncle had said, presenting you with a fez put down, although your people
your Camille mother’s people were never directly involved with any
guns we get along, he said we barter, we do business your uncle
presenting your mother with a bolt of violet cloth, your father, absent
painting a field in a field. Yes, standing in the gallery next to me
you are at the self-same time aged five, walking down the incline and
your mother has not yet become Camille in a Green Dress, Camille
Strolling in White Muslin with Black Velvet Ribbon, Camille Reading in
a Violet Dress, Camille Holding Her Pet Dog, Camille at the Beach,
Camille in the Garden. Has not yet become Camille on Her
Deathbed painted by your father your mother has not yet become
Camille turning into a landscape a pure body a pure body of light and
you you are in motion always in motion in my mind’s eye, even
standing next to you I cannot capture you. But the cake of ultramarine
lodges in your abdomen as if it were lodged in my abdomen
as you vibrate in the Musée d’Orsay and in the pages of each book
where Les Coquelicots or Poppies Blooming, 1873 appears and as you
vibrate pixels on the internet constituting images of Les Coquelicots
while here in the gallery we stand before the red square of light
source invisible. The biochemical aria of photoreceptors simul-
taneously plays inside both of our bodies, but do I wander this
vision do I follow you through this field of poppies shine-shine
alone? After visiting the psychic I watched snow fall into the sea
made cellphone light spike the stalled carousal horse eyes ruby.