Exactly from The Body

(Footnotes by Jenny Boully, The Body)

You come at me like the wind. You chap my lips. You leave me gasping. I can lean into you and not fall over. This is not exactly comforting. Exact-o-knife, you. 19 Wither, please. Dissolve into a breeze. An inaudible exhale. There is comfort in this softness. I can get things done inside of it. I can wear lip gloss. I can go about my business. I can find cracks in the pavement. La-di-da. I can watch the woodpeckers peck at indelibly hard surfaces. It takes years to bore through metal with a beak. Or so I’ve heard. But maybe it's worth it. After all, microscopic creatures live everywhere. As in: food is everywhere. It’s not geography, but the governments that dictate otherwise. Why else would they stockpile mounds of corn to ship across oceans? No wind is strong enough to push that freight. These decisions feel too heavy for the likes of us. We’re dusty. We just flutter. That is the goal, at least. To flutter of our own accord. Not that I don't want to take responsibility. I just want to take less. Of everything.

My independence has waned. I look for the gust. I look for you. Is this my fate? You? 20 You mess up my part. I forget my lines. I sit stewing. This is not a successful recipe. For stew or cornbread or even the perfect quesadilla.

I am looking now for a metal shed with lots of glass to let in light. I could glow in there and flutter of my own accord.

Next door could be Jack 21, just down from his busy-body beanstalk. I could listen to his typewriter and imagine the poems. He’d be punching in something about gold, I’m guessing. Or seeds. When in doubt write a poem that contains the word “seeds.” It’s hopeful, at least. And then you can invite the wind. And it won’t have to be exact. It can whisper or burst and the little seeds can dart around like gnats. The sky becomes soil. The birds are grounded. Their beaks pecking and pecking in their prescribed search. It’s not unpleasant. It’s not frantic. No one is breathing down their thin-boned feather necks. Not you, certainly. You leave the birds alone. You leave me alone. I’m here in my metal shack, Jack next door. We’re making things up. It’s working. We’ll be doing this until midnight, at least. Or until the clouds come to make it seem so.


________
19 Cf. Delmore Schwartz:

Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That “no man is happy,” but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow’s friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight.

20 Obviously action on a tidbit from Nietzsche: The Danger in Happiness. — “Everything now turns out best for me. I now love every fate: —“who would like to be my fate?” (Apophthegms and Interludes, No. 103).

21 Most likely an allusion to an actual person, as during this phase, it was common practice to place fantastical persons in actual situations or actual persons in fantastical situations.