(for Berta Cáceres)
Lisa Samuels has not shared anything on this page with you
In her book a personal devotion to feminist theory
Is an erotic situation because words drape electrically through her mind
Which insists on reciprocity where we live
Whose meeting point’s a commission between external and in-
Sight: at the point where anything is made is the center of its making
You can go there, over to the new center
Down to the new center, up to the new center
You integrate divergence without fail muscles
As a courtesy to this idea, which meets where you become one too
Where the literal becomes physical as a consequence of your attention
You become yourself a concept meeting that one, free
From self-possession’s warrantless erasure of relation.
Go to work and take up the material of nature’s swift ability
To self-heal, if you count a heal as change mark
To the dense struggle to make external possibles
Ready for those shots that come where she is not alone
The very visceral vanishing of point perspective
As the concept ceases to be holding
Provided by its other. The concept realizes self-perception’s lonely cry
Because the filled-in area is vanishing.
Every center gets its day replete inside and out
Not long enough for anyone to know it
Which is why the exhalation leads to terminals where the
Battery charge of culture wants to rest. Please let us rest
Says Cloaky to the bastion of divergence. No, Cloaky, no:
She’ll not. One’s claim in faith to ill sunder finds
There’s battle in the breath, certain scattered objects
Such as water, life, stars, eyes, voices calling out
A topic’s reason for assent to start itself righteously
In the center of what’s powerless. That center pulse
Gives out a new authentic, one’s own object turns
A scaling trans-surrender in the zone that never mocks.
This is what gets called authentic tribute. The idea of her
Eyes and stars and water is a center one can breathe
In as example. The social location of our ideas has changed
Which is exhausting to the slow move against which
Measure’s latent knowledge’s wont to hover.
So we put a body there: its signs of force
Trigger the necessity of knowing from that center
Pulls us towards an other we accept, attention’s moment
Emphasis mine. To cause her to be idea’s open score
The words fill up our heady eyes and flesh out
To the multiples of center. We cannot abnegate
In thinking for her of her near to her
Breath’s contention cancels out the slow
Determination how we value musters in “the world”
A known dispute. There’s no way to speak ugly but to say
Plural’s a wretch, so close in to the skin such
Convention’s blasted its own wise.
Which is related, tell me, to the topic of our
Mass centrality everywhere you can think
Think allow it. This is predicated on belief
Your structures listen to announcements very far away
Her body brings it close and proves the rule.
The satisfied relief’s no thought at all
Since publication’s superadded form
The circumstance of central’s system fix, means we’re
Undergone, a fragmentation loss as having given up
In gaze. It almost makes you wish for porn’s effects,
Distributed submission to the site where desire’s activate
Hits hard a moving purview. The gaze returns itself
Without a recognition of its mirror apps
The schedule of our freedom’s hidden from the beast
We give ourselves, a private reliquary stipend
When we save our chance to misrecognize
For the wrong occasion. We might instead cross-cut
The labor of our thought as yielding when
We meet in real quiescence to the far-off zone
Where thought displaces both itself and us.
The product of a woman failed itself far-reached
But only in a hid-sight dead to actual failure’s
Crucial work. You have to give up in advance to understand
The work the water did over her flesh
Without analysis, our context becomes a moment’s
Harvest kept with hers: that’s thinking parlance
Self-formed in a wrap with far-clung instance
More authentic than what you’re swamped with feeling’s
Vacant register smashed on you when it’s “close to home.”
Further’s no escape beyond control if it’s choisir
We’re dead not knowing so reciprocal to how
We might then land. I can’t interpret her whom I’ve not seen
But having seen in scene withstand
Trajectory of thought beyond the heart.
Misrecognition’s grace is there interpreted
Resisting on the eye, the living space a dark intended
Document we’ll never see, so knowing’s then a subject
Near to me so far as I have no such face nor never will.
Authentic listening’s bonds broke mutual.
When you express it starts to feel as well, a mutual
Cancellation of captivity breached in the ramp
Where blood’s a thought armed on the floor’s example
Intemperate wish to make us heal as hole.
So nothing’s thought the echo of this one-time stolen role.
Accept and don’t accept the rigorous loss of view
Lisa Samuels has shared anything on this page with you
Lisa Samuels has published thirteen books of poetry and prose, with recent experiments in memoir (Anti M, 2013) and the novel (Tender Girl, 2015). Her poetry has inspired musical scores and scholarly essays internationally, and her recent critical essays include Over Hear: six types of poetry experiment in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2015). Her edited book A TransPacific Poetics, with Sawako Nakayasu, is coming out this year, and current projects include Symphony for Human Transport (poems) and The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (prose). A U.S.-born transnational poet, Lisa has also lived in Sweden, Israel/Palestine, Yemen, Malaysia, Spain, and since 2006 in Aotearoa/New Zealand, where she teaches at the University of Auckland. In 2016 she is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington Simpson Humanities Center in Seattle.