Kiki Smith
Getting the Bird Out, 1992
bronze and string 10x11-1/2x7"(25.4x29.2x17.8cm),
head1-1/2x6x1-1/2"(3.8x 15.2 x 3.8 cm), bird installation dimensions variable
Photograph by Sarah Harper Gifford, courtesy Pace Gallery
Getting the Bird Out
. . . to disimprison the soul of fact – Coleridge
1 Getting the Bird Out
You could hear it under the ribs
its flutterings wet and papery
Between her lips you could see it:
seedlings tipping their dicots toward the light
The shipping manifest the suede buttons
that last look over the shoulder: all that could be pulled out
Even the flywheel could be extracted
Without much damage delicacy itself would come free
But getting the bird proved difficult
For one thing the bird was a paraphrase
It clung like motion’s most intimate movement
to the principle of no-stone-unturned
Only when we gave up did it come out
It looked like no bird we’d ever seen
a gob of slag unheaped
On its side it lay the long red cord still deep in its throat
So many things its immobility seemed to say
were now going to be a thing of the past
2 On Broil
Onset with its per second per seconds
with its crude meticulous hustle
Onset exhilaration’s unsavory twin
that invades the definite article flip-book fast
Onset
whose mounted police line the demonstration route
Onset
that roaring tit that distress emancipator
who noisies up the lacerations
who strips of of its belongings
with its eastward-aiming
and westward-rumbling voracity
Onset and its magpie inroads
its sunset effusions
pouring out like the gospel of Job
lapsed and relapsing rolling out the patterns of pandemonium
with its brass knuckled and prowling epicenters
its mortar bandwagon
its furious fury-wilting curating
bursar of the bursting
itself homeless and perishable
luscious and heady as it passes through the turnstile
rummaging through the trash
for a boot to
kick you with when you’re down
to clog your throat with thick spit
to disrupt and foreclose on
our paradigm of governance equilibrium and care
3 At Egg
We have prepared my heartbreak
a list to rhapsodize
The irreversible in thee is what I revere
You have the toll- the doll-house to consider
It’s just me who wishes and reenacts
and wanders the house
Love loves to impersonate
So put some diminutive
in yourself some
liquify some groundwork
some believe
Calcium can be startled
just as a basement can be wooded
Has elegy ever been known
to decompose
4 Reverse Frosting
Say goodbye to my hair my anyway no longer resplendent hair
(which I’ll buzz cut before the die off)
but not to my head and its galaxies
in which you burn like a star
Say goodbye to my breast the left the larger one
but not to the rites of touch
Say goodbye to my looks but not to my lips
which still spell their wishes in a braille of tongue teeth
No more the frost of familiarity
I am molten molting
Say goodbye to my lips but not to my words
mouthed like an inmate through the walls of her cell
Say goodbye to the unlashed
but not the inward eye the deep-sea eye
where etymon sends out its nomad filaments
the pump primed for redefining
The books have been written Reread them
from memory Like me they won’t ever be the same
5 Another Thing Coming
Deadlier thing let’s scale this down
to torn luminance to the strictly dynastic
You’ve ridden the rail of motherhood
exacting of upheaval malfunction mutation
And those cow bells in your daily gazette clank obsessively
Headwind cross-hatchings are all your doing
Deadlier thing
all your atmospherics are load-bearing
all your feats of docility all our ointment and our joysticks
that you have gathered up will induct us
However misty in the pond-light of late cataclysm
you don’t neglect to pick up margarine and paper towels at the corner grocery
And if you misspell Byzantium or put a cold snap on the calliope
you’re our chief engineer after all
The work itself is ours to do
Redundance wears its royal robes
and the missiles are now so easy to make
No need to fear that we’ll recant
We love the small problems to solve
the logistics
It’s heartbreak still that breaks our hearts
6 Malady Transfusion
The short of it is: preclude precluding
Sometimes insensitivity that fall-guy is caring itself
The hive the lost and found the ocean bottom all share progeny
all share an unrestrained unreserve
our postulate and our bounty
The circling hawk is unfamiliar with masochism
The marinade unfamiliar with impatience
Cancer with self-reflection
One after another the unspeakables fall away ruptured into harvest
O my fig partner it was henhouse lovely
the live demonstration of child time forward and backward
reciting the afterlife becalmed in delivery
The double feature at the drive-in all gravy
We still have the bill of lading
Unbearable’s the quid pro quo
mercy amerced
Our grape-cries take their place in the blackness seat
7 The Extra Mile
Sometimes you use your speaking muscle
Sometimes you scatter night like birdseed
Sometimes the algorithm sinkhole opens up and you stumble in
Sometimes you have to ask why there isn’t a state feather a state curse
Space-time means that havoc can’t be separated from translucence
grammar can’t be distinguished from classified information
The unbeatitudes are worthy of smeared mascara
The red shift with its awesome rpm’s carries us on
Sometimes when the bruises have gotten underway early
the extra mile is the only mile to go
8 Unelective Affinity
Cul de sac
with your grandchild sadness
you can’t outrun the moodiness of eternity
The clothes-pinned panties won’t align with the axiomatic
To be short-changed of one’s disgrace is a kind of amnesia
Better to thresh the dominant observation till it glows bloodshed
Cul de sac
arousal is a form of veneration a sacrament offered the abysmal
How timid the emotionally distributed how unoverlapping
No one asks the sibyl for a receipt
Middle age requires an area code and number
It’s please stay on the line and an operator will assist you
It’s book-living and head-dancing on the clash/embrace continuum
the gauzy givens flaking away like eczema
Middle age is a catering business
whose ballroom dancers resemble the metric system
Unkind the one who takes your arm unkind the one who doesn’t
It all comes down to abrogate and liquify
No redos cul de sac
no closing down for renovations
you must now pay list price
though the angels are profitable enough thrilling as fresh cement
Better to go down on your hands and knees
among the ants and their selfless reliance
No potato was ever disillusioned
Thought for all its carnivorousness is participatory
9 None of the
We said our goodbyes
to the action professions to the work-glad
to plan and pacemaker and cost-benefit analysis
where junkie malice neé wonder child is squirting lighter fluid
Build with similar
Build with crevasse
Build the antipodes of the republic
The ground rules: no one-dimensional sacrifice
no dejected doodling
no self-congratulation
Build from the phenotype
build from the startled roots
build with none of the. . .
First it’s May then June then it’s February
Crises there will continue to be
The forlorn leaves its trademark residue powdery as pollen
Where odometer and tachometer cross
goodbye will be just another word
spinning its web in the canopy of appearances
10 Unforeseeable Few
You structure the work by stringing it out over open water
Chaos is acoustic widowed by time and place
You shout your blab from the highest jewel box
and bag by hand spree and esprit and expiry alike
Like the shoplifter you take what you need
Like the paramedic you touch what you have to
No sniveling ecstacy No whining predestination
No eyewitnesses
There’s fog in the timeliness chamber
feathers on the entrenching tool
From the spigot no subterfuge comes
In the hive no schismatics
You feed the scraggly symmetries into the doodad machine
you undisgust the prefix you wiretap you miscegenate
until the Venus mosquito water-born
lifts its puzzle above the mirror stillness
already bloodthirsty
11 No Joke
And yet they come up to me moist diacritical pro tem
Leverage I tell them cash out yield but amortize never
Time abhors an anaesthetic
You have to go back to the fine print
back to when our hearts were in it
to glimpse lamentation unwrapping her skirts
back when dolphins in the fire tower drank from the dream sump
They call me plus one and sometimes unwarehoused
They come up to me insoluble credential frantic in arrears
If sheep are sheepish mice mousy tax taxing: what are you I say
Decision-making is best left to the uvula compulsion to the siphon
Pagination is surreal to the amputee
Procreation: glue-gun it on like sequins I tell them
At the speed of night some assembly may be required
They come up and call me unrealized music across water
The prolific have a bread knife ethos I say
Unhook is worth how much?
Quit is closer to quiet than acquit is to acquire
Latrine frankness strips the just war daybed of its goose feathers
They know and I know that to acknowledge is to sanction
that to inform is never informal
that out there up ahead are communion and the IV push
12 The Alto Clef Is Not for Everyone
Unhappiest urethra,
the sweeteners are graying the carcinogens nosy and gay
and the wind surfers of Bilbao lift high their crested vocals
Lowliness the Nuremberg solvent
won’t keep the headstones from dangling in the cross hairs
Chalking the body’s outline onto clouds won’t help
There’s no fretting above the timberline no central sting
In the birthing house with its votive whiskies its nudes and incredulities
the emulations of becoming elude all the bygones
Insurrection begins with the shibboleths
Lovers eschew increments
They wash in the moonlight inferno embark on illegible assent
Purple flowers and yellow line the roadsides in August
as adoration with its publicists appears
Bury the caveats they seem to chant
it’s the comprehensive that’s incomprehensible
13 American Standard
If it were any darker here
everything would be kaput but the end —
that port of call which refuses to thaw
So: speak directly into the disruption
Demagnify above all else
and remember: some egotism is professional
some endearments involuntary
Time and materials are our m.o.
and the power to disimprison the soul of facts
Remember that night officiates at the embedding arena
but it can’t be everywhere with its ovation and its rubber stamp
That’s one thing I love about you:
the canopy of under things snapping their bright pennants
as in the open-air markets of Martinique
Everything has a beginning except the beginning
It’s so foggy in the bone marrow
Something big is in the works
Come with a screech and with your fishing creel
No one is without a disability and a wish to lay-me-down-to-sleep
Come to me without the comfort of wingspan or verisimilitude
Come to me like moisture like a bee from a steel barrel
Who else would look closely enough at the homunculus to see
its poor closed anus?
Who else crossing the blood-brain barrier would notice how
rambunctious porcelain really is?
15 Diagnosia
No skeleton’s incompetent no screw gun’s far-sighted
Hollow and holy alike grow lovesick and live
To forewarn is to unpredestine As if
There are no placebos beyond the sea wall no stoppers
Wrong to entomb the crest in the trough
Thus is it meet to unbutton the dressmaker’s dummy
meet to make sweet and broad that swath of parentheses
which is our safe house
meet to winterize the dreamers
meet to unloose the milkier among the ricochets
Debacle with its gizmos and its dumpster can always be found diagramming
the jackpot
So vote itinerant vote freshet vote eye-witness vote lioness
Where you are outlier the witch of restitution makes nervy footprints
Where you are the viol-like vials glitter like sequins
Prescribe therefore without proscription
distillate of thunderhead attar of punch line tincture of bucketful
16 The Assignation of Empires
We came through and took refuge in insubordinate spices
the bedstead submersed in lupine and childbirth
We knew heartbreak was heritable
that godsends imbibed our indiscriminating juices
Yet we dreamt the assignation of empires a life’s work
Carnations lined the parade route
even as we heard the disorganized ping the ampules breaking
hookworms outnumbering commendations
Nevertheless we normalized the disruptions
the human taxed beyond recognition
We’d always have each other we knew
and we knew that would never be enough
17 The Having Had
The November discipline touched only on the outer disease
The first illogic begot the beforehand we fell prey to the asterisk effect
Earlier when love was Boolean
you could hear it: thunder in search of lightning the preemptive yea
The second illogic dose dense all ricochet
It filled the acres with stipulations with unfinished tricycles
Doctors ago the local gods
were imperiled by drug interactions by a show of force
The psychopomp uncorked his shock wine for all to sip
Box cars uttered their archaisms
How often we said there is nothing to fear now
A tea rose mauls the lion tamer
It’s coming it will come in aerosol or liquid
By check or money order
the have had the having had
the way one might say how much or how many in schoolgirl Scythian
18 And of Course No of Course
I must work her in as a darkening speculation
as god and country quietly expire
Until then O sweet cat bacillus
bridge work I have you all to myself
here in the departure lounge
where morning is an automated call back number
Some ultimatums occur backstage others convey us
to the very edge of subsistence
The nadir gives a boost to everything
Defects may take the form of errata incunabula in absentia
Communicable is reserved for disease
Render unto reserved for uber alles
Short of annexation I don’t know what
to do except to say:
Exuberance demands it Rectitude requires it
Brilliance you undo me
Employee ID numbers and you-poor-dear
collide in the accelerator bowing prolonging
The field stones themselves shine up like searchlights
The clue is: no clue no self-defense no of course
19 Anti-Trust
Lost sister
gorgeous girlhood with your witchy servilities your histamines
with your spilled jimmies of imminence and pagan subtleties
you want to know where the “the” is in other
why the celebrants are standing chest-deep in the quaking bog
how to game the probability boudoir
Loveliest prisoner you want the heart that wonder bar to prise out
those long nails of I the numbing sobriquet
of me the hand-mown verge before the woods begin
The fractionals add up to more and more fractions
Against wrongful assent against the sweet of menace
against preciousness and painkillers
rage sister put out the moon
Pull the man handle of the one-arm bandit and watch the machinations multiply
History and the sky like tits and ass are your loss leaders
You are music and the instrument that can play it
You are metes and bounds
You are all that real giving a fuck
countersunk among the coordinates of immersion in time
20 Up to and Including
Beautiful bygone puddle
should it matter that you came out of the softest rock
Should it matter that by molten fiat iridescence was hushed up
The sieve has its own conflict of interest
Deprived of decoys how much misgiving can the silent partner bear
Hunger and disgust are so exorbitant
Ardor is as qualified to represent us as the two-party system
This is a witch hunt for those who don’t believe in witches
Ready or not we are overtaken amid the oxygen tanks the waiting rooms
Breathing out: rudimentary as an empty bushel basket
Breathing in: caramel and blood counts
The lovely bare bones lie in a puddle
Should it matter that no one comes out of this unscathed
21 Ontogeny of Hartford
Who dispenses the cold wears the mask
plays the wanderlust legato pawns the knickknacks
undoes the formulas for obedience in the name of obedience
presses the plunger
Who baptizes in creosote becalms black powder
repatriates the cartwheel
uncompresses the mustang into a jeremiad of wind shift and candelabra
Who patinas womanliness with angularities who oils angularity with provocation
makes oblivion feel churlish rebukes punctuation for its cautions
Jacks and eights pluck at the non-equivalence of odds and ends
like a harpist among the Israelites
Who gives the cold its chill bequeaths to us referendum after referendum
and rides the leukocytes down where the sugar tit is unpracticed but electric
Impenitent the g