P a u l B i s a g n i —

Chelsea Girls (1966)

Ingrid, though bandied about, wasn’t her name (nor a misnomer).

The fractious cat resents the refrain by leaping from the condominium.

Third story. Intellectual laziness. Untoward pinpricks.

The comfort of bathos in the subhuman benthic zone.

Is that Viva? Capricia?

Petula Jessamine and Phryne Isabella inspect the freesias

to prove a point.

Uniquely fallible cybernetic infrastructure.

Tributaries complicate the inheritance productively

for all and the two of us.

Mountains beyond espying amongst hubbub for comic effect.

Sweet Christabel! And her proprietary flocculence, wholesale croissant.

That the folds overlook their reticulation despite trailing complementizer clauses

diffuses hope.

On day six of the cleanse,

inconsequence returns, and one eroticizes

the other’s erroneous quest for gaps and stoppers.

A tunnel before the end of wish deferral.

Prioritized fulfillment enlaces Windsor Terrace

and a career shift. A criterion

for successful partnership

should be grounding

in physical space.

Default nature. Circumnavigatory impulse

out of touch with the analytics.

Your livelihood, daily journaling

will cement an artist’s vision

for retirement, delayed diurnal letting go.

What happened to a tuffet,

crinkle, locks

against the kids’ named wall?

Celestina the Abstemious!

Mendicant scriveners throng the interstate in pursuit.

Lust in consonant clusters—

finery for an ascetic community.

If you lose the party,

in an aisle seat with legs outstretched,

negators of luxury and function,

stay slouched. Withstand. For me.

The independence of the tuberculotic class.

Subjectivity hews to the smoothest perimeter.

No exceptions. Trapezoidal misfortune.

Sculpting all torrents marks the discipline

of a student of romantic art.

You will forcibly mutate any shape.

Dirigible shuttlecock,

ritual as horde.

Phenotype’s the key.

Standardize the metrics for

Peter Pan collars.

Our secondhand boyfriend cardigan,

on consignment in Tallahassee,

won’t refract the speculum much longer.

Portals, gel pens, frivolous footage,

repurposed bra straps, Erin go Bragh.

I hate spirits, but you may enjoy yourself

while I hydrate and maintain eye contact.

Commit to preserving incipience.

The ill-diluted masses come in peace.

I’m having an experience all the time.

Reading without grasping,

context-poor, the re-reader

greets more frequent savor.

Contour clinging, unstilted

metamorphic shambles!

Fill out a profile for the immediate future.

Collate dispassionate negative Nancies

into a typology of profit. Call it fringe benefit.

One mile from the park, east or west,

I resolved not to touch a bared foot.

Irregular malformation reassures enticement.

The entrapment joke: Loiter artistically

and count the years until a phalanstery of one’s dreams

restores immature expectation.

To some, the blessing is a remove from argots,

even of trades. Hush!

Shiksa Esther’s neighbors are teamsters.

A well-fed family and their rare pigeon.

Repetition of structure as routinized superstructure,

and so begins a philosophy session

tangent to the uptown station.

I knew how to make people envy me.

This is one of many unrecognized

democratic-socialist stratagems.

The proof herein that stylistic rigor

(or style simply) can yield wantonness

will startle some.

La Région Centrale (1971)

Sound exacts the upward tilt

into and beyond a palette new to dynamism.

A word is the measure of insignificance,

and illusory beams.

Laughing knowingly at well water

made interval, the spectator

professes familiarity with the virtuoso’s machine.

Earlier, a pigeon’s eye

nestled in its mass

to die, and majesty in a sidelong shot

depended on the curvature of the dream narrative.

Now, durational chums bound

by dedication to others’ craft

glean from those who leave

their identity. They wish they were

the Bardzo twins: Eagerly

they attend to idling dervishes.

Smoldering’s become a grievance,

and the grounds for contestation

multiply insensibly.

Sclerotic charms, does your convenience

respond to urgency?

If night should come first,

our turret we’ll discard.

In any case,

water presaged the divining rod.

Nathalie Granger (1972) / The Art of Vision (1965)

Certain women speak by perambulating woods.

They avoid crossing paths for lucidity’s sake.

The wild nearby,

possessed of its own multiplanar thresholds,

is maintained through rote life.

Elsewhere, a flash affords a woman

deluged with molecules

for which origin lacks structuring force.

Hexagonal sun cues agony, asunder.

We passed the dawn of man a while ago—

haven’t you heard?

Friederike’s Barbara branch,

Perpetua’s passcode glitch,

Stan’s mountain compendium:

All admit the solvency of situational knowledge.

My new favorite eclipses nothing

but the conditional posturing of arrangement.

Beneath my jacket,

I fear the old friend.

Suppressed, the sun returns

and ambition shrinks to a cat

sejant

on the mangrove couch,

so named by its proximity to a canoe

moored where the rules hold one’s bike must be.

Tomato glow of misconduct

cleaves to wan humor

in the absence of longing

lamely deemed requisite for art.

Requirement stanches need

after stabbing it.

Expression through woods-walking

would ring hollow without individualism;

one must continue as one.

Even as I warned of evanescence,

we postponed our association. Twice.

The geese don’t mind being illustrated,

but their droppings litter the inroads

to our impulse towards self-definition.

Evasion is no use.

Translator's Note 

These poems emerged from notes I took while watching and recalling the films whose titles they co-opt: Chelsea Girls(Andy Warhol, 1966), La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, 1971), Nathalie Granger (Marguerite Duras, 1972), and The Art of Vision (Stan Brakhage, 1965). The notes witnessed minor emendation in their evolution into poems. Yet I produced the notes with no intention of poeticizing them. In the case of the Warhol, Snow, and Brakhage films, I knew many hours of cinematic inaction awaited me (3.5, 3, and 4.5, respectively), so I wrote to sustain my concentration in the smaller of the two theaters at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. During a Wednesday matinee of Nathalie Granger at Film Forum—I am not a bon vivant of independent means; Wednesday is one of my two work-from-home days, and sometimes I roam with a delinquent love of life—I sat rapt. The lines in Nathalie Granger (1972) / The Art of Vision (1965) that derive from the former took shape as I ambled after the matinee down Hudson Street and ran that night beside the Hudson River.

I finished a creative writing MFA program in May of 2022, moved to New York City (the western lodestar of my Long Island upbringing that I nevertheless evaded for a decade) in June, experienced the second death of a parent in December, and used the money I inherited after my mother died three years ago to purchase an apartment in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights in February of 2023. I have never felt more divorced from poetry, letters, and creation. Moviegoing and the consumption at its core nourish me most reliably. The poems, then, may be understood in a number of ways: as indolent efforts to re-harness my creativity through the creations of others, as translations unbound by honesty of movies into my thoughts, as records of four sedentary outings. When I submitted them for publication in mercury firs, I briefly imagined a book-length series of such translations, but I haven't written anything since. My moviegoing persists, avid and unmarred.

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