[1]
To name her is desire. To name her is a violence.
Helen is no Helen, but is she lack or artifact? A gash of solidness, a wooden bowl of
teeth to break the narrative? A mother whose fingers tic against your wrist, one by one.
The mark carries over and over.
But she is a beautiful body to mark—this body as speech act. A beautiful white body
that swells slowly, expands, empties. Naturally she is nude, a mass of protein in blue ink.
A nude body, filled with with charcoal. Teeth of charcoal. You can palpate the gold,
peeling crust of her. You can palpate her.
To long for a subject is a lack, must be desire. But it is a retreat, further into the cage.
I didn’t want to find Helen.
I never find Helen.
I wanted to write to the Eidolon.
I wanted a place/person/name toward whom to address the breach.
[2]
It was the wet bridge of rupture.
It was when I was seven, playing in the snow, and I accidentally split my lavender
corduroys at the crotch. I felt it in my throat, sore and bile-sick. I wanted to keep my
fingers in the tear, to swallow down my own dark recording.
A year or so later, my mother caught me watching TV and cutting tiny holes into my
favorite green smocked dress with left-handed craft scissors. Nothing cleared the pit, but
nothing gave me deeper pleasure: the hum of my stomach held my legs in their crossed
position, cupping them, keeping me inside. A feeling associated with later, deeper cuts.
Is it better to leave the ruins behind, to leave the old language, or to sit inside it, the
economy of gapes? And how can I offer these gapes to you?
Where the scar gathers itself, the upward itch of pain.
[3]
Violence is what brought H.D. back to Helen. In each new decade, she would see yet
another layer of war. The endless loop of ruin, of, as she writes in her notes, a
“Holocauste.”
H.D., like Stesichorus, like Euripedes, removes Helen from Troy. Like Stesichorus,
like Euripedes, H.D. places her into Egypt, and sends an eidolon to be fought
over. “According to the Pallinode,” H.D. writes in the beginning of Helen in Egypt, Helen
of Troy was “transposed or translated” from Greece to Egypt.
Eidolon, the ancient Greek word meaning, a representation of the form of an object; a
phantom, or look-alike of the human form. The echo of an echo. An echo of a form.
Helen’s first function is to be the sign.
[4]
An actress friend of mine posted a picture of herself as Helen today. She has leaf eyes
stab eyes, she is facing sideways. She is clean, her blood root frozen. Little threat,
little body of a leaf.
If the form of the body is the icon I reject it. I drink this oil and I reject it.
See how I hold it in, the excess/ex-stasis, this bruise on my arm. It came to me a puddle,
and I lapped up its thick resin. I tell the doctor it is more of a letting go, my backchest
ache yellow and bile-tight.
[6]
The brain shores images like a hum, a churn. All I know to do is shore and accumulate,
to step into these long fossils like a skirt and move from margin to margin. To say
anything now simply hides, is not charged with hiddenness.
So I collect the routes others have taken: each decision of syntax, one word after the
next. Beloveds: We are fine and we will be fine. Beloveds: If you haven’t already, evacuate immediately.
Beloveds: They are unable to offer precise fire perimeter maps at this time. The fire takes us street by
street. Beloveds: do we believe that a system can kill?
Instead the margins simply dissolve. In the morning I rise a cache, find the words
evaporating in front of me. I am at a loss for faces, and look around for something not
so sleek, not so un-grooved: graphite lozenges between days of unbeing. Where it begins
and where I end lies further and further out, becomes less and less navigable.
Is it enough, to wave a slick flag to break the form of other? Grouped, the violence is
milk. Easing away from disorder, any coherence we find means mutilation: all the more
alarming, more terrifying.
I have nothing but dialogue here, have no other other way to begin.
[7]
In class I tell my students that we have to define our terms, that we must use precision
in our language or else it will never touch our reader.
In truth, one of the most telling signs that my depression is returning is that I become
both bored and distrustful of poetry, of words in general. It seems so manipulative,
I think, steering words around just to get other people to feel things. I am unaffected
by a poet’s decision to put one word in front of another word; this is just a trick.
I have seen what the flag of green language can do, am angry at my own gullibility.
I find myself inside of the knowledge that language is power, and that I am unpracticed
in both power and its resistance. I am surviving, but in order to do so I have detached
myself from the needs of the world, and even of my own body, and now I am afraid
I have no way to access it.
What is it to depend on memory, but give my own so little value? Where does that put
you? To codify but delete the code.
I am surviving, but cannot find the shape of my own urgencies.
Woolf: It is not a new cry, it is a very old cry.
[12]
My comrades, my beautiful comrades. Helen has no idea we are here. I will say woman
to talk about someone else. I am a girl starfish, gutted clean. Why do you think you can’t write
what it needs? They say. You are literally the only person who can do that.
We watch the veil of milk leave a woman’s face, her breasts bare, the raw parts of her
skin salamander pink until gray. We take care to never wash her face, her cheeks, her
ruddy jaw.
(Once I wrote a poem for a friend, and it ended: I am still alive she said / hand me the
wooden spoon. The next year she died, and I thought it was on a mountain but it was at
home, in her bed. She had a canary tattooed on her thigh, so that perhaps she might get
up off of the roof/out of her vomit. Instead, she flickered out.)
*
Voices don’t feel hunger.
Voices don’t feel hunger.
Voices don’t feel hunger.
Voices don’t feel hunger.
Voices don’t feel hunger.
Voices don’t feel hunger.
Voices don’t feel hunger.
Voices don’t feel hunger.
Voices don’t feel hunger.
[13]
I want to talk about hubris, the carpeted atria of hubris.
To think I could carry women on my back.
To think that I could track self and other was hubris.
My comrades, my beautiful comrades—they know the tiny creature of Helen, they know
who I talk to. That I am superstitious to put things into writing. That I don’t trust
hypotheticals. They know the powder I make in this language.
These notes are the only direction I can turn my question forward.
These notes are rotting in the desert.
These notes are my desire to never reach.
I am looking for scale here. I wanted to see something—
I wanted to write her wave body, reckoning with a sex that she violently distrusts.
I wanted a way to talk about my own without calling it a body, a female body.
I wanted to name, to hold THE THING, the loss.
But I cannot touch Helen—Helen of Troy, my aunt Helen, mothers a mother
again and again. I don’t want to touch her. This is hubris, a loop and loop of a
phantom who thought she was underwater, who did not document, and I cannot
write what she needs.
Where is her golden armpit? Where is linearity? Who is responsible?
What warm stone do I hold now?
[14]
In the weeks before I moved, I watched videos of Inuit throat singing while packing
boxes. In a blue-white kitchen I watched a mother and a daughter, I saw her and I saw
her, facing each other to be a part of her body, beating their hoof sounds against the
other’s throat.
When I sing I feel like I cannot be human, says my favorite singer.
At first I think they sound hardened, bone-angry, but this isn’t true. These are growls
from a slow, slow land, past and outside of anger. They are ecstatic, formed of the prefix
ek (outside or beyond) and stasis (standing, position). Outside position. A radical
discontinuity. They are at a stand-off with language.
(I am the centre/Of a circle of pain/Exceeding its boundaries in every direction—)
A sound below singing, this is a call and response of feral breathing, of women. The low
lows never leave the box of the body. They face the other, hold her by the arms. I watch
them as they bear down into—as they touch—the underpattern.
Moon-throated, each leaves gaps for the other to fill in, vertices. Spaces open for
tenderness. Vertices are the most intimate spaces, can either be convex or concave. They
are tender, like the inside of a knee.
You want to sing like a zipper, the daughter said, each tooth pulling into the other’s space.
Compassion is in the zippered teeth, the inhale to exhale.
[15]
I live in Michigan now; men still work on the house next door. I wave at them every
morning when I take my puppy out to pee. The puppy blinks in the sun and turns into
water. His skin is black and gold until he stretches it white. On the other side of my
house are five men in a Christian brotherhood who have committed to communal living.
On this side, I pinch my thighs to come back. I do.
I do come back: have swum, sit hard, through the same motions of purge and battle,
olive and caul. Through the silence where I find myself being born, through where I
have left my own disaster in a hollowed-out tree as a nest.
What I am trying to say is: this book is a process of learning to speak again, of
continuing to practice the problem. Of learning to lean into devotion when it is bleak.
It was either Helen or a present tense of absence, which is bigger, redder than the
language it comes in.
It was a way of saying that sometimes you’re nothing but meat / the meat of me at all / a
calibration of what the me body is / vs. the you body vs. the he body vs. the wave body.
I write Helen as a wave body
Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015) and two chapbooks. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her work may be found in places like Bone Bouquet, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Cosmonauts Avenue, Foundry, jubilat, and Colorado Review. She is the founding editor of Jellyfish Magazine and she lives, writes, and teaches in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
