Tomorrowland 4

"The body's charge"

This is the last of the main "chapters" (excluding prologue and epilogue). That finality is announced with the opening words, recalling the first line of the prologue.

The second volume planned to make a method
Of her spells and be someone entirely different collapsed
(though she rankled trees) the fragile jeopardy stripes
Were all along reverse of what she wrote
She found the stripes grow down her back she reached
Over her shoulder held the skin and pulled and
it would not release, not go at all

The theme of an abandoned plan continues and the body is the blocker of such projections.

The poem now enters (typically evoking Manda at this point) a body-centred, helpless, sensation-centred, field.

Rest, sex, love, washing, swimming, dissolution, death, mouldering. Somehow all held together in the single word "pulcherous". (p. 86)

All this is in heavy contrast to the civilizing efforts to build in time and space that concerned the previous poem "All the buildings made of voices", typified by its calendrical stargazing and pyramid roof-terrace.

"The body's charge" -  the charge is 1. an electrical energy, a potential energy / actual cavalry  2. an indictment, accusation. (especially on p. 88)  3. A freight, responsibility, maybe an unborn child. ("Manda's swell" p. 89).

The sudden return of Jack:

  We'll lift it up and bury us as
orange and woody sprites become recycled selves
in bricks and troves, in scarves and trousers
lollipop specters nuzzling each other as the decades
pass entranced -- the shade compels the body to follow it
as Jack unspheres on Fasti with a tender disregard
for the dictates of his person, ....

The burial follows swiftly.

*

NB: my personal tomorrowland is Dubai for a week and I won't be posting much or at all.