Intimacy

Catherine Imbriglio

• Publisher: Center for Literary Publishing
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781885635341
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2013 Colorado Prize for Poetry Intimacy is a series of experimental poems that play with, resist, and acknowledge complicity with received concepts of intimacy that circulate in this media-centric age. Undertaking an expansive understanding of the word "intimacy", each poem contains a word or set of words that modifies the noun, uncovering the attending, associative and often contradictory obligations that arise in our relations with one another.

INSIDE OUT INTIMACY

1.

Over their bathing suits, departing beachgoers pull on their clothes

Public dressing an expertise that evolved, as did wisdom through cellular error

Barely concealed that wet or dry the red spot on the yellow gull beak throes alone

Mathematically call for duration, pitch in the contours of moist persons

The sea needs a body to mediate a body if, so like a window, all the great ones glow

To keep your head above water, seek will-unsettling actions, not action in already-settled wills

Memorial minute with one aunt and 37,373 Fenway Park strangers, like a wave, not naked, not form fitting

From here on out, in left breast stage one, caution, lest the littler suckers crack the nodes

Zany the etiologies beneath surf conditions and Carlyle’s laughter

What are the limits in NASA’S public images for immersing body and soul

Turn the fabric inside out before washing this garment

Agitated subaqueous molecules will tone down perception of the mouth’s indivisibility

Reread A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson, yo ho ho

Make what was once close to your body close to my body

Find in floating a motive for time and space displacement, come or go

2.

What if dredging inside a personal history means taking out a child

More advantageous the inside-out flower’s six reflexed petals pulling back from its stamens and pistil

Suppose it true Yörük tribe members chewed the leaves from V. hexandra as a medicine for their coughs

Does my submersion in a salt solution come out green and weaponly

First there now here, stones, pebbles rubbing one another back and forth

How like the genes a series of fault lines expresses synchronicity

A comparative grief here emulates indirect comprehension of the seabed

One intimacy two intimacy three intimacy four, nine griefs to the ocean surface, eleven griefs to the ocean floor

If I were a lighthouse keeper I’d have less company

Like Coleridge’s demented mariner the clown brain moseys along

Deeply contradictory the mind’s reactions to the body’s unscrupulous data gathering

Over and over shadows from the circling flock sped ominously down the brick exterior of the old medical building

Picking parsley ahead of the frost, she accidentally brought into the kitchen tiny opportunistic flies

Like playing clown tag with the surf, what goods can you glean from weather watching

The surgeon knew where to cut into each breast by following screen shots of what was dividing inside

3.

Late one night a nursing home resident asks, what’s deep in the heart of Texas

Six inches in Virginia, she upends me with the standard punch line

Why assume that at my clown expense an 80-something wouldn’t enjoy a long and hearty laugh

Covering 71 percent of the earth’s surface, oceans maintain an enormous privacy

I take pleasure in mnemonic spaces embedded in the five-lined staff

The Pentagon expresses shock shock at the release of its secret war logs

What is the difference between the gray then green line of my personal humbug

Sparkles in the water join the surf’s reprise when replicating the sun with visual echoes

Whom to thank for building in me an obsessive recursiveness so much like the ocean’s

I accept that as condition of the sentence inside words will be infiltrated by a surrounding blank

When he was younger, my father would carve names on the surface of growing pumpkins

At harvest the expanded names would be grownups in the finished scars

How irresistible other tumor-minded gourds bumped up as if bent on human fingering

When scientists find means to resurrect the body who will locate ones like me having no children

Before winter, take time to walk the sea as complement to the rolling dark

4.

Off my high horse accidently spilled on the green rug white dots made by my paper puncher

In his painting of the boats one of them seems to smile and have eyes

Wet down my meanness to set off molecular charges extending the interiors of these sentences

I juggle lines the way a juggler tosses objects, coordinating eyes and hands to perhaps intimate an inside out maneuver

Staring at length to catch the coarse-grained moment of each wave breaking, what matching molecular sequence made me so preoccupied

Stayed inside all day as if dropping the ocean

Or maybe dropped by the ocean all staid inside stayed inside

Do you prefer macro or micro modification as when a fluid lays you green in downed pastures

Believe me I’ve tried who or what being the center of our galaxies

On the scale of one to ten how much pain how much pain do you have

Before the entrance to the tunnel, the twilight beauty of the Boston skyline, windows gold, buildings all gray and silvery

Underwent airport scanning so the collective body would not be terrorized by the violable passages of my body

That inside job how greige and just, how unmanageable

On the scale of one to ten, mark where the breath shuns or panders to the blue or green smack of the ocean

Still leading me on the waters may be equal than but not lesser to what’s companionable

5.

What local knowledge would make my flotsam and jetsam patterns visible

An itinerant clown might hold the line at let us pause not lettuce paws

How hard to hold the line with waterborne illnesses such as dysentery such as cholera

All together my efforts to whip up the ocean, like the ocean, would be no page-turners

Though they can project a briny respect for narrative on Melville on the movie Jaws

Who knows why I have set pens and pencils around the basin in my bathroom

Still difficult to talk about my body as if it were not my body

Not to mention that reconciling with a reconfigured body may take a while

Just as the stone’s throw marks the limits to the integrity of my seafulness

In then out the moon breaks every night with its ancient style

Divide the ocean in half then cleave it then cleave it again

Pulled out from the parts more tide then less tide is still more tide

Riding a sequence may end with you tumbled out as if scraping the shoreline

Just as inside the channel markers there’s a belling in the distance for what I tell what I will not tell

Intimacy a reverting of sound into silence but then this bell

GOOD NEIGHBOR INTIMACY

1.

Baseline imitation studies suggest mirror neurons may be beneficial for understanding another person’s goals and intentions.

I see her move her hand, I move my hand.

I open my mouth and say “Ah” when she tells me to.

Guess what you are prone to, even if you don’t consciously exhibit it.

Even in the normal brain a nerve cell may be unsweetly kissed by a variant.

Guess what just up star alley.

Guess what the emotive, the taxonomy of the emotive.

Merely witnessing an action makes mirror neurons fire in response to that action, so your brain simulates your neighbor’s when you watch him throw out his recyclables.

An object’s imminent graspability is encoded as an intimate aspect of the object’s movement potential, his aluminum cans, fence posts, my crabapple.

Cutting up and removing fallen limbs may depend on empathetic mimicking of a tree’s natural phase transitions.

The pinecone is falling, has fallen, is no longer a pinecone.

A circuit of multiple feedback loops enables the body’s internal and external surveillance mechanisms.

Does she intend for her neighbor to catch her watching him.

On her property, deep blue hydrangeas, a purple butterfly bush abut with time and space, inject relief, commonality, within an infinite egress of witnessing.

2.

Fog drapes my neighborhood in the form of a seadragon.

The good neighbor trips, stumbles into the woodpile.

In the brain’s map of the body, the map of the feet is next to the map of the genitals.

Between the legs, neighbor, ah, secrecy, arousal as you go along.

Guess what the curable, OK the incurable.

Scanty camouflage in an airy looking glass provokes water gossip in the mist, good neighbor telling or not telling on you.

Appealing to other values to justify a value is like describing musical redness to this person.

Even when her higher brain interprets the interplay of signals from various neural circuits and null blocks normally, a family of clowns keeps streaking through.

Each keeping structure may make patterned connections with other keeping structures, often forming healing circuits as diverse as emotional riches, telepathy, stride piano.

If proportionate keeping to yourself allows you to enjoy reciprocity with others while simultaneously preserving your individuality, what then accounts for Thomas Jefferson’s abominable keeping behaviors at Monticello.

Guess what, fantasy, the brain’s desire for fantasy.

Guess what, the clown as a choice between competitive shufflings.

Color perception is neurally linked to emotion, such as a blue or green sore spot within the neighbor.

My brain butterflie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Rush Intimacy
• Larghetto Intimacy
• Thing Intimacy
• Laws of Motion Intimacy
• On Your Side Intimacy
• Do No Harm Intimacy
• Château Noir Intimacy
• Whom Do You Trust Intimacy
• Hinge Intimacy
• Free Will Intimacy
• To the Letter Intimacy
• Street Intimacy
• Loop the Loop Intimacy
• To the Reader Intimacy
• Blue in Green Intimacy
• Per Se Intimacy
• Inside Out Intimacy
• Good Neighbor Intimacy
• So Disposed Intimacy
• On Your Mark Intimacy
• Lunge Intimacy
• Laws of Motion Intimacy
• Fall to Fall Intimacy
• Once Upon a Time Intimacy
• Resumption Intimacy
• Wing Intimacy
• Notes
• Acknowledgements