untitled cento for Ella, Danny’s mom, from books in his library
BY BAZEED
Theano Giannezi, π - 3,14, installation, paper Fabriano 250 gr, 43.3 x 31.5 x 47.2 inches, 2017-2018. Courtesy of the artist.
untitled cento for Ella,
DANNY’S MOM,
FROM BOOKS IN HIS LIBRARY
BAZEED | MAY 2022 | ISSUE 16
Sensing time’s discrete drops as razor-sharp gemstones
grazing my fingertips
I was talking to my mother when she died.
It seemed to me to be a sermon.
All the anxiety had fled.
In love with velocity,
the sun paused.
In love with velocity,
I saw one woman dancing
then the sun buckled and dark fell like a shout.
One thousand nights in this first night.
No extra color quivering about
in a silence shot through with a smell of blood.
Oh! The meniscal calm of it.
The winter wind took [Ella]’s breath away
and the real stars birthing themselves and exploding into nothingness
in the vast swathe of star-strewn sky.
With a vision unfettered by the earlier |
devotion;
the electrical taxonomy of memory;
the longing in between
the two kinds of decay;
the pulse between dimensions and the desert;
she hit her chest with her small fist and coughed out a curse.
The ghost of her, fragile as a steeple of spun sugar, materialized in the bright green field.
Before her, it appeared: a heavily misted diorama, strangely alien.
The trees the trees!
There was always food and flowers.
Repeating the strangely solemn ritual,
she saw silver strands of hair overtaking her head
the age and origin of an obscure ivory.
The mirror showed her the seasonal cracks in her hands and lips.
The dried blood in between crevices of senescent skin.
The art of decay.
As [she] let [her] gaze soften and drift
—the trees the trees!—
from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s edges are constantly renewed—
ultramarine, continued.
Ultramarine, quelling the dark tyranny of despair.
Tumbleweed
enfranchised from [a] miserable slavery
and her heart is running.
Profligate with this precious pigment,
the chronology of water
the secret lives of color
the very precise and intricate track marks left behind
the esteem in which the raw lapis lazuli was held
—ultramarine is a true blue, occasionally bordering on violet—
profligate with this precious pigment
Me, she cried. Can I be cured?
To mitigate the shock of her abrupt projection into limitlessness
the aural component of the message was relentless.
Desultory and radiant, a polyphony and a disfigurement:
Go return, each to your mother’s house.
It’s a season of death and resurrection, but what season isn’t?
There is infinitely more past than there is future.
We will witness our own dying.
See the seven mountains of our mysterious destiny.
See ourselves deep in the earth’s breast-swelling—
No longer young—
—ultramarine, continued—
and know ourselves for the first time
dead and alone
and know what we are attached to, and that is everything.
Too often, we think of sites in stasis
but even the bones become dust and even the dust becomes soil and even the tree becomes a piece of paper disintegrated
remembering the future,
remembering the future,ultramarine, continued.
Re-membering the future,
there before her was the milk river
there before her was the apple tree
foil of dragons and great serpents
and she bent over it and said,
Please, River, be a mother to me.
I brought my whole self to you;
A cave painting I found.
Perhaps I can better tolerate being inconsolable now.
Theano Giannezi, π - 3,14 (detail), installation, paper Fabriano 250 gr, 43.3 x 31.5 x 47.2 inches, 2017-2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Imagine a death.
You wake up and she doesn’t exist.
A large salt deposit piles up under the bed.
She’s a continuous theme after you’ve fallen asleep.
Smiling while dying is apparently not that unusual.
The body releases the same kinds of neurochemicals that flood our brains as we are falling in love.
The heart stops and the blood still moves in the veins, then the blood stops and the tissues still live.
In other dreams, there is a lot of dark space
for the most part, still and rapt.
This is suffering’s lesson: pay attention.
What does it mean to write what is not there. To write absence.
My skin story?
The lost art of hearth and home?
Might we imagine: a derelict tower of babel
an aviary for wild birds
torqued ellipses
works of white paint on white canvas
a dried hummingbird stuffed with magnetic dust?
“The night turned cold and there was no wood for the fire.” ?
“I’ve blundered into a stranger’s life,
mouth full of blood” ?
“Let’s go back again, open your belly and take me back.” ?
This is treacherous, my alertness to what will never be.
For instance guess how
long a person gets to live.
For I want us as we would be now.
Mom & Me & Mom
I want to be in our life.
Oh how I cried.
The crying of something leaving a body.
The deep dark silence
that ate of the so-young flesh.
Just as mummies are wrapped, usingred silk thread,
shadows overtake the corners of my vision.
To spread the spirit of antiquated self-sufficiency
I did not make a sound, though I wept a cleansing.
Housed on a different platform orbiting a dying star
I tend to forget I am walking on the surface of a soft mass on fire.
Theano Giannezi, π - 3,14 (detail), installation, paper Fabriano 250 gr, 43.3 x 31.5 x 47.2 inches, 2017-2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Day followed day, and hour followed hour, and a whole year went by before I knew it.
The Three Kingdoms,
the vital crux where Time, Simultaneity, and Motion not only meet but define each other.
Imaginary cities,
within whose circle no grief or folly ventures—
ultramarine, continued,
quelling the dark tyranny of despair.
All the crucibles of my life were now available across the surface of my own body.
The fruit around the nut being causticedible poetry,
a half-believed mirage, or a refuge
all about love:
What of all the nights these places have seen, the dusks and the dawns, the bloodshed and the celebrations?
Frankenstein!
Like my skin suddenly had nerve endings and synaptic firings and…pulse.
Uncertainty and doubt rolled away from the mouth of my wanting like a great stone.
As if loving were some task outside of myself.
Though I was a flesh and blood organism
what I really wanted was to be taken to whatever the edge of self was.
To a death cusp.
Like coming home to a joy I was meant for,
leaving my name scattered in the wake like a carelessly discarded whorl of peel.
[You don’t name dead things.]
Though I was a flesh and blood organism
for now, please know my ancestors didn’t invent the wheel for utilitarian purposes.
I too have inherited the disease of estrangement,
my thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind.
Maya Angelou reminds us that it is never lonesome in Babylon,
playground for inquisitive children.Let our bodies touch and tell the passions we felt.
I have read somewhere that there are two responses to chaos:
naming and violence.
Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?
We’ve achieved some triumphs over everyday life
but never without complaining bitterly of the cost.
There is a third response to chaos, which I have not read about, which is stillness.
*
Nobody’s calling
but I know that some day you will it’s just plain math
Or instead, am I simply a madman?
In a certain kingdom, in a certain realm.
We are both older and I have cut stars from envelopes when we had no night.
Author’s note: This cento is composed of lines from the following list of titles, all sourced from my friend Danny’s library over the course of a week, while I kept his very chill cat, Terence, company, and enjoyed unseasonably sunny Portland weather.
[Danny’s mom, Ella, is who this poem is remembering.]
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - A Biomythography Audre Lorde
all about love: new visions bell hooks
Outer Dark Cormac McCarthy
The Museum Dose: 12 Experiments in Pharmacologically Mediated Aesthetics Daniel Tumbleweed
Devotion Dani Shapiro
Imaginary Cities Darran Anderson
The Art of Death Edwidge Danticat
The White Book Han Kang
The Trees the Trees Heather Christle
Imagine a Death Janice Lee Secret
Lives of Color Kassia St. Clair
Book of Mutter Kate Zambreno
The Lost Art of Hearth and Home Ken Albala, Rosanna Nafziger Henderson,
Marjorie Nafziger
The Chronology of Water Lidia Yuknavitch
Remedios Varo’s Letters, Dreams & Other Writings Margaret Carson (tr.)
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Mom & Me & Mom Maya Angelou
The Pulse between Dimensions and the Desert Rios de la Luz
The Three Kingdoms Russian Folk Tales from Alexander Afanasiev's Collection
The Two Kinds of Decay Sarah Manguso
Wave Sonali Deraniyagala
Mouth Full of Blood Toni Morrison
Bazeed is an Egyptian immigrant, writer, performance artist, stage actor, and cook living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed on stages in the United States and abroad, including Kilo Batra: In Death More Radiant, presented in December 2021 at the Arab American National Museum. Bazeed is currently at work on a book-length erasure poem of the hyper-racist text, The Arab Mind; The Sunshine School Songbook, a solo cabaret sponsored by late-stage capitalism and the algorithms of Gulf Labor dystopias; and the second draft of their so-faggy-it’s-in-the-title! play, faggy faafi Cairo boy.
Theano Giannezi (Θεανώ Γιαννέζη) is a visual artist, born in 1991 in Thessaloniki, Greece. After completing her studies at the AUTH University of Fine Arts in 2016, she exhibited her first professional pieces at the Gallery Zina Athanassiadou and the Macedonian Museum of Art. In 2019, she won the Indonesian Scholarship Darmasiswa and majored in traditional puppetry while completing her studies in ISI Yogyakarta. She attended a residency program in Papermoon Puppet Theatre in Kasongan and, in 2021, created a solo project in Krack Printmaking Studio in Yogyakarta. Her work has been in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and cultural institutes in Europe and Asia, and she has participated in art seminars and residency programs. Her art practice focuses on exploring and incorporating various elements of nature and human psychology. These elements helped her observe the close relationship of culture with fine art and the transmitted human mindset, by creating artworks consisting of naturally occurring repetitive forms and conceptual figures.