Bibliography

by Nic Leigh

The eroticism, Kathleen, in your patting, dabbing, rolling, smoothing, & in the stroke of your retiary fingers, & your arthritic hands, molding that misshapen eye & its raisin-like buddy, curved from me, busy-fingered, sunrise after sunrise, lingering at the hunch of your back, overwhelmed by the tart clay, in its shadow, & the length of your table, quietly squeezing the hair-specked, criss-crossed scraps in the rolling trash bin, you & your small clay spheres, rubbed to on your powdery bare thigh, as if you had been forming & deforming that forlorn face always, between the thirty-watt light of the bowl-shaped metal floor lamp & the stout taboret, the negative mask teeth, the upper cigar lip, imagining I could rein the histrionic rise & fall of your chest as you “sleep,” knowing I will never make anything as polished, unless you count the balletic splay of a perfectly formed poppy.

For variant theories on how to exploit your partner’s sleeping mechanics, see my book Sorry, Wrong Slumber.

Lost & weathered in your bright light, slugged to the precise slopes of your workspace, lost in an irrational fear of 3-D objects, in desiring to use them to express my dogged horniness, or how lonely is your lonely back to the house at night—you’re like a sausage cased in stars!, enslaved to the deft tension of your wet, smooth furrows that birth lips of bowls, to your insouciant “third eye” (though you might wonder, with all that extra-sensory perception why the need for a third eye?), the hypnotic wave of a spinning piece on the banding wheel, your soft hold of the scraper, thinking—obviously—Why not me?, all else as useful as balls on a wet nurse, weariness of my own task: the scabby, dirt-dry, wagon-pushing work of cleverness, of compressing thoughts & feelings into a phrase the length of a twig, of wringing out that last bit of spunk from your belly, how rage is voracious, “But the opposite of a truth has a hundred thousand shapes & a limitless field”—so says Montaigne.

I further explore these themes in the critical work Japes of Wrath.

The ensorcellment of you, Kath, walking our garden path as if it’s new, skimming your permanently chalked fingers along the roses’ mazy spin, reaching in, imagining journeys, involution, as if dreaming asymmetry, as if dreaming of how magical intimacy, all the wonder of glorious touching, of building eternity out of the arterial stars, I’ve been reading up on the life & death of John Holmes—so much inscrutable screwing!, so much for the barely contained licks of my own piddly personal affairs, all my girlfriends have been capitalists, forever moving on to workers who can be exploited more effectively, the moral being you should always slurp up printed pabulum cum grano salis.

Please consult my romantic account of Holmes’s prevaricating shenanigans, The Executioner’s Dong.

The puffer-fish ball of your molding-cyclopedic seeing like the panoramic vision of cows, the inability, no matter how grassy-eyed, if so endowed, to fail to be curious about the mountains & the sky & about who it is exactly you are in the fieldy darkness, the simplicity of a cow, how if a cow is not simple then nothing in the world, but it is not always innocence in a gentle face, perhaps a Boontling haiku would say it better:

Charlie balled broadly, a bloocher

Killing snake.

Dehigged.


Pearlin, pearlin.

I’ll be sure to include that one as the epigraph to my forthcoming novel, The Charterhouse of Karma.