ariana reines
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BE STILL MY HEART
I’m in Portland, OR. This tour begins tonight. Stuart is to my right, reading Ada, or Ardor. I am on my third Americano.
It is a place called coava that people told us to go to. There’s a table with a drillpress over it, three times the size of my sweetheart’s drillpress; between the coffee and the carpenting equipment it’s like the wet dream of a certain lumberjacky masculinity. I can have that wet dream too. I like to pour coffee down my black hole when I’m bleeding. I suppose that could be said. Larissa our hostess makes books and medicines and also, I surmise, considerable magic.
Here I am in the toilet. I sent this picture to my sweetheart. The toilet resembles a sauna. You’ll notice my hair is looking triangular? That’s because the triangularity in the head regions of Colette and Inanna are among my inspirations upon and for this journey.
I wanted to title the post in which I would describe the launches of Mercury “BE STILL MY HEART” but that was so many days ago and now there is so much coffee in my blood it is as though I have no emotions, but a pleasure to accept their having somewhere and somehow existed. The pleasure of exteriority. I don’t even want a life.
Here are a few photographs from the beautiful party at This Red Door for Mercury, Paul Legault’s The Other Poems, and Harmony Holiday’s Negro League Baseball. Rebecca Wolff looked gorgeous, suited up in a kind of calvinist severity that is very New Englandy and fits her enchanting novel The Beginners very well. Paul wore a plush bear suit and Harmony an elegant black dress; both Paul and Harmony are also physically beautiful to me; since I am talking about appearances I might as well say so. I will let the coffee do the talking. I went in shirt and shorts. There were two bottles of Haitian rum and cookies that looked like genitals in aspic.
And here are some photographs of the Halloween reading at The Poetry Project. I was so depressed I didn’t want to do it. I hate Halloween. I had had a gorgoeus day though, been lucky to have one, and that’s for reasons I had better not speak about because I don’t know how to describe them. But it had been tiring also, and sometimes I can’t tell the difference between exhaustion and demoralization. The reading turned out to be beautiful and exhilerating. I was sure nobody would be there and I would cry like a humiliated Pierrot Lunaire, but it was packed with living souls, including some of my favorite men and women in the world. Also, I looked scary.
I was going for The Fool card in the Rider-Waite deck but it sort of ended up like a semi-French clown sort of thing. I felt that I’d hurt the feelings of dressers-up if I didn’t dress up but I really had to force myself to do it, but it turned out that was the right attitude I think, even though the people in costume were in the minority, including Elieen and Leopoldine, for whose sake I had worked up my courage to paint my face, since Eileen loves Halloween, but they showed up in street clothes, the traitors, but Eileen said the concept was father and daughter in France, which worked, and I forgave them because feeling like a fool is good for me. It can help one to allow other, more important things to come to the fore.
Here you can see some excellent men: Matt Fishbeck and Aaron Scaturro, and if you squint between their heads you’ll see the heads of Richard Hell and Sheelaigh Bevan, who is of course not a man, and Thurston Moore, who is one.
People told me my feet were important to the show. I accept that. Justin Cavin’s photographs reflect that. In any case I am normally shy about photographs of myself, but I don’t have any emotions right now.
The wonderful poet Alan Felsenthal was the dj! I wish I had pictures of him, but I do not. And I have no pictures of James Copeland and his band either.
:(
