RED SHIFTING (II) - [When G. moves into the English language] Poem by ALEXANDER SKIDAN

When G. moves into the English language, it's as if she peels away, like a transfer sheet, from the blurring image of herself, with which, it would seem, she had become related.

The language is transforming, becoming unyielding, drier; commanding little notes of irrepressibility are awakening in it, and forces, attracting and repelling, squeezing into some sort of vacuum.

It's as if she is moving away and with distance, she is taking possession of herself.

Her mouth has been contracted into a self-sufficient pleonasm.

Locked in an impregnable idiom.

Sealed by the Roman alphabet.

An isolation, passing into boundless estrangement, intoxicates, as it does others - a tiny birthmark or a scar on the shoulder blade.

Or the slight asymmetry of features.

I fetishize the voice.

Its trunk descends with roots, into the deep of the throat, the whirlpool of the esophagus, the bread of the stomach, into the Babylonian manger of debauchery, where you can drown with such abandon.

And, every time, I assimilate it more and more.
Bewitching intimacy.

Just say it.

She gives me pleasure - with her tongue, in which I barely manage to keep up with her, feeling, as if I am turning into a foreigner to my very self.

Translate.

More and more often this pleasure begins to cause pain.


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(what a horrifying dream...and yes, very kafkian. it seems to me to have so much to do with the power of language - you pronounce yourself guilty, you are pronounced to be arrested - your confinement is in word only - you can leave but you choose to stay. the source of your guilt (hashish) is simultaneously symbolic of home (the keys). you want to write a novel but remember that you are in russia - you can escape to new york, but you lack the 'keys' to get in. and so you live below ground, in a small civilization, a sub(way) culture - where life with its movements and celebrations goes on.

strange, but not so strange...)