My Heart is That Eternal Rose Tattoo

by John Yau

Overview

An exhilarating collection of prose poems: surreal, dreamlike vignettes. John Yau takes us on startling journey across wastes of “cities fluttering with lost ghosts” and asks the question “what are you doing now that you're here?”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574231687
Publisher:	David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication date:	01/01/2002
Pages:	165
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.52(d)

About the Author

John Yau is a poet, art critic, and curator. With over fifty books published, some of his most notable include Edificio Sayonara (1992), Radiant Silhouette (1994), Hawaiian Cowboys (1995), Forbidden Entries (1997), My Symptoms (1998), and My Heart is that Eternal Rose Tattoo (2001).

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Samarkand Update

(after Clark Ashton Smith)

In one corner of the main waiting room of a vast, five-sided bus depot, which is one of thirteen sharply peaked structures rising above the terrain, that highly disciplined bands of hooded and numbered gnomes erected along the Silk Road last spring, two winged creatures squat comfortably within their voluminous cotton robes. Identical yellow and blue diamond patterns, they are not a design but some kind of signal or beacon.

Three large red moths hover above them. On each wing there appears to be an eye, almond shaped and outlined in fine black dust, which reminds the figure (the reader), who is sitting almost directly opposite the winged creatures (pages of text), of certain nearly forgotten icons.

Huddled at one end of a long wooden bench (or pew), each creature carefully pores over a large oblong octavo, its pages filled with vertical rolls of helical script. Pages reading pages. The beginning of a hall of mirrors into which these figure have entered.

Hexagonal tiles of scorpions and cantelopes. Symmetrical cerulean blue butterfly stain on wall between two onyx inlaid doors leading to overlapping tings of arrival and departure platforms. Arranged on the flanking windowsills, an anonymous tribute; two rows of nine emerald-colored lizards lying on their backs. Between these offerings, mounted on the wall directly behind the winged figures, is a row of black-and-white photographs taken in one of the three documentary styles that briefly delighted the inhabitants of thesurrounding villages.

Seven celebrated eunuchs stare at the ball of bright air gathered before their unblinking eyes, the formal pose of their bald heads and wrinkled countenances frozen in the photograph's collective memory of what a locked room crammed with labeled jars preserves for all eternity in the irregularly numbered vaults carved into the granite substrata beneath the palace basement.

Outside the bus depot, one can hear a crow singing, possibly the one that has been genetically altered; it is covered with a cloak of red feathers and punctuated by a long gold beak. It is said that if one listens carefully to his squawking, one hears him sing of a marketplace where presence and absence barter over what's to be exchanged. It is said that he wants to reclaim a body he longer remembers possessing, a body that he believes existed in the cold corridors of his past.

Others claim, however, that to satisfactorily interpret the crow's song is to exile him from this cylindrical forest, its dense calligraphy, and that whatever words one hears in his cawing are the last and first noises you made in your sleep.

Copied from the Margins

A gouged wall or scratched mirror or both. A pool of brocade swallows in imported smoking jackets. This anthracite shatter was supposed to have been excised pages ago, about the time dinosaurs were abducted by cartoonists in tall rubber boots. Pried loose from every book of handkerchief candy.

Copied from the Margin 2

Candle smoke coagulates on uneven surface face of a heavenly cloud, its shifting plumage. We drop the postcard into a box. Later we boarded a cart headed for the airport. A red cart. A red cart with yellow wheels. The kind that turns backwards in the afternoon sun. When it is a plum floating in peach nectar injected with streaks of delicious poison. Who has time to remember all this someone shouted, arms outstretched, neck muscles pulsing to the digital watch surgically embedded in his right eye. And so we waved good-bye to the dogs before they got too juiced.

Swan

I drifted through a string of sand-clogged towns, an ejected blue deity. I got plopped on every floor. I toured the shovel factory and kissed a row of obedient mitten warmers. It wasn't enough to satisfy the supplicants, their mouths busy forming the platitudes by which they raised themselves from the nearly alive but not quite dead status. I climbed through the rungs in a zoo. I embraced statues after I gouged out their eyes.

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Excerpted from MY HEART IS THAT ETERNAL ROSE TATTOO by John Yau. Copyright © 2001 by John Yau. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

I.
	Samarkand Update	15
	Copied from the Margins	18
	Copied from the Margins (2)	19
	Swan	20
	Another Name for It	21
	Almost Between a Rock and a Hard Place	22
	Scenes from Family Life	23
	While Waiting for the Weather to Retreat	25
	The Perfectionist	27
	Shorter Version	28
	Opening Scene	29
	Robert Walser Speaks about Robert Walser	30
II.
	Untiled I	35
	Untiled II	36
	Untiled III (A False Painting)	38
	Untiled IV	39
	Untiled V (Unsent Postcard)	40
	Untiled VI (In Place of a Dream)	41
	Untiled VII	42
	Untiled VIII (Movie Plots #13 through 39)	44
	Untiled IX (Posted Postcard)	46
	Untiled X (False Painting #2)	47
	Untiled XI (after Franz von Stuck and Arnold Bocklin)	48
	Untiled XII	49
	Untiled XIII (First Variation on XII)	50
	Untiled XIV	51
	Untiled XV (After an Unknown Artist)	52
	Untiled XVI	53
	Untiled XVII	54
	Untiled XVIII (Guide to Museum Collection)	55
	Untiled XIX (Recent Acquisitions)	57
III.
	The Last Emperor Lives on the Moon	61
IV.
	Cadmium Deposits, Cobalt Traces, and Ocher Mist	75
	Heraclitus's Parking Lot	78
	Film Adaptations of Five of America's Most Beloved Poems	81
	Genghis Chan, The Film	84
	Lake Country	86
	The Long Way Around	89
	Double-Headed Creature Features	92
	The Story So Far, and Not One Step Farther	96
	The Shortest Distance between Two Walls	99
	Summer Rental	102
	Summer Hiatus	105
	Poem Based on a Non-Existent Photograph	108
	Our Small but Perfect Town	113
V.
	The Difference Between Autobiography and Romance	117
	The Dog and Pony Opera	119
	I'm Just a Factory Boy	123
	Second Chapter	125
	Side Street Adjacent to Lower Breughel Parkway	127
	The Annual Indoor Picnic of Ambulatory Somnambulists	130
	The Unexpurgated Biography of Simon Yam	133
	Untitled and Unnumbered	137
	Three Panels from an Anonymous Fifteenth-Century Painting Which Has Been Subsequently Repainted on Two Occasions	139
	Three Wheel Rocket	141
	My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo	145
VI.
	from Obit to Possible Epitaph	151
	Single	152
	Double Self-Portrait	153
	Caption to a Postcard from the 20th Century	159
	Chinese Spoke	160
	Chinese Spoke (2)	161
	A Physical Matter	162

Editorial Reviews

With language as lovely as it is strange, John Yau describes paintings not yet painted, photos not yet taken and movies not yet made... Yau's many admirers will be pleased.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

With language as lovely as it is strange, he describes paintings not yet painted, photos not yet taken, and movies not yet made. His many admirers will be delighted.

Publishers Weekly