I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
Li Young Lee
Gianfranco Gorgoni
it is
written Cock-e-noe but people say ka-KEE-nee
as in bikini or Eeniweetok
in the Sound
8 hours west of Montauk with a good breeze.
All this you said and I
wrote how
we’ll maybe never see each other again but all’s well
(promises are always lies)
God damn
your tightrope-walker thighs
the hair inside
leading somewhere I hardly dare mention
It’s such a violent thing in me
All you have to do to make me happy is take off your clothes.
(Frank O’Hara talking)
All you need do is whisper across an ocean
how we’ll go to Cockenoe
(ka-KEE-nee!)
next summer.
But it’s not so good for camping overnight, there’s rats.
What do you mean babe the place
got its name from a Montauk Indian, Cockenoe
camped there a whole year (dates
1652 / 3)
Cockenoe? no: ka-KEE-nee
ka-KEE-nee (right)
you ought to know, you grew up facing it, you even owned a
SAVE COCKENOE button.
It’s an island
and in my vocabulary
Thule, ile joyeuse, isle of the blest
are all just words meaning
next-to-you
and when you’re cool you’re
cool as the Frozen Ocean—
if I could only turn into a frosty iron mountain
(the Vikings made it
to Spitzbergen, named it
The Cold Edge,
that’s how cold I’d be)
a red spike of magnetic ore
inside your blue iceberg,
let the aurora borealis
blush.
Emma Baker
80 year old Mohegan talking in 1925:
Our great-great-aunt used to take us on a certain hill
and point NW, said that was the way her folks came and we
must never forget it.
Never forget how
led forward by dream mammoth
amid clouds of pine pollen
erect bipeds
trekked on through
Hyperborean fields watered by glaciers at a thousand
campsites
seeds of artemisia
lupine, spinach
encased in petrified trash
layers reported up to 10,000 years
still vital
a conscious field
never shattered
a continuous
forward-looping flow
leaping ever and again
out of patterned confinement
mind upon mind
a sentient stream
doomed to know no germination save
by combustion
a backbone pointed to the stars
like the jack pine
whose sealed cones hold seed
up to 100 years till struck by
fire—
at the peak of conflagration
resin
oozing out of the cones blazing
they pop open
and the seed spills
only to come up again
in an abundance of
light and warm ashes
(Heidegger ’33:
Poet, shake hands with lightning)
1654 East Hampton. A bear
drowned in the creek at Accabonac
taken to the sachems per agreement
and when the English came round after that, the old
Sunksquaw pointed to the skin
showing her teeth
(quotes) ‘in token She ett thereof’
seven glittering points
under Ursa Major
lowah mintau ves awza
do the thing I did
laughing
machees-cund duo
bad as the devil
ka-KEE-nee her husband 20 years younger
marriage a political institution
I’m a Paumonok boy myself
Paumonok their name for Long Island
‘tribute-land’
ever since prehistoric times, paying tribute
(there’s so much to tell)
a spirit flinging boulders
from Glen Cove over to the Connecticut shore.
Never forget how one day at Devon
soon after the War
these 2 older
kids sitting in a bay window
back to back
reading Jungle Boy and Kim
I wanted to be
like them
arms
aglow with golden hairs—
what are they like now
with their
brisk, lacquered wives and
wrist-slashing heirs?
Yeah but what’s so much better about
vision
when all you see
is a flower in a book
squashed flat as a private disclosure?
Oh sure the daisy
signature of detachment
yeah but
walking on water wasn’t built in a day.
Thing about a miracle, if
for an instant
it isn’t
too good to be true
you better believe
it’s over.
ka-KEE-nee (the island) I
pursued to 42nd Street, the Library.
Islands are always different and
no matter how tiny
there are
variations in flora and fauna
special diseases.
Cockenoe’s
only 28 acres
and two years ago a pelican
never seen north of the Carolinas
turned up there
dead.
At the Local History desk a woman appeared
lavender jumpsuit, black ankleboots
I thought of you
(from the waist down the resemblance was
startling)
She overheard ka-KEE-nee and
smiling, turned:
I’m from Westport, I know
where it is, my name’s Devon.
Oh no I said,
That’s the name of a yacht club
(((she fled)))
Later on
Oishi-san
got out a jar of liqueur
with a paper label
that same shade
faded lavender
a pair of deer
Chinese writing in their horns
MAKES YOU LIVE 1000 YEARS.
Haunted
by an image of
hands
(if not mine
whose?)
pulling those lavender
corduroys
down your pale legs
while
not for an instant
ceasing to meet your gaze
I damn your eyes lady
your pair of not quite
matching wrists
your mind
like sudden raw sunlight.
Do you and your artist lover in London
the one that has the same first name as me
ever see your own
hearts like red fish in a tank?
When Auden died they found his
dictionary
clawed to pieces—
how can anybody ever find words?
Why can’t my
words laugh back at me like you do?
Here I sit, in a room
high in the rain over the East River
staring at a pink-splotched sheet of manuscript
thinking of old moon diver Li Po.
I want to be a young artist
the name ka-KEE-nee means interpreter
I want to be someplace else
ka-KEE-nee was a Montauk Indian
someplace else, like London
he assumed the name in the year 1648
In the Indian tongue ka-KEE-nee means
repeater
I want to be someplace else
ka-KEE-nee translated the Bible into the Indian tongue
someplace like London
ka-KEE-nee
was an interpreter
interpret
I want to be a young artist in London
language has no power
language goes on and on
ka-KEE-nee is a mere ghost, an old one too and
I want to be a young artist
ka-KEE-nee means repeater
I want to be someplace else
I want to be a cloud with dreadlocks
language has no power to create
I want to be a young artist in London
language repeats
I want to be an invisible river in the ocean, a sea-poose
I want to be an angel with a 5 o’clock shadow
speaking an angelic tongue
language repeats
ka-KEE-nee was a Bible translator
I want to be a pair of eyes other than my own
repeat
I want to be a tongue
I want to be an angelic tongue
I want to be an invisible current
I want to be someplace else
I want to be able to bend the shape of a lightwave by
moving my hand a certain way.
David Rattray is author of A Red-Framed Print of the Summer Palace (Vincent Fitzgerald Co., New York, 1983).
Originally published in
Nicolas Echevarria, Pam Yates, art by James Nares and Tom Otterness, writing by Daisy Zamora, Kathy Acker, Glenn O’Brien, and more.
I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
Li Young Lee