Signaletics

Emilia Phillips

• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781937378547
• eBook ISBN: 9781937378561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Signaletics pits the measured against the immeasurable, the body against identity, and the political against the personal. With a defunct 19th-century body measurement system of criminal identification as a foundation, the poems move in and out of history, only to arrive at the immediate voice of a speaker, distraught about the death of a child brother, the remove of a father, and the estrangement of the personal with the politics of her country.

II

Diaspora

When the world goes pearly

in the helio range with ash and element,

and whatever was

understood in corpus

is suddenly forgotten—

like the reason why I walked

into this room—

when there is no one,

there will be a few,

perhaps, in a sleepy

orbit. And when they finally lose

communication, one will ask

nothing, over and over,

Do you read? — Do you read?

Except this will not be

the language he speaks in,

though the language will be the same

as it was before.

One will cry. Another, laugh

and slam his brow

against the indestructible

window until he’s bleeding,

forehead split like the mango

he once shook from a tree,

until the sound that lives on

between the panes

becomes him, becomes the elegant

slander of his life he hears

or thinks

he hears, eavesdropping,

in this way, on the future.

•

If one of you can

point to this and say,

This is untrue,

then it is.

When and If are old friends

who write

but never visit, a withdrawal

of the senses

from a violent land.

I can’t remember

why I am

standing on this threshold,

every thing before me

a cloud

beginning to scatter,

while gravity

looks through me,

down my body

and into my shoes.

Cross Section

Into the bath drawn cold for fever

I lower until the water covers all

but breasts, eyes, & nose—

One o’clock & B.’s body

is now in the chamber where a magnet

will skim her ashes for screws, bone

fasteners, & crowns. The boy

behind me on the plane asked why

I was wearing the blue mask

& held a cup of ice to my neck

& wrists. Pressure points, I told him but didn’t

explain. At security

my bags & body probed. Why

are you traveling? Why are you flushed?

A pacemaker explodes in the fired

chamber, but the heart slows

in cold water, the fever drawn

from the body: hot to cold,

hot to cold. In the terminal waiting

for the next flight out,

I studied the magazine

cross section of Al-Jazari’s elephant

clepsydra in whose hollow

body a bowl continually fills, becoming heavy

with each hour.

The Study Heads

—after Franz Messerschmidt’s Character Heads

Parts of us we don’t precisely feel until in pain.

For this, we are surface creatures, capable of expression

and loss. Think of magnetism, Mesmer’s

panacea, his patients going willful, each into a noose

roped to a baquet tub of alloyed copper—

in want of power or forgiveness, repair. But what comes?

Only the grimace, hysterical laugh, or monolith

stare. But if their facial exaggerations, cast in medias res

by Franz Messerschmidt, caused the body to react,

tense, with a tingling in the cheek, a light head, a mind to work

over the corporeal field, fallowed by a latent

decision to possess some trifle

of vigor, is this not a minor resurrection?

By proxy, even?

…

The evening after we saw

the heads in circular congress

at the Belvedere, an American (I could tell—

by his suit and walk to the table) shifted

in his seat beside us when J. asked me where

my father was now.

—Back in Bagram.

Perhaps it was the attraction of an idea and not strictly empirical

magnetism, the body as a somatic

conduit, completed

by a lacquer of ions, that Mesmer was after.

From him, we’ve earned the word mesmerize.

The man was listening, leaning in, ever so

slightly, and when I turned in

to his gaze, he spread

his white napkin across his lap, studying it—

as if it was a redacted map that waited

to be redrawn, resurrected,

which is, after all, the byword of memory,

collective and, therefore, impure—

And after a sip of his sparkling water,

his hands, in afterthought

or mindlessness

like a mother to her child’s hair,

smoothed the creases down.

…

From Arabic, we digested zenith,

albatross, and ghoul.

Messerschmidt so angered the spirit

of classical proportion with the contorted

faces, he claimed he was tortured

nightly for transgressions

against “high art.” He began self-portraits

in the mirror, pinching the loose loom

of skin above a rib, twisted—.

And if he was both the spirit and himself,

then...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Subject in the Position of the Soldier with No Arms
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Notes
• Acknowledgments