The Uses of Distortion

(appendix to the     forgotten                                   )

See character         see costume               see ambassador conjugate of
                                                                                                    toreador:

Country of origin     see that night I fell in love (wrong man).
Race and ethnicity   see mauve suite for women.
                    see   my boss is the mouth of god.

I went to another country as an ambassador, she begins,
          and there I read the newspapers.
          There was something so lovely about          the reportage.

All the reason.

He counters when I first came to your country (challenging her)
               I was in love with the perfection of your apples.

It seems a lewd thing to say             but she knows

          he has contempt          for the perfection of form.

Press conference.
Press harder.

She awakens from     her gray jacket               (     ).

She can't help but     feel the air of her bourgeois
             life     thickening like a locket.

          This day     beginning now          ( )
                   in this morning          and the life to which it is bound.

She is holding up the finger   of     an illiterate woman
                      in triumph.

He says release that finger I want to use it.

Here begins the next bracketing     of their encounter.

She has already decided that   her own life
          that thing she wears around               is nothing.

I would give it to you.

He says I spend hours in the supermarket.
She says I have no idea     how to shop.

He would press that finger     onto paper and call it meditations.

The official press release     does not.
Press instead   ensnare.

The Saint of the hand.

The men here are terrible lovers, she says.
          where I come from they are               not lovers     but disciples.

Their fixation on women's bodies     is a form of disassociation, he says.

She has already decided that nothing          could mean more
          to her than                    serving the greater design.

She says There is every reason to be optimistic.

As a painter, he is understood to be inarticulate.

Can she imagine herself really IN a country (     )?

The closet of mauve and blue suits.
The belief that she can not be naked.
Her face an illumination of her non-nakedness. Her face   a clothing
                                                                                  advertisement.

She wears it well.
She says     I congratulate the women of this region.
          He says Aren't you of this region?
          She says It's like a dark room          where you talk to everyone
             deeply
          but without    seeing them.

Good Friday. Her hand in yours.

She says Everything we do makes us safer.
He says I painted you naked.

Here a hell of sorts enters.
Hers. His. That of the (nation).