Jeffrey Schultz
IV. Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell
a light summer dress when the body has gone
—Levis, maybe roughly
In the fullness of itself,
The acronym opens
Upon a woods, upon
What, within woods, lurks.
Such quiet makes its own plans.
This is one explanation
For all the noise of things.
Within the quiet wood,
The most frightful labors:
A group of what had been women,
Before the word for women
And with it what women’d known
Was disappeared, whisper
The spell under breath so low
It never makes a sound.
It is not, the spell, a matter of revenge.
That would be a misunderstanding.
It is godlike and brutal
And beyond signification.
Beyond the woods,
Everyone is still talking
About signification all these years later
As if signification meant
Any god damn thing at all.
But the world is still real. The terrors
It imagines are real terrors.
None of it represents anything.
There are no more women.
No rent garments. No gnashed teeth.
There is no one to stop it.
It is not a matter of revenge.
The woods are their ear to the ground.
Jeffrey Schultz’s artist statement:
Title of series: Fifteen Variations on Themes from Levis.
In a series of fifteen brief variations, Schultz will meditate on a number of themes–some of them poorly recalled from memory, some of them badly obscured or poorly understood–from Levis’s work.
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