Archive of Desire

Now she delivers a “poem in four parts,” which originated as a musical, visual, and lyrical collaboration with the composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu, with Lewis on the microphone offering a live reading of this sequence. Ignited by their encounters with Cavafy’s archive, in the heart of Athens, the multimedia quartet exalted the liminal spaces where desire and diaspora meet—where art often asserts itself most forcefully. In this volume, Lewis brings this performance to life on the page, where the poem weaves in and out of Cavafy’s bedrooms, notebooks, and the suppressed erotic excavation underpinning all of his work. Lewis converses directly with Mr. Cavafy: “often you / reminded us that // the only true / barbarians are the ones / raging in silence inside // of our own / minds.” But she also brings equal parts of herself to this study of artistry and sensuality, as in the short, tender section entitled “Cavafy in Compton/Closet Anthem: Self-Portrait at Sixteen, 1979.” As in all Lewis’s works, here she reaches across centuries to express what is timeless and not bound by our current moment or our single selves: the discipline and glory of art, the give-and-take of love, the kiss that lives in the moment, and the unfolding journey of being human, whose contours become clear only with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.