Capricorn Moon
1/4/11
In Ashville to move Sam; a half sleep—clouds gray up. I should be on my way.
***
Specifics alluded to: Irene Norton Need, née Norton. grew up in East Orange & Dad worked for AT & T. Of old New England Nortons and Adams from Lewiston area of Maine back to Major Peter Norton of Revolutionary War & back thence to the Mayflower to several of John Howland’s daughters—in the 19th century the Nortons and Adams of Lewiston were doctors and teachers and her father grew up at Northfield Academy southwest of Keane NH where his father Lion Levi Norton taught math. Mom went to Mt Holyoke and then did an MA in German at Columbia post-war & met my Dad in the early 1950’s at Berkeley when she was working on a PhD on Schiller, then stopped
had five kids, lived in Atomic town in Oak Ridge and then in Cleveland before moving back to MA, Andover where her kids went to high school graduated, did drugs in the “Ice Storm” 1970’s. Got a law degree from Boston College and then moved with dad to Durham NC where she did public service law for poor folks who needed wills drawn up or help with landlords; died like her mother and sister of congestive heart failure in her sleep in her mid-80’s.
***
Mom called the police
after I threw a pair of scissors not
at her but near at a wall, no
surprise it was across the round table
in the dining room; it seemed we
could not reach the evening meal without a fight—
Dad would get home and the long simmer
would erupt—she did not like to cook
made things like “Island Style Ham” with
canned pineapples; she used milk
in her mashed potatoes but we drank
powdered milk cut with skim
thick globs of sour at the bottom of the pitcher
and only Dad had seconds of meat.
1/5/11
On the drive home from Asheville today I almost fall asleep, pull over at a Bojangles seeing black and sleep, have some chicken prolly lived in a tiny cage; when I pull back
on the highway I am surprised to find I am 30 miles further than I thought; five miles on there is the ambulance and police car residue of a major accident, the exit ramp scattered with sheets of paper.
***
More specifics in hammer point: one older sister—like mom, Dad was the younger of a same sex dyad, his brother dead at 47 of executive heart disease in the early 1970’s—Ruth became a nurse, appeared wise-acre but actually much more pious than Mom sang solos in Baptist Church & married a patient, a sweet gentle guy who had tuberculosis and spent the war years almost exact in New Mexico sanatorium, lived another 50 years, so you ask me not a bad way to get through the war. Drew ad copy for a Western Goods store & they lived outside Denver in a flat street suburb.
There’s nothing like post-War housing developments writ grid perfect and many of the houses built the same no one has to ask where the bathroom is. In Middleburg Heights, we had a milk chute & I guess for a while before the powered milk we got milk or eggs delivered. We’d crawl through it. I am wondering now why I remember the powered milk most from Andover when we had more money, Dad working for a private company and so we were no longer living on a 1960’s NASA check.
***
The rule was we could not smoke pot in the house so
we’d go out back, step across herm rock wall
into the, let’s call them “buffer woods” between
developments. Back further you came out on a golf course
one night I and Tom and John Gorman left golf carts
littered at the bottom of hills and sandtraps—John
a student of Chogyam Trungpa so we were very drunk
he left his drivers license in the one cart still working we
returned to the shed; we are wandering the fairways
at dawn search & one of us thinks to look in the shed
& we slip away. I hitchhiked across country in four days
to get to a Pattie Smith concert, John is in the crowd & tells me
quite seriously she is Vajrayogini.
1/6/11
Barred owls that nest in the white oaks over our house are calling. Early evening crescent moon and the sky illuminated and torn.
***
Hard to know if austerity meals of frozen peas, or carrots and corn, a slice of roast were
necessary for 1960’s family, a tendency towards instant or open & heat, but not tv dinners which were a luxury or fun & certain foods were uncontrolled—peanut butter, or cereal, I would put quarter cup scoops of sugar on rice krispies to get milk & suger slurry, but dinner prison precise; I had badly matched teeth and a ¾ inch over bite sucking my knuckle until maybe fourth grade & it would take a long time to chew vegetables I was often the last to leave, no forearms on the table etc. & constant fights, bad feelings & intellectual bullying. All food precisely ritualized, the exact same breakfast every school day Dad’d cook Mom looking bleary and witch fierce over her coffee. Little soldiers.
Years later my Dad asks my two-year old Sam if he wants the last sweet roll; Sam says yes & Dad says, “well you can’t have it, it’s mine”. Mom enjoys pears or something he’s made for her & says nothing.
***
Passage that was not my time
the wrong ship; I am not a slave but
this one is going somewhere else
I am permitted only to imagine
to make sense of what sense
says in sun and listen; the department
store women’s department floor
I started to carry a book;
it was not about me, but I was
to wait while Mom got hers
at us and bought a dress
we’d be punished because long
before she was done we couldn’t
keep still.
1/7/11
Where are you at today Mom? In what is now steadfastly beyond being apart. Not merely in your own thoughts and desires and efforts to apply, not merely on your way to a reunion, not merely the endlessly desired abandon in which the door to the kitchen and house is forever shut behind you & you can be birch again.
***
Between the age of 29 and 36, Mom had five children—three sons, Bruce, Edward, and me, and then two daughters, Barbara and Laura, so that there were two same sex dyads and “David and the girls” and “David and the boys” she used to say. Which means pregnant something like 50 out of 84 months and nursing, leaking, flexing like a python pushes a rat along its length. Stew body burbling placental caul had been reading Schiller at the edges of 1948 New York suddenly blown to suburb somewhere, small houses and clothes lines.
***
Impossible well called body
birds fly from a startle is
God’s footstep and stele the
track left to auger;
Helen’s face as psyche and
cupid unfolds roseward—
not “into the woods” but
“departed” open.
I knew as leak and marsh what was
at times more fluid dolphin
of forgiveness
Celan called stone
to hold a plate of fruit
into downturned mouths.
1/8/11
Angry today. Some bad part of Mom stretches through time as long as I arrange the transfers. Catch myself circling a thorn I read as “having my motives assigned badly”. Then I have go out and do the weekly pass through Krogers, Whole Foods. I can never move at the right speed to pass without leaving a show of the anger I am carrying from somewhere.
***
Damien says something about guilt over lunch; we are
talking about post-War theory like Sartre and trauma that
I say marks “the extremes to be observed”, but Damien
means something like the assumption (o Mary) of no way
to get out of complicity (new French theories of the Fall);
its an understandable desire to become very very still
but the marks are the same & have been there to read a
long time—its about intention, not use—but I wonder
why don’t I think the same way about red wheelbarrow
(gone symbol) of guilt I am stained by sitting near Mom’s
feeding it & I am soaked it up like a wall in an old hallway
***
Dreamt a stepped on time had come
to light I’d forgot and lived despite
I’d killed someone and hadn’t
yet been caught I’d passed but
now I’d seen it was in the open
I wanted an out and was
checked a series of portals others
reminded me of chalk
lines kids draw, half
to test limit, half to
color day
exact it lights inside
I shut my eyes
some debts don’t cancel.
1/9/10
Moon in silver Pisces in pure crescent unseen as a winter storm stoops its glide at dusk
that’ll snow demains and turn to sleet under the forever in the South so towering sun turns any cold to air and balm;
Meantime in dialect switch signaled indent, disturbing shit in Arizona an American tragedy goes ballistic on a target—woman congressman, never one of these plutocrats—in the fantastic daze of a lie.
***
Mom threw guilt pretty hard, a good pitcher, you had anything
to say she’d be right back it was your feeling your thing
to pay you were angry was a pretty awful guy kind of thing to
be like her father all Puritan severe & black-suit alchoholic who
was so unhappy you don’t want to be like that do you? “I’m sorry
yer angry, but its your thing and we don’t touch so you’ll need
to figure a discharge somewhere but I am not taking it—no dialogue
here, no back-and-forth, this is strictly accumulate setting. You
want some milk to wash it down? I’m going to send you outside to
play alone awhile. Let the sky, suburban hedges, that yellow honey
locust and corner brick daddy-longlegs ants you ran over with
your matchbox cars so completely be your Mom. They’ll do
it better than me. I’m worthless.”
Thanks Mom for telling me the severe. It made me think of the impossible.
***
Woven by the moon hangs in place
a wound there’s no account of
marked in dusk stitch prescience
of ours in autumn hallways
Buddhists call “becoming” that
leads to birth (but blooming
also an under red) become
his eyes a linger beckon
room next door impossible
interior hidden between nothing
other.
Woven by the moon hangs in place
unreal the altar other, the
“wine-dark” sun.
1/10/11
Storms slips by ghost ship, a dusting of snow. Tracks the Atlantic. Last night dreamt a young man bound hands over his head, set them alight and ran out into a crowd. A spirit woman put the flames out. He was John the Baptist and later when challenged, said “you have nothing like that”.
***
Bruce brought a copy of Fritz Perls book home from New College 1974 maybe
and we acted out a few dreams in the Andover bedroom. I’d dreamt of a girl I saw
through garden gates, tied to a stake by her father the king, and Bruce said that’s
what Perl’s calls your “top dog” what’s he say to you?
What was play in our house, like bouncing on the bed.
Mom liked that Eric Berne “Games People Play” analysis and would use
transactional language to put down some frustration with her as a bossy parent she
wasn’t going to listen to and you wouldn’t want to be as it was a loser role
you could be an adult, the obvious problem with this I am staring out the window
of the car unable to say.
***
As melancholy a form without twin would
that guilt is not has to be
loyalty and rue
des enfants
what the children are instead of ash.
11.11.11
Classes start tomorrow. I teach a class on ritual, one on Buddhist Ethics, and the big class for International Comparative Studies. There is always such a long walk from my dream to the classroom. I see worlds that are not there—the student whose brown hair and clothes tell me a story I think in sudden images I accept as if real I must be imagining a relation to—specular mastery over what I’ve mostly mis-read.
And then other times I see a whole chain of relations in a small gesture that I can actually navigate a moment by.
***
Driving through downtown Lowell I see someone has gotten in
a car and, after a specific pause, feel like they’ll begin to move
into traffic, so I say to my slightly blind Mom “hey that car’s pulling
out” and she says “oh you are psychic, which pleases me. Another
time we were coming down from Mt. Moosilauke and talking
about which trail to take—I wanted to go the longer ridge trail and
said, “well, the other one’s will be washed out” and they were I
think I made a happy connection from how wet the trail was or
maybe saw a picture in my mind’s eye of something a few minutes
ahead the way we were going.
***
With molded nutmeg skin and wheat
hair, Sasha was the first doll after my
sister Laura, was a person in a story &
so talked in that stir animals have
sat among the others as they were bought
and had bears the way little girls do beside
them and decided who they were
like Wednesday’s child; Mom’s to-the
sticking Teddy-bear named John and
paint-bald Patsy she carried out
of childhood like the North Star
ascetics carry in clay pots to
keep the coals burning between
breaths of the season’s camps.
1/12/11
Didn’t know Mom and can’t understand it, maybe too busy hiding. Just twenty or so things I say over and over, and I’d want to call after a month or so, or when I felt a certain way, though I was never happy after.
***
Am in a hospital w/double pneumonia and there’s nothing
to do but wait and Franco was dying it took a long time &
Mom would come she knew something was wrong and I
couldn’t tell her I didn’t want to see her and I’d say that but
I couldn’t say why she was not going to be able to help me
and I didn’t want her to know that she hadn’t I was a kid
and sometimes I see kids get frustrate so painful they cannot
speak I will probably die that way or one time did
losing breath Mom you cannot help me with that.
***
In all the upstairs rafters where milk fell
you were the sun there, a black winter pale,
apart. You were the only one who
knew, stepped around where the
floor creaked what I was doing,
saw, but was gone past I thought beautiful,
black, to be left inside, those lit-up
beams almost marigold, almost outside.
A black sun speckled swan’s cuckoo egg
up under a clock there in the ceiling like
the sky with something in between
its blue forever in between I can
never see the far side of
its black, polar depth.
1/13/11
Moon in Taurus this AM; I am trying to rise to the day. See Sam and Rigo off and get ready for class. Later things feel bitter and I feel as if I am spilling.
***
she wasn’t in the writing class, but the teacher let her come in one night to read a piece (as I think about it today I wonder why, the breach of rules heightening the dream-like quality of the encounter) a story about the death of her Mom took a long time even after they stopped fluids she stubbornly lay in the hospital bed a week beyond the possible; she ended it with a coda about wanting to make something with the metal screws and bars
that’d been in her mother’s body and were left in the sifted ash, but they were twisted more damaged and maybe smaller than she thought, so she made a wind chime out
of them hung it up outside her back door on a water oak and maybe clattered
***
Was okay being a mother you are not
supposed to say being taken care of
by a man you criticize those Apollo
boys’ swaggers like you wanted in
was just pride that was at stake you
dealt, worked Dad’s string but ob-
ediant in your part, the agreement
stapled fantasy on some wall “we
are supposed to be like that and I
want it the trappings I/m not ‘spose
to but…” which is it?
Silk and furs Ma and
making sure you never felt
you were pretty but
you knew better.
11/14/11
First day I have seen the afternoon coming back, lingering a longer yellow. Day cool. Lunch with Joe and other favorite things. A day to amble.
***
Its this wanting to be a mother that wasn’t enough we all
settle in our late twenties and cut loss I spent much of my
childhood fantasy that I could spare you that still possible to
be Daphne instead and put that birch leg out akimbo skirt dash
I didn’t understand you’d packed that doll up in the
old black trunk you took to Europe & filled with pillows and
quilts and sagged cardboard later (the way the gold lock hinged
up to snap and clever side pins) black and worn with keeping
around, but such hours under the gray lake Erie were in danger
of blackbirds (Hitchcock knew) it was always on late, and year
after year I missed it. I didn’t know the boat had sailed or that
the girl really in danger given that was the one in me.
***
Tall branch girl gets assigned to the
difference//has to live on the other bank
a house with lights across the river
on the left side of my body below
my heart like a terma between
two lower ribs; having a river inside
the house was a cross that let in
insects and sky
and the forever at either end
of a story; that hiding her there
like Lamonte’s fifth
made resonant I could
never be held, hidden
by the mask of the infinite.
1/15/11
Letters finally between my brothers and sisters, and in the morning and again at night Jehanne & I watch episode after episode of Gabriel Byrne in “In Treatment”. “There are no new problems,” his character mutters to his therapist (who was a D.A. for a while on Law and Order).
***
Maybe it was a dream vivid the way I dream that Dad took we
five kids into the first floor bathroom (I was maybe seven which
means 1965 or 1966, and the Velvet Underground some time that year
played “Sister Ray” in Cleveland I have the recording); he explained
in that grave way he’d be serious that unless we made it easier
for Mom she might have to go away; a strange place the bathroom
for this, and my brother Bruce does not recall this moment and
dream or not it mattered though I might have been wrong about
how sad she was.
***
If time folds I was not already bonfire but touched
did not die in ovens or by spell, or will have
come to the same unfinished. Shore I was washed to
is drawn by Harold’s purple crayon on the cowboy hero
wallpaper, under the gable’s eye. This life Mom and
not another, though it splits like a stick; a short half
of it with books passes the light. Perhaps I am wrong
and spirit doesn’t tell. The distance from me to you
cannot be measured in yurts, is yellowish and
half eaten; there like Saturday and as
green and blind, a image comes to cover
in eclipse of Harvard Sq. I sit outside
Grollier’s, and Sam’s on the phone
in steep sun I say you’ve passed.
***
1/16/11
The paper today is full of articles about science & space, stars disappearing in time and Einstein’s cosmological constant which is a poem you read slant and requires now too much of something we call “dark matter” that doesn’t correspond to the numbers we have anyway, which is why the folded universe makes some sense—it’ll be hard to give up numbers.
***
Mom was thirty five in 1960 towards the end of a serial
pregnancy, sat on a short development street with other
families & seems like a long way from Columbia and
East Orange childhood she never romanced or spoke of
New York as a place she’d lived, though took trains to
school & its possible could have stood on a street corner
in Morningside Heights next to Jack-a-dream; maybe she
did not sense the upper angels and was full unconscious
I can say nothing about, no story.
***
You chose sleep, difficult to forget
& didn’t dream to tell
so busy a debate flower
life in sentences
written in the best, smallest hand.
The “I can’t stand it” of evening
a small thing in a small
house in a small.
Almost complete sidestep you
could safely think in circles
be anonymous cotton
like American destiny
nothing does//the house
you weren’t in.
1/17/11
MLK day. Candy says I have trochanter bursitis (the word trochanter wants some kind of play as tragic goat like singing, etc). After out session I wander past Nice Price Books in Carborro and find various books, browse. Rain comes in late.
***
Bruce tripped to Pattie Smith fast and when we lived in the
Charlesgate Hotel in Boston, “Radion Ethiopia” came out
another dark haired Joan of Arc girl hero we both took serious
anima and enthralled by “Take me up, take me up” was a storm
we recognized. sits oddly with sense Mom wasn’t like
that and instead asleep or deep trapped in gnomic halls but
we saw this need, either as reflection of something Mom couldn’t
see was leaking from her apparent, or as common way of
imagining a way out of prison we shared with her; I always
preferred the former means she was hero and thus worth me
holding out for, but am less sure if I think too long whether
being unconscious allows angels in, a space they can hide
under her skirt and influence is her or not she opened the window
by sleeping her dim body forward; maybe what Alice means
by Alma all piled, a circle of women, coming out of the room at
different times
***
History specific a tincture makes rosary
and reflectant stops in profile
her being occasional to, despite
insight of Kemore handle sequence
required to get milk, linoleum spatterd
leaf shadows pattern a days
mode indigo & quilt relief
a flash a second, understory
she was always thinking
& so impressed resilient what
limit was, what sky was
bent from above
a shoreline apart like aril
imagined Ariel.
1/19/11
Reading circle and day’s shame leave me disaster it is necessary to step away from—a long day from early morning rise I am thinking about Fred, working that over, starts clear gray differences of morning precise as angled shades and light, but later a nice dense ball of thick weedage has gathered, stone that doesn’t roll gone monolith I begin to have to attend to, shout from the top of its emerged again. Fury gathers into thin wirey persistent accusation the way blown leaves accumulate against fences, catches against the hurt. But its hard not to notice how like Mom this way of feeling is, how much she liked a cold fight to rail against, like tides come in.
***
Long before Mom became a lawyer, punishments and
points of view were argued like cases mostly to push
us back if angry, that there was a rational reason could
be said; hence inflexible act of the order of the world &
indisputable one should be loyal to like Arjuna to his
dharma or like Kant would have it logic required.
***
He gets out of the car to yell at me after
I honked, is always happening to me I
am a moment stepped back where I was
going so say “hey” gets shouted back
into my cave I was looking out of.
I didn’t like the beige-white bear she’d
left naked, stiff bristle haird; serial and
so thoughtless Mom’s put me there
“here’s yours” anxiety assigned as
tenet to aesthetic disrespect
of supplied fetish, that my brother
is bear or union soldier lost but I
am from wolves, otherwise orphan
and still snap in lope shepherd.
1.20.11
Moon pulls back in high splendor over cool night. I go out to get Bagheera in and lift him to my throat as ever, try to show him the sky. Sick at twilight, nauseous and then better after eating. I sit with Sam as he irons clothes and packs.
***
I have a sense of several ages of varying intensity, as if in development
I pooled more deeply and became different. When I was young and simple
upstairs I suppose ‘till after third grade maybe, so several years, summers (that one
summer where we took a young black boy from the Huff in & he’d bother
me climb into my bed at night) and after Bruce started talking sex as
the memories of that bed and the intercom Dad put in to monitor are linked—scarlet tanagers and evening grosbeaks, mumps in the downstairs bedroom & later
that was my room where I had the family’s first pet, a brown and white mouse
I called “Eleanor Rigby” by then had a stereo and bought 45s.
***
Milky shawl thrown across August
was first sign steep well of beauty
I was deep in, out in the backyard grass--
I laughed delight and pulled the covers
past my head to nestle further
into the deck of stars—we are here
to see and sleep in quilted time
layers light and layers damp
or what draws the thinnest caul
across the eyes like fingers;
& with no other words near
Cleveland, shale and grass
the nevertheless
night bent down.
1/20/11
What rises through one as a result of a heat and emerges as a vast boiling
can come through once or twice but lay waste to the poor vessel it
cures—I read a brief epigraph in a Fanny Howe book that Charlotte Bronte
wrote about this fever of seeing this “infernal world” and walking from
the bus am thinking overlap how ruinous and ecstatic at once we can burst
into flame. And be grateful for.
***
A childhood room is followed by bark ghosts of adolescence begun from
a memory of meeting Tom Gorman at the North Andover Unitarian Church
thrown down on a margin of lawn I imagine was on the north side of the
church impossible & his long wheat-colored hair flying around likely stoned
blue eyes, he’s smiling laughs & that’s that. The church an otherwise overly
white painted and orderly old congregational with steeple, folks in my family
love in different ways I am never satisfied by especially the hints I get the
minister thinks the example set by Jesus is so high who could cross.
At coffee hour, Dad lying down on a folding table otherwise for cups to rest
his back immediate, who cares what someone says and laughing folks deal
with it somehow make room for this barbarian barrel
***
Gone Mom to what’s forward
and will descend a different city
perhaps disperse as grasses what
your gown left trace—
I’d lift the edge no never mind
as dress was sky what it means
to have come from a body
is to be sheath to the ends of
the fingers, to be smoothed
according to one order among
others a pillar become tears
not as blossom but because
still rounded stone already
was also written meadow.
1/21/11
Gray mornings & cold sinking again; dates set for Mom’s memorial but no plans spells awkward having to listen to what won’t relate//many folks admire Mom & respect her hard work and atmosphere of tolerant attention. Meanwhile I can’t sit quietly through a faculty meeting again, and produce another billow of shame salt.
***
More and more I am struck by dissonance between my “what was really
happening” close look at Mom and power & energy of personal fantasy
images of myself and her, as in, she had no idea what was happening “back
behind the sun-glassed eyes” either about me & maybe little self-awareness
which is hard to understand; perhaps what “unconscious” means, that one
thinks but not in relation to deeper wells, a kind of dry husk.
Raises the question though, what I was doing, dreamt or looked and saw—as
cancelled by these black suns. As unconscious cannot be “lit up” or known
instead, and self in terms of sea, nevertheless boat heroic, does more than
bob, cast in waved pitch or turn emulsed, is somehow darker vein, and “blue pole”
attempts to stride.
***
Not only vast or mergence in text
heart would have, dismembered difference
in solution, solved and host,
whole absorbed’s the same;
the tongue cants a part you
cannot have, the sea particulate,
quotidian in rimes and balances
of salt specific dales
and dwells in slumber, poached
bottom slants and pocket
you are made of, long before
sidewalk was a place, or
evening hour you tried to recollect,
quick brushed across the drum.
1/22/11
Finished Ford Maddox Ford’s A Good Soldier last night curled on the couch. Earlier making copies for the ritual and religion class, highlighting strange continuity between Navaho sand painting, Vedic fire ritual, and Tibetan Mandala, making spaces over six to nine days, and taking them down.
***
when Mom and Dad moved out of Andover, Mom and I did a ritual
to say good by to the house I was doing that sort of thing by then, four
directions & speaking to spirits one had already encountered, a more or
less common ritual—praying is praying though I have found it
mostly useful to use the time as a way to search for a true thing to ask and
for gratitude & wishes spirits, beings, small plants and creatures be
well, get the water they need, and so on; all that to say good by to, strange
what was left by family and spirits—old Indian spirits in the trees & years
later I came back, the crab apple by the breezeway gone & a statue of Mary
instead I liked to see
***
Walked away from the house age 20 out to Rt 93 as
if leaving a crash sight, packed the Kelty and in Brighton
They Might Be Giants let me stay on the floor where
one afternoon Lisa’s broken foot became mine
She told me about the abortion ducks and kids
on the summer Commons & I kept walking away
miles & for three years from place to place
simply always worrying at how we might
get back together, roof tops in Boston or two weeks
work in an empty gas station reading Tolstoy or sleeping
in a park in Wooster the second time we’d gotten
her pregnant, I just didn’t look back and it was a
long time before I even went back to Andover I’d
walked away almost to China.
11/23/11
You say something a person’s unconscious of represent to them is odd
as read you’re claiming absolute authority looked at from that vantage and
besides, the grip of the truth of it you’re kicking and screaming at anyway
I say it, buts not authority ever and besides even half lit so dreams have
color the implicate is there must be more the same hind my eyes I’d need
someone else to offer
***
knowing and not knowing is knowing in stories as close template
since Mom didn’t have so much to say & instead in accordance with
some notion of liberty thought leaving me to that was a kindness,
so left to decipher the world with story “looks like that, it does” – “I’ll let
you be a kid, David & that dreaming’s so impressive; enchant me
by doing it again, will you” I am offer.
***
Sex is it all comes out in the wash
doesn’t it? there’s no back, and “what
was it you wanted?” I am busy to;
and’s why I’m always talk doesn’t
blend, however close it gets to echo,
impaled, ashen, thrown out landscape
(only “Poland” as recent approximate
to say “it’s like that, potato and grease,
that we’re different down here
and can’t never turn my leg into
your rib as hide.)”
I am thrown out on the bed afterward
as curse seems heroic, but against the
terrible harm of your sleep.
1/124/11
Thought I lost pages in computer crash yesterday; now in Jury Pool room in Durham County Court doing what’s called my civic duty, the best I can do is snarl a bit & think Mom who tried cases here is laughing.
***
So disruption; hard to face when I don’t act to make things easier for myself some duty
it’d be nice to evade & my heart hurts because of this; its on me to figure & no help coming from Mom or sibs is it? As basic seasoning or fragrance, lunar ambit turned
brain chemical cascade system to be dark sea as best first way for me to say it—I don’t wanna be torn or half to ask is pride I suppose but we need that too ain’t it?
***
Dylan’s all cant about ponies catches the right
break of mourn balm and lack am despaired &
better be rain. Line so thin I am hung by against
empty sky—a picture window looks out on
short tree perfect street is hardly harbor.
“I’m just like that, sorry, missed my
entrance and now stood about yellow in
an awkward angle to the arrangement
of furnished positions and aura fields
you establish listening all intent to Mahler
paint colors I sea against dichord
Mom busy at the stove steps over where
I am lying; I will never straighten
that corner.
1/25/11
Work on the grant for Alice Notley “what’s important” and collecting text fragments for the official collage yesterday reading The Necessary Angel essays about Rilke’s angels. I’m wondering if the blue-red lady who visits me at night’s like that or a different kind of light—she’s color anyway instead of gold, and specifies descent and worth of color and difference & is not driven by the eye but by weights of her gowns and folds
***
Thinking about Mom its hard not to open the closet and examine serious of subsequent attachments equally fraught by angles of misunderstood frame that black-haired girl
image I stabbed up into the mix as possible point of contact, as if “she was like that I could at least imagine a mode where this double bind could be hero” my best gambit
thrown hard at the glass of it, my arm lifted to angel I am showing “see? a suppose beauty.” she so far awy & but juxtaposed breath is how cut down and bare the exchange offered; so I carry that black-haired girl I am asking you try that on I can run this system
a step further. Am thought I need some other contact point, but’s too late am all fifty-year old webs of fat and gross collect of this focus—chokes me, mercy you want to play “all shook up”.
***
Sea mix gonna drown in such
remonstrate dictions—best can be
done is starboard huddle listening
a long time to the sails;
this isn’t gonna end well it feels
like this I try sitting through eight
years doesn’t pass; some seeds
take a long time to open
I have to wait through beyond
what makes sense and many apparent
chances as this burden want,
and carry further its uneasy “has
it opened,” and brood yellow like clay,
and pray to something like Mary.
1/26/11
Rainy day & cold spit under last quarter moon & yesterday it just seemed all of my people were under duress a bit; I drop off the first check from Mom’s estate in bank & its hard to think a life passed into that piece of paper carrying this fantasy weight its accumulated to—a weight of effort or work turned into sum; I tell my class today I wonder if “society” thought as body or system really has a plan or purpose, and if that dimension is, in fact, not structured by what we think of as desire since not a body; if that’s not what Rilke, say, gets at when he talks about trying to watch someone play a role until something else happens.
***
I think Mom may have assumed a terrible distance
between children and adults, however absorbed in that
Victorian idealization of childhood; & so never
imagined herself actually in relation to us though
charmed and perhaps loyal to a purpose was
willing to work; projection is contagious we
could read our body’s sense in terms of, a not right
flung she liked to pitch us at each other some
days boredom prolly she’d be breathless and girl
innocent wide-eyes about the stab then have fun
righteous “gotcha”
***
A day started good ‘cause came
out of a dream to it, hadn’t shook
by the long ten-o-clock light & only
as day afternoon fall did I wake
enough to see sky
tearing itself & feel what
broke. Body was disposed like
Marc’s fox hid in red
and blue, didn’t know trenches and
liked the ground & impossible Mom
at the ceiling; meant don’t
bother rising for air, it doesn’t
make sense anyway up there,
is some other over.
1/27/11
am from a familiar indwelling packing dream has me turned the way I lie in the bed, the way that feels as a nestling further and weight is this plumb line; the day seems to be a cabinet I could open to look into despite the tall willow oaks on West Campus, written across the windows & other arrangements such as the gal whose been at the divinity school a long time now, hard face, her face sometimes so old I want to go over say how fascinating it is to watch someone so uncomfortable in her own skin she has to change her hair endlessly but it’s the same thing no matter what (today hard bangs); a mean thing I know & put my head in hands; I am sitting between two groups of girls who are talking rapid bird strophes in some kind of tercet structure, bursts that cut this way and that but arrive at three stop and shows; and the refectory sound washes I can’t make out the words
***
have sifted through perhaps first layer of construction paper of this; memory not recall or contact but like chiaroscuro or icon series set loose I want to establish who this person was, such a weight in me I am repeating in my own staves & can never say I if when I think she loved nature like Emerson with a bit of Grimm laced in, a taste of ole J. Edwards and his suspended spider because she knew marshes or felt them, but maybe it
was my way of saying something, a connect I established to what signed that for me & all this time I am talking about this dissonance between black haired girl hero & this disconnected body pokes her kids around, my first way of describing a thing she was trying to figure how to sew I put into my own words…
***
Words like a furrow to say I witch
divagates a hand pluckin at your face
aura pats, “we was fluffing” word
preen not even ‘bout forgetting
simply absent of other work make
you pretty touch there and see, that
time on the trip when Jim and Melissa
spent the bus trip watched
hours of New York go by, sleep
might be better, more honest &
worth saying, “I dreamt the arm
and leg I feel today as
an old truck I was gonna use to
move’d break down.
1/28/11
Sunlight midday was intoxicating today; a long week and I needed time to pass at new angles. Moon in 12th house & bending back to new. Nother month gone to ocean.
***
I say she was shallow today to Jehanne trying that out (if I riff
it’s a ford or some place I could wade across, but I mean like a
scoop in the road that’d get puddled in the rain and reflect pieces
of sky) & go back to think if I made this error more general to
suppose seeing the sky and color there was depth was just asphalt
& Lisa was reflective like that and Cindy—what I mean here is
about access and can be decided too like Laura did “ain’t goin’
down in that basement” t’s what I mean by depth isn’t whether
its there but did you go down? were you shown a door maybe, had
to play down there during a tornado watch or something?
I guess there are all kinds of ways to echo I read as depth just mirror back.
***
Blue lake painting the words don’t do
but we say it “drizzles and splash”//anna
tide’ll pull out so long its parking lots//
you walk a part of the afternoon
bruise; black roofs in the sunset all
red against blue you were leaking
glory was an idea anyway but
not the memory I pasted gesso
the Citgo Sign appears
a familiar substitution I’d end up
at, like the no space
Rodin’s Maenad rounds her
back still touches where she
goes back she lifted from.
1/29/11
Moon goes fast to dark, but the day is lit ‘till later, a small mark; how I respond to changes in light like everything & am under a sky—a simple, clear & only some seventy or eighty or ninety in a life, like sips of cold water. Letter of recommendation out and shopping with my I-pod on “23 minutes in Brussels” with Tom Verlaine, & I remember the symbolist show there last spring while I am waiting in the Kroger foyer for Lena to finish her shopping.
***
Laura writes tonight she’s uneasy and I want to say that its hard in our sib group
to feel like things are going to meet your feelings—what the other one’s want—I
think could be gift of Mom’s maybe bored adversarial observations but don’t say
she doesn’t need me to solve that & could have a different story she’d have to put
aside to think of what I am saying. But we all make a date over Memorial Day to sort
through Mom and Dad’s dragon horde I suppose is what you accumulate you
drink cut powdered milk to squeeze sense, huh? Make it small & mean, the way
Dad’d roll metal ointment tubes or fold cheese wrap careful Bruce found a box that’d
gone through two moves filled with rolled up ointment tubes Ichthyol or Neosporin I
thought we should try to sell to Moma, a sculpture called “The Inheritance”.
***
Without language there’s wait suspends about
my shoulders I reach for a bag from
the Camary afternoon wilt of errands and
asphalt, what’s it been trying to say
cracked off and tuff grass leach humors skried
tangent to snagged tooth a guy pulls up
his pants, eyes needing a world, welled?
What class does is not fixed.
Lena’s English is bad so back by the student
apartments she stays hums we take the bags
up breezeway stairs “hello furnished apartment”
I call we cut past the TV to what passes with
a window lit by the west afternoon and countertop
a sink and surfaces.
1/30/11
The day more lilts & mid-day sun; at the gym I see someone with shock white hair and a purple shirt and for a moment see him as Mom—her recent colors at the corner of my eye, but its not. I work on the Notley grant, but my sense is I’m not quite asking for what they’ll want and wasted work. The next month’ll blossom anyway, readings and travel to Louisville again, and thrown farther, though J won’t go to Egypt ‘cause unrest finally with Mubarak has the airports shut.
***
Mom traveled post-War Europe in 1946 to untouched Switzerland and Norway
but didn’t talk about devastation or even haunt old twisted black beech trees of Ardennes outside Brussels I saw last spring; things were skiing and seem pre-War Aryan fantasy
was my memory but there had to be so many people traveling well I can’t square
Cologne with this she maybe wasn’t allowed in Germany & took the Queen Mary across to London I suppose I just get an Alpine Edelweiss kind of sense she bought us
lederhosen I wore to the Zoo in Cleveland toe head like Aryan youth in the New York 1964 World’s Fair crowd.
***
A green plastic “Packy” key turned
a recording on static and cloth speaker
you’d hear today on docent headphone
the bear behind bars ladling peanuts
a concrete moat between him we’d
throw across; would tell some Disney
Small World I like the light though
down through Ohio hickory, ironwood
all shushed crack and fold landscape glacier
piled up after flat cornfields & Ibex
along the trail’s end ridge
the fence and back was a day being
family among torn from place & a
guy on a diving board feeding seals.
1/30/11
Day gray as moon goes dark, but there is a gathering for spring an animal new
alertness; I wake up and dreams drop from my body like blankets that pressed &
now no longer as my body chooses its day pose. I talk to Jehanne about Mom’s
silence as she dresses, putting the last things in place before a busy day—violet red
skirt and gray.
***
There’s no one talked much as an argument why Mom’s memory of post-war
Europe is so Alpine adventure I am wondering how the contrast set between
the yodel heroism, the Aryan Zion clambering outdoors over Mt Skinner to stare
north up the vast Connecticut Valley to Deerfield massacre fields and girl scout
was read & more generally about German she thought in and her mother spoke
immigrant in enthusiasm enough to read Schiller European scholar-language. She’d
later go strong feminist so maybe read as yet more evidence of Achilles loose
in his purpose; that men flank and order in arm sequence and steel panzer Rilke
saw prescient mad as loss of self rolls its violence across potato & wheat at that
stubborn, relentless black-thought sea.
***
Pages get organized into Artemis
looked up to read, proctor in shadow
called “witch” by Abigail, her
fingers fought the wort dichten
as furrow to make a hem
at the war-tide said of the dock;
in scandal light, hair-lit Jean,
dark woods before death’s entry;
posed finger lick in volk; I
was loyal we would lift earth
skyward bowl as attest,
can’t be uttered after ash or sewn
appalled and Parrish, I loved, however
words gone rue and raum.
2/1/11
A storm steeps its way across the plains tonight we get outer grey edge & spatter from what’s snow there so deep; a new moon temporary tomorrow and deep turn of winter 15° Aquarius at Candlemass. In Hopi culture this is a time one prays in kiva pits & makes first seed trays to show the plants this year how to grow I did once in Northampton and then slid the wheat grass shoots into the Connecticut up by the Rt 9 bridge, you’re familiar with that.
***
1964 I’d cut my sister’s hair to give them “Beatle’s Cuts” &
Mom’d freaked their long hair shagged & punished me in different
ways that summer (she said “the hair musta flew” I said “but I
cleaned it up”) was a kid a sat in Orange my brothers off to New York
World’s Fair Johnson Wax building triomphes the first of many
times for no reason Mom’d discipline one to separate down the kids
to what one parent could manage, Ed and Bruce wearing madras print
shirts Mom had sewn to mark us. I sat outside her old world Uncle Alex
small city house, wrinkly rail steps and was yelled at for lighting his
pipe matches and felt the sky staring down being small.
***
“Roles we have move at different speeds crossed
clouds, draped & self-absorbed; heart weeps
watched leak occurs at the joints in the grass
not proud I am both ‘being a girl 1940’s blue’
and what you’d see was more fierce rodent-like
paved desire that became my freckled,
rounded back. Beat the stuffing outa and keep
walk to the next house take down more
names kinda mid-century woman had kids
into elegance depression window looked out
on. I liked to pick things apart chicken bone
they tied my hand careful to the silver
blue purse ware I kept change in I knew the
kids took, being bad ids.”
