2/2/11
Candlemas storm doesn’t come & instead day is balmy, a frontal boundary pushed way north by swell of warm gulf air. Little rain so adds to the dry pattern that seems to me has followed me for the last thirty years. Last night and today my heart is unconsolable like me body was in ribbons & patched & Lou Reed makes sense.
This morning I have time to read & so dip into “Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone?” for stuff on Alice Notley and start of that, so reading about construction of spirit as such in relation to “feminine” unwanted etc and Antigone as “pure soul” is critiqued. Another helmeted gal talks fast & likely black haired I can approve in such terms but… in later afternoon between classes I pull out Yeat’s “Autobiography”, and am in & Brathwaite’s first “Dreamstories” about the “Black Angel” and in this way am variously arranged.
***
Mugs and napkin rings and colors were assigned totems but unevenly to
my sisters. Bruce had a wooden elephant napkin ring the trunk bent back
over the head to make a round eye more like a truck cab & deer ceramic
cop from Pigeon Forge outside Gatlinburg; Ed of course bear & bear
Mom’s favorite she’d never admit but ubiquity of bears put the lie to he
was hers; I had a donkey or burro or ass for napkin’s ring, ears straight up
I gnawed the groove in and a fox cup made me happy because different
a few times fox came out to see me so maybe something there & Barbara & Laura
I don’t remember so clearly, a house cat I think for Barbara in blonder wood & lamb cup I guess but I can’t see Laura’s right now, then thought an owl Athena. Anyway
parsed and dealt our assignments. And not because of dreams.
***
Desire’s halves accord unequal pace
‘till even breath’s uneven symmetry
a foot clop tacks its answer up
the widened open; dilate flower
lit day awes in sunset what is vast than
had been light crouched Hephestus in the
amber rooves at dawn cannot contain
that night opens in shawls and
covers; oh open we are pressed and
rhymed orange by and ribboned
what tears to shreds
claws and contains, leads us
to spill, oceans and hair that porcelain
we grip so close to shatter.
2/3/11
this long day I am constructing in this as if it were over there and I here that I am covered by, surely we attempt to imagine our voices in relation to a maternal sky in this way, which is Ariel or captive as such & must turn away she whispered must walk off through the poppies and vestiges
***
dolls were Madame Alexander séance of still hours a set, of course,
a Sound of Music sequence in Gretel and Hansel Bavarian my sisters’d
go to Norway after bending ohs and dirndels and meanwhile the small
black cowboy, a girl frankly, my brother bent in his hand, lay between
the lake staircase stairs beyond the reach of fingers, we left in August
a small stone of loss I colored “black plastic girl”, that Michigan would
disappear there, oh
“it was good what we did yesterday, but it was surely surely a sin”
**
as in Mom’s bad linear analysis Bertrand
Russell in abstract from branch to branch
makes winter stele & breath, body closenss
to bare grass un wit since not in waist coat
Kleist or Klein spiraled interlace of deep-
ening tragic he doesn’t get it nor he a streetl
ight made stage he said across the out
beyond, a table & chairs turned over—
drink your milk from the mask David
before it leaks what two dimensions doesn’t
make sense about the space here
Why’re always talk about as if
I married a physicist ta keep that matter
folded between my mirrors.
2/4/11
Going to drop a book off at Joe’s for the Notley paper I imagine him wondering if he has time to process the “drug” of the article’s thought, its wrack and pull & then thought more generally “well of course books are like a drug; some take you a long way leeward, this person’s voice murmuring at you day by day, a low spell; that folks have for a long time used chant to this effect.
***
Teen afternoons reading on the top bunk in Ed & my room pushed against the window that looked south to winking light of Prudential Tower twenty miles off—for some reason the stock memory starts with me reading Dad’s pale green bound Lieutenant Hornblower though fountains off through Larry Niven’s Ringworld or A.E. van Vogt etc. I am in that teen age in-between boy and girl I can be when I am just reading, sense of my body, weight of legs and curl in bed is not gendered exactly which is what? a perverse made possible in so definite an imagination as cell apart from the downstairs world, Mom stacking ironing or sewing I don’t know. When I was fourteen or fifteen I don’t know what she did with the days I suppose deals with another sib though my memory has each of us in a bed cubicle apart reading, and we fed ourselves snacks she wasn’t sewing anymore, so what?
***
Twenty years asleep beside a pond begins
atrophy no mats how da dreams attempt to
offer rain, what they cannot except as art
condensate and solace solitary
and that’s for others the way the crow flies
and doesn’t food in the empty in reds or
apple light. There’s just the road under
the floorboard or over your head you sleep
‘neath the overpass begins to establish
exactly how dreams are not escape what
grains of sand rattle past you,
are debt to, being this body in such awful
care & brood of like you can no longer say
wasn’t shapes you allowed or had to wear.
2/5/11
Sib deals with dragon horde go south & now & now & now I’m at the lip of being the last one to be done. Cut loose & boat adrift I will never see them once or twice and then they have no more to do with me already & decided that long ago, but were happy if I wanted to bring them tea. I sit & listen to my I-Pod and wonder where I’ll get my tunes I don’t talk to Bruce anymore & about how Mom’s death is also a death final and bitter of trying to hang on to something by talking to him.
***
I called Mom and Bruce maybe once a month for years, Bruce to yak and Mom to grieve something at with this foul sense I should be done with that, but lacked strength. I’d get all care feeling or want to hear their voice say back some kind of continuity I guess. I begin at this bad stone of feeling as re-set button at the end of a week otherwise I have become lost in & everyone forgot. Could be a long time until someone wonders what I got up to. So I am work about this project or that, some close process teach a lot of specific problems people bring to me & look up alone when the last gets off or the day arrives at its dome and done. A plaza or street now filled with people specifically not a part of my life goin’ in that store and go out buy I walk through and past like I am under an arcade they the trees and real life sky and clouds and me something’ artificial like gingerbread or a puzzle of the eiffel tower. Some guy says “Oh that’s just a mimetics of common alienation. Nothing worth nothing for me there.” and doesn’t spend rain.
***
The laundry never was done in piles
in the kitchen and sifted you’d push
away to make space for cereal afternoons
before Perry Mason at Five, I’d
nap most days back from school
in the grieve darkening of a winter slant
& dream what my body was ticking to,
the next station;
maybe we are never gone anywhere else
than we imagine and grace back to reel in--
Ed’s Hitachi TV douses UHF for channel
our best clue—we are flickering is
closest yet, there in that lit vacuum,
to where we are passed.
5/6/11
lunch, and thus at day-limens & walking between the refectory and the library ATM I am aware of being both vast and limited at the same time, a feeling I’d call sheets of glass in order to capture the going off into of a pane-surface and the energy fused in the difference between sky and hand full of tuft-grass, of being and not being in relation that is, like the urban landscapes of the Atlantic I’ve grown up in, a color tone that backdrops its deep structures, its “blue poles” into the skyline backdrops of my eyes
***
dark pool days I am larval in relation to yesterday’s project
hence the misfoot of any branch and fork, whether lyre or
leaf-stick I poke at the ground (Buddha said that monks should
not idly mark the earth I find a music in, though haunted
& lonely of playground hours and margins) Mom’d send us
outside to cool off or silence I heard voices sometimes
spirits calling as I stood by the swings & was part of more
general exile of children into available portions of pavement
sun by new shop strip cement or grass edge of street our
most loyal equals
***
a family moves strangely in the self between
emergent poses, some other you are also;
that yesterday’s anger blows off, that
sudden rearranged calico plot
edge becomes a round table in nooked
lamp, that new mandala slid easel along
eye’s sleep, & the things lost:
a stamp book or bear that sublime
are never found again by bed or desk,
left last & unsteady overlap
the day’s vellum leaves; I know
a different thread then, that binds
that without eyes is figured from
the tell.
2/7/11
I was taught by the world a medicine of stones the way a story is written into it & for several years among the rattle as I was washed by streams, by the cool river I fell into set loose by meeting Lisa, river of days, book of hours, cascade of tarot cards in sequence, a tunnel of days I’d catch sight of in the air predicted places I was bound for, surfaces and surfacing in a broader, thicker stuff that nevertheless became a rooming house single with hot plate or stone on a mountain that shed quartz or the night outside Phoenix when a cloud condensed in the air over my fire in perfect echo of a feeling that gathered in me, welled up, and, just as I cried, became condense and slightly rained until we both were shook out.
***
mostly I think I was by myself, in worlds of my own, I’d set the baseball cards out
on the bed, the covers rolled back to make a fence, a marble for the ball or (when
older) lay on the floor careful drawing overhead perspective models of all
the ships including Austria’s in the 1941 Jane’s Fighting Ships book—Bruce had whole baseball leagues
like Kerouac & we both drew up the statistics and played whole seasons so that I
was surprised when I read Kerouac did this & presented there as strange unique
feature of his relentless was like a dandelion, something you’d find in any yard, like
Darger’s drawings, what a boy was 1961, 1964, in Cleveland, was thinking and I don’t know
what my mother was doing or why later, when I was older, I kept falling in love
with versions of her, or some cross of her and Dad, or someone who sat on her feelings
like anyone in my family did which I knew how to move around;
then I think running around campus when am I gonna stop having to deal with these same versions I keep running in to, stop clinging to what? this drag I am carried around?
***
“I think I left my note cards here or something” let
two swings “I am across past you an arc, get it?”
so “nothing to say” she’s become Guadeloupe a dark
pause on the sofa—“not your Mom, am I
this here silhouette keep your eye on,
you can walk the woods at night, huh?
you remembering me each step &
thanks.” “I was just..” “deep enough
in the well you things like
this happen back, what projection’s
not or knot, one
tough thing to figure; I am left
for you, see what you make
of it, you stumble into.”
2/8/11
five and seven are odd numbers—five children is an awkward star seems nice but is like a car with a third angle its being dragged in, the way the choruses come up or shift, this person sad and then that & imprecise reflections rather than clean bifurcate doubles—not two sisters who divide the world into writing and painting, good girl and bad, the people don’t stay still, someone else comes in the French Doors (climbs in because the patio was never built and the doors open maybe two feet up from the same suburban yard, I mean the suburban yard that is the same, well you get it, could be a bird you folded it up right
& seven is the number that goes off the charts, shifts the scale, you are negotiating and evolving difference in opposites as in not-Dad and not-Mom a third creates liquidity and four realizes that the fifth then makes a center and its directions—everything is still holy and beautiful like the Navajo Fourth World after the floods receded—and six is just more fluid motion and still in that 1, 2, 3 rhythm that five and its ten and two hands hasn’t messed up and then seven comes along, and what’s that, some actual other sticks his or her nose into the picture like grace or when, in the imagination, you encounter some other who has something to say, and suddenly you are a third place
***
Carolyn came to class today took a bunch of photos for the program web site; I was struck by how angry I looked, intense, beautiful hand gestures (though a few like
Hitler when I think of it) its like I am wearing a mask, or my body is a mask & bears
no relation, black bear waves his claws around & talks about gender, a discrepancy
between crepant face and landscape I am dreaming & imaging I am looking out from &
I can’t even see the norm references I am conforming only by some intense willed stillness.
***
Some photo an early color I have on
a grey one-piece John Glen suit there
was a helmet for & its 1960 something
it’s the backyard by the swing set;
I am short next to my brothers the
only one in costume I don’t mind but
look out a look I am not a part of
that family I am with my mother and
for a second I can be seen I am not
in the family I am with
they are someone else and
its apparent and the distance from
that moment to this I have still
not realized what’s there.
2/9/11
The tain lush fill of grace—
shaken: skandha upright
sapid, shore,forgiving tide—
foregone evening we’d tack
touch to, runs the orca’s leap
against an ask—dakini in my
closet mama, bright bright
bright that’s not you
***
I feel my unfocused worst during the teaching day, then emails from my siblings come in, things moving along. My mantra in class over and over is that we have not solved social violence. I wonder what they make of that? Sam going grimly out the door the other day says he’s amazed I’ve stuck around as long as I have.
***
I try on the thought I simply did not belong in the family there 1960’s Cleveland
and the stories I told and sense of self were dreamy business of being where I was
anyway, being a person who was somewhere else you catch that in the way I am
apart in the way I look at the camera. Like a cowbird or changeling in a sack of
body, I wear like a mask
& barely ever rose or caught half glimpse of the surface
***
water stains on the book
she made Susan bring home,
the task to put my face back
down into the deep of it
to dive down, to let myself
again be tied to drown’s sun.
***
2/10/11
Nate Mackey’s reading at our house; the early evening fall & half moon sharp outside & light through the pine trees to the south. Jehanne and Lena in the kitchen make a beef soup & move around each other like sisters.
***
Arrive at the punk naught “aint gonna say” sit down
over here and beckon the sound “become e-ville,”
a place escurse and divident twixt “okay I am in the money
alright, you got me” and rain at what the field margins
lie ‘bout, all scandal under a half reflect bale from
what is more than town’s cast—grass reflected sharp in
its most ugly decay brown leak (in Tibet they’d send
trouble maker young monks ask some kinda question
about what they were supposed to learn memory,
some “I see it different”—get sent up the back of some
further ten-thousand foot ridge, sit in that col and
throw spells at hail & let it rain on ‘em six months or so.)
***
The immeasurable what its not,
there that Mom is; her bland shoulder
turns she doesn’t listen I
guess. “Mymn Hymn Nim”
goes some other way mutter
I call down the difference between
maybe we sometime get back
to, I am not gonna wait for
release I don’t want,
but am loyal, Mom, as sound
this body you gave me
knows. there is no
diff’rence ‘tween the leg all wrinkled
and the log in the fire.
2/11/11
Waste day I am good at between lunch and driving dandelion head to Chapel Hill & back, a stitch I know so good and echo of the back way near the river from Amherst to Northampton it makes me happy to repeat.
***
Dad said something like “some kids don’t make it” when I went yaw
at 20—I was beyond him he could not make sense of, but Mom
kept some kind of vigil of wait. I did not want to talk to her but she
did stay there some part of herself on that brae she could look out
& gone think on some part of her towards me. It’s what I do when I
can expect, called brood-like on some touch I keep on those I try and
keep (dark ridge nearby breathin’) close.
w/Lisa it went antedeluvien because I so wanted oh so wanted to be afterall
in a dream we could fold up in perfect Sugar Mountain
& not half to drown, put me face into the water
***
Things can be so different for someone else
you have to vomit that marks your place
some time later you can maybe paint the
perspective that’s here disharmonic
a lotta words get poured out over
some anneal an wash yer feet
I’m not making a sword you mighta
thought I wanted ta, fit
front to back—just don’t want
your face reflected this way in my
trying to consider—
wear yer mask anymore this
stretch mark extruded, semi-colon
place so distant.
2/12/11
Long song in front of the computer this Sat-Ur-day & apparitional responsibilities I tick my tongue over, special, an expert at, some kinda gene I am downstream of from Rear Admiral Need plans the serial invasion of Japan in regiments of supply system I’d rather
spell as an attempt to sequence what yer chakra spins to, mine goes left, and perhaps
someday, some combination set, a door gone ope’ ‘tween
***
Lisa is seeing some guy later accused serial killer of gay guys in the Fens I am so far into the black, just trying to, you know, suggest a different possibility there at the edge of the fall & drop by her place on Beacon Hill she quickly throws me out of, a first floor & no distance between room and street jas a step back between the way a city does. I was by this time quite from taking any of her spells and relentless exactly how far this way you are going I will “Stand by My” well I guess woman I a do-right I can do this being good here as good as anywhere it be for you. I’d like to think Oedipus (who was a DJ you don’t have that reference) actually didn’t want her which suggests precise how myth had come awry or maybe he saw me dance such long trance such long trance her face on my t-shirt and got the point I was trying to say he was so busy telling us signs. (The club backed up on Fenway Park so you know particularly cosmic we were not letting trees grow there anymore to try to express it, that used to be the Tea Party; the bouncer’s let me in as sufficiently destroyed; I throw myself into the air & throw myself again)
I believe they call this “modulation”
***
We musts sit down sometimes, accept;
loyalty remands; put aside your wand
your passport—yar disguises always
tell—its sticking out, really, it is;
no special dispense, you can put it in
a wall; we must sit down in front of,
breaks in two gets soft; you can have
it or not & that’s what makes no
difference—not e’en an echo she
was waiting all pursed in, her, I gonna
refer to “ear”—
I make ought all over shelter
soft prick in a shell & no mark
to tell the angel “no”.
2/13/11
Eileen Myles comes by the poet’s group & has bright; I check her astrology later, born the same dark of fall as Susan in 1949 & with that get to work mars/Saturn (winnow winnow its in Virgo) walk a mile conjunction aspect. I read back pages and wonder about the collision knots I permit, startle you up out of a spell.
***
Eileen walked on some ground was mythic to me in 1979—I threw myself
to the floor in Boston bars after leaping high, but there was no connect, this thing I’d grown up in was a non-starter; and it was a long cross over to a real. I guess
I went to the woods (had a dream I was in a crowd on the way
to a city & stepped into a glade off the road a moment & heard voices say
“we’ve been watching you, you should stay here in the woods a bit—so maybe that)
sit, kick the ground pissed off & roll on the ground & cry (one time I ate some
Peyote in the winter and spent the day laying in one place in the woods & after 4-5
hours got up & walked down to a kettle reservoir & the rocks and falls were
covered in ice, but signs like this I felt like “I already know about this, about
waiting” & so restless and pissed looked past)
“I hear the voices of the sun//coming into clockwork spaces//and the next, the next
is a moment like a mountain moving//dark brown of hill/falling to reed water still
frozen” I wrote down some time before then
***
This sad boy carried in my belly
plays the sun’s angles pretty
angles the day opens wide little
dandelion head can’t relax jaws
snake-hinge further to eat, and
so amazement as the day’s leaves
spill in serial and story their
different, sister tracks, and
loyal to both you can only
come apart to follow, heart
and, we call it “head”,
heart’s double turned stag
his own story in the deep hill
a different risen.
2/14/11
I lose five days slipped between computer malfunction and steady grading run from here to there. Days turn balmy & Jehanne is back from the sea. Talk with Bruce on the phone last night which is next Friday & wonder sad I may be seen as manipulating. In a dark mood I wonder if we should burn the dolls.
***
I looked across the floorboards at what was going on at parent level
& among siblings and decide it’s a prison camp, intractable and mad
authority with no reference to sentiment or body or logic and just
according to number & as moral horizon sibs against each other for
possible privilege, each made alone. 1958 was an Iron Dog year and
I am loyal would never tell and did suffer shame for each lie that
got me something a smile; it was each man for himself & so we
cannot now talk the shame. To be before separate stepped out like
blue-black rain threads from the background of bodies, to be already
awoke in catastrophe.
***
Did I bring that with me to read
mom in the kitchen suicidal copper-
bottom pots or Dad Hephestus agony
spanks us his broad hand &
small meals restraint & proper of
rational rights and where yours
stops and mine begins feelings
‘at thrive among and thrush
made separate “what’s the spelling
of that” my first disobedient knock—
I’ll write well, for water
so that leak you cannot erase, a
careful carbon I make the under
side blue.
2/15/11
Something bad started to happen after the reading & I was not alert to it before I was wounded— among friends & the sudden usual litter of bodies which suggests the reading was more difficult than it seemed and had some kind of poison; perhaps just the limit of several hopes.
***
Bruce says he didn’t think he was in a prison & either he is being kind and making clouds or I came into the room from someplace else & was still confused—aren’t we in a war, aren’t we hiding in closets—when did I first hear the war was a different time & wasn’t happening where I was reading “One Fish Two Fish” in a sealed off space was called the Need home Dad painted charcoal black. He often had things to say like that.
***
Accumulation is just some shitty thing done by the eaves
in wooden bowls work was & mallets—men drift angular
against the river where they festoon & the carp come in laps—
“the lake in the water” was what I felt like I should be ashamed
of, a misstep of apparition because I can’t spell. Different
temporal start points had to be forgiven but established scales
since none of the projects we brought from elsewhere we had
to adapt to buy comics or baseball cards & gum from Schugel’s
what had previous worked in a 1886 bank—mostly the body
continues which is enough rhythm to fake it & ordinary
and memory’s of lost and shell shock in an unknown
woods were still good for could be said like “did not David”
and felt in the expanded registers of a suburban curve to
be, throughout, what one had survived.
2/16/11
Mid-week driving Eileen around & then standing in a suit coat in front on Art Council for $ for the Alice Notley visit next fall. The days are warmer, first spring & moon almost full at night Mallory and Bagheera haunt. I’m not thinking much about Mom. Lisa writes & that knocks something sad, says “did I know she’d found me impossible and argumentative back then” or so; I think you don’t cut your wrist if you are feeling good about yourself, but write back a fair politic.
***
It became unendurable to sense I’d either hidden so well or was so masked
I would not be able to talk to people, catch a person’s eye, with whom I
might actually be able to be myself as if ordinary; I was made against a
grain and never easy as I watched myself misrepresent in every gesture
what I would have rather, and the complex and many things of it I took
at a glance you’d have to slow everything down to make visible, that, for
instance the painter’s Van Gogh floppy hat suddenly made me sideways
think of Mexico and a dream of doorways so I caught up and asked him—
he was reading Foucault twenty years later when I saw him again—and asked
if he was thinking of going to Mexico, though we barely knew each other
to speak, and he said yes.
But it was hard, so many years it was impossible to be seen & I did not
know how to say.
***
Not being a subject’s different
from not having no home—you
have a home despite what’s
empty and white and written down
& they said that to cancel kings a
strange thing to strike down “subjects”
is the king’s stick, his danda left
to him everyone’s war there’s no
way to breath it stays inside—and
“death of the author” scapegoat
some John Cage nails up over the
door to make the angels pass
beautiful in such colors of shame
rain because we kill.
2/17/11
tomorrow Jehanne and I will make love in the afternoon which is now two days ago &
so I have not yet caught up, which love will do, as an aside that takes the longer way to “be here now” & as happens laying there with her in a grey-green I was half again over forty years ago now climbing the black flanged drain pipe in Doug William’s basement acting the part of a cow girl who was climbing somewhere, up to a bar-hotel balcony, or to some roof after all in New York, or a pine tree I needed to look across the back lot sand hills from
***
there’s a place Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot painted with greys and a foregrounded tree along a river let, sometimes the leaves in a grey wind, often a hint of birch and smudge
that’s like what I often feel, a sense of a kiss and some slick parting, I pull my chest from something I am bent into & a sucking sound of mucus waking up, adjusting to a now
separate but touched by dwelling I was doing—I’ve gotten up but sleep follows me down
the stairs and out into the day like daffodils
does everyone slumber like this as what is a season and not history, only sometimes
in history, mostly hibernate and made the pass of the days I felt a held thing I go back
to even when I have to wake; that the world is so ocean we never except when we shut
out all sound, except as dead cocoon, not even then can take our face out of, we are always
seeing back.
***
Drift locus, kinda over impressed
by the constant sounds of breakfast—
you’re flat floorboard Mom, I re-
member; could be fit into different floors,
could be carried around and sat near,
carpenter’s caul, as close as I could get
to you, wasn’t loyal, I’d hope someone
else would be in the room;
wanting that I pulled a Buddha out of
myself and put him upstairs I could
talk to sometimes, like a museum
docent—you’re just hissing there, by the
shadow of the painting, the one Malevich
maid perfect in that schoolroom in Amsterdam.
2/18/11
somewhere else in this building a woman is talking about H.D.’s late novels, maybe The Mystery set in snowy Prague & a man who has lived several hundred years stands in
a cathedral, the room turned round as if in a mirror, the way it did before, when the candles suddenly blazed in St. Wenceslas’s apse; somewhere else the dim trace, what history really is, a shower of rain and the slow sleep and murmur of stones, that gets written, that we can be loyal to, that’s not fallen, that’s fur, and tile, and harp and wax and steel
***
in the evenings Dad would sit in his bare brown upholstered chair a knarled
wooden toad sat under it was Dad’s sense of humor and read Science Fiction
or new magazines and listened to Baroque musique I mean masque in silence
the music was really a silence and we walked around it, you could stay out of
its way the way you circle round a streetlight and when they moved to Durham
he wouldn’t get Mom a TV and she didn’t argue with him about that but after
he died she got one and said she didn’t have to make him happy any more
***
The garage light would make the driveway
last into the evening slap shots fired at
a four panel goal under a row of windows
just so clay pots established depth bare
where a light didn’t reflect and
sometimes shattered and added to the
grey cement above colder gravels
run below the house and spring time flooded
dreamt, house slightly adrift across a slope—
long enough to grow up and leave
yellow lights above the round table
Mom’s head visible when she folds
a paper, turns down the hall
ten steps to the bedroom.
2/19/11
Was Saturday & I was moody, at the end of the Myles, Corbitt, Roberson reading I was suddenly spooked, someone had stepped on my shadow & I didn’t belong. Rapid collapse of the sense of being among and folks cutting along ungenerous folds. Spook, storm, season.
***
It was always teeth on edge—say we went camping Dad had the back of the VW bus set up with a frame and all tools and stowed perfect could be set up was order & feedbags full of towels we’d arrive at a grassy place and pitch tent & already it was impossible to
hold whose gonna go where from the car and several tensions I am reading a book despite
nausea and Ed has to be authoritative in all interactions exact so all this clutter of boredom Mom’s like the ship of floats along stares outside through her Jackie O sunglasses absent queen steady as the car bears her swift and flows over New Hampshire
climb up from the Concord was it quiet inside her head did she feel we were five of rods
pulled apart and erupting in an exact wrong sequence of defensive moves and “no me’s” so that there was no undoing the knot, just more pressure?
We were always about to anger each other.
***
The wheel of dharma has a hinge comes
apart between two things we want
to say, that actions change and change so
is constant like zero, consequential,
dips in sequence; and against the grain
and pushes back some foothold
we can leverage determination
thrown and so then startle—
a door broken in the wall of the always
by ashes, we are some two ways that
don’t marry I can spell it out
you have to feel into the space
the room this difference, overlapt and
hem fingers hold as sewn.
2/20/11
the moon was in February, out and cold came back; worked on the Notley paper less focused than yesterday, the hard work against philosopher word schemes a parallel to so justify all the old dads all the old men beating their arms with their hands dreams of freedom & go my way
***
It was just always tense & someone was unhappy or should have been was turned back against & somehow equal became evil as in no specialness what to have form is to be already so different & no smooth face I learned makes it different—mask smile looking out the window counting beavercars or eye drift along telephone wires—long waiting, prolonged waiting & being fed but not & the only slight space among to let tension out
was to periodic wicked tongue comic & wax jester—oh Lear had nothing on Dad out under the V-Dub I’ll turn a daisy for & Mom thought I needed him & would attempt to arrange time it was just Dad and me, I’d feel bad after want to cover up I didn’t want to
be with him and so I lied & he’d stand there her orders and ask me what I wanted from him to be happy I was supposed to be so hung up about & I did not know I did not know
I was sad because everyone was fighting and mom sad but knew he had nothing for me since unable to see what people needed beside what he had to do to keep them or say well that’s the way things are
***
I have a brown coat on and am two step back from a group of boys one’s firing
a gun my black plastic boot heel is pivoted & I am taller and you can see I am s
ad await for this plan to be done odd feelings among the boys I know I don’t
like too much but allow the cabin & being in the right place to pass
make it by among who I’m not and never be boy scouts—first night a high school
helper hid hide & seek with me whispered they had a club you stand on the stage
nude and come I spend the night put distance between us & tell me I am not
going back backward of the ledge & slipped among thousands falling Rodin
Gates of Hell I have to sit by some AAMCO wait for Dad what we are doing is
about a car and not much fun no one is happy not the dogs or the short hedge by
the garage door or the brick work that goes no where and now years later
here’s the week’s allowance David mark it in the ledger so much to presents
and a quarter for the bank opens at $10 (will take eight years at that dust set on
my desk) and two nickels you can by some trading cards or grape soda
2/21/11
after the wind the week began I was already running towards the week’s end & have / the days are colder I wish I could put aside insults I get but am tired & three nights from now as I write this it rains hard in Louisville & the Notley I am worried is vapor
***
close to first quarter of the year & I wonder at the repetition, the effects of repeating myself, here, playing myself in this key and sequence of tunes a story I am always
saying what do I say beside this sequence of stations that lace some blue purple I
want to keep around I guess—litany white
***
a stump on the far side of the creek was the first threshold you
had to jump across drag your foot wet Bruce made legend
when I was allowed; I saw Doug the last time there he walked
off in a twilight and threw a rock & the trail was broad up
the bank from the stump and ran straight through ten-year
hardwood to where the creek ran back under it and you’d
have to cross it again where there were reeds to reach the
bottom of Dead Man’s Hill I’d come down after following
Susan Fiztgibbons home and go back the same way stick my
head out of the wood’s edge to see if Mom was looking and
run across the street act liked I’d walked home the right way
it wasn’t Egypt just by Lake Erie after it rained one time an
island appeared we called Crocket’s islang Fess Parker on
Disney over three nights thirty years later looks racist.
2/22/11
then I got sick, a cold I knew it the night before, cut some my schedule and tried to write more of the Notley paper but was just wandering; the week acquired muscles & I curled up and finished a book about a girl and a cat Jehanne had given me “a lord, a panther” and why that scene I’ve written about twice now of following a girl home in some eight year old erotic haze the sun was—I can’t say its become a turn that occurs, a passage, but I don’t know what it says
***
no new memory but muscle and what’s flesh—perhaps the erasure of the line
of my cheek I draw a phase/vase/face e-slide chord—makes an access and admits
leak or squawked radio—there’s folding a baseball card in a bike wheel’s spoke
to make a flutter—folded body like a book over
,I suppose I did
bike can’t be gotten its metal sunflower-stained shadow & fat tire quick stand
oh oh the milk cart pump driven you’d spill at the end of the driveway & roll
happy on the tree lawn & in what order—we actually see things, vanishing
but sideral
***
Talk still about moments she tries
to figure out a change what a
change is and its not a thing
Heidegger wanted to get through
the mists to, its already gone, was
chance we can’t say other to bend we
have to bend—philosophy is not
a knight its written on a goat’s skin
doesn’t hold much water the men
had to sing very hard and an episode
of rain gets read in relation, a mistake—
a passage of time, but not the resonance
it was not about rain until it was
and their voices shook.
2/23/11
Pete and I do not make it very far. I push through Winston-Salem, but he drives slower in the right lane and we pull off in Virginia at the Relax Inn simple shed row motor inn with
beds run by Hanuman devotees there in what had been a hard white country; tomorrow we will follow his GPS along state highways through a tangle of coal country until we come through the Appalachian rain at the head of the Red River Valley, a flat ox-bow slide north.
***
rational Mom is always inside a rule system & the rule system got put there; it might be sticky & difficult to change but is arbitrary, which means chosen or biased, at a slant Mom; I guess I understand the philosopher’s trick with this I mean if you are over and over talking to folks who are caught in this kind of thought the only leverage is by going
out the door up to some second floor, get above the system, or so it seems they get all rhapsodic about how this mode of ever upward resolution this constant resolve works and I tried a long time Mom to suggest any number of doors we could go out come back in and start again—it was a time people wanted to shuck off rules and boundaries & so maybe you read me as want some transcendence of ego-boundary in trying to argue but
those were not doorways I read Maslow but it was not going anywhere and that wasn’t
what I meant I was pointing outside at the sky Mom it was already evidence enough & it wasn’t about there being no rules, but a different set I thought a better fit with form/breath, not a resolution up to vantage up to add vantage but a sidestep Mom over here
through these curtains a guy went through not long ago or you came back from didn’t you see? we are always move sideways I am tired of gerunds move wideways and slip between and that’s how we touch
***
she had fierce circles of logic under
her eyes as if shadows of her thin
black hair or finger trace of the last
line of no resolution left her
more and more soft in the end
almost light what had been written
again and again bone to skin she was
an adult girl coat wrapped with
babies she had to get across
from the car to the store their
wish to do almost anything
else, like fish she waded through
& wore skirts not to show her
legs but to make them shepherd wings
2/24/11
we get in Louisville in rain, I am still not well and will be obsessively thinking about Frances for the next two days, as if doing a dhikr a constant protest “she’s a Leninist, is the most, here’s my emails from You are dismissive and don’t really know are being political everything she does is politicalv words have meaning or you have some other
interest than dominance unfathomable & I wil not use commodity as the measure of form’s say” a long mantra thought maybe two hours in and out of not morning wakefulness my body never lets down
***
Mom, were you confused by the weight to give freedom allow your kids loose
little ids is dreams in places they would not be hurt, reading, hidden and a desire
to be good Victorian work, be good laundry folded and polite and no arms on
the table, slightly bifurcated between Dad and you as if Dad was the one who
wanted order though you quite helpmeet were on his side but you also had to
plan because Dad had navy family as his only example of social interaction &
what science boys do when they are alone with each other distracted and saw
saw saw he was the boss not you we knew otherwise
***
Come out of a schiller field you had
a freedom to say “grain cloud space” made
clear; you sold to be German and
got us to scrub pots less
romantic & bakelite radio fabric
soft buzz-pop you hadn’t seen
coming you were led into small rooms
and told to stay.
Days hurt, the children outside and dumb
cooking that didn’t talk each afternoon
under a brown repetition still life
shadow; from the sun as we were
there was no way to compare sudden
sadness to tell.
2/25/11
guys get up and go after I read “Reason’s Wound” (could be she is hurt) and I run flat by 3:30 wall of travel car battery dead & dinner in was two days ago I watch “Deception” on Hotel HBO and don’t sleep again—this morning amid push of paper it seems to me that no action and no thing said makes a change as is at stake & not that it is wrong to witness but that so several are the purposes at any good thing as leaves many consequences and thus the point not to say or act but yer heart what yer heart brings to it (& not thought the
way the Buddhists thought it when heart and thought are not teased apart Isolde and Tristan dead upon the marsh)
in the early evening there is a Jupiter Pluto square in the sky my car’s battery is dead & in Durham Frances is saying our program is not “excellent” I have a blue knit cap and see it on my bed as I change from suit coat to suede but when we get to the lobby its not in my pocket—back to the room, nothing on the floor along the way, or the bed & to boot the other black knit cap also gone suddenly I have none I was half aware of—the black cap maybe I left in a session room, but the blue one slipped into the array just as I tell Joe the way I think is that the car battery died because of Jupiter/Pluto and energy blast static of ICS meeting conjoined pressure detonated along these stress lines…
***
if I don’t include events in fall/winter 1978-9 Boston
apparitions, at least two disappearances occurred in Middleburg Heights charcoal black
dad painted—Barbara’s teddy bear Mary gone overnight in the gable room
already haunted by peaked roof & harold’s purple crayon I followed at night &
a Davy Crockett stampbook was mine I carefully fit stills from the Disney version
into; at the edge of
the desk by the back wrap around window we saw the tanager in the honey
locust from; put aside the way I still make work piles to my right
into what story?
***
If Athens is folded over London & Celan’s
vanished cathedrals a vellum palimpsest of
Rilke’s rose window’d eye and sets brood
made witness by the denotation of crows
time crossed, there’s also slip or, I stepped
away from her to look in the stream instead of
crossing the trigram, a slip mucus’d opens
smack you feel the same arc mom wept afternoon
now your skin, now your bones, now
your brittle, now empty raum
bale of the day gone, starling scattered
or Breughel’s leaves, gilt and starlet
memory of ornament, lost to the divers
hid in a basket or passed on sold.
******
2/26/11
cusp of this has not yet synchronized and so there is a familiar drift could be called the space my body takes up it appears; a last day & I again arrive at the end of the conference in Room 202 & a woman named Carolyn I see each time at this juncture is there to again read from a memoir about her Dad, family, sisters, in Lynchburg; I remember Burroughs says you run into someone at a connection point three times you should say hello, but we’ve already done that & this time we don’t talk, both of us carefully walking away from whatever it is
***
There is the small intensification of movement, arias, the kinds of radiant jostling
we associate with steam or the influence of the sun//growth and heat of the too close;
and the larger systems of homes in repetition and indifference of blue sky mirrored
plains and landscape and other wides—Anglo-Saxon simple of what hewn I have close—the great spell of “K” cast by the supermarket sign Bruce would point to his friend, his skein and scarf, scalp ska, skill—breath over fence cut—become fragment, dispersed,
perhaps what an angel sees pulled apart by constant wings—Mom was at the close,
the immediate window & not much help to offer, hid back of picture window glass reflection, against the greater bitter she kept sending us out into, among others
stain sway the dark you weren’t as much as also
***
Hard not to think this leaked sway this
dark maul a surface shifted belly was
my hunger weren’t the men you feared of—
Lindbergh’s baby robber, all shadow—
Its cain ma, no sugar slurry milk
will sweeten—red rule in the pines
I can’t carry off, Rilke said restrain
you bent all bad to, set a different
plumb—I listened, wanted that
first light in the trees, salt woman’s
visit & we could talk some maybe
we could walk a ways, I could
put down body after body in the snow,
cash on the barrel you could burn.
****
2/27/11
there are times I want to fall asleep into a bell, lost into sound the day breaks,
then I’d be broken the way I feel I echo, parsed by a dowse
long drive home & talk Pete and I are not quiet; a Waffle House travel exit ramps &
gas is more expensive thanks to freedom in Libya I am glad, the house is falling down
isn’t it? Nothing is like Boston once was, back in the 70’s, but I still feel that way.
***
reading is no one’s gift, I am on my side, knees bent, I wait this way, week after week,
getting longer—how much like the many hours I am asleep, just this way and the sky turns over me & when I am awake I return to lie this way and read, waiting for the
dream to open again, as if my eyes were closed, sounds of the house fallen away
there was no way to say this Mom you’d already decided we were both at work
in a field you had no more cups to put out and we felt differently so that nothing
could transpose & I without water had no way to do anything but burn, harder
in an attempt to exhaust the thing, the coin we’d gotten stuck on I didn’t see
was shadow
***
Sad’s like spent little spill of it, tied
to no reason, sad little sill
weight comes on afternoon
towards dinner in stain and still;
sad’s a river falls its way, kitchen
as cave, I remember a door
didn’t alter and floorboards—
it all slows down;
Whatcha greive a Mom? There
by the stove? She got sad at that
time & it still happens,
we get to the window broken
and the vast west and disappeared sun
go down American orphan.
*****
2/28/11
I no longer, haven’t had for a long time, access to something you’d think,
we could call, a feeling that was whole, that I was in my body, as if a
pearly gloss drop in the bowl of the day, dropped in the day’s colors but
true we could call “a true feeling”, wouldn’t it? I became unstrung, the
unstringing took several years, opposite and dispersal, sinew stopped
translating and how, Mom? Was it an accumulation of sad afternoon that
could not sublime I was without water, and thus left salt displaced chrysalis
mucasoidal like everything I pulled away from you caul and stuck in
throat, or drugs sharp correscent leached battery effect on synapse surface
made metal, or necessary starvation? I held together by carefully carried
plates placed ritual and stitch across what no longer felt
***
what can I say, Mom, situations arose I could no longer wait for you at the corner;
it began in high school up to then I was possibly willing to tolerate but increase I
had to rise up to I began to walk home from school you were never on time to
pick me up and I hated being the last kicking dust and circling wait & since there
was band practice or theatre I was late after many days; I’d hitchhike rarely walked
the whole way but got to know thin trail of sand from winter in piles swept
against grass verge of various lawn/field approximations and class locations like
Ballardvale whre Louise Brogan once lived maybe up above the east bank of the
Shawsheen and railroad cut along
***
Skims what I witnessed and billowed ash
I was loyal to the dead and trees most
without feeling know as taste & talked
an audience of flowers, dust, clover
bees acid and verdant in spring return
fields & quiet stacked in pages there
‘s no reference for; I lost I elegy God
lost, was picnic and a girl was gone
how could we butter coke in a sun
full of that, all the girls who were gone
legs and a river washes will last—
I can’t take you there; am not
angry enough to make you feel the same
patches of smokestack flakes
*****
3/1/11
thunderstorms last night & big spring winds—I struggle through a series of social events, teaching, Jehanne’s book reading, a Slavic dinner and Laura’s birthday & grad students, smile pasted on I am really tired still from the drive and have bad news from Jehanne about the Notley grant, no letter yet, but a frontal system; I write this, and my shadow grows longer
***
Mom and Dad’s house on Anderson is now repainted brown around the brick. I rarely drive down that way—it’s hard to look at like a dead vole Mallory brings home trophy & I don’t like to look at Edwin Ave. either, a scar on the tree, going to therapy 3-5 times a week, touched and writhed and then in dark with Arianne go through my circles a disaster, unable the ways I had come apart, soft whispers I was so hurt & pain for a decade, even more laying down and waiting, or that that was no longer a solution, what I’d done to hide
it is all mine I guess no sibling acknowledges & so it is David can’t be pleased I am designate to carry Mom’s mask a wild thing and do poetry too after she put Schiller
down like I am Episcopal acolyte with the shepherd’s cross a girl a girl with black
hair
***
Not dead awhile, we tried to gather
despite ill-fitted worlds &
moved at different speeds Dad’s
calculus could not compute style
properly to say “civil war blue in a
hollow” “some girl stuck as boy”
and “boy stuck as girl” confused the
mirror & “riverboat banker” &
whatever starling Mom was from
she didn’t admit & Dad’s recent life
as shale & “a selfish Russian princess
Aglaya” & six beds, a round table &
books under roof under sky,
and could not.
*****
3/2/11
yesterday I am almost today & experience this weight, surface imagine
I said to Mom “I don’t know why I am sad a spatter Corot leaves; it was
my doing but also history I was a part of what could be reduced to Melville
to be said short & that was not it either; I wish I could have a proper reaction
‘appropriate to the time’ I was somewhere else in a bed, reading I was
last year, had found my way into”
at least one mystery solved though I go by Joe’s to get the book I’d left in Louisville & he roughs around in his pack & finds the black knit hat, not gone I’d given it to
him to get it out of my pocket a day before everything got lost, or maybe that morning
***
around Duke today leak spring air passes brushes of culture & the body
stuff of growing up in Andover, like Cary and other wealth now wafts off
a family that walks by, Dad with his girl, visiting or here before spring break
they sit around I don’t like to acknowledge in my eyes but know the way
to hold my collar bone to get it step my body against that;
high school pictures all the girls had long straight Emmy Lou hair and the guys
more fluffed was there one night I had the body I meant to have and someone
saw it I was “projected” in my history “and it was good” getting out of Russell’s Red
Impala, Russ dead almost fifteen years now some rhythm lost his heart no longer
mutters fill
***
If polis is that, took place spread inland
H.D. wrote we’d gone to after sea, I went
amphibian backwards into whale, lived
invisible un-project and in no space for
I tried to open out by dance, turned
rapid instead, become yours or his, not
differentiate profile & still drowned
that sunbeams’ startle and no surface
in the sky, Atlantean in practice
& polis is crows or spatter
gas flame & radio news outside,
Medicine Hat burns yellow in prairie
night, the earth released in what
can’t be held.
*****
3/3/11
spring break I get home by 3 PM after leisurely lunch and other writing—at last writing on the right day & so can no longer use that as metaphor for my own assonant
dysphasia—
***
I was not able to understand what feeling was & instead, over the table
would wave my hands insistent about “the space” or feel of the room as
outside me, an affect of a small social thought system “space” as episode
or cathedral weren’t they notice I was never in & had no place—I’ve
wondered since we’re social, but the social call it polis is not person or
organic or Indra’s Jeweled net, maybe Yeats’ “strange beast” is gone
somewhere and leaves—I was not a part of the family I cared for I cared
for because I was small or felt I didn’t know, loyal, stubborn; they have
not called and don’t need me & we ate dinner until it was too much and
Mom stood up, yelled at Bruce and left for the bedroom Dad’d scowl
and we’d keep our elbows off the table
“eat your peas David”
my teeth came in badly & when I chewed on the right, the left molars didn’t
meet and a ½ inch overbite, sad mouth, teeth come in sideways and pebbled; I could
put peas into my mouth faster than I could chew and I’d spoon them in
and sit there, trying to chew and swallow and everyone else would be done
last at the table
***
Soft lie of spring promises death or the like
wet black clods cold for peas a release I’d
like to come apart, weather does isn’t it
time? polis got no clothes
is like other fist of the market or fate
to be realized we knew was wrong—
what projects’s a portal or persona not
if you really loved, can you?
gestalt stumbles at equal of figure and sky
can never be against any other back-
ground & says what we love, looks
back and makes us, hiding, not
wanting to say or seen be shared
on the suddenly apparent carpet.
