Dec. 4th 2010
Almost new Sagittarius moon deep & snow I run
errands in.
***
Moving box in a basement with bolts of dress fabric
as yellow top flap pulled back beige carbon-then pattern
envelope and thrown out over a store table and cut by the new
Woolworth’s ruler yard, or stacked in the master
bedroom closet where the intercom control to watch upstairs
was and Dad’s brown suits and smell and one hiding
place among others.
***
Alone among shoppers and past plums
or saturate, the way a base drum got too
full and had to be a long solo on top
as display; what falls was kept
up that way. Broken sweet was it &
the long caul were emerse and thick
note flute nothing.
She’d gone yell I never knew
what alliance or origin had selected
or imbued and furnish and haunt
that walked around her in the front
room & big window in a small town
and sky street maple etc specific
prowled a prison and stepped out.
12/510
Clear, red sky touch over highway dusk—new moon bales & snow west. Manchurian Candidate at Joe’s on living room wall.
***
Cowboy wallpaper was echoed in a print she
made a pillow out of, one of three that
circulate undesignated as cups were (green
Ed, blue Bruce, yellow (Jap, coward) me
we used as weapons or read on, the second
a blue intricate also came in red—I don’t remember
the last pattern, under Eve and Harold
with his purple crayon, dragons
***
What to do with her stuff letter came today.
I am supposed to pick I want to haunt
and say it.
12/6/10
World’s kindness that I do not work Monday AM and I can still watch the sun lit up rose earth and stirring air of the morning as always since even as a child I began to know hours.
***
To unloose a double-bind needs one to ever so slightly release pressure on both ends, which requires a slit to be opened, that is a purchase that becomes scar.
Die, Mom says, also unties the flower (I didn’t transcribe fast enough). Put that in your book of tricks. And turns back to the basket for another sheet to hang on the under sky.
***
Cat-a-mouse pat on the heart, keep
that safe, folds her hand flicker loom
or butterfly skim over my sister’s
in dim-watt 8 mm flotsom Dad
stored back in the recess of the
garage, games & unopened from
last move marked “dining room”
like “toy “r” us or Lowes
sequence of invasion plan supplies
and what we enter and take and return
from under nests lies
under scaffold depot XMass accumulate
we were still hup two at the back of
our minds she caved in.
12/7/10
in AM reading Helen Carr’s Revolution in Verse in bed, bath, alaze
***
Already styled, memory memorial t’will fabrique which the Chinese perhaps
call metal, perhaps a pause, pond, what is otherwise disc fallen to palm
angels arrowing back from the deep summer depart to once more make
ground Michael fertile St Joan will pull forth as sword.
I don’t trust these swift elemental changes, or too long
the design in which I pointed care and ought, to breath
to life, to fire, something of ember.
If you are reading close you know I may already have placed
more than I wanted in this complaint. A distracting that thorn fence
distracts from the feet pushing the small oared boat
out into the glade. Duty to memory is uncertain, yet
we apply for a passport in lines.
***
She fingers her trace beads between image and
fetish stone, rubal, amythestation, onxity
and lapisticity, maid marriage at dawn of
dusk orange, dew drake, spattered
menstrual blood at month’s mark you
would seduce from its beckon, your tongue
flutter calls asuction, asundered blossom
broke its free ship from impasto’d hour
background as leavings or “bare life”
as harm meant herm because we are
not common
said a reduction Mary over, set a boil, the visit
of a God is not my stele; I’d rather all sister
stones//pushed tooth a dragon from the soil
along its angle.
12/8/10
John Lennon shot 30 years ago young man Robert Browning after watching my smoke and mirrors girl and Paul Robeson in “Borderline” & overcast trash day & crawling under the car
***
It cannot quite be as I recall
I am a bed in the cowboy wall paper gable room
I think and in a room next door (actually
a ceder closet Mom kept her red fox fur in & mothballs
the best hiding place even with the door open
the shadows so deep back) my Aunt Ruth is yelling
at my cousin he has the Beatles on a Sony
Transistor Radio I could get Detroit across the Lake
strange and likely confused with Denver or
me listening and ceder and “I want to hold your
hand” when I preferred Motown, Petula Clark
but not Aretha’s “Chain, chain, chain” I
don’t know why; was it 1964 or 65? black haired Mom
doing her Jackie imitato didn’t listen to music
her Dad’s plastic black radio dialed to baseball
while she’s doing clothes in the basement I used to
curl on the floor and listen.
***
Several black haired gals folded kohl 1920
along a newspaper fold//crows that way become
threaded t'shawls and back again//spread wings and
step step across floorboards left
domestic or otherwise interior and mirrors
to change back to daughter or to hero prince
double in Jean d’Arc bob cut & by the
1940’s sunglasses to swan and place city
in perspective; by then adjusted to pose and
yet falcon or dive//neither you nor we
accept material fact//you can
climb into walls you have to
into other lands inside walls//after
a long time waiting.
12/9/10
blue sky a bit warmer and so, softer; bolts of letters off like the eight of rods & winging & with first crescent emerge
***
memory cannot be her house nor mine though
leaked as purple in brushstroke I watch
with a second eye the double (sometimes
bear) that is stereoscopic twin or sister to
pavement, winter pines, camellias and the
pair of cardinals, red and red to green on
my roof; in this way I am landscape and sky
between the face of my life I can never
see and the clouds blown off in sails
***
“I can call the wind, David” my Maxfield
Parish mother, when she learned to sail
said across the kettle pond her small
boat//green-black water I could not see
my face//in the boat I thought “sure”
trailed my hand, wrist still bandaged where
I’d tried to make a cut to stop the June
stars//the vast departures of angels
startled like birds by blossoms and leaves—
even then some remain, friend, bend sudden mist
to share your tears and
visit at tea; the grass and oak and maple
loved my Dad a rosey in his slumbering garden pants
why not my mother also, young witch
a breeze would shelter.
12/10/10
turbulent night, I wake up three times in a startle, struggling, the first time I am hiding in a room that is for sleep, a hide and seek game and someone comes in to the room and around the end of the bed—I wake up startled grabbing at them & there is a white figure of diffused light, maybe a foggy eyed understanding of a streetlight reflection off the glass of the Chagall roses & then two more times when I am cornered, to fight my way out of a situation
***
the tremendously disruptive nature of Mom’s anger a projective
force in gusts disturbed sleep—Sam felt as well when he visited—
or a vibration set up between Bruce and Mom, what is called
faery to say fury when required to admit earth and restless of sex,
the dolls in the house like a series of wicks to focus and manage in
plastic still, movements that otherwise flicker, we’d all have to see,
brood fetish as rheostats, a bank of them pushed up against outside
ocean
***
House irradiate by dream among
silent neighborwalls in uneven time
made starling and call by book;
at night, pages open further
unfurl edges where time folds &
she touches you from Minsk whispers
or gale siren, the most recent
smolder aurora and
pulse like hearts without heat
what sense undone lingers
where the road passes
each bed at the edge
rocked a bit in wake
we almost open after
12/11/10
slurry Saturday w/grey leak sky//read Verse Revolutionaries to the “war” & pensed on academic class-am perhaps vicious to R. duPlesis
***
Irene’s therapist downtown Andover its ridge up
from railroad and Shawsheen a high road and
cemeteries & now stores she never spoke
too much about sadness or what built up as
bitter as as I cannot say as this anger I carry
wound and doesn’t disperse as this bind I circle
start with Rum hid after I teenage found it
supposed locked in a pink cabinet stood in
the basement and easy to unhinge, six screws
Rum or Whiskey, just at night what I want so
as to sleep, since I’ve decided not to use my
body as dam or circuit, since I cannot trust its
feels, nothing halts the horse wind of thoughts
gallop and circle not breath my body obedient
and still unhinged; she’d say, pointing at her
heart, “I don’t like my body David” then how to
enjoy anything that is given.
***
His curdling wave wand his I am
“not a girl” or “mothered” hard
shell takes Victoria figurehead
for theft out the back door deal—
its her fault all dem commies and most
willing to sacrifice you Prosperity,
she’s feast and famine wheeled out of Troy
and pushed into the ocean
& oil Dad’s and Coal Dad’s and Railroad Dad’s
feed her small seeds so she’s rural and sheaf
corn & you cannot trust this on
the one hand, we’ll put it in yer hand safe
emblazoned in metal you eat and
spend her wrists.
12/12/10
Mercury gone retrograde and errands pile up, start to go astray & it rains
***
A certain amount of walking things from
here to there mothers but not, girls at a
time it becomes clear story is an unreliable
resource for imagining what it mean to be
a person & yet childbirth as still how we
out of our mother’s bodies arrive to
dream, to paint a story about a girl
reading at a window & the constant make-bright
yammer of testosterone &
don’t believe it when they talk about
masculine hardness, the penis is so soft
and hidden away & bird to find.
***
Love ma a pence I s’pose a tell
an thought yellow as my bucket
to wash and shush her harmony
so bright always//mind matter her
Pythagorean tracery//I was s’pose
to be angel-like, honor or cups
canary plastic and there, that duty
knighted I was not about//they say
“paint a room yellow where you
do numbers or calculate ration” she
gave me to philosophers, she say
“he’s the yellow one, lady lion
cowardly third big Burt Lahr boy
to think Heidegger’s stun.”
12.13.10
First crucible fold of the half moon this morning; air still warm but clear from rain; as if emerged in a second world, sun and moon separate and sad or tossed at the abrupt removal of a face or mask; that’s real out there’s (percussed by copulative) split I can’t say, real day and not, or knot of it. Is my tongue any better?
***
a battered copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover up on
the bookshelf, mom said was racey that way she
talked later about dancers or Vigo Mortisson she
was not forbidden but it was up high & I didn’t
read it did I? when I was reading the rest of Lawrence
on the breezeway day bed or atop my bunk bed looked
a long way south to Boston over that landscape of
cranberry pocks and blood we wasped over, fierce,
restrained, and vigilant as already our hearts were utterly
blood wolf and stone we hid in that barn; Women in Love
I suppose, but there’s a book says Lady Chatterly’s H.D.
or part composite & somewhere, despite pointed his penis
in all direction there was a sense a girl’s freedom
her absolute to go where, her uncertain how
was like slaves a thing we’d been brought to bear
on, Troubadors since.
***
All this I am fascinated by your neck
curve isn’t it I am still in love despite
all shame I have this desire to break
it//young kids’ll stab your eye to see
or try to stop. Its Fire! Its Fire! birds
shriek dove over exposed rock and a
body that’s impossible storm and
so proper restrained. Some other
than circuits fuse, some other than
arc between juxtapose, some not
synthesis, oh each of us
fell feal as well, “turn that so I can
see it” suddenly,
we’re on the second floor.
12.14.10
What is ordinary? Ordens inflected marrow air, mallow seed, thigh straight of brink or brick. We are here, among ours, call it history or what wants to become light.
***
At the Hickman’s in Beaver Falls, PA bottom
vined & not later Erie tar roof, the
yellow cup lined along the blue and green, slight
flare at the lip so tulip, at night it is there
in the transitional house.
In danger and suspended spider could fall
if not put back precise and
self aware.
***
Absence that seeps through,
we are not made of light
anymore than yellow,—
food intellect requires &
is neither end nor endless, otherwise
called flesh//you’d say “loin
et proche”, the flutter of the
crocus throat to
stammer awn
awed the red sky
odd quiet in trance
metal door of the milk chute
clamped shut and other
obvious charms.
12.15.10
Skies blue and a budge warmer so a storm through tonight’ll most likely rain or pass slush and wash; incidentally agonned by lack of visibility or impact Candy suggests a change of style but to what daemon-mark could I turn to suggest how deeply different my back yard is? I ask Maggie about if I could teach in drag, but that’d be off too as invocation of some terrible gauze and threaten.
***
Lindbergh kidnapping Mam followed in
New York newspapers folded somehow
in my head with the Dionne Quintuplets,
and a house up at the top of our street near
the postbox I’d walk with Mom up there to
mail letters she wrote a lot in perfect small
clenched cursive, the house where seven
girls lived—all orphans, but all with same
black bob cut and all disabled, the one my age
couldn’t make tears and when Mr Radabaugh
yelled so sharp at her about spelling, she had
to use an eye dropper to put tears in to cry; her
older sister Yvonne (a name in “Y” Iseult) had
polio brace & so all of these in a file, black bob
disabled and Mom with her bottlethick glasses
and girlhood crossed eye and “stigmatism” like
Christ and cross, saw world in painful cubist
collisions of planar glass and would lie a bed with
“headaches”, a whole long row of orphan and
the Lindbergh blonde Apollo boy torn away and
Mom’d worry ever since strange men strange
men who looked in windows strange and shadowy.
***
What Yeat’s called “dark leopards
of the moon” is half lief stain and brood,
shadow we wear spectacle, our desire
uneasy dappled skin & honest as cloak
covers that bedroom adrift bed where
colors chalice were quilt and skin and
eye’s spangle tented parchment for
Bali puppet—the way blood runs
& men do ceaselessly. Terrible command
from the deep river’s edge as
fact as spring’s return, not
cancelled by violets we bear
in solemn and disobedient
festal.
!2/16/10
Columnar sublunar balustrade she did not pose by was off hand today & until now I did not notice. now everything is cut through as if by sheets of paper if I could only put my
hand through the air the way I think it
***
Mom is yelling at Bruce. We are driving through
Rocky Creek Park. There were I believe several ways
to drive through the park. Many of them involved
all of the children being silent and Mom and Dad
“talking” or everyone being quiet for twenty minutes
and in some places the slopes rose sharply and the
road dropped or wound up hill. Somewhere in the
park, there was a submarine jungle gym; we’d
swim—well that is a joke I am making now—we’d
play Sundays, not too often I remember sun and
nearby there was a picnic field. Sometimes the creek
was flooded and the little bridges at the bottom of
the gorge would be closed and Dad would drive through
maybe a foot of water. In general church was on the
other end of these drives, so we were always in
Sunday clothes, and unhappy, and on the way back
we’d have to be quiet because Mom wanted to
talk about the sermon & later we’d have to be quiet
I guess because Mom and Dad would “take a nap”
so it was not much fun driving through Rocky Creek
Park or at least I have bad memories of it.
***
“If there were witchcraft, I’d make three wishes”
Mom would sing she remembered being a girl-scout
and, like the Buddhist Pure Land Sutra, where
a bodhisattva makes a vow he wouldn’t become a
buddha unless anyone who thought of him would
be reborn in his pure land & now he’s the Buddha
Amitabha and so the vow is true, it was of course
obvious there was witchcraft, Mom being a witch
even when she was a girl, so her three wishes
were one’s she had made, the golden road and the
beckoning campfire that called her home
that was only two & then the chorus would come
in about memories, and I do not know why
there was one left.
12.17.10
conflict endured from years produces as its after-touch an arm of a cross of light, naturally mistaken as self, which is only, turned that way, weight
***
quicksilver animal guessing game I prowled
or made small to gambol against the backyard swingset
what would be a card game with my son to
imagine being serpent or basilisk, girl-fish
slunk in the pools of Volga tributaries and melt-ponds
whose white fungal hair would twine about an ankle—
dreams of shape-shifting, doing the blues, all
is bent to be possible & learned this early I
could hide in art, as more than portals a picture
on a wall, covered a thing in its visible other,
and a problem of tasting colors or the meaning of
a shadow offered a way out I was taken
under the waves by.
***
Sugarplum faeries on the bookshelf books binding
dust green embossed//picture leaf-glued upraised
hermaphrodite at the edge of Olson’s field//quick step
down the book-opened corridors so that
android spell nestles above tea//steam on the window
as proof//I am here among augers. Always the pair,
narrative and window, outside and seat, the glass frank
as gift; broken goblets but now stretched up between
spired and herald she calls crown
droops its curl and looks askance make
yarrow//cut the stalks
to clear the field of portance
your sisters would also rise
into the darkening.
12/18/10
Actually the 19th late after a party at Maggie's I listen to magnetic fields
***
all I can imagine is a hard jolt Mom felt to find herself
married and in TN among scientists she never talked a
bout who she imagined she suddenly was a part of a society
that was able to produce houses and a laboratory complex
did she have politics before this among Columbia grad
students or just angled reading Schiller a few yards from
where Ginsberg walked past and St. John’s Cathedral
outside the campus but creating an interruption of the
directional purpose of the streets anyway so that you
couldn’t get to the East from there to southern Harlem
but were turned somehow aside and west towards the
Hudson
***
we’re not talking yet and I imagine
you in circumstances I read about working
up a history I suppose the bookshelf
in the “living room” is the place to begin
I wanted to do a close reading; I guess
Dad bought the house you didn’t see it
& were in bed with Barbara and the flu
which doesn’t sound so bad;
what happened then I get scared everytime
I think what I am feeling is obvious
however obvious it is to those who like
I sometimes see a cascade of changing
emotion cross someone’s face or begin to see
how a different a person is, one time to the next.
12.19.10
sad edge of & fear comes off the night; moon moves towards full & eclipse—it’ll be eclipsed at its south node
***
five kids in seven years instead
of grad school at her Saturn return
which meant giving what’d she see
in Schiller I don’t know, wish it was
spieltrieb—against reason that
“living form” instead insists,
a tribe of stories that is
“beauty’s morning-gate”—then we’d
have something to say I got out
of it.
***
Already more than reference is
in letters, but not life alone that
power wants; a second disrupt
cannot be cancelled; she was
broken eyed & Cordelia against//
sisters make the world in two’s
and second sisters take the other
path that’s left, its leaving stones
and dowry; who cuts the room
by meanness spat or stronger pull,
who dreams or has the red,
who has the blue? Makes a quiet
girl more quiet until thrasher thin
she wades into the water,
12/20/10
sister Barbara’s birthday, I sit indoors and write letters and follow-ups and am weary now at the turning of the day—a total lunar eclipse later tonight just before solstice but those words don’t tell it
***
I always liked Mom’s sister Ruth, bluff nurse married
to an artist who’d had TB during the war, shut in
in New Mexico & Denver was a different straight-line
post-war suburban sequence, driveways and fences,
but the same allotment; Ruth had no children—Mom won
there—but two adopted, slightly older each than my
brothers & one time we took the Denver Zepher from
Chicago it had a domed viewing level above the
regular car and we’d sit up there and watch Nebraska
***
Double vision was how diamond hard
light fractile and being ugly back behind
bottle slanted glasses//but cubist,
Dr. Calgari set aside & so more modern
than she might have thought//sisters
divide the world though old as beaches
she’s seeing twice and a bit greedy
her sister’d tell, “Rene disagreed Daddy”
Indian sister could run a mile &
mom ran off the track fused
by the crab crossgrass design she
was stuck having to think it before saying
suspended spider in ghost world
of half broken things.
12/21/10
Late night; everyone up in the house aslight
***
I see Mom in hallways that are green or
a kind of forest calico-rosette lace; or I see a
distraught, angry really, woman wandering
her house; she was already a ghost in my
mind; I’d say I dreamed her this way only
they say the figures in the dream are your-
self, so it might be more proper to say this
was what I internalized; that would be to
treat the dream-image as caused though
when it more likely occurs alongside waking
life, not caused, but proximate, what I’ve been
saying happens because there is a fold.
***
Fold to touch’s secret and stressed
one way means something like give
or bow so as to sense; another way
makes possible love// and I mean this
when I wrote the first line I thought of
three paper doll nurses in lingerie
I had as a child; one short black haired
especially slim and fold the uniform tabs down
over her shoulder; it might have been just
a year later, 1966, Richard Speck//killed
eight student-nurses in Chicago gets
confused in what I am feeling and again later
maybe 30 I find on late night the Charles Bronson
“10 to Midnight” version of this.
12/22/10
Sam busy mailing grad school applications off and Sasha poised beside my typing, wishes she could lay her head against my hand. I notice writing about Mom is a constraint thought pushes against—all the weave I want to do about folds and double
structure angling off sits restless against her as sister and thoughts I have of her I think
must be like cave paintings, a mere mask of something else.
***
There is no question children can be erotically focused, perhaps abrupt by trauma.
Memories of elementary school half lit by Mom are also about girls
Susan Fitzgibbons I followed home in a half dream and then went on down
to cut through the park (I wasn’t supposed to) and hide in the grass a sec to
see if anyone was out to see me leave the shadows, and a velvet covered black
pony on a Valentine absolutely fused and fetish same way later the slim turn
of a leg no matter what horror elsewise Chinatown is pending (or the face-scalded
nurse in Halloween II topless) I am captivate in the most obvious masculine attention
I am wanting that//runs through my dreams & Mom’s worries on top of that
Dr. Sax gone Ripper flits by her window peer each night//I’ve got to hide that.
***
Difficult body silence admits//no one
may listen but a glassine mica slowly pebbled;
like any stone, perhaps a friend, perhaps
forever in it doesn’t say//we live among
outcrops and runnels like us as
all things shape//But never still quiet
never that silence stops//all music carries
without voice a rhythm.
Difficult to know that silence says
anyway what we press against
makes its dented glove
at our face, on cheekbone brush
the wings of alter we
are changed by.
12.23.10
wake after dreams begun in an empty house I’ve returned to—Edwin Ave I suppose at times, at least the yard, when its there as sometimes it’s an apartment breezeway instead—and gather myself and then, escaping from town, “gone to ground” someone explains to go into hills of Western Ma.
wake and a flow of thoughts I think of as the severe sister that dawn is comes over me as I lie still dream web—thoughts about Mom and Dad, how obsessive he was, we now wonder Asperger’s Syndrome—a controlling Dad to obsessive husband was as far as she got, we are stuck repeating and meet second versions and only have a few decades, a few chances, first thrown and then we do the best we can
***
Mom so wanted to be fair, her sister and she fought, and so she thought I’ll be fair, no kid will get more or less, and that met Dad’s navy family stuff and he was willing to, given the
obsessive, willing to order cans in the basement and regime of identical breakfast;
& it leaked out right away, totem animals and colors are not fair or equal, they are
different;
maybe Mom was greedy or imperial smart soul, and smacked down as a girl
and having to make die with the bad part of wife mother (I meant make due)
as possible next step among bad refuges, she and Dad suddenly trying to hold down
the tarp against the Kansas tornado of the sixties and five kids going divergent
interior, she can hardly hold the clothesline, but does, dim girl in someone’s storm,
walking around Lawrence, into poor70’s tenement town, to take the census.
***
After viewing Mother’s body//claustraphobic morgue entry cube
thanked folks who kept us from her according to regulations for care
Ed and I drove farther up west coast of Lake Cayuga to Taughannock
Falls she’d ask us to drive her there to sit at the overview;
a quarry gap maybe 500 yards across to the ribbon stream
drops from one topos of fields to lake underfoot. We came in
from the top and parked. Ed talked about having joined AA and
I pressed him a bit about whether he was okay with the conceit of a
Higher Being//I don’t mind saying Gd//we walked down the WPA steps
and leaned out over & after a bit a group of school kids came
running down both steps, yelling in that echoing way kid’s voices
have in the day, 10 AM, so almost still dew, and one kid leaning out
too far and various kid pushes and girl taking it in clusters, and Ed said, okay
life goes on, and I said, she would like this, the kids & the racing precise day.
12.24.10
Cool day & air fresh before tomorrow’s coastal storm. I cull xerox’s from grad school on Tibet, Indian religions, tantras—siva says to devi’s ear a story or two & I touch work standing at the library making copies, and carrying for twenty years.
***
Mom used to quote Miss Emily D.’s poem
“I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell they’d advertise you know! How dreary
to be somebody! How public like a frog
to tell one’s name the livelong June to an
admiring bog!” Maybe not quite word for word
in the Kitchen, but justifies her low profiling. I always
think of this alongside a memory, making the turn
for the Horn Bridge over the Shawsheen on the way
up to Andover Center, Mom telling me about hubris,
how the second you were proud of yourself, the
gods snatch it away.
***
Be like water means not
only fall and fall again and pool
deep, but to turn against
the edges of the fence
mark scratched on day surface
we’ll come back to look
again. Not only pause but
turn aside makes mark shore
stretches it thin and changes
I have the story in my hand
which may not resemble
the beginning of seeing double
is second sight, spills
and nudges memory.
12.25.10
I get low later day as I often do impossible to be visible and shame to be. Snow comes in & we watch the Banksie film about street art. I tell stories about 1st job with autistic kids and Gary Kallio who is not autistic just so disabled after living a few years 11-14 his mom kept him in & he ate out of cans, so just damaged, one day we ask him, “hey Gary how are you feeling” and, he only writes to us, and always one word answers, and that day he writes, “anguish”.
***
At the end of Malte Lourdes Brigges, Rilke writes a passage about coming in
from outside at dinner time, describing the transition from basically feeling loved and
at one with beauty of nature to slowly, as one walks home, adopting the persona by which one is known in one’s family, until finally you open the door and meet the people who
say I love you to the persona. I know this & every Christmas I’d experience this as I opened gifts for the person Mom thought I was or liked me as & I’d smile, but inside feel so sad, an orange shirt or something not me & everybody so on edge it felt like if I tried to say something it’d be that I was ungrateful or couldn’t be satisfied, or worse, if Mom ever saw how little she knew me, if she knew how angry and upset I was by that. So I will let you dress me up Mom.
***
Doing with others matters//Gods not here
otherwise & no angel, stained glass or
shadow, comes concresced to be
a sheltering ear unless for all/ (though
they fall to earth repeated autumn
leaf and petal); become beauty even with
such poor players as repeat the
morning news automaton.
That endless speaking chants
the chorus blackbird
disconnect to any topic,
sets the strophe to judge
the angels ratify
was beauty done.
12/26/10
Oh war again and we will not so moved the
weight must they say; man war glory is
a problem—throw that against, my glove//
to bear this masculinity without killing the lot
***
Bruce found Tolkein first of course & said “oh my gosh
you have to read this” I was too young but anyway
one summer ten tried to read it in the green hammock
under the honey locust & mistook worlds I later
read correct & it was much later Mom read it and then
Dad, I guess, when they were retired, read it
aloud to her again; to touch time, to be born we say
of flesh is to be again in myths forever rise. No time
is without one & we say it and say it against all other
repeating &
oh brother, oh lost Union corporal starving to death
oh brother who knew WWI when the alphabets and
numbers exploded nightmare they called “the language
problem”
***
We have in us murder and the seeth horde doesn’t solve,
doesn’t make right. Not for anyone, not to make a place
that children later grow achance. God’s revealed slowly
in our words and you must go further to say,
stubborn and not saying what’s first and threats thrown--
despite world gone to its malls and sex on stage,
what we can eat and cast aside; America blazoned
not enough & never was & won’t be.
Take your hand & don’t; let mercy spring through wildflower
break it into twos & become woman become soul
rain, smoke and drift; somewhere in the woods
in the midst of a dream, somewhere in the woods
when you are walking again & become lost
this is a thread that waits for weft.
12/27/10
Snow yesterday makes the ground cold & bare & so shovels and work. Clean Sam’s
battery and haul papers from Grad School, mostly materials on Tibet, to the new office
on East.
***
I am divided tonight//Mom read Wind in the Willows
in late summer twilight//I was eight & don’t know
if we finished—we made into into the winter woods
and Badger, but did we read the chapter about meeting
Pan? published in my beautiful decade, 1908
& like Peter Pan and Alice prescient sadness over
doomed children who’d be sent brave to War//
gingham evenings then, or that Mom had Bruce
see a child psychologist an hour across Cleveland
every weekday morning from first grade on for year
as he defied her (did play with his shit carefully set
on toilet paper as if oracle, but) this first sign that the
parental response would be over kill and endlessly
defended as just.
***
A calliope funeral air is established as undercurrent
soundtrack, mooring cityscape to feeling they call
bhava in India—Being gone long makes vowel you-
tone become breath wah; old enough to curdle blue,
toes turned down to say duration, as long as the sky seems
you come out in the afternoon after a matinee La Jetée
you be long desolate & only the sky’s infinite depth
is close to compare.
That circling and shuffling snake step then,
that two up one back and turn. Lift the mute &
back, in the dark, in the dark two-step;
circling and shuffling of fertile and funeral
in best imitate, in best loyal “playing along”
chords and jagged.
12.28.10
A day goes by. First eddies of semester hate thoughts. Moon past its third quarter in Libra. Darkhours. Started To the Lighthouse.
***
I will say that, unlike some, Mom’s interest in the feminine was not about figuring how she could have power it got down to that, or getting a masculine license. She was not fair,
but never said the rules made that okay. She was not equipped for five kids wife ironing and telephone and played desperate the available. I have no idea what she thought about
in the middle of the day in Cleveland, what role she was supposed to like. She wrote her perfect small cursive letters to her mother, but she didn’t talk about sadness.
It is hard to see what’s behind the mask no matter what side of it you are on.
***
The lady leaves a space in the air appropriate to her
gender & men pull on gloves in the winter and adjust
their hats to suggest a pause meant pose and stele—
evasion aits in a braided creek that must disappear
again like stories. Lies and oatmeal pass the time she
tied some sage across the room the flies would circle it;
there are things to be done to change circumstance
but we should know by now saying he is a king
is a bad trade. Empty space we pile in the center
to mistake who has place—I left it there, “duck goose”
and be gone—strategies we can go quicker by
dropping (we’re all agreed) this place, this flowering
impossible form of my fleshed dream
and yours, laid across it.
12/29/10
Noisy café after stop by the tobacco barrens of East Campus; mid-day; our cleaners have chased me out of the house. Slept to 9:30 with big dream adventure in a crowd of women who comment but are not always implicate in the action. One woman comes up to me out
of a swirl and perches a moment. Says, “I have a spirit message for you. ‘Rembrandt’”.
***
Bach’s “Coffee Cantata” was one of Mom’s favorite records, a
struggle between a German, Schlendrian, and his méchante
daughter disobedient Lieschen, who will not stop drinking coffee;
she sings this joyous love song to coffee and won’t give it
up no matter what he threatens; transpose to East Orange NJ
and pencil in Puritan, but, after at first getting fresh ground &
sweet smelling A & P red bag coffee, by the time I was in
high school it was instant crystal Maxwell House; a parable for
the way marriages go bad or principle and primal scenes trump
sense.
***
Fingers folded into crashing waves of horse hooves
on sketch piano sat in the basement against a north wall
William Tell (turned Lone Ranger radio ghost, lightning
storm over the ‘30’s plains) cavalcade young boys
jump around—frog legged—to; long fingers of Moravian fells
through the century tuft grass we smell genealogy trace off
and mimic in our memory of leg angle and bone; Mom’s
mother’s family Tieppe German immigrant eddied to
Passaic fen gull houses & made the air, potato-grey festal
& clothe quilt knotted & Grimm spelt; we sat
Saxon but the piano was rattle of American cogs, a player piano
Joplin splayed and you pumped the clever automotive
pedals; our favorite old Jimmy Kennedy lyric Red Sails
in the Sunset, Irish seaside nostalgia Nat Cole made famous.
12.30.10
A month or so before Mom died I had a dream encounter with a group of women and girls, all ages, walking away from a school or center; a young girl won’t return a bag and book I’d lost and she’d found. She tries to give me some stones instead, but I won’t take that trade. The oldest woman, now sitting on the curb with me, says she has a stone for me I can have instead and gives it to me.
***
A nice thought would be to read this as an encounter with dakinis (knowledge consorts or sisters) and an exchange of one thing I was saying for a terma—what the Tibetans call a treasure text—a text hidden in some other object the “finder” locates by dream and other clue ciphers and then reads/write. Think pulling a thin strip of paper out of a rock like magic handkerchiefs. Or maybe about Mom or not. I had no other warning. She definitely stepped out the back door. Seemed ecstatic at first. Happy to be done with this body and its work. Later, well, I don’t know what it means to even think in these terms. Was it me not letting go or her? My greed and meanness or hers being a bad kid? In China they have this idea about three different souls, and I thought maybe that’s a way of trying to say these different things. One gone free, but one part that turns toe nail back.
***
Left to sleep is part of the story the way
the image track goes silly cartoon & you
know a second later you will slip the day—
to the lighthouse the sun sets;
what’s called “twilight language” tries to
mix the double world as if it never was
apart—prisoners are exchanged and shadows
have a light that’s a deeper Blake call’s
the marriage of heaven and hell. Cusp we
share and crust. Emotion’s thin veiled tide
between the body’s breath;
undertow, undertoe turns the eye just so
and the breakers and sister starling stars
are not bereft.
12.31.10
a day of almost unbearable bitterness makes me immobile, bile and talk; now late, extended day past midnight into some ritual allowance
***
Mom was not able to pick up the story from the action and believed
almost religiously that missing the first frames of a film—I don’t
know if she felt this way about a play—ruined it & had trouble
with plot, perhaps related to her fractile eyesight little girl behind
glass. Then Saturday movie Samson climbs out of the narrow sheer
well he’s thrown in, hands pressed against opposite walls to shim
only to later the same force applied inward cracks the dolphin-edged
columns to bring the house down, what hero cannot do.
***
Gone invisible didn’t salute or
otherwise saline or solve the bad faery allow
escape or otherwise sublime
toad poisons gradual accumulation;
nightmare would open the barn a release
of light as tempura control, and discovered
astral and ghost sisters by the closet Orestes
attempted cloak.
Was sealed off as an option debt ordeal
untransferable since split and rock shell
built up over the doorway into hero
turns mantle and gray between
the bookshelves an abject fireplace
on Sunday threshold.
1/1/11
Folks over in the late afternoon; sense of shame afterward & Jehanne sweet.
***
How much Mom drank in the evening or day
was a secret; it wasn’t something I smelled on
her breath or remember her drunk & so I thought
it was what she used as a control, the way some
folks use food or masturbation or cutting.
***
Tableau backyard turned Easter, porch
for photo shirts Mom rattled her black
Singer//shoulder seam Klee-colored
in descending age. A great shepherd,
Fritzi, died locomotive pant we slept
on air mattress heard & sad, still
spotted chicken pox clavicle, Kodak
proof I try to lyric.
Wind and coats, half
black-and-white glimpse, a corner
or sidewalk, in mood, tasted
fence or lawn. In a dye equal
to house after house. And wait
for sun to change it.
1/2/11
I don’t understand what Wes Kort calls the social dimension of self. I can speak about it & listen to folks talk about society as if it could be mapped by a calculus. Not simply self as part of a group, but the moving that I do that has a relation to group & carries group forward or not. It doesn’t seem as if it would be possible to judge social process in the sense of determining an ethics as its in motion like the seasons—perhaps governed by cycles of expanse and contraction, or feast and famine, have and want.
***
Mom had a friend from college, Martha Hickman who
married a Lutheran minister—their kids were a bit older,
three boys and a girl named Mary, a year older than me—
when she was seventeen maybe her horse shied and her
foot caught in a stirrup and she was killed; she’d been
pretty and a bit mean; there was another girl in Bruce’s
fifth grade class, Vickie Nash, who had long hair and ran
in front of a car at school, crying. I visualized that accident,
Mary’s less, just a quick glimpse and no particular sadness,
a bright sun and fence. That summer Mom and I walked
the ridge of the Presidential range in the White Mts, somehow
just the two of us and mostly we walked alone during the day.
She lost a small teddy bear in the mist below
Mt Washington—by then she’d begun to collect dolls—and
that seemed to release something about Mary.
***
We are twice among the shadows;
milk weed and mace act field; edged
blueberry oak as memory is billboard
hawks roost in autumn headed;
twice here no calculus can stem
my time hidden in the sun
the children calling “Ringolevio
Levanthian” and I with them.
Undone as death is still stapled
“No trespassing” 10 ft up
above the flood line, a steep hill
without paths trees have just grown
what’s left behind, the bright masque
of the doll house high above.
1/3/11
What’s Pattie say, “Paths that cross will cross again”. Perhaps already the gates of one dream close. I was whirling, mother, the way Rumi taught, and lifted in the air so as to become a ford, a place others can cross, meet or turn aside. I was so happy to dance like that. A great branch tore lose from the shelter oak and spun across the gorge. Sky torn, but left the house untouched. Up in the hills, we were going to do a retreat for awhile, and the retreat house was in good shape and other folks were there.
***
New moon eclipse tomorrow morning in Capricorn & conjunct moon’s North Node, the dragon’s head swallowing sun though we won’t see it here. Last night haunted by “The Red Balloon”, a French film maybe 1954 watched in church school I think, so that I have a half sense of church room closets and a stage, closets you might have to climb to get up into and the black and white streets the boy ran down in the movie. Our eyes fold to see, the world is folded and crossed. I run behind the stage set into the next scene. It folds into a pocket too, like a wing.
***
“The Land of Make Believe” was left by the window
I mean, left at the corner. Disappear now off to school
into the lake grey and wind. Come back by an hour portal
how the hour swallows black, how her sheets tell the settling.
Small smells are bread, the woods where no one goes,
the dark things init, idn’t it, the dark things that smell
musty birch branch hold my mouth wide, make my
arms into nests, weeps of spider webs & cocoons;
I am between half spun, my hair’s too thin and scalp
shows I am not a good girl, some spooken fingers,
some drank sprocket too dramatic to turn ash
a dress I’m smoothed, and fabric plies the deep
hour that I am torn in, eyes broken, eidolon the
departing boy in yellow thought to member.
Goodnight Irene
