Leo New Moon
July 30th
There, it is Friday. With afternoon sunshowers, the temperatures in the 90’s, the sense is of water erupting at head level or just above, between the trees & a close translation between sun beam and shower. I carry bags of old tools and scraps I save New England out to the trash and let go a bit of Dad.
Sam begins to be as tall and lean as when I saw him first, in a day vision, reaching out his hand to shake, back-lit by a Mid-Western sun, fedora doffed.
***
What did we touch each other with, Ma?
Word’s wing slant and looked crown put up over
a head composed, portrait shaped environs against blur,
threat hum twined in tonal frequency telegraph
that left aftershadow and repercussion
“didn’t you say?” who had become the iteration
within, sound transduced like stained light into altars and wells,
the systems in rough commons, but not the effects?
Your hand so breft hoveral on the girls’ heads,
poisonous butterfly that withheld its sting,
passed, luminous oceanliner bulk, a miraculous
density for small wings, just above, just umbra
that made aura at their shoulders
I was the less often, as not belonging to your touch,
so skin was not figured and learned no lines
***
They’d stolen the car it, was Laramie AM
I sat with the two little girls in the backseat
were going to Spokane and had no other way
would leave the car—but
you take anything out of Cheyenne that far,
young polite kids the guy drove and gal half sat
to talk look out at salt stretches and dry
I hadn’t come into Washington that way before
and they let me out I don’t recall—just the half
light in the car silhouette—later I had three jobs
for three weeks in Bellingham bought the
Velvet’s 1969 Live album I would pack
careful in the Kelty to carry back across the States
next to the Ephemeris pages for that summer.
July 31st
In Helen of Egypt, H.D. offers a wonderful trope that the arrow that pierced Achilles heel was Love’s arrow—its hard to explain like that, Greek references don’t carry weight, but in the context of her larger project of bringing this material into reach (and thus also a change on the Romantic impulse to look to Greece to say what is not said in the Enlightenment precise) by narrating layers and developing surface and depth through repetition of memoir (of WWI, WWII) and story (of Greece). Suddenly her meaning leaps large not as an intellectual trope or conceit but as a look that crosses time, and, by doing so, bears out the immediate love in which such time is felt.
*
Driving home I write in the blank end page: the body is time stolen from life.
***
I was Orestes after Sartre, a form of fury
is acceptance that calls the bees to hive
the head’s cloud; that everyone is lost—
is fury, its adolescent moon, slumbered and ill,
poisoned Echo myth cannot heal
is left on the bare hillside to sky—
fury that wraps time taut,
perhaps to secret
tongue’s taught to thumb love to say
time will tell (was nimbus)
*
Les Mouches likely borrowed from Andover Library and
read on the quilt upper bunk of the blue room
struck me identified as “who would walk away from a burning family”
put my thumb out into & walked overloaded Kelty pack
into the overcome and prairies
*
undone anger as Nietzsche’s epitaph a war will leave
***
Seaholme Hill a cascade sequence in the night air
a vision of tarot cards told me there was a way out I
had to wait three weeks until the walk up
Bruce’s lane along bungalows and late August
roses I got a letter that explained the previous signal—
five days later I am in Pierpont Dorm, the walls in lurid mural
no longer Kansas—the rides forgot now perhaps a truck to St. Louis
I stood out 3 AM in Billings to keep though to keep on
walked in late summer night from the Calvin Coolidge
Bridge to Southwest & stood again stairwell drawn
someone had written “David Lives”—that night
my old roommate high on acid would play with Archie Shepp
tells me under full moon he talks with an African Woman
who lives on the other side of it.
8/1/11
I read generation x has given away the social net as scour “get their own back” as the next step that falls from “Ginsberg’s Mistake”—I am not fair to credit one lone generous walk-up fairy I know but he did seek to be emblem & this “we can do anything” translates to a sense of entitlement passed on as resent expectation to more impoverished children of the Reagan lie—is my broad take anyway & for those of us Unsatisfied by our peers even then & walk away from the protest, it’s a second dose of salt we have to pour over our gardens.
I mean that the war never ended is a fact & primary feature of commune culture besides sex I suppose (I wasn’t there) was theft—like poor folks always do, dive into someone’s pack they are away & now further emboldened to defend it “you are hung up on ownership man”—example of precursor to contemporary doublespoke evisceration of straightforward talk an American poet should have been on to, he’s citing Williams as a predecessor.
I mean to say that we were right about love but something else was going on under the covers, and the first to disenchant us were not the Establishment who we knew, after all, were from Franco, but our brothers and sisters—let’s face it, mostly brothers—who were trying to evade the fall all coyotes have to take to be mythic.
Of course, some went out into the landscape after true visions and drugs/dreams and the sheer magic unleashed in the physical was like lightening, but such things occur at an angle to whatever is going on whenever a festive heat limns the earth’s aura in fringes
and the war did not stop.
***
L who would engage in Reichian spells at, I imagine, aqueducts and other evasive points to which the ropes that hold a city down are staked, the not-seen by the curb that produces vantage
who will float in the backdoor of a house Mad Bear Anderson is at, recovering on his way to death, like sunshine, Alcatraz a plural dream for old leather lungs
whose ex-husband whom I’d never met once got on a bus in Amherst Commons & I looked at him & said “you are Don Wait, aren’t you” because I knew suddenly, and he said she was living in Florida then and I hadn’t heard from her in several years,
whose children voices can be heard mingled in Anne Waldman’s poems about her kids play across the laid out sidestreets of Boulder, and now grandmother
1975 hands me two pieces of paper:
one says “David needs and Lisa waits, I don’t know why”
the other: “I am not of your race: I belong to that Mongol clan that brought to this earth a monstrous truth—the authenticity of life—and a knowledge of rhythm. You do well to hem me in with the thousand and one bayonets of western enlightenment for Woe Unto You should I leave the dark on my cave and set about in earnest to chase away your clamoring.”
I had dreamed: I am a young apprentice, feeding the fires of black robed sky-walkers on what could be a Tibetan plateau
Interlude.
***
A voice registers in its higher tone overtones that
make awn over village mailbox metonyms—a crow’s eye
is closest image for the sight of Icarus fallen
by a Renaissance sea—and you sleep anyway, and
dream belongs to history.
We are speaking about what word avows,
repeated into silence or oil stubborn surface
or not, the threads of a fence—
the body’s separate bed is the moral all stories bear, last
breath alone, however mingled, we must adhere,
that love is gravity absent light
does not cancel the count—
resonant, the cathedral’s roof throws our hearts
into the sky’s blues
8/2/11
Ma would always point out a selfish motive in what you had to say, which was, I wanna say now, an entirely restricted scale of interests, but certainly in keeping with the times. You are realized in your mother’s terms—whether you accept the rules of the game or not, you consider yourself alternate, imago in your mother’s sight, and put on the boots, adjust the mask.
The game wasn’t be generous, but gotcha, found you out triumphant.
Against love, Ma, against love, wasn’t it?
***
Lisa always writes this side of the myth she crosses into. I’d written back last month:
This morning I put Pattie Smith's "Coral Sea"--her poem piece for Mapplethorpe--on my car CD and was driving around, so I was already moving when I got your note. Now have run another round of errands (grocery store, library, my office) and listened more. Funny to be and not be, as if in a mandala.
There's a great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called The Years of Salt and Rice about a group of people who keep incarnating serially through time. It’s really beautiful and funny; I got a chance to talk with him last year and he said he really hasn't recovered from where this book took him. You might check it out.
hope all is well,
David
She writes:
I stopped listening to Patti Smith about 10 years ago. Attended a Green Party Convention in Tampa where Ralph Nader and Michael Moore were crowing about defeating Al Gore, with Patti on stage holding hands with Ralph. I was devastated by first hand witnessing of election stealing in Florida and in despair about Bush. And nauseated by the arrogant display by the Greens.
Life's brought me an interesting challenge by setting me onto an ideal environment, a 500 acres historic ranch along a river in the gorgeous coastal range. The ranch also contains some significant native resources, old village sites, kitchen middens. To walk around in a quiet state of mind is to listen to the whispers of the past. Along with this has been a built in small farm enterprise and a chance to conduct a community garden project.
At the same time the land (purchased to make a Park, owned by a non profit and directed by a board) has been under significant development pressure. A rezoning process has just resulted in an environmental review that, as it turns out, classifies the entire property as wetland and makes it very difficult and expensive to build on.
So now Spark and I are tasked with advising our board on how to manage this thing agriculturally in a way that creates significant economic return, and still includes the public access. And in the process to earn money that might be spent to mitigate wetlands process and clear the way for development. Which I really do not want, having fallen in love with the place as it is.
It's 7 years now that we are here, working hard to show that this land has more value as a beautiful, historic, scenic agricultural property, than as a facility of ball fields, field houses, barbeque pavillions, and a concert amphitheater with all of its attendant light towers, parking and infrastructure.
So wish me luck! It is a big personal challenge. Fortunately nothing has been built yet, and thus far the land prevails......I feel guidance from unseen forces.
My comfort is in my 3 draft horses, which I spend time with every day, learning how to speak horse, which is a body language......
The children are all well. Lion is playing bass in a soca band and will be appearing at Reggae on the River this summer. Shield is up the road with her 2 young children and I see them often. Youngest son Salmon joined the Coast Guard, is stationed in Hawaii
Best thoughts,
Lisa
*
in folded, Ma, what piece of paper I stretched for—how life keeps us close in its material facts & the words by which these residencies are announced
***
Think too long makes cobwebs,
perhaps a surface or rock face//asbestos
of rigor//a low distal blue, a following light—
even here the object phrases your
sense of being—ego, however dismantled,
can left its head over the mastered paste//products
of digestion—you cannot go back to the first
encounter after eating—the light
is a cost that is left.
God is used to being eaten—all children
put dirt in their mouths and want
to climb. At times the trees fill with fireflies
and we are reminded of what our thought echoes
in its ceaseless circles.
8/3/11
Dad’s birthday—leonine black-haired lab-coated or earth & oil stained chinos, steel toe paint spattered shoes, distant beard grown perhaps 1965 into “counter culture” w/piles of Analogs by his reading chair.
*
In speaking of her vision of luminous hieroglyphs in Corfu, H.D. remarks that the apparent fact of these was “the most dangerous or the only actually dangerous ‘symptom’” of her mania—she perceived something that wasn’t there—writing on a hotel wall (fictionalized in “The Secret Name” as the intrusion of a temple to Nike among other ruins)—Duncan, writing of this says, “But this is not, we realize, made up… but—that is the danger, madness—come from a source independent of our creative mind, our conscious daydream, The word rhymes with all the surrounding pattern we had been weaving but it comes as if of itself”.
Is a precise description of hallucinations? insertions? I experienced in 1975-1980, and I know exactly what H.D. means when she calls it the only actually dangerous symptom since it registers as actual sign or Image that has been realized, that intrudes into one’s otherwise musing, that Eliade called "hierophany”.
That there is a second world, a double in being, becomes one solution to undoing the riddle of the eruption—the blue toilet paper that floated down from the bathroom ceiling into the tub (from where?), the strange glowing plastic iguana and the old blue glove in the medicine wheel No Guns laid out, the knives shown to me, perhaps twice, by people walking casually by me, the small cardboard pictures of saints by the airshaft window—
Can be understood by a lurking megalomania as a kind of possession (that is, the object possesses one, drawing one into its dimension, its “materiality”) or can be read as a sign of a second to whom or which one can say both yes and no, that exists alongside.
Because we make ourselves through the object, this speaking back threatens to claim us—I was blessed or lucky enough or enough of a dreamer to know I should look down at my feet to differentiate among the competing gravities.
*
The writer wants to interpret for the reader, but what can be done in relation to such events—they stir the psyche (are like vast storms) and thus want a place in a biography, but cannot be explained—I’ve come to feel the language of a double world is more adequate, offers more, is more loyal to life, than the medical language of psychosis or hallucination. But I am no surrealist champion of madness; the touch seared and scarred—I had wracking back pains later and am no longer, if I ever really had been, at home in this body or world.
Instead, like H.D., we can narrate an “as if”” there were two worlds or a fold in time, or speak as I do of a structure that begins to emerge when the grip of possession fails. It is an old story, which must mean I am not the first to break in this manner, nor the first to decided, against the grain of sense and ego, to believe in a doubled world.
*
My Buddhist friends are always impatient with my absorption in dream and vision—don’t I know its all illusory? Aren’t I making a bit of a claim? Shouldn’t I be deepening in that silent knot that is selflessness? What is all this stuff about these “signs” I have seen?
Perhaps its just a long march, but the answer I have struggled to, that explains my aberrant loyalty, is that compassion requires that we love form, which means I must somehow love the intrusion of a radical other (who threatens to possess) and be loyal to. Maybe this is what H.D. calls “love’s arrow” sent by Helen’s glance into Achilles’ heal.
That is, though alien and perhaps unreal, I can be spouse to it—spouse, not master, not slave. I can argue with it, walking a long way according to its plan, entertaining its fiction (I did hitch out West because of my vision of the iguana and glove, I did order my trip according to those signs, I did end up at a gathering of shamans—Mad Bear Anderson and Leonard Crow Dog—I did drive across the desert with a guy carrying a hawks head staff or wand, and we did find the larger caravan, but from an impossible direction, given how we’d driven away).
Perhaps what Blake saw as the Marriage of Heaven and Hell—that we can live with, alongside such other worlds, that we can be spouses to them, and—since spouses also are—parent at times, sister and brother.
***
Just another way of playing the scale, Ma, precise
(I thought “recondite”) many additional pointed fingers
stress explanation—
does it leave as much distance as the opaque or
abstract, a glance apart? Is this why you would throw up your hands?
Would require that we retire, like Hölderlin, to the broken tower—
the source of the Danube and the source of the Rhine
can never be the same, can never meet to marry—
that venus can marry moon, or moon sun
at sunset tides
does not cancel such perspective.
***
To be unattractive, as what must speak across tides,
or simpled, shadowcast face turns down, her look
as no reason to sit down to dinner with,
dull feathers in claw
“I didn’t notice” his kindle & even swagger gets laid down with
the most bull, works his posture, there’ll be someone to
sharpen knives for//I am incontestant in the breaks,
the bad news about//no one can see—
argued & a difficult point we like to look,
she went over to talk to, the same magic act
is a habit I am not talking to//
“your consideration or what doesn’t do me”
its folds “thanks for listening” into a lonely cheek
waiting next to crabgrass for the bus.
8/4/11
plane to Minneapolis is delayed so we don’t start to the airport until 2PM; I am preternaturally relaxed—a strange dream last night I don’t quite recall—the cityscape intensely lit, talks with a young couple who performed together—I’d seen them before & then later would be at their house—I lose my wallet—leave it at a restaurant and it gets taken—I don’t notice it is gone, but have to start thinking about canceling cards, notifying people—at one point Jehanne and I sit on a curb and we are harassed a bit by a gang of young black men, but it is not them. I talk about my poems with the young couple—there’s a sad sharpness and my brain wakes up long before my body, so I feel that light paralysis of REM sleep
***
yer great, wild, going out dream Ma of saddles in the birch tree
shade & the falling leaves of fancy adventure in practical Christopher
(boys name) almost with sword and trumpets of knees
black and white script inthreads woven into yer N.C. Wyeth hair
were pirates and Pan, windflowers along hidden paths
the trenches took underground, the dead slept away—
was in the grey Cleveland sky I walked to school against
and the branches that reached autumn stark from your hair
and the wet, always the wet streets, and the cars on
dim black purchase in their remove and apart
***
At the edge of waltz is fire’s sound
half-footstep’s indecision offer’s stall
drink and wind a fine red thread around
her hair as plaint in statue’s rosewood
lower still the night’s arms till head rests
among. Slipped the door open into night—
gone Ma, the stars of winter garden
gone the dead red fox stole haunted heart
gone gay memory’s whisper willing
gone lover’s arched backward still purpose
ritual word bowed to finger’s lance—
in the next door habit’s clattering
dishes black, mold dappled in just rain,
this broken mosaic between two.
8/5/11
waves of Johnson relatives today after a morning of dispatches; work my difficult relationships at the usual pitch of feeling my only task with people is to go away forever alone, make my tea as if already old, retired, slow walking a fat dog dodder down the late morning empty Oak or Maple Street
here in Minnesota I feel the edge of the Prairie and my heart sings a little the intense red sunrise drum that is in the way the land falls; we are near the St. Croix (rhymes with Troy), the land feels as if it falls up to the bluffs along its angle—corn is up and folks disagree about whether its usually humid here (as if it weren’t also the Midwest still, the last stretches of the Eastern hardwood forest before the distance of grass you sense is close, the way you feel the ocean
I must have some old belonging out here in the open between the Dakotas and Saskatoon, in the old sea bed and great bless of sky, red rises as aura from the earth
***
liniment surfaces I burnished to make Athena’s mirror
perhaps catch a sight of you made Image I could figure as life
such dull sturgeon’s breast bone of smokey glass—
caught on the sea, green emerald glasses or cat’s eye of moss and lime,
was water I was pulled into, pleurisy ripples
and lung’s sad desperate blue
I lifted the fallen banner, Ma
***
Nocturne of the too bright hours in witch
thought, pulled by what could be
her arms//my sorrow Opheliac edged
hemorrhage of sunken weeds
is only an image of.
Is only the place I make her fast
against the dock we return to
after all mooring—the morning
light again makes loss,
blankets of dispersal float
through the new stands of trees,
the field glistens more green than could
and yellow off the rod, and the fresh dirt
of the forward tractor that passed.
8/6/11
hand on the ceramic urn (will crack in time and spill under the eaves and roots, under the Swedish lidded hooves, under Spjot, and Anderson, time’s acorn lintels and district we will brush away each May autumn under the new spring, the broom and flowers
that touch sent final Dorothy into the earth she already was and I am—my eyes know, the sun tells, this forever
he says we are bright with this already God, bright on the grass, we are gathering, thrushes hum between our sleeves in the auras we cast—the make of mind its world, and the call back to the deep
***
strikes me strange I walk back from the Elim Cemetary that I do not know, Ma, where Dad’s ashes lie, or yours will, that somewhere in Laura’s house, the task of making death a fact remains to be done, left among wallpaper remnants, leftover paint in cans, other almost done tasks that slowly fill with light, that become absence, might be myrrh, somehow a larger tree grown out over—I have no idea where or if—we do not like the dead Ma, my siblings who do not like to share, who require us to give; in the night you stay nowhere I can go back to each year—like those fallen in war who are not found, like those taken from the road we never return, gaps in time, unfolded
***
In among the American jostled, were voted flames,
hands folded in aspic —I am a custom of cotton,
dream dress undone as juxtapose to,
collapsed mounds of a sifted grain—
strung against wire, a guitar’s difference works out
a drunk stumbled money can’t change—
the keen waste of tomorrow in
applications
appliance offers—advertise,
a cowboy boot’s quality, a dis tend,
sale’s tomorrow—
don’t write me no more Brooklyn Ferry no,
infolded floods of Mississippi sewage as said
is more close to the ache’s birdsong
8/7/11
knocked wells in the ether of my scheduled poverty as the shape of the script of my epitaph—my hands attempt to hold Ma’s look to social power as the proper bowl for the grace poured into her, will not be mine either—I make bare shelters in the wind like mine shafts into the sky or first hovel Rilke says was thrown up, on Greece perhaps shepherds temple or cote but here on the plains is barn or pump housing, a reclamation of tool shed in the flat extended durations of bedrock East
***
there was a dispersal I perhaps used my chest to forge a way for
through what were emotional marshes egrets preferred to pass
were elegant—skunk cabbage understory in mixed grew up thorns
or beach laurel tangles in thin auspice—I would have asked for
different tasks than abandon, but the sign said “surgery”—
a long walk along sand edged roads if I carried it far enough away
family heirlooms adumbrated in a few books and Swedish camp stove
in the thrown away, what had to be taken to the sea, wasn’t Bronte or
a picture window, was sallow, needed sails
this was augury write in lines in the weather
not hard to discern but perhaps coded for the recipient
you wouldn’t have let go otherwise Ma
the long rains in you, the October Hudson &
what you asked for did not come
we hear the children playing in the empty garden
and would fly
but who called the game
was decided, alphabet,
in sequences that never end
violence
or the surge.
***
If the river goes dry, Ma, it wasn’t
supposed to, or heart lose fire’s anthems
or daylight put the nights spell—
we slept in such shallows,
we slept such close transgress—
this dead stream bed is not arroyo a season,
I called the last moon after the sea
“African famine” in my sleep
the dust does not return to.
You were not mine
but took me anyway
talked late at night downstairs
I would have to dream
what your voice was pitched to.
8/8/11
a humming bird pauses at a still point between brackets of maple leaves the picture window of old Ruthie’s pristine covered bibles let’s in; difficult to explain Lutheran waiting rooms of old age—perfect nap of carpet and jars of peanut butter a kitchen made of advertisement memories and outside where the lawn ends the fields ragged to a half-seen lake would be sunset from the dining room table she is screened by
Ma was also by purple windows black cat & a bottle of bourbon had a turkey on the label and TV tuned to MSNBC to ruminate mantra of Republican folly she was left—three rooms tied to an oxygen chord and small place each hour passed; she had no reveries to tell she went back to, no day she remembered mail, a long American sky over Eden Hollow like the backbone of a whale
***
marked by omen tells, you can consult tarot or i-ching or
numbers, the sabian symbols of the days (a volunteer choir sings hymns
for today) provide images as pensive emblem
St. Christopher coins to navigate duration’s considerable lost
where other guidance is absent or thought strikes
one asked comfort
tho’ at times too often (don’t throw the i-ching every
five minutes—the scope narrows, and you don’t
really need to know the telephone will ring—
some difficulties are meant to be taken neat)
how does the story go for others
who lack coins?
how did you sleep, Ma
not knowing?
***
I have been under and the wind’s purpose I can’t say—
its sad and poppies are more beautiful than anything
doesn’t hold me in place the way work does
I am exposed to this disassociation
at the level of streets and other horizontals—
we apart by surface tension//broken kiss or
masked popping sound//we apart by fact (as verb
apart indicates angle we differ as bodies)—
read back through to see if I have established the wind’s purpose
read back through to see the poppies I suggest you take
read back through to wave flags and ceremony—
if dead at the end, if without
if in the open than does not look back
if otherwise bruised by myth’s “almost”.
8/9/11
a day of suspension in traffic, one airport to another, sky doesn’t care & Jehanne and I talk much; Minneapolis and then wait interminable in St. Louis—too bright, more Southern; we climb out of St. Louis; land late and I drive a bit faster than I am awake for, rattling the Camry along the Durham Freeway; at home, the cats are out—Bagheera comes up from Theresa’s and Mallory meets us on the driveway; Sam is home—his car cut out (the coil Mike says) so we’ll deal with that in the morning; I stay up too late
***
Is there an outside from which what here looks accountable?
We long for and suppose there must be a face that adds itself to
each of us, close over us in what are now pleurisy clouds, was
then as far as the eye saw, the edge of we took as womb is sight’s
world we fill out automata as appropriate Cartesian—
Ma’s face didn’t lend, was in sleep we make statues to say,
to leave a mark in the page, maybe get back to
a thought she was sister
a thought she leaned over ominous
a thought she was among the blue and green beautiful
a thought she was all desiccate and turtle-skinned morose
thoughts don’t stay and try other things to fill
get so far out of yourself no one can see your face
get so far out of yourself there’s no story.
***
What Lacan calls the “symbolic” maybe
is built up by repetition of rose or American
is rhyme, makes energy in the ought—
I wouldn’t make more stuff to solve.
What symbolic is forgot the music worked to,
springboard of dreams you require a girl for,
isn’t the only option “A” by the river bed.
Nor gone out to Loboville with a rod and creel,
his was willing to reduce as all Prometheus,
still needs a girl for.
Not make of the road a Milky Way
not pour Ma out into a semen smear
not otherwise alter as fabric
what got taken away.
8/10/11
wake this AM wondering if I can bear separation; I am more and more left alone or required to wait as J lands so deeply in her feelings’ travel—an air moon picks its fruit or sits deeply, the way winter sets, feels the thaw—
the plane ride isolations—she waits to make a few calls to talk freely about her Mom—I attempt not to breath, to become grey—meanwhile the stock market careens
***
terrible occluding weight of rearranging
the beds with Ed, I’d be steeped in sadness
restacked possessions I was exposed to a limit of
cherish (that word I used to describe
you) in talisman or order (my desk drawers never as neat:
the cash register safe full of quarters—opened at ten dollars, but we would jimmy,
neat red-brown record book to write down allowances
and spent
my models less precisely painted with slipped decals, Ed’s more true
Jane’s Fighting Ships 1941 opened to the German cruiser fleet & trace paper
detritus wooden nickels and YMCA certificates of merit
a game map open on the grey-blue table (black metal wire legs, it was the 60’s)
in the past as good as dreams
but survives as a knowledge of poverty what K-Mart cannot dispel
of fabrics and sources
***
Allured based on lilt laden verse of Bob’s “My Love”
is like we had to hitchhike to get, to be supposed to,
that candle wax would pile on the table,
we were not Irish enough for the birds to pull
seeds from our shirts, to drag on spells in canted city
light “knockin' on heaven’s door” got written in—
bike circling in the cricketed summer night
was a style you could fit suburbs without a change
& no particular anger of the Black Flag later
or push up against, a girl could play you the jeans
were so tight & that harmonica—
as a sole in a between factory with wood frame house,
Winston-Salem or some other Moravia, that hope brunette bar
everyone sat in a sec, flies on the screen//the same night.
8/11/10
in Carborro in the evening with Sam, we talk about Chicago & the approach—I don’t trust my sense of the times, pessimistic and uneasy; cry some in the afternoon simply at the abandon; clouds are murky orange clashed with streaks of blue unlike Van Gogh and sulphurous— as it is our time to see such ominous and drive in the slow disaster
find I am in a process of retreat to fourth house, though the family there is not my own, what sustains of relations not career that people deserve—
its not found in destroy or fulminate achieve or make diamond prow (is sword) to smash what ocean insists, must be from fear of being swept you cannot help
***
“writes” like weather, cedes landscape. calves, heaves of
edge surface of overlapped tides—this said or that as perhaps
some muscle for wait: children, other necessaries
long bracken shelter I build up over the field, in thorns,
strung arcade of thicket, a series of books and dreams made awn
I could make you more distant, Ma, as far off as the sky
as permanent untouched or was
postures of the book in splay of limbs,
right cradle or left of the always shelter of some dis place
text kindled
becomes blood thread or, like lung, transducts in fluids
a catch of the open aster ( a stir) elements
do you get this haunt of perfect?
how it lingers among the remains,
underscore?
the work of whispers to sub-plant
not disloyal or a lie,
but that we are all unable to tell
true
must mark time alongside
to suspend justice,
ark over our heads.
***
Climbed into the auberge noir
by way of trellis-works a dream left,
her purpose in three pearls on laminate
in half grey window light, disturbed—
the reverse of the two of spades suggested
a door, a second possibility in rapid sequence
of glances—here a bright half-grey light
floods the mood;
angels could visit if it were far darker, so dark
no difference between room and sky, the ceiling
could be taken off, one would be equal to
not knowing at last—doesn’t match color of course
but such indices are unreliable alternatives to fact
tho’ we often prefer to sequence.
8/12/11
dreams were of the difficult mandala space tho’ not clear how it would be fit into the plot, involved deaths or a perversion; this leak chases me through the day as backdrop I shuttle back and forth largely about cars that are in various states of disrepair, Sam, head up, trying to figure his next moves with respect to Chicago & heart negotiations better than I ever did
certainly I did not make sense in my twenties, Ma, tho’ precisely how one is to do this when Alice Bailey & Dion Fortune is what makes sense—a white alabaster let into the room as the relation of mars to Neptune functions as a code for what I notice—someone else might say chill, or not follow as my words become a flat mask, but it is permissible for any of them to forget me, in the same way that kitchen cabinets are a part of our mise-en-scene (that uncomfortable visit that is spent in the prefab corner by refrigerator as locus of our alienation/social anxiety)
we made these places to live in; lived in what they felt like
***
Durham full moon in ambient voices is a spell of summer—somehow people know each other well enough to pass time over beer I cannot imagine but children come from these encounters that are perhaps like nomadic fairs might seem more attractive if
that is, if these were like midsummers where farm children came in from the long distance & had the brief, wild focus of love to share with the summer stars, what they make you feel like, what you wish to be haunted by
we seem a long way from that here the tape playing some effort at a punk-disco stomp (I thought first the 80’s and now discern is a bad B-52s song)—by definition after a more difficult summertime perhaps slung down by the Orpheum someone in “throw it girl” children apparently come from
I know its part me I don’t understand what we are doing in places like this—a nice bar (but to what purpose, to make the night bigger than we are? have I ever met anyone at a bar?) there’s more 1980’s & I keep thinking this is about girls and flirtation is perhaps an indication of what I prefer to think or notice
how do other folks experience this as history, as belonging to their minds which must be a double that has inserts here and there I don’t know how to step around or admire
***
We could fall at the edge (someone would
have kids) but there’s the lawn—try spirits there
they used to be (bought Welches 32 oz grape soda)—
suburbia had/has to be a vector for;
the sky remains relevant—there must be more than
these ghost dances, the overwhelming tone—
white people don’t seem to be worth it (but have
kids someone is paid for—DISNYLAND)
something accelerated and what work was
to a day, ah shit the storytell, (overflood of markets as
end result of steeples and domes?) —
shouldn’t let even the name “Walmart” be
in my pome but I a Christian. Someone has
children. We were led off the past.
*
Does “somedays I think we should all commit suicide”
(Mom talked about the GW bridge) read anything
like “starling fell through the sky” or “the sweep
of evening accumulate”?
What is your eye on when I talk this way
and how quick do you adjust? this is usual I
have a gentle or some say “flat” tone I am prayin’
“shush shush” against the dock—
what makes you deicide I have to say?
(everyone here is younger than I am
and is looking at a phone like light a cigarette
she//he poses, stitched through) a hole to
jump down, pop up later still intact &
they were all small beautiful children.
8/13/11
faded to almost blue lilac sky in the still-lit west; I lay on the bed and feel the night gather—quiet house; I flip through next year’s ephemeris as this kind of quiet is full of the hours of my body; I have begun plotting a turn interior and am not sure what it can look like beyond this deep quiet I feel pull
always the sails pull towards alone & the problem of joy in such terms
***
alienation is a friend of anxiety and philosophy, as thought takes you away, that feeling may make more tidal—tide for me is deep sound & so must make alien or bare struggle like a rose in beach sand, or plum tree can last
the 70’s were not so hard to be alienate—Ma and Da a successful example of geek alienation would prosper—I wasn’t having it, was feeling old weird America a more strong source not made correct by ACLU or technology jobs you could have a TV//disassociate identity with orphans and world topped off by Enlightenment satisfactions Ma perhaps did not get
her Romantic after all was programmatic Schiller with his marriage or art and civil order & perhaps none of those writers really didn’t want to be a part of that new dawn made possible by coal and steam (a bit of warmth in the mornings)
I was alien to Reason not because of sentiment or a search for affective ground but since Reason did not stop war, but since it was wrong that a landscape is a grid if we more perfectly tracked all possible locations—out of what, a desperate desire to control, to have say?
my eye’s shape makes mandalas wherever I look & the true shape of the body sight is disc, not epic, not journey (the story of what feet and breath know, what the heart does, of years, but not of sight’s reference to us, its dipper in the well)
Reason was wrong because we had not solved WAR we struck with our forearms we sat in excrement and filth made others; war was all the more brilliant lit-up, ritual we had not repaired, not even close, not with grids, coordinates—was a tool, not “good” itself, not God
Ma was in her Romantic not enough of a critic I was unjustified in the ruin being made at Nordstrom’s, in the bad plan and the lies told & no revolution Enlightenment theory would alter the basic derangement, would put severed heads on pikes—
say what you will, those who know life sensed is sacred are different, know God I don’t care the words
***
Death was cut across the face of it down
the next breath—in this sense a better lover
or ransom fact—could not be taken the
same//violence we say “made the river”
shoulders the sky aside—disarray and
the book gets put down you will not get
back to, accelerates the season you will
not be unchanged by//eclipse
stalled overhead//a brute indifference
the body has no time to mimic, lacks arc
anyway, lacks sequence, lacks a swing—
you cannot say death’s face, is unforgiven
and “left in” like false notes and hammers
unpin the demanded symphonic caw.
8/14/11
Cooler day into nod of August; I am listless as J is at the “Russian” apartment for a few days solitude; finish Schiller’s The Ghost Seer, read a few sections of the later part of the H.D. book. The gym, NY Times puzzles. The sun sets soon.
I am perhaps not seeing straight. What I see, what I am bothered by. The past stalks in my heart & desire, tho’ it rises in sense, can it be as unreliable as thought?
***
at the dinner table the seeds of it—restricted portions and a ceaseless performance of knowledge and wit, recitations of bibliographies, map sequences, text fragments like a “good family” I suppose instilled a habit of pride, context, fact as such, that “Man” could know and we, as best, smartest “men” would arrogate the stars Icarus’ fall and Mom’s jaded, weary indulgence of this masculine so forth
the wound still festers we stand around her memorial service after in pronouncements and fact-forward delineation, prize our “freedom” to say, clever girls, to be above & apart Laura has not yet taken even Dad’s ashes from five years back to some ritual place the way Nyngma adepts would make fun of Geluk scholars at a funeral, since the only rituals they knew were those of debate, robe pulled back, argument extended palm towards the seated face; Tara Tulku looks at us sad American Geluk listeners and says we (who need logic, cannot be moved by feeling or sense) are the most unfortunate—in terrible black rueful humor at how difficult a scholastic sensibility is, with its numbers and lists, and unwritten books wailing at the door like lost mothers
milk the last drop from exhaustion rendered “idea”
***
What was not enough, she would say she loved me
yet did not correspond to my understanding of that, but
words supplement sense and adjust I have to consider
a series of alternate—she could love and hurt, or
love did not equal care, or she was equally angry at
her pay, or felt and hated what she loved, or
separated love and truth in a chaotic gesture at freedom—
she could not put back together,
or the heart by which I reckoned the sky was wrong
or did not want to enter that covenant, or the narcissus
fields so yellow absorbed all light—
only those seen by the blind—angels and wisps
at the edge—who spoke in an air grise that a yellow leaves,
said different,
and who were they?
8/15/11
reading the H.D. Book this morning Duncan points out a difference between H.D.’s early poetics/sensibility, which is guided by sense/reliant on sense and the problem of “not adding to” that the objectivists assert, but that sometime before the War and then in the Triology she begins to consider what we might call an awareness as star—Duncan ties to gnostic Hermes—a kind of light as self. That is, that the poet is also star or has a relation to star. I am struck by sense of self-luminous I had in 1977-78, that I had “broken through” into some upper rooms, or into the sky, into its music and feeling as a space of interiority and thus as home, or inside the home of self—
in any case, an enchantment by nature (and participation in such) that become newly figured in relation to “star”, which I am taking as some kind of awakening to, the doubled or split in being that mind is our first word for
meanwhile a group will be getting together out of Religion to read The Price of Monotheism which considers the way monotheism defined itself against (and thus “for”) by employing the bifurcation “true/false” in relation to what was said; that book uses a term I don’t “polytheism”—I would speak in terms of animism or complexity rather than many (poly) as the difference “mono/poly” seems to introduce just that bifurcation said to be problematic, and because I tend to think of theism as proper to monotheism, and not complex cult systems such as the Vedic or Greek traditions
because by “theos” I mean something like that emergence of an intuitive awareness H.D. may speak of in terms of “star”, as becoming star, when she says:
and anyhow,
we have not crawled so very far
up our individual grass-blade
towards our individual star
knowing beyond knowing
*
not that we become God, though certainly that possibility has had its advocates, but that, as we come to know ourselves in terms of being “star” as well as “sense/sensuous” the notion of an other/beyond to whom we are related seems necessary—already indicate in the notion of the friend or twin, in the fact that we are riven
*
I am surprised, as I write this, by the fact that, by a back door almost, I seem to be saying things in a language I have, more generally suspected—“becoming star” or a difference between mind and sense that might lead one to speak of a mental principle or topos characteristic of “star sight”—my own sense being that the sense of self as star, at least for me, was catastrophic, and that starlight meant a broken sense world, one I could no longer think of as womb, that was juxtaposed to—hence the intimate relation of Star to Tower in the tarot, where Star follows close on the collapse of the tower
and there I am back in code language for an experience, a sense of self I am trying to convey—I might better by saying that once, in that 1978 spring I came home almost early morning to my dorm room & the light was half-light; my roommate slept, my bed above his & I perceived his sleeping awareness as a density of pulse or not-quite-light above his body—as if seeing the nucleus of his sensory-motor system & reached out with my thought and touched/pushed it, brief palpation & he stirred and rolled over. I pulled back that attention & climbed up into the bunk. careful not to brush the pensive knot of his sleep—you can say what you like
***
Terry Havens & her husband Joe bought some land up on a ridge west of Quabbin, called in Temenos—the Providence Zen Center built two retreat huts there & the first time I met Terry, I’d climbed the road from the parking lot, and saw her, in her 60’s, white hair, thin, nude, pulling a sledge with logs to where a third hut would be built; I suspect it wasn’t that time she showed me the beehive cave, but there were three, much like the beehive dwellings you see on the Aran Islands Synge wrote of, whether built by folks from there or remnant of some lost boat of monks gone West along the North Atlantic archepegiogoic coast—
I’d walked up carefully and formally—I’d read my Perfection of Wisdom by then—she and Joe were old Quaker SNCC activists & I asked her if she’d help me finish my inquiry program work (fresh/soph program at UMASS) by doing an independent study on the symbolism of the directions/cross in the world’s religions (spring 1983, perhaps)
a hermit thrush call & wind rustling leaves you could hear all the way across from the Berkshires—no planes—still sun, late August blueberries, early July laurel, a cranberry pock just down off the outcrop rocks in a lull where the rains sank
the remains of a mineral spring spa & hotel opened in the 1890’s; a small bathhouse built over a slab of bedrock, water running up from underground into a brown pool
a rock painting of the Japanese bodhisattva Jizo invented post-War to protect aborted fetuses//cope with the rapes of Nanking and Seoul//a small St. Francis shrine tacked to a slender birch tree I found in a snowstorm over New Years, out walking instead of praying in the retreat hut
***
Swaggered man, a kind of brag antlered,
takes room to dance, his obsidian chest repeats
His Master’s Voice—Whitman, Bottom
in the broomtick, bent round boy, brayed
gold-yellow he was allowed to be—
on tip-toe watched his father shave—
introduced to mysteries and Shriner parades
and work clothes—
all holy masculine no question huh?
St. Thomas proper, right with nature?
my heart breaks this bad ecclesiastical
shoulder I have to push past makes
the worst tradition, displays his cock to
anyone wants to rub it for luck
I am tired of.
8/16/11
books & laying about the house; I move from The Cathars, to Mary Butts’ fantastic The Ashes of Rings back to a history of classical Islam etc. Shehyrar and I talk in the morning as we have been, this time about the relationship of yajna (sacrifice) to puja (worship); the Cathars continue to intrigue, not in doctrinal or systematic terms—Manichean dualism strikes me as untenable—but because of connections to or traces of Buddhism/world-renunciation and the esteem movements like this have in post-Enlightenment culture because of resistance to ecclesiastical power and apparent emphasis on freedom/purity rather than love/care. That is American interest in Buddhism has curious structural parallels to the Cathar case, which suggests (among other things) that my thesis that, at least, Early Buddhism was dualist at heart has some merit. The key, and where I seem to break with everyone, is my sense that care/love trumps freedom—that we cannot achieve radical freedom/purity, especially as this is attendant to a categorical bifurcation of good/evil
***
sustained contact, Ma, with the difficult retaliatory
that has become a lasting memory of Ohio limestone &
its bruised veins I suppose whenever I look out a window
and the sky stretches its blue, as if asphalt in its distant must look—
when you jumped or dove I was held fast
and drowned or pulled after a just-bought skirt
you turned yellow canvas capizzio’s under
shapely calves—fell a long way without wings
was love’s plumb—
I did not let go, but
was disassociate in opposed tribal moieties
and something never found its way back
to the surface
what body was that we fell into Ma
marsh water that
stagnant black leaf rot
were neighbor and like enough to store
to the other sleep & loss
called commerce, Abilene bare
under the endless unchanged
in the “upper world” over
a myth of poisoned streams, Ma,
not “rings of fire” or flight—
bags one would never finish packing
so the trips aren’t took
***
In less satisfied acreage a tire inside
moses reeds or till, sketched over
appaloosan shadowed field (O Andalusia
writ in seams dust devils work out—
“give me a specific example” Ma’d say
I am saying in terms of the general interweave
of Mediterreanian echo and Ohio bright
makes the light’s texture here specific, Ma,
an example doesn’t suit. I speak a lexical anders
a burnt library in the stapled-on scarecrow, nest
or heresy on his shoulder I emblem
inheritance what we are not saying
stoops over your shoulder Ma,
and might be considered relevant.
8/17/11
some stone in my aura gets read back I may mistake as unfortunate—sediments worn edge tell duration might be noticed as shape—I have many and cast, but have sat into that lasting makes impression
disphoria or grief green-blue coast that time offers between us I slant down on, I dismember a bit as blues
(tho’ a seventh still catches a place to stand on a sec, out beyond the even others up through six, admits breath and the simplest chance, however horrible, whatever guts in your hand, to extend further as allowed)
we don’t need guns to prison, Ma just made occasional observations and hated her body, was enough “go away” to make you want to hide breath could be commented on asperic
in Ma’s swamp colors (she was New Jersey sunlight after all, learned low stretches, knee-deep variation of almost Polish stepped blood lands in black reed towards Manhattan towers)
***
between Dad was reading magazines to baroque,
hated Apollo (God of poets) and unable to talk
relations understood primary as engineering, he say
“but you made Mom happy David, what was wrong
about that” and
Mom’s so actually stunning & Ophelia threats she
hoped her Dad watched as she stepped off the GW
into orients of air—
feared also Dr. Sax gave her license
vigilante—
there was not a mirror in the house
that looked back at you
with something better to say
***
8/18/11
window at apex d’arc d’été, the leaves as full as flesh out, of luck’s dispense; and Sam almost set on his Chicago digs & we’ll drive there in four weeks, up over West Virginia across Ohio or by old Need home Indiana, the flat thunder to impossible heart of the Great Lakes, wickering in limestone and birch
a Need gone back that way Ma, not Norton but steel & corn blooded and engines haunted by civil war death fields you drive south to visit
I work patient up my syllabus on poetry and love and have, as ever, too much reading I feel I must assign.
***
not anything like Cleveland or 1961 was
slips away that the sea rises
a broken relation cannot be remembered
somewhere the dressing was produced in rivers
bottles arranged on pallets moved from
& a Big Boy’s open down the street inside
we are prepared to play solitaire at midnight in chorus
hammersmith organ they sold
psyche in kohl eye is wood because
she is waiting
imagination can’t go away, gets stuck
like girl news anchors can’t move their heads
the weight of the instruction manual the cowboy
stands for, is uneven & barely brushed
***
You are not gonna make your Dad back;
an economy in no ways of participation
nor frequency can do fair; the past slips its heels
to be gone into what the crows said—
fight for it back is the same bad money everywhere
you will not be able to describe
the distance the crow is from the curb
how close it is to the puddle
you would like to marry.
I write poetry because the sky is broken
and won’t grow back
the same way; you burn so hard
to correct the equation, your blonde hair
against a laminate surface,
is forgot.
8/19/11
startling blue clouds at dusk over Golden Belt; I recognize folks from when Sam was in school & look tired; there’s a room with bottles full of spells and books that have portraits cut into them that hang on cellophane strips; my I-Pod found a long version of What Goes On In Your Mind from the End of Cole Avenue tapes I keep replaying as I walk around inside the earphones; there is a stack of books in one room, but little thought has been given to the order & so an opportunity missed I say; I walk along the edge of the circle taped on the floor but do not step into it; of course I look at the girls, bent bows, talking pretty or squired; I am supposed to we collude but why? I keep wondering why? I turn around so close to one bright bright face coming out of something she is saying to her guy it takes my breath away; drawings on the wall of County Commissioner public meetings where they sell malls to scatter
***
blue gone wane moon in bale tilt earths the dark in spidery light
she pulls the curtain down is a symbol of something I lost
leans over me to; the bed is just islands; it hurts to keep loss of
things, alphabetical order is an old favorite—the Morton Salt Girl
is down by the river as usual, and cars—even then you were
forced to collage &
some casual is so stubborn
***
The curtain cannot be spun into a preferred direction,
works its way like rain or the way a beach pulls back;
call it history or new field, it still parts
you have to push past again
Christo lays out along 6th Avenue towards Mercy
a suspense against prediction’s towers—
what sparks is unfathomable Psyche
we stand in increasing lines to wait for,
comes against cause, against rhyme, mistook
that chance, quince passionate,
said call by other names—
dropped around us in folds,
in ashes of paper, what was forever
pulled back at dawn.
8/20/11
Bakhtin says we augment others by our gaze, but we might also task. I get enamored of a look you carry off approximate to a standard and a place of swarms, waves of color I go a sea on. The not-you of Ma or a freshman gal that looks bright I see into the beginnings of other worlds & only a dim organic shape (characteristic of anything in a body has to be) makes it possible for this to be about you.
To be equal, I want to be reached into like that too, is a dream of ravishment, to be roughed, made apart, as the hand picks up and drops, picks up and drops, its sort among what were seen as stars.
I know moon opposed Neptune I am particularly suspect to this and whenever I fall in love, I have to step out the door into an ocean first. Is likely my rhythm tho it mighta made you feel good to be briefly so beautiful, no matter how unreliable the source, we are flattered.
***
Ma, you wrote “I am worried David doesn’t have a role” was
one way of saying you didn’t see beyond what you thought when
ceiling was city avenues and systems of polite—the door
opened on a Kleist play, or something by Schiller, and you went
out along Pearl St. to A & P, I at your skirt—we were, let’s say,
organized at different pitches, I, wary among the strange clouds
and you, sorting through a series of masks for the best lemon;
I already knew, even then, what was closer to dream and what fell—
even if Icarus—but knew my eyes saw more color than I could trust
I didn’t see you of course, the sunglasses and fine turn of a freckled calf
that looked good on your boys—cotton skirts in soft yellows, grid flocked
along the A-Line—your more interior other where you did not have
either, your hand working the purse clasp,
all the while cursing the play,
all the obvious tropes there was nothing to alter
once fed by marriage into an unrecognized debt of participation
***
Is it so different? To each day reach
through riverene sediments of sense,
to sift, as if on loom or harp
dark from light, that river does not?
A tower can be struck and built again,
pallets, shifted in sequences in vast train yards—
are in no way equal to this arctic demand
that sealed Echo’s fate.
For a child, the walls breath condolences;
a patience is built up into the
repeated sky—
later, he will realize how many died,
the stone that falls through light
that is not dark.
8/21/11
J & I walk today out in the green along the Eno River, barely moves in brown, limp midge-hovered, but the air is less heavy & a light breeze pushes it off our face and shoulders. A long walk, four miles.
I remember turning to follow her up from New Hope Creek as if we would walk a long way together.
Half dreams come, skit across my thoughts. I dip into time from a great distance that blows across me. My body cannot follow, and I cannot weave a body around these brief
snatches of provinces. The body is in time, where night and day are serial—what I dream of, what catches me up in its beauty is from somewhere else I can never be body to, no matter how outflung into the astral, no matter that I try to make my voice or breath a sail.
***
there was likely no way you could know I was so transported, Ma—
I think after all I knew I was alone in what had altered me,
that the visits, however similar to your own short imaginings,
were in no way parallel
I so wanted to meet you, somewhere in the distance at least.
I never wanted to have to keep going.
Past the end of the road, past the school—
the nights, the sun’s play on grass carried me so far off.
I had no knowledge that the face could bridge such distances
without saying anything of its roots. That in the glow that lit
one nigh cheek bone at least, under a fringe of darker hair,
there was no closeness, that the table lied
that table manners could not nail in place.
***
I am bedazzled,
must, chameleon, belong to light—
that no element alone can name.
Not blown into a moonlit
from the tops of waves
that will receive me again
into a larger feeling;
spark, perhaps, snatched briefly to
light’s unfathomable cause
and spent, not much higher in the air,
that the damp in me
swallows. Your face first
impressed on me the whole deep
imbricate recede.
8/22/11
unbelievable tired comes on me at 4:30—my syllabi mostly done and letters; a long day at the computer; a breeze kicks the leaves outside & someone talks about the clouds, the strange “bob ross” clouds that presage storm, are the edge of a dry to me, but we’ll see—
last day of Leo seems to end in a soft green-gray light; J is home late & we sit and read awhile into dark; I’d been bouncing between a book of Islam 600-1250, Mary Butts’ journals, H.D. Nights, but curl up with a Swedish procedural I don’t know
I could burst into flames I thought about it too much, and so stay low in the water, low in my body, but I’ve heard nothing from my siblings; no one seems to care, two storage lockers now full of things gone decay in humid and soon cold
as if they all simply wanted to go to sleep, to let this barge drift away & too hard to go back to—we’ll see if I hear something by September
***
white folks grow up in America something nasty in the water
you turn off the tap feel the pressure of the whole town back up
against the cocked down handle (painted some works on metal red)
as if we lived our whole life at a window, a cat or wife hidden in speculate
the length of the distraction you should be shopping as substantial as asphalt
is left back of your eyes like a migraine, post traumatic stress echo of the
sun on edged lawns back behind your sunglasses don’t catch no eye
or drive in aimless through the subdivisions
in loops long sculpted curbs
was displaced and needed to be carried to the river
like a cake or basket of
you’d put down in the river
let it go away someplace else
it wasn’t going to rain
and this too full of static image
should be dispersed
***
I am the music Ma, broken organ, a
star half out of it shell,
would be dirge for my neighbors
but for my conscience—
brass quartet’s cases open on a sculpted shade
quotes quaint a public they sold tickets to
I don’t want to have to be mad at;
is so sequence you are taught to read—
stacks up a choke Ma
too difficult to translate
as what I started out as
some house somewhere
a kid at the end of a road looks out
at the great indifference.
8/23/11
heart feels tight & broken this morning; cats on the bed & looking through Klee’s Notebooks since its been recalled—a point about painting “dynamic form” rather than sensed artifact, that is, to “draw from life” you’d need to do the former as much as latter & his work as exploration of dynamic form—interiors
Hurricane Irene scrapes along the north side of Hispanola and is headed for Wilmington area early Sun AM; maybe Colleen was right about the clouds
J goes off to DC this morning to see her friend; I’ll move the bed later; she looks like such a child when she sleeps, curled into the bed almost on her front & black haired head just out of the covers
***
In the aftermath did I live next to you Ma?
am a branch of
leg that was mottled
at least
I shared a circumstance
that your body did
become rippled, rippled
where an apple fell
where the waters were dark
& rusalka’d
the wild is wild beyond &
out there on white granite left acres
as far into silence
we dipped or hands into light
you saw that too
but did not even leave me there
at the edge of worlds
I had to walk out myself
in the long receding tide.
***
I brought roses for the barrow,
lay them red against rust
a 1920’s rain pooled against
the porch stairs
to tell you
the ideas in things
you were imagining
stood apart
for a while I sat
a black barn cat crawled
into my lap
I tried to imagine each thing
for you, since you could no longer
say what they were thinking.
8/24/11
a long day after too much beer last night I succeed nevertheless in talk through from Shehryar in the morning right through Dianne’s chart in the evening, precise chopped data sequences I put down exact but without nuance or too much hustle (always a hope the facts are enough to go on was how my family did it I am exacting weary)
Sam settled his place in Chicago a Dad’s relief & now to be imagined walk up second floor of a brownstone kind of warren with windows look off into the Great Lake sky & its heroes. Wind outside and wool socks and always cold, he’ll be in a ear muff hat of some rakish, and poised over books like the picture of me circa 1985 “astrologer at work” in my study feature
***
am I sad you’re gone Ma?
was put up with you most days we spent
I am on the beach at least &
you swim side stroke lines along the shore
swim cap like Jackie K
your glasses back on the sand
waves in fractal you knew white legs
cut smooth
left its mark like an ad
seed pod a thumbs
in the grain of
sheets of say
I keep calling memory
***
Where the knots are to undo
to let the awning go
hides in the words
skins the hands—
won’t work anyway as sail
what’s already wing
strains against ropes
burst into ash
makes as one swallow
a flock dives sideways black
in the after backlit
you’re gone into
should be done
said this way.
8/25/11
A book on John Dee’s conversations with Angels; he’d work with a scryer, read the Angels’ talk off a cloudy stone the way tertons read whole scriptures they find hidden in a pebble, they are given in a dream
that was 1588 which means there is simply no end for the need to stage apocalypses for those who care to listen—this was three centuries before Corot’s blue-greys would so perfectly capture the sadness of willows hung out over a Normandy stream
I would paint every chapel, every sky I could find that color, and then go back with Marc’s blue. Only when the animals are the same as the sky will we remember even a bit of what it meant before, when we loved.
*
Hurricane Irene off the Florida coast will come up through North Carolina just after the new moon Saturday, blow its winds and fury, and maybe break up as it crosses E. Orange and New York like Ma come apart & said goodby, something like a cloud now, no longer even omen, would be no longer curse.
***
What she wanted was to be allowed
to tell everyone about death,
that the spectacle that pulled them, crowded
further into the hall
would be a kill
stone roof that made no difference to the stars
cellar saloon recalled where
she would rise up in the air to
make a show,
prophetress, against it
whose sister hand would point accusal
or stood in wrapped blanket on the railroad berm
looked off, betrayed, antigonal impossibility
of rapture
her brother was wrapped in
consequences of the curse
not even shepherd, nor lion to
slumber, where she walked two feet
above the desert scales
to dispel.
***
Alone is a long deep thing
the table between us
you can’t find by logic
the way it feels
sparse words don’t make.
Peeled edge of sad that collects
light gets inside anyway—
you have to read literal to mistake.
8/26/11
sleep is not deep & I am up by five, half asleep at four; a tall friend, who may have trouble with his back mounts a set of stairs in the old Williams St. dream house, someone else lives there now we visit, that becomes Arcade, bookstore and café; he’d brought me to meet a friend who takes me out up town and doesn’t want to lock the door—he lives up towards the University where the stores are more prosperous & I say no wonder, down here we lock the doors—later, in an auditorium, the three of us sit apart, talk over the backs of seat, are able to sit closer when a few folks go, the guy suddenly explaining “when I am a girl” and I realize he would be a good looking girl and slouch into the seat, leaning my head against him
*
headlines this morning: “Screaming Irene Heads for East Coast”
***
hot baths almost any afternoon for even an hour
I’d have to wait for the hot water to come back
to refill after the bath cooled, and always reading
Ray Bradbury and Sci Fi of teenage years or
They Shall Not Pass about the Spanish Civil War
& sometimes masturbate, and sperm coagulate gross,
but also sit up and tuck my penis between my legs
and hide it, look how I’d look as a girl, compact and
neat, or long ago when five in the soft shadows
of late summer eves abed, nursing my stuffed dog hero
at my otherwise atavistic nipples
or Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, or
“The Kiss of the Spider Woman”
suggested a door in desire
a way further in
***
Alterity’s just one phrase you
could notice, sufficiently trained to
seize every break
stuff it in your throat—
the last fact that is not God.
Bad food leaves holes called “lack”
the whole house is surrounded by
like a sky—
all information is uneven light
a cadence does not alter
the excess day
that flickers in my care.
Not twice what makes the birch
where you can see.
8/27/11
Irene brushes past Durham in blustery, crepe myrtle against a blue black sky, one low bank of broke apart smoke circling cyclone low, counterclockwise & through the lit and open places not hung with rain, way up the higher jet stream clouds already arriven in states of order. The storm will blow and damp and wet, tear at exactly where things are when it hits.
*
I sleep with the windows open so the wind comes in from the North and I can hear the trees.
***
that I remember, that I have always
remembered, rehearsed, assembled,
laying down my nap blanket at pre-school
in grave morning light, laying down
each alone, remains so strong, like
a wash & why?
about being alone, about learning to be alone
that I was dipped in and made a place for
I could go back to,
an anchorage
the spirits didn’t talk to Dad, they hovered
like bees and followed him in the yard, but
he did not know how the soul, the cave of
the soul lay on him like a mantle
felt vectors and that afterdeath
that there was nothing, he died into
***
In the afterwake, the piled up convinces
makes you wonder, what could be love
instead, that put its face on;
disputation does not alter
wind works, and God, your mistakes
don’t seem to matter
somewhere out there, in some morning
in work’s light
its turned halal,
a shepherd’s purse on the table
drunk where words
give no escape—not the long city
not the Beatrice dawn
not the light that leaks into.
8/28/11
New moon late tonight I’ll call today the last; bills and desk work all day, sort my files & sad; Jehanne and I go to church early, quiet. No music.
*
I wonder how I go with folks, stranger that I am; Bob sings “some people are very kind”, but I have to be so lost for that, to get to that place so anonymous, a guy reaches a sandwich across to me. Most days I don’t find that. I am enough about myself to wonder an old guy clops me on the shoulder, its ‘cause its men’s pancake day and he’s getting into his role.
*
In the car on the drive home I tell Jehanne that I am much more scared by the fact that right now, right in front of my eyes, so many people, so many people, have lives, imaginations, ideas, in which I play utterly no part—much more scared by that than by the idea that after death I will be utterly gone.
What bothers me is a look across the restaurant now into what I have no part of.
***
Not much closer to let go this
shroud I’ve been drink, prefer
and call your skirts.
Anything to hold
the angels have no part of,
has no part of me.
***
She’s downstairs sleeping
where she has returned to
where she was not married—
she was before,
sleeping where he was yet to be
a small door yet unopened
she has returned to go back through
to go back up the stairs;
she has returned
to where she got lost
to go back through
downstairs, not married,
before a door
unopened.
