Pisces New Moon
3/4/11
David Felts’ birthday classmate at CA Thomas Elementary would whip me with his ear-flap cap so that the metal fasteners on the chin strap snapped across your face; David wore glasses w/thick lenses distorted his eyes. I get back to sleep after 4 AM anger I have to spend $1200 to go to Mom’s memorial seems like a further insult & dream strange; at school I get copies of Yeats’ materials for “A Vision” and now at day’s end
was curled trying to understand what he was about
I’m not sure it is meant to be used this way, but I’ve always taken sun/moon position at birth as a clue to deciphering what phase one is at & in this sense am intrigued by the notion that those whose will is in its primary phase have an enforced mask they have to work back from
***
if you haven’t gotten it yet, my parents had few local friends Mom
would talk on the phone with a neighbor about the girls but people
did not visit a few friends of Mom’s from school and went to a
Unitarian church across town & later in Andover, a town away we
didn’t know anyone I have some memories of Fourth of July picnic
flirtation at the Middleburg Heights town hall they did not go to parties
& Mom would quote Emily Dickinson about how much she hated
talking to folks and the way the men would be & sometimes with Dad’s
NASA friends which meant engineer geek civility we were told we
were smart and different I could never understand why you’d want
to be different and secretly despised them for saying this it seemed
to license self-centeredness at least two of my siblings have in spades
I was and am disappointed by
I want to make this read like history or polis & never can—my memory
is not like that & it seems impossible to say how the small plastic soldiers
—one time it rained hard & Dad left the sandbox cover off, it made lakes
& Guadalcanal Bruce could make us see would get excited and make mythic
***
I think it cannot all be as bitter as this
I write in patient chords & would measure
a pastoral retort—a good feeling once
put in a stone cannot be drawn out text
to say so many broken and disappoint selfish
& drawn by power I cannot even tell them
dreams, that we are drowned in mind that hears
even there on our most exposed “Date My
Mother” someone had to agree to sell;
hard to be among the good as dead that
desire even there can love—
I can’t embrace. Polis isn’t, nor history
what millstone is or the loom’s brace
or the gray, flax, linen.
*****
3/5/11
Read from the 1925 version of Yeats’ A Vision which summarizes a system given to him in conversations with spirits who wrote through his wife—one way to attempt a poem I suppose & based on the lunation cycle as a system of phases not unlike Rhudyar’s and perhaps drawn from similar kinds of inquiries and discussions. Someone writes about astrology and eye’s roll, I can’t help it though having stumbled into it as a way of thought about process more than character, and the language worked or was useful for pulling at knots I had with someone. Anyway because it’s a lunation-based system I wonder if one could use the phase of moon at birth—first crescent for me—as a way of thinking about what phase one was, this being the interesting question & not how Yeats used it to gesture about differences he wanted to lay out between say Oscar Wilde and Keats as types—so for me a “desire for the exterior world” who “sees nothing beyond sense but sense expands and contracts” which is true enough I suppose as I feel mind is really sense and have said so & “It is as though he woke suddenly out of sleep and thereupon saw more and remembered more that others & can be seen”. I am more tumultuous than this, so perhaps the lunar phase is the wrong key.
***
let’s see Mom had a leo moon (loves attention) square saturn/mars in scorpio & sag sun & Dad’s sun isolate (without aspect) in leo conjunct her sun & saturn in early sag square mars in virgo, so right there lots of saturn mars moon etc so frustration and work—Bruce and I both have nepture t-squares with a mars/uranus opposition, so we translate that physical difficulty to the occult and leaping & Barbara, and Laura like mom sag girls with leo moons square a variety of things in scorpio (venus, uranus, etc) & Ed with a virgo moon square saturn on the same axis as Dad’s—well you’d have to write it down & maybe that much is music—I am the one babe born at night, just past midnight & with moon in taurus and mars/venus in aquarius and so out of the sequences otherwise scored
***
Dreamt among men, a new part of town I dream
Atlantic and reached by elaborate highway bridges
Boston but south I get lost on the way back above a river &
recent discussions of poetry I should remember
I look for a diner I have eaten at before that is
sometimes near the bookstores in the mall I get
new novels at last night, and sometimes north of what
could be Central Sq. if you thought about it—
several streets over; this city “polis” I can only dream?
shifts of prior examples and walks, &
folded so that even Paris is possible
& the Jean D’Arc statue on the white columned hill,
no longer as wonderful when I climbed up from
a field of stone cemeteries that lay behind it.
*****
3/6/11
The texts of “A Vision” are quite different—there is a long section in the 1925 version in which Yeats lays out a reading of history according to the gyre pulses that is not in the later, which makes sense as it is almost always the case you begin to talk about the procession of the equinoxes you have gotten locked into applying your new tool to everything. One thing he said though, about the way a philosophy created from experience burns whereas revelation gives life which strikes me as implying something like grace or what in Islam is called imagination. I wonder whether “sense” and “experience” are the same.
In Buddhism, mind is a sense, and so, when you sit and hear, that is “mind”, there the external world that Yeats calls the “Body of Fate”. The other day, sitting with the Buddhist Ethics class I had the first clear sense of “just sitting” I’ve had in years.
***
Waves of shame for anger & Dad, the first furious driver, circles a block
& looks for the best parking space—one of the last things I did with him
was go in a snow storm in Ithaca to look for a Christmas tree; he’d always
driven high in second gear, or shifted down hard, hard on the gears &
drove VW buses & now he was just beating the gears and was angry about
something, maybe at me because of the divorce he still didn’t want to
be with me, had such brutal, emotional judgements, a bear who understood
physics
***
Mind’s not mirror or lake, touches
different than we imagine sight separate—
not cast by light, but light brought
to become
outside a landscape & ripe shaking
taken by heart that makes a space for,
not apart and laid on a cloth
but by being at stake—
the stars in the open are not
a mask, and forever material
their field, however I endure it
is fate, light would have me
look beyond towards beauty,
I call sister.
3/7/11
Dream involves moving around Boston, a super bowl that will happen at Nickerson Field & I figure how I will get there from a poetry event at a hotel/conference, decide I do not have to take my bags or could leave them in the car—restless dreams involve a physical urban space and movement, sometimes a drive across country, connects to what—for ten years I met Jehanne in my dreams and told her I was married, then I met her, so perhaps this is something already happening like that, that I am already a part of, I cannot know yet.
***
Laura told me that after two pre-cog dreams she decided she did not want to have dreams like that and so did not; I don’t know why you would say “no”—it is true it is ordinary bit of parsing Kalu Rimpoche called “habits” disparagingly, but I have not say as long as her has & I do solve things at night, and there is a kind of feeling, a body, you carry from a dream & maybe its that the dream was that real feeling I could not have in the mix of sense & underbreath cues I was busy reading among my inarticulate family
I say to Joe today this desire I have for being seen, its about not having been able to accept the loss of my family, that gap I am already looking out of 1963 John Glenn, that I had already lost them & such a long time to have to then spend waiting with them anyway
I had a bad LSD trip Halloween 1975, came home and stood in the hallway and looked in the great heavy mirror that hung in the family room across from the books & I don’t know the words to say the ruin I felt. This kind of situation has to be sat through, there is no other way, so I went downstairs to my basement room and put on a John Mayall record and read Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hell’s Angel” until the morning & that was one night that was like what seventeen years had been & reading was what I could do not to look.
***
It’s true that a brightness catches my eye that’s hunger
and glamour, is so radiant in its not yet been
and drives my glance—scrapes even the sky
instead, its different brilliant alter
like a thorn takes cotton to begin cloth
catches my breath against what is at last
not me, begins reflection’s shawl
in brailed landscape I’ll put up lattice—
ink blurs as promises to keep, knots and falls,
thread twist blues, written like fences
to prop open the door, I am mixed with
air and rain & tell the difference
by these stains.
*****
3/8/11
dream end I have just been asked to help someone by watching a doorway/passage audience members to something are entering & realize—and this is from an earlier dream—I have to be on stage in a bit. in the earlier dream I have never rehearsed and come on as a minor character to give a letter which is a key plot element & then later a longer speech—it is a court love comedy/musical and younger kids are in it and star. so I run dress and then run down to stage area and encounter director/scene shifts slightly & I have arrived at a birthday party for a guy who is a dad of one of Sam’s friends, Jewish I think & she wants me to write a get-well card, so I am not sure what the event was for, why families have gotten together, but first encounter one of the actors offstage who tells me they’d changed the script in any case since I hadn’t been to rehearsals. I spent the other dream searching for a script and trying to use my short-term memory to hold the rough shape of the scenes—all this is the souped up version of the West Junior High Auditorium which is plusher, has surrounding empty halls
***
what Nate calls “sway” in “Sweet Virginia” an acceptance
you cannot move in a straight line given a circumstance &
the more you read, the more that becomes clear & so certain
sounds are helpful in the rough approximate of clatter—old
plastic stereo folded up like a suitcase stack ten records—Ed
would put on all the records by the Monkeys & Cat Stevens
we’d wake up after an hour deeper in the night last train to
Clarksville—when Sam was little I’d play a tape of E.B. White
read Charlotte’s Web over and over & I on the top bunk
the records would keep playing, when I was in band I played
French Horn and we’d have the off beat bored me so I’d
shift it, play two notes or hold through & the band director’d
look angry over our way
***
All the artifice we ain’t gonna get ‘way from is
fence or house & dream real hard, its still
gonna stay—some things aren’t your choice &
that’s a part of everything a person say;
it shift in consent, lover like, not quite in
concert “I’m watching that” & meanwhile
a fire—at least that room’s as close as we
have & its set apart careful window—
a noisy more difficult to imatate (imamora
wit)—at outside is polis I call her to
figure water or reveal: life is not
serial, not systematic, not a space,
we are required to augment, a fifth I
prefer that longer, enless ninth.
3/8/11
one of those days I wake up sad and then by mid-day have surfaced; correspondence and lunch out with J—the next two weeks are going to simply burn & today Ash Wednesday
mourn, blue. a steady rain tonight
***
downstairs in Middleburg Heights we had a player piano Dad stained
antique grey, a kind of hideous colonial, but the rolls were clever, a
map of the music, and sometimes more than ten fingers Camptown Races
or some Maple Leaf Rag a jangle we’d pump merrily
Bruce played a kind of dour effort I’d say Mom felt some
competition with her friend Marty whose son John played
Beethoven Bagatelles & also social awkward—Bruce had
long thin fingers & I took lessons with the same Woman lived
a few streets over we could walk, the only house off my street
I ever went to I suppose &
a Victorian-American practice I suppose that your children
would take up an art & Doug’s father a piano tuner of all things
as well as Catholic, & its strange to think how odd that seemed
we lived amidst Polish families so it should have been we were
the damned there, in our Unitarian charcoal black house
***
Among whom your children rose
your hands, long fingered sawn in
a film, flicker brushed a smock, sparrow
tucked, or cursive precise
made slanted like cat-eye glasses
had two green diamonds & rose
through hampers and clothes line,
our bodies just off as if a
double image folded or slight
time discrepant “Blue Velvet” you
could not touch,
the performance demanded an
elegant line you wrote perfect half-seen
spangled with bottle-thick stare.
3/10/11
a guy has a tape of Marina Tsvetaeva almost singing a poem over some music; its lyrical & after I get up I wonder if I dreamt that because of the Nico/Cale/Eno CD I found on line—the iterations of a comma—Mom when did you last see the ocean? You were by the lake there in Ithaca, like Lake George you went to when young as far as I can tell you
never went back. This makes me think darkly, “why would one want to go a last time to see a place?” What I’d want would be to see it again & how many places that I’ve been to have I already been to for the last time
***
simply no way to explain emotional reaction to
event I see coming in a glance, the whole storm
shape I don’t see as articulate but as force or change
like a cobra in the path I start to shout the people
around me unable to get what’s up as the measure
they understand is different & thus measure that Jack
bent as if to explore a possibility, a discrete region
in which the same way’d be the same and thus transmit
capable, like knock around inside that tune what we
both have to see if I can shake in the larger or
somehow rheostat like Coltrane or overtone ‘till
reminded
Mom, Dad, anyone’d look at me pissed off and not
comprehend or would—if glimpsed a bit o’ what I see
think I was judge in say a sentence as future laid out
reads that way, a sentence & they’d say but you are
abrogate our liberty thar to indicate that & so I cannot
say what I see would prefer to be blind
***
A poor instrument for this establishment Lord ain’t figured
you’d let it play inta dat cornuh, all blare done coronet o’ kings
all wrinkle tat a stain, beblued and darked, gone knot, gone gnaw—
whachya gone cleave from sight Lord, cleaved off in clover lie
sparse feel from “comes at ya” that you askin? inuit bone hollow
a dream o’ different? I a spose to flay me self & why. Else I
torn apart, what’s at four? A be saying a man tears himself limb
to limb be mis-stepped in that imitative sense—
angles wait Lord I’m a not, angels cauterize abrupt &
lop the daisy mop and spray of passion gone fly a moth,
a glance, gone fall be gone into da dirt
aint’t care so Lord ain’t got a double chambered heart
dey don’t need an answer, day don’t talk, der t’roat aint
strung a whispered
3/11/11
Jehanne found out her mother Dorothy has lung cancer today—she’d been losing weight & will likely die some time in the next few months. Once again news while we are away from home, a hotel room. Phone calls to family & friends. I am aware I am intuitive emotionally but not good expressing my sense in words. I know we cannot do anything in the day, no sight-seeing, but don’t know how to say this.
From the streets we hear the Friday call to prayer.
***
my Dad’s mother died in Durham the year I lived with them—he had trouble with seeing her at the home, ‘d go to see her and disappear afterwards we’d find out he’d parked in like a Rite Aid parking lot and read science fiction novels he’d read before, maybe for four hours—he was away & I got a call she wasn’t eating & went to visit, turned on the light she said, “who is that” I said “me grandmother” she said “oh David, I am dying you shouldn’t be here—94 or 95—then sat up & asked me to go look for a medium rare hamburger she didn’t think I’d find since a law then said it had to be cooked medium I went out a got her one brought it back she took a bite spat it out and lay back on her pillow. I sat a minute “you okay?” “yes” “okay” got up to go, she said I should turn the light out.
***
It will a last breath unable to be
still, nacht, aspirate through stop-
like shock; thought may go
on appears, seeks out others
clouds of, all manner of metaphor or,
keeps in cold, talks in tables—
a wren catches a lilac lancet
as seen yesterday, olive head tilt—
almost fact sheer of focus, flat
day, flat world, sheered off as
wind-gone— thought perches and
must already, warmer than glass
than clean, already aboil, sunset polis,
must, its wings.
***
3/12/11
watch “Buitiful” with Javier Bardem in West End theatre with Jehanne and Sam, a film about a guy dying with cancer & come out, Jehanne is fielding calls because her cousin found her Mom on the floor, okay but weak, and took her to the hospital, the film about maybe we cannot control “get our lives in order” but perhaps slips at the end it can’t say we die alone hopeless because not all of us do
***
the places where the sky comes apart is an image but its not a social form
you might not get I am talk about the beige in a city’s sky & relentless
march of pverty, DC looks like Brussels or that I feel loss suddenly miles off
& you sing into a mic and I know we won’t speak again you can’t see
& no social way to say it save tragic heroine or Cassandra & I am not
a girl, what’s not human I have to imitate
this is why I’d say something you thought was control Mom, was my
lack of control, that it was out of my hands I couldn’t finesse, but
could try to hit the car make some kind of signal
I said to Jehanne today, “it’s the opposite of Jonah I am try to tell &
the only tool I have is make myself a whale and scare you”
***
Perhaps a ruined world & death offshore is
we have to do, not related to a story, that
we cared, oh, extinct birds & the red McD’s
fried chicken box next to could be dock
or mallow leaves by a fence;
outside the Atlantic is a city slumped &
death’s a grate, a bitter leg push, gutter
gowl and skrin, a not word—
don’t let ‘em get you to the last station
with their “word’s material” solution, bite
the tops off the cosmos & spit
the petals lie—that’s their death &
you don’t have to go down stone soldier
your own red barrow is wait & still not said.
***
3/13/11
drive back the down from Virginia spill between twin columns of pine south of Petersburg, almost begun on Columbia Heights but somewhere near South Hill
a phase shift that takes place & you are no longer in relation to Virginia, but to clay flat slab of Piedmont cull
J is on the phone gets news and talk to her doctor & far Japan shaken down by massive offshore quake, nuclear reactors melt & forced salt water over everything makes cod or salmon in the trees—so far off the “North American Plate” fragment pressed between and pine & crows stuck on which way
her Mom’s cancer sped and perhaps a few weeks or months; J is off like an arrow to care & I fulminate curse over old wound, Mom, there’s no social saying
***
talk to J about Avalon Hill war games I played with Ed as youth alongside
read military history of to imagine, hexagonal map of Gettysburg field &
re-write I was so busy tying and untying & poured over detailed account
that I see a sign for “A.P. Hill memorial” I can go off talk about composition
of a corps, battalion, platoon fix and thorough a full summary of war just
was a few decade back down the road that way, an aura un modified by
machine that leaks burdock mixed in blood & almost northern light sheets
of departed and still lambent soul
***
Unstable, evanescent asphalt avenues in
brief summer glitter, pale imitation of lake &
bike wheel snakes in last winter’s sand
a gist of freedom, I ride
twenty miles to Waldon Pond to swim
at the town beach exactly how farmland
gets blanketed; at least I am not home
and an essay of this August becomes
thumb thrown farther and faster,
velocities of departure I aim to schedule &
don’t know yet its all covered
there’s no outside the mind known a
body can translate to, that asleep in a field
suggested.
*****
3/14/11
prairie & spring begins to creep into clutter of words at hand I am required to say
skullcap as new cast of soft purple effect hovers almost bees over old yellow grass
and otherwise quince pokes its soft red—once again this clatter that will become
overly still summer lawns not having fulfilled what seemed now possible
then doubles back autumn dragon over her shoulder to make something of it anyway
***
I get tired enough yesterdays agon is like thin red tracery
what word after word establishes as base, an almost lyrical
the asian dragons I saw over Guhyasamaja lectures
at Bob Thurman’s yellow house in Amherst (west side of
main falling down the ridge slope towards Hadley Fields)
that was many years ago, what an omen is I was touched by
& saw Tara Tulku’s tall bald head above purple roses a
robe wrapped in winter, his monk’s shoes
***
Half tone Scheherazade, my voice
dubs books’ subtle quote music
echo “the prairie outside” to ventriloquate
my lines, script unfolded in sun
at the tip of my tongue “as style”
I am from yesterday a long shadow ago
back near before the war maybe
I died but kept read & so was still
that later 1960 found myself again
in a picture book and took up a
story from there— you allowed
this re-ntry Mom were fold sheets by
a stove as a vector to catch such
gesture from across a room.
****
3/15/11
Cold spate day mixed with hyacinth plum breath of dirt exhaled as dream; Jehanne moves her Mom vigil to a “transition” facility, I call “her last bed”, a single with attached window; am visited by electrical disruptions again, dead batteries and cell phone under-story collapse—I growl at a student yesterday about technology rhetoric distorts or hides what is the same, prosthesis or not, jealous or covetous, being invisible does not change this or make evading others a successful tactic. It's harder to learn how to appear than to disappear.
***
I was twenty-five it was not so bad I’d go out in a day, a good day, and sit somewhere: along a flood plain dike or walk out back of Smith College along the Westfield River a bit or somewhere on the old state hospital grounds where the community garden were, you’d have to bike up a pretty good hill, but the grounds were sometimes mowed and half corn too you could find a place to sit down and fall into this: leaf, grass, air like it was a bath, plunged in outside, what was outside yourself and in color, and where there was a sun
***
Thin girl wants something Mom I was not ignorant of
you distilled sun in puritan pitchers, were a red berry bank
clouds drifted past; being German meant a white belly in
your skin & sex was mackerel sky, scale and your dream—
I didn’t want that cold, it was always okay
not to fuck—I liked shapes and you and
Dad were a shape over there—Couldn’t
you tell I was to marry someone else?
That difficult shame I appeared from, fig
was apart, I am sorry for it made you dislike
what did not leave your duty—after your
heart broke I said “touch your heart
it has to say, you said, “Oh David
I don’t like my body” no surprise.
3/16/11
Cross day I depart in sunken boats—sun and cool—I work hard to have a thing to say in front of the ritual class—can they see I am can barely hold on & still more or less benign people say; I miss Jehanne in Minnesota—she goes right by, I call out and wave but am too far away, she’s in a car on a street or the transitional facility, a barn-like space. As long as she stays there she will be preoccupied by the immediate monitor outputs of a body’s vigil that there are room.
***
It was hard to be your therapist, Mom, when I was four; I tried to hold up
that transfer of your Dad like a cardboard sign, but was surprised you
couldn’t tell it wasn’t me. He was much bigger and his aura was East Orange
black & I was so clearly red like Kerouac’s Friday afternoon. What they
call filial piety, Mom, holding that cut-out, twice my size, even though he
was a small European-sized man, like I was an altar boy the way Dad’d been.
You musta seen I was designate and useful for this purpose of exteriorization,
like a can of paint found on your doorstep you could paint your rooms with,
all New England and widow’s peak—he died at 48 smoked and left that cracked
plastic radio was his stele.
You were not that interesting I don’t know why I made myself a fish
got thrown up to feed you. I was “whatever you’d like I will attempt
to realize” you were just gone somewhere else & I was left with
scenery & had to, say my lines.
***
Asperse look “in this world ma”
wed my sight to bloom, a detail
called—I apologize for skin seen
but the sun wants that, to
make nests; you knit
but did not paint & we lost stigmatic
splinters you’d a cull, your
corner to curtains and rugs for
rain. So many ghosts can fill
a room—you decided not to add
milk and other leaven;
the dead hunger for more
than peace; Ma Cik gave her body
parsed, but dream serves too.
***
3/17/11
At spring’s auger & ought of bud, to be red, to rush and rue, bruise air
sentiments of light, watercolor blur of pollen, blush—Mom said she always felt sad in spring & I don’t remember that she was, torn April riven, Easter crow &
whose feast laid out on an impossible plain?
many days all I can make are haunts, intensified by cussed, by stubborn keep doing, notes of the blue mundane, the blue train, alarmed by a Japanese girl on a bridge, repetitions
that taste like smoke
my 10:30 is here
***
I can remember makes marbles or thin tin flip discs with Al Kaline already prose twigs and thus speed & not; it’s gestures my body’s sleep lake and so still “I am not accustom to” perform listen schaften, whist, whist, whilst, wilder & wand—befall vaster bracken,
racketed woo tangle
“till avenues of cigarettes, part soon enough in standards
7-11 on mass ave & prayer of gray lit pigeons resemble strategic
there fastened, there grasped, metallic world
***
Not a year except as reference to an implication
was to make “mother ideas” out of lakes of sun
like a toddler I go back to before again ventures
that were in my body this way, a small knot
tied in sand, airy mom I tried to figure
dreamt and apart wasn’t mom surrogate thought—
I could stutter “sun, sun, sun, sun” hope
if in E flat slight quaver you are not feeling
it & unable to hold, like a red
balloon, drifts over Paris—Sartre left
a door open you went through
there was no after & under such a spell
utteration in kitchen dismal I could not
be Mom, distal through the keyhole.
***
won’t be can’t repetition stim for God’s difference &
not to which I am called through, pulls me from
myself, seed soaked through straw, drawn breath-like
bled and month’s main, memory
*
manse—oh splendid undid countless window’d tower
north of Amazon & underlit—walls like cassock robes
I have no dream passage or how long mist elaborate
hints of stalls in pastel. stuck straw
*
A lack of difference here is not repetition
since “pure” is per, accented “preface”—
another “my profile never reaches its end
but in the first daylight hours I can
push my “place” out into a room
where it hovers fairy or gaslight,
nudges you awake—we take shapes
but not yet”
later the day will fill with passing women
and this will remain fervor “s’il vous plait”
still life with apple an open window reflects
a chapel in flense slim steps, and advert posters call
“legs of spectacle” other obvious we can’t seem
to say, forever wheeled in play.
****
“work the lace, David, my slumber”
3/18/11
Day of labors, blood work, Toyota shop of a battery cable, shop for Dale and Hua, acupuncture and therapy. Moving things from one place to another a river does better at & I am metal for, still almost gauze, brief lie of spring thrush & bereft
a poison stream animals visit in twos— “all I want
is sumthing I can use as a car” “the place we had in
Rome was like a loft we had it made” ate on the stone
steps and graves “it could be used”, what’s called “clever girl”
old murmur black babush shape sack, “don’t describe
when I want to speak from the tangles, son—talk too
much silence won’t say”
day gone yellow
***
read essays on Mallarme yesterday and so today read him & more satisfied—Divigations—short prose sections. strange Barthes took “death of the author” from that example. French at the edge of English and back
I spend much of the time running errand unable to imagine going to Ithaca next week; I hate airports & just want to give my great betrayed lines and storm off, so clearly this is not well thought out
not one of my dear color mates has called to follow up more or wonder how I will be; Lou Reed sings about Stephanie asks why she spent half her life with people she now hates
***
Was 1965 but a yard seven knows
shipyard chinos a guy works along
“after the war” property line a driveway
& green cinderblock his garage next
to an ash Dad smeared knots with pitch salve
& swing set makes a motion where there is
none, scooped grass feet carve or kicked
over pitcher’s mound scar, allotment
world cannot be, diorama Joseph Cornell
made unrealistic & sweet from the same
star diagrams and postcards a schedule
taped to a shoe box—trains don’t run
along Pearl St. to Sandusky & Lake Erie
used in a hundred years a “low bridge” Sal
***
3/19/11
Dale happy to talk a line he thinks might be a good place to run a fence ‘s
my metaphor for the “crooked beat” found his way to Toronto and good on—
I will die in Atlantic coastland between inland, voice close to like others, a
month of ever darkening, moon full in the blue yellow streetlights make teal-midnight,
last bits of meat torn from crow’s bones
***
memory takes me back to dry wells & dream is more lit—the lake I find behind
Schugel’s that was really a development Bruce called “the Valley” & more that
a ridge created a steep bank; I delivered papers on the first few streets below
Pearl St (a “high road” that ran along a fall line) my bike on weekdays; I didn’t like monthly “collection” & pulled a heavy wagon full of Sunday papers very
Norman Rockwell but dreamt Tommy Karnuda’s dad was out in a lake that
covered these streets, fishing & that image quite bright I don’t know why
***
Pump lever to prime a Winchester
pop gun sold at Topps toy aisles
three different stores same merchandise
& catalogs a factory dock and
inside bins and molds by ricket fields
childhood for sale cut by die and gelled blue
soldiers attached to a form tree when
twisted left a navel tuft they rock on
set amid a pile of blankets made Mt. Subiashi
or Chickamauga ridge quail burst
from hidden folds & shooters shot
later I’d sleep, read Black Beauty
if the batteries didn’t die by flashlight
under the same quilt turned shelter.
3/20/11
spring equinox touch, am grading after Dale and Hua go, lamp on light green sofa light green walls; “time of the angels” passes, & sunset is pale and hidden clouds overcast smudge pearl
***
looking back I find it almost impossible to assign recognizable human narrative
arc to a sequence of memories—brewing or foment might be better models then
tree—if only I was tree, birch or become Daphne, low willow and haunt for spiders
and birds; there is a sense of spillage, of overflow, flood attempts to find a basin,
something like a pair of hands, and many hours alternately heating in the brief
day and then lapped off cooler at night
merchants and other sea sounds
difficult lift of the train of this gown to navigate store aisles
a long, a long, to be apart, somewhere, perhaps in the sands, a place dry enough
I might finally be left, be stain dispersed as cloth and dye mats, felt
not human, and not long
***
Words an uneven prism for this chapel
& an alley outside since we depart
after an approach, dove and sparrow or dav
deft that’s dew, dove into a crowd—
late at night, this is the story that is on
that all stories are made of, that we could find
further inside or between rocks, a larger room,
so the man crosses the street, an agent
or we are in a nightclub “Llorando”:
outside the spirits wait to see which we
will choose this time—
Hallaj knew that to be mistaken was one way—
she wrote her own approach, put it under a cup high
on the mantle, to say she’d gone.
***
3/21/11
The past has become habit I call out; images of the day in order composed by frequent structures like noon or horizon, a walk through spring’s gauze to class—series of dreams I call days—I am not as angry today, as inundated (day like ceaseless brown water close up crashes over a dam in serial rolls). US & others begin to “impose” a no fly zone over Libya & all I can think is how this “good intervention” will make us forget Iraq—I am not satisfied or consoled.
***
Mom let us be away over there, “not adults” is one way of suggesting
a capsule sky—a separate freedom is not free but abject—matryoshka
hour spent in lawn tumbles is abrupt against her absence in black Jackie
glasses kind of hope—aren’t some of your problems ours? How to be
industrious between 3 PM and 4? How to justify dinner & not by boiling
water, how long it took, how to measure steam as a rhythm of consequence.
These were the small hand holds we tried as “satisfaction”, inadequate
habits of obedience and dissent, the fall in each day.
***
Insular arcade of small purchase
made bad faith of “Mother May I”, “Red Light,
Green Light” we’d be charged for later
what we were allowed to do—“It’s a Small
World” 45 RPM with yellow label I am subject to
on Decca allotments—layers of sin
become bone’s blue weight, perhaps marrow
we don’t know who we are;
wet cement or caviar, citizens getting off
at sere eel stops we apparent agree to
you had nothing to say about how strange
the dream was, or that your children were
led away, imaginations stolen & won’t know
what wasn’t worth a magpie’s eye.
***
3/22/11
Weary need to get to a gym & get my wind; I read a LRB about Derrida everyone and Ambigen & think not so much new makes a big deal with Ambigen haven’t read the Dharamsastras say, or Ambigen’s sources—relation of sovereignty to exception/patient other & conceiving of it (in the name of Marx) as anything other than a fantasy?
At least I know if you are talking like that you still have some dream of power yourself.
Will I increasingly be unable to talk with anyone?
Moon after the reading offen is tilted list misshapen and sallow near midnight.
***
In Cleveland we had a big rectangular table with wire-metal legs seated eight. It fit nice in what amounted to a passage way at the bottom of the stairs. Other folks used it the same way & a painting I looked at a long time—brown study of copper pot and toaster maybe Mom’s Dad had done & icon, Mom gave Ed I’m not sure why.
I’ve said all this. Mom didn’t include us in her own dreams or maybe didn’t have them. Nothing about the house could have been a dream, though dream enough for me. It was only later she began to see the way her thoughts shadowed elements like grave sisters and that they were thus hospitable. How could any f it have seemed enough?
***
Rhubarb patch behind garage & compost heap
Dad put lawn cut on and peels, coffee grounds
1962 someone taught him since suburban
neighbors don’t throw egg shells onto pottage
a prudence writes that plants fruit trees in her
letter despite curb—any nobody could; a
misplaced wrench useful despite, derange
wasn’t it, 1960 style “Alfa Romero”?
From Aryan dreams to his Mom said he
had a “Jew Nose” hook, ursine species,
basic kindness you want to say it
twice American mean of vast, bent
cornwear coverall to get the light
closer to the socketed valves.
***
3/23/11
Blousy day after reading group last night & classes I stagger though just doing each task, and get home still have to go out & do a load of laundry (broken washer) & buy cat food, home by 9 PM.
Ithaca this weekend & I am already tense, tired of deals with people that count me as need nothing. Feels like they are playing chicken with me now, see if I flinch. Or worse, not listen to a word I say and make the story their way, as if family were should be approached Gramsci style as a battle of position—transportable schemas and all that
***
definite periods—wind and sun along Lake Erie & walks to school
& yard as heart, then the dense overthick blue Andover house—I leave
a long time & call occasional, drop in and out, walk back
to Rt 93 & hitch down to Boston—these years are marked by
a staying away & then being drawn back by “have a kid” and
the later Durham years— storm shadowed then
as branches in the dark light her feelings would
make like shadows a car passes by casts,
intrusions & half-light from outside in fits of bright
***
First kid yr gonna be close gravity-like
to whatever legs do & eyes up high in
the way eyes are inhuman we can do
better than but yr in this way plumb
to skirt; best author decision here is make-like,
simile origin from here and all manner of vellum
and masks on out, as sun appears increased
black, soot, newsprint as caviar whether
you will work to decide: origin of auger
other make-divine writ in scar—
what Hegel wants to call history asleep
in old tombs where Rilke left a plate
of plums to purple back the dark.
***
3/24/11
ah 53 birthstones in the bucket—this one with an archer’s moon gone wane & the fierce outer lights in the sun’s home contesting what we call field’s greater blanket—girls carrying water, and men lost in rain, a strange part of the dance at the far end of the wheat that’s done to make wet smoke dream of being coal; & the traveler in the fierce clothes of the sun’s mansion already leapt away to echo arrow’s search
***
Jehanne back from Minneapolis a brief spell, her sister mother
in her last bed & now the next work, hard parting, sparrow haired
leaves body to wood. J & I warily pack for Ithaca,
I load for monsters who have their own way of recognize
there’s no mimesis captures.
***
Five of cups without the sadness is this
day wrap since often cool seasonal prospect
my brow shadow the streets and wind
laces and transitions at the level of skin—
there’s that mourn down sun pounds black
with a hammer, since lighter & clover’d
chickweed and monkshood, purpleshod &
croak, needlewort, where ground leaks
despite it’s air, despite we look out though
it sift and parse—old flue fire gone water
as way to be life—
the way this turns around again needs
double sight and dream, the double reed
Ole death pipes, awe here the dance.
***
3/25/11
airports & sill—a copy of J. Didion’s “The White Album” at one used bookstore, a copy of Burrough’s “Interzone” & too C. Coolidge’s at another “The Book of During” (might be my second copy to give away) and “The Crystal Text”—incise in the hour; J’s mother declines & she gets phone calls by the hour—last sitting in an airport argue about something else, as life as poppies; we see tall Sam across the Ithaca Airport atrium & there’s a sun snow shower when we land, mom’s laughter and prance;
***
several times in Ithaca & cats; Bruce & Patricia don’t take to Sam
I don’t know why; then to see Mom and Dad, and the place along
Warren Rd. Dad slipped and fell his head & then Mom didn’t pay
her bills he always did so to see her at Bruce and Patricia’s a bad
Thanksgiving Bruce talks at us & Sam has dreams of difficult
women Like Bruce and I did when young, either Bruce projected or
Mom, or the two in cyclone: fact whether you want it or not anyone
***
“What you think of there you look
out a last bed’s window, Dorothy”, infinite
farm girl smile “Oh, about love
and how beautiful the world
is (I am leaving) silent between them—
we don’t say that name, can’t spell,
her kiss on mom’s brow, what body
knows, never apart or distal;
a quilt made serial as packaging
on thin radiator arm rails & sigh;
Michael sits an hour longer into
the window, question, makes his
shroud tabernac & a same restless that’s
there shiver, makes him rise.
***
3/26
We get a call 1:30 AM that Jehanne’s mom has died, lie in bed deciding if she’ll keep her morning flights or stay for my mom’s service. Money gets spent as we re-book & then we are finally set for Mom’s service after lunch at Moosewood & used bookstore browse
Barbara has set up a last picture of Mom & her radiant lipsticked wedding picture perfect once was & several bears—many women are there whom Mom touched & stress is laid on work as a lawyer & her dolls and bears—notes she’d write and sign from bears after a visit, a dazed childishness I am wondering is an aftereffect of 30 years of seratonin treatments folks find sweet and are touched by
***
over all a patina of denial—Scott and Parker pay no attention to anyone
& race around in their cool: cousin Janet’s letter suggests how severe Mom’s
dad “Uncle Steve” could be—buzzers to sound warnings for dinner no doubt
mom thought her small bronzish dinner bell more human; poor church
cookies and tea afterwards
Barbara has moved Mom’s furniture to her house to make a front sitting room
& it is apparent how much she will simply move into their things; J asks
me why she so adores mom and dad and I talk about false consciousness effect
of grown up it took me years to dismember carefully pull away webs
so churlish, pained by sibs’ stunt: Ryan reads Ayn Rand in a corner
a last I won’t write anymore close down the channels make like Ed’s
life is passable ethic or Laura not libertine or Barbara remotely sane twist
a corner of my lips at paucity
***
Latinate or serpentine brows etched on veil surface
ask of depth, your where hills you came out of &
since the sun’s many answers, her deep glass, her
so illuminate—spring grass, plum, witchhazel sky,
pools of drowse—since there are so many puddles
index marked or scandal on your arm—thrush almost
equal to hermit’s pipe a small wren taps open—
vast illuminate books in which awn is scried,
brown carapace skin I die in. & Lintel birch
Morris lit less argument than illustrate, a “riched up”
a roughing—that blood flows in old bones,
a guitarist who’s unloosed his metal strings
arced “bow” above the frets, still finds song
along the reed-bent, powered strand.
3/27/11
day begins early with a wan late moon sullen in the dark Ithaca east; flights, sleep & anger, ends in a dream—first birds seen I the sky, strange and stately & then an obvious visit & several pods land away from, lets call it the summer mansion, off towards an industrial park—a tree appear, large like a balsam magnolia with hibiscus like florets & soon people are eating these, a guy at the landing of the stairs in reverie reaching out and pulling them off (even though the tree is outside, he’s seeing it & pulling florets off he has in his hands in the stairwell) I push past & in last room of the dream where folks from the ongoing and now not quite remembered drama sit—various relationship tensions
that had been building, affections, dinners out, a guy who I recognized and couldn’t place from earlier teaching sneers at how unqualified I was to teach a class on film he’d taken, a few young women, their yearn caught between skirts and other desires to achieve might
involve not using skirts—this is a last scene where blood will be shed, a kind of social violence erupt, and this gets intersected/dispersed by the problem of the visitors (I get up at one point wondering if there is nothing I can do, knowing the plot & then I am showing someone that the visitors have come because of me—I’d earlier been able to make heat waves with my hand walking with someone at night on a beach—to see or draw out my ability to move things—I start to move things like Syler on Heroes did—the visitors have come to pose a threat so I will evoke the ability
***
people are more interested in what they want than the facts or
any advice not to try a thing well-established as untrue, and
the days, weeks, hours of a year assist because in these there
seems to be time, our eyes fill and stretch, become bigger lakes,
no one mentions the dam, the denial—and how this later
makes us mistrust dream when we should mistrust ourselves
hate and desire, and power’s ugly carapace we’d best jump
to excuse—its your choice—we are all suspent over the
abyss and ledges appear for no reason at all
to stop your fall
***
Mom stops short at the edge of dream matters
as theory rather than utters, slight drift sea insets
or “between lap” she’s too Transcendentalist
skewed towards dolls as still surfaces,
can’t left leap her spell fuses what active parts
and sets guards—fierce spiders and moth webs—
wind about her children they sleep
one always victim she saps:
a hundred times she throws, door open to
imagination’s lakes, she doesn’t listen for
answer’s knocks, hides under the glass table
of the single look, her body there a bad mirror
of the outside all, not single but crossed and fragment
loaved look back she can’t fantasy.
***
3/28/11
I am up early and grading out of a strange dream (in Ithaca I had Welsh Rarebit soup & remembered an old 1910 comic strip “Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend” we had a book of I’d read as a child 1960’s) the day cool and wet drip breaks mid-day into at last sun. Jehanne calls before leaving for the funeral home look at her Mom’s body—a nurse took photos before the body was clean arranged since Jehanne said she wished she could see that, found that last shape beautiful, a tie, neck bent to reach after not breath after no release heart’s stopped.
***
Coach K wants me to find a receipt or income statement I apparently had on my desk for a divorce proceeding, to show he had this money. It’s a great charge & I am searching through papers, stacks of things, film, poems that are on my desk—I’d found it and then hidden it—and up on a chair find it slipped between articles in a stack of xerox’s, but its not the one I’d seen, is for three month’s earlier & so I may not have helped him.
This is the way clues are left—we have them in our hands and place them somewhere, to be found or not & even when great personages demand a performance, the oracle may not speak.
***
Ghost at the edge of morning yellow you
carefully step around is location echo can’t prose it;
in two its instead, “there and there” glass I slip
between observed “for God’s sake” I
suppose; perhaps later I will marry you might
call a whale or rib holds breath against—
Histories like this remain obscure in object depths,
knot-because “distributed” not successfully said
as possible social fact to false dollhouse sense of
relations (more time spent at proper undergarment
project for poor clad poppet shame than
awareness of what hand touched’d terms
make color). Couldn’t emerge has to be left,
become glass we later see through.
***
3/29/11
last night started to read Doris Lessing’s The Sweetest Dream, a bit of a “I can do this too” to A.S. Byatt’s epic about the sixties & here about twin snake combo of Marxism and commodity culture progress motif in America as dream of communalism based on strange hybrids of medieval and Native Amer circles—and, just home from funeral, having decide to read one of my better mother versions, I am associate to think Mom’s insistent greenhouse of dolls and bears is like—“sweet dream I’d rather”
mid-day I snarl at ICS class about commodity culture and fiction of fluidity, how basing identity in seems like fine “de-territorial” and displace ways makes you coordinate to no thing and thus can’t brace against to push and subject to the feed line. a de rangement because given up body as scale factor to what life is, embodied and thus death—so I derange myself proper, distend, tear, maul am perfect dancing bear
“a bear wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a bear and a person in a bear suit” some Duke blonde kid says down the table I have to lean over and say it’s the most stupid shit I have heard today (no matter how beautiful he look).
***
In Andover some high school year, I decide to start move the dolls when no one is home. Have the one’s on the mantle collect at the end & use a cord to start climbing down. My GI Joes help the Von Trapp dolls down, everyone is scatter along the wall, behind furniture for the door. This goes on slow for days, and I work hard to seize moments, stay up late, keep ahead of everyone to make the miracle when they don’t think it can happen.
Of course, they don’t make it out the door. Nobody does/did. House in an old ghosted field in a town they burnt witches, might have enjoyed the show. I know later I was careful to remember “feed the dead”.
***
Ambic word jam of “as been”,
as washboard, or waspish you
bent social fact ash—I write aspect for—
two things to say (amber, aspic);
we say are-been, or walk-about or
backward—a dance & sweet two step,
no, a waltz transforms beat ward
no, back, word in Stagger Lee’s barroom ambit;
at least two & first fantasy of
pow over is one, fictive stick & not even a
number, nor count, as up against the sky
against your heart, in your eye’s Mom,
to day, to promise, as ante, as bowl,
I lift that tone, tree to the sky.
***
3/30/11
moon wicks away again; spring male rain in bellows, I think will stay now until the new moon Sunday, in brood, low dark umber, in pool; lilac Jehanne and I planted outside her office window has bloomed scent & this cold wet the southern sun will tear the head off;
inside, Greaney’s “Untimely Beggar” chapters on Rilke end with a bouquet kettle of nods to recent genealogical assessments of Rilke but reads what others call good and bad according to interest as a mark of the “untimely” in his writing & what was the first, best thing I took from Rilke, permission to be bad, to allow what seem to be bad tones or sentimentality or anything else at one time or another crossed out “the authorial subject”, “depth”, “interiority”, music, feeling—allow all these to recur, within a measure, without adjust to overfill
& yesterday, over Sanskrit, Cliff presses me about the sense her gets I think there’s something to etymology, root that’s not lost, the surge (writ srj) in “creation”, the Gainsbourg in it, those “bright canaries over the canals” of a prosperous city—all false and true like coal or flint
***
Cliff asks if I know the poet Charles Olson I spell wrong as Swedish “sen”, sand sound of wen, grease flats & knot, his sone “koan” un own un own—
well hmm yes had a dream some time recent a year ago, but still yesterday “just then” as they say—he came in my room—I’d guess a vector of the downstairs room I had alone at 10 in Cleveland and the front closed-in porch in Northampton I had my shrine & sat, and where Sam slept, second story, but orient North towards lake, downtown, Canada, etc—sat, I said “hey, Rob Sikorski gave me this drawing of yours—its over here” and searched for and among perhaps William’s pastel drawings of one of the 84 Mercurys that circle the sun into quintile sectors pulled it out. He looked at it, I am saying some idea I have about it and he gets all fierce “shut up” look from his last photos—
immodest imprimatur
***
I have a small pit of spirit in me outside
where my mother sent me a far way
I was noticed, taken in by the wind,
the girls in wind, would dance by
by a creek is dream or light a second, salt
spit and weather—crone-pulls-a-sledge
took me in: “tend fire’s there” or “wither
as apple does” because what I’d been
felt was a kind of listen “you can’t
sleep with the wind girls boy though
they like you” took-me-a-bit to learn—
all this is she dipped me in recede salt tide
& spread out for sun, wind, air, night to pass,
‘till what’s left’s a season scatter
***
3/31/11
kind of a bundle of ruin today I guess teach okay, hang posters in the rain; Joe says Tony is in town to defend his kingdom thesis; I feel mawk and fain, vibrate thrum, heart shake have to walk down English Halls and then later Friedl lair of theory hate I am not class of & worse lack double consciousness apparent as white man whose unpreditory power is bleached by, bursts as echo, in corrupt bitter salts
think didn’t I pass I mean not the same as but for me this hiding midst my family was having to pass wasn’t “passing” but pass time with them I had to, despite they couldn’t see me, talked to someone else & horror of “this is not my house” is I am somewhere else, hidden under the bright waters of this surface you project me as, frozen like in a
fairy tale and can’t pass through the ice you don’t see me, someone doesn’t see me,
as I am, as I know & justify
isn’t that having to pass as someone else, not for my purpose, but as required by, but after a while, faking and self-doubt since fed & occasional drawn into relation & half hope
of comfort I am not like I am alien or elfin foundling half bound my pointed ears and fox, or Native Amer whose family is the ghosts still haunt our Andover yard’s rock wall partitioned false meadow who the trees remember & I half see walking about in light dreams
I know its your word & not mine invoked like to say I am in Dachau hidden still, try not to move or I’ll be seen, the whole how much I hate them be seen, the whole how wrong I think they are; the whole furious hate they have legal to unleash with scorpio precicise cuts & real imprisonment; to live among the scientific and rational madden
***
First scenes of dream are body later as unsaid feeling & anonymous field
is not history but letter left days ago, constellate to Orion is we measure
a sleep can’t be said hence a dew of “sin” dells in pocks called “the stain
of irresponsible” horizon of love Libra’s lyre bends due
thought’s great home a dust open above its forgot somewhere hope
a red dark again from caves of the east marbles, topoi as serate nervous,
hands Mom bent unconscious over daughters could be smooth magnetic
auras hovered above skin and cotton slight atmosphere;
a long way into wolf forays at what I meant to say alongside heard whisper
and mix as if unbridgeable chiasm between ear and hand and eye in word
“pulls the sled” workable in arctic as version sister spell of salt
blossoms are what body explodes as after dry I move waltz near and far off
thread to sew a wait, Mom’s black Singer crickets the shirt-cloth seem was
a kiss, what we bend back to she turns above that meadow’s rows
4/1/11
wandering around a psychic fair, I come on a young grey hair native business-type guy from Corvalis Wash. I tell him about my brother and connections to Wash. and he suddenly takes my hand and says, “yes, we’ve heard about you” and then something about my mars/Uranus and a current pattern related to that that I’d handled well. He pushes my hand away “I am not going to do a reading for you, cause instead I am going to do something else which is take this curse off you” and he reaches out touches my arm
later Lisa and I are walking through & I take her by him; he looks askance at me as if disappointed and proceeds to tell her she is a terrible person, really upbraids her, particularly for making use of my false consciousness, but later when we find each other on another circuit of the fair, I can tell instead of anger, she’s heard a different message that had to be said that way
***
over one winter break in high school I hitched to Quebec City
with two doomed smart friends of Ed , a couple MIT bound now
alcoholic fat and Judy become Lithuanian mad-woman hair
she’d begun to be at eighteen; we stayed at the hostel & a an
older woman sparked on me asked me I wanted a massage and then
a drink we went out into cold Jan. night old streets to an empty bar
people she knew made me a bit worried a scam was up she tells
me beers between us that folks say making love to her is like
being with a washing machine too much I get up run back
cobblestone streets like “The Third Man” the next day
she comes by & I am under her power now confused she has
me wear this peter pan kind cap and takes me round the city awkward
until some time mid-day I say, “okay. that’s enough” on a bus or subway,
give her the hat back she’s frown at me and disparage still virgin &
exactly when did she start to fuck with me I still don’t know
***
Outta that kind of coin approximate of hate gets notice
lake a tide moves, lake a daisy reach for sun
smooth flow lake, wind-over lake—boy lost
among reflected summer stars go galloping by
lake hair fallen over his eye, races together look leaned
at sixteen year-old sink “you have to kill me first”
means it bad, goes out back to smoke look for another
way doesn’t open, strains of Brigadoon Ed’s “Pirates
of Penzance” plays upstairs, a layer of charm other
occasional smooth smoke goes to sky he colors “midnight
blue” he knew was future so mixed in turn
half to hate two, lake Solomon, marlin in his tree tried
bitter harts it harts “a rovin’” in dam sweet gum hills
lake a daw ben covered black
***
4/2/11
moon gone back curled snail fetal, legs close & white in the under grub shadow of the bright sun, makes you wonder why its dark under stones & thematization of eclipse as life I am always half stepping in front of you sun, you weave back shuttle moon a way a cat walks—I can think easy about such things delicate image & nothing to say about what we might better be done & past tense is how I’d prefer, as past tense the body lets down
its obvious ther’s problems, huh? folks fightin over whose gone be “bare being” the crowd knows; from here to there is crochet I can’t spell croquet makes a fold & yur
parole sign under duress signified onder mute sang
***
second grade maybe my teacher said we’d be
traveling to Williamsburg now silly Disney locust
& Mom encouraged me to bring a suitcase
I think vinyl plaid or houndstooth zipper open
I packed underwear
& the day dragged the suitcase to school or
maybe dropped off much levity I still dream of
I suppose watched the suitcase lake I’d organize
inside your desk became wilderness of paper
& dragged it along the sidewalk outside
CA Thomas brick which walk was the “trip”
to a different classroom where we sat
and watched slides of the colonies
another year or the same that end of the playground a talking crow appeared in the trees one day, strange, maybe someone’s pet a story Bruce never believed
***
Found a place a possible distance, this still
daily feeling measures a lane side of you didn’t
know the roads would part, rhythm would make lose
pine landscape lake’s a metaphor that mind’s
black, a parallel slowly separates—
it was better across the street among the piano
tuner’s tools—it was better alone in the van,
fireworks through Ohio pine & hickory leafs,
better to be away from you, foot a fence &
watch the other way sky, to walk to school the air
mothers I betrayed you first thing they
said hello, bushes and shadows ask to play,
world you left me to, early, the way a bird leaves
a seed its beak won’t reach.
*****
