Taurus New Moon
5/3/11
I erupt convulsively out of sleep early, 5 AM; Jehanne downstairs in her morning, the cats crewel; after breakfast out I pull open more H.D. (bought in December), Palimpsest and Helen of Egypt, a biography that reads her close to Lawrence; I’ve been reading the German Library translation of Schiller’s “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”, at first for Mom, but the argument he sets between imagination and matter is a rich lacing back and forth across disputed boundaries. He is a fine stylist to boot, so the shapes are precisely drawn; each letter ends is a series of overlapping pulses to tangle his figure at you.
***
Motel panic attacks throughout my later twenties
what Burroughs might have meant, the American drag
a Big Boy restaurant, in Scranton Friday evening
and facing the window by mistake, the tired porcine work
faces I should love waiting in end of the week line,
sad terrible ghosts of Saturday’s lawns
a poor excuse for adventure we are supposed to have
to “get out” & true of bars and most solutions offered—
I could not leave the room, would watch anything
on TV, or pack and drive back home.
Easy to fold up, like a gas station map & put it
away. Except that later I am at work I have to lie
a bit I guess, put something on past ya, you don’t
pick up how absolute not here the guy you are
seeing is, and someone else was there.
***
Maybe we are all pressed against the impossible
harmonies left as scent, and ruined, rose
window open to the street, the poem
torn apart.
“It’s a hand-me-down” American Beauty
used to make me so scared—jeans, shirts,
made me anyone’s child; that stoned chemical
burn you were alone at the end of;
it was autumn cold and the field was on fire.
This being what we are not for so long,
not double consciousness of code, but the third
that my form makes somewhere
between us, I can’t see
I am shaking so hard.
5/4/11
A storm sweeps in late at night & it’s a summer camp kind of morning, cold and grey; I will be stuck grading the next few days though I wish I could be a dead knight in my meal worm tomb, make nervous wrestle of the, let’s say “discrepant” surfaces that give depth and shape, tone, room, and at the same time, so breathlessly portend ruinous and abject distances the family table is perhaps the best metonym for.
(Though one wonders if a metonym covers the discrepancy in its reference, one wonders if it might not be necessary to again recall the round table and poached eggs on “toasting white” bread bought at the Pillsbury wholesale store—a New England franchise somewhere pavement at the edge of Lawrence with cases of almost stale or perhaps sprayed turnovers and humid powered donuts)
***
shuffle goes from astral week’s sweet thing to
Bob’s I want you, makes me think of boys and girls
shine so hard on each other from their varied
perspectival shadows—she’s amused, let’s say
we all learn what’s poison among the glamour we prefer
“that particular flavor requires hours of explanation” or
gone into a coffee shop your eye drawn like a shark
to at blue streak of rage a girl is an attempt to make a dance
what Pollack called “blue poles” are written to focus
resonant sound is what gets called essay or sass
a girl sees come a long way off that problem too
that guy promising all manner of stars, makes the window
glue
***
Alice Notley has a book culture of one I pick up at the regulator I flip
“time’s a revelator” only I am often in, let’s say, a broader present than
a river you could put one foot in to step across; stretches back a ways
and forbidden there’s no explaining but structures event; no thought
about voice the way Alice does that somehow defines a willow place
stark whale ribs sketched up around you biblical with Harold’s purple crayon
skittery skat— voices do come to her from the other side and make possible
distances you have to feel when you read them; currently passed
in some transfer location Hilda sussed out & fed on its yellow light
this riched up evening several places in my body—left temple where
the stars shine out (maybe too hard) and heart side I am leaning—
set out satisfaction in two codes, I begin to bend around; Topaz
wants me to lay down with her and read, help her sleep & the dusk
has gone to night. So again I will.
5/5/11
Mostly the haunt girls visit me in backyards, such phrased locations that coordinate night sky and grass, sallow skinned bush devas lurk or someother ghost genres, earth and clay btan spirits drawn by construction’s scrape & new frames for subterranean water to organize echo; no steeple.
One had the sense of trapped forces, though the garage was a window to wolves & at night their snuffing; was after all Ohio prairie, cliffs fell to lake north the polar stars out over sea as if North Africa, or Turkey, or Prussia along a southern pebbly shore, correspondent. Bedouin and steel.
***
Cheap Japanese electronics changed our family culture,
from little transistor radios we’d get Aretha Franklin and
Petula Clark’s “My Love” from WKYW or across the lake
from Detroit the Beetles & in 1966 or so Ed and Bruce bought
compact Hitachi TV’s so we had TV in our room, watched
episodes of Time Tunnel or Wild Wild West heretofore unlicensed
Mom’s friends kids were allowed to watch (they also had
Buck Rogers flip books and could watch monster movies
unlike our cerebral restrict to Hanna Barbera and Bullwinkle—
though the last provided early structuralist education of
Fractured Fairy tales and puns) meant input of bricolage
advanced footage leaked into & though Mom was flickered
back and forth between birch tree and soldier and Dad in gnomic
living room cave spell w/baroque trumpet music in repetition (he reads
Amazing Stories and Doc Smith but never once thinks to
pass what he’s reading on like Bruce never stopped) though flicker
and repetition attempts at an educated household we have access
to alternate explanations of The Mod Squad and Ironsides &
Bruce, being prescient, knows about 1968.
***
A nestled oeuf of silence passes different the las
t two days, not an angel of history or similar winged
qualm settled about awake like a bowl—
breath more fully perhaps, a scar scrawled
on the face of polis, crowd we enter about its purchase,
colors washed heavily clean, a Robert Frank photo, glance-like
location, a window left open at lashed curtains;
these brackets attempt to suggest the spell
of a remainder, what stays when history departs its gusts
what stars stay and glass persists in shards,
shtetl and verst;
fifty years of pomegranates and the tree, grey like a Corot sky
its shingled clusters of Lawrence I lived by, near up-stream,
author, town, and sky.
5/6/11
unsuccessful winds of the blues camera hang together with this day, an outside author; rain at the movies and a new scar makes reportage (collections of dandelion and other dock simulacra) in a mirror split open
we have dead mothers in the back seat, in for the ride, look out at landscape imperturbable (the landscape in oils some black smudge) they don’t go in to watch the film walk off under the stunted redbuds they call “ornamentation” for sidewalks
***
irresponsible would have been nice but a hard door to open;
most houses have a kitchen floor—lie on the light the windows let,
a smoky moon rises full over antennas, should broad belly
a responsible orange road of it; or in books wasn’t idle some thing to do
was a purpose to narrate here, to get you home later,
that feeling could not stop you
***
Occasional we, in direct aspect, makes city in
the window’s violin as rose scent, an agent
would stop by, the doors open
to that, the way we were seen ourselves, tense
pressed down to effect song;
a thousand times rather be approximate in
dependence like smoke; (driven to horse-riding
lessons in summer, why?) not serene,
but due to fire; Mom did not walk up
the stairs but called to tell me where the
towels were when I shut the water off
that way; the many piles of clothes still
to iron we can’t count; Mom outside hangs
starlings on the clothesline.
5/7/11
down the corridor from the new entrance (in overwhelmed white) a girl covers herself as she turns away and, as if left there by movers, Hercules holds his club; some other attic gestures speckle the farther hall as if curated by the director of this season’s sit com; I miss the show Chris raves about because Damien and Solomon are hungry; we go instead to neomonde and discuss Basquiat and authenticity, or they do, I mostly think on the pale blue backgrounds or notes either the curator chose or was somehow part of what Jean-Michael had to say; a blue that could not be nailed down the way one can fix an arm, something from childhood about the play of 10 AM sun and industrial paint hues, porches and time spent outside poor
***
mescaline in the Andover IRS building where I work as a dishwasher in August
& decide not to go to Bard College (1976 if you are counting) I have a pass that
allows me to go out into the vast open floor areas to retrieve dishes; I am not very high but a little yaw, as I walk, in the floor; the sidewalk will tilt precipitously under me, Peter and Dave a year from now in April & we will all stumble, which is hard to explain unless children’s rhymes are, in fact, true directions for the storage areas; Dave looks at me,
says “we are so fucked” and I will spend the next year and a half feeling that trees turn
away from me with frowns, some terrible crime I have committed the forest shuns me, until one day I am in the Blue Hills and see a cut in the path into a field looks north towards Boston and when my foot hits the grass offstep to go into the open a feeling shoots through me I will never again be turned away the ground says, you are ours forever and we yours
so I know what Duncan means “sometimes I am permitted to return”, what Rilke says “just one of your springtimes was enough” I am fallen into, and lay on the ground and laugh &
that’s some of what I do Mom instead of the Bard College road divergent
***
I had fliers to pass out for the meet at Mt Taylor Rez & walked across
open ground from Tempe to Phoenix—a small owl almost as tall as me
in the strange horizontals of miles flat & a festival at noon struck me
as a good place for that; they had rigged up a movie screen and show
films of UFO visits and suddenly a blonde girl is at my shoulder says
“Hi, my name is Sunshine”, had walked into a kitchen in Olympia WA
at daybreak just three weeks earlier to tell me I should get to Phoenix,
the guys who put me up said she just did that sometimes, said her name
but no one really knew, she’d turn up out of the fields; I had already seen
the bright plastic dragon in the Southwest quadrant of No Gun’s prayer
(Seabrook NH woods) but was pulled by the old blue glove that was
in the Northwest (you have to follow all the directions that you are
given); old moody glove had me hitch all the way from Barstow to
Bellingham and back. I wanted something very hidden I guess.
***
5/8/11
a last cool day; Sam drops by before the drive back to DC; some of the domestic daily got dropped on the floor in March and April starts to get picked up. Jehanne and I talk about our mothers as its “Mothers’ Day”; we are quiet & unpack boxes of ceramics and knick knacks Jehanne brought back to remind (put new mind into); quiet as Sam naps upstairs before leaving
sometime yesterday or today Uranus goes over my sun for the first time
***
a blonde postal carrier drove me a bit north of Sausalito
asked if I wanted dinner, a bath, a pretty, compact, sad
woman in an apartment, some guy had left her;
I was eighteen Mom (1976) so you know I was aware of the
sexual possible of her being open with me in draped mourn
and not disinclined; I suppose this is what people do,
they are sad comfort each other is okay; it had started to
rain outside, a cold Northern California summer unrelented;
I had dinner and listened to her, was likely polite &
had a bath: told her I wanted to get back out on the road
though it was dark & no rides likely; she took me anyway
and I soon pulled my poncho over my quilt and slept—
did she feel “I can’t even pull a high school kid my loneliness”
or was it safer, later that night, too near the pacific—
in the count of clover, the body that exposed me
***
Storm all the climbing horns is a way to do it close to murder
whose thick choke scales the stalk, in “shook free” circumambulate
each phrase takes to establish, purpose fraught, the liquid dye of
ought in fight, spalt “on what ground can we do this heart’s war safe?”
After the sky showed how dawn’s red fierce become daisy blue,
after the black eagle of time came from the machine to take the flood-snake
in his off and out, after the love song Layla went down to marsh reed lilt
after winter’s best frieze was softened by the leak of backlit;
Ascension’s rose could not out-perfume nor wash
against its cooler petals that spent hate; answer is
the only source of light witness to murders cease
its cadent complaint, added “seal”
what broken result is factored in its remains
unanswered as we yet work the levee haul.
5/9/11
I threw that stone Ma I was thinking as hard as I could & it was a bad hearted thing, like splitting up friends, but flew perfect into the new “Hampshire County Mall” logo (circle with a pine tree stamp) & left a half moon tilt; I’d walk like that at night Ma, lopes in shuffle jeans, build up these said walls about the shapes of things as history patina
to pass time better in my own reach; I call ‘em out to curse I expect and then carry as the bad paintings that hide memory—
otherwise I would need to say how often a butterfly guide was at the wisp of my ear straint I did not hear but almost, the bad almost I can’t move to gone on someone else
***
mom’s in tears over the copper bottom pots
already dark so maybe winter & Dad takes us
into the downstairs bathroom—did I dream this?—
says if Mom doesn’t get happier she might have to go
away awhile; Bruce has no memory of this smoke
the bathroom narrow, how could we all have fit?
was a place of Mom’s smells & one time I opened
the door & a tall German woman who cleaned was
on the toilet in stork & so a place of shame, paint on
the ceiling blistered and peeled I’d make a map of
laying in the tub—did I dream this? mom will tell
you how I got suddenly angelic sweet to her &
was helpful I was so scared swore I’d not let her
be sad: I think no one else knew about this version of
the fairy tale, but perhaps why things began to
vanish and snap
***
There’s a hard enough at work in the offering
you get up each day & begin again the look for
the door to the stairway you can’t find in any room
where you’re s’posed to leave your soul cut out
like paper suns and stuck, piano roll,
somewhere you can’t reach, for someone else to gather;
Rilke said to hold a bowl of fruit but you know
only song can slender its way through the down slanted halls—
any house you’re in you have to search, whether
sunlit room or spouse, the fast evaporate of damp
left by an absent tea cup tells you something’s gone
whoever she was, whatever crow or sparrow,
stepped from your left side and looked back
to demonstrate the proffer.
5/10/11
when I sleep long enough I wake up my chest feels as if it is in shreds, torn, sternum aches, not hard blue, but tatters the air can pass through, revenant;
a storm crashes while Joe reads a series of dreams & later (much later) I take a tennis ball Maggie picked up/left behind to her house and leave it on her step for her to figure out
***
to be struck by the moon is not the same as
being too close to your Ma, though that difficult
eclipse (you don’t occur to her) sets a rough
example, let’s say, for your first thoughts about
the sea, the sway of belong, duration’s pulse—
all those more perfect measures, those more
prefect steles (stillness deled, do you hear it’s
lean against that you must give?)
a rough lead you have to decoct
your liver the only sieve means
poisoned feet like mackerels;
the moon beats down its profligate chance
you leak in semen trails gone aspirate
altered streets in muse
***
History is not code effect generate K-Marts I don’t think, is
Horizon Caraval sequence of photograph and map as aspect
lintel or stone I am witness too but distant, a once was
gone crow I pay close attention to the form (being that kind)
know the difference between Berea and pictures of the Sioux
is what is dead, and how to see it, know its not you but touches
haunt sticks and shadows, could be endless shawl of bramble
sweet woman’s sewn down laurel;
you compile a separate archive of assignation I suppose
all things being different but equal still requires we trade
what I wanted to do different—that knot’s history at least
barbed wire catches at my chest, comes up stutter, a bad interrupt
I would say “is realized” what makes a real thing
is broken just as surge.
5/11/11
the lost poems dream: I go back to the car’s trunk to see if I left the last month of Goodnight Irene there when I went to look for something else, as search propagates; I page through a sheaf, want to find a certain thought, but don’t—this leads to the car trunk and then to loss of the pages; put down in some now eclipsed world I stepped out of inadvert into the pageless; what we call the “several worlds” method of explanation you are faced with a disappearance or perhaps with an intrusion, the bottle lined wall of a 1927 ocean liner bar flickers unsteady where before you hung your Monet Boston Art Museum poster print to catch some light of domesticity into your lack of arms or ground
***
don’t wanna be so angry anymore
so angry don’t wanna be anymore
anymore angry don’t wanna be so
be so angry anymore don’t wanna
***
Spin those back words down into the sequences—
file altar kept up by midnight—you make bread
there’s what’s called “folding” you separate in;
allows it later to rise.
& in these reticent series, this time of
cutting in aisles, this “hidden in” you are
supposed to belong, in a line or a row—
I smell the counterpane punch of role calls
we bin to before, we thrown over sack in
no line, just got shot en masse
in stereo you ask for it, in woofers;
its not the chimed dancers, the cutting
in and out, the flower girls, the do-si-do
its whether you too play in time.
5/12/11
Geneviève down from Quebec at coffee talks about a journal she and friends work on—jet donc (tossed ink)—a storm again as we talk, my 5 PM coffee has me up late. The paper colors of the store are related how to the way we talk?
***
series as prism of primary colors Mom would dress us in,
or purchase cups so we’d “have our own”, then lined up
a whole town in a line that snakes around a square in Sunday
to receive polio vax on sugar cubes and go home dyed
a form of freedom in “open sequences” (unending lines of
Christian soldiers a late Marxist calls horde) we were not
or fold mimetic aspect up as “repetition” that scores difference
she was of her time rationalized did not “give us our own”
a means of regulation not individuation, fictive collective of her
restless binary = me always cancelled by difference
***
Comment as incidental Mom would allow, next to the stove,
(animate her mood clot in wit) as strange echo over her reflection
arrangement of faucet and pot in replaceable unit series
yards and skies not atonal but measured like the steers in their chute;
preposition keeps the story particular you’d paint universal
(in blue likelies or transversal) I can’t say it away from its well,
smoke set in the ground Jung said was common I can’t;
teen-aged bow and arms bent to catch a statue offer.
Am I close yet to the shape between leap and disaster
your audience predicts? The nakedness of boiling water,
read omen, should have told me how far from exchange
my occasional was for you, lost in the Sears doll house
I was a bagatelle you wanted moors and steep breaks
in the structure of wind and sky.
5/13/11
Skateboarding down Glen Meadow Rd. one of the guys staying at our house is up early and comes out of the garage with his own skate board; there is a sense I should not comment on this that is related to the effort made to contain my center of gravity for balance, and a line is cut past him, past the yard. I wonder if I should keep going down to Dascomb Rd, into traffic and the thought of a possible accident or tumble into the road/lawn leads me elsewhere
I am on a trip of some kind to a festival; it involves a bus or climbing, open areas; there is a large farm complex with warehouses and some open range; its night and I move through the ticket line. Someone laughs to say I can get a senior discount ticket and I try to imagine how I look, older, a bit of white in my sideburns; this cuts me out of the line into a room; there is a shrine of sorts and windows that look out on the concert hillside (the stage is down a swale from the house). There’s a few guys, maybe live at the complex, and quick converging around a discussion of Buddhism. He is perhaps a Zen practitioner, but not into the wickery stand-off clever you often see in Zen. I am mostly listening, do not want to be confrontive/opinionated. We try to feed/tend to a wood stove/fireplace and I tell him about tantric initiations and my back problem. He asks me if the teacher was from Ganden: I say Gel-luk-pa. Was the Lama a good Lama? Yes. Later there are more folks and I lean against the window; Hot Tuna is playing, either on tape or live.
**
more fleshed out as in “start and stall” is also music
that is, there were many occasional shapes that could preoccupy
bored love let on tree lawn allowance to grow enough
I did prefer the close in under the pines & land walked seemed endless
fence running to slight fall and back rise, and again,
someone else’s land
but I could long walk the high sunned ridge the way your archer’s heart sang
and did, miles along highway offset or lost in Jonathan Edward’s Conway
met by fox, a spray of quartz, mountain laurel in July and blueberry sumac;
there was a close here you forgot Mom, with you big eyes adventured
the shape of New York City from East Orange to Columbia should have told you
the sheep and vegetable enclosures written over in dense architectural calligraphy
echo up in Basquiat and Klein.
***
North col at least is far from people, that kind
of terse sparse of pines and clouds suggests &
we do feel that way sometimes, a last stubborn remove,
skin turned green from nettle tea and blanched aspen
body impossible to sere air, the great free sky a pennant,
non-dual solutions to the “eat cake, eat carrots” problem—
the cold alone is beautiful and hermit thrush almost perfect
flute, does not heal alone, does not sew the dress that’s torn,
no season ends according to plot,; a basket of snakes
covered by the dream of the whole, the lie we slip into
because for a moment we don’t care & haven’t
eaten ourselves, the agreement not to speak we all see made,
doesn’t keep the snakes in the house; the well gets moved
father away than ever.
5/14/11
Shopping day and the I-pod shuffle slips a bit alt. At least one chorus of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” for the drive between Krogers and Whole Foods down Broad Street; I am anything if not a part of my time.
At night, Jehanne and I go to a graduate’s party; its in this mixed use complex I think they call “The Century Center”; there is a four story breezeway style apartment complex set around a parking garage that rises, ramp by tiled slab through the center, takes the place of what could have been a spacious “interior courtyard”; we have to go to the top floor and are at roof level; a sick humid colored moon in gibbous slouch, a vast emptiness and hotel plaque numbers tell us where to go.
I don’t see anyone I really know there and lapse another hour.
***
There’s abstract that is about a subtle form brought to sense
that is therefore realist, though bent, and tells us a small artifactual
such; and that abstract that’s about some “other than sense” you’d prefer
& thus desperate escape plan of trapped gnawing foxes,
or idealist because a topos has been imagined that lacks dimension, lacks
the step between that frames and follows;
Mom’s sense of the serial sequence was the latter, a requirement,
like the formula for distance, more perfect because there, where
lines diverged at established rates, jealousy made no sense,
and she could ignore us.
Many offices are like this.
***
The sheer agreed upon that passes as what we did deserves comment
doesn’t it? Only when we accept America is vast is there enough room
to ignore someone because I don’t have enough yet; wasn’t that what
happened last night, and the night before, when we read poems
and drank whiskey? None of us had enough and, as they say,
“that made all the difference”. You can take that several ways I
suppose, but I was trying to ask if we were going the right way.
Can I really take up so much room that you could not look?
Either I wanted to kill you or I didn’t & the poem
did not make that clear, and none of the things you said
let me off the hook; at some point many of us were sharing
versions of not really having paid attention and thought
that was what a group was; maybe that is why idealism
makes political sense. Meanwhile our hearts.
“Oh David, I don’t like my body!”
5/15/11
dreams’ a swirl and occur in episodes; the last is a version of the dream in which Jehanne has decided to live/be/work etc away from where I live; I am sitting in an auditorium like space, and different faculty members sit around me as part of the audience; there is talk going on about a hire, an older woman from our school who is being hired away; there are meetings that have gone on and the politics of this are being discussed; some one (Bruce Lawrence?) wants to make sure I am not distressed at not having been invited (to interview? to the discussion?); I say of course I understood that and was not upset; I tell someone else about my distress about Jehanne and they move off; I go home—home is a large hall-like space with a table where I write; there are small dorm-sized alcoves off this open space for sleeping; I sit down to write up the feelings I have been having for this text; I make a bed in a corner, a place to lie down in the large hall; some folks come up & there is a conversation about people who are deeply unhappy in some way; I ask for examples, and they point to a guy, tall, black hair, sort of Russell Banks body type or David Solow and then me, I say, well we’ve both been abandoned/are deeply in love with people who are absent; Jehanne comes in, she has been asked to write a letter in relation to the hire/politics of that; its like we are in the Edwin Ave house now and she goes into Sam’s room to write
in an earlier dream, specifics now covered over by the second, I think my way through the logic that I might only be able to love, to handle the limits I encounter because I love or in being and caring (and thus being open to loss), by faith in Jesus, not to save me, but as a real reliance/place to turn & then I begin to do discernment on this, chasing the ravels;
When I wake, I tell Jehanne this part first & she says its was from the movie the other night “Of God and Men” about Christian monks in burro Algeria struggling with violence of resistance movements (here Islamic, there Marxist, etc) and corrupt authorities/armies in characteristic pattern of this late capitalist hour; then she tells me a dream where I am taking pictures of her and she doesn’t like how I ask her to pose.
***
I walk in to the graduation ceremony and Dylan’s Ballad of
a Thin Man steps on, which I know is a complex description
I will not admit, when I am shaking parents’ hands;
I went to my high school graduation, though I had not been allowed
on campus that year; I’d been mistook as the leader of a walk-out
the second week of September, because they had planned
to allow us to smoke outside only during lunch hours; I’d gotten
up to speak was all & since I was already done with all
my credits, a deal was struck; instead, I read Heidegger by the
roller lift that took boxes of groceries upstairs to the supermarket floor
and told Mom I thought Goethe had flubbed the end of Second Faust,
was cast as Hale in The Crucible and then missed the play because,
after a bad LSD trip I got double pneumonia and was in the
hospital, several weeks, as Franco lay dying.
***
In witness of violence, the heart stops its dream
and falls, so the throat can open & the space of
“let in” is allowed to call, reflexive drop
thought imitates in spoils; outside of time and tidal,
most difficult act of voice, this wait for gap
in the otherwise fence of hours, in the books of
words lined on their votive shelves, more difficult
icons than gilt, more rusted and proximal
in fade than bright imaginary birds scatter;
since there is no end to harm, to heart’s misaligned
purpose, this becomes dhikr we are subject to,
the ribs’ barrel heaven we recall as whale
bent over this double we make arm of, aspirate,
choked, or caulked as break.
5/16/11
In this fairy tale, they read pomes and larks for augury, and all the while she wanted to be as famous as birch; assigned roles— (“the angry”, “the prudent”, “the elf”, and so on) they attempted to stage her play as an escape; was there a door deep at the bottom of the feeling marked by their character? Something hidden in the wall borrowed from The Four Gated City? None of them remembered to look. There was enough space to circulate a few steps so that the view changed, and they were fed.
***
This version had it that she was blonde, like his ex-wife,
had a mistimed democratic urge to make everybody listen;
she was, perhaps, after a sister hidden from his mother,
(a shadow from my previous graves), that followed a slant of light
to quarrel; this meant there was more than one difficult conversation
going on at any time—the one with his mother’s crows and
the trees she supposed she’d angered by her love for their dark feathers,
and this second imperious closet
in which the vain of an old pride refused to
pack her bridal gown away, beneath the clear eyed stream.
***
Can’t you hear it? there at the edge
of what the piano strains towards,
an implicate Provènce that love’s
the only key for;
sit in your nine of rods, protests & barricades,
throw the handkerchief back, make yourself
a wall written on both sides in cemetery stele;
I wanted a different thing;
to slip through with others,
irresponsible boats in an asking;
difficult in the lent world.
Whether its meant or not, we can’t
help making all these purchases
there’s no way to afford.
5/17/11
Is the resistance of the object still about sex? If a “speaking back to” its one thing as standing up to care, but if about allowing a push, if about the way hard pushes back… of course furrow is a sweet thing, but we have other modes of touch; the flickering back and forth between erect and flaccid, between gendered roles of making space for and push into, between I and you & self and other, the deep groove of gendered difference scarred into body’s hum—mustn’t we make a choice, one slope of the roof or the other?
Hard is bite and takes. That’s all I know.
***
Oh David, there would be no story if the characters were aware of their roles in the catastrophe. You want to dip everything in the bright colors of narrative haunt, but it strikes me that this is correlate. Of course, he hasn’t called you for weeks. It was his assignment. Just because you see how to play along doesn’t mean the angel can paint you into the fresco.
(I tipped “angle” first, flickering alter of bird, the unstable strike between us, we cannot craft)
after a change of subject, you lurk your ambition project back into the ohm
I have other dead to cope with whose instance poorly translates to our situation, and my voices are coming loose gradient surfaces, as it were, transparent.
***
Inclement dissatisfaction I did not intend to author but must admit
(I am not at the ever dropping hinge) is in the ink, so there to taste
to smell—what a hopeful penitent would call a tincture, sealed and
pertinent, its suggestions for how to lose the day;
we could leave it in the overturned pot (because everything
returns easily to a kitchen, to the sense of a window
in late morning light
only Corot ever really got right);
the curtains were always closed against noon’s overbright
could not be, but how its remembered
tomato soup and a BLT on the peninsula;
and you moving back and forth between the stove
and the “headlands” I’d come home at lunch to sit alongside
what you were able touch.
5/18/11
I’ve misplaced my copy of Palimpsest, conjunct rearrangement that happened Monday, when I started to read Fanny Howe’s The Deep North. At Jack Sprat’s it suddenly was not there, in its place next to the celestial guide and Notley’s needles. My hand was its absence, and today all I can think about is the “little tin soldier” of abandoned talismans, the thick tan book in some location its been afforded, where I have lost a part of myself to a different hour.
It will be possible to order a second copy, or I may still find it in what I will rapidly fill up as a logical pail.
***
Then a sadness came on there was nothing but sex for,
since it was about abandonment,
the falling out of the world thing that was
part of sometimes sensing the future
as a further development of form
a thing I was responsible for, since I’d seen it,
“all my relations” torn shirt to ribbons trying to dodge
“you can’t ask again for something you’ve lost”
but why does this task settle like a veil
with which I hide myself from God?
***
The indigo arms of the waltz left an abstract scar in the lost,
as if something greater than night would separate the sky,
as if a further petal of the rose were at last opening
as had been told of in so many visitations,
furrow in the quilt that was just a dream
of the difficult task ahead (Athena-like,
you could imagine yourself safe in bed
the way a Symbolist might draw it)—
even in the absence of a better story
we could do nothing but fall this way
in the greater separation that is bloom;
perhaps just that touched and left a strawberry stain
against the shadow of your face to mark you
as its own more wounded breath.
5/19/11
The day has a huge sullen space in the afternoon when I walk to school to drop books off and search, fruitlessly, for Palimpsest; as Solace I pick up a few more H.D. studies and some Benjamin; later in the evening there is talk against the big empty sky with Geneviève sitting on the porch at Parker and Otis, as the low dense clouds of the last few days finally simply clear; J tells me later maybe I won’t find the kind of friendships I want with men; I am not sure; it is beginning to look to me as if friendships have seasons that are all the more severe because they cannot be reckoned by a simple count of weeks or weather’s words; I barely know my brothers and sisters and yet they still have character to me
***
What surprises me most now didn’t back then—the lack of curiosity—
its true I’d, make your choice, been brief psychotic or brushed against spirit’s skirts;
I had disappeared through a curtain, but we had eaten at breakfast
and dinner side by side for at least ten years, done the small, uncountable kindness
of passing time; perhaps there was the sense that I lacked curiosity in
them—it was more that the faces I was variously assigned had flown off like
migrating terns or lost kites; I was no longer able to reinforce their dreams;
I had been shuffled out of the deck, all prior positions canceled.
That this was possible was worth knowing.
***
I will die without having known my mother is a strange thing to say
at this point you have evidence to weigh to figure what I mean
entanglement is a word for our establishment in what only each of us
can make mercy; the burst, broken, winged flames of knowledge
light uneven shoulders & in the downstairs bathroom, her must
colored, and sour bodied urine smell lingers and I rush
to finish being around there; the word to press then is “known”
maybe a hidden door will open in a wall, or stone dislodge itself
from your mouth; I will do the final work of death
with the same sense of not really knowing where I am or
whether the last thing I’d done was enough to justify
the next breath; whoever appears then will surprise me briefly
so briefly will the last scene be played I will barely have begun
to count.
5/20/11
Time pockets as a way to explain the sense I am asleep and dream while folks move suddenly forward into prepared profiles I had not anticipated. A blue bird pauses in the still backyard, perhaps back again or enate of last year’s. Damien makes philosophical word flowers in a joy of just saying on Facebook & I wonder if I follow the reference enough to opine;
a day that gets reported like this doesn’t admit much of a body, is more a way of saying body is sustent in occasions of the barest flatter that sedge is caught on
I tell Geneviève I can’t quite get with the way gardens and tree are squared in Paris, that I prefer the steps made by a measure of air and fall to such wild rationality.
***
Bruce told a story about Ma drives him North to
the Portland-Halifax ferry his first trip around &
she doesn’t comment on his fear of being dropped
off, keeps on towards how far they will go and
listens, I have the sense, as an equal, as if still young;
what Mom recalls and wants to transfer whole to
Bruce her trip 1946 to Europe when the world
ope’d from East Orange wood frame to a far
wider; as if brother and sister in this she was never
to me, and in this way, could be loved more easily
the same problem, instead of a stone over the door.
***
I do the “donkey dance” in the hallway
and Dad yells upstairs to stop whatever
it is, when I slept in the gable room,
baseball card littered dreams,
tried to amuse my brothers, downstairs
ceiling cupped Mom and Dad noises
suggest locations of body wells
we stay vigilant at the roof of,
invesitgant and pauper. Later my bed
is in the deep third of the “boy’s room”
I am old enough to be, I can’t hear
down the stairs anymore &
in the light made possible at that distant
read fall asleep by book in the new forget
Psyche offers fantastic distract in their stead.
5/21/11
Long drive to Atlanta I am a duffle bag in the passenger and time elapses until the strange north/south skyline appears. I see the Kiefer Draco palimpsest & photos of 1930’s make Europe look battered we don’t often imagine; people are working hard but aware that something is over their shoulder they have not escaped, that the piles of bricks they are contracted to carry cannot be moved in time; they sleep along rivers the way we watch TV these days.
I am sorry. The first thing I notice about Atlanta is “the girls in their summer clothes” sharp angled low cut blouses (not scoops) are in.
***
Pat and I take over the living room to neck Christmas afternoon before dinner, the room dark and lit by the colored tree lights. In Dad’s place if I think on it, displacement “in your face”. No comments are made but I can feel the transgress.
Some points have to be made a different civil, but we should have “got a room” would have been okay to say.
In the bath I would tuck my penis between my closed legs to see what I’d look like Venus, perhaps be as attractant spell as the other girls, I would notice myself, or someone would, a good girl, but sexy in that way made visible by careful neat, skirt smooth (vermouth).
“What do you want to be when you grow up, David?” “If I read my desire right, apparently a tortured girl.
I would have searched your room for porn Ma, if you’d been me.
***
Cambridgeport June, upstairs room Pat and I
are lost green aura-like, watercolor suspect in 1970
nowhere to go, lean against the window frame,
something summer camp dissatisfaction.
Without drugs but equally in a fairy tale we
suppose out of habit as a means of direct animate
narrative, we try to cover the one possible
combination of two lives we are
with a sense of history we read off what’s ebullient
by the sun; we are in the time of screens &
only half notice the instructions for where we each
are stood; I am gonna leave Orestes & she’ll pine,
leak tar instead of horse dance she was transported
from Mycenae to suggest on Boston streets.
5/22/11
I have been in a car before as a required ordeal opted for with too many possibilities how I might satisfy the sense of the necessity of forward motion. That is, there was a day in the past I lurched on this select as a way to spend & became “we made the best of it”.
The reading at Sun & Moon is not surprised half organized (retribution? probably a result where I assume a connection made that needs to be equaled).
Ken draws up a way of steady.
***
a girl sees her mother suddenly fall in a bathroom
she tries to speak before she dies, we are out along a
pier of sand and fall in the otherwise by her grave Provincetown
lighthouse beach fence stumble, and looks wild, fey
plum and oak scrub, her face pocked by acne &
I don’t have an answer for this sadness I am exposed to
I am required by other exchange values to deny
that Pat’s mom died of an aneurysm that Russell would die
of an aneurysm that Jehanne’s brother would die of an
aneurysm
***
Clover is too late, lost, a sea vista dislodged by wander, tells
history as ghosts in the garden, echoes of children as city’s true
verse seems pretty, but I meant contingent is folded,
not a bread line, but pocket; a photo of 1930’s folk asleep
by a somewhere soon to be devastate Europe, a canal by fish,
is leaf, yellowed, or flake of skin, makes our loyalty to the deep
ritual; we are almost touched, but the material past, memory
doesn’t know as loss, doesn’t work as water.
In the avenue we are struck by how little each telephone pole
can tell us about polis, how the wood pushes us to see
this day and not the last, into the sun of it, the out and out
summer calls us, relentlessly, into. The children by the pool
are lake voices that haunt us, but the resemblance stops there
we are required by to somehow sing.
5/23/11
heat comes up, and I have June vertigo, a whirl as I attempt to cross from sleep; dreams are of complex dramas I am the hero of I don’t care to be; I pick up a Chittick volume on Ibn ‘Arabi who speaks of knowledge and imagination of God; I just did a peer review of an article that muses on the “parasitic” nature of entanglement that had a story by La Fontaine supposed to show acts of mercy lack mercy because the person providing mercy later acts differently, which only shows this if you think that to be a thing, to have a feeling, you must always have it (if “parasitic” wasn’t already enough of a tell to say the general ethic of the text)
at night Jehanne and I watch “My Perestroika” documentary of folks a bit younger than me making sense of changes & what strikes me as common, from there to here, is the sense of the tremendous gap between ideology and life punk rock might be the only way to say
***
Mom in motion is not done for me, civil and
impersonal justification (walks the census through
immigrant Lawrence) of duty she doesn’t let down—
I am easier and less of a threat than her imagined
father wants her to make a difference or that desire
queen’s silk she had to realize; I am the occasional,
left on its own as what the I-Ching calls “grace” means
ornament; on your throat, Ma, a purple grosbeak stain
in walnut, you can finger
***
What’s politics is read by someone else, already donated downtown civic,
graveyard plaques no longer imagined beauty “I want everything that makes
you smell absent blossoms” is “the state”; duty was a kind of chalk, Ma,
you used to paint your face, what others would remember as “council”;
doesn’t suffice as a street-like to raise kids, picnic under black and white versions
of “under the flag” the sisters were disappeared into; I mix up constants,
protest your solution to the “want two things at once” problem,
I doubt we are better than that and would rather love both
modes of disappearance as desire, nothing my eye falls on,
I admired the way your body was a kiss the wounded air
called into its brief, slender lines, to spell character to me:
first distance was in your eyes your glasses reflected the supermarket
inward I had to feel according to my first theories of color: “coke water
green” and the impossible, red, super (letter) “K”.
5/24/11
Summer lifts the not there into the out and out; I am trying to look at, be a look of love, the way fabric smiles, as a more ordinary way of being, as love is the most ordinary we can be. My internal Tony Tost suggests these words may not be hard enough to be ornament, an instinct to smooth down my skirt, touch my hair in the mirror before opening the door is as sweet.
There is this difference of man and women, Ma, your freckled skin on my shoulder. A substitute for the difficult spill of wound entangled (call it moon to make it at least often whole that blood slips between fingers)
***
The room made for my first, impossibly long shame
you were observe over is attentive, neither comforted nor
not as instructed by that agreement you made, Ma,
that erased neutral was a mode of dignity we could all
aspire to, if only out of spite.
By then you had adopted the mother as a way to kill time
without a disrupt of this disconnect your body factored
in the air around the stove.
***
Be careful to call the first names that opening up allows
a place for you to set your stake all recognition becomes
possible in that initial assign; doorway or corner, lion ambent,
folded lots passed out in crane wrappers like gum incidental—
you want the red or black? You will always be drawn back
to the room’s emerald knit quilt, to the slender fingered hand
that falls assignation from oldest to back in syntax;
Bruce this shirt is for Wiggy, Ed, this for Teddy
(eddy ready) this is your sister barbarian you are not to wear,
it’s a big kid thing, having, David you are among us on the left
of the tryptic, where Ekajati sits naked my aged body;
this should be exchange value but isn’t mine the girls will
persistent inform me “you’re a boy, David” I am really a
white bear Mom thought needed no clothes.
5/25/11
just because you disconnect senses doesn’t mean the body doesn’t know what you are looked at, what you said not, can taste as aura your particular discomforts as if painted
in astral I am not opaque to either; figure makes chance I suppose but only after discussion and some official diagnosis of the caul, is one way of settling what I’d rather be always open to; you are looked at love whether you thought it or not, simply by light; I was understood by red, blue, historical specific arrangements of furnish, in paper doll and aspirin, whatever strange form suggests dismemberment wasn’t the knife, all the new and different, and old and thought afforded me; how could I understand you’d laid one hand over one eye and could not see yourself anywhere that had to be me
***
Were there times, Mom, that you found someone had walked
out of the story to sit beside you? Not a more perfect Emersonian
waltz of traffic, but a sigil that inserted how desperate your
children would become, that however long you stood by the
sink, the domestic better you were brewing would have to be drunk;
none of us preferred alcohol to a kiss or became rapists because
the dangerous thrill a guy erupts into the room he’s restless wen
to be toyed, needs to be equaled (according to one current theory of
justice) when you feel in love with the dancer in Bill T. Jones wasn’t
it because he was the face that looked back at you from the
dark glassy pond? It was hard not being able to share the way
love folds us with you, over coffee or in a late hour of clothespins,
the way you might have talked to a sister, had you thought of
yourself as equal to what was not, after all, your desire.
***
I am the piano in the story where the teen aged boy plays
“I Don’t Know How To Love Him” because his secret
name is Mary (we don’t know which), a tense wire that made
resonant storm of his resistance, the bottled up
his Mom thought was because (cause cuz) of his Dad’s remove
(she was only ever able to project) was instead a suggestion
and, later, literal plaint and first admission of what had to be
sin; as usual Mom used this candesence as a light to read by.
Could be sisters in turned adolescent calf us you wanna know the truth;
the guy’s never there on Saturdays, and the complaint takes up
all our heart; but Mom’s in the kitchen fights with her spectacles,
her Dad’s dinner bell and paints her lips despite; antiqued piano’s
wound tight in new rhythms he cuts through the two/four
& that song’s sappy true if any of them know.
5/27/11
I learn a new strategy for airplanes today; sit on the aisles with a good book (Fanny Howe’s Indivisible), and after praying (of course) at take off, not once looking out the window. I am for some reason in a narrow hallway with seat, and I am not allowed to move, but otherwise, my body does not realize it is so high in the impossible air over a map I cannot hope to find myself on.
Seattle is purple maple leaves and lilacs & new green. The clouds are low but break into sun. We are held against the earth by a silver light. Maybe this is what Joe senses her tries to call “Terra Lucida”. Birds fall across a suddenly stiff wind.
***
Ed told Ma I was smoking pot he was scared of based for sure
off some norm or TV ad about how this was a Gallant action
(he confused courtly love with aristocracy you ask me) & so
I was grounded for a summer the usual draconian overkill
(I’d failed my first driver’s test anyway & so could not drive/curl
around Andee in late high school hand under shirt, or even see
I’d climb out my window scale down the porch and get my bike
from bushes I hid it at the whole summer ride off (the next summer
I’d simply hitch across Canada a few miles, so this was preparatory
perhaps) & in July Mom and I walked the Presidential Range south
to north three nights four days at least that; I say Mom didn’t give
me much but she did give me New England. A good basic form
to comprehend direct, as stone lesson (for blueberry crevice).
***
Can’t forgive Waverly Sq. bus print I get inked under
my eyelids, fingernails; any time I try to recall the 1976
I am proprioceptive the view from a commuter bus
down fault lines of idle commercial zones that need paint
leak still the aura of 1960’s intellectual hope like heat
from a gone fire leaves the sky light after its set; hills brood
or I paint them that way with my little eye lash brush,
so mood I am seeking has to be out there and hid
so Mom doesn’t see it—a lot of work when the moon
just follows you no matter how you turn the car—I didn’t
make the connection I suppose that
everything was as broken as I was, just different
but mutual in so fragile America tried to point towards
I was meant to actually enjoy.
5/27/11
I am grease in the water today, undigested clot leaking film, which means almost myself/a suitable version of what I carry. This is not even half the meaning should you have to narrate. Sometimes I am able to make a satisfying dance move in which a proper desire shape translates as collective aura (all the faces in the circle turned a heart in the same direction a sec) but I get proud and political and, as a result, am sealed in a tomb, far away from fiddlers, far away from the waltz. Because that’s how pride blooms its unfolded aperture if you refuse to actually kill.
***
After a reckless ride across South Dakota I am left by a Minnesota off ramp; the girl with her two bags completely full of stones picked up along the highway had run off across four lanes to hitch back towards Rapid City & although it was past midnight, the sky was blue behind the hippie we’d picked up—
who’d lived in a tree in Oregon for a year,
who was the only one with money,
who hassled the lean guy driving all of us, who was off to Minneapolis to become an anti-Sandanista mercenary, would be Blackwater these days,
who tried to get the girl to sit on his lap
who gave Chinese Cookie fortunes to each of us he and the merc dropped off—
when he leaned out the van door, to wish me off my way south, swarthy with long black hair, he looked me in the eye and said “You are going nowhere.”
Must have been some bright highway lights there it reminds me so day-like. I sat down t
o rearrange my pack dislodged, and dropped the bowl Lisa had given me chalice.
So, several things broke, and I had to go on a spell.
***
The steeple, the clouds, the wind wreckless hour
I can sing almost the aspect of, and a wing’s black
shadow fosters, in which slept arrangements
foster, as-we-imagine ground leaves its footprint
or hold press;
sun of a late northern land is the same—
I have in my hands a secret I cannot share
I counted fresh spring quince
in order to wait
to wait out God, to weight God
by the ankles down
held like a balloon like
I am held out-lit and in-dark
against the pause.
5/28/11
Mom wasn’t Seattle’s ragged blue moved sky, a long way mountains off—ness with Rt. 5’s thin choked ribbon laced in and out of the city; I stop by Open Books and meet Joe’s friends, am amazed at the silver glanced light off the water that makes afternoon backlit, buy more books for my crowded shelve not Moms (I can’t bring home more cats, but can bring home Tsvetaeva and Laney Browne) & a small trove of Catholic piety—The Interior Castle and St. Theresa of Lisieux’s “Little Way” (in the flowers), The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and a biography of Joan says her name was written “Jehanne or Jeanne” makes her a girl “John” who is Arabic for world.
I am three chapters in, to the visions of typological saints, when Ted calls out “David” to say he’s pulled up to pick me up corner of the sun warm despite cold May in front of the University Book Store’s narrow commercial traverse.
***
Mom’d prick you unexpected a sly be-guilt she yawned vinegar,
hyperthyroid (th-that) bulged eyes beyond frog & green
was hard to sit near her darn needle watch & so disloyal (I should
sit at her lap cat and milk, read we make Rockwell and herb right (rue)
in my long boy I could have a reason to be bad I have to burden
flit between subject status and jeans I have to smoke desire to limber
it was work to sit close in aural chains I had to focus inward
else mirror Mom’s inhuman short too definite—a terrible girl at the doorway
a meadow stacked up in piles through sheer force of hate somewhere
subterranean I received my dews from & mercy.
***
In the bloom rush of Washington was the first away
walked and ridden to in dust of an imagined always first
by map lit by colored pencil hued, world & loose raisins
at the bottom of the pack; not dreamt Austrian
compared family vacations packed in the volkswagon echo
not dirndl flowers in sky meadows we have almost returned to;
a different myths black flowered remains leaked industry
on brown hills I was off into, rolling beyond sheep
was beyond Mom’s technique of whispered sturm und drang
at the shadowed base of tangled bushes or ornament as feature
of “the hero’s vigil” all travel was to resemble
in its scandalous departures, its “out of sight of God”, its
reservoirs and assignate in flirt, its excess and sky possible
I tried, trial, and wore as debt—
(translated German into the equally American vast)
5/29/11
A disposable wait at St. Louis airport (plastic spoons & other sequence refuse like DNA noise is sub-base for some difficulty I have yet to even imagine) hard summer sky over painted Southwest airplanes & not sexy at 7:00. The phases of strangers in their narratives (shallow and deep) stirs up a ghost of anxiety; it is (I worry about saying given my vows of concern and dedicate) hard to believe there are so many well-fed, ugly people. I so want to do some display of ravage to mourn the stylistic selections they made to get by this day, but am recently suspicious that, if I wait the urge out, I will find out they each have some beauty they are carrying from here to there, that they are trying to get to where they can sleep.
***
You are not in my memory, Mom, the new fingers
that grew in the pool of light are someone else’s hand
& I was never even close to your soul, to the page you were
reading, I can’t even say fellow-traveler, you made dinners,
allowed me room to levitate, should I figure how to,
were briefly entertained between tasks; how could you not
notice my share? take me into your long walk of denial?
We cannot help who we love but why take advantage of
my dumb loyalty? Didn’t you know I would wait?
I was born to my enemy. Her body slipped wide and half-cauled
in her mucus I was under a punished sky.
***
What we cannot see hasn’t become frame can’t be left behind basket at dawn
your indistinct I have not decided how to pull my arm from make poor, window
your at night in webs our not strong enough to bite through a decision not to cut
hence one category of escape ruled out as strategy in the long so many dead
can make anything noble (odorless, colorless, of low reactivity—spirit of the dead
fairy tale night hidden in crooks) it’s a matter, a simple under orle fringe
tall grass allowed in thick, not extended to draw the sky into the picture—
see whenever we talk I get lost into what is not separate.
If you were still enough I wouldn’t know which way to leave you. Is a mirror.
I don’t know what you were up to; it bore no relation, hard to leave nowhere;
did you try to show me a shore, a walk along the shore, a secret?
the sand pulls back in the in-between tide, marks the reverse of river
as birch-like endless arm, the sea folds along, far point indefinite, spald rocks—
so bright, so bright this can only be an hour.
5/30/11
just a series of dreams we call a sequence of rain showers you flip back through to find WWII is why one has art shows—to remember by a series of paintings, that refer to each other by discussion (except for Klee who is fragrant, prolix in different) mud daub started each spring to be lost; we are not reversible in the violence we do to each to each, the human matter we are thrown into by the bomb blast; there’s not a safe way to be a man or a preferred style—every habit hides the semen stains and self-inflect of study we don’t escape war by;
pendent scratched onto a landscape the large stick figure, written across the horizon in a rain scrawl, alters the field, but we need the sky to be different
***
Ma makes me feel like beetles under my skin this attempt
to find direction you are nowhere for me to run away from
hid your body somewhere in curtains of midnight blue I suppose
I went down the jello aisle and went back you weren’t there much
worse than when the women went to the tomb at least an illuminated
man said what they saw was a fact; even when I found you
your body was hidden somewhere only you could find with your
fractured sight; I think maybe Schiller was talking about a different kind
of marriage than the dead in-between place you made material
was a lie, I kept telling you was a lie, but you lived and breathed anyway
I could never understand how//assumed therefore you were sacred
and impossible.
***
Vast sculpture of all me said “no’s” and thought
casts back what ground between us, yet to work?
from the basalt (garden or gates of hell) eve
steps out hesitant as not departed figure,
the same not yet apart between lovers’
wound about each other as cannot—
there’s the human place twixt river and rock
from which we pull magician endless
veils to cover in washed piles on river stones;
this constant between vast empty sky cannot annul
what two are joined indivisible
each seen in her difference, that sown seed
must grow its gesture out, pushed forward
it can never be free from.
5/31/11
sundry day, too hot to work outdoors so I run things to Good Will and consider stream sources for TV as world changes; muse through new copy of Palimpsest and feel an almost rest I think about push/pull with Mom, how my sense of self requires I be both close and far and likely I have been structuring myself to accomplish this location I call an “impossible room” perhaps in the face of a quite normal dire discrepancy
Sam’s light is easy to fix. Nice to touch things that are, after all, energy we have decided to linger, to fall more easily with than without (such relations).
***
I was always getting to things too early, shows, early & nervous
& when Mom took me to Pierpont it was three or four days before
the cars would come over the weekend & drop kids off for the year—
neither of us knew how far that year would throw me I had already
hitched cross country twice but a ride in a car is different from what
actual people will do, take you through a time tunnel.
1977 bends the Rock and Roll Animal version of Sweet Jane over
our heads from the upper tower rooms and I will not come back;
in the spring I will meet Lisa and that will be that. I will step through
could as well be called God or love will be unveiled and by the time
I stop trying to make sense of the horizon and scope and rip it will be
three years later and I will be in Arizona decide I will not stay
with Leonard Crow Dog or Mad Bear Anderson—Mt St. Helens dislodges
& I see the power we have is for others, it comes through for
I have to decide that, who needs it.
and there in the dorm said good bye to Mom worried it’d been a
down two years for me, her chicken, & some dark thing in me
had flapped its wings—I don’t want her there, she goes;
I feel guilt weight stone I can’t give her anything
I am so far in a hole but know no matter how strange it’d been
you say “I love you” you do to be the equal of sky
or grass or side flowerlets in the vast wastes
I didn’t say, we’d been there.
***
Here we are in the after story shame
I learned later, love the work at least, none of us master
and thrown at each other the impossible force our discontent;
least mercy was enough for praise—
old and young make the explanation simply art, such
discrepant hours would story, would figure to be larger, need
imagined world to hold, difference thrown so wide,
carpet wider to be big as—
death may not end the difficult we
parse I am still half pushed aside the lid from
the stone set in my side
unfolds its wings and acres—
& gravity pulls each thing towards
what will hold it.
