la femme follette

serenity

I knew that once I linked feeling bananas to my radio silence, there would be auditing.  Mostly, I feel like I feel fine, busy, birthdays, trips,  etcI would like to build a bonfire & pitch everything in our home right into it, but fine. 

I have not yet made it back to the gym.

I was catching up with Kowalski this morning between this & that (some kind of a day where before 10 a.m. I had already crashed a men's room in the interest of not wetting my pants), and I told him I would probably flesh out the thing we were touching on someday here, if ever I felt like documenting again, whenever the day might come.  I mean, I feel fine, is what I was explaining to him.  We just had an incredible vaca on top of my good, clarifying Lenten action & I feel like I might write in a lucid + revealing + secret-whispering way, yk, in that way that I like to whisper secrets right into yr ear while typing on the worldwide web, but I was not feeling like it.

He offered that maybe I was turning into a new person who no longer obsessively documented.  Before that chat, I was going to bring Creeley to my national poetries again -- relevant as Creeley's cagey candor always is to me and especially in the face of all the hardcore loving raining down upon me this last week or so -- and then Kowalski brilliantly changed the earworm from Must/ I think of everything/ as earned to in my plan to be myself/ I became someone else, so you can laud him or not whatever xo

	Lisa Jarnot - Brooklyn Anchorage
	Found at Brooklyn Anchorage on KOhit.net

Brooklyn Anchorage
Lisa Jarnot

and at noon I will fall in love
and nothing will have meaning
except for the brownness of
the sky, and tradition, and water
and in the water off the railway
in New Haven all the lights
go on across the sun, and for
millennia those who kiss fall into
hospitals, riding trains, wearing
black shoes, pursued by those
they love, the Chinese in the armies
with the shiny sound of Johnny Cash,
and in my plan to be myself
I became someone else with
soft lips and a secret life,
and I left, from an airport,
in tradition of the water
on the plains, until the train
started moving and yesterday
it seemed true that suddenly
inside of the newspaper
there was a powerline and
my heart stopped, and everything
leaned down from the sky to kill me
and now the cattails sing.

national poetry month. again.

If Garçon sleeps late, Fifille draws a mustache on him with body crayon. She will also draw a little, tiny heart under his hairline, by his ear. Aw!

 

Last week, Adrienne Rich died.  It was 7 years ago last week that Robert Creeley died, which was a great loss, and even to me.  It was 7 years ago this month that I saw her read her poem she wrote in memory of him, a poem I have been thinking about, in part, for over a month now. 

 

In Memoriam
Robert Creeley
May 21, 1926 — March 30, 2005

AS EVER

As ever, death. Whenever, where. But it's

the drawn-together life we're finally

muted by. Must stand, regard as whole

what was still partial still

under revision. So it felt, so we thought.

Then to hear sweep

the scythe on grass

still witherless and sweet

 

[for R.C.]

—Adrienne Rich
April 2 2005

 

 

 

90++

 

messages. messengers. angels, too. nyc.

If you know my work, this might be a no-brainer, but about five years ago, after a NYC reading I gave, in the post-event glad-handing and well-wishing, etc, a guy told me that my work was as if Gil Scott-Heron wrote love poems.

If you know me, or maybe if you are a close reader here, you already know that I am of the opinion that most people talk too much, especially to me.  Plus, also, people are always in the world saying things, so audibility obvsly does not confer veracity.  So, I did not think too much about it, besides a regularly-gracious response to the guy's positivity and some polite, mildly-anxious chitchat. 

I had not thought about his assessment for years, but then last night, Alex tweeted a link to "B" Movie, referring to it as "lesser-known" -- which ... I guess one's acquaintance with it depends upon whose house it was in which they were reared -- but anyhow I was listening to it for the first time in a very long time this morning.  It was different from, say, the extra-iconic Revolution or Comment #1, in that with those I have maintained such familiarity that in some ways I do not even hear them any more when I hear them, if you see what I mean.

After the third of fourth time he lays out the solfège of his score, if you will, it started to remind me of a number of my own poems, not with its relevance, nor its power, not at all, but with its flexible, unspooling tenacity and its endless references to 20thc popular culture, his wordplay and repetition.  There was this use of cultural references that one might not have thought to use in an exegesis of his subject, but they of course, once composed, made a perfect, unbeatable image in their new context.  Just like the guy tried to tell me. (Sorry, guy.) 

Anyhow, so this morning, after I made this connection, all of a sudden it felt so personal to me, Scott-Heron's death, his life and what he leaves behind. Not to mention the manifestation of a heretofore unrealized pervasiveness in a culture such that he could influence me without my knowledge, without my intent.  It made me so sad -- big, splashy, raindrop-sized tears kind of sad -- this belated realization of this incidental mentorship.  Because I like to give credit where it is due, and also because it was that awful feeling of losing something I never knew I had, when already I am grasping at every shred of currency from my childhood that has power and reach in my real life.

Besides everything else about him, when you listen to his work, read his candor and conceptual assembly, it is kind of depressing that everything he turned upon with his laser eyes is still a stupid problem today,  In general, it is a bad time to be in a retrospective position toward his work, because when you listen to so much of it now, with our shitty economy and sad people and three American wars and all the kind of bullshit of current events I never chitter-chatter about here ... it is super-depressing.  On top of  all of that, now he is dead.

I really am surprised at how sad I have felt all along -- even all of the 15 hours before I figured out he was my imaginary patron!  Much of the sorrow is because 62 is way too young to die, like, as a number.  But specifically, it feels sad because the last decade of his life seemed so painful for him -- filled with addiction, there was imprisonment, there were allegations of fiscal duplicity -- and now he is gone.  It is over, and there will be no late-in-life redemption. 

Now he is late and great, but I feel like it has been so for some time.  He has recorded, and performed, sure, but while seeming like a ghost, rambling around his own grand, haunted castle of greatness.  Last summer, there was a profile of him in The New Yorker, where he reveals a great many things, among them that the last CD he recorded is, to him, someone else's project.  That it came about, he said, because someone else was really interested in making it and it didn't harm him.  It was -- to use the very apt word of an old colleague -- heartbreaking. 

I think a lot of the reason his death feels so sad to me -- if I can mix some metaphors -- is because it seals the deal on what was already a hard pill to swallow.  Anyhow.  I love this interview with him so, so much.  "I consider myself a piano player." 

Adieu, que Dieu vous garde.

Time
Elle Case

My memory hurts from time. Time
kneels on the ice, pushing sawdust into
the crack, eats a piece of apple pie with
cheese. I will have to suffer more intensely
than I would have if I had accepted the
sufferings of time. Time attracts hum-
mingbirds. Time has the Midas touch. I
have more tone than ever, but still not time.
I want to correct the appearance of lines
and wrinkles, as in some of the works of
Kafka, where particular details of time are
directly translated into a temporal reality.
Time got Janet Lee Bouvier a Reno divorce,
then made tasseled buttons in Central Park.
Have I asked time for too much? To grow old
with my love, see our children grow up together?
Time is surrounded by ashes. Imitating time means
imitating time's virtues, love for penance. The world
pours out tremendous adoration, but time rears us
normally. Time shovels Cheerios, compresses the
lower back, keeps on keeping on. Time doesn't
love us for who we are, time will leave us.

elemental

Fifteen years ago, I got married.  It was easy, and fun.  As I have written before, my decision was based entirely in the certainty that Mari was generous, he was amazing, and he would always choose to do the right thing.  (Plus, superfox.  Also, not a baby, not a whiner, not a mama's boy.) 

While we were in Chicago, we met up with the priest who was the celebrant at our nuptial Mass.  It was so great to see him; he was happy to see us thriving in our, yk, sacramental fulfillment.  I mean, I know that sounds ridiculous, but I am totally serious; and really, God is so good.

 
 

Mari was not wearing his wedding band the whole time we were on vacation, which caused me a little bit of panic before we set out to meet Father Jay.  "What will he say?  He will think you are playing the field!  Dear God!"

Being home during Holy Week totally brought my Catholic Girl to the fore in high lustre.  I swear.

 

(This was the view from our random hotel-room assignment. How could I not believe?)

Anyhow, the reason Mari was not wearing his ring was because I concocted some story to get it off of him early in April so that I could size it.  I wanted to buy him a new wedding band for this anniversary.  If you know, you already know part of this story -- which part depends on who you are.  Here is the entire narrative of the anniversary-gift fairy:  

Before we got married, when we were still in buying mode, we let someone talk us into using a jeweler pal of theirs to custom-craft our rings.  To make a long story short, the guy never got the rings quite right. The second time he presented them to us not-right, we had to take them anyway to have them for the ceremony.  We brought them back to him the following week, after which time with him I picked them up and they were still not what we had asked for. 

 

I brought them back to my office and called Mari at his office to break the news.  He was also frustrated but, like me, resigned by this time to the dude's incompetence.

I was spinning the rings on my desk while I asked Mari what he wanted to do, trailing off deliberately, waiting for him to weigh in.

One must remember that Mari and I were virtually strangers when we got married.  This is 90% of the reason Father Jay was leery of marrying us.  We dated in consecutive, unremitting nights for 2 months before Mari swung by my house wielding a sparkly, 2-carat bauble in a small, velvet box.  It was just after Christmas.  We were ready to get married before February ended, but Father Jay was not.  I was pleased last week to send him an email inviting him to visit with us and have a look at his fine and lasting work.  That he almost refused the job went left unsaid.  Because I am a classy gal. 

 

The day in 1996, with the wedding bands, I waited, holding the phone, spinning -- plink, whirrr-rrr-rrr, plink, whirrr-rrr-rrr.  Mari was quiet on his end of the line.  I volunteered, gingerly, that we could keep going around and around with the jewelry crafter or we could ... just ... we could let it go.

"Yes," Mari told me, relieved and resolute.  "Fuck it, I don't want to keep throwing good time after bad money.  This is our real life."

This dude, he amazes me, all the time.  I took the rings over to Wabash Avenue and sold them for scrap.  ("Fuck it, let it go.")  I think we went out to dinner with the money.  Actually, I think it sounds bold & rascally to say we went out to dinner with the money.  We probably just put the money back into the bank, but it's not like we never went out to dinner, so I take the poetic license.

I had a plain band to wear, one which coordinated with my engagement ring instead of matching Mari's wedding band, but Mari's finger was bare until a few weeks after this, when I saw a sterling silver ring in the jewelry case of a hipster, incense-burning, hummus-serving kind of a cafe in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago. 

 

It was plain, but kind of a two-ring design.  Circly!  I liked it.  I took it across to where we were sitting with friends, piled up under a trio of macrame plant hangers in the window, and it fit.  He liked it, and has worn it ever since.  I think it cost $18.  Fifteen years later, it is battered & worn. 

I always wanted to buy him a replacement, but I wanted it to be a surprise.  I mean, it's not enough that I do not make any of my own money and the man has to pay for all of his gifts for himself, but he has to know about it ahead of time, too?  Bleh.

A couple of months ago, I was sleeping through a transaction with a vendor who wanted to know if I wanted Their [Whomever] Card.  I said whatever, and yes, and gave them the information they needed.  I got the discount associated with acquiescing and then later, when I had quite forgotten about it, I got a bank card in the mail, not the store card I presumed and had already forgotten about.  It had a real credit limit.  I could buy the upgrade ring I had always wanted to gift and keep it a secret till the reveal.

A sequence of trippy, all-shoppers-on-deck events ensued.  In it all, I knew that the real key was to get that ring sized, his ring.  At the same time, I was drawn to a ring on The eBay, of all the places.  I knew I could not buy a ring on The Permanent Market of eBay unless I was triple-positive about the size -- my husband is a sinewy ectomorph with large knuckles, and also especially because platinum can not be resized.  I knew that I could not get the size right unless I had his ring, which has fit him all these many years.  So, first I would get his ring off.  Then, I would go out & get it sized.  By a jeweler, on the thingo they use.  Somehow.  I did not have a plan past getting the ring off of his hand.

The day I got him to take it off, I was sitting around, checking in and clicking around with my favorite candidates for the buy, when I noticed that the eBay ring I kept flirting with most, that I felt most drawn to, that also was in his presumed (small) size, was right here, in this town.  The eBay seller was an old, mainstay jewelry store in the bygone, shabby-yet-enduring part of the county. 

I got up & announced to Mari the children & I had to go out right that minute, knowing that the minute we were gone, he would go to do something else & forget about the ring.  (For weeks, obviously, though it was back on his desk a couple of hours later, with him none the wiser.)

When I made it to the jeweler, I swore the children to absolute secrecy, then got down to business with the institution.  Underlings looked all around to find the exact location of the ring (whose eBay auction number I had stupidly not brought along).  I chatted nervously about the provenance of the silver band, as above, while the jeweler's wife got her sizing thingo and finally slid Mari's ring along the length. 

The ring I brought from Mari's hand was the same size as in the listing of the ring I wanted.  The gal went back with her sizing wand to make sure she had not made a mistake   Then she said to me as she came out with it aloft, in a slight state of marvel, "It is the same.  Did you know these rings are the same design?"

 

I had not noticed, not that I realized prior to her announcement, but she was right.  Not exactly, really, but in their simple, circly spirit, plus allowing for the vast difference in their metallurgical properties. 

It was thrilling in its rightness -- 15 years later & I picked out the same ring, which is, yk, of course, because 15 years later I would still pick the same guy.  Plus, now, 15 years later, the ring is better, the guy is better, and plus-plus, it fits!  (The ring, I'm saying, but metaphorically, too.)  Exciting! 

This is our real life. 

 

love is a place
E. E. Cummings

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds

you can

 

We were away, home for a week, to Chicago, plus the 5-day cushion of driving to + stopping for all the points along the way and back. 

 

One highlight of which extended Midwestern exhibition was this trip to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (on the shore of Lake Michigan, if you don't know.)  The other highlight was the two days it snowed while were there --  in late April -- which made an impression on our ridiculous, weakling children, insofar as it revealed to them who we are. 

(We would also like to clasp our hands and thank God our children were sufficiently impressed by this exposure to a Great Lake, unlike the last time.  Phew.)

So, Mr & Mrs Sloane:  Where were you when your kids drowned again? 

 

We were right there!  It is not our fault they are dumb!

 

 
 

If you knew we were going away, then you knew, but if you did not, how could you?  I do not talk about how we are Going or Away on the internets, and perhaps you did not realize you were reading canned posts.   

A long time ago, my sweet friend blogged about her family vacation and her house was cleaned out in their absence.  And thinking of that, I remember I owe her a letter, obviously, which is a much higher priority than 5 thousand pounds of vacation laundry, half of which is not mine. 

The last vacation we had that was so epic as this one was with Alex's family.  We were the Wild Georgia Adventure Bunch.  But that was completely perfect for summer, and this was perfect for spring.  There is so much to write about, so many dozens of photos to show.

Whenever I think of home, the one image I conjure of the city where it is so pretty night or day that the thought becomes tactile, it is this scene on East Wacker, in the last moments before it curves westward behind you to become north-south.  There are benches built into the wall there, the river is at your feet, North Michigan Ave opens up a lot there (heading straight on and to the left in the photo), for the DuSable Bridge and then is flanked at its north end by the Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower.  It is the most beautiful exterior in Chicago architecture, I think, always.  The interiors are another matter.  Another time.  Many, many photos. 

 
 

National Poetry Month remains.  I feel this poem when my heart beats. 

Chicago
Carl Sandburg

Hog Butcher for the World,
      Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
      Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
      Stormy, husky, brawling,
      City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have
          seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring
          the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked, and I answer: Yes, it is
          true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill
          again.
And they tell me you are brutal, and my reply is: On the
          faces of women and children I have seen the marks of
          wanton hunger.
And having answered so, I turn once more to those who sneer
          at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and
          say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so
          proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job,
          here is a tall, bold slugger set vivid against the little
          soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a
          savage pitted against the wilderness,
              Bareheaded,
              Shoveling,
              Wrecking,
              Planning,
              Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white
          teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man
          laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never
          lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and
          under his ribs the heart of the people,
              Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-
          naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker,
          Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads, and Freight
          Handler to the Nation.

mystery zone. national poetry month

I have a vague recollection of searching out just the right thing for this corner of the garden, and motherfucked if I can remember what it is. 

 

Hand-wringing about Mme Carriére to commence forthwith.

 

The Language
Robert Creeley 

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

superspleen

April 13 is a day that will live in infamy for how hateful and prissy I was.  All day, I was jerky and unrelenting in my scowling resentment of people who just do not do it the way civilized people have agreed.

 

Also, I made an almond-tart kind of a thing from Mark Bittman last summer (two summers ago?) to test its waters again when I get to the gluten-free matzo-brei-ing of 2011.  (I know! A verb I made it into.  More about matzo brei later.) 

 

I was not feeling judgy, is the thing.  To me, judgment is more acceptable, or at least not so taxing.  I don't know.  April 13 was all about me feeling personally encumbered by people not following the rules.  Inside my mind there was a lot of pouting and throwing myself to the floor in protest of the unfairness of the way some people just do whatever they want, in defiance of agreed-upon, well-publicized standards.

It reminds me of a time when we first moved back East.  Some slutty tramp from our homeland, a woman of literal ill-repute, with whom Mari had the most tenuous personal and professional connection back home, started emailing my husband.  I happened to see the first communiqué while I was at his office, using his email (this was 14 years ago, it was a different digital landscape) to ... I forget what.  I mean, it was me sending email but I do not remember the details. 

I responded to it, as myself, totally Minnesota-nice.  I can only recall part of it, and it was so empirically offensive I can not even print it here, for fear the eyes of some people I love will be burned right out of their heads.  (I totally saddled up the patriarchy and rode all over her.)

I can not believe she ever recovered from the blood loss, however, she sent another email, a different time, when I happened to be there again.  It still makes me laugh, how frustrating this must have been for her, to send these missives in a pneumatic tube to a man far away and then constantly have his carpet-bombing wife replying.  Ahahaha.   

Anyhow, the point is that after the second email I got a phone call from a mutual friend.  "Friend."  He was actually a friend mutually between Mari and the Lowlife Creeper; he was an acquaintance of mine, due to the fact that I was married to a pal of his and also, I banged his roommate a couple of years before.  The "Friend" was upset on behalf of the Lowlife.  I told him, in my reasonable voice, that he should go fuck himself, that it was categorically unacceptable and anti-social to personally message a married man about getting together, particularly when no investment had ever been made in the wife. 

Remember the Facebook chart?  Yes.  That is drawn from the annals of polite society.  Oh, sure, it's spruced up a little in parts with an Eastern Promises flavor, but honestly, yes. 

The "Friend" protested that this was not the world in which Lowlife Creeper lived.  That is when I got angry about it.  Lowlife Creeper was not adhering to some misunderstood, undervalued, authentic, aboriginal paradigm -- she had bad manners and bad behavior.  Then, she went around and disingenuously whined pitiably to a bunch of other cretins about my reasonably-firefighting pushback from the ramparts of the dominant culture.

"Let's presume she is not a liar," I seethed to "Friend,"  "That's unlikely, but I'll play along.

"It is reasonable and expected behavior, not some secret protocol.  Watch the news, watch Oprah, watch fucking Blossom.  Show it to [Lowlife Creeper], you stupid troglodyte fuck."  Then, with great, button-pushing satisfaction, I beeped the button on the cordless phone & ended our chat. 

No one actually envies Mari, you see.

Anyhow, it was just like that. 

Looking back, it started on April 12, at the vet, witnessing the lady and her unspayed cat with the obvsly-old injury of a mangled, bleeding tail and her refusal to have the cat spayed while being docked because it would be an abortion.  Of kittens.  Gestating in a cat she obvsly already could not care for adequately.  Omg whiskey tango foxtrot.

The dénouement was in an unfortunate scene in Ballet Town, where I was to get my hair cut.  We ran into one of the Ballet Moms while getting Fille takeout spanakopita for lunch.  While Fille was chattering her up -- I will have no truck with this woman -- she said to the woman that she thought her mother was pretty.  The woman's mother, this is.  Well, evidently, the pretty old chick is the babysitter.  Whatevs, right? 

No, not whatevs.  After Ballet Mom scathingly set Fille straight, she started lecturing Fille on the importance of not making assumptions.  It wasn't just a little educational-aside, like a primer that the child can follow up on later.  She was super-worked-up and lecturing her in this harridan's way!  When she stopped to take a breath, I said to her super-airy, super-sweetly, super-(Minnesota)nicely, "Oh, you know, kids, right?  How was she supposed to know you would let a stranger spend so much time with your children?"  Then I grabbed Fille by the bicep and we were gone, gone, in a puff of smoke! 

The rules of comportment being devalued were not esoteric!  They were the very imprint of Western Civilization!  I am writing these words while mired overall in a book about Friere's educational theory and feminist pedagogy for schoolchildren, so the ridiculousness and irony of my culture-worship is making me laugh and laugh while I am typing, but I am totally serious!  What the hell, people?  Come on!

 

Spleen
Frank O'Hara

I know so much
about things, I accept
so much, it's like
vomiting. And I am
nourished by the
shabbiness of my
knowing so much
about others and what
they do, and accepting
so much that I hate
as if I didn't know
what it is, to me.
And what it is to
them I know, and hate.

     

use it up, he used to say. don't save anything for later.

Alex & I were texting today about the metaspherical nonsense of "blogging" as a verb, how the expectation has become that "blogging" is something different from "writing" and the sadness that sometimes ensues from this corporeal disconnect. 

 

I got to working out that Hemingway would have been fine with blogging, insofar as it is another representation of written work, although Get out yr laptop & open  a vein! is different entirely from Narcissistically splash yr jizz all over everything! -- but I wonder what Gardner would have told Carver about building his brand or search-engine optimization. 

I have a cynical suspicion such product would not have endured.

 

Work
Raymond Carver

FOR JOHN GARDNER, D. SEPTEMBER 14, 1982

Love of work. The blood singing
in that. The fine high rise
of it into the work. A man says,
I'm working. Or, I worked today.
Or, I'm trying to make it work.
Him working seven days a week.
And being awakened in the morning
by his young wife, his head on the typewriter.
The fullness before work.
The amazed understanding after.
Fastening his helmet.
Climbing on his motorcycle
and thinking about home.
And work. Yes, work. The going
to what lasts.

fête. national poetry month.

 

 

Poem
Elle Case

I am in Chelsea again,
black cashmere sweater and
silk scarf against my skin.
And it is snowing a little when
I cross Fourteenth and stop
in front of the wide window of
the Cuban restaurant, thinking of coffee.

Having snow in my hair reminds
me of you, the winter, lying in the
dark with you that first night, not
confessing the truth of liquid kangaroos
stealing into my heart under your hands,
a great gray mob of them thumping
around in something marshier and
darker than the grasslands of New
Guinea. This is the sweater I wore
that night, instead of a coat. New
York City seemed so warm, then.

long past the half; desperate endeavor.

Twelve is a lot of candles. And a lot to wish for, evidently.

I ws in love with the nerviness of this poem for a long time, but squeamish, honestly.  The first time I heard a recording of O'Hara reading it, I was on board. 

God knows my lazy kid is going to have to make a living as a gigolo.  I was just telling another swell Aries fellow I know that I plan to screen Midnight Cowboy for the child as part of a Scared Straight Homeschool seminar.  Yes. 

 

Ave Maria
Frank O'Hara

Mothers of America
                                   let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
                                                                 but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
                                                                   they won't hate you
they won't criticize you they won't know
                                                                they'll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

they may even be grateful to you
                                                     for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
                                                 and didn't upset the peaceful home
they will know where candy bars come from
                                                                       and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
                                                oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
they won't know the difference
                                                  and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
and they'll have been truly entertained either way
instead of hanging around the yard
                                                        or up in their room
                                                                                      hating you
prematurely since you won't have done anything horribly mean yet
except keeping them from the darker joys
                                                                   it's unforgivable the latter
so don't blame me if you won't take this advice
                                                                          and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
                                                                                         seeing
movies you wouldn't let them see when they were young

dayenu

When Gracie, the cat, went into heat the first time, Mari pointed out to me at some time during all the antics that he was really glad we had always just spoken openly about sex with the kids.

Yes.  Because how else to explain the cat rolling around on the floor and just acting weird.  She was also helpful as an illustration -- with Garçon and Fille right on the brink of their respective gender's adolescence -- of how hormones make an organism all goosey-loosey and just plain weird.  This will make sense to you soon.  You will yowl, and roll on the floor, and then fall faint, exhausted; in a metaphorical way.  You will see. 

 
 

This is SexCat.

When Grace, the cat, went out of the window, back when she was still fecund, he was the cat we found with her huddled under the porch.  He was one of two cats that were always trying to get into our house while she was in oestrus, but he is the one who was most persistent.  Also, the cat who won the territory dispute with the other.   

We had Grace fixed just a few days after her out-the-window/under-the-porch episode.  That was months ago, in January, I think.  Because she was coming into heat when she had her surgery, she "stayed sexy" for a little bit, as the vet explained.  One night, about a week after her surgery, she escaped, rolling around in the dark with him, foiling all attempts to bring her back inside.  Then she rolled around and howled for days more, inside.  All night.  It was a grim time. 

She has been going out these last couple of weeks, as previously described.  The first day I let her out, I spied her in the backyard, in a face-off with SexCat.  I went to the back door & opened it and she streaked in with SexCat on her heels.  She came in, but he did not.

I told Mari he was sexually harassing her.  And what the hecks?  Why?  Since being spayed, she should just not even interest him, I would think.  I mean, I do not have a degree in Feline Sexual Behavior, but I did take biology and sociology courses at university.

This morning, I let her out -- super-early for the weekend, because I like her to be back in before people start yard-working or minding business that is not their own.  Forty minutes later,  Garçon was waiting at the front door for Mari and their Haircut Trip.  He called back to me, while he was peering out the window, "Uh, Mom, SexCat is out there with Gracie.  I think he is harassing her, like you say he always harasses her."

We opened the door, and Grace was clamped to the doormat, with her tail firmly wrapped around herself, growling, while SexCat was climbing all over her.  

He is so dumb.  I was glad Mari saw it, because I have described SexCat as a cross between Pepe LePew and Jack Black as Ben Franklin in that one "Drunk History" sketch.  (I don't get it, we fucked in the snow, we fucked that time under the car, I don't understand what the problem is.)     

We let her in and rebuffed him with a plant mister.  Then she crawled into a box in the dining room and hid from us.  (Omg! Poor thing!)  Mari said, "I think I will make that cat doorbell.  She needs a cat panic-button!"  Then he left with our son, while I was fussing over our patchwork doll & admonishing the icon of dumb old SexCat.  Have we not all known a guy like him?    

 

SexCat is sitting on my front porch even now.  He is under the mostly-dormant table festooned with the rag rug that is there for UPS to try & obscure our left-packages, staring down our front door, waiting for Grace.  He has a pretty meow, fine, but doesn't our girl have a right to be on her porch & breathe freely. 

Fille asked, "Can I pet him?'  I was so incredulous, because no!  We are not getting involved with any more outside cats, ever. Also, SexCat?!  He doesn't even know no means no!

 
 

Fille said to me, in her patiently-informative way, "Mom, I think you mean RapeCat."  Yes!  Omg, it works, all the talking!

  

 

The Portion Accruing to Ears
Alice Notley

(From her 2007 book, In the Pines.)

I know, from its primacy
shadow follow down over European
clutch of tones the same
I know shadow or clutch, so

whatever is told to you, no waiver
I was there, you can say
nothing accrues in safety           and no one safe
why should you be, or make sense?

all she wore was lace. why not?
or something else. treason, why not?
quote, the only thing I'm sure of, a
            kind of metric
but that thought don't I see, gone and for-
give. You do not have a light
to shine on me. I have it.

with yr shield. or on it.

Wednesday, I sent the Israeli a plaintive email, stating my request for a 20-minute maximum interval of his time to discuss with him something time-sensitive, important to me, but not top-secret or requiring of an alibi.  He rang me back exactly seven minutes later. 

"Are you OK?  Is everyone all right?" 

I told him we were all fine, that I was making granola bars.  I asked him why he wasn't teaching. 

He told me he stepped out when he got my email.  (Oh.)  We could reconvene when he was finished, at 2:45; he would phone me.

 

The Israeli is my go-to guy. Kowalski is a twice-removed situation, plus this contact was on the topic of the rigors of career vs. marriage and familial obligations.  I know, people are always so scandalized by my extra-marital support team, "OMIGOD, MARI SHOULD BE YOUR GO-TO GUY! HE SHOULD BE YOUR EVERYTHING!"

The last time I got the Mari Should Be Your Everything routine from someone, in a bossy, out-loud way, I was minding my business, nonchalantly mentioning Kowalski's heavy lifting in some goings-on. I was pretty sure I recalled Mari being the one who referred me to Kowalski's capable (metaphorical) hands, but it had gone on for a couple of months, the situation's tension & release. I followed up with my husband while our kids were busy at a class and we were hanging out at Borders, killing time, spending time, hanging out.

During the conversation, I said to Mari, pointedly, But don't you want to be my everything?

He thought about the question, taking an extra 20 seconds beyond his reflex to consider the question fairly. "No," he said. "Because you will change, and want a different thing, and I would have to change to remain your everything. I might not want to do the things required to meet your new service requirements. I would rather be myself and stay married to you than be your potentially-obsolete everything."

My husband, he is smart. He uses too much work-jargon at home, but I like that guy a lot. He picked up pretty early on in our lightning-fast courtship 15+ years ago that I would not be satisfied unless he trusted me with enough rope to hang myself; that it was not a reflection on him, that it was just who I am.  I love my pile of rope, so much -- I tie knots with it a lot, I swing on it, one time, I built a bridge! -- but mostly, I love the guy who is confident enough in himself to not create conflict about a pile of rope that pretty much just sits in a dusty old coil.

Mari refers to my favorite + best, without rancor, as "[My] Other Husband."  I would say that is just about right. The Israeli is just about half made-up of consigliere, leavened with a heaping helping of best beau ever, which pretty well adds up to our spousal infrastructure here, like if we were to demo our marriage back to its studs.

I locked the children inside the house & went out to the parked car to take the call. We sped through my request -- it was just a spot-check on values before some action I had on the schedule -- and then he had a few surprising shovelfuls of plaintive despair to heap in my direction. His thing was not actionable, it was just processing. In the way I described processing the other day -- I already know all of that about you, plus more -- but it is good to be able to articulate things aloud to people who know there is nothing left to say.

When I was all done with 25 minutes of intense, hand-to-hand conversation with no chance of children interrupting on either end, I was surprised how much a telephone-date with my Other Husband felt like a real date with my actual husband. It just felt really good to make the time, to have it made, in both directions.

Undergrowth
Federico García Lorca

(adapted from the Jerome Rothenberg translation of Suites.)

I plunged into my
hour of death.
Agony in the garden,
final kisses.
Last hour for which
the captive bells long.

Cuckoo clocks
lacking cuckoos.
Mildewing star,
enormous pale
butterflies.

From a briarpatch
of sighs
the crank organ
sounds as it had
in my childhood.

You must skip
to my lou,
my darling,
skip to my lou,
my love.

wednesday wip. nat'l poetry month.

Honestly, this world and its ragtag bunch of characters!  Where is my halo?

I am working on this blanket, still. 

 

It started out a lot smaller, two years ago.  I am surprised to see it has been two years since first I blogged about it, but ... it was not supposed to be a race to the finish, I guess.  Fille is very concerned about it, always checking & double-checking to make sure I am not knitting it as a gift for someone.  I am not.  It is supposed to be for our house.  I think it is kind of ugly, though.  It might be time to repeat some yarn colors, like an echo.

The second sentence of the third stanza here is a lot of my problem, often in life.  Sometimes that line & the one following are like an earworm. 

 

Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death
Christopher Kennedy

I'm sorry your parachute is made of cream cheese, but think of
the spectators and their stories, and the asphalt's loneliness until
you arrive, abruptly and without pretense.

You've heard of Jesus; now you get to be just like Him. Every eye
that holds your image belongs to a person who will know, once
and for all time, what it means to be alive. Those who loved you
most will place a wreath at the exact spot where you became an
exact spot. Footage of your fall will serve as an effective warning to
all who believe cream cheese to be a healthy substitute for silk.

This millennium needs more martyrs, inadvertent or otherwise.
My sympathy for you could be mistaken for love. Take
advantage; open up. You won't have many more opportunities to
share your doubts and fears, which, I'm guessing, have crystallized
into one completely appropriate aversion to solid ground.

I hope this isn't too much for you to process on your return to
our distant planet, where all is well as well as all is not so well,
depending on where you're headed, the east and west of which
you probably never stop to consider,
obsessed as you are with the physics of north and south.

 

Christopher Kennedy has a new book coming out this year.  Ennui Prophet.  I am totally looking forward to it.  It is a teensy bit embarrassing that he has some idea of this anticipation.  I am so laughing.   

when poets marry engineers. also, cats.

Last week, I bought flowers while I was at the FancyMart. 

 

"Hey," Mari said, when he noticed them Sunday.  "Those are the flowers from our wedding."

They are.  They are the flowers that are in North American distribution at this time of year.  You might remember, too:  irises & bear grass on the tables; red roses & cymbidium orchids in my bridal bouquet.  That was some fun party.  Fine choices were made.  (Except for by my in-laws, but they are not my burden.)

 

The mother cat, provisionally-named Grace -- although I call her Elsa, Black & Tan, and also Butter Brickle in equal measure -- goes outside. 

 

Not all day, just for a little while every morning.  I let her out before I make a pot of tea and start breakfast.  By the time I am ready to move on to the getting-dressed-before-breakfast part of my day, I open the door.

She will either be waiting on the porch already or she will come streaking toward the door as it opens.  It takes about 40-60 minutes, all this outside-time, and the first thing she does when she comes in is to use the litter box.  So dainty!  Civilized!  Laaadylike!

 

If you knew Iris, you already know it is important to me that cats be great ladies.

Mari remains uneasy with the Letting the Cat Out Project.  Fortunately, he is in the office five days every week lately, so he does not have to be involved.

He came out from the very beginning, very strong, "No cat flaps!  We are not modifying our house for a cat I do not even want!" 

He is always refreshing & reminding about how we do not want her.  I nod, all eyelashes, so he knows I am listening, then I invite him to feel how soft her coat is.  I also point out how she has a ninja star hidden at each wrist.  Then I remind him she is a redhead and a brunette at once, and ask how can he not love her?

Anyhow, I was telling him about how she seems to come when she hears the door open, or maybe she saunters a little across the street, or maybe she was already lolling on the porch.  But then sometimes I have to call her, also, and she seems to come from far away.

 

Additionally, there are times when it seems I have missed my window and I have to reset my timer & go out for her again.  I was fretting a little (overthinking, again) wondering if she could shave down her risky outdoor time, even more, would she be satisfied with less?  I was wondering how I could check in with her more, without cramping her style and trying to make her feel coerced into the house, but also be more available ...

"Maybe I could make her a cat doorbell," Mari said.  "And then I could train her how to use it." 

You have to know that this is the only story you need about my husband.  It is a complete character study, it's all in there.  No cat flaps, no.  No modifications to our home, no, no.  But what he can do is engineer & implement a cat doorbell and then devise a Cat-HR training session to teach the cat to use it.  The cat he says he does not want.  He is amazing to me; life goes on all around us, and he sometimes distracts me from all of it.  

"Poem"
Frank O'Hara

That's not a cross look it's a sign of life
but I'm glad you care how I look at you
this morning (after I got up) I was thinking
of President Warren G. Harding and Horace S.
Warren, father of the little blonde girl
across the street and another blonde Agnes
Hedlund (this was in the 6th grade!)   what

now the day has begun in a soft grey way
with elephantine traffic trudging along Fifth
and two packages of Camels in my pocket
I can't think of one interesting thing Warren
G. Harding did, I guess I was passing notes
to Sally and Agnes at the time he came up
in our elephantine history course everything

seems slow suddenly and boring except
for my insatiable thinking towards you
as you lie asleep completely plotzed and
gracious as a hillock in the mist from one
small window, sunless and only slightly open
as is your mouth and presently your quiet eyes
your breathing is like that history lesson

avril

Correction:  Hyacinths perfectly normal, if a little leggy.  Evidently, I have never noticed how they look before full bloom.

 

The legginess is due to the age of the plant, however.

Variety of daffodil known as narcissus poeticus is perfectly perfect.

 

 

The ebullience brought around by the beginning of baseball season has receded. 

 

Everyone here is lazing and/or sleeping, although the rest of us have availed ourselves of the luxury of the upholstered furniture. 

In fact, the only way I got Mari to get out of bed this morning was to tell him I thought a fine agenda for the day was to start with blueberry oatmeal-pancakes, followed by a fire in the woodstove.  Then we could sit next to each other while I alternated knitting with rifling through cookbooks.  

 

April is National Poetry Month, speaking of laziness, narcissus, and poeticus.  I like this poem right now.  It is a dream-elegy for someone who is still today alive.  I am thinking a lot about how I have been enjoined against an elegy -- even an accidental, prosey kind of rhapsodic eulogy -- for someone who is quite dead.  It happened just like in this poem -- so long that at the end I could hardly recall the beginning.

Poem
Elle Case

I dreamt of you. I was hungover from your homeland,
where we met, in this dream, and we talked.  You
were charming and nifty, useful and solid, our
occasion went on for hours, so long that at the end
I couldn't remember the beginning,

Days went by in my dream before you died. Still I
was dreaming. So, in the dream, I shyly showed
your lovely wife, your beautiful, brilliant baby girl
an essay I wrote about our time together. They loved
you ever more, this new window opened to them,
to look out where I put you on the horizon, shown
now on a backdrop of snowdrifts, steel mills, rivers
that run backward seething with blood. You

were so tall and true on those plains, rugged and
undaunted. Still in this dream, I asked to write an
elegy, and then your girls, they teared up and I
thought, in my dream, oh! how sad this all is!! In
the beginning it seemed only as a long picnic. You
were funny, you told me that everyone should only
remember your life, so you told me just everything.

You found out that as a girl I wrote news so you kept
leaning over, across the orange table set with our
endless buffet lunch, improbably outdoors, among
these magical beanstalks of dandelions and those
legendary japanese vines and saying, "Did you
get that? Make sure you write this all down."

 

pieces. parts.

 

Today we went around all together for Garçon's guitar lesson. While we were along the way, we noticed that one of the restaurants at which we first ate in this town has been replaced by something a great deal tonier. Eight years ago, I was nursing Baby Fifille, perusing the menu while the waitress shouted out the specials good-naturedly to the 3 elderly couples in the booth behind us.

"Orange roughy, I said," she clarified for the table. "It's a type-a fish."

I reached out to clasp Mari's hand and declare that we had indeed found our forever home. And we have, because even though cheerful explanations of fish types have been replaced by beef cheeks and an alarming number of cocktails featuring raw eggs and Blonde Lillet + bitters, the city's unprepossessing essentialism prevails.

Besides a number of changes, there was a lot of new construction. This particular part of town is much more mine & the children's than Mari's, and he asked a few times for me to remind him what used to be here, or there, on that lot, or that one. I had no answers for him.

It is baffling, when that happens, when there used to be something there, and after it is demolished, we never remember it. The feeling is unsettling. So much so, that in his exasperation, Mari asked, "Didn't you write a poem about this very emotion?" I did. I mean, in part. I picked the individual who would be able to articulate such a feeling as an oracle.

If I/wear a pink suit stained with blood
and brains; if I alone know the word
that conveys simply I do not know
what used to be there, but do not
have love, I am a communion of one.

Even the greatest of whom among us, Paul said, would be nothing without love. So, it mapped out to be a pretty great accomplishment on the scale of metropolitan wanting. It was proof of this that the image got such loft in NYC, because everyone, everyone, who lives in a big city has felt that feeling of something absent-yet-unknown; the heartfelt frustration of wondering why we do not have a word to describe not knowing what used to be there, while only knowing it was something not the same.

 

This book was for sale at the library -- which I like to think I would remember being there were it razed -- where I was alternately browsing, plus flirting with Mari and fidgeting with my handheld while we waited for Garçon to finish his guitar lesson and return to us. I had not seen this book since approximately (exactly?) 1992, when I gave it to my then-friend Dutch for his ... birthday? I cannot remember.  I had, in fact, forgotten about the whole interval. There was more to the gift than just me, there were mutual friends -- dudes every one -- who encouraged me to interfere in my eyelashes' way with something that, looking back, was none of my goddamned business.

When I saw that book, balanced sweetly on the wall, it was like 27 boxes of files from off-site storage were delivered to my mind.  I eyeballed the contents lists, but I will never sort through them. Every time something like this happens, I wonder what else I have lost. Not just with Dutch -- although I think highly of him, as far as it goes, and am a little mortified to think he remembers + applies this against my universal account of bonhomie insofar as we interact in this new century -- but with anyone, everyone who is out there, on the periphery.

I think that when everyone is participating actively in the preservation of memory's archive, everything is remembered. When people are dedicated to maintaining a mutual connection, each person is constantly bringing their singular perspective, informing which piece comes first and whether or not something is hung right-side-up or upside-down. Some of the content is pen + ink, some is mixed-media, one of us makes those crazy sculptures of extruded clay. There are little rooms attached to the main gallery where people break out into smaller groups or pairs. Someone spends a lot of time writing the signage and other programming collateral.

Typically, when everyone is there from a group, it is possible to record by consensus.  It is my experience that in a duo, each person shares the weight.  I wrote about this in the time at the end of Cake Mind, when I never could have realized the Gerda Times were about to begin:

I have been thinking a lot about the existential nature of love, insofar as it is neither rational nor orderly.  The accountability associated with the lyric of two people, the contents of your pockets: this shiny bottlecap, that marble, two pebbles, a lock of my hair, a dead lizard, five seashells and a gem from your mother's dresser, spread it out and wait and wait for me to respond with a narrative from memory about the night you got this scar.  There is this magnitude of curation involved -- which pieces make the point?, what is the central thesis here?, etc. 

But being in love is not the same as just bearing everyone aloft 2x2 in the ark of acquaintanceship on a sea of loving, in the more universal sense, in the way about which Paul wrote to the Corinthians.  When people drop through the floor, for whatever reason, the ground that was around them crumbles a little, also.

Only in the worst of cases -- a Joe Mengele, for example -- is the space paved over and rebuilt. The rest of the time, the space stays vacant, maybe there are metaphorical bulbs planted, or rained-on paper notes and a grimy plastic cross, but always, every time, it is nearly impossible to preserve the complexities and subtleties of what used to be there.

merci bcp

 

hate. sleep. kitchen table.

Our freezer is empty.  I can not describe what it is like to look into a 10ft³ chest freezer and see nothing but a 50-pound bag of steel-cut oats and a few steaks.  The hot, hot weather meant that I used up every single reheatable meal that was in there with zero replenishment.  So, that.

 

Also, I am still caught up in writing, which, whatever.  Writing poems leads to reading poems and whatever to all that noise.  I can not travel this winter.  I was able to waste some time the other day -- while reading some Roger Shattuck on Proust -- mapping out the particulars of my own roman-fleuve, here, but then I had to get back to the mines.  Not to mention making a grocery list.  We are completely out of sugar, butter, and tea and it feels like the time a few years ago where everything was displaced by weather + poems.   

But mostly, writing, slogging, finishing up, like John Ashbury not really believing so much in revisions.  I had already been thinking hard about love in ways both concrete & abstract, things keep happening to me, around me -- the ways in which fear all over the country right now is lighting up the pathways of acceptance, if only one looks --  while they are fascinating, these things, I sometimes can not switch gears fast enough in action, because I am hamstrung by ruminating on the pedagogies of love.  It can be v distracting, and I chalk it up to an occupational hazard, ways of seeing, etc.  

One of the poets with whom I am entangled in this obligation, a little stupefied about the dangerous juxtaposition in a new thing I sent him, said to me, "Didn't you once pull off a love poem using a series of public-restroom images?"  I did.  I mean, I wrote it, he is the one to tell me if I pulled it off.  I am pretty sure that after this poem made the reading-rounds in lower Manhattan,  it was part of  a manuscript I sent to the NY'er, which has not been rejected, which makes it like 4 years of acceptance.  No, seriously. 

 

November
Elle Case

You took me to a dark room that was
mine in the morning, but in the night
you would take charge of it, like a fat
woman dozing by the sinks to give you a
hand towel. We were languid, watching
on the ceiling the silhouette of love,
never blinking, its strange, fluttering
arches like a black and white rainbow.

You are inside me making a promise, a
wish my own flesh will not grant. Time
will wear down the poison of my youth,
its antidote bright and true, but now
this fire is a fever, a sweaty, temporary
cure. You will leave me, never to return,
before you see her, standing shyly and
with discretion, inside a men's room in a
farflung city no one can find on a map.

I will be sitting in a chair, shy and
discreet, the brittle perfume of a girl
replaced by a scent of your making. I am
a woman wearing your fingerprints, so much
from you inside of me, strengthening my
blood. There will be a crowd -- a colorful,
garish consolation -- I will feel you in
my heart's beat long before I see you from
my perch. There will be a confusion and
a noise from the gaiety. Your love will ring
out clean and sparkling as a handful of coins,
dropped with grace, into a shining, ready bowl.

 

I write a lot (a lot, a lot) about antidotes.  I am sure a Jungian therapist would have quite a lot to say about that.  Ballet is back in a couple of weeks and the trains need to run on time, streets cleaned, etc.  We know what that means.  À bientôt!  

jurgis

Jesus, I was flipping through The Jungle for poetry's sake and no one needs me to say so, but that old Upton Sinclair knew how to string a few words together.  Not like Steinbeck, though.  I re-read Of Mice & Men in June and it just blew me away all over again.  Just wow. 

This is all I am going to say about the Park 51 controversy, because it is all I can say until I get to going on & on, and there is a lot to go on & on about -- logistically, representationally, geographically, constitutionally, lots and lots -- but here is what I am going to write, having chewed off nine of my fingers: 

America already acted on these impulses, for three years, from 1942-1945, during which the U.S. government imprisoned American citizens here in America.  These Americans gave up their homes, their possessions, their livelihoods, and their liberties, all because the USA was attacked by those who looked like them.  Here we are, in America, more than 50 years later, and still there are people who are not ashamed to embrace this kind of hateful, bigoted conflation even now.  Like everything has happened in the history of this country for nothing.  It is appalling.

 

I have not taken many photographs of food this summer because I have not been cooking v much at all.  This is a staple salad I am squeezing in whenever I can get it together.  I cooked a large pot of chickpeas and portioned them in bags for the freezer and even though this recipe uses the stovetop, it is very briefly, so it is not too bad.

 

The original recipe from Bittman calls for arugula, but I use whatever hearty salad green I have on hand -- parsley, endive, escarole.  His greens-to-beans ratio is exactly inverse of mine, so obvsly that is open to experimentation.  His recipe also calls for cumin seed and ginger, which I usually have around, but I tend to leave things out when I do not have them.  (Love the one you're with!)  This week, we have dandelion greens, which are kind of tough, so I throw them in with the beans right away, instead of tossing them around later. 

Warm Chickpeas & Greens Salad
adapted from Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian

 Chop a couple of cloves of garlic, saute over medium heat in a large sautese until golden.  Add salt, ground cumin, and 3 or 4 cups of drained, cooked chickpeas.  If the chickpeas are not very soft, add a 1/4 to 1/2 cup of  their liquid and put the lid on.  (Now is when you might add the chopped dandelion greens or escarole, 2 or 3 loosely-packed cups)

After 8 or 10 minutes, test the chickpeas for mashability.  You want some of them to be a little mashed, for a binding texture in the salad.  Cook & stir until they are a nice balance between not too soft & not too wet.  Add 2 tablespoons of rice-wine vinegar and a generous teaspoon of honey.  Stir & stir. 

Toss beans (or beans + greens) with chopped greens -- again, about 2-3 cups -- and thinly-sliced red onion half-moons.  I find this requires more salt than I think it should need.   

treading national poetry's water

 

God, Jesus, I can not even keep up with Alex and his National Poetries.  It is funny to me that the other day he wrote about Anne Sexton, though, because I was thinking about Anne Sexton about three hours before I read it.  I was wondering if I should this year highlight a poet whose work I can not abide.  Sexton is right up there with old Syl Plath for me, with the bellyaching.  Get on with it, girls!  

Then, I was thinking about Creeley again, the glory of his coy confession.  Or, you know, O'Hara, who rattled off every confession that went through his mind, but had fun with it.  But the blah, blah, blah of those women.  Oh, especially of Plath.  I mean, ok, a stake in your dad's fat heart, sure, and then you married Ted Hughes.  Whoops.  Also, zzZzzzZzzzz.  Plath does turn these crystalline phrases sometimes, but her whining gets in my way. 

I like Sexton just fine, in small measure, her images are lovely, she is technically a marvel, but then she goes on and on; it is like too much on the cake.  I just wish I could scrape off her frosting roses.

Bernadette Mayer + Ntozake Shange are pretty much the queens of Satin Jacket Switchblade Confessions.

I have been sewing.  A lot.  Those tea towels at the top are for the spring auction.  Details later, when some things get where they are going.  Now, two poems by the aforementioned rumblers.  Two!

First turn to me ...
Bernadette Mayer
from A Bernadette Mayer Reader.

First turn to me after a shower,
you come inside me sideways as always

in the morning you ask me to be on top of you,
then we take a nap, we’re late for school

you arrive at night inspired and drunk,
there is no reason for our clothes

we take a bath and lie down facing each other,
then later we turn over, finally you come

we face each other and talk about childhood
as soon as I touch your penis I wind up coming

you stop by in the morning to say hello
we sit on the bed indian fashion not touching

in the middle of the night you come home
from a nightclub, we don’t get past the bureau

next day it’s the table, and after that the chair
because I want so much to sit you down & suck your cock

you ask we to hold your wrists, but then when I
touch your neck with both my hands you come

it’s early morning and you decide to very quietly
come on my knee because of the children

you’ve been away at school for centuries, your girlfriend
has left you, you come four times before morning

you tell me you masturbated in the hotel before you came by
I don’t believe it, I serve the lentil soup naked

I massage your feet to seduce you, you are reluctant,
my feet wind up at your neck and ankles

you try not to come too quickly
also, you don't want to have a baby

I stand up from the bath, you say turn around
and kiss the backs of my legs and my ass

you suck my cunt for a thousand years, you are weary
at last I remember my father’s anger and I come

you have no patience and come right away
I get revenge and won’t let you sleep all night

we make out for so long we can’t remember how
we wound up hitting our heads against the wall

I lie on my stomach, you put one hand under me
and one hand over me and that way can love me

you appear without notice and with flowers
I fall for it and we become missionaries

you say you can only fuck me up the ass when you are drunk
so we try it sober in a room at the farm

 we lie together one night, exhausted couplets
and don’t make love. does this mean we’ve had enough?

watching t.v. we wonder if each other wants to
interrupt the plot; later I beg you to read to me

like the Chinese we count 81 thrusts
then 9 more out loud till we both come

I come three times before you do
and then it seems you’re mad and never will

it’s only fair for a woman to come more
think of all the times they didn’t care

with no immediate cause
Ntozake Shange
from Nappy Edges

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten
every five minutes a
woman is raped/every ten minutes
a lil girl is molested
yet i rode the subway today
i sat next to an old man who
may have beaten his old wife
3 minutes ago or 3 days/30 years ago
he might have sodomized his
daughter but i sat there
cuz the young men on the train
might beat some young women
later in the day or tomorrow
i might not shut my door fast
every 3 minutes it happens
some woman's innocence
rushes to her cheeks/pours from her mouth
like the betsy wetsy dolls have been torn
apart/their mouths
menses red & split/every
three minutes a shoulder
is jammed through plaster and the oven door/
chairs push thru the rib cage/hot water or
boiling sperm decorate her body
i rode the subway today
& bought a paper from a
man who might
have held his old lady onto
a hot pressing iron/i don't know
maybe he catches lil girls in the
park & rips open their behinds
with steel rods/i can't decide
what he might have done i only
know every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes every 10 minutes/so
i bought the paper
looking for the announcement
the discovery/of the dismembered
woman's body/the
victims have not all been
identified/today they are
naked and dead/refuse to
testify/one girl out of 10's not
coherent/i took the coffee
& spit it up/i found an
announcement/not the woman's
bloated body in the river/floating
not the child bleeding in the
59th street corridor/not the baby
broken on the floor/
there is some concern
that alleged battered women
might start to murder their
husbands & lovers with no
immediate cause"

i spit up i vomit i am screaming
we all have immediate cause
every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes
every 10 minutes
every day
women's bodies are found
in alleys & bedrooms/at the top of the stairs
before i ride the subway/buy a paper/drink
coffee/i must know/
have you hurt a woman today
did you beat a woman today
throw a child across a room
are the lil girl's panties
in yr pocket

did you hurt a woman today
i have to ask these obscene questions
the authorities require me to
establish
immediate cause
every three minutes
every five minutes
every ten minutes
every day.

global warm-ups

Emergency! 

  

Nelly Moser is not doing well this year!  Her flowers are too small! 

In other clematis news, I finally tidied up the old "Polish Spirit."  Yes. 

Nelly & feisty old Mme Carriére are in bloom at the same time this year, which has never happened before.  The flowers are all effed up this year, all over.  Lilacs have already come and gone! 

My own little flowers are effed-up, too.  I am tired of saying to them, "I know it was 90 degrees a couple of weeks ago, but it is April.  Please put on a jacket.  No, you can't wear shorts.  Hello!  Spring blizzards!  No scarves, no hats, you're dead!"

This little weblog gets a lot of traffic about Mme. Alfred Carriére at this time of year.  Last night, someone was looking for a clematis to run up against her.  Rouge Cardinale is what I use for that.  It is not period, but it was appealing and undernurtured at the nursery, so I brought it home.  I know.  Neither is Polish Spirit the right vintage for my garden, but with a name like that, how could I resist, mowimy po polsku, back home in the  City of the Big Shoulders + spring blizzards.  Oh, god, it is still National Poetry Month! 

Right, so, I have been reading Grave of Light, but none of Alice Notley's work can be properly graphically-represented here in this teensy column.  Also, I do not feel like typing. Here is a poem from when I was last asked to respond to a study of Notley's work, if you know it.  I know, I know, I am not being a good Nat'l Poetries Player this year.  Is there a test?  A grade?  Yikes.  I used to be better for April.  (I used to not have a sewing machine nor birthday trips.)

I was already thinking of this poem & a couple of others because I was just in an email exchange with someone excellent  about his poem written as a son, and so thinking of the poems I have written as my son's mother.  There are two sides to every story. 

Postcards
Elle Case

Dear Ex-Beau,

I thought of you, in Central Georgia, with
the oak-leafed hydrangeas and pie at breakfast.
Grits, coffee, sausage gravy on biscuits,
over-medium eggs, then pie. Everything
good ends in pie. What have I started?

Dear Ex-Beau.

There have been two weeks of sensational, perfectly-
plush weather since you visited. I am thinking of your birthday
because Creeley died today. The children eat steamed
broccoli in a picnic every night; we have run out of paper
towels and I do not care.

Dear Ex-Beau,

I want to answer you. Of course I am terribly in love with my
son -- he is all the good things about any man I have ever loved,
mystically assembled into one little, loose-toothed boy. It is a
rapturous cancer, to love someone so much when you know
they will leave you.

Dear Ex-Beau,

Of course, of course, I love the baby. But my son will grow
into a man. I must reflect upon the details I pave onto his senses.
What will he expect from women? He knows I am afraid of heights.
I love red and pink roses, never yellow, nor white.
I never eat tomatoes, for I can not risk disappointment.
Think of everything you know to expect from me. Had only your
mother prepared you for my arrival on the tide.

Dear Ex-Beau,

I miss you, too. I am sad and sore in my heart, so homesick
for you. It is surely the fault of current events and world affairs.
Who isn't homesick right now? The world is in pain from longing.

Dear Ex-Beau,

I was willing, it was you afraid to fall into my hands.
After the hara-kiri of your heart, I never would stay.
I write about it, sometimes. I trace the words backwards,
until everything I remember turns to smudges and loops.

good fences, bob frost

The weather is so nice, sunny & clear, not at all too-warm, which is usually perfect for going around in the garden, but I am inside, starting my engines on a few projects, which is its own fun. 

 

My neighbors are having such bad behavior, which is another reason I am gloried to be inside with the making.  I try to avoid all of this behavior by curtailing my sidewalk-gardening chores to the hours between 10 and noon, but still I might wind up passively harangued into chat by the tenured professor who lives down the street & keeps bankers hours.

Last week, or maybe two weeks ago, he sallied by on his morning constitutional and told me he is moving.  Apparently, his wife has been cheating on him with the pastor of her church.  I know.  Also, that he found this out -- well, he suspected something was up, but "trusted her" (his words) -- when the grad student that lives next door to them mentioned something (zogma!  What kind of balls does that even take?  I have to take a garden transplant down to Ben the Ph.D candidate and investigate him now!).  Subsequent to the neighbor telling him his wife was a whore, two people from her congregation phoned to break the news to him.  Good thing, too, because the next person on the horn was the freaking guy from the Diocese who handles these matters.  Seriously?

So, anyhow.  Later, I told Mari, and he was just like, "Why did he tell you?"  Um, because he is moving and she is taking the dude into their home and wouldn't you tell everyone?  More to the point, would you not -- here in the lawless East -- make me the very first person you told?  "Be good," is all my husband had to say about that.  I know. 

As Frost also said in "Mending Wall," Spring is the mischief in me, and maybe so in everyone.  I just confessed to the Israeli my weariness in my own habit of slyly goading people into fault.  We were catching up and I was about to tell him a mostly-amusing anecdote culled from real-life interaction, but then settled for, "You know, you've seen this a million times:  someone I don't care for is bleeding and I suggest quietly to them that something cool is in the water, and then say nothing more about it, but am deeply satisfied when they jump in."

"Right," he said, for he has known me for many, many years.  "And then they find out that the something cool is hungry sharks?"  Yes, kind of like that.  I did that again the other day, with a different neighbor.  I mean, on the one hand I am weary of my own petulance and impertinence, but on the other, whatever.  

The first line of this poem always reminds me of one of Creeley's:  Nothing says anything/ except that which it wishes/ would come true.  I can never articulate why, but I think it is a function of the letting instead of the making.  Important!

Mending Wall
Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

so. how so

I know this is April and it is National Poetry Month, I do.  If it were not just enough to know, then Alex posted the other day about Ginsberg and how he might be moving toward and that made me happy.  Plus, a Charles Simic poem he came across, which, ok.  While I have not been writing about poetry with my usual blabbity April's verve, I have heeded the calendar's call and been reading a bunch, at night, after galleries-full of visual art. 

 
Tête d'homme et nu assis, Picasso. 1964. Given to the Princeton Art Museum by Gregory Callimanopulos, Class of 1957.

I have been reading this book, long hours into the night.  It is interesting to read Neruda as he wrote because of my whole thing with post-postmodern language poetry, which is about the poem being about the poem -- that a reader, a listener, hears what is being said and its beauty for itself, not distracted from the literal machinations of wanting to form a mental image of what they think is being said. 

The expectation is similar to the abstract artists' saw Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing you see.  It goes right to the heart of what I was telling Fille at the MoMA to answer her startling question, Why is that art?    Poetry is about forgetting what you think you know and just letting yourself hear.  Listening between the spaces between the words and watching how they fit together, sometimes to form a image you never considered, maybe one you can not hold on to.  That is what poetry is for.  It is widely accepted that artists of all genres see things differently than those of us not artists nor in the genre, so submission to the showing is paramount.

The other reason it is interesting to read Neruda in his own language is that I do not think he has ever had a decent translator.  He is widely regarded as one of the most important poets of the 20th century and the people translating him do not do a good job.  William Merwin or whomever is the worst offender.  If you are going to read something translated from the Spanish, you want to see the name Edith Grossman in that slot where they credit the translator. 

Translation is hard.  Many times, monolingual people will shove something in my face in one of the three languages everyone knows I read and say, "What does this say?"  Or, in spoken-French or Italian situations, will ask me, "What happened?  What are they talking about?"  And, this is related to what I was just talking about in that translating something into a new language -- for me -- requires that I stop seeing -- that I stop listening, stop letting -- and get to the making + the naming.  It is not a shift I am able to make smoothly.  Anyhow.  What was I writing about?  Oh, right, how I have spent National Poetry Month at a lot of freaking art museums, seeing and forgetting and letting.  It is a poor excuse for not playing National Poetries, but April is not over yet.

 

Here is a poem from about five years ago.  It is funny, because it was after my class with Robert Fitterman and I had not -- as with many things in my life -- realized how far off the grid I had gone, so the poem seemed totally normal + vanilla to me, but during the workshopping a fight broke out.  Not with me, between three others, among them the venerable Bill Kushner.  That could only happen at St Mark's, srsly.  They are kind of intense.  Of all the people to know how we all need to spend more time letting and less time naming.

Poem
Elle Case

I'm in Chelsea again,
black cashmere sweater and
silk scarf against my skin.
And it is snowing a little when
I cross Fourteenth and stop
in front of the wide window of
the Cuban restaurant, thinking of coffee.

Having snow in my hair reminds
me of you, the winter, lying in the
dark with you that first night, not
confessing the truth of liquid kangaroos
stealing into my heart under your hands,
a great gray mob of them thumping
around in something marshier and
darker than the grasslands of New
Guinea. This is the sweater I wore
that night, instead of a coat. New
York City seemed so warm, then.

gratia plena

Our children are on a long leash.  I do not know if I would describe them using the au courant term free-range kids, but they are definitely less hamstrung than their peers.  I think a lot of this is because we have more time, because of our domestic dynamic -- more agrarian in style than post-industrial -- where we have the luxury of time with them for homekeeping and the other tasks of salary-earning support.  They are right within 10 yards of me nearly all the time, which gives me clarity in assessing their strengths and readinesses for independence.  Also, the things they are allowed to do independently mirror things they have been doing all along.  It is like independence training.  Small steps.

This summer has been a huge change, maybe not as baby-steppy-intro as I would have liked, because of my brokenness.  This will be the summer they remember, whether as good or bad, time will only tell.  For example:  today they both got a bad sunburn while at the pool.  Bad.  I mean, in my opinion, it is not the world's worst sunburn, but I am not the one lying wanly on the fold-out sofa with icy compresses on my back. 

How did they get this very first sunburn?  Well!  I told them this morning to get themselves ready for the pool & also do not forget sunscreen.  They did not, but they each failed to ask the other to do their back and so their shoulders are not well.  Burned.  They will definitely remember it and are unlikely to ever make this error again.  Is time to live & learn, babies.

Garçon is cooking!  He has long been aching to cook, and I just could not.  While I am happy to engage the Socratic method homeschool all the livelong day, cooking is too, uh, at once technical and also boring to me.  Or something.  Trying to oversee the child cooking, just, ugh.  Some of the conflict comes from him not wanting to be corrected and me not wanting him to get hurt.  Then, reasonably, comes the point in the face-off where he postures that if I know so much, I should just do it myself, and I of course say FINE, because who has been doing it all this time anyhow?  I am never happy with the way these afternoons end, and knew something would have to happen to bust up the dynamic.  Or, just bust up my ankle, har har. 

So, today, it was his job to remove a baking sheet from the oven, turn the vegetable patties, then return it to the 400-degree oven.  He somehow found himself (I was not in the kitchen) juggling a half sheet pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, in front of the hot, open oven, and burned his thumb.  Oh, well.  He assures me he will elect more carefully next time.  The funny thing is that had I been in the kitchen, I would have said, "First things first!" and he would have grumbled and I would have complained, and status quo and anyhow, the burn on his little thumb has been majorly upstaged by the sunburn.

I can not detail on the interwebs for just anyone to see without a trace the things the children have been doing out-of-doors, the privileges and accountability they have been granted -- exciting things!  Important things!  Things none of their friends get to do!  Things about which Mari & I have said, "Will you two be comfortable doing [this] alone?"  Every time it is something they have been doing all along right alongside of us, so they know how it goes, but now they will have the challenge of doing it while managing being by themselves in the world.  And their faces go quiet & nervous before they agree, hesitantly, and then they leave together, cautiously confident (and always hand-in-hand, like Hansel & Gretel) before returning all LOOK AT WE DID IT!  OH WOW!

Mari and I would be more excited if we were not in the back of our minds afraid that some meddlesome know-it-all would call the authorities because in America, children must be endlessly supervised by a parent or nanny or school administrator within arms' reach at all times until one day they are given a drivers' license.  It seems so silly. 

The point is this:  no one in the family wanted to see the third stupid Ice Age movie, except my sweet boy.  We were sad to tell him that really, we just ... ugh.  No.  He came back a little while later, "Mom, do you think that I could go see it by myself?"  Oh, um, och.  Uh ... no?  I don't know.  Um.  Ask me later.  Again, ok?

Today, I was lying around at the pool after my attempt at a suitable working out (AquaJogging round the diving well for one hour is not any kind of replacement for my usual grueling sorties, broken foot or not) and thinking about the burn from cooking & all their little errands and how much my little boy very much wants to see that blasted 3-D movie, and in a theatre we know quite well and in our neighborhood, in fact, and I want him to be able to see it, if only his sister wanted to see it, also, they could go together and stay together...

What came to me of course (of course!) was Frank O'Hara's delightfully nervy and daring and sharp, "Ave Maria," which of course starts plaintively, Mothers of America/let your kids go to the movies! and ends with don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice/ and the family breaks up/ and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set/ seeing/ movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young.

I have long  wanted to love the poem for its shocking verve, but was at the same time never really sure of what to think of it!  Now that I am here where it is relevant, it makes me laugh and also surprises me that it makes me say, "Yes!"  Mari scoffed, because of all the poem says in the middle, and pointed out, "You don't let Garçon use the men's room by himself." But the poem does not say I should let him go to the men's room! It says "go to the movies" and that is what he wants to do! Convenient, that, and I say yes! Now is the time! Always with parenting him, not Fille, but always him, where to go next always feels sudden to me, but also always certain & sure.  Like falling from a bike.

buttery

 

Last April, for National Poetry Month, I featured one of my favorites, “Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death,” which is genius, genius, brilliant, brilliant, and exactly the kind of poem I love.  In December, I received an email from the poet, Christopher Kennedy.  Evidently the version I typed in, from the 2004 AWP-panel handout, was different from subsequent revisions and a stanza had gone lost until I (unknowingly) hosted its resurrection.

What is significant about this exchange is that the minute I got an email from Kennedy writing about his reunion with his prior revision, I immediately went scrambling through the internets to get back to the weblog post where I affixed the poem.  I knew there was some amount of damage to assess & control, because I knew I had written frankly about my appreciation of his countenance.  I was quite relieved to find that at least I had refrained from using the word “beefcake.” 

This is a very good example of the kind of trouble I can get into with my eyelashes, the avoidance of such trouble and mixup was a little bit behind my oath to forswear sweet talk for the duration of this last Lenten season.  Only a little, though.  I mostly I find that people do not take offense at flattery, particularly if it is sincere.  The potential for confusion is there, but easily deflected by my forward, girlish glee, as opposed to furtive, childish backpedaling.

The point is none of this, but anyway that I have been thinking of Kennedy's fittingly-titled poem, The Genius, endlessly, what since I do not love my son anymore and the feeling seems to be mutual, more or less.  When did your mother stop loving you?  Was it when you were ten?  This is where they are formed, the hard & insoluble nuggets of meanness, and I have to remember there are two sides to each story. 

I want to some day -- when I am thinking about poetics -- examine how very many poems get me in their third stanza.  I know that my own work tends to have something akin to a bridge right about then, but ... well, no just thinking right now about poems I find myself murmuring to myself, no, it is just a coincidence that the nuggets of meanness are to me as relevant as sympathy being mistaken for love, which is also a good reason to curtail sweet talk in this confusing, mixed-up world.  

Anyhow, make the clicky.  The Genius, by Christopher Kennedy.  My columns are too narrow to present it properly on this page, but it is not long to load or anything.  You might take as long as you like, for it is mighty swell. 

Kennedy is a genius and also quite loaded with what is politely referred to as charisma.  He has three books of forthrightly grim prose poetry – Nietzsche’s Horse, Trouble With The Machine, and Encouragement for a Man Falling to his Death.   A fourth, Ennui Prophet, is due in 2011, I have read.

While this year was awful for the monthlong mix tape of poetry -- I mean, when people look back at 2009, they will say, "She was borne aloft by Frank O'Hara, Paul Violi, and Christopher Kennedy!  And she watched Heathers five times in the first quarter alone!"  -- I have been very mix-tape productive at old 8tracks.  Starting with what about Kay and moving along through all the rest.

Most recently I have patched together a little something to salve against the pain of sons and their heartbreak proficiency. Garçon is some kind of heartbreaking prodigy, because my other girlfriends with animals for sons have grownup-men teenagers. At the moment, for me, it really boils down to the perfect balm of BB & Lucille going on about the thrill being gone. Yes. That is my narrative, for now.

I'll break your arm

A week ago, I bought tickets to a Brewers game.  Oh, and the Philadelphia Phillies are going to be there, too.  They won some kind of ... was it a 4-H prize they got last year?  Or something?  I dunno. 

Anyhow, it has been raining and rainy all week, thunderstorms at night, very bizarre weather, and I have been mostly tolerant of it, get it out, I would think.  Because Thursday, I wanted the weather to be clear.

Which, of course, meant that this poem was on my mind.

The Rain
Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—-
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

The children can't get enough of these guys, like, ever.  This is their first ball game & I am bringing a big pad of paper and colored markers.  They have nine innings to learn the game.  The weather is going to be gorgeous. Seats behind home plate!

this picture is only seven words

  

ham
with a face &
cartoon hairdo

Alex, who I sometimes let influence me a little, was on me about Nat'l Poetry Month & my own poetry, not just the appreciation of others' work.  To that end (never mind that I hate poetry), I was going to zip through a whole 10-minute poem (if anyone can remember those) but then got distracted by an image from Boogie Nights zooming into my head for some reason & now I cannot possibly write a love note to my turn-of-the-century little boy who is now ten years old. 

Any old way, when I choose incongruous words to describe anything (ham w face, cartoon hairdo), it is because they are the right ones to string along.  I just know they are because there is nothing else I could possibly say.  Like in the serendipity of writing poems or the wacky improvisation of parenting, it is just plain. 

I did once write a wacky-o post-postmodern poem about parenting, Alex.  I mean, I was writing about Kowalski (as always) and took a left turn and when I was done, there it was. 

Poem #7

The truth of tomorrow
is oxygen and sugar,
drunk from the cup of
snails come down from
California. Bridges of
crickets took rides on a
bus to drop away. Exactly
the instructions if
Saturn's condition is reborn.

The gap of your right
mind is always
a big blunder, filled
with mercury, pounds
of gold, tractors, homes,
the Chicago Seven.
The presence of the
contents of truth will
heighten their yield. Your
heart will see the glory of
the coming of the Lord. Can you
see? Look into the light,
look along the horizon, into
the very idea that runs along
behind him. You are heroic, you
are speeding, you are a summer reborn.

Being Fille's mother is not quite so quick & clear to me.  This is why my Garçon is my favorite child.

congress

Since about February, I have loved Frank O'Hara so much.  I do not care so much lately about the plausibly-deniable confession of Creeley, because our lives are short and I do not give a fuck about shyness, even if I did give up sweet talk.  It is mostly that I am fearful of going too far in the other direction insomuch as I am long years of equivocation.  

I do think the world could use some of that other direction. Especially now & with the people I love, have loved, will always love. We currently have outbreaks of: disorder, rivalries, incurability, genetic monsters, synthesis. There is terrifying synergy & destruction & property damage and no way out.  I am a little trembly and nostalgic for the time when the worst any of us could imagine would be properly & perfectly salved over by an incarnation of love in some permutation.  That also was a time of no sweet talking, but only because there was not talking, more doing.

It will happen that I will have something happen or be thinking overly much about something or feeling too many feelings -- brooding over the pain of longing --  and fragments of a poem will come to me again and again -- what poem is that? -- and am unable to rest until I remember what poem is.  When I do, I take it out and read it over and over again. 

What happened this time was that I knew which poem it was – We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying – but could not actually recall what was written in the rest of the poem, not the words nor the reach of it, that we shall have everything and promise, that we will name who we trade so that love will live and we will, too. 

Suddenly, at 36, I feel I know the names of the people that we would trade so that we would stay young & have everything we want.  It is the difference between nice to have around and to have, hold.  The strength of that comes from the confidence in our position, that to look at us now, we are fixed in our development in a stasis of metallic silver where we have been struck all along by life.  I have no regrets, but there is a distress in fulfillment.  I feel dizzy in a transition between then, when everything was fluid and possible, and now, where we can hold in our hands the truth that life cannot be maintained as long as time.

Ode to Joy

Frank O’Hara

We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying

                on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs

for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter

                over an insatiable sexual appetite

and the streets will be filled with racing forms

and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars

                will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms

                to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably

as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin

and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg

and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith

                that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness

                near the grave of love

                                                                                                No more dying

We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary

                near the elm that spells the lovers’ names in roots

and there’ll be no more music but the ears in lips and no more wit

                but tongues in ears and no more drums but ears to thighs

as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors’ imaginations

and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory

                under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters

                like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold

as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city’s abdication

and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last

and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan

                whose self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulchre at last

                that love may live

Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in

                and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all

while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds

                to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbèd limbs

that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention

and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs

as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors

pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways

like the ways of gods with humans in the innocent combination of light

and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes through the dark to found

great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time

                which wants us to remain for cocktails in a bar and after dinner

                lets us live with it.

                                                                                                                No more dying

 

An mp3 of an O'Hara reading (important!) is here at the Random House website, if you clicky the "play-button" icon.

we have plenty to say & we are saying it & that is poetry*

Five years ago, I was at AWP in Chicago, which was a lot of fun, super-fun, even as it sapped me of all mortal & mental vigor.  I heard a lot of great people saying great things about poetics and very smartly.  Also, I got to hear a tremendous number of people read their tremendous work. Tim Seibles was in a panel about ... he was reading with two other people, oh, now I cannot remember, but the topic for the panel was, more or less, Language & The Body.  He is a compelling reader -- generous to the listener & comfortable with how his work sounds when it is new to you. 

I remember, I was sitting next to my pal Olivia, who I do not see nearly enough and when I do see her it is too often in the occasion of these schmoozing, starfucker, literary thingos.  We were just hanging out, politely attentive, liking everything, and then this one had us both, just, mouths open, flattened, in a condition.  Still today we get goosebumps to remember.  If ever properly motivated, the experience would be the start for an excellent poem of my own.

This poem is from his book Hurdy-Gurdy.  He is recorded reading it here.

For Brothers Everywhere
Tim Seibles

There is a schoolyard that runs
from here to the dark's fence
where brothers keep goin to the hoop, keep
risin up with baske'balls ripe as pumpkins
toward rims hung like piñatas, pinned.
like thunderclouds to the sky's wide chest
an' everybody is spinnin an' bankin
off the glass, finger-rollin off the glass
with the same soft touch you'd give
the head of a child, a chile witta
big-ass pumpkin head, who stands
in the schoolyard lit by brothers--postin up,
givin, gain, taking the lane, flashin off
the pivot, dealin behind the back, between
the legs. cockin the rock an 'glidin
like mad hawks--swoopin black with arms
for wings, palmin the sun, throwin it down,
and even with the day gone, without even
a crumb of light from the city, brothers
keep runnin-gunnin, fallin away takin
fall-away j's from the corner; their bodies
like muscular saxophones body-boppin
better than jazz, beyond summer, beyond
weather, beyond everything that moves-­
an' with one shake, they're pullin-up
from the perimeter, shakin-bakin,
brothers be sweet pullin-up from
the edge a' the world, hangin like
air itself hangs in the air;
an' gravidy gotta giv'em.up: the ball
burning like a fruit with a soul
in their velvet hands, while the wrists
whisper backspin, an' the fingers comb the rock
once--givin it up, lettin it go, letting it go
like good news because the hoop is a well,
a well with no bottom, an' they're
fillin that sucker up!

*Alex.  Also, chatmosphere.