daily practice

Winter Wonderland.

2012-01-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

it's nearly time for you to be waking. i have not yet been to sleep. everything is mantled in snow, which somehow seems to make the world a quieter place. i got up and made myself a bowl of spaghetti, something hot against the cold night, comfort food. i think of you sleeping, and i want to send my love to you.

Those sweet talking nights . . .

2011-11-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

7th Floor, Berkeley, Asbury Park, November 4

I return from the hotel lobby
with hot coffee. The
oceanfront window is open
and I send love to the sea that is
constantly salt-scrubbing everything it touches.
It washes itself as it washes the earth and its
creatures. The bed is rumpled, and my lover is
off to begin her day. Her body haunts the white
sheets of memory and touch. Everyone needs to
be touched. In a just world every bed would be
rumpled and every morning, this one morning,
hot coffee, goodness everywhere.

Time it was and what a time it was . . .

2011-11-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

Day of The Dead, 2011

Maybe the reason we call it fall,
is owing to the fact that in the autumn
everything falls away;
Trees dissemble, the sun, birds,
withdraw, make their homes in
more distant quadrants.
I have always been afraid to think that life
is more akin to “visitation” than it is to
“residence” on earth.
So in this day, this autumn day, I collect all my
bruised goodbyes, yellow, red, brown,
in that colored round
to forage for a self,
where instead I find much leaving,
a space where fall seems all,
that, and grace, and gratitude.

You, and [then . . .] I

2011-05-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

At Rest, At Last

You invite me to re-enter my body after a near-
life-long absence. You: visceral spirit whose arms
are strong, whose bones clink together when you
speak of God, you whose flesh glows red whenever
you recall the great and ancient Ones residing
everywhere in everything,
tiny particle-gods
making up the air and the dirt
whose life the sprung crocuses, purple and yellow, fling out
toward the sun in exchange for the fire it returns,
blazingly, into the vast and expanding walls of
its otherwise dark and hollow frame. And I,
aflame with the firey particles of God,
you and I, aglow, remain,
as if made entire in a kiln.

So I—my dear muse—and my body (stranger for so long)
elicit the enfleshed songs of love, songs rejoining and
mixing with the spheres, rejoicing in our bodies, your
thighs, your own tender and vast universe between
the nested places you call me to, home, free to rock in
ecstatic forms of prayer that culminate in relishes of
silence, like a scream, a scream, sounds like your name,
dripping from my lips, earthbound, discovering air to all
celestial fire, breathing, chanting our eternal fleshy song
—we, taking and receiving, uncharred, burning.

Calling me back home

2011-03-20T23:51:00.001-07:00

Lazarus, Me

You’re calling back into being, me,
after so many little deaths, huge caverns of little graves;
you’re forcing goodbyes that have festered in their incompletenesses
for far, far too long;
calling me forward you say, “receive my love,”
you, calling me to your embrace, calling me out of the night thick with lonelinesses;
and I am reminded
to return the lightness that you bring,
the heart you bear to me,
thank you.
slipping between bright sheets, me;
sliding in from the other side, you;
us returning now, wondering where we’ve been before,
wondering if there ever was a when or there, invisible and disappearing years in which we were not always
present and together.

There's so much you have to go through . . .

2011-02-24T15:50:00.000-08:00

Dear Father

I fell asleep while reading Keats. I woke not long ago, thinking of my mother and then my father, and while still in half-dream and talking, repeating the line several times, I addressed him in this half-dream world of half-selves, “I am so sorry not to have been writing you all these many years and months, my own dear father." Next I began to write. "But I was so angry when you left—helplessly abandoned—a hopeless fledgling not able to bear himself up with his own wings. What you did was not fair—life has been no fairer—all these many years, as I say. And still, a part of me understands and forgives you. I talk about you with people as if my memories are fond and as if I loved you. It is as if that fledgling bird-boy is both alive and dead—a thousand fantastic lifetimes in an unrecoverable past, an unfinished work beyond any hope of finishing. And so the chasms that open up inside of me are vast and unnavigable—disparities of selves that have been introduced to one another only because they all exist within the same scarred and broken body—else they’d be strangers living in different continents, different parts of the world entirely. They share frivolity and sadness, and the bird-boy within—the one with whom it all began—thinks he may have missed out on much you might have offered. There is no way for him to know now, of course. Part of him was relieved that you were not to return, and another part of him—well, it was not another part of him after all. By the time I found you, an older boy with arms like a strong man, with the shoulders of an athlete, with the scrabbled stomach of a laborer, had risen up alongside the boy inside, and it was he who was not very pleased—awkward, burdened and put upon to have found you once again. These two, the bird-boy and the boyish man of great physical strength, (but hollow, without a knowable inner-life)—one robbed, the other born malformed, never knew how to say anything to you at all. It was the same for the older man who came to me a little later, the poorly married and then divorced fat man who sat on the side of the bed when you, at the age of sixty-two, were in the hospital dying. Sometimes I think the tumor in your brain kept you from all those parts of me. And now, here I am one or two lifetimes further along—and just so, another self or two more—only nine years younger than when you died, talking with you now, unsure that there is in fact anything at all to say. It is difficult to constantly reach inside, for years, and come up empty all the time. It is like never being fully alive, and ill-equipped at best for most everything there is to do in a day or over a lifetime. But here I am because a dear friend who understands these things has suggested to me that she’s been talking with you when she prays, has suggested to me that I might once again take up the faith of our fathers—funny phrase—for I have taken up that exact faith, the faithless, undependable, and overly-critical man who meant so much and gave so little. (I don’t know if that’s fair, but let’s hash it out.) I had a “great expectation” too, once, that you would have long ago helped me learn to fly. But today I walk, limp really, mostly alone right now, mostly alone for all these years, except for this new friend I mentioned. I do not want to tell you her name. She has, like God, many different names, but they are not like the names of our fathers. They exude instead a strong and womanly strain—I simply call her 'healer'—at least that’s what I’ll leave you with for now. Besides, I believe she’s already told you her name inside the temple of her God, before the tabernacle where she has prayed for your release, and mine. Or maybe I will call her 'loving woman,' even as I come to you and write to you now, these many years later, my own 'dear father.'"

I lived inside till I almost died

2011-02-18T23:37:00.000-08:00

She was a Believer and Now

i loved when I did not know i loved

because, unaccustomed, i was loved . . .

a cocoon of warm air curled around us suddenly, on a winter night, swirling with the ocean sounds; there, on the boardwalk, this amazing woman laid her hands on my back and hip. we chose to believe the warm breeze that developed did so out of loving touches honored by the god of heavens and of oceans, and although i did not really believe those things, she did. She was a believer but i was earthbound, heavy, joints giving out. She sent her love into them. And though they were not healed that very night, i loved when i did not know i loved

because, unaccountably, i was loved . . .

she, loving healer. and i foundered for being loved by her, pierced and drowning,

because, undyingly, i was loved . . .

unfathomably, i was loved.

Send in the clowns

2011-01-09T22:35:00.000-08:00

A Little January Music

To be unshaped by the crooked world
is to be misshapen;
To be untwisted is a
curse not easily broken.
"Woundless" is a freakish silver rail that stretches
for miles in burgeoning green-beginnings that remain
their own ends.

Broken
is the order of the day,
outside of which, what have i to say,
or you, what you?

Seasons come, and come, and come.
What is seen or heard?
That snow falls in winter, and nights are long.
That summer months are fleeting.

Between these, all allusion and metaphor,
undoing and undone.

The only thing for me
is me,
or you,
what you?

With all these twisted years and
breaking selves is myhistory comprised,
expendable, glass-tinkling lives,
except for one who bids me breathe but one more breath,
the hope of one more breath that you implore,
the hope of you and not much more
desired, despite the seasons, despite such misshapen
expectation, your hand in mine, perfect,
inside a winter railway station.

Caught a Butterfly Inside a Jar . . .

2010-12-05T23:45:00.000-08:00

Don't Say Sorry

Don't say sorry.
I want this.
This way with us, you so very much at the fore
of everything.

You,
opening the jar--
it only takes a knowing look from you, a word,
and I pour my will inside your jar where you lock it up,
the chaste promise, the man who offers you his strengths
in order to trust you with his weaknesses.

There is something that feels like a finger playing on skin
in the airs that connect me fully, yearningly, with you,
the one longed for--deep longing--embodied in the flesh,
turgid, warm to touch,
the elemental ode you etch in my thigh so I want never to resist
the lure of your own pale and perfect skin,
the scent of you in the rooms of memory,
my world,
my will inside your jar,
always kept, and always kept wanting.

2010-09-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

Frances

I'm not sure you'll understand.

Frances didn't know what hit her. She was feeble. Bones, teeth, calcified.

Should I have felt guilty? Her haunches, sharp, near breaking, their fleshlessness . . . Old Woman that she was, my fingers on her bones.

Forget all of that. When the vet returned with her Frances entrusted herself to the warmth of my lap, the familiar warmth of my touch on her cheek, she cooed, she purred, safe in my arms. She resumed an entitled position of confidence, a respite returned, solid. I held her waning in my hands. I held her with the muchness of love. The drugs were injected through an I.V.

So strange, her absence upon my return home.

Feels Like Home To Me

2010-09-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

You know . . . i've been thinking of you since we spoke yesterday, and how inconsistent, how crazy, or worse, how insincere you must think i am.

that is why i repeat the words--often i have repeated them--i do not think you realize, understand, know . . . .

how very much you feel like home.

because i know you as well as i do, though not as well as i wish i might, i do believe with all my heart that you need to take a stand. you need to become alive.

i've glimpsed the life in you longing to be lived. That, my love, has been your great gift to me.

i am happy with my lot, though that lot feels dwarfed and insignificant whenever i allow you to come near . . . which i do for about an hour, sometimes more, every waking day.

The Torture Never Stops

2010-09-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

The idea of a lover (a small hesitancy rises in my throat), of being loved, raises for me a space that feels comfortable, unchallenged, like “home” . . . a little infantile, vulnerable, at the same time safe.

But Allison, she was a woman who professed no love but the Platonic where I was concerned. So then, how may I—how can I—account for the undeniable fact that she remains a touchstone for me? Her very inaccessibility, her many complications, on a subconscious, even perhaps an unconscious level—something in her speaks to my own ineffable self-ebulliences, speaks not so much to the things I “do” in the world as much as to my own unjustifiable presence in the world as it is.

I do not—have never—fit.

Allison, her irresistible symmetries (I can hear her protests), raise in me feelings that speak to my own inscribed sense of unworthiness. I feel her to be “something” (there may reside my "fatal flaw") unattainable. I live in unceasing pain. I’d have it no other way. I beg for the powerful denial of Her. I am happily tortured, prefer nothing else at all. When I repeat the cliche, “I am madly in love,” I’m nearly certain that I am more mad than in love. Nearly.

But the fruit of the poor lemon . . .

2010-08-31T08:41:00.000-07:00

I admit, sadly, it would have been complicated. And the jury is still out as to whether it was Allison herself who was complicated or whether the world is, in the end, filled with complications that kill. "She died of complications." It is true, after all, that no one gets out of here alive. Sometimes, of course, only parts of us die, so that a person is no longer fully alive, or perhaps they are still alive but in some way new or altered. I don't know. I'm comfortable not knowing, better off I think. These days my only real complaint is that my hands keep shaking and I do not seem able to steady them.

Though I am decisively saddened by the whole Allison passage, by those four drugged-up fuck-heads, apocalyptic horsemen who trample and who kill whatever and whoever lie in their path (the thing I could not save)--the goddamned sadness feels different than the dreamless dark I have known. It's not the same as the black and incapacitating veil of dolors that wafts over my body unpredictably, that circles my hands and feet and steals the peace of sleep from my baggy eyes. I am much clearer about things now: clear that things are never all that "clear." Rarely is anything ever yes or no. Life events and experiences are more often "yes and no," although more "no," I think, than "yes." No is the operative ingredient of every fatal complication. A friend of mine once said, "the word 'no' has five meanings." He'd encountered that in a dream. To this day I have no idea what it means. The only thing I think about the word "no" is that it is serious. No blood. No air. No voice. No dreams. (that's four; perhaps "no sex" is the fifth). When I'm dead I expect the word "No" will be standing over my body in all its multifarious no-tarieties. No nothing. No shit.

I continue the habit, from time to time, of running my fingers over the scars, my face marked like an advertisement, a scarlet evisceration of self. Effacement. I too am like one of the four horsemen. Lethal. An arm of death. Armed.

As best as I can remember things, it had not rained, nor was the night in any way inclement. In fact, it had been a beautiful night. I'd been out, a dance recital, and beforehand drank wine at supper. The dance troupe, Latino, lithe, sexy, hastened a beauty that rose with ferocity inside my chest. When the recital ended, exhilaration caused me to jump out of my seat. On stage, the troupe bowed in unison and I shouted "bravo!" Vigorous applause all around. Finally, the last chiseled dancer traipsed off into a wing, the lights went up and the curtain came down, and I, abruptly earthbound once again, felt rude disappointment on that point.

The moment passed, transient, impossible to hold, and fending off a sense that I had nothing to go home to, I shuffled back up the ramp toward the lobby with the rest. I felt like an imposter. Poseur. I stepped outside. Cool air. Transition. I took my bearings and began walking in the direction of my car. Approaching the restaurant where earlier I had taken my supper, not wanting the evening to end, not wanting to return to my life, I went in. I remember doing it: Assenting. I still can't remember leaving.

What comes back to me, the thing I do remember: a moment of hesitation. Turn? Don't turn? I'd begun to turn and tried, too late, to pull out of the seconds that had already whizzed past. A concrete barrier. Impact. Initial disbelief. Then acceptance. Airborne. Car flipping. Falling. Spinning. Glass. Concrete. The world all upside down. Then the concrete rejoinder to my face, hands pushing off, scraping. No escape. The side of my head, my nose and chin. The sound of something cracking in my ears. Surrender, Succumb. Overwhelmed. Black. Accept.

No light appeared, no rehashing of a life. Out. Cool nature, plain and simple. Blood. Teeth. Bone. Fleeting experience of an undeniably overpowering fact: the flesh is weak.

Still, I hoped Allison might have been wounded enough to have loved a face like mine. An unfaceable face. I touch its scars, and sometimes the raised flesh that stretches jaggedly around my face feels like a net, a net of voices, of accusations. It is like a jury that has written out a verdict. A judge devises apt sentences. Yes and no. So very complicated. Sad.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?

2010-06-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

Just So; In Light

"The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love"--Thoreau.

It's about a shift
in point of view
he says, a slight raising
of the veil, an angle turned,
just so, in light,
as to reflect what lies behind,
beneath, inside.

Inflections of the souls of things
--the soul of things--
he corrects, as if he and I and
the walls are all composed
of the same thing--
Holy--something inside, beneath,
behind--
He's right, this poet with me softly.

Plow it all under, release the shine.
--no, what's apparent's just fine,
every mundane bit divine,
you and me, yours and mine.

Hip_-Hop

2010-06-05T03:46:00.000-07:00

Disjointed-Jointed

The view through this first-morning
window is something right out of Flaubert--intersecting arcs
and rectangles presently reflect the morning light as it scrambles
across the city's rivers and bridges. The light converges; remote
eaves hold the remnants of night, its cool shadows. Glass, brick,
metal, wood and sky--essaying deliberate flats-and-narrows against
columnar towers, window upon window upon window--black fractals,
smooth onyx set in elemental relief, time-buffeted and rubbed, sands
of industry and invention--durable utility, yet light shows forth from
every intersecting line, eternity runs along all-diverse trajectories,
trajectories that circle back, fall one into the other, endless
repetition, immutable processes of variation--

This synchronicity, my friend, welcomes me in my New York City
hospital bed, the morning after surgery, convalescing as I think on
Flaubert, knitting back together while ruminating on Mallarmé,
and looking out the window.

Promontories

2010-05-07T09:07:00.000-07:00

Prayer Approaching Nothing

When a promontory falls . . .
mum. da.
I am fearfully,
fearfully propelled towared my own isolated inevitables.

like an appendage whose use I’ve lost, a tail cropped,
banded and dropped, fragments . . . not of life only . . .
but even segments of my own True Self, killed off . . .
and what? I do not know. And so I pray. Whole-heartedly.
Consume me, and, amen.

Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats

2010-05-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

Cats, Old Cats

My cat, Frances, is nearing twenty, which is very old for a cat.

She must sleep twenty-three out of twenty-four hours each day.

The one left-over hour she dedicates to being fed and being loved.

Oh how lovely . . . to be a very old cat!

some kinda sing havin' to do with the in-b'tween spaces

2010-05-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

Between, and Out, and You

There is this murky world:
all blacks and whites and
overlapping blues,
none of which feels
forced.

The love you do not feel.
It’s all too stark. It’s hard.

In this world I am a kite,
slicing in and out of clouds,
slung between ecstasy and fear,
strung between joy and despair,
tethered to a world of apathy and tears,
a world I'd gladly leave behind for sky.

But they're all One World in the End.

And so I set my self to write a poem,
a poem that flies without a string,
once and for all, after all these years,
salt, seed, cloud, rain,
and me cut free.

I used to be able to describe in detail the tissue-thin
roach eggs lying in a corner of the hot apartment, black and
brown babies emerging, their shit-seeds found
in unexpected spaces, between white pages stained with
the small brown remnants,
baseboard lined with boric,
glasses filled with cheap rum
despair--

When I grew up I moved out,
tried to leave that house behind,
all its dissipations,
I gave up drinking cheap liquor
started drinking wine instead.
Between cutting ties and burning bridges
I'd barely time to think, to drink.

Then to find,
beyond the blush of wine,
You, and the open sky.

All I Have to Do is Dream

2010-04-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

April 27

Strange dream:

A pack of deer charging up a hill

And onward, majestic, their grace-filled hinds, heads aloft,

And a tiny newborn left shakily behind,

panicked and eager—both;

And myself, caught up, in the woods, cheering the straggler along.

What's Love Got to do with It?

2010-03-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

STOP! In the Name of Love

I am broken. I think that’s why I have trouble articulating my feelings, difficulty locating my thoughts. I have trouble making clean connections. I’m all association; never deduction. I suffer from a failed coherence of selfhood. Self-incongruity. I lack poetry. Inchoate persona. He-he. Not funny.

Whatever great thing it is I decide to attempt, I do initially set out with some kind of “vision,” although, even from its inception, the vision is never very clearly established. Never simple or plain. Not entirely. I stab at things, great and small, as if with a dull knife, leaving only masticated valves, lacerated tubes, sucking blood and air, all the result of desperate action. Behind are left the things I maimed, unkilled. I am unsure, unskilled. I ignore important details, overlook simple mundanities. I opt for that which lies beyond me. I am ordinary. I insist on achieving the exceptional.

I think it was Aurelius (or was it the Buddha, or David?) who wrote “don’t sweat the small stuff.” But it took some complete ass to determine “it’s all small stuff.” Not everything in this life is small stuff. I know. Instead of wisdom I was given to masturbatory idleness. I was disengaged, avoidant, from birth. Not wisdom but “wasdom.” Wasdoomed. Boom. He-he. Again, not funny.

This soft underbelly of pain—the scar across my face, the arthritis that locks down my vertebrae and causes my hip to seize—I would never have believed that I was capable of such self-mutilation had not even more serious consequences passed. Which they did. “Consequences?” you ask. I didn’t know then. I did not wake up one day and decide that I would inflict tragedy on some person, on some people, some family who did not even suspect at the time that I existed, that I might have lived nearby, just down the street even. We might have passed one another, more than once or twice, in the supermarket. They probably saw me drive past their home a hundred times but never really noticed. Not until that day. This is bad. And although this sense of things, these memories sans Beauty had come forward in my mind only after encountering her, Allison had nothing to do with any of this. The accident happened long before I met her. I need to stop now.

The End

2010-03-04T00:13:00.000-08:00

Souled Out

It is admittedly soul-boggling, the fact that I have bones, a full skeleton’s worth, a thing I’ve come to know only by viewing other disembodiments. How else would I know that I am a biologically sophisticated vertebrate?

Bones and red jellies. I’ve been living on beef, red wine, and chocolate for far too long. I’ve been in love so many times that I have learned love does not exist. I no longer believe in love. So here I am.

Wishing I were wrong. Reflexive. Not quite suicidal, but sad, not far from that meaning, that je ne sais quoi, a thing she once possessed, now all my own.

Silence is Golden

2010-02-19T19:54:00.002-08:00

Hunter of Silent Flight

I don’t know how to bend her heart. My word-barrages only
tend to separate us. Its her fault; she drives me to these flights.
Near her I grow increasingly lost, energies dispersed, elemental
and dissolved. Nothing like control remains. I am all gut, windy.
All Desire. All Want. All set in flux like nature, moving
everywhere at once. I try to hold my tongue, think "Quiet.
Steady," but the word-tide I cannot stem drowns my cause,
threatens to deluge my best, and tender, and kind intentions.
Why should words come into play at all? Words are strangle-holds
in an ill-advised and hopeless cause. Silence says much more.
More silence tongue or else, I fear, she’ll point us toward the door.

Or maybe words chisel things, hunt for
a voice that would not speak, that would prefer
to sing if only sing it could. And I a Michelangelo
confronted with a silent block of promise, a figure locked
within--one only I detect--then called to name the yet-
born thing the only way I can. Still, because she knows
my oafishness, and all the clumsy routes I’ve gone, she
knows that I’m no artisan. Not only can’t I sculpt or
sing, words remain a clunky thing I toss out like an
army made of breath, excavating passing things,
things beyond my depth, the things that pass between
us pure, beyond all fashioning. Unspoken flights I seek
to name with an arsenal of words, though pass they do
like eyes askance, or flee like flying birds. The meaning
that I want to make, with words I hope illuminate, of all
these words that come and go, the best of them is “Love.”

In the Still of the Night

2010-02-06T08:01:00.000-08:00

Maskulinity

I suffer periodic delusions of grandeur. I move in nighttime spaces, blurry spaces between grandeur and despair. This despair comes to me in colors I cannot name.

I ask why. Often. I suppose grandeur weighs more heavily after one publishes a book. But after that? I didn’t know. Don’t know. Self-accusation. Doubt. When I began to write it was out of love. How do good things go bad? Acclamation. Artifice. America.

It’s that night-space between, lingering, interminable, that makes me want that sleepless, dreamless night to end. I drink to close out the dark in-between. Drink shuts things down.

Sometimes (rarely) I cry. Anxious moments instigate tears. On those few occasions I do cry, that surrender means I’m on the edge of some annihilation. I feel unstable. Vacuous. Afraid I’ve never lived. Bravado slips off night’s ledges. Fear inducts tears that cling. I can’t even ball up a fist to shake at God. I’m a poseur. A dilettante. I go limp.

Nothing has ever come easily to me. Only this mask. I am Mask-uline. Ha-ha. I drink. It helps me every bit as much as it kills me. It helps me because it kills me. It helps me. It kills me. It is killing me. Help me. Don’t.

You see? I am beyond delusions now. I am only sharing feelings, feelings like rose and indigo inks drawn and set down on paper. An image from another time. Ink is no longer “drawn and set down.” I don’t know if the past was any better. It was another time. My gut has history. My sense of things has been forged over time. In the end, my feelings are tied to the past. My life. A history of wasted time. Of not knowing. Dreamless life.

That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? My feelings. Very Dr. Phil. Very Dr. Joyce Brothers. Lost in an age of celebrity shrinks. And for all of it, I no longer feel. This is the extended irony that runs this narrative.

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word

2010-01-24T12:43:00.000-08:00

I’m Sorry
or Hemlock

How can I not love you? Please tell me, because
I am afraid that loving you means pushing you away.

Tell me how Beethoven could not have loved the strings,
the piano, music. How could Shakespeare not have loved
the quill and the stage, his art? How might Socrates not have
been enamored of the Truth?

My art? Loving you. Help me extricate myself.

I am hopeless. Driven toward masterpiece.

You, Me.

Dear Prudence

2010-01-08T17:07:00.000-08:00

Darling Richard

I want to say the following thing, I don’t know whether I should be saying this to you, I, uh, took a picture on Main Street where the Metropolitan Plant . . . was, where there’s a little wired corner of the senior housing with a unicorn in it, I took a picture. It’s no longer there. I don’t know if it was vandalized or not. I haven’t been there in a while. But I asked one of the resident’s what it meant and he said, “Hope.” There used to be a unicorn shop in town, I discovered. Just for novelties. I was out there once and there were some boys near this woman sitting. She demanded, you know, not demanded she said there was a boy throwing gargabe so I told him not to litter. I have a right to say that to him because I am an adult. I called Champagne Rivera. I think I just wanted to make sure I was really there because I lost the paper. I spoke to a nice operator. I think that’s where they do government research, there. I used to ride past on my bicycle, government research and I think there was a CIA office there also. And the last thing I want to say is I had a bad experience with my dog last night and I called my doctor and he said I had a bad habit with my dog. I have lots of bad habits. My doves. There were these boys by the recreation field. They were playing, throwing a ball, I don’t know if I should say this, throwing their balls, ball in the air, and I yelled at them. There was truck, a Good Earth truck, parked. It was there blocking them. They probabaly had a right to be there playing those boys. I think it was a Good Earth truck. I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing.

Mother Earth will swallow you; Lay your body down.

2009-10-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

Bone on Bone Grounding

I loved my father.
He failed--in more than one thing only.
(we all failed).
My father loved me.
His bones are in the ground.

I cannot retrieve them.
I would spend nights inside a cage, pacing
All against the claim "my father"--Not Our Father--
My father whose bones lie in the ground.

They lie buried there with grandmothers' and grandfathers'
Bones, uncles' and aunts', cousins' bones, strangers' bones--
Ulnas, femurs, tibias, metacarpals, once noble skulls
Dislodged. I suckled, took sustenance from father's
Visaged marrow in the world.

I move toward him:
His
bones
are in the
g
r
o
u
n
d o
b n s
e
Wh n I bring my bones, and my mother brings
her bones too, grocery shopping, all these bones together,
I will carry this buried thought
deep inside--Your bones are not my bones.
Where can my love go?
I look around at all the people wheeling carriages in aisles
filled with jars and sacks and boxes.

I wonder about this and watch as my mother,
bent, rump waddling, propels her cart (a thing not unlike a
nickel-plated skeleton). It is packed with flesh and bones,
with pork as well as bran. She eyeballs a soup-bone for its
several possibilities. Broth? Doorjamb? Bookend?

My love, where can my love go?

Bottom's Up

2009-08-31T04:30:00.000-07:00

It makes no sense, the bend to drink,
to hear the clank of glasses clink,
the cheer proclaimed 'spite grief unnamed,
denial, which is truth ill-framed.

And in my body I bear scars,
a tribute to rides home from bars
with drunks behind the wheels of cars
who shorten lives of future stars.

Words gone slurring blankly boast
yet can't remember last night's toast,
the thrumming of the car's front grill,
the dying words of last night's kill.

Insanity. Approach the brink.
To think that I could use a drink.

2009-06-20T06:53:00.000-07:00

Teacher, Student: New Rhetoric, New Colossus
*
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Emma Lazarus
*
To the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the purpose of education is human liberation.
Professing the New Rhetorics
* * * * *
COME, said my Soul,

and there came a time I was dropped inside this Seven Story Mountain. I am the atrophied lava, viscous slag of a volcanic cavern, claw marks on its vulvanized walls where inscriptions tell others’ stories that feel terribly, fearfully, like two sides of my own simultaneity.

We willing learners of all, teachers of all, and lovers of all

I laugh and cry, one voice, laugh/cry, disparate constituents. I have a side not very many detect. Legerdemain of self. I’ve been sawn in two, even yes, asunder—which when taken apart reads, “as under.” Class. Can we take that strange word apart as well? Why should not a man or woman do as much as the seasons . . . ? Teacher, give me a word that I might be saved. . . . Emergence, Rhetoric as Love. Class is inscribed all along these watchtower walls.

Time passes, but I have not emerged out of this tower, have not traversed all these seven tiers, and have no idea where I am in relation to where I began. Memory fails. I am a spiny insect clinging to an outcrop—Where the top? Where the bottom?—I am somewhere, some unlit somewhere.

It is dark; my eyes have read so many texts that, by now, they suffer from myopic overnearness. I claw my way along walls inscribed with lines that say things like, The Man Who Became Himself. Names and initials mark the way. Paul H. Joe C. Bill W. Julie L. Tom M. John E. Jim C. Walt W. Who are you?
What-Where-Why-How. Epideixis. Essaying the stones. If I let go I will fall like a brick.

Cling.
Scrape.
Climb.
At times I [clap hands] STOP.

I stop to breathe. That’s what I’m doing here, right now, stopping, remembering to breathe. Remembering things that have yet to happen.

Soon I will resume, will search the craggy undersides of rocks for niches dug by others’ nails where I will dig my nails, where I will finger dreary-inch-by-inch this wall, moving toward air, toward other hands—there must be an opening, somewhere. I am persuaded. Breathe.

Earth, freshly dug.
Flowers, heads shorn.
Dark shroud.
Light, shades of light.
Water, pooled and stale.
Shoal, scholar, shale.

I cannot tell whether I am a hooked fish or an anchored ship. I’m nobody, who are you?

The scholar kisses the teacher

“Comparison Shopping: Degrees”

and the teacher kisses the scholar

"Mene, tekel, peres."

With finger pointing to many immortal songs,  And menacing voice, What singest thou?--I just want to live before I die-- The writing’s on the wall. Perish. Publish. Teach. Publish. Learn. Publish. Perish.
you are no scholar and never saw your name in print

I peer, peer downward, nomic-detritus filling the cavernous bottom of the Martello. Shards of broken bottles, glass scattered all along, everywhere. I see one of my many faces reflected there. Among the refuse. Above us only sky. The Jinn have been released. Release. Imagine. I inch a finger further. The pull of gravity gathers in my body. Write or be written. If I let go I will fall like a brick.

I am a Fusi dancer. I choose. I let go. I fall, stall, hear a word, find a hand.

Light!

The wrong’d made right

C'mon now touch me babe

2008-12-11T05:57:00.000-08:00

BEGGAR'S BANQUET

I’ve heard that you should always have a plan B. I didn’t even have a plan A. The only thing I could admit to for sure was that I had gotten romantically hung up on a beautiful and deeply wounded woman who, up until that week, I never knew existed. And, that in some eerily providential way, her life had crossed paths with my own. It all seemed dream-like, unfathomable. How else could I explain encountering the box, then meeting her, and the Fab Four’s arrival here in Ellenville? It was all too creepy.

It had been a good day, up until a point. Allison (and Angus) had both come to class. Everyone had the opportunity to speak, to share about their week, and to say goodbye. Allison exchanged smiles (and notes) with her classmates. I expressed my gratitude for each of them. We would meet again later in the day, our class gathered with all the other classes—“Poetry,” and “Memoir,” and “Fiction for Dreamers” among them—at a banquet, the week’s closing ceremony.

I admit I got a little misty, listening as the speaker read a poem her class had composed for the occasion. “Why stories,” she asked. “Why poems? How can we justify such trivial pursuits in a world where people are beheaded by zealots, slain over drug turf, where death seems to gain the upper-hand every evening at six?” The answer, it seemed to me, was self-evident. I looked at Allison and I was crushed by want. I turned, glanced at my watch, leaned and whispered to her. She nodded and I rose. I adjusted my tie, shook hands all around—an occasional hug—and off I sped across the floor and out of the hall. I wanted to get over to the Melrose Group for another round of very important goodbyes. Allison and I would meet up later. I had a good idea where we might confront the four dingleberries and get her voice back.

The long corridor that led to the elevators was carpeted in stainless brown plugs. I loosened my tie and ducked into the men’s room, the door swishing shut behind. The tiles gleamed; every surface had been buffed. I was alone and it was silent—the air-conditioning whirring in the ceiling vents. I did my business and ran the spigot. I thought I heard some feet patter past, but no one entered. I turned the water off. Again I heard a scurrying past the door. The lights dimmed, then came back up. I moved to the door.

Crowds of people were charging past. I stood in the open doorway, floundering, at a loss as to what this all might mean. The air-conditioner humming behind, feet shuffling the carpet in front of where I stood, suddenly I heard the shrill crescendo from without. Sirens. I entered the herd streaming steadily toward the stairs. A dull whistle buzzed the outside of the building. A razor-like wind, the sound contracting and expanding, gusting fiercely. Then it dawned on me: tornado! I half-smiled, half-shit. I surveyed the tide of faces all around me, each one more somber than the last—bodies giving way to a fearful undertow—not quite panic, but close.

I followed down the stairwell with the rest. Once at the bottom, out through the door we all poured. How strange to find it dark. Though it had been nearly a week since my last drink, it felt as if I’d lost several hours to a drunken tear. It was two in the afternoon, nearly black as night—and cold. People rushed for their cars but to no purpose. A long line of traffic clogged the one thoroughfare in and out of Ellenville as cars inched their way toward the Interstate. I recalled the warning tacked on the back of the door, up in my room. I jogged off in that direction, dodging passing bodies at every turn, scanning the crowd for a glimpse of a beautiful woman with an enormous dog as I went.

This sudden turn seemed the strangest thing to me. Looking all around, only confusion, people of every size and shape running past, heads bobbing, bodies weaving. This was the closest I’d come to anything dreamlike in some time. The line of traffic along Dubuque wasn’t moving. Folks wanted to get home. I wanted to get as far out of town as possible, until I could be certain disaster would not visit this inherently good hamlet.

The siren began another pass, a gradual heightening. Dogs yowled in response. I wanted to raise my voice in unison with theirs and cocked my head against the rising pitch. The sound felt like something solid and it mixed with the wind that whipped us all. A shrill and sensate wail started thrumming in my head. I imagined a hilltop, one as high as Ellentine Road, its peak set against the sky like a towering brass reed set to cut the wind so that even the air was sliced in two as it flew screaming past. The howl grew so fierce that I was about to cover my ears when I heard something filter through. It was faint. I did not acknowledge it and stayed my course, heading steadily for the Mayflower Tower with every step. But again I heard something and this time I turned.

Now, what did I know, except books?—not just books, but cases of them, a library full lining every wall in my house. And here I was among all these people, people swarming in every direction, seeking refuge from the threatening tornado. Here, when I looked around, it wasn’t shelves I saw, not the backs of books with faded spines. Real live people were all around. It occurred to me that if I wanted to, I could reach out and touch some of them. A chugging and a periodic POP drew my eyes to the right and the orange color registered. In the traffic, a pickup, three roustabouts sitting shoulder-to-shoulder inside the cab, one in the bed behind. Yes, them.

My feet changed direction. Looking round, I spotted a familiar face, and then another, and another. A girl carrying a guitar; purple hair. A man in a blue jumpsuit, hair pulled back behind his ears, his step determined—the Melrose group, where I'd planned on being by now if not for the threat of a twister. My eyes drew down on the jalopy chugging along six inches at a time. I could see the Ohio barroom. I remembered every orange detail, and tasted the stale scent of an old spongy carpet in the back of my throat. The music they’d blotted out with stupidities, crassness—their assault on anything civilized, anything lyric, harmonies, guitars, voices—a song began to play in my ears. Everything faded to something else, distant—they alone, these strange new people, drew into focus. I flashed back to purple days, days of wine, red things. Days of short skirts and girls whose kisses I scarcely recall, a boyhood and an age of becoming. Thighs. Backs of white calves. Heat.

Round Here

2008-09-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

After a Fight on a Last February Wednesday

If I lost you
I would be like a lonely recidivist
sentenced to a place where there is nothing good
to touch or hear or see or taste.

If I lost you
the desperate psychopath,
would break in all over again,
out to steal this light.

Once beautiful together, have we
suddenly derailed,
lights dim and flashing red?

It’s true. I’ll beg.
Turn these bars to air, once more,
white crinolines fluttering in spring,
breezy lace curtains
shadows hopping sprite-like in

the light of you.

* * * * * * *

What is it about this woman, other than the fact I find her mesmerizingly beautiful?

Even her soft laughter—beautiful. But also tender. Its sound is worked into her anger like a vein of running water. Her eyes—beautiful too, beguiling. Within their translucent hues she hides and discloses all at once.

Her reticences are part of that same confusing lack of finality. If I wait she will arrive. But, I still talk over her, never meaning to. Her voice bubbles up in starts and stops, and I haven’t learned their cadence quite yet. Listen, John. Listen.

The insights she shares speak intelligently about the multifarious world. I think she and I share a plane of experience. We see the world, not exactly alike, but in much the same way. We have felt the sting of fear and the staunch courageous stand. We have felt the surge of anger in the blood and the tender drift of caring that unfolds in tears.

“We.” It is that one personal pronoun that speaks to our pluralities. Old familiars occupy the space between when we sit around coffee, always too strong. Perhaps our feelings have been brewed that way as well. Her silences are movements of the self, her words are rungs to climb. She encourages me to rest, inspires me to action. I can be who I am with her. She can be who she is round here. And, I guess, we will sometimes fight as well.

Crazy

2008-09-22T19:01:00.000-07:00

She would later tell me that she thought I was crazy.

Though I did not intend to mention it, had not even thought of it, when she finally showed up, she and her dog, both being very surprised by the fact that I was there, on the side of Ellentine Road—I spilled my guts. Not only did I tell her that I did not think her story was a work of fiction, that I believed the events actually happened—to her—I also told her how drawn to her I was. I took her hand, looked at her and said, “Allison, I am enamored.”

She pulled her hand away. I’d made a mistake. All of it, I thought, was a huge blunder. “I apologize,” I said. “I made you uncomfortable.” But before I could retract what I had said or in some way qualify my feelings for her, she scrunched up her lips, exhaled, and resumed chugging up what had to be the steepest hill in Iowa. I jumped into the air, raising her story over my head, waving it. “I know who they are,” I shouted to her.

She stopped. She turned and looked at me. I held the story out and again I said the words, caringly this time, “I know who they are, Allison. I’ve seen them.” The dog and she walked back to the car. She opened the door and pulled the seat forward allowing Angus to squeeze into the backseat. Then she planted herself in the passenger seat and pulled the door closed. I stood there for a moment. This is good, I thought, looking in through the window and smiling. She gestured to me as if to say, “What are you waiting for?”

I got in and looked at her. I ached. Amazing. But so sad. Allison didn’t ache the way I did. It was plain. She suffered. I handed her the story she’d written and she lifted each page looking for my comments, which at some point I’d stopped offering. After three pages I had intuited by the writing itself that it had been no fiction. “Did you want me to know?” I asked her. She bent her head to one side as if to say, “I don’t know.” Then she began to cry. I touched her arm—smooth, sculpted. My heart was breaking. I looked at my watch. I had half and hour in which to get to class. It was Friday, the last day. I would leave for home on Sunday.

“C’mon,” I said. “We shouldn’t be late for class.” I started the car and headed off with this beautiful and listless pixie at my side.

When some weeks later she finally got around to telling me she thought me crazy, her reason was that she believed only a "nutjob" would want to spend time with her, much less want a committed relationship with her. She had a point. But I couldn’t help myself. I was enamored, truly. Maybe it was pixie dust or something very like it.

He Was a Friend of Mine

2008-09-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

After Watching the Very Recently Late David Foster Wallace Give a Reading on Youtube

“There’s an extended halt to the action during which I decamp.” Words written by David Foster Wallace. Sadly prophetic. Some Harpers piece on baton twirlers. He made others laugh.

Suddenly I want to ask, why didn’t you just use the name "Dave?” Or even Davy, or the e.e.-cummings-lowercase-thing dave, or after a six-pack-and-a-half, Dave-the-Rave Foster Wallace? No judgment here, bro. Just a thought is all. Your choice, David Foster Wallace, seems so formally elongated, almost academic. Wouldn’t more casual have been easier for you? Less pressure, less invasive public expectation, therefore less evasion on your part; less adjudication by a world impossible not to disappoint and by which we are mostly disappointed.

Saliva issues. Drenched bandanas. Hugs. Too few hugs.

Too few hugs.

I think of your wife, DFW. I could have taken that call. It's what I do. “911. What’s your emergency?” I go through the 911 script. The millionth time. Straight forward. No big words.

“My husband hung himself.” I check my hearing for the stratitude of her claim. I review not only her words, but the way they are served. And suddenly I see her. Oh, I don’t see her, not right then and there, but I see her. She is severed from her last breath by, what for most of us, will remain unspeakable. She’s seen it. She’s been hit.

“Okay,” I say, because I think "okay" is a comforting word. My sense of things tells me that it has the same effect as reading the words “Dutch Noodles” on a menu in a roadside Pennsylvania family restaurant. I repeat it, deeply, sonorously, “Okay.” I am conscious of the effect my voice transfers to hearers. Its monotone is cool and easy. Its timbre (unnoticeable is the trick) lends a body to the voice. “I am here,” it says—like music, all by itself. Suddenly, I am the Adagio, that part that lingers long after Barber has decided to be done, once and for all, with some fixed sense of “what should be.” Of some final thing, a finished project.

“The saddest piece of music ever written.” That’s what some scholars claim for Barber’s Adagio. I make it a point to tell that to my composition classes, true or not true. (In addition to working for 911, I also teach.) “The violins” I say, “draw you out from inside.” I motion with my hand. “They can kill you.”

She, the wife, will need time to heal. For him, the husband, the deadline is passed.

Lay your hands on me, please. Touch. Touch and go. A curious phrase. A furious craze.

I watch DFW on Youtube, “Thanks a lot,” says David, dave, Davy, as he steps, unassumingly, away from the podium.

Prayers, family. Writing, and prayers. Violins. Laughter. "What's left of before."

None of it "okay."

All the leaves are gone

2008-09-19T03:30:00.001-07:00

MID TO LATE SEPTEMBER

Perhaps it happens overnight
that leaves begin to sense it,
that suddenly their hour is short

The process of tinge hovers on the periphery of season
they do not see until it is upon them,
an immanence they have no name for

they themselves would tell it if they could,
of late, instead, the leaves grow kind of moody

. . . Go ask Alice

2008-09-19T03:30:00.000-07:00

CHESSHIRE CATS

eyes alert

quick as cats'

the chess players

bump and bang and parry-check

close-mated war-board

two face off

one's rooked

one strikes

august heat, night on a savannah

hunters crouched in tall grasses

Waiting for you to . . . come along

2008-07-31T22:46:00.000-07:00

Waiting

Allison. That was her name. And the day she entered my classroom, Monday, she was wearing a spaghetti-strapped sundress, dark burgundy to blue, a busy pattern of red and white flowers spread over her fit and slender form. She took a seat to my left, and her eyes, blue enough to contain clouds, were most often cast downward. Though I resisted the urge, my head would start to turn in her direction whenever she moved, even if only a finger. I could barely think and so assigned her a place on the periphery of my conscious mind. If I engaged her in any way directly, I feared I’d be unable to teach.

Because her skin was white white, she looked delicate, even fragile, porcelain. And this was so despite the fact she out-muscled most of the men in the room—her shoulders beautifully orbed, her upperback bare, diamonded. When class ended and everyone had left, I just sat there listening. I listened to the low-heeled clacking of her sandals as they receded down the hallway. An airy rush, the outside door pulling open and swinging shut. Silence. Absence. A week later I would still recall the backs of her calves with pleasure.

By mid-week, I’d started imagining the kinds of music she’d listen to, the movies she would most enjoy, what spending a day with her would be like. The idea of sharing time with her, of touching her, impeded my concentration. Even simple tasks like reading grew cumbersome. I had grown incapable of maintaining a casual conversation for more than three minutes without finding myself distracted because some phrase used, or some passing resemblance would bring her to mind. I appeared to be an idiot, even to myself. Now it was Friday, the last day of class. This thing had gotten out of hand. I determined to take some action.

Word was, if you waited long enough alongside the hilliest road in Ellenville, in time, she and her dog would come running past. The hilliest road in the city was situated just beyond the Prarie Ridge Mall, along Ellenville’s northernmost boundary. I grabbed a file stuffed with students’ stories, swept my keys off the desk, and headed for my car. It was nearly nine. I’d be there in fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. I pulled out of the May Tower lot and headed downtown for gas and a little grub.

Now, there were not a great many high ridges nor much steep terrain in Iowa. Cornfields comprise a good deal of the turf. But when I got past the Prarie Ridge Mall, my car began to climb and cough and I thought blood would seep from my pores in fat, pressurized drops. Ellentine Road was the steepest hill I’d ever encountered. Driving up its spine was like driving in the direction of the sky, as if the all too visible heavens were my final destination. I feared my car, nearly perpendicular to earth by then, might tumble backwards at any moment. And though that thought was disconcerting, it was not enough to stop me.

I pulled onto the shoulder about half-way up what was, I guessed, the one mountain in Iowa. I wondered how Allison could run so much, so hard. Something had to drive her. Unbounded energy seemed to fuel her beautiful and busy legs. I imagined her calves churning like pistons, her thighs surging with strength. This much at least had changed, I’d forgotten about feeling depressed. Being out here with the sense of some approaching unknown, some potentially new and wonderful thing, raised my spirits so that I grew keenly aware of everything around me.

She got legs . . .

2008-07-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

NUMBLESS

Her legs were not very long, though neither were they very short, each sculpted limb, thin-skinned, roundly muscled. I wondered if she knew that her dress had ridden up. Or more accurately, I wondered how much of her might be wistfully and secretly aware. People—we hide things. But there I was eyeballing her thigh, holding an appropriate silence, a silence mixed with the pain of pretending I did not notice the whole fleshy scene. I watched her. Her dog watched me.

Not that you can blame a guy. Yet, after having read her story, “The Story of a Girl,” I withheld any present inclination to move things up a notch. I suppressed any words that might burst open with sudden and resident desire. That was my “stuff.” I’d have to deal with it. As for her “stuff,” I suspect even now, that she yearned for nothing more deeply than the freedom to own the fact that she was beautiful. What I was learning however, was that as beautiful as she was, for her, “beauty” had resulted in only pain and trouble. I could see that she had learned, of necessity, the safety of “alone,” the untouchability of “ugly.” And as I read her words I came to understand that the thing she wished for more than anything, was the same thing she feared most of all—connectedness, union with another human being. I imagined I could hear the chambers of her insides echoing desolately. She had retreated far within and remained alone. I recalled the image of her leg and yearned for her.

"Ached" may be a better word than "yearned" for what it was I felt. In fact, I’d started to ache whenever this enigmatically beautiful woman crossed my path. It was physical. It was not long before this physical aching began consuming my nights as well. I remained unsure whether it was her presence or her absence that proved the heavier burden. Words continue to fail. “Beautiful” simply can’t cut it. Yet it’s as close as I might come. Even now, I cannot pin down a name for whatever resonated out of her streamlined features, her porcelain frailties, her mouth so like a doll’s tipped with wings. I felt a strange familiarity between us whenever she was near, and acted as if I’d known her better than I did. This was so even though I’d never really conversed with her except in the most casual exchanges. Those few times were matters of polite and necessary teacher-student brevities.

But it had been a week since her dress hiked up in class, a week since I’d read her story, and in that time she’d not returned. I had seen those four fools roll into town in their rickety tin can of a truck, looking just as gruff and stupid and making as much of a racket as when I’d left them back in that Ohio lounge. I was growing sick.

I’m not going to tell you that I never drank again. But during my time in Ellenville I decided that I needed to make that call, that I had to decide exactly why I'd come to Iowa. I needed the money. That was true. But still, this was Iowa. Many “greats” had passed through these precincts as they undertook to learn their craft. I was on hallowed ground and I knew it. I needed to honor the artists and the craft, the writers, the poets. Only, it hurt. Without a drink I was less numb. My guard was down. I was numbless.

And so it also seemed the silent beauty of this strange woman had infiltrated bits of me I’d thought long dead. It frustrated me to think that she was gone now, gone just as suddenly as she’d appeared on that first windy night by the river. Everything seemed twisted; I was living between two selves. What is more, I’d stopped believing, shunned everything I’d been taught was true and good, things like “love wins the day,” the notion that the universe honors good intention and hard work, that the bad are punished and the good are rewarded. Karma, resurrection, colored eggs, reindeer: they all seemed part of the same puerile fantasy.

I knew for some time that love had failed, over and over and over again. Love does not win the day. That's what I believed. Dreams do not come true. Actions speak louder than words and most other things. I could handle the fact we all die. The thing I couldn’t take was the idea that I'd realized all these lessons far too late, too late to make a different kind of life, too late to stake a new claim in this dog-eat-dog world where subterfuge and cruelty win power and status and wealth while the rest of us mope around wondering what went wrong. Some people said the world had gone bad. I sided with others who insisted it had always been this way. And really, it didn’t matter much to me. Not now. The whole kit-and-kaboodle felt like a last attempt at a sad reminiscence.

I am always surprised to find that life can go from exhilaration to despair in the span of ten minutes. “Despair” is actually a shitty word for the pit of darkness it claims to account for. “Despondency” may come closer to a sense of the thing. But at some point words always fall short of the thing they describe. When I think about it, I didn’t just one day lose my ability to dream. No, when I think about it, I must admit that I no longer wanted to dream. Somehow I’d grown convinced that dreams were lies, bulwarks against the painful, despairing-and-despondent truths of our sad and ultimately dreamless lives.

And that’s where I'd gotten stuck. But all those feelings hadn’t really taken root, not fully, until I realized she had gone. I read her story over again, feeling alone and helpless, much the way she must have felt. I imagined her body, light and quick, running down the road in her athletic gear. And as I read, I knew it wasn’t just a story. I knew those four dickwads had done unspeakable things--to her, and probably to others. I also knew that she was beautiful and intelligent, silent and driven, robbed of her voice. Still, she could write. I wondered too, whether she still dreamed and if so, what kinds of things she dreamed about.

It would be crazy for me to say I loved her. I had yet to hold a decent conversation with her. I imagined the kinds of conversations we might have had. I wondered, as I lay sleepless through the long hours of the night, what her voice would sound like. Our tastes, i guessed, would be different. She was younger. I’d talk with her about my marriage and divorce and the loss of a little girl I had promised to love yet could not love enough. Those things. I wanted to cry, only, I could not. This limbo is tearless as well as numbless. I am alone with my thoughts too often. I would try to find her.

Helter Scherherazade

2008-06-16T01:11:00.000-07:00

Her Story

She began her story in a prolific voice. She ended on a devastatingly tragic note. “The history of human speech is really the history of voice,” she began, “and the history of voice is really the history of everything. It resounds in the unfolding of a singing universe, echoes in a cockle shell of varying scale, a rotating octave out of which it blares forcefully—palpable, operatic, beastly. It extends out of the beginning of things that carry their own ends in finite and numbered breaths, the dying dragon, the hero’s song. If we cannot hear it, I’ve always thought anyway, one might as well not be born.”

I read straight through. I laid the last disturbing page on the table. Exhausted, worn out, I closed my eyes. How terrible, violation and silence: violence. How wicked. The writing vivid—beautifully rendered evil—“The Story of a Girl.” I didn’t see it coming till they held her down. Over and over they thrust their arms down her throat, their hands, knuckles and wrists elongated, fingers thick and groping. They wrenched out the one thing that, by nature, seemed wholly her own.

“Down her throat they plunged, grabbing hold, first one till he tired, then the next, each one trying harder than the last to dislodge it. Cold to her tears, glad at her humiliations, eager for her gurgling cries—the more she struggled the more they punched and twisted and banged.”

And then it gave. One of them finally drew it out of her, blood dripping, roots dangling. I continued reading, turning page after page. I could see him and he looked like he’d gone mad. Light glimmered in his cupped hands like song itself. He lingered there, hovered above her body which had gone limp. Her mouth moved but she made no sound. I saw his face, saw all their faces. My heart banged. Never had I seen anything as sad, her face, her hair matted, her eyes running the color of blood. Beauty made to feel ugly, joy murdered, goodness left for dead. I touched my cheek. It was her cheek.

I knew them all. I’d seen the four of them before. They had raised an ugliness in me then, but that seemed inconsequential compared to the gaping pit that, then and there, alone in my room, opened in my chest. I was shaking— impotent rage. The image of her face, the way he bent over her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in her ear, folding the light of her voice in the dark hollow of his hands.

*

That's when it hit, out of nowhere. The thought. Cold sweat running down a tall slender glass, sudsy. I could smell it. Her story had twisted my thinking. The taste of a drink infiltrated my body. Craving reared its head, bared its teeth. Inside my body an unnameable tangle of wire sought relief. (I thought I’d gotten past this thing.) I stood, walked into the kitchen, ran some water, splashed my face. With intention, I drew deep breaths, turned, leaned back against the counter. Why are you here? The question presented itself as it had before. To drink?

It took a minute, but I stood my ground and soon it came clear. It was only a story! How could I? I snickered, turned, and set some water on the stove for tea, grabbed a cup out of the cupboard. And just as I had nearly returned to myself fully, a ruckus grew outside. A jumbling rattle clanked and pinged. I turned to the window. Walking round the table, I peered out. Rank unbelief nailed my feet to the floor then. Impossible, I thought. It could not be. Them.

Houses of the Holy

2008-05-29T01:06:00.000-07:00

STRUCTURE

People sometimes tell me I’m a "people person." I laugh to myself whenever they do. I understand their reasons for saying so. I can be garrulous. But they don’t know how things really run inside of me. There are different levels inside of me. When I say I am a structured person, I don’t mean that I do things in an orderly manner. No. When I use the word structure in this way, I am referring to a dilapidated house of wooden crates and planks, warped and molded and glued together, melded by twisted, rusty nails, oversized bolts. My inner rooms are an amalgamation, a ramshackle clubhouse where people hide inside whatever room they choose.

One room is all purple, light and dark, and there are bowls filled with little bits of paper laced with drugs. These bowls are placed politely on doilied tabletops as if they held sweet candies wrapped in cellophanes. There are windows in that room, and trees outside, a park where children laugh and cry and shout.

In another room there is no light. This is where the half-people gravitate, those half-people whose transitional floors gave way too soon, planks crumbling beneath their feet before they had time to cross from adolescence to adulthood. So they fall into that gap, one that opens somewhere between a pimpled, glad invisibility and the somber space below, a dark space where they land, bodies thumping, among the shriveled skins of dried up selves piled around the room like buffalo hides.

There are rooms where people die too early and others die too late. Rooms full of sadists and idealists. Rooms where pretending never stops. Most pleasant are the kitchens, or the rooms with the overstuffed chairs. Some have greeting spaces and staircases. I have built this house inside of me.

It seems that I’m involved in something new, though nothing yet is clear. One thing not yet clear is whether this flimsy house will be demolished, or if I’m only adding on another room. There are levels here where what you see is seemingly what you get. And there remain too, sublunary hiding spaces where people (people like me at least) really live. For a long time I’ve been thinking that once a room is built, it’s built.

I’ve been trying to exercise too. It’s not my nature. I’m doing it because the world "out there" requires physical continuity. I’ve never been physical. When I was a child I could not run fast, could not skate gracefully. I lacked balance. Others seemed born with it.

When I was capable of real sleep, I’d have this recurring series of dreams based on real-life events. The dreams are set in the same summer I learned to ride a bicycle. My father had rented us a bungalow near the beach. That summer stays with me even without dreams. I’d fish for minnows in the bay. I'd stuff bread inside a milk bottle that I’d sink, a rope tied round its slender neck. Fat minnows swam in after the bread and I’d pull the bottle in. I discovered places crickets lived, in a nearby vacant lot, all sandy dirt and rocks, tall grasses clumped around.

One morning I walked up on a yellowish ball of larvae swarming alongside the body of a grasshopper who’d been nicked by the tire of a passing car. Apparently, her pregnant belly had popped. There they were, her squirming babies baking on warm tar. I killed a praying mantis too, behind the house that summer, just because. I hear talk about alcoholic behavior. I sometimes wonder if that’s the kind of thing that’s meant.

* * *

In place of sleep comes gravity; gravity and an unqualifiable peace—both fill the air I breathe, here in my bed, sober, detached. And as I put some sober days together I am finding this truth, that the more I let go the more I tap some hidden and sustaining principle. It’s as if when I do my part, taking care of what’s in a day, tilling the garden as it were, of my own hidden life, then whatever it is that’s out there smiles on me; not in a way that “honors” my daily endeavors because I deserve a reward or something—no, more in a way that these two operating principles, letting go and empowerment, simply resonate with one another. At Melrose House they say: “Just do the next right thing.” Not easy for a putz like me, but I’ve been trying it on for size and well, so far so good.

When, at night, I lie in bed I think about the day. That Monday’s instructors conference, or how far I walked, how many bars I counted (Seventeen. This is a college town for sure). I think about writing again, and my first class. My first class; I must admit it went well. Imagine my surprise when she walked in. Her hair was up, and she wore a flowered dress. Stunning really. I held my breath. I’ve got a good poker face.

And her dog—no one in the room batted an eye. Apparently she takes it everywhere she goes, that enormous, broadly muscled beast. Her silences. I’m unsure which is more ominous, the dog or the quiet that surrounds her. Everyone in class but me seemed to already know: she cannot speak.

“Have you ever felt really empty?” She handed me that note a few nights back. I had not recognized them then: the first six words of my first and only book. She’s a fan. How Glea would laugh at that notion. Maybe not. Glea’s the one that got me here after all.

I’m the one who can’t believe I still have fans, but in fact, ninety-nine percent of my student’s are there because they loved the book. My book. I don’t want to screw this up. God, please, don’t let me screw this up. “Let go. Let God,” they say at Melrose House. I close my eyes. Something near to sleep arrives. Gravity. It is quiet.

I-i, II-ii, III . . . M M M

2008-04-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

Who can calculate which there is more of, water
or blood? Salt and brine, or a sanguinary course
of heat? Sky and cloud, or the oxygen blue pulse,
in-beat of a circuitous and ceaseless rondeau? Source
of poetry, moon-drawn, displaced by the falling prow of

the sky, the rolling wave of the planets, the rush, the lull,
iced and thawed in the history of numbers, seventy beats,
One-one, Two-two, Three . . . a thousand thousand thousand
shark and flesh infested Oceanias. Only a slight hint, a
scent, bare and funereal, of salt-blue, of red that breaches

the shore, the rising tide of all that is, everything in
this one instant, breathing, beating, effervescent baptism,
crumbling mountain of ash and salt, the flood that overtakes,
that sucks the air from our mouths, that liquifies the ground
beneath our feet, broken shells, endless undertow, spume.

This Magic Moment

2008-01-15T01:08:00.000-08:00

Wine

Sometimes, they say, you can taste chocolate in the wine, pepper, eucalyptus. Critics suggest wine has "structure." Nonsense. Not to say some wines aren't a bit like turpentine while others flow like silk, but after a bottle (or two or three) why would a palette care one bit? It does not take long for the head to turn to effusion and whimsy. Whenever I drink wine I taste something broken: bone, blood, steel. The wine I drink has teeth in it—my own.

Yes, I know, the accident again. It is always with me, even when I don't notice it until, turning, I catch my reflection in a shop window, or until a certain slant of sun reminds me that all of life is a Nothing's short reprieve—no more, no less.

More than one person has asked, "Did you see a light when it happened?" Emphatically I tell all of them no. No, I say. There was no light at the end of a long tunnel. Nor did I see my own face laughing at any point, my boy-body riding on a park swing at four or five, or myself all pimply faced and a shy high school freshman, a first kiss, a fight with my father. My life did not flash before me. "That's a bad sign," at least one person has informed me.

What I knew at the moment when my face was actually being destroyed, the only thing I knew, was "the real," which I have ever since believed has its own significant power. Nature. Life yes. Death yes. Yes, when the corner of a concrete slab busted through my car window, me suspended upside down, the car overturned and spinning, and when that slab, overcoming the shield of my flailing hands, my arms, as it momentously began to purée (I heard the bones cracking) my cheeks, the only thing offered me was an obliteration not to be denied which, in and of itself, once come, was not as bad as it sounds. Black I tell them, is what I saw. Nothing the thing I experienced first hand. I surrendered. I was overcome. Lights out.

Obviously, I survived. And when I hear this spurious talk of wine, these are the things I think. An empty bottle weighs twice as much as when it had been full. It is filled instead with craving and consequence, with shame and despondency. Someone has said, "Live the life you have imagined." What happens when you look around to see that all the rot and poppycock of your life is in fact the life you have imagined, the one you have built, the one for which you alone are responsible?

* * * * *

The early morning sun was high and bright. Iowa in August is nothing if not hot. "Sorry I'm late," I said to the table full of strangers, a cafeteria-sized room so brimming with light that it washed out the color of the walls. A woman wearing a nametag (I hesitatingly clipped mine on), well spoken, well-dressed—also drenched in light—welcomed everyone, raised excited and expectant hopes for the week. She gestured from behind a thin podium at the front of the room. The sound system recast her voice in metallic, muffled airs.

There were tables all around just like ours, circled with men and women, nametags matching little folded cards on napkins. The man to my left scooted his chair over to let me in. I was dripping. I clipped my nametag to my sweaty shirt and smiled nervously, a little absently even. My thoughts were elsewhere.

I had noticed some curious structures as I walked along my chosen route—hexagonal frames of metal-sheathed, glass-paneled domes, modest semi-circular buildings set like giant buckyballs here and there around the campus lawns, all made of glass. Inside each one, visible at their centers, stood a vertical firebrand, a dark post with a flame on top. I imagined them the red eyes of leviathans peering out of time. Each structure looked identical, fragile, insubstantial.

"Those are the Author's Houses," the man I sat next to told me after the Instructor Orientation had ended. "The few fortunate students admitted to the university are each assigned a house. It's where they'll write their stories. We are very lucky to be here," he said with conviction. His nametag said Bill. "Thanks Bill," I said.

Drawing a handkerchief from my pocket, I patted my brow and turned to my right where an attractive, modestly dressed woman was sipping a glass of water. Her name was Gladys, and I learned she and her husband had moved to Ellenville from New Jersey. "There's an inherent goodness here," she said, nodding, smiling. I did not know how to react to any of it, the orientation, the Author's Houses, inherent goodness. I asked for directions to the men's room and excused myself.

These Author's Houses, as my tablemates had called them, did not appeal to me. Too symmetrical. Too something. Lovely in a decorative kind of way, perhaps. But I thought, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, give me monsters that burn and howl, not these burnished domes of glass. Small blessing: they'd remain vacant for the summer, save for the red flicker of a dragon's eye in each.

Stepping outside, I once again felt the heat of the sun beat hard against my frame. No matter. I had another meeting to attend, at The Melrose Group. I thought it a simple twelve-step meeting place, but its compass was broader than that. Before the week was up I'd learn that Melrose was actually a halfway house for people struggling with feeling problems of every kind, a self-proclaimed nut house (how they'd laugh about that).

Still, as I had not yet been alerted to that fact, I sat, calmly watching an old man the color of putty scoot his chair in and out under the wooden, candle-lit table that ran the entire length of the room. An incessant tick rippled his cheek just beneath his right eye. A girl with garish blue hair entered carrying a guitar case. The door swung closed behind her. Others arrived, some sedate, some bent as if weighed down by something hung around their necks. A couple of others looked at me and smiled as they passed. One of them said, "Welcome." Her voice rattled like pebbles in the bottom of a coffee can. I nodded at her, attempting a smile.

Melrose House itself was old. The wood-paneled walls and faded carpet set the aged tone, along with stairs that creaked and small, framed prints hung here and there on the walls—a sunny cottage, a vase of flowers. Frayed cushioned chairs abutted low corner tables set with ashtrays. Once white curtains trimmed the windows in lacey patterns and the long wooden table at the center of everything had been set with baskets of paper flowers that were touched by the candlelight.

On the hour a bell chimed. The girl with blue hair read a preamble. A few introductory remarks were spoken by another person, a man in work clothes, his brown hair pulled back behind his ears. Other people around the room took turns sharing. When my turn came I simply introduced myself as an out of towner, grateful to have found a place to come and spend a little time. "I did not have a drink today," I said.

"Hi Michael," several of them responded in unison. "Welcome." The man with the tick on the right side of his face clapped his hands together.

At the end of the meeting everyone stood. We held hands and said a prayer. When we finished, the fellow with the work clothes looked up. "I love this program," he said. "Since I've been coming I've remembered how to screw." A few of us laughed.

"I'm coming back to this group," I said aloud, and more laughter erupted. The old man with the tick clapped his hands.

That night I said a prayer. But, It wasn't the kind of prayer you think of when you think about prayer. No. This prayer was not capable of being spoken. I was out of words. And, even if I wasn't out of them, words seemed somehow inadequate. Words themselves would have thought too much of that moment to stain it with their residues. Silence proved the only reverent response.

Nor was there any conscious effort on my part to pray. As best as I can tell it, I felt still. That's all. And I seemed to be setting something out, presenting something almost physical to life itself, a gift. At the same time, I was receiving something. I had no idea what. To this day I do not know.

I nearly slept that night. I lay back quietly and listened. The wind was passing outside the window. A halo of moonlight danced along my hands. I thought of Gladys's words. "There's an inherent goodness here," she had said. I thought, too, about my parents, my brother and my sisters, when we were all very young. Here it seemed my life did flash before me.

Sweeter than wine, I thought. A long time passed before I could say anything. Then words came. "Thank you," I said out loud. I whispered it more than once. "Thank you. Thank you."

The answer my friend is . . .

2007-12-21T22:18:00.000-08:00

Wind

I did not know what time it was or how long I had been lying there. And when I realized, feeling cold there in the dark, that I had been lying half-awake for quite some time, it was with only a dull half conscious estimation. I was not disconsolate. My condition was sedate. The collar of my shirt was damp. I’d been sweating. My breath was shallow. My spirits were recessed and I lacked any motivation whatsoever to stir them up or fan them into flame. All I was aware of was the damp, the dark, a slight wheezing in my chest.

Then I felt a draft, the play of air from around the edges of the window. Wind knocked against the glass. I remembered how much I hated falling asleep in my shoes. My feet felt hot and cold at the same time—the dual currency of wind. Iowa. Voices in my head. Huffing around my collar. Fricatives in my shoes.

My mind wandered. I was in Ohio, back in that sleazy little lounge. I saw those same four skells seated at the bar. It was their voices that I heard. A heavy odor wafted through the room, rotten, a dank sponge. Still, I retained the vague sense of lying in bed, as though I were half-dead in the middle of an Iowa night, those four shitbags yapping in my head.

And there was music playing, though I did not recognize it. Their voices flooded the place and drowned it. A manic spirit, a lunatic voice, bounded round the room. I could not make it out. Everything in sight, the papered walls, the tables, the people drinking at the bar, all shadows in a dim, uneven orange haze. Wild laughter. A little box set on the bar. One of them had set it there. From time to time the loudest of them would run his fingers over it, move it an inch this way, then that. A small wooden keepsake that could have housed some jewelry or some other form of memento. And the way they hovered around it--it was always at their center, never out of reach, always in their midst--I thought it must contain something very important to those boys.

Funny. I had not noticed it the other night. But I must have. The voice speaking softly in my head assured me this was so. It had registered even though I’d taken no note, or had not wished to see it there. Again I saw the fat one with the beard reach toward the little box, but this time the clean-cut, boy-faced crony to his left drew it fast away, cackling wildly as he did. A scowl by the cheated and the cheater grinned timorously, setting it back down again. Drugs? Perhaps. Funny the things we remember, they say. Funnier the things we don’t.

The wind kicked up, rattled the window. I looked out and saw the lit and empty street. No cars. Air whistled round a shaking lamp post, rifled through the tops of trees. A sheet of news scampered along a painted yellow line. Across the way, the park, an occasional ocher lamp stand and a bench. Darkness hid the river beyond. Then something, a stick, a branch, thudded against the glass an inch from my nose, causing me to draw back with a holler. Shit! I said out loud, covering my face. I threw my feet out so that, in an instant, I sat upright on the edge of the bed. I fingered the collar of my shirt. My breathing had expanded.

I stood and headed to the bathroom to splash a little water on my face. I’d suddenly grown restless and after drying my hands I checked my pocket, making sure I had the keys before I bolted out the door. In the hall I could hear the wind wail.

A shrill ringing announced the elevator’s arrival. It opened like a yawn into which I was drawn. Three floors down, I emerged like Jonah. I passed a row of payphones in the lobby and headed out of doors. A gust of wind blew me back a step. I felt lightheaded, but my blood had begun to flow.

I leaned into the wind and crossed over to the park. Every hollow rut, every cornered sheave was filled with sound, the wind, like chimes, like the sound of breaking glass, the repeating upsurge whirling and receding, dropping suddenly, ebb and flow. I was invigorated. My steps livened. Like the wind I moved swiftly and soon I followed a trail along the bank of the black and coursing river. Its waters ran high and fast, its currents tipped with light. I began to jog and the wind blew away my hat. I spun to grab at it when suddenly I hit the ground. I tripped, and . . . I was not alone. I thumped something full of hair. I heard a growl, felt a body there, a dog—(I hoped it was a dog)—I jumped up. It was a dog, a very big, very hairy dog.

I looked down at him. He sat and gave his tail a wag. Beside him sat . . . an elf . . . a changeling . . . a girl. It was a woman with a sharp athletic face. She was dressed in workout gear. A pony tail hung out the back of her runner’s cap. She was seated on the ground beside this brick shithouse of an animal, this broad-chested mauler that had fixed an eye on me.

And this woman’s eyes were full of terror, startled as she was at my sudden dropping out of the sky. She wrapped her arms around the dog and I smiled the tiniest smile, a frightened little smile, an embarrassed little smile. Her eyes softened and she looked away, reached into a satchel, scribbled something on a pad. Then she stood, all five foot two of her, crisply muscled like the sun, and handed me a note which, had I not been firm, would have been hauled off by the howling wind just like my hat.

With that she turned and ran off. She bounced, easy as a bean, elbows high, her solid chocolate dog in tow. He looked back twice to check me out and soon I was alone, again, or so I thought. I looked around making sure that was the case. Strange to find someone out this late on such a windy night. I turned the note up and read “Have you ever felt really empty?” I made a grumpy sound with the back of my throat and pocketed the scrap. Whackjob, I thought and turned back in the direction of my room. The wind beat against my back, tousled my hair. I turned to look back but she was gone. Beautiful, beautiful whackjob, I said aloud, the words swept from my lips in a great gust of wind.

The Arrival

2007-11-25T19:07:00.000-08:00

Ellenville

Junkies call it jonesin’, kickin’. I would not characterize the minute tremors I was feeling as that severe. But still, I had begun to notice the absence of a drink. My focus was nil, slightly malaised, slanted off to one side. Anxiety, probably more than I realized, searched the haunts of my stomach—that hawk-eyed predator probing dark spaces where anything pre-cancerous might be holding out. I did not shy away even when it stabbed. No. I nearly welcomed the feeling. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since my last drink and here in Iowa, in my room in Ellenville, I felt strangely alive.

I set my bags down, looked around. Not much to see. It was a dormitory room: two beds, two desks, two chairs. I sat on one of the beds, the one under the window. The view looked out on a main road. Beyond the road a park with a concrete skateboarding rink and lots of grass fronted the Iowa River. It careened, serpentine and ever so slowly, through the park’s green precincts. The room connected with a little kitchen, a stove and a refrigerator, a sink and a table that seated four. I was well situated, and at the moment I felt very happy.

“IOWA SIDEBAR: In Case of a Tornado/Severe Weather“—a notice hung on the back of the door. I read with great curiosity:

"The Iowa Severe Weather System whistle will sound a steady three-to-five-minute warning upon the issuance of a tornado warning by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. Residents and guests are advised to take shelter in the basement and lower floor corridors or other areas without windows."

Tornados. Areas without windows. Without glass. Here was something I had not considered, not even as a remote possibility. In my world tornados did not exist. Twisters. I drew down on the possibility, just for a moment, and finally chuckled at the remoteness of it all. Oh Toto, we’re not in Jersey anymore.

My phone rang and I rummaged through my bag trying to lay a hand on it. By the time I did it had stopped ringing. I flipped it open to see who had called. Glea. I closed the phone and dropped it on the bed. For a couple of minutes I watched out the window as an occasional car or pickup passed by. A lot of famous writers had come this way. I wanted a drink but a voice in my head kept posing the same question. “Why are you here?” it asked. “What did you come here for?”

To drink or to write? I knew what it was asking, and I needed to decide which. I could not do both. I got up and walked over to where I’d dropped my bags. First order of business, laptop. I pulled it out and laid it on the desk. Several pamphlets were arranged in a sort of desktop holder pushed back against the wall, a kind of welcome package. There was one for a pizza delivery place, “Till 1:00 AM: Seven Days!” Good to know. I set that one aside. Another gave the hours of operation for the university’s office and computer lab.

I flipped through each of them until the word “Alcohol” made me stop. I read, “Melrose House Meeting: 5:30PM” and took it as a sign. God was in this place, God in Ellenville. It was now three. After hitting the head and splashing some water on my face, I returned to the bed. My head hit the pillow as if landing on a stone. I pretended I was Jacob. Even in my sleep-deprived and dreamless mind, I could remember what it meant to just pretend.

When I drink alone I prefer to be by myself.

2007-10-23T18:59:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO BLUES

I will say (I say it often, actually) my drinking did, in fact, disturb me. I was ambivalent about quitting. I lacked drive. It is hard to know whether mine is an addiction or a weak moral will. When I left Chicago, it was on a clear, sixty-five degree morning in late July. I asked the valet who delivered my car if the beautiful weather was typical. He took the dollar from my hand, flicked his cigarette to the pavement, and snickered.

Night before last I’d arrived in Ohio, a Howard Johnsons just east of Indiana. Conveniently, it had a little lounge attached, a dank hovel with a medium length bar and six or seven candle lit tables, a few cheesey looking cushioned chairs scattered around. Three or four people sat at the bar. The once red carpet had by now been so worn and soiled it appeared in every way more like a dark, odious sponge tacked to the floor.

I was swigging my second long-neck when four skells I’d seen earlier came through the door. I’d noticed them unloading their truck as I entered my room. They must have arrived about the same time I did. Wearing flannel and leather, bearded and loud, they now found a spot at the end of the bar. No one but me seemed bothered.

I wanted to sit quietly. I simply wanted to hear the songs I’d played. Taking my beer, I moved to a dimly lit table in a
corner near the jukebox. The red-orange chair I’d squeezed my butt into hobbled on uneven legs. I tried hard to block out their agitating voices, but the four cretins at the end of the bar were so voluble that others had to talk over them to be heard. The song playing softly was barely audible then and something ugly was growing inside of me. I cranked down another gulp. I sneered at the four assholes intruding on my space. Something about them triggered aggressive and angry impulses. My reaction felt territorial. I swashed down the rest of my beer.

The song I had been trying to hear was playing softly, woodwinds and strings, Saxon, folksy, something John Barleycorn. The loud, gruff stupidities rising from the end of the bar, the music overrun and barely audible, I grew angrier, fidgeted, stared. Then it dawned on me, a peculiar self-revelation. Maybe the music got into me, entered in a way that smoothed over my discomfort. Or maybe it was that I knew, if confronted, those four mutts would take turns kicking my sorry behind around the parking lot out back.

Whatever the cause, it was a stark moment of clarity that amounted to this: they were not the source of my agitation. Whatever was going on, this was all about me. My discomfort had something to do with the very fact that I was here. That I was drinking when I knew (even now I want to take that word back, replace it another like “suspected” or “believed”) but yes, I knew I should not be drinking. I also knew that if one of those gorillas caught me eyeing them, there might be an unpleasant price to pay. I did not always get in trouble when I drank, but whenever I did find trouble, I’d usually been drinking. I had no intention of getting my ass handed to me by four local rabble-rousers outside some two-bit Ohio lounge. So I set the bottle on the table and returned to my room, a little sad, a little lonely, dreamless, yes, but none the worse for drunken impulsivity.

The next evening I landed, still in one piece, in downtown Chicago. The only room I could find was at the Hilton. “Probably the last room in town,” the clerk informed me. By the looks of things, she had spoken true. Two other less expensive hotels I’d stopped at had been all booked up. The Hilton’s lobby was packed with conventioneers (a medical convention I’d later learn). I took the room. Once settled, I saw it was nearly time for dinner. I determined first to go for a walk, look around a little, and see where my travels might take me.

I’d heard Chicago was a lot like New York. It’s not. That’s not to say that my discovery of a nearby park fronting horizonless Lake Michigan was not captivating. Certainly, it was very inviting with couples walking and joggers passing by, children playing everywhere. But when I made my way back into the city all I discovered there were depressed little streets and generally poor quarters, empty storefronts, brick walkups, an occasional wine store, auto-body shop, or Chinese takeout. Not far from my hotel I spotted a little watering hole whose signage carried a name I knew. I’d been listening to Buddy Guy in my car, on and off, since I’d left Jersey. It was his name I saw above the entrance. Three times I walked past before deciding to head on in.

I couldn’t believe the luck—Buddy Guy’s Blues Club! When I had first seen it I thought it was a gimmick, that his name had been used only as a draw. As things turned out, he really did own the place. Legendary blues guitarist Buddy Guy. Framed pictures and concert posters, a souvenir vendor selling novelities and t-shirts bore witness, as did other memorabilia, guitars the color of “cherry-wine” and gold records plastered all around.

I took a table situated before a well-lit stage where a little blues ensemble, a southern band, was playing, not too raucous, almost gently, brushed symbols and a slide guitar with bass. A waitress approached. Despite my Ohio moment of clarity, I remained incapable of reconciling my presence there in Buddy Guy’s with the thought of a diet cola. I ordered a bucket of frogs-legs and a brown ale.

Several brown ales later, I was feeling light. I paid my bill and left. That I’d entertained the possibility he, Buddy Guy, might be hanging around shaking hands, signing autographs, maybe even playing a set made me feel a little foolish when I considered it. I wouldn’t be hanging around there if I didn’t need to either, if I had someplace better to be. I stepped into a wine store, picked up a decent pinot noir and a corkscrew.

Back in my room I felt tired. I was sweating. The light stabbed at my eyes. They felt wooden and heavily drawn. I felt their weight settled just beneath my brow and distributing itself in a tight pattern along the flinty scar-line just under the skin. I dimmed the light, drew the cork from the bottle, and poured some wine into a plastic cup. I prayed some words. I paced. I drank myself to sleep.

Now it was Sunday, and I was pulling out of the parking lot. By evening I would arrive in Ellenville, Iowa. I debated whether I would drink there. I should not. A voice on the radio revealed that the unusually cool weather would end by mid-afternoon. I saw the valet snicker in my mind and rolled the window down. A wall of red tail lights glared at me. I rolled along in slow city traffic, popped in a Buddy Guy CD, and settled in for another long traveling day.

lo lo lo lo lola . . .

2007-10-22T00:20:00.000-07:00

"You are a manly man," she said.

How would it have gone were I to have returned,
"And you, my beauty, are a manly woman?"

Not well, I suspect.

Operator, can you help me place this call?

2007-10-21T16:26:00.000-07:00

The Old Woman

By the time the habit of loneliness settles in and all around, it is like having already starved. There is no more hunger than there is life to be hungry for. It is a deadly habit, having exchanged black for the occasional gray that intensifies and recedes around the early white lie. Sometimes it is a desperate call, moved by terror, of the senses that hear the air strung with maleficence, that see the lonely squiggles pressing themselves against the television screen, trying to get out. Trying to get out the old woman picks up the phone where voices used to live.

Hello It's Me

2007-10-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

THE CALL

I was caught off guard when I heard her voice on the phone. “How are you, Michael?” she said. “It’s Glea.”

I knew her voice, but hearing it felt alien. It sounded to me like a voice one would avoid if they could; a voice belonging to a neighbor who’s been crouching in your garden every evening at dusk, watching as you walk around your kitchen in your underwear; the person who you knew had poisoned your cat, though you could not prove it, and who called because they knew you knew but couldn't say anything about it. I couldn’t tell right then which of us was being creepy.

I responded with shortness. “Glea.”

Glea Carroll of the McNally Agency had been a great support when I was marketable. She stayed in constant contact, putting me in touch with publishers and editors, people she said she knew I’d click with. As my agent Glea facilitated many good things for me. But self interest clung to her like the smell of something burning. I was never crazy about that part of her, and now that I was no longer a hot commodity I discovered my instincts about her had been justified.

“Michael, I know I haven’t called. But I have been thinking about you.” She must have detected the blank recognition, the plain lack of response in my voice.

“I’ve been thinking about you too,” I said finally.

“I realize it’s been some time.” She spoke in clear, distinct tones.

Damn, I thought. I hoped like hell she didn’t feel sorry for me. I wanted to savor my resentment. Across the room the cat began hacking and then puked on some papers I’d laid down when the phone rang. “Goddamit,” I growled through crooked teeth.

“Is this not a good time?” Glea asked. “Should I not have called?”

“No. It’s fine,” I told her, “my cat. How have you been?”

“I’m well,” she said. Glea , always proper, never said "I'm fine," or "I'm good."

“I’m also well,” I responded flatly. “To what do I owe the honor, Glea?”

She hesitated, only momentarily, and then explained why she called. She knew I’d been in a rut since the accident. She thought she had something I might be interested in trying. “You’re not drinking?” she asked at one point.

“No, I’m not drinking,” I said. I was lying. I’d turned into a morning drinker. Mostly wine when I stayed home. Beer if I walked down to play the juke box at the Top Hat where Milna poured drafts and flaunted her huge rack behind the bar. On days when I’d stop caring altogether, often after not sleeping, I’d drive instead of walk. The accident seemed, at those times, remote. Maybe I was remote. The walls of my apartment looked pale to me. “Why do you ask, Glea?”

“I have a contact at Iowa,” she said. “Do you think you’d consider putting together a workshop for them? They’re interested in having you. I can put you in touch.”

In touch was something I hadn’t been in a while. I touched my face. “Teach what to who?” I asked.

“We can work all that out,” she said straight forwardly, as if she had all of it already planned. “You’re a name. Published. And they’re paying.”

The offer was a far cry from television interviews and book signings. I looked across the room and squinted at the stack of bills on the desk. “I could use a change,” I told her. “Iowa. How much and what do I need to do?”

“Let me make some calls,” she said, and we ended it there.

I scribbled her name on one of the refrigerator lists, then grabbed my keys. It was Friday. Milna typically wore a skirt on Fridays. She’d be working till noon.

All I have to do is Dream

2007-09-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

Shadow in Dust

I no longer dream. Sometimes too, I garble my words. My teeth are skewered. I grow self-conscious whenever I have to speak. When I type, I sometimes finish only half a word or add an extra letter, like an extra “c” in the word accident. At night, when it comes time to turn down the sheets, I am reminded of the accident. I fluff the pillow and I lose strength, suddenly blighted. I lie down and close my eyes. It’s the same as when they’re open, only darker, degrees of transition that never find an end.

I used to dream—of tigers on the moon, and rabbits that know things without being told. Of being outside in my underwear. Preparing to sleep, expectantly (expecting what I did not know)—I miss that feeling. Once I dreamed I’d won the lottery and this man in a suit and I were posing with an enormous cardboard check. Lot's of zeroes. I’d wake refreshed, eager to meet another day. Now waking life and sleeping life are the same crossed mish-mash of moribund nothings, a day-time / night-time dreamlessness.

And I’m always tired. I’ll sleep two days straight and still be dragging all the time. I raise my head sluggishly. It’s heavy as a sack of sand. My body is a bag of pains. I sag where I should hold tight, and I’m stiff where I am meant to bend. It was a bad accident. There were days I wish I’d up and . . . those days are mostly over.

Not only don’t I dream. I can’t read the way I used to, or write as well either. They had to put my left eye back in place. There’s a little silicon sheath inside my skull that holds it up because the socket’s gone. I drag my eye around, rolling it along this Saran Wrap hammock in my head. The eye grows tired and then my right eye strains to compensate. There are scars inside my face, more taut and knarled than the ones on its outside. I forget quickly so I now keep lists and hang them on the refrigerator. I hang them there because I kept forgetting where I had put them. Now I have one place for lists: food to buy, things to do, bills to pay, doctor’s appointments.

My first book made enough that I put a down payment on this house. Now the banks are looking to take it back. I’ve sent the cleaning girl away for good. I keep the curtains drawn. It’s dark in here most of the time. A friend who’d visited when I was convalescing brought me a gift, a plaque to hang on the wall. He laughed and I pretended it did not sting. “Dust is a Protective Coating.”

A thin layer covers my shelves and all their bric-a-brac, little shells and figurines. My favorite is a skeleton in a priest’s frock—a Day of the Dead statuette from Mexico. I can’t bother myself about dust. When the phone rings panic spikes in my chest. I typically will not answer. I’m afraid most of the time. It seems my agent, the one person I’d welcome a call from, forgets things too. She no longer remembers my name. I am told I have grown overly sensitive. Memory and language ebb and flow. I am shadow mantled in dust. Worst of all, the blow to my head knocked the dreams right out of it.

Baby I'm Amazed

2007-09-09T21:49:00.000-07:00

I Thought She'd Be Amazing

I thought she'd be amazing and she was.

A lingering sense of unreality clung to our initial moments together, probably because I had doted over pictures of her and flirted with the idea of meeting her a thousand times before. Meeting her scared me so that I determined to enter fearlessly. That fear factor may have, in all likelihood, been part of the attraction.

Sitting in front of her then, face to face, held a thousand trembling pleasures. This went far beyond the safe distance provided by a photograph. Desire, uncertainty, even a sense of dangerous risk. Awe. Competing flourishes of sense and senselessness. All these skirted the short breaths of yearning, yearning that found its source in her. And she wasn't even trying.

There was "presence" in the room with us. Her smile disarmed me. Her genuineness engaged me. Intelligence danced in her eyes and made me, made me want to give to her nearly anything she asked. She thought "nearly" a healthy witholding. As a result I wanted to give her even more.

I don't want to overdo it. But I will say I let my guard down. I emptied myself of as much resistance as I could and handed it to her. She was stern, but nurturing too. I wanted to be what she told me to be. "Strip," she said, and I did, willingly, gratefully, devotedly.

I thought she'd be amazing and she was.

You Know and I Know

2007-09-08T09:51:00.000-07:00

Unspeakable

No one says what’s real.

When they do,
we run for cover.

No one says what’s true.

Double-truth-lies:
These are told
exclusively by lovers.

Fact: there ain’t enough self’s in the world
willing to forego the you’s,
and all the you’s fall in line, loveless casualties
that never win self's with which a life gets lived.
—No one suspects anything is wrong
with lithium and tears.

Like the first morning . . .

2007-07-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

On The Way Back From the Bathroom

Outside, the moon descends
along rails constructed
in such a way that first
it rolls left across the sky
in a steady declension of four degrees.

At its western end it drops,
reverses its route, rolls right
and downward again. It will
continue this way all night,
along an alternating
and constant slope,
and I watch it crossing back and forth,
dropping down,
over and over,
from the open window
where I have stopped on my way back from the bathroom.

I wonder if this is magnificent.

In the mean time, the shelves along the wall remain filled with things I’d hoped to get to but never did. To learn Italian. To speak French. And while there is some regret about those things I never took up, I must tell you that I did once make the time to share a drink with a wooly white mammoth in an Andover train station.

Until then I’d not realized
how precisely
a white wooly mammoth might
press rings of smoke from a droopy bottom lip,
even while steadying a rather thin tortoise-shell
cigarette holder in a hoof,
a bent crumble of cool ash dangling at its tip.

He did not seem to mind that I stared,
morbidly, into the disproportionately
large, unpigmented eye jellying behind
the monocle he wore, its cord attached
somewhere inside his thick and flowing mane.

This event occurred, actually, during a particularly monotonous cross-country tour Myrtle and I purchased when we were first married.

“Clink.” The moon drops
down onto the next silver rail
and the clock across the room blinks,
“Go Slowly Along Your Way.”

Beneath the red rise of mercury
I spot a woman in the field
adjacent to our own.
She is playing a tuba
and I smell blueberry muffins in the air.
The sky rumbles with tuba: blurts Tuba Tuba Tuba.
I shut the window and draw the curtain before moving back to bed.

As I pass, books whisper to me in languages I do not understand
and the bronze Shiva occupying the top shelf begins dancing,
arms wriggling and alive like snakes.

“Stop shuffling your feet,” Myrtle croaks at me. I peel back the blanket, slide in next to her, cradle her gently in my arms. Her booty is pudgy and warm. “I love you like a blueberry muffin,” I say. I whisper the words in Italian. I repeat her name, so fluidly, in French—“Myrtille.”

It occurs to me that this is magnificent.

This is so even when Myrtle says nothing in response.
It remains the case even after we forget each other and fall asleep,
lulled by the cadences of the mammoth moon as it drops and rolls,
all night long, through the tuba-blueberry sky, white clouds
wound like wool around the narrowing encroachments of
another morning’s gray approach.

They say it's yer birthday

2007-05-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

Today is the 25th of May, the birthday of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Raymond Carver. Happy birthday guys.

Jump

2007-05-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

One Life No Net

I’m not built for this kind of thing anymore. Wind slices my cheeks in quick flurries— thin little razors. Gravity pulls me through a wall of air with two fists. My body could almost climb its way back up along the nothing of this fall. But air is not “nothing.” There’s something Zen-like about air in relation to bodies. Everything is falling, everything lives and dies in a state of falling, and physicists have formulas to prove it. They simulate orbits and collisions and spinning bodies on computers, and these are wondrous things that resemble Balanchine’s L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, dancing squirrels and cups and teapots, all held together in the frame of a stage where they leap and twirl—sheer magic. There’s love between falling things. I spread my arms, legs together, tapered, as if executing the perfect reverse three-and-a-half somersault--with tuck. Glee moves in and out of these limbs. This body. All bodies. Here. There. Mine. Hers. I close my eyes. Try to forget her unforgettable face. Will she cry? Will her features solidify angrily? Will she feel empty, unable to move, like Joyce’s Eveline?

I close my eyes for a moment, and when I open them I am halfway to the water. There is a little tugboat in the area, off to my left. I am reminded, vaguely, in a flash, of some golden childhood story my mother read to me. Some people on the deck are watching, pointing. The sun shines brightly against the flecked water which resembles a beveled coin, a silver fish-scaled river. An hour before I’d witnessed the morning sun burn clouds off the tops of the cliffs from my perch in the bridge’s northeast tower. At some point, as morning traffic began to build on the span above me, I stood. Leapt.

Now every sound has been replaced by rushing air, a roar so fast and furious that were those nearby cliffs to instantly crumble—the avalanche would raise a noise like this one beating at my ears. I see that I am about three-fourths of the way to the water and, suddenly, I think of my cat, Diego. Diego leaps up to or down from refrigerator or cabinet top with the fragility of a first fledgling flight, tender padded touchdown, his paws. Once he leapt out a second story window. My sister ran downstairs, screaming, much like this wind in fact. We raced outside expecting to collect a bag of bones. Diego sat contentedly. Nine lives they say. Flight. I begin to wonder. How many lives? Just one I think. Perhaps I will break the water at a “just so” angle, like a diver slicing in unharmed. Perhaps I will burst into feathers, like a bird in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. The water approaches faster. The faces of the men on the tugboat grow clearer, each intensely fascinated, none horrified. I recall a Zen saying: Leap, the net will appear. Not this time, I think, suddenly upended.

Forever Young.

2007-04-18T13:55:00.000-07:00

Burn

The object of the exercise
was to write
about becoming a tree
who’d been planted by a boy of twelve,
one Tuesday in March,
in the evening hours after a large, satisfying dinner; a tree
who, as a sapling
had overcome several horrid deprivations,
lies and drunkenness and poverty,
dying lawns with cigarette burns all over the place.

I’d been drawn to that kind of thing before. So in the morning I ambled past the factory walls to a splurge of bramble near a runoff pipe where I sat down to write, pencil, paper, a bit of quiet. And that's when my present girth emerged, rumbled audaciously. That's when I struck roots--pounds of stilled intention--down inside the earth.

Time sped along.

By noon the sun had pinnacled overhead, and I revealed spots no longer sprouting green. I’d thinned on top, brittled. I heard my shuddering twig-ends ticking together whenever birds took rest in my extended arms.

Soon, it seemed soon, the orange-orbbed sun edged a shrunken arc of western blue. Its lights drew long. It sunk behind the circling waters of the world. Directly, I thinned into an overgrown wind-rattle, winter thistling etched out against the moon.

Still, my inner rings were something—I am the final object of my own leafy desires—something, yes, beautiful.
Popular trends that once threatened my sense of self now had no affect, Japanese reds, the current poplar chic. I'd grown solid overnight and I liked that.

My friends think I’m crazy, hankering after this old post,
dead wood snapped and dangling. But I refuse to leave.
It’s in the way one clings, you know, that makes us who we are.

Sap still oozes from my skins.
The grass beneath me is sticky with the stuff.
Light a match. I’ll burn.
Probably for weeks on end.

Whenever I want you . . .

2007-04-03T15:16:00.000-07:00

All I have to Do

I was not made for the hand’s of love,
nor for her lips, nor eyes, nor tongue,
The last time that I rode love’s hips,
I was plucked out, her firstborn young.

I cannot say why this is so,
yet, so it surely seems,
that love plays an evasive role
in all my loving dreams.

Dream on! the passing troubadour,
warm heart and traveling feet,
Dream on! he sings and moves along
to the time of his own heart’s beat,

Dream on! he sings, with a smile that’s sad,
Say true what your heart must say—
Dream on I will, and swear an oath,
to win your hand, your lips, eyes, tongue, one day.

I Am A Rock . . .

2007-03-22T19:33:00.000-07:00

The Dying of the Night Dispatcher’s Angels

Eleven-thirty, back in Jersey—
he's got to get to work on time.

From the under ground he has dug up more than one bitter passage: what's left of fifty years--a residual hour of fear. That is the misdiagnosed sadness everyone detects--life's lonely work.

But, soon he arrives, on time, at the government job he dislikes very much. He receives his briefing, and takes the seat where he will answer the troubled night-calls of the world.

“I am an idiot,” he thinks, staring at the dirt in the grooves of his fingers. It is late by then, and he wants to laugh, reminiscing first about a dream, then a girl, then music that ends it all triumphantly, gloriously, angels singing, like in a movie. But the stupid phone rings, like a body in a dumpster, throat cut. It gurgles like a sucking wound whenever someone calls.

--nine-one-one: what's your emergency?--
-------------------------
(post-fact-oh conversation)

“You could see his Adam’s Apple hanging out,” the cop describes the scene to him afterward. He tries not to listen but the cop keeps on. “He did it to himself," he says. "All alone. Cut his own damn throat!”

He's fifty years old
and he is sad that he feels nothing,
believes nothing.

In the morning he wipes the station with a cloth,
shoves some papers in a bin, waits for his relief,
and repeats the awful words,
“Alone. Alone."

Have I told you lately . . . ?

2007-03-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

Night Full of Absence

Time moves as slow as stone without you near. I find myself in this strange limbo of desires—to be close and yet not to push too near too fast. I was saddened that we argued as hotly as we did, troubled, enormously. And yet a faith sets in, that our friendship is stronger than either of us suspected, strong and sure, even when we are not.

This short period that feels so heavy brings to mind how deeply you have sent your roots into my life, reveals what a deep mark would be left were you to pull them from its soils. I have been seized by obsessive need, to talk with you, to listen, taking comfort in your voice, even knowing there are no words adequate, none soft enough, none strong enough, for what I long to hear.

Our words rise and fall behind language, like the ground of all we see and feel. Ours is the language of eyes through which the heart burns, of knowing without grasping, of hands that touch wordlessly, in the surging silences of jungles and deserts and enormous skies full of clear, throbbing nights, nights whose skins stretch thin, skies so filled with playfulness that they will themselves to the air they live in, hoping for fire.

I remain incapable of expounding any of these visitations, these spectres that rise up in so many bodiless nights, hours full of rushing spaces, your eyes nowhere to beguile me. I am flung outward by words escaping to find their place in your hands and your limbs, these words heavy with life like vines.

This garden of feeling we have cultivated makes a place for the sun, for water and salt and earth. We needn’t touch them, the years, to feel them, how they have flourished within the borders of this garden's rock walls. These several years sing sonorously, steadily, cemented and meshed together like the letters of a cherished word, a secret word, a word held between us like a prolonged breath, like wet, imprecise kisses, lips groping among last things, braced in waves that en-trance the constant moon, waves ever changing the lettering of the world, the many ways that love is spelled.

I'd wait a million years

2007-02-09T18:19:00.000-08:00

TURN AROUND

He was three hours into the four hour drive home when he called her.

“Hey,” she answered.

She always answered with that initial "Hey," and whenever he heard her say it he was drawn to a territory that felt warm, familiar. In that space distance held sway, but the distance bordered a tract of heart that had known her voice long before he'd heard the sound of it.

“I almost called to tell you to turn around.” She spoke with a natural air.

“I will, you know.” He did not need to think.

“Don’t,” she said when he told her how far he’d already driven.

After they were done talking he recalled her face, her hair. He replayed her voice, “Hey,” and took the next exit, looking for a turn around. “Crazy,” he said.

To turn around then would make a four hour trip into another seven hour drive. Only the day before he’d driven from North Carolina to spend the night with her in Virginia. Now he was back in Jersey--and suddenly heading south.

His back and his legs had stiffened by the time he pulled the car along the curb. She’d left the door open and he let himself in. Drumming music and the hum of a treadmill flowed up out of the basement. So he dropped his bag near the door and went for a walk. The January air felt sharp when he breathed it in and the evening turned to dark. He was happy looking at the houses, recording the names of streets he passed.

In less than an hour he was back and watching television when she emerged from the basement dabbing her brow with a towel. They talked a little and she left to go shower. When she returned in slippers and a T-shirt they called out for Chinese food. She stood at the sink rinsing a plate. He leaned down and kissed her shoulder. She smiled.

After dinner, he stretched out on the sofa and watched her sink cross-legged into an overstuffed chair. The day had ended. Neither of them said very much. A toned thigh stretched out from under her shirt. It was the shirt he’d bought her, the shirt that sported the Chinese character for “Strength.”

He’d been staring at her. “What?” she asked.

He wanted to tell her about what was going on inside his body. “You’re beautiful,” he said instead, and made a less than heartfelt effort to ignore the perfect length of leg stretched over the opposite knee.

She looked back at the television, and he succumbed to a swell of desire so strong that he had to close his eyes to hide it from her. “Strength.”

What he was feeling then was something he hadn’t felt for a long time, a longer time than he’d like to admit. He wondered what the Chinese character for "Craving" looked like.

Soon after, the television went off. They both agreed it had grown very late. She made sure he had enough blankets in his room and said goodnight. She looked up as she turned, half over her delicate shoulder. The full smile of her mouth blossomed and he almost wanted to cry. “Good night,” he said instead.

He turned out the light. Desire tore him into a thousand tiny shreds. His ex-wife never moved him so deeply. Nor had other women, women he thought he’d loved. This was something else, something beautiful and mysterious and full. He surrendered to it's resonance, released his heart and soul and body to its airs. Sleep finally overtook his rigid body, his lips pursing together, a final note holding, a last breath full of her name, the name he turned around on his tongue and blew back out into the night.

Goat's Head Oops

2007-01-30T15:33:00.000-08:00

Goats

I’m not built for this kind of thing anymore, I think, hand pressed hard against my side. The cops had already cleared, leaving a floor full of broken glass and blood to clean up.

Bars—funny places. If you work in one, you know what the camouflaged stink beneath floorboards and in saturated spots in the bathrooms smells like. You know bars are filthy places. Even now, little flies flit around rows of bottles stacked behind the bar and ignore the blood spattered on the wall. I catch myself asking if flies get addicted to alcohol. Barflies. Ha ha.

I love bars. Always have. I think of this particular one as my church—here twelve years this February coming. I’ve bounced in lots of places. Once picked up a part-time gig in Denver where I had to wear a frilly shirt and bowtie. They had a reel-to-reel instead of a jukebox and played the same shit songs over and over, 80’s shit songs that made me tired. I’m no good when I’m tired. So this place is my church. It’s where I feel like I belong. I’d be cranky all the time in a nightclub or a place where bouncers wear frilly shirts and bowties.

I was thinking that very thing when I heard glass crunching under somebody’s boots and turned to see one of the assholes that had started the whole damned ruckus. The cops had missed him somehow. He must have landed unconscious behind a speaker or under a table. But now he was up, charging me, grunting, half-limping as he came on hard. Only, I did a little sidestep, extended a leg and down he went, glass scattering beneath him and sounding very much like marbles dropped on wood.

I’d noticed his bunch when they walked in. I hate when guys like them come in, guys with something ugly behind their eyes. Borderline types that don’t know when or how to die. Back when I didn’t know shit from shinola I took little notice of things like eyes, but after a couple of brouhahas that ended in a whole lot of stitches, I learned. Today I can separate the goats from the sheep. Goats have eyes that sit dark and blank, a little cloudy so you can’t see if there’s a person inside. This guy: goat for sure.

He was up as quick as he went down, his beard scraggly, graying. I could see he was crazy and suddenly I felt damned tired. Exhausted. Everything slowed around me. His hand reeled up with a blade. I grabbed his arm, two hands. He knocked me back against the bar. I ran the edge of my boot down his shins, better’n ten times, and I was shoving his arm down and away and growing real tired when I felt the blade slip in. It was warm. Didn’t hurt. I’m down on one knee then, bleeding. I can smell the place. It’s dark, filthy, and smells a lot like goat.

Last Night I had the Strangest Dream

2006-09-30T02:01:00.000-07:00

Beléndez At the Dodge: gOld Soul

A young
Neruda,
this poet
in a chair that rolls like

a mechanical horse,
a jungle path called exile,

music,

constant accompaniment,
the parrot and the cat,
monkey and the Andean asp,
all that rises in the caw-and-hiss of a
sleeping night caught in an updraft of
dream, tropic stall of northerly wind
somewhere over Central America now,
a small place near the sea, conch and coral, salt;

dream fills the spaces between, sprouts leaves
that perfume the air with spells, dream-worlds
faintly tipped in Mazatlan gold, in blood,
like claws taken in the hunt and adorned
to be worn, still warm, hacked mitts
slightly smaller than the poet who was,
he claims, no bigger than a mango in his
birth, no smaller than his own early shadow
in this long, late light.

Watching the tide roll away . . .

2006-08-30T02:42:00.000-07:00

Monterey

August. I am sitting on the dock, reading, and you are lying on your turquoise towel, face lit by the sun. The lake rocks around us, ever ever, quietly.

These are the same green hills Edith
Wharton camped in while fleshing out the Ethan Fromes . . of the world.

Earlier, you said you would like to own two dogs, and while I was taking my walk up Chestnut Hill I thought about whether a dog might not have made Ethan's life bearable, if he'd have aspired to break away and marry better than he did.

Of course, Edith didn't marry all that well either, her shameless husband-in-the-garden-dancing, naked, in these hills of lunatic beauty.

All of this makes me aware of my own happiness. I am happy, happy and very much at peace here with you.

Then, from . . across the lake a dog yowls. Another answers from , , some distant compound on the far side of the hill.

Drawn from my book, I set my eyes on you. You are breathing and I am breathing and I see what lies inside of you, hordes of summer flowers, hyacinths, and long horizons steeped in light. I see past the gentle reckoning of your thighs, the soft rising and falling of your stomach. My eyes bear down on the steely water of the lake shining through you.

You wake to see.

I have taken away my clothing and I am dancing all around. All my beauties and uglies are turned silhouette against the sky.

You must raise your hand to shield your bleary eyes against the sun.

Skirting the edge of the dock, I am dancing until the light locks up, until it is grown so solid I can no longer move against it. I am immobilized, belighted. My shadow breaks away, bounds over the rocks, climbs up into the trees and disappears. I expand like heat, and you are like an echo, like signaling flecks of sun on water.

The lake tips.

In the cool dark hours, the absence that my shadow left rouses me from sleep. I hear, its footfalls on branches, just outside our bedroom, the leaves it rustles as it sniffs its way through the lightless halls of night. You remain quiet, ever ever, and touch me with your hands so I can close my eyes. They curl up on my face like two old dogs warmed by fire.

This is how it is to love you,
which I do.

What it is ain't exactly clear

2006-08-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

Lied To

Something's gone haywire.

It becomes most apparent around people,
in airports or classes or on supermaket
lines--the great disparate judgments of
insides by outsides, mostly yours on
yours added to theirs--as if yours were
not sufficiently your own, not sufficiently
point and counterpoint, like blades that
repel though smithed to clash and cross
and make a furious noise, a noise that
slides along the self-loathing of
avoidance, because you thought it would
be easier than this and you were wrong.

Desolation Row

2006-08-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

Collage: Editorial

50 people were buried in the rubble.
The number of dead was not immediately
known. A large number of civilians were
inside. The exact number was unknown.
The number of occupants was around 50.
The exact number was unknown. Around 50.
Buried. They were checking. Residents had
repeatedly been warned. Unable to reach the
area. Showed no video footage. Showed no
video. Around 50. Buried. They were checking.
Expanded its assault on Lebanon. Renewed
attacks on northern Israel. The number of
dead. A large number of civilians. Inside.
Unknown. The exact number was unknown.
The Christian heartland. The last significant
road. Barrage of 140 rockets. Three Hezbollah
rockets. Strike. Inside. Fighting. No casualties
were immediately reported. 50 people were
buried in the rubble. Around 50. Buried. They
were checking. Expanded its assault. Renewed
attacks. Farm workers loading vegetables.
Dozens of farm workers loading vegetables.
Around 50. Dozens. Killing 28. The workers’
foreman. Five Lebanese civilians were killed.
19 wounded. Christian areas. Picturesque
coastal resort. Air raids. 50 people were buried
in the rubble. Civilians. The number of dead
was not immediately known. Four civilians.
Four bridges. Israeli soldiers were killed. A
Lebanese soldier was killed. The exact number
was unknown. Conditions. Pressure. Cease-fire.
Disarmament. Bombing of bridges and roads.
Tightening the blockade. Cutting communica-
ions. Starving them. Starving. Dozens. Inside.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14163530/

Make it new-port

2006-07-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

Newport

Bunched hills,
July's dry, umber fields,
green-gathered copses of
occasional trees,

Clouds unfurl in sky, retain this
somber light, this expanding collection
of blue eternities,

Small, brick homes remind me
now and then that I am in England,
on a train, though this seems something far
and nameless, like passing deep through the
belly of some marvelous mound.

2006-06-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

Their motto is don't tread on me . . .

2006-06-29T04:56:00.000-07:00

Self-Evident Things Cornelius Saw

...................Truth is the majority vote of that
. . . . . . . . . .nation that could lick all others.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Three times in the early autumn of 1780,
ten-year-old Cornelius Banta spotted him,
General Washington, mounted, riding
among the 14,000 troops encamped and
waiting for French reinforcements to arrive.
Cornelius may have been delivering cider
from his father's mill, or following the trail
of a deer, or may have simply wandered
feverishly, drawn by the restless air of
revolution, the lives of so many uprooted
men. The ridge would have been thick with
the scent of them, the smoky fires of 14,000
Cains.

Two centuries have come and gone and now
it is late spring, the azaleas are all withering
if not entirely unbloomed, though the giant
rhododendrons overhead bow beneath
flourishes of periwinkle, white-petalled
silences, and magenta tongues of fire.
Washington Spring sifts silently through the
green cresses that it feeds, and all the place
is mist and passing flower, abuzz and good
to take the sun in. The chestnut tree that
shades the eastern bank is not old the way
the spring is old, not ringed with an age of
rippling revolutions, remains too new to
have provided cool passage to a General or
a soldier fingering the frayed remnant of a
letter from the girl he'd love if he survived
with arms and legs still ripe with her, with
hands and fingers that once might cup her
love in round caress.

I touch the little fires all around, daffodils
have given way to daisies, soft petals like so
many colored tongues in a green morning.
Last year's leaves carpet the earth here, layers
of so many leaving years. You can feel them
all, like a nerve that runs throughout, pins
and needles of the place, and too, the lives of
men that would have broken camp that late
September, to abandon this Edenic post for
war, its survivors consigned to roam the earth.
They did it, got all broken and dead, for the
General and the wide-eyed cider boy from
Banta's farm, for streams that rise when rains
fall, for spring that leads to summer, for all
such things self-evident, like bodies strewn in
raw red fields, in every posture but repose.

Heart and Soul

2006-06-14T13:22:00.000-07:00

Villahelle: The Heart of It

The heart's gone broke long before
the body's clothed in tatters,
a loveless hour, a closed door,

some wrinkled folds, driven airs
in which each breath is scattered;
the heart's gone numb long before

loss turns corporeal like a scar
in a mirror that's been shattered,
a loveless hour, a closed door

never granting entry nor
rejoinder to the clattering
heart grown cold and underscored

by summer's passings, winter's hoar-
frosts, heart shrouded in their mantles,
a loveless hour, a closed door

we press against and cave in more,
till the earth beneath gathers round
the heart that's fallen years before
a loveless hour, a closed door.

Bonnement m'agree

2006-06-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

Hads, Fee, Eys, Sol

One woman serves my ego: that
masculine lack of attention
masquerading as adulthood.
She uses words like “man,” uses
“manly” lots, even when I’m not.
“Unconditional love,” she said
last night. It sounded like “Don’t leave.”

Another one speaks to my soul,
her traveling-need desires what's “next,”
all the things she’s seen and done, the
spices she has risked, she hangs her
walls with them, wants always more and
hot and more. Everything but me.
The word she uses most is “friend.”

Too, there’s one whose own need touches
mine, frail and strong, running, always—
her eyes. Sometimes they rest and then
I see and say “I know.” I think
I love her like a mystery,
a thrown improbability
probing last-known hiding places.

But one—she, my ever ever;
each poem I write--her hand's on mine.
We dance along a floor of glass,
never out of sync, as long as
music plays. Play tunes out all my
imperfections. But when it stops,
then she aways. She never stays.

Ending then, these are the women
in my life, none of them a wife,
each one of them more dear than I
can say and each one with their points
both hollow and sublime—none mine.
All mine. And in their turns I see
they’re right and cannot disagree.

The lunatic is in my head . . .

2006-06-01T18:52:00.000-07:00

"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
.........................................--Ben Franklin

Something in the way she moves . . .

2006-05-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

Dear

It happens sometimes, that I am seized with a thought or remembrance so strong that if I am standing I must find a place to sit, or if I am already seated I must turn away so others do not see the tears of mixed emotion, the awkward smile and far away look. Often, these strange occurances have something to do with what is really dear. Often, these nudging reminders have something to do with you. I think you understand what I am saying. I think you know how it feels to suddenly be filled with light.

Do you believe in magic ?

2006-05-16T17:27:00.000-07:00

Conscientious Abjection

I used to believe in
so many things;
that was before I

Tails of Brave Ulysses

2006-04-30T15:27:00.000-07:00

Number nine, number nine, number nine . . .

2006-04-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

Claritas With A Splash

a man puts down his drink, reaches into a sack, withdraws a painting: young woman, fading colors, turn-of-the-century, and another man, ugly, lifts a glass to the woman's painted lips. she is baptized red in the redly pigmentation of cheap wine. immediately, her clarity works through my dirtiness. then the choir walks onstage, orderly, songbooks crooked in arms. i grow full. purrmutation. hushed choir "amen-ing."

i see myself, "tomorrow." the violin section leans in, turns pages while the magnificent mezzo-soprano is pressed in and down by militaristic drumming until
her voice is the only ringed route of escape. one baggy-faced violinist and another paunch-cheeked clarinetist argue accompanied by a wide-legged woman who bows on cello-strings. the room is no longer made of wood, not the hue of a red baptism, but cast in golden light. a child turns and asks, "who gave out the stars tonight?"

the stage is full. black sequins on velvets and silks. huge boulder buried beneath. above it all, wisps of white and balding pate; one man's back, two black buttons mark the split-seam of his long-tailed coat. from behind he resembles a night-locust conferring music on the world, and then a swan. he is too small for his wrinkled coat. symmetrically, he battens up deaf magnetudes in playfulness-and-sorrow. his is a song carried in the hands of a very old man, all the beauty of this one old man.

the very long-lipped bassist with thick glasses, the bony-faced chinese violinist, both look lost, serious. none of the women look as sad as the dogfaced men. still, they can't be thinking of each other--only their parts in the magnificent--only that. only fingers plucking strings, bouncing bows, every boundary locked in sound, closed in with wood and reed, parried by oboe and bassoon, shattered out of complacency by rising brass. how does one indicate the rising pluck from the descending rub? in that space, reverent stillness falls on everything. in that moment i too fall, back to earth. sitting in a barroom with a fading pink woman who's dressed in the color of something she drinks, i hear the refrain, the counterpoint, all. i hear nature and the star-child, the untenable, "play on."

I got blisters on my fingers

2006-04-24T02:10:00.001-07:00

Velvet Overlay for an
Addict Named Derrick In a
Discordant Downword Direction

banging on a piano with fingers blistered by hot grease at my job as the cook in a local barroom is not rare the way late roses are rare (early roses rarer still)—in just the same way walking streets at night is always suspect, so they did not expect me at all, ever.

no other comprehensible course than sleep, because I don’t have trouble sleeping, it’s the waking up that’s hard, like being a killer cop in the fuzzillo 88. it was not that he said he did not give a shit, it was the way he said it that troubled us, it sounded like many men's choirs gathered together, chanting penitential psalms licensed to the local cemetery where your forebears may or may not have happened on a strange peacefulness they remain too eager to share with you.

every time the phone rings my stomach curls in knots. i do not want to answer another call for help. isn’t it plain that I’ve been thrown to earth, a cancerous lech, a carnivorous apocalyptic riding out a rainstorm before the hunt resumes: isn’t it? I am nature’s thwarted rhythm, a green field of time that prays to be written. call on me, lour eed, oh lordee ooh lord.

comparative polarities deuced up with diplomas, stark and savage, like lurid men and women peeing in public lots, peeing, lots, all recorded by the police and pbs, so people can discourse openly about the constitution in a way that is at once enervated and annulled. did newton live quietly, or was he fitfully rendered in
fatalistic laws of motion, mellifluous cog of masculinity raised over the heads of unblinking roman regiments searching for the unceasing body of christ?

still, too early for roses. mid-april. trees are white and yellow puffs, insubstantial as bad marriages. even as a child I heard the loneliest of sounds, a piano never played, fingers never marked red by a heat that bubbles surfaces before it bores downword and whose oceans of blood and salt remain nearby vistas never
traversed, all dead seeds of a latinate urania, every one a maternal minuet, and nothing’s petrichorial prospects borne again and always on the unceasing rains of sameness and defeat.

What's going on . . .?

2006-04-21T00:19:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken in Ecuador (I think) and posted at: http://www.amnestyusa.org/business/sharepower/chevron.html

I know that I am privileged to have been born in the United States of America, but sometimes I wonder what's going on. I'm sure the child in the picture, if still alive, will wonder the same thing one day. Is this craziness surrounding oil an expediency of survival? Sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in one of Kafka's stories. Where is science when it comes to energy alternatives? Why haven't we tapped that nuclear reactor we call the sun? It's good for about 5 billion more years.

Skating away, on the thin ice . . .

2006-04-20T22:52:00.000-07:00

School's almost over.
I'm exhausted.
And not a creative bone left in my body.

Back in the you us us are

2006-03-25T23:06:00.000-08:00

Flight

I am punching holes in the walls of my life when you
enter inside lightly you lighting
my arms making them light. Tiptoeing. Seal
your mouth. Mine.
Eyes closed
You. I.
Together.
Rising.
Soaring.
Comes biting
Mid-March wind.

. . . scream of the butterfly . . .

2006-03-05T01:47:00.000-08:00

Dumb Anding For My Poem Spun

So I'm trying

to get

this

thing

p
o
e

t
r
ying to repeat that
unfurling, hear
that unfurling
metaphear

old song
ancient listening
sound of the start of everything and
the first anding
and all I have to date are dull litanies,
no quick beam of a storied moon, just
the ludicrous lowery of my own tongue-
locked embodiement d-
yang-
. l-
. . i-
. . . n-

. . . . g-
ua w-here soul is

s
ou
n
d

some

thing

(
w
ha
t
?)

else

not

UN-
like a memory,
a past-his-bedtime-summer-boy,
peering out a flimsy wood-and-screen door, frame of a
musty green bungalow, nighted boy, dumbstruck, firstly
registering the rise and beat and rumbling trill, crickets calling,
lulling, scritching their lives away in impenetrable dark.

Sometimes a fantasy . . . .

2006-02-25T05:27:00.000-08:00

Somnambulant Blue: Selkie Song

She walked past and was gone.
We have lived quietly together ever since--
in the lingering anonymities of imperfect timings,
the awkward semblances of her glimpsed face,
remnant of a voice she shook off her tongue like rain.

I wear it like a ring in my ear.
I drizzle the butter of it up and down my thighs.
It is what my body hears.

Something past surrender honeycombs her eyes--
soft light on topaz daffodils. She watches beyond
the quiet clarities of a tired poverty. It feels like
a stomach full of nothing to her.

So she draws the sea, like a hood, over her head, covering the
porcelain solitude of her face with the blue ink of sadness she
holds in her hands. There is a song, a loving rondo, that spirals
between her limned niche in the stars and her earth-manacles.

I sing it at night
while she sleeps in the curled nettle
of her magnificent, criss-crossed limbs.

Beautiful Boy

2006-02-13T22:24:00.000-08:00

Freud and Darwin Talk With
Sharon Olds About Birth

Her legs had never been spread further,
It remains a fact--I split her farther than she'd ever been opened before.
I filled her completely and made her scream
and scream
and that may be why, at first,
she could not love me
the way I thought she should,
the way I thought the world should.

I believe she loved me even if not always or not

all at once.

I cracked her legs open, emerged
from between them, head first, so that she looked as though
she was being pitted. I was like a woodcutter, splitting
the heavy logs of her thighs for winter fuel.

I was a bean, polished and creamy with her;
I wanted to dance in the wine of her,
smear it around with the bottoms of my feet,
slather my round belly in its robust color, until her warm rust-
red oils went from hot to chill. I had stuffed her, and made a
fat sucking- sound when pulled out. I would have preferred
to remain in her warm wet folds.

Look, they said, and rubbed my body, my arms and thighs and
penis,
Isn't he wonderful?

2006-02-07T23:56:00.000-08:00

A couple leaped from the South Tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped. So many people saw this as a scar burned onto our brains. But a man reached for a woman's hand and she reached for his hand, and they jumped out the window holding hands. I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand in her hand, nestled in each other with such extraordinary, ordinary, naked love. It is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and tragedy. It is what makes me believe that we are not fools to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fire, to believe that who we are persists past what we were, to believe against evil evidenced hourly that love is why we are here.

--Brian Doyle
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/questions/epilogue.html

Great Gig in the Sky

2006-02-07T01:32:00.000-08:00

Cold Pastoral Passing

Bright morning star blown bright on blue,
upended egg in vernal sky,
cool light, first star that I see tonight, fair

augerer of old--portentous,
beauteous morn, borne along the grey
berth of river down below, the clear night

fading, passing. And I walk on
through that momentous start of day
toward the allotted hour of industry.

Ticking tiers of morning promise
still star-romantic in my mind
as I unlatch the office door wishing

on that last fiery light I'd spied.
The day's bustle of arrival
distracts me but a little. I watch through

a window to the world outside,
great river of the cliffs, and blue

sky
. . . cleaved
. . . . . . . . by some
. . . . . . . . . . . sudden
cataclysm,

Nature sheared and thrust aside, keels
to mortal jet-streams of collapse,
portal to the wind, fiery fuselage

unleashed in one great upsurging ball,
ungirdling flash of upswirled black
and rising storm, incubating suns

sear the flesh, hot drizzle, smoke whorls
and chokes my eyes so I am blind
and only feel a hand reach out to mine.

Whatever madness comandeered
the wind, another life survived
this cold pastoral passing, fingers locked

in mine, small hope abreast in ruin,
so now we move, in tandem crawl,
from planes of unforseen apocalypse

to what feels like the cool expanse
of space where once there was a wall--
a ledge now fringed with wire and bent barbed iron

at which we take a stand until
our joined bodies apprehend
each churning universal law at play,

the governances of the spheres
that build behind and open out
before so that we need one knowing look,

no more, to write our destinies,
and then we thrust, still bound, to fly
and not to flee, our one last volition

where below the once idyllic
river now runs slick and people
swarm like windblown poppies, like blackbirds

taking wing, rolling in a turn,
they spin and dock as not to burn
while we fall, hand in hand, we two silk-worms,

friends fused, linked thinly by a strand,
hurled about like autumn leaves, gone
like Icarus, unnoticed, from the world.

Tangerine Dream

2005-11-25T15:36:00.000-08:00

This Man, That Woman

. . . . . They send clandestine smiles across the plaza,
this man, that woman. They are still new
to one another. Her husband suspects
nothing. His wife is not so sure, and her
suspicion hisses like steam rising from
the city's sewers all around him.
It is like a yellow stain on a white shirt,
like underserved praise for a two-bit actor
who killed himself in a parking garage
and whose fingers retain the citrus smell
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of a peeled orange.

. . . . . A beautiful young Jewess travels by
bus, wears square shoes, thick stockings, her hair tied
tight, like wool, bound beneath a scarf. She is
happy to have a seat to herself, sits
alone, stares through a window at the
drudgery of an endless highway, dreams
of a future marriage and a rabbinical scholar
she kissed goodbye. She is in America,
on a bus now. Suddenly, she understands
that things will never be the same. As the
bus turns into its terminal point she perceives
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the scent of citrus.

2005-10-17T22:16:00.000-07:00

Spill The Wine, Dig That Girl

2005-10-15T12:37:00.000-07:00

Gertrude's Stone of Was Being and Was Not Being
In Vino Fecundus Gerundus et Terra Caput Mortuum

I had something that was falling out of me. Something there was that kept falling out of
me. It was leaking out of me. It had always been leaking and falling out of me.
There was some time that this something was not leaking. There was a time
it was not drained out. There was a time it was not falling, that the
ground was not calling. But then that time came. That time was always
coming. That time knew its time. That time knew it was time. It was
a time that had always been coming so that even when something
was not falling, leaking, draining out of me it was always falling, leaking
draining out of me. It was not something coming out of me,
not something simply coming out of me. It was falling,
always falling, though not always. It was leaking. This was
a forceful leaking, like being drained. It was something
that was being drained from me and called downward,
to the ground. This calling by the ground was constant.
This call was not always constant but when it called
it always was calling. The draining was forced by
something pushing in on me. This something pushing
in on me had always been pushing. There was never
a time it had not been pushing. This pushing pressed
the draining which was always falling to the ground
that always had been there. This ground that
always had been there existed before it was
not there. It existed in a time that did not
exist. Its existence was not in time. Its
existence was not time. Its time never
existed, this thing that always was.
There was a time I once was. I was
once in a time with something
leaking out of me. It was
always leaking out of me.
I always was. Was is
always. Was is me,
was always me.

Was is. Is
was always.

Never was
was never.
Was was.
This was
the was
that was
falling
out of
me,
press
ing out
of me
always,
never
not
being
drained
out of
me to
be re
ceiv
ed in
to the
ground
that
always
was
even
when
it was
not,
when
I was
not.

These two always coinciding.

Hickory Dickery

2005-10-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

Church Mouse's Observations

On Sex and the Mythic Suburb

When He Was Just Fifteen

.
Loved boy, demon dreaming, run through
an emasculating mill of hours,
boards piled up, planked, trafficked in 4²
religion, waiting on a driving nail
with brambles in his hair, roots turned
from will to function, a piercing on
a civil lathe, dizzying cries out
of dark wood to a foolish track of
silence, a polis of quiescent vows,
sawdust, at last desired, somewhere,
in some way, as someone, someday,
a last tryst with light,
Persephone dragged down to the dark
of an accustomed compromise,
Lethe's tidal give and take

hard to remember what the world was
before she alighted like the moon,
like a dark screen, lit by the sun
ever riding at her heel, the lustrum
of her back meteorotically always
just beyond, beyond the sun and the crater
she cleaved in loved boy's yard now gone to
seed, overgrown like a jungle where
cats roam about the face of a fallen
buddha; lovingly they pad the earth
in carpets of peaceful invention;
loved boy throws rocks at the sun,
sun turns to a river where loved boy
drinks, memory blanked by her sweet
elixir, one sip and forever gone

desert emerges in the bed
where loved boy swam, wild rapids
turned to sand, gleeful accelerations
between silted banks of refusal,
waters robbed of holy wars, baptism
of thistle, purged eddies of loveless nights
where fish that try to spawn go belly up,
rich effulgence stripped, putrefied,
dried bone cast in the heat of shoal
and sand where statuary crumbles,
toppled totem in a dying forest,
illusion lamented, a longing
cleansed, hot wind glides along, her name
rustles leaves, a creeping fire, fissure
rubbled pyre panging for her touch

he straddles the ghost of a future promise
ridden out of fitful sleeplessness;
dreams, like shells, litter a blanket
in a solitary field, a boy
understands an upturned nose smells fear,
he's outsourced to an ignorant safety
of distance and memory that divides,
conquers, like a book fallen on its side,
a museum shelf's glass-housing, a scream
and a shard of nail beneath, listing among
days that do not know his name, loved boy
totters like a calf, like a plunger in
the trunk of her father's car, his ghost
flush against the back of the sky
where night picks away at an ancient hole

cherchez la femme, loved boy
of a motherless house and a
spattering of maypoles, suburban
sex and all still moments in between,
letting go and freezing in a
mid-day and cautionary sequence
of return, eruptions of bread and seed,
a(r)morless armies and a drink
expel a constant howling, it's a drink
he can't afford, he turns onto his side,
heart tympanic in his ear, memory
of taste, saliva on a wooden tongue,
though he was of the earth he was
of the earth too late, stopped
creating, quit weilding language skyward

gods tortured him with lovers,
his mind a constant hum, thoughts mere
impositions, broken apart,
one got away as the other
was being eaten, he remembers
her like snow not far from an ocean
and he feels like a fat man leaning
over a countertop, a glass jar
fired without love wedged into
memory; she likes to describe being
ravaged to her friends, there are boys
she will not name, and one, like wine
sharpened on the tongue, metal on a strap
in a house where love went bad, a midnight
meeting of regrettable constancies.

Tramps Like Us . . .

2005-09-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

Headline Reads: Fisher King

Spies Beautiful Woman. Quote:

"Stunning Really, Running Past"

Beautiful lady jogging by,

Her name's a run-on sentence.

Say it once--you'll never stop.

I know.

Her footsteps sound like fast-held

secrets paved out beneath the surface of the streets.

Lightning feet thunder through my sleep-dreams,

their crescendoed rumbling startles me

out of every wandering daytime distraction. At night

her toes are painted red, but here, in roadways,

she charges along past flooded meadows, pounds her

way up wooded hills, her knees take the weight of

every punishing descent. I watch from a distance,

from my porch, each early Otis evening.

I hurry through tasks in order to keep the appointment. Dry the dishes--quickly! Pare the hedge and tie the bundled branches fast. On those nights she does not come I wane, teeth set on edge, so I listen to the things she's left behind instead.

A reticent music rises,

something like the beating of wings

that fights its way out of her head and

into her body whenever she runs past.

On some other night I may hear

the barking of a dog, a dark fury, or

black grace where she has trammeled the

Western Massachusetts ground beneath her feet.

At times, although I cannot see him, I know

a man appears out on the road where she runs by.

He writes on a pad with a pen,

composes tonal poems that sound like babies

crying through a neighbor's window left ajar.

I know.

I see

that she is incomparable,

that she is a collection of impenetrable

clouds laden with the weight of gray whose

running is a dance in just the same way light

turns into water or bodies become anger,

entropic flower safe against thieves--

and behind the smoke of desire

a consummation of light in her eyes.

Very nearby, fear crops the hedge

of a churning syncope and leaves

forecast limpidity that only a rain

of bloodied lips can revive. After,

her breath clears like acorns

falling through the approach of an

elemental autumn and the miasmic

ether of her beating heart fades, she

grows steady and beautiful and whatever

was frightened is pressed from the

tabernacles of her eyes and her sculpted,

wild limbs, wrapped together in

her driving run, in the gathering of her steps,

chugging, pushing, pulling, spun impassionata,

fire-orchid sucking air out of a broken shelf life

until four turn into two, and the two turn into one

beautiful dancer, gliding with certainty like a

hunter poised to strike a story needing to be told,

an expansive rendering suddenly impossible to contain

under the constraints of a constant muse that leaves an

indelible mark tattooed on an arm.

Beautiful lady running,

perhaps you did not intend

to open this ancient wound,

but now the field is flooded

and I am one in a series of

dead, gray trees patterned like

religious pages in a decorous

book . . . unless you come.

Run past and speckle me in

dappled blues and greens

and every thickly-muscled

world between the scarred

oaks of the need we feel.

It is like girls talking in a park,

a gathering of boys on bicycles,

a cajoling, cruel mimicry by the wind

of a wooden horse and a sign that reads,

"Do Not Enter," set against the night that

falls just before we crawl back inside our lives.

I know.

Her name's a run-on sentence I cannot stop writing.

She kicks all stops away, jettisons the parsed chaff,

punctuates the sweet air with her breath. Say

her name and you are only the approach of something

already gone, the salted pillar of a Friday night

high school dance, a cracked chestnut on the ground,

the scent that lingers in the air after a girl goes

running by, yearning piled up like blocks of an

unanticipated blue and yellow knot of time

where lovers spend themselves like screeching tires

in a town where evening flashes in the sky like a horse

crossing an empty parking lot whose white lines of

demarcation are spirited away by the ascending

winds of what we choose, or refuse.

I know.

Love, love me do

2005-08-17T02:50:00.000-07:00

Oxyparoxysm

I am not available for love,

. . . . . not amenable to being touched;

. . . . . do not try (try!), don't ask of me (ask!)

Touch of Gray

2005-08-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

Confectionary

Is it a bad thing

to eat an entire

. . . chocolate crumb cake,

. . . . . . not in one sitting but maybe

. . . . in the course of a day

. .. all by myself

. . standing inside my aloneness

with nothing more than "sweet"

. . . . . . "chocolaty" abiding there?

At day's end, cake eaten,

I collect its crumbs into a corner

of the box, tip it up, and the sugary remnant

tumbles with sweeping finality

. . . . sweetening my lips and the spaces

. . . between my teeth.

My imaginary wife enters, touches my hair,

says I'm getting gray.

"It's powdered sugar," I say.

A Time of Confidences

2005-07-27T19:07:00.000-07:00

Harvey

. . . and I remember

. . that summer

. when Harvey took me

down those old crumbling

. . . . gray stairs

. . . . to where the honeysuckle blossoms

. . . . . were ripening.

. . . . . He picked a golden blossom

. . . . . . . . off a dangling green vine,

. . . . . . . . and orangello pollen

fell about and dusted Harvey's fingertips.

When he plucked out the middle of

. . . . the blossom

. . . . . and touched it

. . . . to my tongue

. . . . . . . I tasted

. . . . . . . . . Yellow!

A time of Innocence . . .

2005-07-27T18:58:00.000-07:00

Wheels Of Time

Crystal hale

. . slicks down the streets

and ices over

. . a small red tri-cycle

. . fallen on its side

in the clean white snow.

What a time, it was . . .

2005-07-19T10:17:00.000-07:00

Alimental Ode Full

of Sexual Lonliness

If it was not tranquil, it would be gloomy;

If it was not a prodigious quiet, it would be a

parsimonious silence; If it wasn't a family tree, it would be

a bend sinister; If it was not a siphoning off, it would be

only viscous pitch; If it was not beating its wings

everywhere, it would be an abandoned dog, on Galapagos,

waiting to feed its progeny with eonic recumbence,

and, looking forward to finding the next right sized meal.

Time it was, and . . .

2005-07-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

The Train Cars

Two empty train cars
pose
on once silver rails
linked together

at the hip

like docile old women

sitting

arm in arm

in the park

feeding pigeons at noon

The past is just a goodbye

2005-07-07T01:27:00.000-07:00

When She Would

These are my children:

footprints in sand,

oils, traces of fingers, lips, discarded

on the marked surface of a drinking glass,

breaths breathed swallowed by wind,

waste washed down a pipe, rust,

flecks of skin in light,

dancing detritus,

desiccations,

dust

wrappers dropped behind.

These, the ghosts

that lived with me,

hints-of-things embraced.

You should have known their mother.

Deeply,

I craved her,

deeply, the way a man misses life

when he thinks of her,

the way a string yearns for vibration,

music plucked from sense like

a ripe pomegranate

a flash of light

that's how she came to me

when she would.

Teach your children well

2005-07-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

Close As I Can Come

This is one

of my children,

your children,

their children's

children,

bequeathal

preceding me from out of the numerical

constructions of the Arabs.

At work I float in my chair,

hovering ephemera

barely seated there,

anywhere,

but especially there.

I am always crowded.

I'd like to rest.

I'd like to be solid,

just for a day, or even

an hour,

but I am passing even as

I am being

born.

Can Euclid tell me what that means?

It feels like something.

Something I am not.

I think I should be that,

not this,

concentric rings of if-onlies.

The scriptures are the same to me

even if I read

in Latin or in Greek,

in Aramaic, Sanskrit, or

In-Between-Gray-Lines.

That's as close as I can come.

What's The Word? Jo . . .

2005-06-09T01:32:00.000-07:00

Word

I lay these with the runes of time,

storied reasons culled in rhyme;

ruins cracked on rocky shores,

words laid to rest on ocean floors;

Sharp shards of husks and shattered skulls,

hard shells bored by beaks of gulls;

seas erode the sands of odes,

like sleuths unfolding secret codes;

Words mine all Mystery till she gives

the secret space where Beauty lives.

Song Remains The Same

2005-06-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

Buddha Kisses

The voices of your kisses

swell my lips with

echoes,

haunt them,

speak all over them,

again and

again;

they are piled up in rows like

chanting schools of monks

convened before a

golden buddha sitting

neither pleased nor displeased

very much at ease with what he hears.

Suddenly one of them breaks into

uncontainable

song.

Ch ch ch ch Changes

2005-05-28T02:06:00.000-07:00

Petrarchan Phases

small change is drastic, a catastrophic shift in

the balance of the way things had always once

been, diminished undulations of a passing life

gone in incremental devastations, never again

to hear music in just the same way, or to bite

into an apple with the intrinsic candor of a

polished red abandon, a bell gone forth to find

its clarion source in brassy closure, once

relished vigorously, an arrival that is never

more, never less, than a radical return, the

sound of clanging in cloth pockets and

a specified end, a singular cold

on cold giving way to freeze in the lea, an

expansive icing of care, so that what had once

been is remembered as warmer in a world of

what has become,

the thing giving birth to the world that is.

perhaps it is me that has changed or perhaps

the universe has stopped whirling, altered its

course, quit on fiat and on waiting for the

conflagration culminating in the end of

tiresome samsaric revolutions that drain joy

from living.

I'd Pay The Devil To Replace Her

2005-05-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

An Old Lament Made of Mud and Sky

Oblique corona of absence, black, wailing wind, dust storm of lament, bleak light, the feet that carried her away, out of a crumbling rotunda of stones, are pressed in mud, sun-baked stones

undone by love's eroding promises, withdrawn are the passionate invitations of a full woman whose roundnesses my fingers crave, my lips measured the distances between her supple upturned ends,

her scent is gone, her salt no longer sharpens my slackened tongue, the tongue that read to her, recited verses, sung her name, same tongue now stained purple with wine of grapes, cracked lips on which only interminable mumbling splutters,

reason's gone, blank, dumb and lightless,

a fist shakes, relentlessly, at the sky.

Honesty Is Such A Lonely Word

2005-05-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

Decomposition

It has been a year of surgeries. I

nurse self inflicted wounds. I have to claw

around for a word. I've cut the throat of

every word I've ever known. There has been

a rockslide in my body, an avalanche

of words has given way. It crouches against

a hillside like a cat backed onto its

haunches. Granite, snow-like, flutters in mid-

air. I mark each flake, each tiny dust-grave

with a cross of incremental self-betrayals--

inaccessible word. Former friends, past loves,

take flight, shove off without me. I retain

nothing of their unctuous fire. I lie in

a sullen plot of falsity. Words shuck me

like a pea. They walk past me at a slow

and tidy pace. I may never be heard by

passersby whose conversations recall what

once had been, what had been said by whom.

Un-Sexual, Un-Healing

2005-04-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

Oh, That I Were a Dog

( Where I are Plural )

It has always seemed unsustainable,

this lying side by side,

this sliding in and out daily,

hourly,

like teaching or selling,

acting is less of a performance art

--the stage floor subsumes,

is less of an

"other."

I have never been able to make due

beneath the weight of sheets,

the confinement of thighs,

the heavy allure of breasts,

breasts of varying size and tenor,

beautiful, yes, but

the gravity of being a man,

the multitude of beds,

open thighs,

fingers,

toes,

lips, yes, lips . . .

such cumbersome light

this losing one's self,

this becoming a tongue

writhing in the dark.

A part of me wants to make love to

every woman, every woman I have known,

or met, or that has walked a little while

in the earth, women tending gardens,

women healing the world, women

knotting a kerchief over the eyes of

Justice, but even that part of me has doubts,

reservations.

It seems too much for me, this lying here

with you, my stomach asks me what it is all

about, my nose juts forward, suggesting this

is the smell of mother or those long-legged

sisters of my father who, by nature, coddled

and enticed. I remember their limbs,

what their skin smelled like, how their hair

fell along the cheek I set against their

shoulders. Safe arms of incredible women.

You lack the ephemeral nets of those girls I

consumed at the newsagent stand.

They turned into birds and clouds, flight itself,

yes, whatever I asked them to be they became,

and I did the same for them. But, this lying here

with you is so palpable, filled with fleshy rolls

and scars and unexpected patches of hair,

every manner of imaginable alteration.

Your body makes me fear my own.

It is a body I have feared from very early times,

from centuries far removed from this bed,

your walls, the drawers that secret away your

pleasure life, and the closets of your chosen

wardrobe, your desired reds and golds.

Desire enters every choice you make, every

meal you decide to eat, leaves it mark on every

orange peel your fingers tear, every place your

bare foot touches, remains behind every time

your hand wraps around the doorknob to your

apartment, infuses every sweep your tongue

makes over your lips, fills every labored breath
you breathe as you sweat in the park, walking

vigorously, jiggling beneath your loose clothing,

wishing a man of my caliber could lie still, one

night, beneath your canopy, hold and take what

is his, give you his own desire as if nothing else

grew from the earth as it spins under the stars

that shine even as they remain invisible in the

day, the day of a thousand failed loves, the light

of self-conscious stains, of awakening, axis of

light that so diminishes the interminable appeal

of a boy let loose upon the earth, dabbled on by

well-meaning women, and by entrepeneurs who

imprint early monolithic self-doubt on every

perfect being.

Oh, that I were a dog.