Whatever

a self-parody

Looking out the living
room window nothing happened
but I felt something
move my larynx anyway.
 

Friday's Top Five

1. Drunken Boat
I'm stealing the format of this post from former frontman, current ironman poet, Todd Colby. I'm going to post soon on how I came across Drunken Boat in 1991; back then I thought they were going to be the next Sonic Youth—yes, that big! (and that good).
2. Sephyrus
What other candleshop website quotes Robert Creeley and Ezra Pound? And the candles are smokin'. Go Rachel!
3. Typo Magazine
Issue 10 is a little more uneven quality than is typical for this poezine, but it's still one of the best out there. The two highest points in this issue: Clayton Eshleman's essay "Wind from all Compass Points" and Tony Tost's pieces from Elephant & Obelisk.
4. Mike Tanier's Two Deep Zone
For a few years now over at Football Outsiders Mike Tanier has been cranking out the best football writing around, and some of the best sports writing period.
5. PostSecret
Mail art gone mainstream—what some might consider a guilty pleasure.

Shadowtrain

I have four poems in the recently posted September edition of Shadowtrain. Martin Stannard's Things I Want To Learn may be my favorite poem in the issue.

The Hour

by Paul Blackburn (Nov 24, 1926–Sep 13, 1971)

Noon-and-a-half :
waiting to eat
we have sat on the stone bench in the sun for an hour
ignoring the time
except for the time of our bodies, our
hunger     .     We

sit here fixed,
driven back on ourselves,
                                     listening,
caught in the blue silence of this wind,
     hungering for that too
                                     after northern winter

listening to the warm gnawing in the stomach,
     the warm wind
through the blossoms blowing .
 

Mallarme died today

Mallarmé died today (in 1898). Spume to many sirens, we prowl the seasons to fearless solitude, salute whatever concern saddens dreams and flowers sobs. Blessed torment, deep regret, the pavement in your hair—the evening I thought sleeps down eyes, evoking soot. Pierced swimmer, denying wave, the thousand fists of the sun. Mother of skin, of water, of veils. Bored man and stones, white hair, windows on youthful ago. Warm oils, clocks, cough evening light—river cradling swans, rich memories filled with hungering, stubborn offspring. Cling to dewdrops and scorn angel art. Be previous. The still compels a way. Hold the crystal flight at the risk of beast root. Hovering storm kiss of nothingness, gnawing sterility of stone. Exhausted, haunted—tooth of alone.
      —•—
Weary charm, sevenfold rose, dig the cold with pity. Ashen dawn over graveyard lands, genius reprimands delicate ecstasy—agony moon, constantly he, blue sage's evergreen paint. Signify a cloud in tranquil eyelashes. Like poet wilderness with the soul on fogs, them rags of autumn emerge through birds. Flues smoke in yellow sky. Forgetfulness of straw on which at last lying art triumphs.
      —•—
To yawn in bells and springs of the fog, agony in the sky. No more birds, strange nothing. Sea nights on her swaying wilderness. Tedium fluttering, may that wind scatter the blue yellow leaves crawl in.
      —•—
Shadow fingers walk back, immaculate bathing light. A kiss not by what forgotten. Distance ever in from doomed perfume, what petals welcome within. Fragments reverie, lion's gaze, shivering robes resembling manes. Nonchalant comb, bottles of roses, will you virtue. Leave me—nurse my drunken hair. Human aromatics, cruel conforming jewels, vessels, my dark enough mirror. Mirror framed by hours, memories like leaves, distant evenings, nakedness. Am I a falling tree? And that kiss that will not end, that hand: sinister day? My blood may wander into you, immortal horror, as yet I serve the silent stars. Obscure treasure of being that grows in response to destiny like breast milk, endlessly concealed like primeval sleep, melodious stone of evil times, calyx of caverns and azure veils, inviolate light of icicles and snow and lonely hearts. Last, soon, ancient calm—window's blue shutters. Waves know the sky burns to go where light sleeps. And then—what else? Goodbye flower lips. Unknown cries. Utter feels. Apart.
      —•—
Clear air encumbers doubt. Woods that roses malign—fable error. Blue compare sighs through morning murmurs, wind quick to rain, nothing visible sky. Shores of sunlight—hollow gold foliage—animal born of dives. Hour wiles—musical awake— light by lips that kiss. Untouched teeth—reeds that speak—endless around. Song of contours, love of line.
      —•—
Instrument of lakes, speak more of grapes to regret, empty wild night, inflate the forest of precious feet in which my gaze lingers, and let me embrace the day's shadow roses and savage thorns. Lightning kisses curves, writhes the flesh, tears color from the sky, drunken prey. Horns on passion, hum-enamored desire, ash of leaves touching the feet, the words, too, must open to you.
      —•—
The sandal glittering with sand. The pouring rain glazing the angel statue. Evening's fingers stroking the shoreline. Ephemeral percussions of eternity.
      —•—
That pure lie in twilight, with caged thrusts. Shivering kiss which cannot feel a corner, fold pink eves, pose fire, shadow desire beneath your wing. To writhe in the eyes in darkness like boredom in a child, a star in space. Alive of the forgotten long ago, doomed to sing when the dream inflicts its horror down the neck. From blood laughing absent shred, midnight treasure torch. Vanished hairstyles, nails fall like pillows past midnight. Many ashes, only credence. Mirror, dip of oblivion. Gold scintilla, extinct expires.
      —•—
Into the known voice of the angel, the future drools.
 

Nobody here

If 2004 and 2006 are any indication, this is the time of year when my little burst of summer blogging comes to an end. I'd like to keep Nobody here from going into complete hibernation this fall and winter (and spring), but I've no idea whether I'll be moved enough to make that happen. No post yesterday because I was working on some poems. Not much of a post today because I'll be using this morning's "free time" to find out more about "unschooling." There's been some talk about it over at the Poetics List and Possum Ego. I'd never heard of it before, but I've read enough now to pique my interest.

The drive home

The drive home made all the more slow by the broken antenna. One station all that comes in. I-95. Classic rock. "Two for Tuesday." Would've prayed to God to let the second Rush song be "Working Man" if I thought it would've helped. Instead I get "Subdivisions." Turn the volume down. Down, down, through the construction, route 7. Entering New Milford from the south, widened now to four lanes, can cruise along at 55, 60. Not bad. So they had to knock down some trees. Down, down, to the flashing lights, through the orange-and-white barrels, road workers in the overtime night. Down, down, this descent of autumn. That Williams could find, in his descent of winter, elation in his own underwear. Boxers or briefs, I don't suppose we know. I'll find elation when I shake this cough. My car is small amid the construction sea. No plate on the front. Faded light of the dash. Half a tank a gas. No stars. No moon. No sky.

Labor Day evening

Labor Day evening. Half the house asleep. Sitting in the yellow light of the backroom. The cat licking at her water dish under the desk in the kitchen. Stomach still not settled. Throat soar. Words fall. Days uncomfortable. Art impossible. Subjects weaving in and out. Focus lacking. Labor Day evening. Half the house asleep. The yellow light of the backroom, compact fluorescent light taking its color from the wall and the stained-glass fixture hanging from the ceiling. The cat crunching her food under the desk in the kitchen. The window behind me partially blocked by a sheet from Vaughn's art pad painted with bright animal shapes: red bunny, blue pony, red pig, brown horse, brown cow, yellow chickens, black sheep. The refrigerator hums. KC flips the page of her magazine in the living room. The goddamn cars go by outside like muffled screams. Slouching in my chair, leaning backward into fall, into might as well be silent.

Sunday morning

Sunday morning with its slow motions. The porch a frustration with its layers of dirt spit up from the road. The pressboard home going up across the street looks like vomit. Around where the picture window will go, the paper hangs down like a tear drop in a Man Ray photo, way more beautiful than Old Glory drooping over the stoop of the next house over. The 9 a.m. sun shining bright, but not on the new construction. The foundation, deep gray, in shadow. The cars already go by at steady intervals. Living in the valley of the SUVs. Almost wanting to pick up a rock and chuck it at the next one that passes. Like when I was five, and mom and I were living in our first apartment after the divorce, on Watertown Ave not far from the stadium, how I'd chuck rocks from our dirt-and-rock lot separated from the road by a steep slope and a few layers of trees, mostly pines, I think. How I'd thought I'd hit a couple of cars until finally I heard the thunk of hitting one, probably on the roof or trunk, I'd suppose later. How I never felt bad, and kept on throwing rocks, or snowballs, for the rest of the year, or however long it was, that we lived there. But of course now I just grab my empty mug and head back inside, which is good I guess.

Saw a blue moon

Saw a blue moon on the drive home. Course, it was blue because of the tinted part of the windshield I caught it through. Blue as the cover of a philosophy reader. Blue as the thought of "What are we to do?" Forty-eight things to do in this world: 1. Open a book store; 2. Eat a lobster in Maine; 3. Coin a phrase ("kiss a brick"); 4. Kiss the tomb of Oscar Wilde; 5. Listen to the cat pee in her litter box; 6. Clean the litter box; 7. Let one perception lead you to another; 8. Stay out of the way of oncoming traffic; 9. Drink a glass of water; 10. Clear your throat; 11. Drink more water; 12. Make yourself a midnight snack—sharp cheddar & pepperoni maybe; 13. Order Chinese; 14. Sing a song in your head and don't tell anyone; 15. Inhabit your lover anyhow; 16. Quote somebody famous ("Future references lead us nowhere," Elio Schneeman); 17. Realize the cat took a shit, too, and god it stinks; 18. Use "transubstantiation" in conversation; 19. Piss; 20. Make a "Piss Christ" print and display it over your toilet; 21. Create a controversial work of art using only the letter S; 22. Save your money in a pillow case in the closet; 23. Spend time with kids, teach them something; 24. Fuck in the cemetery; 25. Swat flies; 26. Lose yourself in a movie; 27. Hold a book to your chest; 28. Cop a feel, or better, feel a cop; 29. Consider what your last words could be; 30. Make a clock, keep it forever; 31. Challenge a stranger to a foot race at the mall; 32. Buy all your clothes from thrift stores; 33. Eat meat with your hands if you're going to eat it at all; 34. Think of forty-eight things to do and write them down; 35. Bet the house on the Cowboys to cover the spread; 36. Improvise a song while standing in the checkout line: sing it to the cashier with feeling; 37. Don't forget the war; 38. Stay up all night; 39. Wake up before sunrise; 40. Talk in your sleep; 41. Talk with the dead; 42. Feel your way through your place with the lights off; 43. Look for the lunar eclipse; 44. Research jobs where a person can be suspended with pay: get one of those jobs and get suspended; 45. Start a think-tank: don't tell anyone; 46. Pretend to have lost your voice for a day; 47. Scream as loud as you can and see if it isn't therapeutic; 48. Wash your face and hands and brush your teeth.

Stumble through the hall

Stumble through the hall of morning's first moments. Familiar rumble outside from the construction across the street. Into and out of the bathroom. Into and out of the dream. Into and out of the thoughts that aren't there. There might have been a dream, sitting in a cell block, looking at a clock through iron bars. Some chubby guard with a dumb grin, fuzzy eyebrows, and big blue clothes. Big ol' Hollywood keychain hooked to his big black belt. Pacing the hall in his big black boots. Down into the morning, Vaughn at her desk in the kitchen, cranking out the multi-colored Play-Doh. Dash tottering between Vaughn and his mom as he learns how to walk. Magnets across the floor—an orange g, a green o—and tupperware and toy silverware, and toy-sized tins that either are or aren't toys I have no idea. Sometimes my guts want to give up and seep back into the earth. The little noises too much. The excesses, the effusions, the never enoughs. Vague and dizzy feelings cradling objects. "The sky / is a black / sudden cloud, / a sun. / Speak / to me, say / what things / were forgotten." (Creeley, from "The Shame")

bits

Sitting at the dining room table feeding Dash bits of peaches and whole wheat bread. Curtains drawn to shade the room. Vaughn seated at the chair behind me, working on a grilled cheese sandwich. She starts singing, "Higher, higher / the room's on fire." I ask her where she picked up that song. She says "It's from London." "From a movie?" I ask her, thinking Mary Poppins or something. "None movie," she says, "I made it up for you. And Dashiell-do."
      —•—
Took a book from the shelf, last night. Opened it to a little brown bug. Closed it back up and put it back on the shelf. Wonder what he's doing today.
      —•—
Vaughn at her desk in the kitchen, kneading a Play-Doh sky. The whistle of a truck blowing by outside, not quite as loud as summer's seething insects. Grumbling construction across the street. The rumbling stomach won't settle down.
      —•—
Vaughn: "Ow, the chair went on my toe. Ow!"
KC: "I'm sorry you got hurt, honey."
V: "Oh, when will I never get hurt, Mommy?"
K: "Unfortunately that's part of life, honey."
V: "When I die I'll never get hurt."
(Pause)
V: "Ow, I'm so saturated."
K: "Exasperated?"
V: "No, I'm so saturated."
K: "Saturated? You might say that if you were wet."
V: "No, I'm saturated that I'm hurt."

The Pepto clouds

The Pepto-Bismol clouds of sunset, yeah, they're there, just like the fever clouds behind the hills, the remnants of rural lives, the groves and canopies and houses with fields. I woke up hours later, around three a.m., exhausted from too much sleep but feeling better than I had in twenty-four hours, even the sludge slogging through my digestive system was approaching settled. What was with that Ziplock of leaves fallen in August? Vaughn, her bed slightly lit now for the past few days since we bought a night light for the bathroom so she can find her way in the middle of the night, looks to the north I suppose. She who sleeps deeply and thrashes into the wall at times. Her floor a mess of wooden blocks, Lego bits, and books. Dash's door is closed. He who sleeps lightly and gnaws the white paint off his crib when he wakes up. The dark blue night through the window in the hall, the veil of Mary. You can't get rid of what they give you when you're young. I can't at least. I stagger down the stairs, lift my head at the cat as if she can understand that means "hey, how you doin'?" Pour a glass of water. Sit down at the dining room table. It's covered with newspapers, magazines, and old bills. The bananas in the fruit bowl are perfectly spotted. The street's actually quiet. Through the bowed opening of the curtains where they're supposed to meet: blue night, low rock wall edging the neighbor's driveway, vinyl siding and gutters, garden hose, wire fence with chubby posts, the cement walkway ending out of sight, their dining room window all lit up, some people never sleep. I sip the water. My stomachs don't feel better anymore.

      —•—

from "Sixteen Sloppy Haiku"
by Paul Blackburn

A sound you'll never
hear again:
pissing in the toilet
about 3 A.M.
 

Bent into the night

Bent into the night, the yellow elbow of the hydraulic excavator catching a piece of streetlight. It's important to know who is singing on the radio, the name of the song, the kinds of trees passing in silhouette against the navy blue night. The song is a spiderweb I don't understand. The road lined with orange and white striped barrels. The white light up ahead, washing out the stars, is the sign of Mark Ford-Mercury. My mind is stuck on the excavator, that yellow elbow bent into the night. Slaps of dirt along its yellow boom and stick and bucket. Dirt-caked bucket like a hand of a dead man whose knuckles hang down to lightly rest on the ground. But that's not right. The elbow bent into the night is alive; a machine, a force of nature. Having dug into the earth, the bucket's a hand come to rest barely on a lover's shoulder. Hard as a look in the eyes, soft as the trace of a curve. If everything weren't a paradox, nothing would make sense. The traffic light ahead turning from yellow to red.

mentions / Paul Blackburn

As I've mentioned before, it's great to see all of the attention Joe Ceravolo's poetry has been getting lately. It probably won't lead to a Complete or Collected anytime soon, but it's nice to see he has many passionate fans out there. Most of the time when I mentioned him to someone as one of my favorites in the mid or late ’90s, it was almost certainly "Joe who?" A few years ago when I was posting "to" Jack Spicer, he seemed like he was slipping from his one-time relatively prominent place in the minds of those working in the "New American Poetry" traditions. That trend, too, has been reversed in recent years. What should happen next is to get more people talking again about Paul Blackburn. And UC, or somebody, should put his Collected Poems back in print—a used copy will set you back $85 at Amazon. His poems can be "crude" at times and that's likely to keep him from gaining a "general audience," not willing to see past it—or even better, deal with it—and recognize his technical mastery, embedded and not flaunted. He wrote with a bluntness that's refreshing in poetry, but not necessarily welcome. Anyway, got to get ready for work now. Here's a poem of his, a gentleness, from The Cities.

The Art
by Paul Blackburn

to write poems, say,
is not a personal achievement
that bewilderment

On the way to work
two white butterflies
& clover along the walks

to ask    .
to want that much of it    .

A bag of leaves

Vaughn returned from Nana's today with a Ziplock full of orange, yellow, and red leaves. I didn't mow the lawn for like the twentieth day in a row—it makes a great pretend jungle. The Cowboys' first team didn't look so hot this time out. Could be a long season, especially if T-New misses significant time. A few things conspired to have me thinking autobiographically today, from Reginald Shepherd's "Working Class Hero" blog post to Kent Johnson's "competence, linguistics, politics & post-avant matters" in the new Absent issue to Lisa Jarnot's post with pros and cons of academia—the universities are packed with worse poets and minds: it's a sad commentary that she hasn't landed a full-time gig by now. Also, up late last night reading how Creeley “never forgot Williams’ contention that ‘the poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity . . .’ ” What have I never forgotten? There must be something substantial at the core.

Strange bug, 2 a.m.

2 a.m., Vaughn rests her cheek on her sheetless mattress, knees tucked into her chest. In her red Mount Rushmore T-shirt, a bundle of brightness in the dim night. "My Big Starlight," I call her, ever since she first called me her "Little Moonbeam" what seems like years ago already. She tilts her head and squints her eyes up at me from their pale sockets. She puts a hand on my knee and tells me she loves me. The best feeling in the world against the worst: not being able to help your child. I try to remember we're among the world's privileged, low budget and all. The children in warzones with their shattered selves, fragments of flesh, marrow—what happens to capillaries?—image of a father trying to piece his daughter back together. Fear there's no answer. Vaughn starts hacking again. She lifts her head, I grab the tupperware and move it under her. The easy foods we fed her today—oatmeal, crackers, Jell‑o—compiled into liquidy greenish goo. She asks for a paper towel to wipe her mouth, I fetch them from the bathroom, tear off a sheet. She wipes her mouth and hands it back to me. I crumple it in my left hand, seal it away. She has wriggled to a lower spot in her bed. I rub her back. I sing her a lullaby:

               Making your way in the world today
               takes everything you've got.
               Taking a break from all your worries
               sure would help a lot.
               Wouldn't it be nice to get away?
               Sometimes you want to go—

She interrupts and asks me to sing the one "with the girl and the pretty dress." It takes me a second to remember what she's talking about. We had gone through a phase a few months ago, when during a bath, or maybe after one, drying her off with her purple towel, I half-consciously sang the opening to The Doors' song "Running Blue." She latched onto it immediately, asking me to sing the four lines over and over, for weeks and weeks. Though after the first spontaneous singing I realized I had to change the word "dead" to something else.

               Poor Otis, lost and gone,
               Left me here to sing his song.
               Pretty little girl with the red dress on—
               Poor Otis, lost and gone.

It's a short ditty, and after a few times around I try to think of another song, maybe a little more soothing, and that I still remember the words to. But Vaughn says she saw something black fly through the room. "Did you see it?" she asks. "No," I say. "How big was it?" I ask, imagining a Grim Reaper-type thing. "Small," she says, "like a bug." "Like a fly?" I ask. "Yes, like a fly. There it goes again. I think it went into the closet." I look around, squinting because I don't have my glasses on, but I don't see, or hear, anything. There've been very few flies in the house this summer, not like last year. "Maybe it came in through the holes in my wall," she says. "You mean the vent in your ceiling?" "Yes, the vent." "I don't think so. That's for the air conditioner. I haven't seen any bugs coming in through there." "Well, maybe, they can go in there," she says. "Maybe," I say. Our breathing's silent but in sync. The air light as our eyes are heavy. I settle into a lullaby.

               Carry me, caravan, take me away—
               Take me to Portugal, take me to Spain.
               Andalusia, with fields full of grain,
               I have to see you again and again.

               Take me, Spanish caravan,
               Yes, I know you can.

               Trade winds find galleons lost in the sea.
               I know where treasure is waiting for me:
               Silver and gold in the mountains of Spain.
               I have to see you again and again.

               Take me, Spanish caravan,
               Yes, I know you can.

Vaughn's eyes are closed, though she's not quite asleep. I kiss her on her hair, on the back of her skull. I want her to live forever.


 

strange bug, etc.

Been a tough week for writing. Vaughn picked up some strange bug in Maine where she seems fine all day but wakes up in the middle of the night and throws up three or four times. Dash had it, too, the last night in Maine, and then he had, you know, that other digestive issue for most of this week. Took them both to the doctor Monday and the dr. said wait it out. Called him on Wednesday and he said call him back on Saturday if we need to. Dash did finally seem to be over it today, but if Vaughn yacks again tonight, it'll be off to the doctor again tomorrow.
      —•—
Tuesday night at work I got a call from KC saying it was our anniversary. Not your stereotypical wife-nagging-hub call. Nope, we both forget the day. Every year for four years so far. Probably something to do with being together for like seven years before that. Also maybe that we both primarily look at it as a good excuse to go out to eat. So today Meme watched the kids, and KC and I went out for lunch at the Cookhouse. KC had the lemon-butter grilled salmon, horseradish mashed potatoes, and coleslaw; I had the lemon-butter grilled salmon, horseradish mashed potatoes, and a salad. There's a reason we're together I guess. Conversation was mostly about the kids. KC mentioned a really interesting take, intertextual, on one of the Harry Potter characters (I haven't read the books at all; she tells me about them, then when the movie hits we check it out). She asked if I'd been writing political poems lately because the various notes she's seen around the house are mostly political. Not really, I tell her. No more than usual. Not as much as I'd like, perhaps. She told me how she tried some gelato they now have at the bakery on the green. We considered stopping there on our way home, but it was getting late, meaning close to the time I'd have to leave for work, and I wanted a little more time to spend with Vaughn. We'll go with her when she's feeling better. Back home, Meme, Vaughn, and I played a game of Crazy 8's that just wouldn't end. It went on so long, I ended up getting into work just on time: the latest I've gotten there in months. Vaughn won the game, just as KC was about to take my place.

The wordhouse is not a birdcage

1. The whole house is sick with something.

2. It's the water in the shower that makes me sing.

3. The horse in the dream is called Flaming Tonsils. That's the name he has received. We can change it to something more sophisticated but that would be a lie.

4. Justice is understanding; punishment's something else.

5. Memory's the kid who didn't read books but wrote aphorisms almost daily, not knowing the word "aphorism," as if the world needed to know his wisdom born of ignorance; who wrote down his failing thoughts as if there were power in them, feeble mind cranking out simplicities like "Violence is not an answer, it's only a prayer."

6. Irony, that mercenary, combining the head-on march of a pawn with the jump-over hook of a knight.

7. In these days of the Clean Skies Act and Operation Iraqi Freedom, it's the warriors—soldiers and hawks—that are called the children of God.

8. Sitting on the crapper, I close my eyes and see Flaming Tonsils in silhouette against the big bald sun.

9. Life in this world is blood in the stools.

10. The whole house is sick with something. In the end, there are those who cry and those who want to.
 

At the fair, pushing

I think the goal was to completely stop writing about poetry here, but that hasn't quite happened yet. The goal of sitting down now to write was to write about the goal of what I've been writing. But I don't think I care. Why post these writings on a blog rather than keep them filed away in a folder on my hard drive? There're a few points I could argue. But why? My kids, I hope, will need no argument.
      —•—
At the fair, pushing Dash in his stroller, I stop at the end of one of the tents. An empty spot. KC and Vaughn somewhere behind me, standing in a line for soft-serve ice cream. I'm looking out at the swarm of people, bodies in T-shirts and shorts, nauseating expressions of their excited faces as they talk and walk to the tractor pull or the sheep tent or the exit. I hate 'em all. I'm that good of a person. Are there really people who believe you can write poems for everybody? Or maybe that's a strawman that gets thrown around? When poets write on their blogs about populist versus elitist poetry what exactly's implied? Staring out into the crowds, I suppose writing for anybody's a nice sentiment. In a certain slant of light I can get behind that. But what kind of writing's that? "Writing." I've had enough with my precious distinctions between "writing" and "making," which smells of that animal smell that swabbed my nose when we were passing through the ticket booth. Is all hate born of self-hate or just some of it? KC and Vaughn return with their soft serves. At least today there won't be any damn jets flying overhead like they sometimes have done at New Milford's big gatherings on the green. Hate's the second most useful emotion. The danger's that it must be applied discriminately.

Over the hills and into the spider

"Over the hills and into the spider," Vaughn says as she scribbles on her drawing pad. "Over the hills and into the spider," I repeat as I stop to stand behind her. "Don't tell my story," she instructs me, barely looking up from her little chair and table in the kitchen. In the living room, KC's holding Dash and swaying to "Sunday," borrowing from my bag of tricks. Out the dining room window I notice the mail truck is stopped at the neighbor's house past ours. It's still raining out. Our mailbox still has a hole. I walk back to my desk in the back room and sit down. Flip through Google News, then Google Reader. Vaughn skips into the back room. "Can we play a game?" she asks, then without waiting for an answer says, "I want to play Go Fish." "Sure," I say, "as soon as Mommy gets Dash asleep." We step quietly toward the living room and peak in. KC's already heading upstairs to set Dash down in his crib. Vaughn and I get out the set of card games Meme bought for her on vacation. KC heads out for this week's supplementary trip to the grocery store. Vaughn's favorite Fish card is the Pool Shark. She collects all four and we place them down next to her other sets. After she wins, we break out Crazy 8's. I shuffle up and deal, help Vaughn organize her cards, then organize mine. We both hold a Crazy 8 with a big, blue spider grinning at the five cards in his cartoon hands.

Blue apples

The first sentence of the poem posted at Verse today reminded me, superficially, of a piece I made some years ago and so I went and dug up the file. The poem, not titled, is from March ’97, when I was either reading or re-reading Clark Coolidge's Space. This was published in Quicksilver, issue 1, 1998.


Here's another one, "Waits and Measures," from that month; it's a full-blown Coolidge imitation. This one was published in Conatus 1997, the student-run literary magazine at WestConn.


Some related others from that same time:







 

The Bridgewater Fair, 2007

                Vaughn showing Dash her new "tattoo"

Heading to the Bridgewater Fair, we have to drive like a mile-and-a-half around the fairgrounds to find the soccer field where we're supposed to park. When we finally get there we actually get a spot all the way up on the baseball field, right next to the pitcher's mound, nice and easy to remember. We unload our stuff, our kids, and head in the direction we saw others head. A woman calls out to us from a school bus: she's trying to fill more seats before shuttling folks right to the ticket booth. We think probably not, what with the stroller and all. KC asks her how far it is. "About a quarter mile," she says. I shake my head; we keep walking on. There are about a half dozen buses here—spewing their exhaust into the air because of a quarter mile? I shake my head. Eight bucks a pop for KC and me. Vaughn and Dash are free. "It smells like animals," Vaughn says. Smells like shit, I think. The first thing we see is an area roped off around some antique machines. One of them generates a mini waterfall. All of them spewing more exhaust into the air. "I'd rather smell the animals," KC says. We head over to the large white tent where the sheep are. Vaughn wants to see the black sheep. They're in the other aisle; we slowly make our way through the crowd. She says "Hi" to the black sheep, stares at them for a while. I wonder what the heck all the adults without children are doing here looking at the sheep. Make room for my kids you jerks. A sheep is bleating loudly. "I want to see the one whose baaing," she says. We follow the sound to end of the aisle. There's a white sheep being sheared. Face held still in some metal contraption. Beheheh, she bleats, mournfully, as if trying to reclaim whatever dignity she can.
      —•—
After the sheep, we head to the rabbit tent. But Vaughn's not too interested in the rabbits—she saw Uncle Joe's neighbor's two rabbits up close last week. Instead, the crowing of roosters at the other end draws her over there. We talk to a few of the roosters, but spend more time checking out the muscovy, and then listening to the very talkative African goose.
      —•—
We move on to another tent with a couple of large black horses, 1,600 pounders. They're busy eating and mostly we see their big behinds. On the other end of the tent is a small calf and a young bull. Vaughn takes to the cow, affectionately naming him Long Horns. I start to explain that the emblem on the hat I usually wear is for a college football team called the Longhorns, but I quickly realize that's much less interesting than the bull itself. And the next tent down is a whole long tent full of cows. She's really into the cows today.
      —•—
KC and Vaughn get a soft serve ice cream; we sit and they eat. Dash is good through all of this, taking in the scene, the crowds, the cooking smells, the exhaust smells, the carnival rides and game booths. Finally we head over to what was Vaughn's favorite activity last year at the fair: the sandboxes filled with dried-out corn. The boxes are crowded and Vaughn is shy. I point out places where she can squeeze in and start playing, but she's wary of the other kids. Finally, two girls, who look a bit old to be playing in corn, shake off and leave, and Vaughn gets in. She takes a shovel and fills a bucket, pats it smooth, then dumps it, and does it all over again. One boy gets really upset when his grandfather tells him it's time to go. The boy throws corn all over, flails his arms, has to be carried out. Later, a girl whose mother tells her it's time to go is met with screaming and violent whipping of the head back and forth. Vaughn won't be keen on leaving either. I think maybe they shouldn't have this attraction. I tell Vaughn we have to go soon. She says she doesn't want to. She has "finished" her most recent bucket filling. I tell her one more and then we're going. She scoops and fills, scoops and fills, and before too long smoothes out the top. She dumps it out, stands up, shakes off any pieces of corn caught in her dress, and reaches her hands up toward me. I picker her up and put her down where she can put her purple clogs back on. We head out with KC and Dash toward the women's room.
      —•—
One more thing to do before we go. We wander around and finally find the face and arm painting place. Most of the designs cost $2 or $3. Vaughn picks out the Little Mermaid, which is $7. KC talks her out of that. Vaughn's next choice is a unicorn, also $7. Lucky for us, Vaughn sees a heart in the $2 section, and she decides that's what she really wants. When the heart's dried on her arm, Vaughn asks us not to wash it out tonight. We tell her if she stays clean, we can do a sponge bath tonight and make sure the heart doesn't wash away.
      —•—
On our way out, Vaughn and KC cut through the tent where Long Horns is kept so Vaughn can say goodbye.

Untitled

To write so much
and complete so little
 

Dash is sleeping

Dash is sleeping. The cat looks like she's thinking: sitting on the hardwood floor, head up, in the sun as it has filtered through into the dining room. I feel like I'm feeling. The washing machine is rinsing. The dish washer's waiting to be run. How do we fill it so quickly? Dash is sleeping. KC and Vaughn are shopping. Sharma has now been eating her dry food and licking at her water dish. My hands are cold and typing. A knock at the door. It was a Jehova's Witness. "What turns you off about organized religion?" his response when I said "I'm not interested." "I'm letting the cold air in," I answered. "Have a good day," as I closed the door. My hands are colder. The cat is curious. Dash is sleeping upstairs thank goodness. The cat might wonder why I refer to her sometimes by name and sometimes as "the cat." "The cat" is a consequence, mostly, of the kids—she was more often "Sharma" before them. My hands are too cold—what am I anemic? Remember the wind blew the hairs on my shins—and my toes? That could be funny if properly plotted. What couldn't be funny if properly plotted? I get annoyed by distinctions between funny and humorous, comedy and tragedy, as if all drama were Flarf. I forgot what that means. I forgot for a second how my hands are so cold. They're very, very cold. And typing, of course. I feel like I'm feeling. The string trimmer next door might as well be a chopper. Motorcycle or helicopter? Either way is enough to make me forget my hands are so cold, and I was typing about something. Oh, flarf I like as a lowercase term for collage poetry based on search results or spam. Why bother with the specifics? Like when the penis winks its eye. Think of the sun outside. The cat has climbed the love seat to stretch into sleep in the passionate sunbeam. Passive I mean. Dash is sleeping. The string trimmer is singing. The song is one of constant praise. A severe praise like taxidermy. Typing has finally warmed my hands. Birdless on Grove Street, I listen for something more than the washing machine now spinning, the cars whooshing by the front of our house, the grinding engine of that damn string trimmer next door. My feet are freezing on the hardwood floor under the computer desk. Dash is sleeping upstairs. I can't see the cat anymore.

Yesterday

Yesterday was also the anniversary of Jack Spicer's passing. As Ron Silliman notes today, Spicer now has a nicely detailed bio page at The Academy of American Poets Website.

      —•—

Strike / An Elegy for Jack Spicer

The match knows the flame's
nothing
            but a one night stand
it can't not have.
 

Elio Schneeman: a poem and a page

August
           for Elio Schneeman

Heat lightning grips
the treetops and hills
of the tarred horizon

A long drive's dry eyes
wired to the night
behind the ears

Any song blares

Fingers grip the wheel
as words mind

Accepting the thrusts
of the highway's
repetitious white knives

      —•—

And a Wikipedia page for Elio Schneeman on the tenth anniversary of his passing.

The eye bends the

The eye bends the horizon to see it. Nearly bereft of objects, the horizon, old professor, is not--not quite--a straight line. Long-bow horizon, arrow eye. A lighthouse to the periphery north at the end of a sleeping spine of rocks. Masts, dendrites, or a bit of spider web stuck in a corner. Sand-whipping wind over the beach late morning. Feet anchored below the ankles in the shallow surf, I hold Dash's hatted head close to my chest. The looking's slow, slow as words creeping through, into. Ocean sky. What's that? A kiss. KC lifts Vaughn by the arms to help her jump the waves. Colleen with Antonio, reckless boy, smashing the water with his three-year-old feet and shins. Rob's shaved head like a second sun against the dark marine: he seems to be the only one on this stretch of beach fully in the ocean, swimming this windy almost-chilly morning. Vaughn has fun until an almost-big wave surprises her and she decides she's had enough. There's a middle-aged couple playing bocce ball; and a very young couple, twenty yards apart, tossing a football; a father digging a big ol' hole, it's up to his waist, for his son with people gathered around; J.J. building a mountain of a sand castle complete with moat. Vaughn runs far ahead of us, eager to tell Meme about the water. A couple of women, older, cross in front of KC and me; they're watching Vaughn, smiling. As we get near our spot on the beach, I see beyond us in the rougher sand, another little girl and her parents walking among a dozen or so ring-billed gulls. The girl is trying to give them something; I don't think it's food. A shell? A rock? I look around and realize there are almost as many gulls as people here today. I hand Dash to KC. Not far to my right, a gull, disappointed that whatever he just pecked at wasn't food, keeps moving along: An eye on the ground, an eye on me; an eye on the ground, an eye on me. Vaughn leaves with Meme to collect shells and rocks. KC nurses Dash in Colleen and Rob's tent. I don't consider it odd that Dash's bathing suit and swimmy diaper have left my T-shirt wet even though he didn't go in the water. It's just a wetness that I'm sitting with, like sun screen, as I stare out at the browns and greens and whites and blues. Objects, I guess. Words? Mmm.

Drove the night

Drove the night to Maine. Rainbow north of I-84 just past Hartford. Old Testament longings, belongings--what Vaughn packed in her frog backpack that we let her pack for herself: fuzzy yellow weed flower, shrivelled; Jakers coloring book & fresh pack of Crayola crayons; her orange calculator; her frog calculator; yellow fork from her plastic kitchenette set; address book/notepad; small, rainbow-colored basketball; little sheep figurine; two post-its with "notes" on them; Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds, which I hadn't realized she packed when I said "Oh, we should have brought the bird book." Light traffic, cruising just above sea level, eighty-five under tunnels, over bridges (50+% chance of faultiness) into sunshower, a small mass of dark clouds displace the earlier backlit clouds--old cellulite of clouds on the horizon. Stop at Old Sturbridge to pee, stretch back, snack on granola bars and raisins, gulp bottled water under moving clouds, then quick back on the road, into the night. A couple hours into this trip and kids strangely still awake when a half-hour drive's enough to knock them out. Through the road construction, bumpy surface, glump-glump tires, high road noise of the Civic, lane shifts ahead just around the bend, Dash throws up, "Projectile vomit," KC says, keeping an eye on him as I slow to sixty and get over to the right lane in case we need a quick exit from this shoulderless stretch. Sour milk smell fills the car, we lower the windows, pushing on--O puddle of puke. We pull off into the next rest stop. Vaughn's finally conked out. KC and I clean the car seat with baby wipes, but we know there'll be no ridding of the smell tonight. Light sleeper like his mom, gets carsick like his mom. Just hope he keeps eating his veggies like his mom, not like me and Vaughn. Long second stretch of the ride up into Maine, Dash's whimpers alternating with his quick loud little noises, punctuating silences. O hour of nothing with your black trees, heavy lights, and heavier eyelids. Wipers on, wipers off; wipers on, wipers off. The exits in Connecticut come one right after the other but not here in Maine. Finally, we reach the exit we need, take a few turns until we're on the Post Road and find the condos where we'll be staying. Meme and Aunt Colleen are waiting for us. No parking spaces open; they say "OK to park on the grass." Vaughn wakes up and Meme carries her inside. Vaughn bounces up and down on the air mattress on the floor. We say "Quiet, your cousins are sleeping." Dash crawls all over the mattress getting himself briefly stuck under the coffee table pushed against the wall. It takes a while but finally everyone settles down. I start off on the sofa; KC, Vaughn, and Dash on the mattress. But Vaughn wants me next to her so I try the floor, and soon I'm squeezing onto the mattress. Dash gets his third or fourth wind and starts crawling all over the place again. Vaughn wants me to get between them so I move inside and she slides to the end. Then Dash crawls over me and KC follows him and I end up on the other end. Dash keeps bopping everyone on the head and laughing so KC moves up to the sofa with him, leaving Vaughn and me on the mattress. We decide to play rock-scissors-paper. We can barely see so we have to push our hands together to see who wins. We play the best of seven. I take the first "throw" with rock-breaks-scissors. The second throw is a paper-paper tie. After that Vaughn wins the next four throws doing something she had never done before: changing her throw each time. "Let's play word association," she says, and so we do. "Dog," I say; "song," she says. "Moon," I say; "flower," she says. "Sun," I say; "rain," she says. "Cloud," I say; "rain," she says. "Seagull," I say; "cardinal," she says. After this, the game devolves into nonsense syllables I can't quite recall. Soon we are tossing and turning ourselves to sleep on the lumpy air mattress. I wake up frequently with dreams I think I'll recall in the morning but of course I won't. I remember only the one bit of a dream where I was with my family in some kind of lodge with a deck out back and a sliding glass door, and pacing out there was Jordan Davis, someone I've never met and only know of as one of the editors of The Hat and someone who who written some poems I’ve enjoyed, and anyway he's out there, looking like D.H. Lawrence, wanting to kill me, but only in a nonchalant "maybe I will, maybe I wont" kind of way.

Nobody Was Here

Facing the possibility of not having Internet access for a few days, a couple notes following up on the previous post:

1. Although my "small kick" came at the expense of the Here Comes Everybody interviewer, I didn't intend to "kick" him or her while he or she was down (besides, it's old news that I stumbled on). I was, probably, kicking some of the interviewees. HCE was in the Nobody blogroll for some time, and I checked out more than a few of the interviews. It was an idea with a hook, in the best sense; an experiment worth the time spent on it by whoever's brainchild it was.

2. It's not poets being academics that bothers me—which is in many ways the ideal situation for a poet today—but the way that the poetic culture is largely derived from the academic, and the way theoretical ideals get thrust onto/into the work(s) in a manner that doesn't seem to happen in other arts. In a society that's generally anti-academic for all the wrong reasons, this is a tough line to toe without putting more time into it—time which none of this talk is worth (see, I ain't even gonna fix the vague pronoun reference back there).

Here Comes Nobody

Hate to take pleasure in another person's misery, but I couldn't help but get a small kick out of this notice regarding the failed Here Comes Everybody anthology. Already mentioned my annoyance with the massive amounts of poet interviews online and in little magazines in last year's Top Ten Poetry Pet Peeves (which is already dated, jeez the cars in PoetryLand move fast these days), but this is too much: poets willing to give these interviews online, where anyone can search and find them, but balking at them being set down in print? What are they afraid of? Was the interview just an online fling not substantial enough for the page? Or's it that these interviews aren't sanitized the way many are before they're printed? (Recently at work we typeset a book with a long Noam Chomsky "interview" in which it seemed half of the answers were completely rewritten at second pass—why not stop calling it an interview at that point and make it another essay? Because it "allows" for a relatively more casual tone? Academics make me nauseous even when geniuses are involved.) Are these poets afraid to see their scrappy little interviews "legitimized" in print? Isn't this all just part of the continuing privileging of "the book" prevalent in Academia, further evidence that PoetryLand is primarily a lonesome, self-important, and hence pathetic, division of the big A? You're never a real poet until you publish a real book. It doesn't matter if the book's published by a friend, or on the suggestion of a former professor or mentor, or if you had to pay someone to read your manuscript—that's somehow more legitimate than doing the work yourself. Whatever.

HERE COMES NOBODY

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?
Uh, probably "The Celebration of the Lizard." Uh, in eighth grade my friend Pat gave me an extra copy he had of The Doors, Absolutely Live. Uh, that was on it. Uh, that counts, right? "Lions in the street and roaming / Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming / A beast caged in the heart of a city. / The body of his mother rotting in the summer ground / He fled the town. / He went down south and crossed the border / Left the chaos and disorder / Back there, over his shoulder. " Uh, how can you not love that when you're a thirteen-year-old boy? Plus, years later, I discovered it was still pretty good if you recited it in the voice of Mickey Mouse (my Donald Duck's OK, too, but of limited vocabulary).

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?
Excuse me, but I'm peerless. Anyway, I read Time and Money and Consumer Reports and The New Yorker.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?
Really? Why?

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
Tu Fu. Li Po. That's it. I once had a dream, like when I was nineteen and just started reading poetry and shit (you know, like Schoppenhaur and Nietzsche—the shit people start of with when they realize their life's empty and they better get a "move on"), and it was me and Li Po drinking wine and tumbling down a hillside. There was a moon involved, and possibly a pond. Maybe it was the ocean.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
White-meat only.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
Sarcasm, bitch.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?
Not as much as I used to. We're on a low budget since the second kid came along. I owe almost my entire output of the last thirteen years to the poets whose work has moved or bothered me in all the right ways.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?
No one's assuming anything about what I have or haven't read. Which is good, because I haven't read most of it.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?
Well, I've explained it to Vaughn (my three year old) as merely the artistic use of words, and I used the old dance analogy: poetry is to speaking, as dance is to walking. Here's one of her poems:

Vaughn writes on the blue sky
and the blue sky writes
on Daddy
and the blue sky writes on Vaughn.

She's a genius, no?

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?
"The Poet?" Oh, poo. I guess the answer is no.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon—lime

Chiseled—face

I—You

Of—about

Form—free

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?
Hmm, I often have this hollow feeling about my chest. That might explain the hollowness of my poems, which, in any event, are made more than written.

In front of the peach trees

In front of the peach trees in our front yard, Vaughn runs long looping "circles" around KC. It feels like a silent movie as I watch them from the living room, holding Dash up on the sofa so he can watch them, too. The late afternoon sun has softened, and the humidity, perhaps. Behind me the roar of a TV crowd: Tiger Woods has nailed a put for birdie, giving him a commanding five-stroke lead, well on his way to winning his thirteenth major. Hard to disagree with excellence in sports. The peach trees look heavy, almost tired of standing, longing, perhaps, for someone with proper pruning know-how. They're not there for the fruit, but for the shade and the privacy they're not really great at offering. Even on the downside of a lazy Sunday, the cars, SUVs mostly, buzz by at regular intervals. Tired of watching KC and Vaughn, Dash turns and reaches for me with his drool-webbed hands. Lets out one of his happy Hehs as I scoop him up. We wander into the dining room, where I look down at the table. Time is open to a picture of Mia Farrow; she has volunteered "to trade places with Darfur rebel Suleiman Jamous, who has been under virtual arrest at a U.N. hospital for more than 13 months. The Sudanese government has threatened to arrest Jamous if he leaves the building's confines." Dash gets bored as I stand there reading. He pushes a hand in my face. So I walk around the house. The world's sick and I'm part of the disease. My ill effects are in Iraq. Regular people's bodies blown apart every day. For a scam? Dash shoves his wet hand in my face again—Ok, ok, I'll put you down. He crawls over to the seed crate where the Duplo blocks are stored, starts taking them out, looks up at me. It's fine I say by walking to the sofa and slumping into the seat. Nearly 200,000 firearms gone missing in Iraq? And this after admitting 300,000 barrels of oil per day had done the same? And, as The Daily Show pointed out, after 380 tons of explosives and $12 billion of tax-payer money had also disappeared? Too much incompetence to be believed. The sham war's a scam, too. When will it end? A trick question. The war never ends: it turns into something else. "We are disease," an old friend once wrote, "communicable in all the wrong ways." Dash keeps taking out the Duplo blocks and tossing them every which way. Tiger Woods is down to a two-stroke lead, but he looks as in command as ever. CBS shows a clip of his wife in the clubhouse holding their two-month old daughter. Vaughn clomps up the porch stairs outside, soon she and her mom are coming into the house. Dash forgets the Duplo blocks and scrambles for KC's legs. Vaughn runs over to show me a leaf she found. "It's red," I say. "And yellow! and green! and brown! and pink!" she says, then rushes off into the kitchen to store it who knows where. Alone in the living room, I stare at the overhead view of the golf course on TV. Clashing shades of green. Can't prove a negative, yet here I am, blank lines where words should be. Tiger's back up to a three-stroke lead, about to win his thirteenth major. Only 31. Can't disagree with excellence in sports.

Stood in the shade, yesterday

Stood in the shade, yesterday, sword-fighting Vaughn with foam swords, parrying, or trying to, her relentless, two-handed, overhead attacks. Stood in the shade behind my brother's new house in Wolcott, sidestepping Vaughn's slams and strikes, dancing-like to the pops and pings of her older cousins and their friends firing pellet guns at empty cups and cans. KC and Dash sitting on the grass in the shade, looking up and laughing with us as Vaughn persisted in her berserker-style attacks and I bobbed and weaved like, I imagined, Muhammad Ali. Sun glancing hot off the metal slide of the 70's-style swing set farther down the backyard, closer to the woods, not far into which runs the Mad River, though it's more like a brook in these parts—you couldn't even hear it fifty-feet away. Tired out and backed up near the lawn equipment under the deck, I gave up and let Vaughn slash and slap the bejesus out of me with her foam sword. Stood in the shade directly under the lonely bird feeder, laughing at the way she was killing me as I looked at the woods not thinking about it.

Running through

Running through a field of tall grasses. Running from something, but not from something too terrifying. More like running from the cops from a keg party in the woods when we were kids. Though I don't notice it at the time the horizon is startling for its lack of trees or houses or buildings of any kind. It's an incredibly long field that touches the clear blue sky at the horizon. The quickly repeating shushing sound of every step—shhh, shhh, shhh through the tall grass. Soon the sound grows unnaturally loud, so loud it makes me dizzy and knocks me to the ground. Faceful of grass. I turn around under the immense sky, just enough time to recognize the sound of galloping before a red-brown horse races past, hooves no more than a foot away from pummeling my skull. I gather myself, stand, and turn to look at the horse racing away. My little girl crouched on its back, gripping the reigns, leaning forward, head beside the horse's, as if to whisper, "Faster."

The mornings shot out

The mornings shot out one after the other like bullets from a Gatling gun some invisible hand keeps cranking away. Shot into the day, stepping down the stairs, forward into the kitchen—every action an object, every object like a metaphor for something more—but not. Heart to Heart and Silk. Subways underwater in New York City. Airstrikes in Iraq leading to the same overwhelming question they always lead to: civilian casualties? U.S. reports "No." Iraqis point and say, "Yes." Falling into the words of the sick collage poem of the day. Who wouldn't want to climb back into bed, get some more shut-eye? Me now I know I'm sleeping even when I'm not. Most of the time. Most of the time. Most of the time. Dervishes. Whiplash. Static. Words. Fly. Filter. "Flicker, flicker, flicker, flam—pow. / Stairways scared and death rules there." Slippery curves under the swerves of a consciousness. Abstract brooding. "Boring officials" the news reports. "Boring officials." As if. An outrage. Who wouldn't want to climb back into bed? What is your Everest? What is mine? Vaughn tugging on my arm. "Can we play a game now?" She has setup a picnic on a colorfully spotted blue quilt in the green-and-brown living room. She serves me "strawberry black tea" in a plastic white cup. I alternate sipping at that and sipping at the English Breakfast Tea in my real brown mug. She wants me to eat the hamburger and chicken and corn on the cob. The chocolate muffin, the carrots, and even the French fries—or else I won't get my blueberry cobbler. Sitting with her on the floor, back still sore from taking my old dresser out of the house and to the dump two days ago, mind returning to the news of the war. If one more child dies by our mistake—our government's mistake is all of our mistake—fear some miracle will shake all of our beating hearts to fall out of our asses to the earth. Isn't that the way zombies are born? Or a heroic age, perhaps? Meanwhile, I've brought my empty mug to the sink, sat down to type this out. Vaughn in the living room singing to her mom, "To-gether / for-ever. / To-gether / for-ever." Over and over in her beautiful little voice as yet untouched, for the most part, by the ways of the world.
—•—
Re: "collage poem of the day": a collage poem of mine from this morning has been posted over at 3by3by3.

Safire tidbits ending with a digression

Quote of the day: "It's a damn poor mind, indeed, which can't think of at least two ways to spell a word."—President Andrew Jackson, quoted in the latest William Safire column.

Another Safire tidbit: Joe Pickett, editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, in discussing the difference between adviser and strategist: "People have spiritual advisers and even personal advisers. But note that they don't have spiritual strategists, science strategists or academic strategists. In these situations there is no other side to compete with, no one to outfox." Of course, Catholic priests are spiritual strategists who tell their congregations how best to remain on the path to Heaven and not Hell, and how to outwit that trickster Satan. What's even more clear, though, is that Pickett hasn't attended an academic dept. meeting where opposing sides certainly do exist. Along these same lines, it's clear—and I don't mean this as a slight—that Kent Johnson's as much poetic strategist as he is poet (if not more than). I'm interested in the spray of "I am interested" statements that were erased. I'm interested mostly, perhaps, because I don't grasp the full context of the statements—because I don't typically concern myself too much with what poets are doing to or saying about other poets. I'm interested in the way sincerity and sarcasm seem to intertwine, or, rather, deconstruct each other to create, what else: an interesting read. I'm interested in the way the sublime rubs against the pathetic. I'm interested in how Kent is usually quick to introduce into the argument an awareness of the argument's limited meaning—that the scope's only visible when viewed through the lens of a powerful microscope.

Up at the cry

Up at the cry of dawn. The grownup groan responds to. Discrete moments of consciousness. In and out. What are the days but shiftings between such things? Vague as the sky is clear. Quick as the eye is slow. A robin whistling solo over the little rhythm of a sucking mouth. KC nursing Dash beside me. Stray little noises, chirps. Wholesome as salad. Warm as a cotton ball. I curl into the small of KC's back. Disappear again.

A brief article on Wikipedia

There's a brief article in The Chronical of Higher Education on Wikipedia and the new software that researchers at UC–Santa Cruz have developed to help alert readers to an entry's trustworthiness. Seems to me that the more obscure the subject, the more likely the Wiki entry will be accurate, which means the contemporary poet entries don't tend to contain misinformation. Slowly been getting the hang of the Wikipedia thing myself, have started the following pages: John Taggart, Dale Smith, Elaine Equi, Roger Giroux, and Sotère Torregian, though they could all use some sprucing up. (Huh, spruce is a funny little word, no?)

Vaughn and Dash splash

Vaughn and Dash splashing in the wading pool on the front porch. KC watching over them, sitting in one of the green plastic chairs we bought years ago for the Brookfield apartment. I sit on the other side of the living room's east windows, away from the allergens outside, reclined in our home's conditioned air. Feet up on the ottoman, I read slowly Hoa Nguyen's Red Juice, lingering over the words—"like some food / to nurse / a book" and "the blue blaze of watery Earth"—though partly it's that my eyes are moving sluggishly because I'm fighting a headache for the eighth day in a row. Too much time staring at monitor screens? Or do I need new eyeglasses? Hope it's one of those and not something else. "Wore a Hemp Hat" lists some potential baby names. It makes me think of a few of the names on our list we didn't use: Auden (too soft or too trendy), Parker (if we had had another girl), Creeley (if we weren't Keeneys). I struggle through the brain-throbbing skull-pounding for a few more pages of the finely-made chapbook, then give up. Pull off my glasses, set them down on the seed crate, toss a pillow on the floor, and lie down. No sooner do I close my eyes, there's a rattling of the doorknob at the front door. The door flings open and Vaughn rushes in, "Got to go potty," she yells as she rushes through the living room and into the bathroom, where she struggles to take down her water-soaked skirt and underwear. "I need help, Daddy." I get up to help her, ask her if she wet herself at all. But no, it's all wading-pool water. Normally she plays in the wading pool with nothing on—must have wanted to go for something different this evening. While she pees, I lean my forehead against the doorframe of the bathroom. Close my eyes for a few seconds. Vaughn asks for help pulling her soaked skirt and underwear back up, tells me she's going back out. She washes her hands as I fetch her an animal cracker. "Thank you," she says as she takes it, puts it in her mouth and heads to the door. I open it for her. Poke my head out and see Dash still splashing under KC's watchful eyes. Everyone smiling. I close the door and lie back down on the floor, wondering when the Tylenol will start to work.

Woken up before ready

Woken up before ready to wake. Woken up by small voices, then a Harley rumbling by outside. Step downstairs, into the morning routine, Heart to Heart and Silk. News is horror stories of the bridge collapsed over the Mississippi River. Reactions here and abroad to Barack Obama's "tough talk," meaning air strike talk, regarding terrorists hiding out in Pakistan. I don't believe Obama's really likely to approve bombing, but any candidate with a realistic shot at being the next president has to prove himself to be "tough enough" for macho-wacko middle America. Pacifists are pussies. August 4, 2007: if he hadn't drowned so young, Shelley would be 215 today. And atheists have no morals. The good people of the U.S. of A. love their morals. Through the south windows, see the morning sky's already bright and even the leaves on the maple trees look lazy from the humidity, under the broad thumb of sunlight. Vaughn is after me to "play something," to "stop typing on [my] computer." I'm checking out typographica.org's favorite fonts of 2006, but Vaughn's getting restless and I don't want to ignore her anymore, so I wander into the living room. A wasp shadow bounces against the curtain as the wasp bounces against the window outside. I sit down with Vaughn and my mug of black tea, finally. We take out the United States puzzle from a shelf in the TV cabinet. Is it yesterday or today? She places Texas with its cowboy hat and boots and yellow star. I ask her for the state with an eagle on it and she correctly hands me Minnesota. KC comes in from outside where she was watering the plants. I get up and bring my empty mug to the kitchen sink. Vaughn announces that mommy has brought in strawberries from the front yard. A fresh, hose-rinsed snack for Vaughn. KC goes upstairs and I sit back down to our puzzle. Before long we have it completed, except for Pennsylvania. "Where in the world can Pennsylvania be?" I ask. And Vaughn sings the question over and over, drawing out "beeeeee," as we wander from room to room, wandering through the same three-and-a-half rooms. We look under the furniture and we look on top of everything, searching low, searching high. Vaughn asks if maybe the Pennsylvania piece walked outside over night. "I don't think so," I say. A new wasp shadow bounces against the curtain in the living room. Finally I suppose maybe the piece did leave in search of the real Pennsylvania, where it would set itself down, like a flat little jar. Vaughn picks up the football from the wicker basket near the door, says "Let's play that game where you say 'It's my ball, it's my ball,' and you try to get it from me." I crouch like a linebacker with poor technique and snarl at her all silly like. "I'm going to hold the ball like Tiki Barber," she says, "like you taught me." But we won't completely forget the puzzle piece any time soon. We'll look for it again later. And we'll look for it today, which was tomorrow. And we'll look for it tomorrow. And many tomorrows more.

Fare

The New Yorker arrived today and brought a pleasant surpirse: fiction by Daniil Kharms. Not your typical New Yorker fare.

Here's a link to a Kharms poem The Constancy of Dirt and Joy translated by up-and-coming poetry superstar Matvei Yankelevich.

And now it's off to the dayjob.
 

At the familiar

At the familiar task of cradling Dash and swaying, trying to sway him into morning nap. Vaughn gone to the bank with Meme; KC drying her hair; all of us immersed in the morning routine. Sonic Youth on the stereo, "Wildflower Soul," as the words—heard or misheard—sway in mind, arrange themselves.

                        See-through child eyes
                        as old as magic
                        spinning gold
                        leaves fall in
                        to the water

Dash's head rests against my chest, softly placed under my shoulder blade. We move toward the window by the front door. The American flags that dot the neighbor's fence point to the ground. Drooping, staring down. Tired of wars. Tired of the word war. Empty rhetoric of wars against abstractions, as if abstractions could be eliminated. As if wars weren't waged against lives. As if innocents were casualties rarely or never at all. KC steps down the stairs; Dash lifts his head just enough to notice her. He won't be napping now. KC takes him and I head upstairs; my turn to shower. Turning light and water on to shave, I think of my depression-era grandmother, Mary (Messina) Keeney. How she lived detesting the slightest bit of waste, whether a single drop of water or the last bit of creamy Italian dressing in the container. Though the disposable container itself wasn't recognized as waste. Remember the excesses of the 80s when my step-father's extremism about lights being left on around the house seemed like an anachronism. Remember seeing Long Day's Journey into Night with my Aunt Marie and Uncle Sebbie. The father in the play with his obsessiveness about shutting off the lights around the house. How my Uncle had remarked what a different way of life we have now. Didn't seem so different to me, but I understood his point, how it was right at the time. But now we've gone forward into the past. Judicious use of lighting. Turn it off when you're not in the room. What we pay for water. What we pay for power. After shaving I switched off the lights before switching on the fan and stepping into the shower. Now I stand pushing the last drops of shampoo into my hair over my scalp. Suds like words pushed from a mind into a mouth. How needfully thoughts get silently worded. How subtly words get tongue-slapped into being.

Sharma sleeps on

Sharma sleeps on the ottoman under the desk in the dining room. Her favorite place to be since our second kid came along. A purple mouse-toy clumped with cat hair looks almost gray as it pokes out from under her fat rump and stupidly eyes the Georgian green wall. Torn envelopes and statements sticking up at all angles from the mini mail sorter. Constant on-and-off again beeps from the construction work across the street. Rumble of dirty yellow machines moving dirt around. Toy plates and baby-doll paraphernalia across the floor. But Vaughn is upstairs in her room building a Lego tower shaped like a bird, and Dash is conked out in his crib, lullabied to sleep perhaps by the whispering water of KC's shower. Alone in the back room with my mug of black tea staring stupidly with half-awake eyes into the harsh light of the monitor screen bearing the news of a massive Fisher-Price toy recall, unacceptable levels of lead paint found again in toys made in China. Makes me wonder why we have so many toys, especially when Vaughn's favorites, often enough, are Birdhand and Duckhand, which would be my right hand and my left hand. I suppose we have so many toys (it's not so many really) because our families love them, and holidays are capitalist events, and most importantly grownup hands get tired.

Octopus 9

The latest issue of Octopus is up and contains an appreciation of Joe Ceravolo's Transmigration Solo. To commemorate the occasion, here's a poem from that collection. I like the simple, child-like diction. The progression of the observations from external to internal, and their confluence together with the somewhat Ashberian shifting of pronouns: the poem has its "we" section, its "I" section, and its "you" section. And Joe's trademark innocence-filled questions create their typical pleasant surprise (here not quite achieving the kōan-like quality they sometimes do in his poems).

SPELL OF ETERNITY
Joe Ceravolo

We are going to the park.
There are swings there.
There are rocks along a sand bed.
The flowers rest along
the bed. The flowers
rise among the fatigued
insects invading them.
There is a smell.
It invades us
through the insects
and makes us
notice there are flowers along
the bed, tiny flower clusters.
I envy the smell along the beds.
Is this a decaying soul? But
it is not said.
Am I decaying like
autumn insects, autumn leaves?
Find my heart!
Revive it! The old clouds
you find along the sky
have no chance next to you,
because it is autumn,
autumn.
 

Morning of mowing

Morning of mowing the lawn, in part. Morning of taking care of the business end of "the real work." Morning of spinning Duplo people on their heads and arguing in my head with Adobe InDesign forum folks about the pros and cons of ID's paragraph composer, even though I decided the argument isn't worth it. Wonder why my mind wastes time with those things it decides it doesn't want to think about. Remember when I was much younger being baffled by the psychiatrist's question: "Does your mind play tricks on you?" I had no idea how to answer. Even though the phrase "mind play[ing] tricks" is something of a cliche, the question, set in an all-too-serious context, became exceedingly strange: pure defamiliarization. I couldn't really respond at the time, struck dumb as I was. Settled for some variation of agreement with the doc, tantamount to "whatever." Later, in the night, far from the office, very near sleep, my earlier confusion made sense to me: what am I if not my mind? To separate "[my] mind" from "me" was word trickery. A language-enforced schizophrenia. No wonder they thought I was crazy. The better question for the docs, perhaps, would have been something like "Do you think you hear things you're not quite sure you're hearing and that part of you simultaneously knows there's no reason to be hearing?" or "Do you get confused in wondering if you have just been thinking or just been speaking aloud?" Some junk like that. Time for lunch.

sofa cat morning

 
               cat
               mountain
                               sunlight
drape       window      drape
   sunlight
               cat
               mountain
sofa         sofa           sofa
 

Skywriting

Min(d)ing the gaps and reading between the lines for sure: An alphabet formed of buildings and sky: Type the Sky.

Thoughts rise like gas

Thoughts rise like gas as I sit on the can. White walls dull as the technical faculty, or facility I guess, of a poet. Who couldn't take quickly to the counting, and variation, of feet? How many years wasted before the epiphany of full-bodied beat? Could be a lifetime, this lifeline, or you could get away without it. Spring and all, against the grain. As if any work could be without it. To mind the line but not to toe it. The line is a plank but it's not. The poem is not a pirate ship, but it is, as it sails with its stolen cargo below deck, sails ever under the sign of skull and crossbones. The lines, canons. Galleys charged with forgetfulness. Samples composed of dummy text . . .

This is a line. This is a line
break. This is a line. This
is a line break. This is a line. This is a line break.
 

Lightning splits the sky

Lightning splits the sky, crash lands behind the mountains on the horizon as we drive back from Ridgefield where we spent the day with relatives at the house KC's sister's housesitting. Long, skinny road leading to a long, skinny driveway, heavily shaded by trees tall enough that you nearly have to cock your head back all the way parallel to the ground to see their tops. KC said I would like the seclusion and, yeah, it's not bad. Vaughn gets to spend twenty minutes or so in the pool before it starts to thunder. Swims the length of the pool a few times, with the help of floaties. She already swims better than her old man. And that's not that much of a lie. She joins Papa and me in what I would probably call a den, harking back to an earlier time, but what seems to be universally referred to as a family room. We catch the end of a show on Animal Planet, some tanned, brave soul helping to save the elephants of Borneo. I'm holding Dash to keep him away from pulling on the dogs' tails while KC helps her sister with preparing supper. It's not long before Dash is about to doze off. I walk him around and check out the art on these strangers' walls. It's almost all abstract. There's something off, I think, with likening poetry to visual art when talking about its reception or the expectations of its audience, and how much more radical visual art is allowed to be. With so much contemporary poetry, the reader is expected to have a familiarity with the last fifty or so years of literary theory. As often as not it's all the reader is given, no flotation devices to strap around the arms. The art viewer doesn't need to rely on theory, doesn't need to take a stand, interpret or otherwise engage the work, all the viewer needs is to be struck by the piece, some quality of the piece, and have sufficient cash to purchase it or a print. Art and music don't invite scholars exclusively, so why should poetry? Not that poets should be making poems for those who don't like it. But it should be clear to anyone who steps outside of the insular nooks of the poetry world for even a short time that something is wrong with the way many poems are made these days. Even more wrong are the mechanisms, the industries, around the poems. We have burgers and hot dogs and pasta salad, and a special dessert, one-bowl chocolate cake, made by KC and Vaughn in the morning. Everyone loves it, except Vaughn; she likes it, but prefers the chocolate chip cookie Auntie Joss gives her. We stay long enough so that Vaughn can help feed the two dogs, scooping the dry food, and then the wet food, into their big ol' steel bowls. And then we pack up and head home, not realizing till we get there that we forgot the leftovers we were going to take. Driving north on 35, KC tells me about a house she knows in Ridgefield she wouldn't mind owning one day. If we could. I shake my head. "I don't want to live in Ridgefield," I say. "I used to have negative associations," she says, "but it's really nice. If we had a windfall," she says. "I don't want to live in Ridgefield," I say. We merge onto I-84 in Danbury, rain pouring down on the windshield, broad flashes of lightning lighting up the dark sky. "I like Washington," I say, "if we ever have a windfall." She knows this already. "Washington—or maybe Kent." She doesn't say anything, but places her left hand on my right, which I don't regard until now when I'm writing this down.

Four clocks

Four clocks on the first floor and none of them show the same time. Slow-moving Sunday morning. Sitting on the sofa reading about bonobos. The hippie commune ape. But it's not just the love and sex and sharing of the hippie commune, but the other parts, too, like when a couple of the guys got a little overexcited and gnawed off a toe—was it really a toe?—from the girl they thought was edible flowers. Except, in the bonobos commune it would be the females chewing up the males. But these stories are rare and not to be overstated. There's much yet to learn about the bonobos and their sexy, feminine society. But it's hard not to see how anytime, anywhere, anygender, power exists to be abused. And how the antidote is power diffused. No way to pinch or douse or otherwise extinguish this particular fuse. I set down the magazine and bring my empty mug to the kitchen sink, stepping not-quite-gingerly between Candy Land cards, plastic plates and silverware, Duplo blocks, and Thomas the train and other toy vehicles. Dash in his play-yard chewing on his hand. Vaughn picking up her crayons from the floor and explaining to KC, "When Dashiell and I are grown-ups, too, we'll all make the rules and no one will have to listen."

John Ashbery's Birthday

Do you remember how it was in the beginning when the rain was an understatement and the maintenance man inside you brought his lunch pail to work every day? Do you remember his name was Charlie and he ate fried chicken three times a week and he had two missing teeth, one upper, one lower, at the front of his mouth. Like a vampire, he couldn't be seen when you looked in the mirror. But if you buried yourself in sleep long enough, if you woke with a start and immediately forgot why, then you likely were only moments away from having shaken his hand. And sometimes you sat down on the floor together, played cards till dawn, with B movies playing on the TV in the background casting a gray-blue light. He always wanted to eat, but whenever you offered him a snack he refused. Said he was on a diet. But you could see his bones almost through his skin. He was young and wrinkled and spoke to cats and dogs most freely. He didn't have a preference. He was like an angel in that sense. An angel without wings digging a hole under the fence to get to the other side. Fried chicken in his eyes, he was as much at home in the east as in the west. And his daughters played outside, skimming over the ground less like rocks over water than like sunset over the slopes and treetops on the horizon. Of course, he's childless, so when his youngest daughter crashes into the bird-feeder, he doesn't run outside. Sunset can't upset the man who does—not at the moment at least. The man who remembers how it was before the rain became hyperbole. Who after washing his daughter in the bath, cleaning her scrapes and bruises, brushes the invisible calloused fingertips away from the top of his spine. Who puts his daughter to sleep and picks up his son, takes him downstairs and starts swaying to a song called "Maps." His ten-month-old bundle of Ashbery in his arms, fallen asleep, barely.

Dirty Yellow Chair

"Dirty Yellow Chair" is a song I was going to write. It was going to be full of sounds like shallow water and charity dollars. Change, you know. The lawnmower next door turns off. Vaughn says hi from our front porch, my stomach feels groggy, someone says hi back to her. Man or woman I can't tell. I hear things from the back room. I hear things not so well. The AC whirs. We destroy the planet. I stand up, turn off the light; it's not needed at 3:45. Pull the string. I was going to write down lines like "Sitting in her cute yellow chair / the chair doesn't tell me who she is" and "Leaning back into the face of the electric drops / her words doesn't tell me who she is / She's the dirty little angel I'm strapped to / her face like a triangle and her fingernails." It's found language. It's not me but it is. I can't decide if I want it so I don't write it down. Until now that I'm typing what has been happening. I fall into it like an accident. That has as much meaning.

Constantly reoccurring

Constantly reoccurring sound of cars surging by outside. Hounding sound of morning breaking sleep, not unlike the cracks of sunlight through the vinyl mini-blinds, sound and light breaking sleep open. Half-reluctantly I kick the sheets off, stand up, and half-stumble to the toilet bowl, lift the seat, aim, and shut eyes for not a long while. Step downstairs, into the morning routine. Heart to Heart and Silk, read the headlines—news helicopters crash while following a car chase in Arizona, a suicide bomber is sought in Pakistan, a dubiously convicted man is executed (twenty-seven years later) in Alabama. KC upstairs getting Dash to sleep, Vaughn insists on playing. I pour hot water for tea, let it steep, sit down with Vaughn to play Candy Land. She asks me, "Which one do you want to be: blue or red?" "I'll be blue," I say. "I go first," she says, which is true, the rules clearly state the youngest player starts. She gets sad when I land on the Rainbow Trail shortcut. "I never get to take the Rainbow Trail," she whimpers. I remind her that she's landed on Gumdrop Pass many times, but she insists she "never gets to land on the shortcuts anymore." "I want to win," she says. And she will, as she always does when we play, except for a couple of times when she was happy not to win, preferring instead to hang out around Peanut Acres or Lollipop Woods. Game over, back sore from sitting on the floor, tell Vaughn I need a break, let me finish my tea. But she wants to play something else. Sitting on the sofa in the living room back to the east-side of the house, I see all the way across our main floor, to the back room, Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds facing out on one of my bookshelves. I point to it and ask Vaughn if she remember the three birds on the front cover. Excited she runs over, grabs the book and brings it over to me. "Read all the names of all the birds," she says. I ask her to first identify the ones on the cover. She knows the Cardinal, that's a given, doesn't remember the ones we learned last time—the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak and the Evening Grosbeak. When we get to the Great Auk she remember this is the one that "has extinct." And when we get to the Carolina Parakeet and the Passenger Pigeon which appear on consecutive spreads (I typed "spears" at first), she asks if they're the only ones that have extinct—for each one she says "has extinct," I tell her "is extinct, is extinct," she says "ok, is extinct," but then goes back to "has extinct" next time she says it—I tell her they're the only ones in this book, but there are other birds that are no more. "Which ones?" she asks, and I pause a moment before at least one comes to my still sleepy mind, "the Dodo bird," I say. KC comes downstairs, dressed for the day, tells Vaughn it's time for her to do the same. They'll be heading downtown for the Village Fair Days. I'll be staying home with Dash who sorely needs his nap. Vaughn rushes around to get ready. I bring my empty mug to the sink.