Whenever you call me friend
I fall down on my knees and cry
because I know it’s the only thing
never to happen before in this
life is something you can’t see
it’s a pillow under a hook shot
I want to tell you something anything
but you are there and I am here
we are trapped inside ourselves
and the distance is too far
you are something that I would tell
would be nothing before too long
you are not the finisher of dreams
you are the beginning of nightmares
or waking but I’m not sure which
this letter is for you in the future
it will lead you on the path
of goodness or of rightness or of
wrong people and right meanings
or the meaning will be hidden
or wrestling the demon I will have become
restless under the starlight
it’s too bright here to think
the negatives would be pitch black
darkness of a silver mine
there are no trees here
where have you been where are you now
I am no longer here or there
you are anywhere or are you
up in the clouds is a ghost
he is white and blue like a cloud
he paints with his teeth
he paints the rainbow before midnight
that you can see from your window
staring out under the sunlight
through the gauze curtains
over the high mountain far away
that is covered over with snow
past the rivers and forests
that lie awake under Orion
hunting the bull that runs forever
just out of his reach
pointing the way for the two of us
to join together in song or dance
or that other thing and sing
the Grinch down off Mount Crumpet
his heart breaking his chest
thumping with the beat
his little dog too running running
with the bull full of laughter and blood
he can’t see it anymore because it’s become him
we are trapped he says we are
trapped in ourselves it turns out
that all along it wasn’t you or me
but he and her or her and him or
he and he or she and she or they
even they tell us that nothing has happened
even they know that it’s a big joke
one more thing to know before the death
we are crying like crocodiles
before their loved ones’ coffins
we are bellowing with grief like buffalo
on a berth of wild oxen
we are wailing our clothes are in rags
we want we want we want
but never can we get
what is it
we don’t know what it is
but it’s something it’s anything
it’s too many people or not enough
it’s too few trees we need more
beavers to build riverdams we need
grapes too or plums from the ice box
or an ice box even would be nice
all I have is this cube isn’t that right
or is a sphere a cube a donut a coffee
cup your hands in mine yes that’s right
now bring the water to your face
clear and cool and
full of something
what is it wanting
or yearning
I can see in your eyes they’re clear now
they are as clear as a running stream
or the sky that’s clear right
or the water that is in the Bahamas
because I hear that’s clear
you’re as clear as the sound of a bell
you’re as clear as the braying of horses
you’re as clear as the glass in God’s eye
and I
I’m as dull as an ox plowing
through fields in his yoke
I’m as dull as clouded amber
I’m dull as you find me
tonight after dinner
I’m reading the crossword
you’re sitting beside me
you’re watching TV.
+ The body that surrounds him is his, but his insides are not. +
+| He was born on a few separate occasions | +green traffic lights at night | +
| There was the day of his conception a wintery affair saved for those involved |
+ a TV in front of a dumpster | +
| The day he wriggled forth from the dark tunnel of nothing his mother’s womb |
+ surprise photo of you at Walgreen’s | +
| The founding of his little city deep inside by the small builders alien as they were and still somehow intimately familiar |
+ a pink dress in the alley behind your house | +
| Like any city it had its ups and downs the fever of 1994 was especially devastating but they were a hardy folk not much given to flight |
+ me buying a Reese’s peanut butter cup for a child [whose family couldn’t afford it] in front of me in line at Safeway |
+
| As all things must pass the little city began slowly to decay the old ones claimed the young had no respect for culture anymore |
+ trees at night their skeletons revealed by a camera flash |
+
| They began to die off slowly more quickly than being born the end was coming closer |
+ two earthworms on pavement after a rain | +
| As the last breath was made the last accounts closed in the city |
+ keys tacked to a sign in Buffalo Park | +
| It was given over to other builders | +man flipping a four-wheeler and walking it off | +
Lost things have a way of staying lost. They have to want to be found—is that why we tack up signs, hang socks from hooks in the park, have a box for what’s been lost but now is found? Maybe the lost want to be found but we’re looking in the wrong places. Maybe we speak the wrong language, the language of the found, to call to them. Maybe we should try another door.
+
+ “What is your favorite word?” “And. It is so hopeful.”
+ — Margaret Atwood +
+And you were there in the start of it all
and you folded your hands like little doves
that would fly away like an afterthought
and you turned to me the window light on your face
and you asked me something that I did not recognize
like a great throng of people who are not you
and I asked are we in a church
and you answered with the look on your face
of someone grieving something gone for years
but that they had been reminded of
by a catch in the light or in someone’s voice
and I think maybe it could have been mine
and I looked away thickly my head was in jelly
and I didn’t get an answer from you but I got one
I looked at the man in front of us with glasses
he was speaking and holding a book
and I didn’t understand him he was far away
and I could tell I was missing something important
and you nodded to yourself at something he said
Abraham, Abraham, you are old and cannot hear:
what if you miss my small voice amongst the creaking
of your own grief, kill your son unknowing
of what he will be, and commit Israel to nothing?
Abraham, you must know or hope that God
will not allow your son to die; you must know
that this is a test, but then why
are you so bent on Isaac’s destruction?
Look at your eyes; there is more than fear
there. I see in your eyes desperation,
a manic passion to do right by your God
whom you are not able to see or know.
Am I too late? I will try to stay
your old hands, the knife clenched
within them, intent on ending life.
Will you hear my small voice amongst the creaking,
or will it be the chance bleating of a passing ram?
So it’s the fucking moon. Big deal. As if
you haven’t seen it before, hanging in the sky
like a piece of rotten meat nailed to the wall,
a maudlin love letter (the i’s dotted with hearts)
tacked to the sky’s door like ninety-eight theses.
Don’t stare at it like it means anything.
Don’t give it the chance to collect meaning
from your hand like an old pigeon. Don’t dare ascribe
it a will, or call it fickle, or think it has any say
in your affairs. It’s separated from your life
by three hundred eighty-four thousand miles of space,
the same distance you stepped away from time that night
you said your love was broken, a crippled gyroscope
knocking in the dark. It was then that time fell apart,
had a nervous breakdown and started following you
everywhere, moonfaced, always asking where you’re going.
You keep trying to get away from it but it nuzzles closer
and sings you songs that sound like the cooing of a dove
that will only escape again into an empty sky at dawn.
What is poetry? Poetry is. Inasmuch as life is, so is poetry. Here is the problem: life is very big and complex. Human beings are neither. We are small, simple beings that don’t want to know all of the myriad interactions happening all around us, within us, as a part of us, all the hours of every day. We much prefer knowing only that which is just in front of our faces, staring us back with a look of utter contempt. This is why many people are depressed.
+Poetry is an attempt made by some to open up our field of view, to maybe check on something else that isn’t staring us in the face so contemptibly. Maybe something else is smiling at us, we think. So we write poetry to force ourselves to look away from the mirror of our existence to see something else.
+This is generally painful. To make it less painful, poetry compresses reality a lot to make it more consumable. It takes life, that seawater, and boils it down and boils it down until only the salt remains, the important parts that we can focus on and make some sense of the senselessness of life. Poetry is life bouillon, and to thoroughly enjoy a poem we must put that bouillon back into the seawater of life and make a delicious soup out of it. To make this soup, to decompress the poem into an emotion or life, requires a lot of brainpower. A good reader will have this brainpower. A good poem will not require it.
+What this means is: a poem should be self-extracting. It should be a rare vanilla in the bottle, waiting only for someone to open it and sniff it and suddenly there they are, in the orchid that vanilla came from, in the tropical land where it grew next to its brothers and sister vanilla plants. They feel the pain of having their children taken from them. A good poem leaves a feeling of loss and of intense beauty. The reader does nothing to achieve this—they are merely the receptacle of the feeling that the poem forces onto them. In a way, poetry is a crime. But it is the most beautiful crime on this crime-ridden earth.
+Paul was writing in his diary about art.
+This is my brain he wrote. This is my brain and all it contains. ‘I contain multitudes’ said Legion. I think it was Legion. The big heading he had written at the top of the page (ART it read, but only when looking at it from his point of view) sat cold and alone, neglected in the white space surrounding it. He noticed this presently (but not after he had written a little more about multitudes), paused, frowned, and began to write again.
+ART stands alone at the top of a blank page he wrote. It follows itself in circles its own footprints in a circle around its own name. It leads nowhere but is present everywhere. It contains It contains multitudes. Every painting ever made is a painting of every other painting. Every song is a remix, a cover version. He crossed out the part about songs for getting off topic. He made a note to himself in the margin—Music is not ART.
Paul took his axe and went out into the woods to chop trees. Or rather he went into the trees to chop wood. He wasn’t sure. Either way it helped him think. Last time he’d gone out, he’d had an idea for a shoe-insert company he could start called “Paul’s Bunyons.” He chuckled to himself as he shouldered his axe and went into the forest.
+Deep into the woods he admired the organization of the trees. “They grow wherever they fall” he said “but still none is too close to another.” He sounded like Solomon to himself. He imagined he had a beard.
+He walked for a long time in the shadows of the forest, in its coolness. It sounded like snow had fallen but it was still October. The first time the trees seemed to radiate out from him in straight lines he stopped and turned around four times. After he walked on he noticed it happened fairly often.
+Still, after he felled his first tree that day he realized they grew from the epicenter of his axe. He paused in the small dark sound of the forest quiet.
+After searching for days or even months
I finally find it reclining lazily
above the peaks above the city as if to ask
Did you miss me? Yes very much I reply
and rush to embrace it but it smiles
and recoils and tells me No no you
have to try harder than that it says
I do not give myself up so easily
I try a different tack
I sing to it bring it flowers nightly
I compare its eyes to the morning dew
it has not seen the morning dew
I say its mouth is the sunset over mountains
it knows mountains but the sunset
is only a rumor from the Evening Star
I tell the Big Dipper that it moves
like a quiet river across the earth
Rivers I have seen says the Big Dipper
they sparkle in the light from my stars
Your stars like eyes I say and it smiles
No it says that is too easy
It turns its back
it walks home along the back of the mountain
Now the ticking clocks scare me.
The empty rooms, clock towers, belfries;
I am terrified by them all.
I really used to enjoy going to church,
singing in the choir, listening to the sermon.
Now the chairs squeal like dying pigs—
It was the boar that did it.
Fifteen feet from me that night
in the grass, rooting for God
knows what, finding me instead.
I ran, not knowing where or how,
not looking for his pursuit of me.
I ran to God’s front door, found
it locked, found the house empty
with a note saying, “Condemned.”
+When he said Bible I heard his southern accent
and he had a face I expect all pastors must have
a round open honest face
that will always be a boy’s face
though its owner may rightly call himself a man
near my age though I hardly call myself a man
I have seen this face before whether in life or a dream
I can’t tell
I might’ve seen him on the street once
twice who knows and his pastor’s moon face
reminds me of something
some distant light my life used to own
One night on my birthday the moon was so strong it cast shadows
I could see to the far hill and back it was all clear to me
The moon hasn’t done that in a long time
its face has been obscured by clouds for weeks
and that boy on the bus his face I’ve forgotten
I thought I recognized a good number of people
on that bus who I didn’t know at all
ART and CRAFT are only the inside and outside of the same building. The ceiling is—here he put his eraser to his bottom lip, thinking. He crossed out The ceiling is. The floor is reality and the ceiling is aspiration desire that which is desired. CRAFT is building a chair from wood. ART is using the wood as a substrate for an emotional message to a future person, the READER / VIEWER.
The important thing is they are both made of wood. The important thing is they were both, at one point, alive natural things that grew and changed and pushed their way out of the dirt into the air. They formed buildings out of the air. They didn’t even try.
+What separates us from them, the trees? We have to try. We must labor to create our ART, our buildings of air. We lay them out brick by brick, we build them up by disintegrating trees and forming them again into what they were before. Why must we do this? Are there any advantages to this human method?
+Our advantage is memory. Our advantage is the reaching-out over space and time to others with our words, our ART. Our buildings last for generations, and after they are demolished they are written about, photographs are taken, we remember. The act of memory is our only ART.
+Like 40 as I challenge anyone to come too!
It’s like you’re the epitome of lame!
She’s all I am SOOOO CONFUSED
Aw yeah she got word from yarn.
—but technically it’s a pretty sweet, huh?
Dude we were going and delicate fragrance of arguments get based off of are not try
dropping glasses in such an emotional rollercoaster you
and yes, I’m cocky enough to do anything!
I am as good as Phineas and make another picture symphony
This is a modification of a young woman to try
groups disband after they get your Meacham stuff please let it
RJ Covino, own statuses that’ll be a great
MY OWN afterbirth can do that
I am 2 we can be KISSED ON THE page.
You know I’m not sure that
Ben & Jerry’s FTW
4/10 would not be able to vote, because I gotta do it
This is going to be sad about what
Rush Limbaugh comes forward with sunglasses but at least I wasn’t wearing a messenger bag or skinny jeans!
The cooler THAN Facebook
Wine is the best.
YES I was surprised at first, but the train one, definitely.
Also Valhalla is a dumbass…
But we can get based off of course, Jon.
We watched this
CELEBRATE FRANKSGIVING TOO!
That didn’t get started on that
FRANCIS OF VERULAM REASONED THUS WITH the courage to reply.
Anyone wanna watch out
I am cranky from Bro a good as a way to hijack my hand.
Afterbend was not to produce photographs.
He woke up after eleven and didn’t go outside all day, not even to his Writing Shack. What did he do?
+He watched late morning cartoons meant for children too young to go to school. He ate bowls of cereal. He watched his mother play dominoes. He played dominoes with her for a little while until she was winning by such a margin it wasn’t fun for either of them. He went down to the basement to do his laundry. He pulled the chain for the light and it turned on like magic. “Electricity is like magic” he said to himself. He thought he would like to write that down but his Implements were in the Shack. He’d already built up so much momentum inside.
+—Inertia? he thought. “What’s the difference between inertia and momentum” he asked himself as he hefted dirty clothes into the washer. “Maybe inertia is the momentum of not moving” he thought as he measured and poured the blue detergent into the drum. “Momentum is the inertia of moving forward through time” as he selected WARM-COLD on the dial and pulled it out to start the machine. “What do you think is the difference between inertia and momentum” he asked his mother when he opened the door at the top of the stairs.
+“When you switch over your laundry could you bring up my underwear from the dryer” she asked not looking up from her dominoes. A thread of smoke curled from her cigarette and spread out on the ceiling.
++ for Justin +
+Man of autumn, cold wind,
blow down the trees’ leaves.
Fire on the ground. The sky
perfect water, frost-cold,
rippled only by flocks
of black birds flying, gone.
Their brightness can blind
an uncareful watcher, work him
in a froth of hands, not-wings
that ache with the loss of flight.
A tear is flung faithfully
to the ocean of air, slipping in
slowly, is as gone as the birds.
So two hyperintelligent pandimensional beings
walk into a bar. One turns to the other and says,
“Did you remember to check the end state
of that simulation we were running?” The other
says, “No, I thought that you did?” To which
the first replies, “Oh shit, we missed it.
I suppose we must do all of this again. Barkeep,
two beers please." The bartender nods in that way
that bartenders do, pours the two beers,
expertly, by the way, just so, and hands them
to the first hyperintelligent pandimensional being.
The second one pulls a few singles out of his
wallet, places them on the bar, and the pair
turn around and begin walking toward a table
in the middle of the mostly-empty bar. The bar-
tender picks up the money, fans it out, frowns,
and calls to his patrons’ backs: “Hey, this
isn’t enough!” The two turn around simultan-
eously, with parity, and stare at him. A beat.
One of them, the one without the beer, breaks
the silence by exclaiming, “Oh dear god, I’m
sorry! I didn’t know your prices went up since
last time. What do I owe you?” The bartender
says, “Oh, just another dollar-fifty.” The being
reaches in his back pocket, slides out his
wallet, looks in smiling, and frowns when he sees
it’s empty. He looks to the other and says,
“You got a buck-fifty I can borrow?”
The second hyperintelligent pandimensional being
considers this. He sets the beers down
on the table, pulls out his own wallet, opens
it, and frowns. “I’m broke too,” he says.
A dead man finds his way into our hearts
simply by opening the door and walking in.
He pours himself a drink, speaks aimlessly
about hunting or some bats he saw
on the way over, wheeling around each other.
Look how they spin, he says, it’s like the
ripples atoms make as they hurl past each other
in the space between their bodies.
We mention the eels at the aquarium, how
their bodies knot while mating. The dead man
was a boyscout once, and tied a lot of knots.
His favorite was the one with the rabbit
and the hole, and the rabbit going in and out
and around the tree. The dead man liked it
because he liked to pretend that the rabbit
was running from a fox, and the rabbit
always ended up safe, back in his hole.
+ — Philip Gould +
+
When I think of death I think
of Peter Falk in The Princess Bride patting
his pockets as he leaves the room
Life is a series of doors or so
they say but I ask them this
where does that last door lead?
For Falk maybe it leads backstage
a black-walled catered affair with stage
lights slowly baking stale muffins
Sweaty cheese leaking onto dried-out
grapes a chocolate fountain clogged
by some errant strawberry crown
but this is not where it leads for you or
for me that door opens onto darkness marked
only by a trellis or the lid of a casket
the door of the earth’s womb opening
finally to accept us and with us the dirt
not to grow more strawberries for Falk
but to pad his feet as he walks overhead
to visit someone he certainly cares about
but whose name is lost to posterity.
+
So Death plays his little fucking trumpet. So what, says the boy.
+ ++ — Larry Levis +
+He didn’t have any polish so he spit-shined the whole thing,
top to bottom. It gleamed like maybe a tomato on the vine
begging to be picked and thrown on some caprese. Death loved caprese.
He stood up and put the horn to his lips, imagining
it was a woman he loved. He blushed as he realized
it was a terrible metaphor.
He practiced for six hours a day—what else to do?
Death looks at himself in the mirror as he plays.
The trumpet is suspended in midair. Damn vampire rules.
Death is always worried he might have missed a spot shaving
but he’ll never know unless a stranger is polite enough.
Not that he ever goes out or meets anyone.
He wakes up late these days. Stays in bed later.
He thinks he might be depressed. The caprese has gotten soggy
since he made it, maybe three days ago or maybe just two.
The sun streams through his kitchen blinds like smoke.
He decides to go to the arcade. When he gets there,
there’s only a little boy with dead eyes. So far so good.
He’s playing a first-person shooter. Death walks past him
and watches out of the corner of his eye. The kid’s good.
Death wants to congratulate him. His trumpet is in his hand.
It had gotten cold. He went to lay down in bed with a pad and paper. He began to write. Although he hadn’t tried it much in bed before, he liked it mostly. His arm got tired journeying across the page like a series of switchbacks down the wall of the Grand Canyon. He wrote this down in the margin, for later:
+Arm journeying across
the pg. like a
series of switch-
backs down the wall
of the Grand Canyon
His arm began to pain him. He adjusted his position in the bed. It didn’t help much with the pain. It still hurt as he wrote. He began to be distracted by his mother’s music playing in the next room.
+“Could you turn that down please” he hollered across the wall to his mother. She made no reply (music too loud). He gave his arm a break to look at what he’d written. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It looked like Arabic.
+He woke up gasping in a sweat.
+YOU CANNOT DISCOVER ART ART MUST BE CREATED he sat on the couch at home while his mother watched TV and smoked. Dinner had been chicken and peas with milk and afterward Paul and his mother sat on opposite ends of the couch. At intervals she would look sideways at Paul writing. He pretended not to notice.
+ART = ARTIFICE he wrote. ARTIFICE MEANS UNNATURAL. ARTIFICE MEANS BUILT. TO BUILD MEANS TO FIND A PATTERN & FIND A PATTERN IS WHAT WE ARE GOOD AT. He thought about this while someone else won a car.
+“Do you think humans are good at finding patterns because we are hunters” he asked his mother. She looked sideways at him and said “Sure Paul.” “Early on in our evolution we were hunters right? And to hunt we had to see the patterns in seemingly random events, like where the gazelle went each year” “Paul I’m trying to watch TV. If you’re going to write this stuff go do it in your room you’re distracting.” Paul got up and went to his room and lay down on his bed.
+“If the gazelle went to the same place every year” he thought “did they know the pattern too? Or was it random for them, did they think each year ‘This seems like a good spot let’s graze here’ without knowing?”
+He wrote PATTERN = MEMORY in his notebook.
+Say there are no words. Say that we are conjoined
from birth, or better still, say we are myself.
—But I still talk to myself, I build my world
through language, so if we say there are no words
this is not enough. Say we are instead some animal,
or better yet, a plant, or a flagellum motoring
aimlessly around. (Say that humans are the only things
that reason. Say that we’re the only things that worry.)
Say that I am separate. To say there’s everything else
and then there’s me is wrong. Each thing is separate:
there is no whole in the world. Say this is both good
and bad, or rather, say there is no good or bad but only
being, more and more of it always added, none taken out
though it can be forgotten. Say that forgetting
is a function of our remembering. (Say that humans only
worry about separation. Say that only humans feel it.)
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers and queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
+Bottom of the drink: they had
to go. The Coke machine, the snack
machine, the deep fryer. Hoisted
and dragged through the halls
and out to the curb, they sat with
other trash beneath gray, forlorn
skies behind the elementary
school, wondering what their next
move would be. The Coke machine
had always wanted to live
the life of a hobo, jumping trains,
eating from garbage, making fire
in old oil drums. It had some
strange romantic notions of being homeless,
is what the deep fryer thought.
Its opinion was to head to court,
sue the bastards at the school for early
termination of contract. It was
the embodiment of justifiable anger.
It believed privately that it was an incarnation
of Nemesis, the goddess of divine
retribution. What the snack machine
thought, it kept to itself, but it did say
that nothing ever ends. The others
were confused, then angry, but finally
understood, or thought they did. The snack
machine’s candy melted in the sun.
I didn’t write this sestina yesterday.
It’s the first time I fell behind in my task
and hopefully, the only time it will.
This means that today I must write two
sestinas. If I don’t write them today, I
will have to write two later down the line.
Although I feel I’m slogging through each line
I think I’m doing better every day,
though maybe this is wishful thinking: I
showed my friend my just-completed task
two days ago (my God, was it two
entire days? I’ve no idea what I’ll
do after thirty-nine days. I think I’ll
feel like Inigo Montoya, who’d been in the line
of revenging for so long, he didn’t know what to
do with the rest of his life), and he deigned
to be polite, but I could tell the task
was hard for him. He told me finally that I
had made a noble effort, but that ultimately I
failed. So my question: when will
I be a decent sestina writer? For this is my task.
Maybe if I just keep cranking out line after line
I’ll finally figure it out. Maybe one more day
or another week will do it, or maybe I’ll need two,
or maybe it’ll never happen. Maybe a sestina’s too
involved, too much weaving of words too fine, and I
will never write a good one, even on my best day,
even if I employ all my skill and all my will.
I’m not used to writing poems with thirty-nine lines,
that must be the problem, must be why this task
is Herculean. He only had to finish twelve tasks,
and I have one less one thousand, five hundred twenty-two,
and it’s nothing but complaining lines
about how hard it is to be a person. I
am getting sick of myself with these poems, and will
soon be loathe to get out of bed every day.
But I tasked myself with this, which may be the worst I
ever do to myself. I thought a poem NaNoWriMo would
be fun, would line my resume, give me something I could publish someday.
“Is man the natural thing that makes unnatural things” he thought to himself as he looked out the kitchen window at the shed. He wondered who built the shed for the first time since he’d been going out there. “Mom who built the shed out back” he asked. “That was your father” she said.
+His father. Paul had never met him. His mother had said when he was a kid that his father was caught by a riptide while swimming in the ocean. He hadn’t noticed what was happening until the land was a thin line on the horizon. He became exhausted swimming back and drowned. His body was found a week later by the coroner’s estimate. Paul never really believed this story because his mother’s face was sad in the wrong way when she told it.
+She said he looked like his father but she also said all men look alike. Paul realized he’d been standing at the kitchen window for a long time looking out at the shed without realizing it. He went out to take an inventory of everything inside.
+“Where you going” asked his mother. “To the shed. I’ll be back in a bit” he said.
+You never can tell just when Charlie Sheen will enter your life. For me, it was last Thursday. I was reading some translation of a Japanese translation of “The Raven” in which the Poe and the raven become friends. At one point the raven gets very sick and Poe feeds him at his bedside and nurses him back to health. The story was very heartwarming and sad at the same time and my tears were welling up when suddenly I heard a knock on my door.
+I shuffled over, sniffling but managing to keep my cheeks dry to open it. Of course Charlie was beaming on the other side, with a bag of flowers and a grin like a dog’s. He bounded in the room without saying hello and threw the flowers in the sink, opened the refrigerator and started poking around. I said “It’s nice to see you too” and went to my room to get a camera, as well as a notebook for him to sign.
+When I came back he was on the floor, hunched and groaning. I looked on the table to see a month-old half-gallon of milk—now cottage cheese—half-empty and dripping. The remnants were on his mouth, and at once I saw my chance to become Poe in this translation of a translation of a translation. I knelt next to Charlie, cradled his head in my lap. He looked up at me with a stare full of terror. I returned it levelly, making cooing noises at him until he calmed down.
+When he was calm he excused himself to be sick on my toilet. He wouldn’t let me follow but said he would sign whatever I liked when he got back. After half an hour passed and all I’d had for company was the ticking of the clock, I went to the bathroom door. I knocked carefully—once, then twice—to no beaming face, no flowers. I opened the door. There was shit on the floor and the window was open. There was a breeze blowing.
+Tonight, as I look up, the stars
hide themselves in shame. There is no moon.
The sky is black, like my desk,
nothing like a raven. The streetlights
look on the scene disinterested.
They have their own small gossips of the dark.
I came here to find the Lion, old
friend, but he will not show his flanks, his
paws, his shoulders, his mane. I
can hear him laughing from his hiding-place
behind the moon, nonexistent, under
the cold dead earth. The mountain is in front
of me now, a hole of stars daring me
to pierce it with my sight. The lion’s still
laughing; the streetlamps talk about
me amongst themselves, and go out. There
never was any lion, they tell me.
You only hear the wind on the mountain.
His mother ran out of the house in her nightgown. “What the hell do you think you’re doing” she hollered as Paul watched the shed. “I’m burning the shed down” he said smiling “isn’t it warm?” “It’s warm enough out here without that burning down” she said “go get the hose and put this thing out.” “But Mom—” “Do it” she said in the tone of voice that meant Do it now. He went around the side of the house screwed the nozzle on grabbed the end of the hose pulled it around the house and waited for water to come out the end. When it did it was not in a very strong stream. “I don’t think this is going to work” Paul said to his mother. “God damn it I have to call the Fire Department” she said and went inside the house. The shed continued in its burning.
+After the Fire Department put out the fire one of the men said “Your mother says you set this building on fire. You know Arson is a major offense.” “I set it on fire” Paul said. “Why?” “Because ART wants to be random, it wants to be natural, but it isn’t. Humans create ART because we can’t help but see patterns in randomness. But we feel guilty about it.” The man nodded to another man in a blue uniform. “We want the ART to feel natural, to feel random, but we can’t stop seeing the patterns” as the man in blue walked over and put a hand on Paul’s shoulder “ART is unnatural by its very nature. I took my ART and gave it back to nature” as the man led him over to a black and white car and put him inside. He was saying something about Paul’s right. “No it’s my left that was hurt” said Paul “but it’s all better now.”
++
Is he older? I asked her. And I never got an answer, because at the moment she disappeared in a puff of smoke. I like to think nothing ever happened to her save that she went over to the spirit realm. I usually know better though.
+ +Look, I say—look here—
at this old place
where nothing changes.
Look at the people
who pass by. Look at
the trees. The flowers
full of wanting: look
how full they are with
color. Look how they mock
us, empty people who
must fill themselves
with changes—emptiness.
“There is nothing to be
but happy. There is no
sadness to fall down
like cherry petals.”
The trees don’t under-
stand: they are too
tall to see the germ
of discontent in us.
He looked down at his hands idly while he was typing. They were dry and cracked in places. He thought he might start bleeding so he went inside for some lotion.
+“Do we have any lotion” he asked his mother. “In the medicine cabinet” she said without looking up from the TV. He walked into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. “I look strange” he said to himself “I look like a teenager.” He stared into his right eye, then his left. He saw nothing but his own reflection fish-eyed in his pupils. He opened the medicine cabinet.
+Back in his Writing Shack, he started to type.
+++What is it about hands that gives them such power? It is that their power is hidden in the arm. Push on the inside of the wrist–the hand closes. Reach under the skin and pull on the outside tendons– the hand opens again. Hands are only machines for grasping, controlled by the arm, not the mind.
+
+ for Jim Henson +
+You think building Hoggle’s a hard game?
You know bunk. Writing a ghazal’s a hard game.
Let’s meet in a place where words & fabric play—
but not plastic words. (Boggle’s a hard game.)
A cookout where we can hash our differences
over steak, though making it sizzle’s a hard game.
Let’s go to a brothel, rub shoulders with bare
shoulders, or a bar. Being wastrel’s a hard game.
Maybe we could switch professions, you and I,
you write the poems, I’ll puppet Fozzie—a hard game.
When you call me, you never say my name.
Creativity’s a hose—shutting the nozzle’s the hard game.
His mother drove him to the Hardware Store on a Tuesday. “I’m glad to see you’ve taken my advice for once” she said. “What do you mean.” “Applying to work at the Hardware Store. I’m proud of you Paul.”
+“Oh right. Sure thing.” They pulled into the parking lot. “Just be a minute” he said as he opened the car door.
+He walked under the door resplendent in its King William orange and white. He saw the towering rows of shelves like mountain ridges in Hell. He strolled among the fixtures, pipes, planks, sheets, plants (Why plants? he thought), switches. He realized he didn’t know the first thing about building furniture. “I don’t know the first thing” he muttered to himself “about building furniture. I know the last thing would be a couch or chair or stool but the first thing is a mystery.” He turned around and walked straight out of the store and to his mother’s car without looking up.
+“How’d it go” she asked starting the car. “Great” he said.
+I was away on vacation when I heard—
someone sat at my desk while I was away.
They took my pen, while I was taking
surf lessons, and wrote the sun into the sky.
They pre-approved the earth and the waters,
and all of the living things, without even
having the decency to text me. It was not I
who was behind the phrase “creeping things.”
When I got back, of course I was pissed,
but it was already written into the policy.
I’m just saying: don’t blame me for Cain
killing Abel. That was a murder. I’m not a cop.
The Tower of Babel fell on its own. The ark
never saw a single drop of rain. I’m the drunk
sitting on the curb who just pissed his pants,
holding up a sign asking where I am.
This book is an exploration of life, of all possible lives that could be lived. Each of the poems contained herein have been written by a different person, with his own history, culture, and emotions. True, they are all related, but no more than any of us is related through our genetics, our shared planet, or our yearnings.
+Fernando Pessoa wrote poems under four different identities—he called them heteronyms—that were known during his lifetime, though after his death over sixty have been found and catalogued. He called them heteronyms as opposed to pseudonyms because they were much more than names he wrote under. They were truly different writing selves, concerned with different ideas and writing with different styles: Alberto Caeiro wrote pastorals; Ricardo Reis wrote more formal odes; Álvaro de Campos wrote these long, Whitman-esque pieces (one to Whitman himself); and Pessoa’s own name was used for poems that are kind of similar to all the others. It seems as though Pessoa found it inefficient to try and write everything he wanted only in his own self; rather he parceled out the different pieces and developed them into full identities, at the cost of his own: “I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” de Campos said of him at one point, “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”
+It’s not just Pessoa—I, strictly speaking, don’t exist, both as the specific me that writes this now and as the concept of selfhood, the ego. Heraclitus famously said that we can’t step into the same river twice, and the fact of the matter is that we can’t occupy the same self twice. It’s constantly changing and adapting to new stimuli from the environment, from other selves, from inside itself, and each time it forms anew into something that’s never existed before. The person I am beginning a poem is a separate being than the one I am finishing a poem, and part of it is the poem I’ve written has brought forth some other dish onto the great table that is myself.
+In the same way, with each poem you read of this, you too could become a different person. Depending on which order you read them in, you could be any number of possible people. If you follow the threads I’ve laid out for you, there are so many possible selves; if you disregard those and go a different way there are quite a few more. However, at the end of the journey there is only one self that you will occupy, the others disappearing from this universe and going maybe somewhere else, maybe nowhere at all.
+There is a scene in The Neverending Story where Bastian is trying to find his way out of the desert. He opens a door and finds himself in the Temple of a Thousand Doors, which is never seen from the outside but only once someone enters it. It is a series of rooms with six sides each and three doors: one from the room before and two choices. In life, each of these rooms is a moment, but where Bastian can choose which of only two doors to enter each time, in life there can be any number of doors and we don’t always choose which to go through—in fact, I would argue that most of the time we aren’t allowed the luxury.
+What happens to those other doors, those other possibilities? Is there some other version of the self that for whatever complexities of circumstance and will chose a different door at an earlier moment? The answer to this, of course, is that we can never know for sure, though this doesn’t keep us from trying through the process of regret. We go back and try that other door in our mind, extrapolating a possible present from our own past. This is ultimately unsatisfying, not only because whatever world is imagined is not the one currently lived, but because it becomes obvious that the alternate model of reality is not complete: we can only extrapolate from the original room, absolutely without knowledge of any subsequent possible choices. This causes a deep disappointment, a frustration with the inability to know all possible timelines (coupled with the insecurity that this may not be the best of all possible worlds) that we feel as regret.
+In this way, every moment we live is an elegy to every possible future that might have stemmed from it. Annie Dillard states this in a biological manner when she says in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “Every glistening egg is a memento mori.” Nature is inefficient—it spends a hundred lifetimes to get one that barely works. The fossil record is littered with the failed experiments of evolution, many of which failed due only to blind chance: an asteroid, a shift in weather patterns, an inefficient copulation method. Each living person today has twenty dead standing behind him, and that only counts the people that actually lived. How many missed opportunities stand behind any of us?
+The real problem with all of this is that time is only additive. There’s no way to dial it back and start over, with new choices or new environments. Even when given the chance to do something again, we do it again, with the reality given by our previous action. Thus we are constantly creating and being created by the world. The self is never the same from one moment to the next.
+A poem is like a snapshot of a self. If it’s any good, it captures the emotional core of the self at the time of writing for communication with future selves, either within the same person or outside of it. Thus revision is possible, and the new poem created will be yet another snapshot of the future self as changed by the original poem. The page becomes a window into the past, a particular past as experienced by one self. The poem is a remembering of a self that no longer exists, in other words, an elegy.
+A snapshot doesn’t capture the entire subject, however. It leaves out the background as it’s obscured by foreground objects; it fails to include anything that isn’t contained in its finite frame. In order to build a working definition of identity, we must include all possible selves over all possible timelines, combined into one person: identity is the combined effect of all possible selves over time. A poem leaves much of this out: it is the one person standing in front of twenty ghosts.
+A poem is the place where the selves of the reader and the speaker meet, in their respective times and places. In this way a poem is outside of time or place, because it changes its location each time it’s read. Each time it’s two different people meeting. The problem with a poem is that it’s such a small window—if we met in real life the way we met in poems, we would see nothing of anyone else but a square the size of a postage stamp. It has been argued this is the way we see time and ourselves in it, as well: Vonnegut uses the metaphor of a subject strapped to a railroad car moving at a set pace, with a six-foot-long metal tube placed in front of the subject’s eye; the landscape in the distance is time, and what we see is the only way in which we interact with it. It’s the same with a poem and the self: we can only see and interact with a small kernel. This is why it’s possible to write more than one poem.
+Due to this kernel nature of poetry, a good poem should focus itself to extract as much meaning as possible from that one kernel of identity to which it has access. It should be an atom of selfhood, irreducible and resistant to paraphrase, because it tries to somehow echo the large unsayable part of identity outside the frame of the self. It is the kernel that contains a universe, or that speaks around one that’s hidden; if it’s a successful poem then it makes the smallest circuit possible. This is why the commentary on poems is so voluminous: a poem is tightly packed meaning that commentators try to unpack to get at that universality inside it. A fortress of dialectic is constructed that ultimately obstructs the meaning behind the poem; it becomes the foreground in the photograph that disallows us to view the horizon beyond it.
+With this in mind, I collect these poems that were written over a period of four years into this book. Where I can, I insert cross-references (like the one above, in the margin) to other pieces in the text where I think the two resonate in some way. You can read this book in any way you’d like: you can go front-to-back, or back-to-front, or you can follow the arrows around, or you can work out a complex mathematical formula with Merseinne primes and logarithms and the 2000 Census information, or you can go completely randomly through like a magazine, or at least the way I flip through magazines. I think writing is a communication of the self, and I think this is the best way to communicate mine in all its multiversity.
+It’s all jokes Paul wrote in what he was now calling his Hymnal. He had been writing non-stop all day, because he didn’t count pee- or cigarette- breaks. All art is an inside joke. The symbology involved must be—and here he put down his pen and held his head in his hands. He could never think of the word—he said often that he had no words. He opened to a new page in his Hymnal. On the top of it was written in bold script HYMN 386: JOKES.
+Paul scowled. Who had written in his Hymnal? he wondered. He said it out loud a moment after: “Who has written in my Hymnal?” He realized he was alone in his Writing Shack, which was really a shed in the back of his mother’s garden. He wondered why he had to say his thoughts before they became real to him (if this was a habit or an inborn trait). He realized simultaneously that
+He resolved to put the issue to rest by asking someone.
+I am a great pillar of white smoke.
I am Lot’s nameless wife encased in salt.
I am the wound on Christ’s back as he moans
with the pounding of a hammer on his wrist.
I am the nail that holds my house together.
It is a strong house, built on a good foundation.
In the winter, it is warm and crawling things
cannot get in. This house will never burn down.
It is the house that I built, with my body
and with my strength. I am the only one who lives
here. I am both father and mother to a race
of dust motes that worship me as a god. I have
monuments built daily in my honor in dark
corners around the house. I destroy all of them
before I go to bed, but in the morning
there are still more. I don’t think I know
where all of them are. I don’t think I can get
to all of them anymore. There are too many.
I thought I saw you walking
to the bus stop but it was only
a raven. His croaks sounded nothing
like your footsteps (as they pound
down the hallway toward my bedroom)
his wings looked nothing like your
legs (running on the wrong side
of the road away from my house)
I think the one resemblance was the eyes
But that’s too easy
It’s just that I was thinking
of you and a raven flew by
(maybe it was a crow)
I wanted to tell you something in order to
explain the way I feel about the Universe,
its workings, etc. But I couldn’t yesterday
—I’m sorry—I wanted only to ball
myself up and cry all day. It was the sixteenth
day in a row this happened to me, and to be
more than two weeks waiting to cry is,
especially when, the whole time, I wasn’t able to,
absolutely horrible. It was no sweet sixteen,
I’ll tell you that much. Unless at yours, the Universe
kept telling you to quit having such a ball
and that you should have died, like, yesterday.
At first, it feels like you’re winning—that yesterday
you really were meant to die, but since you still are,
you beat the system somehow. But the Universe bawls,
“No, I meant you should’ve crawled into
a hole and fucking died!” And then the Universe
punches you right in the gut, something like sixteen
times, and all you can think is, “Some sixteenth
birthday! Maybe I will go die in a hole.” Yesterday,
at times like this, is a luxury the cruel Universe
refuses to give you. This is when it’s a pain just to be,
when that Marvell line about “rolling our stuff into one ball”
just seems glib, when you don’t want one body, let alone two.
Something else that may come as a surprise to
you: over the past more-than-a-fortnight, these sixteen
days, I’ve had nothing to eat but crackers and a cheese ball.
(That’s not entirely true—yesterday
I had some candy, peppermints and Jujubes.)
Maybe this is why I’m so mad at the Universe—
because all it has ever wanted, this Universe
that gave me life, fed me from its breast til I was two,
and even before that, made a place in which I could be—
all it’s wanted was for me to take the sixteen
steps to sobriety, fold the Eight-Fold Path over yesterday
and step around it lightly, as I would an exercise ball,
but the problem is, dear Universe, there’s no way I could be
something as hard as all that, to wake up yesterday
morning, stretch over my sixteen selves, bound out like a ball.
I hear the rats run
in the walls like water
through a tree. My blood
thickens. As I dream
the masturbation dream
the shelf above my bed
falls covering me in
dirt and decaying beetles.
I see my reflection is headless.
When the waves stop
and the moon grins down
to overtake me: the car
ran up the street that night
when you were nearly
molested in your neighbor’s house:
is this why we don’t have
neighbors? For this the trees
rot only for us?
I woke screaming and you
came to sit next to me. I felt
my eyes were open too wide
that I could not shut them
from the horror movie sitting
on your lap in the easy chair
in the dream the other dream
in the living room under
the tree. Why do I feel guilty?
I wake up in a pool of water
closed over me like an eyelid.
There is no longer comfort
in staring at the ceiling.
Its pitch blackness beckons
into a future of blankness.
My body lay still quaking.
My mind is chained fast
to the beating of my heart.
I sit up slowly creaking.
I find myself alone buried
in an ocean. Far off
there is an eagle flying
toward me. She lands on
my knee and lays an egg.
I think not this again
something I’ve never
thought in my life.
I think not this again
something I’ve never
thought in my life. Not
after losing my car keys
in the easy chair. Not after
scratching myself on a branch.
Not after finding the thing
in your dresser drawer that
night. I remember you suddenly.
You run through me
like rats down an alley.
You are in my blood.
You scared me once
remember? Jumped out
of the bathroom door.
I fell screaming onto
the linoleum. Did you
apologize? Did you need to?
The ocean that surrounds me
creaks like a rocking
cradle. Your face bright
as the moon at eclipse
and as red. Low song
my tide stretching
to the horizon. Ripples
on the surface belie
something bigger beneath.
In bed I am alone for
the only time. In bed
I am a grown man.
Below the blankets I
know you for who you are.
In bed I see your face
pressed against the window.
I look out and see you
and I am not afraid.
Ideas are drool. They labor to create our buildings out of air
+There is a theory which states the Universe
if it began with the same initial conditions
( same gravity same strong weak nuclear force same
size and shape ) would unfold in exactly
the way it has : with the same planets orbiting suns
same people making same mistakes : like this morning
( It’s actually past two but I will call it morning )
while turning on the shower : I as the Universe
intended ( although I was expecting the heat of suns )
had the ice of inner space : those pre existing conditions
before the Big Bang : the shower was almost exactly
freezing for a split second : every day it’s the same :
I turn on the tap hop in pull the knob have the same
moment of utter panic then pain then a relaxing morning
shower where I spend between five to ten ( I’m not sure exactly )
minutes : I have good thoughts : this poem about the Universe
for example : I had the idea while I was conditioning
my hair : it came to me like accidentally looking at the sun :
the pain and the wonder that something as large as suns
could appear so small and yet so hot all at the same
time : so hot in the summer we require air conditioning
( although now in the winter it’s cold in the morning )
and I can’t wait to hop in the shower that tiny universe
of water and steam and soap and body : that and only that exactly
or rather exclusively ( it’s hard to get the words exactly
right : the meanings bleed into each other like the sun’s
shadows on pavement ) ready for me to dream another universe
into it on top of it again and again until they all look the same :
I can’t tell whether it’s my morning or the shower’s morning
or where I put the conditioner or what the initial conditions
could have been that decided I would misplace my conditioner
today : and why and how much planning was involved exactly
that would cause so far down the production line of this morning
: me to wake up so long after the rising of the sun
: me to stay inside all day even after showering to look at the same
computer screen : to give up the actual universe to the universe
in there with its conditions : where the screen serves as sickly sun :
where there is apparently exactly what I need : no more : the same
three sites I visited this morning comprising my entire Universe
January.
It’s cold, and I don’t like it.
I prefer warm weather,
although I like sweaters. They are the one
warm spot in an otherwise shitty season.
But fall is better sweater weather. So be patient,
patient,
while waiting for the end of January.
A change of season
brings a change of mood along with it,
although I never thought I’d be one
to believe that SAD junk about effects of weather—
weather!—
on a person. Who becomes a patient
just because of one
month of snow? I did say of January:
“It’s cold, and I don’t like it,”
but I hardly think it’s fair, knocking whole seasons,
seasoning
your conversation with demands for better weather.
(While I find it
nearly impossible, it’s my mission to be patient
while waiting for the end of January.)
Oh, but how the long nights do so tax one!
One
warm spot in an otherwise shitty season—
all I ask, January,
is one warm day. Do you care whether
I’m a person who becomes a patient
in some psych ward? This just about does it.
I.T.,
although I never thought I’d call one,
is fair and patient
when I call. They talk with me, season
my conversation of demands for better weather
with an argument for the white beauty of January.
They know it’s hard; they say each season
has its detractors. One day, they say, the weather
will be controlled—until then, patience in January.
He wrote JOKES on the top of a page in his notebook. He had run out of notecards and hadn’t been able to convince his mother to go to the Office Supply Store for him. He left a space underneath it and wrote.
+“Tell us a joke” the listeners say to the clown. They have gather together in the clearing because they have heard he would be there, and they have heard he knew very funny jokes that were also true. “Tell us a joke that is true” they say.
+The clown does not move from the stump. He doesn’t move at all. The listeners watch, gap-mouthed, as a butterfly lands on his hat. A breeze ruffles his coat and the butterfly flies away. Hours pass. The listeners grow impatient. Some begin yelling insults at the clown. Eventually, they begin to walk away into the woods.
+The moon rises on the clearing. The only people left are the clown and a listener, the last listener. She has been waiting for the joke a long time. The clown opens his mouth and she leans in closer to hear. He closes it as a tear falls onto his coat, then another. He opens his mouth again in a sob. The listener walks over to him and puts a hand on his shoulder.
+“I’m sorry” says the clown. “Sorry for what” she asks. “I don’t know. I don’t know any jokes.” He disappears. The last listener sits on the log and looks at the sky. There are no stars.
++ You can never go home again. +
++ — Thomas Wolfe +
+Walter rides the bus into work on Wednesday morning when he realizes, with the force and surprise of a rogue current, that he is in the home-for-death phase of life. That era in which the next time he goes under, to the fields of seaweed waving gently, the anemones slowly filtering seawater, it will most likely be for a death in the family.
+He is able to idly speculate on who it might be, and this surprises him. Not much does surprise him after these few months above the waves, because so many things did surprise him those first few months: the plants standing still, the quickness of the fluid these creatures walk in, the lack of pressure that still makes him feel so alone and cold—as if all of his life he had been in an embrace by the ocean, and now for some reason it’s pulled away from him, and it doesn’t love him anymore.
+His speculations lead him to picture his grandmother, small and frail and forgetful. He always assumed she’d be next, since last year when the other one died and Gina said, “I wonder who’ll be next.” She said what they’d both been thinking.
+Soon after that he’d come up to land, to the mountains of all places, the most land-like land, and started a job with an accounting firm. While it was challenging to adjust to the change in pressure and movement, to people staring at him on the bus, in the supermarket, at the job, him with his scales and fins and breathing machine, he’d always made a point to make the best out of a situation. The problem was that the best wasn’t good enough.
+And I’ll get in my car and drive
and I’ll want to keep driving
straight into the next state
or even the next country
or even even the ocean
and go down deeper
keep exploring forever
find out what’s down there
go to the Marianas trench
miss the air world and
come back up
itself a kind of unknown
the homecoming after
What happened to the home I was?
+What secrets does it hold?
Can it tell us who kissed Sara
that night on the veranda, or
who Joey is really in love with?
We all know it isn’t Sara, we
mean look at them Christmas eve
and he’s staring whistfully
at the stars, or the largest
asteroid in the asteroid belt.
She’s staring at him, sure, but
she sees the twinkle in his eye
is not aimed in her direction.
The reflection of that reflection
will beam into space, lightyears
of space, dimming slowly each
second, until it dies out like
all of Sara’s hopes for something
resembling love in this life, real
love that takes hold of her by
the throat and refuses to let go,
love that makes men travel for her
and only for her, love that launches
space ships to that asteroid, the
largest in the asteroid belt, that
jewel of dead rock and ice, harboring
something that could’ve been life
and nothing that actually is.
Dimly remembered celebrity chefs shuffle
down the cold and darkened highways of the heart.
They are the last personality left. They are the meek
who inherited the heart, what was left of it.
Without food to cook in new or exciting ways
nor audience to gasp and cackle, the chefs
of the heart quietly waste away while staring
doe-eyed into now-empty Safeway windows
checking under the dusty produce shelves
for something they pray the rats haven’t found yet.
Years ago, the economy of the heart boomed
and there was food everywhere. Produce
piled high in pyramids of devotion, meat in
gilded glass cases opulent under fluorescence,
dairy which ran like the mythical river toward
cereals hot and cold. Under it all, thrumming
like great stone wheels on sand under a hot sun
near a river where reeds sang in the wind
the heart produced and gave reward for hard labor.
No one knows when it all ended. No one can say
if it was the heart that dried up or the heart’s supply.
Either way, food of the heart became scarcer and scarcer.
People began dying, not of starvation
but of a certain facial expression that could only
be described as desperation. Now
all that are left are the celebrity chefs, last bastion
of a once mighty empire of the heart
are reduced to husks blown dry by wind.
Memory works strangely, spooling its thread
over the nails of events barely related,
creating finally some picture, if we’re
lucky, of a life—but more likely, it knots
itself, catches on a nail or in our throats
that gasp, as it binds our necks, for air.
An example: today marks one hundred years
since your namesake, the last living passenger
pigeon, died in Cincinnati. It also marks
a year since we last spoke. Although around
the world, zoos mourn her loss, I’m done
with you. I mourn no more your voice, the first
sound I heard outside my body that reached
into my throat and set me ringing. But that string—
memory that feels sometimes more like a tide
has yoked together, bound your voice to that bird,
the frozen, stuffed, forgotten pigeon—my heart
is too easy, but it must do—to blink, to flex
its unused toes, slowly thaw to the wetness
of beating wings, fly to me again, and alight,
singing full-throated, on my broken shoulder.
He shrugged the wood off his shoulder, letting it fall with a clog onto the earth floor of his Writing Shack. He exhaled looking out of the window. He hoped to see a bird fly by, maybe a blue jay or raven. No bird did. He inhaled. He exhaled again in a way that could only be classified as a sigh. He sat down at his writing desk. He began shuffling through what he’d written, trying to find some sort of pattern.
+“Each piece of paper—each leaf—” at this he smiled—“is like a tree in the forest.” He was writing as he thought aloud. “I, as the artist, as the writer, must select which to use, chop down those trees, bring them back to my shed and—and—” he frowned as he realized the only end to this metaphor was fire. He ran his fingers through his hair in a self-soothing gesture.
+“I need to build some furniture” he thought.
+His first chair was a stool. It was an uneven wobbly stool that would not support even forty pounds. “So my first chair is a broken stool” he said after nearly breaking his tailbone on the dirt floor. “Maybe I should start again but this time only with legs.” He began again but this time only with legs. He built one leg, which means he cut a straight piece of wood down to four feet in length, whittled the bark off, and sanded it down smooth in what he was now calling his Woodworking Shack. He typed up a note on how to make chair legs.
+++MAKING CHAIR LEGS
+
+++
+- get longish piece of wood
+- cut it to length (4 feet I’d recommend)
+- whittle off bark
+- sand smooth the leg
+
After he tried remembered tried standing the leg up, failing, and after much thought realizing that the ends needed to be flat, he typed one more line on his notecard:
++++
+- make ends flat
+
He had no tools with which to flatten the ends of his leg.
+The definition of happiness is doing stuff that you really like. That stuff can be eating soup, going to the bathroom, walking the dog, playing Dungeons and Dragons; whatever keeps your mind off the fact that you’re so goddamn unhappy all the time. That, incidentally, is the definition of like: that feeling you get when you forget how miserable you are for just a little bit. Thus people like doing stuff they like all the time, as often as possible; because if they remember how horrible they really feel at not having a background to put themselves against, they will want to hurt themselves and those around them.
+The funny thing is that something we people really like to do is hurt ourselves and those around us. We do this by thinking other people are more unhappy than we are. We convince themselves that we are truly happy, ecstatic even, while they merely plod around life half-heartedly, or, if they’re lucky, incorrectly. We take it upon ourselves (seeing as we are so happy, and can spare a little bit of happiness) to help them become happy as well. We fail to realize that the people will probably not appreciate our thinking that we’re better than they are somehow, for that is what we do even if we don’t mean it. We forget that we are also unhappy, and that we are just doing things we like in order to cheer ourselves up a little bit, which really means that this cheering is working; but there is such a thing as working too well. So in a sense what I’m doing here is cheering myself up by reminding you that you are unhappy; I’m trying to keep you honest in your unhappiness; and I admit this is usually called a dick move.
+In fact, the best way to overcome happy-hungering (this is the term as I dub it) is commit as many dick moves as possible, to keep people remembering that unhappiness abounds. If you see someone smiling like a little dog who knows it’s about to get pet or get a treat or go to the vet to donate doggy sperm, smile back. Grin toothily (a little too toothily for a little too long). Their smile will start to fade if you’re doing it right. Saunter to them, slide as if you’re an Olympic quality ice-skater, as if you’re a really good bowler who knows he’s playing against twelve year olds and’ll win by a hundred. Get really close. Far too close for what most people would call comfort. And remind them of how awful life can be: “I really like your shirt—really only children chained to looms can get that tight of a weave,” you can say, or “You’re not really going to recycle that coffee cup, are you?” They will probably get angry, but that’s what’s supposed to happen. By making dick moves, you can overcome what may be the biggest evil on this earth: Happy-Hungering.
+If you swallow hard enough
you’ll feel the stone
the one we all have waiting
Once I found the stone in
the sea it kissed me as
the sea pawed at my back
God is love, they say, but there is
no god. Therefore, how can there be love?
And if there is no love, how can there be God?
There are things in life, I suppose,
that are simply unanswerable mysteries
of existence. Maybe this God and love are one.
Maybe there are many loves, instead of one.
The difference between what isn’t and what is
could merely be one of scope. The mystery
is how we speak only of one love—
to act as though we know we are supposed
to love only one other, or that one other and God.
But supposing that one other is God?
What then? Is the God-lover to walk alone,
supported by God only when He feels He is supposed
to support her? What kind of love is
this? I would argue in fact this isn’t love,
this one-set-of-footprints-in-the-sand mystery.
How to define two loves as one is the mystery.
It’s obvious to many there is a thing called God,
and just as obvious that there is one called love.
Maybe we fool ourselves, we who can’t be alone;
maybe we don’t know what either God or love is.
Maybe, and perhaps; but I for one propose
that we as only humans are not supposed
to know or understand capital-L Life, that mystery.
Isn’t it enough to know that God is
love, and love is God,
no matter which one
does or does not exist? What is life, if no love,
if no God? Maybe this saying, “God is love,”
is less a definition of God what what love is supposed
to be. Of these two terms, maybe2 the one
we should capitalize is Love, that great mystery
of chemistry and longing. Maybe “Love is god”
is a more fitting epigraph for what life is
made of: Love, that most delicate, most misty
of all emotions, is supposed to be their god,
as the one that binds us, that was, that will be, that is.
Walking along in the dark is a good way to begin a song. Walking home in the dark after a long day chasing criminals is another. Running away from an imagined evil is no way to begin a story.
+I am telling you this because you wanted to know what it’s like to tell something so beautiful everyone will cry. I am telling you because I want you to know what it is to keep everything inside of you. I am telling you.
+Can you see? Can you see into me and reach in your hand and pull me inside out, like an old shirt? Will you wear me until I unravel on your shoulders, will you cut me apart and use my skin to clean up the cola you spill on the floor when you’re drunk?
+I want you to know that I want you to know. Do you want me? To know is to know. I, you want we. We want. That is why we’re here. To want is to be is to want and I want you. Do you also? Check yes or no.
+There is a way to end every story, every song. Every criminal must be caught. Even those who cry dry their tears. I cannot tell you all I want because I want to tell you everything. There is no art because there is no mirror big enough. We wake up every day. Sometimes we sleep.
+THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES
+
Paul read this on an old mugshot in the library. He had taken the bus into town to check out a few books on woodworking and got distracted by the True Crime section. He found this mugshot in a book titled Crooks like Us that was published in Sydney. He liked how cities were named after women, or how women were named after cities, whichever was true.
+The man in the picture’s eyes were tightly shut, as though he’d just come into the brightness of day after being dark inside for a long time. His head was tilted up and slightly to the right. He was wearing a short light tie with hash marks, and a pinstripe suit. Paul wished the photograph was in color. He was standing in front of a plain brown wall covered in fabric.
+The man’s eyes were not so tightly shut as Paul first thought. His eyebrows lifted away from the eyes, giving the man a bemused look. His mouth was slightly opened in what seemed to Paul like a grin. This was accentuated by the man’s ears, which were large. Paul wasn’t sure why the ears made the man look happier. He wondered what crime he had committed.
+Above the man’s head was written T. BEDE.22.11.28 / 203 A. THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES was written over his suit, directly below his ribcage.
+The moon is drowning the stars it pushes them
under into the darkness they cannot breathe
they are flailing the moon boasts to my shadow
how powerful is the moon how great its light
My shadow nods and calls the moon father though
it acknowledges also the existence of others
headlights are like little moons father my shadow says
they pass like waves in a dark ocean
Father moon becomes angry and threatens
I can maroon you shadow I can trap you in darkness
your strength comes from my own the little moons
are fleeting like foam on a darkened sea
My shadow fears the night as it fears death
but it remembers the moon’s strength is from another
my shadow wants the headlights like an ocean
might want the moon as a seducer as a lover
The moon is gone and in its place a mirror. Looking at the night sky now yields nothing but the viewer’s own face as viewed from a million miles, surrounded by the landscape he is only vaguely aware of being surrounded by. He believes that he is alone, surrounded by desert and mountain, but behind him—he now sees it—someone is sneaking up on him. He spins around fast, but no one is there on Earth. He looks back up and they are yet closer in the night sky. Again he looks over his shoulder but there is nothing, not even a desert mouse. As he looks up again he realizes it’s a cloud above him, which due to optics has looked like someone else. The cloud blocks out the moon which is now a mirror, and the viewer is completely alone.
+The other side of this mountain
is not the mountain. This side
is honey-golden, sticky-sweet,
full of phone conversations with mother.
The other side is a bell,
ringing in the church-steeple
the day mother died.
The other side of the mountain
is not a mountain. It is a dark
valley crossed by a river.
There is a ferry at the bottom.
This mountain is not a mountain.
I walked to the top, but it turned
and was only a shelf halfway up.
I felt like an unused Bible
sitting on a dusty pew.
A hawk soars over the mountain.
She is looking for home.
A dog moving sideways is sick; a man moving sideways is drunk. Thus if you want to be mindful of the movings of the universe sideways, become either drunk or sick. By doing this you remove yourself from the equation, and are able to observe, without being observed, the universe as it dances sideways drunkenly.
+Shit wait. The problem is not that by observing you are observed (although quantum mechanics may disagree1), because obviously dogs don’t know we’re observing them when we watch them through cameras in their little yard while they play and eat and poop—who poops knowingly on camera? The problem is the actual act of observing that distorts the world into what we want it to be.
+What I want to know is this: Why is this necessarily a problem? The dog is made, by mankind, to frolic and poop and sniff and growl and dig. Why cannot the man be made to observe the world incorrectly around him, and worry about it? Men have always wandered about the earth; does it not make sense that also they should wonder in their minds what makes it all work?2 In fact this is the very center of the creative being: the ability to move sideways, to dance with reality and judge it as it judges you, much like teenagers at the junior prom.
+Of course, reality doesn’t judge us back. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t! If you think it’s judging you, then observe in your surroundings your own insecurities. It is obvious that this way of doing things is far from vogue; usually projecting inner pain onto the outer world is classified as pathology. However, this is because it is assumed that the outer world is on its own terms, which it obviously isn’t, as far as we know. It follows that as there is no backdrop against which to judge our quirks, the quirks must not exist. Thus all is right with the world.
+Quantum mechanics, as is well known, are the most hornery and least agreeable of all mechanics. The cost to get one quantum serviced is usually at least eight times more expensive than the cost of an average automobile tune-up, for reasons not clearly known. The quantum mechanics themselves claim it’s the smallness of their work that justifies the price, but it doesn’t really look like they’re doing anything, and besides, my quantum always seems to break again within six months—maybe I’m just driving it too hard.↩
I attempted to strike this terrible pun from the account, but Hezekiah demanded I keep it if he were to continue the relation of his prophecy-slash-advice column.↩
Something about all music being performances of 4'33" in places where other bands happen to be playing
+ + ++ for Randall +
+Silence lies underneath us all in the same way
the Nile has a river underneath ten times as large
(although this is an urban legend, apparently).
So underneath truth or legend, flowing by
the feel of their own silence, move the stars:
silence lies underneath us all in the same way.
John Cage, I think, understood this: the way
that, in a silent room, one still hears the nerves
(although this is an urban legend, apparently),
or the heart, which I find more easily
believable: there simply is no way that, by and large,
silence lies underneath us all in the same way.
There must be different silences, because we
have different songs to drown them out, different gods
(although these are urban legends, apparently).
But is not all sound one sound? You and I
are two faces to the same head, the same body.
Silence lies underneath us all in the same way—
although this is an urban legend, apparently.
While swimming in the river
I saw underneath it a river
of stars. Only there was no
river: it was noon. You can
say the sun is a river; you
can argue the stars back it
like shirts behind a closet
door; you can say the earth
holds us up with its weight
or that it means well or it
means anything.
There is no
closet, nor door; there are
no shirts hanging anywhere.
There is no false wall that
leads deep into the earth’s
bowels, growing warmer with
each step. Warmth as a con-
cept has ceased to make any
sense. In contraposition to
cold, it might, but cold as
well stepped out last night
and hasn’t returned.
Last I
heard, it went out swimming
and might’ve drowned. Trees
were the pallbearers at the
funeral, the train was long
and wailful, there was much
wailing and gnashing of all
teeth–though there were no
teeth, no train, no funeral
or prayer or trees at all–
nor a river underneath any-
thing. There was nothing to
be underneath anymore.
Look
around, and tell me you see
something. Look around, and
tell me something that I do
not know. I know, more than
anything, that the world is
always ending. Behind that,
there is nothing, save that
there is no nothing either.
Nothing somehow still turns
and flows past us, past all
time and beyond it, a river
returning, to its forgotten
origins deep within itself.
Paul began typing on notecards. Somehow this felt right to his sensibilities. It was difficult to get the little cards into the typewriter. It was a pain to readjust the typewriter for regular paper when he wasn’t writing. He started typing everything on those little notecards: grocery lists, letters to his grandmother, even reports for work (which is what got him in trouble).
+But this was all later. For now he was writing his ideas, “notes” he now called them, something for him to combine later into something. He didn’t like to think about it. On this particular cold winter morning, he wrote
+++Woke up from a dream I was famous. One of the more famous people in fact. I had written something everyone could relate to and at the same time proved my parents wrong. Because I made a lot of money. Or not a lot, but enough and more than they thought I would. It was a good day. Woke up this morning and I was still cold. Still Paul. Still not good at furniture.
+
Nothing is ever over; nothing
is ever even begun. The foundation
hasn’t been laid; how can we hope
to put in the plumbing? The bed
is unmade, not even made; the wood
hasn’t been cleft from the tree;
the seed hasn’t been cast
out of water and growth and sun,
which itself hasn’t started shining.
The cock has never stopped crowing
because he never started. Peter
betrays us again and again with
silence. Christ wakes up at night,
choking from a bad dream, wrists
aching from a dreamt, torturous pain.
I think that I could write formal poems
exclusively, or at least inclusive
with all the other stuff I write
I guess. Of course, I’ve already written
a few, this one included, though “formal”
is maybe a stretch. Is blank verse a form?
What is form anyway? I picture old
women counting stitches on their knitting,
keeping iambs next to iambs in lines
as straight and sure as arrows. But my sock
is lumpy, poorly made: it’s beginning
to unravel. Stresses don’t line up. Syl-
lables forced to fit like McNugget molds.
That cliché on the arrow? I’m aware.
My prepositions too—God, where’s it stop?
The answer: never. I will never stop
writing poems, or hating what I write.
What did he do when he was in the woods? Where did he go? Was there always one spot, one clearing deep within the heart of them, that he would visit? Did he talk to the trees or only to himself? When he chopped down trees, did he leave them there to rot in the quiet or did he drag them out of the woods, behind his Shack, and dismember them? Did he use any for firewood, or did the pieces rot behind his Shack, forgotten? When was the last time he built any furniture? Did he get any better at building it or did he just quit at some point, let the desire to create fall behind him like a forgotten felled tree?
+A tree fell in the forest: did it make a noise? Paul typed his thoughts on cards, or wrote them in a book: did anyone read it? If anyone did, was his life changed? For the better or the worse? Did he glance at the mess in the top drawer of his Writing Desk as he cleaned the Shack out long after Paul had quit using it? Did he put tools in there or leave it empty? What did he do with the desk? Did he add it to the pile of rotting wood out back, or did he chop it up for a bonfire with friends, or a cozy fire with his wife and children, or did he take it to the dump three miles away to rot there? Are these all the options?
+Did Paul ever think about any of this? Walking in the woods one afternoon after becoming frustrated with his writing, did he sit on a stump and cry? Did he wonder whether he should have made other choices? Did he consider quitting smoking?
+
+ He used his body to remember his body, but in the end could only remember the string.
+ — Jonathan Safran Foer +
+He said at the beginning, “It’s like rolling yarn into a too-small ball. Sure, you can roll the memories around for a while, and maybe even use some of them. Eventually, though, you’ll wind them all the way out and you’ll be left with nothing but a small loop. You can tie this loop around your finger, and start wrapping your body, but this is an extension of the same problem. You’ll turn into a mummy of memory. There’ll be nothing left underneath but a dead body.
+“But what does it mean, To remember the body with the body? I imagine a creature made of memory, putting its feet in its mouth, turning into a ball. In this way, it could roll all around the landscape of its memory. I’ve tried explaining this to other people, but it doesn’t make any sense to them. The task of eating one’s feet is, to them, an unsolvable problem. They seem to forgotten that, as babies, they were able to make themselves into loops.
+“So I increase the count to two: two snakes eating each other’s tales, forming a loop. In this way they are able to put two heads on one body. This doubles the number of memories, which really only exacerbates the problem. It’s like trying to roll two different materials up into a ball. The people I tell this to don’t understand this either, they say using two animals makes sense to them. They say there must be different types of memory.
+“I disagree with this theory of memory. I think there is, at bottom, only one type of anything, with subtypes grouped together along the edge of a loop. Color becomes a good metaphor: look how many of them! yet they are all consumed by the same part of the body. Maybe two different materials are still made of material, and maybe they can be rolled into a ball. Maybe there actually never was a problem.
+“Or maybe, and this is more likely, I need to restate the problem. I think it all boils down to the fact that I have a truly lousy memory. I’ve tried different mnemonic devices, like imagining each thing I need to remember being visited by a bouncing ball. I’ve tried trying string into finger-loops. I’ve even tried writing the things I need to remember on my body. If you asked me, ‘Do any of these work,’ I would have to answer, ‘None of them.’
+“Sometimes in the morning I realize dumbly I’ve forgotten my words, all of them. They generally come back by around ten o’clock, but the frequency with which this is occurring is becoming a problem. I feel that my brain is being separated from my body. Is there a place in the universe for a misplaced memory? Does it eat its own tail and roll around the universe as it loops? Does it shrink down and become lost as a tiny ball?
+No matter what happens, eventually I will become them as I lose the last of my memory. I won’t be able to solve the problem of my being, and my being will become my problem, in an eternal loop. I will roll my body into a prenatal ball.
+++CONTENTS OF THE SHED
+
+++
+- typewriter
+- writing desk
+- notecards (top drawer of desk)
+- pen (fountain)
+- inkpot (empty)
+- wood (a lot, more out back)
+- bare lightbulb
+- candle
+- wooden shelf with tools: +
++
- claw hammer
+- screwdriver
+- prybar
+- 2x wrench (different kinds)
+- tiller machine
+- push lawnmower
+- hatchet
+- axe
+
He typed the list in the typewriter and looked around some more. He wanted to make sure he didn’t miss anything. Finally it hit him and he smiled. He typed one more line, stood up, and went out of the shed.
++++
+- Paul Bunyon
+
He got some kerosene from under the house, poured it around the base of the shed, lit a cigarette. He smoked half of it and threw it down to start the fire.
+Importance is important. But meaning is meaningful. Here we are at the crux of the matter, for both meaning and importance are also human-formed. So it would seem that nothing is important or meaningful, if importance and meaning are of themselves only products of the fallible human intellect. But here is the great secret: so is the fallibility of the human intellect a mere product of the fallible human intellect. The question here arises: Is anything real, and not a mere invention of a mistaken human mind? By real of course I mean “that which is on its own terms,” that is, without any modification on the part of mankind by observing it. But such a thing is impossible to be known, for if it be known it has certainly been observed by someone, and so it is not on its own terms but on the terms of the observer. So it cannot be known if anything exists on its own terms, for it exists on its own terms we certainly will not know anything about it.
+By this it is possible to see that nothing is knowable without the mediating factor of our mind fucking up the “raw,” the “real” world. But by this time it would seem that this chapter is far far too philosophical, not to mention pretentious, so I must try again.
+“Hello Paul this is Jill Jill Noe remember me” the voice on the phone was a woman’s. He nodded into the receiver. “Hello” Jill asked again “hello?” Paul remembered that phones work by talking and said “Hello Jill.”
+“Do you remember me” she asked “we were in school together? How have you been?” “Pretty well” said Paul “I’ve been writing and making furniture.” “Oh that’s nice” said the woman’s voice tinny in the phone “Listen I ran into your mother at the Supermarket the other day and she said you need a job. You still need one?” Paul had to tell the truth. His mother was watching him out of the corner of her eye as she was playing dominoes at the kitchen table. “Yes” he said sighing “Although woodworking takes up much of my time.”
+“OK” she laughed uncomortably “I actually have something you could do for me if you think you can get away from woodworking a bit. It’s just data entry really basic stuff entry-level.” “What’s it pay” he asked. “Minimum but there is room for movement.” “OK” he said. “Start on Monday okay?” “Sure” he said “bye” and the tin voice in the phone said “Goodbye Paul see you” by the time he put it back on the hook.
+“Who was that” asked his mother. “Jill Noe” he said. “Oh her was she calling about a job for you?” “Yes starts Monday” he said. She smiled behind her glasses reflecting dominoes.
++ ++
This sat alone on a blank notecard in Paul’s typewriter. He stared at it, sipping at his too-hot coffee. This made sense to him.
+He looked at the spot on the wall where he wanted a window to be, at the rough planks above his desk as they were lit by the bare hanging lightbulb. He sipped his coffee again. It was still too hot. His Woodworking Shack was becoming full of wood that was not furniture. He feared it would never become so.
+He threw open the door to the snow and the ground below it. He reached for his axe on the wall. He reconsidered. He took a few tentative steps onto the blankness on his own. He wasn’t cold, not yet. He walked into the forest. The snow crunched under his feet and did not echo.
+I need a plant. I need a thing
to take care of. I need
a little green brownspotted
blackdirt growing
quietness. I need a sunlit
dawn knowing my name filtered
through a thin green window.
I need chlorophyll
working its magic on beams of
grassmade early morning dewdrop
sweetmaking green. I need
the dark earth sucking water
from a black crevice
its black magic churning
wormilled rockturned starblind
darkness and cold into
the opposite of dust. I need the heat
to blind me. I need the dumb making
to charge my coldened blood. I need
the dropturned leaves to turn again
their faces to the windblown sun.
I need millions of tiny years
summed up and burning out some unknown
new growth into the air. I need four
hundred feet of dark red gnarled wood
and needles glistening wetly on goldheaded
branches hoisting themselves
to the sky. I need ten strong men
to fail to bring you down. Old one
I need the peace that comes with knowing
something sacred holds still
in the world. I need your green tongues
of flame to lick at old wounds
stitching us together away from ourselves.
I need your brownbranching grasp
to keep me from drifting off
into unknowing terrible sleep. I need
to know the snake hanging
from your branches. I need to watch
the dropping of flesh massful
onto the ground from a height. I need
the gnawer at your root to strike
a vein to quicken old brown stone
to movement. I need jeweleyed venom
barking new greennesses into the bark.
I need a knocker of dark secrets hidden
in the dark bark hiding a smallstone
smoldering pearl in the knot. I need
that pearl held out in a hand like an offering.
I need the hand to be a plant’s hand.
I need a plant. I need a growing
growler groaning toward heat and air.
I need a green thin stem surprisingly strong
holding up the weight of a plain
of fallow greennesses of creases and caresses
of tiny worldmaking hardworking grandeur.
I need a singer of life crying
forward into old roads covered over
by dead trees. I need the rasping of root
in dirt. I need the unfurling of fiddleheads
to sing forth a new symphony. I need
fruits swelling large for the harvest.
I need yellow light shining through white bark.
I need juicecrush flowing waterlike
through valleys percolating up
through the ground. I need springs bubbling sap
into cabins of wood fought for by labor.
I need snow on the ground with shoots
dotting the melting patches. I need two
leaves on a thin stalk shivering
in moonlight. I need robinsong warbling
over the heads of small seeds sprouting
to enliven their growth. I need rings
of woody material widening to push
the ground out of their way. I need
new greennesses pushing out from
the brown dark bark gnarled. I
need the robin to build its songfilled
nest in a branchcrotch. I need
the fecundity of fungi on the branches.
I need quiet of the sunlight shooting
through thousands of branched leaves
quivering. I need whisper at dawn.
I need burrows underground foxholes.
I need duff layers eaten through
by worms. I need brooks murmuring
through crooks of roots. I need small
fish swimming in their schools at
midnight. I need oldnesses giving way
to youngnesses giving way to oldnesses.
I need dapplegray yellowshot ashbark.
I need the crunch of dead leaves underfoot.
I need snowquiet deadbranch mourning.
I need those purple mountains majesty.
I need a walk between trees in the dark.
I need that moment when stopping to rest
it suddenly seems that all the weary
forestroads in all their meandering come
to rest their heads at my astonished
feet, none of them needing more than me.
I’m writing this now because I have to.
Not in some “my soul yearns for this and
I can’t help it” way, but in the way that this
moment is structured as such, that it is
crystallized this way, me writing this, and later
you reading it, now for you, later for me,
and this tenuous connection mates me
and you forever, combined with each other, two
electrons momentarily entwined. Later,
when I’m dead or far too famous for you, and
you’re in school, reading my words because it is
required reading, I want you to remember this
connection we’ve always had, this
spider’s thread hanging between you and me.
Which of us is the spider and which is
the fly still remains to be seen. To
eat, perchance to fly: all of that and
more. We can settle all of this later.
Yes, it is you I’m thinking of in your later
time: you specifically, not another. This
is true for all \(x\) such that \(x > 0\) and
\(x\) is a real person, though it doesn’t bother me
to write to a fictional figure or to
a figment, maybe, of my imagination. This is
what you are right now, anyway, dear Reader, is
it not? I’m talking about my now, of course, not later,
which is your now. Later will be my now too,
and maybe I’m ultimately writing to a future part of this
self: you could very well be me.
In fact, you probably are me, some other version, and
I am you in the past, or what you could’ve been, and
at the same time, this isn’t true. Everything is,
and nothing isn’t. The difference between “you” and “me”
is in name only. Maybe you’ll get this later,
when you’re older, when I’m older, when all of this
is something we’ll look fondly back to,
because I do hope to meet you, although much later,
and I hope your feeling is the same. All this
talk on me and you and you and me we’ll keep between us two.
Of course, there is a God. Of course, there is no God. Of course, what’s really important is that these aren’t important. No, they are; but not really important. All that’s important is the relative importance of non-important things. Shit. Never mind; let’s start over.
+The problem with people is this: we cannot be happy. No matter how hard or easy we try, it is not to be. It seems sometimes that, just as the dog was made for jumping in mud and sniffing out foxholes and having a good time all around, man was made for sadness, loneliness and heartache.
+Being the observant and judgmental people they are, people have for a long time tried to figure out why they aren’t happy. Some say it’s because we’re obviously doing something wrong. Some say it’s because we think too much. Some insist that it’s because other people have more stuff than we do. These people don’t have a clue any more than any of the rest of us. At least I don’t think they do, and that’s good enough for me.1 I think that the reason why people are unhappy (and this is a personal opinion) is that they realize on some level (for some it’s a pretty shallow level, others it’s way down there next to their love for women’s stockings2) that there is no background to put themselves against, no “big picture” to get painted into. This makes sense, because on one level, the level of everyday life, the level of observation, there is always a background—look in a pair of binoculars sometime. But on another level, that of … shit, wait. There are no other levels.3
+What’s more, people try to explain how to get happy again (although it’s doubtful they were ever happy in the first place—people are very good at fooling). Some say standing or [sitting in a building][] with a lot of other unhappy people helps. Some say that you can’t stop there; you also need to sing with those other unhappy people about how unhappy you are, and how you wish someone would come along and help you out, I guess by giving you money or something. I say all you really need to be happy is a good stiff drink.4
+In any case, people have for some reason or another, and to some end or another, always been unhappy. And people have always tried to figure out ways to be less unhappy—one of the most important things to people everywhere is called “the pursuit of happiness.” I think that calling it a pursuit makes people feel more like dogs, who are the most happy beings most people can think of. By pursuing happiness, they’re like a dog pursuing a possum or a bone on a fishing rod: two activities that sound like a lot of fun to most people. I think most people wish they were dogs.
+This seems to be an attempt on Hezzy’s part to set an example for mankind. It should be noted that he is an alcoholic, and not in any shape to be an example to anyone.↩
It is thought that only the leg coverings of the female sex are here referenced↩
You have hereby found the super special secret cheat code room. Yes, this is just like Super Mario Brothers—you can skip right to the end. Go and face the final boss already!↩
See footnote, above↩
Nothing matters; everything is sacred. Everything matters; nothing is sacred.1 This is the only way we can move forward: by moving sideways. Life is a great big rugby game, and the entire field has to be run for a goal. The fact that the beginning two verses of this chapter have the same number of characters proves that they are a tautological pair, that is, they complete each other. Sometimes life seems like a dog wagging its tail, smiling up at you and wanting you to love it, just wanting that, simple simple love, oblivious to the fact that it just ran through your immaculately groomed flower garden and tracked all the mud in onto your freshly steamed carpet. Life is not life in a suburb. There are no rosebushes, groomed never. There is no carpet, steamed at any time. The dog looks at you wanting you to love it. It wants to know that you know that it’s there. It wants to be observed.2
+Thank you Tom Stoppard. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.↩
Ah ha! I knew this was going to happen at some point. Now things are going to get more interesting because the dog wants what we thought was a bad thing, right? Right? Didn’t we go through that part about how observing made it impossible to really know anything, and I had to start over because it’s really hard to figure out what you’re talking about when reality slips out of your hands like a fish, but you’re not a cat with claws so it just flops right outta your hand back into the lake. (By the way, Nirvana is thought to be what a drop of water feels upon flopping into a lake—doesn’t that seem important? Doesn’t it seem like a fish and a drop of water here are connected? It helps, of course, that the fish represents Reality here.)↩
When he finally got back to work he was surprised they threw him a party. WELCOME BACK PAUL! was written on a big banner across the back wall. Someone had ordered a confectioner’s-sugar cake with frosting flowers on the corners. It said the same thing as the banner. “Welcome back, Paul” said Jill as he was at the punch bowl. The cup was on the table as he ladled punch in with his right hand. His left was wrapped in gauze.
+“Let me help you with that” said Jill. Paul had a strange feeling this had happened before. She took the ladle and their hands touched. She picked the cup up in her right hand and used her left to lift the spoon. “You know” she said “we were worried about you. When Jerry heard about your hand he said ‘There goes one of our best data entry men.’” “I still can’t really move my left hand” said Paul. “That’s alright you can take your time with the entry.” “I’m sorry.”
+“Sorry for what” she looked at his eyes. He imagined her seeing fisheye versions of herself in them. “I don’t know” he said because it was true. “It’s alright anyway” she said and placed the full punch cup in his right hand.
+Okay, so as we said in the Prelude, there either is or isn’t a God. This has been one of the main past times of humanity, ever since … since the first man (or woman) climbed out of whatever slime or swamp he thumbed his way out of. What humanity has failed to realize is that an incredibly plausible third, and heretofore unknown, hypothesis also exists: There is a dog.
+In fact, there are many dogs, and not only that. There are also many types of dogs; these are called breeds, and each breed was created by man in order to fulfill some use that man thought he needed. Some dogs are for chasing birds, and some are for chasing badgers. Some are for laying in your lap and being petted all day. Some dogs don’t seem to be really for anything, besides being fucking stupid and chewing up your one-of-a-kind collectible individually-numbered King Kong figurine from the Peter Jackson film. But the important thing is, (and here we go with important things again) all dogs have been bred by people for performing some certain function that we think is important.
+Note: Just because we think it’s important doesn’t mean it is important. But it might as well be, because what we as humans think is important is important. But be careful! Just because something’s important doesn’t mean it means anything, or that it actually makes anything happen. Even though just because something makes something else happen doesn’t mean it’s important. Shit. Let me start again.
+“Do you have to say your thoughts out loud for them to mean anything” Paul asked Jill on his first coffee break at work. It was in the city and his mother told him she wouldn’t drive him so he’d had to take the bus. Number 3 he thought it was. He couldn’t quite remember. Jill said “Sorry what?” Paul realized that she hadn’t really noticed him there in the break room as he was hunched behind the refrigerator a little and she was busy pouring coffee and exactly two tablespoons of both milk and sugar into her mug before she put the coffee in. He decided to repeat the question.
+“How do you think” he asked. “Like everyone else I guess” she said “I have a thought and if it’s important I write it down.” “Do you have to say them out loud for them to make sense?” “Are you asking if I talk to myself?” A pause. “I guess so” he said looking down. He had a feeling this was a bad thing. “Sometimes” she said and walked out of the break room. She didn’t understand the importance of his question. She popped her head back in a moment later and his heart leaped in his chest.
+“How’s your first day going so far” she asked. “Can you understand everything okay?” “Yes” he said “you were right it’s pretty basic.” “Good” she said. “Paul?” “Yes.” “Do you have to say all of your thoughts out loud to remember them?” He shook his head.
+Only all of the time, Paul thought to himself but didn’t speak.
+Sometimes I feel as though I am not a real writer.
I don’t smoke. I don’t wake up early but I don’t sleep
all day either. I find myself increasingly interested
in dumb luck. Chance: I’ve found two dimes in as many
days. Does this mean I’ve found twenty lucky pennies?
I want you to participate. You the reader. You,
the probabilistic god of my dreams. I’ve been having
strange dreams lately. I don’t remember them but
they leave impressions. A bare foot. A tunnel
of hair from her face to mine. A boat stranded
in a living-room. Something warm. Something like the sun
through my eyelids. A hand, with all its dead symbology.
My teeth have fallen out. No, you pulled them out
with your hands, threw them over your left shoulder
like salt, to wish away bad luck. I have something
to tell you: bad luck follows like a dog. It lets you
get ahead for a few days, a week, a year. You’ll see,
it’ll bite your sleeping face when you’re not looking.
I’ve been dreaming about the future, I know. In my dream
I am not a writer, I live in a place with rain. You
are sunning yourself as you read this, on a beach or
maybe a desert. Let me move in with you. I can cook
or clean or take care of your dog while you’re out.
I’ll never have to write again. I’ll watch television.
Do I want to become a writer? Tell me. Should I smoke?
I can sleep all day in your attic if you want, become
your god, lose my own, settle to the bottom of the bed
like a boat in a river, dream about nothing but furniture.
“Paul, you can’t turn in your reports on four-by-six notecards” Jill told him after he handed her his reports, typed carefully on twelve four-by-six notecards. He had spent the weekend
+so understandably he was upset. He told Jill all the work he’d gone to to type those notecard reports for her, for the company. She shook her head. “Paul, you don’t have to do all that work at home. Just type it up on the computers here, that’s all you need to do. Thanks for the work though.” He nodded as she threw the notecards into the trashcan and left his cubicle.
+Inside of my memory, the poem is another memory.
The air up here is thin, but the wind blows harder
than anywhere else I know. It threatens to rip
my body away, like an angel of death, to the stars.
In Arizona, I thought I would forget the rain,
forget its sound on a roof like a hard wind, forget
its smell like a far away ocean. Luckily for me
it rains here. Luckily, because I forget too easily.
In a dream, my father is caught by a riptide off-shore.
He’s pulled far out, far enough that the shoreline’s
a line in his memory on the horizon. I can see him
swimming, hand over hand, pulling his small weight
back to land. I see him as another shipwreck victim,
coughing sand and seawater, beard woven with seaweed.
I see him laying there a long time. I see all this
as he tells me the story, years later, the riptide
only a ghost in his memory, I only a child falling
asleep. My mother’s making mayonnaise rolls
in the kitchen, a recipe I’ll send for years later,
in Arizona, in the monsoon season, when my thirst
pulls me back home, my memory’s lonesome twinkle
like stars above the mountains. I’ll send for it
and try to make them, but in the thin air they’ll
crumble into dust like desert air, like a memory.
When Ronald McDonald takes off his striped shirt,
his coveralls, his painted face: when he no longer looks
like anyone or anything special, sitting next to women
in bars or standing in the aisle at the grocery,
is he no longer Ronald? Is he no longer happy to kick
a soccer ball around with the kids in the park,
is he suddenly unable to enjoy the french fries
he gets for his fifty percent off? I’d like to think
that he takes Ronald off like a shirt, hangs him
in a closet where he breathes darkly in the musk.
I’d like to believe that we are able to slough off selves
like old skin and still retain some base self.
Of course we all know this is not what happens.
The Ronald leering at women drunkenly is the same who
the next day kicks at a ball the size of a head.
He is the same that hugs his children at night,
who has sex with his wife on the weekends when they’re
not so tired to make it work, who smiles holding
a basket of fries in front of a field. He cannot
take off the facepaint or the yellow gloves. They are
stuck to him like so many feathers with the tar
of his everyday associations. His plight is that
of everyone’s—we are what we do who we are.
I lost my hands & knit replacement ones
from spiders’ threads, stronger than steel but soft
as lambs’ wool. Catching as they do on nails
& your collarbone, you don’t seem to like
their rough warm presence on your cheek or thigh.
I’ve asked you if you minded, you’ve said no
(your face a table laid with burnt meat, bread
so stale it could break a hand). Remember
your senile mother’s face above that table?
I’d say she got the meaning of that look.
You’d rather not be touched by these rough gloves,
the only way I have to knit a love
against whatever winters we may enter
like a silkworm in a spider’s blackened maw.
He chopped down a sapling pine tree and looked at his watch. From first chop to fall it had taken him eight minutes and something like twenty seconds. Maybe a little change. He leaned against another tree and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. He lifted it out of its box and fished in his other pocket for his lighter, failing to find it. He searched his other pockets. He came to the realization that he had forgotten it in his Shack (in confusion over his True Vocation, he’d resorted to calling it simply the Shack until he could figure it out). He sighed and put his hands in his pockets.
+“I wonder if trees are protective of their young” he said to himself, then wondered if why he had to think his thoughts out loud, then remembered he always did this, then remembered his conversation with Jill. He hoped she didn’t. He hoped that conversation was like the tree that fell in the forest with no one around. “I wonder if a thought said out loud isn’t heard by anyone, if it was made. I think maybe this is what Literature (big L) is all about, if it’s trying to make a connection because no idea matters unless it’s connected to something else, or to someone else. Maybe no wood matters unless it’s bound to another by upholstery nails. If ‘the devil is in the details,’ as they say (who are ‘they’ anyway?), the details are the connections? That doesn’t make sense. Details are details. Connections are connections.
+“Still, a neuron by itself means nothing. Put them all together though and connect them. You’ve got a brain.”
+On your desk I set a tangerine:
a relic of a winter quickly passing.
I’m reminded, fiercely, of a summer:
I watched the cemetery grass on my stomach.
You hate the wind blowing through buildings:
the coldness of fire, blister of a mountain stream.
When you broke down that night: your aunt / you
never have been / you shook that night /
Seasonal affective disorder is real: you
mutter under your breath on the highway.
The ant carries an orange peel past a headstone:
it carries her nearly as often.
I set a tangerine on your desk:
an engagement ring, winter-returned.
I only write poems on the bus anymore.
I sit far in the back to be alone.
I mark black things on white things in a black thing.
I try to make sense of it.
Every time I see a plastic bag in the wind I think:
This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Most of my life I relate to something on the TV:
This is how I try to make sense of it.
The Talking Heads song “Stop Making Sense”
is about a girlfriend caught cheating and willed oblivion.
The song’s real title is “Girlfriend is Better”
but lying about it is a way I try to make sense of it.
The day after I lost her I found you again.
Your face made a plastic bag of my heart.
Your eyes were the wind pushing the bus forward.
I couldn’t make sense of it.
The self is a serengeti
a wide grassland with baobab trees
reaching their roots deep into earth
like a child into a clay pot
A wind blows there or seems to blow
if he holds it up to his ear the air shifts
like stones in a stream uncovering a crawfish
it finds another hiding place watching you
Its eyes are blacker than wind
on the serengeti they are the eyes of a predator
they are coming toward you or receding
a storm cloud builds on the horizon
Are you running toward the rain or away from it
Do you stand still and crouch hoping for silence
“What do you do all day in that shed out back” his mother asked one night while they ate dinner in front of the TV. “Write” he answered. “Write what” she asked in that way that means he’d better not say I don’t know. “I don’t know” he said.
+“Goddammit Paul” his mother said. “You’re wasting your life out in that shed. You need to go out and get—” “I chop down trees too” he said. “I make furniture out of them.” His mother’s face did a Hitchcock zoom as she considered this new information. “Is it any good” she asked, eyes narrowed.
+“It’s getting there” he answered. “I’m getting better every day.” “When is it going to be there” she asked. “When are you going to sell this furniture of yours?” “It’ll be a while” he answered.
+“Then you’d better get a job until then” she said.
+He builds a ship as if it were the last thing
holding him together, as if, when he stops,
his body will fall onto the plate-glass water
and shatter into sand. To keep his morale up
he whistles and sings, but the wind whistles louder
and taunts him: Your ship will build itself
if you throw yourself into the sea; time
has a way of growing your beard for you.
Soon, you’ll find yourself on a rocking chair
on some porch made from your ship’s timbers.
The window behind you is made from a sail, thick
canvas, and no one inside will hear your calling
for milk or a chamberpot. Your children
will have all sailed to the New World and left you.
But he tries not to listen, continues to hammer
nail after nail into timber after timber,
but the wind finally blows him into the growling ocean
and the ship falls apart on its own.
+ — David Letterman +
+ ++ for Max +
+If Justin Bieber isn’t going for the sixteenth
chapel, I’m not either. I admit he is my role
model. He’s so current, so fresh and so new,
and Michelangelo is so old, his art so dated.
Where is the love in those old paintings? All
I see is creation, judgment, and death—
and I don’t get the preoccupation with death.
I’m about life! Ever since my sixteenth
birthday, when me and my two sisters all
nearly died when the car I was driving rolled
into a creek. Even though I’ve forgotten the date,
I think it keeps me thinking on the new,
something Biebs would be proud of if he knew.
I look at him, and see the opposite of death
in his eyes, his youthful smile: though someday
he may be a father, and later host a Sweet Sixteen
for his daughter (who I know he’ll buy a Rolls),
death will never find him. Living will be all
he’ll ever do, because it will be all
he’ll ever need to do. He is the eternal new,
the forever youth: this is the simple role
of every celebrity, to let us forget death.
Bieber didn’t make a mistake on the Sistine
Chapel’s name. He merely showed that someday
all old names must go, that on some day
a name must die so that the thing, which is all
that matters, can stay as it was in the sixteenth
century: fresh, ostentatious, and brand new.
In a way, the name becomes a Christ, experiencing death
so the world doesn’t have to. But I am wary of this role
for a name. It seems a name gives meaning, rolls
the general idea together with the concrete, daily
toil of the mundane. Are not life and death
intertwined? Is not everything tied up all
with everything? I guess I’m saying the new
necessarily comes from the old, as every sixteen-
year-old has a parent. Life rolls to death, and all
is tied together. Each day is born of night, and dies so new
morning can occur. Even the sixteenth chapel holds death.
I don’t care if they burn he wrote on his last blank notecard. He’d have to go to the Office Supply Store tomorrow after work.
+He looked at what he’d written. He’d been thinking about this for a while, felt the frustration build slowly like a thundercloud in the back of his mind. He thought he should write something else on the card, but everything he thought of seemed too confessional or too real compromising. He didn’t want anyone, not even the notecards, to know what he was thinking. He decided to try for more of an interview with the paper.
+Why? asked the notecard. Because there is nothing important on any of them he wrote back. What do you mean? You have some good stuff in that top drawer there. He looked in the top drawer. It was stuffed full of notecards in no organization. He could see bits and pieces of thoughts like leaves crunched underfoot in autumn. It will take so much organization he wrote.
+Why is organization important? Remember the trees, how they formed rows without trying. No matter how the ideas fall, they make something. The snow does that too he wrote. It doesn’t try to make anything but it does.
+No the snow is different the notecard was annoyed. The snow is a blank canvas that humans build into shapes or doppelgangers. It makes nothing on its own.
+in mammals the ratio between bladder size
and urethra is such that it takes
all of them the same time to piss. Take
for example the fact that Fibonnacci
numbers show up everywhere. How can you
look at this at all of this all of
these facts and tell me to my face there
is no God? And yet there isn’t
you murmer quietly into my ear over
and over like a low tide sounding
its lonely waves on an abandoned beach.
The ocean that birthed us holds us
still. We are tied, you and I, together
in her arms. The moon, caring father,
looks down from a dispassionate sky.
My body is attached to your body by a thin spittle of thought.
When you turn away from me, my thought is broken
and forms anew with something else. Ideas are drool.
Beauty has been slobbered over far too long. God
is a tidal wave of bodily fluid. Even the flea has some
vestigial wetness. We live in a world fleshy and dark,
and moist as a nostril. Is conciousness only a watery-eyed
romantic, crying softly into his shirt-sleeve? Is not reason
a square-jawed businessman with a briefcase full of memory?
I want to kiss the world to make it mine. I want to become
a Judas to reality, betray it with the wetness of emotion.
He is so full in himself:
how far down the branch to run,
how long to jump, when to grab the air
and catch in it and turn, and land on branch
so gracefully it’s like dying, alone
and warm in a bed next to a summer window
and the birds singing. And on that branch there
is the squirrel dancing among the branches
and you think What if he fell? but he won’t
because he’s a squirrel and that’s what
they do, dance and never fall. It was erased
long ago from the squirrel, even
the possibility of falling was erased
from his being by the slow inexorable evolution
of squirrels, that is why all squirrels
are so full in themselves, full in who they are.
“Riding the bus to work is a good way to think or to read” Paul thought to himself on the bus ride to work. His thoughts couldn’t become real to him because he didn’t want to look insane to everyone else on the bus. His thoughts came to him like someone yelling over a hard wind. He was trying to write them on his memory but the act of writing was easier and more immediate than that of listening. He was afraid that when he looked at his memory later he wouldn’t be able to read what was written.
+“Thoughts are like the wind outside a moving bus” he thought “or rather the bus is a brain slamming into columns of stagnant air causing them to whistle past in a confusion of something.” He could barely hear the voice yelling to him over the wind. “Speak up” he thought to the voice, then remembered it was his own. He wished he’d remembered a book to read.
+He looked at his hands to pass the time. They were dry in the winter air that had seeped its way into the bus. He tried to figure out how many hours they would make it before cracking and bleeding. “Maybe three or four” he thought accidentally out loud. He looked around expecting stares from everyone on the seat. He was surprised that he was the only one on the bus.
+“Can one truly describe an emotion?” Eli asked me over the walkie-talkie. He was in the bathroom, & had taken the walkie-talkie in with him absent-mindedly. I could hear sounds of his piss hitting the toilet water.
+“I can hear you peeing,” I said. He didn’t answer so I said in apology, “It’s okay. Humans are sexually dimorphic.” I was sitting on my blue baby blanket texting Jon, who was funny and amicable over the phone. He made a three-message joke about greedy lawyers and I would have been laughing if not for my embarrassment toward Eli. He finally came out of the bathroom and kept his eyes straight ahead, toward the wall calendar and not at me, as he passed through the family room into his bedroom, were he shut the door quietly. Presently I heard some muffled noise as he turned on his iPod. I guessed he didn’t feel like talking so I stayed on my blanket watching the Price is Right and texting Jon.
+Drew Carrey was doing his wrap-up speech on TV when Eli finally came out of his room, red puffy streaks covering his face. His eyes and nose were red too, which was almost festive against the pale green and white of the wallpaper. I had been laughing at the goofy costumes on the Price is Right and the jokes Jon was texting me, but when Eli came out of the room I stopped and just looked at him as well as I could. He was staring at my right shoulder as he said, “Go home now.”
+“What?”
+“I said go home now. I don’t want you here anymore, because I just remembered I have someone coming over and I have to clean.”
+“Look, Eli, I’m sorry—”
+“It doesn’t have anything to do with you, I swear. Just go, okay? Go home now.”
+I got up and tried to give him a hug but he withdrew from me sharply. So I walked around the coffee table as he sat down, not looking at me anymore, and stared at the blank TV. The blanket I had been sitting in was crumpled next to him like a dead bird. I opened my mouth but thought better of talking, and closed the door behind me slowly.
+Oranges. Poison. A compromise
between Mary & Judas. Blue
baby blankets swaddling greedy lawyers.
Can one truly describe an emotion?
I cut my ankle with a razor blade.
I can only go one at a time. Humanity
has a seething mass of eels
for a brain, mating in the water so forcefully
that it could drown you under the moon.
You have to go one line at a time, and you have to start on the first or second line.
+It was a gamble
I lost—thought I could get closer
than the library, stayed
on past the admin building,
back down the hill to my beginning,
the driver’s second-to-last stop.
I have to walk now,
through the wind and sun, past
traffic moving merrily along
taking their own gambles
staying on or getting off
too soon.
He walked into the woods for the first time in months. It was a bright summer day but under the canopy of leaves it was cool and quiet and twilight. There was no sound but his footsteps, his breathing. Instead of an axe, his right hand clutched his notebook. His left was in his pocket. A pencil perched behind his ear.
+He walked aimlessly until coming over a short rise he saw a stump. He recognized his handiwork in the way the stump made a kind of chair back—flat until the axe had gone through far enough, then a frayed edge like a torn page. Paul walked over to the stump and sat down.
+He looked up and tried to find a pattern in the placement of the trees. There was none. They grew randomly, beginning nowhere and ending in the same place. A squirrel ran down one and up another for no reason. He opened his notebook and took his pencil from his ear but could think of nothing to write.
+A crow called hoarsely to another, something important. Paul looked up but could not see the black bird in the leaves of the trees. He looked back down to the cream-colored pages of his notebook.
+He was surprised that he’d written YOU CANNOT DISCOVER ART.
+This poem is dry like chapped lips.
It is hard as teeth—hear the tapping?
It is the swan song of beauty, as all
swan songs are. Reading it, you are
puzzled, perhaps a little repulsed.
Swans do not have teeth, nor do they sing.
A honking over the cliff is all
they can do, and that they do
badly. You don’t know where I’m going.
You want to tell me, You are not you.
You are the air the swan walks on.
You are the fringe of the curtain
that separates me from you. I say
that you are no longer the temple,
that you have been through fire
and are now less than ash. You are
the subtraction of yourself from
the world, the air without a swan.
Together, we are each other. You
and I have both nothing and everything
at once, we own the world and nothing in it.
Swans fly overhead singing goodbye
to we walkers of the earth. You point
to them in formation, you tell me
you are not you. You are the air the swans
walk on as they journey like pilgrims
to a temple in the south. A curtain
there separates me from you, swans
from the air they fly through. I say
that you are no longer the temple,
that you have been through fire
and are now less than ash. You are
a mirror of me, the air without a swan.
Together, we are each other. You
and I have both nothing and everything
at once. We own the world and nothing in it.
+ ++
++First, a history: I was writing my thoughts in a book. I got a typewriter and typing things in a book became impossible. I began typing on 4x6 notecards. I ran out of ribbon in my typewriter. I wrote on the 4x6 notecards. I bought a new ribbon and new notecards. Now again I am typing on notecards.
+
+++What have I been typing?Thoughts, impressions maybe, a log of changes to my mental state. I waited long enough and I began recording them in the same way. If I wait longer the ribbon will run out again and I’ll write again, on notecards or in my book. The same thoughts in different bodies.
+
+++That's what it means, "Everything changes or everything stays the same." It might as well be “and.” Local differences add up to global identities. It’s a hoop, right? And we keep going around and we think it’s flat but it’s round like the Earth.
+
Paul pushed his chair away from the Writing Desk and stared at the notecard. He stood up, knocked his head on the lightbulb, swore. He pulled the notecard from his typewriter and crumpled it up with his left hand. With his right hand he reached in his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes. He put one in his mouth, threw the paper in the corner, grabbed his axe, went out into the woods.
+Apparently typewriters need ribbon. Apparently ribbon is incredibly hard to find anymore because no one uses typewriters. Apparently I am writing my hymns from now on. So he was back to calling his notes “hymns.” He looked up “hymns” in the dictionary. It said that a hymn was “an ode or song of praise or adoration.” Praise or adoration to what? he asked himself. He thought maybe furniture. There was still a lot of notfurniture in what he was again calling his Writing Shack.
+The dictionary also had this to say about “hymn”: that it was possibly related to the old Greek word for “weave.” “Weave what” Paul wondered to himself. He wrote this down on a new notecard. Apparently “hymn” means weave somehow. Or it used to. Or its cousin did. What is it weaving? Who is it weaving for? I remember in school we talked about Odysseus and his wife Penelope, who wove a tapestry every day just to take it apart at night. I forget why.
+Maybe she wove the tapestry for Odysseus. Maybe she wove it for herself. What did she weave it of? Memory, maybe? Or dream? I think these words make a kind of tapestry, or at least the thread it will be made of. I will weave a hymn to the gods of Literature, out of fiction. My furniture was a try at weaving, but I am shit at furniture. So writing it is again.
+He wrote NOTES FOR A HYMN at the top of this notecard.
+It was one of those nameless gray buildings that could be seen from the street only if Larry craned his neck to almost vertical. He never had, of course, having heard when he first arrived in the city that only tourists unaccustomed to tall buildings did so. He’d never thought about it until he’d heard the social injunction against such a thing; it was now one of the things he thought about almost every day as he rode to and from work in gritty blue buses.
+Inside the building, the constant sound of recirculating dry air made Larry feel as though he were at some beach in hell, listening to the ocean, or more accurately at a gift shop in a landlocked state in hell listening to the ocean as represented by the sound a conch shell makes when he holds it up to his ear. The buzz of the fluorescent bulbs overhead sounded like the hot sun bearing down all day in this metaphor, a favorite of Larry’s.
+His cubicle was made of that cheap, grayish-blue plywood that cubicles are made of; inside it, his computer sat on his desk as Larry liked to think an eagle perched on a mountainous crag much like the crag that was his desktop wallpaper. The walls were unadorned except for a few tacked-up papers in report covers explaining his script. When Larry made a call to a potential customer it always went the same way:
+“Hi, Mr/Mrs (customer’s name). My name is Larry and I’m with (client’s name), and was just wondering if I could have a minute of your time?”
+“Oh, no, sir; I don’t want whatever it is you’re selling.” (customer terminates call).
+Larry had only ever read the first line of the script on the wall. Sometimes he had an urge to read more of it, to be ready when a customer expressed interest in whatever it was Larry was selling, but something in him—he liked to think it was an actor’s intuition that told him it was best to improvise, though he worried it was the futility of it—kept him from reading further into the script. So when Jane said, “Sure, I have nothing better to do,” he was thrown completely off guard.
+“Um, alright Mrs … Mrs. Loring, I was wondering—”
+“It’s Ms, not Mrs. Em ess. Miz. No ‘r,’ Larry.” She sounded patient, as if she were used to correcting people about the particulars of her title. But how often can that happen? Larry thought, and he was suddenly deeply confused.
+“Oh, sorry, ma’am, uh, Miz Loring, but I wanted to know whether you’d like to, ah, buy some…” Larry put his head in his hand and started twirling his hair in his finger, a nervous habit he’d had since childhood, and closed his eyes tightly. “Why don’t you have anything better to do?”
+Immediately he knew it was the wrong question. Even before the silence on the other end moved past impatience and into stunned, Larry had a mini-drama written and staged within his mind: she would call customer service and complain loudly into the representative’s ear. The rep would send a memo to the head of telemarketing requesting disciplinary action, and the head would delegate the action to Larry’s immediate supervisor, David. David would saunter over to Larry’s cubicle sometime within the next week, depending on when he got the memo and when he felt like crossing fifty feet of office space, and have one of what David liked to call “chats” but what Larry knew were lectures. After about half an hour of “chatting” David would give Larry a warning and ask him to come in for overtime to make up for the discretion, and walk back slowly to his office, making small talk with the cubicled workers on the way. The world suddenly felt too small for Larry, or he too big for it.
+Quietly, with the same patience but with a bigger pain, Jane said, “My husband just left me and I thought you could take my mind off of him for just a minute,” and hung up.
+My head is full of fire, my tongue swollen,
pregnant with all the things I should’ve said
but didn’t. Last night, we met each other
in the dark, remember? You told me time was
pregnant with all things. I should’ve said
something, to draw you out from your place
in the dark. Remember, you told me time was
only an illusion, and memory was only
something to draw. You, out from your place,
I out from mine, that night, I believed in you.
Only illusion and memory were one, lying
down on your couch, through the night you drew
me out from mine. That night, I believed in you
when you told me you loved me. I lay
down on your couch. Through the night, you drew
a picture of our future together.
When you told me you loved me, I lied
in the dark. Remember, you told me time was
a picture of our future together.
My head is full of fire, my tongue swollen.
Waiting for a reading to start
when there’s nobody coming anyway
is like waiting for the tide
to make some meaning of the beach.
The sea doesn’t know or care
what the beach even is, let alone
its cares or its troubles, its
little nagging under-the-skin annoyances
that make the beach the beach.
Sandworms, for example, or those crabs
with big pincers on one side
but not the other. Those really get
the beach’s gander up, but the sea
doesn’t care. The sea
only wants to caress the beach
with its soft arms, to tell the beach
how much it’s loved by the sea,
that complex of water, salt, and
the moon’s gravity, the mercury
rising up and down slowly, like a yawn.
The sea only cares about itself.
The beach lays there and takes it.
We found your shirt deep in the dark water,
caught on the clothesline of sleeping pills.
Your head on the shore was streaming tears
like sleeves or the coronas of saints saved
from fire. The burning bush began crying
like a child who misses his mother. Traffic
slammed shut like an eye. God’s mean left hook
knocked us out, and we began swimming.
Bruises bloomed like algae on a lake.
Your father beat your chest and screamed
for someone to open a window. The air
stopped breathing. Fish clogged its gills.
Birds sang too loudly, trying to drown out
your father’s cries, but all their sweetness
was not enough. No polite noises will be made
anymore, he told us, clawing your breastbone.
He opened your heart to air again. Camels
flowed from you both like water from the rock.
God spoke up, but nobody listened to him.
We hung you up on the line to dry.
I wish I’d kissed you when I had the chance.
Your face hovering there, so near to mine,
your mouth pursed—what word was it you pronounced?
When I think about you, something in my pants
tightens, and my thoughts run, and I realize
I should’ve kissed you when I had the chance.
I want that moment never to be past
like Keats’s lovers on the grecian urn:
his mouth pursed, her figure turned to pronounce
her hips in ways that are not feminist.
But time strolls mildly on, not glancing at my
wish to kiss you when I had the chance,
whispered like a beggar to a prince
outside his palace: time looks up to the sky,
purses his lips, and hears what I pronounce
but pays it little mind. If he would just
turn back, bend down, and follow my design,
I would have kissed you when I had the chance,
as your mouth pursed and you pronounced goodbye.
There are more modern ideals of beauty
than yours, young padowan. Jessica has
some assets, that I’ll give you easily,
but in my women I prefer pizzazz.
I don’t want to bring you down, or make you think
that your perfected woman isn’t so.
It’s just that, like Adam said, 2006
has come and gone. What did she do
in that year anyway? IMDB
has, surprisingly, none, though in ’05
she’s in four titles. Sin City
I’ve never seen, although from many I’ve
heard it’s good. But it’s still irrelevant—
no matter how comely, she lacks talent.
Paul only did his reading on the toilet.
+He read in a magazine that the universe as we know it is actually a hologram, a three-dimensional projection of a lower, two-dimensional, “realer” reality. The article said that this model explains things like quantum entanglement, what it called “spooky action at a distance.”
+After he finished, he ran back out to his Writing Shack and hammered out a Treatise on Literature as Spooky Action. His mind was reeling. He typed out an entire notecard on the subject.
+He stopped to catch his breath. Reading it over, he realized he was completely wrong. “Paper is made from trees” he thought “and so is furniture.” He had thought that ART and CRAFT were two separate enterprises but he realized in a flash that they were two sides of the same building. Were there other walls?
+He couldn’t find a shirt to go to work in. They all had stains on them somewhere. He pulled out a vest to put on over the stains but somehow all of them were still visible. Most of them were unidentifiable but one he thought could have come from that peach he ate two weeks before. Another looked like toothpaste but he was paranoid it was something else.
+When he took the bus into work he couldn’t relax. He was paranoid everyone was staring at his stain and kept looking out the corners of his eyes to make sure they weren’t. They didn’t seem to be but they could also be looking away just as he looked at them. “The Observation Paradox” he muttered to himself.
+Jill was the only one to notice the stain at work. She came around to his cubicle during a break because he dared not show his stain in the break room. “You have a stain on your shoulder” she said “it looks like toothpaste.” “Do I” he feigned ignorance but went red at the same time “I didn’t see that there this morning.” “How do you get toothpaste on your shoulder?” “I don’t know skills I guess” he said and she grinned. “You know vinegar will take that out” she said “although I think I like it. You should start a museum of shirt stains!” “I don’t have that many shirts with stains” he said frowning. “Yes you do” she said.
+++TREATISE ON LITERATURE AS “SPOOKY ACTION FROM A DISTANCE”
+
++There is this thing called “spooky action at a distance.” Einstein mentioned it first I believe. It is about how two electrons can act like they are right next to each other although they are very far away (lightyears even). For a long time this puzzled scientists until someone (not Einstein) figured out that maybe the universe is a hologram or projection. So what appears to be very far apart in the hologram might actually be very close in the substrate reality.
+
+++I want to talk about thiseffect in literature. In literature the writer writes words on a substrate (paper) and later the reader reads the same words off the substrate. Although the writer and reader might be very far apart from each other in time and space, they experience the same effect from reading the words. Even the writer reading his own words after he has written them becomes a reader and feels who he was at that time, like a ghost.
+
++PROBLEMS:
+
+++Maybe the substrate isn'tpaper it’s what the writing is about. Where is the hologram? Are physics and literature comparable? What if the universe isn’t a hologram what then?
+
He dropped the penny in the dryer, turned it on, and turned around. “What” he called upstairs, pretending not to hear his mother’s question over the noise of the dryer. He had heard her ask “Could you bring up my underwear from the dryer” but didn’t want to touch her underwear any more than he had to. “I don’t want to bring up your underwear” he said to himself, and walked back upstairs as his mother was calling down again for her underwear.
+“Did you get them” she asked when he opened the basement door to the kitchen. She was sitting at the table playing dominoes. “Get what” he asked. She peered at him and said “my underwear.”
+“Oh I didn’t see them” he answered. He reflexively opened the refrigerator, reflexively bent down, reflexively tried to feign non-disappointment (appointment? he thought) at seeing the same disappointing empty pickle jar, old head of lettuce, crusty mayonnaise he’d seen already on the way down to switch his laundry over. “Paul” she said in that way that means Look at me. Paul looked at her.
+“You had to get them out of the dryer to put your clothes in. Where did you put them?”
+He didn’t go back into the shed for a long time. His hatchet was in there, and his axe. He didn’t want to face them. His papers, he decided, could wait in the top drawer for a while before being looked at again. The pain medication made him loopy. He couldn’t think as well as he was used to, which wasn’t well to begin with. Even saying his thoughts out loud, it was as though they were on the TV in the next room. Someone was cheering. They had just won a car.
+His mother came in with lunch on a tray. It was hot tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. “What have you been doing all day” she asked “you haven’t just been staring at the wall have you?” He had been staring at the wall most of the day. The wall without the window on it, with the woodgrain wallpaper. “No” he said. “What have you been doing then” she asked setting the tray down on his lap. He sat up and almost upset it, but she caught it before it spilled anything. “Composing in my head” he lied. “A novel of my experience.”
+“Do you really think anyone will want to read about you” she asked and walked out of the room.
+I saw two Eskimo girls playing a game
blowing on each other’s’ vocal chords to make music
on the tundra. I thought about how
once we played the same game
and the sounds blowing over the chords of our throats
was the same as a wind over frozen prairie.
We are the Eskimo girls who played
the game that night to keep ourselves warm.
I run my hands over my daughter’s
voicebox as she hums a song
about a seal and about killing the seal and about
skinning it and rendering the blubber
into clear oil to light lamps.
I remember you are my lamp. She remembers
you although you left before she arrived.
I can never tell her about you.
I will never be able to express that taste of your oil
as we pushed our throats together.
I will never be able to say how
we share this blemish like conjoined twins.
I will fail you always to remember you.
Your casserole dish takes the longest:
it has some baked-in crust from when you
cooked chicken last night. Washing it
allows me to think about this poem’s title
and the first few lines. Now that I’ve
written them down, I’ve forgotten the rest.
While scraping at something with my finger-
nail, I catch myself wondering again whether
you’ll thank me for washing your dishes.
I realize that this would defeat the point
of my gesture, that this has destroyed
all good thoughts I’ve had about saying
“I’m sorry.” This, this is the reason why
I am always apologizing: because I never
mean it, because there is always, in some
attic, a thought roaming that says, insists:
“I’ve done nothing wrong, and I deserve
all I can take, and more than that.”
“Tell us a joke” everyone asks of the clown. He sits on a log and begins to think. Everyone waits gap-mouthed in anticipation. A slight breeze ruffles the clown’s coat, his pompom buttons, his bright red hair. His nose becomes redder in the cold. Hours pass. All but the most dedicated of joke listeners leave him to rot for all they may care.
The clown opens his mouth to speak but no words come out. A tear falls down his cheek, and another. He begins to sob. The last joke listener comes over to comfort him. She puts a hand on his shoulder. He looks up at her, red face, red nose, white lips, and says “Thank you.” He vanishes from the clearing. The last joke listener sits on the log and looks up at the sky. The moon is full. The world creaks on its axis.
Paul looked up to the space on the wall where a window should be. The shadow of his face wavered in the candle light. He looked back down at the card he’d been writing on. He read the card. He crossed out the for all they may care in the first paragraph, and “Thank you” from the second one. “What could he say” he thought to himself. “What could he possibly say to her.” He went outside to clear his head with a cigarette. He took his axe with him this time.
+“How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite,” Jack Gilbert opens his poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” In a similar vein, Hass’s “Meditation at Legunitas” states, “A word is elegy to what it signifies.” These poems get to the heart of language, and express the old duality of thought: by giving a word to an entity, it is both tethered and made meaningful.
+Words are the inevitable byproduct of an analytic mind. Humans are constantly classifying and reclassifying ideas, objects, animals, people, into ten thousand arbitrary categories. A favorite saying of mine is that “Everything is everything,” a tautology that I like, because it gets to the core of the human linguistic machine, and because every time I say it people think I’m being disingenuous. But what I mean by “everything is everything” is that there is a continuity to existence that works beyond, or rather underneath, our capacity to understand it through language. Language by definition compartmentalizes reality, sets this bit apart from that bit, sets up boundaries as to what is and is not a stone, a leaf, a door. Most of the time I think of language as limiting, as defining a thing as the inverse of everything is not.
+In this way, “everything is everything” becomes “everything is nothing,” which is another thing I like to say and something that pisses people off. To me, infinity and zero are the same, two ways of looking at the same point on the circle—of numbers, of the universe, whatever. Maybe it’s because I wear an analogue watch, and so my view of time is cyclical, or maybe it’s some brain trauma I had in vitro, but whatever it is that’s how I see the world, because I’m working against the limitations that language sets upon us. I think that’s the role of the poet, or of any artist: to take the over-expansive experience of existing and to boil it down, boil and boil away until there is the ultimate concentrate at the center that is what the poem talks around, at, etc., but never of, because it is ultimately made of language and cannot get to it. A poem is getting as close as possible to the speed of light, to absolute zero, to God, while knowing that it can’t get all the way there, and never will. A poem is doing this and coming back and showing what happened as it happened. Exegesis is hard because a really good poem will be just that, it will be the most basic and best way to say what it’s saying, so attempts to say the same thing differently will fail. A poem is a kernel of existence. It is a description of the kernel. It is.
+The radio is screaming the man
on the radio will not be quiet he is
pushed far into the background
while some NPR talkers murmur over
his screaming he lost something
very important. He says it over
and over but they do not listen
they think of their children at home
lying in bed dreaming sweet
childhood one of them is staying over
at a friend’s house they are staying
up late they never want it to be over
not like the man. His life on the radio
will be the only one he ever has
his life it is wasted he’s being spoken over
such pain is in his voice. I wish you
could hear it. It’s something never over.
Suffering everywhere always and over it
the same serene murmur of the comfortable
distracted or worse looking over
the shoulder and quietly looking away.
He sat down at his writing desk and removed his new pen from its plastic wrapping. He remembered how to fill it from The View from Saturday, which he’d read as a kid. It had been one of his favorite books. He remembered the heart puzzle they completed, the origin of the word “posh,” and most of all his fourth-grade teacher Ms. (Mrs? He could never remember) Samovar. He smiled as he opened the lid on the ink well he’d just bought.
+He dipped his pen in the inkwell, screwed the converter piston up, and watched as nothing entered the chamber. He screwed it back down and up again, while dipping the nib more deeply into the ink well. He watched as again nothing filled the capsule. He screwed it down a third time. His thumb knocked the inkwell over somehow by accident.
+As he swore, stood up and away from the table, and went into the house proper for paper towels, he resolved to buy a typewriter.
+While chopping a tree in the woods with his hatchet (a Christmas gift from his mother) a bird he’d never heard before cried out. He jerked his head up and to the right as the hatchet fell down and to the left. It cut deep into the back of his left hand. A low thud didn’t echo in the forest because all the needles and snow absorbed sound well the sound.
When he got back to the house his hand wrapped in the end of his shirt he still felt no pain. He called for his mother and found her watching TV in the main room. He stayed in the kitchen not wanting to get blood on the carpet. She turned around cigarette dangling from her open mouth said “Oh god what happened.”
+She drove him to the hospital in the car. The radio stayed off the entire way. Paul wanted to turn it on but he didn’t want the desire not to annoy his mother was stronger. They drove in silence.
At the hospital after the X-rays and stitching and pain medication prescription the doctor said “You got lucky, son. If that axe had hit a half-inch lower you’d have lost your hand. You won’t get full mobility back because we had to tie the tendons, but with therapy you should be able to work it pretty well.”
+On the drive back home all he could think was that he was glad he didn’t hit his writing hand.
+He would enter data at work for fifty minutes and then go on break. He would walk down the hallway to the breakroom, which had a white refrigerator, a black microwave on a brown plyboard cart stocked with powdered creamer, sugar, and swizzle sticks, a dark red coffee maker, and yellow paint on the wall. He’d remember that somewhere he’d read an article about yellow walls being calming. “They use yellow in asylums” he’d say to himself.
+He would sit down at the round table covered in newspapers that took up the half of the room not occupied by the refrigerator, microwave, or counter with coffee pot and sink. He didn’t drink coffee but he would think about starting. He would shuffle the newspapers around on the table and see they were all the same ones as an hour ago. “Or technically fifty minutes ago” he would say to himself. Sometimes Jill would come in for a cup of coffee. She would always check that her lunch, which she brought each morning in a Tupperware container with a blue lid with her name written on it in black sharpie, was still there. Once he asked her why she checked.
+“Why do you always check if your lunch is in the fridge” he asked. “I don’t” she said. “Oh I thought you did.” “I don’t think so.” “Why do you check at all?” “Once it was stolen out of the fridge and returned empty before I had a chance to eat my lunch” she said. “So you make sure it won’t happen again.” “No I’m waiting for the day that it does.”
+