Autocento of the breakfast table
-index of first lines
- -A dead man finds his way into our hearts a dog moving sideways is sick; a man moving sideways is drunk. ART and CRAFT are only the inside and outside of the same building. Abraham, Abraham, you are old and cannot hear: after searching for days or even months and you were there in the start of it all apparently typewriters need ribbon. Bottom of the drink: they had contents of the shed.
-“Can one truly describe an emotion?” Eli asked me over the walkie-talkie. Case Duckworth is the cowardly but lovable Great Dane who solves mysteries on TV. Dimly remembered celebrity chefs shuffle. “Do you have to say your thoughts out loud for them to mean anything” Paul asked Jill on his first coffee break at work. EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME. EVERYTHING CHANGES OR EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME. God is love, they say, but there is hymn 386: jokes.
-He builds a ship as if it were the last thing he chopped down: a sapling pine tree and looked at his watch. He couldn’t find a shirt to go to work in. He didn’t go back into the shed for a long time. He didn’t have any polish so he spit-shined the whole thing, he dropped the penny in the dryer, turned it on, and turned around. He is so full in himself: He looked down at his hands idly while he was typing. He said at the beginning, “It’s like rolling yarn into a too-small ball." He sat down at his writing desk and removed his new pen from its plastic wrapping. He shrugged the wood off his shoulder, letting it fall with a clog onto the earth floor of his Writing Shack. He walked into the woods for the first time in months. He was born on a few separate occasions: green traffic lights at night. He woke up after eleven and didn’t go outside all day, not even to his Writing Shack. He would enter data at work for fifty minutes and then go on break. He wrote JOKES on the top of a page in his notebook.
-“Hello Paul this is Jill Jill Noe remember me” the voice on the phone was a woman’s. His first chair was a stool. His mother drove him to the Hardware Store on a Tuesday. His mother ran out of the house in her nightgown.
-“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.” How does one describe a poem? I am a great pillar of white smoke. I can walk through the rain, that rare occurrence. I didn’t write this sestina yesterday. I don’t care if they burn he wrote on his last blank notecard. I hear the rats run. I lost my hands & knit replacement ones. I need a plant. I need a thing. I only write poems on the bus anymore. I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. I saw two Eskimo girls playing a game I think that I could write formal poems; I thought I saw you walking. I turned off the TV as soon as the end credits began.
-I want to say I take it all back, I wanted to tell you something in order to — I was away on vacation when I heard — I wish I’d kissed you when I had the chance. I’m writing this now because I have to. If Justin Bieber isn’t going for the sixteenth — if you swallow hard enough — importance is important. Inside of my memory, the poem is another memory.
-“Is man the natural thing that makes unnatural things” he thought to himself as he looked out the kitchen window at the shed. It had gotten cold. It was a gamble; it was one of those nameless gray buildings that could be seen from the street only if Larry craned his neck to almost vertical. It’s all jokes Paul wrote in what he was now calling his Hymnal. January.
-“Like 40 as I challenge anyone to come too! Look, I say — look here — Lost things have a way of staying lost.” Man of autumn, cold wind, memory works strangely, spooling its thread.
-“My anger is like a peach,” he said. “My body is attached to your body by a thin spittle of thought.” My head is full of fire, my tongue swollen, nothing is ever over; nothing — nothing matters; everything is sacred. Now the ticking clocks scare me.
-Of course, there is a God. — Okay, so there either is or isn’t a God. On your desk I set a tangerine: Paul began typing on notecards.
-Paul only did his reading on the toilet. Paul took his axe and went out into the woods to chop trees. Paul was writing in his diary about art.
-“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. “Riding the bus to work is a good way to think or to read” Paul thought to himself on the bus ride to work.
-Say there are no words. Say that we are conjoined: silence lies underneath us all in the same way it’s the fucking moon. Big deal. As if two hyperintelligent pandimensional beings feel as though I am not a real writer. Somewhere I remember reading advice for beginning writers not to show their work to anyone, at least that in the early stages.
-Swans fly overhead singing goodbye: THIS MAN REFUSED TO OPEN HIS EYES. TREATISE ON LITERATURE AS “SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE”: the definition of happiness is doing stuff that you really like. The look she gave me (Half-hours in heaven are three times that in hell). The moon is drowning the stars it pushes them — The moon is gone and in its place a mirror. Looking at the night sky now, the other side of this mountain: the problem with people is this: we cannot be happy. The radio is screaming the man — the self is a serengeti — there are more modern ideals of beauty — there is a cave just outside of Flagstaff made from ancient lava flows.
-There is a theory which states the Universe, this book, is an exploration of life, of all possible lives that could be lived. This poem is dry like chapped lips. Tonight, as I look up, the stars, waiting for a reading to start, walking along in the dark, is a good way to begin a song.
-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. We found your shirt deep in the dark water — what did he do when he was in the woods?
- -What is a poem? What is poetry? What secrets does it hold? When I think of death I think, when Ronald McDonald takes off his striped shirt, when he finally got back to work, he was surprised they threw him a party. When he said Bible I heard his southern accent: whenever you call me friend 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. While swimming in the river: YOU CANNOT DISCOVER ART ART MUST BE CREATED he sat on the couch at home while his mother watched TV and smoked.
-You never can tell just when Charlie Sheen will enter your life. You think building Hoggle’s a hard game? Your casserole dish takes the longest: in mammals the ratio between bladder size has been a part of the Unix toolset since the late 70s.
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