From September 12 2009

Do I hear the vibration of crickets throughout the house or could it be the much higher-pitched buzz of the waking cicadas? The same buzz you’d hear among the elms and beeches in New Jersey and Manhattan?

A drone not to be confined with those mystical varieties reported to put the id and ego to rest, and connected the soul to those larger dependencies communed with without the interference of thought or any presupposition? A buzz that becomes a variety of silence just as one trains one’s ear not to hear the whinging drones of power stations, transformers, furnaces, a sound like a bed of leaves or bed of nails or equal height or a field of stones, neither transporting nor to be transported? Hum of the dynamo, murmur of the idling engine, a breathing machine’s exhalation of bubbles?

A TV binge: luminescent jellyfish umbrellas in dark water, the Iron Chef doing Kung Fu chicken with prunes, consumption of a fistful of grubs in Survivor, the new American Idol disqualified, dethroned, the shoot-out, all that glitters being not gold among those watches on Home Shopper’s Network, CSI Las Vegas, New York, Miami, Denver, DeMoines, but Real Housewives of Atlanta, New Jersey, etc., some change back from Pizza Hut.
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What gets spoken does not get read
What is spoken remains unread—such a shame.
A confidential exchange of words with no one in earshot
Cannot be done justice.
As I depopulate the marshes
No one at home would seem to reward me.
The medal remains within its velvet casing,
The marching band remains out of tune
As I dry the swamps up
The light slanting into the studio
Because you can’t unpack these conceits in logical strands
The statement made cannot be simple

Among the cords and fibers and fasces of the brain-stem
Where thoughts both contradictory and related come together
Where one conceit becomes unwound from another, an improvisation
That once engendered among those tiny electrical impulses
Can thrive or perish, just as some seeds catch and increase.
The cliffs on which saplings clutch, whether birch or pine,
Doomed to be stunted among those slate or granite crevasses
Where stone grinds and softens enough for roots to grab
Reminds me of the fragility of tangents, these sallies-forth
On which my modesty depends. May you notice how sincerely
I try not to be prolix, try not to act as if I had to
Prove something. Yet my resume is available to all.

“He isn’t someone I would call prepossessing. Alone I wouldn’t
Seek him out, or someone like him.

Chance alone brought us to the same room,
But the more we learned about the other, the less we wished we knew.
These are not people who I find attractive—they’re not one of us.

“Someone with integrity is what I am seeking. I had an idea…”
Deliberately vague trail off to repel unwarranted attention.