January 10 2010 Sunday
A singing vine
A buzzing fly
And a ladybug
Collapsing itself
To a spotted dewdrop
Settled within
The waxy surface
of the lampshade
Chains that hold
the swings in air
Have not rusted
Nor has the slide
Shelter is unnatural
Upright lean-to or pagodas.
Feb. 21 Sunday
As I rode the elliptical training machine, the television played the same infomercial loop (it never ends!) for a Time-Life-Warner 60s soft rock CD. Bobby Goldsboro, whose face in digitized format underwent silvery luminescent alterations, resembled an animated corpse with a toupee. His face looked made of molded collagen suffused with an argentine, almost lunar glow beneath the wig of black, a plastic helmet with a pompadour for a visor. The most painful soft-rock songs continued to play as I treaded the elliptical. My heart-rate soared. I couldn’t find the remote. Finally, after listening to these lachrymal tunes for nearly 15 minutes of exertion, I leapt at the console to touch a button that might turn the television off as Jimmy Dean sang Big John, no one in the gym to scold or to help me. But I couldn’t turn it off or change the channel. For the second time, Herb Alpert appeared, indicating that the loop was re-beginning. And the apparition of Bobby Goldsboro appeared as well, singing Watching Scotty Grow. I bore with it another ten minutes, which recalled how much I’d recoiled from the top 40 as a youngster. A swim meet tool place in the building, all the parking spaces taken. I would book a flight to a place where this music never played.
May 9 2010 Sunday
The violets of the flowers mingled with the violets of the dusk,
The sun was setting behind the branches of the flowering shrubs,
And the head-lamps of revolving cars lit the space between the rungs
Of the park bench, and the iron fence of the park elongated into shadows
While a confounding number of footpaths lead the pedestrian
To the sidewalk of the square, whether to the City Hall steps or the post office
With its Jeffersonian dome and rotunda, or the white church,
Or to the zone for bars and restaurants, as ordained by the town council.
An ordained minister does not intervene in the tribulations of his flock,
But presides above them like the sun that sets in violet
But in vermillion rises.
****************************************
A sun has not arrived to evaporate the dew from grass that must be cut unless the lawn reverts into a field. How roots behave, clutching a sphere of soil when the weed is pulled from earth by the stem, while taproots investigate the clay.
A breeze connected to a storm-front to the west shakes the trees, shudders the grass-blades, and the saw-toothed leaves of the dandelion, which have already shed their spokes. The needles of the conifers turn brown at their tips, and the cones do not ooze sap.
A king is crowned by his people, an emperor is coronated. Once upon a time Toyota made a Corona; now only Corollas are available, the former a crown, the latter a halo, an aura about the crown. The halo’s color denotes angelic rank, a crown of thorns is abnegation, as would be one of nails. From the skull cap radiates enlightenment; never touch the pate of an oriental child, or the septum at the top of the skull.
May 10, 2010
Planted: one small Alberta spruce on a slope
Between the frayed juniper and the arbor vitae
With its already dessicated brown and orange tassels.
Many small stones, potato-shaped, or the size of walnuts.
How do the taproots of an evergreen
Find their way down, soil so inhospitable
It’s killing off a towering maple.
The towering maple is dying, its middle trunk
Hollowed out by woodpeckers and ants.
Meanwhile, the freshly mowed lawn
Doesn’t brown out.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
February 17 2005
Edge, on edge, edgy, I’m edgy, and a stand-up comic describes his style as edgy because he curses a lot. Is edge some four-letter words, is it life or death? Is edge pushing to extremes? Is edge danger, or a challenge to conventionality? My teeth are on edge, the molars grind, the pulp’s exposed. The paper cut, plain photocopy paper, sharp as a saw blade, though not as strong. The sickle blade, the sharp tongue disclosing truth. Oh no! How corny to upset old ladies at coffee-klatches! Undermine the peace! Yet that’s edgy, son. Your rapier-sharp wit could uncover a gold mine of unchallenged assumptions holding a class of people together like glue. Knock down the jambs, edgy guy! Dress for the role, black leather or tutus. Show yourself.
Things slant a certain way, and other things slant another way. And there’s a point where all lines converge but it’s not easy to find, and the worst thing is the point changes with the movement of the eye. There are an infinite number of these points towards which all lines of perspective converge, and the points lie at an infinite distance. The lines come closer, but they never actually meet. At this point the eye sees the point towards which all converges without the point really being there, so the eye makes up a story to bring the story of the nearly converging lines to a close, and so in the distance the perspective closes: everything is eventually drawn into a vortex.
An infinite number of points in a sphere of an indefinite diameter. Who can say what this diameter is? 20 meters or miles? Does it only extend as far as human sight? How do the short-sighted fit into this picture? How about the farsighted, the ones most likely to see a moose among raspberry bushes and bramble, or the street signs for more than a block away.
But on the other end, do these lines of sight pass or engulf you, extending behind you wherever you’re looking? Do they include you as a wave includes? Or do they simply pass you? You seem to be the tangent they happen to touch before diverging. Everywhere I look objects placed at different angles confuse me, like cinderblocks accidentally dumped in a parking-lot. The little speakers –the tweeters – are pointed in one direction, the woofer in another direction. They each remain in separate, irreconcilable lines of perspective, until I make them point the same way, because for best effect, they have to reach my ears at once.
Things slant a certain way, and other things slant another way. And there’s a point where all lines converge but it’s not easy to find, and the worst thing is the point changes with the movement of the eye. There are an infinite number of these points towards which all lines of perspective converge, and the points lie at an infinite distance. The lines come closer, but they never actually meet. At this point the eye sees the point towards which all converges without the point really being there, so the eye makes up a story to bring the story of the nearly converging lines to a close, and so in the distance the perspective closes: everything is eventually drawn into a vortex.
An infinite number of points in a sphere of an indefinite diameter. Who can say what this diameter is? 20 meters or miles? Does it only extend as far as human sight? How do the short-sighted fit into this picture? How about the farsighted, the ones most likely to see a moose among raspberry bushes and bramble, or the street signs for more than a block away.
But on the other end, do these lines of sight pass or engulf you, extending behind you wherever you’re looking? Do they include you as a wave includes? Or do they simply pass you? You seem to be the tangent they happen to touch before diverging. Everywhere I look objects placed at different angles confuse me, like cinderblocks accidentally dumped in a parking-lot. The little speakers –the tweeters – are pointed in one direction, the woofer in another direction. They each remain in separate, irreconcilable lines of perspective, until I make them point the same way, because for best effect, they have to reach my ears at once.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
9/13/2003 -- 9/14/2003
9/13/2003
You could walk a tightrope over the land corridor that leads to the Free State of Danzig and you wouldn’t please anyone, dodging the border guards while ordering strudel from the local bakeries over your cell phone, and you don’t even own a headset. This had better be good, considering the hits you’ve already taken.
When you pause you deliberate, and when you deliberate you reflect, and when you reflect you have that nasty habit of rearranging events that you can never actually change ad infinitum, because you are at a place that you would not wish upon your worst enemy. Who is your enemy, do you need one as governments and nationalities do to distinguish their integrity from others. The faceless incommunicability of the ones you’ve never touched, were perhaps too afraid to go after, collide with or push through one another, through one another’s bodies in a manner one could not confess to the priest or to the marriage counselor. The house of the dead is the house of the ghosts of the past of the living, the past selves of the living with which you were familiar and to whom you could breath fire and do nothing wrong. The past self of a living person is a ghost invoked by print media. The younger self discontinuous with the present self.
The steps and ladders of the music as it proceeds to some conclusion, a few air-tight spaces in which separate occurrences independent of another occurs, the sum total of the effect being spell-binding in its alleged unity, for which you have not been trained nor accustomed to catch, a rhythmic ladder of strings or wing-beats against a sun that seems to cool and disperse its fire in the sea, an egg yolk in the white of the sky. These various but intact file spaces conceived by equally proportioned notes, a furor of fiddles, terraces of the concert hall to approximate the angelic thrones, molding of blanc mange the herringbone clouds, the equally spaced studs of the ceiling of velveteen the firmament that in retrospect seems paltry when compared to the Superdome roof controlled in the immediate future by a proconsul who wears cowboy boots beneath his pinstripe-suited exterior. A rank smell that wafts into the window from the west.
9/14/2003
A parking garage replaced my early Surrenden St. apartment of over 25 years ago. The cement walls and columns rose through the summer, the din of cranes or giant hammers pulverized the ground. O winter breaks you spun your used vehicle in circles in the parking lot, upon the built up ice. Who cares now if your tires are really skates or the treads of skis the Neolithic man frozen on the side of the Italian Alps might’ve wished he had if he could have seen into the future instead of falling asleep beneath the impending avalanche—crash and boom!—and his fur pelt jacket refuses to keep him from freezing on that mountainside, while the mind in the perishing body thinks identifiable circles before it desiccates over ten millennia, his thatched hut on the lakeside blurry—now the skiers have taken over the polyglot Helvetian village from which he wandered, hunting mastodons or macroceros in the virgin snow nosing to the frozen ground for grass or chestnuts. There’s plenty for everyone, how carry the foison homeward unresolved.
What, might I ask, does that have to do with the price of eggs? A tangent that no one can follow, such as the gloomy mittel-European sloe-eyed philosopher traces with his pointer over an illuminated globe in his darkened classroom, his acolytes planning their career moves on luminous Etch-A-Sketches. How few degrees separate yourself from the social station you desire, commanding armies above a darkening plain while others can hug one another in bouts of indulgent reassurance. As much as they may laugh they know the man with the light pen before the blackboard knows his stuff, knows the hoi polloi cannot know better.
A tightrope walker across the Danzig Corridor
Reflects and falls, rues the day he choose.
Someone always pays for the mistakes
My unrequited crush will shatter into glassy Narcissistic mirrors
When you smell a rat you hear an odd inflection
A paper tiger has a chance of floating on the gulfstream
While those of flesh and blood become extinct.
I walked across the creaking floor to see the time-and-temp clock better.
You could walk a tightrope over the land corridor that leads to the Free State of Danzig and you wouldn’t please anyone, dodging the border guards while ordering strudel from the local bakeries over your cell phone, and you don’t even own a headset. This had better be good, considering the hits you’ve already taken.
When you pause you deliberate, and when you deliberate you reflect, and when you reflect you have that nasty habit of rearranging events that you can never actually change ad infinitum, because you are at a place that you would not wish upon your worst enemy. Who is your enemy, do you need one as governments and nationalities do to distinguish their integrity from others. The faceless incommunicability of the ones you’ve never touched, were perhaps too afraid to go after, collide with or push through one another, through one another’s bodies in a manner one could not confess to the priest or to the marriage counselor. The house of the dead is the house of the ghosts of the past of the living, the past selves of the living with which you were familiar and to whom you could breath fire and do nothing wrong. The past self of a living person is a ghost invoked by print media. The younger self discontinuous with the present self.
The steps and ladders of the music as it proceeds to some conclusion, a few air-tight spaces in which separate occurrences independent of another occurs, the sum total of the effect being spell-binding in its alleged unity, for which you have not been trained nor accustomed to catch, a rhythmic ladder of strings or wing-beats against a sun that seems to cool and disperse its fire in the sea, an egg yolk in the white of the sky. These various but intact file spaces conceived by equally proportioned notes, a furor of fiddles, terraces of the concert hall to approximate the angelic thrones, molding of blanc mange the herringbone clouds, the equally spaced studs of the ceiling of velveteen the firmament that in retrospect seems paltry when compared to the Superdome roof controlled in the immediate future by a proconsul who wears cowboy boots beneath his pinstripe-suited exterior. A rank smell that wafts into the window from the west.
9/14/2003
A parking garage replaced my early Surrenden St. apartment of over 25 years ago. The cement walls and columns rose through the summer, the din of cranes or giant hammers pulverized the ground. O winter breaks you spun your used vehicle in circles in the parking lot, upon the built up ice. Who cares now if your tires are really skates or the treads of skis the Neolithic man frozen on the side of the Italian Alps might’ve wished he had if he could have seen into the future instead of falling asleep beneath the impending avalanche—crash and boom!—and his fur pelt jacket refuses to keep him from freezing on that mountainside, while the mind in the perishing body thinks identifiable circles before it desiccates over ten millennia, his thatched hut on the lakeside blurry—now the skiers have taken over the polyglot Helvetian village from which he wandered, hunting mastodons or macroceros in the virgin snow nosing to the frozen ground for grass or chestnuts. There’s plenty for everyone, how carry the foison homeward unresolved.
What, might I ask, does that have to do with the price of eggs? A tangent that no one can follow, such as the gloomy mittel-European sloe-eyed philosopher traces with his pointer over an illuminated globe in his darkened classroom, his acolytes planning their career moves on luminous Etch-A-Sketches. How few degrees separate yourself from the social station you desire, commanding armies above a darkening plain while others can hug one another in bouts of indulgent reassurance. As much as they may laugh they know the man with the light pen before the blackboard knows his stuff, knows the hoi polloi cannot know better.
A tightrope walker across the Danzig Corridor
Reflects and falls, rues the day he choose.
Someone always pays for the mistakes
My unrequited crush will shatter into glassy Narcissistic mirrors
When you smell a rat you hear an odd inflection
A paper tiger has a chance of floating on the gulfstream
While those of flesh and blood become extinct.
I walked across the creaking floor to see the time-and-temp clock better.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
May 15 2010
As you fly west, from Boston to Dallas, squares of wheat fields,
The bends and hooks of the Mississippi indicate you are above the Delta,
Nearing Memphis, and the scows or freight boats that ply the river
As miniscule as needles or microscopic probes, and when in Dallas,
Each roomy suburban row house features a swimming-pool,
A small kidney shaped spot of chlorinated blue
You’d give your eye-teeth for the spectacle of a cloud-bank
Lit up by tiny squiggles of lightning at their base
As you pass the turbulent zones and enter a clear sky
A crescent moon lights in gradations of blue and crimson
As the sun sets as your plane pursues it over the deserts
The gambling dens and brothels below surrounded by dry empty tracts and missile silos
A blaze of lights of small cities in the dark swiftly approached and passed
In Nevada no evidence of urban sprawl
The descent above large row-houses, each with a kidney-shaped swimming pool
On the monorail among Texas preachers and high school football coaches
The airport’s cozy microclimate, its air-cooled gargantuan lobbies
Branched and alphabetized
The bends and hooks of the Mississippi indicate you are above the Delta,
Nearing Memphis, and the scows or freight boats that ply the river
As miniscule as needles or microscopic probes, and when in Dallas,
Each roomy suburban row house features a swimming-pool,
A small kidney shaped spot of chlorinated blue
You’d give your eye-teeth for the spectacle of a cloud-bank
Lit up by tiny squiggles of lightning at their base
As you pass the turbulent zones and enter a clear sky
A crescent moon lights in gradations of blue and crimson
As the sun sets as your plane pursues it over the deserts
The gambling dens and brothels below surrounded by dry empty tracts and missile silos
A blaze of lights of small cities in the dark swiftly approached and passed
In Nevada no evidence of urban sprawl
The descent above large row-houses, each with a kidney-shaped swimming pool
On the monorail among Texas preachers and high school football coaches
The airport’s cozy microclimate, its air-cooled gargantuan lobbies
Branched and alphabetized
August 16 2010
The weight of the suet-cage dangling from the dying branch
May be just enough to drop the precarious maple tree.
The movement of the dandelions scatters the spores to more fields.
The wings of the dragonfly derive their iridescence and vibrancy
Of color from the volatility of the Pleistocene, the infernal climate,
The bacterial vapors of the swamp, and eruptions of seas,
The same eruptions that hurled
Fish to shore to become amphibians,
Amphibians dinosaurs, dinosaurs birds.
The bloom of Queen Anne’s lace folds itself into
Dun-colored broom caterpillars devour to become the black winged
Emperor butterfly, not the monarch or the admiral.
The shadow of the emperor butterfly that shadows
And overlords the world of the ant, laboring
With its fragment of leaf between mandibles
Whose strength when expanded to the scale of one
Entire man could throw a Mosler safe like a shot-put
Or boulder or compact car into a concrete wall,
Break the wall into separate jagged chunks
Bending those corrugated steel rods holding the wall together.
May be just enough to drop the precarious maple tree.
The movement of the dandelions scatters the spores to more fields.
The wings of the dragonfly derive their iridescence and vibrancy
Of color from the volatility of the Pleistocene, the infernal climate,
The bacterial vapors of the swamp, and eruptions of seas,
The same eruptions that hurled
Fish to shore to become amphibians,
Amphibians dinosaurs, dinosaurs birds.
The bloom of Queen Anne’s lace folds itself into
Dun-colored broom caterpillars devour to become the black winged
Emperor butterfly, not the monarch or the admiral.
The shadow of the emperor butterfly that shadows
And overlords the world of the ant, laboring
With its fragment of leaf between mandibles
Whose strength when expanded to the scale of one
Entire man could throw a Mosler safe like a shot-put
Or boulder or compact car into a concrete wall,
Break the wall into separate jagged chunks
Bending those corrugated steel rods holding the wall together.
From Broken Prisms (January 30, 2005)
The flavor of the month
comes in concrete chunks and pyrites.
with an aftertaste of bonding adhesive.
The bitterness assures the palate of its strength..
It comes in colors, feldspar, cherry, citronella.
But it’s also brown as rust, the water in a well
whose surface only you can see. Its murkiness
belies medicinal properties. The nausea
is a purgation, even as it shreds your guts
into metal coils a machine ejects
to bind, or blow apart, or to communicate.
Tear stains and fallout filtered through concrete,
years of weather, their turbulence apparent
in tiny steel-backed mirrors embedded in the chunks
of concrete thudding to the floor. A taste
of jet exhaust, slightly bitter albeit bright bouquet,
a white rainstorm in a tunnel, a vortex
of jet exhaust funneled into a plastic wineglass.
Can I dip a cracker into this?
Drink it from a slipper? Water my flowers
until their colors mutate to blood-reds
no Ralph Lauren nor architect has visualized?
The lining of paint can also eat my stomach.
The lining that girds my stomach cannot kill me,
can only make me stronger.
It drips down closet walls, gets into things,
seeps into carpet and drywall sturdy
as the baths of Caracalla, its basilicas
arching over bathers, generals and gigolos
whipping their backs in abandon with poplar switches
as the rain cracks an arch to tell them
nothing is so solid that it cannot bend
or break outright, yet hang together afterward.
Stick your tongue out for the sacrament.
It’s bitter, so mixed up you can’t tell
one source from another, but it’s earth and sky
so surely it should be innocent and common
as trees in the yard with songbirds in them,
snow flecked with bird-lime and nuclear fallout
iron-enriched once-coursing streams overstocked
with fish, the undulations of their fins entrapped
in this concrete roof alleged to be enforced
with tempered steel. You can depend on this
they claim, landlord and roofer extraordinaire.
How many inhabitants in this industrial corridor
owe their heads to him, their lack of hats,
their empty hat-racks, their indifference
toward weather-stations, umbrellas, carports?
Parasols remain in glassed-in exhibition cases.
What clouds? They ask, never having tasted
a roof seeping down closet walls into buckets.
Not inspiration, but perspiration,
a symphony or poem sweated from the pores
until the magnum opus pours from open orifices,
dripping cool impurities in blithe ignorance of the hours,
or cracks the surfaces to which we were accustomed.
We thought we’d lean against the same wall all our lives.
It was an idea they allowed to fall through the cracks,
which are tiny, then wide enough to let the old construction fall,
the safety and solidity it promised, a dwelling
with window that properly opened and closed, a view of heights
to which the dwellers were immune. Now all floats in a vortex,
rubber toys and memoranda, urgent once but ignored mostly,
and how many family effects swirl inside the new holes in the earth:
they open and close, and no one really knows why. So when
the roofer comes to tell you nothing’s solid, perhaps he knows
from whence he comes, from floods alone. Which hole
in the sky will open? Can we forecast our fall?
comes in concrete chunks and pyrites.
with an aftertaste of bonding adhesive.
The bitterness assures the palate of its strength..
It comes in colors, feldspar, cherry, citronella.
But it’s also brown as rust, the water in a well
whose surface only you can see. Its murkiness
belies medicinal properties. The nausea
is a purgation, even as it shreds your guts
into metal coils a machine ejects
to bind, or blow apart, or to communicate.
Tear stains and fallout filtered through concrete,
years of weather, their turbulence apparent
in tiny steel-backed mirrors embedded in the chunks
of concrete thudding to the floor. A taste
of jet exhaust, slightly bitter albeit bright bouquet,
a white rainstorm in a tunnel, a vortex
of jet exhaust funneled into a plastic wineglass.
Can I dip a cracker into this?
Drink it from a slipper? Water my flowers
until their colors mutate to blood-reds
no Ralph Lauren nor architect has visualized?
The lining of paint can also eat my stomach.
The lining that girds my stomach cannot kill me,
can only make me stronger.
It drips down closet walls, gets into things,
seeps into carpet and drywall sturdy
as the baths of Caracalla, its basilicas
arching over bathers, generals and gigolos
whipping their backs in abandon with poplar switches
as the rain cracks an arch to tell them
nothing is so solid that it cannot bend
or break outright, yet hang together afterward.
Stick your tongue out for the sacrament.
It’s bitter, so mixed up you can’t tell
one source from another, but it’s earth and sky
so surely it should be innocent and common
as trees in the yard with songbirds in them,
snow flecked with bird-lime and nuclear fallout
iron-enriched once-coursing streams overstocked
with fish, the undulations of their fins entrapped
in this concrete roof alleged to be enforced
with tempered steel. You can depend on this
they claim, landlord and roofer extraordinaire.
How many inhabitants in this industrial corridor
owe their heads to him, their lack of hats,
their empty hat-racks, their indifference
toward weather-stations, umbrellas, carports?
Parasols remain in glassed-in exhibition cases.
What clouds? They ask, never having tasted
a roof seeping down closet walls into buckets.
Not inspiration, but perspiration,
a symphony or poem sweated from the pores
until the magnum opus pours from open orifices,
dripping cool impurities in blithe ignorance of the hours,
or cracks the surfaces to which we were accustomed.
We thought we’d lean against the same wall all our lives.
It was an idea they allowed to fall through the cracks,
which are tiny, then wide enough to let the old construction fall,
the safety and solidity it promised, a dwelling
with window that properly opened and closed, a view of heights
to which the dwellers were immune. Now all floats in a vortex,
rubber toys and memoranda, urgent once but ignored mostly,
and how many family effects swirl inside the new holes in the earth:
they open and close, and no one really knows why. So when
the roofer comes to tell you nothing’s solid, perhaps he knows
from whence he comes, from floods alone. Which hole
in the sky will open? Can we forecast our fall?
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
July-August 08
July 13, 2008
Dome
Isn’t there a conflict between the floor or foundation of a house
and the surface of the earth upon which the house rests?
Doesn’t that surface approach the middle of the floor
since the earth’s surface is circular (discounting irregularities
of topography, such as those of mountains, floodplains, or deserts).
But the dome, made of tiny isosoles triangles, danced upon the earth
it mocked, a little planet skirting the big one, all the while it leaked,
all the while the voices of its inhabitants echoed, beamed back to them
with a clarity that was too truthful to the listener, who would have had
nothing else to listen to except the drip-drop of rain leaking into the
dome because a panel, a thin piece of plastic that could be molded
into any shape in nature, was cracked or leaking. Pray that the frame
of this Mundane Shell doesn’t break as its owner hangs from it
with guy-wires, caulking the leaky triangle with a compound of silicon
or gutta percha, or some such substance, for window frames.
8/3/08
What will the weather do? The rhythms of the seasons. Thunderstorms nocturnal, wind in the trees, deer crossing, crickets singing, birds chirping, flies buzzing, dogs barking, dogs replying to other dogs with more barking, the rare passing of a vehicle, a call and response and counterpoint between the birds, and then between the birds and the crickets or the frogs in the pond, or between the birds and the beeps of the idle fire alarm low on battery power. Seek not to perceive the world through musical terms.
Looking at her, pert and buxom and compact and coy, you could see how he attracted her: he was lanky, naïve, expert in mechanical things. He could fix her car to begin with. So he complemented her—naïve and practical hands-on knowledge of machines suited keenly observant ambition coupled with an appetite from luxury, for cars and houses in vogue.
The density of vegetation in the valley a river makes before it has been dammed—a floor of ferns, a cloud of spores among the vines that crawl the sides of dead trees, seasonal wildflowers on the roadside, grass blades, reeds, cat-tails, hollyhock bushes, the fattened leaves of white oaks and maples pulling the very branches that support them down with their dampness. The park ranger has an easy job—he mows the path to the bird feeder, he feeds the birds.
8/9/08
Age should make a place for youth. I return to trudging through the city of Portland, as apartment complexes are raised along the arterial to the interstate, a maze of concrete thickening with time. I drove to the Oceanside to submerge myself in seawater for a few seconds before I drove back to the mountains. I bought a ticket for Richard Branson’s spacecraft soaring out of the atmosphere into the blackness of space for a few more seconds or enough time to photograph the space before the craft descends. The hell or heaven in a handful of seconds.
Wet and sticky hermaphroditic child, wiping the albumen on his belly to dry in webs. A layer of lithium molecules bonds above the treated surface, protecting the surface from abrasion. I lack depth although I ruminate, and the past for which I cannot exercise retribution angers me. I float or my memory does in slights to which I cannot respond. If anything, I lack enough surface to apprehend the absolute present, or live in the moment, or be the moment. Unexplained shifts in thought become new sentences the connections of which are even less likely to be made the more the future becomes the present. The metaphor of depth or profundity—depth implies scrutiny? Why can’t the shallow scrutinize? Sure they can scrutinize someone other than themselves. Could what we are accustomed to call shallow be a virtue, this word meaning an aptitude to be fruitful and to prosper, not so much admirable self-abnegating behavior void of an effect upon some part of the world? To the shallow the spoils, to the deep nothing or next to nothing, only reputation at best, if others even notice the virtue of the deep, who are too reflective to communicate either virtue or vice, who do not have the horse sense to advertise their virtue when it would benefit them most, who do not, in other words, bring it to the marketplace.
The auspices of the skies
Point to a dry and sunny day.
How could the forecasters
With all their indicators
Be so wrong?
All their instruments
To foretell so faulty?
Faulty all the indicators
Of weather.
They were not the word of God.
In the beginning was the word
And the word was God,
More Greek, more logos.
All began
In some ineffable place
Not with the organs
And fertilizers in the ground
Nor with lightning
And the initial violence that followed
When lightning hit the ground.
Later, the planners said:
What a mistake.
Dome
Isn’t there a conflict between the floor or foundation of a house
and the surface of the earth upon which the house rests?
Doesn’t that surface approach the middle of the floor
since the earth’s surface is circular (discounting irregularities
of topography, such as those of mountains, floodplains, or deserts).
But the dome, made of tiny isosoles triangles, danced upon the earth
it mocked, a little planet skirting the big one, all the while it leaked,
all the while the voices of its inhabitants echoed, beamed back to them
with a clarity that was too truthful to the listener, who would have had
nothing else to listen to except the drip-drop of rain leaking into the
dome because a panel, a thin piece of plastic that could be molded
into any shape in nature, was cracked or leaking. Pray that the frame
of this Mundane Shell doesn’t break as its owner hangs from it
with guy-wires, caulking the leaky triangle with a compound of silicon
or gutta percha, or some such substance, for window frames.
8/3/08
What will the weather do? The rhythms of the seasons. Thunderstorms nocturnal, wind in the trees, deer crossing, crickets singing, birds chirping, flies buzzing, dogs barking, dogs replying to other dogs with more barking, the rare passing of a vehicle, a call and response and counterpoint between the birds, and then between the birds and the crickets or the frogs in the pond, or between the birds and the beeps of the idle fire alarm low on battery power. Seek not to perceive the world through musical terms.
Looking at her, pert and buxom and compact and coy, you could see how he attracted her: he was lanky, naïve, expert in mechanical things. He could fix her car to begin with. So he complemented her—naïve and practical hands-on knowledge of machines suited keenly observant ambition coupled with an appetite from luxury, for cars and houses in vogue.
The density of vegetation in the valley a river makes before it has been dammed—a floor of ferns, a cloud of spores among the vines that crawl the sides of dead trees, seasonal wildflowers on the roadside, grass blades, reeds, cat-tails, hollyhock bushes, the fattened leaves of white oaks and maples pulling the very branches that support them down with their dampness. The park ranger has an easy job—he mows the path to the bird feeder, he feeds the birds.
8/9/08
Age should make a place for youth. I return to trudging through the city of Portland, as apartment complexes are raised along the arterial to the interstate, a maze of concrete thickening with time. I drove to the Oceanside to submerge myself in seawater for a few seconds before I drove back to the mountains. I bought a ticket for Richard Branson’s spacecraft soaring out of the atmosphere into the blackness of space for a few more seconds or enough time to photograph the space before the craft descends. The hell or heaven in a handful of seconds.
Wet and sticky hermaphroditic child, wiping the albumen on his belly to dry in webs. A layer of lithium molecules bonds above the treated surface, protecting the surface from abrasion. I lack depth although I ruminate, and the past for which I cannot exercise retribution angers me. I float or my memory does in slights to which I cannot respond. If anything, I lack enough surface to apprehend the absolute present, or live in the moment, or be the moment. Unexplained shifts in thought become new sentences the connections of which are even less likely to be made the more the future becomes the present. The metaphor of depth or profundity—depth implies scrutiny? Why can’t the shallow scrutinize? Sure they can scrutinize someone other than themselves. Could what we are accustomed to call shallow be a virtue, this word meaning an aptitude to be fruitful and to prosper, not so much admirable self-abnegating behavior void of an effect upon some part of the world? To the shallow the spoils, to the deep nothing or next to nothing, only reputation at best, if others even notice the virtue of the deep, who are too reflective to communicate either virtue or vice, who do not have the horse sense to advertise their virtue when it would benefit them most, who do not, in other words, bring it to the marketplace.
The auspices of the skies
Point to a dry and sunny day.
How could the forecasters
With all their indicators
Be so wrong?
All their instruments
To foretell so faulty?
Faulty all the indicators
Of weather.
They were not the word of God.
In the beginning was the word
And the word was God,
More Greek, more logos.
All began
In some ineffable place
Not with the organs
And fertilizers in the ground
Nor with lightning
And the initial violence that followed
When lightning hit the ground.
Later, the planners said:
What a mistake.
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