Out lazy indolent peasantry must awake by the lash!
A visit to the empty panopticon as devised by Jeremy Bentham will convince the guest of his method’s wisdom, the skylights in the domed roof blinding the guard box and stairwell with several shafts of sunlight, at nightfall the harvest moon descended. A flock of crows visit the powerlines. Irradiated melons growing as large as unlanced boils. So the poete maudit in his night-robes sung to the broken Doric columns and to the trees. When you grow up son, what would you like to be? How’s your report card? Which bacteria can consume both banana peels and coffee-grounds? In the dormitory courtyard he practiced the high-pitched peals meant to shatter glass as in those old Memorex commercials. And glasses of daguerreotypes and plate glass windows. But instead he sounded like a banshee and they wanted to lock him up. The very cover of the book announces an important cultural moment, an arrival. Significance before meaning. I am writing as if English were my second language—this was intended. In the cafeteria the jocks are still drinking two chocolate milks and double scoops of mashed potatoes. Another fight breaks out at Chuck E. Cheese. With the rain the summer vacation at the camp is ruined. A bundle of clothes in the dryer awaits my hand. She wrote entirely about the displaced people she had settled, mixing their dialog with bits from their own language. The skin of smoked trout as if flayed and peeled away.
Let’s face it. When you’re not opening old wounds, you’re opening a new can of worms. You’ll eat some worms since nobody likes you enough to visit you. Worms in compost work. They work through the various foods buried there. I lick the wounds I open clean.
Yesterday I ran part of Lake Morey. Summer camp was in session, and there were two camps. The tents were set up like barracks, their flaps open. One camp was for girls. Many bicyclists appeared, making me wish I’d brought my bike, although the sky had been overcast when I’d departed my house. At the end of my run, I picked a few ripe wild strawberries growing at the edge of the road, then walked upon a footpath that coiled into the woods, scattered with needles. A brook pooled before me. The fallen logs by the brook were matted with moss. The shade was thick, cooling the footpath. At some point, you could barely see the summer houses through the firs.
But before my run ended, a succession of exploding thuds sounded above me from a modernized log cabin on the hill, agitating the beagle led along by a short elfin woman whose face was strained as she upheld her arms almost as if in supplication, the leash in one hand, the tail of the beagle with its white tip waving wildly as the dog turned whichaway seeking the noise’s source—the explosions (M-80s) drowned the music in my ears, played to establish rhythm, boost the runner’s adrenaline level. The old woman’s eyes were turning wildly in her head as the beagle thrashed its tail as she wished aloud for an end to the noise, to the thudding explosions, the percussion shaking the air. When the V-2 dropped, the children died from the evacuation of air from their lungs: the blast was noiseless. The beagle, a pointer, moved in circles, searching for the source of noise, the tips of its white tail swinging. In thunder dogs do not know where to turn. The old woman shook her arms in the air.
The tiny succulents on the rock have bright yellow flowers. Beneath them stands a dwarf arbor vitae purchased on sale at Shaw’s. I filled the bird feeder to the top—that’s why I’m hearing so much bird song—or was there just a squabble? I’m waiting for the time when I can pluck the fruit from the vine without worrying where the rest comes from.
The worm in the compost forms a thread of air behind him. Thus all signs of his work collapse and leave no trace.
Moving in circles, the beagle’s tail wildly flailed as it searched for the source of those booms from the M-80s launched by the household up hill, a modern log cabin atop a lawn made by driving trees and boulders back, made from what must be a thousand trips to Home Depot. A faint memory of the sacrifices of pagan antiquity in the barbeque, lighter fluid and charred meat, fat off the bone sizzling among the embers. The smoke from the barbeques rises to the gods, Mars savoring the smell the most, appreciates the offerings. Would not the crash of a passenger jet smell like that, the fuel tanks torched, the victims twisted and fallen? His nostrils flared wide, Mars appreciates the comparison, not thinking it hyperbolic in the slightest. Offerings of modern life far exceed in number and scale those paltry offerings of the bronze age. Hats off to Vulcan the ironsmith, deft facilitator! Metallurgical advances intensify the event.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
March 26 2011
An elegant algorithm should unfold like an origami plant in the halls of the crisis, a delicate web membrane whose veins you can see. A delicate artifact whose purpose no longer appears above the earth in the enlightened present. Pack in those vowels, those gluten-rich modifiers.
At the camp, I changed my regimen instantly. You could be fast, but that wouldn’t pay. Mammals are not sui generis communal when in families. Had the reptiles advanced instead, imagine the coldness of their reflections, upon their sons and daughters, upon their siblings. Imagine the beetling of their brow in the deep thought required to ice their competitors, the mammals. No Harvard behaviorist highbrow could compare to them in the purely cold courage of their arguments and calculations—sink or swim.
Calculi were small stones, also beads of the abacus. How could they calculate without Arabic numerals? I was driving over the bridge to White River as I thought of this. The sign said SPEED LIMIT 55. We drivers ignored the sign.
In the cleanest most immaculate houses, worthy of the photographic features in Home and Gardens, there is an unlit corner relegated to chaos and abandonment—loose brick, empty paint cans viscera of water-hose and wire. It’s a room full of matter out of place, unlocked only when the residents know that guests would never venture near it, never cross it. But when the house expands, a neighbor’s land bought, the room’s cleaned up, remodeled, and another corner takes its place, but already a dumpster is moored nearby to accept its junk, its records, and its embarrassments. What local weekly, what student newspaper doesn’t print a verse or two about the reliquaries of attics, about faded photograph albums, grandmother’s old photographs, about the continuity of the past from which we were unduly severed? There’s some sincerity to these expressions. But that is not the true subject here, those albums are a digression. Does the visible neglect of these corners come from negligence and exhaustion or from willful forgetfulness? Or is the photogenic order of the household grounded in this disorder? Without it, a quiet and staid inertia, the household a mausoleum, indifferent to fashion.
Surely the last episode of the series must be about aquatic mammals, about the adaptation of mammals to water, whether porpoise, whale or manatee. Meerkats who mount the shoulder of a host, as if a tree from which to peer. Hit the supplicant with that birch switch, while the steam expands in the cabin. In Arkansas, truckers sleep inside their rigs, and the rugs in apartments double as prayer-mats. A fjord holds more than fish roe. Salmon-enriched rivers, the spawn of fingerlings, bifurcates the valleys.
Her mother suffers from allergies, as she does every Christmas. She has a mildly disapproving demeanor. Her taste in art is more advanced than that of her daughter. Her daughter takes no interest, for example, in David Hockney, whom her mother just loves. She loves the pastels, the pinks and aqua-blues, their serene and depopulated blankness. But that’s OK, because the daughter inherited the business, and works long hours managing it. They evaluate distressed property, which means when property goes down, they really make out like bandits, but when it goes up, they make out like bandits too. So they do well. I’m there for the ride. But there’s a daughter out in Los Angeles, and her eyes go strange. I’m no one for scenes.
The oldest daughter takes my mother aside in the kitchen one day, asking her whether she’d ever noticed my pupils dilating or contracting from the influence of drugs. She suspects her sister’s habit, but she doesn’t want to divulge as much.
And another thing: the mother drives her older daughter’s husband to drink or to illness every year.
“Should’ve salted over some money before you were out of work” said Pilgrim when driving Manuel home.
The phrase “to salt over” connotes little interest is earned in the savings, as if the money were being put in a change jar instead of a bank.
Of those untidy corners one always persists.
As if neglect were purposeful, to remind us of the huts in which we lived, or the river side settlements, the houses on stilts falling into floodwaters. Bring your incisors, the means by which to part the meat from the bone. Bring those fabulous triangular back teeth to excavate the marrow. It’s the dentist who excavates the tooth to fill, but where’s the plunger cusp? Loser, you ground the amalgam off. It’s you, said the dentist, who ruined my plunger cusp, the flying buttress I deployed in your mouth. You ground the amalgam into saliva, and I must slave again to put it back.
Thank God there are no spell checks on paper, no red and wavy lines beneath the malapropism or misspelling, no green wavy lines beneath the grammatical error, beneath the lack of agreement especially when the agreement has not been decided upon, the new sentence frankly unfinished. And to be frank is to be free to be incomplete. The condition of writing in the journal is a kind of freedom that is finally unsatisfactory when the faculties are not required to commit themselves to a final work. But laziness is a healthy suspension of the faculties, a necessary indirection. The sun falls outside, but how chilly it will be when I go into the work shed, try to unlock the bikes, untangle the water hoses. The shed needs new florescent lights.
The floor bows when I walk upon it. Nocturnal mice eat the bags of birdfeed or the grass seedling. The floor-boards of plywood are oily. In the recycling center free sand can be had for anyone who wants it to shovel onto their icy driveways. But spring is winning, the winter embodied in snow banks is retreating, but persists in the fields—its officers encourage fortitude against the enemy, saying “if we can only last through the summer our forces can prevail. October is a safe zone. With December’s reinforcements, we can accomplish the mission, return the world to ice. We’ve failed before, but we’ve only learned lessons that make us stronger. Don’t fail us now. Stifle the growth of the grass; Resist the blandishments of the sun to join the plants, the succulents that imprison you. No more water-fairy stories.
Stroke the back of the couch for the dust that entraps you. I’ll tackle and maybe unpack Marvell’s Horatian Ode on Cromwell.
At the camp, I changed my regimen instantly. You could be fast, but that wouldn’t pay. Mammals are not sui generis communal when in families. Had the reptiles advanced instead, imagine the coldness of their reflections, upon their sons and daughters, upon their siblings. Imagine the beetling of their brow in the deep thought required to ice their competitors, the mammals. No Harvard behaviorist highbrow could compare to them in the purely cold courage of their arguments and calculations—sink or swim.
Calculi were small stones, also beads of the abacus. How could they calculate without Arabic numerals? I was driving over the bridge to White River as I thought of this. The sign said SPEED LIMIT 55. We drivers ignored the sign.
In the cleanest most immaculate houses, worthy of the photographic features in Home and Gardens, there is an unlit corner relegated to chaos and abandonment—loose brick, empty paint cans viscera of water-hose and wire. It’s a room full of matter out of place, unlocked only when the residents know that guests would never venture near it, never cross it. But when the house expands, a neighbor’s land bought, the room’s cleaned up, remodeled, and another corner takes its place, but already a dumpster is moored nearby to accept its junk, its records, and its embarrassments. What local weekly, what student newspaper doesn’t print a verse or two about the reliquaries of attics, about faded photograph albums, grandmother’s old photographs, about the continuity of the past from which we were unduly severed? There’s some sincerity to these expressions. But that is not the true subject here, those albums are a digression. Does the visible neglect of these corners come from negligence and exhaustion or from willful forgetfulness? Or is the photogenic order of the household grounded in this disorder? Without it, a quiet and staid inertia, the household a mausoleum, indifferent to fashion.
Surely the last episode of the series must be about aquatic mammals, about the adaptation of mammals to water, whether porpoise, whale or manatee. Meerkats who mount the shoulder of a host, as if a tree from which to peer. Hit the supplicant with that birch switch, while the steam expands in the cabin. In Arkansas, truckers sleep inside their rigs, and the rugs in apartments double as prayer-mats. A fjord holds more than fish roe. Salmon-enriched rivers, the spawn of fingerlings, bifurcates the valleys.
Her mother suffers from allergies, as she does every Christmas. She has a mildly disapproving demeanor. Her taste in art is more advanced than that of her daughter. Her daughter takes no interest, for example, in David Hockney, whom her mother just loves. She loves the pastels, the pinks and aqua-blues, their serene and depopulated blankness. But that’s OK, because the daughter inherited the business, and works long hours managing it. They evaluate distressed property, which means when property goes down, they really make out like bandits, but when it goes up, they make out like bandits too. So they do well. I’m there for the ride. But there’s a daughter out in Los Angeles, and her eyes go strange. I’m no one for scenes.
The oldest daughter takes my mother aside in the kitchen one day, asking her whether she’d ever noticed my pupils dilating or contracting from the influence of drugs. She suspects her sister’s habit, but she doesn’t want to divulge as much.
And another thing: the mother drives her older daughter’s husband to drink or to illness every year.
“Should’ve salted over some money before you were out of work” said Pilgrim when driving Manuel home.
The phrase “to salt over” connotes little interest is earned in the savings, as if the money were being put in a change jar instead of a bank.
Of those untidy corners one always persists.
As if neglect were purposeful, to remind us of the huts in which we lived, or the river side settlements, the houses on stilts falling into floodwaters. Bring your incisors, the means by which to part the meat from the bone. Bring those fabulous triangular back teeth to excavate the marrow. It’s the dentist who excavates the tooth to fill, but where’s the plunger cusp? Loser, you ground the amalgam off. It’s you, said the dentist, who ruined my plunger cusp, the flying buttress I deployed in your mouth. You ground the amalgam into saliva, and I must slave again to put it back.
Thank God there are no spell checks on paper, no red and wavy lines beneath the malapropism or misspelling, no green wavy lines beneath the grammatical error, beneath the lack of agreement especially when the agreement has not been decided upon, the new sentence frankly unfinished. And to be frank is to be free to be incomplete. The condition of writing in the journal is a kind of freedom that is finally unsatisfactory when the faculties are not required to commit themselves to a final work. But laziness is a healthy suspension of the faculties, a necessary indirection. The sun falls outside, but how chilly it will be when I go into the work shed, try to unlock the bikes, untangle the water hoses. The shed needs new florescent lights.
The floor bows when I walk upon it. Nocturnal mice eat the bags of birdfeed or the grass seedling. The floor-boards of plywood are oily. In the recycling center free sand can be had for anyone who wants it to shovel onto their icy driveways. But spring is winning, the winter embodied in snow banks is retreating, but persists in the fields—its officers encourage fortitude against the enemy, saying “if we can only last through the summer our forces can prevail. October is a safe zone. With December’s reinforcements, we can accomplish the mission, return the world to ice. We’ve failed before, but we’ve only learned lessons that make us stronger. Don’t fail us now. Stifle the growth of the grass; Resist the blandishments of the sun to join the plants, the succulents that imprison you. No more water-fairy stories.
Stroke the back of the couch for the dust that entraps you. I’ll tackle and maybe unpack Marvell’s Horatian Ode on Cromwell.
Monday, November 28, 2011
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.
_________________________________________________
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.
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.
_________________________________________________
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.
From April 18 2009
A bar torn down in the Bowery
Brick by brick, has been rebuilt in Las Vegas,
Each grafittied brick, each toilet stall exposed,
Bared to what it was, unbarred, doorless.
Tribute is paid to bands that once played there,
The members having overdosed or moved on.
Three times I’ve been down to the Bowery.
The first time, a handsome prostitute approached me.
Second time, a bum who mimicked Robin Leach,
His carnival barker’s East London accent
In Lives of the Rich and Famous: and the rich
And famous live on! And for a third time
I’d been to the bar cum clothing emporium
Where business until recently was booming,
And fourth around the corner I’d been in McSorley’s
Just long enough to notice the pressed tin roof
Of the fin de siècle, and in a former maritime chapel
Or meeting-hall south of the atomized bar,
Reconstructed brick by brick on the Nevada flats
Where’s they earlier rebuilt Berlin worker housing
Down to each clapboard, each die-pressed curtain,
Importing each timber piece from Siberia
To hose the whole thing down and burn it
To approximate the feuersturm to come
But I have more than just a picture postcard
Of encounters that if not entirely satisfactory
Were at the very least inconclusive.
First, I didn’t buy the velvet-voiced hooker’s services
Who would’ve done better mid-town as a receptionist.
I didn’t praise the mimicry of the vagrant
Who could’ve passed as an East Londoner,
A Dickensian voice sparkling with chapel-bells
As it narrated through the mahogany cabins
Of the yachts of the stars reclined in lounges,
Stars who watched their money grow on trees
Before their final bypass or trip to the cancer ward
As deeply brown meanwhile as Palmyrian figs.
The bar is gone but the toilet reconstructed to the letter.
I can Google the corner from McSorley’s to CBGB
And navigate through the doors of the maritime hall
But every face in daylight has been smudged.
Who’s there now? No one I can get close to.
Brick by brick, has been rebuilt in Las Vegas,
Each grafittied brick, each toilet stall exposed,
Bared to what it was, unbarred, doorless.
Tribute is paid to bands that once played there,
The members having overdosed or moved on.
Three times I’ve been down to the Bowery.
The first time, a handsome prostitute approached me.
Second time, a bum who mimicked Robin Leach,
His carnival barker’s East London accent
In Lives of the Rich and Famous: and the rich
And famous live on! And for a third time
I’d been to the bar cum clothing emporium
Where business until recently was booming,
And fourth around the corner I’d been in McSorley’s
Just long enough to notice the pressed tin roof
Of the fin de siècle, and in a former maritime chapel
Or meeting-hall south of the atomized bar,
Reconstructed brick by brick on the Nevada flats
Where’s they earlier rebuilt Berlin worker housing
Down to each clapboard, each die-pressed curtain,
Importing each timber piece from Siberia
To hose the whole thing down and burn it
To approximate the feuersturm to come
But I have more than just a picture postcard
Of encounters that if not entirely satisfactory
Were at the very least inconclusive.
First, I didn’t buy the velvet-voiced hooker’s services
Who would’ve done better mid-town as a receptionist.
I didn’t praise the mimicry of the vagrant
Who could’ve passed as an East Londoner,
A Dickensian voice sparkling with chapel-bells
As it narrated through the mahogany cabins
Of the yachts of the stars reclined in lounges,
Stars who watched their money grow on trees
Before their final bypass or trip to the cancer ward
As deeply brown meanwhile as Palmyrian figs.
The bar is gone but the toilet reconstructed to the letter.
I can Google the corner from McSorley’s to CBGB
And navigate through the doors of the maritime hall
But every face in daylight has been smudged.
Who’s there now? No one I can get close to.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
From Sept 20 2008
A journal entry compact as some Joseph Cornell box, each one with a lot of unorganized clutter inside it—stuffed birds, ping-pong balls, clocks and feather-dusters. The tail feathers of a golden pheasant. I missed the Tunbridge World’s Fair. Sickness befelled me. I would have gone on Sunday; perhaps the expulsion of drunks and girly shows has only done it good. As to philosophical meditation, nothing pricks me to a higher exponential level: I remain concretely minded. Of this week, what observation did I have? In this apartments, I have at least one den or inner sanctum without windows in which I can withdraw without awareness of what’s outside, whether the wind in the trees or the traffic out the window, whether of cars, pedestrians, or bicyclists. This inner sanctum can be made completely dark, without a crack of light, only the blinking LEDs of the computer like beacons into space, so that the inner space of this den or chamber mimics the vacuity surrounding the earth, vacuity through which the planets hurl without creating a wind so rapid it not only whips the leaves off the trees, but the trees from their roots, and the roofs from the houses with their inner sanctums like this one, until there’s no mediation, no protective barriers between the self and the heimarmoine (harmony)that created it in the first place, no barrier between the prime mover or law of motion and the eye that can perceive it. An inner sanctum that incubates conceits both insupportable and serving as fictions necessary for sustaining life outside, just as saline deprivation tanks nurse the patient to an inner strength. The blinking comes from the pulse of veins in the temple, the headache that seems to occur in the brain produced by the tightening of muscles around the scalp on both sides until the pain feels as if it came from the center of the brain, as if the pain were a holographic projection, not emanating from the place where it is felt. What blinks inside the sanctum comes from outside, the sign of an immaterial magnetic connection: Dr. Mesmer thought his magnetic bed encouraged physical alignments leading to better conjugal relations, that the alignment of the nervous and circulatory systems resulted in the alignment of the spirit.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
From 3/6/11
Container cargo paused on the B&M rail tracks, broadcasting the odor of decayed fish before it shipped to the feed processing plants. Often, even in mid-summer, the cars would stop for hours, sending the odor through every city street. The promenades were the only neighborhoods excepted, the elderly and the already mortally ill wheeled along the sidewalks on the western promenade by the hospital, within sight of the nuanced pallor of the White Mountains as they towered very faintly over tenements and motels. From this vantage, you could see a gloom lift from the airport landing-strip, or a passenger jet rise or land with a thunder you’d almost think could vibrate the roots of the oaks or the granite foundations of the mansions built to overlook the west and the setting sun.
The more intensely you appreciate the cold and precise starlight of winter, the crueler your attitudes towards your fellow men, towards their infirmity and their imperfections. Their lack of aspirations lies at your feet. And the social and political spheres become smaller, more distant globes in the entire cosmogony your unfailing attention dwells upon, heedless of the excessive kinks and pockmarks of the surfaces, the devil being in the details that seem to obstruct the sublime, which is all coldness and symmetry as you gaze at them in a field. And as you drop your eyes to the field, the galactic sprays of wildflowers appear to repeat the constellations—until you step on a bedewed pad of cow-flop, a smell you can barely scrape from your shoes when you enter the safety of your clean and square house.
Because I dressed in rags, no female would regard me. I habitually disrespected the elderly, fretting every time I was in a grocery line when one of them was before me, counting change so carefully from her purse as I rolled my eyes. Whenever in offices, I moved to make way for others only begrudglingly, making it appear as if I were going out of my way for them, when in fact doing so would only be common courtesy. I chainsmoked without regard to those around me, in theaters, buses, and bars.
The more intensely you appreciate the cold and precise starlight of winter, the crueler your attitudes towards your fellow men, towards their infirmity and their imperfections. Their lack of aspirations lies at your feet. And the social and political spheres become smaller, more distant globes in the entire cosmogony your unfailing attention dwells upon, heedless of the excessive kinks and pockmarks of the surfaces, the devil being in the details that seem to obstruct the sublime, which is all coldness and symmetry as you gaze at them in a field. And as you drop your eyes to the field, the galactic sprays of wildflowers appear to repeat the constellations—until you step on a bedewed pad of cow-flop, a smell you can barely scrape from your shoes when you enter the safety of your clean and square house.
Because I dressed in rags, no female would regard me. I habitually disrespected the elderly, fretting every time I was in a grocery line when one of them was before me, counting change so carefully from her purse as I rolled my eyes. Whenever in offices, I moved to make way for others only begrudglingly, making it appear as if I were going out of my way for them, when in fact doing so would only be common courtesy. I chainsmoked without regard to those around me, in theaters, buses, and bars.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
From Sept. 18 2010
The white clover on the lawn is always sweet, there’s a field of it I can approach from the brush and weed-filled hillside in which I can also hide whenever necessary.
And there’s a garden bed to which I might burrow at the end of that driveway, but I would have to fight through too many stones and chew through a layer of plastic and mulch before I’d arrive at the entangled roots of the spiny cucumbers, the lank green beans, and the prize of all, the lettuce-leaves, a pale green of the grape but with frilled edges when stunted as these are.
But the garden bed is in the middle of the yard of this detestable biped intruder, a damnable species of which we, the woodchuck folk, have no use, our numbers indifferently pruned by their various devices, their poisons, their steel traps, and their projectiles, whether bullets or arrows. They sick their wolves on our brethren, those compradors of the mammalian kingdom in cahoots with the bipeds, choosing provender and luxury over hardscrabble deprivation and liberty.
Still, to be fed those bales of lettuce in one of their cages is a temptation, the easy life of comestibles over the hard life of scavenging and burrowing, lacking the agility of our cousins the squirrels, or the mobility and power of our other cousins the beavers, those natural builders and occasional nemeses.
I live to see the day when we can usurp the biped’s place on earth, turn his cities into meadows, into nothing but miles of lettuce and clover, our descendants gigantic, reaching the tops of the apple-trees, eating the tenderest leaves in the tree-tops until they become colossi, our descendants nestled warmly in the burrows of their mothers.
The homeowner spots me, and yells indistinguishable sounds. In this grinding routine, I run into the brush, leaving the ripened white clover to be mowed by this most unsympathetic and inarticulate creature. Who can make out what he mouths, all bipeds deprived of the universal language of the beasts?
Blessed by youth and agility, I dodge the stones the biped throws. I do not envy my older heavier brethren, who would struggle, waddle back to the woods or their burrow. They perish from laziness or self-satisfaction, gassed or smoked from their holes. Of them, I am oddly unsympathetic. You’d think it would be otherwise, that of my elders I’d be more caring.
####
The clouds return after a spell of sunshine, the breeze shifts, passing through my window until the air cools. The noise of the refrigerator recalls the buzz of cicadas unhatched in heat-waves. When the buzzing ceases I am returned to fall. And then the sun returns.
And there’s a garden bed to which I might burrow at the end of that driveway, but I would have to fight through too many stones and chew through a layer of plastic and mulch before I’d arrive at the entangled roots of the spiny cucumbers, the lank green beans, and the prize of all, the lettuce-leaves, a pale green of the grape but with frilled edges when stunted as these are.
But the garden bed is in the middle of the yard of this detestable biped intruder, a damnable species of which we, the woodchuck folk, have no use, our numbers indifferently pruned by their various devices, their poisons, their steel traps, and their projectiles, whether bullets or arrows. They sick their wolves on our brethren, those compradors of the mammalian kingdom in cahoots with the bipeds, choosing provender and luxury over hardscrabble deprivation and liberty.
Still, to be fed those bales of lettuce in one of their cages is a temptation, the easy life of comestibles over the hard life of scavenging and burrowing, lacking the agility of our cousins the squirrels, or the mobility and power of our other cousins the beavers, those natural builders and occasional nemeses.
I live to see the day when we can usurp the biped’s place on earth, turn his cities into meadows, into nothing but miles of lettuce and clover, our descendants gigantic, reaching the tops of the apple-trees, eating the tenderest leaves in the tree-tops until they become colossi, our descendants nestled warmly in the burrows of their mothers.
The homeowner spots me, and yells indistinguishable sounds. In this grinding routine, I run into the brush, leaving the ripened white clover to be mowed by this most unsympathetic and inarticulate creature. Who can make out what he mouths, all bipeds deprived of the universal language of the beasts?
Blessed by youth and agility, I dodge the stones the biped throws. I do not envy my older heavier brethren, who would struggle, waddle back to the woods or their burrow. They perish from laziness or self-satisfaction, gassed or smoked from their holes. Of them, I am oddly unsympathetic. You’d think it would be otherwise, that of my elders I’d be more caring.
####
The clouds return after a spell of sunshine, the breeze shifts, passing through my window until the air cools. The noise of the refrigerator recalls the buzz of cicadas unhatched in heat-waves. When the buzzing ceases I am returned to fall. And then the sun returns.
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