This is the beginning of a 240 page novel. Fishing. Yeah, that's what the world wants. Later, sex and debauchery though. OH! I've got a fine agent and all things in good time. The book isn't finished, but it is wholly drafted. The first draft dates back to 1998, the latest to July of this year. Here is how it begins:

Sand was stuck all over my legs. I was hugging a piling, wrapping my shadow around it, trying to one-hand a spinner to a school of smallmouth bass I could see shifting in the heavy current of green water that was plowing its way between the stone walls of the channel. Lake Michigan was pushing back, waves crashing over the outgoing streams of current, beads of water sliding over the surface of the lake like mercury suddenly released across a floor. I took pressure off the bail and flicked a Rooster Tail in front of the fish, then let out line. I could see Bolton on the other side of the channel, his hair leaping in the offshore breeze. When he saw me looking at him he waved so I gave him the finger. I felt the smallest cold tug, but missed. Most mornings on the beach here are still, cool, and inundated with biting flies. But this morning felt shot right out of a cannon, soot-covered. Hot air blasted around the edges of everything. I could smell burned sand. I flicked the spinner back into the channel. Above and behind me the dunes stretched a quarter mile or more, huge, heartless bulkheads of sand covered with beach grass and sumac. My legs stung a little now because I’d cut them walking through to the beach in cut-offs on some sort of saw-toothed sedge that had recently begun sprouting up everywhere in the local dunes. I’d never seen the stuff in Saugatuck or up in Ludington, but it was taking over here, all the way back to Lake Harbor Road in some places. Its fronds were substantial—thick, like aloe—but when broken the fluid that ran out was thin and abrasive and smelled like rotten eggs.

I was frustrated by the wind. When I looked over at Bolton again he was holding a bass easily over a foot long, but I hadn’t heard the fish thrashing. I could feel the Rooster Tail down in the water bumping into bass who wouldn’t take it. I switched hands and lifted the lure so it ran near the surface, catching more light. I reeled in—cast out. Reeled in—cast out. After about an hour I set the hook in what turned out to be a twenty-two inch smallmouth bass, the largest I’d seen in some time. The suddenly heavy lure moved in a wide, stiff arc toward the center of the flow, out toward the middle of the channel where the sand banks drop into an unfathomable hole. My line twanged through its eyes. I was kneeling on top of a huge flat pad of broken rock the size of someone’s patio, my fishing rod bent toward the fish. When going deep had no effect she tried to walk away, tail-slashing in the direction of the channel wall. She slammed into stone.
In ten minutes I had her gasping on shore, her red, unblinking eyes half covered with sand. She flared her gills and moved her mouth like she was trying to swallow sight back into her eyes. When I picked her up her head filled my hand. She wagged her entire body. I had trouble grasping the shank of the lure. It was deeply embedded. I let go, just looked at the fish. I could hear the screams of the gulls, could feel the wobbly ball of them dissecting over and over again the air just above my head. When I stood up I took a deep breath and found I could manage to work the hooks free of the fish’s mouth with little trouble. I fumbled the wadded up stringer out of my back pocket and tied the bass to a piling.

That's right, 240 pages of that.

Ashbery Erasure (with arrangement)


Erotic Double


He says he doesn't feel well
Here in the shade, one kind of old feeling.

The wordplay gets very intense,
Feelings to things.

Another go round?

Rescue me before the night does.

Barge made of ice, fissures of starlight
Keep us awake, dreams
As they happen.

I can hide it. I choose to.
You. You are a very pleasant person.

The Carolina Wrens are about.
Sometimes they hang around all
year, mixed in with the house wrens.
Other times they appear
on migration, bouncing from limb
to limb, tweeting brightly like
shining bullets of noise made
out of hard candy. In the spring
they claim your land, whether you
rent it or own it, they don't
really give a shit. They fly to
a branch a few feet from your
face and chirp loudly, then let go
with a kind of aural equivalent
of small clouds, lightning-
filled rafts of mist stuffed with briars
breaking and dripping and freezing . . .
When they complain at you a breeze
poofs up your hair. Then they might
fly over to an image of themselves
reflected in a nice big window and
start screaming at that. The wren
I saw yesterday glowed in the dark,
lustrously sienna, and sparked
the dripping leaves with shards
of sound I can only call a protest
against the epistemological in favor
of the ontological. There wasn't
a living thing anywhere else in sight
so naturally I'm certain it was
speaking to me, that in fact it had been
waiting all day for me to return
home from a day of telling people
they would soon be creating poems.
It leapt from fence to branch,
flew down to the ground
where it picked up a leaf
and attempted to throw it violently
sideways, and kept repeating
this action. For a minute I thought
maybe the bird was trying to lead me
to the soul of my recently departed cat,
Reesie, never mind that the most
common killer of the songbird
these days, outside of automobiles,
is the common house cat. But that
wasn't it. We're talking about a wren,
a bird that weighs less than a ping pong
ball, but believes it's something
akin to bigfoot. Here the fuck I am, it sits
screaming, be sure to
make a note of it! And then
just as suddenly it's gone, babbling
or chirping loudly in someone
else's quadrant, probably. Or, maybe,
it goes somewhere else entirely,
somewhere I couldn't possibly
understand. Maybe it becomes
the essence of its own heartbeat,
which must beat awfully fast,
but light as a blade of grass shifting
in dusk's dying breeze . . .
I can't find the wren this afternoon,
the sun beginning to shine now
through the clouds, but it will come back.
I collected the leaf it was so intent upon
whirling about, a simple page from
a sumac, a three inch slip of green. I'll just
hold onto it for a while and see what
happens. In the meantime, back to prepping
for class tomorrow.

(another ashbery erasure)

A SEDENTARY EXISTENCE


Sometimes the truth-that thing

What could it have been
To be more or less

like writing a book disgusting.

Because we can do it. There's a freshness
to the air.

To be more or less unravelling
kindness
the look, the ticket. It is the expression

you know we keep an eye on

today. a speeding ship

My cat, Reesie, was euthanised today after she

became seriously ill due to hepatic lipidosis. She

liked to sit on my stretched-out knees

and put her paws on my shins. She would taunt

me with meows and I would chase her and when

I found her she would be on her side

in her "come-hither" position, like a little French whore. Her absence

shouts out of corners. She liked to lick my eyebrows. She was a little

chubby, but looked a lot like an owl. I am going to miss her very very

much. She liked to wait for the milk leftover after I ate my cereal . . .

Pleasure


I've been thinking about language, that is to say
meaning and sound, and how in the best poems the
latter blends in with, or even overpowers,
the former, and we feel something emotional--we
are moved--even though a logical investigation
of the words--semiotically, for instance--forces
us to consider why that might be rather than just
letting it be. Big fucking deal, my little musings.

What I really want to understand is why logic is
always used to question the authenticity of pleasure.

But then I ran into this quote in Annie Dillard's
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and it just made me laugh:
"There is a certain age at which a child looks at
you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased
speech in all the true inflections of spoken English,
but with not one recognizable syllable."

SPIDER FLOATING ON WOODS LAKE

(The Unknown's truer than the known)
A. R. Ammons


Hull throbs
fiberglass rubbing slowly some sunk musk
oxen's hump--;

diurnal moon full-faced
and pale:
the blackbirds illuminate
fifty trajectories

with the afterburn
of their immediate passing
as the moon

leaves in its wake
a dark hole
large as a quarter:
only the plumb line of this glowing anchor

falling is absent,
dropping out of the sky,
sinking through watery weeds,

a tether
to what's beautiful because unknowable . . .
Meteorite, boat,
burnt coffin suspended in water,

miniscule speck
of bright red blood. Eighth leg
like an axis the spider

floats around
with its seven companion dimples,
dark fur on top,
white as the drifting moon underneath.

(first published in POOL)

Poetry Publishers, Contests, etc.


I sent a book manuscript, called The Coldest Winter
On Earth, out to six presses in June, haven't heard
anything. That's fine. What's not is that I can't
seem to find a good list of presses with links online.
I used to use the one at Zoo Press. Neil even
had it all separated into Fall and Spring deadlines.
If anyone knows of a good list with links online
can you share? It's almost September first, the reading
season (right in time for the semester to start).

Making a List and Changing It Twice, Three Times, etc.


In regards to my list below, I'd, if asked
today, have a totally different take. Book
that changed my life: Maldoror, by Lautreamont.

(Tomorrow, I have a feeling, I'd say
Wordsworth's Prelude)

(Next week Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?)

Book that made me laugh: Shakespeare's Dog, by
Leon Rooke. Sam the Cat by Matt Klam.

The Book you have read more than once question is bizarre.

Truth of the matter, for sheer pleasure,
I've actually read Frederick Seidel's
THESE DAYS over a hundred times . . . I think. And I mean
cover to cover.

I haven't kept track. But many many many times.

But poetry--poetry is written to be read over and
over again. It's true I read Stevens semi-frequently
and that, other than for reference, I don't ever
pick up Yeats. No thanks.

But at any given time I have a stack
of poetry books at my bedside for re-reading.

They're like albums for cripe's sake (don't correct
me--I said albums and I want it to stay like that.
A CD is where you put retirement money or some
such thing).

I just got done revisiting Charles Wright (his three
trilogies)as well as the entire Roxy Music oeuvre.

What next? Jack Gilbert and Ultravox? Brigit Peegen Kelly
and Sublime? Graham Foust and the strange late albums
by the Kinks?

Anyway, I read A River Runs Through it a shitload of
times (back before it was cheapened by that crappy movie--
I knew right then Brad Pitt was going to be a problem
along with Tom Cruise, and now here we are, stuck
with them both) because I once made freshman comp students
read it and write a paper on it. There was a time
when that book seemed like a deliciously beautiful
secret, like Coors east of the Mississippi back in the 1970s . . .

And so let's see what else?

Oh! And how long would I be marooned on that Desert Island?

Maybe I'd just want to bring The Battlefield Where the Moon
Says I Love You.

The more I think about it I'd probably really
want a field guide. Somebody on some blog
said they'd want a pad of paper and pencils.
But I'd burn some wood and draw with the charred
sticks on the giant boulder I'd surely have
next to my single palm tree.

And what about Elizabeth Bishop's slim collected works
(not counting the recent publication of her hidden drafts
of poems--I'm sure Miss Bishop is screaming in her grave)?

Maybe I should be out fishing more
instead of reading all these books.

I need to go stack some bricks (stolen from that
same rich guy's fence down the street) for the kiln
I am building for the baking of bread
in my gristmill. Then: football at a friend's.
Dallas is playing the New Orleans Saints. Katrina
and endless blather about Terrell Owens.

If Terrell Owens ever writes a book about his life,
put that on my list of books I wish had not been written.

What about those Letters from a Nut books? Pretty friggin'
funny!! Thomas Pynchon perhaps? August Kleinzahler
revealing his sweeter side? I hope we never know.

Ashbery 4 (from "Mutt and Jeff")

Contemporary Blister



Actually the intent of
The polish remained,
A fragment of someone's snowball.

And you see, things work for me,
kind of. We get exported
and must scrabble around for a while
in some dusty square.

Wabash . . .

Still, the goldfish bowl remains
After all these years like an image
Reflected on water.

The mouse eyes me admiringly
From behind his chair; the one or two cats
Pass gravely under my leg from time to time.

My sudden fruiting into the war
Is like a dream now. The day

Bounced green off its boards.
There's nothing to return, really:

I saw my chance for a siesta and took it.

I was tagged by Suzanne, but I still don't know how
to make links to blogs when you just type a name. It's simple
I'm sure, but I try not to know what I don't have to.

Urgency may push me toward figuring it out and won't
the entire world be the better for that!

A book that changed my life would be most of the books
I've read, including really crappy ones. But for good
ones--Tropic of Capricorn?, Farmer (by Jim Harrison)?,
Browning (in high school)? The Great Gatsby? I have
to say, though, it was the one/two combination of
reading The Catcher in the Rye and then Nine Stories when I
was probably nineteen. I'm tempted to mention, from a little
later period, Frank Stella's Working Space. I could go on
with this. I could mention my favorite novel, for
instance, Panama, by Thomas McGuane . . .

I've read a bunch of books more than once, including
all the ones mentioned above. Jesus' Son possibly
the most times though . . . I rarely watch movies twice. I
have no dvd collection of movies. I mean zero. Interesting,
because I'm constantly re-reading books.
Oh, I've watched 400 Blows and Fargo many times but I don't own
either of them (or really wish to).

Book I'd want on a desert island would be the Bible, and if
possible copies of The Sound and the Fury and Blood Meridian to
accompany it.

A book that made me laugh: Edisto, by Padgett Powell.

A book that made me cry: The Morning of the Poem,
James Schuyler. I would say I got extremely "choked up."

A book I wish had been written: A second book of stories
by Breece Pancake. More books by Frank Stanford.

A book I wish had not been written? Who am I to judge?

The book(s) you are currently reading: Indecision, by
Ben Kunkel, Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, Gallatin
Canyon, by Thomas McGuane. The McGuane and Koch are best
so far.

Ashbery (erased, rearranged)

THE WHITE SHIRT


But if it wasn't for changes
where would we go? Just
having the illusion is enough.
But charge for it;
serve immediately.

Thing of the past,
you in your growing,
limits,
my working place.
The band is up.

The dry shore. A combustion engine
means it's not working.

Suddenly all is quiet again.
I want to talk about something.
Attention? It's not that easy.

Ashbery (Two)

Who Knows What It's Going to Be


Actually it was because you stopped
as though to embarrass the idea of stopping.

Light swelled, slivers, then listened.

Powdered suburban description
isn't precisely it. No briskness, cartoon
era of my early life.

What's printed on this thing?

Cars were discharging patrons
in front of theaters. It is no doubt
a slicker portrait
than you could have wished, yet all
the major aspects are present.

Bend down, waterfall
in the moss. It all came to life,

but quietly, there to transcibe it.

I post a photo
of one of my favorite
substances,
rainwater,
in one of my favorite
places, Marquette,
Michigan.
This to commemorate reading Marilynne
Robinson's Housekeeping, one of the most beautiful and haunting books I have ever read.

Because I have some kind of OCD that makes me want
to organize texts into assimilable shapes, because
what I think as it pours insanely out of my brain must
find its way into the world in such a way that it formally
distinguishes itself from its muttering siblings,
and because I want to embrace the work of any poet
entirely, I want to attempt to engage the work of
a poet such as Ashbery with a pair of scissors.
But what usually happens is, while reading the poems,
I bump around in my boat over the flow of his syntax
and joyfully arranged nonmeanings, and I want to somehow
take possession of the Ashbery oeuvre, or attach to it,
to live with the reality it dares to propose.
Perhaps rather than cutting small grinning skeletons
out of large rafts of words I should wallpaper
a room--or the front of a WalMart--with the collected poems.
Is there any other poet so fearless in the face of mortality?
His work is an ocean of suffocation. How to have the gonads
to leisurely paint THE WORLD without suffering a collapse
from the desire to capture all in the instant.
How many years of wading, on and off, and I find myself
back in that tropical blue water, frustrated, and
then enlightened. Take a look at the poem "Myrtle."
Oh the problem of A., the problem of A., and the beautiful
idea of my endless torment.

Ashbery One (Title: Tricycle)



About this unhappiness:
Run out and stay a minute,
Roll up in a blanket.

That's how they looked,
Tied to no actual drift.

Spoons were put up for sale.

We stood in our back alleys,
Chagrin brilliant on our faces.

I don't know. Why does one write?

I replied to your waking
And the affair of sleeping and waking began.

Look, a fish is coming to save us.

Maybe unimportance isn't such a bad thing after all.

I remember asking Mark Halliday, who was a teacher of mine
for a short period, what he thought of a poem I liked,
written by Lisa Lewis. He thought it was okay and then added
that she used "too many words," kind of like that dude in
Amadeus who kept insisting Mozart used "too many notes."
Obviously, you can't fail just because you use too many
words, but I get it, Mark, I knew what you meant right away,
and I was only a sort of poetry baby. But recently I have
been reading John Ashbery. And I really do think Ashbery
uses too many words. At least Lewis used whatever number of
words she believed would tell her story, she had a narrative
arc as an excuse. But Ashbery is way too fucking prolix,
and this pisses me off because I rather enjoy what he does
in small portions. James Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem
is one of the best things I have ever read, a long meandering
love letter to the self, a gift of remembrance. I break
down every time I read it, and the next day I'm into the Payne
Whitney poems. The long poem actually formalizes the short
lyrics. Schuyler the hedonist butts up against Schuyler
the dancer, light on his feet, even when he's writing
about being institutionalized. I LIKE Ashbery's ability
to write a kind of narrative sense into an otherwise meaningless
cacophany of words. But compared to Schuyler he is rather
heartless. And, frankly, predictable. So, okay, I took my
white out and painted over the extraneous lines. I'll give
you a few of my Ashbery "erasures" in the next few days.

As I was saying--now up here, rethought after posting
and deleting it below, because I was tired from flying during
a "NO SHAMPOO" terror alert, and I'd rather create anew
instead of edit--all these new poems I'm writing are
in syllabics. Hayden's Ferry Review took two and, in fact,
all of these poems have been taken somewhere, including the
ones that I, frankly, think kinda suck (Why did you send them
out then? you may ask; I don't know a poem sucks for, oh,
a couple of days, a week, occasionally not until it's
published in a book even. Besides, it helps my writing,
seeing my failures publicly displayed beside my successes.
Nothing gives you perspective like seeing a real bombastic
piece of shit show up in your mailbox next to a poem by
Seamus Heaney--who only occasionally writes bombastic shit).
But the poems really are bristling with enjambments--none of
those seamless poetry-as-conversation-despite-the-method
poems for me. And I realize some people count obsessively,
I've heard the stories, the inability to listen to Anderson
Cooper's CNN Variety Show blather without tapping away while
he makes himself look really special and important while still
seeming sincere, for instance. (What a needy person; pathetic.)
Anyway, Larry Levis, one of my favorite poets, wrote
in syllabics quite often, but I had to actually identify those
poems. I couldn't tell. Ron Rash does this too.
But I can only do such a thing--count syllables--if the
restriction is obviously part of the construction of the
poem. I quite enjoy the idea of, comparatively, turning all
"formal" suddenly, mostly so I can immediately go right back
to not counting again, causing many to wonder why the hell
would I do such a thing. But I say let voice do the work.
You might have to revise 100 times (as opposed to 10
for the syllabics poems) but when you get it perfectly right,
with no gimmicks, that's what makes the endorphins
really start flowing. For me anyway. But keep everyone unsteady,
a little off balance. Sure. When I included a single
sonnet in Abrupt Rural I felt like I was doing something
radical. Poetry and choices. It's a fucking blast.

Okay, so
sometimes a
bird is a bird is a
Catbird,
mewing in the
pines, especially
on a hot
day. I keep
consulting the
proper guides
and what I see
is similar to a
mocking-
bird. And yet,
when I came out of
my new gristmill
digs with laundry
to beat on a stone
I'd stolen from
some rich person's
stately
fence-pile, this thing
darted across the
landscape, chasing
a grasshopper with
its little flippers going round and round.

This is where I'm moving. In my old place the carpet was kind of yellow and I was always feeling cooped up. It was on the third floor, too, and if suddenly in the middle of the night I thought I NEED MILK, I had to trudge down all those stairs. Now I'll just stroll through one of my arched doorways. It's a gristmill, so I'll make my own bread and write about the miracle of my bread rising, kind of a Jack Gilbert thing. It's true it will rain and snow on me but I bought some plywood and am working on fixing up a little cubbyhole to stay warm in when I'm grading papers (I'll need some candles.) Adjacent my new home, in fact literally touching it, is a pond full of panfish and stunted bass. Again, the downside is they will taste a little muddy, but there is nothing, as I mentioned in previous posts, as transcendent as catching a fish. And as a bonus fish will serve as my immediate dinner. Stacks and stacks of tuperware tubs tilted on their sides will serve as my bookcase. I'm going to go inside right now and practice a little Yoga.

Oh Grosbeak, how come your sudden presence makes the top of my head fly off, like an ED poem? Granted, you are a cheery little dude,while ED was an intense little dudette. I saw one of these the other day out behind a restaurant called The Oaken Bucket, along the river. I hear them more than I see them since they like to hang out in the tree tops. My hair stood on end as pheucticus ludovicianus surveyed my club sandwich. The red patches on the breast are always wildly different. I tossed a bread crust at him but he took offense, as if I might be a member of Hezbollah, and flew away, leaving a trail in his wake, scribbles of blood falling through the hot, rising river air.

I caught two of these recently, chartering
a boat out of South Haven. This one has already been attacked by a taxidermist. I would have
liked to have shown a picture of one posing next to one of my books of poetry, to show scale. But oh well. The two I caught were 13 and 15 pounds, and afterwards my arms ached for three days. These fish are caught in deep water using downriggers, and the poles snap up when a fish nails them, and they seem to thrash in the pole holder. If the captain of your vessel is excitable, when this happens he may yell, "Fire in the hole!" which is what the guy on my charter yelled. I used to fish for salmon in the seventies, from a 16 foot Chris Craft, by myself. Usually I was the guy with tangled up lines cursing while his boat started spinning in tight, insane circles. I also once ran a Sunfish sailboat into a dock with my girlfriend along (I was like 16, give me a break!). I seem to remember blaming the dock. Anyway, I can think of little that thrills me more than catching salmon or steelhead or brown trout out of Lake Michigan. Playing tennis? Nope. Watching "Fargo" again? Naw. Seeing a gobbler turkey out near Spokane doing its mating display--so serious, like a magician suddenly flashing fanned decks of cards out and then pulling them back in to repeat the act again--for a single, bored-seeming hen? Pretty close, but no. I have to go salmon fishing again soon. Whenever I catch fish I dream earth is heaven, and for days afterwards all my health problems seem to disappear. (But then I begin thinking all the time again--about Authentic Beauty as compared to Kitsch, for instance--and all my "symptoms" return.)

PS--Somebody once wrote to me, after counting how many references to fish were included in my first two books. It was a complaint, as I recall. The number was great, although not as great as the number of times the word "dark" appears in James Wright's "The Branch Will Not Break." But now I'm not sure. I can't remember. Now I'm going to have to check, find the book which is in a box, packed, and get counting. I'm never going to complete my move across town!

The National Poetry Series is pleased to announce...

The Winners of the 2006 Open Competition:

Laynie Browne of Oakland, California, The Scented Fox
Chosen by Alice Notley, to be published by Wave Books

Noah Eli Gordon of Denver, Colorado, Novel Pictorial Noise
Chosen by John Ashbery, to be published by HarperCollins

Laurie Clements Lambeth of Houston, Texas, Veil and Burn
Chosen by Maxine Kumin, to be published by University of Illinois Press

Martha Ronk of Los Angeles, California, Vertigo
Chosen by C.D. Wright, to be published by Coffee House Press

William Stobb of La Crosse, Wisconsin, Nervous Systems
Chosen by August Kleinzahler, to be published by Penguin Books


Gordon is on a hell of a roll; he's got another book soon to be
released by New Issues. I'm glad Kleinzahler was a judge. I'll check
out the Stobb book for sure. I don't trust Maxine Kumin to pick
a book that will excite me. I just don't okay? So leave me alone.
I do enjoy it when somebody who has been around for a good while
wins, as does Martha Ronk here. I get a sense that this will be the
best set of books to come out of this competition in a while.

GUITAR LESSONS



Casual, and a book with a coffee
stain where the sea
stands far off, the corner of a painting

seen through a window at 6 a.m.
in coastal South Carolina. The butterflies and the cracking
in their wing joints if you wait too long

to set them, suffocation of powder, in white cotton.
Girls with their teeth set on edge.
Blood pressure even in nipples, especially

in nipples. Swallowtail goes next to the sphinx.
Light on the sidewalk, disturbed water, 3 a.m. now in Greenville.
Men with their guitars like a pyramid

of giving up. Let's have a party.
Six embossed invitations breathing in mailboxes
in the quiet country. The celery is cold, and crisp.

Here is what has found and enjoyed the seed at Oliver de la Paz's new feeders while he writes his daily poems. Steller's Jays. And they often do what this one is doing when one writes poems. They stare through the window at you, aghast.

Richard Hugo in Winter

(The following is from an e-mail from Walter Lab, painter and poet. I had been raving about the wilderness in Western Montana, the mountains, bears, eagles, nobody acting for a camera. I'd gone there after doing a reading at Eastern Washington University. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to go there to live unless I want to die very young. Anyway, he recounted this story about Hugo.)

I attended the University of Montana for 2 years and returned there to lecture after nearly 20 years. It sounds to me like you slipped into the western edge of Montana. Tenure at the University of Montana might be a form of disability.

But if I just stop for a second, I can recall the beauty you sing, I can relive my confusion about why longing and reluctance are attached, how the physical universe and my molecules are embraced.

You know Richard Hugo's work. He taught at U of M for a while, while I was a student there.

I was an ignoramus, an 18 year old skillful painter, oblivious to most of the world we live in. I had not yet developed real thinking or writing skills, just like my 5 year old, around a bunch of 10 year olds. But because I could paint I was able to hitch a ride with Hugo and some other writers into a snow storm, southwest toward California. This wasn't just any storm, it was the second biggest storm of the decade.

Despite my years I was probably the best driver in the group, but I was placed in the back and given the task of rolling joints from a half pound bag of barely radio active midwestern pot. We drove through the night. Can you roll a joint in the dark? I was relegated to crank out these tight smoke-able roll jobs, crafted with my fingers working inside a large ziplock baggy on my lap. Everyone took turns driving except me and Hugo. There was five of us. Finally in southern Idaho everyone was exhausted from struggling against the storm. Joint consumption had settled to about one per hour and somebody started to drift off at the wheel.

I used to remember all these peoples names, but now don't. The car was full of writers who I used to see in magazines and movies after that trip. A guy who had written an article for Playboy called Enis the Penis, about an Elvis the Pelvis styled singer engaging in genre perversion said, "Dick, get up here and drive". I remember we stopped in the middle of the snowy freeway. No one around, silent, unusual street lights in the wilderness. We were on a bridge, A very high bridge. I had to get out to let Hugo out so he could drive. It was silent. Wet snow was freezing. I looked over the rail down 200 feet and I ran. The 18 year old ran, like a puppy needing to move. I ran ahead of the car on the empty snow-covered and icy freeway. I motioned for them to follow.

Dick Hugo drove slowly behind me. I ran as fast as I could, slipped and fell and slid across the ice, jumped up and threw ice balls at the car. I charged the car and slipped, and as I slid toward the on coming car, Hugo braked and skidded toward me. My body sledded under the car and as we met I grasped the bumper riding it to a stop. I jumped up of course exhilarated, laughing.

They made me get in, and as Hugo accelerated to make up for lost time, across the 1/4 mile long bridge, he lost control. He started to fish tail left and over compensated, kept spinning right and began to turn, around and around. Everyone was quiet but I thought we should be screaming like we were on a roller coaster. It was snowing as we spun. Silently spun. We did 5 360's, moving closer and closer to the rail and the 200 foot drop.

I thought, Fuck me, I might die because of this guy. The Disneyland tea cup spin. I could be driving.

We came to a stop close to the guard rail. Everyone was quiet and Dick Hugo said, and I remember this very clearly, he said, "Bridges and cars were what we came to bomb nineteen years ago."

I got out of the car again and asked that they meet me at the end of the bridge.

Is it just me or do Rick Barot's posts (at Spiral Bound Notebook),
especially today's, feel like Robert Hass poems, bubbling over
with the names of friends and all things California?
There's even a little bit of that wistful nostalgic
thing, the way Hass can write about some place he
just vacationed and make it feel like it is being
perceived through the clarifying veil of a hundred years.
You can feel Rilke's pulse in all of it, but it's usually
competing in my mind with an image or two from the movie
The Big Chill. Barot mentions Hass and Schuyler, and he
reminds me of both these writers. I'm going to have to check
out Barot's book of poems (I've read a few in magazines).
And he talks about Diebenkorn. I've been writing poems based
on paintings--Twombley, Hodgkin, and Diebenkorn ("Ocean Park
No. 115"). I love his painting, Hopper with all the forced
surrealism and Rockwellian sentimentality pushed out of
the frame. Pure Fucking Light. Make you weep right into your
corn flakes.

ROOM DAMAGED BY WIND



It was the jealousy. Server-blades piled on Formica
near the microwave. They glittered like a Christmas tree,
electrical, mnemonic. She looked out the window as if
She were steeping tea. There's a shape inside a bike
Inside the time it takes to sleep badly, and I did
Because the mattress felt trapezoidal. The caller ID
Says Fort Collins. Don't answer it.
She waited until it stopped ringing and then answered it.
So I tackled her. We fell, she started shaking.
Silence ricocheted off the wainscoting. Outside,
A meteor storm commenced over Lake Superior
With a lapidary insolence. Monday droned like a flagging
Platoon stuck in the sand before autumn. "Dear God,
I'm alone," prayed one plastic soldier. "But what
Is your name?" I asked the space where her body had been.
Two bats flew squalling out of the heat
Where the trees dreamed screaming.

BODY, TOUCHING



Purblind, he dug a hole and filled it with lantern
light so he could see, if possible,

what was ringing on the far, lost rim of the world.
He'd never forget, not for years of trying, the dim

haze that settled in those fields--
inarticulate, heavy, but pierced by the pair of teals

he woke to mornings, that flute-note
and the banking. God's mind opened like a coat

wrapping around a woman. The love was splashed with dew.
The sun rose over the lake and the trees leaned over

her body, touching the water,
exploding with dopamine.

ALONG THE SENEY STRETCH



1.
A little rain puddles over a strip of fur
blackened by so many working mandibles, July's steaming, crude
acetylene heat.

By dusk pitifil islands of poplars dragged naked
by briars
tug their remaining leaves over secrets . . .

A Cooper's hawk bursts out of a copse as if glimpsing
the torn wings of a hatchling sister.

I wanted to remind you: the rain has a calming effect.
The deer and black flies stay down, smacked hard in the head.

Sometimes six new blood patterns reveal themselves already soaked
through the asphalt
during an evening it takes
to scribble a few explanatory notes, which are also pink-scrubbed,
stain over stain
foaming a mercurochrome sunset,

the beautiful flames of my former inimical self--

2.
Another automobile idles absurdly
upon the courtesy of the shoulder.
A camera opens and closes its guillotine eye.

The despotic moon flings bones in this swamp water whenever it wants to.

I'm busy moving from one place to another. The problem is,
and the creation of this blog is evidence, I have not been
busy moving. I've been writing a new story, reading, and
wandering around Potato Creek State park trying to hone
my skills in tree identification (I'm beginning to recognize
various maples based on the shapes of their crowns from a
distance), and avoiding packing. Then it got hot. What I
have been really doing is living in dread of dismantling the
things I own, things that create a semblance of order in a
very disorderly and often malfunctioning mind. Here we go
again. My filing system consists of piles on the floor (neatly,
along walls). Now I have to push all that paper together into
large chaotic bundles. It reminds me of how one of my sisters
broke into sobs once because nobody would take seriously the
problem that had developed on her plate of food at dinner,
namely, that her corn and meat loaf and potatoes had drifted
on her plate so that all the different foods were in fact
TOUCHING EACH OTHER. That's what moving is like. That's
what I'm anxious about right now. As soon as I begin the great
anxiety kicks in. I really like the new place, the place I'm
carting all my stuff (books, books, BOOKS). My old place is
noisy and expensive. The new place is very affordable and
quiet. So, I've got a car load of stuff out in the parking
lot, including a big plant sticking out of the passenger
window. It's rough, I know. Pity me. Here's what I do with
books. I secure a box. I look at the shelved books. I lift
ten or so at a time and put them into the box. Then I begin
to wonder, what if I suddenly want to read--or browse through--
this book of Jean Valentine poems tonight? What about this Ruth
Stone book? I just bought this Josh Beckman book. I
pluck out the new Mary Ruefle book of erasures and, because
it's a wallet sized edition,I shove that in my wallet. One
by one, out of the box they come. A minute or two later I
give up and go to the convenience store and buy milk and an
ice cream sandwich and brood. What am I going to do? What's
to become of me?

TURNING SEVENTEEN


(Muskegon, 1976)


The mist off the river mixed with the smoke
And made the wine glow.

Her fingers were soft. They jumped at the tops of my thighs.
An animal lingered in its cave behind me.

A red slab of meat sighed
Coming out of its plastic, and I seared it.

Big Midwest machinery under a volcano, sky bothered
By chemical rain in rural Muskegon care of outlying Chicago . . .

A house-sized generator hummed on the bank
Of the Muskegon River 18 miles upstream, sweet in its duet with razor-wire.

A moment stood up then.

We were bright against the birch trees.
Our utensils clinked, bright before the birch trees.

Industry haloed by woods,
Creamed corn used as chum in the water, soapy as factory discharge.

Like smashed plates, the broken slag,
In these shadows of gulls and homeless women and children.

At dusk even the salmon grew ravenous in the super-heated river.
Bruised, festered, eyeless--faces blown half-off.

Drill Bit Made of Water

(at the airport . . .)


I have sometimes stopped long enough
So that in my stopping
I feel I am moving backwards.
I am not. I keep

Feeling my way down the corridors
That sweat like cattle breathing.
(They don't, really, they are just too bright
And populated.)

And so then somebody merges into traffic
Who looks like you.
I could've been elsewhere, putting quarters down
For a newspaper, so I think it matters,

Because when she stops walking she stands between us
In a wide gulf
Of business and air, radio waves,
But still

Or moving she's as one who grows wet
With love and fear.
Then I think oddly of bones, a cracker breaking loudly
On film, in slow motion.

We have these dreams. I remember the time
Father put his fist
Inside a bread bag
And used it as a puppet

Because mother was cutting
A paperback into quarters with a really good
Serrated butter knife.
His hand turned into scar tissue and a mouth

That addressed me.
"You didn't lose your underpants
In the bushes again, did you?"
I should have said "How the hell

Should I know?"
How can I tell what's what, even
Now, when they have
Rolling sidewalks

In the middle of hallways,
Along with a lane for standing still
While you continue to move,
And a lane for walking while riding

That allows you to believe
You will get home much faster.

(originally published in minnesota review)

Below is a prose poem by Wendy Barker. It comes
from an unbelievably trenchant manuscript of prose
poems that form a memoir about living and teaching
in Berkeley in the 1960s. It's about race. It's
about sex. It's about infidelity. It's about Berkeley.
It's about the 1960s. I don't normally read "memoirs."
I find them tedious and presumptuous and usually I'm
plagued by a nagging belief that most of what I'm
reading is made up anyway. "Here," the author is
saying, "Let me tell you about this insanely
interesting stuff that happened to me when I was an
orphan. It's tragic, too. Tragic and compelling.
But I survived, blossomed in fact. And now you get
to hear about it." Wendy's book never goes there.
It's told in snapshots, beautiful transparencies
that feel brisk with ocean air and the quick breath
of awe that comes from having lived deeply in
the moment. But that sounds phony already,like
a blurb. The best books aren't blurbable. Like all
coming of age stories this one is about the loss
of innocence. But Wendy's book is sexy and tender
and smart and full of historical detail that is so
deeply and effortlessly realized it seems to burn
with color in real time. I'm trying to help Wendy
place this book. It deserves to be published because
readers deserve to read it. It is beautifully written
(it floats, wafts even, quick as a feather on a draft).
Something this compelling, this unpretentious, this
honest . . . Anyway, here is a sample. If you publish
a magazine that is particularly interested in
publishing prose poems contact me if you'd like to see
parts of the manuscript, which is called
"Color, Even in Rain, The Berkeley Years."

(This work originally appeared in Confrontation)

ON THE BAY by Wendy Barker

It was the art teacher Norm who had the doctor friend
who was leasing the twenty-seven foot sailboat we took out
onto the bay that Saturday before Margie the history
teacher's party and we smoked dope all day out on the water.
There for a while we drifted on out beyond the Golden Gate
into the open sea before we knew what we were doing so
it took about three hours just to get back under the bridge,
everybody laughing except the one guy who'd had the six
sailing lessons so knew what maybe was about to happen.
Norm was getting it on with Nini on the foam mattress
under the prow and everybody else was sopping from the
spray that was everywhere over us. That whole day no fog
at all, even after we docked back at the Marina and
stopped at the Safeway to pick up some Cribari red for the
party where Margie had put out candles on the tables, all
sizes and shapes burning down little puddles of different
colors of hot wax around their flames like the lights of the
city we'd just spent the whole day sailing past, turned on.

It's hot again. I'm awfully romantic about winter. It dawns on me that partly this is because not every moment feels placed on standby, waiting, if only I'd get my sedentary ass in gear, to be magically tranformed into a deliriously ecstatic Pepsi memory. The thought never even crosses my mind, in winter, were I a really well-adjusted and fun-loving American I'd be playing volleyball and laughing. Phantoms of television toxins still hiss in my blood. The sun. Recently I've come to associate it with God because Franz Wright does such a good job of hammering the image home in his last book. "And yet/I am changing: this three-pound lump/of sentient meat electrified/by hope and terror has learned to hear/His silence like the sun,/ and sought to change." This is from "The Hawk." But "His silence like the sun" appears throughout the book. I can almost hear this silence on a day like today, and it's different than the old sound I remember, the one in which I hear the sound of lawns cooking. Franz's noise seems to emanate out of a burning aperture. That's more like it. When I was a kid some weather guy used a magnetic sun with a smiley face on it because sun was such a good thing. A smiley face, bearing down on you from high in the sky, burning the roots of your hair. I want it to thunder and rain. I want to feel that joy, as recorded at the end of E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake." "One afternoon while we were there at that lake a thunderstorm came up. It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe. The second- act climax of the drama of the eletrical disturbance over a lake in America had not changed in any important respect." Pretty soon you'll be able to point your cell phone toward your kitchen counter and a Hot Pocket (ham and cheese) will materialize, and while that will be dandy, a summer storm will always still be just a storm. And yet you'll still feel that thrill, standing in the open garage, safe and dry, while sheets of water pound the driveway, and lightning sizzles across the sky over some neighboring houses. You'll still pretty much have to stop whatever you're doing, even if you're inside reading Franz's book, and go to the window.

The Spider Pine



Dark dog biting the left side of the night,
And the dew. It's early, but the dew . . .

Little personal threads all over the air
Screaming through the outfield.

There is a quality to a bumblebee, like a bite of food,
Out in the fresh grass, molesting the clovers.

Echo in the Rothko Chapel, Houston



A little like a plastic Santa. Godspeed, and the faint impression
of a postal stamp cancellation. The administration of F___ U_s
would like to inform you. Blessed are the dolphins
who migrated, amazingly, to this suburban pool. We awoke
one morning and there they were. A son for some fish that
are really a kind of mammal. God makes his corrections.
In the meantime, I'm going to sign your release form with this
Bic lighter I found in the road. Cars ran over it.
I love how the lizards keep bolting, such thin midgets, how they pour
over the veneer while the sun burns down and the mockingbirds
grow silent. Cold, the broadleaves, the gas in a cup. Light blue . . .

In the Honeymoon Suite

(a poem after a painting by Howard Hodgkin)


God peers over the mountain. It's something alpine
And your breasts are almost blue in it. There's a hum like
The future. And entering you is like waking
Inside a real yellow book. "Only now do I discover you left tracks
All over the frame," I get to tell the head of an ovenbird
Who is listening from between my shoulders. In the moment of my
Not knowing where I am, the gravity of rock-cold water
Rushing downhill scalds my bare skin.
Oh, Kirtland, I love your pink tongue, the clutch of veins
You drink raw from my warm neck. God's eyes look stupid, like Big
Boy's. The mountains are burning. It's raining in your pelvis.

For anyone interested, I have a longish story, "Dogwood," published in the latest
issue of Green Mountains Review (Vol. XIX, No. 1). Address is GMR, Johnson State College, Johnson, VT 05656. 7 dollars an issue.

Antimacassar


Ladder burning like a broken back

Suddenly you wake because a large bird has landed on the roof
of your house

It walks back and forth at 3 a.m.

*

Sound of hammers in the distance the next morning . . .

Then later that afternoon you turn off the radio and a moth flies
by resembling in its motion
The music you had just been hearing

Like the time you filled your boat with that large fish and feared
nothing for days

Heaven is buried inside a gallon of milk

After dinner we can set the leaves back on fire

I'm writing on what seems to be the hottest day in the history of the universe. The corn standing in the Indiana fields can't wake up; it just wants to burn. Enter global warming.
Experts yesterday told President Bubblehead Global Warming couldn't conclusively be shown to have caused last year's hurricanes. So here we are, all of us with a brain, melting into puddles
of incredulity because the message, handed on to many by the *liberal media* is *There is
No Global Warming.* The problem is we have been taught to judge WHAT IS by the evidence of the moment. A storm or a really really REALLY hot day does not a crisis make. But careful analysis of statistics and observation over time does. Sorry if that doesn't make good, shocking news. This tendancy to pin specific weather events to the overall global situation is what keeps those who don't want to believe equipped with juicy little comebacks for newspapers and the network news. It's easy to drag out the history of weather and point to a day during
the dustbowl when the mercury climbed to 108 in Indiana. But that has nothing to do with
what's going on. Look at the data, think of your children (think of the animals). The economy we are so desperately trying to protect--because it must, MUST, keep growing forever (see Bill McKibben's Age of Missing Information)--can't possibly keep growing forever (despite trying to create more consumers in places such as, oh, say, Iraq). Democracy, a word I'd just as soon excise from my dictionary at this point, is only another word for capitalism. Meanwhile, religion is getting it in the head, execution style. We throw the baby out with the bath water. Because we need spirituality in our lives now more than ever. Gabe Gudding is wise to make a distinction on his blog between Vipassana (a form of meditation) and Buddhism. Forget definitions; forget sure proof of anything even. Isn't now a time more than ever to willfully find value in things other than that which can be bought and sold (and manufactured, or broadcast)? It's very very hot out today. This doesn't mean the planet is beginning to boil, but it sure as hell doesn't NOT mean it is. Either way it FEELS like a good time to just sit and think and not do anything for such a long time it actually becomes a kind of quality of being in and of itself. Going to Home Depot on your day off is fine. We're Americans, let's not be idle. But I'm just saying . . .