A Leap in the Dark

(after Howard Hodgkin)

There is only one way out of the alley. There is only
one way through the rags of blue, a treeline
beside which to recline is to burst into flight
behind closed eyelids. This comes as the mountains are
pierced with a morphine pall of infatuating dreamlessness.
The orange wallpaper's simply host to a dry arrangement
of yellow bones placed like neighborhoods on top of a
black card table. It all boils down to the painted door,
the evasion that blossoms at the end of its rope.
The word mattress sinks through the bright water
faster than the word fuck. Her feet burn to be kissed.
Rulers, a cracked harness. Let's get you saddled
for riding. The room is a sunset of mechanical flowers all August.

The Eighty-First Evening



It feels good cutting my own arm because it is more seamless
than burying a dead pet or one's own father. Oh beautiful plow blade
of awe, salad in the swells where the grubs rise glowing
from the necklaces of roots and dirt clods, give me back my license
to make too much out of my own hardships
as if I were precisely the one not responsible for them.
We're not exactly the sum of our hair follicles. I remember looking
at my father's hands as they lay at his sides, rodents failing
to escape their jail, the felt-lined casket. My father taught
me how to gut a deer. Now he's stuffed with embalming fluid.
I need a new flag, something to cry under, the way a detachable skin
eventually forms over a tablespoon of even diluted blood.

From "Arc"



The wind thinks her cage is a larger stone
egg twisted inside the sound of a car backfiring
two fistfuls of birds like a body in praise
a current of air ruffles the wolves’ manes

Remember when she washed the shirts
and they came out with extra color the way the edges of the paper
cut her blisters opening an envelope makes a sound like fire

Straight-line winds someone in the Midwest had a thought
and then the heat piled on heat piled on cold and
there was a wreckage of minds

There’s an apple the bees enter on a green bed of moss
metal ladders bending open like a slow divination under black clouds
but everyone sleeping sees a tornado eventually
look at the way the sap pours from the pines
horses foaming on place mats boys on rafts land in the wash

They tap the screens in the neighborhoods looking for milk
a fever cuts open water I mean a ferry bound for Ludington
a bale of hay bristles around an apple's knot of bees on deck

Somebody planted it there . . .

Seidel's new book out in November, is called Ooga Booga.

I don't think he's scheduled to edit a future number of
Best American Poetry.

Table of contents for Ooga-booga / Frederick Seidel.

KILL POEM
FROM NIJINSKY'S DIARY
VIOLIN
NECTAR
ON BEING DEBONAIR
FOR HOLLY ANDERSEN
A RED FLOWER
DICK AND FRED
NEW YEAR'S DAY, 2004
THE BIG GOLCONDA DIAMOND
WHAT ARE MOVIES FOR?
THE OWL YOU HEARD
E-MAIL FROM AN OWL
WHITE BUTTERFLIES
THE CASTLE IN THE MOUNTAINS
A FRESH STICK OF CHEWING GUM
BOLOGNA
AT A FACTORY IN ITALY
FRANCE FOR BOYS
GRANDSON BORN DEAD
DEATH
EAST HAMPTON AIRPORT
A WHITE TIGER
CLOCLO
LAUDATIO
BARBADOS
CLIMBING EVEREST
ORGANIZED RELIGION
MOTHER NATURE
BROADWAY MELODY
LOVE SONG
BREAST CANCER
RILKE
CASANOVA GETTING OLDER
IL DUCE
I AM SIAM
THE BIG JET
THE BLACK-EYED VIRGINS
EUROSTAR
SONG: 'THE SWOLLEN RIVER OVERTHROWS ITS BANKS'
DRINKING IN THE DAYTIME
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
THE DEATH OF THE SHAH

POOF


I've disappeared. And I don't know about
the latest BAP. I haven't purchased the last
five or so editions and plan not to. Editing
SHADE was what I began doing instead. Best?

Naw. Poets I believe people should read, would
want to read more of if they saw them in SHADE?
Of course. It's the world according to me.
Surely, surely, others see what I mean. But if not . . .

Okay. But look at SHADE 2004 again, seriously.
I mean, really. Just look at that line-up.

I did have issues sent to BAP by the way, but no hits.

And I did receive e-mails from Lehman for a while, or from
one of his workers. I live in INDIANA. Announcements
for some bullshit in New York. I either searched for
and found a little opt-out-of-receiving the e-mails
link, or wrote, as I often do, Quit Sending me Spam.

I probably didn't write "You spamming motherf*cker"
which I sometimes do to a stock tip e-mail, especially
if I've been having car trouble, or my blood pressure
spikes (which has been the case the last month--something
appears to be trying to kill me. Is it my own mind?
I'm afraid so. But no, I just need to be alone for a year
with birds and rain dripping off plants, maybe flee into
grasslands with Cynie Cory since we're both rather too
amped up for our own good. She's funny enough to
be lost in the grasses with however, for weeks, for months!).

Whether it's Viagra or Xanax or Mortgage Insurance
or poetry promotion, I don't want it clotting up my
precious inbox. Anyway, I quit getting those DCLehman
e-mails.

Okay then. While you're looking (or not) for the table
of contents of SHADE 2004 somewhere online I'll be over
here typing out this Charles Simic poem:



WINTER NIGHT


The church is an iceberg.

It's the wind. It must be blowing tonight
Out of those galactic orchards,
Their Copernican pits and stones.

The monster created by the mad Dr. Frankenstein
Sailed for the New World,
And ended up some place like New Hampshire.

Actually, it's just a local drunk,
Knocking with a snow shovel,
Wanting to go in and warm himself.

An iceberg, the book says, is a large drifting
Piece of ice, broken off a glacier.

***

I have a bunch of long--six pages or more--
unpunctuated poems, basically lists, images:
water over stones and animals dreaming while
a cloud drifts over the people praying in the
sunlight on the ferry heading north . . .

Blackbird took the latest one, called "Arc."

Richard Serra, the Mackinaw Bridge, 9/11
(I crossed that bridge on 9/11 after doing a reading
in Michigan's Upper Peninsula on 9/10), Frost's
"Birches" . . .

WENDY BARKER'S PROSE POEMS


I talk about this book in a post from early August, about Wendy's
manuscript, the book of prose poems about Berkeley in the sixties.
And so I'll keep posting the occasional poem from the book. Many
are available for magazine publication, and the ms. is looking for
a press. Hard to imagine something great won't happen for this.
You can't put this book down . . .


RELATIVE

What a beautiful place we’d moved to—all year long, something
blooming. And the houses, some excellent properties in the hills.
My husband’s Aunt Ellen sold real estate in Tucson. What a
climate on this coast. The fog was better for your skin than any
lotion you could buy. And neither of us had to drive even ten
minutes to our jobs. She’d taken Greg and me out for dinner at
the Claremont. 180-degree view of the Bay, all three bridges.
Butter molded into rosebuds. Tomorrow we’d cross one of the
bridges into San Francisco, maybe go the long way round to
Marin, and take the Golden Gate back home. Maybe the fog
would lift. She wanted to take me shopping, buy me new clothes.
Start with Macy’s, find me some things I could teach in for years,
that would hold up. A good idea to stock up on high quality,
well-made, tailored clothes, discreet, tasteful, the kind that never
went out of style. Some things were just classic.

The Feminine Mystique

(A prose poem by Wendy Barker)



No, I hadn't heard of it. Ty was telling me everybody was

talking about it, this Friedan woman. He had read it for his

class at Cal. Maybe I should read it. Yeah, why didn't I read

it, and then he wouldn't have to, and I could write his paper

for him. Easy for me. I said I didn't mind. I'd do it. Okay.

When I finished reading the whole book he wanted to

know what I thought. I wasn't sure. But I didn't have a

hard time writing his paper. I just said things the way he'd

say them, organized it all into paragraphs, made sure

everything was correct. Did I like the book? I didn't know.

Maybe my mother had been like the women Friedan talked

about--the problem that had no name. I didn't really want

to talk about it, as long as the paper was good enough for him
to turn in. And tonight--if I could stay with him, not have to

go home.

The Deep Deep Midwest




Where I'm heading, my next trip, with as little as I can
carry, listen for the still present moans of the ancient
glaciers on the horizon like a thunderstorm.

NOW WHERE WAS I

Near Muskegon there is a gas station where I buy a newspaper

and pee. The key to the restroom, it says on the restroom door,

is "next to the orange lotto machine." In fact, it's attached to an

empty plastic milk jug. Okay, no big deal. A lot of gas stations do this

kind of thing. But what always happens is I finish doing my thing

and I come out and wander the store carrying this monstrous

key chain around obliviously, looking at the gum, the pop, reading the

headlines on a newspaper, etc. Meanwhile, somebody has been waiting

to use the bathroom, the door of which opens when I stroll out,

but then immediately slams back shut and locks. I don't know what

happens next exactly. It's always like I'm sleep walking. All I know

is it's like I WAKE UP and someone is walking toward me with an

outstretched hand wanting possession of the blimp that is the bathroom

key. There is usually the slightest look of urgency and dismay on the face

of this frustrated person. But each time this happens I'm totally surprised

I'm still in possession of the restroom key. It doesn't really embarrass

me though. I've always been a flake. Last week the guy chasing me

around the store looked like Roger Federer, the tennis genius,

who I happened to watch in his match last night, against the American,

Blake. Another time a woman looking like a youthful Blythe Danner, quite

striking, appeared suddenly beside me. I'm sorry to bother you, she said,

and she wasn't being sarcastic. She looked troubled she had to ask me to part

with my new friend, the battered milk jug with the duct tape wrapped

around the neck and the single silver key sticking out. When I handed

it to her she said, "You're a life saver." I thought THAT was uncalled for

but whatever.

PIECES

I like smashing this narrative, my novel, into pieces. It helps. Helps with what? you might ask. Everything. Or I'm not sure.

Marilynn Robinson's Housekeeping knocked me out of this babbling universe of opinion and into some other luminous silenter one. And then I picked up some novels by Tom Drury. It's little fragments of heaven, falling like snow through the dark near the ceiling, falling like snow onto the dark on the roof, falling like snow between the stars, falling and falling like snow that will never stop.

Excerpt from FLOOD:

Whatever light was left on earth was evaporating quickly, turning to a soup of black forms—woodcocks and little brown bats and mammoth Cecropia moths—and I was suddenly able to be absent and present at the same time. I could feel myself outside of my little life, the simple filmstrip of it, just watching. I was drinking beer out of a red plastic cup; that was the most you could actually surmise in watching me drift from conversation to conversation; small pools of local color, words like shapes cutting the air with small, harmless helicopter blades of subtext.

Sheryl Saderos was loafing in Allen Vanbogglen’s lap, clinging to him marsupially. At some point I undressed and joined several people for a swim in the pond. When I emerged I was treading water with Alanthra and Billy Rogers, and for a few swimming moments nobody spoke. I could feel the pond weeds—long strings of silken strips seemingly tugged skyward by the light of the moon—stroking the tops of my feet. Rogers was doing something to Alanthra.

“I caught a big pike in this pond one time,” Billy said, interrupting the solitude.

“Was it stunted?” Alanthra said.

“I don’t get what you mean.”

“Well, like, was its head way too big for its body, for instance?”

Billy laughed, then realized Alanthra was asking a real question. “I don’t remember anything like that,” he said.

I dove underwater. I felt like a shiny thing, beautiful and virginal and alone. I wanted to sink into the warm mud like a snapping turtle and hibernate. When I’d made love to Sheryl in her father’s house I could feel a kind of power surge into my hands, hands that made words of her body. If I was able to fuck her hard enough it was possible she might feel Fucked-into-Love. I want to do it this way, she said. But then I made her do it another way. You pathetic . . . , she said, and managed to twist skin on the inside of my thigh. Afterwards, after we’d both come, I noticed her face as she leaned back half in shadow, the way light was flowing in waves over her.

“Are you okay?” I said.

Then she curled into a ball. It wasn’t fetal—she was resting, and thinking. Still, she let me brush the hair from her face. An hour later she kissed me, once, near my ear, then reached for her pocketbook, which had toppled onto the floor. “I need to pay you for the bag.”

I was hurt, truly, after all that, this sudden U-turn back toward business. “It’s not necessary,” I said. But it was. I needed the money.

“No, I insist,” she said. “I really, really insist,” and she took my hand in both of hers and pressed the money onto my palm.

They live in these silver arteries
pulsing across most of Michigan . . .

Sigh. Fish. The clouds.
Not silence but river noise
and trees blowing. So, yes,
Silence. Hush. The clouds
racing past overhead.
Kingbirds and Kingfishers.
I suppose we do live forever
after all. Hushhh . . .

THE DESPERATE HOURS

(an Asbery Erasure poem)



The man, someone's barrier corner
Of the universe is had. Yours was invented.

Know I snore.
I invented medication.

But these lazy things--
What about the pallid ones,
At birth. Why did the city

Call my dungheap my rosary?

True saying, all two horses
Crenellated, bent like a bow.

Call them your town, farm outside it,
Your diary.

You made this once.

It passed.

John Gallaher is saying some very interesting things about
perspective and what I'd call a kind of playful edginess.
Point of view and sincerity. Keep them guessing or honest,
depending on your mood. "Water your own damn flower pots."