REPRINT


This poem was published in Quarterly West, I think in 1999.
It's part of the new book, one of several long poems that are similar.
Margot Schilpp saw fit to publish it back then.

The more I read it the more I realize it's another version of Flood.


COUNTING BACKWARDS


We were perched on the roof of the burned out building
she said In the gloaming and I said You can already see the haze
of Milwaukee Lake Michigan spread out in its glacial
canyon and was turning the purple of a lavender bong
smoke coming out of its mouth smoke coming out like a cooling

gun barrel the incipient stars black as hashish in the sky

or sunspots the warm breeze blew over our bodies with cold
in it she was wet as a lake she was smoking her fingernails
turned blue with blood that was a long time ago
a toenail sinking into a glass of water like a slice of the moon

My wife comes back wearing a robe with a hood
she’s digging a hole to sleep in rocks in the dirt with the grubs
smell of sassafras like root beer this is where I look up
at the trees waving helplessly in a blizzard
feel the whoosh of a girl’s eyes opening during her first kiss
while a fly who has defied nature disappears under the lamp shade
I never see it again
the snow isn’t like dirt it’s like childhood
it’s the hush of thick blankets it’s warmer than school bells
are loud I’ve dreamed these things
but not the puff of zipped up coats
red and black boots the teacher taking a count
The children come up to her waist she’s thin
and young the cyclone backstop hovers a few inches
behind them curling like a wave
like a stranger or a parent or a woman in bed
blocking the snow that covers the sun and rises like a shadow
of a wave over the red tiled roofs of the houses

she opened her mouth and a red balloon raced away from her head
and lost itself in fragments amidst the grasses
and sumac and white pine someone began playing an organ
inland or was it a carnival starting up in Wisconsin
like a needle on a record cranked slowly before warming up
like the white on the throats of the seagulls flying away
to become stars even the white brush-strokes of boats
began pin-wheeling her nipples so close to my mouth she moaned

she flowed underneath me like a warm river

her nails drew tails like falling stars spilling onto my shoulders

I tasted smoke in her skin
her hair shot out from her head it was white
then it was damp and black as the shingles it poured through
my fingers she came with her hair pouring she dreamed
I was liquid I dreamed her eyes flew away like bats
her fingers fluttered like moths they bruised my back with their wings

the snow glanced away from the window
the wave grew dark over the television
where a man kept playing the piano he looked up at the snow
he played harder He hit a single complex note
and let it hang like a rope in the wind
like “A Day in the Life” a bell full of feathers
glasses of water trembled in the sink
half diluted with milk and coffee I shot a seed
halfway across the world the screen went blank
last summer it rained and rained
causing caskets to slide into the roadway like boats
they broke through the slate masonry like runaway trains
one sat idling next to a school bus
a girl gave it the finger a boy began to cry the driver said Mother
heat waves rose out of the asphalt the note held the blizzard at bay
everyone was drinking
when I awoke the next morning
a man was suddenly floating in his pool like Gatsby
he bumped around in the sun for a while
I made the phone call he was in the exact center of the swimming pool
when paramedics arrived it was hot even for August the shade the maples
poured down was delineated it had borders
it was blue as the word pool might suggest it was blue as
the lee side of a headstone and moss the cicadas were whirring
they’d been leaving their dreams like shells
on the screens in the neighborhood
everyone had noticed the medic looked around then shoved
the body with the long-handled brush I’d seen the man clean with

her words ricocheted off the sides of the dunes
and the sun like a deer I was wearing a windbreaker
and a bracelet she had given me it was faux silver
it dangled and made me feel lithe her shoulders were stuck with tar granules
her hair ran back and forth over the roof like fire
she spoke using her hands as megaphones my cock was still wet
and it burned it lay on my thigh and it came on its own
she spoke in the voice of a minister’s daughter
she covered her breasts with her hands
my nipples began crawling toward my eyes like insects looking for something
to drink she was perched on the roof before leaping
when I walked into the mall I saw a row of T.V.s half had on golf
half the Roadrunner both turned up too loud
She said I know I can’t fly she raised her arms like a lightning
rod I said Good because I love you it was fully dark

after an hour of Rembrandt it was now Carravagio It was Pinkham
Ryder It was the infinite past in the eye of Janet Leigh

she swam at my center like an image burning in the middle of a merry-go-round

the inside of the piano was the ringing
that comes after death it wasn’t night the television was warm
it burned to tell lies a tape buried in the VCR ticked
like a bomb the wave held it was a gray you could lose
your arms in the red tiles weren’t red anymore
the pool was black with canvas leaves that had died
snow over ice last week I saw a man walking toward me
I stood in the driveway with a shovel he had a face like
a tan branch he was long in the tooth
his grin tilted forward like a shallow lake
I pressed my chin into the polished wood handle I said Hello
He said Buddy I thank you for your quiet candor
I noticed my foot was shaking I almost said It always does that
He grew smaller and smaller and now I’ll never know what really happened to him

She had a rock and she had a lighter
it was like sucking a desert
until the hash ignited it glowed in its crater
Hawkins had hung a carp in the trees
now they were bones he’d had a dream in it he’d
died and an ichthyologist found an entire skeleton inside
his rib cage it was from the Pleistocene he dreamed he was the Calder
of fish bones the music of death like sleep
the dream of the icicle a cold wind through a reptile’s garden
I wanted to push to her center she stopped moving and regaled
me with tales about men she had known
one hit little jars with mallets he was a musician
one lived at home with his mother and was alcoholic
and when you went into the basement the smell of mothballs
made your eyes sting
one had a cock shaped like a boomerang it could look away
You’re too young I said For what? she said
I said For Boomerangs for alcoholics she torched the bowl
her breasts were silhouettes behind her I saw
the vertiginous walk of an unmoored Ferris wheel burning
as it rolled along the horizon children were screaming
My mother was running with her hands thrown in the air
a red scarf flew out of her mouth
when she screamed a caterpillar on a catalpa leaf burst
the thing had green guts how is that relevant?
my mother wanted to know while running in front of the burning
Ferris wheel I like your mom she said everyone does
I said

An edition of the New York Times showed up on my doorstep
it included my horoscope
and a full page ad for a movie about weather at night
I wept over its pages
I laughed in a menthol jail
And while the single note diminished in the tingling air
the wave curled infinitesimally closer to us
comets careened inside the piano they looked at themselves in the mirrors
before raining as sparks

The stars shot to the rim of the sky like pepper reacting
to a drop of dish soap
in a small green bowl of water I pulled the rip cord and the outboard smoked
and churned up bubbles it was clamped to an industrial barrel
the water inside looked like blood I was sick from the smell of gas
the fish swam under the boat which was flying upside down
in the rain My father was wearing a visor
Remember when the sun used to shine in the summer
he said Those days are gone
She could rip the doughnut out of a down-
rigger easily blue monofilament tethered the roof
to the leaping fish it swam inside a window underneath us and we lost it
she was the bright green of a sparkler
burning all alone in the dark of a blue lawn

These are my versions these are the backward binoculars
my mother the pyre my father the rain dripping off the flanks
of a horse Three months before the year two-thousand
I got an anonymous note in the mail it included a torn ticket
to a Dave Matthews concert and a drawing in pencil
of a glowing vagina someone had clipped from a magazine
the words plate tectonics I threw
the note on top of the White Album I walked in the woods
looking for feathers I let my hair grow around them
I found bones in a hole under a pile of leaves
my wife shook a shovel full of dirt she was casting a spell
I could feel myself turning forty a cracked skull burning like a raft
set adrift I’d lie in my bed and listen to the man fuck his wife
in the apartment upstairs the house shook like a train
was thundering by each coffin a star each star a song floating
over the highway with the windows rolled down

She put my fingers in her mouth she blew cigarette smoke
around them it was something she said she had learned
I remember her middle name was Marie
She was the green of a damselfly

I roll a joint for the first time
in years and look at it
it moves on its own like a compass
a hand slowly opens inside a casket
a flower turns to dust in the rain
a body floats
over the tendrils of its own dangling limbs
Milwaukee glows in the distance like the light Gatsby saw
the television heats up until it turns back on by itself
the piano player’s taking a bow
while the snow rushes by like the sea
tearing away the trellis I built
flinging the morning’s mail like white punctuation
across black ice the man raises his arms and the crowd rushes
the stage a bird covering its eyes with its wings

Poem by Jack Gilbert


Failing and Flying



Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

2001 since Michael Burkard published a book.

This poem is up at Fence, but I put it here
because, frankly, Burkard's poems make me
happy. (13 is missing--typical Burkard).



BLACK HORSE IN WHITE ENVELOPES

a poem by Michael Burkard


for mpt
1 Boxes of meaning.
20 Little books about fire.
3
Kim's drawing:
"Mask" in bed--"I don't want
dad to know I'm afraid of
anything."
4
Umbrella angel.
Suit of death.
When relatives
want to disappear.
5
The word "erotica"
outweighed all the other clouds.
6
When talking about black horses
in white envelopes we are obviously
talking about very small horses.
It is important to tell just how,
if at all, the horses died, and to
be precise as to whether the horses
are figuratively dead or really dead.
The envelopes become less and less
important.
7
But days later the envelopes
become more important in unexpected
ways. You realize very deeply
they are white, not off-white
or almost-white or anything-else-
white but white. They are also
very small, not much larger
than the small black horses.
8
Unspeakable boxes of the small
riders on the small black horses
placed in small white envelopes.
These boxes however small remain
good for breathing, fine for
breathing, but most of all remind
riders and horses and envelopes
alike of what a small gift breathingis.
9
Fire is the next time.
A little fire to read a little
book by by a little rider resting
her little horse before she remounts
to enter little envelope.
10
Father, dad, do you see how small
your daughter has become, if even
small for just a moment? As children
we often have this strange but adhesive
and natural sensation of the small.
It colors a world.
11
To color a world: black and white are colors.
We realize this now from the lack of black
and white films and black and white photography.
Together they served as one of the Masks Kim
could wear, Donna could wear, I could wear.
12
At the Hotel Vallejo you could rent
an umbrella for two dollars an afternoon,
death for five dollars an evening,
a relative for ten dollars (breakfast included),
and a suit of death for fifteen(a special weekend rate).
If you rented the whole package you
could also disappear for a week
for another five dollars. It is of no
use to fall away from the hotel or to
pretend you are not interested.
Face it, M., you are interested.
Tell Donna.
14
Outside the hotel are small riders
on small horses and a word you cannot find.
The horses have not died.
The clouds have not died.
No one has died or come to.

Levis, Plath


These are the kinds of posts I like to see. I'm
in this issue of Blackbird by the way, a five/six page
poem called "Arc" (already mentioned earlier).

(Journey?)

Mei Liu has left a new comment on your
post "10/15/2006 11:33:00 AM":

"My Story in a Late Style of Fire" is a favorite
poem by Larry Levis for a number of people--
including David Baker, poetry editor of the Kenyon
Review. His essay on the poem will appear in the
upcoming issue of Blackbird (http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu),
to be published November 1, as part of the annual
"Levis Reading Loop" commemorating Levis's work
as well as celebrating the winner of the Levis Reading
Prize (this year it was Ron Slate for The Incentive of
the Maggot).

"Ennui," a previously unpublished poem by the late
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sylvia Plath, will appear
November 1, 2006 in Blackbird: an online journal
of literature and the arts (www.blackbird.vcu.edu).
Journey, a published poet and recent winner of the
Wabash Prize from Sycamore Review, is the
author of a forthcoming scholarly article on "Ennui."

Lilac


Martha Ronk


And why this form.
In particular this bent
or bent over.

If the saturation
the deepening of color
the softening of ground.

Well, you say, without it.
Or I wouldn't be the same.
Or everything I think.

Eyeing the lilac
is remembering one walk.
One stand of them.

GAMES


The inexperience of the Tigers shown through
last night. I knew the week off would wreck their
momentum. I couldn't watch the last inning. The Tigers
played the poorest baseball I've seen in a month.
The Cardinals are on a roll. Even in the first
game with the Yankees the Tigers didn't look
like this. Well, we'll see.

*

I've got too many creeps sending me "anonymous"
comment posts. Sour grapes and delusion.
Moderating does little good--you have to read the
things, go through the depressing task of deleting
them one by one. The whole hidden behind a profile
page that says nothing, the whole anonymous
nature of the internet is disturbing.
One person's been sending 5 to 6 comments a night,
rocketing back and forth between delusional sentimentality
and frightful anger. Basically, secular self-righteousness.
And I posted Halliday's piece because I started receiving
poems, tons of them, for critique. Poems about summer
and gardens, children, childhood. When I don't respond
the vitriol comes flying in eventually. I work freelance
editing poetry manuscripts (I did this for Wendy Barker,
whose prose poems I've been posting), so if anyone
is interested in that, e-mail me. And I teach. In the time
left over I try to write something. In the meantime
I've been waiting on some tests to see if I've got cancer
or not. One test said I might, now a second one will
say how MIGHT is MIGHT. Whatever's going on has
been making me sick for a while. I'm anxiously awaiting
the results.

This poem should appear on Poetry Daily once a year, at least.


Vegetable Wisdom

a poem by MARK HALLIDAY


You want to tell me how it seemed
the day you fell in love at the Blue Parrot
and the night in Washington Square when you felt
a weird hitherto undescribed floating absence of love
and how much it hurt that day on Waterman Street
across from Faunce House when the cars passing
were just clots of metal and the poetry books
were just wads of flattened wood because
Cathleen had walked away ....
You want to spill those old dark beans.
They seem to choke you. They threaten to burst
with undigested meaning—

but why does it have to be me, a total stranger
who has to listen and soak it all up?
Your trust in me is a strange miscalculation;
you seem to believe I'm a future lover or brother
whose heart holds a certain space waiting to be filled
precisely by how you feel about how you felt
in Dilemma XY or Situation Q.
No, baby. You have the wrong number,
you were sold some bad information; I am someone
quite other. To me
the exact shading of how your mother in her gold bathrobe
suffered through her final months
(as perceived by you)
and how your father was brave in the silence of the kitchen
(as perceived by you)
is only distantly of interest like bright clothing
that flaps on a line behind some humble dwelling
seen from a fast bus. You see what I'm saying?
I'm a kind of receiver who can take your jewels of memory
and call them beans, beans you want to throw up.
It's a dubious metaphor but I don't really care
the way you in your bean-puffed pride feel sure
I must care—I am something else, you sensitive drip!
You're so pitifully pleased to address a total stranger
but that's because you have no idea how totally I am
a stranger. Will you take some advice from a stranger?
Put that poem back in your fat little filing cabinet.
And then what? Then what? Then try to be strong:
like a plant, a bush, a tree;
a tree's nobility is poemless.
My own agenda is to grow and fulfill myself
without bothering anybody else, under the stars, under the
sun,
with the wind in my hair, smelling the salt sea breeze,
hearing the indecipherable songs of birds
and the alien croaking of frogs content to be frogs.
One zucchini does not ask another zucchini for praise.

A Song, seldom a Song

some black comedy on a Wednesday

Here's a favorite right now, by Warren Zevon,
the lyrics anyway. Coupled with the music
there is something awfully satisfying about
his 'tude . . .

I started as an alter boy, working at the church
Learning all my holy moves, doing some research
Which led me to a cash box, labeled Children's Fund
I'd leave the change, and tuck the bills inside my cummerbund

I got a part-time job at my father's carpet store
Laying tackless stripping, and housewives by the score
I loaded up their furniture, and took it to Spokane
And auctioned off every last naugahyde divan

I'm very well aquainted with the seven deadly sins
I keep a busy schedule trying to fit them in
I'm proud to be a glutton, and I don't have time for sloth
I'm greedy, and I'm angry, and I don't care who I cross

I'm Mr. Bad Example, intruder in the dirt
I like to have a good time, and I don't care who gets hurt
I'm Mr. Bad Example, take a look at me
I'll live to be a hundred, and go down in infamy

Of course I went to law school and took a law degree
And counseled all my clients to plead insanity
Then worked in hair replacement, swindling the bald
Where very few are chosen, and fewer still are called

Then on to Monte Carlo to play chemin de fer
I threw away the fortune I made transplanting hair
I put my last few francs down on a prostitute
Who took me up to her room to perform the flag salute

Whereupon I stole her passport and her wig
And headed for the airport and the midnight flight, you dig?
And fourteen hours later I was down in Adelaide
Looking through the want ads sipping Fosters in the shade

I opened up an agency somewhere down the line
To hire aboriginals to work the opal mines
But I attached their wages and took a whopping cut
And whisked away their workman's comp and pauperized the lot

I'm Mr. Bad Example, intruder in the dirt
I like to have a good time, and I don't care who gets hurt
I'm Mr. Bad Example, take a look at me
I'll live to be a hundred and go down in infamy

I bought a first class ticket on Malaysian Air
And landed in Sri Lanka none the worse for wear
I'm thinking of retiring from all my dirty deals
I'll see you in the next life, wake me up for meals

POETRY


John Gallaher and I are engaged in a conversation
he began by trying to explain an aesthetic for poetry
on his blog, quite brilliantly I think.

I've tried to put something out there by editing SHADE.

By "erasing" Ashbery.

Visit Gallaher's blog where he discusses in a series of
entries his ideas about the irrational imagination.

Put in a suggestion for the growing book list there.

We hope a pretty compelling anthology will come out of
the ongoing discussion. Or something.

I mentioned how I want to talk about "Intent" (in an e-mail)
and its relationship to what I might call the war against
sentimentality. That's a war we should be fighting,
in culture at large, in art. If I read a poem and I can feel you
trying to persuade me to feel something (intent)--no
ambiguity, no irony at all, nothing inventive going on with the
poet's persona, no humor--I'm not gonna want to get lost in
it. That's why I go back to Ashbery, or Palmer for that
matter, or Creeley. Larry Levis, Ruefle, Seidel, Laura Jensen.
"Emotion" in a poem should set up an enormous cathedral
of tensions that have no logical solutions. I want to be spun
inside that web of the emotionally irrational so I can, for one
thing, return to a book over and over, the way I return
to particular CDs (albums, dammit).

John had stated: So the REAL against sentimentality has
to be aware of what living is in its humanness. (He
elaborates on all this on his blog--go there, go there . . .)

In an e-mail I wrote back: Well, yes, exactly.
But you can't come at it baldly depicting your abortion or
blissful orgasms or whatever, the same old human stories
that have really been turned into dead metaphors by the
book industry and television . . .

So how to fling language around like an action painter
in such a way even the writer isn't sure where this
FUCKING THING is going, but you do it and do it,
(failing and failing)

and find emotional truths in syntax, pathos in humor
or in pure speed on the page, words locking together
to create new meanings that are emotional, with a capitol E.

And mysterious (Let's not nail everything down and yet let's
have a thread of continuity to our Not Nailing Everything
Down).

But don't you agree if you can find the emotional
center of a poem merely in its subject and a too predictable
form (form as a version of "cleverness" in and of itself)
it's close to infuriating?

How many sonnets are truly moving in the way you are
talking about on your blog? (A few, not many).

It's like the woman on TV sobbing for all of us to please
find her kidnapped child while the anchor persons repeat the
word tragedy nine hundred times (hers maybe, but not
mine, not again, not this time).

(In this light poetry is political all right.)

Which brings me to these piles of non sequiturs
filling the mags and online mags, etc., as well as the
myriad discursive essay-like poems we all had to plow
through in the eighties (Confession hidden under glitter
and endless allusion) by guys especially, many of them
still being written, tied to certain schools and writers'
conferences, and which still appear in, like, oh, I don't
know, The G_________ Review I guess.

There is work where lyric poets with a certain internal
cocktail of duende and serotonin starvation and narcissistic
subversion connect all of it to humanness. You might start
out being emotionally facile, sentimental or its opposite,
but you need to go inward first (thank you Bly and James
Wright) and identify what's there (don't you?)

and then move on from that apprenticeship.

Leave the planet. (Where have you landed?)

I think folks writing flarf know this stuff, and
I find much work there compelling, even if I have to
wade through many poems to find the ones that take the
top of my head off.

Have you read Katie Degentesh? Good Lord.

I wonder if there's some way you and I could manage
to cobble together an introduction of some sort without
actually DEFINING what we mean and put out a really
startling anthology. The fact I even believe you can put
together such an anthology is a testament to my belief
the visceral work is out there and that nobody seems
to have placed it inside a single book yet. Maybe "it"
doesn't exist. I don't know.

All I see is Ron Silliman slinging arrows at Billy Collins

and Billy Collins walking around with a Miss America-like
crown on his noggin, a poem about his orange juice that
morning just waiting to be published.

Fact is, I can find poems by Collins I like, a lot. Fact
is I can find poems by Rae Armantrout or Beckian Fritz
Goldberg that fucking kick my ass (that aren't ephemeral,
more than the nice blip I get from Collins).

I used to read early Michael Burkard next to Palmer, for
instance (Echo Lake! Ruby for Grief!) . . . talk about human
blood and love on the page and a kind of "understatement of
ego," by which I mean the complex but not pushy personality
of the poet connecting with the reader. Just the idea of this is
moving! I don't think, for instance, that Greg Orr pulls off the
same kind of pathos in his work as Palmer or Hass or Priscilla
Becker do. Maybe in some of the earlier stuff. It can't be that
easy. It had better not be that easy. But that's up for debate
isn't it? Who the hell am I? What about Linda Gregg? Brigit
Pegeen Kelly?.

So kick my feet out from under me, throw me off center
while singing about what is on your mind by somehow going
there with your body as well as your mind. At some point,
of course, you just stop talking about all this it and find the
poems that bring you there.

PS--I edited my emailed response, a little.

OH Well


The Cards are ahead by 5--it's 9:17--and
Joe Buck and Tim McCarver managed to get
Leon Trotsky into the conversation.

There's Game left . . .

The Detroit Tigers


are going to the world series. It was high drama
as Ordonez hit a three run homer with two outs in
the ninth inning to win it.

Even in the Hoosier State


People are whooping. Delgado's second homer
of the game at 9:54 p.m. Now Wright's on base . . .

BLAMMO


Delgado hits a three run homer at 8:18 p.m.

Fairly crushed it.

Mets up three to nothing, and they're still going.

*

The Tigers won. It wasn't that pretty at all,
as Warren Zevon sings, but they're three games
to zip. Actually, Rogers' pitching performance
was pure focus and grace. Not speed but placement.

Steady and boring and beautiful.

Not the best, not the Best, but good.


These poems in the new issue of POOL stood
out for me. For whatever reason.

Nina Lindsey/ Working Saturdays
Kiki Petrosino/ Valentine
Christopher Sindt/ Hymn to the God of Dailiness
Thom Ward/ Barter & Dolls
Scott Hightower/ In the Mix
James Haug/ [place unknown]
Mark Halliday/ Best Am Po
Leonard Gontarek/ Twenty Lines for J
Joshua Beckman/ Untitled [A frieze etc]
Tony Hoagland/ Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Carrie St. George Comer/ Miami in April

LOCAL TIME

(an Ashbery Erasure Poem)


What except
the hand is ours?

Gray eclipse, ill, the lilies
arrive and the models

undress, misread, confess.

Eat the toy.

Skulking aroma, neither of us gets
to know it's winter.

White is our harvest,
good in the roar of old things.

SOMETIMES IN PLACES

(an Ashbery Erasure Poem)



Patient, no poet lies down under the dream.

The sky is cleverer than he.

So what?

The robin builds a nest.

Day weaves a bower.

Self to world: I am standing here listening.

Desire, O accidental man,
the purple plenty dominate our dreams.

Nod and be gay.

You too enter the skirmish of ghosts.

Dragons so blessed with deafness
clamor for lunch.

No, I thought
No, that was mine.

Shut Up



Shut up about that f*cking plane, dirty bombs,
and how we all thought of 9/11. Quit showing that
"charred" (your word media) building still
burning. It happened yesterday and you've still
got that serious tone of voice that says
"I can barely believe what has happened (Brian,
or Wolf, or Katie)." I'm sorry some people
died. Really. Really, I am. Now move on.
(It feels about time for another sex scandal
involving a female teacher and her student.)
Let's see, coal mining accident, courthouse
shooting, gas prices (which nobody is talking about
now that they are mysteriously dropping pre-election),
airport security update, a little footnote
somewhere about Iraq, and . . . there it is:
School Sex Scandel Seductress, right on schedule.

Baseball and Fiction



The Tigers won, but the game was close, closer than the
8 to 5 score might indicate. In the ninth Bradley dribbled a
single and Frank Thomas got up there, in the middle of a
mini-slump, due to blast one. He popped out. Ahh, baseball.
After Todd Jones, the pitcher, escaped by the grace of God,
he was interviewed and he untucked his shirt, exposing his belly,
a few Krispy Kremes through the years kind of belly. It just
plain warmed the cockles of my damn heart, that belly.
The Tigers really did play very good ball, answering each
time the As put up points, and the mid-relief pitching--sublime.
The next game in Detroit, Friday night, might be in the snow.

*

For any local to South Bend Kirsten Lunstrum is doing a reading
Tuesday night at IUSB, Wiekamp Hall, 7 pm. She is a very good
fiction writer. This Life's She's Chosen, a book of stories, was
published in 2005 by Chronicle books and her new book of stories
has been purchased by that same press for future release.

*

I'm teaching The Selected Levis next term and University of
Pittsburh Press sent me a desk copy and a copy of Elegy on the house.
Now I've got three copies of that book. Oddly, last night, I sent my
poetry manuscript, The Coldest Winter on Earth, the title poem of
which just appeared in POOL (I've heard it's out; I haven't received my
copy yet), to Ed Ochester at Pitt. I'm hoping it might mean something
because I'm the kind who would insist something like that wouldn't.

*

Passages North is publishing a couple of my Ashbery Erasure "poems."

How fun is that, and funny, and cool.

Thank you to Eric Smith and Austin there at PN.

*

The sun is out right now but it is snowing, huge cottony flakes of snow.

Last Night's Game


The Tigers won in such a way I was content to keep
drinking milk and grab a blanket. Of course you know
nothing's that easy. A chill runs down the spine.
We'll see tonight. I'll be going on over to FX
during breaks to check out the Mets game . . .

Centrality

(A screaming came) (Norfolk) (Do not call unless invited)


*

THE PROBLEM HAS TO DO WITH THE WAR


When the woman you’d kissed said in class she was appalled by your denouement.
Everyone stopped slouching—student as cloud drifting over
gray battlefields. Dull as the time it takes to wipe mosquitoes
off your arms. In my dream we embed tiny jungles
inside every desert. The problem has to do with the water.
I want the story to fall like water. I want the roller coaster to burn up
In the small jungle. I want the girl in the forest to eat her way
to New England. In life sometimes the love interests die.
Your story is okay but it’s flawed. Her son is home, nurturing his ant
farm. A girl shot through the head says good-night to her grieving mother.

It Keeps Getting Better


The Mets win in three! At the stroke of midnight!

OH Absolute and Lovely Chaos


The Tigers just beat the Yankees in Four!!!

Afterlife


In heaven all the interesting people will be missing--Nietzsche


Thanks Alex Lemon

My Dream, for Jim Zola

Here I am running away
from my high blood
pressure, triggered
by too many corners
I have no control over.
Here I am running from
my own brain, an object
I seem to have lost
in a snowstorm. Here I
am attempting to run
from grading papers. A
version of me sits in the
lighted house surrounded
by wandering sentences.
Here I am running from a hallway stacked with poets only no one actually
has the time to write a poem. Here I am doing one of the things I do best,
in knickers though, which is the unsettling part. I love the corn. I
sometimes run through the field against the rows while blackbirds reel
overhead. I sometimes escape into the dark woods and look under logs for
salamanders while nightmares squall like little hurricanes in the open air
away from the darkness, in the dreadful sunlight, where meetings occur.
But these knickers!! And I appear to be stuck on my side, perhaps turning
in a big circle like Curly from the Three Stooges, dressed like a school boy.
I appear to be spinning in my own brain like Curly, or like a dying insect.
I appear to be spinning in full view of God, who is sending clouds my
way to relax me. (He knows I quit smoking a month ago.) I appear to be
spinning because in my own brain I am becoming God; I can't see your
words because they are littered with accent marks, little knives, and the
blood flying over your tongue is like a wave pushing a dream out.
I appear to be running and spinning. I'm too troubled. I appear to be
running toward the front of my own skull. I am pierced through the heart
by a five dollar bill, which is about what I make in a day. It turns into a
moth. (Thank you) The windows look up at the moon. Here I am running
toward the canals of the fish hatchery, where fingerling trout get lost in the
pipes underground and live there and grow, swelling on the vine, ten
pounds, twenty. When the world is uncapped fifteen years later the
fish comes out white and screaming, flattening out like paper. Under the
moon. In knickers. Like high blood pressure.

excerpt from Flood

(as a kind of poem)

Everything froze and stopped moving, stood cold
and still for a week in the clean, cold sunshine. Clouds
rolled in and coalesced overhead, and I could feel their
shadows on my arms, and inside me, deep inside, under
the skin, then over and behind my shoulders as I
walked, pressing in from behind, then everything
brightened with wintery silver light that seemed to
fall out of the clouds and onto the cars and streets and
patches of new grass near the gas station where
I’d taken employment. I replaced the gas cap on a
rusted Ford truck and hung the nozzle in its notch. I
blew on my fingers and took the customer’s credit card
into the tiny outbuilding with raw particle board walls
and physically forced the roller over the charge slip
placed over the card and wrote in the figures, foregoing
writing down the guy’s plate number. Other cars were
turning in, trailing puffs of exhaust. A woman with red
hair simply pulled alongside my little makeshift hut
and batted her eyes at me. But she wasn’t flirting.
“I can’t see,” she said, pouting. Then she pushed her
washer fluid button as explanation. This action caused
a grinding noise but no fluid. While customers waited
at the pumps—there were eight full-service pumps—I
replenished her washer fluid—the reservoir was
bone-dry—and then we watched together while she
happily squirted the blue fluid onto her windshield
and flipped on her wipers. Somebody honked.
Someone else pulled up to the diesel pumps.
The woman smiled. This small triumph made her
very happy. She opened a leopard skin purse and
began fishing around for a wallet. “Don’t be ridiculous,”
I said, and waved her off. She made me happy.
(Happy women make me happy, I remember repeating
that sentence in my mind.) Then I went to wait on
the pain-in-the-ass who kept honking the car horn.
“You are such a dear,” I could hear the woman shout,
before pealing away in her little red Datsun. The gray,
whistling air was alive with little spits of snow. In a way,
it felt good to be out in it, dressed in layers, prepared
for the cold, and with so much to do. Later in the
afternoon, near the end of my six-hour shift, I saw
Sheryl scoot past in her Mustang, right down Sheridan
Avenue and under a yellow light that had just turned red . . .
I took off my Red Sox cap and shook it, letting my
hair blow around in the cold gusts, then replaced the
hat snugly. The thing was covered with grease. I missed
Sheryl, sure, hell yes I missed her. But I was busy
pumping gas, smashing a roller over plastic credit cards,
puffing out clouds of air while the customers signed
for gasoline, handing them a copy for their records.
There was a lull in business, and more snow, too early
in the year for so much of it, flakes gathering in bunches
on top of orange leaves that had fallen and stuck in
between the branches of the cedars planted decoratively
near the air pump and the open air public telephone.
I went into the shack and warmed my hands in front of
the electric heater Bolton’s brother loaned me (“You can
use this. I bought it because I’m a pussy about the cold
when I get out of the shower in the winter. It’s stupid.
Here. Take it away from me. You don’t even have any
insulation in that thing,” he said). Then he loaned me
a book about “this chick who has enormous thumbs,”
he said. “It’s good though. She hitchhikes with them,
and there’s lezzie stuff, and everyone’s just trying out life.
It’ll make you wanna quit this job. But don’t.” It was called
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. And that’s when Hawkins
showed up with Penny MacCalester in tow. They pulled
up to the small window in the shack and I slid it open.
“This is a stick up,” Penny said, and she was pointing a
curved banana at me. “The genius here is that we can eat
the murder weapon,” Hawkins said. “Or most of it.”
But then another impatient customer pulled up, revved
his engine too hard, shut his engine off, and sat there visibly
tapping the dashboard. So in this manner I read the book
and thought about the future, all while managing to
watch the clock, a habit I would never really break as
a worker.

Last

A prose poem by Wendy Barker


If it meant going dead I would rather. Better just not
see him, or talk. I can't even come in and sit in one of
the kid's desks next to you at lunch time? he said. Not
even that. If the soil were packed down hard, solid
clay like the earth around the old mildewed roses,
no room for air, no sand or humus, maybe nothing
more would grow through. Tamp it all down, not even
room for a strand. The answer was no. Take the green
pillow case I had kept and fold it into a box and seal it
with tape. Same box for the photo of his big head in
front of a redwood, smiling at me. Put it all away.
Close down shop. Move back to the desert.

excerpt from Flood


Sheryl lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out through her silver lips.
For a second I had an impulse to quote Sartre, or Camus, but couldn’t
remember a single sentence from either of them. And then Sheryl said,
“Just because I’m an emotional person doesn’t mean everything boils
down to these stupid either/or propositions. I like getting off with you,
but I can’t imagine spending a weekend with you. You’re always thinking,
and I can feel it in the air. Or if you aren’t thinking you’re waiting, which,
basically amounts to the same thing.” The lane we were driving down was
lined with huge beech trees, and then I saw Stanley Carrier’s Gremlin
rusting away by the side of the road. One of the wheels had been
removed and the car was jacked up but no one was around.
Carrier was this huge guy and I remember thinking that
the Gremlin was such a lightweight piece of shit he could have unloosed
the lug nuts and simply lifted the car himself to remove the tire. The car had
been abandoned at the bottom of Ghost Hill, right where we used to throw
snowballs at cars and run, scattering in a million directions through the
trees. It was a perfect situation. Only once did some smart ass hide
until we returned, but we just scattered again, like blackbirds screeching
away through the dark crevasses of night. Then I thought of my parents
and what possible circumstances could have caused that train wreck. It
was hard for me to imagine I was the result of what came out of the end
of my father’s dick. The two of them got together for God only knows
what reason and the result was my sister and me, a brush fire running
rampant in the fields, long after the initiating parties had
packed their car and driven away. I wanted badly to believe in
Sheryl’s version of a consequence-less universe, but it seemed to
me all states of exultation required that somebody somewhere
eventually feel bad. “I just need to fuck you really hard,” I said,
rather flatly, echoing what Sheryl had said earlier, because I was
tired of talking and thinking by now. “You’d better be ready,” Sheryl
said, and turned up the stereo. A Frank Zappa song was playing, a
song from Zoot Alures called “Working in a Gas
Station.” This was Zappa playing it slick and hard and fast. Noise
flung out all over the place as if off the energy spun out by a bullet.
“I love this song,” I said. “It’s like an orderly train wreck.”
“‘In the Evening’ is like an orderly train wreck," she said. "This is white
noise with a hysterical tempo.” Okay, I thought, not quite together
on the music thing . . . When we got to Sheryl’s she excused herself
to take a shower. “I’ve got sand in my crotch,” she said. “I’ll take it with
you,” I said. “I don’t think so,” she said, and disappeared inside
the bathroom. I sat down on the big expensive couch and
looked at my hands. They looked good, a man’s hands.
The house smelled the same as it had the time we fucked on
the burnt orange carpet—like lemon oil and pipe tobacco. There
is nothing more somber than a house that doesn’t look lived
in. A big antique grandfather clock ticked authoritatively between
two huge book cases neatly stacked with hardcover books,
sans dust jackets. I didn’t care for the baroque opulence of all
the woodwork. Scrolls and louvers and spires seemed to
poke up everywhere. It was colonial torture chamber. The
calligraphy on the face of the clock was a case of runaway hubris.
When I heard the shower come on I got up and used the phone.
It was push button and looked completely out of place.
There had been a few seconds of confusion earlier on the dune,
when I felt Sheryl’s breath on my ribs and had a flash of deja-vu.
Somebody somewhere is praying. There was a feeling like
somebody holding something hot against my side. I expected to
hear Alanthra speak and when I looked I saw tears in Sheryl’s
eyes. It was turning dark outside. I stood in front of a big bay
window with the phone to my ear and looked out over Mona
Lake, which had become luminous and still as a huge mirror.
Maple seeds whirled down, raining onto the water, causing a
ballet of concentric circles that intersected and died away, continuously.
Nobody answered Alanthra’s phone. Making love to Sheryl that evening
was like digging a pit with a pick ax in solid rock. The sun sat screaming
in the sky, and lizards and birds were dying in the middle of the desert
in the shadows of drooping cacti. Her skin was smooth, like it had
been sand-blasted. My hand would be coasting over her. Then all of a
sudden she was deep and wet and endless. I wanted to push deep. I
wanted to go for her heart. She flung herself wide open for me. And I
kept thinking, How does she know? When I bit her nipple she got my hair
in a fist and told me to bite harder. She was frail, and she was meat, and
I could feel her soul banging to get out of her body, to dash itself over my
back and spread there like flames and burn me to death.
It was terrible and beautiful at the same time. I swam against the
Rembrandt-esque tint in the cave of what my arms and teeth were
doing to her. Then she reached between my legs and pulled and I
felt the sensation of falling. I thought of the paintings of Hieronymous
Bosch. Her bedroom was flickering with candlelight and the walls
shimmered, a chiaroscuro landscape full of trees and the grunting of
wolves tearing animals apart in tall snowdrifts. Sheryl was bent before me,
presenting. Something cut off the circulation in my wrists. Through it all I
could smell our bodies sweating. It was sweet, like lilacs, but
underneath it, there was the smell of stale water rotting in a vase full
of wilted flowers, like stale urine, like something hiding in the dark,
something stagnant under the ground, something beautiful. Toward
the end she scraped her teeth along my spine. Then she grabbed my
hair and wrenched my head back so my throat was exposed and she
kissed me. Wasn’t this what two people might do after having a tender
moment at the beach together? I was in love with the fact that
somebody on this earth seemed to know my biggest secret.