Frame it.



Not one worthwhile Hollywood film to see,
since I'll take the inscrutable over the
transparent (ostensibly about X or Y)
every single time. Naomi Watts is great
in a rabbit suit. Outside the steaming winter
earth. Followed by my new homemade
version of a Hotpocket. Yumm.

David Lynch and the Yule? Sure.




I managed to find the quiet to watch The Straight Story,
an interesting David Lynch movie. I want to talk
a little about it but I don't in any way want to review
it. I don't care what you will think (or thought) of The
Straight Story. But I was moved immensely by it, just
so you know. And what I loved about it . . . How can I tell
you when I see a patch of moss in the woods, close-up, and
the myriad colors there, and then move to touch it,
how do I push that experience into your lap and make you
feel something that's like knowing something? (Remember the
blind guy and what happens in that great Carver story,
"Cathedral"?) Maybe I just shouldn't say anything.
At some point I can write a line about it, the way the moss left
an "imprint of its tiny hands on her bare back," for instance,
or I can tell someone all about it--the movie, the moss--but
there's no way of communicating what I mean precisely enough.
Which is why someone who knows me vaguely might turn
to you and ask, "Isn't that Lee guy--you know, the fish dude--isn't
he, like, bi-polar?" Because sometimes I try too hard. The Lynch
movie did such a good job of framing the world. All those middle
distances and long landscape shots. Another crackling fire. Weather,
the corn, the small burning house, the deer hit by a car. Nothing
hyperbolic anywhere in sight, a necklace of colorful jewels tucked
back inside the fabric of remembering the slow-moving, often
surreal world. Then: Richard Farnsworth's watery eyes. In many
ways the film reminded me of Erasurehead--the timing, the
texturing. I rode a bicycle through that part of Wisconsin once,
and was there more recently, Anderson and Maiden Rock, as L.
recalls. It's a landscape I can't shake. I remember enjoying
The Bridges of Madison County (the movie) for the same reason,
but not as much as I did this, this Straight Story. Farnsworth's
lawnmower dies, on one of those omnipresent dirt roads so common
to the region, just short of his destination. But he gets there, and
sits there with his brother. There's no line to write for the actors
at this point. On the script it could say They listen for a woodpecker
out in the woods. I also watched The Three Burials of Melquiades
Estrada, starring and directed by Tommy Lee Jones. A good
movie, but I'm not romantic about deserts or Mexico. TLJ is so
charismatic all I remember is his face and the way he can stand
in half a frame and you just want to see him move. Not the same
man who showed up for Men in Black.

*

I was pulled over for speeding on toll road 80/90 for the first
time yesterday, first time caught speeding in six years. 83
in a 70 and I was let off with a written-up warning. But then
that makes me remember the last time I was caught speeding
was on 9/11 (yes, THE 9/11). It was about two in the
afternoon, I was driving south, from Michigan's Upper Peninsula,
and the cop told me I'd better fill up on gas, pronto, before it hits
twenty bucks a gallon. Remember the sheer panic and
uncertainty anything could happen that day? He let me off with
a warning too, a non written-up warning. His way of being nice on
this day begining the War of the Worlds. By evening the price of
gas had halted. The Attorney General (Jennifer Granholm
at the time) threatened anyone caught gouging would be in serious trouble.
She was tougher sounding than that, I just can't recall the particulars.
Gas levelled off. We all, tentatively, began to laugh a little again the
next day. The world has been changed forever, everyone thought.
Yeah, right, and which reality show would you like for this evening's
crass entertainment. Can I say something that will make many
people angry (or they won't believe me). I still haven't watched
a reality show (unless you count football or CNN), but no Idol,
no Survivor, no Ozzy, no Fat Actress. And it's not
that they're beneath me, really. The just seem incredibly boring.

Someone Has Been Trying to Poison Me

a poem by Katie Degentesh

I have two kids still alive on the 23rd of March 2004
"Here, have another one," said summer, thrusting
the tiny tin of speed at me

actually, it wasn't speed
it was the awakening of nature

bread that smells this good
understands my attitude instantly

That insufferable woman
runs in distressed circles
oozing references to
pizza in Chicago

As I know crowns and wars
the stove is smoking!

apples contained razorblades
and wouldn't go to restaurants

Come hither purposely
with typhus vapours
And I will spit in
the piano room

I'd offer to fuck him
when the soaps are on TV

Assume any shape you like
unless you show me the way
to the ship's rail.

This lamb is telling me that
me, my wife, son and pet
have never discussed this issue

swedish-art-glass me with aloes
or kill me on the stage at night

by gorging yourself on the pits
of microscopic uranium crystals

I got ants in my sugar, baby
and the orange-orchard
is very fond of me

The fourth new tree shouldn't be here
Just when you think you've got
enough, enough grows

My guinea pig just died
The agony, the scratching, the embarrassment
second-hand nastiness
I want my chlorine gas

A pair of hostile geese
With horseradish
burst into my qaurters
I am still well and strong

A Poem from The Little Book of Guesses

by John Gallaher



Campfire Girls at Sunrise Hill



A very serious undertaking, it is,
the way the interior unflattens
as we press our faces to the garlands

and veils, over these
better surfaces, better maps. So we
motored on down

for the evening.

The trees that were around us were themselves
for a moment. Later, I'm silver
under the stars.

And so was everybody else.
We were no different.

Silver trees over silver girls
on these silver hills.

It was horrible. But that's just
words. I could just as easily
have said wonderful.

Please.

Don't remember me like this,
remember me some other way,

some way I never was.

I got a picture of myself, framed, as a kid,
from one of my sisters for Christmas. A sweet
little boy, people say, esp. women, of these pictures.
But I say he looks like he's itching
to be elsewhere, to grow up, to find somewhere
comfortable to be. I won't really give
him the time of day. But here's the thing.
My sister sent the picture in a Schwan's
Sesame Chicken Meal Kit box. Keep Frozen.
I thought, what an odd gift, and put the thing
in the freezer. I thought about it for a bit, using
a toothpick, put on . . a . . CAKE CD . . .Twenty
minutes later I rescued it, him, unwrapped the
frame from its thick blankets of plastic, and there
was the white crust of condensation getting at the
cold glass in the warm air. When I scraped with
a fingernail I could keep a little hole going around
his face. He's wearing a tie, and a coat that looks too
small. It's a nice black and white picture. Thank
you. Years later he got a coat that fit okay. To Cathy:
Sorry I tried to freeze the picture. I thought the
"meal" seemed awfully light.

Strange Things Happen at Night

(an Ashbery Erasure Poem)


Think about it
Prepare to go out of your dreams

Art cannot see you

Your boyfriend
Numb
Should've turned by now

Rain impedes recess
We must act remote
Every day

Bicycle
Ribs
People
The hot thought not lost

Go turn up your living

I mean uppers
The odes
Or gas

Man can be made to last

I recently worked on a manuscript by Ed Adams.
Some fine things in that collection. But that's not
why I mention him. Ed collects and sells books.
About a month after I sent the edited ms. back
he wrote me a letter along with a copy of
Downsides of Fish Culture. On a separate sheet
of paper, a yellow slip folded up inside a white
sheet, he wrote: "Well, maybe you've noticed
your book enclosed here; I'm hoping for a signature
encore (don't worry, I won't send anymore--
Arrow Pointing North or The Coldest Winter
when it appears, though I'm looking forward to
getting to read both of them). I liked the
perch icon last time--can you do (a quick)
pike? Ed PS--Most enjoyed your comments
on poems that didn't work for you such as
'Hello Mr. Oppen' and particularly the one 'Wait,
is he wearing like a blue jumpsuit?'-on
The Purple Girder poem--that comment cracks me
up everytime I think of it."

Thank you, Ed. I aim to please.

I dreamed my room was the world. Painting by Bill Gingles.

SOME HOLIDAY THOUGHTS



Helped put white Christmas lights up this week, round
and round in the daylight, circles floating unencumbered
at night. Also, dead leaves in the gutter, the clouds
like mountains turned upside down skidding past
the damp Indiana rooftops. A cardinal flew into a window
and I received a call and removed it, flung its bright
red sliver of birdness into prickers and smashed flat
leaves. Wind keeps blowing through the waterwheel.
There's a sound like someone drinking cold water. It's
the middle of winter and geese continue to fly in
asymmetrical Vs. They will be doing this in January,
just as there will be a few robins around all year long
(twenty years ago you'd never see a robin this far
north through March). Some herons stay all winter along
the St. Joe River. I want to write about that river but
I need to come up with a poetics first. I need a conceptual
framework around which to hang my ideas about
birds and water. The bird flew through his mind like
a boat cutting water. What would the equivalent to
"a poetics" in poetry be in painting? Oh blessed figure
and ground. Oh blessed picture plain essential in its
vivid flatness. Darby Bannard has a paint-off against
Brice Marden. Who wins? I've got this book I wrote
and I've sent it, along with checks, to certain presses.
I get notes telling me my work is exciting in exchange
for the dough. Good luck finding a home for it, the note
often continues. I used to contract my services to presses
and would screen manuscripts down to, say, twenty. These
would go to "the judge." I did this often. Not once did
the manuscripts I liked (top five) end up winning.
I'm not saying there is anything rigged. I'm extending
the discussion about BAP. I have to keep paying
the money (until I run out maybe) until a judge whose
idea of what's best picks my work. I don't send
to the ones I know won't pick it (Is foetry still out there?
Is there anyone left who is truly blind to the odds
and biases implicit in publishing via judged contests?)
In the meantime I'm revising stories. I read a book
of stories by Jodi Angel. I found them predictably
shocking. Everyone is disenfranchised, suffering, and
everyone seems to end up having sex because of it.
I've read two new stories by Lorrie Moore in The
New Yorker in the last couple years. It feels like she's
writing with half her will. Where is the new "You're
Ugly, Too"? Kathy, my stepdaughter, graduated from
college Friday. She went to school in Marquette,
Michigan, one of the wildest places left on earth.
"Even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible
level, creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable
and apparently uncalled for," on a 3x5 card here, from
Dillard. A spider has a web in the corner of my
bathroom, in winter. It hangs there, at attention,
possibly a container of galaxies and a whole different
array of ideas concerning the definition of a God.
After watching two movies, Stanger Than Fiction
and Best of Show, the latter is the more honest and
interesting creation. I can't get this image out of my
head: Will Ferrel playing an acoustic guitar and singing
in such a manner Maggie Gyllenhaal's nipples seem to
grow instantaneously hard. I say seems. She falls
for him anyway, that enchanting sensitive man and
his guitar. I think my friend Sally Smits knows something
about that. After all we've been through now we're
going to up the troop levels in Iraq. Good thing we're
so sure we won't be needing them anywhere else
in the world. When I saw Jerry Seinfeld in concert
recently everyone around me was ecstatic
to see part of their own past in the flesh dashing around
on stage before them. It was almost unnerving.
Comedians, bless them, are the sanest amongst us.
Comedians and Language Poets. The L.P.s need their
own sitcom however. We need to let them into our
hearts while we chew down dinner (Ham, Mashed Potatoes,
and Green Bean Casserole). I remember a goldfinch
flew into a window in Kalamazoo. I held it in my hand
and could see the spot of blood spread in its tiny eye.
It gripped my index finger and wouldn't let go. I
thought it might be dreaming. It opened its beak and
a sound like a piano collapsing flew out. It started
speaking in such a way I thought of borderline personality
disorder--love, love, RAGE; love, love, RAGE. That's
when I started walking at night again. Only after a while
it's winter. You sit near the door holding a wide yellow
shovel and wearing a stocking cap. You feel like you're
part of the movie Fargo. Buspar: Take one tablet
two times a day due to PTSD caused by contact with
roundabouts in Massachusetts and the subsequent
discovery of a few of them popping up in places around
South Bend. Are the San Diego Chargers the best team
in football? Or the New Orleans Saints? It matters way
way more than you might imagine.

Deflating Shame


The poet of lust.

Twombly Break.

THE KID DOESN’T KNOW



Do not startle. Swayed, taken under, trod
Upon, followed by a bludgeoning of
Sparks. I didn’t want to cough back awake

In love, starving. There was the time I drank
Vitamins like spit off the backs of the
Leaves. The spots of foam had eggs inside them,

Troubled over time into something bridge-
Less. “Kiss me,” flies bubbling over a kind
Of nature-ful wantonness. Those bodies

And the time reserved to schedule a tired
Botany of reflexive sex acts. I
See my love as a calypso of vines

While you stretch yourself naked beside a
Cinderblock’s worth of cold, dry heat. Body
Burns like a backward glance, howling comma

So tight the wind makes a name inside it.
Headlights grow brighter, drown out the night beach,
Moon stuck high on a smokestack, the future

Some kind of ash borer. It snacks on the
Meat of black wood, blond in the snarl of day-
Light. I put up tents on vestibules of

Ice. This is what I’m suggesting. I took
A long walk and found children spitting up
Green pupae, pellets of dead leaves and skin.

They were spitting and smiling. A kid
Doesn’t know what to do with a body.
The people in charge of what goes where turn

The blood in the brain like a wheel made of
Crushed acorns. Smoke pours off a boy’s smooth arms
And legs. He’s only dreaming. The stars want

What’s theirs, the pines want what leaks through the dirt.

Cakes and Eggs


I would say I've been reading too much Breece D'J Pancake
and fiction by Frank Stanford. Or, really, for the way I've been
feeling, not enough. The lake effect is casting its shadow
my way . . .

16 Degrees



I tossed an empty hanger into the sky today and it
veered back to me like a wire boomerang. It's cold outside,
freezing the birds. They walk on the tinder of the bent grass,
mirror to mirror. Kristy sent me a good CD, I Feel Tractor,
and so she's funny and kind-hearted. When the sun comes
out now the shadows are almost alarming. Adult tapes
stuck in the corner of the basement of even the grist mill.
They're in there with a small box of arrowheads, a calendar
rolled up, an entire year smelling of spice. So I throw down
these grades in even columns and everyone steps to one side,
the hall is polished, everyone inhales, feels that clicking
in the bones of their necks as they finally come to
and turn their heads to wake up. WAKE UP!
Here comes January like a shining bullet. Sometimes you
have to stop teaching your class and go to YouTube and
bring up Triumph, The Comic Insult Dog insulting Star
Wars fanatics all standing around on a New York City sidewalk.
It's worth the time out from learning (or teaching) to watch
him hump The Force. I walked along the St. Joe River
the other day and saw a deer with its head above water,
swimming. It ran into a neighborhood after that, its body
following. I suddenly wanted to cut up a green pepper, to
eat one raw. It needs to blizzard. The channel you are
searching for should be available shortly.