A HELD THING


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


He sorted
what I know
you mean

so men become clarity
suck us out of the teenager

I cried
on a canvas

a vivid approximation of communion
reason and madness

that orchard
will make you think of time

for starters

but the rounded human
like a statistic in the good old days
makes the hood

of that bonnet
fall like a city

o little explosions when you need protection--

It’s beginning

Quote 6

Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"Darkness appals and light dazzles; the scrap of visible light
that doesn't hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me
swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling
of meanings confuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore
log bridge over Tinker Creek in the summer. I look at the
lighted creek bottom: snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering
curves. A crayfish jerks, but by the time I absorb what
has happened, he's gone in a billowing smokescreen of silt.
I look at the water: minnows and shiners. If I'm thinking
minnows, a carp will fill my brain till I scream."

Catbird, Carolina Wren, Oriole

Am I getting too nature-y. Too bad. Anyway, these are the

three birds who visited me today at the grist mill when I went home

for dinner (tuna fish straight out of the can and some boiled

frozen corn--it was REALLY good so don't get any ideas!).

These are actually reproductions of the representative

species. I'd love to say I'm so holy an oriole perched on my hand

but such is far from the case. The catbird does sing and sing

regardless of how close I get. These wrens are so absolutely brilliant

in color compared to the house wren (but I love the noisy house

wren). I'd like to tag ten people, say, "name five birds you've seen

this month not counting robins, cardinals, crows, starlings,

blackbirds, sparrows (or at least house sparrows) or pigeons."

Maybe explain where you saw it/them. Yes? No? Dumb idea.

Hmmm. Maybe cross out Magpies too (I'm thinking of you

Oliver! all alone out there in the west with your own bird types!).

I don't know.

Qoute number 5


And it's from by Larry Levis. Okay, okay, it's just Condition of Spirit
is sitting right here okay. And, like, I really buy into (a little
capitalist lingo, excuse me) what LL (creepy, same initials as Lindsey
Lohan (see post below)) is saying, with my whole whale of a heart.



"I believe what Yeats said. Passion is what matters in poetry;
and sustaining one's art sometimes depends on really not giving a
shit about anything else but just doing it. It also has to do with
a certain nonchalance and ease and arrogance by which one
goes about it, as if you don't have any debts or obligations to
pay. The people who are telling you that you do have obligations,
moral ones . . . to their morals, are essentially just bullshit. You
don't have to pay attention to that. At any rate, you've already
paid that debt and you paid it yesterday. What they want to
do is keep you in line and make you behave."

Inside other


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


roll of the snow

shoots up

a warrant is exchanged
in a great hiss of fire ants

the pathetic life force

is last to go home

but my kid is different

nobody would mess with her clams

therefore we can attack

we were interested
in having already done it
behind them

One scholar observes two people

her name was covered up

Of pebbles obscured

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


our lard, in some cases
replicating

miniature to a fault

satisfy reports

we imagine as inexplicable

birth as a lot of hammering

Then a blonde woman
mistakenly assumed
the thunder for a repertory of cries

damn of the earth

in whose rank

Feathers,

then personality,

were to be
argued

to a dead-end in the quietism
of the infinite

last peace . . .

The Genius of Lindsey Lohan



Who the hell is Lindsey Lohan? Is she, like Paris Hilton,
daughter of a zillionaire somewhere? Why are we obsessed
with her personal life? What is it that defines these
girls we can't stop monitoring? Those are rhetorical Qs.
We've stopped living life on terra firma. We sit with
little pleasure centers in our brains pulsing to whatever
news, no matter how insipid and irrelevant, the media
spits out. But I just don't know who this person is.
The name, like some kind of "brand," is in the air, yes,
"Ms. Lohan, your flight has arrived at your gate."
Didn't she kiss some other female celebrity? Was that LL?
I can of course Google her, but then I'd no longer get to
ask who she is, and it seems important somehow
to say that everywhere I look (when I'm not outside or
reading the last pages of Silent Spring, or the stories
of Flannery O'Conner--which I just picked up again,
or when I'm not buttering a potato, which I do frequently,
or enjoying Bill Knott's blog) this woman's partying is big
news. And I don't know who she is (or possibly a better
way to put it is I don't know what she does, or did, in the
past). Is it that she's blonde? If you drink and you're blonde
should you watch out from now on? How come there are
like thirty blonde celebrity girls out there
that all look the same. Or am I just seeing Britney Spears
over and over again (I had to Google Ms. Spears
to spell both first and last name) now that
she has hair again or has donned a blonde wig . . .
Sometimes I make this mistake with birds. "I saw
five catbirds near Ironwood last week!"
But really it was probably the same bird, popping up
over and over again, like Droopy (in the cartoon),
a single catbird, bright gray bird, black beak, mews
like a cat when it's not singing a symphony of other bird
calls mixed with the sounds of car horns and creaking gates,
all sounds it mimics. So, maybe I just saw the one catbird?
So is L.L. really just B.S. (pears, not bullshit)? I mean, maybe
we have several names for this Celebrity Blonde, the way
we like to call the Pope the Pontiff and not just the Pope.
Could be, right? Who can tell me? I know who that other woman is,
Mrs. Brad Pitt, to the extent that when I'm out at a party and
there might be an ad for a new movie, I refer to her as
A. J. She was in a movie with Billy Bob Thorton (BBT)
about flying airplanes (Flying Tin I think, with
John Cusack) once and I'm not sure I've seen
her on the silver screen since then (did she make
something worth seeing in the intervening years?).
I say, at the party, or visit, whatever, didn't A.J. just return
from Africa? And didn't they put fat from some part
of her body in her lips? "Oh yes, she has. And a big No on
the fat injections, my fine poetically addled friend," my friend
W. says, "and have you tried my dip made with fresh
avocadoes." But A.J. is a brunette. Now I'm right back at the
beginning again!! Would W. know who L.L. is? I feel like
I'm stuck inside a Mark Halliday poem.

That Makes Three and Four I Think



"Out of our argument with others we make rhetoric; Out of
our argument with ourselves we make poetry." William Butler Yeats.


"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." Walter Pater.

THEORY DRIVEN LAMB ALERT



Bill Knott's got some interesting things to say here.
Isn't Knott the odd man out, the real creative madman,
the "experimental" poet one most wants to cheer on
because he does what he does because he can't help it.
He hasn't developed a formula for it anyway . . .

The post starts out on Physics but keep reading.

I'm thinking of the Ashbery/Bloom stuff . . .

But the good/great idea is a lot of bleak fun as well.

Flannery O'Conner



"If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol,
you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first."

from Mytsery and Manners

Quotes


I was tagged by Jenni--I don't know, three days ago I guess (what is
today's date?)--and there are too many ways to approach this
task and most don't seem to me they would yield interesting reading.
For one thing, I don't have a photographic memory. I think I
assimilate things I read in some manner most helpful and then I
forget the source and the words completely, unless it's one of
thirty or forty quotes we all hear constantly, such as Pound's
"Make it new" or Williams's "No ideas but in things." And those
sayings are like dead metaphors to me by now. I've heard them so
often they mean little to me, even though I recall at different
times they were important to me and so I guess I would say now
what they mean to me is really surfacy and not very interesting
to repeat at this point. And I don't cling to any
one idea or methodology for writing poems anyway. Or maybe
I write like the tarantula, moving about the landscape touching
everything with my sensitive front legs. When whatever I touch
sends something like mild electric currents back at me I stop
there for a while. The problem is . . . well, it's not a problem, I
guess, except that the resulting poems, once collected, don't,
indeed, have an overarching conceptual and/or aesthetic principle
guiding them, or at least not one that I care to make conscious,
because, well, once I KNOW what all my poems are trying to mean,
they become dull, contrived. Or at least they become no fun to write,
and I suspect they'd be awful to read. Also, I get bored. It's ADD. It's
me trying to deny my OCD impulses. It's because once, in a land far
far away, I somehow stumbled my way into getting an MFA. This
is really becoming coy, and I'm sorry about that. It's a long winded
way of saying I know what interests me but I don't want to or don't
know how to say what it is. I think it's a little of both of these things.
I know I'm creating a really big structure, and sometimes in my
more grandiose moments I think of all these waves of poems I make
as a miles-long coral reef, or . . . and here we are, smack dab back
into the idea of Nature. Coral reefs, tarantulas! But now I will
shut up. But I'll jot down some quotes about poetry that amuse
me, only I'll do one or two a day until I have ten or get sick of the
activity.

This quote is excerpted from a Larry Levis interview, and in it
he is giving an example of what Phil Levine might say in a workshop
to a student who's not getting there, wherever there might be:

"For a moment there your imagination made an appearance
in this poem and its loveliness astonished us all, but then . . .
right . . . here--where you say, 'Love is golden, Daddy, and
forever,' the grim voice of Puritan duty comes back in and
overwhelms you with a sense of obligation even you couldn't
possibly believe in."

an excerpt of FLOOD


A couple hours later we walked onto the lake pulling
a sled covered with tackle, two hot seats, two tip ups, buckets,
a bag of Doritos. We carried an auger and bait minnows and ice
scoops. We had moved the entire operation to Lake Trowbridge
because nothing was biting on Mona Lake. Water. We lived on
small peninsulas of land separated by big lakes. In order to get
anywhere by car one was always driving twenty miles east and
west to travel three miles north and south.

Alanthra had said Roger’s eyes streamed tears while he looked
for the place on her arm to brand her, all the while mumbling
about that “supreme cunt, the devil.”

“There was like a whole fucking chorus inside that guy,” she said.

Now Bolton was staring down into one of the new holes we’d augured.
Whole sentences were pealing out of his mouth, but they got bottled
up in the ice and his cupped hands so nobody knew if he was
addressing another sturgeon or talking to us, but he seemed to be
having a good time.

“He’s found the perfect audience,” Hawkins said, and he handed me
a fresh half pint of peppermint schnapps. I took a swig and my nasal
passages tingled instantly. Even my shoulders warmed up. We’d
already finished the bottle Alanthra bought.

“This stuff’s medicinal,” I said.

“Don’t tell me what I already know,” Hawkins said.

“So why bring a bottle the size of a thimble then?” I said.

Hawkins took a couple of brazen swallows, like a polar
bear attacking a juice box. “Restraint,” he said. “I don’t have any.”
We’d only caught one fish, which was now frozen into an arc from
being buried in the snow. Hawkins kept picking it up by the tail and
posing with it, as if he were about to toss a boomerang.
That evening, sitting with Alanthra in my car, which was idling in
her driveway, I couldn’t tell if I was happy or just tired. I had
begun to believe that maybe they were the same thing.

We kissed. Alanthra licked her lips. “Candy,” she said. “You taste
like a candy-cane.”

And when I got home that’s what I told my mother. “I taste
like a candy-cane.”

“Everyone’s gotta taste like something,” she said. The television
was on and the volume rattled the kitchen window. Huge icicles hung
in the air a foot from the glass. They were lit by the electric light in
the house—little curved rooms encased in ice. Everything else out
there was dark at this hour. I felt the smallest chill.

Then I only wanted to crawl into bed and go to sleep. I was tired.
It felt good. My bed was like a big, warm tub of friendly water,
maybe with a smiling face on it, if you can imagine such an image.
I closed my eyes and let the water cover me.

I slept twelve hours straight.

*

On the way home from the Ramada Inn Sheryl turned
on some Steve Miller. The Mustang floated through the fall
shadows— clouds and sun, flickering bright leaves falling—and
the presence of the dunes leaning over us, always, even when
driving a mile away from them.

So much of that time seems, now, to contain the textures
of pop songs. Once we were closer to the lake, once we crossed
the Lake Harbor Bridge and were south of Mona Lake, the air
turned cooler and Talking Heads were playing, the song “Big
Country” twanging mellowly while Sheryl lit another cigarette.
I didn’t care what I looked like anymore. I had a twist of tissue
shoved up my nose to prevent further bleeding.

“Why don’t you sit up?” Sheryl said. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

I felt like we had driven through a crack in time, and I felt good
about it. The music was blowing over me and out the window
people were busy mowing lawns and raking leaves. The
shadows of the maples and oaks that arced over the road ran
like liquid across the hood to be sucked up into the glass of the
windshield. It reminded me of riding home with a parent after
basketball practice, before I could drive, when driving was still
mysterious (“Why doesn’t the car run off the road? You’re
hardly even moving the steering wheel.”).

There was the drama of school, of sports—that musty school smell
deep in your clothes--and afterwards you’d feel cleansed in the
autumn air made cool by Lake Michigan. And then you’d tumble
into some big luxury car that would hold you aloft right to your
front door. It was like being escorted around on a hovering, dark,
passenger float that was also part isolation tank.

“Here we are,” some parent would say, and I’d open the door.
Inside my house I could meet up with my mother, who might
be stabbing a picture of my father (or Lenore) with a pair of
scissors.

Or Mandy, who’d look up and say, “I see you made it through
another day.”

Or, if my mother were traveling, my father and Lenore might be
at the dining room table, drinking gin and tonics. Later on Lenore
would sneak into my room. “You should be hard already. I want you
hard when I come to visit you.” Lenore cried often, late at night.
“You little son of a bitch,” she’d sob. Then fifteen minutes later,
“I think I’m going to come again,” which I soon figured out meant
she’d already had an orgasm with my father, who was, by now,
literally snoring in the room above mine.

*

final drafts

June is reserved for completing the last draft of this
confusing story--at least it seems so when excerpted.
Then off it goes (the whole book) to Lorin. After that we'll see . . .

1962/ 2007

This following was written in 1962 by Rachel Carson.

It seems even more applicable now.

"There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat.

This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problems

and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frames into which it

fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right

to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the

public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of

damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little

tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end

to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts

It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect

controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes

to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when

in full possession of the facts. In the words of Jean Rostand,

'The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.'"

from Silent Spring

*

Somebody, three folks actually, commented here, some who want

to argue--one for the left, two for the right--

but this space isn't here to make arguments. I've been "environmental"

since I was ten years old and nothing has changed (in me)

since then. It's true Mr. Gore--of whom two commenting persons

assume I'm totally blissed out over when, believe me, no human

in political life would be allowed to even board in my grist mill--

wrote a book about Reason, but that doesn't make anyone

Saint King of the Shitpile. There's nothing partisan about poor

stewardship of the earth. What amazes me isn't anything scandalous

being reported by some biased media, but the fact that the ethos

of the time is exactly the same--as long as we can make money

hand over fist anything is justifiable. Is this not as true as

it was in 1962? I think it's frighteningly true. It's not arguable.

It's what I believe, feel, see, and I don't say this because I want

my side to win. (So the guy who lambasts the GOP's comment

isn't going up either). My heart has always been buried in the bosom

(that's right, bosom) of nature, and I'll side with her everytime.

* I deleted the Gore reference. People can get partisan

somewhere else.

For "nature" read also "art"



Here, I'm quoting Elan Golomb, from her well known book
on narcissism:


"Since I was never appreciated for doing anything right, my ego
was corroded and demeaned by doubt. I surrendered to the
blackest of moods. At psychological bottom there is no hiding in
trivial distractions. Often this opens us to visions that can take us
from our agony. The crickets were my children and I gave to fill
their needs as my parents did not give to me.

"When a person plays, the flow of the unconscious is closer to
the surface of the mind. Healing increases when unconscious and
surface touch in a fiery force that liberates our energy. We need
to expose our wounds to the sun. For children of narcissists,
open play is difficult since we fear exposure to criticism and the
enemy is imagined near. If we are alone, the enemy dwells
within our minds and sees our wounded vulnerability. Wounds
are defensively left to fester in the dark, unhealed beneath
their psychological wraps

"If human company is absent or unacceptable, nature may
serve since, with few exceptions, it does not beckon with false
love and then attack its lover. Things take their natural place
and man can learn to live respectfully with it. The human child,
especially of narcissistic parents, in seeing and sharing animal life
learns that there is another way."

On a nameless road


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


I flash merrily
when people think

if only we could get the cows

to consider voting

like the sky
or our faces

lean, empty mind

washed and arbitrary
shades that promise

a water table.

I don’t know if I’ll ever look young

pitiful morning,
sooner or later,
one’s apertures

start looking disingenuous

desire is never enough

*

the ball

in the hall

it started to cry

*

I like that kind of meaning-making very well.

*

Well, I've got some tests I have to undergo at St. Joseph

Medical Center today. I suppose I'll mention the tick thing.

Anyway, I've been ignoring this continuation of the medical

drama because what can you do? It's quite complicated, like

most situations in which the health community is mostly clueless

as to what to do other than the same thing over and over.

THE FIELDS

After wandering those fields, Howe and Sturgis, etc., came to

find I was host to a tick after all, and I pinched it off, and now

every paper I pick up is screaming about Lyme disease and the

tick was indeed a black legged tick. Why the beautiful painting

by Teresa Tempero Schmidt? Because its wildness reminds

me of the evil lurking inside a tick, and it reflects my agitation

at a press that won't stop scaring the crap out of me every

chance it gets. Did you hear also the important news that

genital herpes helps prevent bubonic plague? It's true, man.

Lyme disease prevents nothing. PS--La Misma, I liked your

epic with the Palmetto bug(s). Hindemeths, Hindenburg, what

is the dif?

TENEMOS


New poems are now up at Tenemos for your amusement.
Click on the image on the left and select away. I've got three
poems in the issue. I glimpsed two good Eric Pankey poems.
If'n you like Eric Pankey KINDS of poems, you might like
the two of them as well. It's blissfully in the lower fifties
outside right now. By the way, I enjoy posting poems in
progress, and I'm delighted (although somewhat nervous
at times) that people read them, and I thank Jenni and Jordan
for saying, Hey, dolt! People Read them! Because you think always,
Yeah, folks read them. And then think, Why not just do this
on a legal pad. And then, Oh, so what, as long as the Detroit
Tigers climb back into first place. Anyway, I've been musing
on Jon Woodward's Rain, and Jane Springer's new book,
and Jessica Fisher's Yale Younger winner. There's a poem
in the Springer book "about" turkey vultures that blows
my ratty-ass socks about off, but then some of them seem
to get lost in the woods and wander into a desert. It's as if
I opened the book and a bird flew up and right out my grist mill's
bedroom window and the poem itself was the experience of
watching the bird get smaller and smaller.

HOMICIDE



This is one of the best hours of television I've ever
seen. If you are not a fan of Homicide, (and I don't
know, can't understand, why everyone isn't/wasn't),
or whether you know nothing of the show, watch this
episode for the chemistry--the humor, the intensity,
the grit, the verisimilitude--between Bruno Kirby,
who died of Leukemia last year, and Richard Edson.
The best dialogue, digressive and local, since Quentin
Tarantino's "Bic Mac" stuff in Pulp Fiction. Watching
this makes me miss Kirby, or makes me regret he
isn't around for more roles such as this. And Edson
is a scream. These are the kinds of people I grew up
with, frankly, people either in jail, drunk, or scheming
to get rich (or even), living in apartments atop bars,
flipping automobiles out in the two tracks near
Cedar Creek at two in the morning. I had a duel
with a migraine headache yesterday. I've had
three in my entire life, so why suddenly do I get
this visit now? What's with all the testosterone piling
up on Poetry Daily recently? Good stuff by John Gallaher
and Bob Hicok. I'm familiar with almost all these
poets' work, that is of the last twenty postings or so. Thumbs
up to about half? Like, though, who the hell am I?
I've noticed I like to go ahead and state my very
frank opinions and then act all self deprecating
about them. But what else can you do if you post on a
blog? Just post poems? Get real. Nobody reads
those poems you post (okay, maybe just close to
nobody). You'll have to pardon me. The headache's
got me moody.

*

I found out what old "Oleander Blvd" (formerly "Heart Time"?

what was I thinking?) was, or at least, for

now, wasn't, and that's that for the time being . . .

INVESTITURE



The maids got lost

in some ballroom,

and there’s a field in it, decorative,
and punitive.

One could follow an inseam,

blue drizzle, salt

full of weeds in your drink.

I find it hard to stay focused

Grass where it’s never planted,
polyps instead of a border of hubcaps.

I liked the way she said
Civilized . . .

*

The comparison, it’s easy
to forget,

can only be offered
with interchangeable parts.

Logs made out of particle board.

Three different kinds of spark plugs.

A mobile made out of pipe
cleaners
and Carleton cigarettes.

*

I sometimes left her fingernail polish
inside my glove box.

Steel and ice

in the music

all summer long.

Her brother
was delivered into recovery
carrying a piss-stained
copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra

(he rode shotgun)

the rock star
philosopher biting
the corners

of the young man’s heart.

*

The springs in the car’s
steel shock absorbers were shot.

Lemonade,

and a few red-winged blackbirds.

*

I walk past a pond in the dunes
and smell that still, plain water

leftover

NOTE (s)



School ended. It was a good term. Now I'm
doing some writing. I like a blog because it gives
me something to do with a draft of a poem.
Not all poems but I post many. Quite often, of
course, I'm still thinking things out when I post
and almost always I look at a hard copy of the
recently posted poem and see an oversight so
dumb it's mind-boggling. This is just to say:
so I post the thing but quite often the corrected
poem doesn't appear until a day, maybe three
days, later. I received Jessica Fischer's Yale
Series winner today and shall sit back and enjoy.
I've got my annuals beaming in pots outside,
a catfood bowl (hello departed Reesie up in cat heaven!)
full of birdseed (along with a conventional
bird feeding tube feeder nearby), and time. I may
have no money (to speak of) but I've got time. I'm
already too hot though. I can't handle anything over
75 degrees and would prefer the temp. hover near 60 always.
If there is a gale wind blowing then OK. Let the
temp. rise. Brown Dog, a character in several Jim Harrison
novellas, considers the ideal temperature to be 42 degrees,
and I sometimes think of that and agree, 42 sounds
fantastic. I love summer because I garden, I swim,
I stop wearing real shoes and go for flip flops (no
matter where I wander) or waders. I like to sit in boats
and get really sunburned just once, casting for pike
or bass or walleye. I want to charter a salmon
fishing boat this summer but it's a little expensive
so who wants to salmon fish out of South Haven
(any further south is a bust)? But back to heat: I
just wadded up my T-shirt and whipped it across
the room because I'm boiling to death. And I've
got a fan blowing right on me. It must be like, well,
I don't know. It must be like 74 horrible degrees
in here. Luckily, I can sit outside and place my
"dogs" in my foot cooler, which is a utility bucket
full of ice cubes I just bought at Martins. Now,
to read a poem or two . . .

And though people keep cutting in

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


they do resign

No point in taking the moment away

in the grass, chirping,
the bench so inviting

a leap into the middle of a dream

striking natural wonders

but, OK

in town there’s a grist mill

that part of the dream

like a ship undone,
sails a blast of trombone

Now the daggers swamp green sky

and you complain

the women sob
and appoint you
diagonal

it is the custom here

pull down most of my face

The hats in the manuscript
were so fraternal

DIVORCE



Egret leaves nitrogen,

and the pieces
of the mind divide:

it's dark on the hurricane side
of the bed.

*

I saw myself then
reflected in a cow's eyeball.

Grasshoppers sailed through the strands of the electric fence.

The animal said nothing.

There'd been so much smoke I couldn't
get to the hood latch
and the crowd of red metal parts

hung freighted.

*

Pigments and shoulders pads,
the swan with his black bulb

of hate,

the heron standing with the fingerlings
in August.

I woke that night
in Fremont
to a stillborn moon.

*

Décolletage, she'd just as soon
ring the swan's

sinuous neck.

She's an archeology
of knitting bones and wired bereavement

Quills, slivers of iodine . . .

*

It was too diffuse

The candle flickered like a nail

her heart beating

Try riding on the back of an armored mite

Try breaking the news
to a bee or a spider

Eyes wherever
God wants to put them

In a school play I got the role of Ankylosaurus

I believe in the soul
but right now I want you to look at me

In a school play once I got the role of Ankylosaurus

*

It's quaint but who wants to go back there

It's such a stern, white process

JUST WHAT’S THERE

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


He arrived sleepy
belabored by

chance

a pose I believe in

beer in the dormer
old guts of contraband:

a horse worships anything

a bag of nuts
long sounds in the corner of strange cities

The tedious process of ending ticks

there are sky
booths in the

breath somewhere

HOME DISTANCE


Robbed early

then buried, scrim of alkaline

flight

come to: a rictus
of solid remembering.

*

Her hair always flying, a flashbulb of
yellow,

a noisy painting by Munch.

Silence is at rest. It’s on view.

*

I told her
in the car, the bread needing butter,

while the weeds bobbed yes along the highway,

no pilot in the airplane,

even twenty years ago.

*

Bees kept filling
the punctured light bulbs.

Neither of us spoke.

Fire dripped slowly
from the eaves troughs.

And the dry stems rattled in the summer heat.

The stillness in the oak trees was maddening

THE SEVENTIES



Singly, right from birth frankly,

I’d find the shadow

that was leaning like a tree
away from my father.

The cherry blossoms shook in the Massachusetts . . .

A bit of the pilgrim
in it

The polished wood floors

Sunshine and the sexuality of chocolate

First, there was the business
with the lawyers,

and the rolling boat of my bed,

the room bright in deep water

for the waving of the lobster claws.

I moved with the clouds,
pencils turning into cigarettes.

And then she’s under you,
smelling of sheetrock, stained by antibiotics,

half-naked,

crying on the apple-moss.

ONE EVENING, A TRAIN

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


God likes us for ourselves

man
the little strange guest

You're free to love

We've had so little will

black drops of acquittal

a crime witnessed
between Chinese water tortures

yest somewhere, fun will happen because of us . . .

like one long serious breath

and there are men to boil


the scent

I'm afraid

is a temple

THREE AND A HALF BUCKS

I don't know what it's like where you are, but here

in the Midwest gas prices have hit $3.49. I remember

mowing lawns as a kid, how I'd have to use my HUGE profits

to buy my own gas, which went into a 2 1/2 gallon

gas can. It cost, I don't know, like a buck or something.

Now it would cost about $10. Good thing our gas tanks

in our cars aren't somehow visible, because we'd have

another way of actually seeing how little product we

are getting for our money. Don't give me supply and

demand. That explains a condition: yes, the demand is

such people will pay almost anything. We have to go to

work. We have to visit our children. Let's call it gouging

on a national level though. The price is the same

everywhere. You have to get the gas, whether it's

because of "supply and demand" or whether or not

you are being "gouged." "Supply and demand" simply assumes

people will pay for a thing as much as their desire

for that thing will allow. For now it appears we will do it,

but we know the government--local or otherwise--won't

be coming in and saving us. Not anymore. There's no one

to tell. There's nothing to be done. I drive a Civic and

I know I cut back on my driving in the summer. Yes, there

is biking, staying at home (start cultivating organic crops

in your yard), but our cars are us as much as our TVs

are us. This is similar to the subprime problem in

real estate. If you loan people money at ridiculous

interest rates, they'll take it, because only the American

Dream matters. Then come the $1,600 a month payments

for the house you could never have "afforded" ten years ago.

We can't pay these gas prices, and in time we'll all see why.

(This isn't the same as the oil crises in the seventies--we were

all panicked. We're not panicked now. We know we're being

screwed and we know morally that's acceptable. The Bush

administration sure helped lower the bar on a lot of stuff,

and the Democrats have been no shining beacon in this regard

either.)

A couple days ago I put on waders and a hat from
Yaak, Montana (Jonathan Johnson gave it to me)
and on my way north I stopped here, Augusta Creek.
I also hit some tributaries of the White River, north
east of Muskegon, but this more southern piece of water
was more satisfying, the few brown trout I caught (just long
enough to keep), the gentle flow of the silver
stream of water. The entire time you are in it the water
never stops talking. I used spinners and leaf worms,
and lost a Panther Martin in a box elder. Stupid tree.
It looked silver in the strange spring light and one side
was not budding out, so it reminded me of one of
the trees from Larry Levis's "The Two Trees," where
the trees say to the poet "you do not even have a car
anymore!" That's not verbatim, but it's close.
Anyway, it's a slender slip of fresh water, this creek,
and rather than report further about kingfishers
and what have you, I'll copy here another poem,
this one by Christine Garren, which I was also constantly
thinking about while wading. Never mind that the subject
matter is disturbing. When you finish reading the
poem you are quieted, the music lulling you into peacefulness,
much like the creek itself:

The Calf

It was dawn and there was still blood on the earth, on the grass,
where the calf had been born. Its mother was moored behind it.
I looked at them both for a long time because their eyes
were like small flats of stone. When the dawn began clearing
the green border, the animals remained full of indifference.
We had been like that: blood had been involved. There was early-on
fierce energy, the energy of incest, and then, over it all,
a strange indifference--
while I listened to the tight silver motion of the river
and to a plane's heavy passage overhead.

BROKEN LAST




It's wet all the way
from her elbow to the

tripwire.

Dinners scrapped together.

Two stones missing each other,

an amalgam
of confiscation

and rain splashing over
into her spit.

The beauty is in the triggering mechanism,

shaved wood and wire,

raw skin and the struggling hairs.

Steam rises off the animal bones
chucked into a pile

and framed by some spiritual's
huge brown teeth.

The trees make no notes they can't get to the beginning again

Water rushes by
too quickly to know what's permanent.

NOTE(s)


1. if it doesn't say (an Ashbery Erasure poem) under
the title it is an original poem. period.

2. thanks JZ for liking my traffic complaints enough
to post its narrative on your blog.

THEM



Magic conjoined,
complaining lilacs and the secret

fields,
a house made of tin

standing out loud in the center
of a dream-platform.

The rabbit appears.
She falls into a hole.

The rabbit doesn't get Trix.

He also planted hollyhocks,
disappointed two months later when they grew so

hairy.

Cold northern pool
smooth as a mirror . . .

sex with no sound
public servants locked underwater

birds all over the ceiling that are the words
he can't say

*

A magpie lands in a tree

It drops a stone in the mathematical water

Where are the stars now

A horn screeched


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)



Particles cannot move
full in sight, gone now

and I am a dog
I can think

I remember once
receiving her swan

convulsive instant dark though a problem

the other wise interruption
so silly
light for five minutes a decade

the facts attach centuries

turn to me
name all I ask

I focus
go down into the vicious city

vibrations and pain

no shopping malls
no houseplants

But you think


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


you keep up with them
conscience and crowd

a bell-jar
wiped clean with suffering

a woman comes quietly
to the glass
transformed into static

you are a voyeur, too
a voyeur trying to kill

the mind, drifting away,
faintly out of tune

no scars
we had the reward of shining

eyes full of cataclysm
a landscape that matters

maybe she will come along
mean
an irritation

her weather is little more
than a groan

ME, I'M LATE!!



I had an appointment, an appointment to see
Dr. R, and I left myself twenty minutes to get
there, which should be enough, but on the
highway a bus and a semi played "Let's see
if we can drive exactly 60 miles per hour side
by side" and they wouldn't budge from their
positions. Cars piled up behind them, somebody
honked. This went on for ten miles. But finally
I had to take an exit. On the ramp I went about
a hundred. (I'm not kidding.) I'm not a tough guy
or anything. I was just REALLY annoyed, and my
car's zippy, a little Honda Civic. I was five minutes
late. But on the way back the sun shined down and
I saw some hawks drifting around, a single vulture,
listened to the Kinks (I posted that Youtube song,
now I've started a whole thing with the Kinks again).
Has anyone noticed wrens out everywhere, demanding
the world pay attention to them? Like angry bees.
Like a swarm of cars stuck behind a bus and a semi.
A guy in some kind of blue SUV was beside me for
a bit on the road and he wrote on a white pad
of paper "I want to cry," held it up (I could read it
just fine), and motioned toward what was blocking
us all from our very urgent appointments in our
very important and quite nearly impossible lives.

MUST POST A. E.s AT ALL TIMES


Good thing almost everyone has a computer--or
several--these days, what with the problem, ongoing,
of me arriving places with these books
of poems I scribble all over, or use white-out
on, bordering on rudeness, over in my corner,
thinking and annotating, until I've got the
thing somehow the way I want it, at which
point I desperately ask if I can use the computer.
"What are you doing to that poor book?" B.'s son asked
me. "It's hard to explain," I said. Context.
It's so important.

The Aged Citizen That I Am


Harsh your gig? Never heard this phrase. The following
were googled:

ben gibbard put you on a mix tape. meanwhile, his
songs are in the background of every comercial and
mtv reality show. does that harsh your gig?

Um, I hate to harsh your gig, but doesn't the word
"international" imply outside of the USA? Maybe it's
just late and I'm not thinking straight.

Chill out not trying to "harsh your gig" Could of
done a shackle flip and 8" front spings with zero
rates and not been able to see what is parked on the

Not trying to harsh your gig, by any means; I've had
many issues with making aztecing look decent, too! I
might suggest creating masks that have a more

hey, not to harsh your gig, but I got the kelty clark
off the returns rack at EMS for 22 beans. I took the time
to set it up in the store and found that it

I wasn't tryin to harsh your gig - making music is all right
with me! Just don't let the club owner underpay you just
cuz its the 2 of ya's

But if you got $60 to burn, I guess it can't hurt. Besides, if
it makes you feel better, then I'm certainly not
gonna harsh your gig

Not trying to harsh your gig, just trying to give a
semi-informed opinion. Best of luck whatever you
decide to do. :)

the working set in like 7 minutes or something.
But I'm just sayin'... As long as you are happy with your rig,
I have no right to harsh your gig

Larry, not to harsh your gig but maybe you should do
some research before you draw the conclusion that K&N
filters do not offer any improvement over stock

I FOUND THEIR ADVICE


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


language itself

A hanging we cling to

now it is half-past five
the learning has begun

Who weren't learning
stopped knowing
the silence

time as a seal,
contained,
not banked:

you don't jostle
the voice,

and the feelings leave

I wouldn't mind moving out of my gristmill, into this Shoe.
It would have to be somewhere more woodsy though. I'd write
poems inside it, and sleep on my bed, have coffee, etc.
I'd lock the door on my Shoe and go out sometimes. I'd
sit in my Shoe and talk on the horn (ha), "I'm open to doing
a poetry reading in your area, etc." I'd watch Hal Hartly
movies in there, and make my famous chicken stew.
Shouldn't there be a ring of marigolds around this Shoe?
No other flower quite fits. Azaleas? Morning Glories?
Please! There's a sign on this shoe, right where it might
say KEDS if it were a true shoe. I'd just put a thing up that
says "Poet at Work." Even when I'm making scrambled
eggs it will say "Poet at Work." Because, really, the poet
mixes the eggs, he SEES them and manipulates the matter
that is the eggs, and he thinks, "Eggs. Eg-gs. eGGs."
He ponders. He looks for a pen. He makes an Ashbery
Erasure instead. "Poet at Work."

WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


He fell apart
rusting and happy

she was blinkered on the carpet

the result was this heavenly uproar

the trillium has
no excuse
for being here

though perhaps the deep fact
of everything is crazy

boys sleeping beside cattle

a kite-string

and mostly our friends fear us

a church you can destroy
without touching the glossary

I tell you the shouting
is too extreme

the hand is too easy

BACK HOME

poem by William Stafford


The girl who used to sing in the choir
would have a slow shadow on dependable walls,
I saw. We walked summer nights.
Persons came near in those days,
both afraid but not able to know
anything but a kind of Now.

In the maples an insect sang
insane for hours about how deep the dark was.
Over the river, past the light on the bridge,
and then where the light quelled at limits
in the park, we left town,
the church lagging pretty far behind.

A WALTZ DREAM

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


She was a strange fault
thought for every minor upheaval

It may have been the praying,
white lake like a photograph

of plasma

a man shits cookie cutters

a steamroller lops off nine busboys

in my own dream
I square the imaginary hinge we were meant to oil

mother is mindful of rain
in the mixed drinks

girls like lemonade

A FADING SIGNAL



The trees sound like dying
escalators of perfection and worry

absolute traps
and the bends

we’re still skeptical

a cantor

(with aplomb)

toward an alphabetical understanding

of mountains and ardor . . .

Intellectual Property

the blue stamp on her ass

the spreadsheets whispering to the heavens like silverware

*

Scattered in the fields of mown grass
are the clothes of those we lost,
(arranged in long orderly rows) after dying exactly

when they were supposed to

But like the

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


Torso of a proud
Saving grace

When the men go down no one hears

Flesh is a feeling
Like wind tearing at memory

It’s just space

Keep an eye on the appalling
Development which enfolds

Your toes first

Then wake up and seem ordinary

Animation



What's better than "Village Green," by the Kinks?

"Village Green" with super slick animation.

My Five Socks, or rather Songs



Summer hits and everyone is playing tag,
including Talia.


Well, I'm supposed to name five songs that
knock my socks off. I mean, what songs give
me goose bumps? Many, many.

I could do a whole Bowie list ("Boys," from Lodger, "Beauty and the Beast" from Heroes, etc)

I'd like to pick an old City Boy song. Old Roxy Music . . .

Eh, sorry.

"Village Green," by The Kinks
"The Red Telephone," by Love
"The True Wheel," Brian Eno
"Father to Son," Queen
"Merely a Man," XTC
"TVC15," David Bowie

Oops, that's six. Oh well.

TAG FOLLOW-UP


I deleted the tag. I started off thinking it was one thing
(books you haven't read) and it seems to be this other thing,
just a list of books people like. I like a lot of poetry
books and mention them sometimes in this blog.

My first impression, to list important books you haven't gotten
around to reading, seems more interesting.

The tag, from Suzanne originally, was a while ago. This wording
is from John G.'s blog:

"Here are five poetry collections you may not have read
but certainly must. (Note: The collections, for whatever
reason, should be a bit off the beaten path. And need not
have caused the earth to open and swallow you whole.)"

The Piercing, Christine Garren (or Among the Monarchs)
The Milky Way, Jon Anderson
Ruby for Grief, Michael Burkard
Collected Poems, James Schuyler
The Sorrow of Architecture, Liam Rector

and I just got warmed up, of course. in each case, where the book is
not a collected, the named work leads (opens a door) to other great
work by the same poet. Yes, yes, I think that's the way it works . . .

Later when

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


it doesn't matter,
my red world

one had the sense to ignore
the enveloping

shroud

everything should erupt

lightning the flavor of blood

war engraved on a teakettle

heaven was to be done
without diluting the whole

rags of old rationale,
a confused box

one longs for hell

that, at any rate, was my winter

LES COLOMBES (DOVES)



Je me suis approché, puis entré, la vallée. Le chants'était envolé.
La vallée s'ouvre avec la pluie. Il n'y a plus de tempspour la saison
sèche. Les colombes en deuil se promènent sur le sable brûlant.


translated by Stella Radulescu (thank you!)

Yeah, well okay



Is anything shocking anymore? Virginia Tech, yo yoing
gas prices (what use to be called gouging is now called
supply and demand--the market is the new God), Enron,
O. J., America's unbelievable hubris despite the fact
it's crapping all over itself on a global stage . . . And yet
I found the fact that Hollywood is serving up a comedy
about the Iraq War, called Delta Farce, a sign that
pretty much anything goes. Nothing, NOTHING, is
sacred. There's posturing, there's profits, and way
back in some corner of a house in some town beyond the
woods and fields, back behind the canned fruit, on a small
dusty shelf, there's decency. And that's not even it.
Who am I to tell anyone how to behave? Who's decent?
This is the point. I can't even discuss it without making myself
sick. Nobody should have to say anything. All I wanted to
do was watch a movie (Hot Fuzz is a fantastic movie by the way--
see Anthony Lane's review in the new New Yorker), and
I had to sit through that trailer. And what then? Do I
say something? What is the dif? Let's all argue some
more about, I don't know, everything. I love how poetry
can exist outside this stream of spin, love that I CAN go to
Ashbery for it, or Creeley, an embryonic blossoming, a cosmic
fissure the size of a raging spider, little splashes on the page
that refer to only themselves, and yet, somehow, everything
else. Small cosmologies of hope. I'm serious. You log onto
Amazon and buy yourself Larissa Szporluk's new book,
and it arrives like a small package of hope. It's the only
way left to communicate without displaying outrage/sadness
etc. What's your point of view? It's tangled up beautifully
in this language sculpture, I have no idea, but I'll
keep reading this POEM or BOOK, whatever, looking,
and not-looking, being I guess. So there's that . . .

SHOOTING

(revised again)


I was in a field, the stars shooting at each other. Newspapers flat
against the car's floorboards. The moon rising, hooking into
a pine. Here's where they butcher your deer. Here, a trout rearing
station. That was all in the dust, before, and then came the grass
reaching out into twilight, breaking across the fronts of our thighs.
Car engines cooling all over Indiana. A sound in the trees like
someone leaving forever.

*

Castration? paper ballots?

Turn off the radio/ TV.

At dusk I've been seeing nighthawks again (they'd
seemed to disappear after the seventies).

THE IMPROVEMENT


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


I hate this room,
the whole whatever

life beyond
part mind in the moment--

kindly, crazy

enough to smile somehow as we converse

transparent mess
of a dream

even when there's a beating
i want openness

of an unasked question

calculations of heaven

i own the starting gate

Monday



I've been on a sort of local traveling binge,
out in the brushy woods, under the low clouds,
in the sunshine between pockets of woods.
So, the turkey in the last post comes from
a little field between pines. The gobbler
was nearby, more cautious. I left him out.
I'm behind answering e-mail, but I'm always behind
answering e-mail. Sorry nonetheless.
Yes, the Ashbery Erasures are coming,
but pouring out they are not. I wrestle with
each one (I didn't so much in the beginning).
Today, a little levity, so a viewing of HOT
FUZZ is in order.

Howe, Indiana


In the distance, a female wild turkey slims down,
streams like a peacock. Northeastern Indiana closed
for Sunday, not counting the ticks. Just biscuits and gravy. Some
murderous afterthoughts, like a few bright clouds
in the sky. The loneliest animals are running down the road.

THE LOUNGE


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


That is if my lord,
lit with secrets,
rested hearty in his lounge

Some praire in the mural

makes me wrong

the late school brothels

have no peg
to hang a film on

we want it sugar-coated

the dance is no dance,
scripts and mutilation

the old way.

DOVES


I've been approaching, then entering, the valley. The song
has lifted. The valley opens with rain. There is no time
for a dry season. Mourning doves walk on the hot sand.

revision of a poem



TWENTY-ONE MONTHS




The moon enters the water
So near her heart. Dove of fine meat resting.

Outside a mob comes, voiced,
you might wonder, like crinoline?

It gets hot inside so close to the egg.

A tower where the ringing bed,
taken right off the blackboard,
promises a secular head roll.

Cheeks, mouth, perhaps teeth, jaw, chin, perhaps jewelry . . .

New star for the sun
and the many million
naked human backs

and all the effort of adapting

while still desiring birth on a flat surface.

I think most lambs smile in heaven.

THE ARCHIPELAGO


(an Ashbery Erasure poem)



sisters land
an arson of feeling

so daffodils as nasturtiums come along as a rule

She said, Really, the mind is a waste

but like a sitting arthritic
the pain
is a building we swallow

word like a branch to all the other words,
low behind our basket,

undo me!

the islands are shrieking

snug in my unzipped fly

INHALE


La Misma brings up Hal Hartley. I keep thinking
about those movies, how some of it reminds me
of bad porn from the seventies, and how suddenly
then there will be something totally surprising.
It might be something pushed way too hard, like the
scene where "the monster" gets beat up
in No Such Thing (and pissed on), or the scenes
in which the monster is doing what amounts to
a comedy monologue, on stage it seems, trying (and
failing) to make sense of humanity. Fay Grim, a
sequel to Henry Fool (one of my all time favorite
movies), is already out on DVD I think. So the reviews
are bad (they are). Oh well. I'll tell you what.
I'd rather watch No Such Thing again just to see
those banged up tin houses in Iceland (and the monster's
odd steel one) than watch something as forgetable and
slick as, say, Momento. I did find Half Nelson
to be compelling, and mostly because of Gosling,
but the ending! In order to make sure the film doesn't
finish all happily tied in a bow it just ends, the screwed
up teacher and his student sitting together on the same
couch. Better than anything Hollywood can cook up,
sure, but push the envelope. Do something! The ending
of No Such Thing was so corny I could barely believe
my eyes (and ears). Hartley is shameless. It's
wonderful. Some of the time, in NST, the Icelanders
just hang around and they seem like wild dogs--
all wariness, the owners of hearts that just won't quit
beating. They just keep living and living (and in those
laughable tin sheds). Watch Helen Mirren smoke her
cigarettes. She's doing all she can to make sure it's
clear she is acting, that she is not about to inhale.
It's the movie you are completely positive is a movie
every second you're watching.

SHORT STORY



Okay, the new issue of Controlled Burn is out
and it contains a freaky little story of mine,
"Banana," and Stephen Dixon fans (I'm a big one)
might find something here that reminds
them of SD. Maybe not. It's mostly dialogue
and it's mostly yelling (across short distances)
and one character spends the entire story
standing out in Lake Michigan.

*

Actually, the link doesn't go to the story, and in
fact it went to a rather weird single page, as Jenni
pointed out. It goes to a more active functional
page now (I hope). I doubt it's even updated
to the current issue though.