POEM


from Abrupt Rural


TWO STRANGERS


1.
My sister used to sing the Scissors Song from her crib.
I'd dream she was dead, just another sleeping insect,
cicada unable to close its eyes.

2.
It's just the moon, my mother said late one night, sitting on my bed,
making shadows.

3.
White birds dipped in candle wax hung upside-down in the closet.
Cats with no hair on their heads looked in through the windows.

My father grew from a small boy into an adult
in the corner. I could never sleep.

4.
I was afraid of the light coming in through the keyhole.

Once I looked through it. Saw two strangers. A man and a girl.
The man was trying to braid the girl's hair while she wept.

CALENDAR SERIES I: THE PYRAMIDS


you were born with a moral sense

which is why the dry colored leaves
swirling in autumn
bring tears

one by one they burdened the enormous blocks
closer and closer to heaven

a wick of blood for your name

you can see it in the bubbles in this rum and Coke

I only felt a peculiar sense it was something
like an island, the Cape

the softest murdering
reason has invented

the way the arm breaks off

buried in the ocean floor

palatial mansion for the bluest barbed wire

the sound of money
reproducing itself
in a vault under the floor in the northwestern-most

bathroom

They have a floor but no eyes

you boil them alive

who wouldn't have a nervous breakdown

NO TITLE



I've been away, but mostly everything just grew hot
and the earth smells like it's frying. I stopped my series--
and it's significant that it's a series, that each is a
machine of words that stand on their own but that
the momentum and accidents that nest like little
blossoms or bombs along a continuum through the
passing moments is also what the texts are about.
Rachel posted a comment, something about cheese.
The reader does READ (active). I, for not one second,
thought of dairy products. I know, I know--the moon made
of cheese and all. But I never think of the moon like that.
Somewhere David Berman mentioned that whenever it snows--
in some poem, I don't know which one--the outdoors seem(s)
like a room. That feels true to me. The moon shredded,
like paper. That feels true. Besides, all of us raised in Michigan
were always looking up into that tunnel of falling pinholes.
Air and light. It's such a friggin' romance--like ice skates tied
together and flung over the shoulder for the walk down to the
lake and hockey on a rink we'd shovel clear ourselves.
I don't know where I'm going with this. Cheese or paper,
it doesn't matter, I guess. Thanks for the comment though
Rachel.

CALENDAR SERIES I: ROMANTIC


you
and the weather inside you

the Graham cracker the blue jay flips and eats

lack of love

after all that's your head in the window

looking out

through rain
through snow

lonely lonely

one of the new jobs we have is dating

you work in reality TV

the myth of the soul mate

the new staircase covered with sub-prime money

then carpet (chiropractor green)

is part of it . . .

couples holding hands with silk over their nude bodies streaming
past stars during Ascension . . .

erase it all remember the scotch pine and the shovel in the snow

driving with Kim

the way the flakes dimpled
the surface of our cups of hot chocolate

they shredded the moon again she said about the falling snow

DELETE



I deleted a poem. The colors, my dear, as they say,
are all running together. When I hit some rocks in
the kayak (white water) I'll be refreshed. I need to
spread the pieces out on the floor the way I used
to when I was a motorcycle nut, my Suzuki, a
Can Am, stripped down dirt bikes. Pieces all over a
tarp.

Indisposed


Or decomposed, or something. (Really just taking a nap.)
So you go around rating the books of people you know--
four stars, five stars, what is the dif?--and then someone
gets bitten by the sourest grapes over it all, cannot tolerate
all the back-patting. If we were all praising each
other's Jack Russell terriers would it be such a big deal? I think
not, Stanley, or Madelaine, or whatever your name(s) are.
Instead of even one star I give so and so's book a dog turd!
But . . . let those of us who have NOT flown off the handle
take a giant step backwards. (Hilarious visual here).
So let's just coast a bit. Hey, I had my soup--it was chock full of
lentils. La Misma, you might notice our friend
Kim made it into the last Calendar poem (which I deleted--
what a mess! Someties that happens.) Anyway, remember
the time we watched that Matthew Broderick movie?
Ah, Kalamazoo. In the day. I may be writing a bit less during
my vacation. It is raining outside. The marigolds are
positively glowing in this odd shade of daylight.

STATUS



31 pages of these Calendar poems, and I'm hungry. Gave a talk
on the Ashbery project an hour ago, and of course learned more
than any student there. It was a good group. I need soup. I switched
over from the Ashbery poems to the Calendar ones on July 7. It's,
I think, July 24. But what if I can't just keep doing this, pushing
out poems, day and night, day and night. Intriguing to read from
Abrupt Rural (in that class) and feel the difference between those
poems and these newer ones. A more nervous, edgy silence
in the new poems, a nervous noise. I have nothing to eat. I have
very little money. Must have income. You must need manuscript
help. Here. Because of circumstances beyond my control I must
leave the grist mill by early September. I was just really getting
a rhythm going (I'd gotten acquainted with all the millipedes). I
need soup. Began a Calendar poem but it will have to wait. It keeps
wanting to be at least partly about soup. No movies
in a long while. Burned out. Not burned out on writing. Just
getting going. Reading. Eating soup. Heeded advice from Susan
and Jordan and Louise and sent Ashbery book out. No one is reading.
Like these short sentences. Good for when one is tired, feeling lazy,
hungry for soup. Kayaking in a few days. A mini-holiday. More
when I'm not so hungry for soup.

CALENDAR SERIES I: A COUNTY ROAD



a circle goes around a branch

it's a mirror of grief's ecosystem

two rhythms, two feet

a commoner radiance the water implies
because it's watching too

green herons in a panic under the raceway net

the largest sturgeon emerges
and spits a fine pile of shells into a basket of roots

was she in limbo

head not touching the heavenly clouds

feet swinging bare above terra firma

and the day before yesterday?

everything everything

she finally climbed onto the heavy table and waited

it was the quietest grave so far
tunnel under the Detroit River

all of her sisters singing together with their eyes sewn shut

no hidden agenda

no discussion

LAKE WINNIPEG

(from Abrupt Rural)


Dark
like an animal's fur, dew-covered, a little oily
as if decay might be arrested

Night
or nurtured, loved. Then blood on a single leaf,
curled near a hatchet,
a bag full of feet
under an almost-full moon.
Althought this harbor's full moon lacks a sliver

Animal
of love. A marten, on hunt, creeps from behind
the boathouse, its teeth shining like lemons.

Bones
The man sees them in the dark, turns up the lamps
via rheostat. Someone else wakes
thinking butchered, thinking

Trees
okay, so he's upset. This happens on the other side
of the lake, trees
crowding the skinny peninsula,

Johnboat
turning evanescent the image of the flowers left
standing on the dock
in the mist of twilight. She feels an ache
in her teeth where she's been biting splitshot,
pike blood deep in her nails.
He'd drive a chisel into the fishes' brains,
and now her iron's fucked up. Nothing's true north.
She's cold

Fillet Knife
and frightened. And a muskrat dives, comes up gleaming.
But only the animal sees it.

NIGHT

I've been popping out quick drafts late at night, half gone,
using an ending that feels like putting the thing on HOLD.
Then I wake. Lucid. Can see what I couldn't. The quotes are
all from Sappho, obviously, various translators.


CALENDAR SERIES I: LOVE POEM



I’m a few days
infrequent of mind

fleeing, floating

damp in the shadow of Sappho

"yoking the chariot"

not some
maker of ceiling fans

I don’t care

though your rain is a darkness for kissing

"My eyes are dead to light"

S for Sappho
for Serious

as I walked to the hardware store to get some Fix-a-Flat
I was thinking that way, thinking each letter, thinking
A is for Albany, B is for Bandwidth . . .

There’s a quality
to the way wind pushes around the white-billed Coots
on a water retention

pond in Michigan
in late November

none of those colors in Arizona (A) exactly . . .

sometimes I find myself neon

outdone lightning unstoppable

but then try finding a ride at 8 a.m.

if I can't get the car fixed
I'll have to walk to the Courthouse

the Hospital

"I convulse, greener than grass"

(G is for gasoline--I don't have any money for that either)

EVOLVE



The poems aren't coming out--splat--as powerful first
drafts as was sometimes the case earlier. As I become
more familiar with the process, here, or any process at any
other time, I begin to make predictable choices, or I notice a
sameness of "disparity" in my justapositions. I've been
working on the manuscripts of others, then dipping into these,
mine here. I've also flirted more and more with the autobiographical
as I've continued, and there is a great pull to connect pieces of the
poem with an implied "and then this happened" and I did the
Ashbery project partly to get away from the limitations of
chronology, physical cause and effect, etc. I like that everything
changes, that absolute randomness is impossible to achieve,
that I have to struggle so hard against the merely predictable.
Sometimes I fail. Big whoop. I notice the poems I find most
imperfect are very often favorites of the readers here--like
Laurel and Charmi. Here's a three a.m. poem because my
insomnia light is on full blast this week:


CALENDAR SERIES I: WORLD-WEIGHT


That kind of logic

figure and ground, an opera of intention

small effects
you call your little group

Dancing in America, Inc.

one-hundred painters of the dailiness school of South Bend

brushes all over
the audience

mineral oil stirred (cut to naked feet)

the smell of unprimed canvas unrolled

cadmium orange for everyone!

but then sometimes you're suddenly aware

of the moon standing wide open behind you

a latte glued to your lips

you look over your shoulder

your spirit life is like the moths outside
who can't read the neon sign

but won't leave

a muzzle for atonement

MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS



What a mindbending blow back in time. This
is a tune from that same album, my favorite song
on the record maybe, or the one that first hooked
me and dragged me in--Wow, I gave this disc a workout.
This was all taking place in the wake of the energy
Talking Heads continued to create. They were still
morphing (and a while later they were still morphing
although by then it ceased to be all that interesting--
I think of Byrne in his cowboy hat in True Stories.
Check please!). But before that, starting in 1977
and lasting until 83 or so? (When did Speaking in
Tongues come out?) Good Lord, what a fun band
to follow. I even liked many of the songs on Little
Creatures (I know that came out in '85, but the bar
was closing by then. Soon we would have
to endure Naked. Good bye to the big suit and all that.
But what a time it was before that.

*

I increased my blogroll there on the right. I included a
link to my editing page just in case you suddenly really
need it.

CALENDAR SERIES I: WOLF SPIDER



It was raining inside
that picture on the wall

and the single tree
had a brown side backing a red
lacquer of trembling

leaves

an exodus

a consciousness on its legs

so it was with these stabs
of things seen through the wakefulness in this other boy

his vertebrae tingling

the frame emitting pure static

(inside it a freight
train shook all the milkweeds)

the briars were so bad even her socks were bloody

stuck by the neck in the moon of that single tree

I did check the bedroom

now the windows were open

the fist holding zero feathers had swelled to even larger

DAVID BYRNE AND BRIAN ENO


I left a new little poem, right down there,
sweet as nothing. Dead as a hare in the silver
snow chute. Here's a cut from one of my favorite
albums (I have the vinyl) of all times. It's found
vocals mixed with music by Byrne and Eno.

CALENDAR SERIES I: RETRIBUTION



there was a hinge—

the door swung one way

creaking

you could see busses
full of northern pike

or was it your night light

the man on his naked back laughing into her failed cornfield of a face

don’t call me an idiot

the suburbs

jail for Irish farmers

he had a key

a searchlight in his pants

it swung back the other way

Sudoku



Interesting development, in that Ken Smith, IUSB professor,
found himself here, the world of The Calendar
Series and all things Ashbery, and he found something
that echoed for him in "Death is a Kind of Intelligence"
because he wrote his own poem using words
and phrases from that original text. He shortens
the line and it has an interesting incantatory
effect. Here it is:


POEM


Our
contracts
teem with
beat up
particulars:

ice
arriving home
on the roadside

sawdust
left piled
in the streets

the neighbors
all
yawning

a year
there
twelve months
with
so little
experience

we get
winter
like chemistry

messy
pie charts
our little captains
complete

love
reduced to
eye patches
and bodies
left to
spoon
mattresses

it's serious

we're
used to
feeling
held

aware
like
a muscular
network

summer
wearing
fighting
weather

tension

the English
report
sparrows
from the Netherlands
guiding
the new
moon

believe me
everyone
we may as well
like
life

THE LAST ROMANTIC

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)



tell me about the waves

the world we made

you must be a gigolo
lost over the fact
you knew he was coming

once I said nobody believes you,
too many complicated leaks,
people who are normal

glue that includes children

My being did your quiet “European”
the way you always insisted

one other person is not a great distance

one block
in one ward
of the city

LOST POEMS


Second Note: By the way, revisions on "Calendar Career"
poem, below . . . it's thundering outside, too (but it won't rain!).

First Note: When I say old I mean old. The poem linked below
was probably written in 1994, and then picked up and
published years later (a different poem, written the year
of Kurt Cobain's suicide, written ABOUT Cobain's suicide,
was published in Sou'wester about three years ago).
Strange, because little in the poem--either one--is in me
now, especially the unfolding narrative style that wants
closure in some final, darkly shining, image/idea . . .

I'm not objective of course, but I see an older me in them
I don't feel kicking around anymore . . .

Not bad, not good, kind of interesting though . . .

I remember the impulse to write the poem blossomed out
of the experience of standing in the shadows of possibly, at
different times, these slowly moving hot air balloons while
I was working for the parks department near Galesburg,
Michigan. The catalogue toward the end, with its Holden
Caulfield-ish disavowel of everything institutional or "phony"
reflects my perception, then, that, basically, I prefered the company
of animals (in the park, at home--the hooting owls,
the coyotes, packs of deer, racoons I fed, my sheltie), but
in the final couplet becomes a kind of lament, a gesture of
wish fulfillment . . .

*

There's a link at Willow Springs, here, to an old
poem of mine, one that hasn't been in a book, and it's
not slated to be in a book. They run around out there anyway,
poems, flailing their arms, consumed with self interest. I forgot
all about this weird piece. Neat to see it's been given
a little online life. Chris Kennedy, whose poem I posted
below, has three books of prose poems. He appeared
in the first number of SHADE, SHADE 2004.

Riddle of Self-Worth

poem by Christopher Kennedy


By cannibal standards, I'm dinner for six.
My pet vulture has the disconcerting habit of staring
at the clock and then at me. In terms of sun,
I plan for a long Alaskan winter. Insurance salesmen
slink away from me at parties. A stiff breeze
blows away my weight in gold. In the world of before
and after, I remain steadfastly before. Last session,
my psychiatrist shook my hand and thanked me
for curing his insomnia. If I had a nickel for every time
my name was associated with greatness, I would owe
someone a quarter. My mother called recently and asked
for her umbilical cord. Yet I'm resilient, a human cockroach.
I'll be here for awhile, blocking progress in a black leather jacket,
switchblade quick and ruthless as a jar of pennies.

The Link!

http://hmbediting.blogspot.com/

a poem from my first book: Downsides of Fish Culture


Poem About Bluegills


There are poems about bluegills. There are poems
about trout. The bluegill doesn’t give a shit.
It’ll eat a bare hook but would rather not hear
about your childhood. The bluegill’s thick headed.
It hunkers down in the weeds, thinking. The trout’s like a young girl
in a wedding gown. Touch it and it dies.
You can pull a bluegill out a pike’s ass, it might
still swim away. I’m not talking about pumpkinseeds,
those little flecks of tinsel. The bluegill’s
the stud of all panfish. People catch pumpkinseeds
thinking they’re bluegills. A pumpkinseed shivers;
it thinks it’s going to convince you it’s cold.
Bluegills are fatalists. A slab in your hand may jerk its head
twice. Once hooked it goes for the mud. By the time
it’s resting on a flotation device it’s willing to die.
It doesn’t grope like a rock bass, swallowing air,
the bluegill’s a realist. It knows it’s just a wedge of painted flesh,
heavy enough to pull you half out of the boat.
If you’ve got a big white bucket of panfish
sitting on top of the ice, the bluegill’s the one still living,
thinking, its head like a stapler, mulling things over.

WORD FROM SPONSOR



If you have a book manuscript, or are struggling to generate
one, I'm freelancing as a poetry consultant/ arranger/
editor/ etc. I'd like to help the poet push his/her work
away from mere narrative autobiographical stance and into
something more mysterious, elliptical. Often, less IS more
when it comes to poetry (witness Jean Valentine and
Charles Simic, two otherwise dissimilar poets--each creates
an indelible universe in a few strokes. If you're interested
in improving poems individually, or collectively (as a book),
e-mail me. First check out the information here:
http://hmbediting.blogspot.com/

CALENDAR SERIES I: PAYCHECK



Let's let
let's

marble in a savory sauce
until

there's nothing
in the spit

totally irresponsible

let's breathe
lungs

into being

where only rocks
existed

a new baby!

little balls on it
little nostrils

shut up
the alarm's set for seven

and I already
worked

overtime


***

I'm all amped up. Happens everytime I read Walden.
The book is so dead-on, and yet so totally ignored
by this culture. But don't go into a diatribe--just read it
and feel blessed you just got a ticket to more freedom than
any rabid capitalist has access to.

I Know A Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.


Robert Creeley

FAY GRIM



Oh, there's nothing really wrong with Fay Grim. I
found its odd style ceaselessly entertaining. I found
the dialogue--conspiracy babbling, espionage cliches--
fitting for the times. I don't know. It's no Henry
Fool. In fact, when Thomas Jay Ryan appears
he seems positvely blooded and human amidst
the wooden pegs elsewhere in the movie. But that
is Hartley. It's like the smartest kids on the block
got together and decided to do a project and halfway
through someone told them it wasn't really a parody.
Anyway, Parker Posey, looking very sharp,
runs around Paris wearing some kind of practically
skin tight button down coat, and we glimpse
garters and naked thighs more than a few times.
But she's not on the make. It's a nice, slightly
vertiginous confusion, Jeff Goldblum being Jeff Goldblum,
the camera tilted for almost every scene--it's Art!
Wait, it's camp! I'm not sure what it is! I saw
The Departed last night, and I enjoyed it. But Martin
Scorsese doesn't need me. I was even hostile about
the blatant exposition constituting the first half
hour of the movie--the endless music, testosterone dripping
all over the place. But, I got over it. It's a ride.
Nicholson just gets better and better. He and Judi
Dench may be the two most charismatic actors
in Hollywood right now. So some good stuff.
I even stopped Fay Grim once and rewinded so
I could hear Thomas Jay Ryan shout the word
Jihad again . . .

THE STRIPPINGS

poem by Linda Tomol Pennisi


We called it the bush.
Woods, forest came later.
We called the mudholes ponds.
The soil, sprinkled with slag,
tried to look glittery.
We called the soil dirt; the slag,
we called coal dirt.
The boys swam in The Lily,
a mile away, and too deep.
We could not swim;
we could float. We'd float
into the bush, around the edges
of holes. The sun flung
a sadness there. We laughed
and played in it. At the Big Pond
we'd float into our muddy faces.
We called the stripping Judy fell into
a coal hole. The town took days
to find her, far from her boyfriend's
parked car. Coal holes were deep
and lined with trash. She
was an older girl. We
knew not to go anywhere
near them at night.

CALENDAR SERIES I: JEWELRY




I’m kind of an overseer

slipping
under the davenport

all those who have been building a universe

you almost
got away with it

silos and a one room schoolhouse

a lifeguard’s tower

I found the bronze claw that sometimes hangs from her throat

small piece of geography
known as the cleavage

an animal looks in through the broken window
backlit by lightning

it’s not like it will change anything

they tell you they’re sorry

in Oregon they don’t have this particular
kind of rabies outbreak

(they do yoga)

so eventually you just drive straight for the country

all that, all of it!

eaves troughs and stunted grass . . .

I like a nice quiet acre
where you can see her when you punish her

ELEVEN

First of all, I'm getting info together at my editing blog,
because I'm going to support myself freelance this year,
and the ad will appear in P&W's Sept/Oct issue, which will
direct a poet to this other blog then. But I want people
to start finding it early, so, twice, the link, here.

*

So I've posted eleven Calendar Series poems, all of them
coming fast, all to be published together, a book of portraits
or skewed narratives, I never want to get to the bottom
of what exactly. There are 53 Ashbery Erasures and
I'm done, and I'm serious, anyone with any ideas about
where I might float the book, the Ashbery book, which
is titled Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, The Ashbery
Erasure Poems, please speak up, tell me what I might try,
brainstorm at me. I sent it to Flood Editons, and Soft Skull,
and neither place is exactly encouraging poetry submissions,
but this is also conceptual art. Right. Well, it is, but
open slots at small presses are at a minimum--I know,
I know. New Issues has a ms (hi Marianne!). I think I thought
to send one to Martha Rhodes at Four Way, but don't think
I made the June deadline and so didn't. And, Clay Matthews,
didn't you once mention a press that published a book of
Shakespeare erasures or revisions? Or if not, who who who
did? I forgot the name of the press is the main thing here.
Anyway, had a nice small meeting of writers at the Chicory
Cafe, the outlaws plotting the takeover of South Bend.
Chris was there, despite the gas leak days earlier at the
Fiddler's Hearth, and Charmi, piled up with books (everyone
agreed Siken's book is compelling), and Talia showed up
late, but brought a willful looking Hadley, and Talia offered me
a few bites of Hadley's pineapple bits, which was nice
but I'd already had lunch, and Ryan was in attendance,
and Vince, he of the guitar and drums, and Kelcey
and Nancy, none of us "teachers" wanting to dole
out any advice really, and nobody really asking us to--
we're just there like Rosalinda and Naoko, who now
wants to e-mail Jonathan P. and thank him for
merely liking her poems (she is THAT moved by art, period).

Okay, a new poem (as of 6:50 pm on Wednesday) right here:



CALENDAR SERIES I: CAR ALONE IN THE LOT



I had a dream I owned
the car and the ferry it rode in

heroin light
in your eyes

stars’ fantasy is this cold slip cover

one-thousand nine-hundred ninety-three feet deep

it might be safer there

headlights beaming into
the face of the most patient fish

O we care less about what constitutes a Samaritan moment

then I remembered
great, it’s the middle of winter

each snowflake a little consciousness

(everybody leave me alone!)

but she unbuttoned

the light interrupted by a million dreams
shined on her nude on this animal pelt

I put on my leather gloves

an empty car is like the loneliest grave

(Pompeii, everything stopped in its tracks)

I can see the lights on the coast
from the deck of this moonless ferry

I’m never going to dream again

CALENDAR SERIES I: OUR BLUEST SKY


a liminal hum
in the leaves, an oriole’s

disinterested
lodging

(a several ounce barge)

You drive in a second nail

sin tastes like that
it comes out of the shimmering blue like a chattering psalm

everyone reduced to a grassy bag of eggs

you can't put ice in red wine, the woman kept
whispering at her table in Bono's . . .

my hands still sticky from
administering salve to the wounds
on open palms . . .

O here’s an entire universe—
bananas and six fruit flies

go ahead shift your little brine teeth

the opposite of love isn’t cockroaches

make bail and see Jesus
don’t make bail and see Jesus

nobody could save the barking deer
near the Gamber River

in the Kuthar forest range

ESKIMO MASK, ST. MICHAEL



A single sound. The white shade of a drum.
One begins to notice things. The shape of a tear.
swaying like background light. Somewhere
a rock has fallen a long distance. Snow geese
sweep the sea . . .

Among the feathers, the stars,
through half-closed eyes, we know the short of it,
how easily the thong is drawn up--
those delicate tufts of fur, white blooms,
silencing the mouth.

poems by Anne Coray

*

Anne is a former editing client of mine, and has published several
chapbooks. The above is from Soon the Wind. Anne lives in Alaska.

CALENDAR SERIES I: FLOATING BRIDGE



sleepwalking, it was
a sort of

falling through lights

trouble gets amplified

the nurses
the corridor

she cried and her tears fell five stories
onto pines
in the small courtyard . . .

we're talking months of this

the man on the phone

won't stop saying "zeitgeist"

as in, it's a whole new one

as in America is ready for [Chemlawn]

*

Bill Gates is standing
at the end of your driveway

until a city gardener comes and replaces him
with
a juniper

*

it's a fluid horizontal


vessel stranded
where the tumor

roared at the edge of a sinkhole

her child not quite conceived

blizzard of
blue-collar exhaustion

instead of a peninsula pouring
into the wound . . .

Clouds like bison skirt the orange roof of the new shopping center

they're lifting the steel gate

let the wind roar over your body

you've lived through it all

for your birthday
a robin's going to build a nest
in a laurel tree

Bottom of



a boiling sea. Whatever, it's too hot for me. And I don't
have anything to say other than that in which the process
I've been involved in does half the talking. I watched Nine
Songs, an insanely bad "erotic" film by Michael
Winterbottom. The grass is stiff and no fun to walk on in bare
feet. The wrens are singing; the catbirds are singing. The
Calendar poems. I want the series for the serial
application, paintings or photographs coming one after
another, and I like the connotations streaming out of the word
Calendar: Time, yes, but also the old pin up images from
way back, the Vargas girl in the automobile repair shop,
and even the way we now flip up that page when the month
ends--August is a red eyed vireo, a sculpture by Richard
Serra, Michael Stipe, snow blowing off mountains . . .
Sometimes at antique stores they'll have stacks of caledars,
and some hanging on the wall, many years old, and there's
all this STORY coming slant out of the thing, the history,
the datedness so quaint and/or erotic. The things we believe
in and the things we once believed in. How we annotate our
lives in the little squares on the paper under the Image . . .

CALENDAR SERIES I: DIAGNOSIS (poem revised 7/9/07)



The enamel
can be too easily damaged

avoid Mountain Dew

We awoke and believed we
were unfulfilled

we felt the sweat glands
opening all over our bodies

deep in the ocean
live fish
who harness electricity
in order to see

Have a seat, says the psychiatrist

*

they find what there is

contemporary road kill

busts from the train depot broken into chalk outlines

port wine in a coffee cup
fermented with crushed Xanax

and who knows why Venus calls home the ones
birthed under the dead rookeries

the murmur located deep in the dream artery

serotonin reuptake inhibitors

the herons kept sticking their beaks in her eyes

CALENDAR SERIES I: MAMMAL



It's one thing to
eat all your ambergris

eye big as a platter

but the deal is the babysitter quit
before my father

could fire her

love drains right out of the fattest black pencil

a mother walking to the store
with deciduous leaves in her mouth

the heaviest
heavenly thing

tunnel in the bottomlessly blue and carbonated ocean . . .

he thought maybe
her body'd been talking to him

"a little bonfire of revenge"

trees in a line
you keep driving away from

until you aren't part
of that landscape anymore

her name was Rosemary something

CALENDAR SERIES I: PAW PAW



Report from
from a nearby small town

a car-jacking occurred

meanwhile the moths
hit the screens
like fur hats

Russian band majorettes

when I quit drinking I craved
sourdough bread

“I don’t know about you but I think we deserve this pizza”

and was obsessed with nude figures
painted by Edward Hopper

I fell in the leaves

I told the fucker I didn’t care

if his muffler packed glass

so now, again with the light slanting across a soft stone surface?

I get it—you’re sensitive . . .

he’s got a garden

he’s got a bucket full of cigarette butts and rain

a memory: his mother holding her diploma at “the ceremony” ten years ago

your car keys w/white rabbit’s foot attached

CALENDAR SERIES I: ISLANDS


They sing in
the street and

the architects
dream of mushroom clouds

and still closets
full of coats

If you can find the right lake stay until midnight

the bones might have yellowed

but they remain white for the moon

I used an eraser on her
until all he could see was
a violin on fire

so she carries stones in her trunk
instead of a bag full of sand

get used to it

if you see a kite over water
from inside an island

it means a blood clot has started to move

let your guitar fill
with campfire smoke

let her drink at least half of the bottle of wine

I met you once

you were naked and floating on top of the ocean

and I was in an airplane

CALENDAR SERIES I: GRAVEL



here is your
story, in my

horizonless competency,

a nevertheless fine
kettle of

mockingbirds

I could see ambulance spelled backwards

I could see the eels spilling
out of the horse’s head

a crawdad sits in a cold
pool importantly praying

(cumulous nimbus)

and here is your
story

coming from a different direction

here is the lung
in a Lucite gravy boat

“I heard she didn't like it directly from the spigot”

correspondance has six cylinders

a couple of shaved ideas

COUNTRY MUSIC


She was cardiac
With integrity, and light,

Soulless angel . . .

People stood around the scene
Throwing gum wrappers
Into the quarry

“Is that, like, a badger?” a man
Wearing a cowboy hat said

I sometimes sit apart

The pond where she drowned
Shimmered in the dusk like a tuning fork . . .

It keened darkly

Oh, please, and with your hands still touching the animal's shoulder

Time gets a little focused

Whittled down to the edges of things . . .

Where the noose should have been
The cops found only a harp

They found no drugs

Bread crumbs in a circle under the moon in the driveway . . .

You could tell the boyfriend was upset with the fish
Who just kept swimming
And looking around . . .

I remember my grandmother,
How her eyeglasses turned opaque

While she over-salted the meat

That was in London

Every lament had an open window for purchase

Outside of town, in the dark English countryside
There'd been talk that a year-old gelding

Had had a stroke

And yet continued to stand

“It doesn't matter if we were broken up,” the boyfriend screams

The moon is humming over the dirt road

It's hard to know what
To do with one's face

And now here come the crows

MY GOLD CHAIN

(an Ashbery Erasure poem)


Un Green the Diva
diamond . . .

her past

and the men's room thereof

I can't help being a little peon

she hollered at me
to forget
being meat on the butchers' scales

But then a dory enters the bridesmaid

The things you think you love

the question is so dark sometimes

CALENDAR SERIES I: PORCELAIN


The doors keep
accumulating

address: wouldn't you like to know

we're lost in our own country

a mouth full of trees gagging on blue water

barrette or a cigarette

it’s Friday, a repast,
a sympathy like glass

and that’s how you are sumptuous

(hardening with acumen—
after a while the roof just caves in)

what’s hidden
what’s only

the spinnerets

your damaged handcuffs

go ahead, let him touch you

bees wake in an attic
and aren’t worried
about self-esteem

I love that you are in biting range

Poem by Thomas Lux


THE PEOPLE FROM THE OTHER VILLAGE



hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.

CONDUCT OF OUR LOVES

Poem by David Gewanter


There's a kind of sky below the ocean--
a field of starfish, turning slowly
like cogs inside
a water-watch, wound by a sea river;
the star's five fingers tremble and
reach for a clam's book of meat,
into which it will inject a sedative
and then its stomach.

In The City, escaped parrots colonize
a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that
In a bag? More hits after this...

--And how should we conduct our loves? Black & white
judgments still beget grays, like baptisms
of the photograph:
develop is Need, stop-bath Guilt, the fixer
Memory. Then we classify the causes,
studying the elephants' "Green Penis Disease"
till we learn it is Must. The philosopher clarifies
his mind like butter;

life dumps in raw clams, and it de-natures.
So do we love who conducts our love?
The zookeeper who earned the elephants' respect

was nicknamed "God" by the others; when Nietzche
cracked and bellowed, his mother stuffed his mouth
with apple-bits,
and he "growled dully to himself." Emptiness
propels, beauty reels--we skip in the currents....
If the Angler-fish can find a female
he attaches his jaws to her genitals:
their blood-systems unite,
his heart withers, and he degenerates into
a pulsing bag of sperm, fertilizing her
unto death. Still she swims through the vaults

of black waters, her angler glowing
from its forehead stalk of flesh: a Diogenes
barrelled by her mate
and her young, prowling in God's hunger;
as the Flounder ages he flattens, and one eye
migrates toward the other, ontogeny
posing as Modern Art, just as his name
poses him as indecisive--

nature dooms that he look up to his enemies, rained
with light; but another one, swimming, can't look down,
a waffling shadow he knows, and he calls her God.

Waking Life

Oh, sure, I'd recommend this. Have a

Linklater night and do a double feature with

School of Rock. Don your philosophy

beanie. The speakers are all telling it like it is (you've heard

variations on these ideas before), their voices steady, but the animation

gives us a subtext and now it's not so dry or pretentious.

Check it out. I found Waking Life delightful . . .

*

I've been saving a few films for a Michael

Winterbottom festival. This weekend perhaps.

A DRIFTWOOD ALTAR

(an Asbery Erasure poem)


I like you, no question
your body a down payment;

the future is a drifter

consensus, polite indifference in young adults

remember?

I caught him shitting on meaning

the emptiness a sadness,
a pagan alert

a bathroom considerable with sludge

a chilly late remembering

they wore their coats
in certain precints

washed and small

and people spilled their standard attitudes, no escape

certainly you must have
known all this,

the birds banging a promise
just as they did before the airplanes

the wind cracking,
indecent in the mirror

god of the trees
stop time

There has to be
animals expectant
in the doorways and windows

*

Note: from Hotel Lautreamont

*

The AEs have slowed to a trickle,
as I am ready to publish the lot
and see what's what.

FAY GRIM



"The defiant disdain with which Hartley beholds the vast
swampland of current cinema is bracing, even if 'Fay Grim'
revisits attitudes and emotional environs he's frequented
before. The unorthodoxy of the film is perhaps its biggest
asset - along with the idea that a personal cinema can still
exist, be so entertaining and provide something new to feel
about character - and maybe even the universe."

That's John Anderson, writing in Newsday, and I think he's
got it right. Is disdain a bad word? It's not a bad word. It's a
word for our times. Fay Grim is a wonderful film.

*

Iris, starring Judi Dench, is engaging if only to see the
writers' and director's stamp on Murdoch and her life.
I don't know enough about Murdoch, but I know the entire
middle of her life has been left back at the garbage dump.
The acting is wonderful, and I must say I enjoyed both
Dench and Kate Winslet playing the older and younger
versions of Murdoch. But what to make of Broadbent,
who plays Murdoch's long suffering under-achiever of a
husband (John Bayley)? We see him in the early days
accepting Murdoch's terms (she does what she wants,
when she wants, etc.) There's no chemistry between
the two of them so the movie ends up being about
Bayley having no self without Murdoch's charisma and
celebrity. He's born to care take. Or, more precisely,
he has no choice; Bayley is Mr. Iris Murdoch. While we
watch Murdoch slowly lose her mind to Alzheimer's
(it happens suddenly) all the weight of the drama comes
to rest on Broadbent's sputtering and desperate
devotion. The world shrinks to a messy cottage, the
little English house they apparently have always
called home, and Dench stares into the spaces
indicating she's anywhere but down here with us, the

regrettably sane (so the movie seems to say). You can't

help but be moved by Murdoch's deterioration--at least
Winslet is shown swimming naked enough times, a
symbol for the erotic life, that we feel the loss of this
person, Iris--if not the great writer, then the
charismatic nonconformist. I suppose it's a strength of the
movie that it doesn't necessarily go into detail about
Bayley and Murdoch in the middle years. Perhaps our
faith in the "love story" here may have been irreparably
shaken. But it's Bayley we mourn for at the end. Murdoch
dies. He no longer has a self. The film manages to show
the role of the caretaker as a sustained act of
self-preservation. The part of the film is terribly disturbing.