GEOLOGY OF THE LAKE SUPERIOR BASIN



it's such a long way down

an elegance in the depth of every compulsion

although I could live
without the graffiti

all those Mastodons and the blood math . . .

and you know each meal
has a magnitude of casualness

followed by the "splitting"

but nobody admits it

the lack of punctuation will continue
the absence of church bells

Even the icicles grow dark as the library closes

In room after room the books disappear . . .

I have a candle and what she left on it

her smell

the economic facts--

somebody dousing a cigarette

a shirt fresh out of the cellophane

love is a form of suffering

MY SISTER IS NOT A DOLLAR

by Michael Burkard


I think it is unusual
I even try speaking. I hear steps and doors
where there is nothing but a medicinal smell,
the person crossing near me crosses on.

At the far end of a country lane
the night burned like shores,
the moon was dead, the moon
was okay.

The peace be and the peace
falleth, the garden is white
with my sister, and one dollar.

My sister is not a dollar,
I am not a man.

Not before the task,
when the burning afternoon rises
across the sky, not before
the angry residue of possession,
not before my teeth bleed
with greed for water . . .

not before. Here is the parting of nails,
frames, the parting of empty footsteps.

*

from Fictions of the Self (Norton, 1988)

WHAT DAY IS IT? OH YEAH, IT'S FRIDAY


I seemed unable to prevent a fey little monologue
this afternoon. A little pedestal-ish for my taste. Maybe not.
Forgive me. Maybe the George Saunders
I read with my friend chicken last night. I haven't
been at a Tom Robbins book in years (is he still writing
them?).



STARLINGS



My one hand is the size
of an elephant ear,

the kind you eat

Out behind the big K-Mart you got Michigan ten centers

and there's the guy who parks his car back here
to protect the paint job

the sociopath

The cracks in the asphalt
sprout, who knows,

weeds of meretricious chemical content

a goldmine next to a rotted davenport

it smells like the railroad

sans vanishing point

no butterflies either
no blues no coppers

It hurts from the humidity so I place my paw
atop a cracked retaining wall

I sleep looking at the bottom of a mattress

my brother, the laughing hyena,
farts until he's dreaming,

twitching like a dog

the unnamed masses are just waiting to rob someone

I want a sandwich

an air conditioner that doesn't fall into
the shrubs every time it thunders

but who out there is content

Thunderbird and plasma TV

the smell of Febreze
all over your shirt cuffs?

I wear a mitten the size of a manhole cover all winter

My Henry Hancock is what my brother calls his signature

Fraud is what they called it in court
before he was sentenced to three years of supervised unemployment

birds always in these back lots

rummaging in the dirt

starlings, care of William Shakespeare

look it up

and a great blue heron rows overhead way out of reach

there's going and then there's being

the luxury of stopping

when my hand doesn't hurt

a little spin the bottle with Sissy Hankshaw
would sure be nice

A HARVEST POEM



Last night the full moon ballooned over trees
tied through the window to her ankle

The lowing in the morning like a pattering of rain

Man can't come around through the back of the house

Tears like sand stuck in my throat

I'm a blight of ill thought

The coyote blesses the Eucharist . . .

And the night spreads gooseflesh up the backs of her thighs

They say it, pastoral, the wind blowing in
through the word

sitting on that porch filled with love

A bird with soft bones in its throat

You are almost there

The soft pins against your lips where you kiss her

The moaning

The coldest water in the deepest wells

Her wings start burning

More blood than can fill a bucket

Two weeks after the first castration


*

the poem owes something to Neil Young, obviously
(and maybe Joel Peter Witkin)

WOMEN OF THE WEB


Here is a nice set of interviews, Women of the Web,
that have to do with poetry and publishing. For anyone
interested in the subject it is worth checking out.
Didi Menendez is responsible for this informative
and entertaining set of interviews. Next up is "Men
of the Web," for which I'm happily working up WHY
DO I DO THAT? kinds of answers for Ms. Menendez's
project. I was happy to have been asked.

GOLD RUSH HAMLET

poem by Paula Cisewski


I will come father by father
until a fatherless son is unoriginal.
I will not pity myself for the weight

of a woman's gowns. Night
is night. I will breathe.
But first, I want

pictographic records
of how every person lives
their life. A multiplication lesson
to equal the universal mind.

I want a trail of lessons, a railroad
to the West. A pipeline.
I want possession of the absolute

rule of freedom. I will
sit window still until
I'm sure, resisting the urge

to live in history. I have a sieve,
I'll shake time out.
I will know something.
Damn it! What does the indifferent

spider-eye of God divide
down into, but any part
of the world, and a man?

*
from Upon Arrival (Black Ocean, 2006)

POSTCARD: CAPE MAY



A trance state in the particle
is par
for Massachusetts

the Red Sox

an expensive boat moored in the mud

Ratio of lawns slept on
to the number of haircuts

certain other cars come roaring
out of the roundabouts

their wheels flying off

one man screams his prosthetic wit

they eat lobster with their bare hands . . .

tiny epics spill onto the docks there

the slut and the girlfriend

the family standing under a linden

(an abbreviation for pain)

a wedge of quartz suffers a panic attack

Charles Olson . . .

but night does come on slow

like giving up the piano for life

pathology of hungers

stairs made out of barn wood next to a luminous Coke machine

FOUR WAY BOOKS

The contract has been signed for the next book,
expected to appear in 2009. The manuscript
changes as I write more poems. What a great
problem--this insane excess . . .

Here's a link to the press.

half moon bay editing renovation experience


here

ROSEMONDE

Guillaume Appollinare

translated by Donald Revell


A long while on the steps
My fingers blew kisses
To the front door of the lady
I'd follow over two
Good hours in Amsterdam

The canal was deserted
The embankment also and none
Saw the way my kisses found
The lady I gave my life
One day over two good hours

I christened her Rosemonde
Wishing to remember
Her mouth a Holland flower
Then slowly went away
Seeking the worldrose

NERVOUS FILAMENTS

slight successive modifications

you put on the blood
pressure cuff
a magnified period of grief kneeling in the Confessional

fly with his back legs rubbing together, praying

he sees a million of you

I think everyone knows that famous still
from Battleship Potemkin--

my little friends

philosophy and remoras

the only fish that has a sucking disk on top of its head

did you just hear a baby?

A priest shouldn't have a tattoo of Darth Vader
ooooooooooooooooo(or call a parishioner a Yoga Nazi)

there was sun shining all over the bed that beautiful morning

little silver penguins holding trays

may I suggest you seek the advice of a mental health professional

I put out some wine

microphones packed away neatly in a box
in the basement labeled

Shells of the Florida panhandle

*

A smattering of language here, including the
title, comes from Darwin's The Origin of Species.

Line ten comes from The Audubon Society
Field Guide to North American Fishes, Whales & Dolphins.

MIMICRY



a Viceroy lands on a Bose
Acoustic Wave . . .

jonathan richmond and the modern lovers

a nodule sparks in a kingbird's brain

this music doesn't taste very good

and no one likes the hood ornament

standing erect

Limousine of the Antichrist

it's almost like his heart stains his trousers

the violent eruption of a migration

monarch bent and ringing against the roof of the mouth

angels are half human
half bird
what's that about?

Stones. Stones and the women who hoard them

or the unpopular lamprey eel

Portals we leave when the love blows away

it's a whole new experience in headphones

the fish die from it

We demand you visit the poetry editing blog!

UNPOPULAR FILM



Said indulge

what kind of crap are you going to

it was a culvert
full of old mail

piles of garbage and graves rolling over in the wind

she put a single candle on a cupcake

as usual the woman was the screamer

innocent were the various
crafts of transport

and the man

the man

trembling at the prospect of pouring her tea!

there are nine of these carnivals

young girls find boys and they bruise them

the littlest saxophone
in Indiana

a keg in a claw-footed bathtub

helium does make one's teeth turn green

And the character you like best is a literal monster

FIDELITY TO RAPTURE



long morning past, drinking

shock therapy on the beach, a haze of
gnats turning orbital . . .

it's the sand like an infestation

and the wind flipping a volley ball net

O Harry Callahan

the silence surrounds you

already halfway to that deeper place

a gull runs along
the water's edge

rush of blood to the cerebral cortex

grass and twigs for the walking stick

smell of a just opened bag of pot

and childhood

the barking frog who used to live under my bed

the long white miracle of smoke and a cigarette . . .

Eleanor with her face turned
away from you

posing for the world and it's manifold trees

I was just saying you never really
come to the end of this pier

ONE TAKE ON FALL



Bees have invaded the bluebeard, the purple flowers,
a plant that has stretched to cover a patch of earth
fifteen feet wide. If you just sit level, the bees on some
imaginary horizon, they rise and fall and blur in their doing,
overcome by what all they find in the blossoms. Nuthatches
come to a yard, a feeder. They take one seed and fly away
with it. They eat it. They come back and grab another
seed. I've hit some turbulence--tachycardia. The heart
beating over a hundred beats per minute at rest. Is it
the apple butter? The buzzards circling overhead
lately? That nine-hundred pound wheel that popped
into my brain so I could write "nine-hundred pound
wheel" right when I needed to? Thank you to the
many (6!) who have had rather elaborate responses to
relatively new poems. The skunk has been spotted
again, digging up yellow jackets. He's on a rampage,
and looks like a tiny snowdrift (he's 90 percent white)
when illuminated with a flashlight at 11 pm. I got up you
see because of tachycardia. I got a line in my head
and if it don't (sic) find a context soon I may just expire.

BODY THAT IS MORE THAN THINKING


there is a train derailment

spirit your rainbow over the water

the flat blades of mountains

one all over the other
one inside the next one

rain falls in a winter of dried goldenrod

and industrial metal

her state of mind is her exuberance
another bottle levered inside a knot of pine

and I swear we could see

the rainbow trout looking up at the sky . . .

Nine-hundred pound wheels

I counted her ribs

two more animals who lack reason

but there were plenty of windows

a telescope in the aftermath
of the roar makes the splinters of steel heat up

a naked breast in the cold
can see everything

the idea of the rational

wind shearing off in your eyes

speak for yourself

But by now the black horses were already falling

CADILLAC LAKE



we were out under
the airplanes

there was a kind of rummaging

a pine cone on a necklace . . .

pink and vulnerable as the teats of dogs

sentimental as liquid paper

She kept a scorecard
as the grass fell on her naked back

a little napalm

the embarrassment of not wanting to finish

The bats crawling
all over the sidewalks like Peter Lorre

I can't put a deterministic spin on it

the ham only partly defines the fork

smooth as the wood of a bow

hair on the underside
where it's softest

where the water gets deepest . . .

From atop a phone line a dove watched the disappearing world

she was forgetting

rotten boards on the dock where the moon bled out

leather on a bed of blackwatch plaid . . .

people missing for over forty years
stayed still in their velvet boats

NATIONAL PICNIC


all the changing and slipperiness

double-jointed

maybe a little bi-polar . . .

now chiggers, read pepper, bounce
around the plaid tablecloth

after all, it's Labor Day

or something . . .

the biggest dent in the microscope

an actual circle
for an eye

Willy Wiggins pastrami sticks next to a cooler of Cokes

Maybe before, when we were under
the bed, when she said I felt like a T-square

they ground up some celery
and dyed it black
and pressed it into capsules

this is how we will live forever

a pot of something Ellen calls Gum Boll

off over Mona Lake you've
got your Turneresque sky

I'll take a turtle over a guinea pig . . .

The Governor of the Midwest Colony clears his throat

He's somewhere in East St. Louis

(Home of the Bottle Rocket)

He's going to explain why
it's a good idea to enlist

*

a couple lines of this poem owe something
to Henry Miller's Black Spring

HALF MOON BAY EDITING



the link.

HAIKU

poem by Jordan Davis

The dog stands by the window
Barking endlessly--
We are playing baseball.

Nobody in the tollbooth,
Nobody at the snackbar
We are not talking.

from Million Poems Journal


THROWN



I know the last poem is a list. I'm
back at the park. I worked there for
eight years. But now I'm tired.
So the poem doesn't have the fuel it needs
to be much more than a portrait, which
is a thing a poem can do/be . . .
Improvisation is interesting. This sense
of getting it all on the first take. And sometimes
that happens. But mostly it's like everything
else. You see where you are and then
adjust accordingly. I'm trying to find a link to a
poem. Because I think it is a good
poem. You can do the work. The poem
is by Joe Wenderoth. Title: "The Weight
of What is Thrown." Let me know what
you think

LAKE GENESERATH


orangutans

an oddity by any measure--

a seminal experience,
breakthrough surrounded by strollers

phlebotomist takes a bite of salad

a fissure in the vein

the face you imagine contorts underneath your own

Poke, someone says in a child's voice . . .

way out in the mist of some lake an animal shoots itself

nobody moves

his boat is one thing to love

the only thing moving for miles

Half Moon Bay Poetry Editing

the link.

URN LIKE A WHORLED COCOON


He wore slippers
until it burned his feet

skin hardening

a bust like a fist inside him struggling to speak

in Nebraska the long grass blows north
and the sandhill cranes lean their long necks southward

it's conductivity

an allergy to simple moss

a tendency to drape clothes over exercise bikes

she got the call at ten "oh" seven

every living being in the house appeared to have worms!

no good bye kiss

I am turning into basalt

me

former metaphysician of Spanish fly

trapped on the ice with the gulls

not even a word

driving and driving over long bridges

WORSHIP OF THE ASTONISHED



The menu looks fine

it's just there's a fly in that woman's sangria

a pair of crotchless
panties left under my windshield wiper

a baby differentiating
between self and a lime green

stinkbug

They put one head right on top of the other

his eyes grew wild as two bird cages

the taste of something awful . . .

I know I woke up
and the sun was staring at me

Orange Juice

it's all about packaging

And the mockingbird knows nothing at 2 a.m.

The Riddler
Don Adams

Monks chanting in the alley

it wasn't at all like yesterday

she spoke as if from the top of a mountain

pubic hair on my cheek
and the crazy thing

unhooking it's nozzle inside her

Half Moon Bay Poetry Editing


Groups of poems--5, 10--once, or ongoing, a workshop
building up to a book. Chapbooks and full-length books
arranged, selected, edited. Here.

HOW TO ROCK

poem by Jordan Davis


Use a lot of bow

Move your head
Quickly 'cross the page

Across the sea
Three hundred years go by they
Say what anybody knows
And repeat it 'till it's holy

The faces you see
In the movies all
Share the look of
Wanted-to-be-an-actor

The words they say
All come from
People-who-wanted-to-write

The musicians bring forth
Music-ambition sounds

Soldiers who train and train
So when the battle starts their limbic systems
Defer to physical memory

It is not life
It may be better

YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL



In wax paper, a jewel
of a sandwich.

Bits of steel,
that's what you bite down on,
a cannonball.

Under long wet trees friends, maybe a family

cars from the sixties

I grab onto an ant who has a piece of one dream in his mouth

brand new rheostat

it's light
it's dark
it's light again

Oh but the woman in the turtle neck

there is a shotgun

tiny big bang between cars is incredibly silent

ionization
tingles all over my lips
and teeth

there is no longer a head in place but a mouth moves
in the air where it used to be

But it is saying all the wrong names!

Talking about cities in far off lands!

Artesian wells every mile
on the way back from seeing the priest


Artesian wells every mile
on the way back from seeing the priest

MODELS DEMAND AND MUTATE



the trees are full of adjectives

a face like an elephant's
slowly falls apart in your binoculars

what about the zoning laws?

but they pour all over the tree with those legs

a thousand to the bottle

one by one you might tie them to hooks

a loose sac unravels
in the stomach and the camping begins

shoe big as a tabernacle
where the hill thins to marmots

Iodine

the perfect birth stone

most of them had never seen a naked man

it's the clock of the world
with a candle burning
where the gears should be

WHAT WAS THERE


he really likes to dance

wind bursting through hot ashes in her hair

Vic Chesnutt
stood up in that
burning house

it was late and only the dogs could see through the window

*

you could smell it

just a lunchroom in the low light

Paul Revere and the Raiders

she put her face in her hands

"Boys, you look about as relaxed as fence posts"

I remember snow
fell on her black hair
and I told her I liked it

ashes spilling all over the stage

the lampshade moved like a river branch

books on Catholicism molding

The water stood like a stranger outside the door to the storm cellar

*

"We all wear clothes under clothes"

he'd written FIND ME on her naked back

a moth flew out of a woodchuck hole

all the windows broken and open like mouths

a page blew down the middle of Eddy Street

dowtown South Bend

the capital of loneliness

THE FUTURE OF THE NOMADS



The rain feeds exclusively on milkweed

then sobs with the lawyers

we came to watch from the gallery, planked
to arousal in our dresses

the invention of meteorology

I wrote how the hundreds
of them bruised her naked back

the magpie whistles
he looks the other way

and the burning car is in a phylum of migration

sew now and think later

from this bed I can see a cloud of wrens
flying out of the snow

a hermit pays
the electric bill

a giant magnetic cock bobs in the window

They made tools of the jaws and bones of deer

I can't wait any longer

the stitches keep exploding into bad ideas


*************

Memorial for Liam Rector 1949 - 2007

Saturday, September 22, 2007

3 p.m. St. Marks Church In-the-Bowery
131 East 10th St.
New York, New York 10003

SOMETHING NEVER FATHOMED



Instead of that, or
rather on a whim

and the one dark inside the one asleep
kept inventing a eulogy

there was a lady
on a pole

drinking gin and tonics all the way to the arctic

no one cancels even a bad party

little hotdogs
and Marxism

kids going crazy
in their own countries

a certain kind of posture gets the sperm whale

she and her rider

the skull with a bunghole removed
played as a bugle on deck where there's never any sun

the little man
he sleeps
he frets

I AM NEVER GOING BACK




Come in. Listen to the wind
express itself.

Inveigle a dying dream.

I like my antelope feminine--
marinated in a closet . . .

But I came necessary to masturbation
like a key deer.

It's what the oceans bring.

(Younger and younger, they all wear body-belts)

Thread in the eye,
the world grows smaller as the guts spill forth.

A splinter of desire, a "Manuel" trade.

(No one's ready for some football . . .)

And the laughing through the walls.

"The shoes, the shoes."

I'm tired of pathos.

This window looks out over all I own.

***

Notes: The tiniest smattering of language
owes something to Sartre's Age of Reason.

Manuel Ramirez, Detroit Lions, drafted 2007 . . .

AUTOMATIC THANK YOU KISSES


Ordinary
men gather holding vote-sticks

but then came the end of that time

a whipsaw of radio congruences

the battering of good manners

she caves

light frosts her bangs
while she shows off her unlocked story

the paparazzi remain sanguine

children who bite for the pleasure

and look at her salad!

plosives and a nice tight
forehead wave crazily all over the outdoor mall

TAKE A BIRD EACH EVENING AND
CALL ME IN THE MORNING




It's cold. The stars had that hard clarity of ice
last night. Late, late. Enough to see your breath
and then find yourself enchanted by seeing
your breath. There is a quality of stillness to the pines
that isn't there during hot, still summer nights.
Some kind of bird trilled in the lit darkness. I've been
reading in a scattered way. But something in the
rhythm of what I try to write is thumping at the
steel door. Little Gothic narrative horror poems
come bubbling out, but what I think is the poems
need to be chopped in half, lengthwise. The hard pruning
of fall, a seasonal poetry. Also a time to go back:
I find Simic less interesting than ever before
after reading the couple of selecteds I own. (This
isn't always the conclusion I come to.) I find
Charles Wright's music consoling and luminous
with pleasure I can feel on my skin. I tend to
go back to China Trace and then hit The World of
The Ten Thousand Things. I like Janet Holmes's
Green Tuxedo more and more. I can't penetrate
Szporluk's Empryos & Idiots. It feels leaden, predictable--
she's brought me here in other work. A fog of
depression floats over this work (not that that can't
be a good thing at times). I haven't watched a movie
in a long time, opting temporarily for sports
and night walking. The last of the moths flutter
around the street lights now. The hummingbirds
are busy doubling their weight in order to make
it to South America. Thrashers, warblers, wrens
all floating along, heading south. The Midwest. I
wouldn't mind a year now plunked down in the middle
of the city. Everyone who enjoys the marine layer in
California raise a hand. Overcast and cool all morning.
Warm and dry and sunny by eleven a.m. or noon or even
one p.m. I am set to watch Jules and Jim, a film I saw
when I was too young to get it. The Colts play today,
the Lions later on (both are 1 and 0). The Tigers
aren't lit from within by the same fairy dust that seemed
to propel them last year, until it all leaked out
of the bag the first day of the World Series.
In the meantime, combinations of poems in different
configurations, trying to figure out how best
to put together the new book, a little surgery on
a number of poems. I took a walk a few days ago
and came upon a soccer game being played at a soccer
complex set out in the middle of nowhere. All
I know is when I turned out of a whispering poplar
grove there was a red-tailed hawk sitting on the
goal posts. After about sixty seconds the ball came
rolling down the field as if it had a mind of its own
and the hawk looked down at it. It opened its wings
once--quadrupling its size instantaneously--closed them,
looked at me and back at the ball, then opened
those wings again and sailed away. Birds. How would
I live without them.

Note: Caffeine Destiny, an online magazine, has agreed
to publish five Ashbery Erasure poems in December/January.

First Frost, Northern Pond . . . painting by Lorenzo Dupuis

I'M QUITE THE GOLFER



I went to a driving range. It's worth it. For
everytime I stubbed a ball into a dribble five
feet to the left I blasted one until it sailed so
far I couldn't really tell how far it traveled and
so said it sailed 300 yards. It doesn't
matter. The little dimpled ball went way the
hell out there. I was so inspired I tried to
write a poem, but the poem was a soap opera.
The other really great thing going on is the
weather: it's cold for once. "Hello," and I can
wave to a person and not find myself
tangled in a net of humidity. I fished in the
morning, ate my flaxseed meal, then drank
too much coffee. But ten minutes ago I took
a golf tee, stuck a ball high in the rough lawn grass,
and hit that fucker as hard as I could. I lost
it in one of the neighbor's tulip poplars
but it bounced in the road somewhere near
Rick Lee's house, and when I went to find my ball
it was perched perfectly, so so white and round,
on a pile of dog poo. Thank you. Thank you very
much.

Soon, "Bare Trees." The coolness hit today. Here comes the beautiful season.
Photo by Harry Callahan . . .

TRAVELING



Okay, so what if
I'd been dying

the woman in the blue airplane

a memory of corn silk

while all along we knew the vinyl
was superior

including the yellow cardboard

the many glass rings

A diamond talks to you, embedded,
wakes you in the afternoon

thirty years ago

There's a rush of emotion
more arterial than formal

columbine in a cup

Two buttons, and the air floats up around her body

If I can find my way
I'll eat whatever they're calling steak these days

and take an aspirin

O, ambulance of blossoms

for two hours we moaned

Instrumental

poem by Priscilla Becker

I began to notice wind, I lay
on the floor. The words
didn’t come, but the sounds.
And there was a smell like crayons.

I thought about my mother,
as I often do. A song without words
seemed the simplest way to describe.

Sadness round at the hollow
of the throat—inside, and one good thing:
it makes you horny.

I’ve never believed there were
a thousand words for snow.
I heard a bird, wasting his song.
You see, I had changed my mind.

In the birdbath this morning . . .

POEM BY W.S. MERWIN


People keep mentioning this poem lately.
It's always been one of my favorites.
I had to post it . . .

BERRYMAN


I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

W. S. Merwin, Flower & Hand: Poems 1977-1983
Copper Canyon Press.

OH YOU TIME CONSUMING BLOG!!







This blog, which began at the end of last summer,

is closing for a while. A year and a month is a good

run, and since my employment is changing the

routine that allowed me to post has morphed into

something else (and I mean, something else!).

Also, I began posting around the time I found

residence in the grist mill, and now that I am

leaving the grist mill (by Thursday I'll have to eat

store bought bread) it seems a good time to shut

up for a while. Have a splendid fall (it's September

and it is 85 degrees). I said it before, but in one

of Jim Harrison's novellas his protagonist--one

"Brown Dog"--says he believes the perfect temperature

is 42 degrees. I'm not sure what I'd call the perfect

temperature but I think I'll spend some time trying to

find out. Or maybe I'll just get my dabbling ass in gear

and finish some unfortunately back-burnered projects

and get this show on the road.