I thoroughly enjoyed John Cassavetes's Shadows, a very effective
movie about the hipster vibe of the late fifties and the awkwardness
that was still part of the mixing of races despite crossing racial
barriers via jazz and all that. The film is earnest and awkward,
clever and rudimentary, and full of acting that transcends the low
budget technology and bad sound editing. It was disturbing at times
but awfully charming, and quite funny. It feels like a film Hal
Hartley would embrace.

DEJA VU


it's a treatment west
of whole

self

self-actualization, floating
on a cloud

of herb supported mindfulness--

the DVD says

Follow the song of the cicada away from the world--

I did, I tried,
but the sun was doing it's purple

and orange thing all over my eyelids

all these fingers and breasts--

hot tears on my lips

suddenly I've got two nictitating membranes

(I'm in here)

The world is a mudslide
of human comedy

waiting to be transformed

The voice comes into your mind like an ocean sunfish

I'm flying over Slovakia

eating nachos during The Hills Have Eyes

there's nothing like us in heaven, or Iceland

I don't know what to be mindful of

They live on these mats

The ocean is a fat piece of travel embroidery

a cousin to Zazen
this umbilical hum--

the spiritual essence found
at the heart of the pumpkin

it's what Manks calls
the statin overload . . .

tripling the recommended dosage of Vytorin
while listening to your eight year old bootleg copy

of Yellow Submarine

Church, Nichols Road

I used to paint. This is a detail from a large picture circa 1985.

Golden Buddha near Howe

from the Mackinac Bridge

PEST CONTROL MAINTENANCE

(Please Bear With Us)

BLACK FRIDAY


perfect day to see No Country for Old Men.

PLACE ON A GRAVE

Frank Stanford


It's not hard to forget what they ate
Every winter, when the father
And oldest brother went back to do time,
Cowpeas and smoked goat, all winter
The same muddy supper, their voices
Thick as pan bread, the hollering
At dawn when the mother went out
To the pens in cowboy boots
With a bucket of feed and a roll
Of toilet paper, finding a swatch
Of her daughter's nightgown
Fluttering on the barbed-wire,
The hollering and calling
The rest of them did when they
Raised up from their cold beds
And went out searching at first light
For their crippled sister, who dreamed
Walking over the mountains
In the dead of winter, the smell
Of cooking in her hair, believing
She was gone from there, dignified
Like a wooden figure on the prow
Of a ship with no horizon.

***

From The Alsop Review and Stanford's
Selected Poems . . .

Three Poems by Arthur Vogelsang


NEW STREET

The final light is the last fur and no animals left.
Listen to me as if you’ll be on earth forever.
Some lamps of the rehabilitated enriched neighborhood
Like six approaching mocking bodies in space
Are ochre, white, sorrel, sulphur blue-white,
Imitation suns of the sun letting go of us
In late winter under a big blue steel bridge
Where the warehouses and their repulsive sidewalks
Have been washed and dried as if they fit in a dishwasher.
Would you listen as if I were gone,
A time from now, but gone,
A time from now, but gone,
And you were around, not to pass on my impression
Of the lamps gathering in a darkening space
Like a round-up of suns in a solar-system prairie
Between the bridge and our building,
Not to pass on my impression
As an immortal impression (pitiful desire),
But I think it would not be too like hell
For you to travel alone by foot through the rare light
Under the obnoxious domineering bridge
Between the phonied buildings where the jobs will never come
oooback.
Listen, I don’t know if everything’s an accident,
A continuing explosion in which the myths of eating and love are
ooobeside the point


NO EYE CONTACT


The birds change their minds every few seconds,
That is the only difference between us,
The crazy man said on the long pier.
It was the first cold afternoon, for California.
They were singlemindedly doing their huge sane shift,
The black ones maneuvering by stars or the sun
Which is the same thing, from Canada to here
And the brown ones fleeing screaming down to Oaxaca and
oooChiapas, as
Always, per last year and so forth backward back and forth.
I had not taken a mild pill for stress
So his contention, said evenly with authority like someone
ooointerviewed
Was hot in me but I hid that
From my acquaintance, a known poet,
Who turned as if insulted by a member of our group
And there was no group, just the two of us,
Or, to be totally fair, the three of us—
My friend turned away to the rail and the sea, a body of water
Which never makes sense as it slides
On some grotesque flexible stem.


2215 SPRUCE


On the one hand, the shady side of the house,
The window built of leaves, shifting,
The rooms adequate and cool,
But the other way
The sun in the street flat and finding everyone.
They are very still in it.
A new song about Durango from next door,
They thud when they dance to it,
An American on the tape sings some verses in English,
To tell the moot story,
And sings some verses rawly in Spanish.
People you want in the mega coastal city
To the south and to the north, to be absorbed in them.
The boiling short poems of a student four years ago.
How they do everything better but three hours earlier in L.A.,
Better that the sun is like a wife, and the shade is its husband.
Durango, deep in Mexico.
The appointment rushing near,
The gin and tonics after,
The ache for certain ones never to be known,
Then bed but now the dark to the left the bright to the right.

***

I found two of these, posted quite recently, on Amy King's
blog, and the third--the middle poem--is brand new
and posted as Missouri Review's Poem of the Week (What week
you ask? I don't know and I don't care). I like the work.

photo by Thomas Hawk

SAULT STE. MARIE




It's later than that, dark in the baggage carts

the wing of the plane, balsa sticks

I built it and painted the paper . . .

I fell asleep and dreamed stars
scattered over my dinner plate

I much preferred "Capricorn"

a pool table and a well full of bong water

I put the crop money in certificates of deposit

Years later I met a woman

and she was something disabled to a birch

The oyster mushrooms
bubbled up amidst the trout lillies

or Sault Ste Marie, caskets coming home from the war

The heart is a belief referendum

channels and locks

someone painted the door blue with a brush

and plastic glads dripped
rain in the sunshine

the pinkest blood is a crushed nose at dusk

I was different back then

looking around

lighting what was left on fire in the dark

I say this because the time to start packing draws near

NOT A LANDSCAPE, NOT A TEASPOON


I know because
of the scratches

almost a perfect circle

minnows sluggish
or heading to war

in the gray-green part of your eye

a busted out headlight

anomie ripples through the residential headquarters

I've come to this place

the luminous stage in an egg cup
made from the pumpkinseed's gill

I untie you

the smallest of lace currents

as the moon shows up howling like a train in the window

fills up the room
fills up his head

To hit her in the face is to
watch her head disappear

(then it grows back)

$6.90 for the reddest lipstick

a love nest in the suburbs where
she tries to please him most evenings

a pack of Winstons for mom

a tire iron gift wrapped c/o Annapolis Steel . . .

it's raining on one half of your naked body

shadow under your armpit
our proscenium arch . . .

The disembodied fingers--

they're only crayfish trying to leave home . . .

And the brand new automatic garage door opener
slowly jerks the white door closed

for the very first time

ERIC ROHMER


It's now Thursday, and I watched Pauline at The Beach.
I'm still in it a little. Men and women and talk that's
way better than The View and a lot of sand and sex . . . a
little like my adolescence, only we were high most of the time
(and acting like it). Very charming . . . the movie I mean . . .

National Book Awards


National Book Award winners include Denis Johnson in fiction
(for Tree of Smoke), Robert Hass in poetry (for Time and
Materials) and Sherman Alexie (for young adult fiction).

DEMONSTRATES PROPER RELIANCE


Ill-fitting, rope
necklace

sweet as dessert the taste of smoke

the bird begins to think
like a man until it is identified

by a human being

a flag waving around in the woods
like an amplifier

a handful of human-growth hormone

(because mom put love
in your bowl of spinach)

I don't recall that kind of merry-go-round in my brain

a choir coming out
of the copy machine

a handshake with the alpha baboon

she stands on a chair all night
with her head near the vent fan

followed by soup and a dandelion . . .

Asleep on a bed of applause that slowly disappears
you rise the next morning

to find it's only been snowing again

CRUNCHY LAWN

The other kind--not the dead grass crunch. The frost pic
above is so evocative though. Let's walk in hiking boots
across everyone's lawn, listen to the Kee-runch.
The moon, when it is out, not often this time of year,
shoots you cold to your core. On the poem front
I both like and grow weary of the poem that starts
at point A (the city, say) and ends at point B, (some
rural township, or vice versa). That is to say I grow
weary of anything I'm doing after I do it several
times, when I find myself moving away from a fixed point
(the beginning) by moving toward the personal and/or
erotic, for instance. Or whatever. It results in a certain
kind of poem, of music. I need to get back to a
point where I can put phrases (not words) into a Shake-n-
Bake bag and have the resulting poem still carry emotional
and tonal resonance. The mind wants to draw a map
with the words, and so the poems keep lengthening,
as if the length were being dictated by a wandering
beagle on a scent. A sub-narrative I guess (Damn you
sub-narrative!) But, yeah, I want back to a shorter poem.

In other news, I was so surprised that Truffaut's film, Jules
and Jim, seemed to be simply about the havoc caused
by borderline personality disorder and the folks
who viciously NEED to enable it. For the last twenty
minutes Mr. T. could have switched to some expressionistic
form of claymation. I can just see Catherine--head a-bobble
with the glee of vengeance--cackling out of her sculpted
noggin before the automobile topples into the river killing
her and the blindingly stupid Jim. I know nobody else
was talking about such subjects in 1961. And I know J & J
is an allegorical film. (The most interesting parts of the
movie, the emotional center, revolve around the war and
how this separates the two friends--Jules is Austrian,
Jim is French--and how, after the fighting is done,
there is now Jules, and Jim, and Catherine (Jules has married
her) and she doesn't know what or who to be for these two
men who love her, etc. (and so a kind of lunacy follows)).
It's a real swinging love triangle, with a huge dollop of over
acting compliments of Jeanne Moreau . . . Well, I couldn't
sign on, as John Gallaher might have it. Too bad too.
Since The 400 Blows is one of my favorite movies.
It was a minor let down. It WAS gorgeous to look at though.
And the war scenes (the multiple bombs) were amazing,
and all that countryside. I think I was in a bad mood. Anyway,
you want to see a real movie go here and watch Robot
Secretary Movie #3 (scroll down a couple posts or more).

Purchased Arthur Vogelsang's Left Wing of a Bird, (5 dollars)
Victor Hernandez's new Selected . . .



A ROOF OVER YOUR SENSITIVITY


It's about a mile down
through the stone chimney

to a cold place
near your bed . . .

The yellow stains

a stenciled name leading back . . .

Fire in the distant fields outside

the amber waves

And thank you for using my To-do list for a bookmark

Something you might say
while reading in Brooklyn

No country for this old old man . . .

2.
I remember the pattern of light

bullet holes in the rhododendrons

each small exploding theory of the function of love

rain in the afternoon

sex in the morning, solar wind blowing through it

3.
I live on a stone crushed delicately
in half, and so my tears pour over my cheeks

so erotically dental

I want you
and I want you
and her . . .

fever that needs to be interpolated

cross section of the jaw
and brain . . .

the one with the grief in her paunch

the one with the skull of Dwight D. Eisenhower

a kind of nativity, this semi-circle of naked honesty

there are just too many moons
in this bottle of aspirin tablets

an essenceless conversation of watery blood

where everyone talks at once

not salt flats but an endless expanse of ice

the old dream

someone who sits up beside me
Icelandic shine in her bones

in the rock-stoked heat

blue or light green on the map as the far north demands . . .

and 40 words per week

color-coded clothespins attached at each point of potential interest

***

The Coen brothers make a film of a book by an author I like and an adapted
title of it, one of his lesser books, makes its appearance in a poem. Stay tuned
for a poem composed completely of titles (movies, books, dictators).

DEFOLIATION



Shifting her feet

a kind of phrenology
that continued down her
wide (green?) back

(I see you will like a certain quiet boy)

my heart so often on wings

most of the miniature beasts
sat hairless at their little desks

not communicating

Beth, with her tiny shoulders

and the tomato hornworms

that slender spike in the rear . . .

eventually a hummingbird
in devil's rags

Little blond hairs on her wrists
on her upper lip

okay, the kiss was a blind seeking
in a dark guest room

followed by a game of pool

beings too large to be humanely poisoned

DDT and the hood of the torturer

but later, a little smoke that she French inhaled

an overt act

now it was the summer of the burning house
the gathering of prisoners

the wilderness better known as the power lines

God should have erased our mouths and eyes

hiss and pop of tent caterpillars
in the fire pit out back . . .

a little cocaine in a dish

three acres of defoliation

three girls to a room

BOOK TV


There are many bizarre phenomena in this world that
have yet to be adequately explained - the disappearances
on board the Marie Celeste, the advanced astronomical
knowledge of the Dogon tribe of Mali, people laughing at
Little Britain - but few are as strange or inexplicable as
the American cable channel Book TV. Mercifully restricted
to weekend broadcasts, it is quite possibly the worst
channel in the US - worse than the KKK phone-ins and
home-made comedy shows on cable access, worse even
than C-Span, the non-stop live feed of all the men and
women in Congress striving so selflessly to improve the
lot of the rich. It's bad. Really bad.

TACHYCARDIA



Natural and pure
coming right out

of the toaster

This sun on a recyclable plate

It's for you . . .

reminds you of the time you got that window seat

a gull flying outside
simply looked in at you

that was a good day . . .

Am I in the ghetto or "the projects"

and then the bag doesn't even
fit the vacuum cleaner

the tears
the tears

and they won't take the cups off your eyes . . .

I keep thinking of that ship

Can it ever be extracted from inside the bottle
and if so
how does one stick it back in . . .

when she took off her shirt
I suddenly wanted to count to two

over and over again

how odd, she said, and looked at the back
of my hand for a lifeline . . .

no line of credit

it's called the human heart

THE BEAUTY OF THE PRESENT TENSE

(A Country Cemetery)

"The dead would like a word with you

They've been waiting for years
oooooooooooooooooooooocubicle of green grass
Surrounded by a white picket fence

Richard R. Sutton would like to talk to you:

It's nice
What you've done with the place,
Plastic flowers, the headstones lined
In symmetrical rows . . .

And the espalier!

I wish you could hear the mockingbirds the way I do,

The music they make when they gather,
Long watery strains like a chorus of cellos.

Or how a single bird might separate from the flock
And form a bridge that sounds like a dulcimer
Weeping in the middle of the night."

*

The nearby stink of cows in the air
A long time reading between sun and cold willows
Buckets and buckets of bright milk

***
from Arrow Pointing North, 2002.

WHAT?


"WASHINGTON (Nov. 7) - Millions of Chinese-made toys
for children have been pulled from shelves in North America
and Australia after scientists found they contain a chemical
that converts into a powerful date rape drug when ingested."

***

So all along toys have been safe and then WHAMMO!? Half of
them, it turns out, are suddenly deadly. No jobs at home either.
Date rape drug? "The growing problem of asbestos found in teething
rings . . ." is gonna get worse . . . you get what you pay for etc.

November 9, 2007


Talks seem to have stalled over at IUSB. Like a
suddenly empty rowboat in the fog drifting away.
Wade out into all that water until there's nothing
but more water. And there's nothing to say to the fog.
It doesn't answer. Well, it doesn't speak. It surrounds
you until you are too with yourself--three is a crowd
until the fog rolls in and then one is. When I find
the boat I'll climb inside it because boats foster
patience. You just wait on the water and rock.

For a couple weeks anyway . . . Then, that's enough fog,
enough water, for anyone. So find a dry forest
instead, and stay there. Make a small fire. Shoot
rabbits and boil them and take donations. Jam a potato
over the end of your twenty-two (for a silencer) and
shoot squirrels for dinner (Hi Dave H.!). Write
poems in pencil on all the paper birches . . .

I'm not sure "stalls" is the correct word. Because a lot
of talking has been done. Good people did it. There's simply
no "movement," no decision, everything is "On Hold."

Joshua K., the Ashbery Erasure book is heading
out to you. Animal Collective is messing with the
silence--Strawberry Jam--a great comfort this November
(thanks Kristin and Neil).

The Detroit Lions are 6 and 2 (don't say anything).

Flickers have appeared on the lawn, glowing like yellowish peacocks.

It's snowing at least. And it's dark, everything close
like the fog, perfect for sleeping. Turn off the music.
Get a big glass of water clinking with ice. It's good
to be thirsty, and tired.

DDL, Unidentified person, Charmi at Julie's Benefit

SYLVIA PLATH

"knight finds ogres out-of-date"
ooooooooooooooooooofrom Plath's "Ennui"


It's trenchant
if not quite verifiable

the metaphysical side of hand holding

the wrist bone connected to the

allegory of the unbendable spoon

professor, defendant . . .

Jeopardy is jejune

Rather a dervish
the eclipse of the animal senses

the silence of muscles moving under skin

combustible song

(in the mind of a Luna moth)

the braid of hair in your hand is thick as a rope

2.
And I don't care about The Song of The Dead Man

"the dead man buys batteries!"

"the dead man reads Milosz!"

the dead man's grave is a crop circle

enough with the dead man

3.
It's a marriage of privilege and a strong pair of thighs

the extraneous island of heaven

the silo of the dispossessed

they put the heads
in a glass case . . .

wild with vision from the belladonna

there must be a flood

silence like a tide rushing into the now open mouths

the old ways long gone for abusing the moon

***
the collection of Plath materials at the Lilly Library
in Bloomington, Indiana includes a braid of the great poet's hair . . .
The italicized line is from the recently published "Ennui"
which can be found in a recent issue of Blackbird.

HEART-SHAPED RECOVERY POEM


you'll come to once the
tube clears

memory of the way the yellow taxis shined in the rain

tadpoles beside railroad tracks

the clamor of starlings

We're talking a real antipasto
a crabcake of substance
a slap in the face with a sterilized lab coat

night and day crawls through the hair
of the still healthy guests

Prime time for Oprah

and several full moon lancings

And you know the balloon

it opens

not to a face but an approximation of intelligent evil

Good Morning

It's the day after
the end of the world

and those aren't real horses

something peeled
down to speechless wood

duck after duck moving across the sealed windows

it happens even
while she's washing your hair

a spider sneezes . . .

An unfortunate metaphor for love--

this giant zipper of skin

last year you found yourself
drinking wine under a giant sequoia

a little Henry Miller at dusk

this year

cold feet and a six foot five
mute guardian angel

BITS


Today, the benefit for Julie Rybicki, who has bravely struggled
against lymphoma--and triumphed--for a decade and a half.
Now she's having a second bone marrow transplant
and I believe it will work. A big Art party and many people--
some who haven't gotten together in a long time--from southwest
Michigan. 20 readings (I'm like 14th), two bands, a silent auction.
Microbrews. I only ask no one blurt out the score of the
Indianapolis/New England Patriots game since I'll
record it. I watched Shaun of the Dead last night--it's like the little
baby that spawned Hot Fuzz. Simon Pegg will go on to do interesting
things. Otherwise there is frost everywhere in the mornings,
coats appear from far away storage bins. I'm oddly speechless.

WHO BUT I CAN ROW O RECKLESS DEATH


It's a secret,
the blackness . . .

swimming at the heart of it

skull open
like a pool in Beverly Hills

the way the antibiotics travel

(she wears no greatcoat)

love flung outward

it's always Monday on the ring of Saturn

gray rocks and the bluest moss

Sid Vicious appearing
on the Red Green Show

he wears no sandal on his foot

and so it is with the wind

the murmuring islands just under the gunwale

the geese half-mated with swans

with blood on their wings

a paint brush
and a ball of wood

each country like a body part . . .

I know you came out of the house looking
in your dirty clothes

she just left in her nightgown

the hardest part of the forest, the machinery

rebirth set sailing at midnight

and the fresh water kelp
keeps floating in up out of the flooded basement

fish in the Ozarks have headaches

the boot soles leave
little hexes in the kitchen

at dawn

***

line 13 from Dickinson, last three lines
adapted from a Frank Stanford poem . . .

CATFISH


Anyway, J. e-mailed me, since we both just happened
to watch Network. It's astonishing to me to see a film that
speaks of something the culture has only hastened
to become. Hard to talk about the movie without getting
up on a soapbox, so I won't. J. quoted the Beatles
in his e-mail though, and I'll print it here, because it's
always great to see in print something you have cherished
for years without somehow knowing why: "He's the all-American,
bullet-headed, Saxon mother's son..." All the children sing!

***

Zone 3 has taken two poems, and so the first big batch
to go out, the testing of the new poems, since late July,
seems to be working out. I say "seems." You never know.
Knock on wood and all that crap. But poems taken at
Barrow Street, Green Mountains Review, and Zone 3
in the last week. That's all right. Anyway, "Walking Catfish"
is one of the taken poems. No problem there. But "The Other
Water" I sent in my usual bluster of premature excitement
and now I have no idea which version I sent. It's a poem
I posted, became frustrated with (Charmi mentioned
that one draft had no music in it--she was right) and
took down. It marked my return to writing this "suite"
of poems after a small lay off. I have a couple drafts
somewhere. I'll just e-mail an electronic copy and see what
happens. If you revise a lot, and I do, this can happen.
I still think revision is a very good thing, but O how often
I send out, say, a second quick draft only to have it snapped up.
In the meantime I've written ten subsequent versions.
Well, so what? I know I sometimes over -write. And
quite often I come all the way back to the original poem, only
I've got a great couplet to add. Such a long way to go to
get such a little kernal of "rightness." But often all that revising
makes a piece of writing that is nowhere close to the original
but is in fact (to me) astonishing (in the sense McGuane said
it--when asked why he writes he said "I write to astound myself").
And so it goes. It's process, messy and often a pain in the ass.
Now I must thumb through coffee-stained drafts and do a little
busy work. It's sunny out, after a misty Halloween. On with
my running shoes. The stock market is taking a dive. Way up
on Wednesday, way down on Thursday. Speculate away.
Thanks to all the good wishes from folks on my birthday, by the
way. Okay. Time to go.

NETWORK


Hello, Mr. Caveman says,


William Holden sounds like a brand name. But, no,
there he is in Network. It's a great movie, full
of wonderful speeches. Everywhere you look
the situation we now find ourselves so hopelessly
mired in is referenced. Nothing has changed.