A Chinese Scroll

Martha Ronk

Disappearance is the quietest.
What to delete.
All of them may be
behind the closest rock or gone
over the ridge into plum trees.
A lavender smudge defines the mind
of a monk who riddled the universe.
He gave up small things
and his antique inkpot
and then he gave up
all effort at renunciation.
In the end he removed the strings.

PLAIN TALK

poem by Joe Bolton

oooooBeyond the I-feel-you-feel-
We-feel of our psychoanalyzed lives,
oooooIt is summer.

ooooooooooooooooooLater,
oooooMaybe we'll part, but for now
There's supper to fix and no anxiety
oooooIn your brown legs.
ooooooooooooooooooMoosehead
oooooIs not an unnatural act with a large northern animal,
Though I have seen suspect red panties draped across the racks
oooooOf dead ones.
ooooooooooooooooooOnce,
oooooTrying to grow a slender tail of hair on my neck,
I told my skinny-beautiful barberess to "accentuate" it,
oooooWho cut it off.
ooooooooooooooooooWhen I think
oooooOf that lock lying there like a severed little finger,
Of how much I already missed it, I remember remember
oooooRemember
oooooooTo always talk plain.

BURST


The house next door to the one I'm in sat cracking
in the cold, while everything with a pulse shut down.
The industrial and public buildings just closed
their eyes. I was in an enormous hallway that
had become a delicate wind tunnel. Noise that wasn't
even there echoed off the plexiglass fronts of
vending machines. Voices, high-heeled reports.
Meanwhile, the cracking house multiplied around
its single burst pipe. Water you could hear and see
rushed onto the floor. This went on for a week,
probably. A phone call was made, a red truck appeared.
A sort of internal Katrina I guess, and now
all the lights have been dimmed and the heat shut
off. Condensation filmed every window for two
storeys, and it froze and crystalized. You can't
even see the blinds anymore. Drip your faucets
people. Meanwhile, here's a grammar lesson.

And Then Calm

A couple of minutes ago, gale winds, and the lather
and whippings of rain against a dull brick wall out
a window at IUSB. It's fifty degrees again. In the north,
more lunatics, straw-haired and inconsolably sociopathic,
a soul with tears on its crusty lids, sitting in a flea market
of stench, a few dolls scattered about on the barnyard floor.
Perching in the darkness, watching houses from
the road as if somehow watching them meant
more than a sublimated desire to stifle an urge toward
violence. No self. Only desperation for some kind of
host-grounding, to vanquish the throbbing of such terrible
loneliness . . .Now, here, the roads in South Bend are more
cave than asphalt, bowls of rain freezing in what were once
simple fissures, like the simplest of cracked smiles,
and the tires lacerate and lacerate, peels of rubber
unloosing into shards. I saw such a flowering this morning--
an explosion--halfway to the monotonous school house, and
the steel of that car hunkered dangerously over the wound.
A samaritan city though--three cars glided into place
near the rear bumper to help. I keep going back to the
poems of Liam Rector and Alan Dugan, like they are the only
real bark on any of the remaining world's trees. A little
different than Mueller, work it pleases me greatly
Cleopatra's Handmaiden is finding has plenty of meat on the
bone. It does, it does. I'm in a mood. I live in the vicinity
of Cushing Street, and at least I can say a Cooper's Hawk
frequents even those black, rain-dripping trees, looking
down upon the potential of mobs and wagon trains of
police cars humming all over the neighborhood gravel.
It's not a relaxing sight. Tonight this rain will freeze in the
sky like a water baseball falling through clouds over the
thunderstruck city, whistling, gaining speed, and then
you'll wake up and see the lazy falling pin pricks of light,
snow flakes, more snow, more freeze, more busted up rims.
California wants me, but I can't go back there . . . I mean, that's
Indiana, right?, goes this strange song from some
gone time coasting along the a.m. radio frequency lines.
Before or after Wings did a version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"?
Before or after McCartney did his "Give Ireland Back to the Irish"?

HE'S COME LONG WAY FROM BROKEN CROCKERY


Saw this, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, at this
little theater. It's completely worth the trip through
the farm land etc. . . . The situation in the film allows
Schnabel to go crazy with the streams of visuals--
Memory and Imagination (I want to call them the two
Ms even though Imagination begins with an I).
Starting out, watching the movie, you think, Oh boy,
is this gonna be oppressive, but it's not, amazingly . . .
We don't stay in the subjective mode the whole time.
Possibly it could have used a touch more darkness . . .
The film though manages a kind of exuberance, a lightness:
the flight of the butterfly wins out over the sinking
of the diving bell . . . Max Von Sydow is brilliant in his small
role. The intimacy between father and son, his emotional
outburst after the phone call. Amazing that in this film,
stocked to the rafters with beautiful French women, the
heart of the movie emotionally is the love between fathers
and sons . . .

CHALCEDONY


The dunes inverted the V the geese made
flying west. I'd get up, shake the sand out of my boots.
Whole afternoons passed as arrangements
of sand and sky. At night I might swim naked in the lake,
sometimes with a Baptist girl
I'd lure from one of the camp houses, away from her parents.
I remember once braiding a blind girl's hair, holding
the cherry-flavored joint to her lips in the shadow of a
oooleaning box elder.
It was erotic as hell
She held in the smoke. "Fuck my father," she said, blowing
oooit out.
That day, from on top of the dunes,
I could see salmon chasing clouds of alewives
over the sandbars in Lake Michigan, swirls
like hurricanes drifting over a map of the world.
For a minute I wished I lived there, miles
from everyone but her, who was blind but had
ooobeautiful eyes.
They were like agate, cerulean-striped,
and when she pointed them at you it was like diving
into a river surrounded by high cliffs.

***
from Downsides of Fish Culture

PRESSING DOWN


In the small two-room treehouse I grew up in
you can look down on the lights reflecting
off the bowl of Cold Station Lake.

Blurred milk of stars printed on water, a few houses
hidden under cover of birch trees and firs.

Sometimes I read a book by candlelight just to make life a little
ooocozier.

My parents drowned themselves here.

They live deep in the forest now.

Sometimes I hear them moving through the woods, but mostly
ooothey sleep.
For so long that's all they wanted to do.

At night the deep water stands perfectly still.

***
from Abrupt Rural

LOSING EVERYTHING


This time of year
the yard is dark, and long. No use sitting
in the house, all the lights on,
watching crows fill the dead elm,
everyone knows you're unhappy--
a little cracked, a single dirge spinning round and round
on the same ineluctable turntable
(a little sand thrown into the works)
you first played T. Rex on,
the black frying pan
you stole from a trunk at your grandfather's
the weekend of his stroke
your only mirror. As the music plays
you stare at the pan dangling over
the sink facing the front lawn
that is like a record turning, like a house bursting
into flames again and again,
like a window with black wings
swallowing the rooms you've long outgrown.
It's snowing outside again,
the flock of crows you reach out to touch
now only a few feet away,
each with a bare lightbulb reflected
in one obsidian eye, each with an oily shine
of metal in wet feathers, each with no voice,
no pulse, cold as painted bronze,
cold as the lawn
you can no longer see through the smoke.

***
from Arrow Pointing North

Hal Hartley on Henry Fool


SPC: On one hand, "Henry Fool" deals with spiritual,
philosophical issues like art and its importance to society.
On the other hand, the film plunges deep into the muck,
with numerous references to bodily fluids. Why did you
decide to go so deep into the scatological with your
storytelling?

Hartley: It's just a desire. Maybe in my process of
growing up and making films, I had never done that,
so I decided to just roll up my shirt sleeves and try something
completely different. I really wanted a loud, ugly beauty of
a thing. I wanted to be knee-deep in creatureal reality -- the
blood, guts, urine, sperm, and spite of the common muck. And
I wanted to amp it up to a comic book clarity. And this was a
challenge for me because I usually shy away from the time
consuming technical labor of stunts and effects (the puking was
a lot of work). Sex -- the filming of sexual encounters -- is stunt
work. I wanted Henry to wallow in depravity. I needed him to
be consistently and increasingly outrageous, because I had every
intention of also showing him as possessing the highest human
qualities. But I wanted these admirable aspects to be hard to
see.

ONLY THE FACTS


For one thing, it proves the whole thing wasn't apocryphal.
But mostly it gives me a chance to notice, out loud, so to speak,
that Martin Walls took third place. Mr. Walls published a review
of Downsides of Fish Culture years ago (in Sycamore Review).
It wasn't very kind. Oddly, later, he apologized for it. It's a rather
long and tedious story. But hey--no hard feelings. So let me take
this moment, glowing in the rays of our shared accomplishment,
to stop and say, Hey, Hello down there, Martin. Did anyone hear
that echo . . .

NO SO MUCH POST LATELY


mostly because I'm posting the poems of new writers--
new poets--over at The Spider Pine. They are doing
some good work . . .

tiny deer (with Star of David)

playground in Lima