Alberto Burri, Mixed Media

Antonio Tapies painting . . .

Robert Rauschenberg died earlier this month. He and Jasper
Johns were enormous influences on me as an artist (and Jim Dine,

and Larry Rivers . . .)

THIRTEEN


Thirteen Conversations About One Thing feels as if it should
be better than it actually is. I really needed it to be good (that's
a whole other story). But it's not that smart, nor is it great
to look at. Nothing new visually about New York city here (and
I have to mention, I just watched Cloverfield, so maybe that
film's spectacle is infuencing my expectations somehow) and
the transitions (the movie is an ensemble piece) from story to
story are cliche (visually). Titles often introduce shifts
to new narrative threads ("Fuck Guilt," for example, Ha Ha)
and that's a clever little feature I could have lived without.
I hate that I have to wait in these movies to see how all the
characters link up, which is unfortunately what I do
if the movie otherwise is not compelling enough to hold
my interest (Happiness and Magnolia are two recent films
of this sort that work for me). Speaking of happiness,
you can guess what the One Thing of the title is, right? I mean,
you did before you got to this point. And the film proceeds
thusly, never all that surprising. It's always fun, of course,
to watch John Turturro (even Margot at the Wedding, bad as
it is, risks coming to life when he shows up), although
he's doing a catatonic dazed thing, something I've seen from
him before, with a bit too much zeal, playing an obsessive
compulsive physics professor longing for authenticity. But the
jokes come straight from Monk (even if you've only watched
five or so episodes of that show, as I have), and we're not with
his character long enough to become attached and truly
interested. This is the problem with the movie as a whole. It's
all surface, not visually startling, and relies too heavily
on the script, which isn't up to the task. I was only really
engaged while watching Alan Arkin, who could read a grocery
list in a thoughtful and nuanced way. Who else, anyway,
but Arkin, can play disgruntled with such elan? And the scenes
that include him and his insurance brokering buddies are
campy, sweet at heart, and over-the-top ridiculous.
McConaughey stumbles through his parts of the movie as if the
script notes advised "Act Devestated" and so we get 20 minutes
or so of The Mummy. Everyone loses in this movie (not counting
"Smiley" Bowman), by chance or because of some character
flaw, but only Arkin has the force of presence needed to make
his character complex and interesting. In Little Miss Sunshine he
was similarly absorbing--amidst, admittedly, a cast of some pretty
compelling characters/actors. But I also kept flashing back to
Glenngary Glenn Ross, and now I know I have to see that
movie again. Alec Baldwin, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey,
Al Pacino, Ed Harris . . . I'm reminded of hearing how Liam
Rector would, at the beginning of each Bennington College
MFA residency, show students Alec Baldwin delivering the
'Always Be Closing' speech from the film. It makes perfect
sense to me. The film is simply that good. Intense, urgent,
and necessary, minute by minute . . .

IN A HOT COUNTRY

oooooo(after the Howard Hodgkin painting)

I have this thing, the future,
torqued with breath

and ambivalence

pros and cons of the standard thank-you note

instead of a steer's skull
I found an itemized budget

edited by a tire track

("cut back on cocaine")

You open your eyes

your thrusting wasn't married

Pavlovian triggers for empathy

(Katrina, Heath Ledger et al . . . )

No other country
lets Parmenides just unravel

No Pleasure

In fact you're encased in this other person's body

(echoing her white water)

good-bye to the echoing past
in other words

mud tug boats incremental with roly poly bugs

that obsession with Queen

Crest Whitestrips

I'd use the analogy
of a car wash if I could get away with it

(a generic for olive oil?")

get over yourself

I am a worm, and no man

I want to drown like one

***
Psalm 22: 6

FLOATING ISLAND


Sleepwalking, it was
a sort of

vacation in seasonal light

sittingooo then waitingooo sittingooo then . . .

Time is a headache

a corridor

the nurses
the passing overhead lights . . .

She cried and her tears fell five stories
onto a magnolia
in the small courtyard . . .

We're talking months of this kind of thing

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

(all the way to Memphis)

vessel stranded
where the cells jump ship

The island is just such a tumor

jumps out of its mind at the lip of the sinkhole

(new underground mall)

its child not yet conceived

The bird even ululates
from its grave in the invisible elms

desiccated in a music box

it remembers the past and pops up

it's not so bad up here

Clouds like bison stampede over the hilltops of old oaks
viewed through the hospital window . . .

*

They're lifting the steel gate

Let the wind roar through your fingers

You've made it

You've lived through it all

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

MATTAWAN, MICHIGAN

ooooooooooooo(Wolf Lake State Fish Hatchery)

twelve inch cutthroat emerald-
eyed

Peel the master plate
off the A. B. Dick press

I was actually eating
the coffee dry

a corona of symbolic figures drifted away from the stream

father eating the
mother eating the father
eating the mother
eating the daughters' brother

all the way past
Garbo Falls

I'm mixing up The Jungle Book
with offset printing again

Brautigan taking a crap at the Landmark Inn

red slash right through your fantasy

cutthroat emeralds with Whirling Disease

LSD and PCP

another angel die-off
left silhouettes of green lawn
showing brightly
through the snow

the figures were actually rainbow trout

a memory asleep in your burning hand

I'd use a teaspoon and eat grounds from a jar
in the industrial darkroom

also known as steelhead

He cometh forth like a flower,
and is cut down

fish floating belly-up by the millions

***
Job 14:2

TRIANGULAR


She was a cuneiform
skimmer

black-billed, peeling the delicate water

almost a girl

I could see this from my pew

the air filling the gaps
between her silver teeth

Clover, I say

an offering to the knife
a kiss on top of each foot

a horse chestnut, a crucifix, a man with sin running out of his eye
000sockets

a shift from the Frost to the Sun Belt

"brother to drgaons, companion to owls"

The bloody canyon
that cleaves her

up there on the altar,
adorned in her bracelets

It runs its tongue all over the thing even once it identifies it

a sacred moment unabridged

His Son

tiny potential bodies all over the restroom floor

the skimmer is a bird

***

line 13, Job 30: 29

I'M NOT THERE


I watched I'm Not There instead of A Scanner Darkly,
but I'll get to it. I'm Not There was quirky and full of oddly
heightened moments, and really does avoid the bio-pic banality.
It's very chaotic though, and at times feels too private,
fetishistic--I don't know. Overall I liked the pastiche, formally,
the embedded flashbacks being 95 percent of what's there,
like the black and white cut to kick starting a motorcycle
followed by a landscape and a cyclist zipping
across left to right. We're somewhere else, back with
Robbie Carter I think (the actor who plays Jack Rollins,
one of several versions of Dylan), when the crash is
heard. But we come back--lights, chrome, leaves, the hand
of The Mighty Quinn (Blanchett) dripping blood. And
the music! The soundtrack is what you'd expect.
But it's Cate Blanchett playing Dylan here, or rather "Quinn,"
who steals the show. Not sure if that's a good thing.
I found my interest increased whenever she was onscreen.
She plays Dylan in his "Electric" phase, the Dylan who
was booed incessantly by his former "folk" music fans.
Was the scene where Quinn and the band pull out
machine guns and start firing really clever? Of course
Dylan pushed back against whatever expectations
were foisted upon him by adoring fans. I thought the gun
thing was really corny though.

***

Two poems have been accepted by Court Green; two poems
have been accepted by Gulf Coast, and one, "Sylvia Plath,"
by Quarterly West. All are from the ATYK manuscript.

***

The Tigers need to go golfing. Drink some beer, smoke some
weed. Go Snorkeling and swim a lot. Then come back all
refreshed, a clean slate, and let's see what happens (please).

***

REAL KISSING


The light is getting Novemberish.
Mid-morning. Some scratching on the roof.
Day like a hangover, followed by the boil-
Ing down. It is the cornfield he watches,
Way out there, good for losing your name in. Thunder-
Storm, flowers of memory, another burn-
Scar in the bay of a crooked paternity.
The windows ping while the new metal steams.
Straps, polished chrome, and a backward telescope
For fucking. Dust is in every raindrop.
Light all over her quiet mind. Little sections
Of falling go into it, not sleeping,
And they add a small room, plan to live there,
Get out the cans of yellow paint. Late
Water-music slides sideways, like
Escher eating a salamander, moonlight on the
Bed turned the color of skin, square as
A radiator, followed by the two of them,
Naked, at pasture. A dog trots dragging a
Metal chain that bangs between stumps
Along a ditch bed and acres of corn left standing.
It approaches the front of the towering house.
As the sun goes down, the windows light up.

BORN LATE



Alchemy, tawdry though the
leaves may be, arrival

something like the 18th pearl melting in summer

organic linoleum

sepulchral
as her grimace

the Pharmacist's daughter lived in her own maniac ranch

A block of soap
carved to look like Pan

And that's just what came in the mail

a volcano under those flip flops

kisses spilling off the water-wheel

Green becomes a stillness leftover in the late-born effluence
of a decade's worth of smoke and flat beer

(I can't get any air)

because there was no acoustic guitar

just dust scraped off an anxious moth’s wings

(and Robin Trower)

***
"Born Late" is also a song by Mott the Hoople, written
by Overend Watts, the bass player, rather than Ian Hunter . . .

Paul Thomas Anderson's Movie


The complex emotional landscape served up to
us in There Will Be Blood is really something. It's
Day-Lewis, sure, doing his Method acting--riveting
work here. So different from Magnolia,
another intensely emotional offering by this
director, in which the actors play off their own
personas--Tom Cruise playing a version of Tom
Cruise for example. Phillip Seymour Hoffman
playing a role he's played before, a barely removed
version of himself, the senstive, chubby kid all grown
up. There's plenty of vulnerability in Blood's Daniel
Plainview, this ambitious man who has no clue what
to do with his emotions. He's a giant boy, and in a scene
that takes place on the beach (the movie takes place
north of Los Angeles from about 1900--1930) the
camera holds on Day-Lewis for a long time while he
ponders the past--you understand he is filtering
emotions, and that he's confused by the
complexity and pain of it all--after talking
with the man he believes is his brother, and
it is a freakily transformative minute of cinema,
equalling perhaps the power of the close-up on the face
of Glenn Close at the end of Dangerous Liasons,
emotive and epic in scope, lonely stones falling through
space--heartbreaking. Then there is the scene with his
deaf son in a restaurant (where Plainview orders a
steak and a glass of water for the boy). Day-Lewis
throws a napkin over his face and begins speaking
in a rambling manner in order to impress a former
business associate who has come in with a group of folks
to eat dinner. It's such a startling development--
funny and troubling--and things just get crazier from
that point on. I found almost as compelling Dazed and
Confused, a film of incredible nuance, full of archetypes
from high school. Everyone I remember was there,
at school, and then at the keg party out in the woods.
I was unexpectedly moved by this film, and a bit
saddened. Very elegaic. Place the cup upside
down on top of the empty keg and watch time just
speed right up. A great ensemble movie, including
appearances by Parker Posey, Ben Affleck (I still can't
stand Affleck), and Adam Goldberg (great scene in which
Goldberg, worried his reputation will suffer
after losing a fight, comforts himself by pointing out
that Jackson Pollock and Hemmingway both were
involved in brawls and nobody ever mentions who
won or who lost--they were simply brawlers). The
two best "high school' films I've seen I have found in
the last year or so--this movie and "Brick" . . .
Tonight I check out A Scanner Darkly.

Margot at the Wedding is not worth ten minutes of
your time. I don't know what happened here. Is this
what Baumbach thinks of women? He can't write for
them. Nichole Kidman is insufferable. Jack Black
delivers comic relief--in fact, for a while, he anchors the
movie, a sort of sensible and down to earth presence--
but late in the film he turns into an hysterical cartoon.
Ignore this wedding, and watch The Squid and the Whale
again instead.

Interestingly, Baumbach is teaming up with Wes
Anderson (as writer) in Anderson's next project,
an animated film of Roald Dahl's The Fantastic
Mr. Fox. That should be interesting . . .

Joshua Tree, California

WILDLIFE


Who needs Vermeer

all that standing in the filtered light with no job

16/1, gas/oil ratio

a little hard to just cross over

even the ones with their names over the pockets

STANLEY, and HANK . . .

. . . CLARISSA

a hundred days later

egg salad with pepper on white bread

a few humans standing around in the parking lot

fescue growing out of some painted pots

Victoria Secret was there, turning from a solid into a gas,
hovering over her salad

Next on News Center 8: Baltimore.

A place I visited.

Pay attention mystery guest

Bears don't live in other bears

I believe in words. One by one
they dismantle everything I have faith in

***
lines 16 and 17 are taken from Laynie Browne's
Daily Sonnets

Re-read a really good book recently

THE SPECTATOR

00000(after the painting by Howard Hodgkin)

Rubber is the least of your waste
problem luxuries

a blossom floating on water

cameras fly down out of the sky
attached to airplanes

and night floods the boat

it covers her eyes and her toes

there is a cow in Ohio
with the mind of a President

disengagement

the articulation of a pulse in the thread of locational festering

his face couldn't be more provincial

and then the city of Akron
hits Annie Leibowitz with another lawsuit

the naked baby was her second self

a little rubbing alcohol in a plastic cup

We're off to Fort Lauderdale

God bless you sir

no record of its DNA

MINOR00SPRING00FOG

I was still myself, a circle, wearing this bed

Offering what may not be

Fear breeding paycheck absence

Against hormones used for growth in normal children

Whose otherwise weather is brimming

A phrase you repeat

The mind knows fluently little of love

If you argue into wakefulness

Separation of your other self

***

collage poem, assembled using pieces of text
from Laynie Browne's Daily Sonnets . . .

TRANSLATION AMBULANCE


They call them tracers and they sit in the dark
With the video versions of what is not you

Bright arcs over gray

“a choreography of human barks rising from the bunkers.”

A doctor,
From Pakistan, enters the Elysian fields of light

Speaking flawlessly

Not making eye contact . . .

A maelstrom of wood plugs up
The fallopian brake where the trees fan out

Sends the boxcars flying

Jet propelled, seeds riding in pasty water

Being born isn’t the great accident

The pure cells ride the
Heavily burdened ones

(a wasp gall explodes)

A surfeit of fortification goes straight to the damaged boy’s forehead

The other ones look out at the sand—

some daydream—

East of Kabul—

Half notes, Whole notes, a soundless impasto

a gambel's quail, way up on top, calling for a mate

LAKE CADILLAC


We were out under
The giant umbrellas

The long white sex of the moon shining--

Unblemished

The marble neck of Nefertiti--

On the bones of the last dinosaurs

The stars are an alignment of tear ducts

Allegorical triumverate

A pinhole in the night for each wound

These comets
Of the new century--

Sentimental as liquid paper

Then an albino pigeon comes walking
Out of the bushes looking like Peter Lorre

I can't put a deterministic spin on it

The Heavenly Ham (TM) only partly defines the fork

Mars shining on the rim of the sky
Like a sinking diamond . . .

Stars reflecting back to where she's softest

Where the water gets deepest

WHO BUT I, 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

the geese half-mated with swans

the blood on their wings

and so it is with the sand and speckled eggs

two boats
two boys

trees filmed over with ice in the middle of summer

her hair keeps flying out of her open mouth

an owl dies on its branch

another Monday on the ring of Saturn

TURNING SEVENTEEN

A poem online, the link here, from Minnesota
Review . . . (which isn't published in Minnesota,
by the way) . . .

HALF-MOON EPIDEMIC


They sing in
the street and

the hounds capitulate

a body yearns against such resistance

a preambulation . . .

drowning over and over
like a mania for success

the ticking inside your own mattress sinks deep into the lost last day

a block of ice the size
of a car battery

that way they still find the body

It's the water that listens, stay way past midnight

the cloud of her hair

bats gagging on lightning bugs . . .

the bones might have yellowed

but they remain white for the moon

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

a kite made of moonlit concrete

get used to it

it's not a funeral procession

(children glimpsed through the trees in a single file)

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

NINE-HUNDRED POUND WHEELS


there is a train derailment

rainbow of spirits spiraling out before the flat blades of mountains

one all over the other
one opening inside the next one

coal-fed reflection in seamless black water . . .

Rain falls cold in its restoration

each drop stippled with moonlight . . .

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

and I swear we could see
the trout looking up at the sky . . .

Nine-hundred pound wheels

I counted her ribs

two more animals who lack reason

(two naked breasts staring up in the cold)

a telescope emptying in the aftermathof the roar
made the splinters of steel heat up

the idea of the rational

wind shearing off in her eyes

the soul sputtering up out of the fog of its waking state

Win a Bunch, Lose a Bunch


The Tigers win a bunch of games in a row
and then practically fall down all over the field
and lose lose lose. It's like a fix is in, like
that World Series a couple of years ago. Nobody
home. Leland put everyone in a shake-n-bake bag
and dumped it onto the field for this game
so the players can feel a sense of Starting Over
and it ain't workin' . . . New batting order,
same old Swing! and miss. This is a strong
team--the talent is there. Come on!!!

*


The book--its arc--feels completed, and it really has been
for several days, and yet I've been torturing some old drafts.
Interesting, how you can transform a thing that is sitting
there buzzing with latent energy, but if it fails after
one or two tries, it's gone . . . Place the sheet over the
face of the victim. Or, better, just place inside the fenced-in holding
pen for future poem-parts.

Some go too narrative--in gutting the thing you stopped flying,
began telling--or you assembled a clothesline flapping with
possible one liners. Several of these are no better than the old
versions, some are worse, and a few really fell into place. Another
problem is a couple became so new to me all over again that I now
have to wait months before I can read them with any kind of
objectivity. Meanwhile, I find little scraps like "Ant with Celery"
pretty compelling, the speed inside that little black window, the
density.

But I have no idea what may happen. I could use a vacation.

SAULT STE. MARIE


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

the wing of the plane, balsa sticks

I assembled it, painted the paper . . .

watched it fly over Lake Superior and never come back

I fell asleep and dreamed stars
scattered over my dinner plate

I much preferred Capricorn, casual

I put the crop money in certificates of deposit

Years later I met a woman
and she was something disabled, tied to a birch

the oyster mushrooms
bubbling up amidst trout lillies . . .

or Sault Ste. Marie, caskets coming home from the war after midnight

The heart is a belief referendum

a spider fern raised only on bong water

The Shining, in a theater east of The Goodwill

several owl decoys
stared out the glass front doors of the lobby

patriarchal, winsome . . .

She struggled under the stinging of that stripped wood

spring-mottled light on her shoulders

a sharp-shinned hawk threw its voice at the sky

the wind made music through a mobile of bird bones

the larger than life-sized head
of Chaim Soutine's

not exactly what you want to look at

while drinking a Bloody Mary

The Soo Locks Hotel

plastic glads dripping rain
in the sunshine

a payphone out on the street strapped tight to a phone pole

WALK THIS OVER


It's like they kept wanting

a night light goes on in the eye

a willow and the creaking in the wood of the ark

boy will you taketh this girl

(including the wild chicory in her hair)

the bed unmade

48 teeth in the comb that are Republican

But this is the mechanism
for a detonation of wonder:

the proboscis

T-bills

the more primitive bone sculptures

("assemblages" they're called in New York,
while in Indiana we call them "Elaine")

and Henry Darger

that, or else we
lose our shirts

it's the quagmire of basic
teenager anatomy

a box turtle blocking the road out of spite

white cabbage butterflies
stopping to drink from her tenderest nerve endings

the sacred and the profane

one minute you're balancing your checkbook

the next some thug is touching her linguine

A DONE THING



We're talking cold bricks

a box spring consumptive with rust

hysterically riddled with saplings

(it's the chaos of such non-narrative witness--

dog and deer skulls both grin at the moon)

so she reaches inside him--

and forgets where she was born

bees pour over a knot of wood

a stone keeps falling through a bottomless well

Memory, the most viral of manifestations

(a kind of "neighborly" soup-bath)

But she remembers how it was: illicit, extemporaneous

a play with two acts
right in front of the car

the pillows sat side by side

the smell of cut pine as she fell, and fell

it wasn't Deuteronomy

a cowbell rang through the lupines

although his spine was now broken

birds settled inside the trees prepared
for the immutable comfort of rain

motionless, but for the tears springing from his paralyzed eyes

how the boy comes spinning up
out of the calm blue ocean

She'd wanted to fuck him for years

then found the hole like a beam of light where the sun stilled the ice in him

an essence diffused in a river of blood

ripples of the everlasting

A COUNTY ROAD


a circle goes around a branch

it's a mirror of grief's ecosystem

one rhythm, two feet . . .

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

green herons in a panic under the raceway nets

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

pastoral as purgatory

head not heavenly with clouds

feet swinging above terra firma

And the day before yesterday?

Everything nothing

she finally stepped off the heavy table and waited

it was the quietest birth so far

tunnel sinking and then rising under the Detroit River

all of her sisters singing together with their eyes squinting shut

no hidden agenda

no discussion the next morning

WILDERNESS


It's not a matter of scale

(worthless imaginable)

a cup of tea for your doll

and cloud to ground lightning

He took it out behind his desk
and then he just looked at it

a fin growing out the back of his head . . .

Americana

Just do it

Essentially

I'm glad you are grown now--

(tall amongst the Michigan fruit trees)

glad our hands rest
on this same rocky island . . .

the window pane
the window pane

She used her checkered dress as a moonlight boat

looked out at the spruces
standing still under the Northern Lights

called them her Sentient Pines

***

Other--one might say new-ish--poems
below . . .

DINOSAUR ECONOMICS


It could be what you see is what
you think, less

world

more mind

Inhospitable, riding a raft of green
John Deere promotional swans, no distinction

between the honking bird

and the smiling company logo . . .

I've got no purchasing power

There I was, on the horizon, somebody's detestable toddler

and now I'm sailing along

in love with this blonde woman's incredible lap

Contractual bondage?

or just a clause, with no down payment,

in the manifesto
of pure being . . .

I remember driving out of Jasper, Arkansas,
and arriving at Dinosaur Land--

another asterisk in the fetishization of the American sublime--

and how at that moment I felt, if asked,
I could honestly say I'd been to the moon . . .

Death is a cement allosauras with no eyes

the merry-go-round of a morning glory
spiraling up between a stone baby's knees

Let the past be the past

A single kiss--I'm not dreaming--
floats languidly upon the history of her dotted line

It's called sharing

THREE RIVERS, 1998


There's a lot of blue on the snow

shades of distances nearby . . .

Someone presses pause on your life

846 windows

And you're a spectator in all of them

A few joints
spill into a shape like fingers

Welcome

from this point on everything unfolds
predictably:

Alan Flaska gets drunk

straw falling out of
his hair

It turns out there is no vitamin D
in charisma . . .

Then you remember the covered
bridge

sleepy, stirring in a cloud of swallows . . .

rocks piled like a toothache
in a white
freezing stream of water

that rises like a celestial escalator

over the hill and away from town . . .

A woman I have recently decided
to hate has moved back to Granger

Shoprite, a new Walgreens

the moorings of dumpsters
vanishing like boats left in the woods

in the rear view mirror . . .

For ten minutes I watched a bare tree decide to do nothing

A single white cloud hurried
across the dim weatherless sky

I picked up seventeen beer cans

I already live where the water stops

WORLD-WEIGHT


Community logic

figure and ground, a plastic opera of benevolent intent

Real small effects . . .

You call your little group

Dancing in America, Inc.--

one-hundred painters of the dailiness school of South Bend

brushes stab at sheets
of brown paper

somebody releases a purple balloon out the front door

gesso sloshes out of plastic cups (it spills on naked feet)

the smell of unprimed canvas unrolled so rich

Cadmium orange for everyone!

warehouses and fast food restaurants

the helium tank

and another balloon flies off like a memory of nothing

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