THE DOG

000C. K. Williams


Except for the dog, that she wouldn’t have him put away,
000wouldn’t let him die, I’d have liked her.
She was handsome, busty, chunky, early middle-aged, very
000black, with a stiff, exotic dignity
That flurried up in me a mix of warmth and sexual apprehension
000neither of which, to tell the truth,
I tried very hard to nail down: she was that much older and in those
000days there was still the race thing.
This was just at the time of civil rights: the neighborhood I was
000living in was mixed.
In the narrow streets, the tiny three-floored houses they called
000father-son-holy ghosts
which had been servants’ quarters first, workers’ tenements,
000then slums, still were, but enclaves of us,
beatniks and young artists, squatted there and commerce
000between everyone was fairly easy.
Her dog, a grinning mongrel, rib and knob, gristle and grizzle,
000wasn't terribly offensive.
The trouble was that he was ill, or the trouble more exactly was
000that I had to know about it.
She used to walk him on a lot I overlooked, he must have had
000a tumor or a blockage of some sort
because every time he moved his bowels, he shrieked, a
000chilling, almost human scream of anguish.
It nearly always caught me unawares, but even when I’d see them
000first, it wasn’t better.
The limp leash coiled in her hand, the woman would be profiled
000to the dog, staring into the distance,
Apparently oblivious, those breasts of hers like stone, while he,
000not a step away, laboring,
trying to eject the feeble, mucous-coated, blood-flecked
000chains that finally spurted from him,
would set himself on tiptoe and hump into a question mark,
000one quivering back leg grotesquely lifted.
Every other moment he’d turn his head, as though he wanted her,
000to no avail, to look at him,
then his eyes would dim and he’d drive his wounded anus in the dirt,
000keening uncontrollably,
lurching forward in a hideous, electric dance as though someone
000were at him with a club.
When at last he’d finish, she’d wipe him with a tissue like a child;
000he’d lick her hand.
It was horrifying; I was always going to call the police; once I
000actually went out to chastise her—
Didn’t she know how selfish she was, how the animal was
000suffering?—she scared me off, though.
She was older than I’d thought, for one thing, her flesh was
000loosening, pouches of fat beneath the eyes,
And poorer, too, shabby, tarnished: I imagined smelling something
000faintly acrid as I passed.
Had I ever really mooned for such a creature? I slunk around the
000block, chagrined, abashed.
I don’t recall them too long after that. Maybe the dog died, maybe
000I was just less sensitive.
Maybe one year when the cold came and I closed my windows,
000I forgot them … then I moved.
Everything was complicated now, so many tensions, so much
000bothersome self-consciousness.
Anyway, those back streets, especially in bad weather when
000the ginkgos lost their leaves, were bleak.
It’s restored there now, ivy, painted brick, garden walls with
000broken bottles mortared on them,
But you’d get sick and tired then: the rubbish in the gutter, the general
000sense of dereliction.
Also, I found a girl to be in love with: all we wanted was to
000live together, so we did.

***

from Tar, Random House, 1983

NO TELL MOTEL

This is the week, and here is the link.

And tomorrow, class. I'm going to talk
like a bee circling the room, occasionally smacking
the windows. The film, a new favorite,
Stroszek, will be featured later on in A190.

Otherwise, crack those knuckles.

You'll be writing writing writing (if you're in the class).

Summer

Rick Lyon

A man asleep among the flowers
is what I remember best.
They'd taken him out to a cot in the yard,
bordered with marigolds and day lilies,
the temporary sickbed in the sunshine and fresh air,
where he'd seem far from the drone of lawn mowers,
the circling retriever's restlessness,
the world all around his awkward face-down sprawl.
She'd seemed faraway, too,
watching him, watching her brother,
another afternoon on the darkened porch
as he slept in a chair.
And that's what it was--
the steady, undistracted, undeceived gaze--
the equal, the answering thing,
his dying, her love.

©BOA Editions, Ltd 1994

So We'll Go No More

Liam Rector

So it's fare thee well, my own true love;
I'm leaving you behind. And not
For the early, for the young reasons, but

For these late, last, ill reasons. I'm almost
Kaput! Yea, you'll get no more of me....
Cancer, heart attack, bypass—all

In the same year? My chances
Are one out of two! And I'm fucking well
Ready, ready to go. To go!—how often

I've operated that way. That way
Almost the entire caper, the way
For people, places, things:

Abandon, abandon, nay abandon before
Being abandoned. But we've, we've
Stayed. You the third wife for me, I

The second such boy for you, and I love
Looking directly into you, as we look
Directly into this last get-go. We all

Have the talent for leaving, like it
Or no. And oh, how rich it is, how fine
To finally inherit!: the final thing

I was looking for, as it turns out,
The great power of leaving
All the breathtakingly brief all along.

Guston's Eyeball

Baselitz's Hangover

Jim Dine's Tools

by around dinner time . . .

Lincolnway Foods burned down this morning, pretty much across

the street from Studio Arts (see banner for pancake breakfast and

fire truck pic above). A huge area is roped off. This is about two blocks

from where I am residing these days. Two firemen were injured.

Apparently this was called in as a robbery and when police arrived

it was a fire instead (I have an inside source). Cinders litter

the streets several blocks away at this point, and the smell of

burnt wood fills the neighborhood. I'd been reading The Wasteland

(along with "Tradition and the Individual Talent," after reading some

Perloff) when I was made aware of this event . . .

*

"The difference between art and the event is always absolute." T. S. Eliot

*

Also, an Italian restaurant and a spa burned on Grape Road last night.

BREAK


The Tigers lost a heartbreaker to the White Sox.
I can't even get into it all. This has been a bad year,
a difficult one to watch. Not much has made sense,
and the Gods are surely not with Detroit.
Anyway, it was gruesome, so gruesome I took the
booby pictured below and killed him. Not really,
I gave him ten bucks and said, Get some dinner
at Logan's, which is kind of like killing someone or
something, sort of, if you think about it too much . . .
I miss Pudge. Farnsworth!! Enough of this crypticia
(new word).

Farve, I just heard (a spider who lives on my porch
told me) has been traded, or whatever, to the New
York Jets. This should be a good year of football.
I can tell it's going to be a00little00bit00crazy . . .

John Gallaher started talking about David Byrne and
Brian Eno and Talking Heads on his blog, and it got me back
into My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the Byrne/ Eno collaboration.
I love the film Bruce Conner made to accompany
"America Is Waiting." I've posted a link to it before.

***

Order this. It will be the best survey of new poetry
to come along this summer/fall. I've got four poems
in it, and I may use it as a text in the poetry 303/513
in the spring (if I, indeed, actually teach the class . . .).

A dancing booby, because sometimes life just needs to be that way.

TRUMPET



Circling back around, I keep arriving where the door
spills out into the neighborhood. There's so much
to see, and do; so much need everywhere. But what kind
of talk is that? People here sitting in the currents
of cooling weather, listing off into evening . . . let death
blow it's tiny trumpet (the latest poll found that 77
percent of Americans don't believe death knows
how to play a trumpet at all). Earlier, said Hi to my
friend Marshall, who rode into speaking range and stopped
and just sat on an old Honda 70 (I had a flashback
of a Gremlin and an AMC Pacer and a Ford Pinto) while
I was surveying spiders, grass mostly, the most exaggeratedly
alert-seeming beings on planet earth. The Bs in the word
Barbaric send them skittering down-hole, a tunnel they
weave when humans aren't watching (mostly--they'll
do it for me sometimes, walking back and forth wagging
they're spinnerets). Mean as it sounds, I was gripping
an ant, ready to help out, poised above a smooth white
web that flared out of a shrub like a little balcony.
"Shouldn't you be teaching," Marshall said. "I'm off!
It's summer. You know that," I said. "Seems a shame,
you messin' with spiders while somewhere someone could be
learning. Priorities," he said. "I'd spell that important
word but my teachers were all like you, nowhere to be found
when needed." There's more, but you get the picture.
The ant, by the way, escaped. He hobbled off just
a little worse for wear. Death toots his broken little
trumpet.

EDITING MADMAN


And shall the lightning, knight's trumpet, continue
I'll better see that long illumined head of mine. All
you need is glass, an inside, an outside, some work to
do, time lurching toward death you glance up
from. All around here people stand staring out
past the corners of buildings like cats--no money,
no food in a bowl. I shall prowl beneath the pines.
But we hardly ever think to lose our breath
that way. It did storm at least. At least a little.
Enough so I can start forgetting some things--
let the rain push it all downriver. Wild turkeys
in some yards outlying, right near the road, south,
toward Plymouth, guarding the mailboxes, a big
old wood construction--post and lintel I guess--
shared by ninety families. Shared by six, I lied.
I did walk that long shoulder. A fine fine crush of
glass powder kept catching the cloud light. Later
I had to drive to Kansas to find a gallon
of skim milk. And then it rained as if I'd voyaged
over oceans for this shining secret.

AUGUST


Blog that shall rattle silent, oh, daily journal
of the most banal of moments . . . Actually, not really,
although it can seem so. Rather, I've got too much
to do, none of which lends itself to keeping an
online journal. I have to say, this ongoing script
puts a dent in the mystery of it all, doesn't it.
Fortunately, who knows when I'm lying the top of
my skull off, sincerity being something I find in the
chaff, meal stuck to the glue at the bottom of the box.
Perhaps, offstage, sounds you might hear--tin shuddering
loudly under moonlight, wooden puppets banging heads,
some dish-shaking snoring--while I wear an actual
Nixon mask and arrange and edit the ten one-hundred
plus page manuscripts I've lucked upon. Then there
is kicking back into syllabus correcting mode. It's
been a good summer, but I protected my time
as if death waited, gimpy but vital, on the other
side of some moody shade trees. Perhaps you even
emailed me and I saved it and meant to respond,
mean to even still, but I lost everything having to do with
that other--admittedly nice--place, and missives often
entered then sank into the dark water at the bottom
of my cave--sorry . . . I don't know that anything
will literally go silent. But I've sure been "waking"
up two days later after various immersions, projects
of my own in, say, June, and now completely those
of others and the whole putting bread on the table
aspect of living (paradox!!). Eating to work, working
to eat. Being responsible family members and others
bent on instruction, once told me, italics molesting
that very word--responsible. I can dig it, though.
One stops giggling at the prospects of Six Flags and
rock concerts eventually, or possibly what some
might call necessary social activities, and instead
How nice that there is simply the wind today, and
that dishes are done, and that tomorrow might bring
15 consecutive hours of total silence, and maybe
a bird crossing a blue piece of sky, and some Mott the
Hoople with my peanut butter on celery, the
sweet indulgence of watching way too much Herzog
and Svankmajer. There is a sense of drifting away
on a houseboat at dusk, I must say, that is quite a thrill,
a kind of dual perspective--one in which you don't
know you are going anywhere, one in which you watch
as the little craft floats out of sight in some small
harbor, Mr. Lee has left the building . . . Indescribably
Delicious, this sense of possessing your own
bones while underneath very calm fish ponder
the universe, and you hear what they hum dropping
out of very small thought balloons.

local color everywhere (church photo courtesy Talia Reed)

image, by ddl

ANOTHER LIT MATCH


You go from junk drawer
to the small knotted heads

the sound a cup makes

it's why the saucer was invented

rain running down the ropes

rain running over the bricks

if you hold your breath time moves faster

the birds leave little Vs

the wind kisses your knees

the stars sink back
into at ease positions

I like not talking like this

wind in the leaves

flowers and dust coming in through the screens

a granule of hope

for the seventh inning stretch

this late in the summer

Image, Cy Twombly