Pay Period

This sky is staggered today. I see geese. They form a line. The light is unlike any other time of year. My friend Jamie Bettaso is here from Arcata, California. We are spending time drinking Yard's beer and making pasta. It seems sometimes like the long silences spent are worth the taste of fresh mozzarella at midnight while watching Saturday Night Live. I am reading Milan Kundera's book, The Joke. I completely envelope his sentiment about forgetting. How can I explain it here? "If a man loses the paradise of the future, he still has the paradise of the past, paradise lost. From childhood I have been fascinated by the folk tradition called the Ride of the Kings: a singularly beautiful ceremony whose meaning has long been lost and which survives only as a string of obscure gestures. This rite frames the action of the novel; it is a frame of forgetting. Yesterday's action is obscured by today, and the strongest link binding us to a life constantly eaten away by forgetting is nostalgia. Remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism are the two pans of the scales that give the novel its equilibrium."

plant print for this day

Lithe Bent

Remember my little granite pail?
The handle of it was blue.
Think what's got away in my life-
Was enough to carry me thru.

-Lorine Niedecker

tips to glass, this

Stocking the fleeting street of 14th
this last night
this darkness

you point to her escaping shadow
as we pass by in this, the taxi.
Strict corset of scaffolding

the pinched nature of her sidewalks
where “curb your dog”
was her only whisper

my fingers pressed into
the rubber window seal
this missing crevice

supple under fingertips and yet
and yet not mine
We tapped our windswept coddled way

from Central Park down.
We drowned out the light of the rainsaturday
that first weekend

while lately we lurk in the silent
stolen of night
creeping through the trembling town

all ten fingers touching this –
the blinking
I am in the center of the universe

Hazy with peat
the smell and likelihood
of this march circle round

and begin again only this time, it seemed
only this place.
We are gazing from across a table

lit by wax and wick
and Maria Callas is speaking across the history
though she is dead

we still eat canolli to the sound of her yearnings
and outside and still
each avenue speaking

through piss and smoke
I can’t contain the bleeding
what kind of blood did we leave here?

Why should she care for us?
She gave it away.
As we glide by in our yellow capsule of transparency

she does not wave back
in this nightscape these streets
where we removed layers like fabric

from the constant hardening of exterior
We did not choose the street corner
but we choose it now

You didn’t need to call out my nakedness
I couldn’t stop it
I couldn’t contain

The streets, the sidewalks, the brick
framed window that let in the sounds
of garbage removal at all hours of the day

half drunk and soft green in the scattered light
I live there; another double life cylendrical
and then another

In the blink dark
I could feel the breeze of tonic September on my bare legs
tonight this city takes my backbone

and creates phosphorates
and in her only acknowledgement
she asks me to glow.

I insist

In part I see one half.
A set of Chinese cups with steam lids.
If the trouble lies under rain, relocate?
Under each of these a thought she or he left.

A set of Chinese cups with steam lids.
A coupling on a paper shelf.
Under each of these a thought she or he left.
Try to get through 5:15 a.m.

A coupling on a paper shelf.
Do you smoke in here?
Try to get through 5:15 a.m.
He says, “I’d buy you the biggest bathtub in the world”.

Do you smoke in here?
Warped weather, whose storm is this?
He says, “I’d buy you the biggest bathtub in the world”.
Half for love, half for eating.

Warped weather, whose storm is this?
I didn’t want a squirrel-hair paintbrush; I’d take you instead.
Half for love, half for eating.
Not once did the night fur seem to waver.

I didn’t want a squirrel-hair paintbrush; I’d take you instead.
But the sound was ominous and still, still deafening.
Not once did the night fur seem to waver.
Pomegranate, potato, can we relocate this steam?

But the sound was ominous and still, still deafening.
Folding each circular memorandum into my daily pocket.
Pomegranate, potato, can we relocate this steam?
I am collecting plastic for a belt – whose waist?

Folding each circular memorandum into my daily pocket.
A post-script belief and I was a believer.
I am collecting plastic for a belt – whose waist?
10 minutes of silence, the train is still running.

A post-script belief and I was a believer.
I am trying to find a place to lie down.
10 minutes of silence, the train is still running.
Nothing has been lost.

I am trying to find a place to lie down.
Sigh no sign of vodka soda.
Nothing has been lost.
Water plants, water self.

Sigh no sign of vodka soda.
What could be more tired or dimmer?
Water plants, water self.
Tiny mirrors at the bottom of this glass.

A-frame

A-frame
the night crescent wave
goodbye to grasses and seed

frame around the front
of waterways and silence
a chestnut and a hatchet

these framed
and tight shipped are lonely
one night that could not remain

face away
from what was leading
a picture that carried all

Hear the howling
disappear in aluminum highway
finally

The tiny sound
round ears so encompassing
telling a kind of slowness.

Time for lithe oats.

Last night was revolutionary. There are so few times in one’s life to sit at a long table under low light and talk to just the right kind of people about the things closest to your heart. I sat between Tracie Morris and Anne Waldman , across from Rod Smith and Kaia Sand – we were talking about the start of a new school out west where those of us who are big sky people can harness the energy and create a Mecca of writing, thinking and most importantly, doing. I hope this site can contribute to and be a log of the doing.