Who needs forever?

To have.

I have
Robert Creeley's
For Love
Poems
1950-1960.

I like to think
of exchange—
this conspiracy.

I will
make
a pact with
glass air

today

come through
guitar
to me

now this-
From the
Dishonest Mailmen

"They are taking all my letters, and they
put them into a fire.

I see the flames, etc.
But do not care, etc.

They burn everything I have, or what little
I have. I don't care, etc.

The poem supreme, addressed to
emptiness—this is the courage

necessary. This is something
quite different."

Morse Code

This dog teethes the doll
tapping its arm
to hear an old familiar tune
I hear
Jingle Bells
coming from under a paw
on the hardwood,
now a ricochet
down a hallway.

This dog's teeth are breaking
tiny filaments of food
from a bowl
reflecting fur
over a stripéd tray
around.

The Pisan Cantos

On my nightstand is a folded piece of paper given to me by Fiona Templeton when she was here reading her latest work. On the paper is the following:

To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered...

These lines are from Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos 81.168-74.

"Here error is all in the not done". Should this be informing my wish to sleep this day into tomorrow?

Night Sweats

Last night there were helicopters overhead. I could hear them coming by the vibration in the air which sent my open window back and forth in its track. Why so many helicopters? I didn't want to know. The two choices are usually a shoot out which the local news wants to get on film or a major incident requiring the transport of a human body to the hospital nearby.

Fia paced the room.

Why is everyone suffering from insomnia?

My dreams have been serial for over a month. If I am not having one, I am having another. There is a cycle of three choices. None of them are pleasant. I can find myself in a number of locations, with or without shoes, always with another person.

The night was long and my housemate eventually came home from the Slayer concert he was at. I could hear the door unlock and his dog tearing around the house. His new orange and white sneakers made a slapping sound up and down the hallway to and from the bathroom, over and over again. I could even hear him tearing a paper towel from the roll in the kitchen. Sonic hearing is one of the offshoots of insomnia, or at least mine.

For now, I will continue to think of falling asleep in a snow pile some 20 years ago when I still fit into a snowsuit and could slide right in beside the fir logs.

The language book

Yes, The Language Book remains a mystery, which needs some clearing up before my exam in mere weeks. I just finished reading a poem by a fellow mate who wrote in block form, a sestina that was about the war. I find it difficult to imagine that we are fighting a war (fill in mind boggling statistics) and at the same time, interested in new music, thinking about that gardening job we once had to pay the bills, what it would be like to be a grandma, you know. Yesterday after I left the Penn Library with the latest George Oppen book in my hand I remembered thinking last year that I lived with a young Oppen. Then I tried to think more about that thought. You know, as if I could somehow come to a conclusion about whether that was the case or not and why I didn’t still live with my very own young George Oppen. But, all I could think of was painting my room navy blue and writing on the walls in white pen. This thought wasn’t much of a clear road into the Oppen question. Nevertheless, it is like my friend Stefan Ödman says, “one doesn’t need to wonder in search of clarity for what has happened.”

n a v y b l u e

I made it through when you bought be a pendant of blue and I made it though the settling of an obelisk in the middle of my bedroom all yours and all yours. Once you napped and I brought home a fistful of leaves from the fall sidewalk fall. You were hot from running in your sleep. I wouldn't want to stop the aliasing now. It is all I do, these days. A mixing of sky color to create a trip I have taken only once across a greener farmland in the middle of a raging winter towards a sea. Violent see nothing in the pitch black. I could hear everything, memory and everything else there. I could see nothing and you didn't even hold my hand. But, I could see it all in the stars above. I could see the navy blue. Knew it looked good on my wool. You took some home in your pickpocket. Oh, yes, your home. Subject of that obelisk. Not green but I think rather than seeing you again in that black shirt I would like to paint the canvas the color of the seamouth in December on the coast of dirt and shadow and sell it. If I could sit in an ice cafe, then could I write it all out and send it without a return address?

beaded

The plaster has

and I retain

hear through

glass

as if I sense

more than

tiny needles

hightied

skycompressed

waitsick

Ol' San Anton-

Some years ago I spent Christmas in San Antonio. It was an odd thing to be on the Riverwalk with other lackluster couples, military personnel on break from officer’s training meeting their parents and foreigners celebrating San Antonio but not Christmas. I was staying at the St. Anthony Hotel where Grace Kelly had stayed in another lifetime. The hotel didn’t look like it had changed much. The rooms were huge boxes with grainy views of a dilapidated park next to the highway and the rumored best brunch in town. In the lobby near the ballroom hung a modest photograph of a white tie event held for Grace in that very place. The photograph sparkled but the ballroom looked so tiny and dusty, I could hardly imaging…

The Riverwalk was filled with restaurants for real, true, hardcore tourists. Hooters, hot wings, Chinese food, Polly Ester’s, you can imagine. The river there, which guided one through the thick of the city, was smoky and seemingly empty.

But, in situations such as these, there is no point in trying to fight the idea of tourist. Instead, I wanted to have a firm grasp on San Antonio from my view. I took rolls of pictures looking up off the Riverwalk at the view above. Palm fronds (how many times do you see those strung with Christmas lights) and chalky verandas, the tinkle of ice in glass and the smell of corn tortillas. A low murmur of people but all told, a delightful white noise of silence that marched through the holiday.

On the last day, I drove to a residential part of town to look at an old flourmill. There is still, somewhere, a picture of me in front of that mill. It could have been anywhere. Sometimes it is difficult to remember where I was on that particular holiday. But, in truth, I was at the core of the King’s Highway from Mexico City. I was in the town of the Alamo, the town where Lyle Lovett steals a girl from another man and takes a ride to a country store listening to Robert Earl Keen.

F-U-R, F-I-R

For Adam:

If the night fur were actually here to waver
then I could stop talking about the Douglas fir
and perhaps then
when all the mail stops pouring in pore-ing
and then males could take
walk and work, wok and w-ork.

It isn't so much the embellishment
the belly-mint and tidings to the tossing
I can stop to say but if I did
I would still spell in the heart a heat the same
as hart.

Diving

There is freezing tonight. The dogs are restless and Hank Williams III is the only thing worth ears right now. My Herstein Abstract Algebra book stands by, a bit lonely. The knitting needles are all bare. But, my time was used wisely today setting up voice mail for everyone on the editing side of the Biochemistry lab I work in. When did I get so quick with the 10-key? So familiar? Suddenly the importance of a message is rated by the 7 (delete) or the 9 (save).

I am living with a dog who peels out on our hard wood floor. Sometimes the sound terrifies me. Rapid nails moving over the same place for a solid minute. Nerves? I'd say. I'd say the dog needs a long hard run on the edge of about 20 acres. But, here we all are, in Philadelphia, in the corner apartment overlooking cracked and crack streets. I long for country. But, we all knew that.

For one "L".

Hotter than a
hickory wind

repeat the
chorus in the
doldrums of
another phase
you
are
in the paint

there was rare blaze
how to guest
you on a train
ride.

One town away
a gamelon
parade
seaweed salad
a central station
container
tossed left like
a corsage.

Mathematical Systems 1.1

Theorem 1.5.1 (Burning Liberation’s Algorithm)

If everything that goes into a triangle must come out of a triangle except for the Bermuda triangle, then there exists in one coffee cart, a girl named Sammy willing to cut hair and the ending to a screenplay, with Sammy and play proof based and well ordered such that the concept for connectedness elicits bergamot.

Proof

Let O be the set (ting) of burning debt minus elderly liberation where tuna can runs through all the rain soaked window pains. For example, {♥}. Note that a non-negative Costello contained a Ben, large enough and negative, that when syrup was poured on a bare chest and poodle skirt, they were called Clubber Lang.

Burning Liberation’s Algorithm will have a host of consequences for us, especially about the notion of divisibility. Since we are speaking about the moss, ceiling side, be it understood that all glitter and 80’s nights used in this section will be hear say. This will save a lot of repetition of certain phrases.

Definition:

Given Josie’s knitting needles and a posturing Tim we say that a Reed PhD divides string theory, written as no quanta, if obnoxious equals speak louder, these female mathematicians make me nervous for some integer otherwise known as “we’ll get there.”

The basic elementary properties of divisibility are laid out in Lemma 1.5.2. The following are true:

(a) Nothing seems self-evident.
(b) These all season tires are slick while peeling out of the party after catching The Costello with Big Teeth neither of which knows how to really smoke a cigarette.
(c) Faxing the advance calculus test back will require the coffee spill to dry.
(d) Magnetic field direction means shooting a full round from a double barrel Browning of which assistance is required to reload each time while, through downpour, onlookers shake their heads.
(e) Uniform continuity could contain unicorn continuity.
(f) If Edward Mooney does not stop proving the Riemann Hypothesis instead of teaching the class, then he will not be rehired and therefore will not be able to feed his six children, all being under the age of seven.

what now?

what now?,
originally uploaded by speedy marie.

It has been hard to think of what to write about recently. I think this cardboard sign is what is posted to my head and heart just now. Any ideas?