Lithe Bent

Surthrival on Duck Pond

2007-03-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

Even though I don’t want to think I really do this, tonight I spun each wine bottle on the very bottom shelf of the store until I could see the alcohol percent. I settled on a bottle of Duck Pond, which weighed in at a hefty 15.5%. I hope it doesn’t taste like the duck pond the cadets use to have to swim through in Texas on those hot early fall days when they were freshman. My friend Teresa, who was a cadet, told me everyone who swam would end up with an ear infection or the like. I think we called it Duck Shit Pond. It was clearly man-made. One afternoon, while I resided with anxiety on it’s banks, my neighbor Dan stripped down to his underwear and jumped in to rescue all the frisbees that amateur frisbee golfers bought and sailed into the pond in one afternoon. As I remember it, he sifted around in chest high muck pressing his bare feet to the bottom in search of the discs.

This is the close of my second week in the country. I live in the country now. Each morning I wander out the front door straight into the drive way and up it I walk staring into the starry sky taking deep breaths of air filled with the smell of cottonwood buds.

Leaving the house Pink

2007-03-06T16:11:00.000-08:00

I do not want to leave the house tonight. I have changed my shirt from white to pink and still, it is not enough. I layer on my pink scarf from April hoping it will ward off whatever is bothering me, out there, but it seems thin. The weather is unnearvingly warm and I have waited months for it to be like this. Here it is and I am stuck inside, waiting to leave, wearing layers of pink.

uncover

2006-08-25T18:50:00.000-07:00

I am undercover, driving down a dim lit highway towards a small town I have never been. In a flash, while I was talking to you I became intensely jealous of those who believe in a god. I do not believe, even though I think I've given it a shot. And - not to over think it - but I wonder what it is I do believe in. Are these the things, the people, the idols, the beliefs that people put hope and faith into? I do believe in a vastness that is going to let my tugs on it create something monumental. Sometimes I get a glimpse of this when I am frustrated with my heart - the feelings created therein.

I use to keep a journal but stopped when a teacher of mine told me, in passing, that journals and poetry were a ridiculous means of expression. I wish I’d had more of whatever it was going to take to keep me writing. It took me a long time to get over the need to put pen to paper every day and now it isn't so easy to pick up again.

The Other Blog

2006-05-03T22:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.trifishwrapper.blogspot.com/

This is a blog I write on with a few other people. We prefer to remain anonymous in our writings, or at least some of us.

Some of us are just better at writing a piece than making a phone call or sending an email.

As Wranglers are to the Ranch

2005-12-13T14:36:00.000-08:00

I traveled West in May. I wrote my friends in Nebraska just before breaking north to my old stomping grounds. The trip was easy. Five days in the Nissan with all my possessions and Fia. Towards the end of the trip though I had doubts about moving away from New York City, moving towards a space that had no center focus, no Mecca. Over the summer I pondered the existence of a cultural hub out here that would still spark the soul and continue the excitement and potential that both Philadelphia and NYC had started. I met with Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff at Christian Bok’s reading in Portland this summer. Portland is a hotbed of poetry, the kind of poetry that changes views, and creates new ones. David Abel has dedicated himself to a strong community of poets.

I want to start a community here in Olympia. Leonard Schwartz has his great Cross-Cultural Poetics radio show on Sundays at noon on KAOS. Surely there are many people out there who want to find a community of supporters….

How does one begin? How do communities begin? Like Ann Waldman said to me, “start with a table and some pens.”

What dance do you like best?

2005-08-26T13:57:00.000-07:00

Did you know the hoop dance is the most requested? And why? And does it matter why? The hoop dance could mean we are all connected. The dance could mean, as it is performed in all its complication (but seamless),that it is just as difficult and natural as the viewer is. How far apart do we stand from one another while we watch the hoop dance? Just a hoop's distance?

Sarah and I watched a hoop dance in Vancouver, B.C. in June. We stumbled upon it after all day walking around the city in a lot of rain and overcast. We had been down to the beach and were wind worn and giddy and the dancers were energetic and nervous and ready to dance. One man (the adult) was dancing so hard he was making the platform move. He was breathless after each dance, talking into the microphone to explain the dance or introduce another.

And then there was the hoop dance. Sarah's favorite. I'm sortof torn between the hoop dance and the jingle dress dance. A girl dances both. And we talk about school and hoop dancing and watching dancing and wondering whether we could do it, how it would feel, secretly imagining ourselves there, hoops wrapped around our legs, behind our necks. Or jumping with the tin sound of tiny cones falling ontop of themselves.

traffic at 5

2005-08-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

Air Canada flies to Castlegar. However, to get from Olympia to Castlegar one must fly to Seattle/Vancouver BC and then over. In essence, much more of a trip than you might want. Out West, driving is over 50% of the day or the trip or the planning. Driving is the essential think time, the down time before the vacation destination arrives and the stress of vacationing hits.

My dad always asks, "Get a lot of thinking done?", when he knows I've been in the car for a while. The trip east or west of the mountains can be extreme even when there is proper distraction. However, when I was planning to show a love-of-my-life where I was from it involved the I-90 drive from west to east encapsulating the overcast moody metropolis of the I-5 corridor, the glacier cut and stuck mountains, the vast sage desert of Vantage and beyond and the dry but beautiful Ponderosa pine hills and valleys of the far east. Without this drive, how would anyone know how far they had come to lay eyes on such beauty (me and the land?)?

Recently a friend joined me in Colville (eastern Wa.) and we hopped in the car to drive some back roads in search of houses and land for sale. I was amazed when, headed out of town, we drove a road I had seen many times but had never been on. We drove up and down giant hills which were dotted with round pinwheels of hay. And ended up right back where we started.

Art as Experience

2005-05-12T05:42:00.000-07:00

If John Dewey were still alive, where would he place this world that we live in? Would he find this time we live in to be one of the two non-esthetic world possibilities? Here we are in a time of inability to move towards resolution. We have too many openings, too many fluxuations, too much violence. “In one wholly perturbed, conditions could not even be struggled with” (Dewey, 17).

Upon waking every morning my mind races to understand what I am late for and what state the world might be in. But, in many a conversation as of late, it seems that all of us are loosing a type of hope in which we can imagine the state of things improving. We might be loosing the ability to struggle.

In the days before the November election I stood in sync with my fellow poets both at the Political Poetry Forum at Temple University and on the streets handing out Move On cards in my neighborhood. We anticipated great change and there was such intense energy towards that change. I wore a smile and a great pin of peace and hope to the polls on November 2nd. Now, how do we resolve to continue the struggle?

Child in the Great Wood - M. Rukeyser

2005-05-02T16:29:00.000-07:00

Even this war is not unlike the dream,
But in the dream-war there were armies,
Armies and armor and death's etiquette,
Here there are no troops and no protection,
Only this wrestling of the heart
And a demon-song that goes
For sensual friction
Is largely fiction
And partly fact
And so is tact
And so is love,
And so is love.

nice paper

2005-04-24T14:07:00.000-07:00

If writing a paper based on the mathematical nature of Finnegans Wake is any indication of how things are and have been going, then I have succeeded in turning my life into a machine.

This machine loads itself up every morning around the crack of dawn. Somewhere in the night the steady diet of beans and rice and coffee has turned into unabated fuel for the next 24 hours which will in turn fuel a greater portion of my working life ... right?

I have begun recording the phone messages my father leaves for me. In his last one, recorded in short in the blog entry previous to this one, he alluded to apple fritters. In this latest conversation, my father has cracked his ribs after falling, without leg stability, off the escalator at the Seattle Airport. Apparently, a lady and her pink suitcase swiped my father’s feet out from under him and never knew the difference. She wandered away while my father was splayed on the floor near the baggage claim. I laughed so hard I snorted, but he couldn’t laugh. His ribs hurt.

Apple Fritters

2005-03-24T07:19:00.000-08:00

If the weather doesn't improve to a spring-like semblance, how are we supposed to get on with things? This morning’s rain and wind are pretending to be a dominatrix but this weather is like a bad dictator who can’t see its own downfall.

My father phoned from his truck. Southbound to a dam job this morning. The stop off at the grocery yielded two, yes two, apple fritters which “vaporized.” Indeed, a sugar high is what fueled the man through the rough morning hours on the lone highway.

Graduation from Temple is around the corner, but better yet is a blessed journey to Gettysburg with family in tow. This place is going to be like a northern Graceland for a week while the Heise spearheads their one and only, Liberty, back to the Western fold.

Wide open window

2005-02-03T04:56:00.000-08:00

It is 7:55 a.m., Philadelphia.

Second Floor bay window venetian blind is drawn up.
Window opens, storm window opens.

There is a black box for a window where the window use to be.

She stands there in a fabulously non-descript sweatshirt.

She is smoking.

The sunrise is hot pink.

I do not know her, but we are living side by side with only a street to divide.

going down

2005-01-21T15:57:00.000-08:00

I have finished three boxes of Tension Tamer tea since May.

Last month, waking up was met with a layer of mice droppings around the kitchen. This month, we have smartened up. One night, late, after I had seen two mice meandering around the kitchen Dennis and I decided it was time to figure out their strategy. We pulled the oven out from its spot to the horror of seeing two sticky traps with nothing but turd clinging to them and tons of dog hair, mice droppings, food bits and debris. We vacuumed and swept and laid the area thick with poison pellets. Then we set traps on both sides of the holes around the outlet where the mice had chewed so they could come and go, using the stove as their own personal condo. Two mice the first 12 hours. Two more followed. Did I mention we were starving them out too? Dishes are now done regularly and we keep trash in a tiny bag which gets taken out into the frozen every night.

I have been thinking of this idea of time. All philosophy is now met with a pure, unadulterated fantasy of driving West or South until I can’t feel the sting of this coast’s weather and actions. But, I would miss the mice kills, the street corner (44th and Locust) which I claim as my own. I would miss walking Fia past all her favorite places. I can only hope though that somewhere and sometime soon I will be owning one of those houses with a porch that has a nice set of chimes on it, instead of walking past back down to the Walnut mansion where mice and stove condos are in heavy supply and demand.

Onskar/wishes

2005-01-06T17:19:00.000-08:00

To finish one thing
open tin
Total finesse on timing
of yours
Get inside
a strong core
Corporeal tinned
who does not try
Cutting from the inside
I want to be that

Finish
and fishing round line
When talking try
in fewer tactics
Less control
Kissing offers
Darkness on a floor
When cutting
we are still trying
Describing this sound
broken glass under tooled leather
You hold it now too
finished under

words

2005-01-02T16:35:00.000-08:00

Arrive
See
Be found

For my love, 2004.

2004-12-30T17:52:00.000-08:00

This year began in a pub on the Belle Ile en Mer in the presence of French folk and great beer. It will end tomorrow night here in Philadelphia with swirling fireworks and a list of study techniques. I am listening to Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban's Mambo Sinuendo.

I would like to think I am in France now. That this house I am sitting at (which is not mine) could be a foreign location. I take my coffee in the round bottom cups with a blue stripe around the edge. Just like the cup I drank cider out of on the island. I am not riding a bicycle; instead, I am running the old trail down by the Schuylkill River which I ran on all summer long in the intense heat - mostly at night when my core body temperature could remain below 120.

I would like to make some kind of resolution. Resolution? Resolve? Remit? Reconvene? Reconcile? Retaliate? I would like to hear yours first. Then I will tell you mine.

So long for now, from the field, this is Liberty reporting….

Hem (home) a simple history

2004-12-21T14:45:00.000-08:00

Here it is. Birch wood floors. Someone came from Chile at the end of the 60's. I can hear the faint sounds in the accent, in the words. There, sitting on the natural wool and blue couch is a woman with dark hair cut straight across. A line falls at her chin. Eva also has this haircut but her hair is white blond. She grew up on Lidingö. The first family with a swimming pool. A swimming pool so you don’t have to walk to the edge of the sandless coast and admire Poland. Constantly covered except for a few weeks in the heart of summer.

Do you hear the percussion? Jazz in Täby. This is the house I grew up in. We move left to right and then back again. Doing dishes after a glass of lite beer and some riced potatoes. No need for mental transportation tonight. I see the advent candles in everyone’s window while walking home. I concentrate on every single light – count. The snow is ice cream, the stones are chocolate chips.

Up and down the felt stairs to rooms of silence and then again. Left and then right again. Night and day are one time. Time cut by a cup of Citron tea – late afternoon, morning, the middle of the night. There is always a wanderer, a neighbor, a closer than close, who wants to hear your stories and tell theirs.

Tonight I will walk down the blocks of cracked and salted streets towards a tea date. There is no snow ice cream here. I have a dog now, she will guide the way. I will try to listen for the chimes on Pine Street on the highest apartment with French doors leading to a porch which is a kind of porthole.

http://www.thesoundofsomething.blogspot.com/

2004-12-20T08:56:00.000-08:00

I believe the degree in here might be close to sub-zero. And I am inside the biochem lab, pouring my second cup of Russian Caravan and the sun is glaring in. I fear that the Racket Sports might take over as the more amusing of all blogs. Is there agreement? Divya Victor. Lady of the word.

Coney Island

2004-12-19T18:30:00.000-08:00

bump your ass off,
originally uploaded by Liberty.

Don't you wish you could play guitar and wire a light?

2004-12-15T14:20:00.000-08:00

I've been looking for this song forever. Here it is on a cd I just downloaded. And boy does it feel like fate. "I keep thinking that time will take them away, but these feelings won't go away." Tonight there is a bouquet of blinking lights overhead. Planes and paling clouds and ice eternal. I bet we really live inside one of those fingers of crystal that grow on the edge of the airplane window, on the outside.

What is on this week’s reading list? The streets are filled with plastic bottles and bags. I want this all over the place. I want a musical implant. You hear that?

My sonic hearing has deadened. Replace silence by the comforting sound of rushing air. I think I was missing the street sounds of summer when it was too cold to leave the window open at night. I live in an artificial environment until spring. Too bad we aren’t all Swedish babies who nap in their prams on the back porch during freezing weather so as to breathe fresh air.

Donut/munk/doughnut

2004-12-15T11:39:00.000-08:00

My horoscope for the week:

As I meditated about what would be the perfect holiday gift for you, I kept coming back to the fantasy of a thousand doughnuts. Nothing pleased me more than the mental image of your living room floor covered with boxes of Bavarian cream, chocolate frosted, jelly-filled, glazed, and apple crumb doughnuts. Here's the astrological explanation for my intuition: I think fate plans to blow your mind with sweet extravagance in 2005. Receiving a thousand doughnuts would be a metaphorical rehearsal.

Frank O'Hara

2004-12-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

Our responsibilities did not begin in dreams, though they began in bed.

"Memorial Day 1950"

The Apple

2004-12-10T10:44:00.000-08:00

She eats an apple every day.

We sit approximately three and a half feet from one another. She chews every fiber of the apple bit until it is pureed to a fine pulp. The eating continues. It is as methodic as any statistical analysis. Bite (very slow), chew (count to 100), swallow, repeat. She analyzes medical data in a spreadsheet all day. Her motions, besides the apple, are solely based on the scroll and right click keys of her mouse. The mouse is dark blue and silver. You can see the outline of her finger, even when she is not sitting there. Click, Click, Bite, Chew, Click, Click, Click.

Circle

2004-12-06T04:40:00.000-08:00

So, today in a snotty haze I crossed town in my car which, overnight, had its left-side mirror busted out. It looks like some kid took a stick to it. I'd say this city is going to eat me alive. I wanted to find a new winter coat in a thrift store called Circle Thrift which is on Frankford Avenue in Fishtown. It was worth the trip. I got a coat for a dollar although my friend told me I looked pregnant wearing it and my housemate wondered if I had stollen it off his grandmother. It cost a dollar. How can I go wrong? It's like my brother says, "if you get shit on it, you can just chuck it." Right-o.

I have been obsessed with making anything fit into a poem. There was a piece of waxy paper blowing around on the sidewalk. I thought it surely could be a metaphor for something, couldn't it? I think these thoughts go hand in hand with the latest email I received from my friend Erin who lives in DC. In it, she refered to us as women who hate to hear men say shit like "You'd be prettier if you smiled more."

Who needs forever?

2004-11-30T06:16:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-29T15:03:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-17T05:57:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-16T14:12:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

The plaster has

and I retain

hear through

glass

as if I sense

more than

tiny needles

hightied

skycompressed

waitsick

Ol' San Anton-

2004-11-13T07:47:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-09T16:31:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-08T16:06:00.000-08:00

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".

2004-11-08T16:02:00.000-08:00

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

2004-11-07T18:22:00.000-08:00

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?

2004-11-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

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?

Pay Period

2004-10-31T07:06:00.000-08:00

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

2004-10-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

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

2004-10-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

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

2004-10-29T18:10:00.000-07:00

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

2004-10-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

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.

2004-10-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

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.