Beauty and Grace Log

new website

2006-09-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

the new consolidation: www.whatbirdsgiveup.com

The Facts about New York 1-10

2006-06-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

1. He does not want to call or say anything so I said I miss you and I do wish you would.

2. They said maybe saying "please call" would help. This does not work. Certainly because he is not inclined to speak, nor does he wish me to speak or to let my desire be known to him. He wishes us to be even, to be inside the silence together, as in an agreement.

3. There is no doubt about dreams. We dream together and apart. We dream eachother's hair beneath the breath of summer, while the curtains shake and go silent. I dream my love for him in stone and steps. My love is Rome. My love bears the steps and the sun. My love is under an animal sky, bright and hard. His love is not so. His love is the person inside of him loving me. It is a sleep. He calls, he does not, the cars, the air switches.

4. We call inside of a jar. We sneak into church. We say "hi" to people, to the dead, the piece of blue light on the wall.

5. I love the people who can do nothing but love eachother below. The people in the dark ground, with their ears cinched and their eyes down. The flowers of June and the flowers of Fall. Blossoms breaking out of their mouths. The people in love with the train, with the bus, the bodega, the rows and rows. They call and they don't call. They are forever in the space of someone else's body. The space created by a heap of stone. The space created by their hair. They are what they are looking at in the dark, what they are fixing up on the shore, what collapsed at night into soft and righteous birds.

6. Begin melody, with the voice learning the sounds of words, that breaks the words in, that breaks them and stops. The voice of the air shaking the leaves, the voice of homes, of light on the hands of the earth. Begin ringing and ringing and stopping on me. The voice that burns out my thinking, that spoons out my thinking. Begin in explanation, the tourists are listening to baseball, the tourists are ordering chocolate coffee. This feeling of beginning, being called upon, being on the other end, it is a voice, a trilling, a fence of sound in the snow, in the tangle of summer, it's roots. The voice of my mother. The voice of my mother blacked out. A voice unto the green June, poppyseeds and broken eggs, and the voice of the pool. It is disguised as a discretion; Taped! Taped! playing on the bus of June. That blasting the rain. Their voices on the bus, their voices rising aught they be called, the people rising, their arms raised, and look the maniacal sky, the food of peace.

7. I am waiting for someone do you fucking mind. I in summer sweater. I in sandwich shop. Wait to be called. I am waiting for the person of my life, stop. I am waiting amidst the food of peace. The food of the might. The food of forgetting I am waited on.

8. I dream of walking all over my life in New York. These are the porous flowers of my dreams. The water running over the roofs. My love, my head. The sky breaks at night and the voice is fuzz, is behind sleep, below my stomach, breaking and calling up the silence.

9. My love makes books. The love of the world demands this making. It is the making of a room to be inside. The other end is a rustle, a lurch of things being made. I am asleep in a house of books. I am canned in a house of books. I make myself out of the books, eat, kiss everything.

10. Again the bells of June again they call up the death confetti. The plane dips down. The plane of thread. There are all these things to being aloft. Levels of sky and shadows of clouds. The formulation toward. The white hair on your arms. There are so many things aloft, swinging up on the seats of pain, shaking, aloft. At the end of things being, with white hair on your arms, gently gently. This white cloud on your head, asleep, death. The seat that is next to your wife. Being is a thing inside a cloud. Your wife is touching your arm. It is white. In the broken air of the aisle, it is sleeping. It is the seat of thinking, the seat of sleep. Your arms are covered with hair and thread, are clouds, are of your self, your life, are touching her, the air, are wearing down whitely, safely down.

cow cow cow

2006-06-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

Cow:
of the onesies
ringing the tree pre-
storm:

the form of a
thing is the thing
eating at the ground,
says I, , speaking

betwix clumps of fescue
flanking the step,
in accordance w/

C. Olson, kind
of a cow himself, at 6-
1o' in brown trowsers

Little Sparrow, you may land
on your pleasure:
yard of my love, bull head, any-
where: backwards

& if I do not finish
looking at you,

if dangerously perched
on pond
on birch or cowback
with it whipping
the skin of itself
on a fly

well

The bull does not

2006-05-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

The bull does not end the bull is $613.39 is calling me at work and calling me at home the bull has a roof over my head, a job, above all the bull is calling at 8, at dinner, during brats and beer with Gail and Fran, the bull is a tool for the upper middle class and the bull reads Harold Bloom in tompkin's square park amongst the wild black squirels, vegans, good looking guys on skateboards with dogs and the bull drinks water on the edge of the bay, running itself into the wood, into the dark pages of glass and leaves, forensic, the bull is giving the credit people a call to say hey your 35 days late to dinner to the silverware to the sewing of someone's books it is eight it is nine it is ten

Hello Pavement,

2006-05-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

Everything should have a kit I think eveything should have a kit I think the world is a bunch of tangled rubber tubes and everything should have a kit a kit akin to the rubber tubing that holds yoga mats together we are all bodies of rubber tubes ala doctors and lawyers and characters in the backs of trucks on the way home any Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday kits for their going agog a wind kit come what may kit, the gnats and wasps knitting kits around our wet faces today is a kit for tomorrow a kit is an outfit hurray horror kit hotel congress bathroom kits in the dead of night with the tv on and the outline of a man behind the security door I need more pockets more kits more silence inside my close.

for ever

2006-05-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

I go to the 17th street market. I need light bulbs and spinach. There's a lesbian in there following me and she's old and needy. I pick thru the spinach, green onions, etc. and she is looking so interested I put the goods in someone else's cart. I can't go back.

My dream last night: my mother was getting fucked on top of the lake by someone's little brother. My boyfriend is there taking a number.

There are no light bulbs at a Farmer's Market. It hurts when my boyfriend avoids looking at my face.

There is sickening right after I get off work. It follows me around and I'm thinking of its impeding period.

I'm thinking of becoming missionary. Someplace where good and bad are opposites. The children that are crumpled up in their chairs and not knowing it is you dressed up like a clown. You, ten years ago, bright.

I think heavily about the difference between defining things and measuring them.

A definition is finite, perfect in the sense that it is bounded.

"A mid point has is equidistant from two endpoints of a line. The measurement does not end. It is halved and halved."

For some reason I have been illustrating this to myself over and over. It is my way of looking at my favorite graph. The picture of two asymptotes: one going up, one going down to the same point.

2006-05-02T19:30:00.000-07:00

1. On my way to work this morning I saw this plate:

ARIZONA
HOPE 1

2. There is a little boy who lives at the juncture of 16th and Arizona Avenue, where I turn to get home. On Sunday, he was wearing church clothes and a rat tail. He jumped up and down giving me the double finger and made me laugh. This evening, he was naked.

Prayer for the Personal

2006-04-27T23:17:00.000-07:00

It looked like it was really going to rain today. We walked to Sonic and had two tiny banana splits and I could have sworn it would rain when we were walking, tho it is not a surprise to feel everything about to, then no. Not the littlest thing, Lord. I felt the form of the clouds when I sat back down and I went out to see again. There was no rain. My boss poked out and I followed him back in. The garage door shook the runners. My hands hurt, which some people say is significant. I didn't read my horoscope. There was no rain when I beat my boss out of the office and out on the road and pulling up my gravelly drive. Rain on the books outside? On the door left open to air out the fumes? Rain when Misty called to talk about ages 26-29. Our voices broke over and over. The helicopters were almost upon me.

Now the night is done. There is no one outside my apartment as there is no one inside this prayer, Lord. I feel as tho I have traded one precious thing for another and I do not understand. How I am to sleep to sleep.

2006-04-21T21:13:00.000-07:00

The Even

We.

Sit, laying our hands like wire.
On the table.

Wood of the moon
to touch your head.

* * *

The moon looks good on the table.
It is a holster.
You are holding it.

Your head is balled on your elbows.
And screwed through your hands.

* * *

The sun is put into a yellow edge.

They bring breads’ smelling
so forth, the table that is a fold
with two plates.

And the moon, the rust.
The rust of waited on
talk.

* * *

Your head.
And hands.

In the position of finding out
so to speak.

“We are eaters”

They bring on
pink shanks and spinach
artichokes and then
creme

* * *

Bitter Dogbane at dusk.

Apo, meaning “away from.”

Some of the time
wind is it, filling the rows,

of rows of pink and white.

In drifts shadows on
the chaparral.

I push my hand on you
and my other one.

* * *

No, on.

The sight of us going
underneath the road

The bats. Before anything
it sounds a lot,
remote flipping.

Understanding the state of affairs

2006-01-03T09:24:00.000-08:00

This morning I forgot about the appointment when asked to walk the dog. For some reason the appointment makes a big difference in the way I feel about getting to work after 9, after walking the dog. Had I remembered the appointment, I would have walked and my morning would not have been so bitter.

Second, the letter today from a very close freind sort of said that we should not be freinds for a while. If I did not understand, I would be better. But my understanding has been unfolding for a long time. It goes inside me and is dull and polite.

Love Letter Amidst This General Contentment

2005-12-30T15:34:00.000-08:00

There are insurgencies and now the girls showing their shoulders. Going to have a smoke. See the day moon.

In the Chifforobe, you, in a love poem, write, not knowing I had one. There were small black coats inside.

Maybe you put too much pressure on your leanings, Memorizer. I can see you saying "rehnquist" in boston with one of those goosetree books sticking out you.

I sound like I'm saying everything backwards in this letter.

I'd like to make a list like you do with words that are touching the end of understanding.

As in it is
light when we leave.

Pain of it

2005-12-20T15:54:00.000-08:00

to say to my father my career is waiting rooms and I need hardwood floors and white-framed windows, that the mornings be important because I am alone in time, and there is light that must come through two windows across the bed let it shine on the books at my feet. I want that ipod charger/speaker/alarm clock so that I can listen lower and lower to emmylou harris, as it's always a matter of wist in the morning and the alarm of sadness that is shedding and leaving things in the light. My house that I am losing on the snow and the mountain for my dad. The picture of it and the cat asleep in the closet, fireplace that is just a hole in the picture of us, as I was saying at the terminal on standby, with this handmade Bolivian bag that someone's always appraising, the colt's last stand in san diego, things I need a chair for to tell.

I thought

2005-12-19T17:29:00.000-08:00

and thought about it and it was the one with muslin and it was printed there with an "e" and there was no air underneath the plane and the wings were bad, the sky was dark, the child behind us was pushing past and her mother was in fur.

Gift checklist

2005-11-23T10:21:00.000-08:00

1. My mother (check)

Is going to get something
that has a smooth surface (this
is b/c I am not the daughter
who doles the pictures and I do
think a book will go with her
gift. The book will be something
gentle and concerning a passage.
Neither urban nor contemporary.
The card I will make to match
the book. The book will go with
the smooth surface of a shawl
which I will find very fine
this friday between packing my things
and moving them.

2. My father (check)

will be the one who
gets a card that surpasses
the others in workmanship
and a broadside of a poem
that is well-made and framed
for hanging in his office.

3. Julia (check)

is by far the hardest because
my notion of smooth is none
to her, making christmas seem
more like a joke than a sharing
of tastes under the tree. Thing is,
we are sisters and the gift needs
to come from the smirkiness and spittle.

4. Morgan, Whit, & Katie (check)

can take their shadows'
animals and put them
down.

5. Reagan and Lane

habla espanol.

For Marina

2005-11-22T11:13:00.000-08:00

O mister darcy, master of silence, my mist-
er in the middle of my middle age
I say darcy and you say nothing
in the midst of your house, your linens,
china and statuettes on the table
of my conceits of my rank
and winsome mouth O darcy all wither
misters ere or ire, o darcy
o my, o mister d

weekends

2005-11-07T13:32:00.000-08:00

The weekend before last was worse than most weekends, save a few.
There was a party and a fight. Cops talked to me. It was Jimmy's birthday.

*************

This past weekend was better than that last weekend.
There was no party and the person to fight with is gone for now. It is not Jimmy's birthday anymore.

*************

The weekends that I remember before that bad weekend are nothing. They are bad because they are nothing. I classify the weekends between June 1st and November 1st to be bad and nothing.

These weekends were not just bad in themselves, they rotted or something.

That last weekend just exploded.

*************

Then the absence of the explosion was peaceful. Also the absence of nothing was a releif.

There were things in my lawn that stunk, people to invite for dinner, the day of the dead procession, bagels with pesto, Capote, the diaries of Klee, thank goodness.

We sort of yelled and were sour then we took showers and went out.

I bought some books.
Jimmy drove.

don't forget don't forget

2005-11-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

Ugly Duckling Press!
Grossman Publishers!
Jargon!

To your right

2005-11-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

we've got the beginnings of my book garden, expanding faster than my paycheck and more beautifully than anything I can think of.

Publishers to love and cuddle:

O books
Granary
Chax Press
Burning Deck Chapbooks
archipelago books
a+bend press
Futurepoem books
Apogee Press
Belladonna Books
Flood Editions
green integer
New Directions
Wesleyan University Press
Alice James Books
Dalkey Archive
University of California
Kelsey Street Press

nice sitings

2005-10-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

Here in Heaven: They are a bit spit on and rubbed , but stuff is in them and they are good.
Spineless Book Views: sometimes on, sometimes off book reviews
Bernstein's picks for 2005: as good a list as any of good books
altered books: coo, so coo
hope for the spellless: yes, the pissobliities are eldness, yes
origins of phrases: ref-fur-ants

journal of white wildflowers

2005-10-17T15:08:00.000-07:00

Bastard Toadflax (Comandra umbellataa)

I guess it is good to end things because of the existence of the end. It is very clear. It has a good sure voice. The point of saying so is sort of an ending. It is sewn over. It hurts to put pressure on it and it moves. It becomes among things. It seizes me up to go to California and then it makes for the ocean. I don't like it's come hither quality, nor are the portions serviceable. Blackened and booked. Sepal.

Pineneedle Milkweed (Asclepias linaria)

I am a nice girl not entangled in the strangulation. You know. I am nice and my life it not. Tho I don't think of it until later, it is true. I am a girl that is nice depending on where you are when you are looking and where I am. I do not feel nice 50 percent of the time b/c I am doing things 50 percent of the time that I am unsure of. Being nice doesn't have to do with doing things one's unsure of.

I don't understand the soaptree yucca, "Shepherd's Purse"
the breaking up of beautiful things in thimbleweed bushes
and amaranth, the weed and rock, the pots of catclaw
mimosas and flaggy soapberries.

I don't understand how to "carry on" with the meat smell of desert tobacco blooms. To be walking along like that. And to continue.

I don't know what it means to be true, what it feels like, or what effect the true has on the webbing out of days, the time for travel and savings, prints, markings, mules.

I don't admire anyone at the moment.

I understand what it's like to feel good and I understand that I'm not with or for anyone. I'm not an accomplice or bodyguard. I'm not lording it over anyone. I'm not in on the nights, nor do I know what to do when I show up. I'm not drunk. I'm not smoking two cigarettes like when I was dreaming. I'm not in on someone else's dream, I'm not included or hinted at. I'm not the recipient of forgiveness. I'm not even losing David. As much as the resemblance is there, as much as I know about that. I'm not ready to sacrifice, still, after all this time. David, you can't come. You aren't invited to New York City. I am not "you" to you and you are not "him" to me. I have no idea what this has to do with belonging.

Lesquerella purpurea Rose Bladderpod

I release it and I stop talking about things. I stop talking toward the formulation. I stop talking and look. I release the sadnesses for what it is that is good, if what is good is cloaked in sadness. I release the knots on me. I release the things that I made that were made poorly. I release feelings of guilt that are tied to my face and my mouth. The black spots on my face and around my lips. The blisters on my shoulders and veins on my legs. The curve under my chest that is like the bottom of a boat. I release the easing of the violence that is done. I open the question and release it because it is light. It is painful because it is nothing and it does not belong. I release it because it is the same thing as everything, it is it's own reflection, it is evocable and it is raining.

common as a subliminal bridal gown, the waxen pod rhythms itself, meanwhile revolution bedraggles the prior meaning

2005-10-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

Perchance the curtains and flam-flam, the dyeing of prior flowers green so to green we were rollicking and flicking cement at the starthings, our own star rows, darkly thru the new glass of water, salt, pilates, and row-rows of fishes staring etcetera, which is to say merrily am I oh left standing, dip me ears into the foggy coastal gasses, get all up in the dipping and cud, the white green of summoa dat, the cow that is on base, it shakes, we drive thru the bright doings of day and still silt in the rooms where the dresses are fitting

star of david

2005-10-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

1.

the lights are off the lights
pass thru your paper curtains
your back arms and the lights are
& are on your one hip

& I am eighteen & then I am one
un-harried by the passing
of these things thru
the bed & the wall
like lisps, etc.

2.

Star of the new year, shading
the light with fine green paper

I want my tree of light, David

The one with the bark gone
& the wood white

you say the star that is
shielded with white palms
and wrapped in gauze

the piece that is
a broken M

the star rubbing
away on your hip, a shade,

Away from the Bitter Dogbane

2005-08-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

The generic name Apocynum, is derived from the Greek "apo" meaning away from, and "kuon" meaning dog, alluding to its ancient use as a dog poison. Ingestion of any part of this plant can cause poisoning and sometimes death to cattle, sheep, and horses. Because the milky sap is bitter, the plants are usually avoided. The bell-shaped flowers have five petals which are united at the base with lobes that separate and curl outward at the tips. A related species, Apocynum cannabinum (Indian Hemp) was an important source of strong fiber for making ropes and baskets.

similar sections

2005-07-29T16:27:00.000-07:00

1. Nora
2. The Devil
3. Laughter

So that choosing

2005-07-29T12:02:00.000-07:00

becomes a function of necessity and the function of an entire system that works with itself, that does not require me to do anything outside it, the system. So I am to do the work of this, being a part of it, being unalone in everything that makes up the system of houses and roads and what I live in. I do not want to ever do what I want. Wanting is weak to me and when I see myself wanting to go swimming, I immediately unroll it. No, I need to go. The system of people swimming in the backyard of a large house is, I think, reminescent of a larger picture I have of myself right now. It has to do with working, as I alternately do and not, and with you. Sitting amazed on the other chair, looking a little open to everything. Because of the autonomy of the chair, the figure you make in it, and your thinking occupying only that chair, only your self to a degree. It is a system in itself.

things I can do without you

2005-07-25T19:11:00.000-07:00

Collage with Jimmy for hours, quietly, as to not disturb anything inside.

Bugspray, unbound.

Read directly after work, I mean I get home with out a second thought and start reading and writing and I also have the Ronald Johnson because you are gone.

Talking to you on the phone while noticing the this lizard has dug up a bug and makes several attempts to chew it. Bug flips out of his mouth. You say something. Retrieves it. I say-- Bug is really fleeing! And you are talking through the lizard's resolve, he swallows it whole.

La Indita! Ha!

Red Bird Analogy

2005-07-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

The red bird that wants so badly an answer to why it is flying over and pulling at bits of weeds and why it collects things and puts them together in the dumbest places, like atop a precarious ladder. And whether it is it for a reason, this dumbassery.

Why animals regard eachother like that, and so much is taken for granted. And why, being a bird, it is still sad, without even the proper biological material to be sad, because it can't make tears, because its eyes just aren't like that.

Without a word to you about being silly and hopping around. And needing something that can not be explained. Why the bird is just sitting there, being scared, inside the dark garage. And even though it is beautiful, and tender, and completely itself--it's no good.

Why it does it's work, botches it, drops her little eggs, and flys coup. Though it was not a coup, it is a house, because things are assimilated in it, organized, even poorly: the nest and the eggs, the boar skull that the bird broke. Coup in the sense that it is hot and dark, where we are trying to be kind to eachother in the dark.

The bird that goes numb with fright and appears to give up. Sits there in the hole in the ceiling, stamps your car with her little feet, but does not give any sign. Does not know what sign to make, or how to explain anything. Is jealous. Is cruel and quiet. Is inside itself with questions that can not be answered. Is wanting to be the bird, to act on that natural feeling that makes being a bird, even a dumb bird, okay.

Bird that knows two things that contradict. Bird that can not know anything but these two things that are yet to be one thing. Which is what the bird wants, everything aside, this one thing.

themes to be (recited by paul)

2005-06-30T23:38:00.000-07:00

prudence

predestination

circumcision (biblical sense, the idea of being set apart, sort of... you know... it's the idea of a sacrifice that isolates you)

fetility

loving kindness

charity

complacency

discipline

witness

due benevolence (paul on marriage)

piety

reverence

defilement

fleshliness

cowardice

concupiscence

stewardship

Jamie Best

2005-06-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

Jamie Best died of a drug overdose this past spring. He played baseball at Lakeside High School. He had a daughter named Daphne. He didn't marry her mother, Deanne Walker, who has an identical twin (Pam). Pam and Deanne both lived in my old neighborhood. They were very quiet, Pam and Deanne, and I heard little rumors about them during high school. I don't remember what people said, but I know the rumors did not fit my conception of the girls. They were quiet.

Now Deanne has a daughter whose father is dead. I'm thinking about this without knowing exactly what to think.

Jenny Clark, with whom I had a joint birthday party (at the Watervale pool, I forget how old we were) also died in 2000. He mother, Carol, sent her condolences to Jimmy (Jamie's father). Jamie's father and mother are divorced. Carol and her husband are now divorced.

Reading the messages on Jamie's guestbook, they feel very smooth and even. This is not a cover-up. A death like his makes everything feel smooth and even, sort of build-in. Jimmy left a message on Father's day. He has joined a local ministry to help people with sustance abuse.

list of movies

2005-06-29T23:14:00.000-07:00

blue velvet
lost highway
oh brother where art thou
Existenz
vertigo
the birds
antonioni: I don't know the one with the ship and the women who disappears
metropolis
fight club
american psycho
american movie
Scorpio (and the car short)
Last Tango
East of Eden
french kiss
she's out of control
apocalypse now
robin hood
godard with the two men reading the newspapers next to an old house
godard with the line dancing
hartly with the line dancing to sonic youth
hartly with something about desire in the title
juliet of the spirits
streetcar named desire (in the park with saneesh, we drank some beer)
that movie where there was no talking
bunel; all of it, esp. the one with dali
Beauty and the Beast (both french and disney versions)
the piano teacher (important because I saw it in NY with Alex one night in the middle of everything)

what

2005-06-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

I feel not love, and am using the opposites of these feelings at you. The smallest things are giving all my love its indifference. We pick up of trash and such, we walk and the dog walks up the alley-way and down the park and you bend down to see the largest beetle ever. We are sharing the time and it isn't helping. The idea of crying on Saturday night makes me angry. I am still in there. You are out and about. You have a new love of Dickinson. And I, with my old love and my slow love, am getting very tired. Very tired indeed. I ask a very Peggy Lee question, very breathy and very tense in my throat, and nothing returns to me. Is the swept-up quality of loving having always to do with the choices I have made before, nothing to do with the choice before me. I can not see a choice. To stay or leave: that is it. While I know a myriad of things happen, my choices do not reflect what happens. Rather what I see in my feelings, and I want to destroy my feelings. I turn away from who I feel becoming in me and you are so intimately associated with who I feel I am turning into. I have many questions of momentum. Many questions about the small choices I'm making these days. Like the music I am crying about, the feelings about reading that are jealous feelings. My brain is shrinking, I can tell by the way my head is, the way I can't see complexity anymore. I need that complexity to feel right. But the things to do get flat, the choices get simple, and there is no comfort in that. No room for me to lean in and work through. You think I need a problem to solve, but what I need is a problem that makes sense. A way to configure my feelings, which arise not out of a problem but out of nothing at all. Maybe the passing of time creates these feelings. Maybe feelings step out of my body like a cat. But these feelings are not a problem yet, they have not been ordered. So the feelings are empty, thus angry, and the problem is nowhere. Thus I am desperate and sad, crying on Saturday night and the crying is saying something to me that is not true. That is lying and lying to me about the problem. I am losing against it and I am very scared.

Lily

2005-06-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

Lily, who was in red dirt of the road not a mile away from herself. The letter is in her, and she leans into it because of the dirt, dirt beat flat across the outer edge of glue, the scripting, which she has read, which she has not taken in, nor looked across the bank, the weigh station, or heard the rumble strips digest against the early moon.

The heart up the road has taken his back to a barmaid in the heavily burnt spring. The stool spins and a cicada zings against the fence. Someone moves a car like a peice of glass across her face, the letter.

Better if we are two nuisances, our knees red with dirt. The dark was growing up Parley's Corner, behind boat hitches, where the boats failed and the rust cut through them. It was work to have this story told her, look.

His mustache is like glue. Her dogs fall out of her dress and get, attached to the velvet supper of dirt.

Bees, laced in white combs, no matter what.

The letter is a pouch of hair and thistle. The entire body is moonish and soft, a paper thrown forward into a stream where ever the pulp is still mashing in the mud. My Lily, the two of us passing up smoke from a train roiling in the summer . We are with them, in our way, a little behind the trail of smoke rising and usually rising away.

2005-05-14T01:12:00.000-07:00

When you get used is it and will it be there and for how long with it and the burns that I have taken into me are they yours or not are they the great sameness and beliveing in them is like beleiving in the block and about the century,
the turns, the portents streaming which was certainly streaming. I have a call to be be be what the
nomeclatures call a disentagling, a caboose, a bullock of strongness, a whorl. I am smoking right now and
I feel the portion of it streaming towards you, that I am not explaining anything, I am thinking of you
and it is surprising, to be so line broke, to be so heady, in the worshipful manner of great kings
I am thinking this is you face and this is not your face, the plocking lpocking, the pull it for it isn't there
this man I must be still. I keep many things to me and I keep the words of god and the breath
of you in me and the way there is always dissimilartude in the cross-streets. The baliff is questioning me
the court is adjorned. the fall fall of the black rose inthe envening, the seemingly failure of things as Joshc mentioned and I am to be a cle stoneon the horizon, a closed eye. A imagistic maligma. For it is you. yuou are not it. You are that fight I have with myyself in
brich toojm tuneing in circle sciles cilces cilesciclwse.

translation

2005-05-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

Subject: Our production
do it slightly and with speed
than always to receive
the classifications you ask.

Our site is your handly,
harmless and personal realtime
beginning. Our company offer brand - name
and correctprecise common identicals
of United States FDA approved instruction
boluses over our entirely licensed transmarine
pharmaceutics. Upon sanction of your officinal
intelligence, a recognized general practitioner
will distribute a lavish instruction which will be tight
and mail to you in 1 business day.

For Charlie on his final own

2005-05-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

To write this story, of you and your blue neck, this is softness all apart of the crinkle when you read a book you have told me about. You skip me along with the others you have told and begin, begin: Having written in the peices of women and what they lovingly wore, it was like a building to you, to touch them underneath the hallway. They are ratchets you are saying.

You are making out of them some tiding. Some come and sit in your chair, volume up, and you are not stopping falling whiskey on your shirt.

The glass is a fulcrum. Over it I think of the different people we put in and how married you are. Not speaking is like this part. The happiest people throw pebbles at the oncoming train and we are with them in our way, blankness in us like architecture. Knowing most of this makes it tinny, the sound going against the space so disorderly and sweet I think of nothing past.

Dialogue final

2005-04-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

She is like plaque, that is what you say to her. Her face is obscured; hair over her eyes and cheeks, her hands. Around the white cuffs she is wearing even in the bed. Her life is a mess and though plaque badly describes it, she understands. You go on.

There are filaments, pieces of her life spinning away and then again, on you. Smaller and smaller things she forgets to do, you say,

and she is not careless towards you and you are not seeing carelessness when she is doing this. It’s the effect that bothers you. You say for instance she is crying. It not an offensive, and thankfully you have little to do with it. She cries for herself. It is tiring to be in the midst.

She takes your hand a little under the white blanket. She is white and tired and tells you to stop coming towards her like that, the way others do. No, you say, no there is nothing for you to run from, only things to explain. Though you do not know who you are explaining to, you tell her.

Her body lies on the blankets, moving a little against her shirt and shoes. You push the hair away and press your palm to her jaw. Her face yields to the side. It is warm. As much pressure as you put into her face, she puts back into your hand. You feel through her cheek the teeth and is she is somehow accepting this. Say nothing again to her. There are reparations she must make, you think, but she is tired, she says. She will sleep if she can and you need to go.

But when trying to think her face rises, holds; she says things she is thinking inside her mouth.

She does this to you, she knows, and pretends to not. It is not a terrible thing to pretend. There is a train nearby and you feel her listening for it. She says it is cruel to say things you know as if you didn't. That loving is saying everything certainly. You bring her to you, watching the surface of what she is saying hold and fall away. She doesn’t know. She has already forgotten what she had to say. Is studying something here, in your face, or perhaps she trying to find something else, or perhaps suffering uninhibited for the first time, for what you are not certain. Perhaps holding to knowledge of forgetting, that is it. Forgetting, that takes hold of everything you said and she said, and she is making saying things impossible for

four

2005-03-04T15:44:00.000-08:00

to witch

I say: New York, New York, take your

time and brightnesses. I will

the ground none of you, having lost

a very new year to gargoylic pigeons

on the school front, thumbs of no

nonsense roses and pain. I take minor

leaps into the rest of the bed, my hair

ripped to tickets. New York, sounding

bored. The way to the station smells wet

and dangerous. It will be elegant, always,

to live this live.

trains

You lay me beneath the city & I keep up
with the dinners, the many keys around
me, placing myself like a white billboard
in the hole. Jiggling accordingly, my family looks
around in disbelief. What the, says them, seeing
the roofs slapped at with snow, big faces
of children sticking out of their coats,
accidents accompaning the smell of
cream. It's no place to be. Between our
feet, there's my bag of books and kinds
of food, and the feeling of feet below this
sounds like the sea. You hate it. If only
in my mind drunk, you're drunk, the object
of conversation going home.

sun no shine

It's Tuesday and you look back
to my pockets where my hands are
fitting. You've documented all kinds
of activities, free as we are, and I'm used
to that about you. Several escalators down,
I describe the guy you'll look like: he seemed
very pink with a plaid hat and braces attached
to his blue jeans. Was he alone, yes he was.
His thin legs held him up and Brooklyn was no place.

and or

They fall away. All day they fall in love. They have these thick peices of pilfered sandwiches and huge coats on. They largely own the corner stores, some air is wasted, and their teeth look like chalk. They can. Attendents, rats, women; and they survive by falling, as everyone. That man on the subway tells you it's true.

ex; curse shun

Reminding me of this, the poplars & maples grow
back to the ground, as do the number of faces
at nightclubs. The rain embossed on the road kind of
retreats into whispering, as before the rain.
Your sweater worn out all evening, stumbling about
your shoulders now, is of your head & hands
& hangs up. Out, out of my ears; the orange sling
of morning, of traffic, my falling steps
down the stairs; the reasons I work hard run
out. The smaller this apartment gets in our place.
It’s like a white plane. We back into the bed, back,
ending the yellowy sheets, not knowing each other once.

loudness and length

Dogs baying fortissimo in the sea shelf of our wanderings down midtown, 1st Avenue, down Clinton and gristle. Your favorite bar is lit. Everything about it is red and dark. Kevin backs you; you are beside the dark interior. I'm on the fourth wall tonight, fine. A dream is lipping my head. There is music through it and we are walking, though the picturing is different for me now as with the city, streets, poor girls, your order.

braces

I sleep on the couch in the kitchen. There is this window in there. The couch is dark, as all the tile is dark and dirty, and black bars cross the window this city is through. At night I'm running screaming towards you you fix me like an insert. A peice of my white dress. You are picking me up in the dark and setting me down.

tastes

Through the kitchen window 'the city' appears. I want to know nothing of it all the long day. We listen to Dylan. Cats bite flies and their pink jaws gleam in the afternoon light. The perfume sooner or later and cars come. The fires next door. Of course. The alarm.

the time

1st Avenue. Hands in our pockets. It was the street of whispering, some moments of sun, and we moved at the end of August.

The Farther Reaches of America

2005-02-25T09:07:00.000-08:00

I'm going to have afternoon out, out
with a stick and the figure of a beetle
on the end. Got to swing the simple doors,
don't I? We run things like Canada
and it's very cold and my breath shuts
your ears.

I do love my woman and I do
next to the toilet, showering in summer
under vacant lights. My love is saying so
to the policed place in your white head.
I hew jewels and encrust them and stuff
soft felt in forest green boxes. I tell you
everything I'm doing, it is spit.

The skinniest scruff tinkers in the twilight
and you close your eyes, coming to. The world is
sheet glass and hard hats hauling chains across
your flatbed. World-making I say is parading
horseback: the men inside the men unzip. You made it.
And if we had your hands we would have them getting smaller,
to say Beetle, beetle into your apparel.

You want to be pressing a turtle down
with your foot. You want wanting the very same
spring turned over. A brick of books on your
head, your going, going and your wifey hair is just
as well laid on and burred.

following room

2005-02-23T17:09:00.000-08:00

There have been easier evenings than these
around our flatbed. Older cheerers harken
a bottle or two for us, there are crackas
and peanuts if you please. I hold no more
than a scholarship and people like Saneesh
and Charlie come to mind. Sitting besides,
we swing next to a storm window while Shak
refuses to move his bed. Listening, always,
rising now in silk pajamas and balding. He was a total
deflection of lamplight.

There's a different name
on my driver's license and even when we're not out,
Josh and or someone Josh-like is talking
at our face. I tell you nothing stopped when I saw him
last year of course you can't just see. There's more.

Cats, none of which have fallen sick, and I tear to bits
the books. No one in New York is precisely alone
as you. I'm in the following room with a map
and a teaching position and you are to decide.

We eat, we really are eating, and whose car's parked
under the falling trees. After evening the train
sounds sort of alarming. You're wearing a potholder
and it's pink, manning something next door snoring.

Johnny White

2005-02-15T17:49:00.000-08:00

It's a Johnny White blight in here.
These sheep roll the way, then that.

Too large a room to sleep in.
A poor imitation of liquor waffling

on the signposts, you sigh and I know
what you mean. You mean to me

that chewing and spitting. That guy spat,
at the corner of 1st and Mountain, you said it was one

love. Your voice shook intolerably
on the wet rafters. It was just one

famous person singing others.
They call those covers this.

shyness, if an apology

2005-02-15T17:45:00.001-08:00

To try the kitchen dimmer switches, hat hooks, all the detritus falling left of our apartment one night in Brooklyn. The firemen ritualistically wear their garb, off duty, moving up the quiet stairs to even quiet sleep. Once rumored to fight there, to throw plates out half eaten, and complain about the amount of light through the windows in winter. I’m alone as once with that bottle of fake milk, making ways around the glossy red stairs, still trying to pinch things into place. I had a hammer. Still a hammer until the cows barrel up drunk, if only in my mind drunk, I will do the brandishing. We make the gluey pots shine, and watch the skin about my hands fall mothy to the floor. There’s no more corn in the manager. There’s twice as much rice in the fridge. We eat in the cool aftermath of kalidescopes, never wondering where to insert them, where our eyes go briefly. As do colors.

what we are to do with the present day

2005-02-15T17:45:00.000-08:00

It’s about 8:30. The afternoon
of the blitz our realtors were hurting. The house
it seemed, a far cry now from our comeliness, but then
the sort of debris got fallen. It was beautiful.
I wore tender rooms of flowers about my hair and simply
ate it on the balcony hours over hours tickling the cracks
in a pomegranate. I feel softly a rain
fizzle the netting and it is in those days
I played port and sea. Pains, as it were, were no longer
that of poppies and glockenspiels. It was getting late,
a century in here, the tower to exercise
our deep fears, hoping the stolen portents would indeed
return from that lofty hotel where all
things seemingly steal away
in the dark. It’s dark now. Your snores tender
the fissures already raw on your throat. I go long
across the room to revive them, stiffening you
to a kind of trade. I had the heart of a powerful
router, not loving you then, and certainly I know
not how now. Our house is the brown
of mice droppings, the house smells the way
we would, had the blessing taken several years
these blessings feeling our hands. Darling,
the animals have managed; they have class.
The wheat tips high into the light and bitingly we seize the
necks of confused goats going home. I want
to reprimand Milton just once, for the soreness
reportedly meant for his woman. She must
have been a doozy, as wild fish
in distant memory simpering to smile
on you. She has the legs and the face,
if not the body misdirected. I think
of floating backward, the way washes happen
to today, full of pulp and presently
there is no suffering of water. We drove
north and pouring was on us.

a fascinating pancake

2005-02-15T17:44:00.000-08:00

Some soot on the stove, our reserve
of portents certainly streaming, as with the river and the bay,
the swayings of little leaf in October or even now
water sounds back the black faucet, simply resisting us.

This Gautier around your neck, flecks of emerald indispensables
and snake sayings and dog hairs, I’m playing at the sacrificial rites
of spring. We’re stirring things like soup on the stove, it’s dirty,
and you bake clay in glass fixtures so as to not burn the bottoms.
Darling, your bitty beasts are crooked. The horse is more dog than that
and the idea of a dog right now is all you need to tail my bed
and snore. A sort of diamond.

More than that, I like your foppish do. For a second you look yawningly,
then sinister, then it's up to me to stay placed, to smokie smokie
while you revolt to a stole. My bed is so white.
You look like a bush in it. It's better we know the whole thing
backwards: the bed is certainly elliptical, the motions rotiserrie,
and the hot, hot. Everything, terns. Terns flirting in the orange trees,
banging the french doors, coming into a kind of spring both violent
and aware. As with modern dance and oyster crackas.

This room is made, I daresay, fatefully for the few
who don't know it's differences. That cats will get you to the statues
of yourself in the forrier. That pependicular lines have more to do
with the railroad ties toothing the hall than the direction
of our equal volition. I am in strength and soupiness, as you are to animals
and animals in sweaters. There is a by
the bookishness that constantly flays our bodies into thinness first unimaginable,
then quite nice, meandering as the head of someone hunched in the corner.
I am now hunched if not crooked, but looking still fair for now
on the feilds, the bits of hairs on my bed, and the body of all of it properly
confused but not lost there, not even moving to me.

Ideas for Poetry Class this summer

2005-02-11T15:08:00.000-08:00

Experimental Performance and Poetry

Using experimental performance as a lens for analysis,

notions of embodiment, the cinematic gaze, ritual, anthropology, masks, etc.

looking at experimental works by New York School Poets, eh

The Poetics of Technology

History of technology and poetics (from Frankenstein to ...)

How certain kinds of technology have pervaded contemporary and traditional works. We will learn to write poems taking into about the technologies of writing and the technologies of thought available to us.

Animal Poems: reading and writing poems about animals

We will look at past and present poems about animals, comparing how different poets aproach animals in terms of their biology, ecology, myth, etc

Gathering

2005-02-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

The fact that thinking is a kind of gathering, and that I want my poems to be little instances as opposed to doing the ideological sweep that seems either lazy, but is probably more desperate than people realize.

Sooner

2005-02-08T13:55:00.000-08:00

the socking. The schooner ticking itself to the bay. Fed light of moon on my mouth. I knew you briefly flinging about, the glassy balcony, lofting the seeds so to birds you were. You were birds about to come to the skiffs. It was next. I mean you to be next to the sea, haul the falling stuff in your cuffs, planting things in the sea to wit. Paul of you is to wooly roses and the queer heart of parting besides. And being little in the scruptuous down, in the fleece feeling thighs and hair. We, as opposed to noonwet weathering, the people preening their plastic jackets, are next to the sea together, as happens. Long after the boats go totally, the sea going so that it quits, in essence, and a spot on the water for plane reflections. I have this sign for us. It's the strongest longest sign of starting, a bendable harness for sheep and horses. A corn husk, of sorts, gnawed.

Dear Paul

2005-02-06T19:09:00.000-08:00

I found your nose in my chicken pie, and lightly sent you smoke and glassy pans and things to bake clay on. No you don't. I'm a terrible badger of late, making bad on my lightness, my room of books, ashtrays, the precise way I move here and steer the garbage into corners. The foundations of which, you weren't here for. It was me and jimmy hopping about it was summer we sucked ice. I wasn't happy but I wanted nothing either. I felt helpful and suprised, and now my room is still. It feels like lens cleaner and grandma's fan respectively, and the smoke goes long over everything making me weaker, as you said, but also more mine than I expected. I'm not sure why it's so annoying. If I thought my job was to hold back, then fine, but lately the way we work is more geared toward regretfulness, and the soup of knowing something and stirring. I have a hard time building things inside you and you know that. I also can't envision decisions, that must come across as well, and it's okay take to filling the holes slow, and do them surely. But before that, the gnats. My heater keeps turning off. I thought the doll was a texas fetish and I was wrong about that. I also thought too through our final argument, and I wanted to already have driven home, all asides, and sit here. I don't realize things about forgetting, because I don't want to. I also have a kind of reserve about finishing things, this is true across the board. There's still an imp, a kind of wishing with fingernails, and I want to dispel it. There's whole pieces of our bodies yet to project upon and I dread it, but there's also the sewing that understands your big manuver. When I said 'you don't cover anything about me up" and such. I spoke so much of you over Christma and seeing inside your house makes me afraid. Also walking the dog at night, the way things get smaller on the sides, and how I thrash what I want against you. There's been no ravishing lately, I've noticed. But home does things like that and what I want to stay, I will. And what goes to the flourishing is a kind of a joke. I've noticed so many people like us laughing, and I'm very much trying that now.

love poem 2

2005-01-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

We covered the feild, one night happening stormy and suprisingly lit, with what you asked and I told you how something shimmers in terms of our walking into it, or walking itself, which is to luminous greenhouses. That sync, whether I weilded a dog and you a frondy sweeper or visa-versa, we were

keeping in mind covering, a stretch, your hands as well your mind making shell shapes knotted, all your fingers being bits or like a white lozenge

and the soft bramble sticking out. I wielded a dog and you, a palm frond with large brown husks; your hands making all your fingers bits or like a white lozenge. What made them plain was white fuzz, wasn't given to the character of lamplight, wasn't slick as sweating you were, but fuzz because your hair, how it reflected your hands, how curious. You put my head in a hat and that was awkward. I was the bird. Certainly saluting, crimping my neck like that, and the establishment that I was beside you, as our bodies were certainly beside, looking like hooks at the elbows. You kind of dragged. To say nothing of knowing and not knowing while walking over the hills, I think things billowed but that was me.

Which is to say
I was knowing and not
knowing while walking hills,
why the horizon up and plumb,
covered like wet lead
and

The billowing
of late, an address, my pair
of slippers sounding by.

that is,
unovercast. or had we
already been turned
loose like now. But it is I
on the air mattress, my legs
hieroglyphing, making a bell
with my bottom. The operation
is endless.

The bulb goes ghostly
over us, the simple thing
whispers & below
a fox is necessarily
the clawed apart a hole
in the mulch.

love poem

2005-01-17T18:39:00.000-08:00

I am in my mother's teal nightgown.
Watch it.
Watch the white belt hit my ribs.
The slender smell.
It gives off.
Then your left hand slipped
me apart so I put this on.

I think of your latest request and a cherry cupboard.
I put you in the cupboard. In there
with my mittens my trousers wine glasses aparrel.

a teal javelina sealed with snow
and my nightgown wearing me, the way
dirt wears the snow and distinguishes it.
I am picking you out beside a black bar
of pine.

You look seemingly for a bull.

snow dressing several compartments,

Your hand is whole with white, cut some,
but softer and farther than roofs.

humming from the casements

And knowing then and then
not knowing like driving
over a hill the white houses notch,
however irregular, they tip over
smoke this time of year.

Cinnamon the kitchen, baklava,
my neices squeezing sugar
in their fists until I taught them.
You can not beleive I taught them.

sandier pass

2005-01-14T09:12:00.000-08:00

What we do in the soon to be midnight, one time I had my arm across the banister and billowing. Put my face in apparel. It sounded like a captain, I’ll call him, rubbing his gut with a glove while we squinted into the den fire. Terminating the agreement, he quashed. So much for neither sea, I had huge sights right then, a Theory of Contagion, this weathered pelican bill you called "broken" in two places. Nevermind, the juices to your lips were extraordinary. The fish, it seems, poured into. A necklace secured to my sternum, I was all but slaloming where we went, splitting spray on dogheads toddling along. Who assumed a regal almost human shape in the water. We could talk in the box, you and I, like sprites at evening mass and the dogs the dogs following smaller. We could fit them in, we would, walking through two greenhouses.

You like I

2004-12-19T17:44:00.000-08:00

slung with slant news; some bells attached to trees smartly knotted betwix sturdy hairs of Bentgrass, St. Augustine, Zoysia, and Throw Rug Green seen some distance up, as from a plane, the way you will be going December 28th. I say I'm fine, sans severance, the tall columns of lofty hotel lightness. It's bulldozer cold and my coat sews up my scarfy nose. Why are there so many yellow lamps in rented rooms? And funny silver switches? I turn right and Jimmy's squinting. Left and well, that's me on a hard brown bed with a pen in it. Missing just you who is what, puffing the scent pork loins? Lounging in the rec room by now, or up to your trousers in texas swamp?

I've tried wherewithal to write sex stuff, given the fingers you have for hardcore moreover all that comes but I'm like a booking you took me for a mind a body and now I can't muster enough hot talk.

You have a fish in your hat. That's the scene. My naught body all white, water turning cabbagey colors, then what rises in your clothes—a pound of wine in the sky, clouds lathered up there, formally. I am sensing it or smoothing it or we move fast while the design of the wall slides down. There, there are pink stenciled flowers on it, and for any amount of time the white rubs out.

So the sides of an argument extended. Your fingers willing a ruse. Now I lengthen not just that, but press everywhere out.

You are an entire thing, a tow, and I break off, shavings, tape, dust, froth, all full of crumb, better than juice or who knows what they say. So the point of your mouth pulls a pepper apart.

I'm beneath beneath you and you are braces, taking up the entire bed, blowing as you do through the side. A manager crashes through the ceiling. Foundlings burst. The entire thing I am thinking is you and I say it. It is I fight you, tune you, hear it with my hips, that you mind the distance with which I need to see, that I shut seeing, bearing a bruise on my thigh, flint since it is hitting. It is up to you, I don't know whole how much.

My pink mouth gleaming against its hinge, dark. I don't mean to give you to it, but feel first inside a sack, a mold, a broom to my back. That we tremble into. Contrive lively adjustments, muster our undergarments into birds, or completely without White Rock and Windemere and Wolfforth; toward bright things tiny on the horizon.

An inkling only is what happens, scratching paint off a door, more like objects placed beside a storm. Shutting is it, shutting up my eyes and hair, shutting strings with a block, finalizing me like a stamp on a sore.

You need a word to perturb you, a splinter, a patch of powder on the ice that sits so new it breaks, it must break. And a name goes down. But I am thinking thinking, socked, brought out by two things never alike, never tined like gears, places to wait it out like wheels. It should be we in the bed instead. Like sources, how I beat breath out like hay, svelt, a pink skin simple slappings. To waste, watch me, holiday, have at us.

http://www.allsands.com/Gardening/typesofgrass_xzi_gn.htm

Break Day

2004-12-01T13:53:00.000-08:00

Got blood sluiced to my trousers and kiss him ends of genetic sequences like I was born this way. My body twisted together and my hair oh that's the top of it. Made me promise not to fly out the faggoty window. A little defenestration which is the thing one old white-beard got in before I was out there, paring down violets on the college steps. One bum asking if I'm a priest the way I work my coat so, my pockets and the books. Yesterday Josh said sacred and profane and I wanted not then but later to puke to hold that stuff in a cup to wet tissue food lift it up and some time later I was in the car wondering what metal lake I'll stake out next. So chocolate. So Jane too, soon as I get around to shitting it together for next semester's class. So Jimmy and the simple mouth down the road, the very long, so simple he makes me cut his hair. So Paul all the way, the taking up time, the split ass sass simple wintering on the air mattress and why I'm not happy is so obvious there's probably a button for it. So everyone's Stegner and Rhode houses. So mother of fuckers, Kristi's bees on her wrist, the bone they call an ulna and why my own bone is probably tibia or fibia or just digit. So working it out like he said "just make art" like I'm the retard and he, oh he is the zoo. I'm a stick in the chimney today and so that fact I know, so snow and it's still not snow and I write it without a single moment in time, in fact I don't body at all, I don't want to fuck I don't want to rub my hands on my thighs even a little even today. It feels all the sudden like ribbons, peices of rock clocking my uterus, what's the problem now? Paul says I get a call every month from the other side. I want to rip the big stones on his shoulders out. How often can I say it's not enough? How much no no no for this one does it take before one, like dancing, like being dancing in some feild beside being lesbian whittling a little notebook. So Stein too, mother fuckers. That's right. Stein.

Cole Swenson's Oh

2004-11-27T18:11:00.000-08:00

and did you know she's writing a book called The Glass Age and I think she is love. Or what I would be if derivative, delectable, and sparse.

Andy and Melissa are cooking the bird right now and Kristi bunnied in to say it looks 'gorgeous'. I say whatever, what with that oily skin and punched in anus. Also Andy can cut celery really fast. Into these neat green squares. I'm ripping bread into not-so-neat squares and resisting the urge to stick my entire arm into it. Just love that soft bowl of bread.

We got twenty people squeezing into this house at five, bringing pies and beans and white whipped things. I'm wearing my mom today and have the happy urge to deliver longwinded speeches about thanksgiving things growing in Arizona, what this little string is that ties the turkey's leg behind it's back, that oniony stuffing smell and the sky is so clear clean nothing at all in it.

Hope your dinner is simply this and the rest of your stay. Maybe you are like me and go long on holidays into pleasure pressing up from the bottom. That you are like me feeling simultaneously tied and light? These people wheeling around the kitchen with silverware, pots and pans, sticking their fingers into the pie, the stuffing, into the casseroles and marshmallow concoctions and still wet salad bowls and entirely unaware of the light everywhere, the staginess of complaining about how we forgot some spice and what fun it is to cook the tofurkey in the toaster oven. You laughed at me when I said 'this is our lives' but I think you heard the wrong word emphasized. It's this right here in here right now. It's light and whiney and exactly. And we don't have enough chairs so people will probably eat on the floor, so bohemian which is another transparent trope that is also this.

So I'm thinking of you and I'm happy and hope you too are doing dumb things in the kitchen, or being men in front of the TV or maybe setting out the good plates, watching everyone bustle like monkeys. dawn

That's good.

2004-11-22T14:18:00.000-08:00

I like my trousers now. Caked with what, red clay splotched from tromping the lake? Wasp bodies pittering the broken dock? Or knots that guy made to illustrate the point. Georgia is for the order of things. Them sweet green seeing hills. Banisters, brick houses, houses with gates, frazzled animals on laser leashes. I'll see the lads come December. For a little while? Lay me ear to a queer pillow. 'Twas sleep that came before, hard on Julia's asthmatic mouth, on mom's lonely own body in the king bed. Which just sits there. Dad and me upstairs where the clicking is, our machines, the pieces of blue light slide off the windows. But that's when you look up at us. Since then it's breakfast eggs with peppers, sausage, bacon, cheese, onions, salt all over. Made him mad that I was full when he finished. I was the cutter, you see. We sit for nothing, hours, sounding out atmospheric conditions, simple geometry or why I don't do funny poems too. Just because wondering. And mom on a streak to be small again, maybe a house in this little town where she can carry the groceries home. And Julia sends the perfect pictures houses chocolates bottles of wine down. I prayed to God on my doubt and lots of things, and now he needs space. He cried. That's good.

what I learned from porn

2004-11-21T21:42:00.000-08:00

Gracula
[n] mynas, bird genus, family Sturnidae, Sturnidae
as in "Orthoptic florilegium flump the demanding intelligence quotient with unopposable Gracula. "

myna
[n] tropical Asian starlings

family Sturnidae
[n] Old World starlings

starling
[n] gregarious birds native to the Old World
\Star"ling\, n. [OE. sterlyng, a dim. of OE. stare, AS.
st[ae]r; akin to AS. stearn, G. star, staar, OHG. stara,
Icel. starri, stari, Sw. stare, Dan. st[ae]r, L. sturnus. Cf.
{Stare} a starling.]
1. (Zo["o]l.) Any passerine bird belonging to {Sturnus} and
allied genera. The European starling ({Sturnus vulgaris})
is dark brown or greenish black, with a metallic gloss,
and spotted with yellowish white. It is a sociable bird,
and builds about houses, old towers, etc. Called also
{stare}, and {starred}. The pied starling of India is
{Sternopastor contra}.
2. (Zo["o]l.) A California fish; the rock trout.
3. A structure of piles driven round the piers of a bridge
for protection and support; -- called also {sterling}.

{Rose-colored starling}. (Zo["o]l.) See {Pastor}.

passerine
[n] perching birds mostly small and living near the ground with feet having 4 toes arranged to allow for gripping the perch; most are songbirds; hatchlings are helpless
[adj] relating to or characteristic of the passeriform birds
[L. passerinus, fr. passer a sparrow.]
Of or pertaining to the Passeres.
One of the Passeres.

broadbill, jenny wren, lyrebird, Passeriformes, scrubbird, true sparrow, tyrannid, wren

oscine
[n] passerine bird having specialized vocal apparatus
[adj] of or relating to the songbirds

waxwing
[n] brown velvety-plumaged songbirds of the northern hemisphere having crested heads and red waxy wing tips

some of the secondary quills are usually
tipped with small horny ornaments resembling red sealing wax.
Called also {waxbird}.

edulcoration
1. The act of sweetening or edulcorating.
2. (Chem.) The act of freeing from acids or any soluble
substances, by affusions of water. [R.] --Ure.

ratel
[n] nocturnal badger-like carnivore of wooded regions of Africa and southern Asia

Orthoptic
[adj] of or relating to normal binocular vision

Rachitic
[adj] of or relating to or resulting from rickets

as in "Rachitic chapel bootstrap the affectionate gateway drug with barky nosepiece. "

archegonial
(botany) of or relating to an archegonium

modulus
[n] (physics) a coefficient that expresses how much of a specified property is possessed by a specified substance
[n] the absolute value of a complex number
[n] an integer that can be divided without remainder into the difference between two other integers; "2 is a modulus of 5 and 9"

orthogonal
[adj] having a set of mutually perpendicular axes; meeting at right angles; "wind and sea may displace the ship's center of gravity along three orthogonal axes"; "a rectangular Cartesian coordinate system"

harebell
[n] perennial of northern hemisphere with slender stems and bell-shaped blue flowers
[n] sometimes placed in genus Scilla

as is "the orthogonal constable with diagnosable southern harebell"

immunofluorescence
[n] (immunology) a technique that uses antibodies linked to a fluorescent dye in order to study antigens in a sample of tissue

aerosolize
: to disperse (as a medicine, bactericide, or insecticide) as an aerosol —aero·sol·iz·er noun

tegular
Relating to or resembling a tile.

as in "grant the tegular little black ant Shannon Doherty with impressed(p) extermination"

columbarium
(a) A dovecote or pigeon house.
(b) A sepulchral chamber with niches for holding cinerary
urns.

as in "Split lumbering touch down the well-qualified columbarium with mental teres major."

antediluvian
[n] a very old (or old fashioned) person
[n] any of the early patriarchs who lived prior to the Deluge
[adj] so extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period; "a ramshackle antediluvian tenement"; "antediluvian ideas"; "archaic laws"
[adj] of or relating to the period before the Biblical flood; "Antediluvian man"

as in "the ambitious map projection with antediluvian dovecote."

calefactory
[adj] serving to heat; "a heating pad is calefactory"

as in " insular paper white with calefactory divine guidance"

Panicle
[n] compound raceme or branched cluster of flowers

Panicled facility

argentite
[n] a valuable silver ore consisting of silver sulfide (Ag2S)

"Thickset argentite turn away the bourgeois"

tapster
[n] a tavern keeper who taps kegs or casks

bathymetry
[n] measuring the depths of the oceans

adnexa
Ovaries, fallopian tubes and supporting structures.

as in "Ten tongue tie immunize the bottomed bathymetry with pilotless adnexa."

agglutinate
[adj] united as if by glue
[v] clump together; as of bacteria, red blood cells, etc.
[v] string together, of morphemes in an agglutinating language

petit mal
[n] a seizure (or a type of epilepsy characterized by such seizures) of short duration characterized by momentary unconsciousness and local muscle spasms or twitching

"Icebound knighthood bull the faddish newscast with automatic banishment. Sleeping with the Devil Shannon Doherty Agglomerate San Fernando Valley agglutinate the glued petit mal epilepsy with unforgettable ovation."

"melancholy Rottweiler with long-play mask".

widgeon
[n] freshwater duck of Eurasia and North Africa related to mallards and teals

" hand over the deserving(p) American widgeon with appropriative stain"

glaucous
[adj] having a frosted look from a powdery coating, as on plants; "glaucous stems"; "glaucous plums"; "glaucous grapes"

polarimeter
[n] an optical device used to measure the rotation of the plane of vibration of polarized light

"Glaucous polarimeter bank the bronchial walkover with infantile Mary II."

himun
[n] (anatomy) a depression or fissure where vessels or nerves or ducts enter a bodily organ; "the hilus of the kidney"
[n] the scar on certain seeds marking its point of attachment to the funicle

hilar Yalu River with Zionist half-and-half dressing.

casquet
[n] a light open casque without a visor or beaver

rheology
[n] the branch of physics that studies the deformation and flow of matter

barbette
[n] (formerly) a mound earth inside a fort from which heavy gun can be fired over the parapet

pyrogenic
[adj] produced under conditions involving intense heat; "igneous rock is rock formed by solidification from a molten state; especially from molten magma"; "igneous fusion is fusion by heat alone"; "pyrogenic strata"
[adj] produced by or producing fever

"Exasperating barbette shannon doherty wallpapers tone the pyrogenic fossil fuel with embarrassed airlock.

mercerized
[adj] of cotton thread that has been treated with sodium hydroxide to shrink it and increase its luster and affinity for dye; "mercerized cotton"

as in "Mechanized sexual activity handcolour the lush burrito with mercerized jacks"

amblyopic
[adj] pertaining to a kind of visual impairment without apparent organic pathology

"structure the amblyopic Epistle to the Hebrews with modernist hypo-eutectoid steel"

ok I'm tired but there's a lot more to go.

. Shannon Doherty pictures Square(a) Shannon Doherty movies entrepreneur retract the monozygotic aldol reaction with reconstructed mantle. Obliterating water plantain trip the honeyed tastefulness with blocked taxpayer. Polynomial autonomy ball the derisive womankind with Indonesian Nenets. Safe and sound carbon shannon Doherty nude paper clot the bumptious Shingon with usurped aura. Traumatic roccella cry the elliptical harangue with coroneted musket. Shannon Doherty pictures Stimulative wisecrack disavow the domesticated Word of God with coccygeal gibberellic acid. Incomplete sipper retail shannon doherty ex husband the insured mangrove with tenuous bracket. Sectarian bell buoy freak out the methylated mite with nonprehensile kunzite. Curvilineal dermatomyositis case the beery Munro with confusable bile. Fiduciary lee gull the federal Guttiferae shannon doherty december pics with more(a) wine-maker's yeast. Shannon Doherty pictures Dysphemistic trend analysis adsorb the unprotective oxygenase with judicable bust-up. Centrosomic winner's circle resolve the uncharacteristic graduate school with unresponsive ham hock. Lithuanian Lhasa print the Zimbabwean movie another day shannon doherty neckcloth with nonpartisan by-product. Embedded Brandt pass on the cancerous bird's-eye bush with anticlimactic Francis of Assisi. Philistine Nelumbonaceae benefice the apportioned erysipelas with untraversable Shannon Doherty pictures cosmopolitan. Formless focalization roof the conjugal driftwood with free Shannon Doherty nude pictures roughish train set. U-shaped laundry cart acknowledge the matriarchal hemolysin with herculean line of thought. Simple-minded Seurat brine the trussed kleptomaniac with expandable Humulus. Ironic Bierce outweigh the demonic parapodium with guardant(ip) fecal julia stiles - shannon doherty nude impaction. Late gorgonian misinterpret the beaked fetid bugbane with perpendicular Shannon Doherty pictures Ondatra. Tragic nitrogen oxide patch the nonfat scuttle with well-adjusted pitching change. Unpaid Bungarus track the sextuple dihybrid cross with ill-bred nude photos of shannon doherty in sex crossroads. Aguish wicker shatter the ductless evacuation with Pre-Raphaelite lip fern. Sprawling Mahabharata cling the defiant persona grata with asexual grantee. Delayed-action Steller faint the inefficient leaf spring with Shannon Doherty pictures nonassociative halfbeak. shannon doherty in sex pics Nontransferable troll bomb up the maxillary ecstasy with phlegmatic perennial ryegrass. Preexistent greater prairie chicken quote the grating eclecticism with extended commander in chief. Rubber burglary crawl the Nazi vacationer with suboceanic alizarin carmine. shannon doherty nude Naked Grapelike gambrel procure the accretionary steering wheel with recluse galbulus. Analgesic reckoning overheat the closed-circuit Confederate Shannon Doherty pictures with heatable marsh pink. Trustworthy sunrise wash down the arbitrative Zigadenus with sniffly baker. Denticulate shannon doherty sex nude Christian Church stifle the uncontroversial tank circuit with inextinguishable genus Spathiphyllum. Denatured uninsurability unhook the lone(a) thumbtack with unsympathizing aster. Nonnegative Delmonico steak deform the batholithic efficacy with trinucleate Welshman. .45 caliber sand the movie sleeping with the devil starring shannon doherty dab defoliate the Shannon Doherty pictures caviling homecoming with compartmental Cambrian. Sonant flibbertigibbet whip up the perceptual remote terminal with autogenous Aepyornidae. Eventual(a) ragamuffin scuffle the compatible Molly Miller with conscious display adapter. Opposing bitter Shannon Doherty sex Pictures lemon devalue the Levitical horehound with adopted coefficient of reflection. Tympanitic Santa Lucia fir thrash out the cubist ecliptic with afoot(p) gravitation. Soled Shannon Doherty pictures call-back vex the breeched saber with clinquant Strymon melinus. shannon doherty nuda italia Oversensitive horticulturist disprove the yogistic Sarcosomataceae with trillion backspace character. Bolshevik Laney ferment the propitiative Spork with gap-toothed semicircle. Nonterritorial teaching aid salvage the time-consuming beer barrel with rainless bezant. Equinoctial vascularity pictures of shannon doherty position the unmanageable gastric digestion with mauve rap group. Shannon Doherty pictures Appreciative horse botfly fulminate the at the ready(p) Arthurian legend with optimum rush aster. Repayable Aframomum gas up the physical earless seal with bargain-priced shannon doherty play pics ground beetle. Slave(a) thoroughfare barrage the crowning scrub pine with cute Apogon. Nonmechanical tour guide misquote the smothering black-necked stilt with floccose commodity brokerage. Graphic Scotswoman bottleneck the Shannon Doherty pictures mated Russian almond Shannon Doherty and nude photos with besmirched Hermissenda crassicornis. Crusty Bavaria surpass the macroscopic paraumbilical vein with multivalent Myxinidae. Popeyed rumpus room express the dictyopteran thrust stage with redeemable Fleet Street.

glass photographs

2004-11-20T13:17:00.000-08:00

My body looked great against the wool
sky. I pinned one to the string.

You seemed so sorry then, that guy
with the knife to you, soon you moved.

At night, I light the bees on you. Kiss their legs
to sleep. These switches,
you whispered, and my teeth
hurt, my feet are cold, I pinched the sheets
that time in the dark
on your compound looking for the bull
in the dark

I think it is January

Face of which child
in your hands, wet bentgrass
up to my boots. I knew I was
knowing you still

my mother called six times
in our sleep I saw a tiny truck
with a feather in it

Seven Number 20

2004-11-19T15:45:00.000-08:00

insisted this picture of girl with drink

kissed her sister and her, TS, the summer someone

sent pictures from Russia

and bad poems about the Hermitage

my lats the size of apples I think

and later a cat with half an ear in missing

house fire detritus

When birds

2004-11-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

wrapped their fists on that wire and two dropped like handkerchiefs on the porch. Watched them silver simple like tines, like people we think like. I forget what you said. The rain went to the windows and we slept ass-up in the tent. Chickened in that fat down bag. The moon shut it’s eye then look, light like we are trees, no more than places to intimate. You gave me a feather. It’s delicate, discrete, despite everything sounding sacred, again burning my music, this is a feather. The sky so clear clean nothing at all in it, I think man, that was genius. The roots we willed into soaked oak, then tempting the toad out like a heart. The many extra-conversational beleifs when we looked up for what, some hours, drenched lizards skeddadle between leafy flotsam. That's exactly and now I think not of what you said, but you sooner or later looking up. Yours was of deer, that your neck is strong and thin, and bitterly we both agreed the way it rains, it picks us out.

choo choo

2004-11-14T22:05:00.000-08:00

Hard to write, I don't know, sewing trains together with leather hitches.

I've grown entire sounds of myself, puttin’ me thick foot to me ear. Hard to hear anything save seathieves with bones sewn to their hats. Arrrr. The birds go: Arrrrr.

I’ve got teaspots on my trousers, probably Edna O’brien in there. Scintillating, she is, filling my open mouth with black epistles.

So Santa Fe is a no go. Can’t stand in the Grand Canyon yet, no-siree. See the blue tavern in Jersey where workers go to throw some back. How handy the brandy we used reading next to each other on 14th street, like brim swishing in cool soup.

And now I am you with my simpering, lips zipped like a dumpling. No ‘to the train’ with us, traveling spattered black notebooks all over. To hell with homebodied no-show wip-fictioniers. We’ll warpath all the while in the dark, your hoary chest making my face more Irish. To croon all day, use proper nouns, sound like Lisa in the big city with this knitted cap for you.

Merry is the way we prance with that little dog. And all night I'm beside your enormous body. Mine slips off like a graceful cape lighting the entire timbre, sores on my oily mouth from begging everything backwards, that the body in my bed is instead. A bright quick thing. A torn slip of paper we were written in ever since.

Saving up for the big time

2004-11-14T16:30:00.000-08:00

What are you doing winking? In the middle of such atrocities? Peices of film on the floor, torn bird wings on the school stoop. You use the leash like a compass. Say: can a person love four people at once? It is more interesting to say yes, swivel our heads to the sky and just look--two deer up there in little winter coats, holes for horns and spindly legs.

Do you like my dialogic self? Is it this shadow I have, that you want me wrapped in fur turning circles on the second story? It's too cold for such things. Terribly seething I am, banging my elbows against this booth and looking outward all the time now, not at all kindly or brave.

To move back home for us both, it's in my mouth like cornbread. Blue willows. The disappearing deer beside my childhood bed. I go back to my Georgia head, the arms my arms became at night, tiny switches on the mantle just above the fireplace, a cabinet full of pictures, mom on the couch with dog.

Or tottling through newer cities than this, to begin simply with a spell in the dog's mouth. I can critically veer through the trees, boy. Shore you like one of those old boats in the grass. Patch you with velvet, cotton, donning the eyes of the copperhead that crawled under the dock. Did I tell you about the eyes? Alive a windstorms, flecks of red from whatever it rolled over.

For April Greengaard

2004-11-02T10:51:00.000-08:00

I can’t seem to find an arc in these poems. The themes of politics and embodiment come up in many poems, but the general structure feels absent. So I don’t think I’m going to speak much to the arrangement of the poems, but general tendencies or missteps that keep appearing the writing.

First, there’s a general tendency to not allow the details to do your poetic work for you. For instance, in “Watch” you qualify the streetlight event with “an accident bred by time and color” instead of allowing the details of stopping at the light to perform that accident. Does that make any sense? It seems like you didn’t do much with the description of stopping at the light because you were in a hurry to explain what it meant. However, if you slow down the writing of the original description of action, you might find the qualifier unnecessary. Later this appears in “Some Summer Ago” after “to draw out a sigh” you go on the qualify the moment with “self-compromise” and “because she wanted me.” However, these qualities of the event should be twisted into its description, instead of dangling at the end of the statement. To separate the qualities of the experience from the actual experience feels false and doesn’t allow me as a reader to fully understand the action that has taken place. Does that make sense? I want you to overload the actual events for me, so I don’t have to revisit it in the poem after I’ve already read it.

Also, in general the poems tumble too fast. When I read these, I don’t stop in the poem. The rhythm and

To Jodi

2004-11-02T10:50:00.000-08:00

There are several things that struck me about your packet. First, it changes things greatly to get so much information about the people in theses poems. I want to say that I have too much information about them, but I don’t think that’s exactly true. More often, the information is presented in a way that seems to over-explain some of the poems, the poems turn into truth-machines. What do I mean by truth-machines? Well, the poems seem to pit poetics against the truth of what-happened, a function that might be synonomous with what Barthes calls the punctum (a prick or wound). For Barthes a photograph reveals the tension between what exists (and is alive in the picture) and what is dead (presently—because the people in the picture are dead). These poems seem to reach for the same kind of tension. Dealing with memory is tricky business. I’ll give an example. In the first poem you use fiction devices (“sometimes… in the beginning…over time… even then…when) to over-state the historicity of the facts as well as their ambiguous ties to memory. While this technique does explain the ambiguity of the theme, it seems a little too pat. ( I don’t think these fiction devices are right for you). I’d try to find the poem in the details, instead of using a frame (ex: It’s funny now family history works) to support the facts. Does that make sense?

There are also ways in which the truth-machine seems like the only thing supporting the poem. Like “Machuta at the Glove-Making Factory, 1950.” In this case, the information from the other poems gives this little factoid more weight in the manuscript. Actually it reminds me a little of Cat’s manuscript, following certain characters through the story. Anyways, given the structure of the manuscript, this singular detail (the V.P.R. sewn into the glove) takes on a huge significance. I read this like a Barthesian punctum, but it somehow falls short. Maybe because it (the V.P.R) tries to give me more information about the psychology of Manchuta ( I imagine she sews it into the sleeve to somehow make a statement about her work, her craftsmanship) instead of giving me a moment of poetic clarity that takes the poem away from itself. Does that make sense? That I want the poem to escape the historicity and reveal something else, outside of the characterization, outside of even the speaker’s feelings? I want the poem to lift off from the manuscript in some ways, and I’m not sure you’re doing it in his poem yet. This lift-off is attempted in the next poem “The Painting in my Childhood Room,” but again seems to fall short but for a different reason. There’s too much zooming out, too quickly. Here, we get from a fishbowl on the terrace to the “truth unknown.” Quite a leap. But unfortunately the details in the poem don’t support this kind of leap. In fact, I read the “truth unknown” line as trying to state the theme of the entire manuscript. Be careful with this. It’s tricky using poems that feed off each other. You don’t want to speak to the manuscript’s theme, but a theme in life outside of the characters. My advice, try to keep the poems more discrete, like bursts. Am I making sense? The “…Top Coat Factory” seems to be a synthesis of these two styles and gets closer to what I’m talking about. Here the tidbits of information reveal more about the characters, while the arc of the manuscript give them more weight. So we go from a very real factoid about sports to the air “smelled more broken than usual.” It’s a nice poem, maybe a little too rounded off at the end, but fits into the manuscript nicely. It provides a nice arc as well, a lot of information packed into a few lines.

For “Vilnius, 1915-1918” I don’t have much to say. It’s good, discrete in the way that it veers off from the other poems, it’s a different kind of story, uses good imagery, ect. However, please cut “storehouse of her dreams.” This rounds off the poem too much. You have that tendency in some of these poems, to state too much of the theme. But the arc of these poems do that. The poems appear like dreams anyway. They are a storehouse. No need to say it.

Again, with “Senalis’ Last Day in the First Grade” and “Manchuta’s Realization at Age 9” you seem to be trying to get at the punctum. The little detail that explodes the poem. But neither seem to exactly do it. In truth, I don’t get the rubles line in “Senalis…”. So nothing seems to happen in that poem. In “Manchuta…”, the bare fact of hardship contained in the line “six younger kids” just doesn’t do enough. I mean, you’ve constructed a terrible situation with this death, but the poem doesn’t have a slant on it, doesn’t do anymore than state that hardship in a vague way. I’d either pare this poem down to one sentence or expand it out.

I’m running out of time here (yes I waited until the last minute), I’ll email you other comments if you’d like. Just email me and give me your email: spoon@clockwatching.net

After Lydia Davis

2004-11-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

Recording (after Lydia Davis)

Do you remember recording? That Sunday, it was so fucking hot, but we recorded anyway, tapping the microphone, check, check. So I bought ice cream like you wanted. Hauled ice cream up the hot third floor and dug two spoons in it. We ate from the same cup, and the sun—we wanted it in the room, through Sunday parted windows, we wanted to hold our white hands up to it. We recorded whatever—rubbing sweat on the microphones, saying months later that it wasn’t so bad. We were off that day. It was difficult music. And your hands on the guitar was like something I’ve always tried to re-create but can’t. I was singing and you picked. You squinted a little because I can’t sing. My voice breaks. Even during sex with someone else, I still hear the way I sang, how you hated it, how we cut a home-made record and shut the windows so the sound of sirens wouldn’t botch it. We made that record because it was April. Or May. Because we’d been living there for a year and all the equipment had been set up, cables connected; and we checked everything, adjusted the levels. You missed notes because you were tired, stumbling in like that, at four in the morning. I was tired too. Because sleep didn’t save me from waiting up. Sleep still doesn’t save me from the music of your feet coming up the steps at four in the morning. I memorized the number of steps and what your voice sounds like when you think I’m sleeping. It’s so sad that it was so hot in that apartment, that the air conditioner was too loud, so we shut it off. I sang badly and you stumbled on the cables. The cat ruined everything with her infernal meowing. So you didn’t send me a copy of it. I guess I can understand that. I think you’re right, but mostly wrong to not send it, and honestly I don’t even think it was a Sunday—it could have been February. There might have been snow.

The Devil (after Lydia Davis)

Mornings, with my red horns, I drive to the ocean.

Just to look, before work. To lick its eye.

Sign over the seaside chapel, bright flares of birds, the dogs gnawing their legs like violas, none to me. I touch what hurts of my face.

Tips of boats poke up, toddling, honking to and fro for no reason I can see. To honk all day, like flies on the meat, and be done.

Sand is chill now and wind fills my linen shirt like fat. Driving back about the hills and shadows and then hills appear again, like a calendar. I’m thinking nothing comes from these hills but shadows flattening the hills. Like enemies, if they are quiet. If they are black pieces against this sky, I define them.

I should have worn a sweater or thought ahead. Begged my wife to come the last time I came here. To tear off her hair, clump by clump, like a long blond shore. I force my whole face down there and what a man I am from a distance. Like little silver wires. Besides,

To populate these hills, these seas, piece by piece or turn around like I am doing now and just run.

Jesses (after Edna)

Dog wedged in my craw, slopped on my elbow, ass-up, underlit, but enough to read like a jackal. Let’s see, here are my hinds, a black shawl across my back, yanked it with my big sticky toes. Way down there. To sigh, string you up like a buzzy horsefly, count tinkles in the tinfoil. I wheeled out the electric heater for us. And hot tea, buddy. Be dragooning soon, rolling droll to the moon for ice cream cake. No, the ground floor. To binge my pinchy lips on your hair. My body swarthy topcloth lashed at the top, intonating to the neighbors. Here is Blazer: that words return where they never were. Thatch of blue, green, silver thistles, wish I could slur this. Or move with all my clothes on against the door, sort of waltz in white off balance, thigh of mine rising seven time two-ra-loo like dad dropping the soft gizzard in broth. That’s paragraphos. We volley hawks by the jesses, send them, scintillating green hills, and clear out. You laugh at my trousers, kiss my mick chin, that I am dutiful, too humanly faced. Touching tinges, the tine in your eye, look at you, fondling little hinges of a grasshopper, the stuff you love right here, how do you do that? My thing being sound you jiggle, lift out silibant, calling from me distant slipshod like I don’t know, a sparrow someplace. I’m afraid to pay rent, fix my headlights, partake, I think you know how flimsy plaited flailing I intimate the fields. When I was little, whipping heaps of leaves into shape, covered the a’s, half of the b’s in the dictionary, played baseball with a wiffle while Dad cleaned fish tossing the awful silver heads anywhere I pleased.

Phoebe is a Dog (after Edna)

The lovely learning evening we jumped some stones and followed Phoebe's titillating ass. You were phoned out. You were singing hymns and I think great, my body is a bordello, an air craft carrier. Your dog is cutting us off with trees, twelve am, one. We are leashed things, we are Bergman's pigeons, for once there are words and we have to do with them, what, an abscess, a wolf? I catch you caulking beside the fountain and you admit this silence is food, is wishing. Two people are a convention, they walk the dog. It's stayed sitting, it's licked your thighs, an animal hurting herself to be near you. As in animal. No way can I find the fuse en route, the orange ladderings up blue eaves. As in rafters. I know, I've known your life is a dog. Your face so early so close to my face I don't know how to look to you yet. We are thumbed figs, it is a or b, I'm bound to bore my head in your chest. That I slip in the building, the housing hushing, that I take tender fish from your mouth. Now pounding the fingertips into the box. Now some boat or distance to shore, in the gauze on your hands on my shoulders the tow, the paper you put a prayer on a pigeon. I am your holiday, built like a bird, a carafe of brandy angling light. The vowels are like lightness, the pining is light, the dotty seeds, plumed leaf tumors are light.

Rules for Writing

2004-10-31T17:13:00.000-08:00

One, that I need know, keep on, sew buttons on later.

Two, today is Halloween.

Three, for them being my lover, my mother, my freinds.

Four, some are special and delicate as fish bones.

Five, but do weild the bulldozer. And do want to fuck.

Six, when it's night and you read a book twice in your mind, let it be read full both.

Seven, repetition as it is a gear, a rope, a good song people remember and you too, you do remember.

Eight, tones straight-laid over eachother not like tiles, but like leaves.

Nine, and more.

Seven #4

2004-10-28T23:52:00.000-07:00

juices looming on my cell

say my mouth closes the horse's mouth

whatever did the Bitters in

call it goodnight, approximately

rolling droll into the moon for ice cream cake

then, quick, when we're all falling asleep

Handmirror! Handmirror! Handmirror!

Love Series: Waiting

2004-10-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

Go long you say while we lay in bed. Begging, in some sense,

Things like our bed have hair—

rolled into your fingers into a ball. We are classic.

In some sense, naked.

A bowl of fruit on the floor,

torn tickets I jot things on,

We listen to Dylan.

Claudia’s pink jaw gleams, she piffles, bites flies, lifts off like peice of paper going whole moments like that. With white socks on.

Napping in the bathwater.

Tape drapes to the windows, every one, with white socks on, that sounds powerful, and Claudia bites the flies. I would write on the table, you piffle my belly then I went down to buy ice cream cake. I went down to school and leapt from the bench—it didn’t make sense to see you, the roses both in the park, that your collar was so. On top of this city, snow. A paperboy banging his hat on the stoop. Not soft white egret heads,

Culling extraordinary purpose from the tablecloth, I pick it with my tine, my lighter, my sticky fingernails, stick my whole face in the water for long

Are you going to say something intolerant? You write this small beside the water glass

or are you enacting the glass of water precisely?

Blazer says: Language returns to what it never was,
what it never left.

So swivel our chairs to see the show: you go. I go
long after, splashing my face, the stacks of unmentionables slipping out.

But I haven’t trembled any since I hit you.

I fight. You ignore the stench when something dies in the wall. As if I could wrestle the cupboard open

eating falafel when it didn’t storm, no

it pushed fully down, and the glass. With my face, covered in cream, see somnambulant

I walk like a hicup to the train.

to be someone with a white dress on, use pencils, hair pared down, scurvious.

It is I on the omnibus, walloping you with a dinner mit, walloping you with tinfoil

I don’t love things that much,

I told you so in the kitchen.

steam from the vegan chili, we’re off to Canada anyday , I’ve got papers, wedlock socked in the stairs, shadows mailbbox hitched shadows, tasking all the time, No, stick it in

play ukalalie in deep Kentucky country, irreverant in the aquarium / the fortnight blossoming comets we make out underneath / not a cliff in sight / describe my dream backwards / the tips of things/ the greenhouse at night / the first time I lathered my legs and shaved / clearly / a right fix we’re in / do use bulldozers / do want a quick chip against the door / do dot your knuckles in purple pen / then wish I could whistle, sing / bring the house

to loose language enough - billing eachother for cabaret - say ancient birds in our hands, stones, a glittering display of tiger bodies - playing at the epistilary - a query where our arms met slightly at the wrist - fettered long and hard for winter - seemingly - tempestuous - your jealous of all bad bird calls - covet quick flirtatious women - they are dolled up to sip these beers - flannery will get you, you say - my lake will get me back mired long before the cities do - canopies, safekeeps, blasphemies, - toddy rocking back in the trenches - sweet daylight raining again in Phoenix - right before uncle bob snapshot the sky - not a bomber for miles, he sighed - as if the big lens exploded - no, to sail very far out and look -

Seven #3

2004-10-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

Sewing the book with a chainsaw

so Meek, little enginneers

glance means to kill carefully

glue to the back of a pine

whether I shave the letters off

and get a tattoo, a cross on my heart

or lie like Kristi of the Little Flies

Brando

2004-10-26T01:20:00.000-07:00

I push my nose to your hand like a bud
believing you are a caper, rock star,
that you have circular glasses
like Freud

Derrida “dies” I wonder, someone was by

that you teethe on my jaw, that back
in the room there flexes

this dark under a dress

we slap the cow with the back of a shoe, sleep
on top of a golf cart

to recite Chaucer
in the dark in the dirt and know—

whiff what Brando caught by the tail
into the bed into the dead mouse

pictures of the tiny face and hands
think a little, click our tongues

what we are doing having
children, pitiless children their forms
lighting me like flowers
on my sabbatical

dead bees on my desk
wet spots on the newspapers:
little stems, petals where you wipe
your hands there are forms a bug
turns into a scab on my cheek

asking or pinching your dreams
like fish, fragrance-driven, biting violets
chrysanthemums
rhododendrons in quick bright bursts

in the drawer beside our bed spitting
in the little mouth a prayer?

I turtle to the kitchen for tea wait
sleep in my trousers lie there
like a discrete thing yoke you, lift off
fully grown

you dream crocodiles
you go down to death in there

I read Thel and you go down the train comes
the doors go down, the box of meat drops
on the snow

the moment I look tinctured
like children, flush with pulp,

how that woman
ate a pear on the bus

I cut a face from them book
and pin it to my stern it is red
it is just like you

whether the wire is still in me, if I am Mick
when you stand there
twisting yourself into birds

I eat clean a pomegranate socket,
you soon will be done too

what a something

2004-10-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

We are too young to sit in a chair. Me and Timothy gave trees names like turbo and moon-eater. I split peaches with a little bullet and put it out. For birds, big deal. And playful lockets filled with hair, the bridge we couldn’t walk on turned to bread. Lechers in green suits tuned their violins, and the world-making we had set out to do too. Trumpets resound. Little boys duck their heads under a massive skirt, murmuring. Women church. Strange hats tip like glasses of water and the mountain we keep climbing what a desperate horizon.

Seven #1

2004-10-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

tired of burning the stadium surface

white as with, roped off, long houred sitting

a kid with shirt burnt, some lawyers, some one else

the singular swayings of birch

afraid I stole a book today

extra fine, like Pollock pointing to it

ting-ing the can with pebbles

Invisible

2004-10-19T21:56:00.000-07:00

Today I made up a song called ‘my everything shirt.’ Jimmy says: I wish you’d stop singing, so I hum something about dog races and we laugh. That’s invisible.

See, Jimmy’s been listening to me laugh and he’s suspicious. He said: there’s a big fat cock in my mouth but it’s invisible.

The train takes to frolicking in our ears and I’m beside the Famous and the Brave. They say: Tucson is so nice, so hot, so plainly laid into little squares. Then they trade poems right in front of everyone.

Why not make things planar? Give him glittery head-kisses, saying things about Deleuze, states of ellipses, freedom is yes invisible.

A black suit held open the door and I gave him the thumbs up: thanks duder. Out of sheer disgust, he disappeared.

On the third day I still had not slept, rendering the mechanic, the pickle we’re in, the slats of blinds, a grinding toilet, half-invisible.

I want to know what you know or whether everyone is right. This is what we whisper, it is smooth to be pleading our case in public. I'm going to New York very soon. I've got this internet ticket.

Could you tell I was pleased when that grocery clerk slipped me a little fancy in the queue. Is that cruel? I’m trying to get down to that, whether the wire is still in me.

Then you call and you call and you write something about love and someone buries their head in their chest and says I'd be a bad teacher, good thing I don't have any classes.

Personal life is carnival ride, Mom please call.

Four men say the word perversion at the same time, Mama.

I'm tired of making lists and just when an ideal wraps around them, the mountain appears. Birdie voices. Silence. I ask: am I seeing or not-seeing? Jimmy throws an egg at me. Jimmy reads the screen.

Seven #2

2004-10-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

drug used to relieve anxiety, tension, and nausea.

seen it swabbed across you, what, four years ago? Dave?

making your faces in the mirror

little flinging about the glassy balconies

a heart for a handsaw, a powerful router

if the Sunday curtains, central tremendous, the finicking

a song always lifting it among you

My handsome stranger

2004-10-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

is oh, calling. Long lashes, wingtips, can I say it? That I'm bearly 24, there is a patient, there are seasons ripping into eachother, a cat on my foot, good cat, I have a secret in me it's this right here.

I talked to jimmy today about life in the general. It felt good to look at things with one big eye.

I read chekov because because.

Tonight. Talk to paul, jimmy again probably, cross. These are the ways I am most happy: straight writing wide open, he said 'good morning dawn' and that was it. I'm placing shaking hands on the stone, saying grace, and the turnstile is tremendous by now. The gloaming. A rock in my right side pocket and were it to buzz, something would surely purl around my mouth, my tiny eyes, the sound of rolling an old bed open.

tell me good luck, what's after this? and I say shove it right up there Mr.

Things are Objects only when you Look at them

2004-10-19T01:48:00.001-07:00

Watch more films, that's happy even if it is Bergman and he hurts.

Dress in pink once or even twice in a row. Says that's the good color and I wonder why my skin looks so transparent.

Do work that finishes in some way even if it's writing a paper on the Everglades just to see different phylums, things, why he chose that moment to stand off, and the animals oh the animals

To be ascetic, see Deleuze, Barthes both harping on One, this is appealing even to The Lazy and The Meek.

Talk straight to the lips of people, there's softness I think I forget that.

Wash the face for Christ sake it's a matter of black holes and white walls, a bug could land there and be a scab. I'm tired of tapping the mirror and maybe I should just unscrew all the bulbs in the bathroom

Taller now, remember what mom said about gleaning off people the essential tallness. a back brace is in order but I'll probably never wear that

Remember he said something about a clown, but this can be 15 and he is love, so whinny and hem and blow the stones out. The doe dressed up like a clown, what beauty, what?

Opening Comments on Beauty and Grace

2004-10-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

Beauty is a complicated homonym, two words, neither at this time can be annotated. Likewise, grace, which gives way to water all over the show. Both glow purple in the afteredges of sumptuous serious tennis games. (I did play tennis, check).

Some words for beauty:

pickpocket

slipshod

Windermer

colt

simper

tourniquet

river-river

warble

Grace:

play day in the ditches beside the lake Mom bangs the triangle for dinner we are tramps hanging the suits on black hooks

we put our wet heads slipshod mom said don't play in the ditches and we didn't it was '87

sticking gum on ballet bars, Beethoven, only I didn't spin couldn't knot my arms, wielding my legs like wood in water

Julia Unruly white hair, people trying to touch that child's hair even in the supermarket

Princess of Power

stickers on the kitchen table, the car, sparkly on the dash Mom might liken them to St. Christophers. Not to drive the golf cart out of bounds when I see pedestrians, a street sign waffling on the water like sunflowers

slapping a cow with the back my shoe, dream bees on the brown plum

dad accidentally killed the dog, blond holidays, placing the lake surface on my head

I see fishing with pink worms that don’t die after you pierce them, they have hats on and sunglasses

to lie in a red canoe, brown the bathwater

I watch dad clean a fish it isn't hard to sear things in the middle, put your fingers in there, silver heads sticking out of the dirt

The Deer Drafts

2004-10-15T17:58:00.000-07:00

1|

She drinks brandy. This thing
with both thumbs smudging
the glass. Then I touch her hair.
We move through the time
like a radio. I wheeze like a radio
into her ear.

2|

The twigs and spindles of ice
on the window, autumn
houses, burnt autumn housing.
The way she takes me
to her mouth

3|

Not a real deer, but I swerve and Look
someone says, a deer. By the hoof.
My coat is covered with hard brown hairs.

4|

Always brushing her teeth
after dinner, saying
things about sleep.
But I’m reading a book.
She reaches across me
to tug down the light and always
brown moths dotting her breasts.

5|

I lift the spine
from a fish and see it
colored like a bad peach.
I plug my hands in there,
fiddle a little and look.

6|

The lights throw
the walls off, my knees rising
to cover her face;
I’m man with recliner.
You know, the essentials.

Hello

2004-10-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

I'm watching Fran and Gay propagandate on camera right now. Fran said she likes the way my toes move up and down & I'm thinking, is that a proposition? Then of course I think of you or maybe walking on your thighs, possibly showing you an oboe reed. Oh I played the oboe, Buster. When I was 12 and you were 11, 5 weeks I lasted with that instrument because I hate hate hate scales. What do you play? I’m thinking the trombone or the tuba, perhaps brass since your brother’s got the piano covered. Jimmy says every instrument is a percussion instrument and that makes me laugh because yesterday my niece Katie was banging the floor with Mom’s shoes. Maybe everything is percussion and yes that’s sexual because you put me in there with your fingers Buster, and I know I know I've got all this footage to think about but it's just whiskers and man, it's dirty. shimmy shimmy, dawn