September 2014
The hand leads to the flowers. (Hélène Cixous)
instead of burning down the temple, she goes into the empty room w/the knife and carves flaming flowers on the wall →
Mother and daughter (10) walking through the park (Armory). The daughter is acting strange because she is walking slowly and looking at things; her mother is walking slowly and looking at her daughter. It’s the mother who is strange, her daughter is to her what the park is to her daughter. Parents become nervous when the pace drops to that of contemplation. The daughter stops before a cedar. There’s a colorful handle sticking out of the tree. The daughter stares at it; cocks her head; takes the handle and pulls it out. Her mother says something like, Put it back, Don’t touch that. The daughter says, But it’s a ping-pong racquet. Later I see them walking past the post office. The daughter is empty-handed.
Other than a grave, the place where one sleeps is as local as it gets. (Kate Colby)
I reach a point, a peak, when I am inspired and can see and immediately fall apart, or rather, sink into that point—though I don’t fall down, but apart, or into the point, the peak: I lose the energy given to me by the inspiration or moment of inspiration. Is it okay? It will have to be but it doesn’t have to—
What I remember is the vigils in Union Square—a spontaneous and peaceful gathering that was almost as instantaneously, though systematically, shut down by the police. What I didn’t understand then was that it was not about peace. Peace was the enemy, so much so that it couldn’t even be used as a front—
So now without any scenes
I must swallow, silently, furtively.
—A book then?—No, you give those
to everyone, don’t even write them
books…
(Marina Tsvetaeva)
I wasn’t motivated to get out of bed until I heard the sound of children’s voices in the alleyway.
You either need (an) enormous amt. of faith or none at all.
The silence on my shoulder (Leduc)
The space creates a table, a desk, and what do you do, with the sound of the sea engrained in the wood
She wd have to complete their speech, filling in all the holes,
The flower is the face → mis/taken for the being → what is recalled/remembered
carve/etch the flower into the surface of the desk, where it’s evolution will only be undergone by the erosion weathering of the surface, not the flower—
Hayashi ate cakes? (in novel)
For what reason have some landscapes and periods of life exerted so little of themselves on the imagination?
not carving on a desk, but on the wall!!
The more I speak, the brighter the sun has become, not solicitous, but blinding, obliterating, until I am all contrast, a shadow, chattering
The sugar-side of the dead.
shunga – spring painting
I cry over violations.
August 2012-October 2012
A novel with no human characters. A wilderness, in which life happens outside of human resource, incorporation.
Dream. Came down a mountain where I was with friends or people I knew. Crossed train tracks. Came to a terraced slope. Didn’t see the lake at the bottom. Stepped in a puddle, then saw the lake. The water was heavy. With carbon. It was a carbon lake. The earth and the sand around the lake were white. White dunes. Whiter than salt. I went down to the lake but didn’t go in, didn’t touch the water. I wanted to stuff my pockets with white earth. I walked up the slope on the other side, white earth into trees. A slug was moving across the white earth. When I saw the slug I saw the footprints of animals. A wild cat, I knew, was near. I started to run back the way I had come. I was in the woods. The white earth became snow. There were animal tracks everywhere. On the other side of a blown-down log was a lynx. The lynx was lean. Further on, on a bluff, a rabbit was enclosed in a fence strung around trees. I assumed it was electric, so didn’t lean over. The rabbit’s back was to me. The lynx was facing me, but didn’t see me. I must have been obscured by the log. The only one of the creatures I got a long look at was the slug. I made it back to the tracks. The land was like years after a fire: scrub, shrubs, weeds. I was running the whole time. I could see the mountain. I recognized its formation.
Evening Oracle: Bringing myself around to something like a watermelon, which is the Japanese apricot, or a watermelon. A watermelon sliced and eaten off the back of God, on all fours like he’s offering his body as a table? Or does he carry the load and we have not yet been born. We encountered a Japanese apricot as part of our extravagant dinner at Ninnaji Temple. The apricot was in a small dish with a piece of fish. The fish has since receded. The apricot resembled a small watermelon in its shape, color and markings. The apricot does not recur, it elongates. It becomes a water moccasin. I was biding my time. My friend Brittany, who I lived with in Belize, she was from Maine, carried a watermelon for eight miles over the mountains in the western part of the country. Is it meant to be carried as much as eaten? It was keeping Kounoura alive, though it was the elderly women who kept the watermelon alive.
Watermelon notes: An offering to the dead or the soul of the dead. An offering made beneath a photograph of the dead. Enjoyment beneath the nose of the dead. The watermelon on the white plate, arranged so the slices fit. For all we know, the husband’s body is upstairs, preserved in a jar.
Pilgrim: the apple hovers between them like a cold, speechless sun … Is there even the tiniest fraction of a second/of the moment, when the apple is touching neither of their hands? No. The apple is never alone. They are warming their hands as if on the sun and it has everything to say.
A disembodied head, hung on a temple wall, becomes an oracle. A circular mirror? Disembodies the head.
When I think about Hart Crane leaping from the ship, I don’t think of the splash—as in Basho’s haiku—but of Hart Crane’s body mid-air. The falling man. He doesn’t haunt anyone’s house, but everyone’s mind. (He has dispelled himself also through poetry.)
Midnight. The marriage of heaven and hell at twilight in the western sky. Being in an old place felt momentarily new. The sky exceeds its limit at twilight, the hour before, we still had time, we did nothing before or after, should have circled more, the regret is always in not lingering, not pausing, not slowing down. The colors gave volume to the air and the sky. Read Hoa Nguyen’s new book and reminiscences on Cézanne. Then we were outside and the sky was watching us. New feats of space. The ones who revolutionize the field do not introduce the new technology through experience but necessity. They had nothing, created what it was and what it is they needed. The sky is higher as the light reaches and there was lightning over the conical mountain. Once. Nothing is vague if looked at; the mind is vague, its expression unforthcoming, not the object: it is real, and is even more so for the chance to be the object, to not talk at all. A man sat in a parked sedan by the weeds and the railroad tracks. He was nervous about teaching or drugs. The train passed three times. The sky was tall as the noses of Americans.
Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind. (James Joyce, Ulysses, 13)
Tonight at Pho #1, a whole watermelon sat on chair, beneath a counter on which a smiling Buddha, gold, was sitting. We killed it with fire, we rose our voices into the troposphere, that is our only chance, right? I can feel a hand upon my foot, a ghost is waking me up. I fell asleep briefly to feel it, it was my affordable possession … We will be eating soon. A watermelon in a near-empty restaurant. Is there watermelon on the menu? A mute druid.
What is the last thing you hear before you fall asleep? What was the last thing you heard? A conversation in a room in a house, night, one lamp on, low wattage, warm, a carpeted room, almost as though no world beyond, someone asking questions, the questions are soft though difficult, speculative, maybe unanswerable, though someone answers, the voices are inside my ear, they are soft and tired, I turn on to them, it is intimate nature. I want to listen longer, but I fall asleep … I am here. In sleep, is there the illusion that I’m not. The voices suggest I am even more fully here, no present, that is, I’m not awake, but physical, what Johanna says about moving beyond psychoanalysis to the physiological, physioanalysis. Then the body contributes to finding a solution, or has them all and rations them out. I sleep with my mind and my body, I sink into a hole in the ground, is there water, my ideal forest, with moss and ferns and pliable leaves and leaves overhead, Turgenev wrote this before.
I think the tiny lizard bears the soul of someone I know who has died, if knowing is also ancestral. But what would it be satisfied to discover, find, or be angry? It is at the window, it is staring at me. But it is more than curiosity; it is missionary. Maybe it is for someone else: an intermediary. It closes shut its eyes, or eye, occasionally, facing the glass, holds one hand to the glass. Its eye has a face. It is watching me writing about it, waiting to receive its review. It lives in the world I do, so not dead… I think it is warm where it is, but it wonders.
Two nights ago the CARBON LAKE dream which was speaking to me through triumvirate of slug, lynx, rabbit. I looked up the lynx and that’s what it was, but last night I was a fish, gasping for air, trying to force open my throat. At 1 in the morning, ate a clove of garlic, drank 2 cups of slippery elm bark, worked on the poem titled “Tonosho.” Today we watched Ozu’ s Autumn Afternoon.
Youna’s baby, Musa, was born yesterday, I think yesterday, September 8, the lantana and the bougainvillea are bright and optimistic, there is the drawing back of a hood as of spring, and now the church bells, ubiquitous.
I could be in the back of an ambulance, but is it parked or moving?
C.D. Wright at Poetry Center, September 13, 2012:
can one just use Celan’s black milk?
paraphrase: sin is on everything a sinner’s ever touched: a toilet, a doorknob
paraphrase: hideous pink testicles removed by the librarian and put in the terrarium with a spider
“Actually, I thought this book was fiery slop.”
“She may have been as sad as a cover band.”
“In my imagination, I’d love to be an investigative reporter.”
“People would probably pay you not to write poetry… if they knew it existed.”
light on the soy sauce brown utility pole. The light has no color at all, but what it hits. The cries of an animal: baby or cat. A cry you can smell. Disordered and diseased. A wet cry. Five thousand year-old gingko fruits. What are the trees in the gravel? The sound of someone clapping. A bird sounds like a baby goat, in all cultures the sound becomes lower. Two middle-aged women, thin, with sunglasses and long hair on bicycles. The mesquite trees are good heads flying around. We drove west on Prince and encountered Bro’s Hot Dogs—a cart, some folding chairs and tables, beneath a white tent in the parking lot of a Quik Stop. No one was there, not even Bro.
The shadow of an infectious disease on the ground is the literal interpretation of heaven
Riding my bike down Mtn. Avenue, with no headlight but blinking lights, working down a hall, the available light cryptic, the movement of a sovereign = fish peeling away into neighborhoods, cadets, moving against the common sense of the hordes, individuals nameless. Feeling both vulnerable and invincible.
January 2012-February 2012
Silence was pleased. (Milton)
the central idea of looking into a hole and interpreting (feeling) life within the decay
The self is the first oppressive regime. The nation is led by a band of men carrying this personal dynamic to its public extreme. Citizenship requires some form of lying, that we are submissive and a part.
Last night was our first in the apartment, fell asleep to Satantango on our free mattress, wedged into the closet, a wool blanket and sleeping bags pulled over us.
Some bodies are never found, and that leaves open the mystery: as if closure is related, in part, to the finding and identifying of the body, and having that to construct an altar around, even if remotely: some thing has been touched, but this is not true, or it cannot be: altars to the missing, or more simply: altars to ideas, to memories, to constructions of individuals passed. But now it has been picked clean, which is far more pro-creative than being buried in a box in a graveyard. Part of the mystery remaining open is with the idea that something else besides death happened: not suicide, suicide is death, suicide leaves a body, and cannot control the leaving of the body, but thievery or ascension, which is soulful thievery.
We drove to Gates Pass yesterday to behold the sun setting. It was already gone by the time we got there … a spot above the western horizon was purple and orange, the mountains were framing a rapidly altering shoal of sky, some land of wet reflections incised in the distance, like a pond half-dried, and the sun’s colors, its devotion long after the first words were spoken.
the shape of one’s life, off the volcano, is remade in that distant space where the volcano is immediate vision. Not that life is misshapen, it may suffer a stroke: it can no longer accommodate itself as it was, therefore the ecstasy of finding the shape of life. The hole is absence to everyone off the volcano, below—never has presence seemed so distant and lonely, but the revelation is total: there is no way back.
A seeking after glimpses of fundamental experience that might change everything, make life new, while revealing the fact that in order to make life new or see anything as changed, one must accept the earth as foretold in its process:
pilgrimage to the sources (Bador, The Hand)
the contradiction of pilgrimages made to one’s idealized spiritual source, to which one is also irreversibly foreign.
ekpyrotic theory
Hokusai is necessary
St. Xavier lying in an open vitrine, covered in a blue blanket to which people have pinned photographs, one of three dogs. American tourists in their own country, wandering through the sanctuary: what are they seeing? The space come down to earth, space come down to earth, and the kind of blindness with which the American tourist interprets recent history. A man puts his hand on his wife’s back, they had something in common with each other once. Broken glass (clear) everywhere on the rocky hillside.
Tucson Roller Derby, double-header, four teams, Lindsay LoBlow (team: Vice): she was running on her skates. Her glasses flew off her face and broke. Miss E. Vil was in the penalty box most of the evening. Tattoos, pretzels strung on a ribbon, a band playing in the cavernous space, referees in a side room, a little girl crying because her father told her not to sit on the floor in the way of the players.
7 man-made structures visible from space:
Well, I want to see how madness is related to sun worship,
I put slashes to an active ending, which is making a pedestal to what breaks new muscle.
a traditional chore, walking seven blocks to the water machine, seven blocks back, as if to the well, to the river. I read Bhanu’s new book in the sun, on the white folding chair in the yard, my back against the wall: perfect sun. A good place to gather thoughts on sun worship.
Long bike ride with John to visit a riverbed, dry. Rode University to 3rd to Tucson, north on Tucson to the end. I like gatherings in ghost bodies of water. We climbed into a pipe, could not stand straight, had to walk with our cell phones open for light. Slight bend. We were under an apartment complex. A brown pad, obtuse graffiti. We biked home through the racquet club.
John’s talk: he pushes himself against the dirt in the trenches, he wants his rib to leap from his body into the dirt, while all around him the echoes of voices like artillery.
Hell: singling out (enlargement) + eradication
It is not bed, it is books:
