june 30, 2007

Calendar check 6:30.
Time check 1:30.
Skin check: itchy.
Wrist check: stiff.
Mind check: jittery.
Stomach check: jittery.
Throat check: thirsty.
Mouth check: worried about someone else’s leukemia.
Soul check: distant.
Pulse check: alive.
Poetry check: parallel universe.
Sky check: blue delightful.
Bird check: twittering and cheeping.
Smell check: corpse flowers.
Sound check: birds, flies buzzing, metallic clink, a flagpole, distant pounding, distant humming.
Air check: slightly breezy, warm.
Clink, clink clink.
Cars passing. Thump.
Cedrus Libani, Cedar of Lebanon.
Stone cairns.
Cedar needles.
Adirondack chairs.
Conversations hanging in the air.
Buzzing plane. Gardens.
Labor hanging in the air, remnants of sweat.
Dry tongue. Clink, clink.
Air belly, squirrel throat.
Darkness behind the eyes.
Mouth film.

Uneasy belly. Toast and jelly.
Uneasy eyes, ants and flies.
Uneasy legs, beans and eggs.
Uneasy hands, toast and jam.

Ordered poetry for the millennium. I am not a MicMac, not a Passamaquoddy, not a Pequot. Hanging conversations. I have made up my mind. Corpse flower, cedar needles. Aboriginal gardens. Poisons. Fatalities. Eco echoes.

Afternoon check: summer.

ping point paing
ha ha
bird, don’t think I won’t fuck you up*
pushing past flowers
pushing up daisies
premature form
projects – projective – projectivist
is it the breath or the typewriter
out in the open field
asshole email
I’m doing it again – indenting lines off the left margin for no reason – oh yeah, because they are new paragraphs
high-pitched hello

*Overheard in New York

Try to be direct, try to direct, the team, the leadership. The common, the committee, the approach, the aftermath. Amazed. I am amazed in grass in weeds in yard work. The root, the colors, the shapes, the tiny “M”, the way things are happening. A tiny phone in a tiny hole. Rhythmic remarks. The tiny mags, the page turners.

may 23, 2007 Wednesday 8 am Starbucks

Stealing time. Stealing it and hiding it in a perfect hiding place. Buried in a perfect dirt hole. Tell you how I miss, tell you how I miss my objects, tell you how I miss my dirty objects. This is like a gaping rawness in my heart. This is like a virgining of the flowers. This is like rotting. Don’t want that habit. Objecting to the purity.

She doesn’t want to do the “right” thing, just create a crisis. “Ask the hard questions.” And who was so careful here? And who gave such good advice? And who worked through tears watering the pity plants the plants of plot the plot of price the price of play. And who uses paints? And what’s the picture?

the desire for—the freedom from delusion. Investigating the nature of delusion from my chair—this is a joy—this is a path—this is a step—this is a way—this is my ignorance—this is the light—this is my death—this is my bag of skin—this is my suffering—this is you—you are impermanent—your attributes give rise to my reactions—there is flux—curtains of loose petals streaming past the window—sun—it’s warm—the lawn—it’s green—it’s trimmed—my neck it aches, how much money in the US goes to lawn care—how many ticks are out there, how many coins, how many undiscovered facts and how much data, how many cells, how many newborn leaves, how many petals and how many sprouts, how many hours digging and how many butterflies are born, how often have you watched a turtle in the last few days—and do you barbecue upon a tiny grill—what are the unique facts of your life if any and how can they endear you to me—how does one “pray” for others—what is the difference between compassionate and sunlight—how can we be brighter and more tender—how can we be burnished and more brave—cherished and with capacity to cherish—all our cherished landscapes in a row—and then—we’re breathing into emptiness—and then—another sprout

tenderness, an inchworm, a pea sprout, a thin stalk of asparagus, the tender impulse of creation, tenderness in documents at work, tender care with headers, footers, table of contents, extending tenderness, your ravaged leaves, your petals bruised and brown, still vines of tenderness, your tendrils, tendrils reaching out, there is a sun of brightness hiding in the data, there is a shadow of creation in the project, the sun is out, the bright light of discovery, the light is beaming from my eyes, my hands, my ears receive this light, I love the light, I am an instrument of the light, an Apollonian, with my seeking tendrils climbing high

just an image

I want to be enlightened. I want to be enlightened. My aspirations are tender, have a tendency to wither in this sandy soil, drown in this rain. I want I won’t, I want I won’t. My tendencies plum blossoms, Blossom like the plum. Year of no blossoms. Blair ate plums and broccoli, his first nutritious meal in a long time.

Just to catalogue your options: details, details, sensory details, grace, the yen for grace, the absence, flaws or beauty or perfection, memories or dreams. Objects or abstractions. Happiest with objects, but they’re few and far between. And most are shabby. Mug of oolong tea—swampy, with no sweetener. The little aloe, fading in its shallow pot. The sensation of flaring from beside my eyes, a tiredness. There’s a mouse living in the kitchen.

march 28, 2007

Here I am 5 pm—New Canaan coffee at Zumbach’s. Excellent. Civilized day—work at home, yoga, and quit at 4:30. Intense yoga one-on-one with Chikeola.

So foreign I can only follow
challenge to my understanding
wall, a see-through wall—a screen
No comparisons are possible
Learn to use my body in completely different ways
Part of me will not go back
Pussy willow (weeping) in fuzzy yellow bloom, this is a first—
Struggling with documents
The shop is closed

It is a thicket. The conifer garden is ultimately soothing. After wandering down into the marshlands, following the rotting boardwalk, achieving the stability of brown and stagnant water, she wanted then to rise. Climbing hills, across the broad lawn, observing the perennial garden now completely dormant. It wasn’t hard for me to find the isolated snowdrop, crocus, just look down. At the gate, sign says No Pets and I feel a true relief at the restriction. No footsteps mark the snowfall on the secluded upper path. Dark conifer presences so silent in their various forms, some curly needles, others quite like fans, or dark green fuzz along the branch. Winding whiteness, the brief sensation of being lost again in that small place I know so well, trickling of liquid drainage through the mushy grasses out the drainpipe.

I am lost.

Lost. Description even becomes too much of a responsibility.

A need to relax the mind, heal the interaction. She is a poet. He is dressed in second-hand clothes. She resists friendship, the contaminant of it. He is studying in the hot, in the cold. She is working on images not words. He is dreaming of the garden. She is assembling her questions into a marble monument, he is handling rotten fruit and leaves.

Here are my projects—

I write a series about rivers, it feels really forced, much less interior than I’m used to.

I’m doing book design, an anthology. I feel like curling up in shame for the uneven obstreperous (bluntly) badness of this poetry and get defensive at the awes of horror over awkward typographic dumbnesses in Duncan’s Selected oh yes it is a bad book and—well, mine probably is too.

I’m writing a gigantic Hallmark card to 365 of my closest friends, a project which I never once get brave enough to mention because it’s absolutely a faux pas in circles like this to write about real people in a dumb form like “50 words,” not to mention being 50 which is also a mistake too grave to mention, so I shut up even though I secretly admire myself, if only for the year-long discipline (its roots in stubbornness).

I have a blog. Lisa acknowledges my blog on hers, kind words; we mention it once in person, then this contact sinks again into the pool of anonymity, mutual lurking. I decide I want to put more energy into my blog, I have sort of a grip on it as an aesthetic project so I post something almost every day in November, although this is quite strenuous, and sometimes, it’s only photos/fragments.

Lisa’s interest in plants helps me acknowledge that I have a yard, a garden, even a sort of love for certain specimens. I bring two plants indoors for the winter—parsley, rosemary—and plant cilantro seeds. The sage survives outside. I think of bringing Lisa some sage bundled as a gift, maybe wrapped in some embroidery floss. No thyme at the moment.

Umm…can’t get there from here. Can’t go to Naropa, can’t spend lots of money on classes when I’m 50 and Blair’s in college, can’t generate a poetic community like the Beats or the New York School springing up from the wasted garden void around me, can’t make contact, can’t begin to get excited again about an online journal project, any opportunity to publish or be published, any sights set higher than retirement sooner hopefully rather than later after I finish paying for the college education of my favorite anarchist who would never rub elbows with an institution unless the term was paid for by a foolish parent (yup that’s me).

november 4

I threw out the white gravelly cauliflower soup. I really needed to make tea this morning. I made it—chai teabag and some soymilk. I also had some orange juice with water and four ibuprofen tablets. My hands are ice-cold. I was resting my swollen arm on top of a fleece jacket on top of a flour canister, with a bag of frozen wild blueberries draped over it. I need the elevation and the cold to combat the swelling. It’s painful.

I also threw out three small dead or mostly dead houseplants. No green thumbs here unless they are green from bruising.