Do you want me to come over there? He’s panting. He’s panting fabulous. She’s tan. She’s handicapped. She’s tand and handicapped. She’s Pat. She’s married. She’s forgotten. She is at risk for sexually transmitted diseases. She’s tarnished. She’s wilted. Wasted, warped. He’s warped, he’s disabled, he’s dyslexic. He’s young.
She talks so fast my head spins. Dizziness disease.
Explosions in the steam pipes.
Rigidity in the synapses.
Men are hard work.
Men do hard work.
Hard at work, hard workers.
Handiwork, hardiwork.
Mistresses.
Busy women clopping by in heels.
Some things I don’t have room for. Titles. Organizational structures. Some things I have a talent for. Some men are women, some women are men. I have my own clients now. I’m managing the project. This is my practice. Practice management system. What is manageable, what is unmanageable. What is your sentence? Linda saying. Job interview. I will ask you a hard question. Your job is to ask the hard questions. Change management. This and that. When are we on the same page.
Com mun i ca tion
Se man tics
It’s not just semantics. I will blurt. I will micromanage. I will be an addict. I will repeat the question. I will get the job done. Please.
Girls as big as horses, reminiscent hooves of shoes, long hair like manes sleek with exercise.
What business are you in?
Every movement seems audacious. Basic rule: to think, to work, invent.
Dave and Heidi. Julie and her baby.
Conestoga.
Mental flexibility is so important.
Just to let you know.
issues with travel come up when other people are doing it
the day your son gets a passport
the day a friend misinterprets
the horsey women leave and so do the foxy women and the blondes
Stone woman, take it back. TAKE IT BACK! Zip—and nothingness; or emptiness and that is that. Alternatively peace.
and animals at all four corners and canopies of birds. Need Need Need Need Crochet a cap of need, I’ll make it up to you.
Stone woman took birth back. Stone woman got surrounded got compelled and crushed stonecrushed crushed crushed stone.
Women looking out from underneath raised eyebrows.
When something’s not that easy to continue. When I have left the field and gained the hermitage. When lunch is lost and chores still stare you in the face. It’s 2 o’clock and women wearing scarves.
Ovoid aftermath
smug somethings of her afterbirth
no stories please
especially no photos
I can’t bear it
thinking of her
trying to breastfeed
little ones failing to thrive
on the diet of America
perpetuated
how could she rise above
how could she contemplate
the fingertips of
Else Lasker-Schüler
she is so happy
lifted on a chorus of balloons
she is so happy
harbinger of abernathies
she is so happy
melt will tell tomorrow
she is so very happy
lifted on a chorus of raccoons
Vacuum
Raccoon
Pregnant woman
Big
Band
Sound
Get tattoos and become a normal person. The dichotomy, the dogmatic. The woman starts to laugh. The laugh, the litany, the lost.
At the next table, the woman drones into her cell phone in a monotone. Sad face and sad words. Manicure. Hairstyle. Family. You know, what am I getting in return? Nothing, absolutely nothing. And maybe expecting something is my problem. I just thought things were going to be a lot different. … skiing with Megan…
Vague wish to go skiing.
I could write some Kerouac-like bluesy pieces, they would be about the past they would be about woman the wife the mother at home they would be the Al-Anon version of the blues, something tells me it would be awfully hard to write these blues honestly
I never gather Duncan. I try to read the poems assigned, I never get them. I buy some of his books, don’t think I’ll crack them. I pay $300 for this class, I’m not sure why. I pay it in installments once a month, and I get shy about my childish checks with purple swirlies on them and a Comic front. I think I should have soberer checks like a real poet.
Trying to contribute. I translate a poem of mine into Olde English. Enjoy this exercise. I’m asked to read it aloud, a fairly strugglish effort. Seems okay. Better in Olde English than it was in New. Lisa picks out phrases in our poems. Well, should I toss the rest away, enshrine that phrase? Who knows.
I learn some techniques, puzzle over leading vowels. I want craft but I don’t want it. I am interested in the other students. I’m interested in shaping the interactions. The environment is so subdued, inhibiting. I ask a lot of questions. One dominates. She seems suitably irritable for a teacher of poetry. Poetry teachers swimming daily in bad words. THere are no highlights. I observe the women’s clothes. I’m familiar with an odd fact or two, like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s death this year or fallout on the Hanford Reservation.
Somewhere I don’t bloom. People very sparing with email, commentary, keeping their vast opinions to themselves. Closetsfull of opinions, jamming in on the shelves.
One of my thematic exercises highlights the word Intimacy.
I go to Bernadette Mayer’s reading at St. Mark’s. Appreciate it. I read Winter’s Day from cover to cover on my 2nd try.
I drop Ashbery’s name a couple of times, get a small sound of acknowledgement from Lisa, but no more.
Incomprehensible.
This is a woman who has to come up with her goals. This is a woman who has to update her will. This is a woman who has to complete her insurance elections for the coming year. This is a woman with a secret life.
Another strong-minded woman. Another sort of reparation. Another cane or a cast.
Harder knocks than most, an -ing rhyme, a woman personalized, a custom preference, a song stuck on a balcony, yes you have a little virus.
The lady next to me, stunning in wrinkles, eyes blue smoked opal coat black and white houndstooth wreathing in wrinkles, eyes blue with bruises, careful with lipstick, still on her chair, dressed to the teeth.
What are these women up to? And then these men, their heads white and bony, their chins with flaps like lizards, that they have to shave.
Note the differences: Anne and Sylvia, Remedios and Leonora.
I love the worn out ladies brave in Mexico.
One of the things that I love about Natalie is her ability to make judgments about people and say them out loud. It’s thrilling to hear her sum up a person, their behavior, their motivations, their unconscious fire, all rolled into one or two quick incisive statements. Initially, I just bought into everything she said. I had never experienced such a wise window opening onto other people. I was hungry for the guidance. Somehow, I had been misled, led to believe that everyone was a Child of God. Christian psychology is very flat and its behavioral modification systems are very dumb. I had no ability to read people, to differentiate between them. I was like a person, a woman, in an arranged marriage with everyone. As far as Natalie’s stories go, later I learned there might also be other points of view.