STRONG TENDENCY
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A strong tendency to want
to have the pleasant, agreeable,
comfortable, secure feelings be all pervasive
And always going for that
And feeling if there is ...
1 month ago
Showing posts with label adam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adam. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Saturday, December 27, 2008
What I Bought on Amazon.com in 2008 (a Retrospective)
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Thursday, December 25, 2008
Rick Warren
I’ve done some thinking the last couple of days about the decision to have Reverend Warren give a prayer at Mr. Obama’s inauguration. Or maybe the word isn’t “thinking”—I’ve heard the TV soundbites, which say nothing really other than some people whose real message is I’m Pro Gay and then other people whose real message is I’m Sure Ain’t Pro Gay. I’ve also read two provocative articles. One piece was from the Boston Globe that expresses regret over Obama’s choice. Another, circulated online, was by Melissa Etheridge—in it she reaffirms the Obama campaign message of hope, of openness, of the future. Both should be looked at. Same goes for Mark Doty's recent blog post.
Regardless of my stance on Gay Marriage—I don’t have a simple or official one—regardless of my conflicted belief that we need to be listening to LGBT groups, civil liberties as well as the Pope, Catholic Bishops and Anglican Bishops (and there’s quite the difference between them), one wonders what does this choice by Obama mean? What does it say about what he will do for gays and their rights, and what does it further mean in terms of the large amounts of gay and lesbians who were vocal for his election, very saddened by Proposition 8 on election night, and now have yet further reason to feel weary?
What I’ve decided is that the choice doesn’t mean much in and of itself. It’s insensitive, but also inconsequential if Obama helps this country establish—at the very least—civil unions nationally for all couples, no matter their orientation. And if Obama fails to make good on his polished rhetoric, if the gay agenda is not part of his agenda, if the Warren choice signals a political flourish for an eccumenicalism that proves to be empty eccumenicalism (especially empty for American minorities)—well then, this may signal the first indignity but there will be much more at stake to fight for.
Bob Dylan sang on election night The answer my friends is blowin’ in the wind. I think people forget the power of this refrain. Maybe the answer is blowin’ because even the wind carries it. Everyone can hear it. Nature itself is revealing the message. Or maybe the answer is blowin’ around, lost, scattered, nothing more than dead leaves and shifting opinions. Both are possible. The song advocates hope and witness, but it also concludes with a sobriety. Promises are about waiting. Hope is the advent of that expectancy. On Christmas Day, as I and many others wait eagerly for Bush Imperialism to end, and for Obama to begin anew, we have to remember there is more at stake than political gestures. Perhaps the President-Elect forgot that. But we’ll remind him. And we’ll be waiting.
Merry Xmas
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Portrait of an Iceberg
I too long to be somewhere else, and someone else. I want to write a diary that will remember me, and that isn't possible. The sea dropped trow, and looked its infant sight away. But that happens often enough, easy enough, simple enough in these parts. I remember when I used to enjoy it - the passionate pleats of nostalgia, and the drippy phrases that curled up to me, imaged in an old album, a clearing of the throat beside the blanched wall.
But that's done, sort of. The moon long gone, ya know, and wouldn't just be like the deepthroated night to sing out of tune, ever so slightly, while I am trying to conduct my empty seminar on the perfect pitch of white and whiteness and white regality. I want to avoid subject matters and style matters: I want to pierce through and just speak in plain song. You know wrestling becomes easier, the more common and rugged the line. Eros for me can be summed up, therefore, rather simply. The necessity of delay, so as to hide the fact one has already been revealed, uncovered, naked on the stark page that is the other person already, read and bored into - like a fissure of false starlight.
Like today, when I ran into you in the coffee shop, and you pretended to be a human test subject for the resiliency of rain, and the barometer of stoicness. The truth is, as I've grown younger all my life, I've realized the true depths of tedium. That means, in my round about manner, that behind every occluded cloud, is another (looser) sail. It can be rent and list - it can move onto the wind and net the bland, gold sprinkled weather. And from there, well, we're off to the races. Tired fences, old charm and bicycles, even rusting flowers. It can follow. It can, it can. In fact, it does. Like an ice floe.
But that's done, sort of. The moon long gone, ya know, and wouldn't just be like the deepthroated night to sing out of tune, ever so slightly, while I am trying to conduct my empty seminar on the perfect pitch of white and whiteness and white regality. I want to avoid subject matters and style matters: I want to pierce through and just speak in plain song. You know wrestling becomes easier, the more common and rugged the line. Eros for me can be summed up, therefore, rather simply. The necessity of delay, so as to hide the fact one has already been revealed, uncovered, naked on the stark page that is the other person already, read and bored into - like a fissure of false starlight.
Like today, when I ran into you in the coffee shop, and you pretended to be a human test subject for the resiliency of rain, and the barometer of stoicness. The truth is, as I've grown younger all my life, I've realized the true depths of tedium. That means, in my round about manner, that behind every occluded cloud, is another (looser) sail. It can be rent and list - it can move onto the wind and net the bland, gold sprinkled weather. And from there, well, we're off to the races. Tired fences, old charm and bicycles, even rusting flowers. It can follow. It can, it can. In fact, it does. Like an ice floe.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
STRANGE CINEMA
My ode to failure begins like a girl who wakes up in a dream
and realizes the surface of her sleep over ungroomed clouds—
suspended in a vague pleasure of doubt. It continues on then
like a train that departs from its track, sluicing invisible foam
and realizes the surface of… Her sleep over ungroomed clouds
troubled me. She failed too. The pungent musk of her hair
like a train that departs from its track, sluicing invisible foam.
But I don’t care about any of this. I miss the person inside who
troubled me. She failed too. The pungent musk of her hair
is all that matters in the lobby where I slept, vacantly foraging.
But I don’t care about any of this. I miss the person inside who
hears nothing but the iced tracing of loss, minor addendums.
Is all that matters in the lobby where I slept, vacantly foraging,
your shadow? Like a cut of pink fruit? A sudden shaft of sun?
Hear nothing but the iced tracing of loss, minor addendums.
Or hear something, if you want, casually, in a crevice, a name.
Your shadow like a cut of pink fruit: a sudden shaft of sun.
But that was before, when we shared and fumbled for sex,
hearing something we wanted, casually, in a crevice, a name—
in a room of lost boots, where the plum wallpaper was kind.
But that was before, when we shared and fumbled for sex.
My ode to failure begins like a girl who wakes up in a dream,
in a room of lost boots, where the plum wallpaper was kind,
suspended in a vague pleasure of doubt. It continues on then.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Catullus
I hate and I love. Why do I do it, maybe you’re asking?
I don’t know, but I feel it happening to me and I burn.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Afternoon in the Park
Consider the dense glitter of autumn.
The sky evacuates, gently, from a railing
and the clouds tune to a dial just beyond
reach. The sun is peach.
The grass is slick in shade.
Strollers pass along the marbled glades
and jettisoned stones,
where the onyx bridge
is cast in a ridge of spruce trees
with other anonymous leaves
wedged with a thick plain light.
Buildings of the city stay stony
on the plump horizon behind the erected foliage.
Salmon buildings, checkered windows,
pigeony towers. Then you come
up around from the sallow bend
of the stray path, on the bent ground.
Your eyes are pumice. We sit on a bench
and observe the tickled air.
Then I comb your hair, which has fallen.
I straighten your collar, which is absent.
I tilt toward your lips, as if you were there.
A swash of copper-and-lemon leaves fall.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
SOME RECENT POEMS
ONE EVENING
Interpretation, mélange, parallel.
You require more than that, but behind the brisk door
of illumination are the grim niceties of intimation. Or
the wispy texts of sex. And breath. Ordinary hells.
I tried to describe the situation
given to me at birth as genuinely concocted—
the games, science, clubs, wars, marriage-spotted
odysseys. All ended in frustration.
But when I think of you, angel isle,
glassy fire, the visit to the catacombs in Cairo,
strange images erect themselves. The snow
breaking its arms and elbows. The turnstiles
of the underbrush. The heat-stunted palms.
The adagios of brittle dreams, the dying mercury
that always seems a bit of music in my mouth. Hurry
now. Tell me what the platform claims.
Why the storm is reaching us, pressing
the contents of leopards and strange centuries
into our depth of vision. Why has enmity
become us, these eternal cities, caressed,
carressing our blankets of foam,
building a museum of sinks. I can’t
complain. Cold summers hummed in your slanting
throat. A reed curled in your homeless
eyes. Go figure. What’s left of the quail,
of the blizzarded stars, of the frail language
that cannot assuage, though to be assuaged
is what is wanted now, here, in the brail
of longing. Our awkward light plummets.
The olives gambol and isolate heads of virgins.
The shins of lily-armor shine. Even the sins
of apples tumble, rapacious as a sky, in the pit
of my mind. Beyond song and praise,
beyond wear and guarded sleep: routine pressures.
I have this record of the rounded body. The sore
shrivel of a boyish stare. Receding days.
Have You Seen It
All American fortunes, all summers: sweet, drunken, never silent—
they go, like a beaver for weeks, once rumpled with spring,
and evaporate.
Surely, no sex, no perversion, just the explosion of the country—170
minutes of my past explains it?—why I look at the long table
and can’t dream.
Giddy reelings of the brain. Unpredictable years of attack, Spanish
trouble, the lower parts easier to handle, then a big room throttles
open. What’s left
is, well, too many owed letters, and the laipdary look of a friend
who has done the best they can, really, the very best they can
but fails.
A Pisces. Seizures. Under the weight of the window. Do these
fragments explain what is left of the gentle leather diary, the linen
days, I enjoyed?
Probably not. You are humorous, gossipy, sure. You’re also a heck of
a singer. Yet the problem has flowered. Dead surface. Feathers.
Stray children.
Now that’s kind of it. I grew up in a park, you see, somewhat
aquatic. My mother wedging me between the chess-piece grenery
while the sun was honest.
Chesapeake Piece
Why shouldn’t we be expected to fail,
when that’s what will be left of us—like
a floating eyelash on a lake of milk?
The throat sore, the arms tired:
then suddenly light evacuates up an alleyway
where windows are walls of brick.
Look, there I am, in the foreground
of a coffee sky, clouds like sheet music
to the illegible baton of some wind.
What was I then, besides my younger self?
Plum hair. Spongy skin. Vacationing, I guess,
in some world that had no need for irises.
No need for widgets. The raw apparatus
of the sun, squatting and remote, purpler
than hippotamus. But we failed. We failed.
A Scenic Passage
Why do I come here anymore—
to be girted round with sweetness?
Is it the contrast of stately figures,
Venus Adonis Apollo the XXIII?
The mirthful winds of song lie about my head.
And in winter, the time of dilation and obduration
is like a colloquy in a rock, riven with raven weed,
stout with the foam of small streams, the babble
of birds and wax, and the ordinary flow of waste.
I come here, I suppose, for the cicatrice
of characters pink around my mouth.
And the murmuring of blood and sap
that beats in the vineyard, near the honey-well,
outside the old fashioned Plant.
More real than the sun, I see
letters of bronze-lit stone take on quiet:
polite and suited with foreignness.
Appurtenances of chaos and wind.
I come here for the grotto of fish.
The assorted bones of garbled limbs.
I come for shadow in a white eyelet.
The rushing brooks below narrow stars.
Rock
I’m somewhat unconvinced by the monumentality of it all—
the parable of cornerstone and horn, when what was meant was merely rock—
stones and rocks piled in troughs, blasted with the lime of the wind.
The slabs of slate like a granite sponge of sea-earth, like a heaped shaping of whatever is
that cannot move. And from the vantage of these mounds of sky and isles of bright
Aruban blue there is the recondite, meekless, undisturbed, hard, material sediments.
Tough black rock. Uplifted hill of all these pebbled crags and chasms, decibles
of what really? Shore waste. Desolate tropics of beautifully barren coast. Beside
the beach are the ruins of something. Light assays the situation. Grass is absent.
Weed, which would have to cut stone—and can—is not here. Not in this pose and position of
balking sun—straw air—other leagues of monotone. And on the bushless, leave-
less rock, atop coverings, igneous aglommerations, sturdy and unsturdy stone—
is you. Young still. The sun tags your yellow shirt in the white blue. So you stand,
as you stood. You do not move.
Twilight Industrial
Few sensed ahead of time from your forehead
The daughters of this day were possessing
The window, the surfaced hymn that lasted
In your plastic drink, beside this finished air.
And now we move into projected space,
Courting the promenade’s eyelashes.
A shawl covers the house of your arms.
I, out walking, am cornering the possibility
Of darkness, the context that is refulgent
Between perfumed skin: loosened gardens.
Never estranged from you—though standing
In distorted hills, the copper moon came lonely.
Morse code of shade. Outlines of first light.
I don’t know if I know you. Touch evaporates.
Stain
The mental furniture is fading.
And unconverted, from your palm,
a shell-like nothing mills through the air,
swishing with some toughness.
It is a thought. A piece of yellow heron’s
wing. It is a story. A last rain
wooden from the dresser.
The wind breaks in and opens.
Pour la derniere fois, nommez! Nommez!
Listing ibises are faint in silver sun—
like rocks of no nation,
like history without faith.
Listen, chuckling fern.
A shadow twitters in the window.
Red Spring
To write truly from what one doesn’t know
here in the obliuette and the cast chateau.
To imagine the fragile wind nothing more
than a palm of imperishable bronze we mourn.
And why is your look held in the long lashes
of looking? The sky curls around radishes
while in the pale air a girl’s hand holds us
to our foul thrill, our second-rate fuss.
You must spatter starlight on a cup
and faded cap. You who have bathed in musk-
rinds and situate yourself in royal rust.
Only now can you know the gritty lake. A thrush’s thrust.
The delightful heights of sublimated leisure.
The pangs of subconscious false-pleasure.
Write in the red snow of your proud lips.
Imagine the boundless matter-of-fact mist.
Now you have it. The long look we took.
The occasions of gooseflesh. The night’s book.
Anonymous Dreamscape
Night ploughs the chalky rose.
Freshets of grass are coolly dewed
with snoring lavender.
On the lawn, coral shadows
creak past the coral moon.
So you dream in blue marble
while the radiator breathes
its mercurial hiss. You taste
a wing that is brown and wet
and thrushed. For you too are
lawn and shadow and moon.
And night ploughs the chalky rose.
City Pastoral
More could be accomplished with actual conversation.
The little room where was, what—the flaking of roses
and rash of shadow? Whatever has been will be again.
Grain fields in the perfume of the broad-necked avenue.
Trotting feet. The round hips of humpbacked women.
Yet I am eluded, in feeling and thought, and think about
traveling with you, here in the raw human river, beside peonies.
Burgeoning meadow-grass. Peach-grass. Jade. Water. Hay.
Why is it painful to express a form; the consciousness of years,
banded by amber winter? August lies. Whatever the way,
see to the dark brushwork of my eyes. Exact, reversing: Weeping
circles that are the jay, the amputated sky, the common store.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Memoir
I spend a fair amount of time thinking about people who I believe do not think about me.
In the case of a few, it is time spent wishing the reciprocal. Longing and pining for the backwards eye.
In the case of one, it is time spent impossibly. Longing and pining for, well, the eyeless.
Between the Brain Dead and the Desperate, we can have most battles.
I am very curious about strangers who I would have be my intimates. (One man is moving; another forgotten; another gone; another nameless.)
What do they think of? Why are they ice and brittle and indifferent?
And more than vanity, there is the suppleness of imagining over a space that cannot be crossed, over a gap that cannot be bridged, over a distance that is distance and distance alone.
What is gross to tell of experience, without art, is the most precious and precarious part of experience. To write out of experience. To write in experience. To write into, out from, out with, out by, outing, inwardly, etc. The experience of experience? Or: a poem. The poem.
Forgetfulness should be a pure, ruthless act. And always accompanied by the sobbing of the innocent, the defenseless, the remote, and the jaundiced.
I forget who said that.
I think I did.
I am very curious about strangers who I would have be my intimates.
Inmates. Convolutions. Elsewhere there are combinations and nuances. For the purely academic and present reality: there are older brothers and suffrages.
Perhaps the label should be pragmatism.
Getting and spending. Giving and taking in marriage. Call it the waste-caught. Blank. With a blank net.
I am curious about strangers.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Girl from the Red River Shore
Some of us turn off the lights and we lay up
In the moonlight shooting by
Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark
To be where the angels fly
Pretty maids all in a row lined up
Outside my cabin door
I never wanted any of 'em wantin' me
'Cept the girl from the Red River shore
Well I sat by her side and for a while I tried
To make that girl my wife
She gave me her best advice and she said
Go home and lead a quiet life
Well I been the East and I been to the West
And I been out where the black winds roar
Somehow though I never did get that far
With the girl from the Red River shore
Well I knew when I first laid eyes on her
I could never be free
One look at her and I knew right away
She should always be with me
Well the dream dried up a long time ago
Don't know where it is anymore
True to life, true to me
Was the girl from the Red River shore
Well I'm wearing the cloak of misery
And I've tasted jilted love
And the frozen smile upon my face
Fits me like a glove
But I can't escape from the memory
Of the one that I'll always adore
All those nights when I lay in the arms
Of the girl from the Red River shore
Well we're livin' in the shadows of a fading past
Trapped in the fires of time
I've tried not to ever hurt anybody
And to stay out of the life of crime
And when it's all been said and done
I never did know the score
One more day is another day away
From the girl from the Red River shore
Well I'm a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
I ramble and gamble but the one I love
And the hills will give me a song
Though nothing looks familiar to me
I know I've stayed here before
Once a thousand nights ago
With the girl from the Red River shore
Well I went back to see about her once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to that seen us there
Said they didn't know who I was talking about
Well the sun went down on me a long time ago
I've had to go back from the door
I wish I could have spent every hour of my life
With the girl from the Red River shore
Now I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
That if someone around him died and was dead
He knew how to bring him on back to life
Well I don't what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
'Cept the girl from the Red River shore
Lyrics as performed by Bob Dylan at Tradgards Foreningen, Gothenburg, S, 28 Jun 1992.
Likely source: The Carter Family, Bluebird (RCA) B-8947, 14 Oct 1941,
via Tom Paley's rendition on "Folk Songs From The Southern Appalachians" (ELEKTRA, 1954; reissued on "O Love Is Teasin'" box-set, 1985).
'Twas in the year of '82,
In the springtime of the year,
I left my mother and a home so dear
All for that girl on the greenbriar shore.
My mother, she says, "Son, don't go.
Don't leave me here alone.
Don't leave your mother and a home so dear.
Never trust a girl on the greenbriar shore."
But I was young and reckless too,
And I craved a reckless life.
I left my mother and a home so dear
And I took that girl to be my wife.
Her hair was dark and curly too
And her lovin' eyes were blue;
Her cheeks were like the red red rose
That girl I loved from the greenbriar shore.
The years rolled on and the months rolled by;
She left me all alone.
Now I remember what my momma said,
"Never trust the girl on the greenbriar shore."
Monday, September 29, 2008
The Head of Pompey Presented to Ceasar
You sat on a high lawn chair
beside a gauze of screed and thin frieze.
I could surmise from your gaze
very little really, except that the light
was bland and free. Casually indifferent.
Meanwhile, the sun’s collar was like
a message sent from no one to a missing
page. And the clouds, like a boy, read out
the eyes of all your bluishness.
beside a gauze of screed and thin frieze.
I could surmise from your gaze
very little really, except that the light
was bland and free. Casually indifferent.
Meanwhile, the sun’s collar was like
a message sent from no one to a missing
page. And the clouds, like a boy, read out
the eyes of all your bluishness.
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