A publication

Jonathan Penton at unlikelystories has posted three of my memory cards on their site, from the Cloud of Unknowing series.

http://unlikelystories.org/content/so-i-encourage-you-accept-your-failure-and-embrace-the-word-whole

7 June 2017

When I say “darkness,” I mean absence of knowing. I followed the bulldozer's drone til I saw a gap in the forest, black mud bearing the impress of a wide tread, then a wisp of smoke, earth mover removing trees. Find the gap in thinking, a teacher writes, where you can, for a moment, be. But the gap in the forest doesn't denote rest, just earth jaw with teeth knocked out. The man in a silver car still lives parked beside I'iwi Road. The roof is lined with beer cans and bottles. They make a neat grid. Behind him, an old house breaks slowly down, absorbed by o'hia and hapu'u ferns, its brown beams snapped inward. His silver car is a filling, but the mouth bears no witness. Another car sits 50 feet past his, filled with black plastic trash bags. I was struck by the grandfather clock beside the door of the room where James Comey and the president had sat alone. Good night clock, good night constitution.

--7 June 2017

6 June 2017

Humility is seeing yourself as you really are. Meditation, I once read, has sometimes lead to breakdown. Its side effects are not noted on the box where I locate my meditation, pull it out and sit inside it, like a demented rat in a federally funded experiment. The leaker wrote an anti-Trump tweet, which proves everything. Beyond the fake news, he screams, we can hear the TRUTH; while there's no mirror in my meditation box, there are his tweets to navigate. Perhaps he sees himself as he really is, though not in his humility but in ours. I peer into his mirror to see how small I can become. Note how, in the bass line, McCartney actually plays in a different key, how this destabilizes the song. Perpetual modulation is like anxiety, though it's disciplined by the music box. The leaker's name is Reality, so I more than suspect we're all pilgrims at this point. Take the road least bombed, and open your arms to the child in Mosul who'd huddled beside her mother's corpse. There's more there than meets your mirror's eye.

--6 June 2017

5 June 2017

This discipline doesn't require brute strength, but joy. In order to forgive, the teacher tells us, you need to go back into the wound. Forgiveness has more to do with memory than with forgetting. If, in this forest, I recover my wounds, tie them in a bundle and leave them on the sweet soil beneath the ferns, and if, amid these birds in whose songs I infer (but cannot know) joy, then I can leave them to their composting. We remake ourselves in the image not of our attackers, but of our forgiveness of them, less image than the skittering sounds of these birds after a night's rain. We see evidence of the pig in wet soil, her rooting about near the tea plants. We hear coqui frogs, and we call to them with smart phones before consigning them to freezers or feeding them to the chickens. The wound is what we work on, tethered like a goat to a stick. The girl with a violent mother used to tiptoe into the kitchen to get herself bread and cheese. She'd tuck herself in bed, putting food in her mouth with one hand, stroking her own hair with the other. She murmured kind things to herself before she fell asleep. 

--5 June 2017

4 June 2017

You know that stones are hard. The dying octopus comes apart, her white flesh tailing off, arms waving apart from her brain and mouth. At meditation I sit beside an older Vietnamese woman, her make-up neat, her breathing hard. She never expected her stepmother to ask forgiveness. She was good to her children, especially her own. The Vietnamese woman misses her stepmother. Afterwards she says that when she writes she tries to get her nouns and verbs to agree. Another woman calls out the word “if,” as in, “if I have hurt you.” If the other knows if to be true, then if is a dodge. That's true, the teacher says. It's complicated, she adds. Go back into the hurt before you forgive. I add my name and email to the list at the door and return to my loop. I'd get closer, but there's no road or GPS for that.

Volcano

--4 June 2017

30 May 2017

“'Love your neighbor.'” His last words: “tell everyone on the train I love them.” An unanticipated but well attended death. A woman took her shirt off to wrap him in and prayed. Down a narrow street at a bus stop a man named Christian swigged a beer, yelled profanities at the cops; the man who'd chased him down called him “cocksucker,” demanded the cops shoot him. “He stabbed them in front of children,” he kept saying, as if it were children that were the problem, not the knife or his intent. Muttered something about meth. For one agitated moment, Jeremy Christian is all the lost men of America, screaming his hatred as he paces the bus stop's narrow perimeter. He's wearing sneakers and shorts. We can't see him well from this distance, but who's to say we ever could. He's every last blocked desire, every last casting of blame, every last lost hope for agency this culture has to withhold. His mother can't believe he'd do such a thing. He was a nice man.

--30 May 2017

29 May 2017

Think what you want of this nothingness. On a walk with my dog, I counted my steps. Never got past three cuz she sniffs. It's her forensic investigation of the grass, occasional downspout or bulldog. For want of this nothingness he replaces “integritas” with “Trump” on a stolen family seal. In China, if you possess the seal, you're in charge. Trump follows others in a golf cart rather than walk with them. Our prepositions of the day are: with, in, for, of. All that's left are orders and insistence. Do this, do that, but don't consider it nothing. Build a wall around the sink-hole: Earth mouth hungers for your need. The president's excruciating want is our nutrition. Arrested on a DUI, the golfer graces my screen with his puffy eyes. He wrecked his body pretending to be a Navy Seal. #FakeNews is the enemy, Trump tweets. I am Tiger Woods.

--29 May 2017

28 May 2017

So I encourage you—bow eagerly to love. A soccer dad in black knee brace kicks his son in the leg, yelling something about a hammer. Ask if the perpetrator is much bigger than you are, if you're in a confined space when you confront someone who spews racism, think about instability and escape routes. Think before you love, CNN advises us. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing was anonymous. He advises me to bow, but I do not. I walk by the man in the Bulls shirt as his son's eyes fill with tears. A coach speaks to his team nearby, says he turned girls down because he didn't like their parents' attitudes. On my way back, I stop to tell him of the coincidence. The president tweets about fake news. As Williams writes, some men die for lack of the real stuff. Others see it, walking past. A young man with full beard is dead in Portland, along with an older man, the one who must have said, “You don't talk to girls that way.” His name was Best.

--28 May 2017

25 May 2017

Feel not merely who you are but that you are. She wove a multi-colored shawl as biography of Anna Akhmatova, enclosed a key in the decorated box. Who we are is clothing. There's a frog on Camus's motorcycle, and it's hurtling toward a tree at excessive speed. Frog, too, feels the problem of existence, albeit without memory or prospect. Only Basho could render the SPLAT well on the page, but that incident at the tree solves the problem of identity (frog) vs. (sentient) being only insofar as it illustrates its end. A green stain means nothing unless you know its history, but history means little unless you know what it means to sit beside the pond and croak at lilies. The pond's water is also green, but only imitates substance while it drifts. The frog jumps in, we remember. But we cannot remember frog.

--25 May 2017

[to be published by Bill Lavender]

23 May 2017

Embrace the word whole. “Ze hole in ze text,” Herr Iser intoned, circa 1985. That's where we fall in like babies in a well, before we ascend into the headline, which rests at the top. Tails you find the bottom, where wisdom is before it kills you. Of course you think about suicide, he said, because you're trying to prevent it. I just added the “w” to make the pun complete; the hole had had a hole, albeit without a sound. Being of sound mind, I think out loud, muttering mantras on the plane (“we are experiencing turbulence, do not be worried,” said the Chinese voice, too often to prevent it). Can a canned voice console? Will our robots help us through our griefs, whether of beloved uncles or disappointing friends? Should we can our own words, like blood or peaches? The White House website advocated “peach” in the Middle East. I remember someone put a large leaf over the letters “im,” so that only “peach” turned its skin toward Kahekili traffic. The pun in German is with sex; the word whole is where we're headed.

--23 May 2017

21 May 2017

In contemplation, direction as we know it ceases to exist. We only travel in one direction, my friend tells me, and it's toward dying. What the direction is, the map doesn't show, nor does the map's voice tell us, sprouting from the phone. The metaphor of roots takes root, but seems to mean less and less, when going out's the same as coming in. Shanghai's doors illustrate a leap from one economy to the next; even those that are boarded up (corruption!) retain their numbers. The difference between horizontal and vertical housing is only quantified as direction, not as value. A Buddhist temple sits surrounded by shopping mall neon, though its golden roof tells another story. Twenty minutes before we landed, the video screens showed us how to do tai chi in our seats. To land is to float over marshes and acres of new apartment blocks and a river that would prove full of plastic and the city whose history is one of opium and banks. We pulled up to the as-yet-to-be-completed terminal, then bused to the extant one that took us in. My office is where friendships go to die, though our good uncle died at home, well after the airline refused him oxygen. Something's happening in our culture, a friend says, and we're all going back.

--21 May 2017

17 April 2017

That clever display of wit won't increase your devotion. De- does not denote undoing, unless undoing falls on amnesiac ground. When I told my daughter what I wanted to do to the girl who broke her brother's heart, she said, “Mom, you shouldn't even think that!” Devotee of dew. De-volution's not the opposite of re-, though shards of it can be found beside the chain link fence. A newsman was arrested in front of Trump Tower, because they own the street. What I got paid to march I measure in my sun-burned skin. Her debauch was a white dress she was too young to assume. The pleasures of risk expressed at the expense of his feeling. Desire's not kind. What I say can't matter; it's all pantomime. Sit outside his door. Reach for his hand. Muss his hair. Ask him what he'll do this summer. (Aways use the future tense.) Turn on the car's a.c. Walk him around the block. To be mother is to follow with a broom, to gather in the dust, apply to your forehead, then lick it from your finger.

--16 April 2017, Easter

13 March 2017

Accept your failure . . . you'll discover that you melt like water. The dog darts to catch lizards on lava rock and I pull her back with my left hand. My student claims Language poets (contra manifesto) use the first person pronoun, but I suggest that it stands in for "put pronoun here." What the “I” does in poems, it does. It's a minor obstacle, but all too frequent. “It's nice outside” differs from “it's mine” as a state does from desire. What matter the agent, when there's an act to be performed? The point of her tail is white, the rest gray; half her head is gray, the other half brown. Rep. Steve King claims we can't save civilization with “other people's babies.” Mine are Asian-American. In Ashbery's poem, the pronoun “he” introduces some 40 lines of statements, as if “he” were manifold. One Trump supporter prays to a 6' cardboard cut-out of his hero each morning as he leaves the house. No one can pinpoint when this happened. They are hyphenated anti-Americans.

--13 March 2017

12 March 2017

Try covering them [certain memories] with a thick cloud of forgetting. I hadn't thought forgetting a thick thing, more like a balloon lost to the green screen of mountains. In Hiroshima at the bottom of the 7^th, everyone filled a balloon with smoky air, then let it go. I was surprised to be surprised to see a modern city, thinking it had been forgotten. Memory inhabits air, whose invisibility cloak hides it from the field, where the balloons fell. I remember I have two hands, one student wrote. And I that walking stands in for adrenaline and bad dreams, because after so many decades I can't face what it was I felt. Rick Ankiel threw five wild pitches in one game, before he was pulled. Why that hurts so to watch, when West Virginia coal miners will die for lack of health care, and the nurse's brother died of kidney cancer at 25. The ER told him twice he was ok. The difference between pain and anger, between what we sense and what we see, is thin. Contractors have been advised to plan the wall with good aesthetics in mind.

--12 March 2017

11 March 2017

My point is—don't judge. He imagined a Valentine's day card, himself ascending to heaven on wings, leaving his lover earth-bound. Scared himself so he walked to the store, bought a card and a STAY CALM mug. In class, we talked about the difference between “mug” as signifier and signified. My mug melds into lug and luggage and engage and wage and always at the end there's war. Steve Bannon wants to “deconstruct the administrative state” and, while I want to say Derrida didn't use the word that way, I figure it's trivial, such mid-course correction. If we use them, we're “enemies of the state,” the one that's imploding like a building sinking into its own dust. The children love it, confusing dump trucks with one that killed a major league pitcher, he who sang so sweetly on the mound. They release pigeons, don't they? She wonders how to listen to Trump supporters without judgment, declares she can't. Tim says they tried back, suggesting he join the Log Cabin Republicans. Our former president paints portraits of the wounded, tells us how important it is to talk things through. The sergeant's face frames one dark eye, one aquamarine.

--11 March 2017

7 March 2017

Why does it have to be so hard? A grad student perched several floors up, threatening to jump in the courtyard. “Suicidal ideation” means you have a plan. She said there are guns in her house, but she won't let him use one. I remember having a plan to have a plan. My friend stood on the other side of the railing at the Golden Gate Bridge, but failed to jump. What we call failure is an inability to die. To survive suicide is not to be the person who tried. My mother had a plan to have a plan when she was pregnant with me. Later, when I developed plans to have plans, she wrote in spidery handwriting on a now faded legal sheet the names and effects of medications. The boys who killed at Columbine were on anti-depressants, the softball coach dressed as a gypsy told me. Later, he sent me evidence off the internet with a finely penned post-it note, “Glad they worked for you.”

--7 March 2017

25 February 2017

The first two stages, though good and purifying, end when we die. A friend asks how--at our age--to deal with losses. My mother Martha refused to grieve for her husband. She thought she'd break apart, and she did anyway, slowly. This year, in an effort to speed up the game, pitchers can call their intentional walks without even throwing the ball. Speed entertains. The turns on a dime of the president's opinions jazz us, before we fall back in confusion. Gas lighting is a dead metaphor. To grieve is to vacate tenses, not to mix them up. I pull the past forward as if it were a dying cat on a maroon blanket. (That was two years ago.) The beautiful door in Trump's wall is all that should be built. We took my mother to the cemetery, where she pulled back, like Lilith on her green leash, abhorring the box my father's ashes had been placed in on the day she refused to come with us.

--25 February 2017

24 February 2017

Everyday concerns and contemplation are always an imperfect mix. I asked students if they'd done the reading (I had my suspicions). Only the vet with a toddler had. Turned out they all—save one, and she got an A--had two or three jobs; there'd been a death in the family, a sick grandpa to care for, and one boy tried to kill himself. Every day Alex told us about his run-ins with the cops: they thought he was breaking into his own house! He had to go to court! No sweet sessions of thought, or days in a rain-drenched garden. In lists and sums and long commutes our lives are taken before they end. Commute my sentences; the short form is for busy folks. The president's words are short, except for adjectives like “beautiful” and “tremendous,” which are reserved for walls. A friend accused of plagiarizing his identity drops off social media. In my bedroom there's a photo of him in the cold San Miguel swimming pool, my kids hanging on his back. I saw Alex the other day, his arm around a girl. I asked how he was. "Good, professor, I'm good."

--24 February 2017

20 February 2017

Perfect humility is not a destination. The paragraph is not perfect, though it appears to be humble. All forms contain their own predictability. What to do about the wall that runs through our living room. In the book about donuts, one house bears a sign, “Don't feed the living room.” It's a book about love that ends when the boy with too many donuts saves an old woman in a cellar from drowning in bad coffee. The paragraph's borders are porous only in content; the form is fixed. I took photos of places the dog stopped on her walk: a grass patch, a yellow leaf, the bottom of a light pole, a gap in a blue fence, a white pipe, an abandoned plate lunch, a brown dog, the neighbor's cat. When I stepped in the elevator I knew someone had been drinking. Trump's Vodka lives at the end of one the spokes in a diagram of his Russian connections. The dentist drinks vodka, my mother told me, because it doesn't smell. 

President's Day

--20 February 2017

19 February 2017

Humility is seeing yourself as you really are. The dog gazes back, her dark brown eyes framed by a hint of iris. Her forehead is folded, gray and black, her nose long enough she can't see the red dot in front of her. The word “hackles” comes to mind. Each morning the man prays to (and for) a six foot cardboard image of the president. I'm struck by a desire to do nothing but sit in the field out back and hold the long orange leash that keeps my dog from bolting. John Bolton's in line for the NSC job. Each night the president crawls in his bed in the house in the city in the nation behind the wall he knows to be his legacy. His will be done, his kingdom come. In a hangar in Florida Melania used the “trespasses” version of the Lord's Prayer. From the other room I hear Bryant tell the dog to sit. Sit, sit, sit, stay. Come! Good girl.

--19 February 2017