17 July 2017

I want to write an honest sentence.

I want to wear an honest bonnet like a helmet to hold out “fake news.”

I want my honest sentence to do good work.

I want my headgear to include only actual reality.

I want my sentence lived out in minimum security poetry.

I want my poetry to enact a radical moderation.

I want to tease out fundamentalisms until their threads become available.

I want the collage of tree and lace to exist as texture more than as image.

I want to taste dirt to see if there are pesticides in it.

I want “dull as dirt” to be my slogan, because dirt is neat.

I want to write about the green bird who uses a palm frond leaf as theme park ride.

I want to know the name of that bird; without names, there's less decency.

I want to get him out of my head; he's infecting my syntax with a verbal virus.

I want to avoid cognitive decline by inviting parasites into my body.

I want Alzheimer's not to be the symbol of our politics.

I want to write an honest sentence about a dishonest world.

I want to be funny, but not a laughingstock.

I want my honest bonnet to make me Professor Bitch. (That's not want, that's is.)

I want the old hag to leave me her super powers after she enters “memory care.”

I want a world without quotations.

I want to have an empty nest that's full.

I want to be that bird on that leaf on that frond in that field beneath this sky in this place.

I want the mountains to lean down to me.

I want my dog to tell me what she smelled and why she rolled in it.

--for James Jack

16 July 2017

I want to write an honest sentence, one as true as the weather. But nothing's so untrue as the weather, forgettable as pain here on the Koolau's windward side. The mountain's obscure, it cannot be read. It blocks every attempt, calls back the occasional hiker. There was a boy in slippers for whom they searched for months. Don't trust a liar when he tells you the news is #Fake, even if his platform is suitable to the lyric. Threads unspool like couplets. He said his lips were seals, and our daughter didn't get it. She's got humor deficiency disorder. (HDD). Thought Romeo tore his trousers on the balcony; I told her he hid his erection. Only some bodies are bawdy. In his late poems there's either the performance of senility or senility itself. My mother's friend's daughter wouldn't recognize her estranged brother, though she might see her son in his early photos. Baby thrust out on a father's arm; precarity's joy. Divorced from late capital, that is. I can't remember the weather, though I think it was too hot last summer, and rainy. Gray clouds have passed and now the sky is white. Somewhere in the alphabet, Ron told me, there's a section about the weather. Did he express feeling? someone asked. But attention cannot but involve feeling, a sense that something exists on the lawn apart from us, toad or lizard or the dog shit someone couldn't find to throw away. Car alarm and rustling trees, digital music pulse, my daughter's voice. Even the abstract can be attended to. I understand none of them; they are like the mountains or the avant-garde. Helicopter clutter, some doves. What I wrote two years ago I failed to remember, and yet it made sense. The vocabulary of politics without the politics. That's not true or fake, is presumptive. To appropriate is not to make a statement, but to till the earth for one. Only the pure survive, staring in mirrors like weightlifters to see that their posture is true. I've chosen the elliptical, it's so like running on an ostrich egg. On the screen a poker game, commentary I can't hear. The son's lawyer was paid by the president's campaign, before the act in question. “That was before the Russia carnival started!” he says, who is its prime barker. This weekend our populist plays golf. It's real golf.

--16 July 2017

14 July 2017

I want to write an honest sentence. I want to write honest sentience, a body of thought flung into the dark cold of a waterfall's pool. The only good conspiracies are those that make no sense, those attached to birth certificates or grassy knolls, but this one with all the i's dotted and the p's and q's minded, proves entirely coincidental. It's like a Bond film without the flying cars or Trump (Sr. or Jr.) dancing on the roof of a fast moving train as it approaches a tunnel too shallow to accommodate his fat ass. My vocabulary does this to me, and it's gotten more profane these past months, more consonants per square inch of vowel, more spit and less varnish. I want to write an honest sentence, but the words are lacking. They flee from me, the quality words of substance, the words that anchor me to reality when I think I know what that is. Depends on how you define the word is. That's a used up scandal, but this one offers fresh meat on a daily basis. The rotting stuff sits at the back of the proverbial garage, covered with maggots and the raven who's been shown to feel paranoia. They make plans these large black birds, opting out of instant gratification for something they know takes more time. Re-reading the poet I find him obsessed with “time,” and with other abstract nouns, birds that aren't differentiated from one another. Like a menagerie without a genus, or a genius without a key to the library. When Bryant said, “bring the rope here,” the dog did so. “Tug of war” is another metaphor based on violence, though it's really only pulling a rope, like taffy. “Tug of candy” might do as well, and be sweeter for all concerned. I don't understand a word of his late, later, latest poems, but they do offer me permission to go on and on. That and coffee start the races; I am a greyhound chasing a lure. The allure of nature is abstract. A sheaf of rain crinkles as it approaches; I and the dog step up our pace. There's too much vision and too little sound in our lives, even considering the ear buds (what flower they?) my students wear to dampen their anxiety. A wall of sound after the concert in Lyons made us all leave quietly, like lost sheep. I remember lying in the sleeper car's top bunk and seeing only the concrete platform. But I heard the correspondences, too.

--14 July 2017

13 July 2017

I want to write an honest sentence. I want an honest sentence, like or unlike our former neighbor. I want the assurance my sentence will (be) last. I lack insurance, as do so many of us in the era of empathy cuts. The mantra is short: Ted Cruz. The mandate is shorter. Sirens in the distance foreclose nostalgia for the journey they take to help. To help, if not create a relationship of dependence. Government is like that. The white guy in the gym called me “socialist fool,” for which I thanked him. That was not a lie, like the news he warned me about. Liberals! To re-read one's favorite poet is to find an absence of politics, though “listening tour” approaches it. The world of fiction's fictitious, but there's still a politics to that. If you tell me that tree's fake enough times, I'll see it as plastic, like an airplane fork except on Lufthansa. The Germans still believe in metal. He though it meant “air dancer,” but it means “guild,” which is less poetic, but there's still a pun there that redeems the practical banality. My new glasses warp my woof, meaning my dog appears out of tune with her surround. The far signs clearer than closer ones, the ones that confirm conspiracies by simply making lines between numbered dots. But numbers are fictions, too, so who's to believe even the narrative that fails to sink in the lagoon, whether or not it's polluted. Micro-plastics or micro-tones, either or none of the above are avant-garde. What you couldn't make with the plastics located in an albatross's tummy. The young man convicted of killing the protected birds was given a short sentence. You can sign a petition to get him kicked out of school. Maybe he can tweet out photos of Donald, Jr. and his dead prey. Amen.

--13 July 2017

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

24 June 2017

When my father died, he called down the hallway to me, and I came back. (The nurse said I could still talk to him, so I whispered good-bye in my father's, though--being dead--he couldn't acknowledge me.)  My mother gave him my father's gold Rolex, the one he'd bought for $100 after the war; she sold him our grand piano. He did her taxes when she could no longer keep her accounts straight, and told me on the phone that she was doing well when she was not. There was a cashier at Safeway, he told me, who spoke over 10 languages. Sure enough, the man bagging my groceries talked to a woman in Korean. She laughed. When he and his wife came to see my mother in her Alzheimer's home for the last time (I asked them to come), he teased her with motions of his arms and questions she could not answer. He said he could spend hours there engaging with her who slumped against the arm rest, her eyes flat glass. When my mother died, he sent a brief note. When his wife died, he sent a longer one. She'd collapsed suddenly after a wonderful day together. When I saw his house had sold, I emailed him and got no answer. I googled his name. There was his mug, an address in Incarceration, Virginia. He had a number, a sentence, and a crime: aggravated sexual assault. Someone had failed to protect him. A year and a half after his arrest the house sold and movers took everything away, but none of the neighbors knew a damn thing.

--24 June 2017

The world is not what we think it is

Since the anniversary of my mother's death was a few days ago, I googled her street, and found that one of her neighbors had sold his house. He and his late wife had sat for days and nights with my father when he was dying, and had loved my mother, caring for her well into her dementia. I'd always been fond of him. So I emailed to ask where he was moving, and to wish him a happy father's day. I got no response, so I googled him. First thing that came up was a mug shot. He's in jail for five years for aggravated sexual battery. And he's nearly 80 years old.