Ordinary mysteries

Ordinary mysteries: beside a green electrical box outside the cemetery, a pair of tan shorts and patterned shirt rest splayed on the ground. Memory now seems connected to photographs. It wobbles otherwise. No alphabet catcher with butterfly net to pull in names, just this hunting instinct with no visible prey.


Dante did not like neutrality, the Yale professor says. He thought you should take sides, though sometimes the side you took was solitude. #Quitlit.


"As soon as one reaches the true, that is, the invisible, it seems rather that each man inhabits his own islet . . . and we should rather be astonished that sometimes men come to agreement about anything whatever" (MP).


The shirt and shorts are not fit for television; there is no plot to be found that ends there, beside Kahekili Highway. The mystery is that there is no mystery to be solved, presented like a clue that answers only to itself.


Fear is best represented by underground parking lots, either in the solitary clicking of heels on concrete or in a locked car someone is trapped in. Make it look like suicide so the intention could not be yours. Use despair as your excuse for not passing go or collecting your $200 or for landing in jail, but with a good lawyer.


The end of anxiety is a charged emptiness. No content to distract from pounding heart, sweats, and prickling in the extremities. The end of it is the middle, no exit sign, no Deep Throat to hand over documents.


Vatic, vacant. Vacancy, empty room. My room outside Brattleboro looked out on the parking lot as it slowly filled with snow. The mystery of "seeing" that image at this time, when the sliding glass opens to a palm, and my dog barks in the next room. And all that comes between is, for this instant, gone.


The birds are not visible, but they are not invisible either.


In the Cambodian narratives, a family huddles in their elevated thatched house, knowing someone sits below, listening. The image of the listener enters into them like a microchip. There is small man inside of me who hears what I say, and he is not my conscience but something that only pretends to be. Someone walks for days to see a dying relative, and then comes back. Someone else steals rice from the paddy but cannot eat it where she can be seen. The invisible is not true, but it's safer than.


The invisible the true requires a safe zone, where you can give your angel a GPS and send them off to forage the qualities of honesty and loyalty and not suspect them to be at odds. With my glasses off, you are safe from my gaze, in which we presume judgment. To not see clearly is to let drop my gavel.
It's a start.


The invisible the true is abstract. You cannot read Dante and think invisibility cloak; it's all out there to be seen. The formalist structure of punishment. Not adequate to the crime, but somehow miming it. As if punishment were a 3-D mirror, but we'd forgotten our combs and our toothbrushes. Nothing to cover up our anguish.


He and Virgil were in their college's outdoor club, wandering in the woods and wondering how to get Yelp-worthy views without falling into the canyon and dying of self-portraiture. You will see your own last moment in your phone and that will reassure you that you fell. "Keep ticket as proof of your voyage."


Bryant returns to the sadness he felt when he had to tell Radhika that she, too, would die. And to the time when she put on her fairy costume and couldn't fly.

Trump tweet n+8: Shampoo His Handgun

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After some very important melodies, including my melody with Presupposition Xi of China, I will be leaving Japan for Sow Korea (with Presupposition Mope). While there, if Chamber Kim of Nostril Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shampoo his handgun and say He-man(?)!

Tatts

At Sangha's baseball game today, I sat behind a young man with lots of tatts. One was a skeleton inside a birdcage; underneath the cage was the word LIAR, underlined.

Toothbrushes & towels

My breath tastes of sleep and coffee; I don't brush my teeth before going out with Lilith. "The 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, didn’t say anything about providing a 'toothbrush,'  'towels,' 'dry clothing,' 'soap,' or even 'sleep,' the administration has argued." (WaPo) The government attorney said it was a matter of vague "language." Our vocabulary does this to us all.


Space blankets are shiny, though. Kids resemble moguls of aluminum snow on concrete floors. "Be concrete, Sue," Mrs. Katz told me in 9th grade. I couldn't see my writing as a sidewalk.


A local poet tells me she's reading my book. She says she likes my images. But I think there are no images. Or is "migrant child in black shoes, or none" an image? The word is irksome. "A mental picture or impression of something."


Does Abdellatif Laabi use images in his description of a woman's torture unto death? Or have we entered the chamber, watched her lifted on a pole through her tied-back hands, felt the heat on her spine, swallowed her words? The electronic probe in her vagina: is that image or act?


He gets water-boarded, but the term is never used; that term is like an image for the fact. Feeling death is not image, but act. Or acted-upon. Given that our institutions are not armed (at least not officially), why do we lack courage? It's that corporate onion, the one in many layers; because we're in it, we refuse to cry out. There's no Tin Drum cafe beneath the street, where onions are the agents of water.


There is no necessity for "soap" in a sentence that includes the word "sanitary." It's too vague, unless you spell it out. An eight way tie this year for spelling champ. How did they spell the word "sanitary"? Was it too easy to include in the list? Or "soap," with its trick "oa" spelling of "oh." Oh say can you see.


ICE raids this weekend; a million souls to be deported, based on a tweet. Families cut open, dismembered. You cannot call them "concentration camps." It's a question of language. The language is inappropriate, therefore you cannot call out their immorality. That word is not strong enough.


I used the name of a dead poet in my blog post, the one I intended to scrap later on. It got more hits than any in years. Serves me right for lacing my writing with a name, with the named image of a man who cheered us up in our poetry cells. The mourning for generosity is palpable, but we seem to need a model, and there's no magical contagion yet. (He wrote important poems about contagion.)


Are we generous to the dead because they have forgiven us?


Or is our attachment to the dead like the blur of the hockey puck on the screen, when all the shots resemble grace notes trailing from the special effects machine? Guitar Saturday always begins with guitars, and ends in noise. When I ask where the guitar is, Bryant tells me it's hiding behind the drums.


The Cardinals writer uses numbers brilliantly; she enumerates how many minutes the Pujols ovation lasted, how many seconds of the Yadier and Albert hug, how quickly he ran to first on an in-field hit (nearly the first ever!). I cannot count; it hurts too much. So I pull a number out of air.


In-coming link to Jon's blog. "Lie down with the dogs of easy metaphor, get up with the fleas of politics," he writes, after posting a photograph of a cactus. A gun-loving American clicked "like." That train left the station, the one with all the guns in it. What do you do with them all? The neighbor's garage sale features dresses, plastic toys, and a folding table. You can get great books at the library sale for 25 cents.


The tortured woman held her silence; her body diminished unto skin and bone. I can't see her face, her torso, her crooked legs and feet. I can't know her by what she resembles.



Note: In Praise of Defeat, Abdelltief Laabi, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith from the French. Thank you to Jerrold Shiroma for recommending it.

Another walk with Lilith

He lets on part-way through our conversation on the sidewalk next to "mosquito park" that he's 77. He's white and heavy-set, leans forward from his waist; his belt attaches to his dog's leash. His white translucent shins are mottled with cuts. Murphy is small and fluffy. He lost weight when they went on a trip because he got to play with another dog and had longer walks than the man can give him now. He chides Murphy on how he acts toward Lilith, but I say Lilith is fine, she can handle. They used to walk the graveyard, way up by where the Chinese millionnaires are buried, and where Marcos used to be. They used to go around the whole block, as Lilith and I do. His tan cap reads JAZZ. He's listened to some of the hard stuff, but he prefers smooth jazz and classical. An audiophile. Tech guy, who kept up. Gave a lot of old cameras to Kailua High School when he went digital. Better images than Ansel Adams could get now. Murphy stops to sniff. He was friends with the guy who developed the graveyard, rich guy. Lives next to the house there that's being painted. It was in horrible shape, rusted nails and peeling paint. Built by a Mormon, really a nice house. He should pay me to walk his dog around the entire block. It's over a mile, you know.


Prevent suicide meetings all begin with a taking of the toll. Survivor; my brother died by suicide; my son (and I had tried when I was younger); a neighbor and then so many others; a son. And then we talk about many colors of beads for the walk in September. The tents are too expensive this year.


Two men embrace in front of a shop in Chinatown. They are lying on cement. I am leaving a reading at the whiskey bar. One story concerned economic precarity, loss of health insurance, and a gun. He would put on a yellow sweat shirt in the alley before robbing the cash place, and then he'd get back in his street clothes and sink the sweatshirt with a stone in the Ala Wai. "Our Seine," they'd called it. The gun as means, end.


The poet is transgender. She has pig-tails and a short narrow dress. She had hated being Hawaiian. So articulate, they'd said. She didn't sound like she was Hawaiian. The language, too, crosses over, crosses us up. The other poet is learning Tongan. Her poems are mini-lexicons of roots and exfoliations. She pulls up short when she reads about a hurricane. Last night I read from a book about mass-extinctions. The yellow frogs are now curios. You can buy little gold ones in shops. The others live in fish tanks in a building sealed against a deadly fungus.


The frog in the bubble is or isn't frog. But it is treated better than kids in cages. The DOJ lawyer, whose words came through stiff lips, argued that the government need not provide toothbrushes to detained children. Trump says he called off airstrikes because people would die. "Words matter," the suicide prevention advocate tells us.


I read the description of seals falling off of cliffs onto a beach and dying. There were too many of them in one place because they were fleeing global warming. The white leopard on television is getting poached. We haven't seen the lizards we used to see on our front steps. A loss beyond all you can imagine of loss, he says of his neighbors who lost their homes in the eruption last year. It's my 21st anniversary and I'm almost over my abandonment issues.


Outstretched palm fingers, gray back-lit sky. Hottest summer temperatures ever. Nearly the highest suicide rate in the nation (argument over statistics ensued). The ice cap is melting, but Pompeo sees financial gain in it.


Our group leader passes out small bottles with a card attached. When someone is in crisis and wants to die, ask them to pause to take a breath. Then open the bottle and blow bubbles. Bubbles make people happy.


Note: readers/writers referred to are Jeffrey Ryan Long, Leora Kava, and Noa Helela.

To be scrapped later (20%)

Lilith turns back when it starts to dust rain. No details from which to begin my meditation. Except those I see on my screen: permafrost melting 70 years earlier than expected; Himalayan glacier melt threatens water supply for a billion souls. "This alone is to be alive to the extremities." (HDT). This, alone. An altered solitude. Harriet Tubman kicked off the $20, leaving Andrew Jackson alive to our exchange. Adopted the child of an Indian family he had killed. "Had killed" referring either to his own hand, or that of an underling. They call them "wire rooms," Aldon writes, not "concentration camps."

Concentration is difficult if your executive function doesn't work well. The frontal lobes ordain certain forms: some yield scatter, others cluster in the neat folds of a handkerchief. I ironed my dad's, then folded them to fit his pocket.


I admire Amanda Cook her economy. Consider cutting 90% of this later. The low battery will help today. 28%


I no longer understand what balance to attempt between information and meaning, between meaning and stark fact. I am before I think, therefore. My students said The Crystal Text didn't get to the point quickly enough. Could have been a lot shorter. 27%.


Some spiritual texts exhibit a disdain for the past. Live in the now! As if they were separate beings, and you could walk one on a leash and leave the other at the pound. The past is not an orphan text. During meditation past events float like episodes in a psychedelic movie, unattached to affect (at best). I do want some content with my nowness. 26%


He was always present, Carla writes of Kevin Killian. I can't remember seeing him in Maine this last time, but I saw a photograph. I saw a photograph of a migrant child walking down a long corridor, alone in his black shoes.


The men did the talking, while she remained quiet. Another solitude, another we don't romanticize. The deformation of not being middle-class. My mother's descent into serious kitsch, a life that could no longer surprise her. 23%


The sky has cleared, now blue and white above the rapis palm. Trades. Even the weather is named after commerce. 22%


I type an address into Bryant's google map. He had sent us directions for when we arrived. So detailed they resembled James Boswell. The "garden" proved to be two chairs on a sidewalk outside a closed door. The session as a theater without audience. Two chairs in a converted garage, two outside. Air conditioning rumbles through open louvers. My anxiety gathers detail like microplastics on Laie's beach. 21%


She writes about sewing with Mormons. The noisy one (no sense of detail) and the quiet one (more careful, probably smarter). When they came to our door in Virginia, my mother wanted to ask them when in time families are locked together.


20% and the light turns red. Time is energy, except it diminishes. Failed to sleep well again, but drank two cups of coffee in the morning. One would think someone who suffers anxiety should cool it on the coffee. One should think. 20%


Edited at 17%

Abstract inventory

Those I haven't seen lately: the pot-bellied white guy with small one-eyed dog who claimed to be a "radical centrist." Hated Hillary, though. The Asian couple with two small dogs who went to Liverpool on a Beatles tour; he voted for Hillary but likes Trump now because "he gets things done." Something about no war with North Korea. Young men march to Trump's Orlando rally in red hats, offering white power signs to the camera with their hands. "He makes them all so mad; he gets things done," a 36 year old woman tells the press.


What I do see on dashboards at the cemetery during my walk with Lilith: a "Blessed" sticker, in pink; Slazenger cap, red with leaping logo; a perfect sea star. At one grave two large plastic bags, closed against the rats. Inside one, a large unopened sack of Pepperocini potato chips, set beside two small cups of dip.


My return to abstraction isn't working well this morning. Might have to go back to those pesky line breaks.


"When I say I love you, you think I am selling you soap": reading Amanda Cook's blog memoir about living with small children and a mother who loses her threads. When I say I love you, I'm asking you not to die. When I say I love you, I want you to hear it inside your bones.


Joy Harjo's poem, "Compassionate Fire," involves Pol Pot. I read about the fields of bones, but we didn't visit them. My child has bones, and some of them are bruised. In the documentary about a documentary, the first interviewer tells Pol Pot's aide that his family was killed by the Khmer Rouge. He has waited 10 years to tell him that. The aide says he's sorry.


I sit outside his session in the garden, ti leaves rattling against roof and stone wall. Above me, though I don't see him yet, is a beautiful white dog. He will note the blue and gray eyes. I saw a cat run toward the sidewalk, but it wore the wrong coloring to be the cat that's missing.


My transition from paxil to prozac involved days of singing loudly that turned to anger, anger to exhaustion, exhaustion to unhappiness, unhappiness to ebullience. "The paxil seemed not to be dealing adequately with your depression," she said, a couple months later. How I did what I did for 20 years on that stuff. When you've been in hell, purgatory seems reasonable. (Forgot to figure out which Dante translation to read.)


We had an awkward evening once with the new poet laureate. Her partner wanted to discuss the Australian movie about stolen kids. She asked about ours. Another poet's friend asked if our daughter was "a real orphan." In front of her. He was a doctor.


My neighbor spends a lot of time beside another neighbor's cars. The cars sit beneath a tree that releases sticky bits. She plucks them, one by one by one from the hoods and the roofs. She asked me if I wasn't bored in Volcano with so little to do.


Trump, Jr. mocks Biden for saying he'd cure cancer. A couple hours later, Trump Sr. promises he'll cure cancer.


Early childhood trauma can damage executive function (aka super ego). Children at the center in Texas do not cry, they scream. Someone holds a puppet up to show them how they've been separated from their parents. Pass them along. They will learn to hate themselves, and you. Just don't use the word "concentration"; it's as abhorrent as "genocide."


I'm fascinated with Trump's use of the word "love." He loves the North Korean leader. He loves his base. He loves coal miners. He loves the good white people of his country. His love is trauma. How can I say I love my damaged loves and sound sincere? Can I put the word "love" on a conveyor belt and send it to you, without its being plucked off and eaten by someone I don't know? On the refrigerator the other day, I read: "If you eat yourself, do you get fatter?"



Note: Amanda Cook, Ironstone Whirlygig, Lowell, MA: Bootstrap Press, 2018. [Lowell is one of the largest Cambodian cities in the world.]