|
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Lydia Lucid "There'll never be an end to it!" I said angrily. "Our hands will never be free!" Simone de Beauvoir The eyes protrude handsomely and not in a bulging way so as to suggest a goiter, but in a way intimidating--as if the woman who looks thru such eyes could see through any nonsense or falsehood. He thinks the woman is probably (true to form, Earth wise) stronger than he, even though he, like her, has spent a large part of his whole life questioning reality. Imagining, then questioning, "reality." Maybe he imagines her falsely. His eyes lend her eyes an aura (or mystique) that leads him to imagine a reality, a way of atunement with reality, or a way of valuing reality that is stronger than he is. Her eyes lend his eyes an aura (or mystique) that leads her to imagine a reality for him that is stronger than she is. He closes his eyes and listens to the cartoon on Channel 18 about Saul, Jonathan and David. David takes the slingshot and slays Goliath. He opens his eyes and looks at her photograph. The lips. The earlobe. Is her hair auburn? Her eyes light green? Blue? Would she, could she, help him to improve his French? to edit out his (wretched) excesses? She saw the falsity of trying to recapture the whole, but the still images still flashing annoyed her. They promised to deliver a tryst--a trust--more satisfying than anything that might come after the morning routine. She arose and stepped off the few paces to the sink, to gargle and brush, to put on the stiff, unpleasant shower cap. Was his hair blond? Cut in a mop? Had he mentioned something about his room? Had they held hands? Were they watching "Strangers on a Train" at the Bijou? Had she dyed her hair for him? Reddish brown? But then he'd be starting a new friendship and his weight impeded his (once spry) gait and she was a two hour drive away. Once there, he could park two, possibly three blocks, from her brownstone, and could perhaps huff and puff, with pauses at sidewalk benches. Or they could meet at a bookstore. She thought, "Say there is for both the me and the not-me no non-relative territory to invade or defend." He thought, "Do these android appearing, insectlike kids who drive big-tyred trucks and go innocently forth to fight a desert war they will later grant was no piece of cake, do their genomes'roots extend deep into Euro-American history? Roots deeply tinctured with bellicosity?" "Yea, though I weigh 300 pounds, and lack charity...." Does she have enough stamps to post the cheques for the cable bill? the light bill? If she takes her umbrella, will it rain? She is annoyed that she did not get up before it became a burden and an annoyance, but it arrived late, and for a time it was pleasant. Surely it were futile to sleep on past noon. She could drop the envelopes at the mailbox and just keep on walking. But where? And why?
posted by jim
at 5:08 PM
Mayan Discontinuum We have left an upstairs loft, the shape changer and I, and it is raining. I fear for my feathery hat (Rosellini, fawn/sage, like the dons wear in Sicily), for yes, in one of those infamous & universal bordertown passages, crossing the Street of Mud from the Celibate's Bordello to the Accountant's funeral, once I got soaked, but that was partly synthetic, though the corner church was Trinity, lichen-privileged stone, and that navy pinstripe suit--the cleaners made it like new. I hasten to catch up with Mother. And then we probe the auld foggy narrow lane, slowing for shadowy passers by, of course, whitened in the tiny glow of legendary meagre headlamps : I drive from the British side. We stop and ask a trusty, "Is this the torment then? Just for pedestrians? And are there broader lanes, perchance, for motorized carts--as this appears to be?" His canny brow lifts above a Stevensonian eye: the trophy of a brogue: "I canna answer! Overlay, vanquished palimpsest--the humour!" Guide, pensioner, translator--but who is this, welling up ashes from what bloody, unbroken--though broken, and rebroken--heart? I guess, or at least I gather, then, we abandon the car, certainly a bailiff of the other world accosts us for facts of origin, as from some subterranean template. Fallujah? Mexico City? I stammer "Broadway," my mother mentions the Hill by its vernacular name, its alliterative moniker (even then I seem to recall not knowing the characters, the pronouncement), whereupon we escape behind or through some machinery, and there appears a table on a backlit lawn, some candles, a spread of midnight Lute Fisk picnic condiments mysteriously obtained, strollers chirping gaily alongside a picket fence to whom I whisper "To the east, no light, the birds not yet waking ...," whereupon they approach with interrogative eyebrows and penetrant gaze. "Hurry up, please, it's time--Let us away!" My mother smiles as if to indicate, "No matter. Do not worry." Never mind, she seems to say, without need for actual remonstrance--and I suppose that's when we waken like metamorphic simulacra, or like some ectoplasmic form of human metaphors, in the big house, and my companion, Tonto Frazier and I, we kick the punks in their butts and we flatten the toughs, the seasoned yard birds with Queensbury jabs, counterpoints, the occasional roundhouses. Money, a deed, appearing in my buddy's wallet, attracting the warden's interest--suddenly the friend, sly, almost Fieldsian-Falstaffian, reminds me out loud of our vagrant identity: "If we have no proof of residence and therefore you shoot us in the head, who writes you the cheque you so clearly--droolingly--desire? Hmmmm? The mullahs of mosques? Yes?" I think I awaken to lights, the thermostat set at 55, the furnace fan still on and blowing, me making the usual inane memos for Easter reading in church: Matthews, Nabokov, Hamsun, Kabir, Rumi, Baez, Kafka. "The charred guest can speak. But barely." Mom said. "As from some cable or newsprint report. Through bandages." I omit to ask, "Was this bold volunteer of reconstruction jumped upon by several devils, from a liberated window ledge? And is he bandaged, then, beyond all recognizable and official boundaries of identification?" Perhaps yes and in serifs--squiggles of injured marine (life-) ink, italics of impotent sarcasm--I likewise forget to ask, "how do we spell Sunni? Shiite? Kut, Najaf, Karbala?" And how does George W. Bush?
posted by jim
at 3:39 PM
I have returned (2-23-2005). But I have biomedical ethics class upstairs so I had better skeedaddle. So this is just to say, i have eaten the plums that you left in the ice box, but I shall return, with Mayan Discontinuum & other poems. Soon! adios, Old Dog
posted by jim
at 1:56 PM
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Wednesday / 1-26-04: announcing the return of (new) old dog, jim mc curry, after a sabbatical for weight loss and mind-body conditioning exercises, and other therapies: some poems and prose to be posted tomorrow or Friday. It's the third week of the spring term at Carl Sandburg College. Recommended readings & listenings/viewings: Eckhart Tolle, THE POWER OF NOW; Chogyam Trungpa, ORDERLY CHAOS; all available poems of Tomas Transtromer; Robert Bly, Iron John; all available tapes and books by Clarissa Pinkola Estes; the films of Michael Moore; the Ray Charles movie, Ray; any available tapes by Father John O'Donohue, especially "Anam Cara." That's a start. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the current witches' brew (Jefferson of course did not refer to Team Bush, but I do!) cannot last forever--be of good cheer.
posted by jim
at 1:22 PM
Friday, July 11, 2003
cattails cattail leaves shine in the eastern sun. under erasure, similes, goslings in single file, pink & gray covered wagons range the northern horizon. they can of course roil, dissolve, change like the thoughts of the fat bald meditator, the cursing drunk in the woodhull breakfast booth. cattails gleam like diamonds in the early morning sun.
posted by jim
at 6:47 PM
Thursday, July 10, 2003
I dreamt last nite I was coming back from Denver or somewhere-- driving back from out west --and stopped at five a.m. for breakfast in Kansas. Then went to the best service island imaginable(saame town), with country folk of the friendliest sort. stayed there getting my Honda refurbished and slicked up till noon. one guy sd to some gal, Go with me to the ballgame? she was cool, sounding neither too willing nor too demur ( I dreamt I thought, "Right down the middle!") She sd, Sure, Dwight---or Orville (or something, i forget)-- but first I gotta get Mom (or Grandma or Auntie or something, i foget) moved in today. There was a conference of language learners. It was an interesting maze of mortar & bricks. I told them I'd put a notice in my school paper, tell everyone to stop by there on their motor tours. Of course it may be significant that I'd been rereading Knab's THE WAR OF THE WITCHES about the Sierra de Puebla scene s-e of Mexico City, and dream entries into the underworld -- a book that makes the Castaneda epic, impressive as it is, seem concocted in a UCLA library by a master quilt-maker named Carlos.
posted by jim
at 10:21 AM
ABC A. Main Street The ancient interplay ... kids on bikes, black kids with combs in their hair, weaving through stern old matrons with white hair who teeter on their boney legs like flamingoes, trying to cross over ... and a sentence or two from Borges, as I sit reading in a dog damned taxi cab about an imaginary planet where objects are totally ideal: "The classic example is that of a stone threshold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from sight on his death. Occasionally, a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an ampitheater." (Ficciones, p. 30) B. Commentary At first I sided with the old people, thinking how easily they could be knocked over, how fragile their bones. Then I thought: Don't take sides. Watch the interplay, yin and yang. Yesterday a motorcycle cop behind me was handing out tickets to kids for riding their bikes on the sidewalk. I noticed a lot of older people eyeing the cop ominously--as if to say, "Quit picking on the kids. The kids are alright." In the evening I mentioned this to my mother, and she said they started issuing tickets two years ago after some kids pushed some old folks off the walk with their bikes. C. Synthesis Combine A and B: reading B first, then A. # The Denver Parole Yellow tequila puke blossoms the Chevy. One inhabitant of the building I inhabit practices chainlink-billyclub maneuvers in a black muscle shirt close to the Chevy. If I stop watching, he will stop twirling and come inside. I move away from the window. The door slams shut. He has left the alley, arena of defiance, perhaps to brush the melting snowcap off of his oily Elvis locks. Which side of the wall is the opposite of confinement? Cops play robbers with nightsticks. Doctors play cops. Perhaps if I puked. This is a pleasant neighborhood. A sleeping wino every so often lifted inside the dumpster and ground up inside the machine-- they know and do not mind. Sun on snow, a narrow causeway between apartments--one day, returning, I meet a young lady in synthetic furs, panhandling, crying, "Small change?" Guilty against all odds, I stammer my No. Cockroaches rule. I don't have time. I have come to Capitol Hill to discover asthmatic bronchitis for the very first time. This morning a doctor told me, "If you've ever smoked pot, you will know how to hit on this inhaler." I woke up choking on a cough lozenge stuck in my windpipe last night. The doctor laughed and seemed to enjoy my telling him this. I am moving to Manitou Springs some sunny morning now, or midnight, when the capitol is like one of those glass balls you used to pick up and shake as a child, to release a tiny blizzard unto the village inside. I'll go out to the alley and pack the Chevy, and drive up into the mountains where the streams are dark. There it will be closer to the mark. Below zero. #
posted by jim
at 9:21 AM
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
UNIVERSAL PICTURES My sister dips her head of snow beneath the still waters. Labrador retrievers in black lab coats consult each other freely they glance at me with a mystic, worried look-- They scribble cryptica in a dead tongue. In an olde Inn sporting a belle epoque belfry-- a master ventriloquist sings bel canto in a dead tongue Of someone's .. epic, lonely question Belonephobic yet well trained in dead, operatic tongues as in a belicose muse --ossia-- a bemused bellicosity as in some .. slavish? some slavish and .. beholden tongue I joke with our cousin distantly wandering from pavilion to pavilion in the park begging-beseechingly-- "Hash meat?" When I congratulate him with the Academy sandwich, he turns and tears off his mask and squeaks in a new, clear voice-- When will you start to pay attention to your own people's music? Castilian cantors? Moon antennae? Huddled in their fiery apartments, conspiring to reinvent oak leaves and pass them off as huddled masses, the demons brighten. They mutter, Nimbi, cumuli, they quote Our President: Bring it on. It's just a dream.
posted by jim
at 8:46 PM
flambeau a series of farflung adventures, the I rambles that once rumbled -a lava lamp? now char crust coaled-- as Vulture Peak? ____ As friends with the family foot of snow and coal-- finned & downy as a fine fur hat-- visit for the holidays to drink Florentine wine-- the I, bashful, thinks to abase desire, to tell stories --and thus hold sway? ______ Attachment to form will drag us back --yet-- Give up thought. Embrace phenomena. Walk on coals of fire. # SHARON & ARAFAT ON NIGHTLINE wataga meadow still in bloom. the anhydrous ammonia plant never was. put in fifty years ago to degrade the meadow, & the meadow monks (mice, bees, & such) it existed but was not the moon eclipsed by the shadow has no effect on the light of the sun. * if the lamp is right next to you, turn it off. if the lamp is right next to you, turn it on. * who yokes the great matter to some imputation? How can the rabbit glisten in rain, cleaning her paw? if she regard you with her clear eye, how shall you say anything? * if you say something-- then is something next to "it" what is said of "it"? * Who can bear this weight--so many-- the I, the yoking, the yoked? Is it this complication, makes the hosta spring lily like, with light leaf edges? Let the edge cut the tongue, lift a finger ful of black loam to the bleeding tongue-- #
posted by jim
at 8:32 PM
ACROSS THE LINE for Dian Fossey All I remember is her eyes, in photos, at various points in her lifeline, from a spiderwork tracery grown clear. Fiercely protective of the gorillas' lives, teased out of thought by their implacable stares, irrefutable as the koala's, hanging upside down in a tree not of his own devising. What kind of men were they? As you or I might strike, then snuff out a match-- From the darkness within or without, they entered her hut with machetes, and took her life in their hands The missionary quoted Tennyson over her grave. # BRIDGE ("Every time we say goodbye, I die a little ... I wonder why a little") The myocyte withdrawal, the onslaught of autumn, a new school year, It dropped me, Ithaca-- it brought me to my knees. The illusory prerequisites & perqs, yr arts of sex and breathing yr analyzed credit hours, yr scuba transfers.. Frankly not content, really, just to be cool, to mate, we go into air conditioned rooms to discuss the nuages thereof. * Unending tedium. "Outside"? a red leaf falls. Has broken (in) essence? "Inside"? Light spots on jean curves, say, -- if not batik, blue bandanna, blue tattoo, faded / bluest arc of buttock, Go to the front of the room-- scrawl in boldface on the chalk board SAVE -- story of amber Fleece . this honey Dew * She notices her options, It depends. If fall's no mere mirror-bridge from summer to winter -ossia- petal membrance, blossoms past * Eyes howitzers? Chew your sponge. * to shew why SHE had better NOT go out into the eye of day * using my P.X. jacket for an orange nylon mini skirt, as unheard music is sweetest, a drumroll, double curtsy flexing her long luminescent legs . Listen, buster-- Keep it in yr pants. # METALLICA As I turn from the wind, the bluesy ocean seconds the one who’s just been blowing spiritual: Cousin Mary, J.C. Repetitio principii— the sea cribs a life free of cachet, flashlight battery reputations-- And is that the shade whitens us, Ramon? The pounding surf don’t worry no more, she never wants it to end. Entre- chat denied, the wry conclusions favored by monkish fans— we never the less admire the noble beast whose snout protrudes between the pour soi & en soi a warm cozy, a backseat piled with books & blankets invitingly— we uninvited shameless who negotiate the jostling hunks of traffic. #
posted by jim
at 8:03 PM
Monday, July 07, 2003
treason : a five minute film for Ann Coulter [this piece, "treason," first appeared in muse apprentice guild, edited by august highland] You know what it is like, of course, to spend years in docile and earnest learning mode(s). We boomers recall the "good student" mind of the Forties and Fifties, even the Sixties. History, we say, not his or her or my story-- as in "istorin." To find out for oneself. The air we breathe. After the meeting I said to Alice, Comrade--what time is it? Seems like midnight, she said. Yes, I replied, but it's only eight-thirty. The time had changed. Standard from Daylight Savings. Late October, dark already as we were driving back from the union bargaining sessions of sweet silent thought past camps where once we strikers fired up burn barrels, bore placards--"Will Teach Fur Food," etc. Ignis Fatuus. I think I see these wraiths, will-o'-the-wisps. Fitful, rising gases, not aspirant. Breathed out by spectral lungs from rot of leaf and timber. No metal roses, I think. Not steel, not copper. Softer edges. Whorls of en-soi beyond pour-soi and en-soi. Call it the very atman, or no-mind, if you like, not thought. Before our union began to appear, to sit to table with muted tom-toms of denied paranoia, masks of muted (if not national--still, mutual) interest, we striking teachers got to know these costly leaves of rust, Payne's Gray, plum and gold, raw umber, ocher, and birdshit oxide, all too well, our signs so crudely painted, waving with those autumn leaves, our protests like an annual rite of nature. Driving now I cast and snap my hook, my reminiscent glance toward Lake Storey. The fire is surely false. Yet at times history--the real, the air we breathe-- must surely accomodate herself to what we see and say and feel. And not the other way around. Now the time has changed. In the careful signs and smiles and intonations of diplomacy, win-win bargaining, in the terms of a re-financed mortgage, if not apanage-- a re-negotiated marriage with the princess who might turn back into an ancient hag, no one quite dares to say, We are a variegated rotting lung; you are a snakehead Medusa. The point must not be too emphatically sharpened, too finely labored. The point must be veiled by a kind of pointillistic mist, a vaporous plum-pudding. I am at this wheel. And I for one smile at this mortgaged will-o'- the-wisp, I smile and nod, and say Yes, oh yes, to no one. We are but mist, or spume, or as a foundling gypsy prince, an elfin princess deposed. Alice, is it 'round Midnight, or after? And should our Wyrd dispose it so, may we survive our parent generation, stay and live in grounds like these, friend to furred and feathered coot or owl, racoon or squirrel? Our dulled and slavish brains a state of mere, birthing decay, the original Mind but nature's own gentle, subsiding shock, inuring itself, accustoming itself by imperceptible stages, settlements and degrees, to blood, raw meat, the orphaned moment of Now? Antic, dancing rags of flame and shadow, friend, foe-- someone to listen to, to hum, to whisper and sing? Clamorous for dawn and the new: a new kind of classic jazz, an age of hidden music. An american samisdat, perhaps. Contrite, reminiscent, your children, --oh brave new order of the world made safe for the top one %, we salute you, your children-- and yet with dark surmise. These red suburbs half hidden behind glowing plastic orange toothed jack o'lantern grins--we pray, Do not dispossess us, new republic, Mother, as we drive, driven from fire to fatuous fire to fatuous fire.
posted by jim
at 5:12 PM
Thursday, February 27, 2003
Title: "ON TOUR, III.8 : ahl tell you whut" Munching tortillas, a Texan grows stentorian, recalling the day he said to his ex-, 'Sit down and work it out. Take more lessons from Ma. I'm down in North Carolina. Went down to Tucson Arizona and sold that gawd damn truck. She knew gawd damn well. U.S. Marshals come down there and arrest me. I want to throw a fist through the backside of her forehead, bring her thimble ful of brains back with me. Sneaky gawd damn son of a bitch. I had some credit down there.' I took a good look. And when I got a good look, he looked no different from anybody else. # then i tried a shorter test poem, from my manic political rant "Dear Alice," which goes thusly-- Artifice of How many tent revivals can Billy Rose utterly pitch on the head of a pin? Unawares, we had trucked to Moab.
posted by Matt
at 3:33 AM
|
