11: Maricela, Cruz, and a conversation about eyes

May 31, 2011 – 8:42 am

it is strange to me
she said
that they always
look at our eyes

the cat
the dog
how they know
you have them
she said

even ants
he said
when they stop where
they’re going
where ever it is
and you know
they understand
you have eyes

and that’s where they
find you
she said

even the spider
he said
the spider stands perfect
in dark luminous posture
and looks you
in the eyes

she said
it’s some sort of law
that even as you cross the river
a hippo will watch your eyes
with her eyes
she knows were to look

he said
and the tiger
before he takes your head
home with him
he will take your eyes first
with his eyes

she said
so if
if hypothetically
we had hands and fingers
where our eyes
happen to be
we would all
be holding hands
at some time in the day
on our encounters
for even the bear
the bear who runs
from the yard
when startled
is seized by your eyes
yes he said
the hippo and the tiger and the spider and the bear
image it: all of them
now with long arms
and hands and fingers and wrists extended
from their eye sockets all
holding hands at some time of the day
meeting by chance or designación
in our common spaces
worldswide
at moments hands locking
(or at least waving or pointing)
where our eyes once were
a new law on the river
and in the forest
and the outside table
where spiders are known
to offer their eyes to you
and watch you
she said

even viruses
he said
even viruses
she said
and stars
he said
and stars

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10: eating raisins outside Panama City

May 30, 2011 – 10:18 am

if I eat another raisin I’ll burst
as the clouds rolled in slowly
to the east of Panama City
electric blueberries bursting on the fringes
and what we took for booms
might have been house walls
crumbling around the perfectly good plumbing

it was silly to watch her eat raisins
and say things like if I eat another raisin
I think I’ll bust open and show you true human
honesty, chew them to a mash as the sun
shone through cloudslash in the sky
under which tree after tree leaned,
groaned and crashed into a spray
of feathers, hornets, and lastyear’s leafandloam
on a narrow oldcut way where we watched
the rain stop and the bees make ovals
above the heliconia–known to eat children
and ambulate when no one’s looking–
silly because my pants were wet
and I kept picturing a room where
all the thumbs were stored til needed

if I eat another raisin I think I’ll burst
and bring us the news of tornadoes
in the north and images of people going
by on the hoods of cars, waving, holding
out their shoes as proof of a weary past
and a promising future.  We listened
(all kinds of things come to you outside Panama City)
and it all seemed so far away as more
thunder came, thunder from the east
thunder from the west and when it met
above us in silver collision and shattered
we leapt for safety into an old crater
where the rock from some ancient sky
protruded from the earth like a boxer’s knuckle
and we huddled there and waited and she said
if I eat another raisin I think I’ll burst

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9: little americas

May 29, 2011 – 9:54 am

everywhere they built little americas because
as Anne said we don’t like much else

the Texan knew that to know food the eater must divide the plate into its parts.  It’s hard work.  On one side of the plate he piled the noodles and from this start point the plate became a world, an experiment.  Here the worms.  There the carrots.  Ants, still living but groggy, to the north. Spider legs piled like beard snip to the south.  Until it was all divided into a common federation of tastes.  The Texan then to pursue ate a portion of each (using the tips of his fingers) individual part that had once been the whole, including the minerals (for this he used the wet end of his pinky finger).  Spider legs and the toasty feel of smoke from the grill; the eyeball that carried with it a creamy sensation of all those times he|she|it had looked down and swallowing became like blinking against a dust storm; the noodles were like the time Grandmother had stolen a hug and moments later the Texan drew a long gray hair out from a gap in his molars; and what he’d taken for the carrot he quickly understood as daikon the taste of which was like the sound of clipper bite into thicker thumbnails.

the story Anne told. Her friend Jeanette asked well what happen to the Texan the Texan who took little Americas with him in a bottle and a bag and Anne said the Texan ordered another plate and this time when it came as it was served (and meant) he ate because for him at that moment every country on the planet tasted like the smell of approaching rain

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8. the seagull

May 28, 2011 – 9:04 am

it had to be
illusion
something, as they say,
attributable
to the weirding weather
Texas drought
or some asofyettobe-calculated
algorithm of formal space

a discoloration, a warp
of natural fabrics,
nitrogen and oxygen
Aprilfooling in May

but in a window square
of gray Saturday sky
a crack or hole emerged
opened wider and wider
with a quiet of suppressed sleep
into the shape of a seagull

or

they said no we see nothing
no rain in the sky, no birds in the sky,
no grazing gazelle or elephant in the sky
but I persisted that in this and only in this
window does she appear every morning
a lone seagull only in this window
hundred of miles from any sea

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7: how heavy am I, I ask

May 27, 2011 – 8:54 am

birds and water are drawn from lines
say from a lookout in the desert
where the smoke still can be seen
rising, see it as lines

you can dig for fish bones in the sand
and find them fully dressed and sharp
hot as the bottom of a furnace

and wonder where it should follow for sequence

what I wanted was a little wisdom, carrying
images of mountains between my ears
and the dactyls of Homer, those having
to do with teeth, scales, sea bottoms, and the insides of bags

the outlines of ponds I can still see in that house
up the street where a friend would show us
a bullfrog, the gold fish, some strange plant
that reminded me even then of the right-most
panel of Bosch’s Garden that might not seem all
so delightful at all but still I wanted to reach
in and touch the smooth leaves, the red flower,
the granite water that reflected our interested heads
because all these things would be something new
to remember more so, something more, tangible
sensations above what I might read between the lines
where the artifacts we carry burn in words
a broken bone no matter healing is always broken
and reveal themselves so that what we took for two eyes
one day might exact as an elephant or a sword
or a shattered poem drawn onto clay or divisioned
into church panels.  I’ve never understood
what might be needed really at a locked door
or what I might do with a little piece of bullfrog’s
stomach spooned onto the back of my tongue

what to do then with those lines of birds
and those images of ponds smoking on the hot sand
where Hamlet is always dead and dying

how heavy am I, I ask,
and answer at any given moment:
a frog’s eye, a pond, and flowers falling red from the sky

is how heavy I can be

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6: a moment in the life of Paznan and Gisela

May 26, 2011 – 8:08 am

in the court below the blackwings turned to paper
and then she opened her eyes and saw that it was true

Paznan flicked an orange peel and told her
it would be so and so it was but not really,
an image after blinkingfast and after being spacked
in the head with the broadside of a sword, his, yes

a thousand years tomorrow, he said, they’ll
recall you naked on the prow of a ship
with your tits all brown and chiselchamfered

Gisela made herself into a spar, a fir, the wall
blocking all or everything that might be called East,
etched herself into the shape of spiderweb, the kind
groovewoven like the circling years of a decapped tree
round her father’s, the king’s, brooding eye
made herself fast against the breeze and the eyes
Poznan cast to her, his little hard frame, an empty bird cage

and father will come, she said, the king, she said
whose eye is a waiting spider
and father will come, she said, the king, he said
a hungry spider waiting

and the feathers will turn red in your eyes
he said, and she closed her eyes to see it

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5: it . . . tears pleasantly at my skin

May 25, 2011 – 3:58 pm

until the storm hit and our hands parted
remembering how I used to think about the boy
who posted his Ciudad Juarez sister nearby the car

saying “five dollars American”

and we thought about it and wondered if the boy
would watch

now it’s something quaint
in the hard wind as a break of siding
came twirling at us like a cutting blade
and we felt the wind burst breastwise
and lift us higher

the last thing I heard was

“We wanted to fly, fly once
birdwise, afeather, the rain in our ears and eyes
can you feel the sun on your back?”

the last thing I heard him say
and underneath that stupid gray monster
went on sweeping up the building windows,
flipping through the boring photographs everyone takes,
grasping at the fingers that learned
only yesterday how to hold a ball
or another person’s hand

and me blowing above it all
wondering where I might fall

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4: those often chance meetings we have

May 24, 2011 – 8:34 am

I knew a man who wore the
little and big veins, his arteries
too on the outside of the skin

spanish he was but spoke Chinese
to the shop people, teachers, and politicians,
the big politicos who we knew disposed
of people, leaving them little more
than blackening feculence under dumpsters
and the larger turtles stoning under
the sun gray in the numerous zoos

little Jimmy once came home with an eye
in his pocket and everyone knew
what all that was about

The man with the veins taught us about sensitivity
and rubber, softness and elasticity,
slickness and snakes,
he schooled us on the art of nails and knowing
what to do when they sprung from the walls
of schools, churches, and animal pens

he’d sit and say, poke this one,
and I’d poke then step back and say
I have one of those, but inside you,
he’d say, yes, and they never really
knew the waystations of the blood,
and I’m yet more proof

does it hurt to sit down? I said

when he spoke English the popliteal
would make like a frog blobbing for mates
at night and the Spaniard would lean in, turn his lips
into an ant hole, point to the subclav and say, Watch
out for sharp rocks with one eye squarer than the other

little Jimmy said, Why don’t they fall off
Why don’t they explode
Why doesn’t someone do something
my father said.  He has strange ideas

he was followed by a nurse who bore a white
bowl, a candle, a recorder to record the musings
and the pressure of plasma inside the biggest tubes
which surprised us with their size and Amazonian ferocity

at night under the lamps he looked lumpish,
woolen, fustian, dancing
under the congregating moths, and months
after his appearance, after much talk over wine and beer
in the camps and cafes, he disappeared then reappeared
on the swollen southern coast, like a great apocalypse
of seaweed and jellyfish, dragged in strings and heaps
by the sea birds and underbitten by pearl-eyed fish

we never saw the nurse again
and all the politicians denied it
everyone as the sun went down
watched the man give himself up to the tide
and sink into the night

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3: traditional haiku in binary

May 23, 2011 – 8:11 am

in pearlwhite blossoms
I saw a spider eye and
the universe turned

red

suns for taking
hang low from hillside trees, reach-
ing, I take your hand

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2: the poetry teacher

May 22, 2011 – 10:37 am

The poetry teacher told us
to make our poems modern
so to use words like radioactive
and sex (as every modern knew about this)
and chrome and catastrophe
and computer and rising water line

we asked him why chrome and not
steel and he told us that we should never
take things that didn’t belong to us
we should make new things
images no reader had ever seen before
like an elephant with three legs and a red hat
but that wasn’t really a red hat but a hamster
but that really wasn’t a hamster but a red hat
or a germ that ended up running things
or a war where everyone forgot their knives
and so instead tried to tear each other apart
with whatever they had in their pockets
which was just lint though someone
had remembered a deck of cards so he
proceeded to threaten the enemy with his queens
and jacks and maybe the sevens
everyone laughed at his sevens and his queens

yes, the poetry teacher said, make poems
no one’s ever read before or the creative spirit
will perish or that elephant with that hamster
(which is really a red hat) will fall into a hole
and drown, but then the poetry teacher
paused.  He looked at the lights.
He looked at the windows.  He looked at us.
He said, “Have I been asleep all this time?”
We said, “We swear it’s not a hamster.”

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1: the end of the world and the beginning of everything else

May 21, 2011 – 9:30 am

the end of the world and the beginning of everything else

when Cruz opened the door he saw
a man holding a flower in a little white
cup, and Cruz asked him who and what are you
and the small skeletoned man with the flower
in his cup said he couldn’t remember his name
and that this must mean the end of the world

Cruz’s girlfriend Maricela asked about, called others,
while moving her fingers across the necks
of neighborhood cats with their tails like questions
and black thorns in their mouths, asking
on the phone about visitors and yes
they said–Father in Texas, Sue in Japan,
Morrell in Mexico, and Erasmus in Spain–
all told of the visitor who had no recollection

of his name but held a white cup and a pink flower
and stood at the door as if he’d just been shouldered
there, ordered to ring the bell, while the others fled
–and the time, the time Cruz wanted to know
and Maricela said they said at the same time
you opened the door and asked him who he was
and got nothing in return but an open mouth
and a flower in a white cup and then you
ordered him away because his accounting reminded
you of a broken lamp and a flower doomed to wither

how is it possible, Cruz asked, possible
that this could happen? It’s impossible for a man
to be in all those places at the same time
with a dead flower in a cup and possessing an account
of himself that would fool no one; just as impossible
as earthquakes on the moon or thanksgivings on Mars

and so, Cruz said, it must mean the end of the world
and the beginning of everything else and that periodically
–Maricela watched him, waited for him to end the thought–
that periodically the fabric of the world folds, many folds
meeting at random points, and this, he said, is how images
are made and change things forever, such as the image of a man
with a flower and a cup and a mouthfull of namelessness
walking away into a bluing afternoon nameless

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My Project for 100 Days 2011

May 11, 2011 – 9:50 pm

I’m looking forward to this summer’s 100 Days writing, reading, view et cetera. You can find info about the project here. Here’s the new description

The 2011 100 Days Projects is going to play things somewhat looser this summer than in the past. What do we mean by this: 2008 saw a collaboration between Carianne Garside, who led with drawings, and Steve Ersinghaus, who based his poems on her art; 2009 saw Steve Ersinghaus lead off with a story a day; 2010 saw John Timmons lead with a film a day, and many of the artists followed his films, drawing from it as a means of inspiration. This year, rather than this sort of follow-the-leader framework, we’d like to encourage all of our participants to range between the participants for theme, motif, or other inspirational method. For example, this summer Steve Ersinghaus will be writing as poem a day. Other 100 Days participants might want to draw an image from one of his poems or follow him for a few days. Ersinghaus might, on the other hand, write poems inspired by photographers or painters or even fiction writers or other poets.

In doing so, it might be fun for people to use weblog tags, “like” buttons, links, and social media technologies, such as Twitter, to acknowledge, integrate, blend and synthesize numerous peoples’ works. Maybe you’ll come to enjoy a particular artist or set of other creators and continue to develop their themes in your own work.

In this way, we might be able to trace a map of links between our various weblogs, resulting in a graphical sum total of 100 Days activity.

Those who want to participate should provide their feed link to the email address in the next section and then watch for activity on May 21, the day things start.

But now to the issue. I’d like to range through things that people do after a couple of days. I’m going to start by writing a poem a day for a few days and see how things shake out. I’m also going to play with tagging and links. I spoke with many of my writing students about the project and they seem pumped. In many ways, 100 Days is about the creative process, which I define as a way of solving problems. In my own writing, I like to play with images and the imagination. I like to ask a question: what can I imagine and put into words. It’s pretty simple. Using the techniques I’ve studied, can I work with the haiku form and its variants, can I follow the Chinese masters and make things like they did? Or things like them. Can I juice an idea out and follow it, writing a passable poem that makes something in an economical way.

My advice to students, if they’re fiction writers, for example, is to read a lot, but to read those kinds of things that might prove useful for digging for ideas swiftly. Things that will teach a lot within the time span of 100 Days.

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100 Days 2011

May 5, 2011 – 9:55 pm

John, Carianne, and I are currently thinking about the 100 Days 2011 kickoff. Those people interested will learn lots in the next few days, as things will be finalized by Monday, May 10th. The emphasis this summer will be on collaboration rather than on “following” any particular artist. Look forward to a message in the morning as we prep the systems.

One thing’s clear. I’l be doing 100 poems this summer.

To complete a circle.

Much is cooking.

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100: How Everything Ended

August 29, 2010 – 11:45 am

How might everything end? What would you do if you came to the end of everything, which is the title of a fiction written by a good friend of mine several years ago? In this fiction, the writer tried to describe the end of everything. He asked people: “Describe the end of everything. What do you think I should put there?”

“Isn’t that the point?” Ruiz responded. “That the end of everything is impossible to describe because there’s nothing there.”

Erasmus disagreed. “There’s got to be something there. Besides, there’s never an end of everything. Nothing can ever end entirely,” about which Marisela said, “That’s pure speculation, an infection of the Platonic, something of the seeds of religion wherein infinity is imagined by the thinker as the godhead and thus inventing a form of dangerous reality.”

Cruz took over then, ripping the blank sheets of paper out the writer’s hands (and his pencil, which was still sharp) and he etched a landscape. Over there (no need for a verb here as the brain fills it in) mountains, to the left he drew a (here the verb is a convenience) cloud, and in the center he drew an edge. “This is what I see when I think of the end of things,” and he gave the paper to the writer and asked his opinion of the drawing.

“I’ve been trying for the last one hundred days to remove unimportant information from my writings. I call them fictions” (remember, this was many years ago, when such a descriptor was still in fashion) “because I didn’t want to be encumbered by story conventions.”

The other characters looked at the writer. They waited but he didn’t know what they were waiting for. He filled in the silence with conversation: “In addition, in coming upon the work of the filmmaker and the poets, story writers, and other image makers, another goal was to promote disruption. For example, the viewer might watch the film and after reading my fiction, which was inspired by the film, they would go back to the film and see elephants where before there were no elephants but other things, other objects, one after the next. Yes, this was the challenge: to permanently alter the context of the original.

“The third goal was to examine the nature of spontaneous creativity, its limits, its influence and its definition (this fiction, for example, is about definition, which will soon be made plain). In the context of these 100 fictions, spontaneity is not necessarily defined as guess work, that is, guessing about the object. It can be said that the novice writer (for some reason they want to be a writer. In most cases, they simply want to play the role of writer) makes several errors in their thinking about craft. The first and most significant error (the second error is that they don’t eat well) is that they don’t seek out and study their tradition. They don’t read. Reading the tradition means amassing memory on the characters that writers in the past and in the contemporary have invented and explored and are inventing and exploring. Without this knowledge, the writer is merely guessing about the craft and might not know what to do when a character opens a box and finds a mole asleep in the tissue paper. You, for example, Marisela, are a patchwork of an enormous store of characters, most notably from the oeuvre of Garcia Marquez and Alejo Carpentier. Without them you would not exist. Knowing what I think I know, I can draw from my teachers and their teachings and swiftly, writing a fiction in less time that it takes to make beans: my aim is not to be like Marquez or Carpentier or Ovid but to explore you, Maricela, where ever you lead. The list, however, is long, for on top of the characters we also have the types, the numerous types: the romance, the science fiction, the back-country tale, the street myth which is principally an oral form, remembered from those old days when we sat on the sidewalk at night and spoke about “the witch and the siren” or La Llorona.

Maricela blinked her eyes. She lay her hand on Cruz, who might have been asleep or thinking about bears (which is another story). “Yes, the disruption,” the writer continued, “the invention, and the spontaneous. And ultimately the fiction, which is an important form and has nothing to do with reality. You hear this: ‘get real.’ ‘We must contain our fantasies.’ You hear this ‘I’m honest. Vote for me.’ No, it’s significant not to compare fiction with reality as reality is itself an invention (and it’s also important that we prevent people who abuse the fiction to abuse the fiction and pretend that they are providing us a gold brick). All political seasons prove this essential fact: if a reader believes the ‘fact’ then this fact becomes ‘real,’ a matter of belief, and this ‘reality’ is conflated to ‘faith.’ Fiction is the enemy of faith. Yes, the fiction explores a premise, often stated, often not. The exploration may depend on character, which depends upon other, unwritten characters and types. Yes, it’s been fun, it’s been instructive, it’s been ‘real,’ and I thank the filmmaker, the writers, the painters, and the photographers, as we’ve been sneaking behind each others’ backs and subtly changing their works, breaking them open, converting them, altering their shape, removing and adding, everyone to his or her own thinking and goals and techniques, like thieves who enter a house and move the owner’s belongings around so that when they reenter, the owners ask if they have entered the correct place, a place they so longed for (which is a metophor). But I’ll leave those people to their wondering as I know they will find their way out and if not then they will survive nonetheless.”

The writer stopped speaking and true to form Maricela and Ruiz sat up straight and said together, “Yes, we can imagine the end of everything. It’s simple: we simply redefine ‘everything’ as, say, everything is: everything that was produced in the last 100 days, everything inside that 100 days is the ‘everything’ we mean and nothing we do the day after shall be included in that 100 days. It’s binary, so binary. And infinite.”

“It’s perfect,” said Cruz. “Better still is we won’t have to draw it as it’s already been drawn.”

Erasmus, however, ever impractical, merely shook his head. Ruiz, animated and sufficient for the moment, grabbed his arm and drew him away, followed by the others, all of them, enclosed, everything redefined. The writer watched after them. He heard doors close. He heard what might have been the snapping of a director’s slate. Then nothing but the silence of their hasty withdrawal. And an openness, the openness of everything ending.

And that’s how everything ended.

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099: The Interview

August 28, 2010 – 10:19 am

In these times of recession, you know how tough things can get. One day you’re project manager. The Firm for which you’ve worked several years is an inspiration and clever. Then one day you find yourself slicing a pea into sections with the sharpest knife you have and eating each sliver as the rain falls, bleary with fatigue.

I’d stood outside the Firm’s front door with my new hat, erased. My last act was to take that hat and lay it on the sidewalk and walk home.

So when I read about the opening, I immediately applied. A woman called soon after. We set the interview for next day at ten o’clock, in a townhouse in that area of the city I new least.

In these times of recession, everything is coded. Even familiar things take on new life. The price of gas becomes a dragon and so after a fill up, you say, “I was made scrumptious by a dragon.” And shoes, shoes become sails, and so you say, “The wind has eloped.”

The interview was conducted by a man and a young woman. The man offered me a glass of water but he didn’t say, “Before we begin, would you like a glass of water?” No, he said, “I once wrote a poem that began: ‘The icicles are in full bloom.'”

I’m a fast learner, quicker than most. Most people wouldn’t know what to do or what to say. I, on the other hand, responded, “I forgot my hat,” proving my potential value from the start, and the man smiled and handed me a glass of water.

He led me into an adjoining room and I met a young woman, his business partner, who wore glasses. These glasses had meaning. I caught on immediately. I said, after a brief greeting, “The miners are indeed trapped and will soon be freed.”

The man sat down. The young woman sat down. I sat down. I knew exactly what these motions were about, what they signified, how they should be interpreted, this dialogue of human motion.

The interview proceeded. We spoke for hours. Together, we saw things through signified hangings and other forms of lacework. I was asked about darkrooms (the old spaces of photographers) which took me to my time in Brazil, New Hampshire, and Chihuahua, and soon the man said, “Yes, the inquisitor” and I responded, “Yes, and in old boots” and we laughed, knowing exactly why and how long to do it without being rude.

We eventually spoke about “what is there.” I found this a perfectly reasonable topic in this world of recession, dishonesty, and discomfort. We didn’t speak about “what wasn’t there.” Which I found perfectly reasonable, also, as in this world of recession the press, the government, and the educators had already perfected their inventions under that rubric. We eventually had dialogue about motility, roaming across fields where the bees go from flower to flower, and randomness, the definition of which I, the young woman in her glasses, and the man (who also wore glasses, but different glasses than the young woman, which could only mean one thing) we held in common: “Yes,” the young woman said, “I also remember the elephants.”

The man had a tendency to bring back the image of ice, which I understood to mean, and was correct, of course, to take as a sign, a means to develop an image around vision and how darkness obstructs it. Heat, also, as ice can just as easily render human skin blue. The young woman, on the other hand, had the good sense to focus her attentions on the virtual, the ‘almost,’ and the precise surface.

Yes, we talked about light, which brought us back to the image of sand and how windows are made (to see through or out of). And then it all came to an end. The man abruptly stopped speaking. The young woman concluded with a statement that any other interviewee would have have found obscure or abstract or dumbfounding. I, on the other hand, who had seen the Firm close down shortly after they’d let me go, I who had witnessed the trains stop running and the clocks tick to ticklessness, understood exactly what she meant and that, next day, rain or shine, I should return, with a hat or without a hat, young or old, religion or no religion, and get back to the job of making things.

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