Darja, Winter

My voice is cold asleep.
Down-to-your-bones naked
you stretch white legs and
darken eyes ever earlier.
The flowstone fields where
cars freeze to nothing harden
beyond what we are willing
to believe. I mound up heatless
bits of word and suck your
crystal fingers, tongue-stuck
and waiting for clear roads.
I shovel your hair from my
alley mouth; you roll over
sigh, and steal the covers.

When Flying Pigs Freeze Over

All evidence to the contrary, I have neither:

(a) died, nor
(b) dropped off the face of the planet

Happy Holidays, Everyone! The great beast of an office isn't through with me yet, but I braved tonsils and scaled the larynx just to pop in and say "hello."

Hello.

There will be many New Year's resolutions, up to and including:

#1 - Increasing my presence in social circles & decreasing my presence in business meetings
#2 - Reconnecting with all of my online friends
#3 - Making more artwork in general, be it drawings or paintings
#4 - Attending writers' meetings regularly (and getting Charmi's book back to her!)
#5 - Using more images on my blog, now that I've refreshed myself on the HTML syntax

And showing up at Chicory for readings again. This last time I skipped-out to attend my family's holiday function--totally selfish, right? ;)

Now, I'm off to Livejournal to spread holiday cheer and further evidence of my continuing warm-blooded existence. Fa-la-la-la-la!

Later.

Captain Sellout and the Film of Tomorrow

Last night, I forsook an opportunity to read poetry in favor of viewing a major Hollywood motion picture that took copious liberties with a hallmark of the English language. I'm now sitting alone in my office, waiting for the men in black coats with patches on the elbows to arrive and strip me of my English degree. But I'm still smiling.

Alright, perhaps the smile is a bit forced, but I really had a great time last night. My wife and I made a spontaneous decision to drive more than an hour to Portage, IN because it's the closest IMAX movie screen around here. I used to work in a movie theatre--I have tasted of that dark knowledge, the double-oil popcorn batch--and let me tell you, I haven't seen a place jumping this much since 1996. People streamed in and out of the doors, there was neon everywhere; it was so lively that I couldn't help thinking of our own, lonely local 16-screen cineplex and how amazingly dead it seemed by comparison. I pinched myself--yep, I was still in Indiana.

The great blazing light that drew me to the theatre and away from an intellectually fulfilling experience at the local coffeehouse was none other than Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf, in glorious 3-D on a screen whose height is measured in stories rather than feet.

The film was surprisingly true to the events of the epic poem, though they embellished it with a backstory which imparted, I believe, an "agreeable symmetry." All the major plot points and characters were there, from King Hrothgar's gregarious lot, to the great dragon which threatens Beowulf's people in his final days. But it was Grendel, first and foremost, that bought my attention and sealed my favor of the film. I won't try to describe it, but our introduction to the beast was chillingly perfect.

I keep seeing this in movie reviews, and I'll echo it here--if you get the chance, see it on an IMAX screen, in 3-D. It's worth it, at least if you're in love with movies. My wife and I have been, ever since we served time together in that box office, O so long ago.

Rare & Required

I want comments on this one. What are some recordings that, when you listen to them, you just can't get over how incredible they make you feel? I'm talking musical genius--to your ears, anyway. Not necessarily musical perfection, because I haven't a lick of technical knowledge to back that up. I mean those awe-inspiring recordings that you would play for anyone as proof of what music can be, how deeply it can reach. Or how about some obscure gem that you think might blow my mind, some underappreciated classic? Post about it, and here are a few of mine to start things off:

1. The Beatles' I Am The Walrus as performed by Oasis at the Glasgow Cathouse in June 1994, a recording which was included as a b-side on the Wonderwall cd single (the import version, anyway). It's just insane.

2. The song Some Devil by Dave Matthews, off the album of the same name. Minimalistic and haunted, just an incredible recording all around.

3. California Dreamin' by The Mamas & The Papas. No one could ever re-record that song and capture that atmosphere, it's just absolutely tight from start to finish.

4. Wild Is The Wind by Nina Simone. I first heard a portion of this on YouTube, playing over an innocuous scene taken from the film Scarlet Diva. I picked up the track at the first opportunity--her voice just floors me, and the song itself is fantastic.

5. Country Feedback by R.E.M. Another one of those songs where it just feels like so many factors collided so perfectly that they could never be repeated or improved upon. There's such heat and loneliness and aching in this track.

Directives To Self

In the spring--next time it comes around--go to the pond one bright midday and look for the swarms of new tadpoles, the ones that are like loose commas or spattered ink blots just beneath the surface of the water. You used to do this as a child, you remember the muck-smell and the impossibly gentle touch of twenty or thirty wriggling bodies in your palm, the cool water, the smells of life and death. When was the last time you did this? Feels like forever.

Then, it's been forever.

You also need to lay down in the grass before the snow gets here. Just fall onto the grass and let the earth clutch you as it spins. Feel the orbit, the almost unimaginable sweep of rotation, in your soul, the awesome faint rushing that is like being born across the snowfield on your father's back, or in your mother's arms, or pulled in the sled with your infant brother toward your grandparents' old home at twilight.

These are requirements. You cannot continue forward until you go this far back. At last you've reached the age where there are things you have not done in recent memory. The age where you find what you forgot you had.

A Graduation of Sorts

Today, I officially become the senior employee in my department. The last person who had been here when I started the occupation has now left for another job with another company. It was harder to watch her go than I expected, harder because nothing that happens here is supposed to really matter to me (my own rule, not theirs). But I liked this woman, a lot, not because she handled part of the load, but because she was such a good person. Nowadays everyone comes to me with their questions, and nowadays I seem to be full of answers. I was dragged kicking and screaming all the way, but after four years I have become an expert at my job--the English major who chronically skipped his classes has become a billing coordinator with over a hundred hours of unused vacation time.

Still, if you peel back the cover, or if you wait until nightfall downwind of the den, I promise, there is an artist who will emerge. He is always, always there.

Spiritual Volcanism

I exploded this weekend. My Adam's apple went sailing over the wall. Hair flew like ticker tape. A pair of lungs--I guess they were mine--inflated to the size of zepplins and burst. Ribs showered the football field, two states away. All of the smoke and ash that had been jacking up the pressure rose into the stratosphere, a dark column of confusion. My funny bone zinged across the parking lot, skidded to a halt in the shadow of a Tacoma's tire, spun there, spun and sputtered out like a firework flower. In the center of a charred circle of pavement my translucent ghost swayed and wavered, a little shell-shocked but so relieved. Now it's Monday; the flesh comes back like footage of detonated sandcastles played in reverse, and this time, I hope, there will only be little eruptions, or better yet, sound seismic doldrums prevailing beneath the sleepy desert.

Summer Is Dead

Finally, the weather shifts. I love October--only in this month do cold, gray skies and rain seem appropriate. Now I can feel justified driving to Martins and picking up a gallon of cider (Kercher's October Gold is the best). The enormous pumpkins on the front porch have stopped sweating. The trees behind my office are green and gold; not gold trees and green trees but both colors on the same branch, evenly mixed, evoking the clothes of a jester, something carnival anyway.

Rejoice. Autumn has risen. From here on out the days will grow garish and crisp, and then into the leaden dusks we'll slide...

The Rant

This is nothing new to anyone who has had even the remotest contact with the internet, but I'm moved this morning to proclaim just how much I loathe email forwards that supposedly contain outrageous or fascinating "facts". Almost invariably they're a mishmash of exaggerations, skewed statistics, or outright fabrications that have been circulating the internet for the past ten or fifteen years. The gall of these inflammatory lies is irritating... There is always a vague yet recognizable "source" named (CNBC, Oprah, or my personal favorite, "scientists") followed by some hokum editorial statement such as "You won't believe this but it's completely true!" Morons receive these emails and, lacking any natural defenses, quickly become infected, swelling with uninformed emotions until they burst and release duplicate copies of the virus to everyone in their address book, at which point the disease finds a few suckers more and circulates again. If you're unfortunate enough to be in the address books of more than one of the infected, you can have your inbox bombarded with the same ridiculousness two, three, four times a day. Perhaps even worse than the pseudoscience are the email forwards stuffed to capacity with hyper-religious content or patriotic sentiments so grossly intolerant and perverse they'd make Dubya blush (I've been involuntarily subjected to a number of email "stories" that end with a message which can be approximated as "learn how to speak English and love Jesus or else stay out of my country!").

Okay, that's my rant.

Translation

You, whose name means "honest child"
and I named for a god
of war

might enter peace
talks to
prove how apt your denomination

and how I live mine
down, leaf & stem twirled
between

harmless thumb & forefinger,
light steps
over holy ground,

wafers of diplomacy set on
my tongue
abashed to speak with you alone.

A One-Gin-&-Tonic Night

The workshopping session at The Bucket went well, I think--though I probably should learn to raise my hand and wait to be called upon. Then again, three cheers for juvenile enthusiasm, right? So, I took everyone's comments into consideration and revised my poem considerably tonight. I think I've punched it up a bit, but please feel free to comment (Note: The two If's in the later stanza are supposed to be indented, can't figure out how to make that work on the blog though):



Tempus Fugit


Is it safe only to look
at the now?

I have heard you expound
the evils of the backward glance,
how unwolflike
the clouds of futile If's.

Then, no clarion,
a horn on a pole in the distance
warned against the skies:
wait to unfold
my map,

do not number the eggs,
do not dwell on the wishbone
wondering if it should have been spared.

It leaves now
the only plot of relevance allowed.
If
I listen to that horn.
If
I don the pelt and fangs.

Softness, rather
lays me lengthwise into both
the lost days and the coming.

I look into them,
Time's limpid pools
and count koi
heedless of prayers and regrets, yet
weaving both together

and in my hand
a string,
a key,
a kite with an infinite tail.

On the Last Day of September

The backhoe rested its muddy treads on firm earth beside the soybean field. Days before it had gone back into the woods to dredge a fetid bog, and a dried cake of muck clotted the massive steel belts, turning them a pale brown. Resting there, driverless, its arm like the neck of a dinosaur rose up and crooked down to the bucket with its pneumatic mandible. I walked around it, confident as though it were dead, the little cabin locked tight and another padlock on the gas-cap. The weight... The weight was a soundless presence under the blue sky. The very silence of it exuded a form. It neither shifted nor creaked in the stiff wind but resolutely slept. And as I rang my knuckles against the bucket it did not ring back nor make any sound... only resolutely slept. And for that it seemed the machine was not meant to move at all, a statue only, something incapable of motion, a bone of the earth cracked and thrust up into the sunlight, or the fossil of the first mammoth redwood trunk that grew for a million years and now had weathered away every weak ring and fiber, leaving only this craggy relic of its most impassive heart. It was a stone arch in a desert valley. Immobile, and never meant to move. It shrugged off the wind and was. Beautiful and uncaring as the stone breast of a mountain. The treads could have been a single fused mass, rigid as bricks and mortar, welded vertebrae. I hoisted myself onto the machine's back for a moment, enjoying the vantage of the rippling soy--bronze, but nothing like a statue--but I must also have felt the remnant ghosts of violent mechanical life remembered in the metal, for I suddenly grew disquieted and climbed reverently back down.

We made this beast, it works for us. But in the snarl of armored hoses and the bucket's toothy maw lies the harsh truth. This was a creature of the Inanimate, made to rend and demolish without pain or regret, to do the work of fifty heartless men. Or fifty with a purpose. Or one building a world. Like most awesome, inhuman beings it was only safe in its dormancy--awake and roaring it would return to existence a dangerous toy. Later that evening a lone man with a flatbed trailer arrived to take the backhoe away. We all stood in the driveway, safely distant, watching it rumble toward its perch, where it teetered briefly on the trailer before folding itself once more into sleep, a dragon gone to roost. And when the tiny mammal crawled from its head the others clapped their favor for him, filling the dusk with transient sounds, constructed by fragile, fluttering hands.

Buying Seersucker

My wife, my brother-in-law, and I were at the mall over the weekend, and ran across a rack of seersucker suit coats. They were that sort of white-and-almost-black-stripe pattern, with the stripes so numerous and narrow that it creates a dizzying optical illusion. Having not moved all summer, they were priced to vanish at approximately $7 each (the original price tag, if it is to be believed, reads $140).

Well... it's not something I would normally wear, unless I were intent upon being mistaken for Don Johnson. However, it did seem just right for a costume piece--I've decided that to emcee my annual scavenger hunt* I should don ye olde garb of a cheesey gameshow host, complete with mini-microphone and helmet hair. Let's make a deal, you know?

So I returned to the department store this evening, selected from the five remaining jackets one that fit me (approximately), making sure to share with the clerk that I would not be wearing this to the club, no siree, this was for a costume. A costume, you got that? However, when the clerk rang up this little beauty we discovered that it was not on sale for about $7.

It had been placed on "ludicrous clearance" (my term, not theirs) for the laughter-inducing grand total of $2.57! And because the planets had aligned just-so, I happened to have $3 cash in my wallet.

I am now the owner of one loud seersucker jacket, and I'm sorely tempted to go back and pick up the others for my best friends, for no other reason than to see how far this joke can go.


*Sorry, the scavenger hunt is just for family and those few people to whom I've sworn a blood-oath.

Hip to the Bean

I have become a coffee drinker. There was no clear line that I crossed, no seductive espresso experience in an alleyway with a lighter and a silver spoon. It started with a cup here, a cup there, a little social drinking. At family gatherings when the question was asked "Does anybody want coffee?" I suddenly found myself with something to say. Peer pressure, obviously. Then I began working in an office, one that provided coffee to its employees in the breakroom, free of charge, and some mornings I just needed a warm drink with a little jolt of caffeine. Now, it's merely the jolt of caffeine I'm after (though not to be unfair to the coffee, the flavor and warmth are certainly attractive features, however it takes two sugars and a lot of cream to make it palatable--a practice my father would shake his head at, having admonished me in my youth that I should "learn to drink it black"). Now I think of Harvey Keitel's suave and indelible character from Pulp Fiction, who could take his coffee with "lots of cream, lots of sugar" and no one would dare question his mettle.

Note to all--the Chicory Cafe does a sinfully delicious cafe mocha. It's like cheating, hardly coffee at all...

Of Tattoos and Cryptozoologists

My voice cracked three times tonight as I interjected my meager commentary among the conversations of the writer's guild. Maybe they didn't notice--I certainly didn't say aloud, "bah! I sound like a thirteen-year-old!" Of course, Charmi is probably reading this now, smirking a much-deserved smirk. They were all wonderful people to meet and I'm glad I decided to attend. At their urging I'm reprinting, here, some of the poetry I brought with me to the meeting. For the non-poetry-enthusiasts reading this (you know who you are, my friends) I promise this will not become "verse central" as my Livejournal (which I'm almost certain you don't visit) has become. No, indeed, I intend to put as much prose here as I can squeeze out of my thick skull. In the meantime...


Notes From The Hospital Room

I.

We are running in new circles
Alien to the spirals and circuits of the last century
Which still keep time for us
Yet familiar as Shakespeare, that old horse
Standing by to draw the fire engine
Should we all catch Hell.

II.

A coin is a coin is a coin
Flipping, once minted and worn through passage is
No less worth the exchange
No longer bitten as proof
So we take in trade these furlongs
These fathoms and miles in the patterned
Grain of body hair, the folds of skin
And brain
Folding and unfolding
A time into a time, into now
Into the moment I understand everything
Has come before, and I am circulated.

III.

The spell is the greatest human invention
Its breaking our grip on the inevitable
But when it takes us the end does not matter
We have left our astounding
Ripples in the polished stone.
In a spell I pour out a torrent of words
And when it breaks, a torrent of words
Soaks the hems of the women's skirts
As they come and go.



[Before you know it]

Before you know it
You have lost the luxury of trying
Something new
Without breaking the whole
Spine supporting everything you count
As your life
And each fresh unbroken face
Peeks and smiles at you from the tapestry
Robing the doorway
You cannot pass
The complex embroidery of truce
Beyond which glimpsed
Young beauty guides a garment down
The concourse of the perfect calf
And tucks something behind one ear
Or beckons, perhaps.

This Circus

Many walk the tightrope, and hope there hides a net somewhere,
miles below, resting under the fog. Others expect nothing more
than an end, and walk without care for the crash.

Yet both of these acrobats, in the absence of balance,
in the face of the fall, find their first instinct
is to clutch at the rope. They reach, unthinking.

That tells me something
about the nature of existence. Our bodies know:
It is worth the stay.
The end of the show will always be there another day.

New Casablanca

Time passes because we need it to pass. If any one of us could be content to remain exactly and perfectly the same forever, Time would stop like a lake freezing overnight. No human being, even the most sedentary among us, remains precisely identical to who they are. We are ourselves for years, then one day our eyes open again, and we see that it was an illusion--who we are stands miles away holding up one last signal light, as if waiting for a plane to land. And the moment we realize this--that who we are now resides like a statue on the horizon--we begin to call it Who We Were and resist the urge to trek back. This is difficult, because the statues of our past gain mass with every passing second, and the gravity they exert cannot be ignored; you would sooner slip away from Jupiter's bed at dawn. High above, winking in the cold, dark morning sky, serene planes with warmly-lit cabins dangle the possible tomorrows within reach.

Accomplishment

We moved Katie into her new apartment--well, most of the way. There was a valiant struggle with a television, but we, as intelligent primates, used our abstract imaginations and conquered the force of gravity. I saw many strange things today... an early 20th century school building turned into a dentist office that reeked of the 1970's... a pink stuffed centipede, at least six feet long... a house of evil dolls and one quite amiable collie. Earlier in the day I had called upon the power of Tetris to pack a Pontiac full of boxes, no two of which matched. To maintain our strength we drank water purified by reverse osmosis and shared Twix cookie bars. One of us fell early (the plague, I'm afraid) but she was with us in spirit. By nightfall the apartment was in beautiful disarray, stuffed with antiques and possibly 3 million spiders biding their time in the bottoms of boxes. That, however, is a challenge for another day... the point is, independence has been declared, and standing between her and reclamation by the Motherland is one massively cumbersome television.

Transcendence

Every time I step into an elevator, I think of chance. If it's a very short elevator, like the one I have at work that goes between the upstairs and the downstairs, I wonder what I would get away with should it break. A broken ankle, a concussion maybe? This does not stop me from using elevators. I am recklessly willing to climb into them, although today when I thought about going to the Schurz Library, I thought: I will take the stairs. The climb will be good for me, and I won't have that nagging, compulsory imagination. Then I arrived, after work, and climbed into the elevator anyway. The doors whisked closed and I could hear its creakiness--no more or less creaky than usual, or than any other elevator's creakiness. Still, I thought of the four stories below me, and of velocity, and how my feet might rise up in the freefall, and that the sudden electric sensation in the pit of my stomach would take my breath and my voice away. The choice of complaining about my fate would be taken away--whether I wanted to or not, I would plummet and float like a dandelion fluff, silently within the little cabin of the elevator, then crumple onto the floor like a paper cup. But then again, maybe four stories is not enough time to transform into something weightless.

As the elevator came to a stop I was finishing these thoughts, and then it gave that one final dip that tells you you've arrived; but of course, I was not expecting this, and as my stomach fell out from under me, for that briefest instant, I faced the chance head-on.

At the end of this trip was the fifth floor, and on that floor were poems and drawings by Naoko Fujimoto, who I became aware of via the open mic nights. She had placed them in second-hand frames, garage-sale frames (or, so they seemed--perhaps they were family heirlooms, though). The drawings were very colorful with delicate black lines forming the main images. Some of the images went with the poems, which were on plain white paper and pressed between two sheets of glass in a frame. Every frame hung on a long, long thin wire that was hooked around skinny piping that traveled the upper part of the wall. From a distance it looked as though some very strange and sensitive spider had gone around capturing artwork in its web.

I do not say this lightly when I say: Naoko's work is pure brilliance. She will be published someday, it's only a matter of time. Reading and viewing her work tonight, I was moved. When I left (taking the stairs, enjoying each solid step) something was changed in me, a pebble tossed into a pond. By tomorrow morning the water will be still again, but the pebble will remain there, under the surface, changing how light enters and exits me. I did not want to leave, really, but the library was closing.

Now I have to go tend to the dog, who is barking a tantrum in the backyard. C'est la vie.

Eh Hee

This might be the first real taste of autumn around here. As I crested the Eddy Street bridge the sky presented an unusually even distribution of cloud strata, like lines on a notebook page. It's cool out there, and going to be cooler tomorrow while we're helping Katie move into her new apartment (Viva la revolutione!). Summer's not gone yet; it never goes quietly. There will be another flare or two before we reach autumn proper.

I was going to title this post "Office Boy" and give the rundown on my cubist existence, but instead, a song got stuck in my head. Nevertheless, office life continues grinding onward, a blur of numbers and deadlines and Excel spreadsheets expanding through my day. And anyway, how could I call it "Office Boy" when I'm closing down on birthday número veintinueve?

Am I always going to default to feeling like a kid inside? Am I going to be Robin Williams? I don't know if I like that...

So, my company brought in a masseuse the other day. They're funny like that. Yes, I know, I am fabulously lucky to be employed there--but I digress. It was a chair massage, and as I'm chatting with the masseuse something in my memory is firing off little flashes of recognition. Following a hunch I quizzed my mother later in the day, and it turns out that the masseuse was actually someone who used to babysit me when I was just a small child. (Had I been a large child, I'm sure that wouldn't have made any difference.) The point is, for having all the trappings of a "city", I am living in a town, and am reminded of it regularly. Not really a criticism, though. I enjoy the security of living someplace that is relatively unimportant and (better yet) non-strategic to the big, dangerous minds of the world.

Now if only we weren't downwind of Chicago...

Beginning

The metaphoric image of a panther in the snow is one given to me, not one I invented. I did, however, write a poem around it, and at the outset of this new blog I believe it is fitting to print that here.


Panther

Black bellies of bare branches
Snake through the silent forest
Under hay bales and hillocks of pure
White snow.
The air sharpens
The honey-lemon cough drop
Down my white throat.
Dusk stalks from the wood.
A form glides onto my path
Like ink pooling in the eye.
A great cat traces
Ice-laden lines of old bamboo
Looking for seclusion.
High China, winter.
Everything out of place:
The black panther,
The snow,
My eye.