I was sick of being myself so I went to the museum to soak up the old masters. The ceilings were high, the light diffuse and the temperature-test machines were ticking. There was a wonderful Ernst Ludwig Kirchner I wanted to get close to, one of his Fränzi paintings. The problem was the digital cameras. It’s not like the days where someone was taking a picture and you’d politely wait until they got the shot before passing in front of their lens. No. Now everyone is taking a picture of everything. And people are not just doing goofy imitations of sculptures, they’re also taking 12 photos of their girlfriend next to Fränzi. Folks, I don't have time for all this acquisitive art-loving. In trying to save my soul by staying out of everyone’s schlock photo, by the time I went home I was more myself than ever before. So much for that.
The candle began as a simple tool, just wick and molded wax, but soon morphed into the ultimate object of contemplation. Long after the electric light and back-up generator, the candle was at work with new purpose. People saw themselves in the flame, the even burn that quickly turned to thrash and panic, the wax relinquishing its form, the good posture collapsing, sloughing off and going cold. Up sprouted candle shops, beeswax farmers, candle match makers, votives, floaters, tea lights, candelabras and menorahs. There were candles for birthdays and candles for the dead. There were candle-making kits for kids, candlelight dinners and Candlelight Drive in Glastonbury, CT. Everyone knows the fascination of fire, but it was more than that. It was a body, the supposedly sole abode, taking itself apart, a controlled experiment in transformation, self-contained, solid to liquid, and back again.
Our Siberian aupair’s year is up. It doesn’t matter: we tied him up in the attic and are keeping him as a slave. Just kidding. He’s bigger than all of us put together. Good old Dmitry. He’s still living with us, doing the Tuesday baked noodle dinner, dog-walking and channel-surfing while looking for a job that will help him avoid the suicidal Russian army. The first thing Dima needs is some money. So what’s the first thing he does? He signs up for exclusive membership at the local fitness club. 70 euros a month. No exit. He tried to explain that he has no income and his visa status is shaky so that free 2-month membership trial shouldn’t have been automatically extended. They didn’t care, just showed him his signature on the contract. I wonder if mandatory fitness club membership is a legitimate reason to be exempt from Russian military service. I could write to Mr. Putin and say Dima is a “required member” at the club. The Russian army is mean but these fitness club instructors are pretty heartless themselves.
I was writing a poem recently about pain, and the weird similes we reach for in trying to describe it. It didn’t go far because of my penchant for the gruesome. Nevertheless, I got wind of this book The Body in Pain, which I've just started reading. One of the first things the author notes is how we’re largely unable to describe pain without expressions like “as if” or “as though.” There are some adjectives used frequently, such as “searing,” “burning” or “throbbing,” but often we resort to constructions like “It was as though someone stuck a knife in my side and twisted it,” or “It was as if my head were in a vice.”
The Body in Pain also mentions pain scales used by doctors, the most famous being the McGill Index. But I found another related to insect bites from an entomologist named Justin O. Schmidt, which is vivid and whimsical. He rates the pain from insect bites from 1-4, 4 being the worst. It makes you almost want to get bitten. Here it is:
1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm. 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch. 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek. 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door. 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue. 2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin. 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail. 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut. 4.0 Tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath. 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.
- a heart fashioned from a hay with a wooden cutting board plunked down in its center and hung on the wall - sticks bundled with a bow and hung on the wall - a collection of beer steins with images of German cities - silk flowers, with a pronounced proclivity for the sunflower - an enormous silk sunflower in a floor vase on my husband’s side of the bed that we didn’t notice until I set about making this list - milk jugs painted with farm scenes (surprise!) - a mirror framed with ceramic cherubin - the mandatory regional bank calendar boasting local nature scenes - hay clustered in the shape of a boy with a burlap cape and hat, hung on the wall - a mini-sled atop the refrigerator with a hay bale as passenger - (they really dig hay. as andy warhol said, “This is a tomato soup can; we have to make do with what we have,” or something like that.) - plywood cutouts in the shape of a teapot and cups, painted blue and white and plonked on the wall - you’ll find it hard to believe, but another hay heart with a long tail as if to mimic a rug beater, hung on the wall
I shouldn’t be critical, but there was hardly any place to put our stuff down because of the kitsch. And, if forced to choose, I’d choose farm kitsch over the driftwood, lobster shells and bird shit of maritime kitsch any day. Anyway, we had a great time in the Black Forest, which is surprisingly sunny.
Camroc Press was kind enough to take one of my poems. Red Cap is up today, a poem inspired by Red Riding Hood. Anyone familiar with fairy tales and psychoanalysis knows this is one screwed up story, and that's its whole allure - that flashy cape as prey to carnal urges, the forest itself the sexual psyche.
Speaking of badass forests, we're off on vacation as of Saturday to Germany's Black Forest. It's actually a kind of save-$ vacation since we usually spend a fortune on gas driving to the Alps, or take a plane somewhere. This'll only be 3 hours away, and without a view of the Mediterranean. Suits me. I don't think there will be any wolves there.
If you'd like to see a version of Red Riding Hood that includes a ferocious wolf, check out this one.
Dear probably-otherwise-nice Man who lectured me about people who don’t clean up after their dogs while I was walking my dog in a very clean fashion,
Dear Murderer who had a difficult childhood about which I am sorry,
Dear upright German Lady who reminded me of the rules of the road while I was riding my bike slowly on a dirt path in the middle of nowhere without another bike in sight,
Dear Decent Writer who is otherwise somewhat of an egoistic foot-in-the-mouth kind of timesuck,
Dear must-not-get-enough-attention teenage boy who insists on playing his music for everyone in the subway despite being asked politely to turn it off,
Like most people, sometimes in solitude I talk to myself. Sometimes it’s something significant like “I’ll never do that again.” Or other times it's a revelation like “No time!” It could be coupled with a grand gesture, or just shaking my head. I do think mostly all this is not “talking” as much as “remarking,” although I do sometimes ask myself an important question: “Do I want to eat the rest of this?” Sometimes I’m just looking for a little companionship. I say to myself, “It’s raining pretty hard out here.” And I answer, “You are right.”
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. (Daniel Deronda by George Eliot)
It was a pleasure to burn. (Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury)
In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. (The Book of Laughter and Fogetting by Milan Kundera)
Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. (The Bell by Iris Murdoch)
One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. (The Lover by Marguerite Duras)
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. (The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien)
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture of Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta. (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami)
In the town there are two mutes and they are always together. (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers)
Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. (Waiting by Ha Jin)
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. (A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole)
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. (White Noise by Don DeLillo)
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Jacob Dietmahler was not such a fool that he could not see that they had arrived at his friend’s home on a washday. (The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald)
This movie I’ve been seeing all my life, yet never to its completion. (Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates)
I’ve got two poems up in the new Scapegoat Review: No Stars Tonight and When Wonderful, Add Water. “Welcome you enjoy!” as we used to say in China.
Alongside a couple other diversions, I’m reading Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori, a collection of five short stories from the point of view of the same man in eastern Europe between the wars.
The gulf between Jews and “goyim” is clear in the first story. You encounter Jews as lice-ridden children, but also as bold intellectuals in the person of a young devil-may-care pianist. I’m into the second story now. The narrator does talk about Jews and he himself incorporates the negative attitudes towards them, but this doesn’t quite consume the book, and you don’t hate him for his hate, really; he is self-aware and intelligent. He is an anti-semite but not in a rabid way. Still, in the book, what you can assume is a ubiquitous repulsion is about to turn the world upside down.
It’s one of those books that I remember having in my bookbag and I’m not terribly drawn to it, but once I start reading again, it’s very engaging. It’s not a compulsive read, but worthwhile and evocative.
I still have a four books from my challenge to read this year, and of those I plan to get to the Jim Shepard stories and Butcher’s Crossing this summer.
The best thing about school vacation is there’s no school! There’s no homework. No forcing people into bed right this minute, and back out in the morning like strips of bacon. There’s no math test or Latin vocabulary. No long-assed parents’ night. No has everybody got lunch money? No piano lessons or gym clothes. It’s as if part of my superego has gone to sleep, or is off jet-skiing in the Caribbean. I get up in the morning and close the shades so no one will wake up!
I got a rejection from a big name journal a couple weeks back. I wouldn’t even mention it since it’s not a surprise that I’d get a rejection from a big name journal, but aforesaid big name journal actually solicited poems from me, and then turned them down, making for a very sumptuous session of humiliation.
Oh well. I hadn’t submitted anything in ages, but over the past three weeks or so I sent out a number of poems so that, aside from aforementioned big name humiliating journal, I got some acceptances, too.
First, Barn Owl Review took a poem called Unseen for its 3rd issue, which I’m really happy about, both because of the poem and the journal.
Then Juked’s poetry editor came back from vacation and took two more poems from my last submission, a poem called Despair and my little series on Monopoly Tokens, a couple of which have appeared here.
My poet friend Robert MacDonald has told me he stalks out my publications and then submits to the same journals (with great results) and now I’ve turned tables by submitting to Apparatus Magazine. They took two poems and a fiction piece called Tinder Box, which I'd submitted as a poem. The editor thought differently. I said I didn’t care how it was categorized. Check out Robert’s poem in the premiere issue.
Finally the very exciting Scapegoat Review took two poems for its next issue, expected up this month – No Stars Tonight and When Wonderful, Add Water.
So, in the scheme of things, I should come out positive, and thanks to daydreams in which I'm smoking cigarettes and drinking port in Lisbon in the body of a 23-year old man, I do.
Downtown there’s a man who will write my name on a grain of rice for 5 euros. I’m sure he’s a decent man who could use 5 euros, but what would I want with that? Please remove my name from all grains of rice. I write my name on the dirt in the eaves.
Daniel Pennac’s 10 Inalienable Rights of the Reader: You have 1. the right to not read, 2. the right to skip pages, 3. the right to not finish, 4. the right to reread, 5. the right to read anything, 6. the right to mistake a book for real life, 7. the right to read anywhere, 8. the right to dip in and browse, 9. the right to read out-loud, and 10. the right to be silent and not defend your tastes.
When I was four or five I was standing in our gravel driveway on Marlboro Ave. The sun was shining like a good example and at the same time it began to rain, but only on half of the driveway. My mother said this was a called a sunshower. And I said, ok, now I’ve seen it all.
I’m reading Manhunt, a book about the chase and capture of John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices after the Lincoln assassination and attempted murder of Sec’y of State Seward. Even those without a special interest in Lincoln would enjoy this book. The beginning, especially, is so compelling that I had to talk to myself to keep from yelling and protesting. Even though you know the outcome, there is Booth climbing the stairs in Ford’s Theater, and it’s almost as if you could prevent what’s about to happen. Very exciting book and picture of the bygone.
Photo by Thomas Allen, a man who likes to conjure the characters out of the books by cutting them loose from the covers.
some die of heartbreak some die of loneliness some die of an overdose everything you die of is an overdose an overdose of tuberculosis an overdose of choking an overdose of ocean an overdose of accident none of this is the least bit funny said the man who died laughing
Many people think German is ugly but I’ve come to love it. I’ve lived here almost two decades and still learn something new everyday. Some think the sound of German too hard. My brother finds it hilarious. When I visit him he greets me and the kids by shouting all the German words he knows (and laughing about it), a list that includes Schnitzel, kaputt and Totenkopf. We laugh, too. German is funny, sometimes, but also expressive.
I admit to loving all the high-falutin’ words that float about intellectual circles – Zeitgeist, Weltanschauung, Weltschmerz, lebensmüde, Schadenfreude- as well as words with less ambition.
One of my first favorites was fünf, a simple little one, meaning five. It reads as if you’re trying to clear lint from your nose. The /ü/ is pronounced like a deep /u/, only purse your lips and flatten your nostrils. Sort of. Fünf would make a good name for a cat or small dog, or a whiskered pig.
Another is wunderhübsch, which is the product of German’s ability to smush words, as many as you like, up together into a new word. Literally it means wonderfully pretty. The first and last time I heard someone use it was when Luisa was a baby and a young woman said Luisa was wunderhübsch. I found that very sweet. Luisa was and still is wunderhübsch, but this is not a word I hear much. Hübsch alone is also good!
I also like the words that start with /pf/, like Pfirsich, or peach. It’s such a jumble of consonants, and when you say it, it goes down so suddenly it’s hard not to be amused. I also love Pfeffer, Pferd, Pflaume, pfiffig, and I mourn the Pfennig.
One I learned fairly recently is Stickstoff – as in nitrates, used in fertilizer. This is a laugh. Don’t forget that in German an S before a consonant is pronounced sh. It’s funny to hear grown-ups having a conversation about Stickstoff.
One of the best words is doch, the word used to contradict a naysayer. It’s irreplacable, and I love it for its right-on usefulness rather than its sound. The closest English equivalent would be “did, too!,” (or "is, too") as in “you stepped on my foot,” – “no, I didn’t,” – “doch!”
I also love Schmutz (dirt, grime, smut) and Dreck (ditto) and Gejammer (wailing or complaining), and a lot of anatomical words. But I’ll leave those for another day.
There’s a lot of noise out in the universe. We miss most of it in our little spaces. For example, barking dogs. Right now, you can’t hear the one driving me nuts.
And really, what is with the dog star? That must be loud. I bet it keeps whole neighborhoods awake.
Take my temperature. I feel a little better already.
I didn’t hear many people celebrating the arrival of summer over the weekend, but a few long faces did lament how the days will now gradually get shorter. All I can say is Thank You! I prefer the sun in small doses, and the less daytime the better.
When I lived in New Jersey I don’t think it stayed light much past 9 pm in summer, but in Germany at the time around solstice the day ends at about 10:30 pm. And dawn is already creeping up at 4 am. I know because I was up this morning at 4 and my first thought was whaaa? The sunrise/sunset guide claims the sun rose at 5:15 am and set at 9:39 pm. While that may be true, there is a definite before- and afterglow.
I’m not crazy about summer to begin with. I’m only glad the solstice means the tilt and curvature of the earth will let the ridiculous length of days start to erode. For the night to be pitch black seems natural. I like the stars and the moon, or if it’s raining, plain old soggy black.
After feasting, mint restores coherence. * The sky appears impermanent this morning. I’m taking it personally. * The wind is sorry, going grey. * slate grey, smug grey, sullen grey, worm grey, symphonic grey, rock-bottom grey, dungeon grey, dove grey, radium grey, brain grey, vesper grey, slush grey & blue intrusion * Concerning my prescription: Can I still eat citrus? Can I light long candles and drink wine? Can I succumb to Catholic mystics? * Weltschmerz. I wash mine down with coffee. *
The new Dirty Napkin is up, including my poem Emergency Subsitutions. Charmi has a wonderful poem in the issue, too, called A New Mythology. It moves seamlessly and appears to have been effortless but it's doing some hard work, with pacing, progress and surprise. I also liked Timothy Pilgrim's Side Effects May Include. Otherwise, it's too early for me to have read everything. Go over and read it for yourownself!
I finished another book from my challenge today: Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell. I really really liked this book. It’s got story. It’s got character. It’s got plenty o’ words grouped up together in good groups.
I knew I’d like Winter’s Bone from the first paragraph. Take the first sentence: Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. The first interesting thing about this sentence is “break of day” and its lack of “the.” Woodrell could just as easily have written “the break of day” or “daybreak,” but no. Something a little off there, a little old fashioned? Ok. And then the sentence becomes a string of senses – the cold, a faint smell on the air, then the wallop of sight.
2nd sentence: Meat hung from trees across the creek. What I like about this sentence is – having just gotten to the end of the string of the first sentence – this picks up right where we left off, as if being re-jolted by what we just witnessed: “...meat. Meat...” I like the meat/trees/creek long -ee- happening here soundwise. And the image brings me something macabre. What kind of meat?! I know from this there are going to be some sacrifices made I this book.
Then: The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Here Woodrell has dispensed again with the “the” before “low limbs,” and plays again with sound - flesh/fatty, low/limbs, saplings/side. I’m impressed. Can he keep it up? What I especially love about this sentence, though, is “pale of flesh.” It’s almost Elizabethan. Or is it Ozarkian? I’ve no idea, but I dig it. I also like that fatty gleam of meat contrasted with the saplings that have to bear it. And I learn later in the book about the young bearing up under their history.
Now the killer: Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone. I could rattle on some more about language here, but mostly look at that metaphor. I know this book is going to involve something ripening. This is a story about a 16-year old girl growing up in poverty with meth heads and other sundry characters, including a guy named Uncle Teardrop and a Shakespearian trio of witches. Experience is going to round the girl out. As a reader I’m happy about the “sweetening,” a foreshadowing that tells me this story won’t be all bad – there’ll be something good in it, or at least worth working for.
My first dog was Toto. We got him as a puppy when I was about 5. He was a black & white mutt, and friendly. When my parents divorced three or four years later, my father took Toto with him. I don’t remember being too unhappy about it. There was enough to be unhappy about. My mother said my father needed the dog to protect his new house, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t want either of them.
When I was in junior high, we adopted a little poodle named Bunny. Dumb name, but she came with it. Every step you took, she was at your heels, nipping your feet, trying to get you to play. I considered this my sister’s dog. My step-father was also fond of her. We never took her for a walk, just let her relieve herself in the yard. We had a big yard. She was a small dog. She died of smoke inhalation when my mother set the house on fire with a cigarette.
My father also had a dog named Django that I often used to dogsit. This was a shepherd mix, a nice dog, mostly because he wasn’t mine. He was brown with beigy red patches, head more labrador than shepherd. He lived to be very old and was put to sleep to end his suffering. Why do we consider this right and kind when it comes to dogs but not to people? This is screwed up.
I have a dog now, too, named Stella. She’s a handsome dog, friendly and well behaved, aside from eating garbage and other dogs’ shit. I like her but at this point I know I’m not a dog person, or a cat person, a rabbit person or fish person. I’m hardly even a person person. But the kids and husband wanted a dog and I went along. On the evening before we got her, we all voted and I indicated a desire to vote no. They looked at me like I’d taken a shot at the pope, but luckily missed, and was thus responsible for the pope for the rest of my life.
Chinese Phrase Book (War Department: Washington, Dec. 10, 1943) Dissemination of restricted matter – the information contained in restricted documents and the essential characteristics of restricted material may be given to any person known to be in service of the US and to persons of undoubted loyalty and discretion who are cooperating in Government work, but will not be communicated to the public or to the press by authorized military public relations agencies.
Chapter 1: Emergency Expressions
Please help me : ching BAHNG MA-AHNG Please come and help : ching LA-EE BAHNG MA-AHNG I am lost : waw MEE-EE la / LOO! Where is there a village? : SH-UM-muh DEE! Fahng / yo R-UN J-YA We are American soldiers : waw MUN / SHER! may GWAW R-UN Are there soldiers near here? : FOO! JIN! / yo MAY-EE yo / BING Are they our enemies? : SHER! DEE-EE run ma Don’t try any tricks! : la-oo LA-OO SH-ER SH-ER duh Did you hear what I said? : TING J-YAN! la / MAY-EE yo You will be rewarded : YO-OO BA!oo cho / GAY-EE nee
I recently mentioned poets being compared to other poets and how that sometimes irks. Of course it’s not confined to poets - also actors, artists and other writers are compared to their predecessors and contemporaries. I’m sure this bugs them, too. Still the publishing industry seems to think that, rather than originality, comparing writers to other writers is a good marketing strategy. Check out this advertisment for Elizabeth Kelly’s Apologize, Apologize! from the NYT.
*”Begs comparison with Daniel Wallace and JOHN IRVING.” (Caps theirs) *”With the linguistic mastery of a Carol Shields or a JULIA GLASS, Elizabeth Kelly’s debut novel comes down hard and strikes the bell.” *”Meet the Flanagans, a quasifunctional family that might give JONATHAN FRANZEN pause.” *”Part GREY GARDENS and part THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS… “ *Dave Eggers fans should enjoy Canadian journalist Kelly’s rambunctious first novel.” *”An imaginative and energetic triumph…Think of Dostoevsky on laughing gas.”
That's it. I have to say this really blew me away. What a crutch! Hardly a word about the writer herself or her book except in relation to other writers or other books.
Ok, so the real question now is if you want to read this. Because maybe you do.
Hey I have a poem up at Juked. It's my 10th poem in Juked, which is a pleasure, and also means they'll be contributing to my social security payments. Thanks, Juked.
I finished the first book of my book challenge over a week ago – The Crimson Petal and the White. It was okay. Enjoyable but not really satisfying, what is typically called –for better or worse- a romp.
I’m now halfway through Helen Vendler’s Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, which has helped humanize Stevens for me. I love his poetry anyway, and if anything, this book only makes it better.
I’m also nearly done with Down and Out in Paris and London, which I started on the train to Paris last week. I was under the impression the book was non-fiction/reportage, but when the narrator at one point is asked to write some political articles and says he has no political opinions, I was thrown for a loop since Orwell certainly had political opinions. I looked on the back cover and it says “fiction.” So let’s call it autobiographical fiction, and more autobiographical than fiction, unlike the “memoirs” you see these days that turn out to be frauds. It’s an excellent book.
When my mother arrived last week she not only brought me some books I’d asked for, but also a stack of books she planned to read herself, including Netherland, The Reserve and The Sorrows of an American, all of which I will inherit before she leaves. In exchange she gets my copy of Continental Drift. It is ridiculous considering the number of books she is going to leave behind, but I love that book so much, I am almost tempted to tell her she can’t take it.
I am not wearing brown today I am wearing black and I invite you to believe in a shirt that’s purple Fashion makes demands like should the socks match the slacks or the shoes I am living the wrong answer Then the question of mixing gold with silver jewelry and the shorts best suited to ugly legs are called pants I will never achieve a black belt the same shade as my bag Unfortunately when I fell to earth I woke up in a country where socks clot sandals which is confusing The other day we visited a department store in Paris took the escalator past lingerie My daughter asked what is lingerie Before I could begin to think my husband explained underwear simple as that beyond me to say
Check out the new Literary Bohemian, where I have some wine blurbs in the form of postcard prose . As we say here in elsewhere, "welcome you enjoy." Of course there's lots of other good reading to be had in this issue, including Dave Rowley's Letter Written on a Paper Crane.
sportscar: She’s touching the wheels when the call comes; she’s young, tonguing the hood in the mannish slang of the last century. Lipsticked, she’s a sport, a shiny body.
thimble: You thought it a helmet, dainty with immunity; you thought you’d hide in bed but we snuffed out the thumbsuck, the meat stuck under your fingernail.
horse & rider: Imagine this could go on: collecting profits, paying dues, rolling the dice to land on the carpet, where it’s your bluff. Imagine rearing up and exposing yourself. As if you cared: As if no one would snicker at your haunches, made of chalk, while on the boardwalk the rains start.
After a few last minute mishaps, we’re off to Paris tomorrow. My daughter will turn 13 there on Sunday. I told her any visitor who turns 13 in Paris, who enters their teens, will have a good love life when they’re older. She bought this, and I was glad she accepted it as a superstition possibly in currency beyond her own mother’s mind. I think of how my father and step-mother told me they’d had an astrologist do everyone in the family’s charts –I was about 13 at the time– and they sat me down one day and said oh how we hate to say this but your chart shows that you’re going to have a life of suffering - a sad suggestion I often refer back to.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to Paris, also to suffering there. I’ve never been much of a francophile, but I do love the country’s red wines, the perfumes of Guerlain and Chanel, the word fromage, which is so droll, and especially Eric Satie and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose “Montparnasse” is one of the few poems I know by heart. I learned it in French by singing it to the music composed for the poem by Poulenc.
Yesterday I home-made tomato sauce; today it’s hamburgers.
Yesterday I was killing myself in increments; today “go forth and prosper.”
It should be warm and puny today but now it’s damp and mismanaged; Yesterday it was cramped and overcast. I took a shower. This is an advertisement for rain.
I’m not eating my Wheaties, loving my neighbor, taking out disability insurance; time is money.
I got up around 7 am yesterday; today it was 5.30. Yesterday was a holiday.
I politely asked Carlo to roll onto his side last night when he was snoring and my effort was a great success; today who knows.
I hate tv; tv hates me.
Carlo is taking Luisa to an opera tonight; Miles and I are watching Spiderman. He’s got radioactive blood.
I had a poem accepted at The Dirty Napkin this morning - "Emergency Substitutions." It's a somewhat older poem and I'm glad it found a home. Two other poems were turned down, so of course after my blip of happiness for "Emergency Substitutions," I began lamenting for the other two poems. Maybe they're really bad, or stupid, or maybe my older poems are better than my new poems, or boring, or spastic, or mabe I'm spastic, or old, or maybe I should just accept the blip of happiness and then shut up. Anyway, "Emergency Substitutions" includes cognac, heat deaths, tv news, cooking, eggs, medical research and all kinds of stuff and I hope you will read it when it comes out.
It's a holiday here and Luisa and I have ruined two cakes! The first one simply failed and the second crumbled. Ach, who cares. We're lounging around, reading books and spooning cake crumbs into our mouths.
