Light At The End Of The Tether

The Effort

2012-02-07T18:23:00.000-08:00

Small, small, small snowflake, small one

i needed special glasses and a tensor light.

Like a preemie, like the thing you have to keep alive

and they wondered why i spent an hour out there

in the cold on my knees not wanting it to disappear.

Burglary

2011-12-29T18:35:00.000-08:00

Tingling inside the entry hall, left of the foyer stairs

where guests have glanced in worry, hot, up at her shrine.

She's not here and this is a strange, after-hours tour

any room to be cooked by flashlight, meat smells in the air.

What was that song heard coming, coming in, about gone love?

Booties forensic with quietude and task

padding up to the second floor, toes outstretching like beast noses

toward one room and crack of the next for discriminate sniff

so when it comes to choice, one follows the wits, the point of it all

as if it were a jungle night, one can't be heard,

to her mumbled voice on tape by a bedside jug

garbling her text, her very own whisper that it's all okay, he's here

the country, it's in good hands, watch: the last act's simple comedy --

and the world goes wet, spit pearls like the ones at her neck

making it a new day in the dark, turning it upside down.

My Main Man

2011-12-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

One of us was a sour apple

and then there was none

It's always dwindling, I'm

someone, with bird vision,

ear on the tracks

doing the head count

ready with the barber blade

an accountant cutting costs

taking a big bite out of life

that's how this show is going

to be run, or my name isn't

Hegemony

2011-12-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

Who set this up that we're walking in the radiance of a Fall day

we, talking about it only in whispers, and then only when we're sure

they're in a good mood, catching a ballgame, eating a frank

or if we cuddle close to them to be unseen as not unlike,

some of us boutiquing at the shops, the same couture as them

the spitting junior image, same talk, same walk boulevardiers.

and why is it these same Mysterians came down came in

and made us slave to their digestion, our intestine -- just

relaxing fragmentarily to look clearly at ourselves, your eyes,

when busily a man in a camp and woman wide spread --

what's their intrigue, how did they get inside me, you,

conspiring us to go along, play ball, play dead

I Am Who

2011-12-11T16:43:00.000-08:00

Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.

Charlotte Rampling as Charlotte Rampling.

Two films: The Look and My Week With Marilyn. These movies will get unequal public attention, yet they deal with very similar issues. How does a public person, one known for physical beauty, form an art despite the beauty?

I'd argue that Michelle Williams does, just as she inhabits the character of Marilyn, who died trying.

Marilyn owned the screen, and if memoirs are right, had the personal chops to fill a room and dig holes in the psyche of those favored and cursed around her. Monroe played, most successfully and often, comedic roles -- yet she yearned to be a serious actress consonant with the 'method' age in which she worked. We might watch Bus Stop or The Misfits, but we remember Some Like It Hot or The Seven Year Itch.

Williams has the moves down. The glances, the gallery-pleasing photo moves, the reclining postures, the depressive panics. Women befriend or mother her. She stuns or bewilders men. Sometimes Marilyn's conditions are right, and a project completes. This is the film world well-handling the real world of the film world.

Charlotte Rampling, in The Look, isn't playing herself. She is herself.

This is documentary. It's about her as an actress, and it does intersperse cuts from movies in which she's acted.

She talks about acting, and in one interesting scene, she and her son, who's directing the actual film we're watching, engage in a stare-down, phrase-response acting exercise, wherein they repeat a random line back and forth and form a dramatic moment between one another. At points, they 'blink' and move to another line conjured up by the context and continue on. Fascinating.

Yet she declares that such exercise bores her. By contrast, we see her interacting -- for real -- with men and women whose artistic projects she shared -- novelist, photographer, poet, artist -- and with confidantes and friends. Even, occasionally, random strangers.

Rampling, almost always in her film persona, plays the neurotic, the distant, the stern, the corrupt, the determined, the strong, the disarranged, the sinister, the seductive. Some like it cold. In The Look, we do see her British-French humor come out among close relationships. Whatever the mood, she makes clear -- explains in the serious parts of her conversations -- that there's a 'space' that must be found, forged, secured, around her wherein an authenticity can emerge for whatever acting or photographic moment she's in.

Marilyn Monroe couldn't be Charlotte Rampling because she was Marilyn Monroe. This may sound self-evidently silly, but the point is this: beauty alone, what draws people -- a myriad people through the accident of a lens -- needs character. Michelle Williams has done much to show she has the character to play a Marilyn who wanted it.

Charlotte Rampling rejects a friend's remark that she's 'grounded'. Though she doesn't say so, she may have preferred being called 'centered'. One can't help seeing her intelligence and maturity, a kind of depth that an icon like Monroe might seek but find no easier to handle than a wet bar of soap.

An American like me might pause to ask: is Monroe us?

Funeral Flight

2011-12-02T22:05:00.000-08:00

The airport girl joked

teased him as 'Seattle guy'

storms shook all in him

The Process

2011-11-22T12:45:00.000-08:00

Entering a room with a closet on a hushed late morning with rain heavy at times

only with the thought of keeping madness within bounds,

legislating reason into it, into the cross words merged with physicality,

hedging with restrictive clauses the feral urges.

Taking a test vote to register in public and hide a subcommittee fire --

who governs shall lead each for each into a dark called light,

bills getting passed as countries pass away,

then going into the kitchen and pretending nothing happened but nature.

The Five

2011-11-19T15:17:00.000-08:00

One normal way. In yellows and greys, in cheek-pinks and corneas moderated to a Carolina blue,the spirited hope of warm day time, loin love and the occasional aged whiskey --

that if it were just a matter of being alone, just a matter of self-solace -- this tenderness -- one would manage it like a watercolor, a paper sheet done within the breeze of half-an-hour, sun slapping the hand with its burn.

But then there's night to think of and the second self, impatient, ready for the baton of blood,

the impetus to purge, to frizz the hair, dance around in nakedness, slap-happy deeds, to the i-don't-care, to the fuck-you, and its dualistic song of oh, oh, oh.

Why, my love, the birth of it! That other, sequent life, das Kind,

the leprechaun of a piece of yourself which calls your name in a cat yowl closing on a suckle, burping thrice before dozing into a body-warm swaddle.

Don't we gather here, my friends, open-hearted enough in our success to embarrass the look on each other's face,

that there's a fraternity to acknowledge at the offramp where cold breath meets cardboard sign and one reaches for the limp bill stuffed in a pocket --

avoiding those central places where American men line-up and the bold and crazy women chart a circle of repugnance and you just cast them four odd coins that you scramble-for as you break into run to miss a witch's curse.

The other us, the fifth, we bring to that table, that table of one's own version of kosher,

what's filled the heart like leftover canteen water, a secret, the slosh of worrying that it's just luck after all,

that the salt taste is actually one of one's own tear-grieving and we bring in the chairs, vindicate the emptiness by inviting-in the whole world.

Weather Man

2011-11-13T15:45:00.000-08:00

Aren't all cities built on a terrace of carnage, shifted layers of earth between the pottery and dead language of a first and next

embers cooled and dusted over, pocked by the shepherd staves, pig-shit-on, and trammeled by the wolf packs

whole periods of neighborhood, of relatives by marriage, of bedsharers,

of work life vulnerable to forgetting, to being forgotten, to have been.

Straw beach hats found in a trunk: such are opportunities. And thinking of them in this city, figments of snap memories, things that might have happened if they did,

several of the friends I've had would remark on this casual reverie, the sitting here at the fresh front staring with a caffeine blank, no doubt to passers-by

puncturing any thought -- if they were inclined to let it breathe -- that here's where the work gets done, where worlds are reimagined

the old transmitting sharpness to the young in the breach, at just the right point, time's beauty mark.

Well here's something, the drunk espresso fine enough for it, clean, and my mood is forward with the ships,

the boats conveying the visitor, idler, the family with a hand-held happy child,

espresso fine enough with a cinnamon dash and unintrusive jazz --

tentative about this, but try it:

On a day of surprise, on the first day of an injustice,

a perpetrator jerks into action, musters his 'crazy' and acts on the unthinkable, and a whole Rube Goldberg of a process sets off -- no hitch -- on its way

and what happens to us, in this City On The Hill, enraptured --

I say to you, do this: amo amas, you know, catch the U.S. in a swoon, get caught-up in the hurricane, the unconditional love, hoping for the wind to veer.

Dead Ducks

2011-10-20T21:11:00.000-07:00

Some statements elevate a man.

For instance, Kung Fu, circa years ago,

prescribed that rules must play like music --

and the notes on Yeshua watch him urge

(in a throw-off line) to be like babes.

William Tecumseh Sherman,

man to fight all war, pronounced that war is all hell.

And there's Qoheleth's 'all turn to dust again',

and then, and then, there's Nietzsche,

or S. Freud, or even Groucho Marx.

J.P. Sartre, in fictional despair,

saw the omens present, the encroachment

on the eve of World War Two

of the throb -- if you heed -- that causes the heart

to burst its dam, to flood it all.

Some prophet, just to be one up,

to get the last word in, from his webcast shouts

Give me a match to strike and I'll fire the world

and the crowds somewhere, with butane near the stage,

flare-up the hall, bring the curtain down.

The Enabler

2011-10-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Night after night she loops through the nausea of word games

the drunken, petty moments in which the politics of speech

sounds like theirs, standing as a cluster of dry bushes, once

cherished tomatoes gone to seed withering in the first frost.

There's this too, the guarantee of garbled fear she slurs

making one think of the disappearance of all things

which amounts to saying goodbye to yourself, icy

and motionless, plunged in a horrible ecstasy, the other you.

To drive with her, this America, this lover,

pushes across the state-line edges around the clock,

just flight and risk, until the only sleep a neck-crick,

back-creak -- roadside sleep, refuge under a hunter's moon.

The Constant Singers

2011-09-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

That warm sleep of a cat counted in long hours, and we

we so dogged, crafting speech as if it were the climbing ivy, sure growth

You, you be my crystal ball, and I yours, we double the future

in our words -- as if that would, as were-it-so -- to bring the mutual end

of the entropy in the system called the universe, and we

the malcontents in its side, bearing ourselves from within and out

the brain-churned, tongue-loose lucifers, would-be bringers of light.

The Bureaucratic Frisson, Part 2 Of 2

2011-09-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

You haven't gotten the whole story. During this waiting time, maybe 25 minutes in, a very personable young woman with a clipboard, after attending to a score of others south of the aisle, made her way to me over the three ranks of chairs where I sat, and asked if she had managed to talk with me yet.

I was prepared, having seen her 'work the room' up to then, and explained clearly my simple problem: how to use the online system designed to prevent people from having to queue up in the local offices like this one, like I was doing now. I left out anything that sounded remotely snide.

She was sympathetic, but pointed out, there's nothing I can do from here.

I went back to looking at the screen, and as my number was near to being called, I stuffed Sartre into my book satchel, zipped it, and prepared for what seemed to be the need for a modest dash to the proper window before the potency of my queue number deliquesced.

My turn, Window 8. The lady there was girded like any pro to deal with what happened to come her professional way. I threw her off-balance.

I was hoping to get you! I chirped.

She locked her chin a bit closer down to her clavicle and pretended to finish-off some prior business on her computer screen before she asked how she might help.

I detailed cleanly and quickly my problem -- really a simple one, I underscored. She had an answer oh-so-ready. You'll have to call the national number.

Ah, but I have done, and it, too, could offer no access -- is this a systems problem, then?

Her distant frown emphatically denied knowledge of any, and told me to keep on trying.

I nodded and then asked her an allied question about how to change my email with the Agency.

She denied even the possibility that there was any email contact whatever between the Agency and any individual at any time, and began to explain how The Privacy Act interlocked with government programs.

I nodded and raised the question of what I must have been smoking at the time that the Agency screen seemed to show an email I may have inadvertently and irrelevantly given at the time of my online contact. She began to smile strangely, but at that point we both heard very raised voices coming from another window south of the aisle.

You'll have to come back, someone was saying to someone else.

The other voice muttered something in a growl.

You'll have to come back, the first voice insisted again

Fuck you!

My window lady had her head turned in that direction. I whispered to her, I used to work in a public office. She said, Security should have stopped all that, but he's just standing there.

Our business was almost at an end, but I decided to play my trump card.

I used to work for SSA.

She perked up, now connecting up why in blazes I had been able to use, earlier in the conversation, the term 'T bens'. Up here? She asked, now with true interest.

Mostly at Bay Area Regional, in Richmond.

We chatted shop talk for another few minutes, but by the time I left, it was as though we had worked in the same unit, desk-to-desk, for a dozen years. No. As though we had served, unit-to-unit, in the same theater of war.

So familiar we had become so quickly, that when I told her my stint of service, she dubbed me a 'pioneer', and when I told her I left with my retirement, she came close to 'high-fiving' me.

Sometime soon, she intimated, and to signal her intended exit, she scuttled the fingers of her left hand across the counter as if they were departing feet.

I actually did get up -- her time-per-conversation being measured for efficiency -- I went to shake her hand. She seemed almost giddy, our talk a sun-break in her very cloudy workday. She responded with a jazz riff of a handshake, fingers thrumming the inside of my palm.

This wasn't 'business' -- this was homecoming and fond departure.

Good talking with you, I said.

Remember to call that number, she chuckled.

The Bureaucratic Frisson, Part 1 Of 2

2011-09-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

I have become a card-carrying Medicare enrollee and am unashamed of it.

The application process, online, went smoothly, and the personal 'call-back' I expected from a 'live representative' didn't have to happen. They just sent me the Award Letter and my card.

Later on, thinking about my access to online information, I re-entered the system, quickly realizing I hadn't yet established a password, so I followed the instructions to get one. After going through four entry screens, the alert showed: Unable to access at this time.

Ultimately understanding my standard American English pronunciation, the automated, sound-sensitive, multi-menu national phone number, which I went to next and which might have resolved things, also didn't. After several of my vocal and numeric attempts over the phone, the alert sounded: Unable to access at this time.

This is not a major problem, since I'm still working -- functionally, happily, and getting better at what I do -- and when I do retire, I'll be applying online again, a new claim, a retirement claim, at which time my 'access' problem would likely be resolved.

But I'm something of a terrier, and I like to dig.

So I went into a local office.

Knowing fully ahead of time that the press of humanity would not be genteel, I readied myself with patience and a book. The office itself is situated in a newly-constructed building, the fourth floor, and there is a greeting station wherein you punch your choice of reasons for visiting, get a 'triaged' number (four separate sets, depending on your query), and take a seat in an area set up like a private viewing room.

It's well-lit, has an aisle. There's a big screen TV silently displaying the current numbers being served. Those numbers were getting matched every so often over a loudspeaker directing people to particular windows.

General information also gets displayed on the big screen TV. It shows in English and then in Spanish. I deliberately avoided the English in order to practice my Spanish. I also watched a close-captioned version of how Social Security works to one's advantage. It stars Patty Duke-Astin and George ('Mr. Sulu') Takei and takes place on a mock-up of the Starship Enterprise, its bridge.

I'm sure it's a comedy, but I was too absorbed in the book I brought along, La Nausée, Sartre's seminal novel in which a bridge between Phenomenology and Existentialism is laid out in fictional form.

Although written in the late 30s in France just as fascism was rising as a plausible political force in Europe -- what with Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler saluting and huffing and shouting and lying and bashing -- the realization felt by the main character Roquentin that the existence of any thing was nothing more than an empty abstraction, that its reality was only a convenience, a relation between itself and any other thing, including oneself (!) -- that realization made him sick. Movement and arbitrary assignment of meaning.

I might say that I myself was getting a bit of vertigo trying to comprehend the missing floor that Roquentin had found himself unable to stand on. And I was sitting.

I jerked myself away from the book's momentary abyss and looked at the screen. My category of numbers (Roquentin would have rejected all categories as ephemeral?) had reached A32. My number was A35. I, for some inexplicable reason, began feeling butterflies in my stomach. They flew around each other, one non-thing around another, one nerve impulse firing on the basis of chemical activity derived by my reading a book in a public office. I had to stop this. It was almost my turn. Almost my time on stage.

Summer's Prime

2011-09-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

Next to the sandstone coping of the kidney pool

what matters in the strict perplexity of a young life's

only the ease of the settling-in, inside the now,

a good youth body with its supple skin and muscle,

the worry -- of not 'being here' -- a simple school abstract

or film plot, here laughed-off -- un-thought -- a mere omission,

the extant world, the one of hankering for another touch

so as to be one flesh by fleshing-in, concentrating on

the plunge, stroking backward through the womb of water.

Post-Partum

2011-09-12T00:03:00.000-07:00

Symbolism is no fake. Things are not just 'things' in themselves, blunt stuff that has no fourth or fifth or sixth dimension -- measured in a mind's eye.

The woman of a couple she's dismayed since much of the space, the ample flat being let, is dressed in white, fashionable teeth-like bright

Clean and pure, the bounce of 'no' color, the heart of a child ready for impress of primary hue and crying out loud for only the good we have to offer

So her eyes downcast, her mouth covered-up, she's rushed back to the real estate car and even thinking why did I trust this why even come close to this monster place

Brought to the spotlit rooms where shadows shall come, where a clear glow hints an eventual dusk, its ghost, just half-a-tick, half-a-tock, away

In Two

2011-09-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

I followed the news and cried or came close.

Airplanes and buildings made me sick.

I prayed the witness of peace in a book --

but I thrilled at video Gunga Din.

I wrote to a Quaker church:

The silent god, inside me, wanted out --

yet I thought I could enlist and man a desk,

and stood when the players sang to my flag.

I shut out all the hate talk,

cringed at the jingo Friday night carhonks --

yet I didn't read the church replies;

my parents lay in a Navy grave.

I swim this purposeful, blind wave,

where I crest with Mohandas Gandhi

and curl with G.I. Joe: we're one -- but

we're too distant to clasp hands.

The Violinist's Daughter

2011-09-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

The last he saw her -- flimsy blouse and dirty feet, a little drunk and nails bit broken, speaking loose, and her heroin boyfriend out and in

in Amsterdam -- had she known that she was getting this, into the weatherbeating of steetwind, life as only suddenness, a joy of coming high

and welcoming old classmates prim from the States as though she spilled from the beatitude of orgasmic up-all-night collapse

the liver over-exercised, surmising rightly she'd be now long dead, an object of anecdote, a generational footnote.

The Dinner Worry

2011-08-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

In the midst of my modest wealth and ability to spend,

it sets in, taking the comfortable chair,

the chaise with the button-backed cushions,

and frames its face by the window's changeable sunlight

while I'm in the thick of wondering

by whose invitation it comes by.

No one could arrange more awkward stay,

a visitant whose not-so-veiled requests

come on as knuckle cuffs, gloved punches,

asking if another wine or fruit be served,

no one other than me, the host, to fetch,

nothing but 'just do', to handle the appetite.

If I were dreaming, this would pass on through,

be gone like an intrusive aunt or a workman

saving travel hours by sleeping in my garage,

my habits thrown to a corner for just that while,

all that I've grown to expect so disarranged like hair

but able yet to be combed -- if only I were dreaming this.

Overnight

2011-07-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

What consoles you in a haunted house, not windows -- fierce eyes -- nor corridors of air -- breath of the beast -- and there's only a grey sun ever and the lands around, they're weeds, and you've always a chill and coming down with something

And the estate agent refrains from the stories of the prior owners, who've 'moved on' due to a death in the family they had to dispose of the property quickly which is why a place this large can be sold at such an available price

I rise very thirsty having trouble with the covers, my feet not finding the slippers and my calf cramping and there floats a tiny -- a fly that is just an infant -- fly in the water glass it must have dipped and been overwhelmed now placid on the calm

And in skimming it dry onto a raft of kleenex, its dim twitching and I rinse the glass and swab the lip before drinking so very much of the water and flipping a switch and having only the nightlight to follow back to the flat place where I am to lie

And it is nervous and 3 and I dream about pushing on the heavy doors and outside is my dad, he of the long-passed-on, wearing a sick-cap and smiling and glad to see me there and hugs my hand and I know that the house is a house for the dead

I want to say something true but grind mum. Lilies. Taken at long exposure, the recumbent quiet of Victorian child corpses. The dream shakes, dehydrated by caffeine and cold-meds, and the dawn world, unrested, is unalive outside and by me goes a fly.

Two As One

2011-07-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

Whenever the embrace, the hold me, as in the love squeeze when vaginal play overtakes the exhausted male member and music huffs from the mutual lung sacks

it becomes in the pause that moment when I clasp the genuine first -- not intercoursively, but over the school gym floor with the chaperones and the cycling wax of popular songs

our hands and cheeks slipping then cleaved in the Fahrenheit, the smell of her hair, the roll of our step, the quiet village of our turns, the dance between

Ground Zero

2011-07-22T23:02:00.000-07:00

At a late age, yet, with comfortable money, friends, why does he crack,what crazy does he find, why does he crime since no one thinks remotely

by what flash of nature determine himself as the doer of deed -- he, never predisposed, never disturbative, not known as a secretive, nor never alleged before

the mal salt airs do it, too much sun, his trendy hair trim and gizmo watch and a knowing nod at the bakery with just the right tune in his aging ear

the wind takes on a voice -- and it, the Devil's -- and when he dances into the street the morning of, in a wedding tux fit for a violation, his eyes glitter, Oxfords smartly click along the pave

Hearken Beldam, Graceful Crone

2011-07-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

Our Lady of the Salt Red Sangre

Our Woman Who's the Blue Señora

Wake our focus from its somber quiet

Solve our puzzles with your nimble fingers

Guide our vigil with your brilliant street lamps

Bless our business with your fluent say-so

Our Lady by the Gold Fenêtre

Our Duchess or the Prim Madonna

Glorify us past our daily problems

Plentify us in our meager holdings

Clarify us through our dented vision

Magnify us by our hopeful errors

Honored Goddess of the Fullest Breathing

Wisest Virgin with the Sun-Bright Candle

Navigate niches, penetrate wishes

God, godder, goddest Gal

The Long Goodbye

2011-07-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

Maybe you're 30 and it's America's 70s and you've got a place above Franklin in Hollywood and the place is next to a roomful of New Age girls practicing naked yoga.

Maybe you've got a 'Madison' sent to you from Mexico to pay for your expenses and to buy off your friendship and you wear a thin tie and black suit and smoke too much.

Maybe there's a mysterious, classy blonde heavily put-upon by her washed-up novelist drunkard husband and they have a doberman who dislikes your face, but the blonde cooks you chicken kiev and begs your help.

Maybe the cops distrust you and the mob does, too, and you lose your cat even though you go out at 3 a.m. to buy special food for it.

Maybe you've got access to the Malibu Colony and a classic car to drive to the border.

Maybe you've got the moral grit to 'resolve all issues' and the sun is on you and maybe it is a Hollywood ending to an episode that sums up your life.

Maybe that's what it's all about.

The Cost Of Some Things

2011-07-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

Unfolded, the menu labels the food in sequential pages, alphabetically, one set of courses per page. The actual dishes read in Chinese characters, and the accompanying English makes sense, but sounds more exotic than what we normally find.

What's 'pottage'?

She tells me. Her ensuing oral presentation, very hard to understand, includes reciting the daily special which is either one or two or three separate options. We're not sure which.

How much? B asks.

The waitress begins an explanation of what comes along with the beef or oysters or tofu -- or all three.

How much does it cost? B clarifies her question.

We think she thinks we are asking to be told more about the beef dish.

I point at numbers on the menu. Price?

Oh. Eight dollar.

When they come, the two items we've ordered overfill our table-for-two. Six small boats and one large of differing dishes: pork, rice, edamame, tofu, leeks, mushrooms, brick-red dried chilis. We've been told that this is 'Taiwanese street food' -- no street I've ever been on. This has the look of elegant service and the taste of sophisticated cuisine. But not at all its expense.

To maximize their square footage, the place is set up for café seating, so we lunch with two young men on one side and two middle-aged women on the other. I can't help overhearing the women's conversation the segments I catch of which center around family history, something I first think will be a genealogical recital but turns into something else.

When we leave and I take a step or two to follow B out, I pivot back and muster the greatest politeness I can find.

Excuse me -- were you just talking about the internment camps?

Yes.

I am looking at her, but not really 'seeing' her, not comfortable -- I conclude later -- focusing on her face. She's as willing to talk about this with me, though, as she was eager, it must have been, to arrange the meeting about it with her friend.

My father at one point was interned just south of here. She shifts paperwork a bit. This is a map of the inside of it.

She points down at the document she's had out this whole time -- I think again her reason for lunching. Barracks, in rectangles. Plotted-out in numbers. Fences. Gates. Guard towers.

I shake my head, not quite sure what I am going to say. Are your parents still . . . in the area?

Yes.

With the impression I've glanced from her face, and from her voice and figure, she's an attractive woman, perhaps 60 years old. And I'm standing before her, interrupting her engagement. The words we are exchanging are nearly idle, flat. My purpose is unclear to her and inchoate within me. The conversation inherits whatever stablility it should have by taking place in the bustling ambiance of a public lunchroom where things are quite safe.

I have no business doing this.

Then I say what I must have felt I had to say. My concentration on her face now brings her features into sharp focus.

Let them know that I care.

Nature's Hoof

2011-07-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

The husband dies 'of natural causes'.

The family, which includes his spouse and two grown children, mourns, and after a reasonable time, reaches an emotional balance, a healthy stability.

The widow, in her late 50s, living away from her children, has continually loved the outdoors, is a horsewoman in a modest way -- not a competitor, but a knowledgeable rider. Not long after her husband's death, she re-engages with that vocation.

In a routine outing with friends, working the horses off-trail a bit, they negotiate a gully. They're aware of scrub growth, stray logs, the rockiness of the terrain.

Somehow the jennet mare she's on slips, and the widow rolls off its side, forward. The fall disturbs the closeness of their line and riles-up the coltishness of the horse just in front, who kicks his hooves smack into her chest, stopping her heart instantly.

Does it matter that this is a 'true story'?

A Moment Of 'Small D' Democracy

2011-06-25T21:47:00.000-07:00

So I'm standing, mildly put off, this Saturday at a distance from two people, a man and a woman separately using the available ATMs outside the bank. Their looks don't quite repel me, but there is a 'social evaluation' going on whose upshot goes something like this: so very glad I'm not them.

Well. The woman at the machine backs off and comes my way. It's not accepting check deposits, she says. Gets in front of me, but indicates I can go ahead. I'm there to deposit a check, but I'm dubious about her judgment. Really? I say, almost melodically -- kind, but with a patronizing skepticism.

I go to the machine. It tells me it cannot now accept checks. I go back in line, behind the woman who just clued me. That's what it does say!

Such verification cements me, perhaps by the 'egg-yolk' on my face, in unity with the gal. A new guy wearing a baseball cap files behind us, and we tell what's up. He, too, has come to deposit a check. So we're a line of three.

The fellow at the other ATM is still futzing away at his business, and noting the queue, looks over apologetically and says Sorry! I'm almost finished.

No problem, we indicate.

Now a fourth person, another woman, joins us, we fill her in and invite her to go ahead with her transaction, which isn't a deposit. It works fine, and she remarks that such a problem as ours did occur at another ATM just this week. She wishes us a quick resolution and a fine day.

We're now becoming 'a community', all commending her on her luck at this machine.

The original guy leaves, and the lady in front of me tries his ATM. It works. As I take her place, it's almost a 'high-five' moment. Two clean points, our team is up by six.

Now I take my chance and discover that it's accepting my check, but not reading it effectively enough to note the deposit amount without a 'zoom'. Perhaps an allied glitch. But the zoom works; so too the deposit. As I leave, I pass the baton to the baseball cap man by verifying that the ATM will handle him.

Even though we've 'been in this together', I feel superior, utterly in charge, utterly analytical and socially skilled, dealing with a class of people I wouldn't want to sit with at the theater or stand with in the museum. Well. They wouldn't be there, would they? I think. No need to bring the hand sanitizer.

As I unlock my car and get in, hoping to scoot away before the guy leaves the machine, he rushes up to me. Holding my ATM card in his hand.

You forgot this! He says cheerfully.

I take it with a genuine thank you, feeling totally lame.

We, The Living

2011-05-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

Impatience is in all of us in the business of hope, tugging her kit closer.

I thought, Don't go, but she'd ramped, the plane lifted-off for an ill-at-ease, long airflight to a land less comfortable yet

filled with -- pick one -- deep and ancient blood feud, dengue, rice blight, bird flu, tyranny

You say good morning to the Colonel and they strike you silly

at what used to be Vocation. But it's unsure, pretty surely not, a voice that's calling you

You call yourself, you're facing yourself, you've faced yourself

And I turn past the tourist toys and scanners, the Starbucks, escalators, skybridge, out through Departures into the concrete lot, unlock my Toyota with a beep, watch out for cars, and wend my way to home.

A Wake

2011-05-25T12:26:00.000-07:00

This might be said about the death

of anyone: that its quick memory springs from live mouths around a table

that someone is always looking at you when you bring it up, your tone forefashioned, grave --

an entourage frail as the body itself nods, and then a matter of drinking and eating

and for some, fucking. Because when bodies grow cold, the spirit rises and swoops

and while the finally sedate fall into flimsy gravity

others swivel and clutch. They insist on it.

Library Guy

2011-05-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

With the enormity of holding keys, the anxiety of secret Sunday morning when no one ever comes the first hours

or late Monday when the sleep sets in on the studious and they clear out

that par-lit time the stacks have mass, get weight, hang heavy off a low-watt bulb

dead man- and spunky woman-names show on the spine, or in deep footnotes

stamping the place like a caught lover

me just being the sentry, acting the watch, my bowel holding a cosmos of ghosts, the knot of human mind I don't know my own

my walkabout a rendezvous with a fear that if I lie down I never rise, that there's only my walking then nothing

that the odd ideas smelling of thread and binding glue, they're the only real,

that, and the frontispiece of a dragon folded with a pencil note: my home

Style-Blind

2011-05-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

A teacher once said that satire can't just wallow in its subject; it needs to follow it with a keen, but quietly judgmental eye.

Over the past 30 years, America's puritanical heritage has resurfaced in its politics, and much of that can be attributed to fear that what we see in P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights was 'real', that it represents what was a 'mainstream deviance that corrupted our children'. Even people who 'experimented' may wrongly believe that this movie shows 'what it was like'.

Actually, Anderson gets wonderfully comic performances out of these actors, some of whom have become fixtures, either as major names or solid supports. They all play deluded people of average talent and intelligence, maybe a bit less, who focus on their American Dream which -- given the Southern California milieu -- means using the lens of a porno industry camera.

You don't watch Boogie Nights for sex or for music, though both suffuse the movie . . . uh . . . top to bottom. You watch it to find the true nature of your pity. How much human outreach do you have? How would you -- if this were real -- how would you counsel any of these people? You gladden when the ones who don't sink from their actions don't sink.

Most of the movie is simply fun, despite the awareness that those dumb-headed actions happening recklessly at the edge of one behavioral cliff or another presage downfall. For some of the characters, disaster comes. For others, life plods on in very common ways.

It's not real, but as you watch, you see how it could have been real.

Watching and seeing are retrospective skills. That's what art is for.

Living is for mistakes.

Kiss, Kiss

2011-05-14T22:56:00.000-07:00

Within love

discontinuities, however

you count the bickering and maybe

one or two of the fallings-out

followed by climbings-back-in

they do say it's there anyway

the pair-bonding, for life, like

two swans.

Feel The Power

2011-05-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

Australia's Aboriginal Elder, Cedric.

How 'primitive' must a culture be, still to hold onto a human interplay with -- not the physical world?

Hopi Chief Dan Evemhema. His spiritual compass has centered in North America, but tapped into mystery, too.

For 'contemporary', 'scientific', 'secular', 'modern', 'technological' mankind, though,

when did the last 'respected elder' live and die?

Sometime when common households held several generations.

1940?

Let's check Wikipedia on this.

(photo: Ted Szukalski)

Street Saint, Saint Street

2011-05-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

Attestation as to the ear-

witnessing of the heart's want.

Was as if i'd pulled a bunny out or flipped

a coin had landed on its edge as a naturist

knowing a bird from a bat were a flutter in the belfry

weird and wild no plainer nor truer

was the angel talked from voices

vocal in my bowed-down head.

Sworn this day, as my maternal aunt

had a brother-in-law whose son was me.

Victory In Europe, 1945

2011-05-07T16:00:00.000-07:00

This Vera Lynn RAF appearance.

Stanley Kubrick uses her song as the exit from his 1964 Dr. Strangelove, as an 'automated deterrent' of nuclear bombs mistakenly (subconsciously!) gets triggered -- the Doomsday Machine causing 'blossoms', one after the other, Springtime.

Kubrick's irony goes, as usual, that distance into the human heart . . . which only The Shadow seems to know.

This entry to the brave people, dead and living, who weathered those times and fought that 'good war'.

And good will to the many who oppose fascism in all its forms.

Laying Out The Cards

2011-05-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

The town quarter where we have slept sleep, some men at golf under umbrellas, the women upturning diamonds and hearts,

unto the babies a donation of constant things,

what is magic after all except the continuance that has no answers for itself

that it's begun is all, that there was a start, that a stranger, a man choosing between two forks of a road goes headlong off onto the highway of his own making

and what of paths, anyway, they just go and we're not sure they stop since that end produces a fresh choice.

If you wander to the left and I move my hand to the left I am taking the same journey and if I cry at the season when sadness calls for it and you pinch tears from your own eyes you are feeling the same sadness

and when the woman needing distraction plays the deck, and after the lay observes what the cards have turned, the resultant,

she sees a woman playing the deck and observing, and still hears the infant, still feels what's been there the while, the squeeze at her breast, that surprise, that unconditional.

Lying Low, Flying High

2011-04-29T23:59:00.000-07:00

To be roused by a handful of beads

and on the carpets were strewn petals

ears filled with the fiddler and the bongo

touches, blue songs arrested from the night

at the marrakesh of a friend's apartment

gold spangles and red pills and pillows

all this evanescent scene foretold by Roz

from her beatnik couch, hand on her clavicle

a relic, this memory, an ancient find, so very old

clacking of beads, night resting upon itself.

That Time Of The Deity

2011-04-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

Being it's the month of 45 and rainy

one gazes at the deck and wonders

if I saw a god's face, I might turn it to stone,

or draw mustache or scribble some jokes

or become like rain myself or forget my name

Being it's a week of the 45, rainy,

too cool for the deck, one stalls in the thought

about just what makes things a god and

whether I could make one an ornament from stone

or paste it to pictures of cities far off as a cute joke.

Being the remainder is 45, rainy,

such final days are to brood

over whether to bury or burn, dig down a god

alongside me -- or mount us both on the mantle,

twin boys, and obsessed for fame, for esteem, to be loved.

The Parts And What They Make Up

2011-04-24T15:51:00.000-07:00

After almost 30 years, the magic of this still holds.

Peter Weir is one of the few directors who has managed to allow-in, for his audiences, a sense that the world isn't flat, that our apprehension of it as a scientific object or manipulable set of economic relationships -- that understanding -- isn't the prime or only way of taking-in the world.

His The Mosquito Coast, his Picnic At Hanging Rock, his The Last Wave, surround eccentricity, weirdness, or mythic spirituality. The Year Of Living Dangerously, which might be a love story alone, or an earnest socio-political pitch set in Sukarno's Indonesia, gains immensely from the character Billie Kwan, Linda Hunt's smashing 'trouser' role.

Billie is the puppeteer, the clever arranger of his part of Jakarta, maneuvering foreign journalists and embassy people, as he may try, to effectuate success for a -- depicted here -- sympathetic Sukarno walking a thin line between Communist insurrection and military repression.

The film is not just a liberal plea, worthy though that is. Sacrifice shows itself, several people risking real personal jeopardy and giving themselves over to doing the right thing while surrounded by corruption and cynicism.

The clip above, while (still!) hotly romantic, represents a moment not simply of sexual assignation, but of moral choice -- Jill (Sigourney Weaver) is betraying and committing at the same time. In accepting what she gives, Guy (Mel Gibson) is now placed at a moment of choice himself.

They're not conscious of it, but they have been taught Billie's idealism and they do not fail him.

A Little Big Song Of The Earth

2011-04-22T23:48:00.000-07:00

What comes, comes. An upstart park alongside a sidewalk witnesses up-shoots of the spring, an urbanscape where a cluster, itself, of daffodils in yellow constitutes awe.

In the shuffle to find a purpose, as the sun spills onto a clear pond, slapping us awake to confront or present or simply be,

that bright yoke flashes in the moment, the madly artificial gone.

No business of ours anyway how business goes when the body is going in its turn in tune with its life's own hum.

Art Means Work. Yes, Work.

2011-04-21T12:42:00.000-07:00

This should open your eyes and interest you.

What to those of us who are 'just plain folks', who believe in 'democratic arts', who may recognize that being called a 'philistine' is a slur, but simply show our social equality in return (Back at ya!) -- what to us appears as an elitist enterprise, ballet, really produces more sweat in a day than a lifetime of backyard barbecues and lawn-mowings.

This clip doesn't show it all: the blisters and infected corns, the slipped discs, the exhaustion, the struggle just to be able to get a chance to suffer that way! The schooling, the disciplined adolescence, the foregone 'outside' life, the forced 'early retirement' at 30 or -- if you're truly strong -- 40.

The sheer physicality of it.

The mental grit needed for it.

Nils Tavernier's film of a decade ago, Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, honors the institution it views.

It should also raise the question: How much guts do I have -- how much have I given?

Person, That Whole Person

2011-04-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

And it's vernal, she's washed winter from her sallow skin, the skin of the near dead, and gotten done with the African violets

and uttering such words certainly meant to be meant as come from the mouth though cadged from a bard . . . thee best, O most best, believe it . . .

noted that I've liked love, the punctuations of it, the wink and wave at you, shadows bristling with a holy ghost

that such religiosity has its habits, its myth of desolation and rise, of utter promise based so truly on the rhythm of that waltz on the hooves.

Ms. Wasikowska. Ms. Bronte. Ms. Eyre

2011-04-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

Hard work week at the end of which I found this reward.

Texture.

Yes, Romantic sentiment between socially vulnerable young woman and a Byronic older man.

Yes, 'Gothic' secrets, 1830s English country conservatism, heath, rain, snow.

Yes, a mute servant class, a knowing but powerless housekeeper.

Yes, many sins, some revealed, some merely suggested.

Candle fire. Hearth fire. Room fire. Estate fire.

But we're not merely interested in the discharge of formulas, are we?

The film is a real one.

The Sleep Of The Just

2011-04-05T20:57:00.000-07:00

Speaking of that, how expansive we've become, how complexities drive our technology and our very imaginative edges get put on notice and we solve intricate problems elegantly,

an edge of understanding comes from the Neolithic when one reads about the village not that long ago smelling of goats, when they faced a problem -- say, adultery in their midst --

not wanting to let things slide but do justice instead the right thing and the perp's I'm sorry not enough and his offer to work half the season on the common plot of barley

failed as a remedy so a deputation of strong men took him by his arms and legs, the most shoulderly of village men, and heaved him into air as high as their collective strength.

Again and again. They lifted from the dust and heaved him up and flung him into air as high as their collective strength.

Many more times than once, each flop on a new spot, colliding with fresh pebbles and rock edges impacted earth catching a finger or elbow

or cheek flailing doesn't help these situations are governed by gravity of law.

Until, exhausted, even the hardiest sat. Body bones. 206 of them. We used to think in these small terms.

Mrs.

2011-03-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

In a perfect world this would be a space machine and she'd be here herself rather than a closet

we reach into that gap among the rounded hangers and conjure maybe an article of clothing gives a clue.

Part of her is frozen in the image -- that can't be taken of her only what someone misremembers faintly yet as an artifact of beauty but second only to her -- that registers

The rest, the real thing, is flying-off somewhere with the hearts and woe-squeaks of little animals called men.

The Moment In Question

2011-03-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

wish a dollar for every wave that's made it to the shore even of the oceans where i've gone underneath

where they've warned of the undertow, and not listening, bravado like an underslung jaw, the highkneeing over the curvelet short surf petering out at the sandcrabs

the further motion five feet above the chest go headfirsting into the transparency what an illusion

and finding the face now pressed into the silica a man's length away from breathable air and rubbing it into you the lesson

how do we lung the sunlit atmosphere when below it wanting to converse in its comfort on a beach chaise

-- a monkey on a warm tree limb -- but only recalling that looking up into a watery sun moving with the rip along and farther away from the call This way!

an imperative This way! just a bit to the shallows to stand and be upright at the first inhale.

But With A Little S** In It

2011-03-25T22:35:00.000-07:00

Love the brashness of Preston Sturges's mid-Century 'screwball' characters. In this clip from Sullivan's Travels (1941), Joel McCrea, a film director, is on a mission. It shows a long-standing literary/artistic clash. Witness Philip Sidney's An Apology For Poetry (1595):

Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth -- to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight.

Director Sully wants to teach, but his studio guardians insist on the delight, and he reluctantly gives some leeway. The film follows his earnest, yet naive, attempts at what he sees as a kind of social realism -- until he accidentally falls victim to problems he barely, only idealistically, understood.

By the film's end, he's learned something about what's to be taught and how people laboring under social miseries take their art.

Not-So-Commonplace 4

2011-03-24T15:03:00.000-07:00

The discursive writer writes as an act of conscious will, and that conscious will, along with the symbolic system he employs for it, is set over against the body of things he is describing.

But the poet, who writes creatively rather than deliberately, is not the father of his poem; he is at best a midwife, or, more accurately still, the womb of Mother Nature herself: her privates, he, so to speak.

The fact that revision is possible, that a poet can make changes in a poem not because he likes them better but because they are better, shows clearly that the poet has to give birth to the poem as it passes through his mind.

He is reponsible for delivering it in as uninjured a state as possible, and if the poem is alive, it is equally anxious to be rid of him, and screams to be cut loose from all the navel-strings and feeding-tubes of his ego.

-- Northrop Frye

Brothers

2011-03-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

The butcher knows that war is all hell

which is what I don't know the anger inside

amorphous and best doling out invisible curse

mumbling at a petty breach or social lapse

I do not know how to splinter a man's head off, nor the glory

spitting the preliminaries to a girl who doesn't know

my tongue she'll never have child once I'm through

and just let her lie there bleeding and that there's never a reason

reason having nil to do with it just the joy of carving,

just the joy of thanksgiving back at camp, whole and better.

Taking Inventory

2011-03-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

An iron green still remains to March

and on the lane's steep serpentine off the bluff, the windshield catches in its full stretch the silvered corneas of the Sound.

Under the flowerets such still meek sunlight casts no shadow

and before the pearl-grey, sinuous gaze of the waters to ask whether I should invade my own purposes and sound those misadventures

when, like a new year about to spring energetic in its own blossom, the cherry, the plum, the garden, this.

Fourrures Interdites

2011-03-18T17:08:00.000-07:00

Working over papers, I, drinking mucho coffee -- floating in it, threads of tabby.

The cat, Midge, simply cocks her head, as if to say, What? ain't you seen hair before?

God's Little Acre. Fraction.

2011-03-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

In counting the vegetation, six Douglas fir, two cedar, all 30 feet in height, a broken palisade against sunshine which isn't coming,

it being the March rains called showers causing river rise

the industrial parks built on valley silt farm land, lower, flooding, it's late winter

the time to walk the perimeter and its interior, a desmesne under family name,

to go, as provided in devise, to the Fine Daughter and her consort when he will and their heirs in perpetuity,

they're not even living nearby, nor has she yet met him, yet the land is firmly hers and the projected his, too, through eventual encounter and conjugality

and let this be public notice thereof and that my boots trod this land this day amongst the junipers and large old rhododendron whose flowers soon enough will match the size of a human head,

and nubby lawn and knobby tree roots snaking to widely balance the tree heights, the color green as Ireland half way around the world,

and that I'm lord for now, ambling this very parcel here.

Goliard

2011-03-10T13:44:00.000-08:00

You can call me a wanderer, I'm not

like the people on TV, true, cagey with the dollars per square foot

grousing over cupboard knobs and closet space

chuckling at those kitchen appliances are so new I might take up cooking

or what's not to love about the double sink and soaking tub! The views!

And at special times making sure that the baby's first Christmas will show on Facebook

or that the anniversary celebrates at a fine restaurant and give each other a rose and then visit the beach you walked on when you courted, and then make love don't ever change.

But before you think me shiftless, which, neither, am I,

just strolling from casino to casino, a cup of quarters, a well drink,

in need of a haircut and the suede jacket in need of a deep dryclean,

chatting up over jello shots the first available Kim at the snack cart

or picking up the tab on her garlic guacamole. A guy with bad habits

low rent and run-ins, neglected kids sequestered with the ex, et cetera,

like health going or gone at 40, and I'm whistling in patent pathos at the cheerleaders mocking back in teen sopranos.

No. None of the above. Try remembering you've seen me, registered in no big way, no ma'am,

as a guy in the Safeway aisle converting the metrics to ounces, sodium overloads, no wonder

you passed by. Or with a book bag. Or reciting to myself. No wonder.

There's lots I've done like that, like kissing and deep-breath exercise, but my mind's

remarkable most in that only I, only this instant, began to love this singular phrase out loud:

'cardamom and cinnamon'. Cardamom and cinnamon. Say after me.

Miss Jones

2011-03-04T12:28:00.000-08:00

My love's hungry for its own eradication,

but it's a lemon I can't swallow whole

until circumstance comes along and wedges,

skims tangentially by and zests, just squeezes --

her fingers adept on the kitchen boards, and

with the utensils found in the drawers, a chef.

Fast moving like a dance when it's called for

but patient with the time, waiting for the reverb,

the well-echoes, the satisfactory plunge

a taste makes when it bulls-eyes. The zen

of plinking a sexpartite cross-section citrus shim

between the ice cubes of a tall, cool glass of H2O.

And her appearance, smearing itself like ectoplasm

what a goddess in that she can walk on her hands.

Management Praxis

2011-03-04T12:12:00.000-08:00

What needs to be done.

What needs to be said about what needs to be done.

What must not be said about what needs to be said about what needs to be done.

What must be said never to have been said to one about what must not be said about what needs to be said about what needs to be done.

Got it?

Absolutely!

Then it's yours to steer. I'm sure you won't let us down.

With Jeanne Moreau As 'Christine'

2011-02-25T22:34:00.000-08:00

We get a lot of that, the logging debris, splinter chips, hillsides looking like a bad shave, bark-shred torn away like venison mauled-off by a bear.

Walking the moss that's grown seasons high up, now in low shadows of treelings cracked haphazardly and interlocked, we follow the path of mammals.

Last night I watched John Frankenheimer's film, the one about the train burglarizing Modern art from Paris into Germany,

The mania of a colonel steeled to steal. He's High-Cultured, sure, a man with an eye and a purpose.

But he's a Nazi and uses the ways of The Reich to fetch the paintings home to him, chafed between their 'decadence' and excellence.

The Allies are near. The Resistance has its work cut out, and as in all the post-War winning views, heroic French leave lives, in existential black-and-white.

Burt Lancaster, here a Frenchman, diverts the art train's path for a full screen-hour, finally chuffs up a hill, and with his bum leg slips and staggers and ultimately rolls to loosen the lugs on the railroad ties and knock out their quoins, derailing, when soon it comes, the engine and its first car.

The end takes place, in this case, by the wooded hill abutting the railway line, the way to Deutschland.

This end brings death to hostages and 'Krauts', this ends in boxes of Degas, scattered-about Seurat, piled-up Picasso, contents of the Jeu de Paume atumble amidst the timber-trash of broken ties,

Art ambiguously crated-up from sight, inert and quiet, beautiful inside, ready for the next appreciator's ego, ready for the next dare and swaggering excuse.

Ends always come.

Heritage

2011-02-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

This woman's friends. There's a loom which the woman-friend works.

The man-friend's feeding chickens. At night we sit in a kitchen with an oil lamp strung-around by a live spider's web.

There's some snow lying on the horse pasture. There're antiques nearby stored for sale in the barn stalls and in the barn loft.

There's still hay scattered there. Above, in the isolate crack-shafts of sunlight, old toys and edge-worn mirrors of dead beldames.

There's something about possessions.

There's something about what we have.

The Condiment

2011-02-17T20:54:00.000-08:00

Avoiding a curse is ritual. Tossing salt over the shoulder. It'll not happen, then, that bad dreams come at you.

And for positives, one looks in the mirror at moments of great confidence, perhaps after a day when separate compliments come: You know so much. You're just so funny.

Not to mention a spark of a glance that under other conditions start long expeditions, find new continents.

So, to looking into that mirror for the Great One, the hero to take you on the journey into the possible, that you.

It's a finding that what's a prison of one's own limitations turns out to be a lucky number.

Pick the chair which makes you invulnerable to table whispers, sure that in the decorative tapers around, you're royal in the glint.

Non-Denom Glory

2011-02-13T17:58:00.000-08:00

In the crook of fallen fir twigs,

water beads.

On them, the sky breaks bright:

light shock, sun splinter, glass dazzle.

Just so,

in the scheme of things

how -- and why -- I'm.

Peer Pressure

2011-02-13T14:44:00.000-08:00

People don't want to do it all the time. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Yet they're supposed to want to do it all the time or there's something wrong with them.

But what's really wrong is that they're meant to claim to want to do it all the time and feel as though they mean the feeling even though they're not having it.

Sure. Some people do want to do it all the time, and we have places for them with cots, nutritious energy snacks, showering facilities, and plenty of filtered water.

Most people, though, would forgo that haven and just be left alone for a while simply not wanting to do it.

Political Aikido

2011-02-12T15:37:00.000-08:00

If good will won't work

back off.

An aggressor toward you

wastes himself.

His hacks, his arm thrusts,

twist them.

An aggressor toward you

hates himself.

His fury outward at you,

bend back.

Just so much his force to send,

used up.

Tyrants fall, their systems

thin sticks.

.

The Big Water Trip

2011-02-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

Being taken to the house never seen, but a friend knew,

a piece of Green Dolphin Street could be anywhere, is.

And it not yet the vernal equinox, cold clearness still,

a whipped-cream curb where snow folds like a rolled-up cloud.

I fear windstorms as much as penitentiaries, and snow like the hangman.

As nature falls, it exacts an inheritance tax on the animal body of me,

my debt for the memory of grandfather's grandfather clock

still wound and winding, found and finding, a brute distress.

When spring comes, and in the late spring when it follows

with the bump of settling waves, of chopping waves

taking on cloud-forms and blown air, sprinkles, no ice traces,

me, sailing fast as a catamaran to the Any Islands.

Old Times

2011-02-05T21:01:00.000-08:00

45 and rainy. How much

we thought he lied. His 'fever illness'

causing him to walk with a cane,

his track/field University life before,

his dual names as 'cultural I.D.'.

And her. Her tongue wagged, good

gossipy tales, with knit brows,

self-righteously taut as a sexual breath,

her blush, her chuckle, her fingering

lift of the Dry Sémillon, epicurean quaff.

And now. Her on machines, him blind,

missing the imperfections we all share.

The Last Time I Saw Paris

2011-02-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

When 45 and rainy, one considers

people's history in a fat book.

And a rainy history considers

45 people's fat when in one book.

Paradoxy

2011-02-03T12:21:00.000-08:00

I know there are answers to this.

How do I find myself in non-neo-colonial proactive defensive wars.

How do I find myself in non-exploitative, socially-mobile, wealth-engendering corporate hegemonies.

I know. There are answers to this.

This is no irony. This means a changed world.

Whose terminology games me, a 'boy of the 50s'.

Post-Modern Rhapsody

2011-02-02T12:29:00.000-08:00

The sedan, its sound system at medium-high volume catching the diamond tosses and pearl droplets of Donizetti bel canto, stops before a business intersection at a long light.

Across the way, dressed in a long smock, wearing a rubbery tiara spiked like the Statue of Liberty, dances a bearded man waving a sign promising 50 dollars if we do your taxes. Boogaloo, his 50-year-old lip twist seems to say. Get with the rhythm, gesture his fingers and fists.

His highs hit Donizetti highs

His hip-pivots, orchestral swoops.

Walkies

2011-02-01T13:17:00.000-08:00

Let's call them social workers, these two women who stood in the office of one of them. The office was a place of acquainting, dispensing, love. The one whose office it was had rescued a dog, a German Shepherd, 'King', condemned to a suffocating death by law.

The Shepherd had failed to adjust to its foster homes.

The one woman whose office this was kept wristing-back, from time to time, the chain holding King in a muscular show of who-leads-whom.

They loved animals, these tall, strong two.

The office had a burnt-brick northern wall, an architectural allusion to industrial times. Contrasted to that Dickensian surface were the other three walls, each with thin strips of chrome and large, broad panels of moon-bright light.

The post-modern shine contrasted with brick, the venerable, rough rust-and-char, but, also, now with the dark swirls on the coat of the jittery King.

Woman Number 2, a sturdy gal, had cloaked herself in an all-weather, quilted, down-stuffed, rain-proof jacket of red. And when she got down on all-fours, encouraging a rub with Hi, boy! Hi, boy! no one foresaw or could stop King's wild move.

So fast was its lunge and the retraction of its muzzle. So much was the sound of an ice cliff falling. So much was the umbrage in a nature without reason.

Free Speech Movement

2011-02-01T12:22:00.000-08:00

Political table set out on the sidewalk at the public entrance of a US Post Office displays a poster of President Obama with a Hitlerian mustache. Plenty of leaflets.

Young woman, 'co-manning' the table, smiles a sweet smile and flaps a short 'hi' wave at me as I enter. I pass on.

As I leave, I try to avoid eye contact, but I notice a conversation has been started between the other political operative and a woman, suburban middle class, white, maybe in her late 40s, who had dropped off her mail.

She's smiling, and she's already said something.

Now I hear what she says, smiling, twice: Do I look like white trash? (pause) Do I look like white trash?

Another Year, Another Quiet Mike Leigh Triumph

2011-01-30T19:09:00.000-08:00

No murder. No sinking ships. No wise-ass teens.

No Legions, no small-town-joe-makes-good.

No court of law. No con. No 'bad-lieutenant' cops.

No talking dogs. No blackmail, and no hooker scenes.

No corporate conspiracy. No royal court. No 'hood'.

No war. No aliens. No capers. No 'black-ops'.

No poor-class gal to get the handsome lead.

No 'magic' world of shallow, feel-good 'myth'.

No rape shock. No coming-of-age in a 'simpler' time.

No cowboys, no pop music. No selling-out for greed.

No mystery to solve of someone's quirky death.

No vampires, zombies, cannibals. No crime.

With humans, we know the fragility of bliss.

Simply, cinematically, we aren't prepared for this.

Clue

2011-01-29T15:33:00.000-08:00

Miss Scarlett,

in the library,

with a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Go Figure

2011-01-29T15:04:00.000-08:00

Dead people.

You can't live with 'em.

You can't live without 'em.

Yo! Foodies!

2011-01-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

It's about time.

Out of my respect for those who suffer from 'seasonal affective disorder', or as we acronymically know it -- SAD -- it being a cloudy January, there is reason to bring Spain into our lives.

And a guilty pleasure. Spain . . . On The Road Again.

TV series. Mario Battali. Gwyneth Paltrow. Mark Bittman. Claudia Bassols. Thirteen episodes, tripping around España. Eating.

It's true that viewers have noted the 'internal dramatic tension' of this series is less than it might be. And that its comedy fits routinely into the casual, and for the most part limited, conversation of people waiting for a restaurant table when they're hungry and barely scripted.

But that's part of its charm: finding an Epicurean edge to a world -- if one thinks about it too carefully -- otherwise largely hellish.

Speaking for myself, there are simply times when I want to note the placid sections of the Bruegel vision of which I am a part.

Being a gentleman of a certain age, I can certainly appreciate Mark Bittman's flirtation with the entrancing Claudia Bassols.

Where did you say that spa is?

At any rate, food and wine, my friends.

Oh. And I'll try one of these. What did you say they were?

The 100-Dollar Poached Eggs

2011-01-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

They were very good. A choice was given between on the hard side or should we go softer, which is the method I prefer, the yoke being liquid and sloppy so as to give a gastronomic reason for the artisan bread with its peek-a-boo texture holes.

And there were garlic smashed potatoes, as well, your basic red potatoes not so much 'smashed' as 'distressed' so that the skin breaks like chapped hands, but with tender baby-cheek-sized white starch mingling in its fall-off separation with that very skin rubbed with herbs and kosher salt. And garlic.

The coffee was also very good, served by a perky, shaved-head waiter with fashionably thin glasses and a good sense of humor, a great rhythm to his friendly patter, which made me open the discussion when the breath seemed right to deal with the relative social behaviors attendant on men's urinals having privacy splash-guards, versus a more trendy, 'open-minded' style of bathtub-trough, shoulder-to-shoulder presentations.

If I were a sociology teacher, I suppose I could've assigned a poll to be taken.

It was, it really was, an 'educable moment'.

.

Witnessing The Dread Turn

2011-01-21T17:57:00.000-08:00

How tenuous feeling the onset of 'bad' that's oncoming,

vulnerable in the terrible spot of never touchable before

can't deflect it, reguide its inevitability, disguise this thing.

Whereas the kiwi tastes like a grape that needs to be sweetened

nothing sweetens this, this lead slug in the mouth.