Al Dente

I see you brushing your teeth

in the reflection off the glass-mounted print

of the John Singer Sargent scene

of an Italian fountain with bathing women.

I deny you don't travel.

The Fascist Cut

Who cares about who cares

writing it down is an act of arrogance is a virtue

someone must think, and it's me, and I'm quick and others follow

the scars of experience on a face called text

the whole point is action and the hell with them.

Like a poem about a dog, a cloud, an egg, and a she

one must shoot the dog, eat the egg, fly through a cloud of fucking her

and go high on a sunny place to head a regime.

You see, choice is for the weak.  We're here, just straight-off verbs.

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Chow

The anthro prof, Jim Frazer, called it 'eating of the god', a strange appreciation, you'd think, for all that comes one's way

as when the mayor of a town would bake a man of dough -- an extra-large -- at harvest time

and break bits off for the farming folk to dip in the new wine decanted from old bottles

But now everyone knows each feeding place in France lays claim to good bread, and even the émigrés in the States serve hot loaf.

In fact, she and I know this place that's authentic here like a private home with Alsatian dog warming by the hearth, where

even though you call ahead you wait, full with a hungry sort in the anteroom and, poured around, complimentary Bordeaux blanc.

Once (if I may speak frank) by the power of their pork terrine we made love on a tiger rug out of Indochine.

I'd give it four stars on nothing more than the sweetbreads and the fact that our child was born

rollicking to the beat of the human heart as that beat goes on.

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A Garden Of Allah

An unanchored woman is far more precious than rubies, and

we awoke him from a deep bed sleep after making-out

propitiatory hand-over-fistful of money

to see the divorcée freshened by her love of travel

and the whiskey of his anecdotes about power avalanched us

putting our allegiance on 'On' by feel alone, charisma,

so she would dig for him, work hard for the victory his,

since everyone, all interested in November votes, looks to

this kind of sodality, this almost blood-brethrenship.

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My Main Man

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

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The Long Goodbye

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.

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Style-Blind

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.

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God's Little Acre. Fraction.

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.

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Goliard

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.

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Miss Jones

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.

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Peer Pressure

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.

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Post-Modern Rhapsody

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.

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Walkies

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.

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Clue

Miss Scarlett, 

in the library, 

with a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Go Figure

Dead people.

You can't live with 'em.

You can't live without 'em.

Yo! Foodies!

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?

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The 100-Dollar Poached Eggs

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'.


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Laying Down 'Le Gant'

. . . a scurry of whispers coming from the restless wall pipe

Lenin had the logic for it . . .

Waitstaff circling la table, laying spoons, folding serviettes,

straightening a candle such that shadows from it fall like noon,

drawing from inconsequential talk a new notice,

the concord of their motion like mute swans.

After it all, the cheese, the mousse, Château d'Yquem,

significant time broke through, and we 'transcended' where we were --

she murmured aufgehoben, citing Marx --

where consuetude is left behind, departure points

to the arrival where routine becomes a new life.

her Burberry gloves falling like feathers to the parquet floor

Yet, I said, yet the soul still hovers . . .


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Talk About Passing Time!

Let's get morbid for just a minute:

Best death.  Don't know it's coming, don't realize it's hap . . .

Second best death.  Just as, or immediately after, you finish howling with laughter.

Suicide's bad -- you do know it's coming, you likely aren't laughing -- plus it's got the drawback of your being able to prevent it -- there's a decision for you!

Worst death.  This may be a tie.

One would be death by exotic and drawn-out torture executed by a devotee with skill and patience.

The other would extend over many months, perhaps years, with long and certain debilitation, pain, and general isolation from human sympathy.

Actually, the fallacy about all this has been pointed out by those keener than I.  

What we've been talking about isn't 'death', but 'dying'.

What we've been talking about is a segment of 'life'!

So, let's drop that and go on to that more appealing subject:

Immediate life, something gratifying.


I'm thinking of tonight's gyoza and rice, a brisk walk before the predicted snow, and reading from several good books at the bedside.  Good night's sleep.  Another vacation day.  Casually involving myself in tai chi, streaming old episodes of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and feeding the cats.


No grimster, I, my friends.  Lighten up!  I've provided a comic ending.

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Nostradamus, Nearly

1

To read what's next, read what's now

To read what's now, read what was

2

Prophecy:  the present condemning the present

3

Too much future, not enough time

(art work: Katherine Venturelli)

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