Aztlan ('The Place of the Reeds')

was the traditional home of the Aztecs, a possibly mythical motherland from which the tribe ventured forth on a one-hundred-year walk. It was a land to the north of Mexico City. Chicanos recognize Aztlan as being in the American southwest, and it came to represent the stomping ground of 'La Chicandada,' or the entirety of the Hispanic west. The Aztecs (Mexica, pronounced 'Meshica," hence 'Chicano') walked south, out of the deserts, on their way to what would become Mexico City. They apparently walked across Devil's Highway on their way home. (77)

All day, at home. Read cover-to-cover Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway. Am still recovering--I lived in that desert, my desert, in its subtlety and ritual--its heat, its rains--am still reeling though I know the story, have known it all my life, having lived in it most of my life. My great grandfather was a rock-pick miner who came north from Mexico to join the mining companies in Arizona. A wetback, yes. One of those folks crossing that desert, 110, 115 degrees before noon, if you arrive in late spring or early summer: the desert is very predictable: it's always fucking treacherous by May. Flesh separating from the bone like pigs slow-cooked in a sand pit. That's the image that stays with me. Pigs slow-cooked alive. Pinches Coyotes, they know this. Poor poor people don't. Where do we think we can get to? Snow here: frozen wood and bricked streets laced with ice: my damp hair freezes instantly, my eyelashes and breath too. North and further north of the hundred-year walk and the hundred-year floods and the place where no reeds that I know of grow. I wish I could go back home.

Just watched Saved!

Loved it. But kept thinking: when will abortion emerge?

My roots in born-again Christianity fight it out with my Catholic upbringing and my working class liberal self-righteousness. But am in awe of what I am not seeing: why can't the spiritual take on the real? or: the current political culture: because I'm pretty skeptical and pretty romantic.

A close friend said recently, after much shit that pissed me off, that at least the recent conservative outpouring would result--as it always has--in great music, poetry, art. Look at the 60's he said.

You know, that's not scientific, but I appreciate the artfulness of his point. So get on with it people. Tell me he's right.

home ec

Lots of egg in an egg. Those nifty little microwave egg cups mama sent? Do not cook on high for longer than one minute.

Do not do it twice.

* * * * *

What is the verb form of Swiffer?

Can't stop swiffering. Very O/C right now. Cat hair is very bad for this. Or good, depending.

The assignment

last Thursday on girls' night out, a this week's dream journal and full report, night after next, usual place and time,

which I recall was the origin of pages in August, dream

latitude and dream license. --Not a mystical soul-search in notes, not at first, I say, but a hard look at loss, slippage between the dreaming and the writing it

down. And as I look back, I can see I began to look away as the space between dream, dreamer, waking self and writing self, in writing became more obviously a source of (a reason to) aestheticizing. Hell of

making it up. Now why stay true to a dream if not for more self-reflexive writing? --and what's wrong with that? Nothing's wrong, I say. And nothing's true here, either, though it makes sense. The digging up

of stuff might've been there when the porch deck buckled and split open last night, and we cupped dirt from a hole in it, moving it elsewhere for planting, I write, though in the dream I was looking at the woman's long white arms and the word

gauze comes to mind now. She stood up, her back to me, and the hole smelled wet and the earth was black, warm (that's obvious), and I am sure now that was don Juan's porch, the one Castaneda rolled around on all night looking for a buzz

of something new, an alternative view, which you could say is something mystical, or was before the hoax of don Juan and co. etc. though I get stuck now on what: what kind of wood would

do that, buckle up in tall waves, look ashen and cracked as if having been nailed for decades into this porch deck, before rain fall before the dream? That kind of wood was conjured, I'm telling you, true, though I can't imagine it's possible and did, and I alone am left

alone to tell you how the house crumbled and killed them all Job's servant said, if you believe what you read. It's raining outside. No it isn't. It wasn't raining in the dream when I was there. She was there turning her back, ask her.

Red vinyl, black vinyl:

the other Mexican restaurant in town and dinner with Sean which might've gone late into the night if not for teaching tomorrow and his first big day of conferences with students. I am up too late now for a woman who must face the dean first thing before class, then class, then the festivities for MLK, then appointments, then back to the do jang: but wanted a word in: word: we talk about writing and I recall: I came here for this: it takes a man who's left home and returned to show you the places he used to go to are the ones you're still looking at: that place still had Christmas up and the bar? open as long as possible: cuervo and dyed blue salt: every section's smokable:

Despair

some days of making headway against the obstacles of things that must get done in order to do: oh for time to make a phone call or two: but tonight a student asks: do you like conferencing with us? and in absolutes of course yes: that's why I do it: days go by and the week loses me and the teaching keeps me grounded and meeting with people keeps me grounded and the writing keeps me grounded when weariness takes over though I worry it'll not pay off: then it does, on a Friday like today, when everyone gathers for an afternoon student reading and again for an evening student/faculty reading and again after, when people linger and gather over food and drinks elsewhere to keep the momentum going: sixty-five heads at least in that tiny coffee house on a friday night when you might assume there are better things to do: the closing act, stand-up comedy by somebody who admits he's never done something in front of people before, and they clapped: we clapped: don't know what kind of audience I have, he says: a generous one, I call out, hoping: and they did, they clapped and whooped: and he did: he made us laugh and he dispelled the nervousness weight in the room of writers being readers and serious readers and writers, and took us away from our smallest self-conscious selves towards some sympathetic knowing: not me but us: there at all in the first place because of others, though the others have to agree and approve and can we: be generous: I didn't know and was afraid but: he was so nervous and so brave: it was perfect: it worked: the work worked out:

Open mic tomorrow night

after a full day of teaching and back-to-back conferences and the student literary magazine reception: time to give the mic back to the student who first envisioned it: she's ready to take it on again: tomorrow night, the last of my open-mic introductions and an appropriate time to read a difficult scary piece: closure: to an incredible week of conferencing with all 30 students, my TA, my research assistant, and my four independent studies: in between, hotel and flight arrangements for Frank's visit and reading, posters for the mic, grading, reading and prepping for class, and email the bane of my time. But the appointments began in the coffee house this morning and the evening closed with dinner and friends. No. Here, with you, book: closed.

Can't believe it:

I'm teaching two classes, 28 students, and somehow not only do I have a TA this term for Beginning Poetry Writing, but today one of my advisees, a wonderful hell-smart reliable kid and a McNair Fellow, asked me if I could put her to work as a research assistant, up to ten hours a week. McNair will pay for it--she gets work study. Ten hours a week? The departmental student assistant works ten hours a week for the eight of us. Can you say Xerox copying, friend? And interlibrary loan? She even offered to write synopses of articles for me. Oh, I've got plenty on my plate, but I've not learned to delegate without creating more work for myself, so this is going to take some imaginative thinking. But the gods do love me. The suffering and poetry course in the spring is not yet fully researched and I've been worrying about how to get that shit done before leaping into the teaching. I have a bibliography to get her started and a few of Freud's essays to locate. And she's taking that course in the spring, too, so she's excited about knowing as much as I do. Helleeyouya. I can almost breathe again.

First night back at the do jang after nearly two months. I did practice over the break (nak bub mostly with Trystan, who calls it "tuck and roll" from his days at Tumbles, though damn if I don't do a damned good fall now), but I've forgotten some of the details of ki cho hyung, which is an art of detail, fluidity, dance, and I'd only learned 1-4 before I left. Five and six looked impossibly confusing and physically unattainable tonight. Six: double an da ri: hah. I'll be a white belt forever. Ki bohn soo, though, is the real challenge. It requires engaging with a partner, learning to identify the pressure points in another person's forearm, hand, neck, and making someone surrender to her physical vulnerabilities--the wrist snap, the turned elbow, the swept knee. You train to force someone to yield up his center, of gravity, of certainty, to his appendages: margin over center: fall or I will break your wrist. There are 15 techniques to learn for the yellow belt. I have a sloppy three I barely claim. I am not lazy, nor disinterested, but afraid of inflicting pain--of understanding how to use it--and until tonight I think I didn't see that ki bohn soo requires all the attention of a lover in love. Pleasure or pain, it is the same responsiveness to responsiveness, and delicate, and artful. Whittle me torturer, no. But I see my partner won't respect me if I don't learn to apply the right pressure. --Still, after being gone for so long, and after making so little progress, the school welcomes me back and works me hard along with the others. Kwan Jang Nim announced that he would take it easy on us tonight since so many of us had been away for the winter break, but an easy night with him is still a shitload of pushups, situps, crunches, squats, kicks, horse-stance punches, lower, lower, thank you sir, and always more of it just as you think you can't do more. I walk into the do jang wanting to walk back out and walk out wanting to walk back in, fear to triumph, every time. Tonight, after two months of practicing round-house kicks at home, I did them consistently and nearly balanced, and without putting that back foot down before returning to stance. And the real glory here is that I left the office at four-thirty, hell or high water, so I could do it.

Ted got his brown belt while I was gone, got two black eyes and a busted lip during the test, had knee surgery last Monday, came back that Wednesday, and showed up tonight with enough enthusiasm to help his wife Cynthia through her first night back in a year. She's a white belt too. Guess us white belts are still loveable.

My body's telling me now how it'll feel tomorrow morning. Oh lowly white belt, I am not worthy.

Revolutions

1. to be nice to myself.
2. to be nice to myself.

First day

of class tomorrow: two back-to-back poetry writing classes, beginning and advanced, and I have been fantasizing all weekend about fourteen lemons and twelve smooth stones which I will give over to, put into the hands of, the fourteen beginners and twelve seasoned poets, these round desirable fist-breasts organ-lumps, this fruit and earth, this madre y padre, this sex and death. And for the beginners I have a lemon poem, Eden poems, Eve poems, dead garden poems to show, as is sweet and fitting--Frank Gaspar, Louise Gluck, Milton, Eliot's children in the apple tree--and for the old salts, also crystalline also fit, Marie Howe's mountain, Blake's grain of sand, Dean Young's asphalt, C. K. Williams' clay, and Frank Gaspar's stone garden statue of the Buddha. And someone will say: not navels, but nipples and wombs filled with veins, with seed, with infant limbs and roots and blind knowing: and someone will say like bone like ash like the myth of Sisyphus the rock that rocks the sea, the monolith and the tower, the law and the father: and I will say yes yes and yes yes: bring it on: deeper: