leaving arizona

The God Babies

Little feet go tete-a-tete art with a wild thou, Potter, potter potter potter potter. Could be rain, too, this winter's slow sleet breaking out all death, all spring's acomin', then all summer again, little baby, all give us a song, all wild and heart-stop threshold and stark tree blow, my baby, thou and the monster hurt no and no no and no and no and though (we’ve had a harsh season) there is only one view from here (the tree mesh, the sky-lit net all limbs all dearly white and black) and though it is quiet here my thou, I see the wait, the closer walk, the art with thee that art: your feet not far behind.

***

Am going back to winterland tomorrow, am packing, sorting photos, already missing my little ones, my Glen. Am telling myself: chin up, be brave, there's a world out there and you must live in it, you are one of the lucky ones.

***

glen

weep for love and salt

What the fuck happened here? Someone explain it to me, I don't understand . . .

*

Well, I kept Cynthia's link on my blogroll in case she returned to her url, and every so often I'd click on it, just to see. This morning, the shock of it was that I thought it might be related to her internet harassment, though of course Steve and Simmons are right: just a porn spam squatter. Will now delete the link and flag the site as Suzanne and Lorna advise. O sorry fate.

*

Someone needs to write an elegy on the death of a good blog.

*

Hear this, C? We miss you.

*

Sonnet in the Key of Sodomy for Marilyn Musgrave

Jasper Bernes has a poem up at order & decorum today. I just heard: they're publishing a new poem each day for 440 days, each naming a current member of the U.S. House of Representatives. There's a call, get your own up.

One of the marks of Jasper's work, besides that it's smart, lyrically gorgeous, iconoclastic, as satirizing as it is reverent--that often as not it's politically explicit--is a major turn-on.

I was thinking of the word statute, skating along the chain of associations—stasis, The State, metastasis, that girl Stacy, ecstacy—it gives rise to. The law: born and maintained and remade in violence. Beautiful as the statue is, the fucking thing won’t move, and as such represents my frustration that I can’t bring it out of the dream and into the clearer airs of general being. Like a Giacometti, it steps forward perpetually without getting anywhere, a burn victim, a Bernes victim. I’m its shepherd, but I’m not doing such a good job, it appears. We are beautiful; we are brilliant; we are deeply incapable.

Note that first-person plural, the courage to speak among others. We. It moves me that he thinks in those terms. Recently he sent me an astonishing, intoxicating sequence of poems (he called it a "prose piece" but what the hell) saturated with genre bending, Warhol, Los Angeles, Berryman, sex, drugs, first-person plural, Godot, and everything else he could get his hands on, which is sweet and fitting, since the damned thing is about money, and what isn't?

He looks like an exclamation point. He looks like looks like. Henry Halfman, his mind a mint that would ballast and bulwark the sagging markets, poem it, write value into the blank, aggregating zeroes of the approaching end.

Well, money is its trope, anyway. Really, it's about assigning value, and love, big hard questions for words, for poetry. As in: I am so thrilled by this work I can't say how much. Or: I love Jasper Berne's poems. --How many 0's is that?


00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Observe, if you will, the marvel of the human kidney, more like the mind than the brain is, more like a poem than the vandalized dictionaries of our proto-anti-hero—including, excluding, absorbing, exuding—his million spongiform mechanisms disbursing the toxins it is our fate to catalogue: gin and revenge; nicotine, carbon monoxide, mercury and time; attaching the fathers to their flywheels, effacing the coins. Henry’s kidneys were failing faster than his other organs—he could feel them kick and twist up their mouths, saying—and, late in March, after a brief stay in the Jewish Hospital, Henry became gripped by the delusion that he was a kidney, our kidney, the kidney. He fell to his knees and thought, as he often must, of his kids. Los Angeles was sick and Henry was sick and one of them would die first, martyr. He started practicing with the LA Times, seeking out the hate crimes, the cruel kabbalistic rhymes, buried in the last pages. He hugged the homeless, hoping to take on their fleas, their psoriasis and rotten teeth. He wandered through Watts, still unrebuilt, collecting firearms and bags of marijuana and bottles of fortified wine. He pissed on the Porsches in the driveways of the rich. He put ads all over Hollywood, hoping to reenact a Cambodia on the runways of LAX. Before my mother gave birth to me, I passed through Henry, his pain a watermark flashing within me, that I would seek him out, my father, my further and further. They took me home and wrapped me in a patchwork quilt and smoked a joint and put on Bob Dylan, and the big factory of the ocean rumbled and rummaged around for something it had lost. Henry was learning to swim. He was running back and forth across the Santa Monica Freeway stopping accidents.

From Jasper Bernes' Promissory Notes

Blue and Purple. Because

the car next to us was blue or purple, neither, the color of waking in the children’s hospital. The nurse floated a translucent blue-purple cloud over my forehead, someone said there now she’s awake, and I was. What was in her fist? Because the color of something lost when I was four floats forth and parks next to us, next to me, I stare from the passenger’s side window at the purple-blue hood of the car where rain and paint chips distract me toward something else, the present honing in on the present, the parking lot, my wet shoes, a mosquito bite on my thigh, the dark-haired man in a salmon polo shirt and black horn-rimmed glasses watching me stare—

he is my age, I think—he climbs out of the car and follows my gaze with his, which by now is on his face, his eyes. It is twilight, just after rain, and his salmon shirt is beautiful in this light which is smoky and violet, same as the car. What was it she had in her hand? I asked my mother. The nurse, what was it? He wants to know what I’m looking at. Rain on his shirt, his shirt clings to his skin. His eyes are very dark, his brows and lashes thick and dark like Zali’s,

Zali who knocks on his own forehead to make a point, who says from across the table where we used to sit: this dirt you don’t burrow past. His face makes a face, a blind mole. He digs at the air, knocks on his forehead. I think the man in the salmon shirt beautiful. He doesn’t see what I see, he is concerned now and holding my gaze and saying something to the woman getting out of the driver’s side of the violet blue car. I am sealed behind glass. They are soundless. The woman turns to look at me, is thinking: what are you

looking at? Something borrowed, something blue. I asked my mother, what did she have in her hand? Nothing, what do you mean?--she had nothing in her hand. Zali waves his fist, says: write your book, find your love. Yes there was something there, I need to know what woke me. The color of a crucible of violets. I don't know what that means. I woke violently, I woke with my eyes. They look at me, man and woman, I've nursed something from them. No sweetie, there was nothing, it was nothing. I'm sorry, I say. Of course they can't hear me.

Quien Eres Tu? Quien Eres Tu?

Federico Correa

*

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

~~Frank O'Hara

chicken industry

besides the white chickens:

"I am somewhat reluctant to divulge the secrets of the way I taught poetry, however, since you are a good friend and I trust you, I shall divulge.

On the first day of the unit, I began by bringing a live chicken into the classroom. I instructed my students to write a few lines on the beauty of the chicken, dumb loud fowl although it was. Then I slit its throat."

*

chicken bones, paint

"As for those that lay egges, it is not so certain that they dreame; but resolved it is that they doe sleepe."

This morning I dreamt of cherries.

Cherries on the mannequin's dress, cherries I abandoned in the fridge. The kitchen was dark and empty when I forced myself up and remembered that he touched me, put his hands on the back of my head to see what had gotten into me. We were in a warehouse. No. Your garage but bigger. I'd cut my hair to the nubs. I could feel his hands on the back of my head, his fingertips got into me at the nape of my neck where the skull ends. The cherries were in crates and ripe for pitting. There's a hard bone in here he said. I have no idea who he was.

*

"Evident it is, that horses, dogs, kine, oxen, sheepe, and goats, doe dreame. Whereupon it is credibly also thought that all creatures that bring forth their young quicke and living, doe the same. As for those that lay egges, it is not so certain that they dreame; but resolved it is that they doe sleepe."

it's Greek

How much translation is preference?

And you prefer...?

A passage from Plato's Symposium first translated by P.B. Shelley as The Banquet, the only translation of the text much available until Benjamin Jowett's version of it became standard:

"And since Love is the child of Poverty and Plenty, his nature and fortune participates in that of his parents. He is forever poor, and so far from being delicate and beautiful, as mankind imagine, he is squalid and withered; he flies low along the ground, and is homeless and unsandalled; he sleeps without covering before the doors, and in the unsheltered streets; possessing thus far his mother’s nature, that he is ever the companion of Want. But, inasmuch as he participates in that of his father, he is forever scheming to obtain things which are good and beautiful; he is fearless, vehement, and strong; a dreadful hunter, for ever weaving some new contrivance; exceedingly cautious and prudent, and full of resources; he is also, during his whole existence, a philosopher, a powerful enchanter, a wizard, and a subtle sophist."

Here is Jowett's text:

"And as his parentage is, so also are his fortunes. In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven in the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his father too, whom he also party resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising , strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some interigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist."

So beautiful, anyway.

Happy birthday, reli[e]able signs. Happy birthday.

August 12, 2004, 2:10 pm

for A.D.

"—if they're all immortal and powerful and stuff, how is it that one has to invite them in?"

Somebody should write something about poetry and vampires. I'm partial to hunger. Not so much to sucking.

"Vampirism is epidemic in character. Where one instance is discovered it is almost invariably followed by several others. This is accounted for by the circumstance that it is believed that the victim of a vampire pines and dies and becomes in turn a vampire himself after death, and so duly infects others."

***

"Where do you find your energy?"

"I eat amazingly bad poets for breakfast."

"No wonder you're so thin. It's a good look for you. Very chic."

"Thanks."

"Better than lettuce, eh?"

"Way better than lettuce. Way better. More like Atkins. Meaty enough. And empowering."

"Empowering?"

"Yeah, empowering."

"You look empowered."

"Oh I am, I am. "

"Yeah, you look it."

"Thank you. Thanks."

"So how do you know?"

"Know?"

"What's amazingly bad?"

"You don't know?"

"No. Well, I have an idea."

"It's pretty obvious."

"I mean, how do you know?"

"It's pretty obvious."

"Amazingly obvious."

"Of course. You can smell it."

"I like that. You're like a bird of carrion."

"You see my point."

"Yeah. Not bad. Sort of a Swiftian cleanup job there."

"There you go."

"With or without the irony?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, how serious are you?"

"How serious do I need to be?"

"I mean, do you mean it?"

"Did Swift?"

"You're not Swift."

"Not so quick yourself. I'm a fucking vampire, remember? Bird of carrion?"

"Right. Well you wear it well."

"Thank you."

***

Stormy out there.

Things explode here and here and elsewhere--and I hold my breath, as when swimming underwater. I have been swimming underwater lately, skimming the bottom of the pool in the short life breath has on the rare days when a car is free and lightning is far enough away.

To all of you, I couldn't keep up with your kindness: thank you.

"and also that they were able to cure stammering with a kiss."






. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . flying fish . . . . . .

Had to write an "artist's statement"

for an anthology project being edited by Franciso Aragon, whose beautiful book, Puerta del Sol, is now out with Bilingual Press.





So much of that writing and thinking took place here, it seems appropriate to post it now that it is, at last, elsewhere from my desk.

*

Was it for this that I


A ghostword is an accident, a non-word that crosses into the dictionary through typographical oversight or misinterpretation. Rarely, it slips into usage, bastard imposter, and assumes a legitimacy of its own, but then it no longer passes nonsense for matter. It is an actualized fiction. Like other words in the language net, it takes on meaning. It crosses meaning. It is my fantasy.

In my nightmare, we have to find the right words. We were crossing America where at first I was alone, as when looking for home. I had a ticket in my hand and at my feet, on the escalator, my one heavy bag rode with me past their faces, women I used to know, their faces garish blue, their faces shadowed or mirrored, reflected in the surfaces, recurring. The escalator was a wheel of heads that churned them out again and again. I heard myself repeating myself—still, still—we were negatives, a phantomnation:

but the fairgrounds went a long way out, so I began walking. I began talking to you, cousins. For this, someone left a body in the grass, human, pale, thin as a gazelle and socket-eyed and you looked away, back towards where we came. This side, the glass in the sun, the drowned rising against the bank, the river crossing through so many middle-Americas—for what? The bodies stared into us and nothing, cousins. We were crossing America and taking our dead with us. We named them after our suffering to find them again, but the words were hard and without them we were lost.

In my family, words were hard but dear, were both hard-won passage and long-suffering monument. Words authorized the way. They named the only boy, my brother, after Saint Christopher so he might move through the world with influence. To honor his grandfather Juan, they settled on the middle name John since Juan had become Johnny anyway. They called my father Charlie, and sometimes they teased him and called him Charles, but his birth name is Carlos, Carlos Bustamante Franco, a name of uncertain disadvantages. Once he said to me: “when you are old enough, we will change your last name. You don’t need to tell anyone you’re Mexican American.” Spanish was a guarded secret kept from my brother and me except when my parents lost control of it. We learned only the obscenities as kids.

My father is a civil engineer, a surveyor for the Phelps Dodge copper mine in Morenci, Arizona. I learned to say these words with distinction. He had just enough trade school and talent for drawing and math to eventually rise up and out, from the depths of the open pit—where the other men in the family moved dirt to the concentrators and smelters—to the rim of the maw: "the largest open-pit copper mine in North America." He walks the mine's radius, a diviner of pipe lines and ore lines and shaft lines from the palimpsests of the mine's previous lives. He tells the company where to dig. That's how he describes his job.

My father brought home rocks and words for rocks. Iron pyrite, azurite, malachite, obsidian, pink and white agate, lime stone, granite, flint—and he brought home history in rocks—obsidian arrowheads, pottery shards, geodes, fool's gold, turquoise beads, grinding stones, slag, and once or twice a fossil of some inscrutable shape from the sea. He drafted maps of the land and brought home graphite pencils painted turquoise blue and numbered in gradations of hardness and darkness which he kept sharpened to the quick and bound in rubberbands. He brought home watercolors and oils and brushes and colored pencils and gum erasers and tracing paper and paper with tiny grids, and at night he wrote his tiny numbers in his gridded books and took his scope out to the front yard and pointed it up to show me what he could of the moon and stars. He told me da Vinci mixed his paints from ground minerals and linseed oil, that the old ones, los indios, did something similar. He practiced mirror-writing, he kept maps of the sky. And because he coveted, he salvaged books when he found them and brought them home to me.

I read and read. In school eventually I read that narratives are powerful but subjective constructions, that rhetoric repeats itself; it represents, replicates, reiterates, reifies. That Word is a collective mania. If I am to turn to it looking for something, for a reminder of what is clear, or for a poetics, it would be more dark water to cross. So immersed, the surface falls away and this you keep in mind as you can to avoid seeing the vast lack you drown in, what you don't want to see: no likeness, no distinction, no history, no myth, no legitimate identity, not really, but instead your longing ticking away in an absurd surreal nothingness, your disillusionment at ten o’clock. By then, nevertheless, you will want a breath of air and a few words to say, some language conscious phantasmagoria that begins to sympathize again with your lot. In this sense, poetry is like prayer. Or like a rhetorical question. Kristeva asks, can disillusionment—world weariness, suffering—be beautiful? Keats before her, can the beautiful be true? And my father: you are free to write—that’s what’s new—what’s beautiful. Aren’t we all of us bastards of your words, if you say so?

August 4, 1792--

July 8, 1822





And there the body lay, age after age,
Mute, breathing, beating, warm and undecaying
Like one asleep in a green hermitage
With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing
And living in its dreams beyond the rage
Of death or life, while they were still arraying
In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind
And fleeting generations of mankind. (LXXI.609-616)



Happy birthday, Shelley. You're 213 today.

Weird. You're so weird.

*

Leave flowers on his grave.

*

pobiz: don't talk about it in public

I'm feeling shaken up and very sad.

Yesterday's mail brought terrifying news: the second royalty statement I've received since the publication of The Keepsake Storm in February of 2004. The first statement arrived around this time last year, early August, and came as a surprise since I hadn't realized that the UA Press's fiscal year ended in June and that I would be notified so quickly about book sales. At that point--from February to June of 2004--The Keepsake Storm had sold 400 copies, which I believe was about a third of the initial press run. The press assured me that those numbers were good, and I relaxed, did some readings, published a few poems, but backed off from doing any major networking. No Breadloaf, no book tour, no AWP panel. The job market ride nearly killed me, the new job, the new book, the dissertation...I dropped the ball on a few opportunities...I was exhausted and overwhelmed...

But? My book is paying for it.

Yesterday's royalty statement--if I'm reading it correctly and I think I am--says that from June of 2004 to June of 2005, The Keepsake Storm sold 78 copies.

78 copies, one year.

I don't know what it takes to go out of print in a year, but I'll bet these numbers will do the trick just fine.

So here's the point: to the 478 of you who bought copies of my collection of poems or had your library order it--or if you picked up a cheap used copy somewhere--THANK YOU. I don't have words for that kind of gratitude. If you own my book, please let me know so I can order yours, or send me your manuscript--not because I owe you but because I want to know you.

To anyone else out there listening: I could use some cheering.

Advice will do too.

*

Probably this is relevant, probably even true, but I have higher hopes for the life I write in:

"I do know, however, that in this po-world (which is and isn't the real world) one is expected to stake a claim. Those who do not are considered intellectually flabby, or not serious enough. Unfortunate, but true. This is why manifestoes get written, why wars get waged. The more marginalized one's chosen art is, the more tenaciously one clings to one's idea of that art. If you're going to care about poetry, you'd better care about it in the right way! The truth is, of course, that no one cares. I've noticed that since I have begun to "publicize" the new sincerity, I suddenly have a lot of new friends and nearly as many new detractors. Nothing's changed about who I am, what I do, my views on poetry, what foods I eat, who I fuck, etc. Simply by naming my practice, by appearing to have an aesthetic stance, I have invited both applause and derision. Those who claim that life is separate from poetry are not paying attention."

*

I invite your applause and derision, then. I'm Stuck.

*

I was watching this kid in the back yard next door who was playing by the fence with his Legos. He was talking to himself and burying the blocks in the mud and picking up little rocks to add to the story, and though I don’t know how his story went, I could tell it was good because he didn’t look in my direction when I dropped my shovel and said something about fucking caliche and the heat--and the longer I was out there the more brilliant that kid doing his own thing with the Legos seemed to me because he didn’t give a rat's ass for what Legos are supposed to do or that they were muddy and clogged with rock, and I started worrying about the moment in his life—very soon now—when someone would tell him he’s doing Legos all wrong and make him clean up his mess and make him feel small and stupid for doing his thing:

which to my mind is what "staking a claim" is about—-telling others how to play with their Logos—-right? I mean why can’t everybody play? Dejalo. That kid is serious enough. Let him be.

*