Quiet again, and clarity. Grade their little papers, tweak the Romantic syllabus, post their assignments on nicenet, pack for Appleton, WI, photocopies, lead workshop, teach Blake, get in the car with Pam. Grab the Campus Diversity Committee file before you go--you can do some of that stuff in the car--drop off Romulus. Drive. Six hours. Look forward to new landscape, a hotel room, learning something new about the job. And when you're tired, sleep. Simple. If my head would only work all day the way it does at 4 in the morning after dreaming of my little bluetick hound again. He was living with an ostrich the size of a small car. They kept their money under the rug and everywhere leaves were falling while we stood on my grandmother's porch.

***

And Blake:

IV

The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.

***

We need some sun around here, some blue sky, that's why.

***

And boy am I tired.

***

postcard: Knox

(I'm going to miss it again this year)

~~Prairie Fire: It is spring and Knox’s fancy turns to thoughts of lightin’ it up at the prairies. Yes it is time for the annual controlled fire to maintain the prairies at Green Oaks. This year we are scheduling the fire for Saturday April 1. If it is too wet or windy, we will move to Sunday April 2 for the fire. Weather permitting here is the schedule: 1 pm – hand out equipment, listen to safety talk, then start burning South Prairie. If we have time we will also burn Woodcock Field. The fires will be followed by some brush clearing. About 4 pm we will light a bonfire and start a BBQ. We will provide soft drinks and items for the grill (meat and veggie). All are welcome to come help with the fire. If you do come to help, you must dress sensibly – wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts you don’t mind getting muddy and ash-covered, wear heavy boots, bring a bandanna to cover your mouth, and bring work gloves if you have them. You should wear natural fibers like cotton or wool as they are not terribly flammable – polyester polartec fleece tends to melt and is not a good choice for working a fire. You should bring some water to drink as the fire gets hot and the fire work can make you very thirsty. If you have questions, please contact Stuart Allison at x-7185 or via e-mail at sallison@knox.edu. For directions, please check the website: http://www.knox.edu/greenoaksdirections.xml. Remember, to be the Prairie Fire you have to do the Prairie Fire.

***

"And that's the question, isn't it? How to institutionalize the tradition of having a diverse student body? Not just in the mission statement, but in the culture itself?"

***

Weeping in the car on the way to pick up film after leaving the office because I'm so tired I can't remember what I need to do and I'm sure I'm going to forget to do it, even to put it on the list that's out grown the pages of my book which makes me feel dull when I look at it. Great administrators: can they be forged? Hammer me fine, then, while you're at it. Don't just stand there. Do something useful while you're hitting me.

***

I don't know where it went. There's just enough left to pour over Blake.

***

Well maybe 3 a.m. is too early to get up, even for me. All but the ever train whistle in the distance sleeps; I will work my miracles in the dark. And here are clouds tumbling by the Arch, my last view of it from the van window on Sunday: first photos with the new camera. Very pretty. Like a goddamn big promise. Like a hump day.

***

I've learned how to blink. Almost certain it will never come in handy.

***

The point is every term blurs into days of getting to the next great thing and I drop off here only to get back weeks later, forgetting: that both classes are wonderful, that they laughed openly today. That Longinus and Burke, they got it. One leaving the classroom grinned to himself and I asked: what is it? And startled he said: oh just that I can tell it's going to be wild. Which is what I've been trying to say--this is the stuff of going to be wild. --And I saw good poems today, Brian's tiny poems both just as variegated and lush as anything I read elsewhere. Howard and I read student poems together, and I remembered again: he is a mighty fine reader. Mary and I arranged her thesis, the tightness of the collection emerging as I looked at the possibilities and saw continuity in the work, however which way it turned. And the enthusiasm of the last group--Chris, Hilary, Stefen--next week the Four Quartets and their poems--what more? Long Wednesday, you could be full of yourself. You could be vacuous.

***

Fog in the trees and all is the color of fog and shadow, even the birds. I hear the chimes on the porch wrangling. See them? In the photo it is sunset, view of my front porch door. Clearly I need windex. I don't know if we'll see sun today. Yesterday rain, and I lost a glove.

***

"You know how dinky a waterhose looks when it's filling up a pool? And the water isn't going up at all. But I'll bet my water bill is."

***

postcard: Knox

~~The Winter 2006 issue of The Common Room is up, featuring literary criticism by Knox students Christopher Astwood, Lindsay Braddy, and Kate Garklavs.

~~Seven Knox students, Howard Friedman, Kate Garklavs, B.J. Hollars, Sarah Kilch, Mary Kiolbasa, Bethany Reece and Andy Scott, along with students from Sarah Lawrence College, will read from their own works of fiction and poetry at 7 p.m., Saturday, April 1, at Pookies Coffeehouse, 72 S. Cherry St. in Galesburg. A group of Knox students, Sylvie Davidson, Al Keefe, Adam Krause, JoAnna Novak, Brendan Todt and Sarah Wylder, and a group of Sarah Lawrence students gave a joint reading on March 2 at the Sarah Lawrence campus in Bronxville, New York, as part of a program called the Knox-Sarah Lawrence Exchange.

***

And all I've managed to do today is stamp out tiny annoying fires.

***

week two

One thought on waking: don't move. And then: pain. Big blue chair neck much worse and the day ahead full. I have nothing else to say about that.

***

Because I'm inclined to snivel, and I don't know enough to snivel. I don't know what I'm sniveling about. C on living with pain, in which pain could be how you know what you know: aesthetic, ethic, economy, community, body. Not an epistemology, but the location of one, as well as the location of being afraid. Pain could be teacher. Not guru, but the location of guru. "It has to do with altering the way I move in the world." Pain could be pay attention. To everything. It's just pain, someone said to me when I was hurting. Say: I am not my pain. Me: "I am not my pain," the declarative somehow reiterating: do as words do: you do not represent: do not exist in this equation except where x (the other side of am) is ever the variable. That's the confusing part, when the self finds itself in pain. Locates, I mean.

***

Photo: time and place of Mary's last honors meeting with Natania and me. My solution to too many independent studies this term? No not the pub. Contain them to Wednesday meetings so Wednesdays look like this:

9:20-10:30 Beginning Poetry Writing
10:40-11:50 Romantic Literature
12:00-1:00 Andres, Spoken Word and Slam
1:00-2:00 Brian, Frank O'Hara
2:30-3:30 Howard, Teaching Assistantship
4:00-5:00 Mary, Honors Thesis
6:00-7:00 Hilary, Stefen, Chris, Poetry Writing

Thursday will meet with the 13 BPW students individually, convene the first Campus Diversity Committee meeting of the term, then home to pack for the spring ACM Committee on Minority Concerns meeting at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, and that goes all weekend.

But Tuesday is mine all mine.

***

Bathtub epiphany: if you're going to believe in the difference between pleasure and pain--between master and slave, mind--you're going to have to write those kinds of poems.

What? No.

***

And Burke:

I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other. Nothing is more certain to my own feelings than this. There is nothing which I can distinguish in my mind with more clearness than the three states, of indifference, of pleasure, and of pain. Every one of these I can perceive without any sort of idea of its relation to anything else. Caius is afflicted with a fit of the colic; this man is actually in pain; stretch Caius upon the rack, he will feel a much greater pain: but does this pain of the rack arise from the removal of any pleasure? or is the fit of the colic a pleasure or a pain, just as we are pleased to consider it? (emphasis mine, 31)

***

from David Rivard's Wise Poison
("...to call your pain a fugue...because it sounds lovely").


Earth to Tell of the Beasts

Because it's summer a trellis of Gulf air curves over the day,
buckling resiny.
--------------------6:30 one morning,
you killed yourself.
-----------------------And in one of the minutes since then
I'm drawn to the porch by a ripsaw's
E-flat run through plywood, a crude lullaby
about shelter & endurance. Between cuts, from the shade
of a hawthorn, a jay whistles
the sassy hyms & palpitations
fate will never be able to outlaw.
-------------------------------------So, ears filled by all
this singing, fate cowers, & trembles,
and agrees to the erasure of every word placing your Toyota
on Maui, parked off a cliff road. Words like the syringe,
your deft fingers tying
off, & shooting, while flames eat the wick of rags
you stuffed in the gas tank. A junkie,
but not only that. As for mercy, when the gas ignites
no words will be allowed to flare outward with the explosion,
each syllable elided that would scorch
clumps of fuchsia, fleshy leaves of wild ginger.
--------------------------------------------------It's a good bet.
It's easy. A sure thing. That the warmth & abiding
plenitude of this morning would permit me
to call your pain a fugue, an intricately feathered
spiral, because it sounds lovely. And lovely implies consolation
and accuracy. But all the while, buried inside, hurt
is still hurt, shame is still shame.
----------------------------------And though you turned, once,
at the edge of a pool in Tucson, green eyes intensified
by the water, snub nose peirced by a tiny silver stud, gossiping,
you would never have claimed
your laughter was a music, as I could now,
the run of notes
a stampede, & after the stampede just tracks in the earth
to tell of the beasts & their escape.

***

Those kinds of poems: no, the eligist can't help it, turns to consolation, solace, song. The building of a shelter, the music of the building of a shelter, the convention of elegy such that everything you can say is a violent sawing through and building up of a loveliness to hold suspect: easy. Burke says smooth things are relaxing, beauty a small delicate thing, an ordered thing. Tracks that tell of beasts but not the beasts.

***

Anyway, I am tired of difference. Am a slave to likeness.

***

From a student tonight, just now:

Sure, everyone knows about my headaches and whatnot, but there's only like 4 people in my entire life who have actually seen what a migraine does to me. Everyone else hears about it after the fact; sees me when I'm better, with a wry grin on my face and a shrug of my shoulders, doing what I normally do.

***

On the other side of am.

***

Sunday morning

Blogger let me do nothing this morning before leaving, so I arrive back home surprised at this photo here--spring snow--something after all. Something is something. Spent all day in a van to St. Louis and back to attend a reception for admitted students. Four hours one way. Because I fell asleep with Burke in the big blue chair I have big blue chair neck and can't turn my head without my shoulders and upper back screaming. Bad way to be in a van. But the reception--the house that housed the event--I think, gorgeous. The Arch too, if only from the window in passing. I must rise in four and a half hours, am worrying tomorrow already into something worrisome. Would like a dream I can remember, but not the one where the classroom turns into a city street.

***

Saturday

Stayed up last night and posted branches after being out all day and night. Slept in. Would like to sleep more, but the sun is up and that's it. The trees in the light are beautiful. The sun is not yet high enough to shine full on anything else.

***

Well when you buy a lamp for $5.99 what'll you think happen? So don't do it twice. The third hide in the basement.

***

Why this visceral bellow against the great divide between poet and teacher? Probably because it fucks with my day-to-day, and nothing else. But look: I can't get anywhere if your poet isn't always already teacher. And: lots of us in classrooms? Stop with the jekyll hyde long enough for me to hear you.

***

Woman must buy shampoo. In this she is resolved.

***

Woman bought shampoo and a new film camera. In this she is unresolved. The bulbs she bought don't fit her lamps. In this she is resigned.

***

Camera: in this she is in love.

***

the dreamer

He's coming to visit June 1st when school is over and is bringing his mom with him for vacation he says. His mom says he's adamant, that in any case it's time for him to make the trip. For them to make the trip. They haven't been here since I arrived three and a half years ago. Well, how could they? Now he's informed, knows what he wants: a quick turn around Galesburg then a train to Chicago to see the city and a game at Wrigley Field. Firsts. Last June we hit the beach in Mexico where he was master of the waves. This year he flies, knows everything about the Concorde. Wish I could see him on that plane.

***

"But part of enforcing our borders is to have a guest-worker program that encourages people to register their presence so that we know who they are, and says to them, if you're doing a job an American won't do, you're welcome here for a period of time to do that job."

[I mean, why not open up a few more sweatshops right here at home? We can rebuild Walmart, make it better, stronger than it was before.]

***

I stand corrected. Trees lose their expressions.

***

Forgot to pack my lunch, am here till 5:30 when then we have a dinner, damn me did it again.

***

postcard: Knox College

~~Please join us at 4 o'clock today, March 24, in the Skylight Room of Seymour Library for a Caxton Club event featuring Robert Hellenga. Professor Hellenga will be reading from his newly released, highly acclaimed novel Philosophy Made Simple. Refreshments will be served. The reading is free and open to the public.

~~On Monday, March 27, at 4 o'clock in the Alumni Room, Writers' Forum will feature Kaye Goldthwaite and Caylan Childs. Please join us for fine student readings and cheese and crackers.

~~And on Friday, April 7, at 8 o'clock p.m. the first Off Knox open-mic night of the season will take place at Kaldi's coffeehouse. Participants have three minutes to present a poem, an excerpt of fiction or essay writing, a dramatic skit, a song--or anything else you can do in three minutes.

Former participants include: Pat Dodge, Emily Anderson, Adam Krause, Mary Kiolbasa, Miles Eberle, Steve Yasukawa, Eric Ratzel, Brian Lowe, Robin Metz, Miranda Steffens, Gina Franco, Pri Delima, Zach Lencioni, Chris Astwood, Sarah Jane Wylder, and Nick Regiacorte.

Interested? Contact Karen Hilberg or Gina Franco to get on the April 7th list. After the first 10 performances, the floor is open to anyone in the cafe. Off Knox welcomes everyone in Galesburg and the surrounding communities.

***

Insomnia kicked in at 1:45 this morning. Woke while dreaming of taking pictures from the Clifton bridge of the moon in the river moss. Haven't seen that bridge at night since the year of nights I wandered streets with Jim and Darren. They were fourteen too. We three still wander.

***

In the dream, I'd graduated to a digital. Ought to graduate to something but don't know what so keep clicking away with my fifty dollar point-and-shoot and picking up film from the drugstore. Which is an okay way right now. Don't know what I'm doing. Just like doing it.

***

Don't know how to do this, for example. Wire?

All local amateur photographers are invited to enter the 2006 Sandburg Days Photography Contest. A $50 gift certificate from Midwest Photo Service will be awarded for Best of Show. A $25 gift certificate will be awarded for first place in three categories - Landscape and Nature; People and/or Pets; and Architecture (Buildings and Houses). Winners will be announced at the reception. All photos (8 x 10 maximum print size) must have been created within the last three years; they may be matted but do not need to be framed. A limit of three photographs per person. There is no fee to enter.

All submissions must have a secure wire on the back so they are ready to hang on the display board. Professional photographers, artists and educators are invited to enter, but will not be eligible for prizes. Entries can be submitted (with name, postal address and phone on the back) to the Galesburg Public Library, 40 E. Simmons St. Deadline for submissions is Tuesday, May 9, at 8 PM. Conventional and digital prints are acceptable. A selection of photographs entered will be on display at the Galesburg Public Library until May 19.

***

And this from Rebecca Loudon feels very good. Stones would feel much better.

***

And Longinus:

But evil are the swellings, both in the body and in diction, which are inflated and unreal, and threaten us with the reverse of our aim; for nothing, say they, is drier than a man who has the dropsy. While tumidity desires to transcend the limits of the sublime, the defect which is termed puerility is the direct antithesis of elevation, for it is utterly low and mean and in real truth the most ignoble vice of style. What, then, is this puerility? Clearly, a pedant's thoughts, which begin in learned trifling and end in frigidity. Men slip into this kind of error because, while they aim at the uncommon and elaborate and most of all at the attractive, they drift unawares into the tawdry and affected. (emphasis mine, chapter III)

Hilarious.

***

first day of school

Longinus, Burke. And roses. So not good to be this tired setting out. Nervous too.

***

Lemons are more interesting, less symbolic, than roses, but oh on such a day--do you know what color the sky is today? big blue chair!--what a thing to hand out roses, to say here is your experience, now where is your language, and to watch them all wide eyed respond as if receiving gifts. I'd forgotten that association--had listed all I anticipated them listing--but this one: flowers are for giving (for forgiving?) as gifts: I'd missed it. The one that counted. People don't act that way when you give them lemons. It made them attentive, this loveliness. --And I saw a few, later, walking around with a rose in one hand.

***

And then we read Frank's "Seven Roses," morning as it was for them too. As well as fogbank.

***

week one

So guess what? It snowed last night. A lot. Is still snowing and snowing. The world is white and black this morning from my study window where all I can see are some trees. Bare trunks and branches. And snow. It is so beautiful. And again: this is spring.

***

Guess I'll get dressed for pictures. How do I not have any of snow? After nine years of living it? That's some denial.

***

Oh it's perfect snowball snow. Thank your lucky stars you're not here, man. Because I win.

***

Amy's spring MiPOesias. See for yourself.

***

The best thing to do is shave him.

***

I am going to bring them roses tomorrow. Usually I bring lemons. But tomorrow, roses. I'm fond of flowers too. But it occurs to me to ask: why not more about teaching it? How should I begin. Someone said once, if you don't start with image all is lost, they'll never get it. Someone else, start with language, just as when painting start with paint. Start with Hugo. Start with the dictionary. Start with bad poetry, dead kitten poetics, prose poems so-called traditional forms lineation white space and whatever you do don't let them rhyme or write about love. So I do. I start with image and everytime suffer the stiff little self-image conscious poems it produces and I think: that's what they heard? Fear? How is that even possible, it was fun. So?

***

Blogger is acting shitty again. The art of losing things. Very bad for my heart.

***

Read what Shelley read to work on Shelley, always that advice in the corner. But I missed it the first time having read Caleb before Cenci, didn't I, and so stuck on this passage from the Cenci preface for years knowing it's ventriloquized, his voice, not his voice, and looking for the source in Hume, in Plato. What's he getting at?

Undoubtedly no person can be truly dishonored by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character. The few whom such an exhibition would have interested could never have been sufficiently interested for a dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge, -- that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered, consists. (Shelley, emphasis mine, 300)

Then in Caleb find pleasure in the sound of this--"I am unable to cope with you: what then?"--and I recognize it, a little hall of reverberating mirrors. Here I am! A discovery that maybe only I can care about, but a little piece of the conversation now in place. (Why I love this literature, the implicit dialogue, not just a little like blogging if you want to know why both are not despicable.)

...treating the public, who has a claim to all my powers and exertions, as if it were nothing, and myself, or rather an unintelligible chimera I annex to myself, as if it were entitled to my exclusive attention. I am unable to cope with you: what then? Can that circumstance dishonour me? No; I can only be dishonoured by perpetrating an unjust action. My honour is in my own keeping, beyond the reach of all mankind. Strike! I am passive. No injury that you can inflict, shall provoke me to expose you or myself to unnecessary evil. (Godwin, emphasis mine, 168)

"The fit return to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance" when Trystan was two (I told you he started reading at one, before he could use words to ask for a cup of milk, well, what did we know) was the scrolling marquis on my screen (not because I am a passivist but because I was thinking about the phrase). I found him twirling in my room reciting it over and over: the fit return to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance the fit return to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance . . .

***

The Garcia girls. Home. Night ... Houses.

***

And today she rests.

Many thanks to Jordan Davis for sending readers over the last three days while I was thinking aloud in real time. To Suzanne and C, gratitude and much love.

***

Alone in the house with a little loud Modest Mouse.

***

postcard: Knox College

Our own Bob Hellenga is reading this Friday from his new novel, Philosophy Made Simple, at 4 p.m., March 24, in the Alumni Room of Old Main, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. The reading is free and open to the public, so if you're in the area, come and hear. See the full announcement for more details about Bob (one of my favorite colleagues) and a bit about Knox.

***

Things As they Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams:

"and that, if those errors of thy life be known which thou so ardently desiredst to conceal, the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale" (emphasis mine 434).

***

Spring term. Ten weeks, counting down. And then I will go home. To Glenda and Chris and my babies. You know those people just put in a pool? And a hot tub. A HOT TUB. Seriously. I'm suffering just mentioning it.

***

Sunday morning: spring break concludes

5:30 am and the sun is coming up fast. In the few minutes it took to post another look at my building, the sky has lightened from a hot orange glow above the houses to a salmon yellow aura behind the trees. If you don't get up right now, you're going to miss it.

***

6:30 am and yes, you've totally missed it. So now I'm off to the tub.

***

Caleb:

"He wished for annihilation, to lie down in eternal oblivion, in an insensibility, which, compared with what he experienced, was scarcely less enviable than beatitude itself. Horror, detestation, revenge, inexpressible longings to shake off the evil, and a persuasion that in this case all effort was powerless, filled his soul even to bursting" (165).

Ah, the power of humiliation. Been there. Recently.

***

Her mother rang my doorbell yesterday afternoon while I was feeling mostly seclusive and unhappy with myself and nearly didn't answer the door but for her persistence. I didn't know the woman downstairs ringing my bell, didn't recognize her, was thinking on my way down the stairwell that she must be looking for someone below me, or for the people in the attic, but when I unlocked the door she said: you're Gina. I'm Lindsy's mother. And for one shrill hysterical second I remembered the time I came home from a high school football game after getting jumped by the Garcia sisters, and my parents showing up at their parents' house (to talk, they said) with me sitting in the truck all bloody and blue, and that their mother--mother of five sisters--threw her screen door open when she saw us and flew out in a great cloud of pink nightie and that my tiny little mother somehow dropped her, tore open her gown, and twisted the shit out of her great big breasts while my father threw punches at their father from across the fence and I sat in the truck feeling that I've never had an ounce of dignity and that this proves it. You're Gina. I'm Lindsy's mother. You threatened to call DCFS about my grandson? And this is when my hands started to shake.

***

But? There is enough self-serving arrogance in service to others to assume it may call itself dignified. The meek, as they say. The teachers! But this is worthiness always in peril of taking care: do you trust me in a bad time to act appropriately towards you? Wouldn't if I were you: I fuck up all the time. Oh I know the right answer. After. Sometimes during. And still I can't see you for all the me--the train of me--that came before you.

***

Department of Children and Family Services.

***

A statistic from a speech the president at Pima Community College made on one of those worthy dignified occasions. Something like: our average student is an unmarried Hispanic female between the ages of eighteen and twenty something, holds down part time or full time work, and has one and 2/3rds kids. The math is wrong here, I know, no matter. What I'm getting at is that kid? That's Lindsy. Hell, that kid is the Garcia sisters. To a certain extent that kid might've been me. Which maybe tells you why she's living in my attic. I conjured her.

***

My building. My attic. You see my problem.

***

Associative logic again: two separate cases, same courtroom, same judge. In one case the Garcia mother is holding her soft pink nightie in her lap with her purse and the Garcia father sits next to her. He is wearing boots, cowboy boots with high polish, which means he has dressed for the occasion, they are his niceshoes. I have never seen my father in cowboy boots--his niceshoes have tassels--and remember thinking there! That's one thing you know they don't like about you. My mother and father are there, and the judge, and me. In the other case, just the three of us. My mother and father have had restraining orders on each other since separating, and the judge is saying, in light of your daughter's testimony against you, Mr. Franco, you just lost your case. Or he is saying, Mr. and Mrs. Garcia, you have no sign in your yard against trespassing, so you have no case. Mrs. Garcia holds up her gown and says what about my property--she ruined it. My father holds up his hands and says what about my children? My hands were shaking then too.

***

5. From a wrong connexion of ideas.

Some of our ideas have a natural correspondence and connexion one with another: it is the office and excellency of our reason to trace these, and hold them together in that union and correspondence which is founded in their peculiar beings. Besides this, there is another connexion of ideas wholly owing to chance or custom. Ideas that in themselves are not all of kin, come to be so united in some men's minds, that it is very hard to separate them; they always keep in company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the understanding, but its associate appears with it; and if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang, always inseparable, show themselves together.

John Locke, "Of the Association of Ideas," A Essay Concerning Human Understanding

***

the whole gang, always inseparable, show themselves together. Guess what that reminds me of.

***

My father at the fence throwing kicks at the Garcia father, or my father at the fence with our clothes in his hands, or my father at the fence, my mother in his arms, sudden, swept up as if to be carried over a threshold. It was night, I know because my brother and I woke him when we tried to sneak in the front door for the clothes we'd forgotten in the dryer. But in my memory there is daylight and I can see her face when he drops her over the fence. I hear her head hit the pavement. It sounds like my head. She looks like she is sleeping.

***

From the comment box:

"Yes, lovely writing, but what happened then?!" Meaning, I think, what happened with Lindsy's mother? Well, not very much, but maybe that's the point.

***

"I conjured her." What a romantic thing to say: conjured. What a superstitious thing to say. You tried to get out of that place, but the Garcia sisters followed you to Galesburg, Illinios and settled into your attic in the shape of an 18 year old girl, her toddler son, and his sometimes father? And her mother? Ringing your doorbell?

But I have been trying to say: yes, that's it exactly. That's narrative. A whole gang of unaffiliated points all held up in likeness, in contingency, in progression, in parallel, until it begins to seem necessary that one day after months of the screaming and the crashing and the baby wailing for hours on end, and after months of sleepless nights waiting for the police to arrive, it all becomes incredibly familiar. Because it seems I have done this before.

So I open my door to the back stairwell where they are having it out good and I look her in the face and I look her baby in the face and I am shaking I'm so pissed because the baby is so scared and I feel just like he does. Scared. And I start screaming. About the drugs, the violent fighting, the doors being left unlocked, the loud parties at 4 am. And at the end of it I say: you don't care about that baby. You'd better care more or somebody's going to take him away from you. And she says: you're no better than I am, yelling at me in front of my baby, are you? You're just as bad.

***

And is this likeness insignificant--should I believe that knowing it is surely not necessary? The mind sticks things together, is less willing to unstick them in such matters. But which matters? Which matters matter? When you get the living crap beat out of you, you tend to remember it, but why form your story on it? Because your hands start to shake when you think you see it again? Is that a good reason to tell a story?

***

Because you've never hit somebody like that, wouldn't know how to do it if you had to, but they let you see how it's done, the sisters, just as Lindsy was determined you'd hear everything, know everything, and that's a terrible intimacy. It means you're one of them. One of the family. Kin.

***

Or else it's a wrong connection of ideas.

***

You're Gina. I'm Lindsy's mother. You threatened to call DCFS about my grandson?

Uh, yes. I did.

Is there anything I should know? I am worried about him.

***

Sunday morning: spring break concludes (comments)

Some of your comments are here. Apologies for the confusion. Had some trouble with posting the photo, and, well, worked with two separate identical posts for awhile. Don't ask.

spring break, cont.

Same building, another view. I keep forgetting the plants need watering, need repotting, that now is the time to start looking at pots, to buy tomato seeds, sunflowers. The tulips on the porch have begun pushing up, little fools, not good. I'll not have tulips this year, nor chilies. Lost the container garden last year to leaving. I left. This year, not so certain. Many things must happen. In exactly the right order.

***

And Caleb:

"The spring of action which, perhaps more than any other, characterized the whole train of my life, was curiosity. It was this that gave me my mechanical turn; I was desirous of tracing the variety of effects which might be produced from given causes. [...] In fine this produced in me an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance" (emphasis mine 60).

***

Bathtub epiphany: if you're going to believe in narrative, you'll have to believe in that kind of God. I don't even know what that means.

***

Little shit thinks he can eat from my plate.

***

And then there is sprung rhythm, "his need to back up his poetic practice by a theory which demonstrated the immanence of God."

Eh.

***

The story of the big blue chair:

Everything is ludicrous
in blue velour.
You tell yourself the fuss of
cleaning up basement mold is
nothing next to seeing the product
of your labor in your study.
Decadent beast. How to concoct
a room for it? You end up with blue
in the rug, the painting, the punching bag,
all self-consciously blinking at you
and you feel you've
taken to wearing blue eyeshadow
and you fear someone will try to love
you, will make room for you because of blue.

***



***

I only own seven or eight editions of some kind of Shelley so why are none of them here? Trying to recall the context of this line, the other lines around it:

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Someone said, you've got to read that line with a sense of Shelley's sense of humor or you miss the point. You've got to read a lot of Shelley that way to believe it. (--the point, get it?) Is there any other way to read thorns? A critique of Catholicism, I wager.

***

"yes there's something mournful autumnal and righteous about the terms"--and resilient. Mythic, even. "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe."

***

Or that the points (thorns?) form the story, the "spring of action." Something like that. Because I don't seem to have a sense of spring without Genesis--nor a Genesis without Milton. Nor a Milton without Blake. It's not just metonymic, it's cause and effect when I'm feeling lazy, which is most of the time. At which point I'm back to pointing out that spring, for me, is allegorical, much as I might dump on the idea.

***

!

***

Rap is only fun to listen to if you're in the same room with it. Otherwise it's like listening to the oldest washing machine in the world run its cycles against the basement walls. A mechanical series of thongthongthongthongthongthongs. Decidedly not narrative. The whole house vibrates. And because they're being evicted, they're making sure their fuck yous are heard. And on such a day--sunny, crisp, lazy--it is a real thorn in my side, yes.

***

Associative logic again: why don't I have a sense of the word thorn without Christ? So that the expression "thorn in my side" always brings to mind the piercing of Christ's side, the wound itself. Who put that there? It doesn't belong there.

***

Sticky:

Wordsworth's Note to 'The Thorn,' "their minds are not loose but adhesive": by which I think he means associative in the most hyperbolic way--minds that love the relationship between cause and effect--that turn juxtaposition into metaphor--that love a good story and the repetition of a good story--sequences and contingencies and narratives--and rhyme (repetition compulsion), obsessively so--and ritual, especially if ritual is associated with ends. This he suggests (and he's stealing much of it from Locke), is the superstitious mind. Which in the 19th century was still synonymous with Catholicism, or at least with the enthusiastically religious. But look, he's also describing the way poetry works, and he admits it's a bit of a problem because he doesn't want to say that what poetry is for is what religion is for. Or what I mean is, I don't want him to say that. But I can't seem to crawl out from beneath it because, I suppose, I am superstitious. Gluey minded, whatever, you see what I'm saying.

***

Spring Term 2006. Of course I'm getting ready to teach the Romantic Literature course again. You pieced that together, surely. Tomorrow, the syllabus. But I won't bore you with it.

***

postcard: spring break, Galesburg, IL

Detail from a building on the running path I made the first summer. Am waiting to run by it again, a regular appointment. This will be the third spring when I remember spring is blustery and cold, alternately gray and bright as the clouds wash through it in a big hurry, and it says it will rain but it doesn't or that it will hit 53 but feels 41 in the wind and then the sun comes out and warms the square by the dining room table for five or six minutes and I feel astonished by so much light. I look for light all day. Why put on two pairs of socks before bed when you didn't all winter? Not yet buds or flowers--too soon--and though the birds are back and the soil has thawed, it is only to deceive the likes of me: why am I so cold?

***

Bottom, center: the dot of light in this dark window is another window on the other side. It is shaped like a T, is maybe a Trick. I'm unable to find the other side.

***

1 am: woke to more screaming from upstairs and the inconsolable baby crying his lungs out. Sounds of falling, drunken falling I think. It went on for more than an hour. I don't call the police this time. This is hurting me. I am getting used to it.

***

Back door, unlocked and wide open, banging inside the screen with the wind.

***

As well as the categorical and the hierarchical. Just how terrible is it? Well, yellow, currently. But we've lived with that level of insecurity for awhile. We're getting used to it.

***

"It was pleasing to them to consider, that the fangs of this wild beast, the very idea of which inspired trepidation into the boldest hearts, might be played with by them with the utmost security" (Caleb Williams 77).

***

Homesick because the desert is so predictable, that's why. Three hundred days of sunshine a year with the thunderstorms rolling in at 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon every July and August, count on it. Variation on a theme: few years back it snowed on Easter and all the people were in the street taking pictures of their kids trying to make snowballs out of slush.

***

Spring for a reason, my student says. It's like birth. While I have no desire to be born again. Traumatizing enough the first and second Times around.

***

(When he said sex isn't exciting unless you can strike a bit of terror into your partner the creepy part was everyone in the room knew he was a talking about himself and therefore feared to disagree.)

***

Shaped like a T, sacrifice and redemption, more a T than an X once the body's head bowed on the neck and left the arms raised up. "It is finished." Emulated in worship, the traumatized body and the promise of resurrection: you need only get to the other side. That's the logic, anyway. That's the trick.

***

And then it happens--just now--that I pull into the carport and find the back door propped open and a red truck I don't know, tailgate down. A few boxes, some trash bags in the truckbed, I notice, and out of habit nearly pull the door closed, nearly reach for my key to lock the door again. It is evening now, still light enough to see birds lift from the bare trees, but dark enough for street lights, and dark enough for the lamp with the red paper shade in the living room. Romulus and I listen to the ceiling. They're banging and scooting around up there with a purpose. I recognize it from last spring when they moved in. Eleven months. They're moving out.

***

litwindowpane

for Suzanne: near sunset, my living room window.

***

Show us your panes?

***

Am trying to reread Caleb Williams. Do I have to? Yes. Where's the sun? Would rather sleep in the big blue chair. This isn't grad school any more, you know, you're too old to sleep in the big blue chair. Nevertheless, I'm inviting the cat. You'll sneeze and get itchy eyes. I know. It's okay.

***

"Terror was the order of the day." Godwin, 29 October 1795, on why he killed the original preface.

***

Order being the word to weigh: logic, prescription, coherent arrangement as opposed to disorder, as well as authority, as well as rank, as well as chronology and narrative, and business to execute, and ruling institution: terror, the organizing principle.

***

postcard: Del Rio, Texas (family I missed seeing while in Austin)

Dan, my stepfather, my friend

Chris, my brother (who grew up with me), welding:
a swing set for the girls
(we always wanted a swing set)

My mommy with Justice, my brother's youngest child, my nephew

Carla, my brother's youngest daughter, my niece

Alisa, Carla's sister, my brother's oldest daughter, my other niece

Leslie, my sister-in-law, with Justice

starlings

R. Ricci


For Jake.
And for me.

postcard: awp

Crawlspace getting there.

It's true, they exist: Eduardo Corral, Simmons Buntin, Emmy Perez, Jonathan Mayhew, Jordan Davis, Tony Robinson, Anne Boyer, Joseph Massey, C. Dale Young, Reb Livingston, G.C. Waldrep. And then, later that night: Steven Cordova, Maria Melendez, and Francisco Aragon, all at once, and over big pink martini-shaped cosmos.

Yes, it did hurt. Later, the next morning before my reading.

But I did meet them, if briefly. Eduardo is sweet and just as funny as you'd expect, Jonathan is talkative, open, and thoughtful, Jordan is keen, amazingly sexy (if not a poetics then what?), Tony is modest and well spoken, Anne is shy but willing to point out that we own the same blouse, Joe is hot and reads like a lion (just wanted to say that), C. Dale was rushed but apologetic. Simmons is very very tall!

Reb--okay, Reb I saw from a distance, but I meant to meet her at the No Tell Motel table though I didn't manage to hit it when she was on--which I regret after reading her account of it, considering I might have offered volunteer table sitting (would've done it, Reb).

Steven is wonderfully Steven: emphatic, affectionate; Maria is brilliant and beautiful and warm. Francisco is full of curiosity and enthusiasm, and wants to see what others know.

And as you know, my crush on G.C. Waldrep is profound. My students were teasing me about approaching him when I saw him at the bookfair and couldn't find words to introduce myself. A close friend of mine would say that at my age, shyness is pathological. Okay. But I lucked out. In person, G.C. is generous, lovely. No photo of him, so here's a poem.

***

Deliverance

I realized I had read too many poems
about pulling the dead from the living:

ragged cry of cow or horse or pig straining
against the inanimate flesh in its gut,

the human urgency, greasy hands
reaching deep into unimaginable places,

groping around, arms stiff against the creature’s
useless labor, trying to hold on, trying

to bring out the fetal pieces already half-rotten
in the placenta’s wash. Sometimes the animal dies,

sometimes not, and everyone human
goes home thinking about the change in life,

what great mystery approached
in the palm’s proximity to alien heartbeat,

what small nation, vigorously defended.
But it’s only the dumb rhythm of begetting:

with or without us that poor carcass
would have found the air. The same tall grasses

grow in the rainy season. Late at night
we would still wake to find ourselves,

shivering for no reason, no reason at all,
fresh from that hard dream of safety.

G. C. Waldrep

@ the unassociated garden party thursday night where I met some people I've wanted to know and others I'm glad I already do

This reading kicked ass and I flirted unabashedly in the wake of it (I think I made him blush) only to wake up slightly more than slightly embarrassed the next morning.

Well, sometimes it's worth it.

The lovely Theo Hummer was there too, though I didn't know she would be. Did I tell you she lives in my beloved Ithaca apartment? That she put me up there the last time I'd had too much to drink in Ithaca?

Thank you for going to my reading, sweet Theo. I know you missed the Kenneth Koch panel for me.

Got my subscription to The Canary, too.

Aaron Tieger, who I'd met on my last journey to Ithaca, NY. Good to see you again, Aaron. Hello to Wendy.

When I asked Jordan Davis if all the photos at the robot are his work, he looked confused. As in: you'd do otherwise? Heh. Yeah.

Hint: when something looks as sexy as it does, sometimes it really is.

the four undergraduate creative writing majors knox college sent to awp

BJ

BJ and Andy

Andy

Bethany

Kate

Postcard: Galesburg to Moline to Atlanta to Austin

Thought I'd light some candles. Not yet at AWP. Leaving at 4 am tomorrow, arriving around 2 pm. Staying at the Omni downtown if you want to call me. Reading at 10:30 on Friday with University of Arizona Press Camino del Sol writers Ray Gonzalez, Maria Melendez, and Virgil Suarez. What an honor.

I will look for you when I get there.

Hour long final portfolio conferences with the poetry students yesterday, today. In the intensity of the work one student cried. I'd taken something from her--pleasure, I think--and all of last night, this morning: was it necessary? Well, was it?

a few more things I wanted to show you but didn't when I became afraid

the trees that mark our fires

from the road a steep hike down, no one besides him at the bottom of the wash

the river, my river, the crossing toward the swimming hole seven miles up the road, the easy nobody fishes here place to get to by the trees that mark our fires

The painting the press considered but rejected for the cover of my book, as it is decidedly too disturbing.










Hands of Water, Federico Correa

the trees that mark our fires

Twist, little ribbon.
Keep coming undone.

--from Jake York's "Blood"

Fall Cottonwoods, Walt Gonske

Before the January disaster at the Sago Mine near here, where 12 miners died, the operator had been cited 273 times since 2004.

None of the fines exceeded $460, roughly one-thousandth of 1 percent of the $110 million net profit reported last year by the current owner of the mine, the International Coal Group.