. . . .

A membrane filling with air or blood. It grows where my brain should be bobbing in my head, but isn't, and the dream is the color of closed eyelids in bright light. I see it from the inside and feel the membrane stretch, the pressure on the inside of my skull. Then it breaks and I feel that too. Like a balloon bursting by my ear. From the inside. And I am startled awake.

***

I told Richard this dream when he offered to interpret one. We were standing around the bonfire. Wendy wanted to sing. I wanted ghost stories. Richard said give me a dream, I'll interpret it.

--Recurring I said, but it's just started recurring.

--Recurring? How long is the dream?

--It happens very fast.

--And what color is the balloon?

--Pink, I guess.

--It's your consciousness expanding.

--Really? It feels like aneurysm.

--No, consciousness is pink. Aneurysm is red.

--Good to know.

***

But neither red nor pink, now that I've gotten a closer look. A membrane much like an eyelid, veined and growing. It's dark in there but I view it from within, so there is also its slick mucous feel. The first time, I woke on the twin bed in the little room I shared with Glaydah in Vermont. The light was on because Glaydah was still out and the light was giving me trouble. I thought my head had burst and let the light in. My eyes were closed but the light came through.

***

Familiar in another way. We dove for rings and coins all summer and practiced skimming the bottom of the pool. Stay down as long as you can, okay? Trystan's challenge at the municipal pool, and later in the ocean. As long as you can. Okay. Light art, weightlessness, blue and cool, and all you have to do is hold your breath. You can't stay long, but stay as long as you can.

***

What world is that? The one I can't occupy. I can't see the inside of my own head as though standing in it and looking around. Will not move through water with gills and an air bladder. There is equipment that allows for some semblance of these experiences, but only artificially. What does the eyelid do? What the throat does, what the anus does. I don't know what you're thinking, how you glue things together in your skull, not really. You don't know either. Open, close, open close. The dream is not itself mysterious; it stands in for the irritable reaching after. Closure. Which is impossible, of course.

***

It might end with its own parallel. The dream, my waking, my holding my breath, and the relief, waking and taking a breath, the apneic throat failing to open, the membrane stretching, the lungs holding, the heart pumping dark blood through a sleeping brain growing sleepier with oxygen deprivation. It fights back with a dream let's say. To open things up again. Expanding consciousness: you forgot to breathe again. You cannot live here in this place where there is no breath. The membrane breaks, startles me awake, and I inhale, those collapsing moments. And another: I wake to find myself not breathing and cannot sleep for fear of forgetting.

***

Not, as I'd first thought, that forgetting leads to dying, that it is 'life threatening' according to information available about apnea. But that forgetting leads to delusion. Promise. Dream. That's my fear: "the world wants to be deceived," Kaufmann writes in his Prologue to Buber's I and Thou. And me too, I want to be deceived. "Mundus vult decipi; but there is a hierarchy of deceptions." At the bottom, oblivion. Forget everything. At the top, forget only what is unpleasant.

***

. . .

Flickr won't let me post a photo just now. I'm hoping if I give up and wander around the house some more the problem will go away. Of course I can't stop clicking the post button just in case. These are the things that get in the way of my life. O/C, you know. Nothing, Thomas pointed out to me, a little good lovin' wouldn't solve. For now, I leave you with links to Bread Loaf photo albums. I recommend the slide shows. Ready? One two three four...

***

The most beautiful fable. Crushing. Including everything.

***

Is it just ME?

***

. .

Woke at home. Am home for the duration now, and this is good. I'm ready. I missed everything, everyone. Even Romulus-the-biter. Cloud cover is confusing. I could sleep all day. Also remind me to reset my watch because it seems to think it's nine and though I don't know what time it is, it ain't nine. --Came home to the perfect jeans researched and ordered on line weeks ago. They're too big now. They'd have fit weeks ago. Is that good? I've never returned clothing by mail before. I don't even know how. Now what? --There is no milk in the house. Ought to learn to pick up milk on the road before coming home. This is state of affairs too often repeated and too sad to talk about. No tea without milk. No mind without tea. No day without mind. Predictably.

***

And so I went to the drug store to drop off all that film I've been carrying in a bag since leaving Arizona and you know what? They smiled when I walked in and said Hey, how are you and It's so good to see you and Did you have a great summer and Can't wait to see these photos, and I felt really really good. Like I'd walked in the house and gotten hugged after the wanderlust had worn off. By people who take care of my images. And when I said I have more than 20 rolls here, I don't want to overwhelm you, they said No No we can do it and We want to do it and They're half off we have a special and So come back for them this afternoon. And I thought I think I could really live in this town. That's exactly how it happend.

***

I bought curry, chicken, tofu, mushrooms, a big hard pear. They're going in the stoneware pot together. I went in search of a ripe avocado because now I must make my own salad. I found none. I went in search of a priest because I miss my conversations with Michael Suarez already but the rectory was closed and the two churches were closed, just as it seems I left them when I last tried the doors. How many times must one brave the elements before finding a perfect avocado, perfect jeans, an imperfect priest? I am not brave.

***

Oh and do you know what this place looks like? I'm scared to unpack the car. As it is I'm avoiding one room by wandering to the next and I'm going in circles and it's not getting better. Where the fuck to start. Yeah, I'm having advisees over to dinner on Saturday. They can sit on the heaps and eat oatmeal.

***

Images, dear ones. They exist. There is work screaming to get done, but tonight I'll spend looking through your faces and bringing you home. Say thank you I've been saying to myself all day. Wow and thank you. For everything.

***

(walnut table where I sit in my kitchen thinking, typing this)

***

week eleven (the last of summer)

About eight hours from home. I owe everyone in the world an email but would like to hear your voice after not hearing your voice for nearly two weeks now. Call me today if you'd like and if I'm not lost or traffic bogged, I'll answer. Or just wait: I'm picking up the phone today. I missed you.

***

Fogged the windows with the shower. Fourth floor, looking out. Above the trees, on the glass, a trace of someone who stood on the a/c unit and wrote


Jesus


and drew a long tear-shaped heart beneath it. And because I took a long shower and left the curtain open, it remains for me to see.

***

One word and one image to write in the condensation on the glass. What is it?

***

I think it's not what I see.

***

. . . . . . .

Last feast with Audrey Petty, Wendy Walters, Peter Orner, Richard Siken, all wonderful. One of the best things I've ever done, this. Get thee to the mountain.

***

Ah and now the light comes up. Time to pack and drive. See you in Ohio, maybe, tomorrow morning.

***

Somewhere slightly lost outside of Cleveland. Well, the dark does that. Nothing worse than road work and traffic at night for night blindness. So I pulled off the highway and drove down a shitty dark busy road until I found an ice cream shop with a restroom and a boy who knew of a Holiday Inn just past the freeway, not my freeway, but one that'll get me back on track in the morning if I go in the right direction. And because I paid more than I wanted to for the room, I felt ravenous--with abandon--so I ordered a salad and a bottle of water through room service so I could fixate on something besides having to park 32 miles from the lobby hall where the only access to the rooms--the elevator--is located in a hotel that doesn't provide help with luggage. The water was expensive. I was grumbly with the girl managing the front desk. She was alone on shift and on the phone when I walked in and though admittedly efficient, not efficient enough nor kind enough to slow my nervous night blind mind. I stood around and waited for her to complete the phone reservation. She made change for two men while I waited, while she talked. "This is a non-smoking hotel," she said into the receiver. I wanted a cigarette then and thought of walking out. But I had no cigarettes. I had no vision. So here I am.

***

I miss Bread Loaf.

***

. . . . . .

It ends with ending. Almost as if it never happened. But not really. So much happened.


***

. . . . .

postcard: Bread Loaf

(wet ampersand)

***

Out of Love for the Gesture That is a Poem a House Tries to Anthropomorphize

A house beside a freeway on the fault of America
is one lonely place. To change the vibration, accept
the metaphor. Let the poem expose its credentials.
It is not treason to allow the object to act as if human,
but smugly "non-western." A C-O-W-B-O-Y wrangles
errant ontologies. A C-O-W-B-O-Y wants to go home
to her house beside a freeway on the fault of America
and read a poem that ends like this: and that is how
I learned to love the impossible. To change the vibration,
a house must stop blaming America for its neediness,
for being such a constant bore about it all, as though
there is nothing else to speak of. When a gesture
outlasts the weather and no one notices, that is America--
one lonely place to be impossible, adrift as a poem.

Wendy S. Walters, Birds of Los Angeles

***

. . . .

postcard: Bread Loaf

(photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis)

***


Trembling

--------------------- In heaven all the interesting people are missing. --Nietzsche


Hello friend, beautiful face
in car fire. I, the flesh wish,
am sickly wrapped in light.

I promise to wink the voyeur,
spike the drinks to a fine glow
& swallow. What happened
to your arms? Raw concrete,

bad paint? Uncapped, the bottle
can't be broken. Voice, be amazing
circling the river bottom.

Remember fingers rattling locks,
fingers jump-starting the zipper
spine. Filleted boy. Anesthesia
is the bottle rocket. The belly.

Did you hear the rain last night,
thunder? Tomorrow, I will be
afraid. I might never wake up.


--from Alex Lemon's Mosquito

***

. . .

postcard: Bread Loaf


Epigrammatic notes from a craft class by Thomas Sayers Ellis: "A Risk in Every Room."

~Writing is sweetened by risk ... not merely a secretary to reality ...

~The poet's job is to invent ____truth_____.

~Reality does not give a shit what happened to you.

~The poem [as opposed to poetry] is a flat fixed finished thing, a container. How do you trick poetry into becoming the poem?

~The line is a unit of sound, unit of meaning: this is fragmentation. Now what is fragmentation? The part to the whole--the human brain does not need the whole to get to the thing.

~Stevens, Necessary Angel: poets must learn to find sameness; difference.

~Verse reverses: what begins the scheme of the poem. Smart is one note flat.

~If this is poetry Family Feud, what are the top four ways/words into a poem?

__I__
_The__
__A__
_You__

~You're waking in the front door, but the experience should be different. You should see that the stanzas are bodies standing in the room. You're giving the reader an experience that is not so hand held, so linear. Leap (Bly): what can happen between stanzas.

~Make poems, the music, from the insides, edges, all the possibilities of all the known associations of the text.

~Ben Shaun, The Shape of Content

~There's no way around the prose monster.

~The majority of the work--the good work--you've done a s a poet starts way before you've begun the poem. You select a title, you've made a major mistake. You've selected. You've cut out all the possibilities.

~Go to a different church every Sunday, first draft.

~The poem wants to be whole, organic--it does not make distinctions.

~The poet's job is all things everything.

~At some point sound went that way and meaning went the other. But you cannot show me two syllables that do not make a dance.

~Does the poem "work"? That is not even the question anymore. What's it supposed to do? It is lying there on the paper. That's what it does. Yeah it "works."

~A line of poetry is a breathing walk.

~The lyrical thing a poem reaches for is not a poem.

~You do want to be good at the art of surrendering, good at listening to what the poem wants."

~ ... an advocate of the noble attempt to move through and around things that are already finished.

***

. . (of week ten)

postcard: Bread Loaf

(fire on their faces, silhouettes, smoke and mud, a figure emerging from the light behind him, unreplicable)

***

"All day I've been looking at the world thinking God made this. You know, trying it on (God made what the clouds are doing right now, my fingernail, your beard hair, this soft bed of starry grass in the cemetery, my mosquito bites). God as poet. And this other voice interrupts, saying, you're not falling back on that again are you?--you gave that up a long time ago."

"Well can I ask you something?"

"Yeah."

"What's giving it up gotten you?"

"Eh. A sense of feeling safe among others, maybe. A sense of autonomy."

"You do get those things, yes. It seems. But is it the best way to take care of yourself? Does it make sense to believe you're entirely existentially alone? I mean you're not crying at mass because you're moved by aesthetics, honey. You want more. You want transcendence. And it's like you're putting the plate in front of yourself then taking it away. The irony, really, is that you're the only one pushing the plate away."

"Yeah. Yeah. I didn't want to be that person, but yeah."

(the sound of the trucks on the highway, the stones in the wall and the hands that placed the stones, my eyes, your kindness, Mark Doty)

"You want God on your terms, right? Your way of making God. Am I right?"

"But how do you get out of making God? It's easy to believe on a sweet sunny August day in Vermont when there is only this to look at. But it's not true."

(the color green, the way you think)

"You can't get out of making God. Not completely. It's hard. That's why they call it relationship. If you want to love and be loved, dependency is mutually creative--as well as other things."

"Other things?"

(fire, fear, fight)

"Well it's not always a good thing. But I come at it this way. I can surely understand desire, as can you. Beautiful women are great for theology because theology is all about desire. You think God's going to leave you to rot in a box? I've known you, what, five days, and you wouldn't do that to me. Think about that crazy obssessive love that parents have for little Egbert who in the beginning is hardly more than a tube with things going in one end and out the other--and Egbert's crude brutal primitive attempts to communicate--and how crazy excited the parents get about Egbert's gassy gurgling, though anything he's smiling about probably has to do with milk. And all through dinner all you hear is Egbert this and Egbert that. Think about it. God made you, put his image in you, made all this and filled it with desire--his image--and you think he doesn't want it back? He wants it badly."

***

. . . . . .

Today is this blog's birthday.

***

Left Tucson Sunday morning, visited Steve and Jake on Monday in Colorado--thank you, Jake, for feeding me and inviting me to stay with you three in your sweet home--arrived in Galesburg Tuesday night after driving 500 miles through Nebraska which is like being on a treadmill for the entire month of November. After that Iowa was delicious.

Now on route to Vermont and typing from wireless just outside Cleveland, Ohio. Listen, I've never driven so much so far. Construction delays and congestion all of yesterday on 80 and 90. I missed seeing Sheryl in Denver thanks to construction and the ramps being closed--a stranger in the city driving through strange streets, lost and looking for a reliable sign of where I am.

***

Me and my map.

***

Vermont looks a tangle. In 10 hours, if all goes as well as possible, I'll hug Suzanne and C. There is more to say, more to remember to say, but I can't type and drive at the same time.

***

. . .

week nine

Northern New Mexico, utterly beautiful. Woke to birds and the sound of wind in the pine outside the door. I can smell the pine from here. Las Vegas and heading your way Colorado. Expect to hear from me.

***

. . . . . . .

I'm off!

***

. . . . . .

Doves outside the window this morning, though not now. My last day in this house. For now. By tomorrow evening I'll be somewhere in Texas, with luck. Oklahoma, Missouri, then Illinois where I'll stop for a day or two to rest, repack, gear up for fall term, mapquest some stuff, then head off to Vermont where I need to be ready and on by the 15th. If I pack the boxes carefully and give up looking at the books now. If I pull the clothes from their hangers and drawers and put them into the suitcase. The atlas, I don't know. It could be anywhere. Leaving is hard for kids. I'm still a kid.

***

My grandmother used to arrive on a Greyhound once a year. The stop was an empty lot, an unmarked corner in Duncan, AZ, with only the curb to sit on. We were dressed in good clothes so we stood around shoeing dirt, trying to see through the green tint windows when the bus pulled up. She sat in the back, was slow to descend. Then she smelled sweet, like cigars and cardboard when I hugged her. She brought her things in a box the driver would drag out from the underside of the bus. My mother hugged her. The bus rattled. The tires were hot. Hot air flushed our faces. I hugged her. I didn't know her much but I loved her for loving us enough to want to be with us. I felt adoration. Excitement. A sense of something missing being found. My mother cried to see her and she cried again in the car with the soft green seats between us and the radio on low when the bus left again weeks later. I see my mother once a year, she said. I cried too, for then leaving seemed the saddest part of living and I knew I would break my mother's heart.

***

But then, I'm on my way to you aren't I? I feel adoration. Excitement. Don't worry, I'll find you. If you're there when I arrive.

***

Going through Colorado and Iowa instead of Texas and Oklahoma. For a change. Through Colorado Springs and Denver on I-25 looks like, and not too far from Boulder, if you want a visit. Probably day after tomorrow? Drop me a note. I'll stop to say hi.

***

. . . . .

When we all moved in together, Tony brought flowers. Roses actually. For the dining room table where I tried on potted angel wing begonias and woven placemats. Plateware I bought at Mervyn's, a clearance of solid green or pink sets. So everything we ate swam in their utilitarian pepto-bismol, four bowls, mugs, plates, salt and pepper shakers, a spoon rest. All but the spoon rest survives, retired, in the top shelf of my kitchen cabinet where I store an old hope I'll not have to eat off of them again. Which I don't understand. Because I don't remember eating. I remember we sat on the carpet together, we had nothing to talk about. The phone was in front of me and I dawdled before calling in sick. I watched him cut into a thick chicken breast, working at it with a steak knife on the pink plate on our beige floor. The meat was dry. He was shirtless and his shoulders and neck were sweating. It was summer. Do what you need to do, he said. Do what's due first. You know? For a long time he was more capable than me, and more kind. I started walking at night in the medians against the headlights on the highway. I was restless, just restless, though I thought I was dying. Before I turned twenty-two I told him I'd never seen the ocean. So he drove me to the ocean and when I saw it I saw what was due. Sea, and I was starving, I wanted something vastly beautiful. Like shells worn to sand. He pulled the sheets from the bed when he took the bed and left them crumpled on the violets. The violets I thought were beautiful. They were out of place.

***

"Just as I have assiduously avoided sullying my eyes with any poetry book that claims authenticity in personal experience, especially the melodramatic (“tragic”) kind..."

Sullying? I mean, really. Sullying.

Recently I overheard a woman say she hoped her neighbors wouldn't put up a clothesline she'd have to look at. "The eyesore."

Smacks of fear of contamination. Especially the melodramatic kind. "The neighborhood's going to pot." All this dirty tragic personal experience sullying the view.

You don't really mean it, I assume. Not authentically?

***