. . . . . . .

I'm here for the night. Wish me better weather in Illinois tomorrow. It doesn't look good: snow, heavy wind, rain.

I drove 377 north from Del Rio to Forth Worth through river country early this morning just as the sun broke. It was cold, silvery. A low fog hovered just over the water with the light in it, the river crossings all bearing their signs: "watch for water on the road." And the water rushed by. Low trees and long hills. Three sounds on the radio. Spanish, Country, Gospel. I listened to The Picture of Dorian Gray when I hit the open highway and left the hills behind for the flat lands and gas stations and strip malls of small places I couldn't find on my map.

Two goats grazed head down beneath a full blown cottonwood glittering in the sun: barbed wire between them and me on the road: a silhouette at dawn: the photo I didn't stop to take.

***

Happy new year, ya'll. To which we are all resolved.

***

. . . . . .

On the road again tomorrow going north. Back to the middle country, twenty some hours from the driveway. I'll check in with you before midnight to celebrate the new year. I'll be the one in a hotel room somewhere in Oklahoma, okay? If I miss you, kiss somebody for me.

***

. . . . .

. . . .

Del Rio has an internet cafe after all. Jasmine green tea and my mom hanging out while I research yet another residency. This one here, at Amistad National Park. I could live in a trailer and photograph flowers.

See the flowers? Does she look like me?

***

. . .

I'll close the year with images from the backyards of my mother's and brother's homes where this morning I woke in the dark to roosters crowing outside my window and elsewhere in the distance. They crowed to each other, to themselves, in answer, in echo, insisting as reflections do that among them all, all that familiarity, is the source. The original. The one that started the whole thing in motion. In the first place.

***

. . . day after christmas (week six, winter break)

My stepdad said: I don't know anybody in town who does that anymore except maybe the little old man on the corner of seventh if he's still alive. I showed up with my boots in need of caps and stood waiting in the smell of leather and oil by the glass counter filled with creased oiled shoes. What you need, the old man said. I held up my boots. I'll have to do both okay: he made a note on half an index card licked the end of his ballpoint: you pick them up when? Well I'm leaving the thirtieth I'm from out of town so by then you think--? He pulled out his wallet, a thin worn snakeskin fold of soft bills, said you want them now or tomorrow, that's all. Now or tomorrow. I close at six. You pay now or tomorrow okay. Ten ninety-five. Okay.

***

. . . . . .

Hello Texas.

***

. . . . .

So long, Arizona.

***

. . . .

Or incapable, as it turns out.


***

The car is loaded, but I'm straggling. Something about needing proof of insurance in the car before taking off. Something a fax can take care of, but just a bit too late in the day. So, reluctant to hit 90 where the deer stand in the highway and the darkness closes in for hours without another car passing, I'll wait until 2 or 3 this morning to leave for my mother's home.

***

. .

Fighting off whatever bug Trystan and Sage have conjured. I feel it most in my eyes and in the small of my back. And I'm packing to leave. I'm off to the Texas border early Thursday. If you want to be in touch, do it before then. My cell doesn't work there, mama has no long distance, and the Internet is a thing of the town library, only. I won't emerge until New Year's Eve.

***

week five, winter break

Hope. With forgiveness, this wisdom. That despair isn't necessary. That hope can be given, and need not be hope for the wrong thing. So I'll bring out the sun all week, a promise towards, and not against. Because you remind me I'm capable. Thank you.

***

"The purely speculative discovery of the philosopher that he is wholly dependent in the order of being, that in his own existence not-being comes first, is always liable to cause him distress, because it is not wholly spiritual, and the imagination may suddenly intervene. This distress then continues deep in his mind, preventing him from thinking freely, and contemplating him who is the source of light. The distress easily changes into an attitude of complete hostility and refusal. Poor human understanding cannot live in the air at such a height. This trouble--due both to metaphysics and to the imagination--may often be at the root of some bitter forms of atheism."

--M.-D. Philippe, O.P.

***

The stupidest thing on t.v. this morning? The Master Cleanse Fast. Ingredients?

60 oz water per day (or 10 oz per glass)
12 tablespoons Organic Grade B Maple Syrup (or 2 tbsp. per glass)
12 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice (or 2 tbsp. per glass)
a little over half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper (or 1/10 tsp. per glass)


Nothing against fasting. I believe in short fasts. But why choose to put this particular garbage in your body while on a (minimum, get this) TEN DAY fast? Well, there are whole books and cds that explain the benefits of maple syrup, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper. You can purchase a water bottle while you're there. Part of a feature on avoiding weight gain during the holidays.

***

Off to the postoffice to mail Macdowell, Casa Libre, and a box of manuscripts. Wish me luck with the line. Then to replace the car stereo. Then dinner at Simmons' house.

***

. . . . . . .

Woke in a terrible way. Confused. Regretful. And without a clear memory of what I wanted done. Then, this photo, taken in April of this year, was in my head. Like my double, half closed or all. Didn't take long to find it.

***

. . . . . .

"The dream of the green living room was my first experience of such strangeness and I find it as uncanny today as I did when I was three. But there was no concept of madness or dementia available to me at that time. So, as far as I can recall, I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping. I had entered it from the sleep side. And it took me years to recognize, or even to frame a question about, why I found this entrance into strangeness so supremely consoling. For despite the spookiness, inexplicability and later tragic reference of the green living room, it was and remains for me a consolation to think of it lying there, sunk in its greenness, breathing its own order, answerable to no one, apparently penetrable everywhere and yet so perfectly disguised in all the propaganda of its own waking life as to become in a true sense something incognito at the heart of our sleeping house."

Anne Carson, Decreation

***

. . . . .

Spent all of yesterday reading about pre-Raphaelite painting. I'm to teach the Victorian literature course in the winter term, and it's true: I'm in over my head. And why had I never read Modern Love before? I'm pretty sure I've been in this relationship.


By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet
Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
Each wishing for the sword that severs all.

***

I'm off to the tub to go read all fifty sonnets again.

***

Shall I start a wishbook? Yes, let's. Tell me what you want for Christmas. For starters, this this and this. Okay?

***

From Ana Castillo:

Guess what, kids? The Mayans are alive, if not exactly doing well. The general idea seems to be that the Aztecs are long dead. (Don't lose your head ove that fact!) And that the Mayans are also extinct. They are not all lost in the jungle wearing taparabos either.

FYI--approximately TWO MILLION Mayas live in the United States today. However, like the rest of the mestizos who live here, whose people originated from the Southwest, Caribbean and throughout Latin America (academic term, I know, I know)--they cannot register here as Native American. Instead, they are immigrants. Even those of us born in places as far north as, let's say Chicago, are 'seen' as immigrants.

We didn't cross the border.
The Border double-crossed us.



(thanks for the link, Emmy.)

***

Worth mentioning: walked into a place called Sound FX to have the cd stuck in the player removed by the guys who installed the thing in the first place. The manager, Moises, shook my hand and dwarfed mine in his while I tried not to stare at the thick gold chain and pendant hanging at my eye level just above his great belly. The chain was thick as my ring finger, the pendant bigger than my hand. Big Daddy, it said. His cup behind the counter said the same.

***




I am buying Glenda's car. This is what it looks like.

***

. . . .

. . .

Made travel arrangements for AWP in Atlanta and paid the exorbitant registration fee--my ticket was only fifty bucks more--and now the question arises: will I see you there?

***

Because we're celebrating the release of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, edited by our beloved Francisco Aragon and forthcoming with the University of Arizona Press in Spring, 2007, at the annual AWP Con Tinta event. Won't you come?

***

Here is Francisco's note:

"Dear Anthology Contributors,

Brenda Cárdenas and I will be organizing a group reading to celebrate the publication (or imminent publication) of THE WIND SHIFTS: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). Said reading will form PART of the program of the annual CON TINTA event at an off-site location during the AWP conference in Atlanta. In addition to celebrating the publication of the anthology, the CON TINTA event will serve as an occasion to honor Judith Ortiz Coffer, who teaches at the University of Georgia in Athens. Brenda is part of the CON TINTA Advisory Circle. For those of you who may not be familiar with CON TINTA, have a peek at the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Tinta The CON TINTA event will be held at a yet undisclosed location in Atlanta on Wednesday, March 1 OR March 2 from 6:30 -- 8:30 PM."

***

So many gorgeous poets in this anthology. Take a look.

***

AND it turns out I could use a roomie for the conference hotel. My roomie just backed out. Any takers?

***

In the second dream she rides a bicycle down a dirt road strewn with round stones and puddles that reflect the overcast sky. When I find her, she has already fallen, is gathering her mud covered skirts and her books (well why shouldn't she look like a Pre-Raphaelite painting?--the last one did), her cap tangled in the hair fallen loose from beneath it. "Don't," she says to me, "I came to ask you, please don't. I am not through."

***

. .

Zali said: there is the moment when the dream would reveal a secret but procrastinates because the dream does not yet know what the secret is.

There is also the dream that unfolds over fitful hours in the most predictable way, subjecting the dreamer to its most dreaded end.

So it is: in the first dream of you you tell both secret and dread. It takes all night and all morning. I am exhausted.

***

week four, winter break

Listen, I haven't said: if you're in Tucson I want to see you. But I meant to. Please write me, and I'll send you a phone number. My cell doesn't work so well here, so if you've left messages for me there, I might've missed them. I know there are messages waiting, but my bars are too low to retrieve them.

***

"This is my home": a complicated claim. Towards origin and tendency, towards a knowledge so often mistaken--out of comfort perhaps--for identity, though so thoroughly removed from its designation. "This is who I am." Or to view the claim as we actually intend it hour to hour, "whom," rather: "I am whom this is," where the question of who--ostensibly grounded in an object position, "whom," against an existential verb suggesting otherwise--provides the illusion that "I" answers "who" in matters of existence: who are you? I am who. With whom am I speaking? With me, the I whom speaks. And where are you? I am here. This is my home. By which point the complex of grammatical designations needed simply to point to intentionality, an intentionality--a speaking self--an I whom am me--point also towards the inherency of place, location, space, temporality, other, in the telling of "am" before ever arriving at "my," where, in a matter of speaking, "home" becomes obsolete, an emphatic redundancy laying claim to all that fails to clear my wake. The emphasis, you ask? The more you I am, the more me that is, with two diverging possibilities: The Less You, or The More Us.

***

. . . . . .

We're off to San Xavier del Bac for mass this morning. The oldest Catholic church in the country just happens to be outside of Tucson on the Tohono O'odham reservation. Some poet once called it the white dove of the desert. The name stuck.

***

. . . . . .

Woke with these rhythms in my head:


Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear She might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite--
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."


Took me a bit to recognize them as Astrophel and Stella. Why? I don't know why. I memorized it at one point. It was there this morning wordlessly banging on the drum.

***

Drums, incidentally, are what Glenda plans to get Sage for Christmas. Because Sage loves music. Because apparently she loves the drums. Of course she does, I said. She's three.

***

Finished the UA Poetry Center Summer Residency application, but that's the least onerous one. Onward with Casa Libre en la Solana, the MacDowell Colony, and then Sewanee, if I can sustain the energy. Know where I wilt? In asking for letters of recommendation. I wish that work on no one I love and who loves me back. And I need one recommender to apply to McDowell, two for Sewanee. So it may not happen.

***

pa rum pum pum pum

***

"The monster's going to make us all into one Santa Claus and we won't be able to watch t.v. anymore." --Sage, hands thrown up in despair

***

. . . .

As it turns out, Internet, but no printer in this room; in my room, laser printing but no Internet. And the quandary raises any number of Great Possible Things To Be Done if only the printer and the Internet could be brought to work together--in my room, of course. The wireless is broken; the printer in this room, broken. Glenda spent an hour on the phone with a cable tech last night who said "hmm, strange, call back tomorrow," and I changed the printer out with no success. So here it is: the obstacle forcing some kind of manic focus towards Great Possible Things To Be Done, where just two days ago I hadn't taken those residency applications to heart. No, while I was on the plane, the Poets & Writers section announcing residencies and conferences was more like the Sky Mall, or the Target wishbook.

Maybe next year, dear.

***

Okay, I sent to Junta. Did you send to Junta?

***

. . . .

Aztlan, I'm home again.

***

Call for Submissions

Junta: Avant-Garde Latino/a Writing

Latino/a writers have historically embraced experimentation of form and craft as a way to explore their culture. Even so, much of Latino/a writing, published in the United States, has been limited to particular approaches to subject and style that havebeen validated by mainstream publishers. Rarely, if ever, does the writing express the immense diversityof aesthetics practiced by artists in the Latino/acommunity. In addition, the reality of a U.S. Latino/a Avant-Garde is virtually non-existent in contemporary literary discourse about "Latino/a Art" as well as across the literary spectrum. Sunstone Press, an independent publisher in Santa Fe, NM is producing an anthology that will be edited by poet Gabriel Gomez. The anthology will feature Avant-Garde poetry and poetics by contemporaryLatino/a writers. The tentative publication date is fall 2007.The anthology will first appear at a conference in Santa Fe, NM, scheduled for October 2007, and will be available nationwide thereafter.

Caveat Emptor:

It is not the intention, with this anthology, to categorize and codify certain Latino/a writers as “Avant-Garde” nor to establish any notion of a preferred aesthetic. The objective is to interrogate the very terms "Avant-Garde" and "Latino/a experience" as intersecting locations of poetic practice so as to bring forth work that bears witness to our varying aesthetics as artists and thinkers. The ultimate goal is to encourage both readers and publishers to recognize the breadth of Latino/a writing and thus deepen the public's understanding of the Latino/a experience.

Guidelines:

Please submit up to five poems. Manuscripts should not exceed 15 pages. Include a cover page with your name and contact information as well as the titles of your poems. Your name should not appear on the poems themselves.Writers are asked to submit only electronic versions of the poems. Send as MS Word attachments only. Both MAC and PC platforms are acceptable. Submit work to junta.anthology@yahoo.com. Writers whose work is accepted for the anthology will be asked to write a poetics statement no longer than 750 words.

Deadline:

All manuscripts submitted by January 10, 2007 will be considered. Contributors will receive two copies ofthe book upon publication.

***

. . .

In the aeroplane over the sea.

***

I'm in Atlanta. In the airport. It's too warm for a coat and wool sweater. I have both.

***

I absolutely lost it on the drive to the Peoria airport when for whatever reason the airport traffic was rerouted from the highway through some mysterious out of the way neighborhood that brought us all to a 20 mintue crawl. We passed police cars with siren lights waving us forward though we could not move forward, could not avoid maybe missing our flights. I lost it big too--I couldn't stop crying once I got started--not because it was frustrating but because I didn't know where I was going. I was lost and trapped, and there were no signs along the way announcing "airport this way->" or even a road sign I could reference on the map. I was this close to getting on a plane home, but before it could happen I would be lost on the outskirts of Peoria in long lines of traffic going nowhere...

So by the time I arrived at the airport and had a minor dispute with the guy who wanted me to transfer four pounds of something from one suitcase to the other (to which, after failing to find four pounds of something--"that was like one pound," he said to me after watching me sweat and scramble--I said, "you know what? charge me, just charge me"), I realized I'd start crying again when I hit security and there was nothing to be done about it. It finally hit me: I hate flying. At least everything up to the moment before you step on the plane. I resent undressing in front of other people, my belt, my shoes, my coat, my laptop, my empty water bottle (targeted today a total of four different times just walking through the security gate), and the fact that invariably, someone pulls my bags aside or pats me down. But why should I let myself feel so vulnerable? Well, because it's the truth brought to the fore. We are vulnerable.

***

. .

Just as I manage to unpack a suitcase, it's time to fill another. The sun at this angle: the little white steeple above our rooftops is almost flamingo pink for a minute or two. But now the full yellow sunrise and the busy trucks on Seminary Street with their red tail lights flashing by the stop sign. Everywhere the houses let off steam.

***

Is there time for one last visit to the priory, one last class session? Tuesday morning routine: bathe, dress, get in the car, drive. The last time I attended Brother John-Luke's "Philosophy of Living Being," I realized I'd missed enough class, at last, to be lost. Well, I vowed to read more Aristotle, to catch up. Well, and I didn't, did I.

***

I know I've been out of the loop, but fill me in, won't you? I miss you. I'm trying to catch up with your archives. And what the heck happened at Jordan's place? He seems to have disappeared... If I owe you email don't look for it yet. That corner of my universe is like a ten-car pile-up collision. One has to look for survivors, first. But you know, call. Or else you might get a phone call from me at not such a good time: sorry, C, for calling so late last night. It was not so late in my state. I just wanted to say I'm thinking of you.

***

Bathtub. Priory.

***

"Art is a very high form of love--and only a higher love can possess a lower one."

***

Herman has left the house for Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Ithaca, finally, before the MLA Convention, which, we all know and loathe, is just after Christmas and just before New Year's Day. My friend shared my house these months since summer, and we made it ours, and we wrote books together and watched tv and had long talks about everything--especially other people--and now that the house is solely mine again, I am far too empty for it. Wish my friend a safe journey home. Wish him serenity of mind, too, while he makes his interviews and campus visits. He will have some hard decisions. So wish him the right one.

As he always says: "the universe is a perfect place." I'm not sure if that's the same as saying: "we live in the best of all possible worlds." I don't think it is.

***

week three, winter break

Though the streets have long been cleared by the plows, the snow brings another quiet morning with black boughs and silvery white rooftops and lawns emerging slowly from the dark. Sunrise, but gray, yet. Friday we were snowed in by the blizzard, every one of us, as part of the snow's incredible beauty. Everything stopped moving for one full day and went blank. We could go nowhere while the storm stormed. We had to play at house. So I began the reading for next term's class, picked up The Mill on the Floss and read for hours in the tub, and reading felt so good, I read all of Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric, which if you haven't read, you must--immediately.

***

Then I read through forty manuscripts on Saturday (most I'd read before), and looked for a book that would fill me with awe and envy and make me wish I were capable of writing it and make me steal to the office to photocopy it for myself. I nearly despaired among the stacks, fell asleep beside them early Saturday night, then woke, as I often do, at two in the morning, and picked up the last three manuscripts. I chose one at random, and read it straight through with the kind of joy that poems rarely bring me anymore, if only because any genre you know too well has way of becoming predictable. At four in the morning I walked into Herman's room and nearly woke him to say: this is it. I've found the book I wish I'd written. It's here in my hand.

***

Extraordinary, weird, childlike. A mystical a journey through a mythical landscape, and hell sophisticated. And yet, I have no idea who wrote it. Isn't that strange? Here is a wonderful book: its author is dead or doesn't exist or is silent and invisible. I will hand the work over to the powers that be and hope for it. I may have a sister or a brother, somewhere, but I may not find her, him.

***

Saturday morning Penny and I left the house at seven to make the final session on "Art & Wisdom" at the Priory, but the ice was thick on the highway and though the sun was brilliant, it brought no warmth. The windshield fluid was frozen. We stopped twice to clean the windshield with dry snow. Nearly every mile presented another semi-truck hulking in the median where it slid off the road and was abandoned by its driver to the snow drifts and ice. The ice glittered in the trees and on the flat plains everywhere dazzling, awesome, but it was our great obstacle. We had to turn back. It took us two hours to get halfway there and home again.

What is usually a forty-five minute drive.

***

. . . . . . .

. . . . .