. . .

. .

I think I've killed everything flowering on the porch. Am watering now. Cross your fingers for me.

***

senior week

Well, I got up at 4 a.m. and thought I'd have a chance to finish off some grading, maybe think my way into a notebook entry, maybe make some tea and watch the sun come up. But with deadlines looming up on Tuesday for final papers and final grades--and maybe with this prickly still heat that settled in the past few days--there is nothing but panic in my inbox this morning. And that's the morning. All given over to panic. And for what?

***

Gratitude and thanks to all of you for your support and congratulations below. The generosity of this community is incredible and I am a much happier and more fufilled writer thanks to you and your blogs.

***

From jane dark's sugarhigh:

In fact, everyone reading or listening also knows these formulae that are being demonstrated with exemplary narratives, from which they can learn nothing and experience only cosmetic difference. This happens year after year; decades pass. Surely the publications and talks would just stop?

I don't actually see why it would stop, considering the compulsion to repeat--with variation--is so powerful (and the compulsion to repeat with only cosmetic difference is part of any coherent poetics). Shift gradually: that it does.

I can't speak for ought.

***

Graded final portfolios for the beginning poetry class in conference today and discover I'm a trained marathoner. Worked through seven portfolios with seven students, each an hour or more, and remembered the exhiliration of seeing the results of long work and a little pressure towards extensive revision. The work is good. These sessions used to wear me out beyond belief, but I'm feeling all right tonight.

***

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

postcard: Knox College

The rumors are true.

On Friday, May 26, at 8 o'clock p.m. the Senior Send Off(-Knox) will feature a reading by the English Department faculty at Pookies Coffee Bar. We're really good. You don't want to miss us.

***

. . . .

Every morning I arrive at my office and Bob Hellenga (who shares the 2nd floor building corner with me and who gets to his office between 7 and 7:30) leaves his chair to say good morning. I love this routine; it exists no where else. This week he points to his head and says "It's all over with. Up here." I can hardly make myself clear the desk to begin another day for all the summering in my head, I know. Glenda, Chris, Trystan, and Sage arrive June 1st, just as Trystan predicted. They're going to live in my house for some days before we all go back to the desert. This also exists no where else.

***

. . .

Couldn't sleep last night after this news. Nervous and excited (and redeyed and foggy).

Dear Gina Franco,

I'm pleased to notify you that you have been awarded the Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry for the 2006 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference . . . .

Any of you going? Will I see you there?

***

. .

For Sheryl Luna: a link to a post Jasper Bernes made late last December. I've linked to it before but it's worth pulling out of the archives even as Jasper has revised and amended his thinking since.

This is what happens with Ron, he confuses forces and flows and market conditions with people. There's no conspiracy here. There's five billion shooters on the grassy knoll, dude. It's not like J.D. McClatchy and who-not are sitting in smoke-filled backrooms plotting their takeover of the poetry world. It's a lot of people, whom the big pictures eludes, making decisions that are for the most part based on what they think is right, and the rest of the time on their own petty needs and allegiances. Talk of a "School of Quietude" or a "Gang of Eight" is just bullshit; it hypostasizes into concrete personages and institutions things that are trans-personal and trans-institutional. . . . [read on--it's worth it]

(p.s. I think Jasper is endlessly right-headed in his blog.)

***

from the Annunciation notebook, May 23, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 10:51 p.m.

My brother calls and talks for awhile which is rare, so I don't understand him at first, what he's thinking about, why. He's studying for a certification exam to get his plumbing license. He's nervous. Already he spends his days thinking about water and gravity, water in pipes and resevoirs, water under pressure and water leaking in the walls of somebody's house. He's been working with Dan for years, learning the trade. Water is their language. He talks about ratios of weight and direction: water will always find the quickest way down. He talks about containment. The sea is a basin, the planet is a basin, is pounds per inch per mile of water, its contents pushing towards the surface, against air. Every cell in the body is just a balanced container of water, he says. I begin to see what he sees: there is water, there is cell. Nothing else much matters.

***

postcard: Knox College

Please join us at Pookies Coffee Bar, today, Tuesday the 23rd, at 7:30, for the Senior Portfolio Final Reading. Each student will read 5 minutes a-piece from his/her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Having undergone all the anxieties, terrors, rigors of collecting, revising and introducing their work, all will be ready to "push off" from Knox by then. So please come out to enjoy a great reading, have a cocktail, and applaud our students' achievement.

All are welcome to The Cellar Door reception on Wednesday, May 24 at 7:00 p.m. in the Studio Theater in CFA. There will be live music, dancing, reading, acting, and a special gift for all who attend. Don't miss your chance to pick up the Family Issue!

And do join us for the final Caxton Club of the year, featuring Donald Anderson, reading from his own works at 4 p.m., Friday, May 26 on the west patio of Ford Center for the Fine Arts. In case of rain, the reading will take place in the Round Room. Anderson's short story collection, Fire Road, received the 2001 John Simmons Award from the University of Iowa Press.

***

week ten

It's all pink and gold this minute. And so many birds: one that doesn't sound possible, like a big smooth rock banging another big smooth rock. And the handprint on my window is visible but fading because the sun's angle is right, but rising. And the tea is on. And though I worked all weekend, I am underprepared for all sorts of things today. Including getting dressed. And it's the last week of classes in a term that hasn't been warm enough in the mornings to have class outdoors. So I should've told them to bring sweaters and coats. Because I don't want to be inside.

***

It occurred to me recently when Jerry Harp happened to read a poem about an encounter with water moccasins the day after I'd dreamt of snakes, and when Michael Martone made a reference at dinner the other night--"essentially drinking their blood"--to Trojan battles or something like that after I'd heard it before phrased precisely that way--"drinking their blood"--years ago from a poet who tried to teach me what is good about teaching poetry,

it occurred to me that if you have a literary life and if your "literary" is of the mythic sort, there is often only the mythic reference to look to for meaning--the recurring (and that's how myths are made) mythic frame of reference. That is, chances are, there will be a lot of snakes and a lot of blood (and a lot of Hume and a lot of Blake) all over the place, and it's no coincidence when they recur, not really, though it--coincidence--always seems to announce (like a little sacred reiteration of something important, something reminding you) "hey there is a God."

And funny I didn't notice before: not a sign of God, but a sign of more signs, the merest function of a common language. How else do you expect people like you to talk to you?

***

I know. This is no revelation to you. I should've worked this out like about four years ago. Or when I was ten and couldn't believe in what all the fainting was about.

***

I said give me an image for "fairytale childhood" (this, from a poem by a student who sits nearby)--and make it concrete (they say blanky, they say teddy bear, they say handlebar tassels)--and make it one that generates all the associations we have in the poem (they say milk, they say Betsy-Wetsy)--loss of innocence, eroticism, romantic fantasy, waiting, (they say nothing)--what about "girl" I say, why not that--? No, they say, we don't see it. One stays after to ask why don't I read the way you read. I say I am teaching you to read and write how I read and write but there are other ways, your way for example. I don't say I am teaching you a language, that's all. Because I don't think of it.

***

He said what's good about teaching poetry is drinking in that young hot energy for the work and the showing up power and the unjaded questioning of you and not themselves. At least until they start to get it. And that's what I've been doing with you, you know? Drinking your blood? I didn't say, because I didn't get it, hey I thought they drank the blood of their enemies?

***

Fluency, signs of more signs: I can imagine their infinity, the same recurrances--coincidences--moving through "milk" and through "blood" so as to make them inextricable in a poem (fixated on nursing/vampirism), the same making them nearly the same as the ones recurring in the handprint on my morning window and the red paint handprints on the walls of the vandalized room I photographed weeks ago. It is only where I see something meaningful announce itself that fluency ends. God has a way of putting a stop to the play of signification. There is no questioning God. Only the face of God.

***

Annunciation: I am on the porch, typing, watching little winged things drift past the evening sun which in a minute will set past the treeline and the houses in front of me. Romulus watches birds and waits for one to land near. Those are grackles, I think, but I don't know for sure and would be no more convinced if one said "hey, there are grackles." Or even if one said "cats and birds are enemies."

***

But I am reluctant to give up the sacred, the idea that repetition is announcement, is reminder towards rememory, is ceremonial poem, occasional poem, mythic poem: elegy as well as funeral. And not because I am consoled--I am not consoled--but because giving up the ghost in the word negates the beauty of what is repeatable and repeating as well as the beauty of past things imposing on me now wrapped in a blanky on the porch as I have been before when the sun is past the houses in front of me, and the coherence of things I photograph to which I have no words I can apply, and my conviction that on the expressive face of it I get up in the morning to see what I can make of what comes next. That's yet a conversation.

***

. . . . . . .

. . . . . .

Why Romulus must vomit on the only light colored rug--on Saturday--when I could do anything at all first thing on waking--he decides I must hear, see, and touch the contents of his stomach. First thing. I can't even tell you, big deflated balloon over here.

***

Dear Human Museum,

You are so beautiful.

Sincerely,

***

from the Annunciation notebook, May 18, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 7:00 am:

I received Jeff & Kathy's floorplan and photos of the new place in Galesburg. The place looks lovely. I've been doing nothing but looking at those pictures and thinking out the rooms. Trying to see it. Yesterday I began thinking of the wasted winter space of the balcony porch--that wonderful porch closed down seven or eight months of the year. So I thought: surely some wintery garden could live there, something beautiful or useful could be kept, even grown. But I could think of nothing that lives outdoors through a midwestern winter. That's the point of winter. We will need a furnace out there, then. An electric blanket with a long cord. --And the tiny back porch with the east facing window: a small table on stilts and a tall chair and I could write there in the mornings when the sun comes up in the spring. Maybe put a few shelves by the window for herbs. We could take up canning. Why not? We're midwestern folk now.

***



***

. . . . .

Wonder if there's time to stop and buy M&Ms for the kiddies and pick up my photos? Doubtful. They're not going to be happy about it. Remind me again: why Childe Harold? Why Byron, for that matter.

***

But it seems I ought to do this:

Just a reminder that I will be leading a bird walk at the Green Oaks Field Station on Saturday at 8 am. We will be walking for some hours and a couple of miles, if you so desire, but people have the option of turning back at any time that is convenient for them, so there is no fixed ending time. In a few spots there have been some biting insects, nothing serious by my Canadian standards, but if you are bothered by bugs you might want to bring along some insect repellent. The weather forecast looks promising - partly sunny and moderate temperatures. Please feel free to e-mail if you have any questions.

Jim Mountjoy

***

. . . .

We're back to pretty clouds and sun and wind making the tops of the trees move. This I see from my window. I haven't been out yet. I would like to stay in bed with my bug and drink tea, but I would also like to get moving on such a day. A man across the street fills a blue wheelbarrow with dirt. Three others shovel gravel from a green truck. They rest on shovel handles, talking over their gloves. One wears a yellow t-shirt; one rolls up his sleeves. They are squinting in the sun.

***

In the dream the man gave me two sealed glass jars. In each, an infant snake, a cobra and a king suspended in water, both drowning. It was up to me to let them out but the cobra scared me and I couldn't save one without saving the other. So I walked away and had a conversation with someone about what to feed snakes and let my indecision get the best of me until my companion realized in the course of our conversation that my snakes were dying and acted quickly to open the jars though it was too late. They were dead.

***

The bodies were soft and limp but for tiny bones spining through the flesh. They were hairless.

***

"Sooner murder"--

no, that's not where I was going. As a worm on a hook I almost said. As the bare pink skin of a dog's nippled belly and all the little pups inside poking through. (Love kept me apart.) Suspension, and only a little time is left before.

***

I was saying to the students, notice the inappropriate woman must die. Nearly always. Those things can't (be suffered to) live. As in the case of Eve for example who makes an email announcement to her peers about missing books, missing/stolen books, and receives a backlash tide of responses, not about books, but about how she ought to act, write, address, behave. That will fix her. --And you see what I mean by fix. That's why lynching, why stoning, why impaling: to fix in one place, to pin and wriggling, to suspend to put an end to all suspense.

***

"You may be right but I don't have the heart for it." Is that what you're supposed to say? "Do what you will." How about that? I still don't have an answer to what I ought've done, I'd do the same again, wait, let someone else act, find a distraction, be seduced, hover between venom and (Will kept you apart) helplessness in my own inertia knowing no inaction is inert. There is hardly a before. There is only towards and with it terror.

***

Not towards, but through. Through and with it terror. "I don't know, I've never understood it."

***

795: These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry
796: Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv'd
797: And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
798: To me, for when they list into the womb
799: That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw
800: My Bowels, their repast; then bursting forth
801: Afresh with conscious terrours vex me round,
802: That rest or intermission none I find. (Paradise Lost II)

***

You know what it is? That I want to say "I didn't put them there." That I walked away and thought "I will think about this later, these snakes smiling in water, I will suspend judgment" because I was in love--with whom? wrong question--. The appropriate point to make is I had no business being in love. No business. Busyness is dizzying.

***

Appropriate. Point. Do.

***

As the catheter stuffed urethra. As the plush nippled belly full of tiny bones pushing through. The shovel shoved up the middle of the effigy, the midway I came to myself in a dark wood. A jar in each hand. As she put it in her mouth, bit, and swallowed. As am I holding you up: am I

***

in the cool of the evening taking a walk in the trees. If you want to know she waffled. She sat beneath its shade, and watched the light move in its leaves. She kicked at the windfalls, plucked a few samples. She talked to her companion and felt loving and too small. And why not become a vessel? And why not be baited. She knew. She waited. I put them through it. For my brooding.

***

. . .

Clear to me now why I'm sleeping so much and feeling weary--even why I crashed so hard after the Momotombo event--simple. I'm fighting something buggy. It thinks it's winning. But it's not winning. Now that I've seen it coming, this bug is going to die.

***

postcard: Knox College

Yesterday, Peter Orner gave a beautiful reading. He's lovely in person, too. Genuinely. But I forgot to post it here along with our other events this week:

Please join us Tuesday, May 16, for a Caxton Club event featuring Peter Orner. Orner will read from his new novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, at 4 o'clock in the Bookfellow Room, Seymour Library. The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo is about a teacher who has volunteered to work in an all-boys Catholic school in Namibia, shortly after the African nation achieved its independence in 1991. Orner also is the author of the critically acclaimed Esther Stories. Orner will sign books, available for purchase after the reading. We look forward to seeing you there!

On Thursday, May 18, at 4 o'clock in the Alumni Room, Old Main, Poets Jerry Harp and Mary Szybist will read from their own works. Harp is the author of two collections of poetry, Creature and Gatherings, winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Prize from the Ashland University Press. Szybist's book of poems, Granted, won the 2002 Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. Finally, Ms. Szybist will announce this year's Davenport Poetry prizes. This is an event not to miss!

And on Friday, May 19, at 4 o'clock in the Alumni Room, Old Main, Caxton Club will host a reading by Michael Martone. Refreshments will be a-plenty! See you there.

***

. .

Dreamt that on the day the visions came I woke and said everything must change now. In the dream my mother was cruel. I was twisted in the dropsheets on my father's living room floor, my mother painting the walls the color of orange sherbet and putting up dark green drapes with fist-sized cherries on them. She is leaving the house to live with my father. She has become someone else to be with him. Look at yourself. I don't know how you can live with yourself, she says to me. Why are you talking this way, I ask. You know why, she says. In the vision my father appears in a black limousine screeching around corners and I appear to myself with a fistful of cigarettes. I cannot see my mother though I look for her. I am engaged to two women who are looking for me in the house. They know each other, know of each other. They are happy. I am a balding man of 36 in the mirror, and they love me. In my father's house I see men being strapped down and raped in the corners of avocado green rooms. I look for a way out. I look for a vision of my mother. She appears as a grainy halo of light. I wake as a woman again with long wild hair on a river beach and regret not having what it takes to keep seeing. Everything must change now I say aloud while leaving the shore, but I don't believe I can make the turn.

***

And it is because they've just spoken to each other again for the first time, really, in twenty years, about the divorce, and because they had the same argument, the one where he claims he's done enough and she reminds him he did nothing. Because she is entitled to part of his retirement; because he is close to his money and can't fathom having to give it to her. Because she tells him the money is also for his kids, his first family. Because he tells her he gave me a car--the 84 Honda Civic--and because she reminds him I took out a loan, paid blue book price for it. Because he says he did everything he could do: I have four kids. Because she says, No Charlie: you have six kids. Because this little thing--this not very interesting thing--that in his head my father stakes his claim as a good responsible father. That he believes it. That he is not sorry. That's the reason for the nightmare, obviously. The not very interesting nightmare.

***

Would rather write beautiful poem things.

***

"This play gave me nightmares," a student says of The Cenci. We laugh. She does too. It is an old story, that Beatrice Cenci is her father's daughter, as much like him in name as in recourse to action. Incestuous rape the final turn for Beatrice: she chooses to act precisely as her father does: retaliation. If she is defined in The-Name-of-the-Father, if she is a daughter of the master's house, she has no recourse but his. And the Father's weapons will not bring the Father down but perpetuate Him. Resurrect Him. Reify His reality as the only reality. We know this. It is an old story. But do we know how to stop its production? Does the play tell us that?

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. (Cenci preface)

What is pernicious, perhaps, is the imagining of a cause and effect relation behind retaliation and revenge, quid pro quo: this for that when no relationship exists at all between the threat of incestuous rape and the execution of the father--no necessary relationship, I mean. Further, that we then assume retaliation has an ethical value, can be termed good versus evil, or even more hierarchical--gooder less good, badder less bad--without recognizing that if cause and effect relations are constructed--imagined--the same logic applies to moral hierarchies: imagined "wiser and better." --The poet, of course, just as guilty as the rest of us.

***

Well, one cannot live a life without imagining things. Of course not, that's silly. It's all in how you imagine things. Oh and how did you learn to do that, imagine them how? Oh, I got acculturated.

***

Should Beatrice have suffered? That's it?

***

Bathtub epiphany: if you're going to believe that suffering is not subversive, you'll have to wipe out Christianity and most of Western European and American culture while you're at it. --What I meant was, is no longer subversive. Really? Are you sure? Maybe you're just like the rest who don't want to look at it anymore. (Well and when did they ever?) Maybe you meant: ought not be subversive. We're back to that again--? I thought we'd settled that argument, the "ought" and it's value as a moral thing. You can't use ought with any seriousness. What about: is it subversive to conflate subversiveness and suffering or is it merely what you'd expect of my acculturated imagination? Depends: what are you trying to subvert? Not the Father again I hope--I mean, nothing subversive about that.

***

Right. But I admitted it already, "this little thing--this not very interesting thing." This "not very interesting nightmare." Then I guess the question is why bother with these old things? Why not throw them out if they no longer fit? I didn't say they didn't fit (they fit only too well) but that I am tired of them. We are all tired of complaining about the Father. It is your weariness, then, and not the old things, that is not very interesting (that we find weary)--and don't even think about connecting weariness to suffering--I won't allow it.

***

week nine

And after a bath I put on a movie to quiet my noisy head and spread out on the floor with many pillows and a blanket and fell asleep and woke once when my neighbor rang my doorbell around 7 p.m. to ask about getting wireless in the house and again around 1 a.m. when I remembered to get off the floor and to crawl into bed, and though usually so much sleep would have me up and making tea by 3 in the morning, when the alarm went off at 4, I was in a dream I can't remember now--something anxious but also beautiful--and I hit the snooze and slept through it for another hour. Now there is sweet milky tea and a bit of last morning darkness and a tub of warm water and The Cenci to look at before getting to the office to do many things I ought've taken care of this weekend. Week nine. Now it gets crazy.

***

I will tell you about the Momotombo Press events. Hang on.

***

. . . . . . .

I might be lying but it never got above 40 yesterday, 40 dark blustery, and that describes the weather for the entire Momotombo Press visit. It describes the weather now. I'm damn near pissed about it and blame myself or God for my pissiness, waffling, which is never a good state to be in. They--Francisco, Maria, Steven--left yesterday morning, so you can imagine I did nothing whatsoever after. The house is still in after-dinner state. You know what I'm up to this morning.

***

Okay, all but the kitchen. Which means I just moved everything that needs washing or dealing with in there. And now my laziness is kicking in again. Because the other thing needing doing is laundry and who wants to wash dishes or do laundry on a cold gray day? I'd rather prep for class. I'd rather tinker with poems. I have grading to do. I'm tempted by television, but then it's all over with. This is what boredom looks like after big events. I can hardly stand it.

***

I mean what's the difference between boredom and depression? It's not as if I can tell.

***

from the Annunciation notebook, Sunday May 11, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 7:20 a.m.

Hair all my life not a little thing, a self-consciousness a friend once said while probably drunk, "you really need to cut some of it off, it's like a fucking organ," and yes, startling and pure, his accuracy. Some people grow their livers day after day, nipping at grief, grieving at everything, the liver inside growing fat and heavy with all that fear, and my hair grows this way, to such excess, such decadence, thick and heavy. Slurring. In his voice: disgust.

-----

My father and mother grew my hair, my father saying "the day you cut your hair, I'm going to burn the house down." I was not allowed to cut it, I think, because it grows and grows abundantly, deep auburn, red at the roots, fair against those laws of nature that should have made me darker haired and skinned. For my father: a sheer red mystery. The top of my head grows a veil.

-----

The hair organ, like any organ, running through me, through the inside of me breathing my blood and eating the stuff floating there and casting off the dead that pour out of the top of my head for all to see. I wore it dutifully, loved it dutifully, hated it dutifully, chopped it all off dutifully, and then, forgetting, finally, my purpose--having no purpose having lost my duty--I began to grow it again out of excessive grief and longing for home. My father's house, where I am not welcome.

***

Dishes done thanks to Suzanne who talked me through them on her Mother's Day. C is right. Bathtub and Dante, not laundry. The sun is not scheduled to come out until Thursday. I can't think straight without sunlight. I feel like making holes in things.

***

. . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . .

God that I could tell you why this moves me to tears to look at it. Both plates from The First Book of Urizen, Urizen weeping in his great divisive sleep, that most of all. But then there is Los, wrenched from his side, forging, horrified, giving up, pitying, and from this, Enitharmon, new mother, who inspires his chains of jealousy, and between them: Orc. All of humanity.

***

Lorna Dee Cervantes:

how so often a woman's Muse takes the form of her children; whereas for a man, the Muse typically takes the form of a young and strikingly beautiful woman, usually with long flowing hair. (silent laughter) For me, it is the awareness of my own mortality which affects my craft -- certainly supplies the big waves that rock my boat. Motherhood will put you there, especially single motherhood: My Greatest Fear -- realized.

***

I told you: chicken mole, saffron rice with red bell pepper, corn tortillas, black beans, green olives, papaya with lime, pan dulce. But first, blue corn chips with guacamole: minced garlic, ground oregano (grinded not pre-ground, I mean), and (grinded) chiltepin. Twenty perfect avocados spooned onto the cutting board. Pastry cutter--not blender, mixer, or fork--to cut and mix. Topped with diced tomatoes and fresh cilantro. And sliced queso fresco on the side.

***

Everyone wants to know the "secret" to the guacamole I make. I've just told you. Tell your own secrets.

***

They came, they ate, they went. They seemed very happy. Woman who feeds everyone, the whole world, spooning from her pot: to be her. That woman.

***

. . .

Off to teach The Cenci this morning. How many years have I waited for this? I wonder how it looks to them. Wouldn't it be fun to be a Shelley scholar? Oh this lion is so Shelleyan.

***

So easy to give up Wednesdays to forgetting, but that's the trouble I'm working to avoid, eh? What to remember. An intense discussion about mainstream poetry, Spoken Word, Jeffrey McDaniel, and publishing with Andres. Brian read over half of O'Hara's "Second Avenue" aloud to me, spontaneously, as it ought to be read, and I was entranced--all the while. Nic showed up to say hi and for no reason I can place I took him to Chambers Street to see my abandoned building. Then we talked for a long time. And we needed more time. So that was good. Met with the three--Stefen, Hilary, Chris--to talk about Tost's book and again was thrilled by how it works. Had dinner with D, L, M, N, and remembered I can tell.

***

From Nic:

the Pepsi penguin is from, as you guessed, a special Christmas edition can design from 1994. Check it out here: http://www.foxinsocks.com/pepsi/pepsi3.html (it's the eighth one from the top of the page, labelled "Penguin Sliding Down Pepsi Globe"). So, twelve years old. That's still a pretty long time, or at least it seems so to me.

***

Twelve years, undisturbed. Impossible, almost.

***

Thank you, S. Very thankful for you this morning. --And you will let me know when anything here ought not to be here, right?

***

. .

This is killing me. It's dark and cold and no fun on the porch. And threatening to rain. Well when can I stop carrying a jacket around? Spring is infuriating. You see why I lose patience and go home.

***

Sent poems to two magazines yesterday, which if you know how I work, you understand I did grudgingly. I know I'm whining. I'm never ready to let them go. But the best way for me to get disinterested in new work is to send it away.

Slow to compose, slow to send out, slow to publish. It's not that I mind this clock. I would choose a slower one (because I am learning something now about my shifting interests and these strange new poems I don't understand or know yet how to shape) if not for my contract review in the fall.

So grudgingly: kicking and screaming against deadlines all the way, but working toward something necessary and good thanks to such impositions and despite all pure id efforts to sit around tinkering happily with one or two poems. Take them away from id and she just makes more.

***

from the Annunciation notebook, May 9, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 6:45 a.m.

Here is the Nietzsche that ought to be somewhere in the dissertation:

"It has always been not faith but the freedom from faith, that half-stoical and smiling unconcern with the seriousness of faith, that enraged slaves in their masters--against their masters. 'Enlightenment' enrages: for the slave wants the unconditional; he understands only what is tyrannical, in morals too; he loves as he hates, without nuance, to the depths, to the point of pain, of sickness--his abundant concealed suffering is enraged against the noble taste that seems to deny suffering. Nor was skepticism concerning suffering at bottom mererly a pose of aristocratic morality, the least cause of the origin of the last great slave rebellion which began with the French Revolution."

***

Why you'd make a note of the passage without noting where it comes from tells you how perfectly well intentioned--because you meant to use it that day and not lose it--and how perfectly lost you were. Not sure now what you'd have done with it. It resonates, yes, but so do lots of things.

***

Where was I? In the middle of Puree. Cleaned the chilis of seeds and veins, cooked them soft with white wine and a fat yam and half an onion, more ginger and garlic, more cloves, cinnamon, chicken stock, apple cider, and the water the chilis soaked in for a day and a half. Put the whole thing in the blender after, then in a great big pot. Roasted the raw peanuts in the oven and pureed them with walnuts and pecans and ha! some animal crackers. Added them to the great big pot and put the stuff on the stove to reduce which will take all of Thursday before adding bitter-sweet chocolate at the end. Poached 33 breasts of chicken and pray they will feed everyone. Looked in the cabinets for great big storage containers and cussed a lot.

***

Saffron rice with red bellpeppers: asked for saffron at the grocery store and had the whole place scratching their heads and asking me to spell it, describe it, say how it's used. They sent me to the organics section, the specialty foods section, the bulk spice section. They hunted and apologized but no one recognized the word saffron. Stopped in at the tiny Mexican grocery store--Jalisco--for avocados, cilantro, queso fresco, papaya, chiltepin, and asked. For the rice, right? Yes, for the rice. We don't have it in stock but we'll find it and bring it on the truck on Thursday around 3 p.m. Also pan dulce, fresh that day. For your guests.

***

Black beans. Corn tortillas. Twenty gorgeous avocados. Romas.

***

On the phone tonight my mother tells me my grandmother made wonderful mole and loved to eat it. I didn't know. I am self taught. She also made a cooked jalapeno salsa in her molcajete I wish I'd learned to make. We don't talk about the flood.

***

And, by the way, I paid three and a half dollars for my molcajete across the border. It wasn't easy to find, is part of a dying art. Everyone said: I use a blender. But grinding releases oils the blender can't. Don't spend fifty. Call me before you do.

***

week eight

See the penguin? Look close. Am tempted to find out when Pepsi last put penguins on their soda cans. Dated or faded? Anyone know?

***

Last thing before sleep I counted dinner guests. I stopped at twenty who say they're coming but remember just now one other I forgot. Thursday, Francisco Aragon, Maria Melendez, and Steven Cordova arrive around five. Dinner is at seven. When you get into town, friends, call me so I can meet you at your hotel and get you over to my place before the crowd arrives.

***

And no the landlord did not get my message. Avoiding the kitchen this morning though I need tea badly. Can't wash the new blender and put it to use. Can't wash yesterday's dishes. Can't clean chilis. May as well go teach a couple of classes.

***

Arrived home to find my landlord prostrate before my sink pipes which are everywhere on the floor. Been here most of the day, he said slowly, as if gauging how to feel about it. He is a quiet, thoughtful person. The sort who is likely more thoughtful and more quiet when he's angry. He is wondering but not asking, not directly, what I've poured down the sink that "looks like dirt." I tell him I water the hanging geraniums in the sink. Or that I used to. That these days I put a bucket beneath them. His expression doesn't change. He says the clog is in the mysterious pipe--"the vent"--that runs through my kitchen counter into the floor and roof simultaneously. At the T or the Y joint, he says. I see he doesn't know which, T or Y. Because the joint is in the wall, inaccessible. Which is part of the problem. I tell him my stepfather is a master plumber. He raises an eyebrow. I almost say and just landed a job as city inspector and just passed the exam certification with flying colors, but catch myself. I say instead that my brother is also a plumber, that I'm embarrassed I don't know more about it. The house has proper plumbing he says, so there's a vent. The vent is necessary, has to do with water levels. The vent exits somewhere on the roof. I nod. I don't know what our conversation is about; I am nervous and talking the way some things use feelers. The way plumbers use snakes.

***

And now a plumber must be called.

***

Twenty feet of water or more backed up in the pipes below my kitchen sink: up to two weeks of draining on my schedule of sink use. My brother once talked to me about water levels, the exacting pressure that achieves the perfect arc[h] of a drinking fountain--and how difficult, and how profound. A drinking fountain. Plumbers know these things. The laws of water and air and containers. The pipes wind through the house. I think of joints. Which are also articulations.

***

Lotta black muck, my stepfather says. Yeah. Smells bad huh he says. Yeah.

***

Yeah.

***

. . . . . . .

I need an attitude adjustment. Something more laundry trash grocery store for cleaning fluids friendly. This is not easy. It started off badly. I thought the gloxinia had become a heavy drinker, a bottom drinker sucking up the excess water in its tray overnight each night. But no, that's Romulus again. Who won't drink from a bowl. Who's also snubbing his water glass these days. Who clawed a fat hole through one of the gloxinia leaves this morning and complained bitterly when he found the tray empty. I walked into the room in time to watch him do it. If you've grown gloxinias or tried to you know his was an act of pure jealousy. I'm thinking well diva gloxinia and the wolfcat can both stay in Galesburg this summer.

***

The clogged kitchen sink phenomenon on the Sunday whence great cooking commences is reason enough woman rents and won't buy. Oh she tried plunging. Her arms and back ache with it. And she borrowed her neighbor's tall strong boy to help her until an hour into it the water level had actually risen and they both said huh and shrugged. Nothing to do but wait for the landlord to get the message. He has a bigger plunger. In the meanwhile woman will go buy another blender to combat phenomenon on the Sunday whence great cooking commences #2: the blender must die. It did. Just after the tall strong boy left and she filled it with chicken stock and nuts. Mole is a great blender killer. That is why though they eat on Thursday great cooking commences Sunday. Last time the oven went out: #3 is always a surprise.

***

In the dead blender: lightly roasted Spanish peanuts, pecans, walnuts, and sesame seeds soaking in chicken stock (of course it's not canned) with garlic, onion, white wine, apple cider, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger. In a pot with warm water, dried red chilis, pasillas and anchos, awaiting deseeding and deveining. For which we need a living kitchen sink.

***

C, I think that was my blender you picked up?

***

. . . . . .

Whose hands again I guess, this time as if wiping whose hands of it. Outside in the yard, a board leaning against a wall. Ivy and dandelions everywhere nearby and the sun is brilliant though the day is cool. This was yesterday when I went back. These, like the handprint on my storm window which is only visible early morning when the sun is precise. That quality: I wipe my hands of it thus.

***

. . . . .

After yesterday's reading still enough afternoon light on the buildings for photos so I went back to the place off Chambers Street I've been taking in a bit at a time and walked around the yard trying to see it. Brick, iron doors, heaps in dark rooms buried in heaps. And whole walls missing and sky coming through. Such places lose their names, or have no names, or if they do have names they belong to the neighborhood kids who go there, I know, having had many places like this among mine ruins. Like this: beyond recognition. What did it do? What was it made for? Who was its maker?

***

Through the camera at a rusted door in the yard, looking, walking closer. Took the camera from my eye to see the light light up the orange-yellow insulation swelling through like an organ where the brick fell off. Glanced towards another door, a doorless doorway, really, and saw a wall inside swathed in red paint, what wall I could see from where I stood.

***

from the Annunciation notebook, May 4, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 7:45 a.m.

We made bricks from red construction paper, peppered them with black crayon dots and outlined their edges before gluing them onto the cardboard hull, our fireplace. I would be the best of brick makers, the most industrious, the most artful. But it's true Dina's bricks were more even than mine and better for building.

***

***

And something else. The names belong to those who don't belong there. Let's go to the old gym, to the old waterpump station, the old swinging bridge. Old as signifying placeholder for no longer and going there a stand in for to where things fall apart. Rage in that.

***

I was terrified in that room. Well, but why? (What did it do? What was it made for? Who was its maker?) The prankish handprint dotting the i. Two fingerprints inside the o like eyes and a line from each, tears or a grin, could be. But both hands and arms dipped to the elbows in red housepaint. The ceiling splattered in red paint. Who left the place as painted as the place, and likely in the dark when people working nearby--around the corner--are home for the day. Who was intent.

***

***

Who wrote in small hands across the walls and the toilet stall doors SHE SHALL ALWAYS REMAIN UNFORGIVEN and inside the stalls beside the toilets HELP ME and HELP ME once in each stall on the right hand side where the light from the first room entry makes it just visible in broad day. I squared my handprint against who's handprint (I dotting the i) and they matched, size and shape. Two rooms, two sinks, two toilets, two doorways, two stalls, two hands, two views between the camera and me. Me and it. The doubling shook me until I recognized a third. SHE not me. Third person, not first. And the obvious thing sank in. Incidentally it happens that.

***

. . . .

What are those doing there? On the porch two geodes I left sitting on the eaves now placed in the square of sun in front of the potted chili plants. I didn't put them there. They look deliberate. Nothing else out of place. Baffling. The only other person around here is Romulus and he didn't do it either. Hand with big ladder?

***

Or else--shudder to think--I did do it and don't know I did it.

***

postcard: Knox College

4 o'clock panel and 8 o'clock reading, Friday May 12, Momotombo Press

Francisco Aragon, founding editor of Momotombo Press, will lead a panel discussion on small press chapbook publication of poetry and fiction writing, at 4 p.m., Friday May 12th, in the Alumni Room, Old Main, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois. The other panelists are Maria Melendez, an associate editor at Momotombo Press, and Steven Cordova, a Momotombo chapbook author.

All three poets will also give a reading that evening, Friday, May 12th at 8 p.m. at Cherry Street restaurant. The events are free and open to the public.

Momotombo Press focuses on the publication of emerging Latino writers and is part of Letras Latinas, a literary organization located at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Aragon is a poet and translator and Director of Letras Latinas. His most recent volume of poetry, Puerta del Sol, was published in 2005 by Bilingual Press.

Melendez, an associate editor at Momotombo Press has published poetry, essays and fiction. Her collection of poems, How Long She'll Last In This World, was published in the spring of 2006 with the University of Arizona Press. She teaches writing and literature at Saint Mary's College in Indiana and coordinates Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing with Verse, a cooperative venture by the Center for Women's InterCultural Leadership at Saint Mary's and the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame.

Cordova, a poet in New York City, has published poems in numerous journals, including Body Positive and Art & Understanding. His collection, Slow Dissolve, is published by Momotombo Press. He also has worked at Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City.

***

. . .

I don't know. Maybe it is finished. What a thing to say: it is finished. I'm not saving worlds here. Not saying that.

***

Maybe the longest weeks are the ones you can't re-member, however committed you've been to re-membering. They are long and lost. Move on.

***

from the Annunciation notebook, May 3, 2003, Ithaca, NY, 7:45 a.m.

And to whom?

***

The gorgeous convenience of Squidoo (wasn't I just asking for squid a few days back?) is also the end of me actually visiting you. Should I choose, I've got a lens-baby that lets me see what's going on at your place without knocking on your door. Well, I haven't really. I haven't made those arrangements yet. But I might. And then what will you do? Do it back?

***

. .

Woke this morning and discovered I'd left the porch door wide open--discovered it because the birds and trains were so noisy out there/in here. I'd leave that door open year round all night if I could. So the house is cold this morning. So what. Why close off the best room in the house?

***

Mary has agreed to house-sit again all summer, so now I must make a decision. --Ohp. Hear that? Tea kettle calling. No, no coffee in the morning. Sweet earl grey with milk. Gallons.

***

from Alan Soldofsky's "The Lyric Self: Artifice and Authenticity in Recent American Poetry," Writer's Chronicle, volume 38 number 6:

It is my contention that the lyric self's emergence pre-dates Lowell and his confessional heirs, making its earliest and most influential appearance in English-language poetry in the Conversation Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge written at the end of the 18th century.

This is a contention? I thought it was a given. A long established given (that really needs undoing). That Coleridge stole it from Rousseau ("I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.")? Who took his cue from Augustine? I mean isn't this how the term "confessional poetry" was coined?

BUT that by the way Charlotte Smith did it before Coleridge in The Emigrants (1793) AND in Elegiac Sonnets (1797)--AND that Coleridge AND Wordsworth both knew and admired her work--AND were in fact young fans--AND I don't see anyone giving her CREDIT for what women had been doing ALL ALONG in 18th century autobiographical writing. IN POETRY.

It was already popular when Coleridge did it. He was just being fashionable, and, as poets do, imitating poets he especially looked up to.

***

on Mary Darby Robinson:

...she would enjoy a most fruitful professional relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who described her as "a woman of undoubted genius" to Southey roughly a year prior to her death (Wu 177). Coleridge's interactions with Robinson should appear quite remarkable to the modern student of Romanticism. He sent her a manuscript copy of his as yet-unpublished Kubla Kahn in 1797; was influenced to write his poem The Snow-Drop after reading a poem of the same name by Robinson; and, perhaps most notoriously, openly borrowed the meter for his poem The Solitude of Binnorie from Robinson's The Haunted Beach (which, in turn, owes much in terms of its gothic aspects to STC's Christabel and Rime of the Ancient Mariner...

***

Bathtub epiphany: it is cold in here.

***

week seven

It's either a mistake to meet with the poetry students and the literature students in the same two weeks as meeting with advisees for pre-enrollment, or it's inevitable. I've blamed myself in the past for poor scheduling, but I see now, even if I spread appointments over a three week period--and this in a ten week term--it's impossible to avoid this crunch and still see them when it's most pressing for them. The poetry students are revising work for final portfolios. The literature students turned in essays at the end of week five (any sooner and they'd have had very little to write about--most wrote about Blake as it is), so are now looking at revision work and topics for the final paper. And pre-enrollment takes place weeks six and seven. Every 20 minute appointment slot I opened on my calendar last week filled, and it's the same today. And I opened every 20 minute slot I had.

Which is to say, if I owe you an email and you hoped to hear from me this weekend, apologies. I kept to myself this weekend. Meeting with students is good work, but it crowds my head with the sound of my own voice--just as email does--and I am tired indeed of the sound of my own voice.

***

Meanwhile I've got a poem going nowhere tapping me on the back. The most bothersome kind of poem, the one going nowhere.

***

I will write to you though. Though if you're a phone sort, pick up the phone.

***

postcard: Knox College

Please join us today, May 1, at 4 o'clock in the Alumni Room of Old Main. Writers' Forum will feature BJ Hollars & Nina Sajeske, each reading from their fiction.

On Thursday, May 4, at 4 o'clock in the Alumni Room, Old Main, essayist and fiction writer Sara Levine will be giving a reading and talk entitled "On Liking Littleness: Essays the Size of Handkerchiefs, Novels the Length of Nosebleeds, Conclusions Detached from Tedious Arguments." Levine will also be announcing this year's Davenport fiction prizes. See you there.

And do please join us on Friday, May 5, at 4 o'clock in the Muelder Room, Seymour Library, for a Caxton Club reading featuring author M. T. Anderson.

***

from the Annunciation notebook, Ithaca, NY, May 1, 2003 7:45 a.m.

A Thursday morning. Predicted: rain, thunderstorms. And just minutes ago I looked out the window to make certain there was no sun to miss. Nope. No sun. By the time I'd blown off my 7:20 appointment with the sun--because there is no sun--the sun came streaming in my window and I had again missed my window of light. Well, not entirely. Just now it creeps up out of reach, over my roof. The clouds take it too; in and out it fades, shines. This is a joy in my day, this appointment with light. The east facing window in my living room is a Dial. All year it measures the light as it creeps past the treeline & the house next door. Over time spent living in the light in these rooms, watching for it, remembering its seasons, I know this house through its light. The light that comes through the east window at 7:20 a.m. in the spring sleeps late in winter, or makes no effort to show. Still, the house I know (and will leave with sadness at the end of this summer)--the rooms and their windows--takes its daily place in the sky just as the sun takes its daily place in the house.

***

Gratitude, always.

***