Hot page cool breeze. Birds and juice. Death in the air, creeping. Suicidal Ideation. Nothing but pleasantries, a need to scan the lines. Rustle woods, the deer step, squirrel shuffle. Peculiar disconnectedness of individuals, editors, the edited smile, the censored speech. Pileup of phrases. The litter of prepositions, the punctuation of punctuation. Texture of voices and air conditioning noises. The bands and patterns of tension. Often I ask: what are you talking about? What does it mean, the transfer function?
Tag Archives: cold
Bhikkhu emptiness here in
suburbs son sprawled out
in light at 5 am this is
a ticklish dream wrapped cold
around my torso cold and
drowned around my torso
dog tickling and jiggling
jingling here him sniffing smithing
april 17, 2007
The coldness of this spring to go out with the trash and breathe a moment in the cold air. To know yourself. I can’t really tell what’s going on. I feel an awful lot like a narrator. I have no story, just to let go of that tail.
The long tail, prehensile.
Happy tail, silly tail. Tail of my dreams.
And also—toil. And toile.
Old fashioned fabrics, what has happened to you? In Girl Scouts, I made a book of fabric swatches trying to learn their names like “Dotted Swiss.”
This morning I listened to stories about the golden carp. And stories about stories. And resistance to the fact of stories. And the sources of stories. Beyond. All I can tell you.
You enters shyly. You has been driven away, off the mountain path. You has flown over the cliff in a blaze of herbal fire and lifting smoke. I feel your cloud on my arms. I feel cold leaching down my arms. I feel devils on my arms, in my hands. I feel dust coming up, dust and ash, clouds of smoke from the charnel grounds.
Her laughter—can’t kill herself because her son would then have to kill himself. I listen and might be tempted to be afraid, temptation to be afraid, mentally ill like everyone one. Everyone one.
So here we go—
Braver tonight about the cold in my arms. The scratching sound the pen makes. Smoothness here, no buttons. Smoothness, softness and smoothness.
april 14, 2007
Just three pages, all boiled down to just three pages. My granola stomachache, the dryness in my nose and mouth. Heater ticking next to me, cold air drafting from behind my shoulder. Grayness out the window, brownness out the window, sign saying “wetland preserve” names that small anonymous swampy spot. My relationship with suffering is changing, trying to change. Or is this all in my head anyway?
Remembering…
isolated parks where I have retreated to do some writing. Not happening today. Today, no pleasure park, just chaos in the Starbucks. Busy. Holiday buzz. Bland songs, blunt. Cold feet. Fast talkers.
Sometimes here, sometimes not here.
april 6, 2007
Wool socks don’t help. Cold feet, cold hands, cold pen, cold pages.
Tracing. Battles, bombs, blood. And how we carry on.
In the household—there is nothing happening. The garden cleared of sticks and stalks, but not turned over, soft and warm under a thin layer of rotten hay. Earthworms fat, inert with cold. Occasional grub, dug up, in half moon pose, not something I really want to lean in and observe.
Sense desire—in its place—I don’t like a cold shower, nor do you. I have my coffee. I like my kids, like ducklings, in a row. I dream of tsunami or thunderstorm, the fast typhoon, the accidental candles. I will reread that chapter, Melville, about the lightning strike.
Visualize. Visualizing. Visualizing Kilimanjaro. Visualizing the bright shreds of sun carved off Vivasat. Visualizing nails in the floor. I took a washcloth, wiped the dirt fingerprints off the bedroom door. I arrested qarrtsiluni. Exacerbated. You can tell there is no channel carving here. You can tell the bird is disturbed and fluttering on the nest. Puffed up down against the cold. Chilly nest, someone might have to fly again. Taking care, how dare, not fair. She puzzles, then allows. A dream of behaving differently. Nice things for others, not to get found out.
Everyone is gone.
Everyone is gone and it is after winter in this cold café.
So then last week was our last session—postponed until after Thanksgiving because so many in class were going out of own or otherwise couldn’t make it and it was my first day back at work in Jersey after the long weekend and the previous week’s hiatus because of surgery on my aching wrist I had to work from home. Huh—I was cutting everything pretty close, had some goods to drop off with Blair, not urgent, just his vest, his coat, his soap—well, what if he gets COLD, he’ll need this stuff, my drive to deliver it to him got the best of me and almost hyperventilating after leaving work at 4 pm under gloomy skies I drove with one hand down into Manhattan, 87 South from Westchester over the Third Ave Bridge, onto the FDR, 23rd Street exit just like usual and then I think I’ll turn on 7th Avenue and work my way back to Union Square along 16th Street—well I turned at 5:30 pm onto a street I shouldn’t have turned onto until 7—goddammit, do I really need such pointed reminders that somehow my timing in this life is really OFF?—red lights in my rearview mirror and I get two fucking summons, one for unsafe turn and one for not seeing a sign or something like that and my heart is pounding and I’m trying to hide my broken left arm because God knows the fines for driving with a broken wrist are probably more than Astronomical, but the policeman doesn’t really seem that interested in me anyway and this too hurts my feelings, thinking a different sort of poet would have engaged him, spurred an action, wriggled out of it, into some grace at the last minute, a reprieve, but no I limped away, now afraid to drive, delivered Blair his package, followed on to class and found a place to park in Queens and participated in the small group, just Josh and Lisa (and the cats) and shared some feeble poetry from the past and made it home and paid my fines plus surcharge within 15 days—$180.
Where am I? In Silverado, the foothills. Sloshing around in cold water, panning for cold. Defined by the late afternoon, the decline of light over the side of the mountain.
I am not hungry. I lost my appetite. No dinner last night, just some mozzarella sticks, frozen and reheated at Richie’s. A glass of cold white wine. Sauce: ketchup mixed with hot sauce, tasted good. Richie and Suely slathered hot sauce on knuckles of reheated chicken meat. I watched and held my own.
november 4
I threw out the white gravelly cauliflower soup. I really needed to make tea this morning. I made it—chai teabag and some soymilk. I also had some orange juice with water and four ibuprofen tablets. My hands are ice-cold. I was resting my swollen arm on top of a fleece jacket on top of a flour canister, with a bag of frozen wild blueberries draped over it. I need the elevation and the cold to combat the swelling. It’s painful.
I also threw out three small dead or mostly dead houseplants. No green thumbs here unless they are green from bruising.