June
01 refuse, reject
04 fling flang flung
05 wanting courage
07 wanting a change
08 healthy ... or hateful ... or both
09 harbor cherry
10 garden interruption
12 amen
June
01 refuse, reject
04 fling flang flung
05 wanting courage
07 wanting a change
08 healthy ... or hateful ... or both
09 harbor cherry
10 garden interruption
12 amen
An experiment with the overly long line -- how to avoid a sense of padding? How do you use prepositional phrases? The whole first stanza is really just trying to warm up. It's completely irrelevant to the rest of the poem. Don't know what to replace it with, however. Maybe it would work better at the end. I have no idea what I'm trying to write in that poem. I'm trying to capture a period of time over the weekend that had a big impact on me. The impact was composed of many small impacts that do not fit together. I was trying to adapt to Bly's concept of "leaping," or fast association. I don't think it exactly worked. Some anger got involved. And -- why not? But the fight is never my first impulse. My constant impulse is to keel over and hide under the bushes. Tonight I felt that so strongly, walking at my betrayed beach. The humidity was thick and I couldn't move through it anyway. An utter lack of purpose. Younger, I would commit some very random change just to generate a change of scene. But I don't have the energy. So I walk through humidity. At the betrayed beach, in the betrayed woods, the dog around the block, twice a day, three times, no chant comes to me, no voice, no hello, no goodbye, no answer, no guidance, just the jittery dog sniffing and peeing, and my slack will allowing my leg muscles to express this chained feeble flight from my perch to the floor, from my floor to the perch, from my perch to the floor. And back. And back. I refuse: to go to the Terrace Club (so far) In futile vigil
June 01
refuse, reject
That poem is a mess. I don't even want to read it again.
my sisters' influences
the homestead
any witless radical flirting
to drink champagne alone
to quit anything
to listen to anybody
to "talk" to anybody
to dream
walks the path alight with looping mourning cloaks
wrestling hachets in the mind
extreme displays of clouds and light ignored.
...the need to prove that a solution, more than sufficient, indeed in excess of the vital problems, can always be expected when one deserts ordinary logical attitudes. I have never ceased to believe that, among all the states through which humans can pass, love is the greatest supplier of solutions of that kind, being at the same time in itself the ideal place for the joining and fusion of these solutions. People despair of love stupidly -- I have despaired of it myself -- they live in servitude to this idea that love is always behind them, never before them: bygone years, lies about forgetting after twenty years. They can bear to admit -- and force themselves to -- that love is not for them, with its procession of clarities, with this look it casts upon the world from all the eyes of diviners. They are limping with fallacious memories, for which they even invent the origin of an immemorial fall, so as not to find themselves too guilty. And yet for each, the promise of each coming hour contains life's whole secret, perhaps about to be revealed one day, possibly in another being.
June 04
fling flang flung
In the bathtub this morning about -- 8 am? -- maybe, a weird mix of scents, jasmine aromatherapy candle, peach suds, a trace of mildew, warm water's trying to lay its hands on the screeching pain in my back -- nasty coffee tastes like well diluted mud and I can't read and drink in the same position so I have to keep moving up and down in a screech of pain -- reading L'amour fou by Breton, which is like wandering around on the scree of his incomprehensibly overstated meditations on images and objects -- until I stumble on this statement like a sapphire, and fling the book out of the tub:
I sabotaged myself with a dream. Why? I woke up from the dream, and I told myself it would come true, but I knew it wouldn't. All the same I let myself think that it would. I knew I was doing it, I could feel myself doing it, I knew it was wrong. I looked at the clouds for strength and I talked to the birds. They seemed very flighty. I talked to a crow and a bluejay, and a grackle looked at me for a long time. A skinny little gray and white mockingbird, it jumped near me and then it turned its back on me. Maybe I sabotaged myself with a dream because I was telling stories about disappearances and grudges and secrets and lies last night. I was laughing as I told the stories because I knew they sounded bizarrely funny. I forgot that those secret voids are in my body. I feel them in my back right now. I feel them in my son's whisper through the phone, in the empty house, in the clinking wind, in the loneliness. I feel them in this constant efflorescence of brain chemicals -- thoughts like a crystal garden -- beautiful floral breaths, collapsing at a touch. I mean, No, I don't feel them. It becomes less scary when I think about writing about it. B said You could write about this. It's always been my biggest challenge to write about nothing because I'm too afraid to do the research. She said she would be the spy. She would interview the speechless birds. The big one with the naked head and red wattles and the small gray-capped one with the broken wings. They might cackle or caw, chirp or twitter, but the Translator would tell me the truth. And then I would know. I have an osteoporosis of the understanding. A cognitoporosis. If I fall, what understanding I have left will shatter and send shards through my bloodstream and they'll pierce my heart and destroy all my fingertips.
June 05
wanting courage
I feel scared. My kids call me looking for reassurance. My younger son is in Gallup. He's completely lost his voice. He gets on the phone whispering and when I hear him whispering I feel panic that something is wrong with him and I don't know what it is and he's so far away and -- I'm here alone with the dog and the stupid VCR. All I can do for reassurance is take care of the pets. It makes me feel better.
Thoughts: I think "Vestinambula" as a concept is over. I think it's more of a jinx than a description at this point. I want to focus more on writing. I've never felt really comfortable with the concept of an online journal. But I love the concept of daily writing practice. I want to take a short break from daily writing online. I need to retreat. Free myself to do the worst writing in the world. That's only possible in a paper notebook. Next Tuesday I'm going away to Portland, Oregon, on a business trip. I'll be gone for a week. Most likely I'll post until then ... after that, I'll be on a break until I get the site set up at a new domain name. If you would like to receive notification of startup under the new name: email me! ~~~~~~~ I walked and walked and walked the dog at Cove Beach -- until his tongue was hanging out. I was finally granted a little reprieve in my perceptions of loneliness. New ideas: I need to go out with at least four men before I make any life choices. Why four? I don't know. The directions, I guess. Seems like a good number. The Divine Matchmaker. A very cool and amusing idea. ~~~~~~~ My younger son completely lost his voice somewhere in Arizona. My older son is staying longer in Idaho. I'm glad. But I had to give him a hard time about the financial implications.
June 07
wanting a change
This website will be moving soon. A new domain name. I'm going to change its nature a little. Maybe. Don't know yet.
My relationship with the beach has been miraculously healed by walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, and more walking. And the subtle sky tonight. My kids are SO COOL. The older one wants to spend more time with the younger one in Idaho -- maybe camping. They call me! They don't call the dad, I'm sure of it. Does this make it worth it? I'm looking forward to getting out of the office next week. The documentation is sort of under control. I don't want to attend the "rally" -- I really don't -- but I'm looking forward to going to Powell's and getting the Hearing Trumpet and maybe le semaine de bonte or whatever that book by Ernst was called. Seems kind of far to go to get a few books ... I don't know what I'm doing with the website. I guess I'll just relax. Somebody wanted the domain name and I couldn't think of a good reason not to give it to them. I really want to be on the Internet. I've gotten myself into so so so many (five thousand) situations where I was constantly generating emotional output and receiving nothing back. I've always felt comfortable with that. It's a sign of health that I've recently been able to experience loneliness as painful. I just don't know what to do now. One -- cut out efforts where I receive no returns? That's how I got into this mess ... I had several bad experiences with the Girl Scouts. 1) My dad took me to the first meeting on the wrong night. 2) On the night we were supposed to present our collections, I didn't get a turn because we ran out of time. I burst into tears of disappointment and anxiety. 3) A girl in our troop was giving a speech in a meeting about how our troop used to be so great, and what happened, and she was crying. I had a hateful evil feeling that she was a damn baby and why didn't she just get over it already. 4) We got to go camping in our leader's backyard. My younger brothers got to go to UTAH -- friggin' UTAH! -- camping. But I got to go camping in the leader's backyard. And I hated that woman.
June 08
healthy ... or hateful ... or both
I feel better. I felt better yesterday and today I still feel better. A lot of influences came together.
what's left when I strip away twelve layers of evil nonsense. Oh, that and turnip heart. Dog legs, tomato eyes, and brain of stewed prunes. I'm sneezing in my sleeves, while disposing of sixteen piles of hazardous waste, Realms of Arthur megaliths loom grimy and grimacing -- but do they bloom into hydrangeas? Have mercy on me! Standing at the crossroads, immobilized and pointless Waiting for the medicine man, the traveling roadshow, the flying circus, Someone who will throw me a sapphire peanut Someone counting beads I can trust.
June 09
harbor cherry*
*This title means nothing -- I just like the way it sounds.
It makes me feel safe.
Again, I appear in a naive, flat, beginner's frame of mind,
I only had a few unreal moments. But am I slipping into unreal now? I planted the tyrannical dahlias. First I had to clear a square yard of extremely healthy wild goldenrod and Queen Anne's Lace. I was dripping with sweat. It tastes very salty. I got all six of them planted, and a decent distance apart. I think they grow big and bushy. The outraged forget-me-nots made demands on me. I said "Hey, shut up, little blue eyes, you have no right." In a private moment, the moonlight yarrow shone its brilliant yellow flashlights into the ultraviolet sage, looking for trouble. "There's nothing you can do about him, believe me, he's like that." Still, she wouldn't switch them off. The santolina hesitated in the dressing room behind the lavender. I coaxed her. "Go ahead, put on your golden spiky wig, you can't avoid the coronation, even though the daisies are late." She'll get to it next week. At this time, the garden was shady and profound. I picked five fragrant strawberries. A deep exhalation rose out of the neighbor's big tree. It sounded like a poem.
June 10
garden interruption
I was real almost all day. Almost all day!
Go on, let it be.
June 12
amen
Life is so damn weird and funky and happenin'.