This Summer

(Jeanne Heuving writes -- in "a small poem by me, in honor of the bygone SUMMER")

a chain of enchanted day-zes

(Annie Finch writes)

A.

There's such a difference between night and day
when you're in a country house, and alone.
If you leave your windows open, night brings in
jetsam, like the stalking mosquito hawk
lurking the corner where the curtain hangs,
And especially one giant flapping moth,
Sounding as beautiful as a bird,
Who makes me stop. And make the room go dark.

To watch clouds that are forming while still they are flying

To fly in clouds, not today but another one

To see this summer end so hot and dry when it began so cold and wet

To think its reality was 'really' like the black-velvet painting, of a desert scene I saw as a child when standing in the sunshine in Tubac, Arizona

To think that the sunshine was extraordinarily bright and the canvas of the black velvet very, very black

To think I think I was supposed to see something different in the painting

To think that as I stand here now

To not see an end to this summer

To have pain as if one must always have pain

To have a different pain as pain were different

To have that pain be part of the continity of this summer

To have the difference be on the exterior of this summer so not to worry so much about its interior

To see the exterior surface as a relief

To see it as a continuity rather than a difference

To see the next-door neighbor as an old woman on her balcony in a blue-flowered dress

To see the neighbor next door on the balcony but to not to say hello because she is just next door and strangely aged

To see in her face that she was exposed to terror, and that this perhaps made her a suddenly aged woman

To see the lines carving up her face from her glasses rim to her nose

To see the 'rim' about this woman as blue light

To see the Mediterranean blue light in the clouds that are forming

To see in the exterior of the surface of the clouds the plane of the sea

To feel that there is a paper-thin division of space between the land and the sea

To have seen the space of the sea

To have seen the algae swishing and swishing in the sea

To have swished and swished in imitation of the algae and to feel this swish as a bodily reflex

To know that the algae is swishing when one is not there

To watch the algae swish and not in the mind but in the body

To watch it swish at the same time have it be in the mind

To not know the timing of the swishing but to note that this is also voyeurism

To like my own voyeurism but to prefer to see it under water

To know nudity is an option when commodified in a certain shape

To visit the place where the sea boils and the schools of fish swish as if a commodity

To think the fish must get weary of one's voyeurism so as to remove the glass

To see a sea plane of blue floor on the underwater map

To think that this plane extends to Morocco and Algiers and that it is just a floor

To think that this is not a fantastical map, but something 'really' "real"

To look at the map of the floor not as a miracle but as a struggle over time and space

To have a lapse in time for a long time

To have broken my watch and to lose the slip from the repair shop

To not have noted the name of the repair shop, and to not have found that the watch was fixed when the shop was found

To leave the country anyway, regardless of time or money

To think of the summer as a continuity not a difference

To see that the clouds now press up and divide among themselves and that this is their engine

To think that the floor of the sea does not have an engine and does not have an end, and that this is not a cliche

To think that the clouds mark the place where Matisse one recouperated and that these hills are no longer people by people like Matisse

To think there are too many swimming pools in those hills

To think there is a water shortage this summer but that the little Fou must run under the surface

To think that Fou means "crazy" in this foreign language

To think I could not find the Blackberry Trail this summer, which runs along the Fou

To think that Bernard once hiked up the Blackberry Trail with shoes on but no pants

To think I was eating blackberries and a little stunned when I saw him hiking without pants

To think that I was stunned

To think that I could fill my mouth with blackberries

To think that the blackberries this summer are tiny and crisp, not bursting and black, the reason being the heat

To think of other years of blackberries in the overworld when I will not be here

To think that the algae is swishing and swishing

To want to remember that as a bodily reflex

To not not remember the picture but as a feeling of motion as statis

To think that remembering is a statis

I think I a parking place at 2 a.m.

To think I drove faster than a Frenchman from the St. Tropez Peninsula

To think that I annoyed so many truckers because I could not find the lights dimmer

To not be able to see the shape of the cars at 2 a.m.

To have found a parking place, as if a New Yorker

To have forgotten the shape of the parking place but to remember the garden

To remember the shape of the garden as a feeling of motion not stasis

To know there are other gardens and that they do not have a stasis

To hover there, in the water, indefinitely

To hover in clouds that are forming while still they are flying

(Daniela Gioseffi writes -- in a poem/essay for Dennis Brutus)

HOW THE RICHEST CONTINENT BECAME
"A NATION OF TERRIBLE DISEASES"
-- "Africa is a nation of terrible diseases"
George W. Bush, 2000

As Bush arrives, Mandela flies from media lies.
He knows the Trojan Horse is coming to Troy,
--a great gift of billions will be a crippling loan
to be paid back at commerical interest rates to THE WORLD BANK,
and the profit will go to Eli Lilly -- funder of the Bush dy-
nasty.

Dying people are real to Mandela as blood that bleeds
in their broken lungs, weak bodies needing drugs
at high prices set by Eli Lilly.

"Africa," said Bush as he campaigned in 2000," is a nation
full of terrible diseases!" Arrogant frat boy who fried his brain on drugs,
"that boy can't think well," Mandela says to a laughing audience of black men.
He is still proving he's a man to "Dad."
Some think-tank cooperate cronie has told "Bush the Lesser"
it's time to look good to blacks and pay back promises made to Uncle Toms,
Condolezza Rice and Colin Powell.

"Condelezza Rice" is the name of an oil tanker owned by Chevron which
murders Africans
for the oil of Nigeria, and so "Condie," must assuage her guilt. She
wants to star her boss
in a TV play titled "AID to African AIDS,"
--though the puppeteer is Eli Lilly, with the rest of the script
writers, Bechtel, Exxon,
General Electric, Rand, AT & T, General Dynamics, Halliburton, Shell,
Enron, Anderson Lockheed Martin all watching from the wings -- all
holders of the strings
as the puppet's mouth moves in the play, smiles and smirks,
"I leader of all charitable nations will help Africa a nation full of
terrible diseases,"
but as he lands on the colonized CONTINENT rich with black skin,
with his WHITE MAN'S BURDEN of stolen diamonds, oil, gold, slaves
all in his heavy pockets, Mandela flies from media lies. Mandela
tired and sick from years in prison will not be compromised,
photoraphed, shaking hands with the pillager's puppet. Mandela flies
with the words he spoke to oppose the Oil Wars on Iraq still wet on
his tongue. Words that said: The USA bombed Japanese civilians, even
as their army surrendered so that it could say, I am supreme, I am
global empire, watch out! To boss the world the U.S.A. sizzled thousands
of babies, women, grandmothers, grandfathers into stains on sidewalks
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Capitalist Empire lied as it bombed Vietnam, Afghanistan and
Bagdad for a War on Communism turned to a War on Terrorism made with
weapons deals, oil and military profits, fashioned from human
frustration.

The puppeteers of cruel globalization rule the world from outer space
with polluting plutonium and neutron bombs. Corporate cronies are
crowned and groomed to "President" by making all the blacks of
Florida's voting records "Felons" with the stroke of a CouterPoint
computer key. Its puppet dictator destroys its consitution and does
not know a "country" from a pillaged continent, can only talk of
"terrible diseases," not art, culture, music, poetry, craft, textile
designs, diamond mines, intricate harmonies, music and dance, black
humankind!.

The puppet's mouth claims it has come to aid against AIDS but the
American media does not tell that billions of working Americans' tax
dollars will go to Eli Lilly -- campaign contributor of the Bush
junta as it threatens ARgentina with embargo for trying to sell
cheaper
AIDS drugs to Africa. And what of education beyond drugs for those
who are not yet
HIV positive? What of condom distribution projects and clinics?

So that is why as Bush arrives, Mandela flies
into the great blue truth toward the Uniting of Nations
where at last a black man, if disrespected by the U.S.,
is at last Secretary General, as Empire trashes the unity of nations
and offers aid to AIDS as lies, lies, lies,
media lies,
and so Mandela,
Mandela flies, flies, flies,
as Bush-crowned corporate cronies arrives.

(Paul Has a Flashlight in the Metro
in the Blackout of 2003)

Steps into the metro hole
little boy in a foreign basement
I could make an image for
I could make an metaphor
for light

This is dark, the skin of his light hair
the red streaks, his mother's his father's
grid -- who knows who gets it?
warm in the hole
dark in the daylight
faces screened
climaxed
dark in the hole
little boy in a basement
with a flashlight
I could make an image
try
for light

The language holds
a vacuum
No concrete sight

Diet Coke in France
substitutes for Coke light
in this America, dark hole
I could make a metaphor
for an image I used to know

Little angel brought you
I could make a metaphor
for metro, subway is not in their
New York grid, power
dark -- to make a metaphor
needs
light for

inconsistency -- even the word
blinks, implicates
echos, plastic table cloth viewed at a stretch
across a third-world politics of
peoples -- with the lights out, now
a vacuum for power, seconds, fewer than
a metro substitutes for
stop

empty, warm
little boy in a basement
pulled out your
flashlight
dynamite
image for ice

Lots of it here
where hot is
South of France
light
bends its
heated radiance
your
way -- let's say, I could make a metaphor
with
tinker toys
I could make an image
with
sound and sand
dexterity you call funk -- a leftover from
Mr. Greenjeans, Mr. MacGrue, too,
who, in running the zoo, gave me aspirations to
have you, be a guru,
or president, like you, anyone who
can put the black blocks back
into the basement
places on the grid
missing
spaces, I made an image --- but
held the vacuum intact,
what it itself takes
to make a hole
a fact

Dream Vine #2

(Lyn Di'Orio writes)

I took an evening nap with H. and had a sequence of three dreams. In the first one there was a huge black serpent with a glistening ringe body and a fantastically big head. I was fascinated with this creature that towered over me and my mother and then at some point I realized it was coming after me and I ran away from it with my mother. In the second sequence there was the same large black glistening snake whirling around in the air, but in this dream I was with H., not my mother, and don't recall being that fearful or running. In the third sequence I was writing all the details of my dream down so as not to forget, then I woke up.

The first sequence reminded me of when I was a child in Puerto Rico. My mother, the hypochondriac, was always going all the way across the island to see the American doctors at the hospital at Roosevelt Roaads, the biggest naval station on the island (which was closed down last year in the wake of the Vieques agreements). She always had to see the American doctors because, for her, they were the best ones. In point of fact, that's just not true, but that's what she and most other people thought at the time. That naval base was on the westernmost part of the island, really beautiful and wil geography (looking out from hospital you could see the ocean from almost efvery angle). Anyway, we were waiting for the bus inside the base to take us to the hospital, when I turned and saw a centipede, about a foot long with large horned antennae, a bright orange gorgeous animal. I was fascinated and told my mother to turn around and look. She did and jumped ten feet (okay, one foot) into the air -- poisonous, malignant, dangerous animal, get away from it! It was hogging the ground in front of the bus bench, so we had to go wait on the grass while it passed from there, slowly, and grandiosely as if enjoying our fear.

Interpretations:

Paul though the serpent was my book, which I'm anxious about and can't completely control. T. had a much more complex view -- for him, the serpent was temptation, desire, the penis, power, which I'm both attracted to and also replled by. And he felt I associate the first serpent/mother dream with the centipended story not just because of the worms themselves but because the centipended story is about how I was taught by my other to revere the power represented by the American doctors and the military hospital overlooking the ocean. I did internalize her attitude, but also a skeptiicism towards it. And I just realized in writing this to you that the serpend, which ostensibly might have been coming from the ocean is an interesting ambivalent emanation of power then, representing both the Father (American medicine) and the Mother (the ocean which is just the backdrop for the hospital of my childhood).

Henry thinks the serpent is both my book and Power, and that writing the book will give me control over the power that is expressing itself ambivalently in the dream.

Richard's interpretation: "I don't have the time right now to absorb this dream because I am studying for a fucking French test. But I do have a few questions: Why is the snake 'black'? Is there a racial component to the dream, connected to your ambivalence and fragmented knowledge of street and hiip-hop culture which is causing you so much concern? Espeically since respect in Latino scholarship depends on this knowledge ... which is why, perhaps, the dream moves back to the safety and familiarity of PR. It also moves, tellingly, back and forth between H. (hip NYer) and your mother (PR origin), who are, to some extent, figures of this Latino/a-cultural split that sits at the heart of your book and your anxieties about it: of island and mainland ghetto, white and black, high and low culture, and this complex, unstable notion of Allegory that you are trying to trace. Just a few priliminary thoughts. Let me know what you think about this reading of your dream."

(Aliki Barnstone writes)

It is the small creature that moves inside the body,
fills the lungs with cool raw light,
slides down the spine, and undulates in the pelvis.

You must lure it from hiding, though it coaxes
you with a kiss. You kiss my back and it
understands the back of the body is what cannot

be seen, just felt. Still when we love it asks:
"What word is this?" It wants your stories,
wants to tell you mine. All nerves, the creature

knows it bears the wounds but cannot bear them,
shinks into the heart where it can neither stay
nor leave. These are the private chambers where
you will find it waiting for you, its friend.

--- "The Friend of the Body," from Madly In Love

(Cynthia Hogue writes)

On the whole
earth human
history a herd
of sheep needing
to change course racing,
hurtling in apparently this
direction, from the lamb
of St. Agnes to recent
cloning, the concerns
to include loss
of cropland, disastrous
to sublime becoming
one with our interests
and problems. Understand
when I see in
the future I mention
the military in order
to propose building windmills
and a Fort I call Crystal. I utter-

ly ac-

knowledge the present
use of forts
was an interim solution
but let's talk
for the moment about
access not just
to rejuvenate the sense,
almost forgotten,
is not stranger to this phenomenon
of uniting long-alienated
disciplines by touching
on issues of individual
creation and social
conscience. As in a garden the edges
of stones were carved
in a non-ego-based
legacy as if hardy
plants in peace took root.

--- From The Book of Dust
after Agnes Denes, for Dan Mills

To think that she was a she deer all along, who lay in the grass

To think that Bernard's cat lies next to a rolling sprinkler watching water

To think that Bernard's cat loves water

To think that Bernard died and came back

To think that

To think that Bernard died and came back

To think that Bernard died and came back the same week that Katharine Hepburn died and did not come back

To think that she did not

To think that Bernard died and came back

To think this again and again

To eat too many organic chocolate squares the week that Bernard died and came back

To watch the cat watching water that week

To save the newspaper article about Katharine Hepburn but to not read it

To take this article to Bernard in the hospital, who saved it for me

To still not read it

To have organic chocolate squares become the bulk of my diet

To not be able to write

To not be able to write

To think Bernard died and came back

To want to save Bernard

To wonder what his experience was like

To stroke his head and feet

To try to make Bernard come back

To feel imbued with power to make him come back

To feel fatigue with such power

To wonder where the heart center is in the feet

To think that maybe I could make Bernard come back, if I knew where the heart center was in the feet

To search for the heart center in the feet instead of the chest

To feel this is silly but to do it anyway

To learn that no one knows where the heart center is, really, in the feet

To learn this from a massage therapist who told me I would give up writing for love

To feel depressed over that statement

To feel depressed over statements

To eat too many squares of organic chocolate

To not be able to write

To understand that statements state nothing and are themselves depressed statements

To feel that if one loves another enough, one can make another come back

To feel fatigued with the power to make another come back

To wonder what his experience is like, to have died and come back

To feel I could make Bernard come back, as if he was another

To feel guilty about depressed statements that state nothing

To be depressed about the guilt

To write about that, for lack of writing

To know this occurred: that I had the power to bring another back

To feel shrunken such power

To be told too many times that I have responsibility

To feel fatigued, shrunken

To feel I am a void, the week Bernard died and came back

To forget about Katharine Hepburn, except that I did not read the article

To want to go away, but nowhere

To feel oneself rolled up and down and shrunken, no image,

To feel only surfaces of interior

To feel oneself showing void, as if a picture

To feel no crisis in the void or picture

To feel the void gives an image that is nothing

To not be able to write

To feel that myths are nothing but writing, giving no picture

To watch the cat watch water

To have that become a picture

To watch the sky

To watch the cat walk into the garden and roll over the catnip

To watch the cat destroy the catnip

To feel a little sad about that

To feel that the myth of Sisyphus might have given Bernard a heart attack

To know that that is not "really" "reality" but to feel the guilt

To realize that the heart is "really" not writing

To know that what is "really" is perceived through pictures

To make myths about pictures that are graphs of the heart that is not "reality" "really"

To think what "really" is, is a misnomer for an image

To think we think it's "really" "reality" when we see charts and graphs of the heart

To see Bernard's graph of the heart in the hospital's "reality"

To know the heart is a muscle, not unlike the triceps that work the garden

To be disturbed about the fate of the catnip, because I planted it from tiny seeds

To know I planted the seeds to grow into catnip for the pleasure of cats

To watch my cat roll on top of the catnip with pleasure and trepidation

To watch my cat slink away in euphoria and grief

To feel euphoria and grief

To eat my own garden this year like a cannibal

To eat puny stalks of red chard that survived the deer and Sisyphus's great rolling rock

To pick a Tiny Tom tomato and know that may be all this summer

To settle for small returns this summer

To wonder if Sisyphus will pull out of his shell of experience like a rock

To know my experience and that of Sisyphus is different

To feel hurt by that difference and yet interested

To see the she deer lying in the green grass with her spotted baby

To realize I am no different from the newswriter from Texas in the Santa Fe basement a quarter of a century ago who thought I was a fat girl pasting proofs in the newsroom when I was eight months pregnant

To know I was not pregnant with a foal but with Paul

To know that identification is a tricky process but to enjoy it anyway

To know that identification with either animal or human creature is sentimental and unnatural

To know it is natural at the same time and to not feel this as contradiction

To not be interested in ideas about the difference between animal or human creatures

To not be interested in ideas but in something else, neither animal nor creature

To want to spend a night in a tent

To feel clipped of my intent, this summer

(Kate Simpkins writes)

By virtue of hour hands, I move.
Isn't that enough?
May you see what I see, and release such a song from your body:

At the base near the mouth of the ocean,
the delphenium blooms in her airy complaint,
"The sun is too strong," she says.
I answer, "My lover is not strong enough."

And the Iris makes her daily prediction
in the tongue; you want to speak,
"He will leave you, pass from the skin of air
to the muscle of earth, and you will long
for the precipice again."

While you talk about wanting to talk,
a language rolls through me.

-- The Rock Rolls Through Me

(Aliki Barnstone writes)

How humid it is today, the sparrows darting
in and out of tall trees.
Why can't I love you as I love what we made?

The heaviness of hands, the lightness of hands.

I overlook the garden I shared creating.
Oriental lilies, ferns, cosmos and daisies revel in moisture;
hostas spread wide wings over black earth;
vegetables wait for harvest.

The cardinal's whistle sears the sky.

But heat and wetness, so beneficial to plants,
are restraining hands on my head.
Heavy hands, light hands.

Herbs and roses scent the air.

I love you is a spell cast by poems, TV, radio songs,
by summer and its trance of bounty: long days of light
and sleeplessness,

the spreading verdure of the land,
the sky glazing green before unleashing storm,
tornadoes, rivers flooding their banks,

agistated dreams, desire.

The heaviness of hands, the lightness of hands.

Summer in the earth and in the sky acts out its abundance
while I speak out scarcity:
I'll leave you with the hindsight
of the blankness on the other side of plenty,

vast blank fields of snow --

all the possibilities following this
blank page.

---"A Humid Summer Day," from Madly In Love

(The Wife of Sisyphus; or, When Women Are the Enigma Because Men Forgot to Write Them)

"A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwist my breasts"
-- Song of Songs

From the puff and air, she rose in him

That night, following instructions (for once),
she would not leave him
but dragged him to her sunny lair
where, shifty as Sisyphus, who hated him -- Hades, who, like her, demanded all of him, skin, teeth, and hair --
she abounded in him, his bodily
existence, kissed him
lips of thyme, rosemary, lavender spilling out
all over her hills, myrrh-drenched breasts

Her rival friend, Persephone,
had the nerve to have her hair done
that day she reportedly showed anyway
to dance at the neighborhood barbecue
because there was hot meat.
Rich folks spread like overfed cattle
over luxurious hills Matisse would paint
taunting the living who dread
to leave a tired man for dead!
Thanatos thriving, his investment stocks rising out of
Pluto's pit, writhing snakes, made of him such a beloved
drunk with strength and glory
his generous arms full of geraniums and chysthathemums
parachuting from stars
to fall even farther than
cars twisted along the roadside
a little accident
just because they broke a mirror
and drove for seven years
from the village of Pierre Feu all the way to Bormes
down where down was desert blending with kilometers of cicadas and plantain, the loud
wisp that can't
resist
flotation into space

it's the enigma that brings
blood
back
nerves
to your
hot
face

Following instructions (for once),
she refused to kill Sisyphus's slave woman.
She refused to rub his waxy white limbs, preferring bee-balm Coppertone to embalmment.
She refused to pay the priest for the great sung oration.
She even refused to freeze his dismembered head and send it UPS to the pre-paid tank.
She didn't believe in futures
so let his body rot
to love and feed on a high stretcher
on a ridge somewhere along the Great Divide
between Utah and Wyoming
or Nevada, a vista
they called it, the Great Basin, where she bathed him
in bright sand, brought him new slippers of crossed golden leather
to walk the sands, fed his fragile body
berries from the Blackberry Trail, of sand
from her own teeth

She would not leave him
nor let the vultures hem and peck

But she would leave herself

(A Language for Sisyphus )

How canst thou hear
Who knowest not the language of the dead?
-- The Earth speaking to Prometheus
in Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound"


For now we are at a distance
from the Earth we hear
but no one has a language
A language? a mirror -- Sisyphus, our head spins
you open your eyes
in fear of the wisp of this instant
so sensual it steals
blood, your naked collar bone
and chest of hair puckers -- the word is "pink"
I hear it from another
description of your passion
to hold no ambition -- to try to go
outside the place where language's disruption
forces no eruption exploding, no channel of excavation
sense, this pink mirror an afterthought
borrowed from the epistemological grid
you slid into fantasy like grammar
whose skeleton frame washes over
a metaphor that might link
joint by joint by tendon by
wired finger, hand -- such energetic hold
folded over the mold of
the trochees and dactyls of an older
order -- you let go. Arriving smoothly, I am jealous of your ripples
you who make this journey into the
wasteland of partials so dreamy
that this novel screen -- thus, we fly
losing the drama, a second half
the delimma of a memory of dashes
smashes your great spectacle
gone in the flash
that your eyelashes bat
back. "I am still here"

in the silence of Panthea and Ione at the feet of the blistering mountainside
in the soil of the Earth of the raging purple Midi
in the wave of the broken heart beat
in the craftiness of the yellow life raft
we joked about
floating in the wake

For what? -- an unfettered freedom?
to turn red flames into blue stones,
to turn your mainsail over the curve through the Straits of Gibraltar
and skate again across the Mediterranean, where your kin
make surfaces of shadows
wishing to be Plato being Damned
in the joy of the misunderstood
at the city gate

So we wait "among the flowery glades"
the baby hostas spears appear
in the year of the garden so late
this season of scorched delphiniums
and a rain that saturates
You, naked in "thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees"
I watch you cut them down and drag
sticks in dread of dialogue
with the dead

I am in dread of time which is tragedy
however I might be useful -- but such desire is not solace
everlasting

As if my shadow, too, is long and bold, that it will absorb me in its summer stretch and plume

As if there is little difference between light and day, black and white, enhancing, becoming, this new shadow play

As if Lamb's Ears in the garden soil hear special instruments of sound, so that they interpret grief as desire and desire as a folding blossom so urgently upon entering the earth

As if there is little difference between grief and desire and this love

As if the earth of desire could swallow Sisyphus, who so loved the earth's surfaces

As if a myth could make native a narrative for my lover Sisyphus, who enters earth's shadows only to return

As if the Mediterranean of an ancient universe slips new surface under feet, floods blue where there was rock, loose upon shadow, this love over ground, this life, bliss

(Walter Hess writes:)

A sun, mid morning high, my shadow long and sliding runs over ruts.
Over the dirt land, a warm slow amble home.

Against the hiss of sixteen wheelers on the highway
down below, the red bellied warble of a bird's song.

Against a stuttering motorcycle, the lilac odors
from a humming breeze.

Wind waves the long and bowed extensions
of the hemlock branches on the slope above to waltzing.

A slow loping caterpillar bumpted my shadow.
Black striped, it stopped at black.

I watched and let the bug, still loping, go to where it needed to,
but all the hungry birds seemed to be fed.

(Kate Simpkins writes:)

There are no blankets on this 3rd floor
across from Port Authority Station. Plenty of sun.
E's been watching the same woman
faux hitch hike across the bridge for 7 days.
She has new shoes, he said, a new dye job,
a new knap sack, and a good sense of humor,
or so he thinks; I think
you're Jimmy Stewart, I said,
and I'm tired of the commentary.
If she wanted to go anywhere,
she'd take the freakin bus.

His staring bends cool
and pours into the awkward
white between his brows,
a kind of refusal.
Meanwhile the rug we bought
is not Persian. If it were, all the rumors
would have spilled out like cobras.
Black is no longer decadent, right?
Sad, but khaki's the new decadent.

Sail away with me, I think,
into the real. Let's be the Nick Carraways,
settling into the M3.

If This Summer really turns out to be a wet blanket

If this Biblical torrent of 40 days and nights will swell like a prow and rush us screaming to the Atlantic

If mud has no recourse but to run

If the tipped-over beach umbrella stuck in a flower plot will survive if saturated

If Bernard can bike down the streets of Midtown carrying an umbrella just like it with big blue and white flowers on it while riding in the rain seven years ago

If he can discover that beach umbrellas do not protect one from the rain

If Sisyphus can manage to take the day off

If he leaves because his wife needs an hour of thinking time and therefore never comes back

If the cats had had their catnip because the seedlings hadn't washed away

If I had been able to live with their howls in the car on the way to the Catskills

If they really are better off in the dingy apartment in Manhattan

If the deer I thought had gotten so friendly that she lay waiting for us in the yard had really just been giving birth to a foal in the grass

If Sisyphus can drive to the town of Cairo on the Hudson and find a passing instant of sun and come back

If a foal is the young of any equine animal

If that doesn't just include deer

If the foal runs amock in the forest like a silly baby with spots looking for its hidden mother who is sheltered from the rain

If the headlines say Max Factor's Heir Really Does Justify Rape

If summer blogs really have encouraged this downpour

If we will be followed by the Weather Channel when we move to the South of France

If Bernard can shell peas from the Union Square Market in the Catksills

If my husband can import produce from Manhattan to Upstate New York

If reversals are normal in sequence

If the negative of myself and/or my relatives and/or someone distantly affliated with my mother's family can be found in my grandmother's Bible which I have never read and can therefore become a study in reversals

If the void is really fulfilling

If detachment from pleasure is really desireable

If desire is evil and undesireable if one is a Buddhist

If we desire to desire and that's that

If maybe Gregory Peck was really like that

If maybe we report experience as if it were a window and find out instead that it is a sash

If I will stand at the sash in my nightgown this summer

If the negative of the photograph will grow blotchy after my bath

If she wore black or white jewels around her neck

If she was my grandmother or someone else who was pretty

If she failed to record her children's death although three died before her

If longevity runs in the family like mud

If a blochy photograph exists only in negative

If my father is a conservative who thinks I'm a liberal who wonders what we should call ourselves

If the conditional is always an act of possibility or a rhetoric with a face of potential dejection

If smiley faces on stickers ever went out of fashion

If my students make smiley faces even though they are in college

If smiley faces were ever in fashion in New York

If New York ever wore its yellow ribbons

If I wasn't shocked at the yellow ribbons in New York during the first Gulf War

If now we have Gulf War I and Gulf War II and pretty soon we'll call them GWI and GWII and confuse them with the entrances to the George Washington Bridge

If these 40 days and nights haven't made me a little rancorous

If the kiddie pool from the drug store wasn't enough

If we are really considering going to Dick's Sporting Goods at the mall in Kingston to play ball out of the rain

If the rain will have to end

If there's a law about that

If the theme song to Camelot the musical from the 60s has any meaning today

If Richard Burton could really sing

If Robert Goulet were really a rock

If the poetry wars on the internet will be like Gulf Wars I and II, post and avant, tradition versus innovation

If conclusions suck

(For Sisyphus of the Over World)

"To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld."
-- Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus"

How an epigraph ornately carves the ragged edges of a poem
and sears it with pinker sheers that lead to a rim like a ledge
not over it

Thus we ended the day over a rock
Larger and larger it grew
out of the density of soil
shaped like an egg, not an edge to cling to
where a hedge of Monkhood
might have stood
wallowing in the forgotten reproduction of
leaves as respectable poison to forest deer
who will now lie dead in the forest
instead of just having bad belly aches
from eating lavender and catnip and wild strawberries last year
in abundance

All Sisyphus wanted was abundance
Me, in my all head and hair
in the masculine mirror I am
a woman abundant without
sufficient limb for my climbing ambition
I require
the sweat of a digger, the driver of an ox,
the man-shape of a muscular bound with taut rope for
shoulders and chain-saw
teeth attached to a handy swinging ax
sighs off the fallen wood
might ooze from bitter pores -- cries of earth
crusts
to litter the external framework

But Earth only knows her shadowed interiors
I know my tender worms and elegant contours
I do not breed in it
"the dim caves of human thought" -- Bullshit!
I am not mine to choose
when listening to the over-world's speech
in spotted green hues these camouflage leaves

Punished you are, Sisyphus, for daring to breathe
and love in the over-world in this subterranean adventure
in centuries of fallen space Promethus was unbound
for the last century's dream, liberty and freedom, cheering on the next one
which died in
a car accident, in
this one
Now "the absurd man" says yes to everything
restlessness, TV interviews, corporate thugs
the pace of thieves
the love of lifers who only wish
to write sparely about their
spectacular death
as if they could dream it

The movie set displaced
in the surface we forgot to look where
Thanatos gives Sisyphus permission from Pluto
"to return to earth in order to chastise his wife"

I am the wife, my wider pools of circular
removals
engulf the great world bearing stones
offering more tranquil settings jealous for your desire
I see you "facing the curve of the gulf,
the sparking sea,
and the smiles of earth"
your Zodiac boat tipping backwards
you getting wet
it is an awkward Mediterranean tug
swarming with life, meant only for
rugged communication with the paved piles of stones
from the yachts of Cannes
too boastful to hoist sails
too powerful like kings
who used to fight underworld regimes -- who refused
the tepid water --
your view as viewed
from the window above board

* Quotes from Camus and P.B. Shelley are stolen and used out of context and without permission.

To think that the deer we chased from the garden with rocks and sticks every day for weeks has now adopted us and considers himself our pet

To see that the deer is sleeping in the grass near the garden this morning, and that he doesn't bother to move when we fling open the doors when we first get up

To think that we still haven't gone to the Walmart in Kingston for the cheap plastic table, and that it doesn't matter any way because I can't write in the garden in the rain

To think that it continues to rain and rain

To think that the rain-saturated Northeast may simply sweep into the sea while the desert of the Southwest is crackling under the dry burden of all that heat

To see that a reviewer of a poetry book I hold in my hand had nothing to say about the poet's poem except to quote it profusely for the sake of the book jacket, which is to say nothing

To think that we pulled a 200-pound boulder last week out the ground in order to plant Terry's Monkshood

To realize that we did it with only a rope tied to a '94 Honda Civic, in spite of the fact that the boulder was egg-shaped and had no edges

To realize that Bernard almost lost his fingers in the process because he was holding onto the boulder with the rope because it had no edges

To think that I was pulling the rope with the boulder and Bernard, too, as I drove the '94 Honda Civic in the first gear

To remember this happened last week

To realize I forgot all my dreams this week

To not want to rise out of bed this morning because the rain from last night just continues to pour and to feel a little depressed because I imagine myself cheated out of a good part of my summer

To like the sound of the rain on the roof anyway

To remember the sound of the rain on my friend's tin roof in Santa Fe in 1991, in the tiny room with the bunkbeds that belonged to her boys in the house that she made herself out of Santa Fe mud, which took her years and years

To remember that the sound of the rain on her tin roof in her house made out of Santa Fe mud was the sound I heard just before moving to New York City

To remember that when I lived in Santa Fe in '78 we would be in summer rain storms that sounded like the rain was breaking just over our heads

To remember that we were on a mountain in Santa Fe and that it was very different from being in New York City

To remember that Paul was a very small baby in Santa Fe in 1978

To remember this morning as I woke up in Woodstock that I had actually never seen a very small baby until I had one myself

To remember the day after he was born we were walking around
in the Santa Fe Sears store off the Santa Fe Plaza and that people were looking because we had such a tiny baby and that we were buying diapers and because he had just been born

To think that we hadn't thought to buy diapers before he was born

To wish I could live like that now, not thinking about things at all before they actually occurred

To realize that today is Friday the 13th, two days after Paul's birthday, and that even if I am not supertitious it is a bad sign that today is the 13th and a Friday

To be annoyed when my husband shouts from the bedroom that did I know it was Friday the 13th?

To think about my recently renewed interest in the occult, and to wonder if it is because I can't figure out the world in any other language

To think that I am writing poetry because it is a language that lets me not figure the world out at all

To read the front page of today's New York Times and to notice two photographs of equal dimensions, one of yesterday's funerals of Palestinians killed by Israeli reprisals and the other of yesterdays' funderals of Israelis killed by Palestinian suicide bombers

To think that it is silly to measure the dimensions of photographs so precisely as if the circularity of events were somehow rational

To think that any equality now will make no difference

To think that George Bush tried to make peace in the Middle East last week just a little too late

To think that George Bush must have seen his picture on the front page of the New York Times last week holding out his arms like the great peace-maker like Clinton like Carter like Jesus Christ

To read below the photographs of the funerals of murdered Israelis and Palestinians on the front page of the New York Times that Gregory Peck died

To know that I already knew Gregory Peck died yesterday, but to know I was waiting for the New York Times to tell me again this fact this morning

To wonder if it is true, as my husband told me me last night, that Gregory Peck looked up at his wife and smiled and then died

To think about George Orwell saying that dead men never die smiling

To wonder if only a classic Hollywood actor could die in this way

To wonder if Cary Grant smiled at his wife when he died while giving a talk in someplace like Iowa or Indiana

To be sad about Cary Grant's death, even though I didn't give a damn when it occurred in the mid-1980's and my friend with the long blonde hair and white dress told me he had died, as if she thought I would be very sorry

To realize that only now I am very sorry

To wonder why I am

To wonder why we always say, everytime one of the classic Hollywood actors dies, "Katharine Hepburn will be next," and why she has not been yet

To wonder along with my husband last night if Katharine Hepburn did, perhaps, die, but that we were away in France at the time and we didn't know about it

To wonder why I am glad Katharine Hepburn probably isn't dead, although to wonder how long we can keep saying that

To think I should look "Katharine Hepburn" up on an internet search engine, to find out if she is really alive or dead, like I did Doris Day when neither of us could remember if she was alive or dead, and we were listening to all those Doris Day records in January

To wonder why I discovered Doris Day records in January

To wonder if I was just making it up, when I wrote Ron by e-mail, that the first wave of feminism ended with the suffragette movement in the 1920's

To realize that Katharine Hepburn's mother, who was suffragette, had a daughter who was a feminist, but that the second wave of feminism had not started up yet

To not wonder at all why Katharine Hepburn had to die in "Christopher Strong," whether she was a first or second wave feminist

To think that "Christopher Strong" is a deeply depressing movie
about mothers, wives, and death, not really feminism

To wonder if Dorothy Arzner, who made "Christopher Strong," left Hollywood feeling depressed -- or if she just wanted to spend more time with her lover, the dancer

To wonder how Dorothy Arzner got away with making all those movies at all, and working all those years wearing men's suits and ties to the classic Hollywood studio factory

To wonder how I got to Dorothy Arzner

(Paul Is Looking)

1

Paul is looking at Manhattan illuminated a barrel in a dark tunnel
over water
I want to be in his picture too so I
strap on latex gloves and groove to the harmony of
doves uncannily assembled in a dark city park
where the woman in a scarf dumps her week's worth of
breadcrumbs
Predictions are counted upon
as in many days and rainy nights
The Weather Channel personnel warm their
awful coats of mail and shake championship Miracle Grow
hoses weighing down the ash of any fire that might rage or set
in dark skies lit of the West
where I might have wandered
this spring trading camaraderie for
the interior condition

2

She gives me the subjects and missing verbs. And I gay away spend the era walking off
nights of horror movies and horse rides at sunset
Hearing voices from the West
promotes no evil
What if (again) the man with the sloped back stalking me loops inside his
backward truck and dashes a dagger of ice? So what? What if
for us children with their batting eyelashes and skin whistle thin
make young read for
ice as light with watery sludge?

Onward into the peppered landscape While microcosmic mudslides might appear
a foot deep in cavity I hadn't thought to notice
(again) your drawings with wrinkles and brows
Grown perfectly steady
modestly already a child you loop inside me backward
Antiquities astound you pleasure esteems riches bask
truer to your inheritance than any intent to survive
Long and agile skeleton frame
A bob of beard foreshadowing gain

3

Don't laugh. We could be on I-80 the death corridor of the country
Where Laci Peterson (who the hell?) competes for coverage with an earthquake in Algiers children plucked from rubble towers Nebraska to Reno snakes past
its tender dark shape
Someone shook his flashlight
and the whole bridge migrates

I am hoping sensation is not the equivalent of mirrored accidents

Rivers of dusk
I ride you like a plane of sky
I work with the medium
I await further instruction

To record a dream in a journal in a bathtub

To look for the dream later on the page and to see the ink has been erased

To watch About Schmidt on DVD while eating five squares of organic chocolate late at night

To learn about a rhythm of poetry and film by watching About Schmidt on DVD

To be so excited about the rhythm of poetry and film while eating chocolate that I could not sleep at night

To have a mind full of wakefulness about the emptiness of Midwest culture and spaces and the fullness of detail about both

To remember Rapid City, while waking up at dawn with the candle still burning, and to see out the blind that the gardens are not yet submitted to light

To watch the garden shovel planted sideways against the garden, with a longing like addiction like chocolate in the angle of the early morning light

To think about my husband's face resembling Jack Nicholson's in the pillow and wanting to witness it but having his head turned against me

To want to watch Five Easy Pieces again to get the allusion to the scene with the Omaha waitress that was deleted from the final film cut

To disagree with the editor-director about one of the deleted scenes but not this one, and to not remember why I disagreed

To nevertheless feel puffed up in the early morning, like I should have been a film maker

To wish I could fly to Rapid City next weekend to do research for my novel as if I could write it this summer and escape the rain

To disagree with the New York Times writer who says that Lewis Caroll was not a paedophile without reading the article about this

To worry about paedophiles in general while looking at Lewis Carol's photograph of a little girl sleeping like Olympia on a couch in the Times, only with clothes on (one shoulder of her bodice down), which may be the difference between England and France in the 19th century

To worry that people are attacking psychoanalytic thinking as if Freudians are all Freudians as if they are all alike

To think about the two editors at the Times who had to resign

To remember that there were two editors at the Tucson papers who were caught in an explosion and that one died

To remember that the other one had recently just before the explosion refused to give me a job which is why I stayed in school and which is why I went on to get a Ph.D. because I had nothing better to do and to know that now I am living an entirely different life

To read the traumatic life stories of Ph.D.s from the '90s in the Chronicle of Higher Education and to realize that the stories are all about men

To wonder what it would be like to have my stories recorded in the Chronicle of Higher Education

To think that we have to do the laundry and to go to Walmart for a cheap plastic table to use in the garden after it stops raining

To sign up for another Human Rights organization on the web because I can't be in the garden because it is raining

To want to speak in lines of poetry but to be forced to speak in prose

To desire in the infinitive mood as is deflecting a bad mood because it is raining

To desire to defer deflecting

To think about all those people in the laundromat today and in the Walmart in Kingston

To remember a time when I would never set foot in a Walmart in Kingston or a Walmart anywhere for that matter, until one boring day Bernard and I drove to the Kingston mall and played ball in the aisles of the Walmart sports department

To think that just five squares of organic semi-sweet chocolate could make me sick

To know I need a cheap plastic table from Walmart to write on in the garden whenever it stops raining

To think that tomorrow morning there will be clouds and I will not watch the new light through the forest on the garden created by Bernard cutting down half the trees

To yell at a deer who is eating the tree leaves in the forest now that the trees are on the ground

To think I used to like deer before I had a garden, and that I
would lay my Arrow book edition of Bambi next to my father's bedside the night before he would go hunting in Rapid City

To think that my Coral Bells might get over-watered

To think I am watching tropical fish swimming on my screen saver and wishing I were there

To forget every time I dig in the dirt that there will be roots and rocks, rocks and roots, and that digging in the dirt will be agony

To remember that every time only after the fact like a ritual

To let Bernard go to the laundromat alone because five squares of semi-sweet chocolate made me sick

To wonder how I can write poetry if I can't hold a pen

To think about About Schmidt again and the rhythm of film like poetry, and that flattening of space and culture requiring such delicate decisions about pace -- and to wonder how one might do all that while still remaining "inside" the poem or film

To think that one must remain inside and out at the same time, an impossibility

To think that that is the act that I have in common with a couple of poets I know

To imagine that it is not raining

To wish for a kiddie pool from Walmart

To wish the rain would stop, like in the old days

To wish for a poetry full of chaos and the appearance of light as if actual light without the sheer beauty

To wonder why everyone likes the poem with the conventional ending and how I scorn that notion of "beauty" even though I wrote it

To think again about About Schmidt, which has so entirely affected me, and to wonder if I could drive across the highways of Nebraska and South Dakota like in the old days

To drive and to sweat and to wait for what my mother always called "the viaduct" so we could stop and cool off in the highway in the 100 degrees in the shade pooled over the baking asphalt

To see nothing but asphalt and flat fields

To drive onward through the Badlands and to realize they were really ugly but fascinating and to not have a clue as to where the Badlands began and ended

To just stop at a place and call it "the Badlands" sometime in my childhood

To take road trips with my mom

To wish I hadn't become so delicate and could take road trips with a tent

To love every frame of a movie as if it were a moment

To let a movie remind me of detail

To let the detail be the rhythm of the poem like a movie

Questions for Today

Are dreams the professions of poetry, or poems the blanched skins of dreams?

Would Martha Stewart have dressed for the rain and hidden her ragged hem in the blue sedan driven into Manhattan from the Hamptons had she not been indicted for fraud?

Was that really a box of butterscotch pudding in the bottom of my grandmother's Chemex coffee pot in Urbana in the 1960's?

Did my brother really send an e-mail from Las Vegas about calling from Los Angeles on a cell phone?

Would it be so hard to blow a little hot desert wind our way?

Is there something else we might do besides watch Scooby Do
and Smokey and the Bandit in the rain

if, at midnight,
all lights are out and all laughter stops
and the horrendous occasion of weather like shelter
becomes a fog-shroud so brown that we must lean on the velocity of artistic compromise?

Dream Vine #1

I was out shopping with C., C. and another woman who was not my friend but her friend, who remained absent and present in the dream. C. was eight and a half months pregnant. We were shopping but C. went into mild labor. We checked into a hotel room, so C. could lay down and we could call the doctor. We couldn't reach her doctor. So we talked to his colleague. He said: Not to worry. Go back out shopping.

So we did.

While shopping again, C. went again into labor. So we went to another hotel and checked in. C. was on the bed in labor. I tried to call the doctor, but I was so nervous this time my fingers fumbled. We seemed to be in a foreign city and there were lots of numbers to dial. I would get to the 10th number and make a mistake. I would have to start all over again.

I finally said, Don't worry, C. I'll find the doctor. I went outside. I walked downtown. It was a small French industrial city with a winding sea coast , one I do not know of in life, and I was walking along the street when this attractive Frenchman in a yellow BMW convertible picked me up and said, Are you looking for me? I'm the doctor.

So the doctor took me for a spin around the city. I was still worried about C. But I must say I enjoyed driving around the city with seacoast views in the yellow BMW convertible with this handsome Frenchman. I had that "stuck in time" feeling one associates with the time of dreams. The doctor told me: You shouldn't have believed my colleague. You shouldn't have gone back out shopping. Meanwhile, we didn't seem to be making our way back to the hotel where C. was in labor. Although our only intention was to help her.

Bernard's interpretation:

"You are projecting your poetry onto C. The yellow BMW is a yellow egg opening up, the handsome writing of your poetry, the little chick coming out of the egg. That's why you don't want to go back to the hotel and to C. You are sexually attracted to your poetry.

"I will send you my fee."

I am most dissatisfied with this interpretation.

George Bush does not kiss Jacques Chirac on the two cheeks
He will not kiss French and make up

"But that's illegal in Texas" Thus says By association

we find ourselves spinning on the startling Lake of Geneva on whose surreal bored surface sail motivating match sticks a fauvist painting dips below maybe makeup for cosmetic surgery
for too many men for too few hours for too few countries
post-operation photographs wearing
sunny suits and long ties distributing
a language of the male without skin in which muscle bone
flinches sideways and or to the left the way the jaw lifts or separates or descends fingers lace or fold whose thumb holds
whose top or bottom
who's on the bottom
like friends
solidarity violence

Suble gestures like the sheik's
in sunglasses performing round headdresses
someone Jesus Christ
or the man a marrionette on fine French strings
always jerking (we can't stand looking) whose
woman's hand I once saw fleeting by
in a car in a town
on a road in the South of France
a fetish out of Flaubert, really

"How much thought is given a handshake?"

Thus says The wave of the
performance and
the applauding hand

New York is an energy that saps the bones and teeth
So here the bees and dicentra droop to sleep
to the silly hearts of lamb's ears
more like spades than blood
telling the rain where to wood
its tiny balls of invading trees
we spy underground
enemies of the sky
we wish for thrown lavender
but in the garden there are laws.

Bernard's old white Rodier T-shirt gummy in bermuda shorts grinding scraping the remarkable fallow the
yellow of the ancient years the dark of his
Burgundian ancestry
legendarily one of miners not farmers crawling out of night
out of sight of the hole to drink
a simple Auxey-Duresses
in a higher administration
in the river of sensation and platform and tuffs
let the grape leaves
pop wherever a tiny canvas a little red sun shorn of violet ripple
in the course of the dirt
as fine as my husband's muscled jaw
drooping too but now in the wet sweat
of this summer's sameness

A relief not at all unlike the fast blanket of the blue and white
winter