This Summer

(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