This Summer

(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