one word mirada: tiled

santiago's mess
brilliant anarchy
coral reef confreres
the aftertaste of fate
byzantine firebush
calming storms of fury
dawn's mosaic
in Maria's wake

gabriel must be blowin' today

I heard this on KRTU, while driving around town this afternoon:

one word vertigo: tiled

fervor
we left there
as soon as we could
reeling
the pages turned
the windows shattered
eyes stolen
down the ladder we
climbed, seemingly
lost
fertile crescent
never missed.

monk lives (mccoy, too)

con toda caricia...

Roy's smooth funk:

Marsalis Family layin' it:

Flora's still here, still Flora:

And Lhasa, well, good heavens (for Devil Mood, who introduced me to the deva/diva):

one word rio frio: shallow

in the great deeps
you'll find
little beyond
what you can find
right here
in the sun on your
son's lovely back
the rise of your wife's
anthem, as she gathers
wisdom to her breast,
cherishing the rest...

Sunday #173: Where in the World

PEARLS BEFORE

Mississippi’s Pearl River, so named by French explorers in typical disregard of its already given Choctaw Indian name of Nanawaya, is a 487 mile long river that has its beginnings in a lush green portion of east central Mississippi. Sieur de Bienville can perhaps be forgiven his lustrous appellation for this lovely river. It was apparently from her mouth at the Gulf of Mexico that he plucked oysters that bequeathed food for his men and jewels for his beloved’s ears and throat.

The river’s initial course is to the southwest, before turning at Jackson upon a south to southeasterly course that will take it all the way down to Bienville’s oyster bed. Not, however, without first pouring her lurid jade green waters into a 50 square mile tub of grey bath water known as the Ross Barnett Reservoir. She staggers out of her grey sleep through a spillway that magically stains her waters green once again, limps down the eastern edge of a city that has punished her for her presumptive flood waters of years past, finally regaining some vitality as she wanders free of municipal bondage, then boldly intruding for a stretch as state boundary to the Papist insinuations of Louisiana’s St. Tammany Parish.

This commemorative desecration of a bejeweled river honors a governor whose habit it was to stand in the way of all possible healing between the races of his constituent state. Stood, he did, in the way of one James Howard Meredith, a man of both African and Choctaw lineage attempting, in 1963, under the chaperone of several hundred federal troops, to integrate the University of Mississippi, a bastion of latter day confederates with several infantry brigades’ worth of beauty pageant-winning coeds, the maintenance of whose sexual purity was no doubt felt to be endangered by the ravenous presence of a solitary diminutive black scholar. Governor Barnett did not win his battle of the doorjambs at Ole Miss, but his habit of obstruction appeared headed for the ultimate victory of eternal life in the guise of his tepid namesake, ironically inserting itself into the forward progress of a river given its original name by the progenitors of the governor’s old adversary in the sacred halls of undefiled higher education.

Until, however, the summer of 2000, when, with a sense of millennial drama, the gray eminence (reservoir, not governor; no one has yet tracked the possible correlations of decline between that one aging body politic and his memorial body of water) began to recede, not by mere inches, but plunges of feet. Of a mind, it would seem, if mind can be so attributed, to abandon all semblance of political mimicry and return to life a reborn, reincarnated, unreconstructed river of dreams.

Thus were the passions engaged of a vagabond tribe of amateur archaeologists and geologists that counted Evers Jameson, the self-named Lord Spudlee Spoo, and the silently attentive Avery Redding in its numbers. Evers had been there from the beginning, as Nature in league with chastising drought (and in unholy alliance with the ACLU and NAACP, whispered the more deranged of the governor’s old cronies), slowly revealed a wonderland of underwater forests (those clearcut and those entirely unmolested), asphalt roads, entire neighborhoods’ worth of shotgun houses deemed unworthy of relocation by the Corps of Engineers, playgrounds, service stations, ice houses, schools, schoolyards, barns, farmhouses, swimming pools, and a cavernous landfill that the lead amateurs had christened Paradise. In the unlikeliest of locations, Titanic was raising herself. Evers, as scout for the notoriously reclusive Spudlee, had chronicled two thick journals’ worth of observations, statistics, sketches, newspaper clippings, and photographs taken with his mother’s commandeered old Leica. But, he was tired of the hermetic turn his life had taken as minion for Spoo, a sweethearted lad beneath his aristocratically swollen pigeon’s breast: hence, his insistence—an insistence that surprised both himself and his lordship—that Lord Spoo cast monasticism aside and venture forth before all the good stuff was taken. Not surprised by the newly brazen manners of Evers Jameson was young Avery Redding, beneath whose appearance of quiet reproof lurked, as one might guess, first love of a lass for something other than doll or pony.

one word quark: drive

flagrant
this bend curves through
green waves
the mind's own
wave, as if
feynman had
nothing better to
do than invent
the rest of your life
in one quick flurry.

rain prayer for tres leches

Only we'll settle for longer than a minute, 49 seconds. That's for sure...

one word pynchon: gravity

rainbow children all amiss
lost in the trees
the rivers abdundant
the rough gods and their
amber trysts.
look beyond where
you are carried:
look down the dawns
of inventory,
the meek vistas
of the agile myths.

one word seminary: pause

vestal
this moment of vespers
called in the rudiments of
love's time, called
out from the suburbs
of time immemorial
prayer most sublime
desire most crimson
april most rare

from the archives

[“Thus Peter was identified with Janus, god of gateways, and came to be called the Janitor…” — Barbara G. Walker, The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets]

[“She took my house / took my Cadillac, too” — John Lee Hooker, “Stripped Me Naked”]

Mr. Bedrosian at the Temporary Employment Agency

miss thang, i cannot fill out your forms
righteous dame got one hell of an axe to grind
stripped me naked
she gotta whole lotta love to come after me like that
cockamamie stories even trying to take down brother jesse
that cold enough for you, now that is cold
dig me i’m the cowardly lion, i got hell to pay
but you don’t take jesse stuck up on his two by fours
that’s cold, talking ‘bout riffin’ off all the other big smokey joes
where the hell does she come off

she took me down but I still got the keys, oh i got the keys
that skill transferable enough for you, miss thang?
references? – miss righteous blew the whistle on the whole bunch of us
took my cross
took my prance on the water
took my whole damn custodial gig
me the January man i see you comin’ and goin’
took my Cadillac, too

my piety is a salty chair
it’s either this shirt or the other
this ain’t minimum wage, baby
this is dumpster at family dollar
i got more fertile topsoil than the blacklands east of 35
scrape if off, chica, i got plenty more

light industrial or what?
number of words per whose minute?
blue car, yellow rose, the number 529—
forget about it, i got short term memory
mortgaged up to the hilt i’m talking
light fantastic, not clerical, not voc rehab, not
surface design
i walk the aisles of san fernando holding the ass of my pants
up with one hand, now that’s fiber art

weren’t for the viejas hot for sunday mass
i’d clear the whole 92 downtown bus with the stench of me
when they first turned me on to san anto in portland
i checked into the san pedro springs
used to wander the college, rip off the bookstore
old bent paleta man tossed me his leftovers

i’m sure miss righteous got hip, tipped off the heat
bloody pharisees in sweaty black, i got no more time
for denials, spat once, what kind of stick was that he
jammed up my ear? I let the cock crow all he wants
nowadays

i hear she lives in jersey
just once i’d like to throw on a
pair a slacks whose ass ain’t grimed
put on the other shirt
trim the beard, lose the shit under my fingernails
walk up all nice and pentecostal to her door
buddy pablo with the meter turned off
we show miss high and mighty a real good time
none of that trumpy mess, we’re talking
cape may, pastel, Atlantic salmon
some place harborside
bellies all fat, take her down
blow some Jamaican weed, she’s wiccan, she’ll go for that
i’d give her the keys, hand ‘em right over
what do i need with keys
just me and miss righteous
feel that wind blow
transfiguration’s got nothin’ on jersey sun goin’ down, wind up
great blue heron standing in the mist
i didn’t need jesse to prance on the water
i taught him, it’s in the blood
all of us little fish

one word cannery: paws

cypress woods
Atchafalaya basin
your curdled eyes
risen flame
down this neck of the woods
peril flashed
missing was conjured
the rest of us were
abandoned
in the guessing
of the game.

seaside prompt

This on the marquee at Pappadeaux's this morning, as I was driving down the highway: Shrimp Montage. Y'all players, consider that your prompt, while the Sunday girls are waking up.

reef massage

shrimp montage
cinematic calamari
jelly-faced little ottos squeezing
feisty displays
anglerfish catharsis, manta
raybans checking out the babes
actuarial sea-slickers
swimming in profit shares
even hanks could not
resist. williams charts
another blockbuster-
cuttlefish rhapsody, the ins
& outs of craven disguise
Shane was their mister
(Come back, Shane!)
scrambling down the western reefs
massaging the protean myths
digitized oblivion
carrion in the trenchant streets.

Old Man: el otro abuelo

Stick Years

This one I knew.
No: this one I watched,
And watching, disappeared,
Within the shadow of
Another. Summered
In your wake,
Felt the deep print of
Your disregard, the world
Your world &
No other, fashioned within
A private cacophony of
Cattle-driven rampage.
Upon these Teutonic
Zen monks, we
Throw ourselves: I,
Like pasta against a wall,
Seeing
What will stick.
Years till the sculpture reveals
Itself, stripped of
Difference,
Spawn of common dust.

one word mercenary: twine

unbend your mind unwind the times of disavowal the nouns of protection blue in green the climb to the mighty tops, shriveled by argument dallied by crescent dreams gurgling undertow the mind swivels missing the point missing the misery the crust of time the passion that withers vigorously on display capturing the fallen dream

A Confession

As I noted, today's earlier post was inspired in part by reading the opening chapter of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. There was, in fact, another source of inspiration, albeit perhaps an odd one.

This past Friday, I had the great pleasure of listening to Ellen Bass read poetry at Gemini Ink, a literary arts center here in TL. I have known of Ellen for some 20-odd years, as she was the co-author of the seminal The Courage to Heal, the guidebook and Bible for countless thousands of survivors of sexual abuse; a few dozen of those survivors were clients of mine. I'd known that Ellen was also a poet, but I had never read her work. After hearing her Friday, I am reading it now, and I have more of it on order from the biblioteca. There is a simplicity and a straightforwardness (two poetic elements I am not well known for in my own work) that I am drawn to, and yet each poem I have read of hers also offers at least one moment when the words transfigure, and we're taken out of the unfolding narrative into something that transcends. It may be an image, it may simply be a metaphor that races past - nevertheless, these transfigurations feel like blessings every time they surface and hit. So, as I read her poems, I found myself, at least for the moment, wanting to write a poem in a similar way: to tell a story simply, and then let the narrative naturally draw me up and out. With the story of my grandfather pulled into place by Wolfe's book, it was time to give it a go.

Below are two of Ellen's poems from her book Our Stunning Harvest:

Then call it swimming
(for Susan Lysik)

you are concerned. your writings
are not poems - there are no line breaks
sentences wind like coils of a pot

they are not stories - no beginning
middle, end, characters
are not developed
the action is a child
turning
in green chiffon

you apologize: I
don't know what to call it
you want a name

then call it swimming. the water passes over you
the smoothness
the liquid
the smoothness more enveloping than making love
your arm, arching in the sun
in drops, crystals, falling

or call it walking, the air
cold in your nostrils
the ground soft with rotting leaves
the green is too bright

some are mushrooms, some maize
some take long as persimmon to fruit
some leave early
they are the black pearl droppings of deer
some are overgrown pups
they hang on your tit, you cannot
shake them off

call it
coming home, returning
by a different route

call it a sandwich in waxed paper
we will give it to our children

call it an antidote
to what we have been taught

call it rubble, what remains
through pyres, altars, ovens, electricity

call it what comes in place of sleep
what we ask to know

a tribute to redwood pods, they
burst within fire, seeding
young groves


Baptism

Her grandfather wants to baptize her,
to sprinkle her head with water
in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
He is an old man. He
may die.

Her father wants to compromise, to say
Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and
All That Is Divine. It is
his father.

I am the mother.
I know too much of
fathers, sons, and the ghostly things they have done
in the name of the holy.

I want the water on her head
to be rain. I want her watered as our
earth is watered, to live
in the light of the moon:
the crescent, the full, the waning
cycles that pull tides, that pull sea creatures so deep
that sight is only a myth, cycles that pull
bean sprouts through loose soil,
sap up trees, and plush blood from her womb
many moons from now.

I have no need for the supernatural.
Her breath is the miracle. She
is divine.

He wants her blessed in His name.
I want her blessed in her own.

For my grandfather...

(I was reading Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff this morning. He opens through Jane Conrad's eyes; Jane was wife of astronaut Pete Conrad; she was a good friend of my mother's at St. Mary's Hall, here in Tres Leches. The stunning pall of death upon death among the flight testing pilots brought my paternal grandfather to mind, a man for whom Pat Booker Road, the highway into Randolph Air Force Base here in Tres Leches, is named. I labored for many years under a grandmother-induced fiction of why the road was named after him, and then was brought up short some few years ago by the real story. In the intervening years, Heroism took a dive: this seemed more a story of good ole boys and dreaming. After reading of Janey's ordeal and the long reign of the Friend of Widows & Orphans, I came back around.)

Tale Enough

The stories told of you were mythic:
Flight training,
Downed through the trees,
Thrown free,
You managed to save your crew
Of seven.
Two weeks later,
You died of burns sustained
In the heroics.

The official story was more
Prosaic.
No crew,
No freedom,
No saving, just
You & death
The very next day.
Your seventh crash
Was fatal, your
Luck run out: for this,
Your (and mine & my father's) road,
Wide asphalt memorial
Into your old buddy Randolph's
(Or was that mythmaking, too?)
Field.

Bulky, burly
Spencer Tracy looks
In the pictures,
You with the football
& basketball
& boxing teams
You coached, Borgesian
Beasts lined up
For the cameras,
From times of desperation
We no longer fear.
Fat buddy-boy cigar
(Or am I also dreaming?)
In hand, you
Might as well have been
Tammany
Or Barnum in
Your Big Show.

Why the need for
Stories beyond
This? 6
Resurrections not Tale
Enough? And where
The seeds? Borrowing,
I see the divebombing to
Wake your sons,
Hallucinatory
Fog-flying, trucks
In flight
Above you, as you
Navigate the bridge's
Beams.

We all must add,
It seems: some simply
Add better,
More pointedly, more
Enthusiastically, than
The rest.

Where did I
Hallucinate your fear,
The emptiness of that
Cigar chomp,
The knowledge that there
Are unlucky 7s beyond
The 6?

Next time I visit
The white teeth &
The wide meadow,
I'll remember the heroism
Without
The myth.

one word firespike: growing

passel of growth
in the winsome tides
sinners begetting
new growth
new vibe
in the end we
accomplish
next to
nothing, in the derivations
of our peace.

one word discography: angels

nyro's head was tilted
in the gathering suns.
she made her way through
gossamer, she sang
from a heart
blackened by loss, yet
radiant in its disarray.
Desiree was calling
her,
fealty was her bliss.

okay, just follow along here...

Listen for the panther screams (no, not Luciano):

one word entropy: coin

gaggle of busters,
infantry on the move,
piercing the distal,
accelerating the forgotten.
why crawl for the invisible
dream that wavers?
this was the very last
and you were beyond even that.

one word lapsang souchong: dispute

goofball lizards
tree in bloom
nature calls
upon her loom
after you've answered
the call of the wild
tea time soothes -
it's glorious time -
carry it with you
the emerald rhyme

cedric, on your feet and earn your salary...

Can't get enuff Fats.

I've looked long and hard for Fats' "Christopher Columbus." I found a cover by a pretender (not bad on the keys, but the Fats' song mimicry was painful). You'll find Fats heself on Paschal's Playlist in the blogroll (Song #148). Sidney Bechet's "Viper Mad" right after is a revelation (ahem), too.

one word social work: welcoming

victims of vice
leaning into the measuring fields
mislaid files
engaging occupations
round the corner
and round the bend
this was your last call
till you called the pleasure
of your plenty

while we're on the subject...

The Cinnamon Peeler
-Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

sunday scribbling: #172: ThE pLaN

(You know the girl: another November one, come to think of it)

Call Ghosts

Plan your robocop ditties down
the skinny dan, not steely but
still worthy of the night's
castoff diminuendo:
we crashland into
mutual pleasure
dance a round
of this major motion
picture we call
ghosts on the prairie
if you ever wonder where
they went, check your rule
book, your menu,
your Franklin planner
we elude ourselves
when we least expect
the rondo
I would simmer
I would saute
the rest
the clouded dreams
the cash money honeynest
of your rounded haunch
zisz plan enuff for you, darlins?
get off the bus &
drizzle down the feverish
castaways, we be
amoreena's fruit if
we be anything:
fate drives, but fate also
plurals, & if that's
in your Plan, sugars, then
deal it all to me on the
downslow.

The November Girls + 1

RLJ (11.8.54)

That's the way it's gonna be, little darlin'
You'll be ridin' on the horses, yeah
Way up in the sky, little' darlin'
And if you fall, I'll pick you up, pick you up



BR (11.8.49)

Baby you know we can choose, you know we ain't no amoeba

JM (11.7.43)

Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line

But it ain't all about las chicas:

NY (11.12.45)

You see your baby loves to dance...

one word vineland: welcoming

virile
new world coming
orange lederhosen
velvet tangerines
take a handful
smell the inner life
let it whet
all your appetites
all of them bon
all of them merry

one word sutra: palm

this hand:
hold your dreams
pass them along
in the gathering breeze
cherish those
in dustbins
gather them
in the waiting hearts

one word whole foods market: coral

feisty
spirulina:
even the ingrates
will find
their way home.
in this peace,
we are left
worthy
of all that we
miss:
even the very last breath,
the very -

one word dromedary: spray

mercenary liverpool,
spray-painted alleyways:
the alleviation of
times immemorial.
shade the eyes,
liven the limbs;
april is ever looming
in the fields of
passion.

one word shogun: lazy

i can't go there,
you shouldn't,
we needn't even try.
matthew will grouse
as he lingers
in the aisles,
but trust me
this one
brews
too near the beast;
try him at
a later time.

one word creamery: heartbeat

poster child of
vivienne's seed:
the one you passed by,
the one before the orange flame,
the one whose terror
was ribbed in blindness:
that thunk
was plenty.

Sunday Scribbling #171: Indulgence

(A self-indulgence: This morning at the 10:30 service, six members of the Episcopal Church of Reconciliation here in Tres Leches were invited to tell stories of reconciliation in our lives. This was the one I read.)

The Art of Reconciliation

I did not know my father beyond the age of 5, exiled after a messy divorce. It’s foolishness to think that children forget banished parents: they live on in our imaginations, in the looks we give strangers, wondering just maybe. After a brief self-initiated meeting with him again when I was 21, I thought to myself, you’re the father here, you make the call next time. He never did.

You still don’t stop aching for lost fathers, though. At the age of forty-one, I wrote a novel entitled Scarred Angels. It was a scandalous literary potboiler, but it was also, in its way, an imagined life of my father. After I finished the novel, I found that I no longer ached for him: in my way, I had found him, and set him free. And he me.

Art—writing—reconciled me to my father, let him live more fully in my heart. Becoming a father has done the same. What I give to my son Walden are the so many things never given to me, and yet in that beautiful crossroads of Walden and me, the spirit of my father also gives and receives.

Here is a poem I wrote, that my father also inhabits:

[stray door]

How many fathers do you father
at 14 on a Detroit horse track,
lost in the downtown rivers,
the look he throws you across
the ground at play, seventeen winters
or past the time of worry,
a time of sensible wear.

Go to the saint anthony hotel,
walk the gloom of travis park,
invent a snow day in march,
all your hearts melting in
blue noon, orange flame—
playland in feral bloom
calliope seated in her white chapel
her marble knees.

Picture instead grey corridor,
cedar mounting, his eyes stray
door to door, the gloom of west
commerce infecting, dreaming his
dreams for him, beyond the greengrey
hills, beyond all west texas
onto the sands of india’s
gandhi salt, not his taking—

Death by drowning, she says:
he lay in wait, an act of mercy,
stone cold on the floor,
flurry of grease in the air—
no more waiting—
in a field of white teeth,
no songs, but a different chatter,
ankle deep.

one word rodeo: heartbeat

kubla khan,
liz k-ross;
we all been travelin',
no matter the cost.
this way whines,
that way
you overobsess:
(almost inaccessible
language)
you do the rest.

one word xm radio: alert

chamomile tents,
astral projection:
is it any wonder
you quest for the next
rendering of hazy
quizmatics?
why tarry in
the last row when
the seeming is now?

one word joel grey cabaret: alert

standing in the shadows
heartbreak rumbling
diana in her wiggy gloom
spells your doom
shuffles your fate
meets you at the gate for
dinner at 9;
you wonder if
you've been this way before
wonder if michael in
his aviary softshoe
felt the rumble
overcompensation for causality
exercises in nominal bliss
calculating the y-intercept of
sensual inebriation &
the gathering abyss.

one word cabaret: alert

Casper the friendly
tittered:
his fees were friendly, but
his groom was waiting -
grooming freely,
grooming in bliss,
grooming beyond the mighty,
the able,
the kiss.

one word chuck: berry

I must confect:
the blood was real,
the berry lines were
calling & time
was all a-dither,
whether here or there,
whether the sins were calling me
or I them:
which would you choose, if
the answers were in the sharing?

one word reruns: vows

Following Dee, as follow we must:

downy empress,
she will go far:
not in your kia -
well, there you are.
it doesn't help
that jello smacks of
incense &
perfume smacks of
horse:
the rest is in the bin
& for you there's
less to force.

The perils of surfing...

You run across things like this:

Life without earrings is empty!

From Liz Taylor's Twitter account (DameElizabeth).

olson, v

"A big lagoon of a man. I swam. I swam very deep."

one word radio: vows

reedy they were,
we imped in orange and blue:
mindless?
shivering, more like;
if you go down the dog's way,
dogs will find you:
woof!
this would not be the last
time, but you
just might be the first -

olson, iv

“The crack finds you, you do not find it. I did not find this city—it found me. I, for one, was seated upon a rock, beside a mountain lake. Snow was falling. I was newly dead.”

“Hardly new,” he says, glad to find some ground.

She pauses.

“Newly dead. I saw a hand in the snow. Arthur’s hand. Warm, around it the snow was melting. I went into the forest looking for the rest. It was just that: a crack. Here. I stepped through right here.”

They were seated in the alley behind the theater. Wild-limbed wisteria bloomed in an arbor above them. Anarchy of hibiscus, cosmos, avocado, fig, lime. Down the alley, Van, a moon man tending bees.

“The hand is still warm. Five years.”