arms can be magic, war can be magic you know. You always can have it, but not like you want it (I know).
I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, a gift from an old friend. It’s a novel told like a collection of vignettes featuring a really disturbed/disturbing feral man from backwoods Tennessee. It is truly wretched. It is hard to read alone; I keep the lights blazing, I take frequent breaks.
I am exhausted. I have been for a few weeks now. I need this vacation something turrible.
The Berliner Ensemble Thanks You All
Must…not…buy…half price Marcel Dzama book…must…save…money…ARGH
In the Clear Long After
Spring is cheap, but clean of sky. Long after she used to
meet him on the sly. He didn’t say much, because to
speak you need a voice, need lead. Among the dead there were
such fresh ghosts, they were still breathing. Through their
mouths. Time, time, to adjust to an other. An ether
O so—No—too sweet. Intox-icated with permeability. ’Tis nox-
ious, to eat evanescence. However steadily, however slowly.
They stemmed into heady blows.
They missed
the stain. Of blue berries and argument. They missed
their lips. The yew and the thorns. They missed.
Their flaws.
O, to be stung by an errant bee. O, to sting.
O, to see you again. Covered in spring.
Olena Kalytiak Davis
I’ve been returning and returning and returning to Shattered Sonnets…lately. Which is strange, because so much of it needed to be cut and I felt impatient with the book when I read it, disappointed and exhausted right after And Her Soul Out of Nothing years ago. But there’s something really compelling about the act of birthing a poem, which is a little bit what she enacts in this sprawling, endless book. (Also I hate it when people use the C-word, which she sprinkles liberally through the text.) And also for the duality and sometimes multiplicity of language, and the way the sound of a word will remind her of the sound of another word, and she’ll obey that impulse, to astonishing and delightful results. (Lead or Lead? — dead. Intoxicated- noxious, and on and on.) A poet’s poet? A poem in the act of disrobing? In defense of her overgrown garden?
I am avoiding cleaning the house. Can you tell?
excerpt from “Lying, A Memoir”
You’ve probably heard of him, William James, brother of Henry, the Victorian novelist. Anyway, William was not a novelist but a philosopher who, in my opinion, had some things to say. I love it most when he writes about will. Years later, years and years after the falling school, when I had long moved on from the nuns, and my mother, and my illness itself, I read a book by William James and, like any good book, it did not teach me something new, but drew out the wisdom which was already there, inside me.
William talks about there being two kinds of will. Will A and Will B, I call it. Will A is what we all learn, the hold your head high, stuff it down, swallow your sobs, work hard kind of will. Will B, while it seems a slacker thing, is actually harder to have. It’s a willingness instead of a willfulness, an ability to take life on life’s terms as opposed to putting up a big fight. It’s about being bendable, not brittle, a person who is brave enough to try to ride the waves instead of trying to stop them. Will B is what you need in order to learn to fall. It’s the kind of my will my mother never taught me, and yours probably never taught you either. It’s a secret greater than sex; it’s a spiritual thing. Will B is not passive. It means an active acceptance, a say yes, and you have to have a voice and courage if you want to learn it.
If you know Will B, you know your life.
You know what my mother never learned. That it is only by entering emptiness and ugliness, not by covering it up with feathers and sprays, that you find a balance so true no one can take it away.
Lauren Slater
At my reading yesterday
“This second poem–” (bell for the next class rings) “Uh oh, y’all are going to be late.” (no-problem burblings from the teenaged audience) “Right, so. This next poem is called ‘Come Over Here and Stalk Me to My Face’, and–” (thigh-slapping laughter erupts) “–Wait, why is that–oh. Right! Ha! Ha! Yikes. I KNOW. Okay, and it begins with a quote…”
from “My Search Among the Birds”, Mary Ruefle
Sept 1. Early this morning a cardinal appears out of nowhere, looking like Santa Claus.
(later) Suddenly it occurs to me this just might be the birds’ Christmas–I must do something quick, something special.
(later) Went out and bought six paper bags of french fries, carefully arranging them in a frisbee so their ends were up.
(later) A dove comes, a pale gray soft dove, smaller than the pigeons but larger than the wrens. Doves are lovebirds, how can they come in anything less than a pair? My medium dove must be a heartbroken one.
My French Fries are being eaten by the Medium Heartbroken Dove.
Is there anything sadder than the sight of a medium heartbroken dove stuffed with French fries on Christmas morning?
Sept 2. Is there anything better, more beautiful in all the world, across all the lands, over the Taj Mahal and everything, than two pigeons, ten wrens, a cardinal, and a medium heartbroken dove come to Ohio, to an asphalt roof, to eat potatoes on the day AFTER Christmas?
(later) A piece of available sky.
