Crossing

Already my hold in this world is weakening
The next is appearing. Doorways
Start to shade themselves in
In blank walls. I find myself in conversation
With people who are not quite living,
Not dead. Crows flap towards me
Veering off suddenly when they realize
I am still alive. (It's only a technicality, but
In this matter crows are punctilious.)
I walk through walls that shouldn't be there
Find myself in kitchens that have not yet
Been built. Women fall in love with me
Under the ludicrous misapprehension
That we live in the same world. I don't know how
To disabuse them.

The flesh is sliding off my bones as though
I had been hours in the stew pot. Clean white
Ulna. Tapered radius. The lovely jigsaw
Puzzle of the wrist. I must be careful
Not to move too suddenly and step out of the meat
Altogether. My bones startle people;
They flash at inconvenient times. Thoughts
Stream from my skull like the banner of cloud
That tugs from the summit of
Mt Hood. Nothing will stay put.

Love burns and scorches. All the bits of
Me that are peeling off, like birch bark,
Catch fire. I am not long for here.
I would like the time for a proper goodbye
But I think it may be too late.

Coming Home

Why was I in tears last night? It wasn't because I think Obama's policies will save the country, or the world. We are dug into a hole so deep that maybe we will never get out: and I made my peace with that a long time ago. We may stand at the end of humanity's little run on this planet: we learned sorcery before we learned wisdom, and we're more likely to destroy ourselves than not. That hasn't changed. Presidents come and go. Some will be better and some will be worse.

No. I was in tears for personal and very American reasons. I learned in the late sixties that I belonged to a treasonous family. President Richard Nixon told me so himself, in so many words. We didn't support his war: therefore we were traitors.

Well. You tell a person he's a traitor, at the age of fourteen, and he believes you. It's not like telling a forty year old that. At forty, a person just recognizes the hyperbole and shrugs. But at fourteen, if your president tells you you're a traitor, it sinks into your heart. You will never feel the same way about your country again.

So ever since, I've wandered in America as a traitor. And all the narratives that got built into my life as an American child -- about freedom, about opportunity, about government of the people, by the people, and for the people -- all turned into bitter parodies. They were all stolen from me. I was American; I couldn't help it; but none of the American stories belonged to me any more.

Last night I got my stories back. It was McCain's concession speech, even more than Obama's speech, or Obama's election, that did it. McCain said -- and I think he believed it, though many in his audience didn't -- that Obama loved his country. He said that the fact that he and Obama disagreed didn't mean that one of them wasn't American. McCain told me, after more than forty years in exile, that I wasn't a traitor any more. I could come home.

It's not that I can believe the stories in the simplistic way I could when I was a child. Nothing can erase, and I wouldn't want anything to erase, my knowledge of Sand Creek and My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Americans have done evil and they will do it again. They don't live up to their stories. (So who does?) Lincoln, the man Obama quoted last night, the man on the penny and the five dollar bill, suspended Habeas Corpus and jailed the opposition press. I know all that, and much more, to my nation's discredit. But no one sensible expects their childhood stories to be literally true, any more than sensible People of the Book believe that God made the world in seven days, or that Noah's flood covered more than a local patch of the Middle East. These stories aren't history. They're stories of the heart. They're stories about who we are. They're stories about what we want to be true. And as of last night, the American stories are stories about me again.

It Rains

Sat this morning, with my massage blanket around my shoulders, hearing the rain rattle and hiss outside. My eyes were unfocused, a little crossed. Every once in a while, apparently of their own accord, they uncrossed and focused, and the room swam into clarity.

Rain. There are few things more comforting to me than the sound of rain. The only time in my life I've lived long without it was the five or six years we spent in New Haven. Even when it rained, in New Haven, it rained wrong. Great big fat drops that actually made you wet. It didn't sound quite right. It was dirty and intrusive. It made people anxious. They'd linger under awnings, peering out at it as if it was nuclear fallout. When I'd just arrived, I was sitting in a cafe with a bunch of other first-year grad students, and it was raining hard outside. Someone suggested we go, and someone else suggested we wait until it stopped raining. I laughed, thinking it was a joke. They looked at me. And I realized that I was truly in a foreign place, where what I'd learned as the rules of nature don't apply. Rain stopped, here. And sure enough, fifteen minutes later, there were only occasional stray drops. Unsettling. Rain as something you could actually avoid, like a pothole in a street. You could just go around it. I never got used to that.

Here the rain sings all winter. The sky weeping gently for all the sin and suffering below. It falleth as the gentle rain of heaven..

Carolee, who inspired me to resume sitting, asked me to tell her about the Pacific Northwest. It rains here, Carolee. It's a quiet gentle green country, and it rains.

If I were King

This is just for fun. I don't know anything about economics or taxation, but, having always had a utopian bent (which I view now with extreme suspicion, but which will out, from time to time) I can't help every once in a while but try to think about what I'd do if I were king. I do wish there was a larger conversation going on in America about just what we want the country to be and how best to get there.

It is not entirely reassuring that, according to economists, our collective well-being depends upon our individual foolishness. Maybe it should be reassuring -- since individual foolishness is never in short supply -- but there's a fundamental madness revealed by the fact that the sudden realization that we are living beyond our means, and our attempt to respond to that rationally by reducing our spending, should imperil the economy. If our economic health depends on an ever-increasing indiscriminate consumer frenzy, you kinda have to wonder whether it's an economy that's worth keeping healthy at all. I was some sort of socialist in my younger days, but always halfheartedly, since I was also ardently anti-centralist and libertarian. I could never quite make the ends of the laces match up, between the two. I'm not a socialist now.

(By the way, calling Obama a socialist is, of course, absurd: taking the highest income tax level from the 36% it's been under George Bush back up to the 39% it was before does not pitch us headlong into a different economic system. On the larger scale it really doesn't count as a change at all.)

Capitalism has, among other systemic flaws, the tendency to suck wealth from the bottom and accumulate it at the top. There's nothing mysterious about this. All other things being equal, the winner of a poker game is the guy who starts with the most money, because he can afford to lose more often and still stay in the game. Add to that basic fact all the advantages of growing up rich -- the good schools, the good medical care, the varied experience: you wind up with people who are going to be a little better at making money, and a lot better at keeping it. So over time the money just keeps trickling up. There aren't many respectable economists, I think, that would dispute this. You don't have to regard rich people as sinister and predatory. It's just the systemic effect, over time, of market capitalism. The so-called "progressive" income tax was introduced in America, in 1913, explicitly to counter this tendency. If that's socialism, then America has been socialist for nearly a hundred years, now.

There are various methods for pushing the wealth back down towards the bottom. The simplest solution, and the one I favor, is just to tax the wealthy and give the money to the poor. If I ran the zoo, I'd slap a really hefty transfer & inheritance tax on absurdly large estates -- say, estates of over five million dollars or so -- and give the money to the poor. A guaranteed national income, or maybe a "negative tax," as Milton Friedman called it. And then, rather than establishing huge elaborate government programs, we could just let the market do the rest. I don't really understand the repugnance to just giving money to poor people. I know, some of them will get drunk with it. Some rich people get drunk too. It's too bad; but no one seems to think that taking away their money is the proper response to it. A lot more poor people, if you gave them that extra money, would buy health insurance for their kids. Some will object that the poor will all stop working and give up trying to better their circumstances, because the government is giving them $5,000 a year, or whatever. This strikes me as just silly. You don't live that comfortably on $5,000 a year. And people are greedy. They want more. A few people are hopeless as workers, that's true; but that's nothing new. It wasn't caused by welfare and and it won't be fixed by capitalism.

I'm not fond of taxing income. We want people to work, don't we? Why penalize them for it? These are the people who are producing the country's wealth. Why do we punish them so heavily, and reward parasites that simply swap around stocks and bonds and other pieces of paper? And why do we just leave inherited wealth sitting there? When I was idly living off my inherited money, I paid maybe a couple hundred dollars in taxes per year, tops: when I began working, I suddenly paid tens of thousands every year. That struck me then, and strikes me now, as absurd. We should tax assets, not incomes. If we did that mostly through inheritance taxes, we could essentially never tax people on anything they themselves earned. I should think people would like that. And my heart does not bleed for the billionaire who is allowed to pass on only five million dollars tax-free to his kids. It just doesn't.

SAT Morning

I knock softly at the door. Light leaks from under it, which concerns me a little. How much has he slept, I wonder? I open the door a little, and pause, as I always do -- I always disliked it when I was a teenager, if people barrelled into my room -- and then go in. He's sleeping in his clothes, as he tends to do these days.

"Time to get up," I say, rubbing his back a little. He wakes readily enough, which is good. He probably did get some sleep.

I go downstairs, scramble some eggs, make some toast for him. I never hang around the house at breakfast, let alone cook it for anyone: this is my silent way of marking the importance of the occasion.

Martha comes down in her nightgown. Goes over the list one more time. Goes over the instructions with Alan. Makes sure he's not carrying a phone that will go off: supposedly your scores are cancelled should you commit such an enormity. Checks to make sure he has everything, twice. Two number 2 pencils? Eraser? Calculator? Photo ID? Alan bears all this with typical patience and good humor, answering, "check!" spiritedly to each inquiry.

Tori appears, sleepy. She's wearing one white sock and one black sock. "I like your socks," I say. "They show originality of thought." I give her a little half-hug -- Tori doesn't do full hugs. "Or absence of it," I add.

Tori smiles faintly and drifts to the window. "I don't believe it's morning yet," she says. "It's too dark."

"Standard time starts tomorrow," I say.

I go out, into a remarkably balmy dawn, to warm up the Honda. Leaves swirl around my feet. Soon they will be a sodden mess. Weather this warm in November means only one thing, in the maritime Northwest: a bruising rain is on its way from the ocean. By tomorrow the remaining leaves will be beaten from the trees by the deluge. But at the moment all is quiet, warm and still.

I leave the Honda running and trot back up the porch stairs to the house. Alan is moving toward the door. Martha's running over reminders and exhortations for the third time. That's her job, in the family: to think of everything that could go wrong. My job is to quietly make sure people are awake and underway on time.

I reflect, not for the first time, on the sexism and unfairness of it. She gets to seem fussy and overanxious, and I get to seem strong and solid: but if she weren't here, I would be the one having to fuss, checking to make sure the pencils were sharpened, making sure he's got something to eat with him, running over the SAT instructions. And if I weren't here she would somehow manage to drag herself and Alan out of bed on time. Thousands of mornings and events together have shaped our responses this morning. The family works, and we are very fond of each other. But I wonder sometimes how much playing our parts costs us.

I drive through the quiet leafy streets. "Did you take the SAT's?" asks Alan. I can't remember. I remember the GRE's. I think maybe I didn't take the SAT's.

"I'm really not sure," I said. "I don't think they were as standard then as they are now." Though I don't know. Maybe it was me that wasn't standard.

"When did the SAT's start?" asks Alan. He has an orderly and historically oriented mind, and likes to have things in their places. He also still, at moments of abstraction, expects me to know everything.

"Golly. No idea," I say. We subside into silence. We're never big talkers, just the two of us. We rely on the females in the family to make conversation go. Sometimes when I drive him to school he'll make an effort to start a conversation, always the sort of question you'd ask a distant acquaintance: "How are you doing, these days?" And I make an effort to answer, in the same vein. If Martha or Tori were in the car we'd all be chattering away.

I pull up to the nearby high school. We're a bit early.

"How long does this go?" I ask.

"I don't know. But I can make it home fine on my own," he says. Two guys, casual, sure of themselves. No fuss.

A few kids are going in; a sprinkling of parents. Martha would no doubt go in with him and make sure everything was happening right, go over the checklist one more time. I just drop him off. He's perfectly capable of dealing with finding the place and making sure he has everything. Though again, I only have that confidence because I know Martha's been on it.

"Break a leg," I say.

"Cheers!" he says, and he's off.

I make myself drive off without watching to make sure he gets in the building okay. Leaves swish under the tires. Tears prickle my eyes.

The Trees

Dave Bonta is hosting this month's Festival of the Trees. It ends with a piece of one of my poems, so I have a personal interest in this one, but the festival has been since its beginning one of my favorite flowerings of the web.

The Gifts of the Eye

I look at the faces on the bus. If I were to sketch them, I would be drawn ineluctably to one of two things: exaggerating what is striking about them, or downplaying it. Do I admit that she has a big chin? Do I, even, delight in it, allow it to take over my representation as in fact it momentarily takes over my perception? And what are the spiritual consequences of the choice?

She looking over my shoulder, would probably want me to de-emphasize the chin. Because there's the danger of losing the person in the chin. To draw the chin big, is to deny the common humanity. There is an element of cruelty, of dehumanization, in grotesquerie; or there can be. She becomes only a vast chin, cleaving space. All other facts about her dwindle. We all live, after all, in terror of being caricatured.

Still. Isn't there also a subtle cruelty and dehumanization in standardizing, in classicizing, my image? Doesn't it carry the same message, in a way? That she cannot both have a big chin, and be a human being? That I can't simultaneously see her chin and the pilgrim soul in her?

The standardizing impulse tends to win out. We see normalized images of people all day, every day. All over the world people are photoshopping images, to make them more normal, to erase the grotesqueries of the human form. With the result that we view even minor deviations with horror. After a day's immersion in the images presented by TV and magazines, we emerge onto a street of bizarre, deformed human beings. Lopsided faces, bulging asses, duck-footed walks, stubby fingers. Hairs like spines poking from warts, from ears, from noses. Pouches under the eyes, under the chins. Scarred, mottled, wrinkled, patchy skin.

It's my job to touch people, to love them in all their physicality. When the clothes come off so do a thousand little deceptions, sartorial photoshoppings. We have people undress for massage, in the Western tradition, not really so much because clothes hamper our work but because what people want is to lay aside their clothed personalities, to be touched as they are instead of as they present themselves all day.

There's something about touch that undoes the dichotomy. Once I am touching someone's chin, its divergence from the classical simply vanishes. My fingers are finding the exact way the facial muscles lie, how the fascia clings or pulls free. I'm at a level of detail and closeness that renders the classic and the grotesque equally irrelevant. I don't use my eyes much, when I'm doing massage, unless I need to be checking for bruises or injuries. I use my hands, and my fingers don't think someone's chin is big. They don't care about that sort of thing, and when I'm thinking with them, rather than with my eyes, I don't care about it either.

And when the clothes are back on and the lights turned back up, it's what my hands know that I pay attention to, still. The image my eyes present seems both artificial and inaccurate. I don't believe in it any more.

Exaggerating and normalizing are the great gifts of the eye. But they can be poisoned gifts, if you rely on them too much. Especially for perceiving human beings. It's too easy to forget, just looking at people, that if you laid your hands on their bare chests they would be warm, rising and falling with the breath, pulsing with the heartbeat. Every single one of them.

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

---

Note: if you were not on the Hawthorne bus last night at 6:15, (stage left, third seat down) the chin under discussion here is not yours.

Note also: if you were there then, I thought your face was marvelous and wanted to draw it.

Aching in his Skin

Through a hole in the cloud, one dim star.

---

The prodigal son comes footsore to the ridgetop,
Stares down at the tents of home. A scrape
Of sandals behind him. He's not ready, this soon,
To speak, but he manages: "I'm home, Dad."

The old man hawks and spits. Looks him over,
And finally says, "what, was you gone?"

---

The sifting, braiding sea.

---

Our supposedly prim forebears at least
Made cars that you could neck in. What is it with
These bucket seats, divided by an elbow-high
Island for the gearshift? Don't people
Make out any more? They might have been designed
By Queen Victoria.

---

Listen to the thump
Of the tree's green heart.
He reaches
Up to suckle the sun;
He reaches
Down to suck the water.
Trembly in the wind,
Aching in his skin,
Wanting,
Wanting.

Not Alone

what humpty dumpty told his therapist before the incident with the wall, from i am maureen:

my feet are changing, and my elongated toes
grasp railings quite agilely. up there,
i see things so clearly. i’ve been thinking
about my blessings. it comes to mind to be grateful
my kids aren’t made of egg shells

And this photo and few simple words about the week's edge, from tasting rhubarb:

All weekend, I hid, curled up, chewing my fingers. Go away. Go away. That frightening, fragile edge. This tender, mysterious edge.

I'm so grateful to this whispery world where people can sometimes tell the truth.

Hole in the Head

The morning sun, having made a lurchy, staggering lift-off from the horizon, just clearing Mt Hood, glares straight into my eyes, blinding me. Tatters of mist catch in the orange leaves; steam rises from the glaciers of the mountain. The world spins slowly, trying to catch my car as it turns the corner. Hah! Just missed.

I understand those wretched people who made holes in their foreheads, hoping to open their third eye, taking Lobsang Rampa for a real guru, when in fact he was a British plumber who knew not a damn thing about it all, but probably had some skill at making holes in things. My head feels like a prison sometimes, thoughts batting against the inside of my cranium like moths caught in a light fixture, increasingly frantic as the heat becomes unbearable. Open the damn thing. Let them out. And let the light in.

It's discouraging, when you see the obduracy of attachment and aversion in people who have meditated strenuously for years. We were happy enough, here in the West, to pick up the Zen notion of instant enlightenment. No mess! No fuss! One snap of the fingers, one ring of the bell, and the extras will hop up off their cushions and start their dance number in the background while the light wells up all around you and it's perfect clarity, perfect love, now and forever. We were less eager to pick up the Buddhist time scale: kalpa after kalpa, a scale to rival science's, making this life a tiny little speck of time. Hundreds of thousands of lives bound to the wheel. Not so fast, bucko.

In the meantime. The warmth of an untidy bed, newspapers scattered about, the Sunday comics. Reading V.S. Pritchett's memoir, A Cab at the Door, on the advice of that marvelous poet, Julia Martin (no blog yet, I'm working on her, but anyway coming soon to a Qarrtsiluni near you!) What an extraordinary gift he has for conveying the way in which parents cast the glamour of their delusions upon their children. Our children, God help them, believe in our bluster far more deeply than we do.

I love the way you rise up suddenly, like an otter, glowing with life, puckish and impertinent. I half expect you to be dripping, and to shake the river water out of your hair. Maybe a kalpa's not so long a time after all.

Table

The light of a row of candles in a tray; a twist of fabric through the curtain rod, leading the eye in a parabola up to the ceiling and down again. I've never known a person so young who knew so much about making a place. I'm often a little wary when I get a young client: so often they won't trouble to make themselves comfortable. Low lights, warm room, empty bladder, phone ringers off, kids and animals settled -- older people will see to all those things. Younger people often won't. I've become a lot more assertive about the ordinary comforts. I don't have magic hands. I'm an ordinary massage therapist, and if you aren't comfortable, you're not going to call me back. But anyway -- no need for assertiveness tonight.

Marvelous tattoos. That's one thing I like about young clients. You never know what art work you're going to find.

The flesh firm and dense. It always takes a while to calibrate. What's hypertonic, in this body? What's the range? The fascia here is all tight, but I'm not sure what that means. I close my eyes and stop thinking about it. Let my hands think instead.

No grief, here. I've had a series of grief-stricken clients, and it's taken a bit of a toll. But there's a lot of happiness here. There's been grief, plenty of it, and recently; but she's flickering now like a trout in a sunny stream. I hope she's happily in love, or happily caught up in her work. It feels like that.

I hear things, when I do massage. Little moans of pleasure or worried intakes of breath. They're not real: that is, they're not real sounds that you could tape. It's some tactile or energetic information that my brain delivers to me by converting it into sounds. A sort of synesthesia, I suppose. When it first started happening I thought they were real sounds, and I'd try to listen more closely, and then they'd go away, of course.

Full of tenderness. I sit at the head of the table and work the masseters, the jaw muscles, with my fingers, and then I lay both thumbs beside the nose and drag down to the jawline. Those of us who feel obliged to smile at people all the time get jammed up there. I always love that particular move: it says this is for you, and you don't have to produce anything for me in return, not even a smile. Especially not a smile.

My hands come to rest, and I breathe, and listen for your breath through my fingertips. "Thank you so much," I say. Since I can't say "I love you, dear" to someone I met two hours ago.

I go off to the bathroom to wash my hands, and to give her time to get off the table and get dressed. Wait till I hear her moving around the room, and come out to pack up. Sheets, face cradle cover, pillowcase, and sweatband into the the laundry bag. I tip the table on its side. The face cradle itself comes into two pieces and fits inside the table. The table folds in half and buckles closed.

I love the paraphernalia of my work. I think you can tell what a person feels about their work by how they feel about its tools and apparatus. I remember being faintly annoyed, when I was a programmer, by the periodic bother of IBM replacing my work computer with a newer, faster, better one. For almost all practical purposes, one machine was as good as another for me, since I wasn't doing performance tuning or testing. But the people who loved programming were delighted with their new machines, petted them, took them for spins, tried this and that, chattered excitedly about how fast they could run a TPCH, speculated about changing the cache parameters. Me? "Seems to work fine," I'd say.

But I'm delighted that way with my table, my linens, my cushions and bolsters. Cleaning the table is never a chore for me, even though I do it before every massage; I delight in opening up the table, wiping it down, looking it over, oiling the lock-bolts. I even love doing the laundry and folding the sheets. I love them the same way I love looking over pens and notebooks and fine papers at the stationers.

The table is old, now. I bought it years ago, back when doing massage was an idle fantasy I knew I'd never pursue, when for years at a time I had the application papers for massage schools tucked away in my top drawer, a guilty secret, tucked under my socks. I'll need to replace it at some point. And I really need to get an adjustable face cradle. I have a certain reluctance for changing anything at all, right now, because I can't believe it's really true, that I really get to do this. I'm afraid if I change anything it will all vanish, that the dream will vanish and I'll wake up to another day stranded in an arid cubicle in the industrial burbs, looking wistfully out at the sky.

Abject

Oh, hell. I've been clumsy and stupid and offensive and hurt people's feelings, and I'm really really sorry. I didn't mean to. I was just running off at the mouth, as I do sometimes. All right, most of the time. Please forgive me, and know that I value you far more than I value any stupid opinions I might hold. (Or might have held, since I seldom think the same thing two hours in a row.)

Taking and Sending

Crescent moon, high above the fog. Streetlights make spines of light that poke through the leaves.

---

A huge young woman, one buttock for each of the two seats she occupied, reading on the bus. She was swaddled in witchy velvet, a hooded cape. Black cloth bags were perched about her person. I was practicing taking and sending, trying to take on that mass, to take on the chafing of those bulky thighs against each other, the humiliation of being very fat in a country that has a hysterical aversion to fat. Knowing that any mistake I make will not be an ordinary person's mistake, the passing result of inattention, but evidence of a fat woman's expected stupidity; knowing that I'm a death's head to women who are desperately afraid of getting fat, knowing that many men won't risk their status by being seen with me. I breathe all that in. Breathe out -- what? That's easy: the certainty of being loved. The daily touch, the physical affirmation of work, family, friends; the easy cuddling. The laying on of hands. Give that all away.

As I feel the witchy cape settle around me, I notice all the shiny dangly things, the earings, the necklaces, gleaming and twinkling. Two buttons draw my gaze, jet disks, like little pools of wet black oil. What can they be? Is that a pouch, a purse, nestled there where her breasts jut over her belly?

The buttons blink. The pouch resolves into a tiny dog, staring intently at me. I slide into his consciousness easily, as you will sometimes, when you're taking and sending. I am made of nothing but devotion, loving this woman with my whole heart, perched on this belly, nestled by this breast, the best, most loving, most wonderful woman, a woman of extraordinary abilities and extraordinary tenderness, loving me beyond desert or imagining. Her fingers gently cradle my ribs. I adore her. I bask in her love.

The polarities reverse, and I'm breathing in the assurance of love I was trying to send. It's not at all uncommon, with taking and sending, to realize, when you allow yourself to slide all the way into your fantasy of other people's suffering, that you're simply, completely, stupidly wrong. I should have such daylong tenderness, such love, such pleasure in the touch of hand or paw.

The Responsibility of Poets

There's a poll up at Read Write Poem, asking "what is your responsibility as a poet?"

I guess I don't understand why you'd even want to talk about it. It seems odd to me, to talk about the responsibility of poets. As so often, nowadays, I feel like I've missed some critical piece of the conversation to date.

Why introduce the notion of responsibility? If you have a responsibility to do something, you do it whether you like it or not. Did any single poet in the history of the world ever write a good poem that she didn't like writing? Do you really want to browbeat poets who want to write about the gleam of black tulips into writing odes to Senator Gordon Smith's voting record? It makes no sense to me. I find it difficult to believe we're talking about anything, frankly. Poets are going to write about whatever they're going to write about, no matter what we say they ought to do.

Lets keep responsibility in the sphere of being a human being, and not staple it to particular avocations. If you care about the poor -- as Jesus, for one, emphatically instructed you to -- it will be in your poetry somewhere. Or -- even better -- the roots of that caring, beyond day to day political squabbling, will be in your poetry.

I understand wanting to refute the people who say poetry is effete, idle self-indulgence. I understand resenting that, and wanting to say: no. This is important. This is the most important thing I can do. And I believe that in fact is true. There is nothing more important to a poet than writing poetry, and that's as it should be. But to me "responsibility" lumbers into this conversation like a bull elephant, drunk on fermented apples, wandering into a glassware shop. When the heart wants to sing, it must sing, and it will sing. What good can it do to say that it has a responsibility to sing?

My motto is H.D.'s , who wrote:

I go to the things I love
With no thought of duty or pity.

I don't think poetry has much influence on day to day politics, which is probably a good thing, because poets tend to be political imbeciles. A poet as wonderful, subtle, beautiful, and perceptive as Ezra Pound could be a sucker for Mussolini's drivel. There's no guarantee that poets will have any political sense, and in fact there's a strong prima facie case for expecting them to have none.

Here's what I think is the sum total of poets' responsibility: 1) to try to see clearly, 2) to love, and 3) to cultivate their gifts & do the best work they can. It's no different from other human beings' responsibility. If your eyes and your heart are open, your poetry will do the right thing. Don't pester it.

Sunset

You are old, Father William.

Bits of poems surface.

Because I am mad about women,
I am mad about the hills,
Said the wild old wicked man,
who travels where God wills

There lives not three good men unhanged in England,
And one of them is fat, and grows old.

What shall I do with this absurdity,
Heart, O troubled heart
This old age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold:
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang

But I don't feel old. I feel in my prime, full of piss and vinegar, spoiling for a fight, hungry for flesh, full of love and discontent. Last night I got off the bus and walked slowly home through a shifting hall of subtle colors, sunset blushing the turning trees into magenta clouds, gold phantoms in their chains, glints of green. White flowers glowed in surprisingly wet, deep, dark corners. I had to stop at the flowers, stupefied, and just watch a while. Like Geoffrey Chaucer lying on the grass to watch the daisies open in a May dawn six hundred years ago. He really did that, you know. One man, one place, one time. No doubt his leggings were stained with grass and wet with dew, but he didn't give a damn, and neither do I, standing like a halfwit, gaping at the flowers, beads of late sunset condensing on my beard. A woman came by, walking a Great Dane so tall that his head came to my ribs. An affable and good-natured creature. She smiled at me, askance, pulling the Dane's head away lest he lick the sundrops off my face.

At the corner, the unruly sage bush, well past its prime, but you can still grasp the remains of the flowers and come away with your hand smelling like a dream of the Mohave. Beyond the massive trees there were lavender pools in the sky, eddies of pink and violet, sprays of silver. And behind it all, behind it all, night gathering, a vast catlike creature huddled on its four legs, crouching low, intent and alive and utterly silent.

Without Rest

I drive carefully in the pre-dawn fog. Her headlights are a little out of true, the left a little higher than the right. They don't quite intersect, half a block ahead. Dear little cross-eyed Honda. I flip through the radio channels. That engaging but vapid new Nickleback song. Then "I got the rockin' pneumonia, and the boogie woogie blues." Fun, but over almost at once, and succeeded by one of those brassy energetic 60's pop bands -- not Chicago, but of that ilk, can it be Weather Report? -- that I've disliked so long that I don't remember why I dislike them. I reflect that I can't even hear them any more, I've only listened to my dislike of them for so long. I wonder what they sound like?

I listen a moment. "God, I hate this," I note, still not sure whether I've heard them, or just forty-odd years of accumulated dislike. Still, I punch the "seek" button.

Ah. George Harrison. "... 'cause it takes so long my Lord. My sweet Lord." That carries me the rest of the way to Tosi's. I sit in the parking lot till the last of the steel guitar fades away.

I'm on the run, I know I am. Doing my best not to think about things. But I can only do that so long.

The bland fog lightens. Ghosts of the doug firs across the street appear. Everything is gentling down into an ordinary day. The cars sweep by, endlessly, people on their way to work. At five they'll all drive back. And tomorrow I'll be sitting here watching them drive to work again.

I drink my coffee with deep appreciation. You know, the quality of the coffee beans doesn't matter a bit. Any bean will do, so long as its not old or moldy. What matters is whether the coffeemakers and pots are quite clean. Yesterday I paid four times this much for an indifferent pot of bitter coffee, in a gleaming silver vessel that I know, in my heart, was cursorily rinsed in the kitchen. You could taste the tang of days of old coffee grime.

I look back over what I've written, noting the snark. I check: yes, I am feeling a little sick. This cold has hung on for weeks, possibly months. It's actually unlikely to be a cold virus, which, as we all know, tends to last for two weeks (or fourteen days, if you take rose hips and echinacea.) I wonder what it is? I'm tired of it.

It's of a piece: one of the things I'm not thinking about.

Now the fog is phosphorescent with dawn: the whole sky is impregnated with silver light. A sense of intelligences pulsing above, light handing off to light. Thousands at his bidding speed, and post o'er land and ocean without rest.

I close my eyes, and the burning lessens. Sit up straight and ease my shoulders, let them hang. The upper traps and the lev scaps eye me suspiciously. They're not about to let go: they know this is a momentary shift of posture, and that I don't really mean it.

Last night, the young nervous collie, jealous of me, wanting my approval, took it out on various imaginary intruders. Barked at the fire. Growled at the couch. Industriously licked my arm as I worked on your upper traps and lev scaps. Physician, heal thyself. I know.

They also serve who only stand and wait. Ah, but that's not "sit and wait." You have to stand. You can't be on the run. And it's silly to run, anyway. God has my address. He has my social security number. He knows how to get hold of me.

Three long breaths, my shoulders hanging, again. This time I mean it. This time they start unwinding, strand by strand. I love you so much, so much. My sweet Lord.

American Sentences

Okay, help me here. All the cool kids are writing these things called American Sentences. If I understand it right, this is a poetic form invented by Allen Ginsberg, and it's a single seventeen-syllable line. And I don't get it.

This is a humiliating confession for me. I pride myself on getting poetry. There are some forms I like less than other forms, but for the most part I feel like I understand what they're getting at. The way that the ballad form goes for repetition and undeniable closure with with every quatrain, say. I may like it or not, I may think it's suitable for some particular poem or not. But at least I get it.

Not so with American sentences. First of all, the line. One line is the same as none. Isn't it? I mean, a line only comes into effect by being divided from other lines. What lines make are pauses, where you draw breath, or lift your eye. A single line isn't a line, it's an absence of lines.

Okay. And now syllables. First of all, the American language is a heavily stressed language. Its rhythms aren't made by patterns of syllables, they're made by patterns of stresses. From day one, no one's really minded if you have a few too many unaccented syllables, or a few too few. Who's counting? Not Americans. Now, if you have a language with syllabic quantity, like Latin or Greek, where syllables are actually long or short -- I mean, long or short in the amount of time it consumes to say them, where a long 'a' is (more or less) twice as long as a short 'a' -- counting syllables makes sense. You can make patterns out of them. And some languages, such as French, are severely handicapped, having neither stress nor quantity, and they have to count syllables to make poetry. What else can they do?

So. In an American Sentence we have seventeen syllables. Why? Why seventeen? Why not eleven, or twenty-one? Most verse forms spin off rhythms or patterns of daily speech, exaggerating tendencies that are already there. A line is more or less what you can say before taking another breath. Iambic pentameter is more or less the rhythm of English speech. Jingly rhymes come naturally to children, and rhyme-schemes spin off of that.

But seventeen syllables? It's artificial. It's arbitrary. It has nothing to do with natural American speech. There's no one who just always pauses on his seventeenth syllable. No one even knows when he or she's come to the seventeenth syllable. The only way you can figure out if you have seventeen syllables is by counting them out on your fingers. You can't figure it out by singing, or chanting, because there's no American song that has a seventeen-syllable line.

So I don't get it. I like some of the American Sentences people write. But not as poems, just as sentences. And I can't see why they'd be any better, or any worse, if they were sixteen or eighteen syllables long. I simply can't see it as a poetic form.

So help me out, here. What does an American Sentence feel like? It must touch some chord for you all, or you wouldn't keep reading and writing them. It must have some source in speech or song that's hidden from me. What is it?

Before Winter

for read write word #1

God's cocked hand
Is full of rain, broken levies, dirty water, and
Cholera: but unaccountably
He misses the beat
And does not throw.

Stubborn incandescence, the anapest
Of the year: warm wind in cool shadow,
The science of sidewalk-splits,
Fingers of frost in the Earth's warm belly.

You turn to me at the flood wall,
Hooded eyes laughing, making
Whispers into a tingle of ouzo
On the sides of my cold tongue.

Mountain Ash

A flash of light from the outlet, when I plug in the laptop: piercing blue at the center, yellow at the edges. I see, suddenly, all the wiring of the city, snaking through all those walls; the substations, the brooding gigantism of Bonneville dam, millions upon millions of lights burning, lights burning just to make a room cheerful, lights left on thoughtlessly. Motors running: kitchen appliances, clocks, stoves. I walk through the house with the lights out, and see tiny eyes glowing in every room, a dozen little red or green indicator lights on various gadgets that aren't even doing anything, but which feel the need to say that they're alive. Microwaves that want to tell me the time. Smoke alarms displaying vigilance. The machine equivalent of blogging.

Your pale face held an unearthly beauty yesterday, a beauty I wanted to reach through to, but am old enough to know can't be touched. Like reflections in a pool: the moment you touch, they vanish. Instead I turn your head and grasp the back of your neck and give the whole thing a soft wringing-out. "Like a cat picking up a kitten," someone said, an image that is inaccurate, but which always recurs. Then, putting a little traction on the skull with a thumb and forefinger in the suboccipitals, the other hand cradling the occiput, I rotate the head, slowly, barely perceptibly, like the wheel of the stars at night. I speculate that you must do yoga, and then realize that you, in your twenties, can probably take this range of motion quite for granted. All the way from the rising of Vega to the setting of Arcturus. I could turn even further, if I liked. Young owl.

Later you talk eagerly, glowing, sitting on the bed. I stand a little awkwardly -- I'm not willing to claim the intimacy of sitting on the bed or on the floor, and there's no other seat to be had -- and I feel again how oddly my age sits on me. But no. Really my age suits me, I think. I have always been this old, and now I've grown into it. The thing out of place is the way I thought of people my age when I was young, or maybe, to be more accurate, how I didn't think of people my age. In a just world you'd ignore me completely, tit for tat, as paper cut-out rather than as a person. Fortunately, fortunately, it's not a just world.

Sun on the mountain ash, its fruit a glowing rust-color, the even-set leaflets rippling in the breeze.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Time to Walk

Dawn just beginning to break. No hint yet of birds. Kiki comes to delicately inquire about breakfast. I'm not the usual person to feed her, but I'm sitting here at Martha's place. Perhaps?

But no. I'm tip-tapping away at a keyboard, as usual. After an expectant pause, there is the sound of crunching behind me. A little dry cat food. Then she vanishes, off to make her early morning rounds, whatever they may be.

No sound of birds yet. Put my coffee back in the microwave. So many habits I'll have to establish, if I'm to eat breakfast at home.

Thoughts crowd me, that never crowd me at Tosi's. I should clean the kitchen. I really should establish a weekly routine, everyone cleaning the kitchen once a day, and make it happen. I should have done it fifteen years ago, for that matter, rather than have vanished from the squalor every day. I need to get those SOAPs off to that insurance company. I ought to get my room set up for writing. I should paint it, too. And speaking of painting, both porches, front and back, really need to be not just painted, but rebuilt. What would that cost, I wonder? A lot of money we don't have. Will the economy improve if we elect Obama, or is it too late? Probably too late, I reflect. Several good years of recession, no matter what. We should never have incurred this debt on the house. Why did I let that happen? I used to make good money.

Well. So that's why I always eat breakfast out, so that I'll have lofty thoughts about Buddhism and literature in the morning, rather than this long depressing mumble about the home front, laced with recrimination. Let Martha do the long depressing mumble.

No. Not content with that any more. The changes I invoked, I have to deal with.

There is a lightening in the sky, just enough to make the silhouette of the neighbor's dogwood visible. I open the door to breathe the free air a second, and to see what the sky looks like out of the direct glare of the kitchen lights. It's quite light out there, really, and the air is as fresh as if it had wandered straight here off the Pacific.

I turn off the kitchen lights. Now I can see the sky, mottled gray-blue and iron; the trees are still just black cut-outs against it. I'm reminded of the tattoo across a client's shoulders. "The trees were dark, but the sky was still blue." Proust. And leaves, just like these. What a marvelous thing to discover, on turning down the sheet. It seemed unprofessional to remark on it. It seems unprofessional to mention it on my blog. But I mean. So wonderful.

Tori comes in. "You can turn on the lights, if you like," I say, but she gets her cereal in dark, without speaking, and goes into the living room, where Ashley has been sitting quietly at her computer, all this time. It's nearly seven, though. I can't expect to have the kitchen to myself forever, not even on Sunday morning. The urge to get out is mounting, becoming irresistable. The air is calling. Three crows fly silently over the dogwood. What do I do, if I'm not going to Tosi's? Walk up & around the reservoir up on Mt Tabor?

Now the first bird, or the first one I can hear. Scrub jay. They don't usual weigh in this early. Are the other birds really silent, still? I open the door again. Someone else is peeping faintly. At the turn of the weather, though, I don't really know what to expect. In summer, when it was this light, the full chorus was going. The birds are disconcerted too, having to change their habits. They want someone to refill their coffee; they want the clink of dishes from the diner kitchen, the smell of bacon. Only the jay is awake enough to complain about it though.

The sky is almost white, now. Time to walk.

Juvenilia IV

These two have been in the oven a long time.

---

Tenure

That old wall-eyed professor, he approves of everyone;
Thinks anyone is worth the time of day.
What can he know? No, find the
Razor-tongued, vitriolic man,

Whose students run in tears from his office,
And try to please him. Be sure not to smile
At anything cute. Don't laugh unless you see
The corners of his mouth begin to move.

Look for the greed in every generosity.
Obtain the dental records of that horse's sires
To the third and fourth generation. It's tricky
You have to look like you don't want his approval

Or he's sure to withhold it. Show how every action
Defeats its avowed end. How the sentimental
Is laced with cruelty. Set yourself ready to sneer
Because you never know

When an opportunity might arise, and then
You might sneer at the same thing
And find yourselves comrades.
The blessing! So suppose you do that,

Your reward will be someday
To run in tears from that office yourself
With cruelties tailored expressly for you:
And armed with those, and the skills you have learned,

One day you may have an office of your own.

---

Some One Time

Rose-white; the track of a thrush,
A dotted line against the clouds:
The softness of your vulva
In my fingers.

Folding the sky into
An origami of moisture;
The sweetness of your wetness,
The curved lines of pubic hairs

Barely felt, like the lines on the back
Of a drawn-on napkin; a braille
Of wanting. You came
Forever.

The hard lozenges under my tongue
Of nipples that have woken
After long slumber. It is painful
And so folded in

With suffering past and to come,
That grief overcomes even delight,
And suddenly I go slack, and bury my head
In your shoulder.

"It's okay," you say,
Using my own words against me.
And you are right. The sky
Is stitched, and unstitched,

Day and night, the clouds fold
And unfold; the labia kiss my fingertips;
If nothing is forever, it is only so that
Some one thing can be in some one time.

Damn Nagarjuna,
And all his tribe:
Your sweet-and-sour taste
Lingers on my lips.

The thrush comes to
A momentary halt: its thin branch
Sways once, black,
Against the white sky.

Juvenilia III

I don't remember why I didn't post this. Possibly because I backslid for a day or two before I fully recovered. It must have been written in July.

Sugar

So I knew I'd been gradually gaining weight back. But not that much, I thought. And I was feeling good, in my body, strong from massage, fit from bicycling. I don't have a great ambition to have the same waist I had when I was seventeen. I may not be svelte, but I'm in much better shape, at fifty, than I was at seventeen. I stand straighter and move easier and it takes a lot longer to tire me out. I take a malicious delight in the fact that a lot of the athletic jocks who made my life a misery in junior high school can barely waddle back and forth between the house and the SUV now; I float past them on my lovely blue and silver Trek in ungenerous exultation.

Then came the last couple weeks: all hell broke loose in a number of ways. Business mysteriously tanked. Was it the weather? High holiday season? All I know is that the phone went silent.

The weather was sultry. Some people have less of an urge to eat in that kind of weather: not me. Any discomfort makes me want to eat. And someone brought home a half-gallon of limeade.

I love limes, and limeade, with the sort of fervor that hobbits have for mushrooms. A tall glass full of ice, refilled with limeade, and refilled again. In no time the half-gallon was gone. I got some more. I haven't tried to reckon just how much sugar I consumed: I don't think I want to know.

It was interesting to watch, since I have a clue about the mechanics of it now. From that point on, I was riding the isulin roller-coaster. For years I've given up putting sugar in my coffee. Now, in some bemusement, I could watch my hands reach for the sugar in the morning. "I don't take sugar in my coffee any more," I would tell them. They would nod agreeably, and tilt a couple tablespoons into the cup.

And suddenly I was hungry all the time. All the time. Hungry even when I was stuffed, when no human being could possibly be hungry. Desperately hungry, the way you'd feel if you'd starved for days. At any idle moment I started thinking of what I would eat next. Nothing was going to stop me from eating. And meanwhile, a totally unexpected emotional bomb had burst beneath me, lofting me completely free of any self-control I might have tried to bring to bear on it.

Yesterday I was finally able to call a halt. I pulled out a measuring tape. 47 inches. Mein lieber Gott! At my most expansive I was still under 49. I must weigh something like 225, then.

Thank God for Atkins. There's only one way I know of to break the power of those blood-sugar swings, and that's to go completely cold turkey on the carbs for a couple days. Doesn't matter what the hell you eat, so long as it's not carbs. No sugar, no corn syrup, no flour, no rice, no potatos. No fruit. Eggs, bacon, butter, hamburger, hot dogs are fine. Just no ketchup, no barbeque sauce, no juice, no flavored-corn-syrup salad dressings: none of those thinly disguised mainline sugar hypodermics. We're not aiming at nutrition, the first couple of days. We're just aiming to stop the blood-sugar levels from swinging wildly.

I quit at noon yesterday. I ate a vast salad drenched in oil (the carbs in vegetables apparently metabolize so slowly they're not a problem) for lunch and some hot dogs for dinner. At breakfast today I find it hard even to remember the desperation of that urge to put sugar in my coffee. Here's my coffee, there's the sugar. "I don't have sugar with my coffee," I say. "All right!" say my hands brightly, demurely pretending they always do whatever I say.

I can't say what a relief it is to be free of that sugar-compulsion. It infects everything. There's a subtle current of desperation running under every other emotion, when it holds sway.

Juvenilia II

I wrote this when McCain first chose Palin. Might as well post it now, since she's in the public eye at the moment. I write about politics sometimes, but almost never post what I write: I don't like the tone I slip into. It's easy, all too easy, to write out of contempt, but not much worth reading usually comes of it.

Insult

I'm trying not to take it as a studied insult, McCain's selection of Palin, but that's what it feels like. It's the nightmare of the last eight years replayed at high speed, and thrown in my face. Americans, it says, are vapid and ignorant. All they want is pretty faces and pretty words. They don't give a damn really about knowledge and hard work and experience and human decency. They're incapable of distinguishing packaging from content.

That's what it says to me. And it only hurts, of course, because I'm afraid that it's true. Perhaps it is, and democracy for America was always a stupid idea. Maybe the mob really is incapable of governing itself.

I felt more than a twinge of this when Obama won his first caucuses. He's won my grudging approval since, by running the smartest, best-organized, best-disciplined presidential campaign that has ever been run by anyone. And of course by having policies that I approve of, or at least don't loathe, and by seeming to be an intelligent and decent man. And above all by his motto for hiring: "no drama queens," he's supposed to have said. I approve down to the bottom of my boots.

But at first it felt much like this: I was just exasperated. This is serious, folks. This is the presidency of the biggest, baddest rogue state of them all that we're talking about, a superpower bristling with nukes, and with an enormous army posted all over the world. This is the economy that's taking down the stability of the global climate. This is not a job for a freshman senator from Illinois. It's not a job for a neophyte governor of Alaska, either.

You want change? Fine. Elect a congress that will enact change. That's where change is supposed to happen. There's only one way a president of the United States will make fundamental changes -- by overthrowing the constitution. Is that what you want? Think, for God's sake, think for a change.

Braid

It's embarrassing just how much gratification figuring out how to reliably reproduce this simple braid pattern gave me. It took at least an hour, and of course it's so simple that once I grasped it I felt that any dunderhead should have been able to figure it out in five minutes. But I also felt the delight of seeing complicated things unfold from simple principles, which is one of my chief pleasures, and the delight of kinship with long-dead Indian and Tibetan and Celtic artists, whoever they were, who first figured these things out. I'm sure they got the same rush of gratification. Once you know how it works, you can make it work anywhere, any time: it's like the pleasure of learning your first arithmetic, and finding that it works everywhere: two plus two is always four, whether it's apples or oranges or noble truths. How cool is that?

---

I'm dutifully reading a biography of William Pitt the Younger, because I don't know anything about him, and that seemed weird, for someone who is as interested in Napoleonic times as I am. I've discovered, though, why it's taken so long for me to learn anything about him: he is the single most boring Important Person who ever lived.

Against "Carrying the Practice"

When I first started going to the Tibetan Buddhist place, KCC, what I mostly went to was a Sunday evening discussion group. We read books by Kalu Rinpoche or Alan Wallace or Pema Chödrön and talked about them. A consistent theme, and one of the reasons I liked the group, was how, as our teacher put it, to "carry the practice" into everyday life. Putting the insights gained through meditation to work. When push came to shove, I felt, this was what mattered. If the practice didn't make me wiser, kinder, calmer, and healthier to be around in my daily life, what good was it? So we talked about how to deal with difficult relatives or unhealthy cravings or exasperating work situations in light of the Dharma. They were good discussions, and I miss them. I couldn't understand why our teacher stopped holding them.

As I've aged in the Dharma, though, I've become more and more skeptical of the usefulness, or even the possibility, of "carrying the practice" as a conscious endeavor. A friend of mine was contemplating suing the people he used to work for, who had treated him abusively (and illegally.) He asked me, did Buddhism have anything to say about how he should proceed? Besides just "concede"?

My answer, basically, was no. It doesn't have anything to say. You can't really run "what would the Buddha do?" scenarios, not very usefully. And to my thinking now, that's not what Buddhism is for. Buddhism is really pretty useless as a guide to daily life. We simply have to do our best, as we did before we met the Dharma, to look out for our own interests and yet to be fair and kind. It's hard and often unsatisfactory. Often there just don't seem to be any good solutions. That's life. Buddhism doesn't change it. Often it doesn't even shed any new light on it.

So what good is it? Why do I still think practice is worthwhile? Why do I still do it?

Buddhist practice changes two things: what we see, and how much space for creative response there is in between seeing it, and our habitual response to it. These are both things that happen before conscious problem-solving even begins. By the time we're contemplating a practical problem, and trying to decide what to do, the parts that Buddhist practice can help us with are mostly already over.

Buddhism, of course, has ethical precepts, just as any religion does, and they're much the same as everyone else's. Ethics is not something that changes a lot. Be kind, follow the reasonable rules of your people, do your share of the work & take only your share of the gain, think how it must be for the other guy. Avoid getting drunk. Try not to lose your temper. Tell the truth. Keep your promises. Give to the poor. That sort of thing. Nothing radical there. A good Buddhist and a good Muslim and a good atheist all look pretty much alike. And all of them find themselves in ethically perplexing situations where the rules aren't much help. You do your best. What else?

In Buddhism we work on familiarizing ourselves with the workings of our own mind. We watch its habitual patterns. We identify what it chooses to pay attention to, and what it prefers to ignore. In meditation, we attempt to stop, for the space of a few minutes, or at most a couple hours, taking our perceptions at face value, and attend instead to the process of perceiving. Instead of contemplating the stupidity of Sarah Palin, we attend to how we seek out only information that makes her look stupid, and avoid information that makes her look thoughtful. We watch ourselves construct her stupidity; we watch how obsessively we return to its construction, how urgently we resist its deconstruction. We begin to understand her stupidity as a property of our own minds, rather than as a property of Palin herself; and we begin to understand how we in fact are violently injuring our own hearts by holding on to our contempt for her.

Do we then vote for the McCain-Palin ticket? Of course not. And there's no reason why a Republican Buddhist should change her mind and vote Obama-Biden. That's not the level of change we're looking for. Buddhists have no more political perspicacity than anyone else, and there's no reason why they should. We shouldn't look for that. What we should look for is a deeper understanding of what our minds are doing.

In particular I distrust a sort of "heroic Buddhism," in which you really try to act as the Buddha would, with no concern whatever for your own well-being, letting everyone else's physical and emotional needs take precedence over your own. Without the Buddha's clarity this is only another variety of attachment, and an invitation to abuse. If Buddhist practice works, then true and effective generosity will grow of its own accord. Buddhist selflessness in practice would not look much like Jewish-mother selflessness. For one thing, the more you understand about the mind the better you understand that, generally, what people regard as the sources of their happiness are actually the sources of their misery, and that "doing what they want" is possibly the least kind thing you could do. A genuine Buddha would be a pain in the butt. The Buddha Shakyamuni's brother-in-law, you'll remember, wanted to kill him, and I bet he wasn't the only one.

In the long run -- yes, this understanding seeps into the practical world. We do become gentler, easier people to be around. We hold our opinions with a slightly less desperate clutch. We see things a little differently. But hard choices and perplexities don't go away. My feeling about practice now, is -- just do it, and leave it on the cushion. In daily life just do your best, as you always have. Don't look to Buddhism to solve your problems and change the externals of your worldly life. That's not what it's for.

Juvenilia

I generally begin the morning, settled in at Tosi's, by opening a wordpad document and naming it with the date. Every so often, after a few dozen of these files has accumulated, I do some housecleaning: open each of the files in turn, give it an intelligible name, and move it to a subfolder named "posted." But some of them haven't been posted, or parts of them haven't been posted. It's always interesting to see what I've censored, and why. I'll be posting a few of the censored posts (suitably cleaned up) over the next few days. Here's the first.

---

I wrote this a couple months ago, when I turned from reading about Cook and other explorers to reading Orhan Pamuk. I have struggled a long time with a prejudice against the Islamic world, which long predates 9/11 and the current idiocies. Somehow Pamuk finally undid that for me, simply with a description of a man coming home to Istanbul in the falling snow.

I put this aside then because of the racism it rises from: and I still have some qualms about posting it. I haven't found the snow that will reveal the Hawaiians' humanity to me, though I know damn well it's there. There's always some people on the periphery who will do to body forth your personal bogey-men (in my case, people who live in eternal blazing sunlight and want nothing but justice). Whether you should allow yourself to post poetry based on it, though, I don't know.

---

Justice

Listen. I know, I know, I know
What they did. Cook brought misery,
Some intended, most not. You could say
He deserved it. You could say
We all deserve it. No doubt we do.

It was the snow
That turned the corner for me. Snow
Falling in Istanbul. Arriving there,
Fresh from the Hawaiian Islands, from

The brutal clubbing of Captain Cook
(Struggling and drowning in two feet of water,
Struck again and again), I realized
That in my mind people who never saw snow
Were not quite human.

If you never pulled off snow crusted boots
With numb hands, well --
What kind of monster would that make you?

But the Turks and the Persians
Of course they had snow. I knew that,
As one knows things that one has not yet met in story,
Idly. But now that I have seen the flakes sifting down
And vanishing in the gloomy Horn, I know
That the Turks were human. They would have
Reasons of the heart, even if they were bad ones,
For drowning Captain Cook.

Just this past week, a friend wrote in praise of a poet
That he sought justice for his people
And my blood ran cold.
Justice, God I hate justice, and I hate peoples
Who require it. To want justice
Is to want to live in the endless sunlight,
On the white sand, endlessly, endlessly
Clubbing a wriggling man in the water.

So I wander the streets of Istanbul
In the falling snow. Give me cruelties
With a beginning and an end. What man
Who knows himself can possibly want justice?
Not me. I want mercy. Have pity
On a worn out sailor far from home. We have done
What we could. Let me raise myself
Onto my knees, just once,
The blood streaming from my face,
And taste the sweet air
Just once.

Wherein You Have Offended

We're also on the cusp of entering the ten days of teshuvah,, wrote Rachel, the ten first days of the month of Tishri during which it's customary to seek forgiveness from anyone one has wronged in order to approach Yom Kippur with a clean slate. If I have offended in the year now ending, please forgive me? (Seriously, if anyone has bones to pick with me, please reach out and let me know so that I can do whatever I am able to make amends.)

You have offended against my vanity,
By loving me despite my faults.

You have offended against my suffering,
By understanding me.

You have offended against my prejudice,
By loving my enemies and your own.

You have offended against my tears,
By drying them.

You have offended against my glibness,
By taking complicated things as they are.

You have offended against my loneliness,
By touching me when I was most outcast.

You have offended against my darkness,
Like a broken hydrant, shedding light;

You have so offended, Rachel, that I doubt
You can ever make amends.

Shadows of Clouds

4:17 am. I fell asleep early, at 10:30, and woke at 1:00. Lay in bed thinking for a couple hours, and finally got up. Now, do I try to nap for a couple hours before driving Tori out to the college to meet up with her car-pool? (I never did quite grasp what the event is. It involves going to Hillsboro, though.)

Maybe I do. I'm very tired now. Tired enough even to sleep a bit, maybe.

Such a strange life. Nothing seems quite real to me. Nothing but the the touch. I'm only really alive when I'm touching somebody. The rest of it is a long slow cinematic pan, a sliding picture-show. Words leave people's mouths and float to my ears. I hear them or I don't: I make my best guess as to what they might mean, either way. Who knows? The speaker might not know what he means either. We're all hard at work producing meanings for each other's consumption, but we seldom achieve much but echoes of what other people meant before.

The trees of the park walk deliberately around me. Kisses are real. You are real. But future and past, wobbling through our talk? I can barely even track them in the conventional sense, let alone believe in them.

The patterned clouds push the trees down to the horizon; their shadows creep over the root-mounds. Great rushes of tenderness, of desire. I'm afraid for you, afraid for all of us.

These fragile bodies. All we have.

Machik's Heart



For Jenny

Machik Labdrön appeared in my Ngöndro visualizations of her own accord, early on, dazzling white, and always dancing. She borrowed her forms from Chenrezig and Sukkasiddhi, I suppose: like most enlightened beings she shifts forms casually. I'm partial to her because she paid her dues as a human being, having married and raised children to adulthood before achieving enlightenment. (I found this image of Machik on the web, by the way, unattributed, which may mean that someone somewhere holds a copyright to it. If so, let me know! I don't want to be thieving.)

A flush along the jawline;
a little catch in the breath.

I listen for all that's not said.
I am so many people in so short a time:
the lover who left, the boyfriend in highschool;
teacher, false confidante, mother,
the little cat that came once and
never came again.

It is not this business of
becoming other people that is risky
It is trying to remain myself.
Let go, let be, remember only
the infinite tenderness of the Buddha,
Milarepa's quizzical smile, and Machik,
dancing, white,
dancing. I hold her heart,

beating, in my hands, not just hers,
but my own, and Machik's, and
the cat's, all one heart, just this one
fleeting evening.

Later I stand in the washroom,
unable quite to catch my breath,
having traveled through an alien,
intimate past, knowing far more
than anyone ever meant for me to know.

Whew

I lived through it! And so many lovely people came to see me through -- I was so grateful to them.

Thanks, thanks everyone.

Small as Ocean

for Christine

I suddenly saw you today
you were twenty-one and
looking in the mirror
and you had no idea, no idea at all
that the world behind you was staggering
in the slipstream of your beauty.

The pupils of my eyes
are very small,
as if the dark spots
were nostrils,
you said.

Now
We watch our sons
recede, and the world shrinks;
the shadows are tall
when the sun is low. No matter
how little we become, the casting
runs over the dusted ground:
We have done
what we could.

I hold your ribs
in my hands, and
each finger finds its warm ledge; and
like the ticking of a clock
I feel the beating of your heart.

Suppose we have gone small
as they have grown:
The fire still rises, and
the haunting of your body
by heart and wicked blood
and the marvelous sky, and
the shadows stride over
the red clay and the forest; and

opening into
the wildest widest open
countries, they are
night skies and torches,
seen at the last drunken
glimpse and dreamed long after.

You had not learned then,
as you have learned now,
that empires and monsters
and small fluttery things
enter at every inbreath;

that to say as small as these
windows into the heartspace
is to say
small as leviathan,
small as ocean.

Thanks!

Wow, thank you all for the encouragement! Thank you so much. Public speaking is a trial for me -- which is why I abandoned teaching -- but this is reading aloud, which is an entirely different and much easier thing. So I'm actually looking forward to it. And I don't think they let you bring rotten fruit into Barnes & Noble, so I should be okay.

Here's my playlist. It's eleven short love poems:

Santiago
Untitled ("I love clumsy women")
Vanity Fair
Argentine
Not True Any More
Love Comes to Portland
The Rain You Sent
The Poor in Spirit
Flute
Pilgrim in Brooklyn
Love Poem (to Jo)

As for recording -- sorry. Beyond my technical skills. I don't think I even own a device that records sound. But I'm glad you want to hear!

Eep!

---

Barnes & Noble Reading Series is delighted to present poets Dale Favier, Dan Raphael, and Maryrose Larkin.

When: September 17, 7:00 p.m.

Where:
Barnes & Noble
1317 Lloyd Center // Gift section
Portland, OR 97232
503-249-0800

Hosted by: Tom Mattox


Dale Favier has taught poetry, chopped vegetables, and written software for a living. Currently he works half-time as a massage therapist and half-time as a database administrator for a non-profit. He is a Buddhist, in the Tibetan tradition; he lives with his wife and two nearly grown children in Portland, Oregon. He never wrote much poetry until he began blogging a few years ago, at Mole – http://koshtra.blogspot.com – and fell in with bad companions, with whom he eventually brought out an anthology, Brilliant Coroners. He has an M.Phil. in Medieval English Literature from Yale, and his most recent work has been translations of Old English alliterative verse.

Dan Raphael: All that matters about dan raphael is the poetry, which he performs in places like Wordstock, Bumbershoot, Burning Word, Mountain Writers, Portland Jazz Festival and KBOO. His most recent books are Breath Test and Showing Light a Good Time; he's currently working on his new manuscript City Rain Coincidence. Current poems appear in Stringtown, Otoliths, Knock Journal, Skidrow Penthouse and Refined Savage.

Maryrose Larkin lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works as a freelance researcher. She is the author of Inverse (nine muses books), Whimsy Daybook 2007 (FLASH+CARD), and The Book of Ocean (i.e. press). Maryrose is part of Spare Room, a group of people who organize readings and other events in Portland. She is co-editor, with Sarah Mangold, of FLASH+CARD, a chapbook and ephemera poetry press.


Learn more about the B&N Reading Series

Same

I woke before dawn. Orion was walking in the southern sky, but he was gone when I went out to the car, and there was a lavender sky to the east. Now I'm in Tosi's.

"How are you, Tosh?" asks a customer.

Tosi answers in a single syllable, as he always does, forcefully and finally. "Same," he declares. As if he wants it put out of doubt forever, that his state of health or mind could ever change. And he is, in fact, one of the anchors of my life. Always here, always the same. He looks sixty, maybe, but he's well over seventy. Sixty years ago, as he's fond of recounting, he arrived by ship in America, innocent of English, and was put on a train with a label bearing his destination pinned to his shirt. Went to work for his uncle, (or was it his cousin? I'll have to listen more closely, next time) in Chicago (or Cleveland?), busing tables and washing dishes. He still buses tables, when they're shorthanded: the waitresses fuss at him when he loads the bus tubs too full and lugs them to the kitchen. "Do you think you're a teenager? You're going to wreck your back." Tosi grunts dismissively.

He takes a hand at the line, too, in a pinch, though we rather wish he wouldn't: he doesn't really have the timing of a line cook any more, and the eggs arrive a little hard or a little runny, the toast maybe a little burnt. The waitresses apologize obliquely when he does, murmuring "Tosh is cooking today" when they set down your plate. But it's usually his son Jim cooking, who makes a perfect breakfast, every time. If you like diner food. No one complains about Tosi's cooking, though. I think we all know that the day Tosi lets a job go undone at the restaurant will be the day he decides to die.

He sits at the odd booth beside the door, at slow times, and his old friends come in, and have animated conversations in Greek. They all have wonderful faces. They belong to the last generation that didn't really care about men being handsome, the generation in which a man like Humphrey Bogart, with no physique and no prettiness, could be a film star. And consequently they're much more attractive than the men twenty years younger, who have mostly run to fat and look like they couldn't handle themselves in a fight. Of course, Tosi's friends are Greek, too, and the Greeks are the handsomest people in the world. They just are.

His youngest daughter waited tables here, for a few years. She was astoundingly pretty, and even more astoundingly innocent and attentive. She listened to everything everyone said with round eyes, she loved and admired everyone, she was delighted by the most tired jokes. When she confided to me that she was getting married, I took her hand and said, "Oh, all the blessings!" She was the kind of person you could be maudlin with, without embarrassment.

She's a schoolteacher now, and has kids, and has put on weight, and looks a little worried. I see her here every once in a while. Her face still lights up when she sees you, but only after a small delay. She doesn't live at the surface now: she has to come up from somewhere to respond to you. I grieve for the girl who used to patter happily around the restaurant, pouring coffee.

The cars swish down Sandy Boulevard, now, with their long shadows in front of them. All going to work. I don't have to go to work till noon, now. Time to write almost every morning. I still can't believe my good fortune. Mornings to write, afternoons at the Foundation, massage in the evening: it's the perfect life. I keep expecting someone to snatch it away. Surely you can't live so much the life you want to live, and get away with it? But I won't borrow trouble. It knows where to find me; it has my address; it can look me up if it wants me. I'm not going to go looking for it.

The Elephant Downstairs (Unfinished)

My brother started me on The Lord of the Rings. I suppose I was ten or eleven. He was nearly done with the The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume, and said I should read it when he was done. I picked up the second, The Two Towers, just to look at it. About twenty-four hours later, in which I did nothing but read and sleep, I had finished it, with the gates of Cirith Ungol slammed shut against Sam; my brother in the meantime had finished the Fellowship, so I devoured that, going back in the narrative, as well. I gulped down The Return of the King in another twenty-four hours, up until the destruction of the Ring -- and stopped.

I couldn't bear to finish, to no longer have it in front of me to read for the first time. It was several days before I picked it up again and finished it, very slowly for me -- I was in the habit of wolfing my books, in those days. But this was the last I had: I savored it.

Of course I read them again, over and over: I counted some forty times, before I lost track. I read them aloud to my children, a couple times to each. I learned Spanish, French and German partly by reading translations of The Lord of the Rings into those languages. A long easy text that I knew by heart: it was a perfect way to absorb vocabulary. So it's a peculiarity of my linguistic competences that I know the words for hauberk, baldric, and chalcedony in four languages.

Where was I? Oh yes. I put off finishing. And I thought of that when I thought of the fact that I've tended to leave things by favorite authors unread. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy I read soon after I had first read the Rings: I remember that the very first time I felt carsick, we were on a long journey in southern Oregon, near Mt Thielsen, and I was staring at an ink drawing of the helmeted twin soldiers that pursue Titus in the last volume.

Gormenghast is chilling to read because the author dies under your hands: he had a degenerative illness -- I don't remember what -- that gradually robbed him of his powers of connected thought and of sustained artwork. Titus Alone has strange gaps and discontinuities that increase as the book goes on: but as Peake is so idiosyncratic, laconic and florid by turns, both as a writer and as an artist, you don't realize it for quite a while. He never loses that power of the line, the power that Blake thought was the essence of art: in one swift curve he captures a whole world of imaginative intensity. But as Titus Alone progresses the canvas on which those lines emerge is increasingly blurred confused -- or, simply, and terrifyingly, empty.

So I came to the end of Gormenghast in a sobered and subdued frame of mind. And for years and years I never read anything more of Peake's. There wasn't, after all, a lot more to read, and it wasn't easy in those days to find: everything but Gormenghast was long out of print. But eventually I snapped up Mr Pye, which was not much more than a morsel. And there it lay. I read his wife's biography of him. It is, as some complained, a hagiography, but all the more moving for that: she loved him and missed him desperately. And although I'm sure he had numerous faults, one thing he could clearly do is love: he swept her off her feet, and she stayed swept, ever after.

I felt, reading that biography, that I understood fully for the first time -- though I couldn't quite put it into words -- what I was in the world for. Peake saw things. Beautiful and ugly. And they set up a resonance in him: they made him a wellspring of vividness and intensity. One night, he and his wife-to-be heard odd trampling noises below his studio: on opening a trap door in the floor they found that an circus elephant had been lodged there, whom they fed buns and sugar. I have no idea whether this story is true -- his later biographer presents it as true -- but it certainly feels true: that Peake, by the intensity of his perception, could cause elephants to appear in the middle of London.

And that, I felt, was my own gift, on a far lesser scale; my calling. I have always heard the elephant downstairs. I have always been struck witless by apparitions of beautiful and grotesque things, not all of which can be seen by other people. And I've always had a gnawing, nagging idea that my job was to make a door, or at least of window, of myself, so that these things could come into the world.

Last night, rubbing oil along the humped spine of an old man, the night air came walking in, at intervals; his younger German wife, leaning against the wall, spoke softly, looking aside, as Europeans do. Pools of light and dark, sleeping and waking; a cuckoo clock that spoke unexpectedly; a tiny dog that let me rub his belly but never quite trusted me. I am doing the work I was sent to do. And so what if it breaks my heart?

Too Rich Already

I am too rich already, for my eyes
Mint gold...

--Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake's grotesquerie has been dwelling in my heart, the last couple days. I don't think it has anything to do with horror or revulsion: it has to do with loving things as they are.

It is the real bodies that claim my attention and my devotion, and the extravagances that time puts on them are what I love above all: the crusted, twisted, hammer-toed feet; the marbled muscle-and-fat purses of the inner thighs, the jowls that give you purchase to stretch the facial tissue. What do I want with twenty-year-olds, their perfect bodies, their fluid joints, their bland, uncharactered perfection? Give me bodies that have suffered, that have fought with the world. Give me pouchy, knobbly bellies, hips that lock, arms that can't rise above the shoulder line. Give me scars, mutilations, edemas, hernias, mastectomies. I want a book that's been well read, with scribbles in the margins and tattered pages. I want an old house that has settled, that has yawed and twisted, that has been loved by the uncritical eyes of five-year-olds for generations.

Camassia Preserve

The shallow soils of this rocky plateau support wet meadows, Oregon white oak-madrone woodlands, vernal and permanent ponds, and even a stand of quaking aspen.

Strange skies, peeling
like the bark of a madrone;
poison oak gleaming like
fire reflected in brass;
oak galls nest in
last year's leaves.
Grasshoppers cock
and spring, as I pass;
drawing the straight lines
of a pattern I'm too dull to grasp.

I find my son
at the brink of the dell,
sitting on the bare gray stone.
Below is a firepit,
unsanctioned, no doubt.
For a moment evening
takes my imagination, and I see
the restless teenagers,
the flaring light, the dares;
they know this place is sacred
but no one has taught them
what to do with sacred places.
They can only improvise.

But here in the strong
but failing sun
are only blackened rocks;
my son with his long thick hair,
his steady kindness, his
grace; he is indulging us
by going on this walk, but
he cheerfully
makes a virtue of all necessities.
We leave this to you, all
this beauty and confusion.
We're sorry it could not be more,
that we could not hand you
a confident future.

My dear son
we bequeath to you
an evening habit of video games
a nature preserve or two
and this fading autumn sun.

Dissemination

Let the vultures carry scraps
to the bluffs above the river;
Let the fox leave bits of me in the gravel of the creek.
Let drops of my blood fall in the marsh
to engender dragonflies, and small hunting things
that are furtive in the reeds; things that snap suddenly
with toothless jaws. Let my fingers
burrow into rotten stumps
like grubs, and wait their long winter,
to emerge, glistening, long-legged, wrinkle-winged.

Let the dogs fight over the bones
that are left on the dunes,
filch a rib or two from each other, till the game
turns elsewhere. Then the ants will chew them clean,
and the winter sun will turn them
into white splayed branches where
the blown sand pools.