Separation

Steam from a bowl of oatmeal rises,
dimming the party hat mountain.
The plunger falls in the dark waters,
settling on the murky grounds.
Something orange, something wrinkled,
something sprinkled, something soft.

I want to come around to your side,
kneel by your arm, offer myself.
This is my prayer, this is my sign
here at this table. Close by, the
apex of trees continues to climb,
The distance varies, the sun
crosses the room, searching.
The chunky bread is browning, there
Is a moist piece of sun on your lip,
butter is melting in the bowl,
and I hold your hair out
like a bolt of Egyptian cotton,
like a gift I can barely manage.

Everything is always rising and falling.
The temperature- not as steady
As one thinks: A cloud shadow, a
yellow wing, the wind, your breath, a fret.
Pauses.
Tiny separations that blink and blink
again, even as you finish that sentence,
that spoonful of raisins and oatmeal.

Approach

I come in low over the water.
There are no hydraulics.
Only a firmness and resolve.
I look down through the surface below.
Orange and blue fish swim.
Seaweed is apparent.
But this may not be what it seems.
I may have been a symbol.
No memory tells me this.
But the evidence is apparent:
in the cereal I eat, the way I comb my hair,
and a smile I wave about like a pistol.
My face carries a trajectory of hope,
indistinguishable from my hello.
Every handshake I conduct, every
embrace of another person,
grows like red trumpet vine, like the
weight of a long heavy dream
full of pewter and moss.
I change clothes quite a bit.
To be forgotten.
Even now as I drop closer to touchdown
I am pullng on fresh dark trousers, now
the ochre pullover covered with sleet.
Now my hands are again free to eat a donut.
Now I see it is powdered sugar,
not weather, covering my sweater.
The empty hangers bump against my temple.
My patience is running thin,
my hands look like small birds
about to launch themselves into the white sky.
There is a bump, my coffee spills onto my pants.
Maps and crosswords fly through the windows.
I repeat the names on the roster,
a litany streaming from my mouth:
Margo, James, Stengal, Patterson, Dion,
Diane, David, Davis, and more.
Is it less than thirty, more than one hundred?
No mattter. I am still a thief.
And I have taken things I cannot return.

Embraceable You

It's not like setting up a tripod, or
seeing windows in trees.
I haven't lost anything and
discovery came back there
on the beach where I slid in
with a soft silt slice.
There may be clouds about, weather afoot,
but I never looked over my shoulder or
even sidelong, as a matter of fact.
I know this is not a confession,
or a questionnaire,
but it is like you are a letter
I can't quite get out of the envelope.
And I can see by the folds in the note
it is an origami bird,
a parrot, I believe.
And the message is just the motion,
the head moving forward
as I pull the tail.

Enlightenment

As I sit in a restaurant drinking a cup of coffee
chairs and tables fall through me
piling up under my table.
I hold my coffee in hand
as my table
has become part of the pile.
I am tired of this job
of reassemblage
but I know it is
my only responsibility.

Later:
It is good that others
have surfaces
to eat from,
surfaces to drink coffee from,
in an on-going kind of way.

Car

I stepped out of the Scottish Inn into a light mist. "Car," I thought."Where was help?" I wondered. Broke down in Lake City. On Main Street I could look east and know this street deadended into a lake. The Movement of God would take me west to the Engine Room where the boys would pronounce the word serpentine slowly while looking at my belts. I had developed a mild case of tinnitus in the form of an inner voice saying "car" whenever conversation arose. This was not the Tennessee I had drawn. The one with horses and whiskey was balled up in the waste basket at the Scottish Inn. And there would be no drink at the counter with MacDuff to send me on my way. Ganesh said, "have a good day". Ultimately what would save me was the prayer offered by a woman who was moved to speak to God concerning my situation. "Lord, help him find the path out of this mess," she said, touching my shoulder there at the gas station. "Car," I responded, as she walked away. Later the boys at the Engine Room would give me some weak-ass coffee and say, "you're all set." "Car," I replied, smiling.

Big Friday

This is how it got away from us:
Many of us began to notice the
true cyclical nature of things and
became fed up with Wednesdays.
Oh, it was like pulling teeth, but
eventually we rounded that corner,
circumscribed that square.
Mondays were next, a day,
that for obvious reasons,
lacked zest and produce.
Tuesdays got caught in that cross
fire and Saturdays lost their novelty.
Sundays encroached on meaning
and Thursdays had nowhere to go.
That left Friday, Big Friday, as we
jokingly called everything left. The
next thing we knew past and future
spiraled out of control, and crashed.
Night air, sunlight, and a little rain
were our first choices for what
to gather around Big Friday. But
even those things were no longer
sitting in slots, waiting for a bell.
Nothing ever started again on Big
Friday. And nothing was ever finished
in the sun, the rain, or by the moon
looking in.

The Silent Speed of Starlight

How far has that light come?
People pass me on the interstate
as I putz along, looking up.
The time it takes for me to see
them is like starlight. Isn't it?
Approaching. Receding. Until we
meet at that exit light. Eventually
every star will meet me, entering
my little planetarium through the
wet, double doors over there. And
finally, the bear will lose a paw,
the dipper handle will fall in my lap.
But others are coming. Enough for
some kitchen utensils. I will find
the garlic press, the little creamer.
There, dangling above the southern
horizon, the apron and strings.
All in good time.

Forgetting the World

These are the days when
I could be doing anything,
but I am doing this now:
standing on the gray deck,
arms raised, pulling in signals
from the world. Everything is
bringing from the future. And
receiving the future takes work.
It could be in the mailbox or my
ear. The nuthatch at my door,
just blue and shadow. The wind
coming across, something is waving.
It says, "sustain this." I can't. It
lands on faded prayer flags tacked
to the rail. Dropping my arms I think
about these things, and for this moment
and the next, I forget the world.

Headwaters: A schematic of sorts

"We here at the Larnie Ketteridge Home have been assigned the task of renaming rivers. First we say welcome to the sun this morning and welcome to the laundry driver, Dirk. From the Department of Interiors I have received a packet of five rivers that I shall rename today. Thank you Mr President for providing this volunteer retiree program to make it easier for all of us to remember river names. Thank you interior people. I know you are busy on the inside and underneath, so it is up to us on the outsides to stay current, to be updating right now. The first river I have is the Moselle. Why in the hell I got this I do not know. It is over there somewhere. But I see by a map that the upper part of the Moselle wiggles like a cat cleaning itself. Felix is my name for this river. Next is a river in Ohio called the Muskingum. This is silly. I name this river Central Mosquito. Another river is right here down the road. The Cuyahoga or crooked river. It too wiggles like a cat cleaning itself. I name this river Krazy Kat. The fourth river I have is the Sawanee. The idea of "way down" does not appeal to me. I name this river Toot. What the hell. Why not. And finally today I have the Mississippi. I feel that i-double s, i-double s, i-double p is an unnecessary way to remember a river. I will name this river Sippy Cup. Now people may wonder if this program actually works. Well I have received many cards and e-mails from people all over the place who have reported great ease in remembering rivers I have previously re-named. Such as the Turbinado Sugar, the Lesser Leaf Rake, and the Piper Cub. No explanation was necessary as the names truly fit these rivers. Well I would like to thank Floyd, Archer, and Frownman for their help with research today. Good day."

Futurama

"Are we in for a surprise?

The future is like magic. It wears no robes or veils, but arrives naked, tossing its surprises to the right and the left. How does it arrive? It neither comes from ahead nor do we enter it running. This is because it and we can only approach what is always coming toward it and us. There is no possible action or sound that can be made without being received elsewhere, thereby describing and deciding the future which only wears the attributes of something recognized as past.

Is there such a thing as truth objectively speaking? This question curves around and demands that I ask myself why I am asking myself the question in the first place, what good an answer will do for me before I am annihilated. If I am convinced that the story of your life and thought reveals the truth about our condition on this planet, then will I be happier as I proceed? Why else am I asking it?"

-Excerpted from The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, by Fanny Howe

The Real Man: Searching for the Marlboro Man

After the funeral I spoke with a close friend of the Man. Leland June had known the Man since the seventies. He invited me to visit with him in southern Tennessee near the Georgia border. Contrary to popular belief the Marlboro Man lived there near North Potato Creek in a tiny burg called Turtle Town. Leland showed me the man's horse, Toby. Toby is a miniature horse, probably four and a half feet tall. The Man suffered from sciatica in later life and could no longer mount his "prop" horses in the ads. Leland told me that the Man liked to ride around on Toby in the backyard roping goats. What came as a shock to me was Leland's disclosure that the Man's funeral contained an empty coffin. Apparently he had been cremated with the express idea that his friends would smoke him once or twice a year. The Man thought it would be a good reminder to all about what went wrong with America and smokes. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to smoke the Man that afternoon with Leland June. June mixed some of the ash with some Bull Durham and rolled us a smoke. It was a powerful experience. As I stood there inhaling the Man I noticed that I could not get my head out of profile for a good fifteen minutes. "He was something," Leland said. "Not was, is," I corrected. For the rest of the day Leland walked around shaking his head, repeating the words "is" and "was", chuckling to himself.

Convergence

"Women watching children, Heidelberg, August 1954"

Let's back up a little bit to "The Catholic activist Dorothy
Day and children, 1950's." These are photographs. Black
and white. Earlier in the day I confuse Doris Day with
Dorothy in a conversation about service versus dogma.
Now I am in a books store where the Day photograph

trots toward me from a book I open, called Our World.

In a moment I hear the Beatles sing "hey bulldog." And I
am reminded of a blog a friend in Germany wrote with
that title. The pages flip and "Women watching children,
Heidelberg , August 1954" is staring at me. Who will
recognize the oddness, the tiny swirl of convergence,
the idea that something like this has landed on a flower,
hesitated in its own busyness, and then gone on?

Funeral for the Marlboro Man

There were 5 of us at the funeral for the Man. George Peppard was gone. So was the Duke. We had brought the Man’s horse, black, 1/4, 19 hands or so, name of Tar Baby. A beauty. There weren’t much to say. We brung our’n animals too. As a sign of respect our work gloves covered their ears. Numbers was everywhere there. How many packsaday, 2nd hand this, 3rd hand that. Goddam first hand nuthin’. Tar counts. Damn. Some folks with orchestra instruments was playin’ The Magnificent 7. So they lowered the Man and the band perked up the horse’s ears a bit. The tawny gloves wavin’. All 5 of us with zippos a-clickin, the light flashing off that silver. That was it. Shit.

I wrote this in response to SarahJane's story on her blog called Death of the Marlboro Man. If you haven't read it you should. It would make Donald Barthelme smile.

Hair loss

So I spontaneously decided to get my hair cut. I pulled in to a hair place not far from where I live. I did this because if I just ponder getting a cut, my hair will quickly shampoo itself and even start whistling. There is also this inversely proportional thing where the closer I get to the cutting chair the less I know what I want. But I can always tell if the stylist knows what I want even though I don't know. If he/she looks at me in the mirror while holding my hair I feel fine. But if she only looks at my hair, I am worried. It's a holistic thing.
Putting your hair in the hands of a complete stranger is either complete idiocy or pie in the sky oblivion. Factor in an occasional low flying hornet emerging from the duct work and a record for comb drops-6. You are headed for a white knuckle carnival ride. She did just fine with the scissors. But the clippers became an experiment in terror, as she dipped from side to side, chipping away from all angles. It reminded me of the way I eat a pie when left alone with it for a day. Small slivers dedicated to this idea or that desire. A christening, manifest destiny, or eminent domain. One by one they are necessary until the entire apple rhubarb pie is gone. In the end my head looked like the empty pie pan. Partly shiny through the crumbs.

Millard Fillmore, the Man.

Let us now turn to the life of Millard Fillmore, last of the Whigs, major player in the secretive, Know Nothing movement, and strongly aligned with the Anti-Masonic movement. H.L. Mencken spread the myth that Fillmore installed the first bath tub in the White House. This is false and a lie. Actually Fillmore installed the first dumb waiter in the White House by retro-fitting an existing clothes chute. As a member of the Whigs Fillmore enjoyed the spell and tutelage of the Whig's boss and power broker, Thurlow Weed. It would be a short life for me if I awoke to find this name assigned to me. Weed wielded enough power to bend the will of the Whigs to his whims. Way too much alliteration. The Whigs are remembered for very little. That was so long ago. On the other had, the Know Nothing movement has a legacy that flourishes to this day. This secretive Anti- Irish immigrant movement, invented slogans printed on clothing. The first slogan on a shirt was created in 1847, emblazoned on night shirts, primarily in the Buffalo, NY, area. It read on the front,"I know nothing but my Country, my whole Country, and nothing but my Country." On the back it read, "So help me God." But we digress. Fillmore's greatest accomplishment was his defusing of a major war with Peru. Fillmore smoothed over a disagreement with the Peruvians, and tucked in the sheets. This then is all we care to know of Millard Fillmore. Father, husband, Peruvian peacemaker, dumb waiter maker, Know Nothing, and member of a secret movement that opposed another secret movement. The 13th President of the United States to have never been elected President of the United States.

To be a Chinese Citizen

Last night I was eating at restaurant with my friend Doug. Our waitress was an young Asian woman. We tried to guess her nationality. Thai, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese? We settled on Korean after a lengthy process of elimination. So we asked. Hong Kong Chinese. She then launched into a long explanation of the traits and differences. Interesting. Indo versus mainland. We got on the subject of her citizenship and she described the test. Mulitple choice questions like "who was the 13th president of the United States," what was the color of the uniforms of the North and South in the Civil War," and "what do the fifty stars represent on the American flag." I had no idea who the 13th was. I started counting and naming. Not sure. To my surprise she said that in China all you needed was a background check. No test. Then she laughed and said, "imagine if you had to know 5000 years of history and dynasties to become a Chinese citizen." We decided the citizenship test was pretty lame. Probably dated back to the days when the American gov't considered most foreigners inferior. One of the side effects of jingoism.

Pattern Recognition

Discreet music rising from a toaster.
A large blue rubber band on a cold deck, unemployed.
The bending of folding chairs in the morning light.
The wet glass table drying in a crowd of trees, the
twenty inch fingerprint found in the glass.
Breath near my ear and the soft falling
of warm animals on the periphery.
A group of candles, relaxing between burnings,
idly chatting, looking toward the mountain.
The purr of the furnace, answering Fall's phone call.
Twin bamboo doing their little green yoga
just beyond my shutter speed.
Winesaps curled in a clear bag,
dreaming of becoming me.
Salt and pepper, always ready...
Buttering all this discreetness
with the knife of my ear.

A Parent Up Each Sleeve

We have a parent up each sleeve.
Maybe a mother up the right,
a father the left.
It wasn't always that way.
We chose. Dominate hand,
dominate parent, or
ambidextrous/counter-intuitive.
When my arms are crossed,
my mother rests under my left armpit,
my father, the right.
It feels like they are lying
across each other after
sex. It's a comfortable position
for me. When I point with
my finger it could be my mother's
instruction. Or my father's command.
I can feel the length of her, beckoning,
in that finger, while other times he is
bulky, emphatic. When I put my arm
around you it is my mother, like a
fish, curling, wavering softly. And
when the other arm is extended it
holds gunpowder. It can be discharged
if I hold it steady. When my hands come
together, they touch with the realization
that the two of them found time to be
together. When my mother hand is
holding my chin it soothes. My father
hand holds tightly the same chin, pulling
at my lip, directing my mouth. My face
can not smile with my father's hand.
When I shake hands with you my
mother is there. I hold her like a gift
for you. On the other hand my father
holds a small book of cautionary tales.

A Wind Disorder

My back is pressing against a
stone wall, low and crusted like
bread. Occasionally I rise up,
my hair moves about, I smell horses
off in the distance. They will ride
through me long before I will
ever mount them. But now I look
again. The tall grass is moving.
there were no horses, only this
pale wavering, the wind. There is
no saddle for the wind; if anything,
I am that saddle, gritting my
leathery teeth. I wait here for
the shifting weight of a rider:
As light as the weather, cotton,
as heavy as a thought seems, wool.
There I am now, moving across
the lumpy pasture, the wall
receding,
the light, noticeably clearer.

Hanuman Is

Note: This is the 5th of five interconnected tales of Hanuman. To read them from the beginning chronologically start with Hanuman In Love, Hanuman Loves, Hanuman Leaps, Hanuman Returns, & Hanuman Is. In that order.


The sun stood behind a soft gray door. I crouched in the dusty rocker, squinting. The leaves around me reminded me of the sunset. The brown ones had gone down. It was like night had come. Others had fallen, showing me such beauty, their light changing. I listened intently to them falling. Sighs and murmurs. Once in another time I commanded them to stop. "Please don't lose what you have shown me," I pleaded. I did not want the brittle brown stillness. But now the sky was coming once again. And the wind reminded me as it tugged at the colors. I held a piece of the tree in my hand, a tiny palette.I touched my finger to the leaf and streaked my face with the colors: orange, yellow, a burning red, some blue down my nose, some purple across my brow. "I will let this color remind me," I thought. Then I remembered Rama's hand on my shoulder. And his voice telling me that how you see is like a squirrel curled sleeping in a tree, waiting for you to look, to awaken it. "The world starts that way," he said. "What is this power that I have?" I remembered thinking. He smiled. "It is not yours. It is not something you can ever know." In Rama's face I saw the same colors I had on my face now. It was the same. This then was my lineage. Through this leaf into Rama's face and back into mine. Who was looking at this leaf? Maybe it was Rama in the temple. Maybe it is the wind now moving in me here in the rocking chair. Maybe it is the falling sense of the colors that are filling me. Maybe it is the rattling sound of the leaves above. I lean forward. I cannot find that sound. Through the trees the mountain is growing in me. It pops out through the top of my head, perched there like a cap. It too carries all the colors. And it warms me in the cool air...