Three Poems

Identifying Remarks


……………………………………….................WITHERING REMARKS
Isn’t it all just ochre? You’re saying your borders have borders? Is this an interview? I see I’ve grown up: Let’s run away from each other. I call that a didactic colon. I’d believe you on a panel, behind a row of water bottles. You know, the Middle Ages had no need for architects. People used to all share the same sun. They didn’t write dissertations about it (not that we should deny ourselves that pleasure). Dissertation yourself! I extend my hand and recommend its magic, saying anything. “Hold my hand, Rationality!” Withering away is the only state I acknowledge.

……………………………………….................SEDITIOUS REMARKS
Today the rainbow, tomorrow the rainbow’s rainbow. Fake weddings every day. Those hands won’t look violent in the morning, just puffy. Timing is terrible, by definition. I love how two flat fifths make an octave. No economics without dynamite. People would still eat though, pumpkin pie with gin; fuck too, on zigzag quilts, in grape-leaf light. Just no more millions. Energy isn’t a thing. All breath is news. There’s no hello. Not till we’re arm in arm. The only state apparatus that pertains is cookery. From the kitchen everything takes on new colors, weights and saturations. Who cooks for you?

……………………………………….................GRUNGE REMARKS
Your mom tied a knot in your rainbow. My mom taught me the power chord. All our talk gets fed into this metal tube and compressed into music: Enya, or Yanni. Metal is the frame tale, the salient element. The only magic is a freeway. Songs should be five minutes long, counting grunts. Keep glowering under that beanie, knotweed. I’m painting my guitar this Dosewallips color. It has a pressboard kind of intensity. These are my friends, Mumbles. This is my cat, Participant. Here, eat this raw carrot while I sing. What’s your anthem? Or is it rude to ask?

……………………………………….................SAGE REMARKS
We tend to stay one move ahead of ourselves. Embody statistical error. Wear the ring of its double accident lightly. The things of the soul are the greenest of grays. I have learned to listen to them like dueling banjos. Not that I envy the Recording Angels their office. It’s probably a constant struggle not to spit their tea out laughing. I try not to make a big show of mystery, but sometimes that’s what’s there. Mystery can be a windbreak as well as a veil. Poets and spies wear blank baseball caps. A change of emphasis is the only freeway.

……………………………………….................CONCLUDING REMARKS
I mean I don’t mind dying, I just hate explanations. Also men, and rooms. Goodbye to their haircuts and distended assertions! Their withering away is only a change of emphasis. Forget about them, time for introductions, this is Ozma of Oz. This is “the regular pelican.” These are new sprouts in old eyes. The rest will not be written down. Getting to know each other is the hard part, not getting along. Get a move on, empty little certainty. I, too, like to turn away. If we start out in the same weather, that’s something. Beyond old hat, blue light.

(monastery)

How can I work this big scrappy heap of method?

Maybe I want to annotate what they do and what they like about it, knowing it’s bad Proustian
.............self-torture and control freaking

Now’s the time to know the future and not die of knowing

“. . . by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they
.............turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them”

10:45, there’s lots to think about but it’s too late, need to get my child to camp tomorrow and go to
.............Castle Grayskull

First steps are not supposed to get hung up on terminology but they do, on TV, in books and dreams,
.............sometimes, get hung up

Playing checkers and poker with Ceci, teaching them the concept of italic type (like the ASL
.............orangutan conversations in Daughter of the Deep)

Churning, got groceries, got Ceci, date with Rachel, Cyd was here when I got home, chatted with him
.............a bit, now it’s late

“Now it occurs to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own innards his own
.............airy citadel”

T and U seem more worried than V, W doesn’t seem worried at all, and I don’t gather what X thinks
.............of anything

10:45, there’s a lot to say and shut up about but it’s too late, I need to get my child to camp
.............tomorrow

Study proteins, feel the feelings, try to feel the feelings and feel trying to feel them, love prosodically
.............and jam out

Perfect rhyme seems to me a part of the fatality of humming the songs we hum

But I can want the all-at-once quality (or a different all-over quality) in a temporal/sequential work
.............becoming

First day of fall a clear sunny Friday tangled in the morning then went to scoop a friend up

If you thought the sequence of gestures or animated the sequence of marks like that Picasso movie,
.............something quite different would happen

And the more I listen for the rhymes the more I resent

Finer than certain old lilac cartoons you feel you should scatter about

I worked at home Friday, got Ceci, we made a freezer dinner, stayed up late and watched The Golden
.............Compass . . .

the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few and she fills the air

I had a hard time listening but remembered or noticed it is a kind of laughter and not an attack

Afterwards I wrote you that you might hurry to read

(There is a certain vertigo in reading letters from Great Spruce Head Island, knowing the 1970s are
.............coming)

Affecting nothing but my own frayed nerves, yours

In the old days you’d enter a monastery

(cordless)

Incantation: to forget that bird the moment you flipped it

I was thinking of bluff and love, how they rhyme

Thanking Cecil Taylor for having fun with the North American vowel values, deep in the prickles
.............again

Now mystically friends with the cool kids in the neighborhood, he also knows how to fly

“I feel amazing, becoming a knight . . . It’s becoming being on a cloud . . . like a horse!”

Cloudlessly: figure out who’s the extension librarian, can they do anything for Clark County
.............Mosquito Task Force

Or my “personality” wrung out of shape in the presence of three bejeweled and demanding loves

Sometimes I think “Oh I just have to be different” . (cordless) . but don’t imagine what that is

Asked the kid to clean the sink with half a lemon like my mom taught me

Wanted to start “Alongside Notes on Love” and other lists, for instance of annoying things

Blushingly not at all complex, you drew a heart I thought was a map

And ladies’ hats “like picture frames enclosing tiny mausoleums and weeping willows done very
.............finely in hair” (Mrs. Gaskell)

It’s typically fucked I can’t find my work notebook, must have left it “at odds with”

“But it’s all one universe, and you know it”

#7 plopped a great three-point shot and I plopped oatmeal
.............Human on my faithless arm

I joked that the poem was Richard Wilbur but
.............slept in it and washed it up on weekends

Big THINGS to do about coffee pods for date

Crumple my books, take a shower, change cat litter
.............go home on foot to sleep among holy statues

Laundry, cut boards, screw them together, bathroom paint, love notes

.............transistors and lasers in order to make this day great
Then off to make errands with a downtown strange fate

Framed a freezer dinner, watched The Golden Compass, stayed up late

Went to Japan, realized he was in love with Miss Kids

“Yeah we’re Cordelias but we’re also Doloreses”

Love above is a malediction, can’t stop hearing it

At sea, the feeling of wanting nothing, a nothingness

What if everything I didn’t obsess about is amazing?

After extensive tunneling, come up with this glazed look

.............“O magic sleep! O comfortable bird that broodest o’er”

Strip of pink duct tape stuck to the window

I can’t decide to sleep in a novel

Sometimes you feel close to a baby gazelle

A victim of the words love and of

Cream of squash flower soup assuming I made

Sticky buns, worked the dough last night, risen

I need love, insurrection, all the music, and a patchkit

I want to forget what that little bird is