Musette

May 1 poem: Our task (cut-up)

My work life began to intrude on the writing of April, so much so that while I worked on pieces, I didn't post them. So I'm reaching back to my cut-ups project and, looking at it from this distance, enjoying it. The words here are from the desktop encyclopedia, pages 580-581, fin whale to Fisher (as in chess player Bobby).

I was at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on the USC campus yesterday for poems by Chase Twichell and some unexpectedly fascinating work by Daniel Tiffany, a USC prof, who read from Dandelion Clock and other books. Most interesting were those Dandelion Clock pieces which begin with lines from Old English and spin out sound- or sense-related paths from there. No doubt it was that listening that brought me back to my own experiments. Also heard Patti Smith and Dave Eggers talk about the passion that is art, whatever one's art may be. The two of them are generous souls, so inspiring, so spacious.

 

Our task

Devotees may wait years for the beauty of open craters or the sparks of luminous beetles. Those who lack faith have other means of escape: Rockets of colored salt, a rubber carriage, exclusive molecular structures. A godlessness large enough to spread thinly over the 13 level  realms  will be allowed to exit the next without injury, or enter the private network of innocence without ordeal. Purification tends to cause a severe sting, conspicuous circular scars. Do not recoil from salvation marked with orange or yellow. Common fields and ash may lie outside human control, awaiting the pollen and nectar of mating, elongated sandspit as nest, wild magenta scrub as body. The air flashes, clearing forests, seed and fire synthesizing each other. Leaves fall. Time will burn our private egress, our dormant fireseed. Watch for light-producing signals, for warmth. Eat.

 

Photo, of fireworks seen aslant, by Peter Harding via Flickr.

April 7 poem: Once, then later (cutup)

 

Lots of writing, but little posting, so early April will unfurl in a string of posts today. I seem to have questions of origin on my mind, and more than a few pieces go to that theme. Today's words came from pages 1066-1067 of the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia, Middlebury College to Mikan.

 

Once, then later

The earliest human waveforms were steel skeletons sheathed in biblical interpretation, rhythmic prosody used for money, asynchronous serial transmission. Adam never laughed. “Cracking” was the province of professionals, a dazzling game of chess. Semicircular prayer was widespread. Four dwarfs born in the Central period developed a bawdy nightclub act to transmit the scattered sparks of visual disturbance. Used bears, planes of extravagant onyx, basketball for drama, in an alteration of composed and improvised writings. “Less is more” was adapted from the first divine wind, and echo it before the ascension to heaven, the central void of the universe, a major premise that employs less unison, more improvisation. Or zithers. An administrative question: Was hell the metamorphic host of an “aura”? Was facade simply an imprecise term for permanent exile? The ornately decorated dialects of bagpipes, viols, oboe date to magma injected into an operational ceiling, usually with no formal training.   Four groups (incl. many women), sometimes called “gnats,” or “the mighty handful,” migrated to the dome of the heavens. Dictum: enlighten by analogy. That is, from literacy to music, the starting and stopping points in time, collaborating with passages, dizziness, art. One or two beats behind, a protein and an acid molecule separated. Bloodsucking patterns bear some resemblance to the raga. The gods mobilized after heavy losses. The steel-and-glass world is only mentioned once.

Photo by Nigel Howe, via Flickr.

 

March 26 poem: Man with no hands

I was interested in this image, by edgeplot, via Flickr, because sometimes when I look I see the figure of a man in the gray brush. As for the words, they're a record of today.

 

Man with no hands

“That was God talking.” The first thing the voice says. Not a preacher’s voice. Troubled, but with what? It tries to talk smack with one of the regulars on the street, who walks past fast with a stride that says, “Don’t get any of that on me.” Peripheral vision won’t curve back far enough to put a clear face with the syllables clinging to the wall behind, but the hair on the back of the neck, the whole back of the body, rises for sensing, follows the movement. Voice narrates the bus that pulls up, more about God, God’s pain. Driver gives him a look—how much trouble is this going to be?—and lets him by. There’s no money on offer, no coins dropping. Just stripped wrists placed on farebox, paired knobs so narrow without the bloom of palms and fingers below. The abruptness of the stumps. We all let him pass without looking back to see where he lands. Soundings from the voice: the seats above the engine far behind. Mumbling a while, then picking up, roaring. “So much fuckin’ pain.” More and more words, in another character's voice. Yelling all the way to the valley. Anguish and everything else. A laugh. No one looks. What’s he gonna do, pick up a gun? Until an old woman rolls her cart back there. Her hearing’s bad, but not her eyes. Not the mother in her. “It’s all right honey,” she says first to her daughter, then quietly to laughing, suffering God. “Sweetheart, it’s all right.”

3/26

March 20 poem: Signs

Monsoons arrived with the first day of spring. I expect it'll be glorious out there when the storms finally lift. It's already so lush that "you can almost imagine it's humid" in this desert, David said on the last sunny day. I did just a bit of fevered writing today, and with my focus turned mostly to a work project, I don't know what it produced. Not what's below. That's just a short bit I'd saved for a day like today, when something would be better than nothing at all. Perhaps it's the haiku of prose poems, a thought that flitted through. But t's day 20 of this project and it's still going. A miracle!

 

Signs

We long to think the air changes somehow, becomes charged, and that a person might sense it, the tiny hairs on the belly or nape rising with a buzz of tingling. Or that a faint  arc of ripples might form in the bowl of water kept for capturing subtle vibrations, and a dog or cat seeing this, might become restless. We wish for sleep to deliver glyphs we could puzzle out to mean “a falling plane” or “angiogram” or even the image of campaign signs reading “four more years.” Our endings, though, surprise us when they come. They just come.

3/20

Image by Pierre -M- via flickr. Looks like tarot, no?

March 10 poem: The next stranger I meet on Seventh

Day 10 and I'm realizing that I will have to filter it all later, but for now just let the world find its way in. Today: the texture of the everyday here in my corner of downtown L.A.

 

The next stranger on Seventh

Has a fear of quakes and elevators (mimes swinging a mouse by its tail). Wants Jesus to wrap me in his arms and prays for my salvation. Would like me to take the brochure every day. Never used to wear a jacket while arranging the papers in the cold. Got the sleek red sneakers from a friend at Nike.  Got the blinker snapped to “Vietnam Vet” cap from a vendor down the block so no one hits the motorized chair. Has never once smiled in our quick passage at five till eight, though his dog seems to. Might believe dogs “smile.” Believes, in English and Spanish, that a barking prayer will drop like a coin in a slot to the soul. Believes in jackpots. Yells “don’t you put that in this cart” when the boy picks up a toy that’s all whirl and rainbow. Believes a colt or a kid will test you so you’ve got to be firm. Learned to play the ocarina before blindness. Never learned to sing. Almost has the ankles for those six-inch heels. Wanted to be a stewardess, likes the uniform. Is only visible in the dark at six, waiting for the 38. Wonders how much the melted wedding band might fetch. Wants fries with that. Takes extras from the Sanka sample girl. Didn’t make a dime yesterday. Will be there in five minutes.

3/10

Photo by jshyun, via Flickr.

March 9 poem: Contingency event

Afterwards I went looking for an image of Vaux's swifts, which had flown into the poem, and found this skywriting. Apparently the swifts, which had been attacked by a falcon, had split into a couple of small, swirling groups. The loops reminded me of handwriting practice, ballpoint ink on the sky.

 

Contingency event

The funny thing is that until it happens, time feels continuous, the silky fluidity of forward and back. On the edge of the ocean’s broken glass you can see it reversing again and again, wind, rewind, the thinned, shiny, scraps swept back into sheets and shattering. The water, drained of oxygen, doesn’t color this time until fish rise in silver tiles, millions of them, paving the lanes around the boats in the marina. Enough to feed how many, how much that lies below? The emptying sea seems full as ever, fuller now, the invisible rising, continuing to rise, to be carried in, scraped away. Swifts keep scribbling the drained sky and the blue seems not to change. Yet in old Polaroids it’s different, and it’s not just the ink. Sometimes I hear you gasp so softly in your sleep I know you can see the tiny eddies in the laminar flow, interruptions still so small they’re only felt in intuition. Parts of the school or flock will veer away, or try to. I want to wake you, not walk into the day we keep expecting, to heal what’s breaking by breaking.

3/9

March 7 poem: Affectless woman on bus tells the future. It's bad.

 

I thought I was listening to the woman, but I could've been listening to myself. Or maybe it was the blue, blue music of the blue-ringed spheres...

 

Affectless woman on the bus tells the future. It’s bad.

The geese come down, the girls in crowns. They never look you in the eye when you tell them this place only seems like heaven from space. Blue is no guarantee. It’s no sign or haven. You don’t have to be a virgin to wear it, but Virgins do it to confuse us. This is what we know so far: Blue is the color of the sky on Saturn, no land, no sea. It’s toxic gas disguised in blue, a bluescreen world. We paste ourselves in, see what we want to see.  The glue is coming loose. It’s peeling off while we’re not looking. The birds in the back yard dive in for the red berries, don’t die, come in for more, more, more. Fat black birds on empty branches. Fat bird heads on people bodies. You can see what’s really going on in the astronauts’ mirror faces, all the cameras pointed out and in. There’s a camera on the driver’s head. That’s why he won’t crack the window. That’s why he turns up the voice that tells the names of streets and swears under his breath if you listen. Words leak out of us like beats uncorked from earbuds. Sometimes, even now, they tell the truth.

3/7

Photo from our friends at NASA, who label it: The blue skies of Saturn, photographed by Cassini in January 2005

March 3 poem: Watch

Start anywhere, they say. The first line came from spam that caught my eye. Which led me to a windy street in Culver City, one of the tree museum streets planted with just one variety. And other places.

Watch

You want to look like a sportsman. A sportsman in a watch. You time the movements of the trees with your hands, something you worked to teach your younger self. There’s a metric for the sway of something hidden, the toss within the toss of identical limbs that cradle and pitch above identical streets. You watch the circulating green, think: ink in water, cirrostratus, emeralds on a ring, a lover’s finger.  This is why you need a watch. You don’t want to get lost in the dissolving. It’ll carry you away like dogs chasing the secret scent of game before scattering, or the din of inaudible howls. Admit it: You want to bring something down. Catapult the birds from branches. One particular bird. You can’t get lost in sensations as you sit in the blind of your car. Patience and practice bring you back to the minute, the moment when there is only breathing, what’s held in on both sides, watcher and watched inventing one another, winding the stem.

photo by niiicedave, David Prasad, via Flickr

A step back

Another moment of perspective from our inspiring friends at Astronomy picture of the day. It's the Cone Nebula neighborhood, and the credit and copyright belong to Adam Block and Tm Puckett.

Our correspondents

The lovely Louise Steinman sent a bit of inspiration that's related to the book she's working on. The drawing came with this note: "...I was thinking I've probably never shown you the Ukranian Egg Cup Woman. I (or rather my friend Chery) found her in an antiques store in L'viv and she became our talisman, our Quan Yin as we traveled to the sites of ancestral massacres. She's a cheery lady: I do't know if her colors will be as bright as they really are, but here's a little drawing of her."