Cropinua Sundiacti

painting by Pavel Tchelitchew

Fremder: “More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.”

Gaston Bachelard: “The poetic image exists apart from causality.” ‘…the increased intimacy of a house when it is besieged by winter’. . . Bachelard also says that “all corners are haunted.” Are there corners in nature? “These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” (Rilke).

I have come to learn that there is a genuine truth in certain voices, whether it is someone speaking to you about a particular subject, or a stranger saying Hello, or someone singing a song from their heart, like Adele, but when someone doesn’t have a genuinity about them, it makes me curious as to their intent. Their walls are built before speaking; their voices are shattered by a lack of compassion; a voice becomes a mere sound, only a sound, habitual, to reflect their sense of hubris that makes me think of fungus growing from out of no where, in a strange place, and discovering that there had been a kind of secret depth in that place all-along, like unseen dew drops, mocking the naked eye. The initial unseen subject disguising, in a sense, what was to come, until the physical dimension revealed the invisible build-up. The invisible, eternal; the physical, temporal. From there, faith becomes profitable. Faith that most people are indeed full of love.

Aeschylus: “It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.”

Robert Kelly: “A word comes to mind. I write it down and see what happens. When you do this every day for 50 years, you learn how to wait.”

Are you warm? said the winter ground to the hibernating animals. No answer. No sound, except those of the crisp rustling leaves.

Stan Brakhage: “‘Polis is’ said Charles Olson, having found the archeological root of the word-end (thus beginning) of, say, ‘metropolis,’ etc. 'Police is a clear etymological derivative of ‘polis.’” ... The Police, then, are the public eyes; and they are, thus, expected to be Specialists of that ability-to-respond which most of the rest of the society has lost all Metro sense-of.” [Ha, too bad Stan didn’t live to see what's going on in this day-and-age.]

I read a quote wrong, and from that sprouted a new thing. I love it when this occurs. This is what came out of it: “I've bruised the carpet again,” but that wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was, “I’m bruising the walls,” but I realized that bruising the carpet sounded much better, since carpet is designed for pressing. The word “bruising” came out of skimming over “brushing” too quickly. Am I the only one who thinks of random questions? For instance, a question like the following came to mind just this morning: “After Francesca Woodman committed suicide, who took in her cat?” Her parents? A friend? Did the cat know--at the moment Francesca’s body pulverized the ground, death’s shadows surrounding the scene--that she had died that very moment? One would be surprised at what animals know; how, in some strange way, their emotions are attached to ours, like unending veins, nerves, brain stems. My uncle tells a story about his sister (my aunt, of course) who was living in Germany with her then husband who was stationed in Berlin back in the ’80s. Their dog wasn’t taken with them to Germany, so it was left for various family members to take care of while they were away. While my aunt was in the hospital, about to have the baby, my uncle said that one late night, as their dog stayed in his room that night (and most every night), he was awoken by the dog’s sudden, random howling. Turns out, the EXACT time that the dog started howling was when my aunt was giving birth in a hospital, some 4600 miles away.

The self, lost in selves, distracted,
leaving a piece of the Unreal You
with someone that sees the Real.

painting by Pavel Tchelitchew

Eduard Wiiralt, Heads, 1926

There are times when I am all over the place in my mind that I just can’t stay put for long, without being distracted by other thoughts that thrill me, thrilling me to the point of moving on from one beautiful thing to another. It’s as if at times I were transfigured, turning into a ricochet, and in the oneness of my body I remain as one, but in the vast openness of the expanding universe of my mind, I am in several different places at once.

Robert Louis Stevenson: “...any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly favored, that we can pass a few hours agreeably.”

Conrad Aiken: “sharply we flower in this foul farewell”

In response to Gary Snyder's “How Poetry Comes To Me” (“It comes blundering over the / Boulders at night, it stays / Frightened outside the / Range of my campfire / I go to meet it at the / Edge of the light”), my own thoughts on How Photography Comes To Me:

It comes blundering over the horizon in shadowy angling, every possible light to trap, as if numbered like a limited edition. Some days, I go to it, and like a stumbling child attempting to walk, to mimic those enormous imposing adults, I find a new spark in the dark, slain again by the shutter-eye’s blink, as if to tease the scene, compressing it into time, like freshly compacted clay in the hands of the sculptor.

Cecil Taylor: “each note . . . a continent, a world in itself.”

Pound: “In the light of light is the virtù.”

*

A poem, a farewell, to a former love:

THE GREEN LAWN OF THE COURTHOUSE SQUARE

As our hands were shaking near raw
in mythological in-action as we held one another
on the bright green lawn of a courthouse square

in the cool, pouring rain (behind that mocking sky:
a big blue empty sea), we both knew
that we had been taken to the furthermost limits;

mutual separation was my heart’s near doom—
an atrocity of the dismemberment of my loins
that resembled scraps of metal across an

inflamed, asphyxiated landscape. Our anatomies
had already begun to pre-drown the earth with our
longings, like nature’s decay—not ignorant

of our names nor our human shapes—that signified
limpness in our precious limbs like broken trophies.
Some time, many days later, I re-visited that once

poignant locale—still as poignant as before—on the
green lawn of the courthouse square. I stood within
that enterprise where our bodies had been fastened,

soaking up the remnants, preserving what
still confirms a memory, as if like pressed leaves
upon my heart; our voices now like faint whispers

speaking underneath a wilted rose.

*

Poem:

     the slow transition
of you & me

O, Leak to my lips
into my lips

Sun like flaming corn
School buses to the groins
of the air
        Public school
systems
are like a McDonald’s
to the shin    stomach wanting
to cry again
much to the consumer's chagrin

FLESH     the old music
makes me want to weep
in a car
         riding with attendees
for betrayed blues
as if one were crying one’s eyes away
in a bar

those that dig for gold
that gold-dig without shame
that want me to talk with them
about their problems
for what gain?

*

Written after my cat obtained an eye injury, which broke my heart, entirely:

Weight comes, falls away from the body. What pains you like a combination of explosions in the belly, daubed nuclear, clear hearing of weeping at night, as joy comes in the morning. Faith daubs away darkness, Light peeling away the chaos without wry eye, joy feels like toys in the hands of children—furry kittens with dreams of capturing the sputtering fly. Innocence of animals like lightning put on alert, stops to behold the light within me that is brighter than the sun. I cannot question why I was reverse-engineeredby Yahweh—how my eyes of a once MISunderstanding were enlightened, were decoded with a precision of eye-lash thin seconds to accept the falling scales from my eyes, like corrective lenses covering me.(Good news: Cat's eye healed!)

*

The breath of the future is knowing that the next morning a bird will sing, as if birds open their mouths to inhale sunrays to get that much closer to God, the tender place of the chest within.

Or: Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky (Emily Dickinson).

From Curiosities of Literature (1807): “Why should we not erect an asylum for venerable genius, as we do for the brave and the helpless part of our citizens? It might be inscribed a Hospital for Incurables!”

Mark Storey: “No wonder Southey could laugh when, having written fifty stanzas about the forthcoming royal wedding, he heard that the engagement had been called off.”

Jack Spicer: “Let me chop apart / With my bare hands / This blurred forest.”

Sometimes cameras make me nervous. I feel overwhelmed, like an insect in a glass jar, frozen, expecting nothing. In photography, does a moment in time become an image, or is the image already there, dangling like a prize, to be taken? This should be a one sentence answer.  Maybe I should be playing a piccolo, everyone’s noses are like Pinnochio’s, no? Not everyone, but many. Gwendolyn MacEwen once wrote: “...for this cold impersonal dawn was for me another kind of darkness, a new and secret form of night.” There's something quite poetic about hearing a train off in the distance, particularly during the night hours. It’s like audible film-noir, leaving a mental fragrance.

Eduard Wiiralt, ca. 1926–34, from the private collection of Juhani Komulainen,
part of a 2009 exhibit

 

  

Fragments & Buxus

 

HIM, Fred Tomaselli

W.H. Auden: “words have no words for words that are not true.” 

E. Jabes: “In the middle of words is the void through which they escape.”  

How painful my heart ticks itself through every desolate road I’ve crossed. Heart, you beat through my chest with the esteem of a locomotive.  

The word for “spirit” in Hebrew is the same as the word “wind.” Lovely. 

I always imagine myself in various places, in various periods of time, in various weather patterns, and just the other evening I imagined myself at night filling a water gun full of honey and aiming it towards the moon, already yellow on the horizon (“a yellow skull”). An overwrought imagination as if from the Middle Ages. A ghost that complains of being unburied. Mozart plucking prayers from the air, sculpting them into unquiet constructions. A reason to feel human: textures of twists, silent potency, balderdash—a midcentury shape of a large scale; “the secret of modern life fore-shadowed” (Gautier) or the opposite in essence: the way “Lady of Shalott” was “half-sick of shadows”—cataracts counter-acted, running down the cheeks of the once blind woman. Re-birth’d; no sound, no screaming. A new birth where I’m born into fabric on a Nympheus print or Melilla in indigo blue and silvery gold texture. Feeling out-of-place, abnormal “in a vintage sort of way” or like a tiger shark let loose in a swimming pool full of party-seals. What, say, is easier on the eyes than keeping them closed? 

I must be in the silent minority. No effete snobs or superlicious sophisticates here! I admit to viewing “House Wives of Orange County” for a brief (painful) spell—felt like watching a Kodak commercial—felt like soaking one’s hands in dirty dish water: all of these little men running around in gray golfing attire with perky, big-breasted (silicone?) wives doing the Electric Slide through their extravagant kitchens with overly-cozy connotations. Ah, a silent minority, like winter’s white-plaster mirror; “what artists call a French gray.” A French gray eats away the evening, like serving spareribs to a pack of wolves; monstrous like disappointed husbands and wives. 

There is no such as “nothingness” (outside of space/universe, granted, for the Universe, collectively, is a Something. Our minds, like the universe, expanding). Nothingness derives from man-made philosophies. Everything is a Something. Perhaps it is simply that doubt, fear, etc. gives a means for the “idea” of nothingness? like the atheist that feels that life has little meaning and zero value? or, the idea that we are merely existing only “in the now” “in the present” and that human beings are mere flesh and bones and that, ultimately, we are to simply perish as our Complete Finality? If be the case, however, then the purpose of life is essentially insignificant and we are simply ‘being’ as, well, Beings. There are quite a-many in various communities that would have believe that the earth and humanity are the result of time, chance and energy. This, of course, means that God does not exist as a personal, infinite being. This also means that nothing is significant or absolute. If this were true, there would be no meaning to life! There would instead be only accidental mechanical functions. We were not accidents of “physical laws” but instead we were created.

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A poem: 

Squeeze the shadow—let it crouch near you.
We’re all just moving pictures passing along;
perhaps the way a child looks at a ferris wheel.
I'm a water-colored merry-go-round: my ribs,
the nexus of another breath. 

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It’s safe to say that Sherlock Holmes was never trained to be an observant and thorough as he is—never trained to find needles in haystacks, for seemingly, Sherlock Holmes is the haystack! He simply picks ‘n’ chooses as they come, at ease; what better way to attack the developments than to observe the unordinary in the ordinary and vice-versa? 

Knut Hamsun: “. . . truth telling is unselfish inwardness.” All of these people tell you what people are ‘not’ rather than informing you what they ‘are’ or can ‘become.’ “So tall and quiet like a king.” 

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Interesting ditty here:

 

“If the room is stuffy, and I therefore open a window to air it, and a burglar climbs in, it would be absurd to say, ‘Ah, now he can stay, she’s given him a right to the use of her house—for she is partially responsible for his presence there, having voluntarily done what enabled him to get in, in full knowledge that there are such things as burglars, and that burglars burgle.’ It would be still more absurd to say this if I had the bars installed outside my windows, precisely to prevent burglars from getting in, and a burglar got in only because the defect of the bars. It remains equally absurd if we imagine it is not a burglar who climbs in, but an innocent person who blunders or falls in. Again, suppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root in your carpets or upholstery. You don’t want children, so you fix up your windows with fine mesh screens, the very best you can buy. As can happen, however, and on very, very rare occasions does happen, one of the screens is defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant who now develops have a right to the use of your house? Surely not—despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows, you knowingly kept carpets and upholstered furniture, and you knew that screens were sometimes defective. Someone may argue that you are responsible for its rooting, that it does have a right to your house, because after all you could have lived out your life with bare floors and furniture, or with sealed windows and doors. But this won’t do—for by the same token anyone can avoid a pregnancy due to rape by having a hysterectomy, or anyway by never leaving home with a (reliable!) army.”

--from “Western philosophy: an anthology” by John Cottingham. 

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Oh, darling, you're such a lamb.” “Hello, sweet duchess.” One often confuses the life of a man with his art. Everyone seems to look alike when you don’t know them. You can never tell what private tragedies people have experienced, but when people start throwing salt over their left shoulder, I have to start wondering.

No inanimate object can have a personality, so is said; but, we look at a house and say that it's cheerful, gloomy, melancholy, &c. but what we're really doing is simply describing our own reactions. The human mind has been compared to the atom bomb, whose two elements, when kept apart, are perfectly harmless. So it is with the human mind.

Interesting to note that Stamps use a blend of corn dextrin (gummy substance extracted from starch) and water. It is designed to last longer on commemorative stamps. On “regular stamps” however a blend of polyvinyl acetate emulsion and dextrin are used—also added: a bit of propylene glycol, used to reduce paper curl. Interestingly, polyvinyl acetate used for stamp adhesive is the basic ingredient for bubble gum. Brilliant.  

Reb Alsem: “We live out the dream of creation, which is God’s dream. In the evening our own dreams snuggle down into it like sparrows in their nest.”

Reb Hames: “Birds of night, my dreams, explore the immense dream of the sleeping universe.”

Reb Hames: “Words are inside breath, as the earth is inside time.” 

Is it true that every woman wants to be seen in that “certain light”? Why are “manly pursuits” misconceptioned as hunting, gambling and electronic-tinged? Does Kitty Bennet really swoon at the color red? What of Henry Miller’s “Rousseaustic withdrawel from the American Dream” which he referred to as “The Air-conditioned Nightmare”? Do newspapers really lie? Radios? Are the streets the only thing that “howls with truth”? Why did everyone go gaga over military men in Jane Austen’s books? What are you willing to admit? Can a mind ‘room’ anywhere in blue? Are you eating dinners based on the colors of famous sports teams? Would you write about Majorca if you lived close-by? Do you have a small chair-fetish? Are you a moment event beyond muted punch? Is minimalism a flat elevation of charity? Wipe your hands on your pants? Your minimal hands? Your pants, dirty in light? Does light . . . overwhelm itself? Does light . . . shed tears over photographic Dark Rooms? Does the hefty circle of a bird’s eye make you think of Quaker-calm? Does are you what of? 

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Corita Kent: “Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries.” 

The awkward silence irritated him (me?), but somehow glittered in his chest (mine?); a fever that expressed itself like wordlessness of paintings.  “Bone-tired.” The mirror looking back at me; what do I reflect? Perhaps it seems me jumping from place-to-place like an Egyptian jerboa? I have realized that it would see happiness in my external composition. Indeed. The basic difficulty with certain people is that they don’t know how to cultivate their happiness. Happiness is a habit. It’s freedom! And I feel more free than a feminist raving about short hair; how long hair symbolizes, according to some, “a delicate Alice-in-Wonderland thing that undercuts the image of a strong human being.” How silly. Peace of mind! I wear it well. If one pierces “Mystery” all that flies suddenly, momentarily, becomes airless craters. Mystery possesses the unique ability to heal its wounds. There are times at night I feel swept away from the world—from all of the anger and forced liberation and disease and war and revolutionary irrationalists. There are instances, however, during the day when I am a “passion flower”; a “scarlet runner”; bright “forsythia” and “yellow jasmine.” The world, crumbling, falling like dolmens, and it seems as though animals are, at times, daydreaming about a way to escape the man-made machinery; they look directly through us while the strokes of the clock writhes into the next “second.” 

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“The evil that men does lives after them,

The good is oft interred in their bones.”

--Shakespeare, JULIUS CAESAR

ACT III, SCENE 2, LL. 80-81

Distance, the greatest place to center oneself? “The ladder urges us beyond ourselves. Hence its importance. But in a void, where do we place it?” Answer: Beyond ourselves. Perhaps it is true that we must “wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us.” Doxa? Have you really wondered why Mickey Mouse has four fingers? For a very good reason, I should say! It is like “the creation of another imagination”—sound without borders.(Damasio: “The body-minded brain.”) . . .

An image biting to see the patterns; this is both organized words—they reflect between gardens as company. Center, frisked like a bomb. I is auditorium; the pandemonium at the podium in the great heart’s flurry. I, He, of hints? Is He this sea-invented pun? I created a slow-motion for my shadow to witness it lag behind in empathy. Gradually, light shattered it back up-to-speed. 

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Yevgeny Yevtushenko (one of Russia’s most beloved poets) once said: “In Russia a poet is more than a poet.” Well, in America a poet is an Incomplete Completion. Poets with voices in the sky; a yielded wealth “could literally be walked on”—no poet is every truly “underground.” Poets only go “underground” when buried. A “grave” condition? What are these words on a journalistic-“blog” but a shipwrecked Sub-Zero? Underwater baptism of text; this page, this paragraph, like an ocean of bluestone; poems marbled to the ocean floor. Look for gold at the bottom; you will only discover . . . words . . . words in wont . . . or an opened book; unfinished yet “finished”; decrepit at first glance from the foamy surf, but onward it rises and rises for the jewel of reaching where Identity eludes us. A voice. You lose it to a whisper, like a ship sailing pas a well-lit lighthouse; a voice heard in a seagull’s throat. Listen. We are drained into the seas; dark are their maps. The seas inhale, laugh outloud at Man’s attempts to reach the bottom of the deepest summits. If I were poems, you would sink into every word like a speculation. Parallel’d hexagrams glisten with foreknowledge. I swell in the winds of your every breath.  

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from “Lavish Absence”: “In ‘Mirror and Scarf,’ one of my favorite chapters in The Book of Yukel, the closeness of sound in the two title words, miroir and mouchoir, sparks a breathtaking meditation on the face as reflection rather than flesh. In English, it is less convincing that “Mardohai Simhon claimed the scarf he wore around his neck was a mirror” until, at Simhon’s death, a large scar is discovered under the scarf. Reflection always comes back to a wound. It both has its origin, in a wound and circles it’s like a scarf-mirror.”

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Kathe Kollwitz self portrait (1898) reminds me of This.  

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Reb Alphandery: “Our dreams extend us.”  Are we, therefore, extended by the remembrance of a dream? or, are we extended every time that we wake from sleep? I suppose Sleep, itself, is a kind of extension; a necessary extension, just as the electrolytes in our foods are necessary extensions for keeping our hearts beating.  

Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is beyond brilliant, like the hyper-metamorphosis of a blister beetle. 

About the deerfly: “all species are annoying to man.”  

Film about Francesca Woodman Here.  
 

Looking at photos looking back at me thinking that photos think that I, too, am a photo. Photographs are wrinkles in time. When our eyes look upon them, we smooth out their wrinkles. Separating the infinite from. As with material objects, lusts, etc. being one’s “god,” I suppose Edmond Jabes’s “god” was The Book, or books in general perhaps. A shutter-cap widens the camera’s eye. Man created the camera’s eye. God created man’s eye.  

The other evening, while my stomach’s geography rumbled like a thousand bison over the land, with limited I strolled into a local dollar store to purchase a bottle of Acetaminophen. I looked around for a moment, noticing as always that another holiday had come early, forced onto civilization; commercialism’s angry beast snarling and drooling at the mouth. Easter quickly approaching—“I wonder if I could locate candy for fifty cents?”—A young blonde no more than twenty looked at me twice, greeted me, as she unraveled floral flowers from boxes. I walked down an aisle looking for the medicine section, as so, drifting past a man talking on a cell phone who I heard say as I walked by: “So the flu actually comes from a bug?” I proceeded to search out the proper aisle, hearing friction between a Guardian and a mentally-challenged child, confining myself to the poignant cries. A petite red-headed woman smiled at me, only glazing over my aura briefly, obviously too engrossed to shop or think of the lovely conversation she had perhaps recently had which scuttled her balloon, as if perhaps patching up a relationship before it hit rock-bottom; for, granted, who dare deserves to be sent to be without supper? Cryptic possibilities have always laminated my mental epilogue; my undissolvable interest in stretching the tendon of every moment, edifying my curiosities, steeped in near absolution. 

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A poem I wrote recently: 

As spring peeks out its blossomed snout

   And winters goes dashing about,

The warmth above unfreezes the doves

   And the flowers erupt in a shout!



If I want a house warming gift, I’ll just let the windows up in the dog-days of summer. 

The best part of waking up . . . is breath in my lungs.   

Field Guides, Fred Tomaselli  

(photo collage, gouache, acrylic, and resin on wood)

Like Statues With Aching Joints

Octopus, Graham Sutherland 

                                                       As words separate, I draw close
                                                                          as words draw near, I fall apart.

                                                                                                      --Murat Nemet-Nejat

 

Some time ago, my heart boiling over with some unspeakable ringing; a tolling of which no words could describe, this tiny poem erupted from me: 

 

Often I feel like a walnut tree
     on some beautiful street
And my ink is staining the sidewalk.

 

. . . and how perfect, I thought!  As René Char once said: “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions”. . . and writing is often like another limb; taking time to physically write or type what your heart speaks onto a canvas of white. Vila-Matas once wrote: “it suddenly occurred to me that in fact more than ninety-nine per cent of humanity prefer . . . not to write.” (Also, appropriate: Mark Twain: “When the nub was sprung, the assemblage let go with a horse-laugh.”) Picchio, [on not writing]: “Experimental laziness. Post-human sloth. Time out for beastliness.” M. Duras: “To write is also not to speak . . . It is to howl noiselessly.” And, delightfully, Baudelaire: “the real hero is he who keeps himself amused.” (with writing, perhaps?)

The other morning, standing in the backyard, wondering what eyes distressed my existence as I statuesqued my best vertical distinction (“My nervous relax as I tell it.”), while a dog (Sadie is her name) barked her lungs out into the unseasonably warm February air, a black Nymphalis antiopa (mourning cloak [often confused with “morning” so is said]) presented its presence to my delectable retinas, and I thought: the completest sentence of all is a butterfly flying past one's ears, so close that one's ear-follicles are played like musical-keys by the Flying Blur-Flutter's mere wing-flaps (silk handkerchiefs thrown into the sky, carried with the breeze). Thoreau would have/must have swelled with the intensest admiration as I--no solemnity nor a sad composure--I thank Yahweh for these treasures. Speaking of mourning, or morning, I was begot during the morning hours. 

*

Richard of Saint-Victor: “The outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible.”

Where O Where to find a speech therapist for the eyes! When seeing eyes in distress, in a fit of tragic annihilating-charging, it's as if I could pull pieces of whalebone from the individual's retinas. Ah, on two sides of the same glass, aiming a gesture at me, unawares, or aware all-the-while? We often take the choicest bits with a less-than-promising theme. It is the way certain critics hand out their Death Notices. Over-look the homespun hippie garb. One with one's icy reception, like our grim state of the union. 

Thinking long summer thoughts. 

Overheard: “. . . a firefighter that couldn't keep fighting because of tightness of chest. Depletion.” I picture how one must picture another; solidifications of which to uncrack codes--entire maps pulled by sudden force of looming gestures, like how (ick!) Marx said the automobile is the opium of the people: no, nah, no! the opium of the people are the people themselves. 

*

Nervous energy only exists for artists; a momentous breakthrough. Lend me your ears: a respiration to snatch Purpose from the trolley wheels of my point-blank mistaken facts--for murmurs of suggestion. I see ears not opened; open mouths undergoing other chords; the fretting, the tongue, like a shutter, like winter jackets flapping in a warm tree. The other evening, in a book store, an elderly couple sat in the cafe, snatched by their daily coffee, so she said. I overheard them speaking of (or seemed to be, at first) Norwegian composers. I spoke with a sudden influx, a jumbled reflection: “Did you say that he's [referring to her husband] Norwegian?” We talked and talked: my desire to listen and learn from those 80 and 82 year-old mouths still remains with me: little details of departure. 

A day after the lunar eclipse of December 12, 2010, I wrote: Clouds obscured the moon last night. I missed the eclipse that was said to be the first time since the Salem Witch Trials did this dark eyelid blink upon the moon in December. I stood under the sky, briefly, like some beast of the field stopping to listen to a despairing howl across the distance, looking up with Concordes flying out of my eyes; felt wrong-headed and without inspiration. For how often the moon has been brutalized in the sight of humanity's folly; how often has a halo given the curiosity of Man's embrace; how often Man has demanded the spread of moon-worship and insinuating its “powers” and “energy.” Grandiose, sensual, mystical: what better to see the moon hid behind thick clouds on the day it had gained worldwide attention! In another place, the moon blushed, naked in a clear sky, looking for a celestial grotto to slip into, hiding in the eternal blackness of the background, as it did four-hundred years earlier, as suspicion inhabited the English lands. 

A Play without dramatis personae is like wind without wear.

One fine day, I had a strange thought, which arose upon my so suddenly amidst a cold, wintry day.  I envisioned my mother wearing a wimple (secured) in the seventeenth century before I was conceived. In like manner, I envisioned my father as Philip IV on horseback (see Velasquez's painting); two figures and a “still life,” achieving an impression of reality, like Velasquez's bodegóns--an atmosphere of Seville, or like The Cook from 1618 where a woman, holding an egg in her left hand and a wooden spoon in her right, looks at the young boy who appears to be letting her words “go in one ear and out the other.” I imagined her head turning to her left, staring at me with those piercing eyes, smiling; her left arm rising and thus throwing that egg out of the painting and into my face; shell-cracklings, white yellow, oozing down my nose and overflowing over my lips. I would obviously choose not to wipe it away. I would merely stare superbly, as if a painting could fill one with calumny, like a lightning bolt that blows fuses. I envisioned my mother wearing a series of tapestries after my birth (my father still on horseback); my mother, Juliet-like, rushing across a field of flowers to take in the decor of their detail, their aromatic roundup. Under her eyes, a tearful florist; a trickle. After having snapped out of this vision, re-appearing back to Reality, I had thought of how “some people try new things because they're new” and how one shall say, “I don't! I just think about them first.” And do all mothers die only briefly? My mother enjoys cleaning house; dislikes loud voices behind her in a restaurant; enjoys hearing the harmonies of an all-boys' choir'; enjoys shades of blue; dislikes cooking and being read to; likes board games and Search-a-Word puzzles; wants to visit Denver; will not fly on an airplane; holds hot French fries out of the windows or in front of the air-conditioner vent to "cool them off.” Perhaps this text now become too modern? As you are reading this, whomever you are, what are you surrounded by? Are you surrounding by pizza and corporate coffee? O, I share your woes and your loves. “It comes with being alive.” I share your disillusionments or departures. Can you unravel the mysteries of the Anonymous? Is your father wearing an Inverness cape? Is light flowing from his face? Is your mother in a blue-funk phase? Does she enjoy Mississippi Pecan Pie and Chocolate cheesecake? The fact of the matter is this . . . The splattered egg that clogged my face entered also into my eyes . . .“in one ear and out the other.” Strong. Strong as an old-age addiction of taking things apart and then putting them back together again. A scene from a film yet created: Spin Meisters dip their hands into grab-bags, pull out wretched tar.  One thing that I must do is dye a cow purple. I wouldn't walk a mile for a camel, but I'd ride camels for miles like a Magi. 

Consider Cuban corruption: If one is caught with an unlicensed rifle, you are liable to be executed.

  

“What is the point-of-view of the enemy?”

A mountain spider that catches nothing in its web. My roundabout examination of the night, earlier, was like a torn chink in another dimension. To be able to hear from beginning to end.

                                 Ear 

      beyond ear.  Eye 

                             beyond eye. 

Joining G-d in the Eternal Absolute. 

*

I remember how her face was the final bloom that I seemingly exhaled from. Replica of a remote place. We were meadow mice in some unimaginable pathway, in serene meadows intertangled between showers of petals, struck from mountain flowers (pink     orange    yellow       every color        you name it). And then one day it all became squeezed and dissolved; wholly flung like pine needles lying thick and strange on a stretch as far as one's eyes allow. Our dry arroyo (chalk scrawls) that once were oceans       oceans       Oceans on top of oceans. Now, winds howl through open space. She became quite an unfamiliar scorpion; curled tail of foul malice, poisoning the soil of our golden walk. A mass emptiness possessed me. A rattle of stones from morning earth. My heart, thrust through the cold starlight of space. 

* 

When the music plays loudly--the only sounds around--I oft feel shrouded in whispers. What could lift sand and ask who started the first fire? What were their names? Bone by bone, skull by skull, I do not seek an answer. The indefinable is a hollow, wild energy. Unless, of course, one is James Mason, or a deer nuzzling a fawn on a fresh mountain slope. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter anyhow. Anyhow, when the cat looks suspiciously into the open air as if it has heard something, seen something that I would not right away, I immediately think someone is breaking in, or has already broken in. The cat walks away. Will she die first? I hope that this music satisfies the burglar's ears. I am not paranoid, nor am I a worrisome person, but I am only human, yes, and often I am a grinding pebble in my humanly torrent. I wait in silence for a sign. I go and scan the domain. I open the door and watch as my icy breath floats through the noble winds of a wintry midnight. 

* 

LIGHT. Before my birth, I could have reached out to touch the light. Tiny veriest shadows illuminate truths if one understands the tempos of light. In the womb by "chemical chance" or "anti-chance"? The Euphrates River is drying up. Drying, twisting, tightening, like a twist-grip throttle upon the globe, increasing. Prophesied stability grows. Visibility wetting the lips of the Future's posture. I was in my mother's womb. Yahweh breathed me into existence. I sit here in silence. In awe. Words dissipate before arriving to my tongue. 

Standing Figure, Graham Sutherland