the body under light of day II

Restraint.  One of the first things taught
one of the most enduring things practiced:

never speak too loud, or talk too fast
or eat too much, or want too much.
A golden mean for everything.

In poetry, the practice is not speaking
what you mean to say.  To say it 
in another way.  To let you sense

want and desire, need and a kind of
emptiness to be filled, but does not
speak of it under the light of day.

talking about truth

for G. Lloren



Thursday on a week that has the weight of years
you leave the office past seven.
Outside, the dark says both 
the day is old and the night young.
The crisp breeze blows the leaves a promise.

At the convention last night
everyone wrangled
about the word you summoned
afraid of its presence 
in midst of a tagline.

The word was a beast
giant and a phosphorescent green
reptilian and curled, 
legged and tailed.
"Too spiritual," someone said.

"Too dragooning," another said.
They all tried to poke it away.

You hail a cab and look for coffee
there are bills to pay.
And you are now past forty.
How the strange beast, last night
was queried by fools. 

"Is it sectarian?" someone asked.
"Measurable?" asked another.
"Vendible?"
"And does it fly?"

truskawkowy

there may be a sense of comfort from uncertainty.  if the weather permits.  i ran this morning and collected thoughts along the way, had they been pebbles i wouldn't have made it, even a block.  maybe it is better to say 

i plucked thoughts along the way.  the weather was gray with a bite in the breeze.  the sky was slate.  a few days ago there had a been a strong quake that broke down hundreds-year-old churches.  not counting the real houses of the living.  

i went to see a part of the city and the traces of earth-moving.  she recalled the sound of glass straining on the 19th floor, and the narrow escape staircases swaying.  the quick escalator 

couldn't move.  a crippled woman had to be carried through the flights.  still there were cars on the streets.  in another place, there were no more bridges.  in yet another, tons of rain.  and flood.  isn't it too easy to say 

all of these are a reckoning?  the cab driver said calmly.  there was a cross on his dashboard.  his radio airs an advertisement for floorwax.  in between the spaces of every so few hours 

were aftershocks.  the national media feasted for sympathy.  but in the meantime, in some places, there was talk on the importance of mayonnaise despite a protein living.  a well-taught 

young conservationist pointed how egg yolks were used to build the heritage churches.  this, of course, was all well-known.  still, every body went on living.  and in a pad, a cheese and wine party with cold cuts.  

a german who was stranded in hongkong arrived exhausted in the country.  and wondered why the people play mournful love songs.  some prefer to take photos of themselves.

i looked from a high point at the capital and thought of bubbles.  random and uncertainty.  like a child who died at four.  or a dog born from a stray to be a stray to die unloved and starved.  a body without burial on a public high way.

sometimes this country makes me very sad.  and while a good number debate about the future, i return with my luggage and kept fever.  she gives me medicine for colds, which i refuse, preferring water and rest.

how a friend is so happy to give a sachet.  From home, she says, reading aloud the ingredients.  skrobia, regulator kwasowości: kwas cytrynowy, 1,1% sok z limonki (syrop glukozowy, koncentrat soku z limonki), ekstrakt z czarnej marchwi i hibiskusa, aromat, substancja wzbogacająca: witamina C, sól, barwnik: annato.  but there is no truskawkowy, she says, pointing at the strawberries as advertised on the cover.

a piece of thought in motion

in the middle of writing a post on the concept of line as ****, IT dawned: the ground concept on which to build the reading on ***.  for some months now, the enthusiasm to write about this series has been hibernating; but, until now, there was no particular seed with which to germinate the entire articulation.  also, there were, and still are, too many things on the calendar.  too many projects and legwork necessary.  the near-unbelievable paperwork and the meetings and post-conferences, including the working-dinners over which the more important and sensitive matters are discussed while couched in the trivial act of eating.  i want to mention this concept of the line right now (such is my excitement), but one must not get ahead of things.  i am looking at the clock---as i have the habit of removing my wristwatch, like keeping the phone away, when i intend to have a "breather"---and it says two hours before the need to leave for work.  today, as wednesdays should've been, would have been a writing day; except, for weeks now there has been no writing days.  for instance, two meetings are scheduled this afternoon...i wish to write again through hours that seem to stretch the day and the sunlight; but it is difficult to sit down and keep still to call the thoughts into form, into a piece of infinity entry, in the middle of a deluge.  
 

writing for children

photo taken of a neighbor's wall a few months ago:  bright day at sea with a school of fish, a pink shark, and happy mermaid.

how do we tell our children about the world?

about its being a Neither place.  about the world-at-large only as good as our-world-within can get: the starry heaven above, the moral law within.

pink sharks do not and do exist. 
so do mermaids.  the happy ones.  those who do not  keep on singing about lost loves.

how do we tell our children about the world?
that it is only as beautiful as we will it to be so.

a temple of dragons

The red temple of dragons sits atop the city.  Above the known residences of the elite overlooking the city that sprawls itself like a net for all the working middle; that spreads itself thinner as it goes farther from the Uptown and closer to where the port-less edges.

T, though no longer as militant, and I couldn't help "reading" the landscape while climbing up the red stairways of the red-pillared temple:  how myths were, or have become, religion; how a culture is strong and vulnerable, how art is, how economy is.  No lengthy discussions; only many fragmented ideas.  Some photographs.  We tried de-constructing the temple:  turning it into the highest temple of the folk Sky heavens:  Agyo's; or the dragons, turning real, the last protectors of the temple under siege.  We've had had more conversations on culture and the comic book (as cultural by-product) the past forty-eight hours.  

Inside the temple, a kowtow.  And the scent of incense.

For a moment, at high noon, at the foot of the stairs before leaving, T mentioned a word I took for dusk.  

We went to another temple, a coral-stone church; and then another of the most recent architecture, a hundred white walls like dominoes on top of a land that used to be sea; all in two hours. Then it was time to send off T to the airport, to the parallel universe I once had been.

Along the way, watching from the window the road edge curves and the stiff street light posts, I realized I liked lines.  Literal, visual, two-dimensional lines: the way they are drawn against a backdrop of negative space.  "Espasyo," T said.  

The sky was so clear, it was white and cloudless.  Marching the beginning of summer.


On my way home, the dusk in the city was a gradation of the lightest  yellow, to cyan, to a sober dark blue.  No tinge of red.  A waxing moon was rising, thin and white like a clipped nail.   

time keeping

 there is a kind of peace in running and in being with one's dog.  in spite of all the humidity one tries but cannot avoid.  and later, in the high of noon when every thing is so bright it hurts the eyes.  and every thing else is lazy, and balmy, and not wanting to move.  good to sit on the couch by the window with a glass of water.

(and come friday, a performance for women's month.)


(come saturday, the beginning of the graduate school trimester.)

(tuesday, T to fly over and talk about graphic illustration.)
     

but in the mean time, here.  zagajewski in his so many things breathing in between the said.  the consciousness and the sense of present-ness a construction from memory.  lewyka, the comic(?) banality of the tangible  where "[c]urls of apple peel slide off the table on to the carpet, where they are trodden into a fragrant mush."