Preface

If you were to devote only one time to read 
a piece of Hegel's, take the Preface: it may be
the actual body of what he may have meant: how 
always it appears in the beginning of any book
yet, not the first thing to be written.
What he found 
was a horizon where conflicts settle themselves 
to remain settled as conflicts. A horizon 
we keep moving towards, in spite ourselves, 
we cannot ever reach. He died, the book 
unfinished. Might as well be. 

(no essays) a long goodbye 4

In time, I will give in, finally
Into the overwhelming lake of words
Into the river of words flowing
Into sea, and eventually
Into the ocean of forgetfulness.

The reader (the world) (you) becomes 
Finally my faceless intimate friend
Sitting beside me on the cliff
Overlooking mists of distance,
Pasts, dreams, futures... our feet

Dangling on the edge and the sky
Forever with a silver still sun.
And I will tell in the way my father
Once told of his childhood stories,
My own childhood, misty with disuse

And untelling, kept too long in a room
Within a room, within a room barred
By hardwood door, by steel door, 
By brick wall meant as much to conceal
As to say, "Move on. It is done here."

Beside the wall, sometimes a table.
On the table, flowers from the yard.
By the flowers, tea.
Sometimes, beside the wall, a bed.
I knock on the wall. And sometimes

Tell a memory in that exact way
Telling fails to tell all the details:
Exact hue of the afternoon, exact
Feeling of the felt at the bottom
Of a chess piece I was playing,

Learning consequences and consequences
Long before a single move is made.
How did my own father failed to see?
He taught me the game. "Pensar. 
Pensar." Can a child see futures

When a decision is made? I inherited
Many things from my father, I'm afraid.
Including the older face on the mirror.
The same face my lovers see 
At night, in the morning, when I think

I am alone, placing palms on the wall 
Holding the flood of words into 
Becoming few and fewer still.  

this morning

Is it the certainty 
of loss that keeps us
going? That certain
kind of lack

kind of incompleteness
completes us. 

For what is "fullness"
and "perfection" 
in utter satisfaction?
But unsatisfactory.

Our lives are completed
by a sense of incomplete.
Perfection 
because imperfect. 

Else, a life dormant.
A life inert. 

So continuously we sing
memories of wounds.
Old old scars 
never heals. 

Or we pause on moments
perfect like this:
early morning sun 
through curtains to 
the floor, dog beside, 
detection book on lap, 
earl grey tea like new 
beginning, local bread 
and feta, some birds. 
A love letter
written to be given
sometime in the future.

Which will be 
not very long from now. 
As I anticipate 
the news anytime, 
sending me to another
place away
from here. 

crossings

 

Comes the bird
touching water
shore of another 
same world.

right across

exes and whys

The programmer I am working with now
knows the landscape and language
I only have the vaguest idea about.
Her algorithmic words she translates
meeting on a plane with my verse 
in an art collaboration we call mad.
On her 13-inch MacAir, 
black on violet Queer. I wonder about
the prompt for such declaration or
the necessity for staking such name.
Or any name for that matter, names
being able and unable to define
at the same time. I understand and not
many familiar names people call
themselves to make more human.
An agender, for instance, refuses any
line, that mark, which maps shapes,
forms, volume, movement, spaces.
The project we are working on
brings abstract spaces into a real.
Something one can hold onto,
participate in. How so many things
I do not fully understand, except,
as the collaboration's theme goes,
we are all children of Eve.

world moving

1
When we lie down seeing the sky, 
we may as well be standing 
from another angle; the sky is sea foam.
Such ways the world can be

seen, different eyes: punto de vista.

2
The call, sooner than expected, arrived
yesterday; half the request granted.
What it meant we knew from the beginning.
In the beginning, we knew 

different and the same: punto de vista.

sezon deszczowy

I bought cigarettes at a corner store because 
it was late because I wanted to wait awhile longer 
till (maybe) she'll come around because her messages 
had said situations because her new lover left 
and her old meddled and her father half a world away
are simultaneously happening into a bad place 

because in nearly seven years since we met at Gerry's 
she had not talked about bad places except very briefly 
and in passing the time her mother passed on 
and she did not return home and I did not ask because 
she did not tell why because once she said who wants to 

listen about bad places because people care about funny 
and she had worked herself funny because she did
not want to tell about lonely because it was clear because 
it need not need any telling because it was bright as day 
the alcohol and the series of lovers because she insisted

staying in this country because when i asked why there was 
no clear answer because something was lost or someone was 
because she was slurring when she called 
describing how to move the night because she was still 
in transit but wanted drinks because I've taken rain checks 

because our hours rarely meet because she comes when 
she comes and who else was. 
I sent her a message saying I was

coming over because there was really no need for her to bother 
bringing the buckwheat and the wines to my place when I could 
because it was always easier for me to leave than for me to ask 
her to because hours could get so late like the time it was already
morning and my head had become a blast because she comes 

when she comes because I wanted none of it because we've known 
each other seven years now because it had always been good 
distance because there were bad places that need not telling 
because they were bright and clear because it was always

in keeping of spaces she remained quiet while I waited 
outside her door this rainy evening in this rain-est season of the year 
because it was (always) proper to wait for a woman's invitation 
to be let in because no matter the bad places described by phone 
into an invitation to share a certain loss because her door

never opened after knocking and five cigarettes one after another 
because the weathermen predicted rain because she did not stay 
sober enough for an umbrella, story, or train.

entering oceans

He said he would like to farm one day, spend 
the remaining of his life bearing with the land.
This man I admire so much for kindness
my own dark heart slows its pace.

It has been nearly a decade now since last
we spoke. I continue to echo his words,
writing is word made flesh.
Perhaps, after all, I've heeded the calling

no matter in another form. Quiet mornings
by the window such as this, I think it is
the lonely sailing that I feel. At seventy

I would like to stay very close to the sea,
see all the time the horizon all will cross
on the given day.














photo by J.Quintos

what can be shared

What can be shared but what I can tell you and you, me
The burden words have to carry, a weight in universe
To ferry across the tide of nothing, myself to you and you to me
No matter the truth it battens: no such thing that matter
Truly can be shared. For what is love, but two lonelinesses
holding hands in the dark.












after J.Garcia

bamboo wind chime

It hangs now on the doorstep,
this bamboo wind chime with wind
making sounds of water.

It makes a different pottering 
from the rain taking its slow time
this morning.  There is enough

natural light for a day the colour
of clouded glass.  We do 
not take a walk.  We take

patience and leaves of paper 
rubble we call life.  Or the idea of it:
a meeting under a tree,

an afternoon tea, a conversation
like you and I have
all the time in the world.

The Pacific

I am reading Thomas Centolella         a thin book of quiet         size only slightly larger than my palms         that hold in the same way         many things unsaid between bridges of things mundane         Yesterday         I had new eyeglasses to see more clearly and I bought                 her a ring         feeling not for the first time         Certainty         Arriving home         the little dog sick and a next-day appointment with the vet I hope we will not need         It rained heavily last night         sun shining briefly this morning         sweet         for the local roses someone from the office gave         for the garden I will have more time         next week while everyone else in this Christmas country         I hope to cross a sea         an ocean         with her to an island of migrating flocks         In the meantime there is an ocean's love         a happenstance at the exact same time Thomas Centolella writes The Pacific.



The Pacific



A thought has been rising and falling
in the grayness of the season, 
like a freighter in heavy fog,
appearing and disappearing:
How is it we never tire of dreaming
we can be autonomous as the sea?
Or be among the swimmers
holding their own against the undertow?
And the body surfers encourage us,
the way they submit to the powerful flux
and are buoyant, transported
by what could just as easily destroy them.

I keep thinking of that woman in Godard's
Two Or Three Things I Know About Her.
Real love, she said, leaves us changed afterwards.
What happens after that, she didn't say.
I remember you were grateful, as so many are
given the chance to move on to something better.
Fog lifting, the tide comes voluptuous as a great love,
and tastes bitter, like what comes after.
Stunning turbulence.  Like a brilliant smile
that keeps edging closer, and from which
I edge away.

The Patience of Ordinary Things

The Patience of Ordinary Things
by Pat Schneider

 

It is kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thnking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

about Now

Life has been quiet lately.  The writing too, quiet.  And it must have been months now since I   last sat and truly patiently waited for what must come to come and be written.  I wanted, needed, to go for another residency, a long stretch of timelessness to be able to listen to write.  The noise of paperwork from the university and the field has kept me farther and farther away, to a kind of tone-deafness...

After Chai's Photo

There is a photo of you eyes closed, on grass.
Neatly labeled "five minutes of sun."

The patch of grass could be anywhere
Here at the front yard, or back

Five yards or a kilometre away.
Sometimes it ceases to matter.

Sometimes does.  The photo is tagged
Oslo, Norway.  A world apart, also

Forgetfulness and consciousness away.
Your cat-lover friend who takes the photo

Hides behind the lens and bites
Into an apple.  And does not say.

what happened to icarus

ICARUS


Only the feathers floating around the hat
Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.

“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked,
uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?

And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.
He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,

Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.




~ Edward Field

edit

write drunk with passion, edit sober.  how often is this told.  to the beginners, this is still something new. when does a stone turn? when does a thing become old from being once new?

and how many times do we have to edit ourselves?  revise and revise to make something new.  out from the old.  consider a lizard shedding skin.  an animal from an egg, evolving.  everything always

turning gradually into something else.  although: sometimes it is not always the new that works.  grandmothers say if it's not broken, why fix it?  jim said a poem is only really done 

once you've given up on it.  not a surprise to this day he keeps revising and revising.  and he stops sometimes in the middle of conversations to think.  no one knows.  some may have lost count 

after all the revising.  simultaneous revisions, all.  the young ones tire of hearing the same old.  lines.  always moving for new.  but who is keeping tabs?  and does it even matter  given 

we are a community of forgetful.  see how everything repeats itself.  yesterday, in a discussion weaving literature and history, do you see a pattern? repetition in different forms. several 

editions.  all that changes:  our positions.  places and decks from where we view the stars.  see how ursula once wrote a story six different times, in six different versions of worlds existing 

as we must do now.  under this particular sky.  why not write a poem then about rebirth?because haven't we all been told:  you and i, stardust.  and if there really is a constant amount 

of energy in the universe, then at some point of these all, you and i must have had shared the same soul.  how we must have drunk ourselves in passion.  then we edit ourselves sober.

other lives and finally

Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of "Old Battersea Bridge."
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed

anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here when I say "I never want to be without you,"
somewhere else I am saying
"I never want to be without you again." And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

 


Bob Hicok

remains of the beginning of day

3 slices of toast
3 slices of ripe papaya
2 kinds of cheese
half a bottle of lemon concentrate
coffee, dregs
some thin slices of carrots
half a glass of water
two dogs, pretending to go back to sleep
the quiet of the morning
faint imaginary sounds of birds
sound of a leaving plane
occasional sound of rain drop on some roof
a faraway dog bark