waking up with no memory

It is the entanglements after. If there are any.
Most of the time, it is best

when both know it is nothing else. But that
spur of the moment--

muscles, adrenaline, the quickening of beats
towards cosmic release

before returning to the exhaustion of bodies 
and what is it that has always been there: our

own tired places in a slow and spinning world. 
It has been a long, long time

since.
Never quite losing sobriety facing passion.

Always steady to take the long drives 
and decide at least three steps ahead, as though

still playing chess with whoever it is across.
On better days,

I think myself in transit on a lucid boat
crossing an ocean called Weather&Time.

There has got to be a return or an arrival
somehow, although at the moment

my thoughts are only as simple 
as has she thought of me today.

do you sail?

The past few weeks I have been thinking of rowing.
There are two rivers nearby, large 
at this time of the year. 
There is much need to release and attempt to draw 
out into a clear line what has been repeatedly said.

I have stopped taking walks and will have to resume.
I no longer have my dogs.
I sleep and dream and wake up as though 
I haven't slept at all.

St. Patrick's may be a day with a reason.
Maybe one day we will happen to meet, you whiskey 
on hand, me, on the rocks.
And because I do not believe in therapists, 
I wrestle with own shadows,

Fill up the to-do list and bed with heaviness.
Sometimes the day begins with a clear mind
which means nothing and I come down to make tea,
which means coming through a number of doors 
that entering or exiting becomes uncertain.

sitting on the steps, leaving on a bike, at 10

There is a plausible reason why
women (may) tend to believe it is
they who are rejected.
The apparatuses of ideologies
repeatedly soak them so.
But long ago, before all these

we were ten and I said something
that had hurt you and I was sorry
and you wouldn't accept it,
refusing the popsicle offering
already starting to melt in my hand.
Sitting on the steps that summer

I learned who will always be
fearful; and suddenly fearful 
of my own discovery, I 

threw away the offering in anger.
The popsicle's sweetness 
melting away, its bone to the sun.

Was it my first desperation then?
The first grand show 
to the largest audience of one

whose magnificence I discovered
and feared. And she?
She wouldn't even look at me.

So at ten, I took my bike and
learned to leave in pompous glory.

nearly midnight

It seems to you there is a consistent hunger
In you somewhere you can neither point nor name.
Everything else appears alright.
Action movie on the cable, some mutated turtles

The kind you could have loved lifetimes ago
Now you place on mute and sleep through.
Its only redeeming quality, a young woman
Too beautiful only the young can believe

To be real. You would have preferred bio pics, 
Political conspiracies, the end of the world 
As is known, at least; these are familiar.
Closer to what you have come to believe.

And what do you believe? At eight, you had 
Your last faith in Santa Claus; at fourteen,
Fools' love. You wonder how some can go on
Dreaming of romance. Or world peace.

You remember someone saying to look at
Inevitable failure in the eye, exchanging
Blows with it anyway. A hopeless kind of talk,
Pessimism you do not subscribe to but

Remember anyway. The hero suffers in the movie.
You feel yourself pointing out refugees dying
In the next channel. And at the street, 
the stray dog scrawny and sick with open woods.

The three candles you lighted at the church
Of Saint Teresa saying god alone suffices.
You still believe. And you feel it--although
What it is, you no longer know. 

All news by the day growing more and more
Disturbing. Stranger than any tall story
About mutants or aliens. These kinds of movies.
This world. Growing more complicated to resolve.

The TV goes on without sound.
Your dog shifts at your feet. 
It, too, cannot sleep. Ever shameless
In trusting you, waiting for you again.

drowning with woman

Counterculture communes in the 60s and 70s
attempted to distill love
through music, herbs, and freedom in forest
idyllic edens or as thought to be.

My own short experience told me 
youth has a way of imagining 
as does any spring beginnings.
To have a time of easy belief in hope

has its own good, if only to make the later years
bearable with dream-like memories. 

There is always something beautiful
about the long ago we have lived or survived.
Thus, that smile when we are
alone one morning with second cup of coffee

and remembering. Times, there, of love
also of beauty we had not recognised
while it looked us on the face. Gentle gust.
Perched on our palms like easy wind.  

How time flies. 

The hours we wasted arguing and hating
each other as much as ourselves for 
nonetheless loving both self and other. 
No counterculture communes truly survived.

There is no way to distill love.

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.

de luz

Imagine dos orillas en dos islas diferentes, separadas en el tiempo por exactamente medio día: así, cuando una soñaba despierta, el otro estaba a la deriva en al sueño.

                                                                    *

Las nubes se incendian
como enamorados
desnudos en el rio.
Cuando caiga la tarde
se convertiran en un rio de estrellas.










                                                                                                           

(Marjorie Evasco & Alex Heites)

half a morning

away from the calendar, it is easier to pretend an endlessness.  an easy-ness of being.  this morning, i cut the flowers growing from the basil.  the flowers were beautiful, but the basil will die if they are let be.  i talk to the dogs who have the gift of contentment.  they are lucky.  yesterday, there were strays at the streets and i thought, someday i shall be a fosterer.  not now, not yet, when still preoccupied with the many things that speed time.  who ever said life is a race, and we are all racehorses?

at the conference, someone cried semi-feudalism and nearly raised a fist.  it started with the talk of horse-rig system.  an old way that lingered, half-dead, into the present.  and the word she cried so confrontational.  the large room was quiet.  no one said a word.  not everybody agreed.  i thought, why worry about men?  worry about the horse.  who cannot say a word.  who cannot have a god.

this country has a history of gods.  It is standing on a huge island of a God.  everyone prays.  too many claims.

Jayvee asked me to write something to close his exhibit on transcendence.  a one-man show of 3x4 paintings of acrylic and mixed media.  layerings of washes and drips, transparency in monochromatic whites, blues, grays.  non-figurative sense of the form.  i finished this morning, while the sky is in September downcast.  the news earlier was urgent about war and a mass burial.  i also wrote Jayvee a poem.  not one of us mentioned a god.













  

design

"Art as life is design," I recall saying, "an appearance
of random.  Even though it is not."  
What would I have thought if I were across the room,
thinking of the pieces of today:
a conversation on diplomacy, a paper stack,
a calendar with running days, an unanswered letter.

























  

of motion

among other things, there is the constancy of motion.  the comfort of it.  like a kind of softness that urges one, gently, to move.  wake up, darling, the sunup.  the windows are the first to know.  and the curtains.  and she kisses you on the lips.  you wake up to find she is still asleep.  it is less than a minute before the alarm.  that your body has awakened you through dreams.  and the first day of the weekend has found you:  it is the temptation:  to be in abandon.  but some part of you is waiting for the daily paper, and an expected post that may or may not come.  and the knowing that the abandon is only an illusion:  soon she will wake up and rearrange her mind into a list of things to do.  most likely the laundry first.  the dog now licks your toes, it is time for a run.  the blanket still covers you, and her scent is beautiful.  you think: five minutes.  and if there are still eggs and milk in the kitchen to make her breakfast.

















 

companionable silence

companionable silence is perhaps one of the most beautiful, warm things.  when the moment has rested itself; and there is no need to fill anything with words.  (you are just there across) i, here on the couch, under the reading light.  the dogs napping just beside.

it is not with everyone we can have companionable silence with.  more often is that sense of need to find comfort in words, holding on to them like life buoys for safety, like security blankets we wrap ourselves with.  like scaffolds we use to support moments.  

perhaps it is the fear of silence.  or the fear of thoughts--the other's or our own.
perhaps it is the fear of distance from the other.  or the fear of alienation, that dawning so often ignored how the beloved other is really, in essence, a stranger.

companionable silence feels to me as this comfort without such fears, even as this comfort knows, harboring no illusions, that the other will always remain other.

it is almost like faith.


 tonight is one of those nights of companionable silence.  it is after dinner.  i have already walked with the dogs.  you are at the table, working on the laptop; i am on the reading couch, finishing the book, "The Portland Vase," stopping briefly at times to read you the most interesting parts.  not too long ago, it was "The Root of Wild Madder", something about the natural red dye and the handmade Persian carpets.  i do not tell you how i miss being so voracious a reader as when i was younger; you already know this.  i do not tell you how at times i think there is so much to read but so little time.  we both know how it is to be adults.

already it is late night, past midnight.  i have a chapter and an epilogue left.  there are a couple of papers to review for tomorrow; maybe i'll stay up awhile longer.  

beside the bed, a few more books that i do not read cover to cover.  only when i feel like it--a page or two or so--before turning off the lamplight, or after waking up and not wanting to get up just yet.  roland barthes' "A Lover's Discourse", in spite of its seemingly romantic and/or casual title, is not, after all, a light reading.  it being the rumination of nuance.  nuance being the Intractable.  i particularly like the book because, as koestenbaum so aptly describes it in the introduction, it "is an attempt to get rid of 'love'--its roles, its attitudes--in order to find the luster that
remains when the stereotypes  have been sent packing."

Of course, expectedly a kind of reading that would need one to mull over thoughts after reading a fragment-chapter.  much like milan kundera's
"The Curtain", which, for some time, i tried to read at the airport and aboard the plane.

there is, too, wislawa's book, from where some poems i read for you on mornings.