It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and academic German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and pocket German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

the romance of faith

Faith requires, as far as the romance of it goes,
A certain certainty: the blind seeing with his/her heart.
Such faith, such faith! When sober, I wonder.

But how many times in secret in deepest darkness
Did I return the call and listened for what answers. 

what we left behind in love

Who, what we left behind in love.
Left behind out of love. 
All reasons into one final tangible thing--
The leaving. Who truly understands it

Not even fully the one leaving, 
Feeling only that which comes first
As feeling before any knowing--
Feeling being the very first language

Of that that cannot be enclosed
Into any simple names.
Who, what we left behind in love.
Left behind out of love.

Others, as well as our own selves--
Versions of the less or more of
What we now are.

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

The Kamasutra of Kindness (Position No. 3)

The Kamasutra of Kindness
Position No. 3



It’s easy to love
through a cold spring
when the poles
of the willows
turn green
pollen falls like
a yellow curtain
and the scent of
Paper Whites
clots
the air
but to love for a lifetime
takes talent
you have to mix yourself
with the strange
beauty of someone
else

wake each morning
for 72,000
mornings in
a row so
breathed and
bound and
tangled
that you can hardly
sort out
your arms
and
legs

you have to
find forgiveness
in everything
even ink stains
and broken
cups

you have to be willing to move through
life
together
the way the long
grasses move
in a field
when you careen
blindly toward
the other
side

there’s never going to be anything
straight or predictable
about your path
except the
flattening
and the springing
back

you just go on walking for years
hand in hand
waist deep in the weeds
bent slightly forward
like two question
marks
and all the while it

burns
my dear
it burns beautifully above
you
and goes on
burning
like a relentless
sun




by Mary Mackey

where is what the moon says

photo by Alvin Pang

At the time before letters, what the moon says 
to the lovers is whispered to the breeze.

When the letters came, the poets wrote.
And the lovers read what the moon says.

The phones lines stretched and what the moon 
says the lovers hear on each other's voices.

Now the moon looks at its virtual self on the Net
and what it says 

is whispered long and quiet on email.

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.

public, private, and secret

Gabriel passes away at 87



So a storyteller passes away.
into an other world where perhaps 
there would be no more need 
for stories.  This world we have,
so needy for a better place.
'Though sometimes we forget--

or perhaps because we remember--
we celebrate what brightness
survives in the dark.  A piece
of fleeting life.  He says,
"All human beings have three lives:

public, private, and secret."
And so we live each and each.
A tight exclusive circle.

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?"

the displaced

it is difficult to love this country, i thought many times, one afternoon walking through the heat of molten air.  but the people are always warm, no matter the odds and flaws.  and that is why, maybe, not far away a foreigner has decided to stay.  carrying his toddler child, he points at a very clear blue sky and a bird and speaks his German, his child happy with him.  an other world fitting itself in.

the roles we play

Linda, who said she can't leave New York there's just so much theater there, said I see her when I could, when she's back, there, or here, or wherever it is she is referring to, as home.  

She said why do I not leave this place.  I said why do you return.  I did not ask do you feel like a stranger here?  I do.  Every time I return, the place has something new.  And I get lost:  the streets

have a habit of changing names.  The landmarks have the habit of changing faces.  Old places disappear, always something new.  When I first saw Linda, she was not 

the picture of the name in mind.  She was otherwise; and warm and bubbly; meticulous about each step of the process.  I was not surprised.  Long years in the theater have a way of creeping

itself into the skin.  In a workshop she tells the participants the cliche among us they may not yet know:  we're all actors playing our lives in roles.  Linda says we are friends, we are lovers, we are

wives, we are children, we are mothers.  One time she whispered I am feeling cold: I think I might be sick.  She asked for a pill and I gave her a glass of lukewarm water with it.  She curled herself 

on the couch, like a fetus.  I turned off the lights and closed the door.
What are we when we are alone?  What role do we play in front of the wall?

a good book

read illustrated shakespeare at almost the same breath as the comics.  snippets of greek mythology like fairy tales too.  they are among the many in the house of shelves.  many books has since followed long after the bobbsey twins and the hardy boys, and nancy drew who must be pretty but who never seems to grow old (the give away: how many cases could be had in a year?).  including what was once mistaken as must-be porn: the only forbidden books in the house.  these about men and women who arch their backs in throes (what are throes? and throes of passion? and what does this mean: to hold, to tighten, to gasp, to thrust?) 


to read 

is to suddenly have no body, no couch, no bed, no room

only mind, wandering, not lost, in somewhere they call clouds

where there is an old man, a big fish, and the sea.  a boy, a whitewash, a picket fence.  a tale, a revolution, a beheading of nobles, and two cities.  an escaped convict, and a guard.  a white fang.  a mockingbird, a house of the seven gables, a family stranded in an island, a man alone in an island, a story of a man who became buddha, and a man who became the greatest salesman in the world.

since then a longer string of names met while being without body.  names of people with birthdates and graves and histories of the real.

and in between, books of poetry.

to read

is to suddenly have no body, no couch, no bed, no room

only mind, wandering, not lost, in somewhere they call clouds.
 
and what did you get after all this reading? they ask, they who did not know
the art of disappearing.

two parcels

the first parcel had been, supposedly, received 11 months ago.  documents processed for at least two days, an airplane ride away.  i was promised delivery by courier, and waited, patiently, through 11 months.  no reply.  called long distance etc.  meanwhile, the office went ahead with things and so it appeared the parcel had been received.  until i personally checked to make sure.  there was nothing.  retraced steps personally:  airplane, inquiries.  yes, the parcel was sent.  the young lady searched the files:  in a packed drawer in a steel cabinet, in a pile of brown folders on a table, etc.  she produced a trace in a card:  yes, it was sent months ago.  she typed the code and printed electronic proof:  yes, the computer does not lie.  the parcel had been sent, and received (supposedly) 11 months ago.  the electronic trace gave a name.  i called the name.  hi, do you remember receiving the parcel on this date?  the name denied.  no, i did not receive anything.  less than an inch away from literally saying are you accusing me?  i ran my fingers through my hair.  there was no use arguing or pushing when the next words wouldn't be good at all.  okay, i tell myself, what would be the point of arguing and the prize of winning it?  the documents are still lost.  lost in the jungle of the name's working place.  sigh: to retrace the steps, to book another flight, to process the documents again.

the second parcel was received yesterday.  Gloria, who must be feeling partly responsible for the lost documents, was excited: she sent me sms and walked with me the moment i arrived at the office.  your documents have arrived! she said.  the odds are.  one look at the sender and.
the second parcel was expected: i was informed i was to receive it within the week.  still, it is a happy thing.  the second parcel of papers.  with all the copyediting marks of the hardworking copyeditor who must've wondered why there were too many absent punctuations.  why subheadings and titles are in small letters.  i will have to begin writing stet after stet after stet.  the note enclosed in the parcel said a cover artist has been assigned and i sent email that i've asked someone to do it.  that she is in muscat/masqat, oman may need to be discussed.  in the meantime, let's see what can be done.




















 

fragments. on ways of living.

1.  (i realize now) not being able to write for a week while traveling is like closing the dam, letting the waters rise.

2.  at least three languages involved.  and how do we float through the surface of understanding and communication?  the language of the empire.  no matter how much we may have our own reasons to abhor it.

3.  like every thing else, the socialbook is part illusion.  there are more stories when distant friends are actually met.  no matter the short notice, no matter the so short a time.  such as:  V now doing kabbalah and learning Aramaic.

4.  a gift of turmeric roots that still need to be planted.

5.  a visit at the sequestered home-museum of a fallen dictator's wife: palpable opulence, palpable greed. 

6.   an attempt to make a red paper doily to impress a girl.  and failing.  the beautiful woman who makes it look so easy, smiling at the effort.

7.  Louis Theroux's Extreme Love: Autism. 

8.  On ways of living, what is love then?  what is love?  a reservoir.
















    

translating understanding

1.
exactly how does one "experience" the worldview behind a particular language?  i do not know.  even though this i believe:  being able to understand another language, to speak it and/or write with it, is to be able to pass through a glass wall.  i think of this now because of where i am these days, speaking another tongue; because of the manuscripts that need to be read of the same language, but different because written and crafted; because i remember understanding a spoken another and being able to rudimentary speak it, too, even as being unable to read it.  and being able to read another language, and yet neither speak it nor understand it spoken.  what is the measure, then, of multilingualism?  and how true this experiencing of a particularity, a worldview, behind a language?

some time a long time ago, i understood and speak sign.  but when the hands-talking stopped, the understanding was lost.  the skill of trans-lation, gone.

Abad said the first language is feeling.  everything else used to convey it is translation.


2.
a brave young writer's collection reached me this afternoon.  i am asked to comment on it.  the works are burdened with the weight of its words.  the printed attempts to grasp Universe into one's left hand.  in her note, she said she meant to explore divinity and "sense and essentiality, existing and occuring (sic) within the utmost prosaic, but also poetic, function of language".  she called her collection "Quintessence".  i do not understand what she meant.  do not know what to say.  maybe.  to take life and language and poetry less seriously.  sometimes.  and maybe, too, that poetry may possibly be all about simply sensing the outside through looking in.