Up

It has been a long time since I've looked at the stars. I'm looking up and there are more now than there were before.

dream

do some dreaming. even if you cannot sleep.

gifts

Florists send the best apologies. Orphans bring the best winter squash.

Ruth

This Is How It Is--Ruth Stone

I look at the gene bank,
examples by the millions,
and they won't do.
On this planet, for me,
there was only one impetuous specimen.
How angry I become
when I walk through the corridors of my dreams.
On all the beaches of the living world,
the shadows of where you were
are washed away by the tides.
Only in my skull,
night after night,
I wrestle with your obstinate ghost.
But even that is better
than this three-dimensional life
that is so boring without you.

Ruth Stone, is this ancient saint of a woman. in her nineties now I bet. blind. lost her sights decades ago. decades before that, her husband, the father of her young children killed himself. almost all her poetry is for him. or for her kids about their dad.

Fly-fishing for girls: expectations

Fly-fishing for girls: expectations

The 'flies' in fly-fishing are not reel.

I imagine, regular fishing--the expected

piercing of an animal smaller than the one you wish

to hook dangling from a line,

bait soaking in the water long enough to elicit a bite,

the bite that snags the barbed-hook,

giving a quick puncture, a tear in the lip,

and, perhaps, a slight snack swallowed

by the large animal

before being dragged

against the current

and into the air.

"It's not like that, Hun."

Imagine

securing a bait-fly to a barbed hook:

the silky wings, now crunchy in death and dehydration,

turn to falling confetti

towards the bottom of the boat

the very moment pinched by fingers

to lift him from the container;

his tiny body shreds

as the tip of the hook begins to pierce the abdomen,

and long before it ever reaches the thorax,

the shape is mangled

and becomes thick goo between the angler's fingers.

"No, Babe, we 'tie flies.'"

Imagine

tying knots in line

in ways clever enough to create loops

in which to place a fly,

and pull with such skill, ever so slightly,

to fasten that fly to the end of the line.

Instead, his fly-head is decapitated as the line cinches tight.

"Aw Darlin', there ain't no flies in fly-fishing!"

My Angler,

he hooks

pompoms, feathers and fuzzy things

in the line

with knots and bows

only to look like flies.

The fish are impressed.

journal updates: Summer 2010.

Recent updates to my hand-written journal contain only this: scraps of papers, notes, post-its, business cards, wristbands, leaves. The only written words are those enough to identify the objects, the places they were collected, cryptic explanation, and the names of the people I was with. All dates are approximate.

hole

maybe you're one of those people with a little hole in your heart, and it has always been there. and your whole life you search. and then one day, when you die, they say: "[ ] had a hole in his heart his whole life. But no one loved love like he did. Isn't it ironic?"

and of course, it won't be ironic at all.

Young animal

Young animal,

you are born naked

for want of man.

believe

I believe that 'believe' is a word that can be used to express whatever it is that is important to you.

I believe in writing credos in pencil.

Core Roots

I have maintained the same core group of friends since sophomore year of high school. Nine years later, I'm interested in growing without them. It's not that they are all that bad, rather, I'm not as much like them as maybe I once was. I've changed, I've grown, and I want to see the people around me also change and grow for the better. Endlessly. This group is static.

As a houseplant grows for years in the same container in which it was born, the roots reach the edge of the plastic confines, turn in on themselves, and begin to form a mass, a 'root ball.' Overtime, the root ball begins to strangle itself, chokes and kills the plant itself.

The group has become a root ball, a clusterfuck of incest and lies, heartbreak and cancer, known secrets and public shames. We know everything about each other; we can predict each others' emotions and goals, successes and failures. The group has become an entity in and of itself . Judging, engorging, lusting, hating, shaming, suspecting, cheating, enabling. It's choking itself. We're choking each other.

I can watch it all happening as if I were in the greenhouse starring into the pot. I'm not so embedded that I cannot take a blade and cut away the roots that are mine, transplant and move on. And so I will.

Story starts.. ideas in my head, inspired by my day.

-It's almost perfectly natural that the young funeral director would step outside the front door of the funeral home to fetch the morning's news at the exact moment the fire trucks and ambulances, all lights and sound, raced north past her on Main St.

"The first time I stopped by, I met another woman here..."

"Yes, a woman about my age?"

"Yes, she was lovely."

"Ah, yes, that'd be Jane. A wonderful woman. I was good friends with her husband. He died, oh, 5, 6 years ago now... we've been taking care of her ever since."

reminders (to live) from PostSecret

sensation & season

As the seasons begin to make their change, is it noticed first in the light or in the air?

I am one to see it first in the air. Perhaps one day, I will feel the change in the light.

How to get back

I find myself wondering how one gets one self to somewhere else.

"unchopping a tree" -Merwin

Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated. If the fall was carefully and correctly planned, the chances of anything of the kind happening will have been reduced. Again, much depends upon the size, age, shape, and species of the tree. Still, you will be lucky if you can get through this stages without having to use machinery. Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men's work.

It goes without saying that if the tree was hollow in whole or in part, and contained old nests of bird or mammal or insect, or hoards of nuts or such structures as wasps or bees build for their survival, the contents will have to repaired where necessary, and reassembled, insofar as possible, in their original order, including the shells of nuts already opened. With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment. It is even harder to simulate the latter when the leaves have once become dry — as they are bound to do, for this is not the labor of a moment. Also it hardly needs saying that this the time fro repairing any neighboring trees or bushes or other growth that might have been damaged by the fall. The same rules apply. Where neighboring trees were of the same species it is difficult not to waste time conveying a detached leaf back to the wrong tree. Practice, practice. Put your hope in that.

Now the tackle must be put into place, or the scaffolding, depending on the surroundings and the dimension of the tree. It is ticklish work. Almost always it involves, in itself, further damage to the area, which will have to be corrected later. But, as you've heard, it can't be helped. And care now is likely to save you considerable trouble later. Be careful to grind nothing into the ground.

At last the time comes for the erecting of the trunk. By now it will scarcely be necessary to remind you of the delicacy of this huge skeleton. Every motion of the tackle, every slightly upward heave of the trunk, the branches, their elaborately reassembled panoply of leaves (now dead) will draw from you an involuntary gasp. You will watch for a lead or a twig to be snapped off yet again. You will listen for the nuts to shift in the hollow limb and you will hear whether they are indeed falling into place or are spilling in disorder — in which case, or in the event of anything else of the kind — operations will have to cease, of course, while you correct the matter. The raising itself is no small enterprise, from the moment when the chains tighten around the old bandages until the boles hands vertical above the stump, splinter above splinter. How the final straightening of the splinters themselves can take place (the preliminary work is best done while the wood is still green and soft, but at times when the splinters are not badly twisted most of the straightening is left until now, when the torn ends are face to face with each other). When the splinters are perfectly complementary the appropriate fixative is applied. Again we have no duplicate of the original substance. Ours is extremely strong, but it is rigid. It is limited to surfaces, and there is no play in it. However the core is not the part of the trunk that conducted life from the roots up to the branches and back again. It was relatively inert. The fixative for this part is not the same as the one for the outer layers and the bark, and if either of these is involved in the splintered sections they must receive applications of the appropriate adhesives. Apart from being incorrect and probably ineffective, the core fixative would leave a scar on the bark.

When all is ready the splintered trunk is lowered onto the splinters of the stump. This, one might say, is only the skeleton of the resurrection. Now the chips must be gathered, and the sawdust, and returned to their former positions. The fixative for the wood layers will be applied to chips and sawdust consisting only of wood. Chips and sawdust consisting of several substances will receive applications of the correct adhesives. It is as well, where possible, to shelter the materials from the elements while working. Weathering makes it harder to identify the smaller fragments. Bark sawdust in particular the earth lays claim to very quickly. You must find our own way of coping with this problems. There is a certain beauty, you will notice at moments, in the patterns of the chips as they are fitted back into place. You will wonder to what extent it should be described as natural, to what extent man-made. It will lead you on to speculations about the parentage of beauty itself, to which you will return.

The adhesive for the chips is translucent, and not so rigid as that for splinters. That for the bark and its subcutaneous layers if transparent and runs into the fibers on either side, partially dissolving them into each other. It does not set the sap flowing again but it does pay a kind of tribute to the preoccupations of the ancient thoroughfares. You could not roll an egg over the joints but some of the mine-shafts would still be passable, no doubt. For the first exploring insect who raises its head in the tight echoless passages. The day comes when it is all restored, even to the moss (now dead) over the wound. You will sleep badly, thinking of the removal of the scaffolding that must begin the next morning. How you will hope for sun and a still day!

The removal of the scaffolding or tackle is not a dangerous, perhaps, to the surroundings, as its installation, but it presents problems. It should be taken from the spot piece by piece as it is detached, and stored at a distance. You have come to accept it there, around the tree. The sky begins to look naked as the chains and struts one by one vacate their positions. Finally the moment arrives when the last sustaining piece is removed and the tree stands again on its own. It is as though its weight for a moment stood on your heart. You listen for a thud of settlement, a warning creak deep in the intricate joinery. You cannot believe it will hold. How like something dreamed it is, standing there all by itself. How long will it stand there now? The first breeze that touches its dead leaves all seems to flow into your mouth. You are afraid the motion of the clouds will be enough to push to over. What more can you do? What more can you do?

But there is nothing more you can do.

Others are waiting.

Everything is going to have to be put back.

Copyright © 1994 by W.S. Merwin, reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=7857

the return

I plan to come back here soon in a effort to save myself from the loss of art.

t.

I loved the idea of you and hate the reality of you.

letter: re: memories in a box

C: Tonight, I find myself quite drunk (a current character flaw that I reckon you, of all my contemporaries, will find most forgivable) and reminiscing through a box of artifacts--letters, notes, print-out, leaves, pineneedles, poems, pens, maps,--a box of things I could not bare to explore till now (drunk, distant, or otherwise). While smoking a bummed Pall Mall (another character flaw you and the economy will hopefully, forgive), it occurs to me that there is nothing like listening to you play music or enjoying our quite conversations in the dark under a gazebo in the landscape of a Lake we surely both love, "under a sky strewn with stars," as Mark Strand would describe, or in the atmosphere of an anticipated summer storm like the one that marked one of those last nights we all shared.

Stars or storms, I hope that this note finds you well and happy or as near to it as any of us dream.

v.

you would think, by evidential lack of blogging, that i have nothing to say and that nothing is going on in my life. that is only partially true.

somedays

I am unsure whether I am Livor dead. 

the fury

v. is casket at both ends burning.