Travels Inside the Archive by Edge of Maine Editions

Travels Inside the Archive

Also by Robert Gibbons Yellow and Black The Woman in the Paragraph Ardors Lover, Is This Exile? Of DC This Vanishing Architecture Streets for Two Dancers The Book of Assassinations Body of Time Beyond Time, New and Selected Work

Robert Gibbons

Travels Inside the Archive ARCHIVE OF DAILY LOG FOR NOV 24, 2007 - NOV 24, 2008

Edge of Maine Editions Brownfield, Maine

Dedication On the eve of publication of Travels Inside the Archive, this dream arrived reading in amber/ochre ink: He took his craft to seek many lands, to enter many ports. He went to many lands, entered many ports... Went to many lands, entered many ports... [as if mapping down the length of the page] Entered many ports... Went to many lands, entered many ports... Entered many ports... Then abandoned ship & company, & returned to find himself. That same day I’d already composed a dedication, which read: This installation is humbly dedicated to those performing the most difficult work on earth, those close to a simulacrum of the unheimlich, which writing desires to employ: the Homeless. Let me add here, then, in Dedication: To the Homeless, & to the Abandoned Company.

Acknowledgments “The Paltry Sum,” first appeared in The American Journal of Print; “Benazir Bhutto Declared Dead at 6:16 p.m. Pakistan Time,” “Goya in Times of War,” “She Knows Everything,” “The Americans, Redux,” “The Same Man, Stripped of Power,” “To Ask Americans to Imagine History,” and “Why Can’t They Just Say, ‘The War is Wrong,’ & Leave,” Counterpunch; “One Day in the Same Vicinity,” The God Particle; “Glasgow Freedom,” “Goya Drew an Image,” and “The Disasters of War,” Janus Head; and “Just a Few Days after Meeting the Gypsy from Seville,” in Juked. “Challenger: Rauschenberg Particles,” was first published by Mark Olson of Innerer Klang Press, Charlestown, MA, in the fine press limited edition chapbook, Of DC.

To read and to journey are one and the same act. -Michel Serres, Jouvences sur Jules Verne It’s the book of the Act of Writing. The book that takes life and language by the roots. How can it be written? With the hand running. Following the writing hand like the painter draws: in flashes. -Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing Only the divine is total in sip and crumb. -Eugenio Montale, Satura Like Proust, Freud is a specialist in transubstantiation, but he hears flesh in the patient’s associative speech, while Proust writes flesh in his metaphors and hyperbolic sentences. - Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt Thank God for the sanity of flesh and wine in the midst of all those I.B.M.’s and prisons and diplomats and neurotics and schools and laws and courts and hospitals and suburban homes where children are taught to despise themselves. -Jack Kerouac, Journal, Wednesday, November 3, 1948 ...any homeless person might well be the home of an ambulatory divinity. ... divinity wears the mask of the homeless person not in order to disguise itself, but in order to show us the mask itself, to draw our attention precisely to the appearance of the homeless person, to help us better understand the meaning of such notions as home, homelessness, foreign, hospitality and acceptance... - that is, [in]to our deeper selves. -Costica Bradatan, “‘I was a stranger, and ye took me not in,’ Deus ludens and the theology of hospitality in Lars von Trier’s Dogville” ... the core of politics in sensory experience: in one single notion, the power that causes being and holds beings together and the place where one goes, without privilege, to walk and look about. - Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words City of my walks and joys! -Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

A Lot of Accidental Love Saturday, November 24, 2007 There’s a lot of accidental love in the world despite so much crass indifference. The first snow of the year differed by one degree from rain, shimmering down, instead of falling. She called saying she had to tear herself away from work for a few seconds just to share the phenomenon, somehow, if only through the inventive magic of A. G. Bell. The tone through newly created fiber-optic lines was as musical, the uninhibited joy was, at that high pitch, & in that realm of tactile closeness from a distance, it could have been an actual whisper in her presence, but wasn’t, containing the added timbre of shared longing, so that it may never stop snowing in memory. Today’s another story. The day before Thanksgiving, early morning at Starbucks, Tanya says it’s ok that she doesn’t have tomorrow off, Portland is her family; in the afternoon at Browne Trading, Parker says his day’s going better now that he sees me, which I throw back at him; then Said chimes in with the first of three handshakes; while Adam gives me a break on the smoked Scottish salmon I know my brain will need to recoup by Friday morning. It’s amazing. Accidental love in the world despite so much crass indifference. Laurie had her sneakers untied when she carried a small fridge through the door I held open for her earlier in the afternoon, little did I know she’d begun her day at 5:00 working at the supermarket. Let alone the erotic aura surrounding both faces of Martha & Amy, the latter whom in another context I might be tempted to call Mary. By dusk the little African kid in the parking lot walking from the sidewalk on Forest Ave did another good turn, holding the door open for me when I entered RSVP for San Pelligrino & Chilean cabernet, “Are you the doorman?” I asked. “No.” “Well, I am in real life, & people tip me all the time, here, take this.” “Thank you.” With two bucks he went straight to the cooler behind the registers, where Chris can be found if you look hard enough, Phil will talk sports, or carry Italian water out to the car, & Garrett will offer all the respect your age didn’t

know it deserved. In the mean time, the kid will pull out a couple of good-sized Pepsis from the cooler, thinking his next good turn could be rewarded, too. Right?

Beyond Blue, Mourning Sunday, November 25, 2007 Her plane doesn’t take off for another sixteen hours, but my viscera knows better than consciousness itself just how short a time that is, missing her already, entire gut-full. If it’s this way with her still here, just off now for a couple of hours sharing what she knows of yoga with others, what have nights I face alone in store? A continent away, California foreign under these circumstances as Algeria, Sierra Leone! Coffee shut off by itself while I was out, barely palatable now, & black, milk chilling it to a cold heart’s temperature. I’m in a bad way already. Look on the bright side I’m sure friends & family might advise, you’re alive, & she’ll be home soon. That’s not the point for someone who’s honed his skills at living in the moment. Moments without her as interminable as years, resembling something I don’t even want to mention right now. Suddenly all music turns sad, beyond blue, mourning.

The Cooperative Effort Monday, November 26, 2007 In order to read all that one has over the course of many years, including during the dark solitude of hermetic apprenticeship, there are at least as many tomes one has to skip. By choice, & necessity. Pleasure merely standing next to sturdy spines with contents physically closed, but spiritually open. I won’t name names. Sumptuous sentencing, dropped fragments, & shared, hard-won experience. Love those rooms. Even times of travel a small shelf sculpts its own space somewhere in the room in Cannes, Dublin, Long Beach, Nice, Zihuatanejo. Right now James 2

Wright is writing a letter from Venice claiming not to have too, too many books in his possession, other than that by the poet he’s addressing back home, saying he’s thinking of him because he knows how much the other would appreciate Tintoretto’s Annunciation at the Scuola of San Rocco. He says the divine comes as such a shock that one “can almost feel the walls shake.” In fact, the walls are practically torn asunder by the artist, the architecture deconstructed into ruin. In this case it takes the cooperative effort of history, belief, skill, corporeality, & the spiritual to name & produce the Unexpected.

A Part of You Lives On Tuesday, November 27, 2007 To live life so well, so rough-hard-edged, indelibly marked, indefinable, invisibly anonymous, private public, generous humble loving, experiential traveled leading children right into themselves, seeking secrets, knowing fast, as well as full, the abject & ecstatic, valuing Art, cherishing the rarity of friendship, rarer than Love, the sea & prairie, or ice cap & tundra, appreciating music as natural innate inspired & constructed, no dropping names, & no false notes in speech, the Truth honed close to bone, real Freedom, deep, against those closest, as well as those unseen at the top, voiced gratitude at every turn, risk taking to the max inviting loss & defeat, those grand teachers, no kowtowing to power, avoiding the rich, if need be, so that then when death comes a part of you lives on, because to live life so well, hard-edged, subtle, discreet, intuitive, indelibly marked, indefinable, invisible, anonymous, private public, generous humble loving, experiential traveled leading children right into themselves, seeking secrets, knowing fast, as well as full, the abject & ecstatic, valuing Art, cherishing the rarity of friendship, rarer than Love, the sea & prairie, or ice cap & tundra, appreciating music as natural innate inspired & constructed, no dropping names, & no false notes in speech, the Truth honed close to bone, real Freedom, deep, against those closest, as well as those unseen at the top, voiced gratitude at every turn, risk taking to the max inviting loss & defeat, those grand teachers, no kowtowing to power, 3

avoiding the rich, if need be, so that when death finally comes, whether suddenly, or after the long ago, a part of you lives on in recollections of others, in things crafted or collected, in long-lost photos, in histories & myths, in the unrecorded & recorded records, will, letters, diaries, notebooks, love letters, write those love letters now so both of you live on, when death comes, whether suddenly, or after the long agon a part of you lives on.

The Cure for the Common Cold Wednesday, November 28, 2007 Picked up the midweek staff of life, a round loaf Stephen said one food writer reported that he once joined a car mechanic in Paris to buy bread, but when they brought it back to the shop the man simply left it on the table. The others, instead of tearing it apart, left it alone. When querying why the men had not eaten it they all laughed, “Oh, that bread is green, we have to wait four days before it ripens.” That’s this stuff. She wants to put it in plastic, I want to leave it out, or at best in in brown paper. I might slice a small piece of crust or two, (let’s face it my will power will never match that of a car mechanic), allowing a little more air in, but mostly to go with the almost black red wine Natalie Zilli gave me yesterday, along with red peppers she roasted herself, & two layers of anchovies, her attempt to cure my cold. Generosity may well be the cure for the common cold. With bread in tow, I found myself on cobbled Silver Street, with Gold halfway down on the left a veritable alleyway just above Commercial, Commercial all but abandoned at midweek at that time of the afternoon, what with everybody else’s mind on the holidays, postponing the pleasure of a good meal, or a fine fillet, for the deferred gratification, as Ted Dalziel recently called it, of getting something for someone else.

Lasso Hanging by Lamp Light Thursday, November 29, 2007 At 5:39 in the morning, having slept past the coffee grinder going off at 5:00, one of her stray hairs attaches itself to my wrist like some lasso, (a jealous lasso), after mistakenly pouring a cup of juice for her. I don’t have time for this. She’s not home yet, & hasn’t been for almost a week. Got to get ready for work, pick up the house, but here I am saluting her return from out west, nevertheless. Tonight, as I stand in the lonely corridor the TSA sequesters people waiting for passengers, I don’t have to focus on specifics, just keep an eye out for the initial ragtag band of first-class nerds, then when the economy-class herd rushes forward, keep an eye out for this unmistakable aura that precedes & surrounds her, a gold flame, an electricity with incalculable voltage. The room’s light will actually soften under harsh fluorescents & white ceiling tiles. There she is! I’ll see her first, of course. Right now, I should jump in the shower, but this lasso hanging by lamp light is practicing in miniature exactly what I’m talking about.

American Aspiration Friday, November 30, 2007 To arrive at work on time, sun lifting its own weary bones out of the bed of the Atlantic, climbing pines growing out of rock & sand of Peaks Island, well, it’s a dream of someone’s grandfather for grandson, the grandson’s living for both. Everyone who wants a job should have one, & yet if employment rates go up, the Stock Exchange goes down, why’s that? Why’s Wall Street such a measuring stick for how America’s doing in the first place, if it’s not masses wishing to be rich, rather than merely make a living? That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do: make a living while writing the equal of the art of living. For a few years even earned a living wage. The luxury of the transcription of Bach’s Sonatas for Solo Violin audibly driven through a couple of adequate speakers along with a glass of

traditionally made Sangiovese on a Friday night after a long work week in the company of someone to love, or some variant on the above, should be the limit of American aspiration.

Inside or Outside Cure Saturday, December 1, 2007 I had to open the front door before I could write a word, the stare inside too long & hard, I needed light other than corpuscular psychic apparatus of self-reflexion with its ever-present-changing memory shadows, & wasn’t let down by the blast of windy light whirling the last of autumn’s leaves down the street, around, in & out of everything the wind-driven light in a frenzy delighted me to such a grand degree that I ignored the accompanying temperature, skipped measuring the mercury in the old mid-century thermometer left by previous owners on the front stoop, galloping out like a wild horse or escapee from the psychiatric ward in my white monogrammed Ritz bathrobe & charcoal grey cashmere scarf to rescue four blue recycle bins floating down the asphalt like a frozen black river, my neighbor looking up from under his knit cap, as I greeted him, calling out my name in such a two-tone of voice revealing first that of mystified vision, then registering a ring of added glee, that meant nothing you do, “Ro-bert,” inside or outside your house, any longer surprises me.

One Day in the Same Vicinity Sunday, December 2, 2007 I December second chill causing one face to stand out from the rest in the line for the bus on Huntington Avenue. Sure, everyone wants to get a seat, all want to beat the imminent rush hour, but for this guy, last in line, an entire felt blanket folded & draped around his neck, dread in his eyes, night’s the 6

real concern. The sun that’s left, sharp angle out of the northwest, is still of value. No more sunsets from this vantage in the city anymore. It’s light, then not. Survivable day, night’s threat. Suddenly the image of the fetish sled hauling folded felt & fat props itself up between him & me, & I realize the whole of Beuys’s marrow bone of art. Though this guy wouldn’t get it, he’s closer to it. II The little square’s deserted as the temperature turns cold, & wind ignores Canada’s borders. He’s not there now, but in warmer weather I’d catch Dakar sitting on the bench, exactly as he was as magistrate in Ghana, formerly The Gold Coast. I asked him once to tell me his most notorious cases. Seems a minister siphoned off parishioner funds. Brought in by members of his church, Dakar chastised him sharply, gave him probation, & a chance to pay it back, in installments. On the other hand, a woman was found with stolen jugs of beer hidden in the rafters of her house. Pregnant, she couldn’t have done it by herself, but wouldn’t reveal who else helped. She spent a year in jail, for which the judge claimed no regrets. Slowly, though, I sensed a deep discomfort, covered by calm demeanor, finally reaching bone-chilling, sinewy, ill at ease.

Snow is a Pure Light Ranging from Blue to Gold Monday, December 3, 2007 It’s not as though someone would want to start with a topic from the news, current event carrying with it the shallowness of newsprint or TV screen, or worse concoct some surrealist crash of objects, apocalyptic impossibilities. It wouldn’t be right. But I see it happening all the time in poems, in prose. I can’t get past the second sentence. Look, the motivation is desire to see one’s language act in the service of a truth. My middle-aged bones fighting the cold helped by a low-level sun unhindered through thermal window pane. A brother suffering in 7

Vienna unheard of trauma at tongue at throat, victim of the fine radiated waters of Kiev 55 miles down-river from Chernobyl draws the attention, often direct, always at least tangential of his extended family, those who thought they could never love him more than they already did. Snow on Christmas market stalls in the plaza of the city is a pure light ranging from blue to gold that heals. The skin, the largest organ, resists invasion. Some would take on his pain. Time lengthens in distance, sisters draw near.

Offering it Up Tuesday, December 4, 2007 Recent hurricanes chased the 986-foot tanker Polar Adventure up out of docking repairs in the Bahamas all the way up here to Portland. Additions to Pier 2’s fender system, & reinforcements to its current facilities safely accommodate the gargantuan, which right now juts out into the harbor like a blue iceberg. Meanwhile, up in Pangnirtung, just short of the Arctic Circle in the newly established Inuit territory of Nunavut, Eskimos worry over climate change & pesticides. Walrus are moving further north, caribou are skinny, & ringed seal have thin, patchy fur. Fat in Beluga whales is changing color. I never ate muktuk, the outer covering & blubber of a whale, but when I had the lone, last piece of whale meat available at Ola’s in Boston in 1969, I didn’t take the experience lightly, offering it up as sacramental, linking me to some unspoken mystery. Young people in the territory eat only young seals believing the older ones filled with too many contaminants, the same ones that have found their way into Eskimo mothers’ milk.

The Dead are Subtle Diplomats Wednesday, December 5, 2007 Black trees emerge out of far-flung new snow, an immediacy, an interpretable 8

script the dead send up messages in, preferring to commingle with the living, knowing desire is of flesh alone, something spirit has yet to let go of, the dead remembering the body fondly write branch, write limb, write bud against remote backdrop of fading, opaque sun to reveal an ancient, convoluted language as concerned with hiding secrets as revealing truths, as much centering on conflicts unresolved, as those resolved. I’m reading trees today. The years are long behind them. The dead are subtle diplomats. No arm twisting here, no shouting, no bellicosity. Do right by them, they say, & you may find yourselves doing right by one another.

The King of the Netherlands Thursday, December 6, 2007 I took notes. Must I go get them? No. Couldn’t afford the catalogue, as usual, but the Rembrandt etchings have always cut me to the core, & to have so many to choose from, to loll in front of, the ones I was unfamiliar with hit the hardest. One, a head. Open-mouthed, expressing anguish or anger. It’s the size of a postage stamp, & Rembrandt’s the king of the netherlands, the outskirts, the gutter, poverty, mind, a similar head resurfacing later, this time attached to a beggar’s body, open-mouthed, pleading, asking for a hand-out. It’s the hand now equals the mouth. The hand, I pointed out to Kathleen, extended, not for a coin, but a nail.

Goya Drew an Image Friday, December 7, 2007 Goya drew an image just as we do a breath. Unfairness, torture, gossip, calumny, poverty, war, pride, butchery, ignorance, disregard, weakness, he drew human frailty & fallibility in perpetuity. To the extent that his “Beggar with a Cane in his Right Hand,” didn’t even bother to stand today, sitting on a muddy bank in 9

the sun with a scarf & a hundred layers on, & not bothering to beg, because one thing that has changed is this age’s disbelief in charity on a small scale. Forget giving alms directly to the poor, it has to be on some grand, elaborate scale, taxdeductible with all the receipts & paperwork organized, when the lawyers ask.

To the Hilt Saturday, December 8, 2007

Nothing comes easy, but I love difficulties, and difficulties love me. – Robert Frank

It’s not that one’s an artist one day, regular guy the next. Direction of the energy, & intensity of it might change, turn raw, get jagged, but it’s there despite nagging distractions, including the day job. Can get wearying, too, especially if you write something of worth, or paint something, the first getting published ten years later, which recently happened, or the painting never sells. Core belief might remain, white Paris cat staring from framed postcard, brother Theo, the reader or two or three, loving wife. If lucky! I didn’t work all that hard today, mostly looked at photographs, someone else’s work: saw a breast below a smiling face; a bull still standing with a sword to the hilt through its neck; cityscapes of light & dark; images juxtaposed in the developing tray; & Kerouac playing the typewriter. Robert Frank taught me the value of energy spent on a daily basis, those sort of moments toward the work’s longevity.

Another Annunciation Sunday, December 9, 2007 Feeling quite feminine for you, pregnant with the world, in your absence. Protuberant bulge of abundance for you like that gravid Picasso bronze in the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden. Experience for you here, go into labor for you, before you’re back from California, just to let you know in language the form our 10

new blood will take. Purple splurges in grey clouds at dawn. A wave against shoal rocks I thought was a sailboat two days away from winter. Such activity out there this morning! Light rode sea. Clouds stormed in in groups. Then a vast cold-front covered the entire Northeast seaboard shaped like one of those early hydrogen-filled blimps, igniting sparks of snow. Our child, the new world, will be a girl, filled with Peace, enjoying similar qualities that you have standing, speaking up for yourself.

Postcard from Boston, December 10, 2001 Monday, December 10, 2007 There’s carbon on my knuckles from wrestling with the chimney flue this morning after an all-day fire yesterday. The first two really cold days here in New England, finally. Ran to catch the 7:15 ferry. They dropped the gangplank for me. Last on board I stood out on deck. Sun off the ocean made it bearable. Entranced by the patches of snow covering the Blue Hills in Milton in the distance. The other guys on deck couldn’t take their eyes off a Navy destroyer escorted by five tugs entering the harbor. Just when I thought they were riveted to that male fascination with military weaponry, they turned away just in time to catch the heads of two seals bobbing on the surface. A firefighter tug went out to welcome the huge ship, anchored, & shot four towering fountains of water high into the frigid air. All that clarity, the light, commotion, fauna, flora, snow blanketing hills made me grateful to have tangled with soot-covered iron before I left the house.

Glancing at My Boots with Affection Tuesday, December 11, 2007 Headed into the shower, what with guests on their way from western Maine, glancing at my boots with affection. They were practically new a few months 11

ago, when I could dovetail them with a number of other, older pair. But the older ones got unwieldy, lapdog leather, inner soles giving into the ground below, (might as well have gone barefoot), forcing me to wear this tandem, still sturdy, every day. Reluctant to throw the others out. I imagine they group round in the mudroom, share travel tales, smoke, drink, gossip. They remind me of those van Gogh used as subjects for a number of drawings & paintings. In fact, one pair have probably already told the others about being at the National Gallery of Art in 1998, after their friend, Ted Dalziel, stood at the head of the line to score the first four tickets available to the public for the opening of the show sent over from Amsterdam, while the eponymous museum added a new exhibition wing. Rawhide laces, expressive tongues, brilliant eyes of small metal circles for unstrung lace holes in black, yellow, & blue, all integral to the dark worn leather, as if the artist were cobbler’s apprentice in his youth.

Last Day of Hanukkah Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Inseparable from the fire its light takes precedence over it. – WC Williams Wrote three letters before a hint of sun on the horizon: an apology, a thank you, & a request. By the time I looked up the line of light across the sky was so startling, I wondered how, (undistracted from my concentrated efforts with the words), I’d missed it. Pink & blue & black as wide as a Midwest superhighway. Slowly, mesmerizingly slowly, the source, the flame below the earth, or above, depending on one’s perspective, whether scientific, let’s say worldly, or poetic, let’s say provincial, the hydrogen & heat began to emerge as a shaft of cold ice particles thrust up through a delicate frill of clouds, quite still, perpendicular, & erect. Now the more feminine oval, the egg-rim shell’s subtlety, a whisper, an improvisational intimation took its turn. She & I, we two, spoke low, refusing to 12

budge. We reminisced: exactly the same last day of Hanukkah five years ago, when we stopped on rue des Rosiers in Paris to peer into the dark, closed shop window just in time to see the man ignite the final candle.

Cecil Taylor on the Horizon Thursday, December 13, 2007 Twist Merce Cunningham dancers in Paris so choreographically reversed making movement unsettlingly postmodern. Snow comes down unrehearsed, brand new in unreplicable flakes. Clouds span the region’s skies with the exception of a continuous pink line Alicia pointed out at the horizon as her interpretation of the image of World Hope. Not bad, two weeks to the day before Christmas. Not bad, small sense of renewal among Men & Women. I’m cognizant of the final night of Hanukkah, & aware of the West’s inability to see the revolutionary core of Islam as similar to its own overthrow of shackles, only to allow Power to shackle the Unknown Other. Over & over. I once wrote, “Kind December light.” It’s here, again, just above the Atlantic, in Cluj, in Pyongyang with the New York Philharmonic on its way with what I hear might be Bach & Beethoven, Joplin & Coplin, & even Francis Scott Key with Bird Dizzy Monk Bud Miles Coltrane & Cecil Taylor on the horizon.

Essential, Added, Integral Friday, December 14, 2007 New parking garage going up at the foot of Eastern Prom obliterates the vista of southern sky as you approach India, Fore, or Commercial, but that didn’t deter Stephen from expressing delight in seeing even a fragment of sun today, filtered as it was, through a minor gauze of flour between his eyes & the sky caused by another twelve hours of baking. It’s the artist’s way. At some point Keats, at some point Cage, at some point de Kooning realized that interruptions are a fact 13

of life, so that staccato rhythm, new, abrupt, becomes essential, added, integral. We sliced the bread as soon as I got it home, serving it minimally plain, or with olive spread, a glass of wine, spontaneous prayer automatically intervening, & an exchange of inherent compunctions shot out in incomprehensible syllables, grunts, sighs, moans.

Writing & Reading Saturday, December 15, 2007 Even immediacy of interruption, incorporating that into the present? Constant distractions at work away from the real work, reminding me that at this time last year I stood in front of the machine at 6:15 already sewing another bookbag for the backs of youngsters dreading the return to school. There, on the hot factory floor in front of the despotic machine preventing me from reading or writing, I’d sail to Venice where the vaporetto dropped me off with my stack of books & sense of absolute freedom on the little island completely covered in the mosaic of stone tiles surrounding a lone building, which I never entered, preferring to stretch out reading under the Adriatic sun in order to find my Soul in words. Distress at lack of freedom to read, that bondage, always led me to the margins. Look at me in Belgrade, content as hell even on the dollar-twenty-five a night barracks bed with a book, or roaming the streets in anxious freedom to stop & gaze & wonder. Coffee & walnuts this morning drove me to Mexico City, where we’d read in the forty-dollar a month boarding house room living on pecans & red wine in luxurious joy. In Nice, my knapsack of clothes became veritably useless, showering only on the beach, sleeping out of doors for weeks. Freedom on the stones of the Mediterranean, reading. Fifty-two jobs: delivering brochures the length of Lynnfield Street at eight-years-old to teaching in fractured classrooms to factory worker in leather, fish, meat, & canvas, or underling even in libraries, where they tried to forbid my writing & reading. The margins I’ve carved out today. What will Lorca say? What pleasures, secrets, & insights could Duras, Cixous, Montale, Olson, Kerouac, & Dorn, offer my own Soul today? 14

Blood shed on a page is there to be read.

On Marginal Way Sunday, December 16, 2007 Poets & mapmakers, so much in common, compass Souls at sternum & solar plexus. Bloom’s shoes tracing Joyce’s footprints in Dublin all the way from Paris & Zurich. Today, after reading the latest atrocities on women gathering firewood at the outskirts of camps in Darfur, suddenly, anachronistically in my path, another refugee from Sudan, (what with Maine sheltering the largest of that diaspora), paused in colorful robes, possibly confused by the sudden snow squall, quickly renegotiating her bearings on Marginal Way, of all places, in Portland. Snug in my vehicle, I tried not to stare, tried not to turn to look too hard at regal gait & beauty surrounded by swirl of snow, but she caught me in her own sight staring back, seeming to forgive my wonder, curiosity, appreciation, perhaps recognizing something akin to old griot eyes in the village, going about recording local histories, that last a thousand years, remarking boundaries, mapping the consequential.

The Whiteness of White Monday, December 17, 2007 White page, white ground, white sky, white, white imagination now in Portland, when I come in from shoveling, & hang out in the four-season porch with all the white windows & stones. That flint came from a riverbed in Cahors in southwest France, that chalk from a cellar in Reims. White wine in a big, clear goblet. On the way home from dropping off provisions to a couple of friends practically housebound after eye surgery, she exclaimed on the road against the white background, “That’s a red roof!!!” It was, above the barn, & I was proud to be associated with a woman of language, who’ll clue you into anything. Really, I 15

hadn’t noticed the intense redness of the red roof, & didn’t Motherwell go out of his way, along the way, to paint The Redness of Red? He did. I saw the artist’s proof at Judy Rothenberg’s Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston. This is the whiteness of white, in which the blank page needs contrast of black letters, the Franklin stove over there, the oak leaf treading in the wind like a tractor tire in a field across the white white backyard slam against the near invisible chain-link fence.

December 18, 2002 Tuesday, December 18, 2007 After weeks under the weather, I tore myself out of the ease of the house. Cleaned myself up pretty good beforehand, though, (after an Irishman’s sauna, not Finnish, you know stretched out in the sun in pajama bottoms the full length of the window-seat), cutting my hair a bit, showering. Trailed the waning sun down to the inner harbor, timelessness spread out over calm water, all movement, including my own gait made in pure space. Cornering the sun eye-to-eye at the shallowest end of the harbor, paid humble homage. Walked back the other way just in time to catch an almost full moon come dripping wet, with a touch of pink, out of the Atlantic. I really wasn’t expecting much out of the world today, just fresh air, when all of a sudden, between the moon on one side, sun equidistant in degree above the earth on the other, the sturdy, wooden Saint Joseph steered in looking for dock space at low tide. Three not so wise guys backed that beauty in where on the other side of the gangplank nothing but pure mud. One guy walked the boat back along the dock with a rope over his shoulder as if he were a mule. I asked the captain if he named it. No, the guy who built it in East Boston in the forties, was from Nova Scotia, worked it for a couple of years, then sold it to his uncle. Added that everything back then had religious connotations as far as the boats went, you know, the Saint This, Saint That. The first crewman walked up the plank with one good-sized lobster visible in his plastic creel. The next went off empty handed. The bearded captain carried a canvas & leather carpenter’s 16

sack which could have held tools, even cash, but remained an unknown mystery, which at bottom, we both knew, was really none of my business.

Right on Time Wednesday, December 19, 2007 Off to work, what else? That’s my class, after all. One side grandfather bolting the old country to run a small grocery across from mostly Irish St. James Church, but then gave so much away during the Depression ended managing meat for the IGA. The other, born here, ancestors robbed of “Fitz” at Ellis, sold tea & coffee from a horse-drawn wagon, & supplemented Depression hard times in vaudeville stage shows with three musical sons. Blue-collar immigrants, if you view things from this side. But from the other over there they began as honest, industrious farmers in Mayo, & scholars in Kilkenny. All I’m leading up to here in as spontaneous fashion as I’ve garnered from America, & take as impetus from their blood energy is that on the way to work full white moon was going down over my left shoulder just like that evening on the other side of my life, when young, at twenty, just outside of Split in the then Yugoslavia, only moon rising & sun setting, then, today moon seen over left shoulder, sun slowly dripping wet above the Calendar Islands in Casco Bay, I pulled into the driveway at work right on Time!

Time Overcome Thursday, December 20, 2007 Some beautiful dreams I’ll keep to myself for a change, reminding me to pay attention & appreciate real life, when it finally surfaced at four forty five in the morning with the sound of the coffee grinder going off. I did, I managed, I kept the lesson. Tactile appreciation, linguistic, olfactory, mnemonic, & all the rest of the senses following the taste of java all the way down & around to the cool & 17

warm waters of the shower to the blurred red of the horizon from Back Cove to Eastern Promenade with sun coming up through clouds like a high-school girl’s head wriggling through lace & frills of a prom dress. A vow toward life itself, while we still have it, nothing still, Time overcome. More than anachronistic: here, I’d just referred to both grandfathers during the Depression, when Maxine invites me in to look at the lone gift she got herself for Christmas. Former piano teacher, she showed me the tree ornament found in South Portland. Miniature player-piano, which lit up & played three or four different tunes. Told her my father had a player-piano, too. She kind of shook all of her tiny bones with Joy at the coincidence enough to say that she had one, too, during the Depression, when the family in the apartment below them, (there were nine!), in what I imagine were cramped quarters, played the sole, lonely, roll they owned, over & over: Glenn Miller’s, American Patrol, which when I said I didn’t know it, she plunked & doo-dahed it down note for note, beyond the then monotony to the now fond memory.

Moment of Joy Friday, December 21, 2007 When the star rose over the island this morning, defining morning actually, it seemed so exceptionally proximate. The nearness of its concentrated light opened vast potential spaces above, below, all round it, so that a minor idea of expanded reaches of the universe, traveling as it were, past all the debris ice rocks elements asteroids galactic realms was a gentle note, a finger on a keyboard registering such pitch, that its perfection produced an unexpected moment of joy, remnants of which seem to continue to reverberate somewhere inside, & out.

She Took Her Time Saturday, December 22, 2007 Fortune & tragedy walk hand-in-hand in the snow. Fortunate to be colorblind, when Bell Telephone tested whether I could arrange all those wires in the cables, couldn’t hire me. Permanent employee of New England Telephone Company in Salem, Massachusetts, can you imagine? I went off & fought for life in fifty-two jobs since: long list of potential tragedies. Please consider these four sentences a Prelude, minor musical intro to what I want to get at at dusk on the last full day of autumn, 2007, winter threatening, more feigning threat after midnight tonight. Snow’s no threat. Piled high here in the back out of windows Mr. Flaherty tacked on to the small Cape we lucked into a year ago provides the contrast for a colorblind man to notice the house obliquely over there on Lawn Street. Damn fortunate to notice it before opening to a page not read before. The entire coincidence includes thank-you-card imagery signed to those acknowledging meager contributions made during that very fifty-second job this year: Renoir. Rafael Alberti writes that rose is Renoir’s color shining on the backs & buttocks & the bottom of bare feet. Called my wife over, away from her desk & the writing she’s good at, asking her to describe this newfound color across the way. Waited patiently for her, while taking a sip of white wine. She took her Time: “Rose,” she called it in her frugal, one-word, linguistic economia, to no surprise of my own.

This Thorn Tree Sunday, December 23, 2007 My friends, the blank page, & steady snow Bill says reminds him of his years in Switzerland, the 1638 farmhouse, pear kirsch the landlord made, that he & his wife, Pat, added to tea in white afternoons. The Erviken headed back out to sea just as the snow came in erasing its name on black hull. Another friend, the inkscratched page, something akin to this thorn tree thrust up through the entire snowfall without piercing a single flake. 19

The Joy of the Purity of Color Monday, December 24, 2007 The open red grapefruit, a veritable Calendar Wheel leading all the way from the beginning of Time to the latest Christmas Eve’s eve, a day always pregnant with possibilities, & fruition of belief that the Time will eventually come. She & I, we two, who have been together for so long we can hardly believe the twenty years, but do, & savor them, would often celebrate this particular day at the Ritz Bar in Boston (connected as it is in the imagination to the same in Paris, New York, & Madrid) with oysters & a fine white Burgundy, French Chablis or Saint Aubin, the latter located between Meursault & Puligy-Montrachet, & just right for our palates & wallets. However, such geographies will not accommodate us today. We’ll stick close to home here in our outpost in Maine, the snow enclosing us like a cave or womb. We started the day reading aloud to each other alternating paragraphs of Olson’s short story, “The Stocking Cap,” in which the poet reminisces about ice-fishing with his father, his father’s precision in all matters, & his own early sensing of the existence of death in the waning of the sun at the end of those days coupled with the waning fire it was his job to tend the day long. We did that above two halves of the red grapefruit Calendar Wheels, & dark coffee. She’d wondered yesterday why I kept stocking up on these fruits, (she tallied six when we got home), & I’d simply say, “Because I like to look at them,” which was mostly the long & short of it. I did, additionally, more than the mere aesthetics, derive from the fruit the symbol of wholeness, the protuberant bulge of birth, of creativity’s spirit, of the abundance of Christmas itself, & lying fallow as they do during the work weeks leading up to the holidays, they enclose a certain promise, a delectation of sorts for the Time when we will have Time, the freedom to slice open & savor the fruit & the pages. For it is also at this Time every year, (just as it is in November, when I’ll read Tranströmer for that month’s “luster of precious furs,” which image recognizes the survival of humankind in northern climes wrapped inside the skin of animals, or every spring Williams’s Spring and All), I will find the 20

solitude of a dark room with a reading lamp to contemplate the fifth chapter of the book, William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Painting. The author, Terence Diggory, centers the examination of his theme by looking through the eyes of the poet looking at Brueghel’s London Adoration. Now, without the scholar’s & the poet’s help, I might find the sole appreciation of the Beauty of the piece, a word seldom, if ever used in this book, although “pure,” & “new,” & “naked,” are. Surely, too, to reread is to reenact one of Freud’s tenets for the experience of pleasure, which is to return to the scene of pleasure, over & over, & thus, in that sense to renew, certainly the basis of ritual. The Adoration offers us the Joy of the purity of color, which element Kristeva points out in her examination of another painting by Giotto, is the lone element that can bypass the human being’s internal censor. So the blue & the rose of the Madonna’s garment wash over our eyes, & the flesh of the child offers the tactile notion of the Spirit itself. I notice the juxtaposition of these feminine elements to the dark masculine architecture, & silver military hardware of raised halberds, but it takes the scholar to dig further, particularly in his chapter titled, “The Old Man,” to point out the poet’s concept of “antagonistic cooperation,” as the “fecundating principle,” & why this particular page is so heavily bookmarked, calls forth Williams’s notion that, “sex is at the bottom of all art.” So it is. Red grapefruit Calendar Wheels of Time & Bach Cantatas streaming into future memory. The sky with a hue of renewal taken directly from observing the figures in the Brueghel. She’s away now, but there’s a sense of her remaining in the absence. The Black Magi is a majestic, humble figure, is he not? Myrrh & frankincense are in the air. We talked of Love early on this morning in bed, but in the best tradition of cooperation, she suggested an alternative to making it, that of writing a poem.

To Think of Peace, Good Will, etc. Tuesday, December 25, 2007 It’s difficult to think of Peace, Good Will, etc. without the static of Iraq seeping through walls. Even if I refuse the news, as I did on Sunday, it seeps in like sand, or underlying threats of Improvised Exploding Devices, or bad water, bad blood, hungry children, ancient grudges. Guilt seeps in at the separation in distance, the protection of geography, & corruption of Homeland Security, let alone the inability to make a difference, have the least amount of impact, or realize just how little use a few sentences sent off from the margins of poetry will have on the morning before December 25th, 2007. Basically, it makes you sick.

Thelonius Monk, Live in Paris, 1967 Wednesday, December 26, 2007 Up with the sun in a life that has taken on the form of a gold girandole shooting out in so many directions the center holds. That heavy sunrise accentuating lightness of the recent snow. Coffee, get the coffee. Juice, pour the juice. Résumé, print out more copies for the interview this morning, & job fair in the afternoon! Where’s that tie I got for the occasion? What was the meaning of that steel cartouche, possibly covered in fine enamel in the middle of last night’s dream? What’s a Mayan doing walking on the highway? The Blues on the face of that old black woman waiting for a ride changed my entire outlook today on everything.

Deep into the Freedom of the Day Thursday, December 27, 2007 The bare-bones oak written against the sky, & the terrible little squirrels happy at the hard-packed surface of snow, along with the first view of Tremont Street past 22

cleared-out bushes near the back fence, are all that happens the day after the holiday, when I crave Freedom & Time, & a bit of her proximity. Surrounded by gifts: the new Absinthe: New European Writing (I’m sounding very Frank, by accident!) sent by Bogdan; Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945, from Ted at the National Gallery; a very funny, one-act comedy titled, “Miller/Thompson Holiday Play,” (as yet unpublished); & reams of emails I’m so thankful for, including pics from St. Petersburg (not Florida), & Sitges, Spain. All quite comforting, which is what Rimbaud called winter, & why he hated it, one small thing about which we’d disagree. I’m happy today, a rare exception. What with the day off, the Mexican blanket keeping me warm in winter, my library, my artifacts, with Dogon stool elevated to the height of the writing desk. Did get out fairly early: walked down Exchange Street tapping on Starbucks window to give Tanya the peace sign; stopped in at Books, Etc. to check out their poetry shelves, but found nothing more interesting than what I had in my canvas bag, Montale’s Satura; then strolled into Emerson’s, saying hello to Tom, & browsed the antique maps, when all of a sudden I found one depicting Kattegat Strait between Denmark & Sweden, a body of water upon which I sailed in 1967 at twenty. To my chagrin, Aalborg was not cited on the barren nineteenth century geography, (the strait was spelled Cattegat), but of course Copenhagen was, & there at the top of a sharp fjord stood Roskild, as the London map spelled it, where I peered down into that rocky ledge imagining its history being told over my shoulder by Camelia & Bent, (who live there), etching the name of the city & its location at the tip of the promontory all the more deep into the Freedom of the day.

Benazir Bhutto Friday, December 28, 2007 Declared Dead at 6:16 p.m. Pakistan Time How American hubris errs in projecting understanding of Others’ cultures, then 23

applies down-home solutions of massive power, & arm twisting, along with holier-than-thou prescriptions is really rich, isn’t it? We’re the enemy! (Piaget asked, “What do we do now that we know the Self is hateful?”) All I know is that Benazir Bhutto was declared dead at 6.16 p.m. Pakistan time, 12/27/07. She supported American interests, interests which are solely self interests, mostly lacking in compassion for any Other. Democracy, false religion, we’re spreading word of around the world, when we’re fools to think we really have it here at home.

Minor American Discrepancy Saturday, December 29, 2007 Minor American economic discrepancy visible days after the holiday through overnight snow transforming everything in sight into fine lace & latticework, especially given early-after-solstice sunlight on the way to work before seven. One homeless man at Prebble St. squats on his duffle bag in front of closed threshold of soup kitchen, another approaching the door draped in huge off-white cape of blanket. Slowing down just a bit in the car to register the scene, before catching the green light at Cumberland Ave. on up to Congress, where another guy’s on the last public telephone in Monument Square. Giving thanks for what I have, & what I don’t have to put up with, suddenly further on on Congress a lawyer, or stockbroker, or Death himself in a dark suit crosses against the light, stopping halfway, & forcing me to slow down, only to realize his sole dilemma is trying to prevent thin, shiny wingtips from getting wet in melted snow yards from the curb.

Kept Me Company in Her Absence Sunday, December 30, 2007 It kept me company in her absence, just as the sun had earlier, when out of bed 24

alone to view it before it disappeared into heavy cloud cover & overcast for the rest of the day. I wouldn’t see anyone, really, but corner store owner for Sunday paper & a bottle of wine at midday. Read & listened to music waiting her return. She said she’d be home by five. Shut the stereo off a few hours before that, but it didn’t stop, the phrase, a deep chord from the center of one of Bach’s cello suites repeated itself in my head at varying intervals, again & again, then again, not at all as if the needle stuck, & not all consuming, nor in the least bit intrusive, but somehow, accompanying a certain visual appreciation for one of the African masks or bowls, or the fifteenth-century Chinese sculpture, or a particular page in Montale’s Satura, I heard it. However, by the time she returned, right on time, when the phrase finally ceased, I realized it had become most associated with her body. Half-clothed, or naked, that extended chord continuously wrapped around the lines of her limbs & skin. Separate joys, internal music & her image, had combined in the weight of my anticipation to produce a pleasure close, yet far removed from her actual presence.

Of a Stillness Monday, December 31, 2007 Of a stillness. I found that. The nearest sound a thousand miles away. In a plane. In a recollection. A remembered murmur. Of a stillness. I found that. Inside. White birch bark hides glacial majesty & depth. The pain that drives one to one’s self, ultimately welcome. No shadow of a bird ever spoke. Of a stillness. Roots of spring. Nothing. Nostalgic, nor romantic. Eye contact with her this morning resonating now. Of a stillness. Not prolonged, dogs start, hammers mark an end.

New Year Tuesday, January 1, 2008 She talked of Time as continuous, practically eliminating Death. Whereas, he 25

stopped it dead in its tracks, keeping the moment alive. Snow fell overnight without a single witness. Yet everyone heard it, internally, at the depths of their Soul. The phrase, Keep an eye out for the music, turned the whole world into song.

Turning Time Around Wednesday, January 2, 2008 Spent a few hours reading Bergman, sometimes preferring his words to images. All translated into a sort of set. My favorite setting: man, woman, sitting, talking, but often just silent, as if the audience could read the actors’ minds, or interpret minor body language, as somehow foreign, or their own. Light shown through all eight windows. The two of us, (were we really any longer only us?) separate, alone, together. Her internal clock beating slowly, even turning Time around, rejuvenating, without the use of flashbacks. His blood palpable, pulsing, in the veins, in silence, without the need of voice-over, before a nonexistent audience, unless the two of them, doing nothing other than being alone together, watched the scene, as well, where Time intersects a silent now.

The Most Impressive Thing I Saw Today Thursday, January 3, 2008 Tree branches held on to as much of the latest snow as they could bear with little, if any wind the day after the storm. Taking a breather as I shoveled space for the old Volvo, the blue, cloudless sky took on the entire oak above me, as did the horizon the maple to my left. Pure Joy & Time embracing. When I walked to get the papers I saw two snow caves some parent must have helped the kids with. Tried to assist the woman with the silver Audi stuck in the snow, but she wasn’t interested in my story of driving one up to the White Mountains in the summer, so I flagged a plow truck down, & left her stuck, in good hands. On Lawn Street 26

the double-trunked birch was a candelabra of light, & anachronistic to the most impressive thing I saw today: a man coming out of the post office wearing shorts & tee-shirt, quite proudly displaying his souped-up prosthesis where right foot ankle calf & knee used to be, speeding down the sidewalk on Congress, his modern hardware looking every bit the back-end fender of a Harley chopper, only without the bravado of noise.

Between the Actual & Miraculous Friday, January 4, 2008 No exaggeration, the first star peers through a late afternoon charcoal-purple sky. Must be Polaris, which nobody refers to anymore, what with astronomers looking past it. But not me. My radius of Eros extends exactly that far, or more often reaching out as it did first thing this morning touching her, saying, “Source of my Ecstasy!” Whereupon, she responded, “I saw your poems up in the sky in my dream!” The rest of the day went on the same way. Snow on one side of the road, bare ground the other. Although missing exact sunrise, witnessed sea smoke shortly thereafter. So cold the woman who always jogs with her dog left it at home. Blank sheet of white paper flew by the lobby window like a pair of wings! Invisible ice on tree branches, better than tinsel. The radius intersects the circle, does it not? That’s the extent of my geometry. However, today followed a path between the actual & miraculous.

The Winged Habitué Saturday, January 5, 2008 Subtle, transformative power between the initial desire for, & then the desire to: the former purely visceral, the latter an act of language. Ask any artist, in any medium, it’s still the same captivating, motivating miracle Williams referred to as that, “which bridges the gap between the rigidities of vulgar experience & the 27

imagination…” Right now I’m haunted by the image of an osprey, the winged habitué of these shore-side oaks at this Time last year. I keep looking at bare branches in expectation of black wings, white-tufted breast, awesome talons & beak dropping morsels of fish flesh under piercing eyes of regret at any loss on the snow-covered ground below. But because I saw it once, & watched all week through binoculars, it reappears now before my eyes, this hawk, in revenant form, is all I want.

Oranges & Sardines Sunday, January 6, 2008 Keeping the log, just as previously, the notebooks, or forwarding letters as a way of keeping track & in practice, just as she’s doing, now, upstairs on the yoga mat. First breath each morning equaling a phrase of language, it’s automatic. What “reliance on architecture” meant this morning other than my constant concern for the cold all week, gratitude for this humble abode, I don’t know. Before she went upstairs she sliced another of those Calendar Wheel grapefruit for me, when I finally counted twelve sections, no less! I told her, then told her the anecdote found yesterday in the Obituary Pages, which I refused to go back to, but told her Michael Goldberg was a second-gen Abstract Expressionist painter, who took over Rothko’s studio, & as friend of Frank O’Hara offered the poet enough drinks for him to realize why he was not a painter, although he may have preferred to be so, as most of us do, knowing it might be easier at Times, & at least potentially more lucrative, surely more lucrative. O’Hara witnessing paint taking over for words, & words taking over for color, better understood his own calling refusing to mix Oranges & Sardines. The obituary yesterday told of how the painter finally sold some work, but the collector only doled the money out in installments, whether monthly or quarterly I’m not going back to the obit to find out, but recall how with the first installment the artist bought an electric blanket, & stayed in bed for two days to get warm.

Truth Becomes Her Monday, January 7, 2008 “Truth becomes her.” The three word phrase accompanied the image of a stack of books upon waking from last night’s dream. The dream’s method: concentrated & diffuse at the same Time. I knew who the phrase referred to, but the books? All four or five were black, without covers, or titled/authored spines. Not exactly the bedside stack I was reading from just before sleep, although that stack contained a black notebook, & another, excerpts from Walter Benjamin’s diary. I concluded the dream books were primary sources, just as she is a primary source. In the diary I recall Benjamin dreaming of Adrienne Monnier’s rooms, (oh, look, there’s an exhibition of miniature books covered in enamel, whereas the dream books were massive tomes!), visiting Brecht in Denmark talking of Baudelaire, along with the briefest mention of Asja Lacis with whom he was in love many years prior, & to whom I’m sure Benjamin would also bestow the opening phrase.

Inscription, Caption, & Secret Mark Tuesday, January 8, 2008 In his Letter from Paris, 1936, Benjamin hails the emergence of photography as something to be of use just as Goya’s drawings, urging the need for inscription, such as “I saw this!” Or captions documenting atrocities he saw earlier in Berlin, or heard coming in the future sounds of Kristallnacht & jackboot goosestep. Advocates photography as a weapon exposing in “every public or secret mark” the evil heart of Fascism. Such visual evidence emerged too late in Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, & for him. Where was that power then, where is that power now?

The Disasters of War Wednesday, January 9, 2008 Terror goes a long way, spawning trauma at the depths of living. However, transformed in that dark undercurrent, in dire circumstances, at the bitter end of a long ordeal, the whole enterprise can turn around, reverse the fear. Two examples come to mind from The Disasters of War, which didn’t see the light of day for thirty-five years after Goya passed away. In “What Courage!” a young woman climbs over battlefield dead to light the cannon against relentless onslaught. In “They Do Not Want To,” an old woman’s dagger is the exclamation driving home the point written quietly in pencil at margin’s edge. Perhaps it’s just that man has to earn courage, woman’s is more innate.

Just a Few Days after Meeting the Gypsy from Seville Thursday, January 10, 2008 I made the assumption. It may seem strange, but that’s what the dreamer does. She believes what she sees, & beyond that, draws conclusions ahead of Time, which happened again last night. Fresh from understanding the Spanish phrase, ahormar la cabeza, which is the matador’s act of directing the head of the bull with the cape for the kill, & just a few days after meeting the gypsy from Seville, who said we must go there in order to fully know the spectacle, & just before finding out that Goya painted the bullring there, the Maestranza, with its elegant colonnaded galleries, under the influence of etchings he found by Piranesi, when he fell ill in Cadiz at the home of his friend Sebastian Martinez, well, it made absolute sense to assume last night that the painter in the dream priming the canvas under a large palette knife with a thick coat of red used his own blood. Especially now, now exactly, at this moment of discovery with my sources piling up & surrounding me, to find out that the muleta is actually shaped in the form of a heart.

What’s Here? Friday, January 11, 2008 Whether falling in love with lullaby before nursery rhyme, or grandfather’s recollection before schoolyard debate, fragment before paragraph, photograph before etching, or postcard before prose poem, seems of little consequence, when approaching the blank page begging for a mark, or scar of relevance. Whether crisscrossing Boulevard Haussmann, where Baudelaire once strode with feet on cobbles & head in clouds, or young in Berlin, where Benjamin formulated the value of storytelling over that of the novel, knowing death authenticates content, & experience gives aura to the art… Conjecturing as early as five-years-old, that Paris kept in its streets & architecture secrets for the scribbler, or bricoleur, I continue to attempt to get down true experience in notebook, diary, journal, log, poem, or what’s here.

Both Realms Saturday, January 12, 2008 Uninterpretable runes with randomly sculpted eyes communicating in the dream a sense of knowing beyond this earthly realm. I heard my name called down from the fire escape by the girl with the slender body, smoking, a scratch on her face the mark of Eros. She & her friend were on a break from the factory next to the printing company, the sound emanating from inside: rhythmic, mechanical, productive, sonorous. Some clown tried to hassle me as I listened, but I brushed him off. On the sidewalk while tying my bootlaces turned to red ribbons. A bride carried flowers into a small car after the ceremony. At the crowded party, where no one spoke, I theorized it was because of the altitude & cabin pressure of the plane. Rudely awakened by the alarm, I suddenly missed the entire atmosphere, the whole gang, with the exception of intrusive clown, whom I recognized from the day before, along with the girl on the fire escape, & a few partygoers, so I guess both realms are a good deal closer than the dream might have made it seem. 31

Far from Expecting Anything Sunday, January 13, 2008 She got up as quickly as I’ve ever seen a body move, when I asked where my pens had gone from the breakfast nook, practiced as she is in the arts of dance & yoga, while I sat reading a great poet’s praise of the feminine, vocals poured over radio waves adding harmony to what was already a perfect Time, the snow still keeping most others inside, & quiet, alone in their respective intimacies. Far from expecting anything of significance, her movement quick smooth fleeting offered evidence that she guessed the instruments were needed for some reason, (they weren’t, but simply to have available), but the act became transformed into a vision, & coincided with a recollection halfway through recording it of reading Benjamin’s analysis of art criticism, which he believes is a matter of digging up the insignificant, & raising it to a level of significance. So although it may have pleased me to address her nakedness when dancing off to get the pens, the silly, not quite drab colors of pajama bottoms lent credence that Love alone played the elevating part in the art of the act.

All the Way to Life’s Depths Monday, January 14, 2008 That I unearthed… It was prescient. I couldn’t help it. I was on. On to something. My unconscious, or sympathetic magic reeled in the coincidences: from the talk of crows, to understanding evil as both accusation & projection, to the date on the library slip, now bookmark, for the borrowed article, “The Emergence of Maps in European Rock Art,” in the journal Imago Mundi sent exactly twenty years ago to the day, 1/14/88, when I did that kind of research, so that specifically checking for the date almost expected it, but the shudder & pleasure of eerie surprise still touched, dug down all the way, in that instant, to life’s pyrogenic, archetypal depths.

An Audible Chorus of Anguish Tuesday, January 15, 2008 By mid-morning I hadn’t forgotten the crows flying due east in semi-darkness, but by then my hands were covered with newsprint accentuated by the light of heavy snow. I wanted to avert my eyes from the carnage. I wanted the simple & complex comfort of Nature, but the static was awful in the news with political hacks justifying bombing artillery infantry attacks in Iraq using the smooth term SURGE to gloss over burns, amputations, disembowelments worse than death, decapitations, incinerations, which obscenities the words can’t do justice to, America the Beautiful. I wanted to avert my gaze for the rest of the day, not revel, exactly, in the diversion of aesthetics, & surely not compose some ode to the discrepancy between lifestyles of the invisible rich, innocuous famous, & disenfranchised foreign & poor against the disinterestedness of Nature in man. It’s just that by the time I began to address the issues, it felt like the black newsprint on my hands had discolored into indelible blood, while the crows metamorphosed into an audible chorus of anguish.

Measured by Memory Wednesday, January 16, 2008 Yesterdays measured by memory alone? When I broached the topic in brief conversation with Elaine Cella one ran into another, another undercut the former, the heavier supplanted the haphazard, the pleasurable overcoming the traumatic. Out of the fever dream from the crib an hallucinogenic sun shimmered above the closed french doors separating my parents’ bedroom there in Salem, until fire engines retrieved the body of the man who’d fallen into the lime vat used to remove fur from animal skins in the leather factory across the street. My French grandmother cooking in the kitchen divided from the dining room by the pantry with trough slate sink & copper faucets, “OK, Grampy,” I answered when taking me aside in the corridor to say, “Bobby, fish is brain food.” Aunt Mary hiking her 33

skirts up way past what was acceptable back then rushing out in freezing water to rescue me when I fell through the ice skating at Gallows Hill. My father warning me at six with the added tip of his shoe to, “Do something constructive!” attempting just that ever since.

One of Those Days Thursday, January 17, 2008 One of those days when there is no difference between the beauty of the world & the need for language, between light of the dream, its tender, gentle characters, perhaps the dead, & the dark light one has to get up in to make a living. Her flesh next to me is nothing less than a refuge & a sentence. The breath of talk, the plan for today amid the realization that living in the moment retains vast expanses of memory. Memory & the present moment. Fill the air with Rachmaninov’s Song Op. 21, No. 7, sung by Anna Netrebko. Our own mouths sipping coffee, sharing everything in the exchange of minor words & silences. “Stay safe,” our parting phrase heading toward respective workaday worlds, where the snow-covered world possesses an added interior: what Benjamin might call the aura, or Goethe the thing of beauty in the veil. Sky’s magnificent cathedral clouds. The lonely, thin, hooded figure walking the well-worn path of the homeless toward public facilities so early in the morning bringing everything back down to earth. But why the image of the tanker Torgovy Bridge rises up before me long before reaching the harbor is a mystery that can only be explained away by the earlier recollection of when I was captive at the factory job with the only window facing the only spruce, the apparatus of the machine timing my every move, in full control of my existence, the film of the memory of Venice passing before me then, vision of Torgovy Bridge transporting me somewhere else today.

New Companion Friday, January 18, 2008 Wanted from the beginning of the day: protection of the objective. That dark waked to, & dream woken from, the internal pulse, external walls & windows. Sky past roof, familiar tree limbs & invisible roots. An hello with passionate echoes, a so long without afterthought. The rain expected & sun’s surprise. Didn’t want much, other than everything. Essentially calling on all to cause fear’s disappearance: in nonlinear fashion, memory circling, desire abandoned, humility eschewing pride, fragment fracturing whole, doubt increasing faith, love intuiting truth, death on sabbatical, it worked. The world a new companion, better man am I.

One Shoe On Saturday, January 19, 2008 Working at the Salvation Army in the dream. The boss called ahead to say he was on his way in, but that I should look for some ankle-high, leather boots for a friend of his. Searching the steel grate shoe bin, I remarked to fellow workers there were only two left meaning two pair, four shoes, one pair a child’s, & the other just about my size. Why I found myself in stocking feet only only the dream knows. A duet came over the radio with a female lead of Ramblin’ Rose, Johnny Cash chiming in on the first refrain. I tried one of the used shoes on, which fit well enough to wear, if a bit too large, but when I tried the second one on it was identical to the first, both right feet. Laughing in disappointment, I held it in the air with my hand next to the other, my leg stuck out to exhibit the surreal dilemma to coworkers, who offered up a chorus of disinterest. I was on my own alright, the boss on his way in, one shoe on, one shoe off, I hightailed it out of there, but not before looking one last time under a couch for the boots, where an old leather briefcase lay, empty, & in too much disarray to bother with wherever the hell it was I was headed. 35

Sunday Sunday, January 20, 2008 Crucially beautiful, subtle, the extra arc of space to the blue nighttime sky accentuating gold stars in the little universe Giotto erected inside the Arena Chapel in Padua.

African-American Aspirations Monday, January 21, 2008 The projected poem changed at every breath, at every turn of round January light. After dropping her off, I drove back into town answering her question with where to get some music, when tempted to say to look for poetry. My favorite moments were each green traffic light on Pearl Street, while the newest version of Bartok’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin & Piano played all the way to the stop sign at Commercial, easing across to Custom House Wharf in front of Harbor Fish, one of the biggest reasons for our moving up here in the first place with its fresh, low-priced cusk & hake. One of the three Dans was working. We talked of Sharon Jones, Johnny Cash, Bach & Bartok, after he explained that the in-shore scallops on sale were from a day boat captain he knew, & that they “still quiver,” when he brings them in, adding that he likes to “pop them raw.” The new guy, Matt, hand picked them for me from the tray, & got the exact amount on the scale on the first try. I don’t know when I realized that Monday’s the well-deserved holiday for African-American aspirations, but it pretty much coincided with a memory of the former fish cutter at Harbor, Pepper, actually the best they’ve ever had, who could make short work of halibut, never mind the easier sword or tuna. Last time I saw him was not at the fish market at all, but sitting outside his apartment two doors down from us on State on a hot day wearing a green boa around his neck, sweating, eyes distant & glassy, he offered the usual strong, affectionate handshake, saying he loved his constrictor, & that her name was Cleopatra. 36

The Ethereal Transaction Tuesday, January 22, 2008 Gallery show & sale in which certain items not hanging or displayed are brought out by the dealer with verbal description of origin, style, & time periods. The Shu is mentioned in relation to a number of items, including one miniature ceramic I’m partial to: less than an inch high, detailed calligraphy in blue on white, along with two finely-wrought bronze hinges representing a door or gate. It’s priced at a reasonable sixty dollars, but I don’t have that on me. An incredible sculptural diorama in grey clay fills an entire side of the room, where the ancient artist emerges from an exact replica of himself to explain why he includes a self-image in each piece he’s ever made. His flesh, or spirit, is covered in the same grey clay as the masterwork. Unable to afford the miniature, which I now recall had a minor chip at the top, I’m drawn to the first piece on the wall made of wood with black paint, red lines, & oval silver markings forming a temple nave or vestibule. I seem to have an in with the dealer, who is friendly, pointing out that the price has been reduced in half a number of times, so that now it is within my range. But the owner intervenes claiming that I’m part of the “dibinity.” When I ask her what that means, she says, “desperate,” which upon immediate dream reflection, I agree that I probably am. Carrying the piece back to the dealer, knowing I’ll be able to buy it from him, there’s joy in the heft, shape, & beauty of the art work, while a small crowd or chorus of empathetic onlookers stands around listening to my attempt to elevate the meaning of the word “desperate” to “desperado” during the ethereal transaction.

Secret Snow & Fish Bones Wednesday, January 23, 2008 Snow fell in secret overnight. That’s visual music, five words. Then I swept it off the sidewalk & her car, seeing in the act staff & clef of a musical score. Earlier, at supper with her, I lifted a series of fish ribs still connected to its spine out of 37

the soup I’d concocted over the weekend, seeing something in them quite similar to the pleasure offered by the visual music of secret snow.

These Valuable Minutes Thursday, January 24, 2008 Leaving the light of the dream is the beginning of the day. So long dream flesh, so long dream desires & fears, I’ll take real life this time. A whisper. Morning’s dark light. The cartilage of movement carrying conquered wounds openhandedly out the door toward work, where moonset is a welcome companion in the west, escorting me all the way down Marginal Way to Preble to Temple strengthening one’s resolve, when suddenly glimpsed again between Natasha’s faux Italianate & City Hall’s cupola. Befriending it before it sinks peacefully into Maine’s western mountains, I circle round Eastern Promenade to witness it above Obrion on Munjoy Hill, these valuable five minutes before work provided by the green lights till then with sole exception of usual wait before crossing Franklin Art, a recent, shortened euphemism for Arterial, which continues to divide the city in useless fashion. Parking the car, I’ll take the atlas along with me, not to see where I am, I know that, but where I could be, if I were free.

Triptych to Accompany Winter Industries Friday, January 25, 2008 I. Out there in the frigid air trying to identify the blue trawler heading out with newly rigged purse seine wings, as if it were next in line heavenward, but no luck, she’ll remain anonymous past the more easily identifiable Cape Akrotiri, all the way out of the harbor, where on the outer reaches heavy clouds part to drop a shaft of dense yellow winter light amid the grey, suddenly reminded, once again, Goethe theorized yellow out of grey will seem to breathe. 38

II. If the wildcat were a sister ship she’s listing across the open field, weary head below tufted ears, extra slow across a patch of snow & more snow starting now. That’s as good as a raccoon’s tail trailing behind her, stiff, tilted. Since we domesticate everything, there’s little left for her. She has to scrounge around the neighborhood for scraps. I’ve seen & heard her hiss at passersby. Nameless sister ship listing across the empty field causing a sense of love one step above pity. II. Snow & Goldberg Variations could accompany winter industries just as they do here, but hard-pressed fishermen abide by stringent rules & dwindling catches. This morning before work I drove down to the wharfs where most of the local fleet remained tied up with just so many days allotted. Snow has stopped, revealing the cruel real in every direction. Cat gone, alone. The Akrotiri rising slowly, mechanical leviathan offloading all its oil ashore.

The Evolutionary Scale Saturday, January 26, 2008 Getting to my age, after so many years listening, after so many practicing, living & language become one. However, the pink-clouded sky before sunrise was life only, language merely gestating. The lean Gulf Scanda lay snug in harbor water untapped of its hold of oil by the crew. An hour later the larger Salvia Express headed to ports unknown, at least to me. Moon hid behind scrim Kitsy Winthrop told me soon after was a theatrical term for gauze draped down between viewer & that seen. Shrouded moon, moon in mourning? A Darwinian day if I ever saw one. So many out of touch with survival instincts. Dogs on a leash, & the rest of the world running wild. That’s an exaggeration, of course. Before I made my way home there were well wishes from Natalie, Russell was nothing, if not gracious, Charlie held the door for me, & bowed, no less, at Harbor Fish, while young Rebekah asked for my Web address. Phil made me laugh out loud, (do animals 39

laugh other than mock?), & my neighbor dropped off a letter, delivered to the wrong address, from Irene, as grandly insightful as any language could possibly separate, & elevate, human beings on the rung of the evolutionary scale from our predecessors.

The Dream Ran Out of Time Sunday, January 27, 2008 We were all in the dark when the book club got together in the dream, which of course contained symbolic meaning all its own, although I talked right through it, explaining hidden motivations, articulating secrets of the trade, then asked Kathleen to turn a few lights on. One young girl said she liked how I made homage to fall, that all that meant to most people was a fireplace on a cool day, adding that I had a good reputation among her peers, which I was glad to hear responding that I had a knack for tarnishing it. An older guy tucked a fast one under my chin asking the name of an obscure writer in the lineage of a more obscure school, from which I didn’t blink, but drew a difference between what a doctor of philosophy would do to store & test others with knowledge gained, while my readings ranged far & wide for use in writing. The dark room shifted somewhere along the line to a scene with picture window & white grand piano. When I woke I immediately realized that I’d wanted to talk about the internal erotic charge that starts & validates the language act, but the dream ran out of Time.

I Spent Time Monday, January 28, 2008 I spent Time thinking about Mayakovsky, & academics armor-clad by their offices. I spent Time thinking about Riga & Rothko, Lili Brik & Mayakovsky, as well as armor-clad academics by their offices. Time listening to a bowed bass, 40

watching her sew, while thinking about Godizdat, the State Publishing House, Mayakovsky, & academics by iron-clad offices. Time reminiscing of Venice, Paris, while examining the shattered atoms of words uttered by Mayakovsky. Time imagining the small, barren study Mayakovsky kept till the end of his life on Lubyanskiy Passage in Moscow. Talked on the phone to my father a thousand miles away just short of death on his second-last bed in the hospital. Read about Vladimir’s Renault, his aversion to Nice, but no longer thought about academics, their offices, nor how they got there, wasting the least bit of Time, already, having done so.

Paean Tuesday, January 29, 2008 That’s a grey-green sea driven by a harsh wind one wants to say adds up to black, when grief’s begun, & he’s not yet gone. Sleek tanker Nordbay stands anchored, almost paternal. I told her I’d call to see how he was doing, but no answer in the private room, where I hear we’ll need masks to enter. That’s a far cry from what we had in mind agreeing to meet this Friday on his 92nd to hoist a few, reminisce, joke, laugh. A chorus of muffled white masks? The empty room the phone just rang in may haunt some future dream. Below the keyboard moments ago Bach ended, Bartók took over. They echo in the empty room replacing the monotone of phone with subtle touches, nuanced chords of death’s descent, & eventual ascendance.

Out There Where It Was So Uninviting Wednesday, January 30, 2008 Forced myself up & out there where it was so uninviting. The biting cold, roaring surf, stones taking revenge with every wave for being ignored so long, battering walls & houses, all civilization in jeopardy of nature taking over. Wind wanting 41

to reduce language to sounds of anguish. In the middle of the day! Can you imagine what night has in store? At the same time, I saw on the largest immovable boulders’ scars & markings their investment of the past in the future. The wild’s reminder of just how risky this venture of life is. Eschatologically, buoying me up.

Two Sides of a Mood Thursday, January 31, 2008 I got down. My mood. I don’t often. I wept, inside. It lasted over an hour. I drove through darkness like impinging walls in broad daylight, or a forest at night. On the other side there were no words, but invisible signs like those preceding the intention of making a mark drawn by Tapies, or a shape composed by Smithson, say, the Spiral Jetty, upon which a man could walk as much to the center of the earth as the center of himself, but without yet moving a stone, a pure sign in the middle of the bodily sculpted mind, beforehand. All of a sudden other voices chimed in like the aftermath of the dream-sign <Chorus Women Lament> she said, “Love,” then another sung, “Life is Art!” I was on the street by that time, when a beautiful Asian woman stepped out of a storefront on the arm of a blind man. Her columnar skirt, her narrowest pointed shoes, whom I turned away from refusing anything more than that briefest glance, in his honor. Then, listen to this, I couldn’t make it up, the most regal of young African girls walked a walk you rarely see on this continent, glided, the African girl, whose nameplate I would have read if I could have caught up, but she flew up Middle & then Exchange, making the most of her break from housekeeping down at the Regency Hotel, restoring my mood to the coolest hue, say an indigo blue brushed by the near impossible.