Tilly Artaud

NOTES: I spent one summer at my mother's house with a toad, an American toad, a female American toad, who visited each night at ten and left in the morning at six, for 12 weeks; then she didn't appear at her perch by the glass door, for two weeks, a summer vacation.

"If you continue to come here," I said to the toad, "I'll have to buy a terrarium." At the word "terrarium" she crawled away into the night.

My life was quiet then, and that was my entertainment. I studied toads on the internet. The male toads have distinct voices. They call in mating. The females have little red gullets. Toads hibernate under the permafrost. No source seemed to know how long they live.

I reluctantly named her Tilly Artaud. She was free, not a pet, but I could only train my cat, Francis, not to eat her if he knew she were a pet.

After not going out for weeks, I went to a bar and met an electrical engineer, a motorcycle racer who raced in the Black Hills, a Renaissance man, in a relationship with a young married woman, and I told him about the toad.

Tilly appears in my short story "Dumb Luck" in a paragraph. I used it already, but it's a longer story than that. Do I write it long form, as a creative nonfic? As a children's story?

I started on a children's story that turned lewd about frogs and turtles. The turtles were the landlords. The wife turtle drove a red Corvair. Her husband fetched six-packs of pop and beer from the country store for frogs who were guests. He strapped them to his shell with a bungy cord. He went on foot, crossing the highway at a walking bridge. One day a car hit him, and the frogs didn't care that he was limping. The frogs were a very famous rock band staying at the lodge. Continue?

Sentences like little isles of meaning

SLS Writes
Summer Literary Seminars

"Courtesy of the indefatigable Doug Messerli: terrific, fresh and interesting, form-bending prose-poetry by Ann Bogle here: http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/solzhenitsyn-juke-box – and here: http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/fianc%C3%A9e.

"She’s not doing anything particularly new (nothing’s all that new anymore — hasn’t been in a long, long while), but she’s doing it very well indeed: being interesting to the reader (as a result of being interesting to herself, one would suggest), as she hops from one little isle of meaning (shreds of recollections, leaps of logic, narrative’s constant self-adjustments) to the next ... "

[read more]

Écriture de la chatte

The story has had four titles: "Écriture de la chatte," "How to Be Another Writer," "YKK," and "Feuilleton".

...

YKK is a zipper manufacturer whose initials stand for Yoshida Kōgyō Kabushikigaisha. A boy told me (and I believed as a child) that YKK was my name in code.

...

Another writer was not always another writer; before she was another writer she was a young woman writer and before that a girl who wrote; before that a child and before that an infant; before that an egg in the scenic camaraderie of heaven, in a film about two pants, parents enjoining her to take up.

She has lived with her and inside her. Has she seen it? She has not seen it, but she has roamed its hall until airborne, a cord dripping. Who cut it? Saw. He saw it, the boy, from the foot of his mother's deathbed, her covers flung off--dark furry snail suddenly visible--signal of what's next, his dying at the beginning or her end.

Another writer writes a serious paw, a mistake of cat, a dripping maw, a dune of replacement. "Sex is a renewable resource," she says. "If I have slept with all of North America, then you have slept with all of North America and Iceland besides. Wake up, lizard!" but he has slid off the bed.

She'd rather write his penis than her pussy. She's seen that.

Her clit is off limits to all except a stranger. He sends her a chestnut-sized, handpainted black and pink-petaled vibrator with 12 speeds and two gyrations. When it runs out of energy, she plugs in the long one, long like a rolling pin.

“It was the size of my forearm,” she said when he asked her. “I squatted over it. The head was inside me, and I covered only the top of it like a helmet. He didn't thrust. ”

She is long and curved up near a bell; only the carillonneur has knocked it.

She goes to the garden in August with her camera. She pictures it for the wild rhinoceros, a serious writer, living in Reading. She has never met him. He sends her fifty photos of his pumped up self, even one of his erection during a handstand; she says, “I'm not big enough for you, not wide.” He texts her from a restaurant in Philly where he is eating mussels: when r u cum-ing?

In the photo an elegant nail partitions the leaves: a flower, she's heard that, or an ear of prime rib. She posts the photo to her weblog under the heading "Sex and Taxes” and leaves it for fowl to peck at for a week.

“I don't want you to get a Brazilian,” he tells her, only he calls it a Bolivian. She has to get a Brazilian, every few weeks for a year. “I like you with hair there,” he says, “I like women with hair there,” but his position is a losing climb. “Suit yourself,” he says, “but it's for men who fantasize girls.” “It's cleaner,” she says, thinking of the artist in St. Paul who wouldn't let hair near his mouth. She has told him about the camera but not about the rhinoceros who texts her in Reading: gitting any? like a common pornographer or a crowd.

Blood everywhere, and this time she hasn't prepared for him or shaved. Fifteen pillow shams at the Palmer House devastated, a serious poet from Philadelphia, not the writer from Reading afterall.

The third first he: Had he seen it? The ring. He couldn't move forward to be inside it with her: it was a deadlock in several positions. He went down to look at her, to shell gaze. There was a wedding band. “You said you weren't a virgin when I met you,” he said. “I'm not,” she said. And he returned it.

Fiancée

The willing suspension of disbelief, a parakeet.
You cook then leave dishes for the reader.
I prevent having dishes to wash by not cooking.
I eat nuts and cheese and berries, but what if I did not eat?
. . .
A while ago, my boyfriend left me. Bella says it's sexy that I go around my small circle in town saying, “He broke up with me. He left me. He quit.” Sexy, but I don't know how not to: he didn't leave, and he wasn't my boyfriend. He was my fiancé. He stays in, deep in, a granite fissure in Manhattan. I stay in Minnesota and go out. I go out to meet the girls—old girls, new. We go on, trifling with language that's in use for us. Hot, cool, loving women with not cool, loving husbands or with hot, cool, loving boyfriends or with no husband or boyfriend: duende for a season or a reason for a while.

“You don't like the word ‘cunt,'” my fiancé said judiciously. “I like it but not as a first name,” I said.

Bella shows me a heavy, beaded necklace that matches my boots--beige-tipped and turquoise-shafted, the turquoise color not visible under jeans. I bought the jeans already tattered so I wouldn't have to wait for them, but they are all cotton without added stretch, so I wait anyway, stand around cased in them, dropping pounds walking and talking ceaselessly in them, talking and walking, while the air in the rooms turns pale red. He'd spy me dancing to paragraphs, gorging on beer then pizza yet growing loose and looser in the limbs until I feel like a girl again, a go-girl on a budget, a Gidget, a gadget. Yes, I say to Bella: I'll take the beads and black wool wrap with alpaca feathers and peacock brooch starred with crystals. I wind the stole around my jeans and pin the peacock at my hip. The wrap swings like a thick skirt over the jeans and beige boots. The peacock sparkles. They say and it is: subject for a runway.
. . .
Bella tells a story about a woman, an acquaintance, who came into the boutique with her boyfriend, the woman smelling of an STD. We perk up, listen. What STD? The smelly one, Bella says. The one with impossible syllables no one has heard of. The men of the north reject condoms and motorcycle helmets. The law permits you to break your head.

We walk to the Narrows from the boutique, fortified by talk of men and fashion. The Narrows is a blues bar known for outbreaks of small violence. I am wearing the winter white swing coat I bought for the wedding and the gold and turquoise beads.

A crowd parts to assess us. We take our seats at the corner of the bar. At the boutique we drank vodka. If I want to kill myself, but I don't, not here, not now, I'll order red wine. I ask for a Stella. A handsome man is already sitting next to me. I eye him as I shimmy in. He has beady green eyes. We go straight to politics. He is a Republican who lives on the Lake and commutes to Wall Street. Here, I am not surrounded by liberals on a sofa. Liberals are irresponsible dreamers who know nothing about finance, he says. I am not a liberal I tell him, but a leftist, a feministe. I hate abortion -- keep it legal, I say. I am wearing the sapphire ring. I have no friends and no enemies. My fiancé left me, I say.

An hour of this, a radio hour of talk-fucking, his green eyes boring into me, he leaves, and I turn, isolated. “He's married!” I say to Jen. “After I invested an hour in it.” Jen laughs and repeats to Bella what I say. Bella has to leave. It's ten. I move to her seat and into the brown eyes of a bald man shorter than I, a Libertarian distributor of faux tin ceiling panels. He sails in summer, ice boats in winter. I am a leftist and a feministe, I tell him. My fiancé left me. When we get up to dance, I feel drunk, but he holds me at the waist, and my legs kick out freely on the tiles.
. . .
If I get caught drinking and driving, I'll go to jail for a year. I tell the man with the brown eyes to drive us. Where are we going? To his house, he tells me. His friend, also named Tom, gets in the backseat. That Tom wears tiny spectacles, and I think that I have gotten it backward and that the glasses-Tom is the intellectual, but what if none of us is? I put on the seatbelt.

At Tom's the other Tom says good night in the driveway, and we go upstairs to where a clean white dog with beige spots and beautiful brown eyes is watching us. Tom leads me to a black leather couch in one of the living rooms. He strips me: boots, jeans, swing coat, beads. In moments, he's in me. He's not large, not small, slick. This--that--entry--is raison d'etre. “Clean as a whistle,” I say to the air, meaning no organisms, the organisms you can feel on contact. "Tight,” he says.

My fiancé said,“It was like having sex with the Holland Tunnel to be fucking Diana. My wife that was sex in a monkey patch. But sex with you is the sweetest, snuggest space.”

I'm glad Tom rolls me over and buffs me again. I call out in the dark that I'm a Jamaican. Another man comes near the room and stands in the door. He says something, but I miss it. I don't know who the other man is, but I see his shadow watching us. I wish the second man would come in, but there's thought in his distance. Later Tom tells me it's his foster son. Tom is 61.
. . .
I wake in the bed looking out at a giant golden maple, not knowing what town we are in. “What town is this?” I ask Tom, and he tells me but I forget. He answers my next thought, "I can't get you pregnant."
. . .
At breakfast, Kevin, who is 23, tall, dark, and impressive, sees me in the light. “I thought you were African when I heard you,” he says. “British and Swedish,” I tell him. “I might be Arab,” he says.

Inaccrochable

Unapproachable. I imagine an L. Frank Baum novel with a hairy lesbian marching band in parade. The womyn visit the barbershop and keep their hair short like men's then let the hair on their legs and armpits grow like European women's.

The womyn are hippies in their way.

I have to look back at it: men in Madison guaranteeing the free speech of a preacher on the library mall. The preacher stands during lunch hour on a concrete platform and shouts at the group, perhaps hoping to save them, "F-o-r-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n!" The beards face him braced at attention, forking the word in the cold.

I walk by watching them, not stopping, thinking, "What fornication?"

Later, ten years later, in Texas, I visit G.'s apartment. She orders the men to piss off the balcony but lets the women through the bedroom to the bathroom to pee. Pages of my thesis are strewn throughout the rooms and cover the floor. We sit on them and on old CDs. The visitors grow upset, to the point of hysteria, if one of their lovers sleeps with another of their lovers or husband or wife. "F-o-r-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n!" I shout from the bathroom. The men hear it and send in J., the little drug dealer girl, to see.

. . .

When the man comes in the house with his girlfriend, he is hoisting a 12-pack of Bud, and she is holding her eye where he has flicked it with his baseball cap while driving. M. and I have been arguing about the future. At first we are glad to be interrupted. I immediately think of the two of them driving 25 miles out of Houston to get to us in Sugarland, but when I see that the girlfriend is injured, I get on my horse.

The man is wiry and jumpy. There is a tattoo on his upper arm of Charles Manson. He jumps and jumps. He looks like a man on a pogo stick. He will not stop jumping. "I'm going to smash all the windows of her car," he claims. "Stop him," I say to M., but M. does nothing except try to make peace with concentration. "You're not allowed to hurt her or her car," I say to the man, whose name I have heard once and forgotten. The man veers close to my face and says, "Who are you? Bella Abzug! Gloria Steinem!"

The girlfriend smiles then goes to lie down on the daybed in the dining room. The man runs through the kitchen and out the back door. When he comes back, he says, "I smashed the windows of her car." M. goes out to the driveway and returns. "He did it," he says. "Call the police," I say, and M. says, "We can't have the police here. The neighbors will complain about rehearsals."

Then the man jumps near my face. "I'm going to tell you a story, Bella, Gloria. When I was 13 my father beat my mother every day, and I threw myself into the fight and tried to stop him. I couldn't stop him. He was bigger than I was. You have TLE. I have TLE. You have bipolar. I have bipolar. But mainly I shoot heroin. Would you like to shoot heroin?"

"No," I say and look at M. "She doesn't do that," M. explains. Then M. leaves the house by the front door, and I pretend he will be right back, that he will not abandon me to a fiend. The girlfriend has not gotten up from the daybed to look at her car. She lies turned to one side holding her eye and shyly laughing.

I go to the master bedroom. I close the door. I leave it unlocked for M. The man comes running through the door, jumping and making noise. "I'm going to eat you," he says. Then he leaves and I lock it. I get in bed. I can hear him fucking her in the dining room. I hear her songbird sigh. I can try to get under my head. I pull the pillows over my ears and the covers under my chin. I pray, What solidifies them. What unites them: Blessed are these the workers of the world.

Hypogynormous ruble (exchange rates for Zynga)

Blackjack. A digression at Matchbook. Or Mississippi Review. Or Mad Hatters' where a thread started about irreality.

I had intended to spend $110 at FarmVille but have spent $250 -- $110 because that is how much I won playing blackjack outside Hinckley, Minnesota (across the border into Wisconsin). In my honesty or fastidiousness I adjusted our winnings ($220 or $110 split) for the speeding ticket that Peter got crossing the state line in his oversized red Japanese sports car I called the "sports Buick." When he was pulled, I had not been thinking of speed. He had once been a cop himself: I watched as he placed his hands carefully on the steering wheel, separated and displayed, and tweezed his driver license from his shirt pocket with two fingers.

The night before, we had "won" at slot machines then jumped on the hotel bed (WCCO was our sponsor), too giddy to wait until morning when we were sure we would win again. Morning came and we sauntered from the hotel to the casino to lose at automated poker. We went to the gift shop. I adjusted for silver wire blue beaded dreamcatcher earrings and a carton of American Spirits blue. By four, we were at the bar side by side slumped over gin and tonics gone almost still. The bartender suggested Wisconsin, the trading post casino where we ended up turning it at blackjack.

"Moodswing," Peter said, radio-style, confidentially, and we laughed.

I have the eerie feeling that I half-wrote that story but can't remember where I parted with it. Raconteurs shine when their stories find you. They know it when you shine.

When farming started in September, I thought of gambling, of my childhood best friend's marriage ruined due to gambling, and of farming as a trope for living in the Midwest. Could I ruin a marriage farming at Facebook? Yes, but if Peter were here, we'd be going somewhere, not stuck to a computer.

As with the trouble with gambling, I managed to spend beyond my self-suggested limit at the farm while [farming and] wanting to do little else. It became a chase for "money" (numbers like rubles), following a weeks-long passion for the perfect placement of each tiny animal, tree, and length of virtual fence.

I compared that to writing, while I worked. I thought it was nicer to "farm" than to write because there is no need to offer opinions when I farm, only to reveal biases in landscaping, my version of it: the so-called traditional.

In virtual farming, there is no chance of real money, only the risk of spending it.

70,600 FarmVille coins or 240 FarmVille bills can be had via Paypal for $40 if you can't or don't wish to wait for trees, animals, and crops to develop. A farmer can make it without spending real money, but there are incentives to buy.

In an email claim to Zynga, I wrote, “On December 7, I bought 595 FV bills for $100 USD. I bought 28 gumdrop trees for 560 FV bills or about $94 USD. I sold 12 gumdrop trees immediately for 12,500 coins a piece and kept 16 gumdrop trees to display on my farm. Since that time, the resale value of the gumdrop trees has inexplicably and without notice dropped to 3,000 coins a piece.” I asked for a clarification and price adjustment. I wanted them to know that I could track exchange rates for all four kinds of currency and points at FarmVille. I had lost a hedge arch (that joined the blue barnyard to the sheep pen) and wanted replacement coins for that. Zynga replied that the answers to my questions could be found in the FAQ. I had read the FAQ and the TOS. Now I wait and watch for news of lawsuits I had read about but pardoned for the pleasure and sake of farming.

With 60 million daily users, Zynga (run by a group of male inventors) had failed to produce a FarmVille flag for India, leading to worldwide protest and instatement of a flag. (Zynga has yet to produce a flag for Sweden or coats of arms for Scotland, either.)

What had I expected, given the tinny dialect: “howdy, partner!” "reckon so" and "cowpoke" crap, as if makers at Zynga hadn't heard a snow farmer from Mississippi speak.

"Hypogynormous ruble."

Terms of Service at FarmVille require users to link to the FarmVille or Zynga websites in internet references to them.

[Dec. 13 at 9 a.m. Zynga writes, "We have credited you 114,000 coins to your farmville account for the gumdrop trees you have sold. Your current coins balance is now 598,385. Thank you for your patience."

I needed no credit for the 12 gumdrop trees I sold but for the 16 gumdrop trees I have yet to sell. Zynga will still owe the price difference for four trees (38,000 coins or $21.53 USD).

Dec. 15 at 8 a.m. Zynga writes, "Thank you for contacting Zynga. We have credited you 38,000 coins to your farmville account for the 4 gumdrop trees you have sold. Your current coins balance is now 742,568. Thank you for your patience."]

Once the Christmas tree is out of the courtyard, or even before, I can purchase the greenhouse (100,000 coins) and sell the manor (10,000 coins) in exchange for the lodge (800,000 coins) or the villa (one million coins). Then what? The villa is the top.

The future is not ours to see, que sera, sera.

Seven digits

The farm before harvest today, the day I made my millioneth coin on FarmVille. Grapes, sunflowers, roses, tulips, eggplant, cotton, corn. I bought a windmill.

Why I Farm

I farm at FarmVille in lieu of last year's directive to "go to a hospital for codependency in Pennsylvania" where art may be a culprit instead of a constructive act armed in its power to ward off faux illnesses. Occupational therapists teach art once a week at psych. hospitals, where I visited briefly twice and made two important artworks, one a collage using a paper bathmat and magazines. There may be a fine line between imbibing (vis-a-vis making art) and intoxication (a kind of overpowering pride in creation) (something I'd miss). Not to mention the money in it, in farming, the concept of it at least.

Unplugged Hand

Interview

Fiction at Big Bridge at Experimental Fiction/Poetry/Jazz

Jeff Hansen interviews Ann Bogle

Burning Bush

The Argotist Online

Poems:

"Another girl to figure out," "Catnip," "Haiku Romance," "Head," "Key of James," "Many how are seid," and "This is Why I Loved You" from dog barks up a tree at the apple left in it under a deerslim moon (Orium Press for Dusie Kollektiv, 2009) appear in The Argotist Online, ed. Jeffrey Side.

Olmsted Point at Yosemite

Work on What Has Been Spoiled

New at Big Bridge 14, ed. Vernon Frazer and Michael Rothenberg:

"The Housecoat" (1987)

"Mugabe Western" (1985)

excerpts from Work on What Has Been Spoiled (1988-1993)

Turning Thirty

Of all the authors in the library, it was a wife from Maryland who called out from her marriage dormer I was not to read her. It might have been 2005. She shouted: “Some people should not be allowed to read books!” I intuited from Minnesota that the shout was for me, though we hadn’t spoken of or to each other since graduate school, nor even then.

On the cover of her book is a girl from the waist down in black skirt and shoes. It is one of many covers that began to appear after Reading Lolita in Tehran had delivered Lolita in a turn in planetary events as a beloved American novel to the hands of school kids and friends of Bill W.

I have a writer friend in her sixties who reads for language, for its sounds and expression. She does not read to be taught moral lessons. She reads to listen to language as if it were as abstract and lyrical as music, emotive and without argument.

I have another friend, nearing 60, who reads like a music librarian. He reads Vladimir Nabokov. He reads Robert Musil. He reads Alice Munro. He’s read more of Richard Howard’s translations than anyone I’ve met (Richard Howard, who knows the wife in Maryland and her poetry but not my reader friend). He reads scores. On the train he may read scores or he may conform and read The New Yorker. He might argue that music does argue, that he follows its arguments as if they were written in Italian rather than in notes on a page.

I used to read then write for the enjoyment of language -- Gertrude Stein through the Beats -- and when I read Lolita it was that way. I said later that Lolita was top shelf, not a book for messengers, but that might have been off, a dusty statement.

Then the covers appeared: girl from the waist down in rain boots. Girl from the waist down in Mary Janes. Girl from the waist down her socks slipping. Girl from the waist down on a park bench in the sun. These covers spoke as clearly as the bones and ghosts in titles.

After the Maryland wife telekinetically commanded me not to read, reminding me for the first time of child prostitution in her father’s native country, I turned away and didn’t read her book. A princess, she gave in an interview that she drank whiskey in a Manhattan studio before she married. There are different kinds of whiskey. Being there, reading. I didn’t know what game she’d won. I didn’t know how, whether with her glistening branch of hair; her pretty knees (knees I don’t recall); or her visionary decision to write with her writer husband their first sex in Nerve.

In John 4:18, the harlot is a Samaritan who has had five husbands, and the man she has now is not her husband. The husbands of the departed wives have strokes and sinus infections and seizures and lesions and kneecap replacements. They are celibate, though they may own someone.

I began not to care as I had cared that women I had known were at last publishing novels, except for the first one at 30 whose books I’d read, women trained to write poetry who had been cheerleaders in high school, multicultural cheerleaders who had married, had children, and in middle age signed novels about women turning thirty. I saw how parochial and sycophantic it might seem to care for novels written by women in friendships tested by beauty: Asian white cheerleaders! Latina white cheerleaders!

I had been a cheerleader at Lolita’s age or younger. In fourth grade in our red corduroy skirts and white wool turtlenecks we looked like the girls on the book jackets. It was a year of red, white, and blue bell bottoms, chokers, and mini-skirts. It was not a decade of pink stretch pants, pink sweatshirts, and pink snowsuits.

The police heard the music at my birthday party in fifth grade: a group of us girls had taken the portable record player to the park in the middle of the night and dropped our clothes. We hid in the willows from the cops’ search light, our outfits draped over the hockey boards. The light scanned the horse path in a staccato blare then passed. We were aware but not afraid. I had felt in my spirit a song, though not a song, about “freedom,” a poem that had nothing to do with law, religion, or sex. The girls who stayed curled in sleeping bags while the others streaked in the night became athletes and cheerleaders, sisters without borders of the doctors of “turning thirty.”

I had thought of reading every book by every writer I had met. When the wife in Maryland shouted across the country, I had read the novels of a classmate, for joy that she had come so far, for joy in the stories and surprises in language, for joy that she had beat the clock and found readers, not only the competitive and pilfering and preening writers who’d been her audience at school, but readers for a story.

The institutional preference for short poetry and novels rushes one at the AWP in the form of human bodies, younger women and older men, poets seeming to outnumber fiction writers eight to one with their sixty- to eighty-page collections surpassing fiction writers’ cumulative stacks of “nothing.”

The wife in Maryland had not studied fiction writing, had not sat in fiction workshop, and her novels with the girl from the waist down and the rainboots on the covers became New York Times bestsellers.

In 1997, nearing 35, I sent a short story about turning 28 to an editor at The New Yorker. The editor, a poet herself, called the story “ambitious.” It took eleven years, but Vernon Frazer published it as “The Sitzer” in Big Bridge. Meanwhile, an essay by Ben Marcus on experimental fiction appeared in Harper’s in 2005. Marcus writes, “ambitious” in menial code suggests “You stand not with the people but in a quiet dark hole, shouting to no one.”

Solzhenitsyn Juke-Box

My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don’t want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin’s death and Peter the Great (6’7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in the Bronx. A woman named Svitlana asked to translate it to Ukrainian. I know that if I were willing to write stories in longhand that better stories might result, yet I stay unwilling, realizing how stubborn it means I am, as when I pretended to have read Gulag Archipelago for the hell of it. Woiwode recommended Gulag to the workshop, had come close to requiring it, but decided to trust us by suggesting it instead, and everyone (except me) did it and didn’t speak of it but nodded his and her head silently in the hall or coupled over it. I jabbered away as usual. I said, “Write short talk long, write long talk short.” Years later, I wrote in an essay called “Hoss Men” -- I didn’t know where to send it -- write short, die young, write long, die old. I might have gotten a paying job had I read Gulag. It was the one fatalistic thought I’d had about recommended reading, not the one time I failed to read something recommended.

I had read Russian literature in translation though only a story or two by Solzhenitsyn before I went on the Russian cruise. The Kempinski was home in St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg has thirty sunny days in a year; I was there for three of them. That was the end. Moscow was the beginning. The Volga and the seas were in between. Looking at bookracks in St. Petersburg affected me like being lost. The English translation section, though the bookstore was large, was meager. Nothing I tried to find had been translated. What had been translated seemed obscure except a tiny book of one-acts by Chekhov. The world did not exist in English there, as it does in some places; once I even snapped at someone who didn’t understand my request for directions. It was frustrating, even a little frightening, to be in Russia and unable to read the alphabet. I could make nothing of the words. We took a week of lessons in Russian on the ship, and I realized my brain had grown too old to learn a difficult language. The boy from Eton already knew the alphabet and many phrases. His grandfather, Sal, said his grandson was a world-class genius whose musical compositions had been performed at the New England Conservatory though he was only 16.

A tour group from Switzerland spoke German, and I listened to them. These Swiss were very sexy people, by land and sea, where we met them, not only because they were Swiss -- I wouldn’t know about the Swiss aside from euthanasia -- would euthanasia make a people sexy? These were rich Swiss people in middle age, sexier than Americans and Russians: one woman wrapped her head in a diaphanous black scarf and flicked her legs jauntily in belled slacks and one of the men looked like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. We were visiting islands and later in New York when T. got his hair cut, I said he looked like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island. One of the Swiss men asked me to take off my clothes and join them in the hot tub on Mandrogi. I smiled and thanked him then strolled the island with the widows in my group. T. ran up a $2,000 bill calling the ship from Manhattan.

I tiptoed out of the dining room in the evenings with one of the widows, a woman from Turkey, to smoke on the deck. Smoking was allowed and cheap in Russia. Our group of mostly Yale Alumni frowned on tobacco but sipped vodka at the piano recital. The Serbian bartender recommended Imperia vodka instead of Beluga, and the Turkish widow and I drank Imperia on stools and smoked cigarettes. The Swiss smoked and drank vodka before meals, wine with meals, and vodka in the afternoon and at night.

A retired feminist literary agent named Jackie and her boyfriend, Jock, were on board. Jock was kind as one might expect of a man traveling with a feminist, and Jackie was happy yet stern. She mentored me one day over lunch. She said I had to push a novel to get an agent. She said I’d ruin my life if I got married without a book. I thought I’d ruin my life if I got married without a child. Novel as dowry. I didn’t bring up my prose poetry chapbook while we were sailing Stalin’s Reservoir: XAM: Paragraph Series published by a couple of anarchists farming in rural Wisconsin. I’d seen a Russian anarchist shot to death in a play set in Chicago; his girl committed suicide. Russia with its furs in tents and vodka huts and painted icons: my novel?

. . .

On the flight back from Frankfurt a six-foot-tall black woman sitting behind me asked me not to recline my seat. She was American, a youth activity director, fit as an athlete, also returning from Russia. Since we were both tall, I agreeably understood. Russia seemed mostly white and a little Asian and not very mixed. An estimated fifteen million people live in Moscow, yet I saw only one black man there -- dressed in a Revolutionary War costume.

I had taken leave of the widows when they went to their seats in first class. I thought T. might have thought of that when booking the ticket: to seat me with Yale ladies on the plane. My legs swelled on the flight. Then in the middle of the night in New York, a large painful lump formed in my breast. I spent the next several weeks in doctor appointments and ended up with a partial mastectomy. The lump had been some sort of infection, not cancer. The scar mostly healed, and T. said it had healed. One of the widows on the trip, Phyllis, returned to New York to learn she had pancreatic cancer, and though we called and wrote emails, we never saw each other again.

The day I flew back to New York from St. Petersburg, Solzhenitsyn died. T. was personally affected since Solzhenitsyn had been his neighbor in Vermont, and Solzhenitsyn had met T.’s dog, James. I wondered if the obituary were the cure for not reading Gulag. If I submitted old stories to major houses -- something I had avoided in the 90s in favor of submitting less old but cold stories to smaller houses, who later claimed not to want short fiction -- I might call them “early” or “neglected” and still find a job.

Two friends solicit me for prose poetry or something like the Bronx list. It’s turning me suspicious that they can’t get through anything longer than a few words unless they wrote it or the writer is famous, famous like Solzhenitsyn? Prose poetry is for rebellion, I say.

A mystique has settled on my sister’s hair. My sister is an artist. Rather than feel bad, if she and her friends are going to feel sorry, for her uncle the psychiatrist or her sister the writer who have bipolar -- her bipolar sister who writes -- she mythologizes her kinship to them -- whatever that is, she says.

Sound Experiment (2)

1. At Ana Verse select the Gabcast recording of Swedish folkpoems. Play the first song, "Rida, rida ranka."

2. Play Leo Kottke's "Big Situation" (c) 1994 as the Swedish folkpoem "Varan Prost" begins.

3. When "Varan Prost" ends, play "Basal Distance." Let "Big Situation," "Ode to Coffee," and "Basal Distance" play simultaneously until "Basal Distance" concludes the experiment.

Po-cash

My savings account had $16,000 in it. There were $16,000 in my savings account. I was on this side of the economy. I sided with the economy: get on up, banks, get on up!

Barbara hadn’t called for a year before her position at the biotech company had been eliminated: Six years after her chapter seven, she owed $16,000 in credit card debt, and her wisdom teeth teemed with cavities. She was unemployed, and her wisdom teeth hurt.

Aaron called to say his wife’s sister had been killed. She’d been beaten for an hour then shot between the eyes by someone she knew, someone backing a jealous girlfriend. I didn’t believe that, but I believed someone had killed her -- until they knew more -- slayed. He asked me to pay for the funeral. After his divorce from his rich second wife, he had filed chapter seven. He said, “You have money,” and, “My wife’s family are white trash.” At one time he had wanted to marry me. He could have said “my third wife’s family,” but he said “my wife.” He had a job. I said, “Aaron, you earn $90,000 a year,” and he said, “Shut up” and “fucking bitch” as I might have said “goddamn.”

Nancy called to say the housing market had slowed to a creep, and she was running out of cash. Her mother had died leaving her several million in real estate and locked assets. She was tired of it! she said.

My sister called to ask for $200 for a dress form for her clothing design business. She pitched it like a saleswoman. I had spent $400 on her birthday the week before that, thinking it was extravagant and due to having something.

My mother called to invite me to a play. I felt like I owed her, and I did. I bought the tickets.

At 60, Brian, a music prodigy, who had rent control and a house he inherited in New Jersey, never called. I called him. He and his wife, a publishing executive, couldn’t buy groceries except rice and beans. Chop-chop salad, I said.

Jason called before his chapter seven to ask me how to file. He worked nine-hour days trying to sell Chevrolets and had borrowed $60,000 to pay bills: daycare, mortgage, food. “Black is up, red is down,” I said, knowing he turned to pleasant memories of lawbreaking when he felt discouraged. I asked him to meet me for coffee. He said he hadn’t bought a coffee in a year.

When I was poor, too poor for lunch out or coffee, cash poor but rich in time, the word broke had too catastrophic a meaning, so I said poor to give it balance, to live inside it. I was eating, practicing at gentility and at saying “fixed income.” My friends lived flamboyantly with millionaires they ended up not marrying. The therapist for the county suggested I move out of my mother’s house and into government housing.

Who remembers? What do any of us remember of those times?

I am a would-be philanthropist with my nest egg, but I would go down. The egg came from winning a poetry contest: $20,000. The text of my poem is as follows and appeared in a hard cover volume called Touch of Tomorrow, $80 a copy:

Florence’s Weekend

Grace brought Ryan
with his saw
to grind the trunk
and make the logs
build the stack
and clear the leaves
the tree left
when it died

I had told three people who later called broke of my success. I said they can write a poem, too: anyone can! They said they didn’t want to write a poem. They said they were too busy working to write poems. When they realized all I intended to give them was a story about a poem, they said: Why didn’t I get a job (if I couldn’t be useful)?

Anger management, the therapist said, so I went. The therapist there scowled at me for coming in late. I realized I was angry because I knew no one who could meet for lunch. Why did poor people go to therapy? They borrowed money for housing; why not borrow money for business school? What had I learned at leisure school: the days went by slowly, the weeks went by fast. I didn’t know how to pass time; it passed me, and it couldn’t be saved. Time kept running at me, flapping its salty deck in my face like A/C.

Queen of Spades

I changed my mind about what had taken place: I had failed improperly, not, as I had at first believed won every heart. I had not won every heart. I had failed to note it. The hearts were in the field. The hearts, our hearts, our two tall hearts, our too-tall friendship, too tall for men, our hearts in our eyes, at a level, to the side, our hating to do this: to win, we lose. In shoot the moon, one must win the Queen of Spades and win every heart besides. The Queen of Spades is worth 13 hearts. I had lost the Queen of Spades. I had not kept my eye on the prize: the prize is men’s eyes, eyes of surrogates, lechers, lepers, lawyers, leaders, landholders, landlubbers. The Queen of Spades had not won every heart, but it was not in her heart to realize it, and now: what difference did it make? She had reported her gain. Had she not won her own heart repeatedly, to her own self-satisfaction, had she not concealed it, not robbed? Didn’t she make sense to herself, wasn’t she pleased? Didn’t her publisher—name withheld—vie for her in the heart-sniffing world of connoisseurs? Didn’t the losers sign off at the end, due to a formal requirement that they admit defeat to her, the winner of hearts? Didn’t her hearts all fear her? I was not yet beginning to fear her. I admired her, as I admired all good people. Her quip was a dagger that stabbed out of her mouth, insisting on the laughter of the people around her. Incest, she laughed first, to a famous poet about a famous poet, whose biographer vied to be yet more famous.

Did her face require so much studious fascination? I had looked at the side of her face more ways than one—the sort of face she wore but also the sort of face her parents, who were God to her, had given her, her ancient bone structure, her judge’s eyes, her smile like the Mona Lisa’s. No man would add a mustache to that face. I had not “bested” her. I was not best. I was better and “sincerely.” It was for men that we had slowly abandoned our happy female natures, in favor of our female utility. There were men who had not seen her naked (in the flesh) but who had wanted to: She looked better naked, men said, following counsel; she had a little widow’s paunch. She went giddy turning down hearts of five men and breaking open the marriage of a sixth. Later, she bore two children and took another from its mother; in that year of winning hearts (all the hearts, she still firmly believed, her looks like a dragon’s), she bore herself like a “widow.” Men edged up to that spot, to that kinetic circle with one woman inside, the men on the skirts of her central position, wanting to touch him: her father, wanting to meet him, to know him, to pass his tests, to be put to the test for his riches, but they’d already had her, and the father, not hearing all of this ridiculousness, girl-to-woman, woman-to-man, serenely born, knew she was not a widow! The hearts-winning the mystery, in that year of her life.

She had not won every heart, though she had won the Queen of Spades, and I had failed to win her: Ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King. I had lost, sorely, had failed like no other: no diary could tell it! She flew pyramidically to the bank, in generous forms of self-appreciation, nodding to buyers that she had “shot the moon,” that the anonymous missing other person had failed miserably while trying to shoot the moon, a quip, a dagger, her laughter lunging ahead of theirs, required. Neither of us thought of real winning. We set about brilliant losing, dark angel forms of luck and greed, the desire, the craving, the need to lose so strenuous, in fact, that one wins, but we tied at 13. She was 26 when she faked her victory; I was 29 when I lost mine.

Under the covers, the dark bleeding iris melts its moon, its room, is first one iris then two, then a triple gold, a girl, a follower, a believer, a friend, just sniff her: she’s real, petals the scent of themselves, of each phrase. She is dowager, maiden, handmaid, kitten, coat rack, stamen, the height, the glory; the night she leaps toward and whispers to, the air, the pillow that buffets her crazy hair, without its claws, its courageous stare: it is and isn’t there, both dark and fair. The queen of hearts is worth one there.

Curfew

Composing in my head this afternoon, I wrote a fast masterpiece. I had not had a glass of wine nor eaten a fruit; I had climbed a hill in high gear. Pushing against the pedals in sport sandals and pedal pushers, a “crossbody mini” (as such purses are called in the industry) holding my nature-man cigarettes, phone, keys, and no notepad, bobbing against my backside, my organic cotton royal blue t-shirt, I saw phrases, a seven-pack of lines, every line its reasons: nothing reasonable on the page's blank and nothing out of order. Every minute its thing. Every thing its minute memory. Every memory its own account threading rivulets to sea, spilling water to wall flowers.

What would be perfect.

Here, indoors, sitting merely where the equipment is, after a drink with the meal, nothing comes but the memory of heightened tactics.

I sing better in my mind than I sing aloud. Mentally, I sing soprano.

The story was about the adulterous man who shaved his head in spring. The story was about the Houston police devising a punishment for the adulterous man -- shaving heads of adulterers would be an excellent idea to them except the adulterer had beat them to it -- never letting him cut his hair would be another. Not that the courts would cite it. Not that the adulterous man was balding or a skinhead and so had shaved it; he was a thespian. The Houston police devised a punishment for the adulterous thespian that would not hurt the nights or household income of his French young wife. The Houston police caught him drinking. The parking lot behind the tavern emptied of its hundred cars. The police wanted that one bald thespian's car: The car was a Houston police car bought at auction and stripped of its decals. The police in their turquoise squad cars followed the thespian in his plain turquoise car as it followed a slate blue car Mondays and Wednesdays to a street far from where the thespian lived with his wife. The thespian smoked a roach on the way, proudly unaware that the police were following him, preferring to think that they were riding beside him.

That time the judge sentenced him to five AA meetings per week, a work permit (he kept the car), plates in the driveway weeknights by nine.

At the gate

Red door
Collected Chekhov
Publications
Collected Montaigne
Childhood silhouette
Grandfathers' photos
Nonfiction collection
White vinyl chair
Fireplace
Le Fanion urns
Surrealists by Man Ray cafeteria tray
Childhood books

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