Jungle

We sneaked blood-red tomatoes from the new kitchen. The new kitchen had oak cupboards, the top ones lit behind glass, showing carved flute vases -- green and robin’s egg blue and delicate pink -- porcelain chickens, beaks pointed to each other, two chickens discussing, one cock and one hen, the long ice masher, the silver plate, the Japanese clay plate, the wooden dish. There was a woodworker in the family; one of the grandfathers taught shop and built furniture. The granddaughters quarreled over who would inherit it: the gentle, cut-copper lamp, the small table, varnished and erect, with its legs flared at a stance to seem curved but not, straight. We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over bread and vegetables and not to indulge in sex with strange men -- men were all strange once you got used to their distance -- were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees. Sex was for gitting kin -- the new rules same as the old rules. Girls were for sex. Leave girls out of it: Let Latin grow in them. Teach girls joy and “no touching” and "three men max." Slather them with mother’s caresses and dog’s big-face kisses and paws.

(Published in Minnetonka Review, issue 2, Troy Ehlers, ed., March 2008, p. 15.)

Work of a Reader

Monday, January 22, 2007, 15:39:00 CST:

A lot of new work has come out in the last week or so -- I'm enjoying it at a clip, in particular UnlikelyStories 2.0: The Cross-Media Issue and collaborations in Sugar Mule.  Now broadsides and experimental chapbooks and ars poetica.  Appreciating those in my office with its desktop is going well.  Trying to read fiction in bed is not going very well at all. I avoid the cozy room where physical books surround my bed in wait for me -- books by fiction authors that I bought or checked out of the library -- all due or recalled before I can get to them.

In one of the greatest bookstore moments of my life, I recently bought the collected Chekhov (Ecco) and began with volume 1 (of 13).  "The Darling" is how far I got, but I had already read it.  That is followed by an essay by Tolstoy about women, called "Tolstoy's Criticism on 'The Darling'," not to be missed!  I ended up snubbing George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London) like neglecting to meet a train.  I bought that book for its flowing brief sketches of lives of real people. Then it gets worse -- this reading of books -- I go to the cafe and can only read a minimalist there, one crouton at a time.

My three Emily Dickinsons are in storage, but the boxed biography is here.  My Collected H.D. is at his house, a thousand miles away.  Then I get E.D. and H.D. out of the library and read and want to quote and forget the other books.  At the library, there are three areas: Children's, Fiction, and Non-Fiction. Poetry is in Non-Fiction. I read at www.poets.org (the Academy of American Poets) for a week.  I meant to but forgot to get the Collected May Swenson from the library, but I read her online.  Then I go back to The Cross-Media Issue and see how much there still is to see and try to buy an item at eBay for Rain Taxi, but the auction must be over.  Then I read the Norman Mailer article at the kitchen table while eating beans.

Equity

The man who planned a surprise attack on me on my birthday in 1991, EG, writes better prose poetry than I do -- his prose poetry is better than his "line poetry," and my line poetry is better than his. He gets paid to work as a college tutor; I am obliged to tutor for free. I have three degrees; he has none. He is a "hard way" writer who did not graduate college; I am an "easy way" writer who did graduate, three times. The "easy-ways" have a harder time getting paid than the "hard-ways." I am sure you feel that it has nothing to do with our genders that he is paid, and I volunteer, only with that I care: a feminine preoccupation that I have with getting paid. Am I "crazy"? Is he "wild and crazy"? I volunteer within local jurisdictions -- but why? why? for what? I have told my mother, "You are in cahoots with these violent people when you don't object to it," but she thinks it's writing experts who decided it. Writing experts might agree with me: his prose poetry is better than mine, but prose poetry was not the arena when he attacked me in 1991. The arena was short story (mine) and line poetry (his).

Freundinnen: Her Lost Friend Poem

It is a bad habit to appraise one's friends with the eyes of one taking leave of them forever. Worse still to be compelled to imagine what they will say to each other, once it has come to pass, concerning one's imminent death. --Christa Wolf

The circumstances of our lives
are the least important thing about us.

Still I am compelled to ask
where you are, how you are,
what you do, whom you love

if you still live

where your haunts are,
where your thoughts are.

It occurs to me that you
don't deserve my concern
after so much empty space and time,
certainly, monotonous time lost wondering
what has inevitably happened to you

without answers, without participation
why bother?

I would drop it all together,
leave it to chance alone -- our false,
timid intimacy --
except for one thing:

This separation may be final.

We may not appear
suddenly after some years, as before --
again in the same region
ready to haunt and understand
each other incompletely.

your silence may be your unwillingness
to do that anymore

that's all right
and all wrong
both with consequences

How casually you cast off friends!

I have personally wanted more future
chances
to dispel anger and show forgiveness
driven this way toward ideal friendships

I am bound to be haunted by you --
and this is the greatest unkindness --
you know this about me, my tendency
to fixate and never unbind
connections of the greatest and most
trivial kind

I am not suited to forgetfulness

With what tenacity
that could move bridges if it were physical,
I have anchored on you,
my favorite sinking ship
and mystery

You were never so clear as in your absence

I waste myself this way,
choking over the past.
You are the last one to settle

All the others -- the grave stones
marked at last -- solved,
all useless to me now, ordinary
memories that don't make
me sicken.

This is why he and I
will last forever
my first clearly permanent bond:
we don't want anything.

What a freedom that is
for one year, mates who want nothing
that can be gotten from the other
or held back
as punishment

what perfection
to be so clean and unused

Love? I love him until it is absurd
and never forbidden
(how lucky that is)

I don't want any other person
this way.

To dangerously recant
what I've learned to a canyon --
you, who couldn't care, who
never received,
the ungiving -- the tenth ungiving
mother, another
imaginary fortress
I've used

how sharp. how personal.
public exposure -- all I've ever wanted --
downed

Why would I want you to feel guilty?

I only want to know if you do
and how stupid that wanting is.
There are futures for us that are
immediate and unattainable

perfect as death.

(Ann Bogle, fall 1984)

Sound Experiment

Activate all three poetry recorders and one music recorder at once: play Swedish Folkpoems first (until the Swedish fragment is done). Play excerpts of XAM: Paragraph Series; 8 Poems; Swedish Folkpoems; and "Bigger Situation" (Leo Kottke, One Guitar, No Vocals, Private Music, 1999). "Trio: All the Way from Baltimore" along with "Bigger Situation" gives a jiffier version of the same thing. [Note: I removed excerpts of XAM: Paragraph Series, 8 Poems, "Bigger Situation," and "Trio: All the Way from Baltimore," recordings at Gabcast (http://www.gabcast.com) on October 7, 2007].

Maiden names

Men were using women. Women were asking for it -- to be of use to men -- and what did the men want them for? To be "women." A woman has hair on her head, covering her ears and neck and shoulders, but in no other place (except two narrow arches over her eyes and lashes). A woman's hair is rarely of a color of her own but comes from a chair, a treatment chair where she learns to be correct in her colors. A woman earns all her own dough (a slang word for flower). Dough is a color, the color of M&Ms, the colors of plastic cards. Each of the cards represents men, her suitors; they are colorful and holographic cards who ask for her, send to her, pay for her, provide for her, supervise her, and who know her name and her mother's maiden name. The men enjoy using the women -- on her plural-her usefulness they spend 39 cents to send a greeting card. The men keep the women's maiden names ready. Maiden names screech to far-keeping fathers.