ghost post

oh, i'm a posty posty post
i've got all the posty goodness
of a posty posty post

welcome all be debonair
to my bloggy frigidaire

yardwork

I haven't been much up for relating the details of my life on this blog lately. Whenever I've started to I've erased the post before putting it up.

It's cool breezy sunny.

I'm glad we've got tomorrow off work.

Did a little yardwork yesterday. Kent said he wanted to do some barbequing so I thought I'd sweep off the concrete pad and once I got that going I went ahead and snapped off or dug up lots of those tree shoots the trimmed trees have been sending up. Nice to see it tidier back there.

I'm due for a nap.

six feet under

The library bought the 3rd season of Six Feet Under and we powered through it in less than two weeks.

It was pretty good.

comments on "The Man in the Pinstriped Suit", version 2

This is not a major revision. I like that. I'm glad I decided to post a poem on this blog that seemed pretty much done.

What I've been doing up to now has been challenge myself, assign myself a poem that really needed help, a poem that was only going to be done on the other side of a long process, a process that I couldn't see into, could only find my way through with a machete and blind reckoning.

For a long time I didn't have the motivation to do serious revision, the kind of revision that requires the idea that someone wants the poem, wants whatever it's going to be after its troublesome development.

When a poem is a revelation, when it seems to rise up out of emptiness, when it's exciting and brings all its own energy, I can say it doesn't matter whether anyone wants the poem -- there it is!

Here it is, only slightly different from the way it's been for the last 20 years on the page of a booklet of writings from a high school creative writing class.

The Man in the Pinstriped Suit, version 2

The long line to the bank teller’s window won’t move. The woman before me, her black hair twisted into a bun, skin a lighter brown where the straps of her blouse have slipped, sways, one hand hanging onto her toddler as though to an anchor. Her grass skirt sways as she sways. Beside me a man clears his throat. I turn to him, and find myself squinting to keep out the brightness of his pinstriped suit. As he talks, my mouth hurts. His voice draws out, longer and longer, each word crawling past my nose in fuzzy caterpillars. I know I have to swat them or they’ll creep into my nose and I’ll suffocate, but I can’t raise my arm. The woman in the grass skirt has pulled my hand across a butcher’s block. A white surgeon’s mask hides her nose and mouth. For some moments she works steadily with a big knife, then gives me back my hand. I step away from the head of the line, my fingers wrapped in bloody bandages. “That wasn’t so bad,” says the man in the pinstriped suit.

comments on "The Man in the Pinstriped Suit"

I wrote this in high school, in the Creative Writing Class, or during the Creative Writing Class, I don't think it was a response to an assignment. I quite like it. It has that great turn where "I" try to raise my hand but find it's being worked on by the woman who'd been in front of me in line. A dream logic that you just accept when it's happening. And it was a dream. A real dream. How much it is the precise dream I had who knows but it reads like a dream. I'm happy to have run onto it again.

The Man in the Pinstriped Suit

The long line to the bank teller’s window doesn’t move. Before me the lady, her black hair twisted into a bun, her skin tanned dark on her bare back, sways, hanging onto her toddler as though he was an anchor in a storm. Her grass skirt rustles back and forth. The man beside me clears his throat. I turn to him, squinting to keep out the brightness of his pinstriped suit. As he talks, my mouth hurts. His voice draws out, longer and longer, until each word crawls past my nose in little caterpillars. I know I must swat them or they’ll creep into my nose and I’ll suffocate, but I can’t raise my arm. The woman in her grass skirt has my hand pulled over a thick wooden table, a white surgeon’s mask pulled over her nose and mouth. She works steadily for several moments with a large knife, then gives me back my hand. I step away from the head of the line, my fingers wrapped in bloody bandages. “That wasn’t so bad,” says the man in the pinstriped suit.

link

Just discovered the blog of Seth Abramson, poet & public defender. Damn, this boy writes humungous posts and puts up 3 or 4 a day. Plus he's impassioned and intelligent.

comments on "Night Poems" version 5

I've only changed a couple things. If you've seen this poem's last version you may not even spot the changes, though they are more significant than changing "haven't" to "have not" ... a simple change that would have improved the poem slightly. Instead I changed the line "the painted shadows haven't faded" to "the painted shadows shine." Should I go back and say "the painted shadows have not faded"?

The other change finds "My breath offers silence another shelter" becoming "My mouth offers silence new shelter" ...

I feel a little ridiculous reposting the whole piece when I've made such minor changes, especially since too many times when I make itsy bitsy changes the very next thing I do is make major revisions. I don't think that'll happen here. Maybe I'll even change a line back ... "have not faded" is sounding good.

Night Poems, version 5

The window is open, standing somewhere,
open to a door.



I walk the wrinkled corridor between dreams.
In the faces on the walls
the painted shadows shine.

Like trophy heads in a hunter’s jungle bungalow
lamps jut out,
all staring glass.



A mortgage locked by wet stamps
life insurance keyed to contrition

she rides a horse
wakes with car keys in her hand



Surely these clothes are blankets.
My mouth offers silence new shelter.

My hair? It won’t wake.
My eyes turn toward something they saw closed.



fingers up northern faces
of the mildly gated

lights lost in
among handles.

Happy Birthday, David!

Draw, man! Draw!

star wars episode III

"What was the part where you were laughing inappropriately?" Kent asked.

"Which time?"

"Where nobody else was laughing."

"Oh. The long, loud laughter?"

oh blue

oh blue sky oh sun oh sun oh soft breezes

Rain

rain rain rain

comments on "Night Poems" version 4

I'm likin' it. I read "Night Poems" to Kent. We discussed the final period (.) of the poem(s). It's not really ending a sentence. K liked the last few lines as independent statements. They seem to me broken thoughts. The last line of the preceding section, "My eyes turn toward something they saw closed.", might be turned toward the fading dream ... the final lines being all that remains.

I don't know. I don't really like the idea of "dreams" as something separate from what we do as a matter of course. They're not a different place, are they? Then again, yes, dreams do have different rules. I find myself using dreams to suggest something, maybe something too obvious. I've never liked the then-I-woke-up way out of fantasyland. It's how Alice gets home. But if a dream is just a dream it's easily escaped, it's not a real place. Hm. Maybe it is a real place AND a dream.

I got rid of the numbering, tried dashes instead, then decided I liked the extra spacing.

Night Poems, version 4

The window is open, standing somewhere,
open to a door.



I walk the wrinkled corridor between dreams.
In the faces on the walls
the painted shadows haven’t faded.

Like trophy heads in a hunter’s jungle bungalow
lamps jut out,
all staring glass.



A mortgage locked by wet stamps
life insurance keyed to contrition

she rides a horse
wakes with car keys in her hand



Surely these clothes are blankets.
My breath offers silence another shelter.

My hair? It won’t wake.
My eyes turn toward something they saw closed.



fingers up northern faces
of the mildly gated

lights lost in
among handles.

Info Desk Blogging

The person whose regular Info Desk hour this is is out with a bad back so here I am. Been here 5 minutes and it's not crazy yet.

Mysterious stack of Chinese books on the far corner of the desk. Did somebody intend to return them? Or did a person stop here to ask a question, put the books down and forget them? I guess I'll leave them alone for now, just in case somebody shows up anxious.

The boy-watching isn't nearly so good here as at the university, we got a much higher proportion of oldsters and toddlers, but cuties go by now & then. And once in awhile one comes up and asks me a question and I get to enjoy it. One of the benefits of public service. Of course just as I say this, Young Guy gets headed off by Unhappy Old Lady ... oh well, he wasn't cute just young and old lady was unhappy but polite.

Clouds are throwing a few drops our way. Curious series of storms we've been getting. Not our usual May in Berkeley. Overcast is typical and fog, but not rain. Fairly warm tho. I didn't bring an umbrella. But it's not really raining right now.

OK, we're at the half hour and the joint ain't jumpin'. Sure, where are the bathrooms, where's the copy machine, do we have spanish language instructional tapes, but no long involved complaints or mysteries. I'll amend that to say, none that I can help with ... I've sent a couple different problems to other desks. And neither of them has gotten anger turned my way.

I'm going to the Y for yoga class when my relief shows up at 5. Last week's yoga I was all huffy & puffy and at the end of the class the muscly guy in front of me turned to give me a dubious look, "are you okay?" To which I snappily replied, "what's not okay about looking at a hot bod like yours?" ... or I said, "Tough class!" ...

Tough class? Oh. Look. Raining. The Y is only a block away, I shouldn't get very wet.

talkin' thru machines

K had to convert audiotape to CD so he got a cable to connect a Walkman-type cassette player to the Mac. He played the tape through the Garageband program, transferred the tracks to iTunes, and burned a couple disks. It all went pretty smooth.

Nice.

All those fiddly things intimidate me -- recording levels and adjusting this or that. I want to plug something in, hit one button, and have the machines do it. I know I have tapes of some old readings. Maybe I could try this method with those. There's that tape of the interview I did with Mom, too. Boy, I remember that! We disagreed about the way the interview should be conducted -- I just wanted her to talk and let a conversation happen, she didn't like that, wanted to compose each answer before speaking it into the tape recorder. We actually got into a fight over it.

Everything

I'm going to write merely to write. No other reason. One other reason I can think of: in order not to write about other things, think about other things. By writing merely to see words appear I can avoid writing as a way to say something, that which I'm thinking about but about which I'd prefer not to. So I put down another word. I reread what I've said up to now.

out goes London

When I was going through the boxes of papers Wednesday I came across a bag of souvenirs from my 3-month semester in London. Ticket stubs and maps and ... whatever ... I sifted it through my fingers and let it fall into the recycle bag.

This trip was back in fall 1988, a program of Santa Rosa Junior College and AIFS. A group of students from SRJC (and some other US community colleges) brought along professors -- it's essentially your US community college transposed to London. (A friend's grown daughter is currently in Spain under the same program.)

My English professor made keeping a journal one of the class assignments. Thus I kept two journals in London, one for him and one for myself. In the one for myself I could bitch about him and talk about sex. Otherwise they weren't much different.

So my pre-Berkeley life is migrating to Berkeley. And some of it is getting thrown out.