It has been two months since I last wrote and one would assume a change in season has arrived. But all that has arrived is April, that month so synonymous with spring yet so unpredictable. In the Midwest, in the Northeast, in the Northwest, a snowbell blooming, a snowstorm descending. This year where the months mean nothing. Several days ago it was the mid 70’s, today the mid 20’s and snowing. The other night, driving home, I nearly slid into winter, into sirens, into the unexpectedness of return. How could none of us expect it? Not even snow but ice. And no one was ready. Not the roads nor the brakes, nor the SUV in front of me who danced right to left to right until the guardrail decided to join in.
It is April and the same outside as January. The same inside. How was it that I kept driving on, past the police lights, the smashed in windshields. How is it that I’m exactly where I was. Or how is it that I’m in love. I don’t know how else to survive, perhaps, the temperature as I write 22 degrees outside, a light snow falling, a future so blank it’s difficult, really, to wake up in the mornings. Except. She exists. And I keep waking up, and I know even the weather is unsure of what will come next. Winter will end when it’s ready. The flowers who had already bloomed, who are hanging, heads down, at the edge of the house, will return. She will be here when she's ready, and I will walk outside and hear each snowflake as it melts, each flower as it blooms. Her pulse, quickening.
4.06.2007
2.05.2007
A Lull, An Icicle
Here’s my question, Bentley: what does it mean to love only in the winter, when all is either asleep or dead, when the ground divides, the asphalt disappears in spheres, in black holes. The same as. What I can’t explain. This genderlessness of winter. The wool, the thick coats, the hats. Who doesn’t become invisible. Who isn’t suddenly approachable. A wallet left alone in the snow. A girl. A boy. One and the same. I love everyone, the rest of me so numb there’s nothing else to feel. The empty streets, the wallet that had fallen out of my pocket, waiting on my return. I love each thief, stuck inside, beside a radiator, a space heater, a cup of cocoa.I love a friend here, a friend there, trying to get out of bed in the mornings, to see as much daylight as possible, to forget about their uncertain futures. I love that I’m not the only one. And I love the digital voice I wake up to in the mornings, fall asleep to at night, love the person it belongs to. I can admit it. But it’s only possible when I can’t over think it, when there’s nothing else to think about but the layers of clothing needed, the glove covering the hand, a scarf protecting the lungs. When it snows horizontally and everything in the world disappears and equalizes and I can’t step outside for days. When the streets shimmer and windows turn to ice. When the malls and the theaters and the universities shut down and the temperatures drop below zero and everyone is like me: desensitized. This heart opens. It’s easier in the winter, Bentley.
Even right now, at this moment: the neighbor’s elderly cat screaming at the door, the distance, the dreams, the dead, even myself. Right now, it’s true. And how much easier it is, Bentley, when it’s too cold to stand below the icicles and wait for one to fall to pierce the chest.
1.21.2007
Die Ford Die
and take it with you, the whole parenthesis
of it, opening upwards, smile-like, slime-like,
to the world, containing everything and everything
that comes just after it. You will take my election signs
and the snow that's covered them just after your passing
through this world and into another, after one of many passing
plays broadcast on ESPN classic, you in maze,
in maize and blue. And as you go into it, the cool
blackafter, all afterburners and more than occasional
vitriol, take the clot of mourning with—
haul it all away, Xmas trees in the weeks
after the holiday, still clotted with lights. You were a light
of sorts, and sixty thousand in Grand Rapids
pressed their bodies together in a hundred plus lines
weaving back and forth in a warehouse, spilling like light
from lampposts weaving in the snowy haze
out into the street and freezing. We gathered
here, hearing aids and walking aids, and special
teacher's aides and all other kinds of aids, just
to watch the funeral procession crawl up I-196,
least venerated of Interstates, towards one of the outposts
on the trail to your final rest. Your name was
vapor trail on all our lips, even mine, these slipping things
that never had much to say for you, and if you were
a President, I barely knew it; you were past tense for me,
a memory of pardon, airport, and one
of this city's few claims on sweet hereafter.
But I stood there too in the wind and cold,
above the winding road, not above exactly,
as no one stood above your procession as it passed,
leaving the overpasses only half-filled out of ceremony,
but we were there. If you were there, then you can say
you were, and there we were together, hands clammed
together, humming, almost, with something like the galaxy
of excitement we reserve for celebrity approach.
There were some flags. And I can say, here
if not elsewhere, that I felt something,
strange as that may be, for you or your idea,
not you in fiction, devoured by wolves, as if
you could be anything other than fiction and if
we could know the body as we do the story, and
I was cold and I was there and there
we were together, triangulated, you and I
and more than sixty thousand who had a kind
of rabid love for you, their kin, their kine, and there
were almost contrails in the sky from fighter jets
who had come through hours ago in a dry run for their
maneuvers during the last of your many funerals,
and I wish they came together better, spelled something
out in the chemical remains of fire and refracted light,
but I could barely see them, and then I could barely see,
and there is very little left to say.
of it, opening upwards, smile-like, slime-like,
to the world, containing everything and everything
that comes just after it. You will take my election signs
and the snow that's covered them just after your passing
through this world and into another, after one of many passing
plays broadcast on ESPN classic, you in maze,
in maize and blue. And as you go into it, the cool
blackafter, all afterburners and more than occasional
vitriol, take the clot of mourning with—
haul it all away, Xmas trees in the weeks
after the holiday, still clotted with lights. You were a light
of sorts, and sixty thousand in Grand Rapids
pressed their bodies together in a hundred plus lines
weaving back and forth in a warehouse, spilling like light
from lampposts weaving in the snowy haze
out into the street and freezing. We gathered
here, hearing aids and walking aids, and special
teacher's aides and all other kinds of aids, just
to watch the funeral procession crawl up I-196,
least venerated of Interstates, towards one of the outposts
on the trail to your final rest. Your name was
vapor trail on all our lips, even mine, these slipping things
that never had much to say for you, and if you were
a President, I barely knew it; you were past tense for me,
a memory of pardon, airport, and one
of this city's few claims on sweet hereafter.
But I stood there too in the wind and cold,
above the winding road, not above exactly,
as no one stood above your procession as it passed,
leaving the overpasses only half-filled out of ceremony,
but we were there. If you were there, then you can say
you were, and there we were together, hands clammed
together, humming, almost, with something like the galaxy
of excitement we reserve for celebrity approach.
There were some flags. And I can say, here
if not elsewhere, that I felt something,
strange as that may be, for you or your idea,
not you in fiction, devoured by wolves, as if
you could be anything other than fiction and if
we could know the body as we do the story, and
I was cold and I was there and there
we were together, triangulated, you and I
and more than sixty thousand who had a kind
of rabid love for you, their kin, their kine, and there
were almost contrails in the sky from fighter jets
who had come through hours ago in a dry run for their
maneuvers during the last of your many funerals,
and I wish they came together better, spelled something
out in the chemical remains of fire and refracted light,
but I could barely see them, and then I could barely see,
and there is very little left to say.
12.30.2006
No snow still for the dead Gerald R. Ford
Sad day of sorts. Ford is gone and there will not be snow to await his body's return to Michigan, probably. Perhaps we will see some kind of spontaneous majesty from the skies, but the middling weather feels like it's here for a while.
When the ground is frozen much more is required to inter a body in the earth. One must warm the ground before digging, or else use special equipment, or else blast its frozen heart away with explosive charges and then dig, the last of these being problematic in cemeteries for obvious possible zombie reasons, for all-too-clear indian burial ground reasons, and certainly that would not be acceptable in the quiet heart of the city in very early January, upon a solemn occasion such as this.
I will be there in attendance, at the public viewing for Ford. I hope for snow. I turn my eyes up to the clouds and think of the physical remains of the former president, the only president never elected to the post of either Vice President or the Presidency itself. I hope it snows for you, Ford. I hope it covers the world again in white.
When the ground is frozen much more is required to inter a body in the earth. One must warm the ground before digging, or else use special equipment, or else blast its frozen heart away with explosive charges and then dig, the last of these being problematic in cemeteries for obvious possible zombie reasons, for all-too-clear indian burial ground reasons, and certainly that would not be acceptable in the quiet heart of the city in very early January, upon a solemn occasion such as this.
I will be there in attendance, at the public viewing for Ford. I hope for snow. I turn my eyes up to the clouds and think of the physical remains of the former president, the only president never elected to the post of either Vice President or the Presidency itself. I hope it snows for you, Ford. I hope it covers the world again in white.
12.22.2006
Well met, then, Willard
I am here, have been here in waiting. Waiting for weather—as you (probably) know, there is not a spot of it on the ground anymore. Has not been for weeks it seems. And close now to the holidays, just in sight of them, still the ground is bare, if wet and watched over by consistent wind. I wish for it, for winter, if this is what it is, what we can call it. We have passed the solstice just yesterday which means the days begin their game of lengthening again.
It is dark out in the world. There is no poetry in the darkness. There is no language in the heart of it, the occasional flick of light, the loneliness, the quietude. I could map your face onto it but where would that leave me—here, still, the sound of typewriter keys striking the faceplate as I write my way into it, whether the weather sees fit to grant legitimacy, a brief white blast, a taste of it at least, or if it does not.
It is dark out in the world. There is no poetry in the darkness. There is no language in the heart of it, the occasional flick of light, the loneliness, the quietude. I could map your face onto it but where would that leave me—here, still, the sound of typewriter keys striking the faceplate as I write my way into it, whether the weather sees fit to grant legitimacy, a brief white blast, a taste of it at least, or if it does not.
12.16.2006
Trapped under snow or rain or fog
Or wind: there goes a roof, a cow, any semblance of thought. My body landing miles no months away. But I'm back, Bentley, I'm back.
12.12.2006
What was underneath this space
a year ago—a hundred years ago—a thousand years ago—
and what does having a tomorrow mean? Does it mean that I will be returned to this, over and over, until I find another way out? Does it mean that there is such a thing as history? Have my actions, few though they may have been, had repercussions? Did they percuss down through action and equal and opposite reaction, slowly murmuring in the background behind my heart?
Air sound from below. Air sound from outside. Rain sound melting all the snow to ground.
There will be almost
nothing when I wake—
and what does having a tomorrow mean? Does it mean that I will be returned to this, over and over, until I find another way out? Does it mean that there is such a thing as history? Have my actions, few though they may have been, had repercussions? Did they percuss down through action and equal and opposite reaction, slowly murmuring in the background behind my heart?
Air sound from below. Air sound from outside. Rain sound melting all the snow to ground.
There will be almost
nothing when I wake—
12.09.2006
Wind is hard against the panes
and there is not much outside, friend, tonight. The gases of the atmosphere are lined up as if to buffet the glass and force a kind of entry. I know it's not personal (such solipsism here, the world aligned for you) but it's hard not to think of world in terms of self, how external and internal weathers relate. To what extent they correspond. Think Poe. Think whiteness, pallor of flesh, the slow creep of death, shadows spectral along the snowfield.
Weird day for weather: everything gusty, but nothing via precipitation. No prestidigitation from the up above. No trickeration via lightning and snowcloud oncoming, none of that illumination. The plus about words ending in -ation is that they rhyme inherently. That they imply a state of action, a snapshot of the act diminished in our naming and cordoning off of it. The body's movement, the magic of storm, becomes manageable through the mind's decision to just think about it. Which is something.
My whiteness. My whiteheads that dot my back like mushrooms awaiting rain. My wiving of the weather. My avatar of W, that wingspread and impression of sudden motion. Everything in winter is associated with the letter, the worst in some ways of the seasons. But the weather has its reasons. I love it—love to be underneath it, under its spell, its thumb, its cool control. I would be great as a kept man, a toy, cared for, collared, leashed, within.
Weird day for weather: everything gusty, but nothing via precipitation. No prestidigitation from the up above. No trickeration via lightning and snowcloud oncoming, none of that illumination. The plus about words ending in -ation is that they rhyme inherently. That they imply a state of action, a snapshot of the act diminished in our naming and cordoning off of it. The body's movement, the magic of storm, becomes manageable through the mind's decision to just think about it. Which is something.
My whiteness. My whiteheads that dot my back like mushrooms awaiting rain. My wiving of the weather. My avatar of W, that wingspread and impression of sudden motion. Everything in winter is associated with the letter, the worst in some ways of the seasons. But the weather has its reasons. I love it—love to be underneath it, under its spell, its thumb, its cool control. I would be great as a kept man, a toy, cared for, collared, leashed, within.
12.08.2006
Between falls
Cold world tonight outside the glass. As usual, nothing appears to be alive. No world transformed. Nothing trudging through it. Silence is one indication of my control over this world. This desire to be up after others have passed through into their slumber. No curse, this; no swear words necessary. Pleasing—though not without a dryness around the eyes, weary sensation one, and total darkness in the tower, weary sensation two, and a sense of slowly shuffling off towards sleep. If I had more to me I could stay up until three or four, or five, when the old begin to stir and fill their mugs with something dark and steaming. I admire them for this singular pleasure. My parents were this way, awake and away to their days for hours before I would stir. Now on occasion I am up before the light, before the night subsides and the factories along the water turn down their smokestack output to avoid being found out for what they in fact are. And if I am aware of anything at that hour, I am grateful for it, this glimpse of early motion that I do not normally get.
I wish I could get by with three or four hours of sleep, that I could work late and awake with no effect on the body's defenses. Imagine what I could be privy to—the motions of the trash trucks on their circuits through the grid. Different sorts of snow. Traffic patterns that don't occur in daylight or late-night hours. They might look from above like halos, or precipitation (more than traffic does already, that steady or sometimes clotted stream), like the video game Frogger, or diamonds chugging through a tube. It could look like anything, and I would be there to witness it, somehow. This would be a kind of power, secret revelation. Vivisection, maybe. Pattern recognition. Precognition even.
This is desire for knowledge. Desire for bragging rights. Desire for the ability to shovel out the walk before anyone else in the time zone does. Desire—a cloud, an ampersand of thrills hovering closely together, on the edge of my mind, outside of reason. It's there and silent mostly in this life, punching chemical signals through pneumatic tubes to the brain. But it wants things. It is active often enough to pull me one way or another one, towards one body in rest or motion.
I wish I could get by with three or four hours of sleep, that I could work late and awake with no effect on the body's defenses. Imagine what I could be privy to—the motions of the trash trucks on their circuits through the grid. Different sorts of snow. Traffic patterns that don't occur in daylight or late-night hours. They might look from above like halos, or precipitation (more than traffic does already, that steady or sometimes clotted stream), like the video game Frogger, or diamonds chugging through a tube. It could look like anything, and I would be there to witness it, somehow. This would be a kind of power, secret revelation. Vivisection, maybe. Pattern recognition. Precognition even.
This is desire for knowledge. Desire for bragging rights. Desire for the ability to shovel out the walk before anyone else in the time zone does. Desire—a cloud, an ampersand of thrills hovering closely together, on the edge of my mind, outside of reason. It's there and silent mostly in this life, punching chemical signals through pneumatic tubes to the brain. But it wants things. It is active often enough to pull me one way or another one, towards one body in rest or motion.
12.05.2006
Beneath
When I was younger it would snow like this—layer on top of layer—and you could buoy yourself up on it with snowshoes, or cross-country skis (that wax, those boots, those locks). I am thrilled to be alive today in all of this (6 inches plus, everyone in the world complaining about it but me with four-wheel drive and sliding through the everything). Shoveling is even a recurrent pleasure: I was cold in the morning when I got up, every step a gasping against the hardwood floors, but when I went outside after coffee to huff it off of my driveway I came in flush and hot and ready for the day. It is my routine.
Others in the house make sport of watching cars try to make it up the hill (30 degree grade in my estimation), as they skid and their tires whine and all they can do is make it happen laterally, nothing in their dream of forward motion. The more interesting thing is when they don't give up: their minds are set, they have this goal of driving up this street. This is their world. Their wildly skidding, snowdrifted world. So we watch their taillights disappear back down the street, sliding into the banks or the cars parked at the bottom of the street in the danger zone, where descending cars cannot make the stop and turn and in turn hammer them, more often then not driving away without a note or admission of their guilt.
The engines rev all night. Some few do make it up when the road is plowed, or those that came in weighted four by fours. We see lights: plowlight, policelight usually without sirens, towtrucklight, brakelight, headlight, the light that descends on us from stars, from windows, from the few streetlights that illuminate the night. NintendoWiilight cascading from the top floor studio where the college kids clearly room together. You can see them manipulating the controller in front of their televisions. Ambulancelight when our neighbor has his weekly health scare and the authorities are called to try again to haul him off, even though they should know by now that he will not go with them.
I will not go with you. I will not go with anyone if lights come to vanish me back into darkness.
We even witness airlinelight blinking fast across the sky, far too close to qualify as actual astronomical occurrence. Rare thunderlight against the snow: you can't see it like you do in rainstorms, but it occurs. Lightninglight technically I suppose, not the result of thunder but concurrent with it.
Snow and light are everything in the world on nights like this, on days like this.
Others in the house make sport of watching cars try to make it up the hill (30 degree grade in my estimation), as they skid and their tires whine and all they can do is make it happen laterally, nothing in their dream of forward motion. The more interesting thing is when they don't give up: their minds are set, they have this goal of driving up this street. This is their world. Their wildly skidding, snowdrifted world. So we watch their taillights disappear back down the street, sliding into the banks or the cars parked at the bottom of the street in the danger zone, where descending cars cannot make the stop and turn and in turn hammer them, more often then not driving away without a note or admission of their guilt.
The engines rev all night. Some few do make it up when the road is plowed, or those that came in weighted four by fours. We see lights: plowlight, policelight usually without sirens, towtrucklight, brakelight, headlight, the light that descends on us from stars, from windows, from the few streetlights that illuminate the night. NintendoWiilight cascading from the top floor studio where the college kids clearly room together. You can see them manipulating the controller in front of their televisions. Ambulancelight when our neighbor has his weekly health scare and the authorities are called to try again to haul him off, even though they should know by now that he will not go with them.
I will not go with you. I will not go with anyone if lights come to vanish me back into darkness.
We even witness airlinelight blinking fast across the sky, far too close to qualify as actual astronomical occurrence. Rare thunderlight against the snow: you can't see it like you do in rainstorms, but it occurs. Lightninglight technically I suppose, not the result of thunder but concurrent with it.
Snow and light are everything in the world on nights like this, on days like this.
12.03.2006
I predict some photographic evidence tomorrow
—some video perhaps
—some beginnings of a story
—some more precipitation to cover us all in wreaths of it
—some beginnings of a story
—some more precipitation to cover us all in wreaths of it
There is light but not a lot of it
The sun has long set. The snow has set in around us. I expect this may be it for a while. I love the world when it is bright with snow like it was today. Everything ashine, reflective, beaming even. Good snow day with sun is good indeed. And now it's been dark—it's past midnight and as usual I am up in contrast to the sleeping thousands within (maybe) earshot. I have my tower. I have gotten used to it. When I ascend I gain perspective on the world. The weather quiets even against the windowpanes and I am ensconced here for a while to watch. I might be watching you if you are moving still.
A lot of light is still reflecting. The night comes packaged with its own unearthly glow. Is it moon or light trapped under clouds? Is it starlight from billions of miles away finally cascading all around us? Is it the front porch lights or back porch lights, motion detector lights, or Xmas lights just coming up all throughout the neighborhood? Tonight has far more definition, Willard. Most recent nights I could make out one, two houses perhaps. But this evening I am clearly in the world, surrounded by other bodies all in their own four-square shrouds. Dozens are visible. The light is kind of amber, kind of sepia, almost. Are you there this night, dear reader presupposed?
There is only so much to deduce from observation. The telephone cables, or electric cables, or cable cables, or whatever bisect the world as I see it into two parts, roughly of the same total area (thinking two dimensionally). With this little light peering out the world could in fact be simulation, simulacrum, total fake. It could be a well-rendered scene: all quiet, a canvas lit exactly right, placed outside the house by those who may control what we see and survey. It could easily be two dimensions masquerading as three. Without motion it's difficult to tell. There are trees, sure, and this is a street intersecting with the alley behind it. The alley has its own weird rough grade, the slope crosshatched with tiny pits, probably to allow for water to runoff in this cold climate to help with traction. Or something. It does not work to a very good effect. The streets are a grid, a kind of Midwestern map of the hearts that dot this city. We are on the northeast side of the plane, in positive relation to the X and Y axis. Lights strobe slowly off and on in the distance. Motion lights perhaps. A trick of the weather filtering out stimuli, perhaps.
Is it strange enough just to have this window to look out and porthole up the world? Or should I be glad of this, that these panes are something, a frame, boundaries to my sight. Should I be pleased with this chair and this tower and this view, these cables bisecting all that is in my sight, the blowing warmth from the duct below, the few lit windows I can just about see into. These two windows prove a kind of life. I could go all floating-eye like Emerson and hover just outside and watch their lives work. I could upload video of it to the network and trap it there, saved and safe and watchable. What would that be evidence of. Who would it draw to it? What worth is any individual life in aesthetic terms? I will leave it there for now.
A lot of light is still reflecting. The night comes packaged with its own unearthly glow. Is it moon or light trapped under clouds? Is it starlight from billions of miles away finally cascading all around us? Is it the front porch lights or back porch lights, motion detector lights, or Xmas lights just coming up all throughout the neighborhood? Tonight has far more definition, Willard. Most recent nights I could make out one, two houses perhaps. But this evening I am clearly in the world, surrounded by other bodies all in their own four-square shrouds. Dozens are visible. The light is kind of amber, kind of sepia, almost. Are you there this night, dear reader presupposed?
There is only so much to deduce from observation. The telephone cables, or electric cables, or cable cables, or whatever bisect the world as I see it into two parts, roughly of the same total area (thinking two dimensionally). With this little light peering out the world could in fact be simulation, simulacrum, total fake. It could be a well-rendered scene: all quiet, a canvas lit exactly right, placed outside the house by those who may control what we see and survey. It could easily be two dimensions masquerading as three. Without motion it's difficult to tell. There are trees, sure, and this is a street intersecting with the alley behind it. The alley has its own weird rough grade, the slope crosshatched with tiny pits, probably to allow for water to runoff in this cold climate to help with traction. Or something. It does not work to a very good effect. The streets are a grid, a kind of Midwestern map of the hearts that dot this city. We are on the northeast side of the plane, in positive relation to the X and Y axis. Lights strobe slowly off and on in the distance. Motion lights perhaps. A trick of the weather filtering out stimuli, perhaps.
Is it strange enough just to have this window to look out and porthole up the world? Or should I be glad of this, that these panes are something, a frame, boundaries to my sight. Should I be pleased with this chair and this tower and this view, these cables bisecting all that is in my sight, the blowing warmth from the duct below, the few lit windows I can just about see into. These two windows prove a kind of life. I could go all floating-eye like Emerson and hover just outside and watch their lives work. I could upload video of it to the network and trap it there, saved and safe and watchable. What would that be evidence of. Who would it draw to it? What worth is any individual life in aesthetic terms? I will leave it there for now.
12.01.2006
And it came, and it sounds quite crappy against the windowpanes
Seriously. A foot is on the forecast, which is good. An X arrived at last by mail, by a hundred thousand gusts of wind by night. It is white and granular and all over the place. But it is blustery and it has kept me up. It sounds like a sandstorm. Flecks, not flakes, sandblasting the house. Snowblasting the house. Does that count? Can it strip paint from wood? It sounds like it could. So it is cold and weather's here around us like a blanket. It is all along the ground like a rind, like a round sung by schoolchildren a hundred years ago that has finally settled down across our brows and hands.
It sounds like it would sting. This wind. This combination of it over everything. The old house's windows are not completely snug. You can tell in these kinds of situations especially. Rattling. The thundering of gust against glass. Luckily we are on the inside half of that equation. Else we would be cold. We would be beautiful and silent, over and still.
Snow day is what the local news claims. I am a stickler for them, and this seems in no way like a day for snow and staying home to me. I am from another country, one that "very rarely" cancels classes. We consider our education, our work, our continued productivity important. We are stoic and we are cold and we are covered in this most of the year. We will snowshoe, snowblow, cross-country ski to work if necessary. Snowmobile, dogsled, trudge. We have methods of counteracting weather, or working within its bounds, against its tyranies. But here, in the South, it is a different story. The weather balls that glow against the night (they are setup by all the local weather stations, and they write songs to pair with the interactions of the weather balls with the world—they are warnings, blinking, colored, beacons in the cold) suggest the mood. How should we take this? As a slap? As a warning blast? As a punishment for the things we've done, come at last and long overdue?
It sounds like it would sting. This wind. This combination of it over everything. The old house's windows are not completely snug. You can tell in these kinds of situations especially. Rattling. The thundering of gust against glass. Luckily we are on the inside half of that equation. Else we would be cold. We would be beautiful and silent, over and still.
Snow day is what the local news claims. I am a stickler for them, and this seems in no way like a day for snow and staying home to me. I am from another country, one that "very rarely" cancels classes. We consider our education, our work, our continued productivity important. We are stoic and we are cold and we are covered in this most of the year. We will snowshoe, snowblow, cross-country ski to work if necessary. Snowmobile, dogsled, trudge. We have methods of counteracting weather, or working within its bounds, against its tyranies. But here, in the South, it is a different story. The weather balls that glow against the night (they are setup by all the local weather stations, and they write songs to pair with the interactions of the weather balls with the world—they are warnings, blinking, colored, beacons in the cold) suggest the mood. How should we take this? As a slap? As a warning blast? As a punishment for the things we've done, come at last and long overdue?
11.28.2006
Mounting pressure and atmospheric
Pressures: barometric, atmospheric, even geriatric, mount in the sky. There is something happening in the world above us tonight. Slight chance of snow, though it hovered closer to sixty most of the day and probably still is, even as bursts of rain illuminate the night and cover everything in running, everything in stickiness, in sickness/
I approach sickness: it's a fear brought on by fluctuation in the pressure (exterior, in the inner ear, especially the differential), that abstraction (untasteable, unshakable, complete in its physical absence). My body knows it though, bag of wind and water as it is, it reacts to the world's movements in kind. And so the ear reflects the bigger ear outside. Are we in something's mouth, something's innerness tonight? Or are we cradled here in space alone/
What comes next/
a dash/
an em/
a dot dot/
I approach sickness: it's a fear brought on by fluctuation in the pressure (exterior, in the inner ear, especially the differential), that abstraction (untasteable, unshakable, complete in its physical absence). My body knows it though, bag of wind and water as it is, it reacts to the world's movements in kind. And so the ear reflects the bigger ear outside. Are we in something's mouth, something's innerness tonight? Or are we cradled here in space alone/
What comes next/
a dash/
an em/
a dot dot/
11.17.2006
It is lonely here
All there is is tracks. Mine and Willard's. A pair. Forward and retreat. If we are buried here, would anyone ever, finally, know?
Does it matter if we are observed, or not—
Do we exist in the emptiness if we are alone—
Is there anything on the other side of the dash's bridge—
Or is there just field after field of whiteness—
As if that was not enough—
To what extent is it enough—
And does the use of extent disqualify this for poetry—
What is after the whiteness of the margin—
Is it like breathing; does it drop off—
And if I begin to drop little things off of it—
And listen for their echo on the slope below—
What will occur; or will they conglomerate
in stacks, band up, all of my possessions, and shout
out their echo and return to me?
Is anybody there?
Is anybody there is the echo in return.
The is of anybody there is like a broken tricycle—
an uncompleted sentence—
a slice of Morse—
a beat and what is less than a beat—
the what that comes after em—
maybe our collective mom—
the palindrome of mom and the light that spreads around it—
like a butter knife laid horizontal on a table,
perpendicular to all the frozen forks.
I always think of Antarctica.
Then I think of John Carpenter's remake of The Thing—
and then I dash it off—
(I have long been good at launch,
much worse at landing—my excellence at the trip out
but keeping nothing in reserve for the return.)
This is rerun. All is rerun and what comes on the other side of it.
Does it matter if we are observed, or not—
Do we exist in the emptiness if we are alone—
Is there anything on the other side of the dash's bridge—
Or is there just field after field of whiteness—
As if that was not enough—
To what extent is it enough—
And does the use of extent disqualify this for poetry—
What is after the whiteness of the margin—
Is it like breathing; does it drop off—
And if I begin to drop little things off of it—
And listen for their echo on the slope below—
What will occur; or will they conglomerate
in stacks, band up, all of my possessions, and shout
out their echo and return to me?
Is anybody there?
Is anybody there is the echo in return.
The is of anybody there is like a broken tricycle—
an uncompleted sentence—
a slice of Morse—
a beat and what is less than a beat—
the what that comes after em—
maybe our collective mom—
the palindrome of mom and the light that spreads around it—
like a butter knife laid horizontal on a table,
perpendicular to all the frozen forks.
I always think of Antarctica.
Then I think of John Carpenter's remake of The Thing—
and then I dash it off—
(I have long been good at launch,
much worse at landing—my excellence at the trip out
but keeping nothing in reserve for the return.)
This is rerun. All is rerun and what comes on the other side of it.
What good is it if it is only expected, only coming, always coming?
Weather station does not predict snow for tomorrow. Nor today. Nor this week. We are still on the cusp of the winter, the windy edge of it, the lip of it, contemplating the drop and precipitation down from clouds. Weather station website does give 30% chance of it occurring tomorrow into Sunday. There is a 30% chance of the realistic onset of winter. But even then I don't believe it. I wore just a shirt today. I wore just a shirt the day before. When there is snow in air I will upgrade to coat, but until then it is not happening.
I refuse to believe in it. It resists my resistance to belief. It does not care. It is idle pattern in the atmosphere. I could worship any idol and it will not take note. It does not love you, nor me, and will not respond to charm, even prayers spoken under the lilt of a foreign accent. Sexiness does nothing to it. Gets nothing from it. We could be anywhere in its grasp, under its heart, beneath its slowly descending haze. But for now it's fantasy—distant like arithmetic, the cold clicking logic edge, the impersonality of numbers. This is an essay on its coming.
This is a lovesong to said winter, to said precipitation. I will burn for you. I will burn almost anything for you. I will set myself ablaze—be all fever forever—in your name, in your shadow's image on the doppler radar communicated to me through bitstream and TCP/IP, the complicated beauty of packet switching networks. You come to me in color, and then all suddenly in black and white, or white and white and white.
I refuse to believe in it. It resists my resistance to belief. It does not care. It is idle pattern in the atmosphere. I could worship any idol and it will not take note. It does not love you, nor me, and will not respond to charm, even prayers spoken under the lilt of a foreign accent. Sexiness does nothing to it. Gets nothing from it. We could be anywhere in its grasp, under its heart, beneath its slowly descending haze. But for now it's fantasy—distant like arithmetic, the cold clicking logic edge, the impersonality of numbers. This is an essay on its coming.
This is a lovesong to said winter, to said precipitation. I will burn for you. I will burn almost anything for you. I will set myself ablaze—be all fever forever—in your name, in your shadow's image on the doppler radar communicated to me through bitstream and TCP/IP, the complicated beauty of packet switching networks. You come to me in color, and then all suddenly in black and white, or white and white and white.
11.12.2006
Something like a phenomenon
The image at left is a scanning electron microscope shot of a snow crystal at a very high magnification. Think architecture. Think Escher. Think aqueducts or cupholders intersecting, layer upon layer. Think complication and the depth of structure that underlies sensation. Think clay or styrofoam—maybe it is styrofoam, torn to tiny shreds and disposed of in the clouds above. Would there be any way for most of us to tell?You can almost touch it—well, you can touch it, but the resolution of touch is far lower than this image; there would be no way for the human hand to do much with something like this except to make it melt. Even thinking about it might make it melt. Any power directed towards it could make it disappear. Even awareness, or a lingering uncertainty about its structure. So,
forget.
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