I have nothing clever or eloquent to say. I feel totally overwhelmed by how complicated all my loved ones' relationships are with each other and how deep the feelings run. In presence, things are intense and confusing, fleshy, tense, clever, raw – in separation the layers relax into a painful tangle. Visions scatter, communication is layered through time, space, and multiple media, memories are nonexistent when I want them. I will never have the money to buy enough gassy plane/car tickets, nor the time to feel like I'm not always running when I visit, nor the emotional capacity to be able to spend enough time.



Does anyone know where Jophet is?

1. Sass you are mysterious and strong
2. By mysterious I mean so very thoroughly known as to be loved completely
3. Do you know I didn't put that excellent Buddhist textlet there, Kid Nid did
4. Does anyone know where Jophet is
5. Don't you all feel we should be interrogating the FORM of this more than we are
6. What does six divided by 5 equal
7. By mystery I mean like when Flannery O'Connor uses that word
8. I'm less of a humanist than I ever was before
9. By strong I mean really super strong

"What the Buddha actually suggested is that it is the avoidance of the elusiveness of the object of desire that is the origin of suffering. The problem is not desire: it is clinging to, or craving, a particular outcome, one in which there is no remainder, in which the object is completely under our power."

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like
http://deliriouslapel.blogspot.com/

In Chandigarh, plants grow on dogs.
In Chandigarh, dogs jump fences.
People in Chandigarh don't walk, they waddle, so full of pee, tears and breath.
Spiders in Chandigarh reside between skin and muscle.

Apple Scholars' Loving Labor

Will it fruit?

Fragged in jigs & waggles, familiar blurs, you bluff these eyen with your hazes. Struggle to produce a subject-position, strengthen in sun. Compton's tortoiseshell, Milbert's tortoiseshell: sometimes these words mean more than "I".

This is not an effective strategy for stifling dissent.

Country Music

Who're you?
I'm Marlowe.
It's my second name. Clarence Marlowe. Not my middle name, I don't have a middle name. I go just by Marlowe.
I play the guitar. I have that red one, that yaller one... Now see, I'm real country, you probably don't understand me. When I say yaller, I mean the color. I've got a Fender, a Gibson, I have seven guitars.
You waiting for someone?
I have a four wheel drive. Not everyone has one of those. A Ram Raider. It's not like a Bronco! It's a Ram Raider. It's like a Land Rover. I'm about to go to Philadelphia to get another. Another four wheel drive. Philadelphia, Mississippi. All that gambling out there, I might do a little gambling on the way.
Have you been married? Just asking.
Me? Yeuh, twice. It didn't work out like I wanted. Got a restraining order on her the second time.
We still see each other. Can't keep her away. But, I do what I want.
Did you come with someone? I don't want any trouble.
How old are you?
30, well you're still pretty.
Are you taller than me? I like ladies that are tall and slim and pretty, not fat like me.
Me? I'm 20. No, 30. Well, I'm in my 50's.
This is my telephone right here. I keep it in here. Do you have one? My number's 535-7070.
Just sayin. It's an easy number.
These guys think they're so good but they're not. They think I want to play with them but I don't want them. My brother, he was the best player around.
There was a girl once here. She was going with another guy and then she was going with me and then she said she was going with someone in Tuscaloosa but it turned out it was that other guy and he stole $285 from her but she took him back, but she said to me I want you and I said well I don't want you, and I didn't. I didn't want her.
He thinks he's the boss up there, telling us not to play. Well then, I'm not playing, for the rest of the night. Used to be nobody could beat me. Also, that other guy up there, Buddy, he was the best around but now he has arthritis.
I've got blood pressure.
I like you, you're like me, you just say whatever you want.
I sell cars and tractors, a little bit of this and that.
Hey Butch.
You seeing him?
I have no vices. I don't smoke, I don't drink. Only one vice- flirtin, that's right.
I've gotta take my medicine. Wait, no, where you going, wait a minute, I've just gotta take my medicine.

I slippt into the hometown screening of Astra's movie halfway through it. In this way I was able to avoid paying. I'd never seen the auditorium so full; I stood in back and watched the Žižek antics with inward groans: "This is just what I expected, so stupid." But when it became clear I'd not missed the Judy Butler bit I was very glad. I'd never even seen a photograph of her before. Watching her & hearing her I loved her as much as I already did and was moved to brimmy briny eyes by her comment on the Bangor queer-bash murder from several years ago that always gives me the flinches when I walk downtown across that bridge.

When Heusinger von Waldegg designed the corridor/compartment layout of the European passenger railcar he managed to institute a legacy of perennial vexation against me qua American, qua New-Worlder. I board at Reggio di Calabria, having read on a park bench much of the afternoon. Seeking a seat, I find a new crop of glares behind each successive door. Compelling webs of resistance are stitched of the following: dialect, family ties, tenuous impromptu sleeping-arrangements against vinyl upholstery. I choose not to push through such thickets. The corridor is comfortable to me; its anonymity, its window-lined narrowness. But I block passage.

Two results of neglect:




One result of tending: turnips

Speaking of embryos

I have received in the mail two small vials and two buccal swabs. I must swab the inside of each cheek and insert and seal each swab into each vial. My brother tested positive for a gene mutation that indicates he does indeed have the heart condition that brought the implantation of a pace maker, but which he thought he may not actually have, because of the fact that he has never had to change the pace maker battery. Now I must undergo such test. My two questions for my mother: 1: Why should we do this? and 2: What are the implications of this new scientific knowledge?
Her responses: If it turns out I do not have it, I can stop taking the tiny nibbles of atenolol pills I take every night, in the case of arrhythmia. If it turns out I do have it, I will continue to take the pill, and in the case that I should become pregnant I could have a genetic test done for that fetus to see if it too would have such gene presumably allowing for preventative measures for the resulting child.
Or alternatively, if I wanted to have a child, I could have in vitro fertilization in which several embryos would be created and then tested to see which have the mutation and which don't and then one without the mutation could be implanted in my uterus.
I responded that we live in different worlds, I don't even go to the doctor and the idea of paying a million dollars for a child seems kind of crazy. She said it's ten thousand dollars a child, her friend had two children that way to avoid the cystic fibrosis gene, and that one side of the family paid for one, and one side of the family paid for the other, and what a wonderful gift.
I don't know what to do with this new knowledge. While I do not want to be stubbornly regressive in opposition to my family of scientists/science heads, I also feel like getting involved in this sort of thing leads to further dependency on my parents- they justify all the things that I need to do medically, but then they must pay for it because I don't have the kind of lifestyle that can support genetic testing and in vitro fertilization. I'm going to do the test, I got the things in the mail, I guess it's good to know what my risk is for syncope and such things, but I am also wary of the outcomes of this process. I am also however, very close to whole heartedly embracing this process of building our genetic knowledge, at least in theory; my immediate family is already half cyborg, and improved in that manner by science, and with my current plan to compose a child with non relationship derived sperm, I could just go ahead and get that embryo engineered and tested.

telegraph

I just found out that Upton Hill Regional Park, where I used to go to use the batting cage and play put-put golf when I was a teenager, was the barracks of the US Nazi Party during the sixties, and that the founder of the party, George Lincoln Rockwell, was assassinated around the corner at Dominion Hills Shopping Center. I am surprised that we didn't figure this out in middle school when my friends were obsessed with the mafia, nazis, and serial killers. The discovery of this geographical overlap of us led me to this photo from 1961 of Rockwell at a Nation of Islam meeting:

Apparently Rockwell tried to form a coalition with the Nation of Islam because of both groups' support for racial separation; he praised Elijah Muhammed as the "Black Peoples' Hitler," and Malcolm X as the next promising leader. In spite of which, while on a "Hate Bus" tour in the South in 1965 Rockwell received the following amazing telegraph from Malcolm X:
"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense – by any means necessary."

Ian, please bring quality literature back to the blog.

...I HAVE ROID RAGE!!!! GOTTA KEEP UP LEN

Chem

wachel/
7:11pmRachel

chemical!

wutsup
7:12pmChem

how bout this
7:12pmRachel

i love it

i really do

because i am busy and crazy
7:12pmChem

just doing a wittle computa work
7:12pmRachel

so its nice to hear from you

thesis?
7:12pmChem

yup you are busysysysysy

yup just entered joanna's manuscript
7:12pmRachel

kind of sucks

great!
7:13pmChem

what're you studying

?
7:13pmRachel

anatomy
7:13pmChem

coool
7:13pmRachel

i've done some good things
7:13pmChem

what body part
7:14pmRachel

shoulder and armpit
7:14pmChem

yeah. right on.
7:15pmRachel

i had my first day of doctor shadowing today and it was cool

family health center
7:15pmChem

good
7:15pmRachel

but the academic part is just wow

so much work
7:15pmChem

wow what

yeah..

turns out i can't go to penland bcuz it starts in february

but its ok
7:15pmRachel

i miss you

hey are you applying to penland?
7:16pmChem

i miss you too
7:16pmRachel

being so busy makes me feel like i need to take life by the horns or some shit

how do you feel about not applying to penland?
7:17pmChem

i feel ok about it

7:17pmRachel

7:18pmChem

but i wrote it before you wrote about penland chat is so weerd

ok anyway

it's ok

7:18pmChem

i don't mind

i'll just apply next year

or do something else
7:18pmRachel

neat

yeah
7:19pmChem

like make sweet love with bernice
7:19pmRachel

yeah!
7:19pmChem

i wish
7:19pmRachel

who is that?

your teacher?
7:21pmRachel

in this quiet space i just want to mention that i am in a great elective "medical/legal issues and our changing concepts of reproduction and the family" - a joint course with vt law school

the first meeting was the shit
7:21pmChem

it is funny i was just reading in a picture book that belgium has the flemingers and the walloons and the flemingers are large, monstrous, light, slow and quiet and the walloons are small, dark, and impulsive, and bernice was (that course sounds rad) always talking about how flems are staid and she was having trouble with so many outgoing americans

and her emails to me are like formal letters

it is funny
7:23pmRachel

i like it when people make technological communications polite and kind of formal...its romantic

how is bammy?

how is backy?

gordo?
7:25pmChem

i agree. i uncharacteristically wrote her an email that said things like "i LOVED working with you" and i'm sure she didn't know what to do w/ it

bammy is crappy

but normal
7:25pmRachel

in this quiet space i'll tell you that human dissection really does help you learn
7:26pmChem

my backywhacky is not hurting so much now i am just trying not to fuck it up again

gordo was empty and i got some work done.
7:26pmRachel

those things sound good
7:26pmChem

almost attacked by a great dane
7:26pmRachel

wft

what fuck the?

but what happened?
7:27pmChem

because i think the owner couldn't possibly imagine someone would be walking down the street because even though it is a tiny and completely walkable/bikable town everyone drives absolutely everywhere
7:27pmRachel

i know its not funny but its hard not to laugh
7:27pmChem

and the grocery store has bullshit food and many people are obese
7:28pmRachel

it reminds me of how jason's bammy relatives call orange soda orange juice
7:28pmChem

the mayor is really nice he was a firefighter and now owns a bookstore which he said he always wanted to do because he thinks reading is so important and on the weekend he holds court and people come talk to him
7:29pmRachel

a great thing about a small town

local government is completely different in small towns

when do you get a break?
7:30pmChem

also yesterday was todd's bday and i went out to eat with his parents and his mom said things like "i'm just a southern gal, i ain't never been nowhere, i don't know how to say any of these... sooovaka? (souvlaki). and she also said toddie do you remember when i used to make barf caserole (todd: yeah, that was good), well this food looks way more like barf and then they (parents) would crack up for 10 minutes
7:31pmRachel

yes!
7:31pmChem

also his father kept repeating over and over spicy chicken with RIIIIIICE!
7:31pmRachel

lets make barf casserole for our offspring
7:31pmChem

totally

it was funny
7:31pmRachel

that must be where toddie gets his coolness

thinking about peoples parents reminds me of this fucking awesome elective

embryo donor controversies and non traditional families

it blew my mind i'm so glad i'm in it
7:33pmChem

whoa, so you have two "nontraditional" ones
7:33pmRachel

no its just one elective

with the best teachers
7:33pmChem

oh ok same one

sounds good
7:33pmRachel

two awesome ladies, both doctoras and one is also a lawyer

and we read about this case from 8 years ago

and talked about what we would do if we were the court

then they told us what the court did

it was unbelievable
7:34pmChem

did they align with yall
7:34pmRachel

it made me want to tell all my friends to become lawyers
7:34pmChem

oh. so they didn't
7:35pmRachel

in some ways but mostly not

just real quick

there was a single woman who wanted to have a baby
7:35pmChem

fuck that bullshit already
7:35pmRachel

so she went to a clinic for a donated embryo because she didn't want to mess with paternity rights of sperm donors

(lets just stop right there)

so anyway the fucking doctor

accidentally implants in her an embryo that was not donated but belonged to a couple who they helped get preggers
7:36pmChem

i didn't even know you could get an embryo
7:36pmRachel

and the doc covered it up
7:36pmChem

that means it doesn't have your jeans?
7:37pmRachel

yes

then one of the docs staff threatened to out him

so he went to the woman's house with PRESENTS FOR HER BABY
7:37pmChem

why did he do that- was it on purpose?
7:37pmRachel

and told her he fucked up (but he didn't tell her about the cover up)

accident

and she's like, "oh, we're all reasonable people, lets just talk it out"...

and she's been in court ever since

8 years

the son is in therapy

the fucking embryo parents moved into her town so they could sue for custody

now she only has 60% custody
7:39pmChem

whoa... so if they had been ok w it it wouldve been ok but they weren't?
7:40pmRachel

and the embryo dad is suing AGAIN because he wants full custody

no, the dad is like, "every sperm is sacred"
7:40pmChem

annoying
7:41pmRachel

when she first went to a lawyer

the lawyer was like, "is there anyone you could marry? anyone at all?
7:41pmChem

ha

i guess i've always assumed when i want to have a kid i'll just get one of my friends to sleep with me but maybe that'll be harder than i think
7:42pmRachel

i think its a good route in our circles

who should be your baby daddy?
7:42pmChem

i should've gotten seth's sperm when i could. god damn it.
7:43pmRachel

yeah, i wish he would be into it but

hmmm

dan has a bad back
7:43pmChem

yeah i want him to be my baby daddy. i would leave the country.

two bad backs is no good
7:44pmRachel

wow dan is calling me!
7:44pmChem

whoa!

you can get it if you want

i might should get out of 5th floor
7:44pmRachel

i got it but he says hi
7:44pmChem

hi dan

or we could try to negotiate this conference call
7:45pmRachel

jessica rosenberg just started chatting with me!!!

overload
7:45pmChem

who's that?

first girlfriend?
7:45pmRachel

yup
7:45pmChem

whoa i want to chat with her.

PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!!!!!!!!
7:46pmRachel

aaaaaaah!
7:46pmChem

just thought i'd throw that in the mix
7:46pmRachel

harumph
7:46pmChem

YOU LOVE THEM MORE!!!!!!!!
7:46pmRachel

I LOVE YOU MORE!
7:46pmChem

I KNEW IT!!!!!!!

I KNEW THAT!!!!!!!!!
7:47pmRachel

i hope so

i should go study and end these chats
7:47pmChem

ok i think i gotta get something to eat to properly manage anziety

yeah end this shit
7:47pmRachel

ok let me know how to handle it when you find out

anxiet

y

peace out my love
7:48pmChem

i can tell you one thing- alcohol, caffeine, and guilty sex are not helping

hahahahahhahahahahahaha

lol

lol

lol
7:48pmRachel

yeah hilarious
7:49pmChem

iotflmao

ykwimb?
7:49pmRachel

i hope to talk more when i have time soon
7:49pmChem

i'm on the floor laughing my ass off. you know what i mean biatch?

this is gonna be the way we talk for the next 4 years!!!!!!! hahahahahahahahahahaaha

lol

lol
7:50pmRachel

fuck no

don't even

i can't handle
7:50pmChem

i think the "builder's" bar i recently ate is fucking me up. i have roid rage.

my mom sent me it in the mail. thanks ma.

ok bye bye bye ratch?
7:51pmRachel

bye friend

i really love you
7:51pmChem

bye toodles ciao. i love you too.
7:51pmRachel

take care of yourself for me

xo
7:51pmChem

i will try.

tell me if you come with good anxiety remedies..

chow
7:52pmRachel

later alligator

I've developed nearly constant anxiety. If it's not one thing it's another. I can push this anxiety away with work, so therefore I must always be working. I think I can remember days when I daydreamed, when I relished dozing as a pleasurable and creative time. I wonder if I will ever daydream again?

Ada, Arbor

When to begin? It began with Ava. Well, I don't know how far back plans were made to take a trip to Ida. They were going to see Edie there. All I know is that when Ava and the rest of them all made a stop here on their trip south was the first I heard of it. Except that I remember when I first met her I mispronounced her name, I said "Eva."



Not long after, my own travelling plans began to take shape. I knew the route would take me across old Iroquois territories. There was initially some vexation over placenames; was the destination on lake Otsego, in Otsego county? Or was it the somewhere in the city of Oswego, on the shores of lake Ontario, the seat of Oswego county? As the Susquehanna runs south from its headwaters at lake Otsego, it passes first through Otego, then 70 miles downriver through Owego. I prepared a sheaf of maps and set off; soon I was in the clear air and brilliant sun and the trouble with these names ceased to bother me. As I passed to the east of Cortland, heading toward the north country, I was spurred on by thoughts of the great orchards that lay ahead of me.

She said the prettiest place on Earth was Baltimore at night

Our old sailor-friend Daniil Pavloff VIII made this elegant film several years ago but it never achieved any kind of distribution until recently.

The warm wet of a morning not yet turned, day snaked flush with day, spines aligned. Lines unwind, splinter to brittle segments and rays. The stab of it! When I think I'm grown away, far-off enough now to not mind the gap: skipped beat at every third stroke, a stutter somewhere in the heart. Simple, unmendable grief.

What do I do with this love? Interrogating myself just leads back into the big questioning breath-hungry chest which is so overwhelmed with feeling that it can only manifest as a huge swallowing hole such that everything goes around and around uselessly like in an astrophysicist's dimension-theory doughnut model, into the hole and out again without ever having gained any depth.

STOP. Sleepy eyes & spittly beads.

DINNER ON THE GROUNDS

"Sweet; unsweet; coke."

BOUSECHEEK

Too hot to keep chocolate; it runs all over. Every time I take a sip of mate it immediately comes dribbling out through my skin. At the botanical garden I was talking to Jophet by the cacao tree and couldn't believe the amount of brine coming out of me. I got sunburned from sitting & reading in total shade. The twisty red candle on the windowsill relaxed its shape and leaned itself curvily against the pencil-sharpener. I put icecubes in my lemonwater to cool it and they were gone in less than a minute. I put four more in; they were pea-sized a minute later when I went to drink.

Lenya and I were back and forth between Chişinău and Medea gathering our weathers to go south with my tocayo to fête Jophet, who awaited us – and her thirtieth birthday – in Tallapoosa. In one of those meantime evenings I rode bikes out the bay with some Chişinău friends to see if my uncle's schooner was coming in off the banks yet. It was. I'd spoken with Lenya that evening and we had a loose plan to find Jophet at dark and watch some bad films with him; leaving the sunset-glow of the pier toward that end I had the pleasure of encountering Ralu, whom I'd not met before but about whom I'd heard much from Lenya. Her sister took this photograph.

They were clumsy together. The three had shared a couple Augusts' worth of the intimacy of I want to know where this one is going.

Jophet is in Tallapoosa in joy of thirty-first birth & thirtieth cumplimiento. Her bicycle moves through the palpable heat like a flinder-mouse, finely awake to each synchronous valence. She navigates libraries with the grace and force of her years. Her succulents thrive. She can be reduced to no collection of details. Having ganged south to give love and hugs engendered perennially in them by her and having now ganged north again, her tribu already wants more such outlet!

Have you ever seen anything like that before in your whole entire life?

Harvest, Herbst, Κάρπος

Many species of Lycaenid, including our common Everes comyntas, are myrmecophilous in the larval stage – that is, their caterpillar-body will secrete sweet liquors tasty enough to ants to cause them to tend and protect the caterpillar much as a little frontier family would their milch cow. One species, however, complicates or upsets this image most compellingly. Far from settling for the peaceful model available to it as a Lycaenid, whereby it might live out its larval life transforming vegetable matter partly into butterflyward body mass and partly into a sugar-tithe for its protectors, Feniseca tarquinius chooses, inexplicably, fauna over flora as the fodder for its larval stage. Alone in this choice among all North American butterflies, the handsome caterpillar gobblingly ravages its way among the plump little bodies of the Wooly Aphid (Eriosomatinae): the larva of which, it should be noted – and there must be some kind of reason for this disturbing quasi-symmetry – is myrmecophilous.

Bellows Falls Library

I try to be present!

Happy Birthday Ian!

Applying mulch to raspberry beds in sweet May's sudden summer heat: forehead drops prayer-beads of sweat into the riotous dandy-grass alive with bees between my brother's australian boot and my brother's australian boot. Eight species of butterfly intimately met over the day, three of them exposed to reversal film, two of them taken onto my finger. No bulls, so much the better. A baby instead. Birdlets' beaks gaping in their nest. A couple dozen good oysters from Long Island Sound.

love for you on motherday

Cold / Caldo /:/ Black / Blanc

Opposition always devolves immediately into something gentler, more complicated, more porous toward the ichors of loving-kindness. That's if the energies of breath are left to their own magical devices; being that our bodies bound breath in muscular constrictions and that from this we tend to generate notions of selfhood identifiable with body, sometimes the fiction of opposition is maintained and carried to elaborate rhetorical ends by parties who feel it auspicious to oppose one another.

The perennial presence of you in me; the continuous vibration of those moments of luminous intimacy, the surprising way they're free to move in time loosely, erratically, irreverently, with rasp of wing-rustle, like how a perfect early Mourning Cloak moves in space. Or like how a Baltimore Checkerspot does, bright and brindled under the light of your lucky eyes that time in the grass above where the sweet and the salt waters mix.

I could mask this. I could pretend that my memories are of my young youth and of Tamara, whose school was across the piazza from mine in Baku and with whom I precociously eloped in the dory we built together over the course of two tense, rainy months; or that this first, indelible, irreducible love was wrought in me by sinewy Rula, the tough fifty-year-old Greek with the disarming serviceberry eyes who'd been a guerrilla leader during the civil war and whom I came to know in her exile in Tashkent through the sister of the tutor I'd engaged on barter-terms to help me with the pleasurably vexatious jargon of Το Χρονικόν του Μορέως.

I can wear a mask, I can put a mask aside. It's you, You are that love, you're the one I think of and dream of, the one my heart smiles at. My whole heart moves out of this body, embraces that one (yours); forgets its place; stumbles; is ecstatic.

I feel your wings moving, you're on my shirtsleeve; the air between your powdery scales and my pale blue squinty eyes is a live, sensitive tissue. Our presence is common. I feel you kissing me, me kissing you, in love, soft mouths, gently, again and again, continuously – even though I'm just here in the sunlight, sitting, and you're just there on my shirtsleeve.

The world is my blank

At loss; shucking Glidden Points. Taking Wellfleets with beer, cheers to lady Lenya. Standing against the gunwale of my dory I send fifteen-foot tongs down into the salt-&-sweet of the harbor's waters, extend my self: come up with half a dozen good Malpeques. Swallow sea, swallow you, drown, in love!

BELLOWS FALLS LIBRARY

dear /brokenheart /gleams of loving /complicated ways /together & rise together, breathe /chosen /frame /as sapwood turns inward and becomes heartwood /losses; loving /lonely too, reading Virginia Woolf, coming home /planty, tenuous /riding my bike /unsettled springweather /connecticut river /gentleness of death /baby /31 /clouds of love /maritimes /Further prospects /brief life /excitement and lightness /measure of heavyhearted sadding /wanting /I most love /gushing spring /beautiful /glad nonetheless /All I can /hardly /let alone /capabilities /buoyancy /hopeful /no place in the world /fairly clear /hold you close /miss /your

SWEET OLD WORLD

Metals invisibly alter the acid-structure of the proteins I beat in this copper bowl or heat in that iron pan. Nero d'Avola blackens my glass, leavens the spinning sink of me, purples my kiss-hungry mouth. I begin to sing, first in one language, then another, then in both at once, like Guillaume de Machaut. When my body started rejecting flesh it got crazy for fish. Now I'm nervous whenever I'm any distance from the seacoast. My money wanders off, sometimes returns to me brightened with gifts. I want you, are you reading this?

I give up

"In a room the size of one solitude
my heart
the size of one love
looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness..."

(In Yunanistan, among leps, or among lepers; in a leftover building; Bildungsroman mythologies pushing and pinching at the edges of the overdetermined continent of my personhood; pâte brisée against a wet fork's tongs; drift.)

"...dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:
'I love your hands.'

I will plant my hands in the flowerbed
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know
and the sparrows will lay eggs
in the hollows of my inky fingers..."

Nationalist bile leaks all over foodstuffs which like languages seem to be so much grounded in their special ecology, their ring of mountains, their big river, and which like languages are: phonetic/vibrational sympathy with place is real, terroir is real – but also real is the endless shaivist dance of people over the rind of this beloved burning sphere. Apples wandered west from Alma Ata along the spice-road with the cinnamons and cloves and nutmegs that the dirty euro-lords were needing so badly in those days to mark their class difference: as amurrikan as apple pie, a promiscuous medieval fusion food with Central Asian roots! Likewise, for unnecessary example, eighteenth-century London slang is full of Hindi words on account of the gypsies who held such lovely & subtle sway there then, the gypsies having wandered from India centuries before; and a Turkish sweet-shop in Bergama was perfectly manageable by me with my Greek as all the pastry-names one learns in Greece are already Turkish.
>>SPIT!<<
It's like my old Phanariot grandfather used to always say, "Nationalist bile is the worst sauce."
***
"The Dutchmen [(Deutsch-"men")] of Pennsylvania's hills and valleys loved sauerkraut so much that they not only honored New Year's dinner with it, they even wrote poems and songs in its honor. During the First World War, when an edgy government attempted to rename sauerkraut "Liberty Cabbage," a fighting Dutchman named Charles Calvin Ziegler wrote these lines in its defense:

'Liberty Cabbage' now's the name,
But the thing remains the same.
Has it not the old aroma?
Is not "Liberty" a misnomer?
Why discard the name as hellish?
When the thing itself you relish?
You may flout it and may scold –
No name fits it like the old.
When applied to Sauer Kraut,
Liberty, beyond a doubt,
Loses something of her halo.
Should this little bit of reason
Be adjudged an act of treason
You may thrust me into jail O,
But in spite of all your pains,
SAUERKRAUT it still remains."

Big Juri was over last week with his spunky little bud of a granddaughter to help my brother harvest and sort his tulsi. My brother is all about ayurveda and thinks of tulsi as material for a special tisane good for the health of our bodies, whereas I feel it to be the living, photosynthesizing body of the goddess Tulasi Devi and am squeamish about the idea of gathering its leaves with an end toward boiling them in water. I took pictures, hammed for little Rosebud, laughed nervously in strained chitchat with my brother.

A plant can retreat so far from the complexities of its oak and dogrose forebears into the shaivist asceticism of the desert of no-thought mind that it becomes a tiny, needless body consisting only of a rootlet and two bright little leaves: but this creature will, with all the power of its prana, be yet capable of giving vaginal birth to live gemmy stones!

Claremont, 245

A big rock-maple takes my headstone in slow swallow, the slate asleep while its willow weeps with inward, earthward strength. Like chilamates we send down eager root-mass from every branch. Deep, back, past the rising balconies from which all these hundred years wave, these hundred-fifty years, these two-hundred years. New England. We took to the tides and didn't rejoin the schooner till our duri was good and full with about half an inch freeboard. Women working the kitchen's smoke, wise, smiling women who've made us up like stories, watch through the ventanilla del cuecho as we come up from the boats.

how we got our name

http://robinamer.com/2009/02/10/inside-out-names/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/content/articles/2005/10/17/rugby_match_report_aylesford_151005_feature.shtml

"Me han estremecido un montón de mujeres..."

love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love

"Y tú apareces en mi ventana, suave y pequeña, con alas blancas..."

Pieris rapae, male. As if it manifested directly out of the energy of my unseasonable butterfly-hunger, or out of the vibration-field stitched through the many lepidopterical books that I'd left piled around the desk by the window against whose panes it was so suddenly flittering. Its tiny delicate abdomen, thickly furred, its hindwing undersides shot through with the pierid's special greenish-yellow cast. Irreducible. What cabbage brought you here, into this house, into the room I grew up in, in February? Where did your larval self live? Chant me your lines, how many generations of milky flight from Québec 1860 to here & now?

Vanessa atalanta

Last year it was almost the whole season before I saw a red admirable, even though I'd been down in the Crimea those couple deep summer weeks among the long-tailed skippers, hackberry emperors, common snouts, gulf fritillaries, etc., and the Gallonses had gotten to see that one in Central Park. I was walking in Zeke's orchard, late fall, with Pavel Durgeyevich: he was the one noticed it and called me over. It sat for us a long time on the gloss of a toothy apple leaf which bobbed lightly with the afternoon's breathing. The blue patch was pretty much faded out, but what a lovely creature! I had no film with me; nevertheless the color-saturation comes easily to me now even against today's wintry palette, fat bright apple-skins punctured by the stubbly green gold at our feet like that moment in Emily Dickinson.

Ong textbook:

"Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. The writer's audience is always a fiction. The writer must set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves. Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for [him], to which [he] is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads my letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may very well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive. Most books extant today were written by persons now dead. Spoken utterance comes only from the living."

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Lulu? That vital shakti which Wm. Blake called Orc, what makes the heart run, lets its holes work, lets the whales surface & breathe inside my chest which is almost hers, almost hers: identity happens, I become tidal desire without object, gas footlights grab & catch at the hems of me – all flames, like Emma Livry! A woman lives her full soul's size and the man-worlds around her topple like cardhouses, damning. Almost she routs the evil even from the Ripper's own heart but the poison letter of maleness arrives, enfin, as the letter always arrives. «Male journey» comme on dit. Must this letter always arrive? It musn't; with your help, héros, with your ashes and answers, I begin to rip the Jack from my own root. Jack, Mack: stiff, flip-flopping lozenge of green barred with black. Le couteau sur la table disparaît au cours du repas.

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Lady Lazarus? Death finds its way into a body's life like psychology into the jīva but my heart sometimes blinds its fingers' tips down a run of big jade or smoky-quartz beads all the way to a darkness so big it equals all of space and brings calm as it's clear it can't ever end: and the beads were words, we find, when the lamp gets its wick lit & the glass chimney's set. Words made into pomes. Hard linguage-forms exceed the page, strange fruit in excess of her mouth and mine. Slang & psychology mix, promiscuous, with simple sublimity of space in the uneven rise of the lines, my dory good and wet, its seams all proven, off beautiful Nauset. Elle est partie, elle est là.

Wa mā adrāka mā l-Sassafras? Bright insensible steel of the kettle at purr on the meetinghouse stove, quaker-light invading the space like vodka. Sunday morning always resists being kept outside with the dogs and the ducks. I wonder if you understood the way I felt about the stove, an Atlantic, cast at a forge in Portland (556) half a century ago. I remember slipping you a note rolled tight round a heavy little bottle, launching the surplus of me otherward, into the meshes of the Symbolic Order, from my island. Mon naufrage. The streaming light from the window snags its beams against a hip of the kettle, forming a little pucker of emptiness. I stare into this clear glare-knot and it's a tear, a hole, a puncture in the colored field of forms filling the jewel-organs of my sight: stove, pipe, steam, painted & unpainted wood – behind all this rich ecstatic maya-tissue lies a pure spatiality of empty light et ça c'est toi, c'est Toi.

SANJURO

We were all thirty, like Sylvia Plath. Clouds had been scudding across the squinting eye of each of our hearts ever since we could remember. That they began to clear off, that a sky was found to be behind them, seemed less important at the time than that we were suffering suddenly beyond precedent.

Want to be punished like this.

I was such an idiot. I didn't know anything about mystery or majesty. I didn't understand how plants worked & wasn't interested in learning. None of the food I liked to eat was good for me. I hurt people, I didn't know how to open up to them. The word "love" was as blank a thing to me as a butterfly was; and that latter I'd just as soon have killed as photographed – that is if I were ever even to notice one, which I never did.
Happily, though, my crianza played itself out in brutal Bucks County, where one is not allowed to go on for too long without being made to account for oneself.

Recordar

To remember;
from the Latin re-cordis,
to pass back through the heart.

Žižekniks bloggling

Things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. What we call creation is a cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe. [...]
Love is a cosmic imbalance. I have always been disgusted with the idea of universal love. Love is an extremely violent act. It's not "I love you all." Love means "I pick out something," it's a structure of imbalance. Even if this something is a small detail, I say "I love you more than anything else." In this quite formal sense love is evil.

TANTRAMAR

Les foins qui nous ramassions dans nos doris –
salt hay like down Plum Island where the Merrimac dumps –
midst clamor of waterfowl, Akkadie!

Someone took this picture of me ten years ago at that Vienna kaffeehaus (whose name eludes me) famous for having been the first place in "Europe" ever to serve the stuff, back in Ottoman days. I was there to celebrate the release of my cousin's first record. It seems like I was much younger than I am now. Her record was great, we all loved it then, and it's since become a classic throughout Mitteleuropa. Massy tides of memory. I hadn't seen the photo for some time: it surprised me last night coming out from between two pages of a volume of Βιζυηνός that I've been revisiting. I like the affection I feel for myself when I look through this little window across a decade's distance.

The floor shakes under my belly for a minute and a half as the Odessa train hauls itself past our house. I'm on the parquet most of the morning, my torso propped up on its elbows to effect a slight back-bend (countering the ache resultant of too far a walk on pavements last night with heavy bag of new books & no arch-supports) and to free up my hands for the sketch-work spread out on the floor before me. Sketching the several interesting varieties of flowering shrub that hang so insistently, so independently, so immediately in the dense silver-washed air of the world captured by the collection of Crimean War photographs my brother brought home for me from Jassy. I'll show my sketches to Pavel Durgeyevich who is sure to be able to identify them.

Thin paper, weakened by the wet of a drizzly run of days & a crying jag, parts against the slight tug of Beard Street's cobbles like the jib sheet of a Gloucester schooner struggling against gales up the Gulf toward Βοστόνη. Voice gives to gulf of silence, inscription eclipsed by the hollow behind it. Day blooms.

Awake too late, three calls already having come in for me to the phone that my brother and I use in the house next door and we're all out of pu-erh till he (my brother) gets back from Jassy. Make do with a mate (Ilex paraguariensis). Scrambling my morning body all over the empty house. The days go quietly, by evening-time my ego relaxes and becomes "self", I harmonize the chaos of cosmic forces in me: then I go to sleep. Morning poses the entire question again. Beautiful, deciduous lives of consciousness.