happy birthday sarah yanni

He was happy because bicycling season and butterflying season were synchronous. Ballad-singers built intricate masses of sexual energy around themselves while they worked their looms. In wooden rooms, such a vibration of formerly living tissues! “The tissues that comprise my body” (he was thinking out loud into the empty space) “share ancestry with those of these broad wolf-pine planks.” It was like the erotic sympathy that overtook him in old cemeteries: Selastina, Barberry, Patience—graved in slate, their unlikely names were the mouths and hands with which the unwedded dead worried his flesh. Dust, lust: he’d intended exploiting the rhyme in some sort of testament until he found he’d been beaten to it, with preclusive success, by Charles Cotton, a minor poet of the seventeenth century. Women create flesh, eye, limb; further, we weave the magic field of sex-pleasure which sets the first stitches of such creation. Men practice power, pretend it’s pleasure; but it’s not. They consume, discard; are disposable thereby; don’t have the patience that pleasure takes. He entered the room and the hushy thump of looming ceased. Penelope looked up from her work, two yards of bright textile filling her lap.

a) There we left you, on the suspiciously lush pasto of your parents' lawn, in the warm dark of a very late night. The funniest bits of texting I ever messed with.

b) There we left you, in that hard world of winter with all the water stoppt up solid & framing the clean live air in angles & planes, slip & fall, miss the train!

Pink rock faces ocean's thunder in craggy early-20th-century planes, lines interrupted and truncated and textured according to superannuated spatial notions out of the cities of Europe. We used to come here with our wooden things, our oily pigments and stiff sailcloth panels; we'd make pictures. I'd make pictures of you, you swimming, you sitting. I'd swim; you'd make a picture of that. Where did all those pictures get to, I've been meaning to ask you. I float off, into the islands. There are three knives on me: one for oysters, one for scallops, one for cutting beads out of green lilac or apple.

MISS RUTH LYMAN

Who was possessed of many
amiable qualities, the joy of
her Parents, the delight of
her connexions, and
beloved of all, if youth,
if virtue deserve a tear,
reader, drop it here,
when the engraving of this stone
informs you that she left
her weeping friends in the
23d year of her Age, June 22 1783

Old 91-Corridor stock; her great-nephew became friendly with Emily Dickinson, he would take her on his knee in converse while courting her sister. Her stone was cut from Connecticut's coarse silicate tissue and imaged by a carver there before being brought out to salty Maine. Within a few years the inscribed text will fall away; a light tap would do it now.

My brother and I swam the Dniester, he beat me to its nether shore but I beat him back. Little lateen-rigged boatlets skittered buoyantly past us, manned by boys. I felt as good as I've felt in weeks. The sunlight crutched my flawy vision such that I could almost read the "Karadeniz Çayı" sign in Bender from where we lay on the east bank. My brother got a passing tsigane to back him on the tanbur as he sang (for my benefit, bless him!) that Canceaux song. Then there was rose spoon-sweet for all from a tidy treat-vendor who cleaned his little silver koutali in a cup of saltwater after each of our mouthings.

Paschal joy is imminent. After great pain a formal feeling comes. The beloved fellow-creature is near, the one with whom alone I've followed creation further in and farther on. My song. Three darts into the heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak. Joseph Sykes's stones stand hard, soft schist from salt-swamps, waiting for sun to come athwart them and thicken their lines with shadow to animate the faces figured there. Like a slide quiet in its slot before the bulb's switched on. I love the ocean, I love the linguage, I love the melodies and the countermelodies. Where did you go. Under a rosebush that dies back every winter. I miss the place of rest, you, Sofferetti, your lap. Where is your lap? You are continually dismantling it, forming it up again every time you sit down.

I sustain a focused expiration; in it nascent flames chuckle. Having thrown mouth and nose over my left shoulder into a deft, smokeless breath, I come back to blowing before the little dance sags wholly. Old lover, soft and bleary in our flannel sheets upstairs, I will warm these rooms for thee. Breath circulates among elements: cold air off the massed saltwater and the rocks; wooden rooms packaging it elegantly; the hot, wet mystery of my lungs; yours, upstairs; the suckling glow of a young fire. Free circuit of breath voids me, I delaminate from the thickness of my morning. Dragon. We are given breathing, a readymade spiritual practice. Stacked stinking popple steams beside the black box, hot now. You descend.

Monster baby

I was in the hospital. It was time to give birth and I was thinking My stomach isn't really very big. The baby just sort of squelched out, no pain, no drama. Immediately nurses took it away. I was lying in bed for a while, I knew my mother was trying to find me but I did not want to talk. I told a nurse I think it's time I saw my baby. She took me down the corridor and out of the hospital onto the street. We walked into the food court of a strip mall and I stood in line behind her at the Pretzel Shack. She held the ticket for my baby. A feeling of deep dread and regret came over me and I thought My life is over. She gave the ticket to a man in an apron behind the counter. He came back with a plastic catering dish with a clear snap-on top. The dish was filled with dinner rolls. The baby squirmed underneath and tried to push the rolls out of the way. I took the top off and long fingers with long nails started snapping together. The baby's face had a tiny hinged jaw lined with sharp teeth. It had a well-developed nose and dark eyes. I was thinking Those Italian features must have come from Christian, my sperm donor. My mother finally ran up. Her hair was dyed black. She stood looking at the baby. We walked and tried to cross the road. I dropped the dish and the baby's face fell off except for the mouth. I picked the dish up and carried it across the road trying to avoid being bitten by the mouth while my mother was pushing the baby parts across the road with her foot, trying to get them out of the way of the oncoming cars. I was thinking I hate my life, this baby is a problem. My dad rolled up in a pimped-out red Ford Festiva with black flower detailing on the sides.

Today I interviewed a housing developer for my documentary. He said that he thinks the primary reason "this town is so dangerous is that many of the criminals displaced by Katrina moved here."

I was leaving ceramics class early. All my pots were glazed. I walked to a tall building, entered and found the elevators. I got in the elevator and was trying to find the eleventh floor, but my vision was blurry. A young man in a suit and a lady in a dress ran giggling into the elevator as the doors were closing, like a commercial (life insurance? cologne?). The elevator started to ascend rapidly. I still couldn't find the button for eleven and the floors were going by faster than I could read, so I randomly pressed one. The elevator stopped at the fortieth floor and I got out. I saw then that the small footprint of the building had continued up the entire height, that I was in a spire. I walked out of the spire into a bigger space. A couple was floating in a pool, embracing and laughing. Tourists were eating at a restaurant. My father walked up to me and handed me a bundle of white envelopes, all labeled with black writing. The envelopes were filled with different types of pine pollen or pitch. I said "Now I understand why I'm so sneezy. My allergies followed the pitch up the elevator. I can barely function." My father said don't worry just put the envelopes into the trunk.

HOOT

they are three persons related complectly, they sing for You! this the hammer kill'd the Jon Henery/ this the summer where you made your pile o'cashes/ this the big sea where you lost your diamond pearl-rings/ I find you nuther suit for sunday lunch// I kisst you in the gardlen/ I kisst you in the spring/ we don't hafta go to town nomore/ cuz there aint no lackin thing// Macker Jims he gone for seatime/ he dint leave me no coin/ gon'hafta scrounge for rum-jugs/ fill'em with gooseneck wine// Run down Jill-gal run down/ catch my yaller hound/ bring them kegs of dandy-coke up/ and gather all the kiddies round

First good dream in a long time

I had just arrived back in New York. I was in downtown Manhattan. Seth was my brother. Our father called and asked me to go to 180th street to run an errand. I started walking uptown by myself and passed a mortuary. I went in and it turned out to be a combination mortuary and paleontology lab, the mortuary took care of the flesh and then scientists studied the bones. I started talking to the people that were downstairs grinding down and polishing vertebral bones. I was offered a job as a bone polisher. The catch was that it was from 5 to 8 every morning- did I mind? I got excited thinking, wow this is perfect, I can make money polishing bones in the morning and then can have the rest of the day to do my own work. I showed up on my first day and was suddenly confused, it didn't seem like I would be polishing bones after all, there were tables and a band, and it seemed like people wanted me to wait tables. I asked the supervisor for clarification, and she said, "oh no, for your job you're going to be playing in the mortuary band, we hope you don't mind." And then there I was playing clave in the funeral celebration with this awesome "well respected Dominican Republic style" band. I was really happy.

I rest in Sofferetti.

Born breathing, soon forgetting just how it's done. Relearning leads to the heart.

Consider the lilies of the field: I learn to love by watching dandelions practice nyctinasty. As soon as its breaths stop my body will rot as readily as a taro corm.

The big machine exhales noisily, sweet-smellingly, more hugely than any lung ever could, and begins to glide off. By the time the last car clacks itself across the seam in the steel there where the rails curve to leave town, I've reached her house and am working to get my breath back.

A grotesque at thirty-one.

If the tissue of a paragraph be inflated or engorged like pulmonary or clitoral tissue, is it abler then to hold these half-formed passing things, eye-spots, memories kept in friends' heads, flakes of light? Inflected with separateness, putting up the prose-system anchor it rode, does it signify more potently now or does its new heft sink it?

My window was everything; four hours between me and my lover's arms. Window-pillow, window-mind, window-heart. Window-eye: bare and hatted heads pass across it like prayer-beads as the train begins to move quietly down the platform. Head, head, head, bead, prayer for openness, prayer for hugeness, prayer for nothingness. Big early-green spaces open up beyond the town's limit, invisible leagues of track pull me on through the morning's tenses.

All Mercer county resisted me while I walked. In my wake coal-towns I suppose would lapse back to their habitual owner-choked dullness but while I was raising the dust off their main streets it was like Yojimbo, suspicion animated the doors & porch-boards and ocularized the windows till before long I'd always be approached and harassed in turn by a coal-company thug-band, a coal-company sheriff & deputy, a general knot of folk, and some evangelical fools. Everyone wanted me on their side, or out of town, or in their depressing little jail or deal-wood church. One time I did accept a meal & some monies to stay a day and fix a busted Estey reed-organ for a couple of bible-jerks but usually I took care to get through as quick as I could. I was headed to Bramwell. All these hills' messy eructations of raw carbon were turning to diamonds faster than God or time could ever figure out how to make them do and that silly Gilded Age saw little Bramwell enjoying the residency of more millionaires per capita than any other place in the U.S.A. The Bluestone ran red from the earth-disturbances upstream but cradled the town in an elegant kink like how the Tennessee does the golf course opposing Blue Goose Hollow and the other old rail slums of Chattanooga which are all gone now, gone, gone, for highways! My blood ran kinky too, a certain instability to the electric charge of my heart-muscle. I felt it falter, times, my heart, thought little of it; but since have come to understand what a damned complicated mystery God worked in building me. Love can be any of so many things, any tiny thing, a little animate quiver of Potassium ions!

The Italian Doctors Are Mutating the Gene in a Dish

(to match our own mutation)

"What is the normal function of the KCNH2 gene?

The KCNH2 gene belongs to a large family of genes that provide instructions for making potassium channels. These channels, which transport positively charged atoms (ions) of potassium into and out of cells, play a key role in a cell's ability to generate and transmit electrical signals.
The specific function of a potassium channel depends on its protein components and its location in the body. Channels made with the KCNH2 protein are active in heart (cardiac) muscle, where they transport potassium ions out of cells. This form of ion transport is involved in recharging the cardiac muscle after each heartbeat to maintain a regular rhythm. The KCNH2 protein is also produced in nerve cells and certain immune cells (microglia) in the central nervous system.
The KCNH2 gene is located on the long (q) arm of chromosome 7 between positions 35 and 36.
More precisely, the KCNH2 gene is located from base pair 150,272,981 to base pair 150,305,946 on chromosome 7."

My great-grandfather dropped dead at 33 years old in Bramwell, WV. The doctors said it was a heart attack. But now these Italian doctors hypothesize that maybe it was caused by the above gene mutation. Hypothesis: the mutation was inherited, but during the course of its inheritance, the genome perhaps compensated, and though the mutation remains, something else now makes the protein necessary to the potassium channels.