Barkinglips:

Memorium to Brown Dogs

2011-10-24T14:56:00.000-07:00

Everywhere
Brown dogs
Mix. Mix, match
Brown to brown --
Hair and hair, generations of bones and dust,
All the dogs in the world
Mix, match, mix
Until they are all brown.

What love they bring.
And what love we have for them.
Rejoice for every happy dog,
Smile.
Mourn for every unloved dog,
Cry.
And please, God, bless their souls.

All those dogs, brown,
Black, white, tan, gray, blonde, red,
Speckled, dappled, brindled, spotted
Dressed up with white chins and feet,
Shoulders strewn with ruffs of black,
Withers stroked with fingers of platinum,
Tails fringed and tipped in white,
Eyebrows fooling with spots of brown;
Eyes of gray, blue, brown, amber, gold, and black,
fogged cataract eyes,
car-struck sockets sewn shut over beauty.
Flesh, blood, bone and sinew, nerve and instinct.
Match, mix. Mix our
Memories of our brown dogs.
God bless their souls.

Auburn Blood

2011-08-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

I keep sleeping on my blood-stained pillowcase. Even the pillow inside I have not tossed away – even that I have kept because the blood is from the worst injury I have had in years (knock on something), and it was to my head. I have slept on the historical pillowcase for 47 nights.
Just before I turn the light off I look again at the stains and smears, drops, and suggestive smudges on the pale green pillowcase. Secretly, I am glad that the pillowcase my head rested on that first night is pale green.
I looked this morning at the pillowcase. The place on my head still hurts a little and there is a bump, but the last bit of blood leaked out over three weeks ago from where the scab had clung, even as tiny hairs tried to grow through it.
This morning it is time again to dye my hair. It was due about the time I fell on the asphalt.
Miss Linda, I gotcha, I’m not gonna
leave, Miss Linda,” said a stranger named Sonny,
who held my hand until the ambulance came.
I could hear my friend behind me say to 911
"There is so much blood,
there’s blood all over.”
Sonny said, “Don’t worry, Miss Linda,
I ain’t goin’ nowhere, I gotcha.”
As the gurney rose into the air, I looked at the asphalt. There’s blood all over, so much blood.
My head was cauterized and glued after hair was cut off. Now it is healed and the glue has come out and the scabs have come off, and my hair was cut last week. I'll dye it redbrown -- one auburn or another – whatever is on sale.
With the color mixed I squirt it on my hair. At first it is deep purply red, like blood from your liver or some other dark innard which hides blood. It drips on my face, my neck, one drip rolls down my chest and stops at a nipple. With plastic gloves, I hold a hand mirror, and see a niagara of purply red pouring down my neck.
I wipe that off, and even as I do the color begins to turn auburn. Auburn more and more like blood.
Now I am redheaded again, and I will be more careful. Tonight I will sleep once more on the bloodstained pillowcase; a little dye might rub off.

Dog Days of Wisdom

2011-08-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

The dog days of wisdom speak with barking voices
and small growls of jealous appetite.
They lick my mother-hand -- or bite;
They whir like needledragonflies, hovering clouds
Over hot dogs restless in the moving shade,
Bothering those driven by heat to
worry at beggars' lice or imaginary fleas or
The broken stick from next door's tree --
Dropping it, pausing, and chewing the end again.
All will settle down when cooler days
point toward Autumn.

How To Pronounce a Word & Have It Increase Your Vocabulary by a Fewness

2010-10-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

Mr. James Fuchs, aka "The Magnificent Wreck" (because of putting shot, or shot putting, even when injured), died this month. The obituary writer for the NY Times wrote that "Mr. Fuchs (pronounced Fewsh) [was] the No. 1 shot-putter in the world in both the 1949 and 1950 seasons, during which he set four world records for the standard 16-pound shot, the last of which was 58 feet 10-3/4 inches.
"Pronounced Fewsh" -- like foosh? like the first syllable of fuchsia? And how many words are there that begin with few? Eight if you count various forms of the same word, but I won't.
FEWMETS - the feces of a hunted animal, by which the hunter identifies it. "I been lookin' fer my durn cat ever'whar, chasin' it from fewmet to fewmet, from hairball to hairball; cain't find it nowhar." (NOTE: a fewmet is like a scat, but you have to wonder why you would yell "Scat!" at a cat unless you wanted more fewmets.
FEWNESS - the quality of being small in number. Pl. fewnesses. "My feet are not fewnesses, nor are my thighs; my lashes are fewnesses, but not my big eyes."
FEWTER - (n) a support or holder for a spear, attached to a saddle or breastplate; (v) to set your spear into the fewter (see Fewtered, Fewtering). "Yerp, Sire*, I was riding along topspeed trying to fewter my spear in my fewter. Damnest thing it just fell off, and I been lookin' fer that durn fewter ever'whar but I cain't find it nowhar'. Sorry, Sire." (NOTE: * this is the origin of "yessiree, Bob" if yer Sire was named Bob. Sometimes it was "Yessiree, Nigel," or "Yessiree, Cholmondeley" (pronounced Chumley.) For my next lesson, I will investigate words that begin with Chol.
FEWTRILS -- trifles, things of little value, "There might be a fewtril or two in my handkerchief drawer."

I would like to suggest a fu (pronounced few) more words :
FEWmament (a small firmament),
FEWsomely (used with small praise),
FEWment (payment in pennies and nickels),
fulFEWment (an unsatisfactory return on investment),
FEWneral (an interment with hardly any mourners.

I Believe the Crows

2009-11-13T09:40:00.000-08:00

I sit here every afternoon to watch the sun go down and the moon come up, near to each other -- both low above the horizon.
I do not ask the obvious question: How could that be? The sun and the moon, so near connected? I do not say, That can't be, it's impossible! because I know an infinity of late afternoons where I have sat and watched this same scene -- as if it were a painting! -- and I believe the crows.
I believe the crows. Their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, on back in time before there were paintings, have seen the same thing I do now, and have eaten the seeds of wheat, and have talked about it all as they do now.
Look! Admire! Plenty! Caw! Caw!

This painting by Vincent Van Gogh was completed shortly before he committed suicide.

My Own Castle

2009-11-13T09:05:00.000-08:00

Although the sky is indigo, like the textiles from de Nimes, and although my horse is watered and well fed, I am not sure I want to pause here to stare at the darkened towers of that castle on the steep smooth mountain (made of stiff coagulated custard), nor do I want to hallooo to its loneliness. I dare not stop to gaze and wonder:
Why is there a black cloud over that castle, with its many empty windows
and crenelations like filed teeth?
I dare not take the time to look back at my own castle -- to admire the way it smiles at me in its good humor and waves its flag.
Why does my own castle have a light and down-soft cloud above it? Are there two gods of the air blowing? One, his foul black breath, so thick it sinks rather than floats, and the other, laughing as she blows, so her sweet airy breath rises like the good smell of baking bread.
Are there two gods?
I dare not slow down again because now I see the wooden fences that try to keep the dark castle-men safe from land or sea invasion, and I see they have but five warriors left. And are they warriors? or are they widows, left behind?
No-one waits to hear me, but what I have to say is "I am your neighbor. I'm just passing by."

Lined with Black Lace

2009-10-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

SWEATER•Black cashmere lined with lace, w/blk snap-on mink collar, or embroidery strip. Size S $125.
1. Okay, which is it? the snap-on mink collar or the embroidery strip? that's all I want to know right now. Let's see; the mink = animal screaming in pain as it is skinned alive. I know I'd rather have the embroidery strip.
2. But what is embroidered on the strip? I hope it's naked men, frontal and backall. I like both.
3. Is the lace scratchy? Am I going to be sitting at the concert scratching in time to Chris Mann's Scratch Scratch - A History of Grammar ? Or will I be distracted (almost an anagram of scratched) while I'm learning to scratch??
4. Sometimes it's illuminating to read want ads. What do they want? What do I want? Where would I put it? How many new musical techniques do I want to know about? What is it about hip hop?
5. Rabbits. I dreamed about a rabbit last night. I was helping a man who couldn't walk because his legs were too limp, and he really wanted to go somewhere down the highway, and I got him a rabbit also. I'm a very helpful person.
6. Whaddyuh think? Am I really a BLACK Cashmere sweater type? Do they ever make cashmere out of denim? rayon? kudzu?

Her Life List

2009-10-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

She was nearing the end of her Life List. She'd only started it a few months before, when she realized that many of the things she'd always wanted to do she had already done. (One thing -- "learn English grammar more perfectly" -- she realized that she would never do. For example, she probably should have written the second sentence [see above] "... she realized that many of the things she'd always wanted to do she had done already" or maybe it was "... she realized that many of the things she'd always wanted to do she already had done". But all she could hear was her mother's querulous voice saying blah blah blah already blah blah. It was too late for all that, already.)
She had jumped on a trampoline; she had played a bass guitar; she had peed in the desert; she had had wild pigs brush against her as they ran through a forest; she had kissed a skeleton; she had climbed a sycamore tree 30 feet in the air and gotten back down by herself. With her cat. She had gone up in the basket of a cherry picker and surveyed her own street this way and that and peeked over the cornice of her own house, without ever looking directly at the ground or her own feet. She had jumped in quarry water that was too deep for her and thrashed back to shore, alive.
She had pasted on a mustache, worn men's shoes and jacket, and passed for a man at a bar. (Someone, she thought maybe it was another man, had flirted with her.)
She had written letters to the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker, and eventually one of her letters had appeared in each.
She had crossed "Jump out of an airplane" off her Life List, realizing that that was more honestly what she wanted. She had stood at the foot of a ladder, at the top of which a Mexican man leaned against a fourth floor windowsill while he painted the minions and pinions, or was that mullions and millions, or pillions, or muntans? Ah yes, muntins! She had stood there, looking up, and seeing the curvature of the ladder, so tall it was mimicking the curvature of the earth she thought, and had decided against adding that to her life list.
She had written a novel and she had it. Printed out. Somewhere.
She had fallen in love once more, driven a tractor, picked up a spider and let it jump off her hand onto her shirt before it climbed into her hair.
She had bid on, and won, the opportunity to walk slowly into a (large) cage with a (very old) tiger and stay for five minutes. $510 went to the Zoo. For free she had held a baby orangutan. (That had been near the top of her Life List. Oh, the sheer physical joy of that, the trust in those round beautiful brown eyes, the tickle of those darling fingers!)
She had posed nude for a drawing class at the senior center, and afterward had chased a mugger and hit him with her umbrella. (If she hadn't had an umbrella, she would have hit him with her fist, but thank god she had an umbrella.) And not only that, she had stood on him until the police came.
She had slept one night -- a sort of fund-raising pajama party -- at a homeless shelter; and been locked up one night in jail, for refusing to disperse with the rest of a crowd.
She had called up the man who had broken her heart 40 years before and said, calmly, "I never liked you either." There!
And now she faced the last two items. The last one was simply, "Die." The second to last was "Drive 120 miles per hour without endangering anyone else. Fly perhaps?" The time had come. She had kept her mother's old Ford Galaxy in a garage, taking it out every week for 30 years to blow out the ... well, now she couldn't remember what she was blowing out; something to do with tubes or pipes. Sort of like a colon cleanse for cars. This was a car from 1971, and it was long and lean and still a shiny dark green. It would look like a flying leaf, a glistening magnolia leaf, as it sped along, with her at the wheel, dressed in a cream-colored magnolia-petal satin dress with a nice hat on her head.
She went to sleep that night, the night before she planned to fly the Ford. She dreamed that she drove to the grocery store, and saw her neighbor there picking out another dog. She went inside, and it was an antique show, and another friend bought a green enameled brooch in the shape of the pi symbol: (π). Then a truck came up behind her and the driver complained that there were puppies running under her car, and so she threw a piece of paper out the cracked window. She could see tire tracks in the muddy hill next to her. The grass was ruined, ground into the ground. And then she pressed her foot to the metal, or was that pedal to the metal?, and in other words she floored the Ford, and took off at what surely was 120 mph.
Her mother might have liked this! It was a glorious sensation. The Ford Galaxy flew straight off the top of a high building, passing through cumulus clouds and cirrus clouds (accumulations and seriousness) and slowly it began to descend.
She could still steer! It was amazing! She wasn't frightened! Slowly the Ford descended toward a narrow one-way street downtown. She could see that there were cars moving along the street, and she could see the gaps between cars in the left lane and cars in the right lane, and places where cars were parked. She guided the Ford down, and it landed with a slight bump right between two cars, and she kept on driving, and then she woke up. At least she thought she woke up. Now she wasn't at all sure.

Rib Cage

2009-08-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

Every time I drove to my friend’s house I saw the dead deer in the road.
First she lay as a shapely but stricken form, her orangey fur stretched over high ribs, her small black hooves lying like tossed dice on the asphalt, her head resting on pebbles and the chuff of roadways.
Each time I drove there, with my own tender feelings toward my friend herded, gathered for protection inside my ribcage, where they must stay invisible as if dead, I saw the deer – crumpling day by day, car by car, driver by oblivious driver, into the roadway, crushed so that even bloat couldn’t raise her up again.

She is almost disintegrated now.

Dust to dust? Sinews and muscles to ground meat; bones to chalky splinters, hooves to powdered keratin, doe eyes to pulp, mites to motes, and finally, after enough hot days' pulverizing, dust to dust.

PSI (Pronounced Sigh)

2009-07-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

This sandy beach is one of many along the course of the river winding through the park. The beaches travel like vacationers in search of perfect refuge, and change size with every storm clot of debris.
This month her favorite beach goes halfway across the river. Water washes out the banks and the shallow rush takes small stones, sand, sunken leaves on watersogged caravans along the bottom.
She always brings her dogs. They pull sticks from the muck. They chase each other; climbing the bank on one side, then leaping back in to swim.
She walks bent over, looking down. She feels the blood rush in her head. She gleans broken glass and crushed cans from sand and water. She has a knack, perhaps a talent, for seeing the particular shade of brown glass from the shoulder of a beer bottle, or for spotting a fragment of a plate amongst the small rocks. She puts fancy bits of china, glass with parts of embossed words, a china doll arm, a bullet, in her pocket.
It is quiet; she mutters “Goddam people, broken glass, so much... .” She feels terrible today. Everything breaks.

When you have a broken bumper on your pickup truck, first you notice that pedestrians look scoldingly at you. Something is your fault. Then, when a Schumann piano etude on the radio comes to an end, you hear metal scraping on pavement. It is yours. You stop.
A large piece of rusted iron has fallen from the grasp of the chrome bumper. It has been dragging on the street.

She wrenches it off, and when she drives away the truck seems lighter, quieter. She has left the piece of iron alongside the road, giving it to a fiefdom of castoff bolts and bottlecaps, shreds of tires, tangled bungies, and bits of forlorn glass.

Today she has driven the truck to the park. As she wades in the river she finds a sparkplug, a tire that is being buried by mud, as if some troll under the river is pulling it to his part of the world.

When you have a broken heart in your chest, especially if you are old, you first notice that this may be, probably will be, the last broken heart of your life. You don’t hear noises, you hear hearts beating and sobs. You hear breaking glass, and the clatter of washed plates that will never again hold meals for two. You aren’t quieter, lighter; you are heavy.
She lets her tears pour as she bends to pick up trash. She observes herself from the shore. She wants to look broken. She wants to look strong. She wants to look lonely. She wants him to be looking.

She realizes that she hasn’t heard the dogs in a while – the while she has been cursing herself and the “goddam people” who let broken glass fall into rivers to be mistaken by minnows for food, so it rips their guts. She feels terrible today. Everything is broken.
She straightens to whistle for the dogs. They do not come. She is one of the goddam irresponsible people. She hears a train whistle, a high-pitched bark, an owl. Have the dogs been crushed to bits of bone and fur by the train? Will she leave the park alone, carrying a bag of smashed cans, plastic string, and a pocketful of wordparts: “oun...” “mad...” “refill...” “..ola” “...psi”? She cries some more. Then, without a sound louder than the river itself, the dogs return and wait for her to take them home.

Two on the Highway

2009-06-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I was coming north on 95, and then 395. On a curve, while going 50 miles an hour, I saw something I'll never forget, and I'll never forgive myself for not doing something. There was a mallard duck, a female, crouched near the concrete wall on the left. I'm sure she was injured or stunned and unable to fly away. I was afraid to stop, but I don't forgive myself for giving in to fear. If I always did that, would I ever do anything I should?
A week later, driving again on 395, I made myself look for the duck's body, but I couldn't see it. No brown lump, no smashed bill and water-splashing feet, no downy breast pressed to the asphalt, no small bright eyes which I swear looked at me as I drove by the first time. Perhaps, I sometimes say to myself, perhaps she recovered when it got later, and the traffic subsided. But how realistic is that?
Yesterday I was driving south on 83, and I saw a straw snap-brim fedora, waiting by the concrete wall. It was settled there, on the debris which accumulates on the edges of highways, and immediately I thought of the duck. Blown off course, both of them, and I did imagine the man's head, bare and over-sunned without the hat. And again, I imagined the mallard's ducklings, waiting for her to fly back.

The Analemma of Living

2009-05-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

I hesitate. What is the truth?
Every day, I blaze a new starseen, sunshadowed path on earth -- a journey without Presbyterian plan that
scribbles a figure eight.
An analemma of my wandering might
resemble that of the sun's,
which written (though not etched) in the sky every hour
will describe infinity.
It's noon by watch and town clock,
but the sun won't say that:
It's . . . earlier . . . or later.
The sun stays where it is, scorched and burning. It is we who move --
We heretics who do not have to burn, at least not for truth about the earth and the sun.

This analemmic path -- caused by the earth's tilted axis and her elliptical orbit around the sun -- makes me think I should try harder
to be where I ought,
to act as I should,
to weave truth into truth, love into love,
and simpleness with complexity.

You might say this is my own Equation of Time.

Magnetism of Water

2009-05-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

When I saw Spaulding Gray in NY, Jackie Onassis and her date were sitting two rows ahead. It was somewhat unnerving to be watching Gray, but seeing Onassis at the same time...he was so intense, and she was so famous. Because of where she sat, I saw that her hair was like a helmet in the back, a steep pyramid that forbade assault on the summit.
Meanwhile, everything Spaulding Gray said opened him to us. He had no protection except his desk.
I felt awful when he died by jumping off the ferry. Many times I'd ridden that ferry too, up in the front where the water is pushed away by the ferry so forcefully and noisily that it looks like pale green whipped cream. [Just add eggs and beat slowly.]
I think how easy it would be to just jump in. How hard it would be not to.
That's water for you. Swimming to Cambodia? or to Staten Island? or back home?

Soffits and Gables

2009-05-03T20:40:00.000-07:00

What underlies the truth we see?
Soffited eaves and gable overhangs.
In bed, before I go to sleep, I look around for
the tools to scrape the rot and
rout the nesting carpenter bees.

Soffited eaves and gable overhangs--
so long before constructed to protect
the soft underbelly of my being.
But why should I keep protecting what
has changed a thousand times or more, since first I built the gable that is my roof
and my decoration?

So, soffitted eaves and gable overhangs,
are you ready for reconstruction and repair?
Shall I paint you with lipstick and shadows?
Shall I bare you to the air and look for sunshine?
I don't need to call a handyman
to fix my soffits and
paint my eaves and gables,
I will do it myself because,
after all this time, I may be able.

Stars on Soul

2009-04-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

His trews were strewn with gold A+ GOOD JOB stars and sprinkled on the firmament floor while he danced. She danced too, with abandon and perspiration, and glued a star on her sole. They walked four blocks, and her star did not stop lighting her hobble, and she found it when she unglittered herself for bed.

Sundial in Leakin - Time in a Place

2009-04-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Time turns on itself, a moebius highway twisting into new territory, no brakes work here.
You might as well walk out of the desert blindfolded, as with your eyes open, because given a big enough desert you will walk in circles.
One compass struts its stiff veteran's legs across maps and charts, measuring distances.
Another compass wavers, then points with his blued sword to magnetic north. But maybe it isn't the same as True North; maybe it's a compass tired of its journey?
The old North Poles are buried under glazed seeps of arctic ice. Graves of trolls are there too, in the ancient cemetery.
The next magnetic north wanders like a warrier looking for his lost spear, looking for his new encampment. His descendants wait under the ice.

The "Time & Place" sundial sculpture (August 2008-May 2009) above, with Nature's fallen tree behind it, is by artist/activist Douglas Retzler (seated). I took it April 5, 2009. Go to sundial, then click on photowerks, then choose a set of sundial pictures.

On the Verge of Falls

2009-01-18T12:36:00.000-08:00

Each step is the first.
My father taught me how to walk for miles looking at the ground and sametime at birds overhead, faint sickle moon, cat on a porchswing, cumulus, insectegg, cirrus, silver brooch. So in walking down Falls, I see it all except what is around the next bend in the road, what is under the bramblethicket, who is behind the steelclang door. But I can hear the tunes stuffed in oil barrels. I can hear whispers. A person could spend a whole life . . . lookwalking.
Anywhere.
I lay one foot, then the other, on the verge of Falls Road. See there? Bugsquash; struggling leavesofgrass; dandelion whiskers; a rosehip blown from a gaygarden a block away; antifreeze puddle in a greenmelted gemmy dribble; splats of crow lime; a rats’ hide softened with forty-weight motoroil; a pigeon skin with pink legs stuck out like fancy chopsticks (I cross myself); a cobbler’s nail freed from a millworker’s boot in eighteen ninety-seven, ninety-eight.
Ninety-nine, 100, 101, 102 … a thousand and one
Sparklemica flecks; crusted lockwasher; twisted padlock key; the wincing collarbone from a med-student’s skeleton; the corner of a 50% cotton Confederate flag, sagged and suspicious up there on a high stone porch; a cicada shell hatched lonesome midway in the seventeen-year cycle; coal dust whupped up from a rehabbed cellar; a pinky-gray formstone chip; bentspoke of a bikewheel; three reflectors from pedalbacks (wanna bet how many there are on the verge of Falls?). Bottlecaps – crush-rusty boutonniéres from drunken bachelors bound to be groomed by brides?
Each step is a different step.
Scrapes of turd and flights of beetlewing. A bite of button with silkthread -- botticelli blue. A young girl’s tearstained friendship bracelet, fallen off near a hard-dirt shortcut home. Bits of broken glass: beer brown, Bromo blue, sunned lavender with greenlips of Coke bottles. Spangles of colored glass – yellow, red, blue and black – from a kaleidoscope that helped the curious child with A.D.H.D to get through a day…or was it for his rope-end mother? Dangle of red dog leash – a frayed handgrip and nothing more. What dog was it was killed? And, Daddy, is that her blood?
Every step was a lifetime.
Extruded from its mangled tube, dark oily lipstick smeared like rawliver onto stones. So, just whose kisses were promised and stolen? Is that a broken heart I hear? No, it’s just an orphan earring -- a piece of cheap redplastic; nothing more. Did that blue and white china shard come from the plate that held Grampa En’s last meatball dinner? And is that the nevertarnish lid of a nickel-silver rouge compact, like the one pale Gran carried everywhere for blushing youngcheeks, back in the day?
Walk with me?
That’s a flyer for the VFW dance in Timonium: Valentine’s Day, with a polkaband and a hot buffet – tendollars, tenderly, ten years ago, gone for good and godbless. A shiny blackpearl of glassy slag -- spit from a cokefired train – rolled for 80 years, mile by mile down Falls from the North Central track. And (for just a second) a shadowblink of light through a shutter up the hill – signaling secrets like a boyscout’s mirror.
What was lost?
Who fell?
Who wept?
***
What was the reward?
Who won?
Who laughed?
That yellowbrass key – see there how the hole wore out so it fell off the keyring? So who was it couldn’t get in their house? Whose phonecall was missed? Left brown kid glove, wrinklefingers frozen in a curl – grasping what?
Is each step the last?
Is that twig from a branch from a limb from a tree with a sparrow’s nest? That jaywhoppered woredown rubberheel mightacomeoff of Stanley’s workboot – the one it took him a year to break in and now it’s broke off. Damn! And a bluestripe denimhide workglove, pimpled with drywall cement, flattened in mid-handshake. Stanley’s glove? Or his friend’s … that guy, LeShawn’s?
Wetsoaked dried soakedsoddenwad driedagain grey foldedfelt of newspaper – the letters strained into each other, stories mingled updown goodbad easydangerous shockingheartyfine with a chance of… What news is too old? What notice has not been noticed? Found your watch. Describe. -- Found your dog, green collar, describe dog. Lost. Sentimentalvalueonly brown kid glove, given me by my mother, my lover, my doctor. Still got the right one. But please, I’m on the verge of a, of a... A sooty brokedown mufflerpipe with coathanger twisted around it and a peeling of plastic chrome snagged from the bumper where it hung. Who roared into hell?
What was lost? A thought.
What was found? A line.
Each step is the first step..
Every step is a lifetime.
*****

January 2008 for friends Christine Sajecki & Joe Young and their show Deep Falls at Antreasian Gallery

Grace and the Kitchen God

2009-01-17T12:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my friend Grace Young (Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, Breath of the Wok) spoke on public radio about the Kitchen God who lives behind the stove in every Chinese American and Chinese kitchen. The night before Chinese New Year, on toward midnight, you start eating things like stir-fried lettuce, so that you eat right into the New Year. Meanwhile, my own Kitchen God is sitting back there, his legs up over the gas line, picking lint off his robe, counting dust bunnies, humming to himself, and waiting for the banquet which the thoughtful household leaves for him. He knows every bad thing you've done for a year, and he's ready to tell whomever will listen.
In my house, right now, behind my stove, he's cussing me out because there's a leak in a pipe right above the stove, and lots of cold water has dripped down, and the puddle I didn't catch in time has made his robe sopping wet, and ruined his little stash of stir fry and dried shrimp that he keeps for emergencies. In my house, the Kitchen God wears a thick green terrycloth robe with big pockets, and has his own vacuum cleaner because I am not a very good housekeeper. Last year a small rat visited him back there, and he was not smiling. (Although I think they shared a lamb and rice kibble from the dog bowl, and possibly that lima bean I lost back in March of '08.)
This year, I plan on leaving him really nice snacks and a small glass of beer for a week or so because maybe if he feels full he won't tell the others -- the Garage God, the Bedroom God, the Closet God, the Backyard God, etc. I just couldn't handle it if everything started falling apart.
To see more on Grace and her KG: WokitchenWisdom

Hey! It's a Free Sky!

2008-10-02T13:54:00.000-07:00

I stepped out the back door of the Rotunda and saw a glorious sky with clouds playing soccer and the sun playing hide 'n' seek. I pulled out my small camera and pointed it at the sky. One click later, and a security guard told me to put the camera away, photography is not allowed on the property. "I'm taking pictures of the sky! The sky's not on the property." "I'm telling you, stop taking pictures. I don't care where you go, but you can't take pictures here." In defiance, I turned on the movie mode, held the camera to my chest and slowly strolled to my truck, tilting the lens up and around. Then I sat in the car for 5 minutes photographing the sky, as reflected in the dark windows of the SUV next to me.
I should have said, "OK, I'll sit here and draw the sky." I wonder if that could be considered a first amendment right?

Barkinglips.com: "This domain is under construction."

2008-09-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

My lips twitched, pursed, twisted. I licked them. Then I looked up my domain name (for which there is no website yet):
http://www.barkinglips.com/ and I found what looks like a website for my "parked page" -- set up by directNIC! They provided the giant lips, and hyperlinks to many search pages for Lip, Chapped Lips, Hot Lips, Lip Injections, Face, Lasting, Plumping, Emu Oil, Augmentation, My Lips, Full Lips, Pink Lips, Big Lips, Bigger Lips, Wet Lips, Dry Lips but, alas nothing about dog lips or barking dogs, or wisdom from the mouths of dogs!!! I've just requested permission to put my own picture (of a dog) on the page, so this may be gone soon, but omigod! it's better than anything the dadaists could have dreamed of! "Lasting Lips" has some particularly cool conceptual links.
I believe it might be worth it to just buy a dot com address for $15 a year just to be able to enjoy a directNIC parked page for the nonce.

The Old Appliance Club

2008-09-07T11:38:00.000-07:00

Did she know when to quit? She called her stove a piano; she put frozen peas in the biscuit jar; she felt as frazzled as widow's net caught in an eggbeater. She looked up her name with Google, and omigod, there she was, the perfect definition of her unsaved self: The Old Appliance! And now there was a club about her! The club flew about her, whacking her ears, rounding off her shoulders, until she was just an old appliance, too wide for the back door, too warm for ice cream, too noisy for the keen of hearing.

MAPS & BIRDS: Getting Home

2008-08-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

Like a throbbing bead waiting in a velvet box, or a tumor crowding honest flesh out of the way, or a perfect speckled egg in a tight moss nest, the magnet readied itself in her brain, just exactly where – through bone and forehead wrinkles – her third eye would be.
She knew already that she had the third eye, because something as slight as a stray hair from her bangs, pointed for a nanosecond at that part of her forehead, brought an intense feeling of centering. With her eyes closed, in the dark, someone could experimentally point a pencil closer and closer to that third eye spot, never touching the fine hairs, and she would know that it was there.
She amused herself sometimes, lying in bed – what else was there to do? – by bringing her forefinger slowly toward her forehead until she could feel the prickle, the feeling that the reptile in her head had woken up. Ah! there it was. This time, would the snake strike at her finger? Could she, that way, travel back 40,000 years to sing in a cave?

On Not To See a Bird. The noodles boil to paste, blacken, catch fire. She comes home and throws the pot into the snow, a hissing startled crow. Upstairs, she finds him asleep, eyes clenched to the plumes of acrid smoke. She slides beside him, has dreams—acres of corn-stalk, winter rag—pinioned by the wing of his arm.

Oh, no, she was on to something. She’d spent seven decades trying to find the direction, the point on the map where she should fly.
Like a bird with a magnet in its brain, like a homing pigeon, she had burst from her cage on a roof and flown in circles for years.
Home kept changing; where was home?
Is a roost always in the same place? Why did a male chicken get to be the roost-er? Why not the hen? Would she have to become a rooster, in order to find her real home, the home inside her brain?
Could she excite the reptilian magnet, the heavy like-a-ball-of-mercury orb of her third eye, so that it would point to due happiness?

Cartogram. The green cut to tan—textures of a grocery bag—the rivers bluer, counties wider. They opened out, out there, thoughts losing the yellow gridwork of cities, marked with the spare periods of desert towns. You are here? she wrote, across the legend, waiting 5, 10, 100 miles for an answer.

Again she thought about all she had learned about birds during her life. Forget the stuff that didn’t pertain, that didn’t really interest her. Here were the things that she found compelling:
1. The blue feathers of a bird, be it blue jay or kingfisher, get their color from the sky. No bird is really blue. Blue is the presence of scattered light and what? imagination? desire?
2. Pigeons, albatrosses, and hummingbirds have a small magnetic center in their brains which helps them keep track of magnetic north and its opposite, south, and its outstretched wings -- east and west. It is possible, speculated one scientist, that humans have this magnet too.
3. Chickadees can live 12 or more years. Each year, the part of their brain that records where they stored seeds and berries, in little pocks and crevices, dies and regrows, empty of information. How could a chickadee, without accounting practices or Microsoft, keep track of seeds buried in 2006 and since eaten or hidden in 2008 and still there to be eaten?
4. A crow can be quite shy, and will wait in a tree, politely, for the sparrow to leave the feeder. But rare is the sparrow who attends the feeder by himself.
5. If a bird flew overhead and shat its stream of liquid excrement on your head, this will be called good luck.
6. A tree full of turkey vultures is a tree streaked with white splatterings, gallons of it. It is also a noisy tree as they settle in at deep dusk – the sound of leathery wings beating like the wings of Da Vinci’s helicopter to lower their heavy bodies onto the roosting limbs. The slightest noise can make half of them fly up out of the tree, and it is like hearing a motorcycle gang strip off their leathers for a fight.
7. You can kill a baby bird by feeding it too many worms. Its belly will swell, and burst, and the baby will die a horrible death that you don’t know how to halt or hasten.
8. A trumpet vine thrilling with orange trumpets will not guarantee hummingbirds or angels.

What does this tell us about humans?

Whippoorwill. She stood in the wind at the edge of the lot, pigweed blooming and rattling cups. She angled her arms in semaphore, to spell out hello or love or cannot see. He let the afternoon open his face, red breath, wet tongue.

No, no, I may not be a bird, but I know where I’ll roost tonight, and I know over which trees the sun rises and beyond which highway the sun sets.
And that’s that.
---------------------------------------------------
This was a ‘blind’ collaboration between Linda Franklin and Joseph Young. We settled on two thematic words—birds, maps—and we wrote our pieces, understanding that Linda would read her title and first paragraph [roman typeface], be interrupted by Joe [italic] from the back of the room, then alternate between them until Joe was standing next to Linda at the podium. It was read at the 8/16/08 fiction 510readings at Minas Gallery, Baltimore, and worked better than either of us could have imagined. For more by Joseph Young, go to www.verysmalldogs.blogspot.com
For more on Minas and the 5ive Ten readings click on links in "site seeing" to the right of the page.

Acknowledgment that the Bug Exists.

2008-08-11T11:54:00.000-07:00

I was walking and a bug landed near my elbow. I couldn’t ... I was walking and a bug landed near my elbow. to read the rest of this, go to my new blog that is solely for these Google-search generated writings.
To read the rest go to www.gobbledeGoogle.blogspot.com

"She Called It Freddy" News Stories the Way I Like 'em

2008-07-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

Police said they found the remains ... stuffed in a jar earlier this week. Police said a worker at a pump station found the jar buried Monday. To read the rest go to www.gobbledeGoogle.blogspot.com

President McKinley Clutched His Chest

2008-07-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

When the retiree got up to bowl in the fifth frame of his second game, he clutched his chest ... McKinley looked confused and rose up on his toes, clutched his chest. Took one look at the monitor, let out a terrible scream, clutched her chest and fell dead upon the floor. To read the rest of this appropriated-phrase story, please go to www.gobbledeGoogle.blogspot.com

Googling “clutched his chest” news garnered 709 hits in 0.12 seconds. Googling “clutched her chest” news garnered 4,090 hits in 0.14 seconds Googling “grabbed her chest” news garnered 11,800 hits in 0.46 seconds Googling “grabbed his chest” news garnered 16,900 hits in 0.34 seconds

Old Men and The Frail Operculum of Snails

2008-07-09T21:10:00.000-07:00

Even in my youngest, ripest years, from twenty-four
to twenty-eight,
Young men did not, as the poet Yeats suggests,
“suddenly catch their breath”
When I was passing.

Even then, it was
Old men – old to me – men ten, twenty,
fifty years beyond me on the Path
Who smiled and wanted to stroke my arm where
fine golden hairs grew and looked like a
crop of wheat ready to be mowed,
It was old men who liked to put their arms
around my waist, and pretend to
Nuzzle in my ear,
Who invited me to dinner, so that
I could sit across from them and
Smile for French snails and wine.

Once, a fat old man who was my boss,
Invited me to dine, and I dressed carefully,
knowing what would come after,
But not knowing that I would have to suck
Cooked snails from their hidey holes in shells.

If I had not been young, perhaps I would have
Sucked a snail into my esophagus and
Died, asphyxiated on a harmless morsel that
Crawled once along its trail of lubricating slime,
And I'd never have ended up under the fat boss
Rolling around in his bed,
closeup seeing the sweat
pouring from his forehead, his ugly nose,
Seeing the hairs in his nostrils, seeing his
rubbery penis stalk my garden.

Now I attract only the oldest of old men;
now I am
Perhaps in sight of heaven itself--
and I have hidden the
Desire to have my body loved or caressed;
Except,
I do still like to have my shoulder touched,
my arm stroked.
I have never eaten another snail, but
love to see the glister of their garden trails,
leading
Without specific aim, but generally toward
Safe damp rocks and tender shoots.

New Drug May Save Aged Bra

2008-07-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

Double click on the drawing and it'll be big 'n' boo'ful, and you'll be able to read the fine print. But, in case you still can't read the fine print, the news article reads:

Baltimore.--(A&P)
Special to the Sun
Tests of a new wonder drug, ichtyoelastinpu, seem to indicate that it works to restore all aged bras, and elderly underpants too. So far, garterbelts have failed to respond in a statistically significant way. Socks which underwent the same rigorous testing were found to suffer accelerated aging. Dr. L. Oldedrawer, 57, of Baltimore, says that the next item entering test trials are jockstraps.
Ichtyoelastinpu, which is made of a derivative of Queen Anne's Lace roots (daucus carrotus) seems to work by restoring the DNA of the decaying elastic strands to their youthful vigor.
This will be good news for all who are on a limited budget. The drug is going to be offered for sale to the public, under-the-counter, with the brand name UNDUE, as soon as October of this year.

UPDATE!! Furious industry leaders, including the CEOs of Matronform and Victoria's Gossip, claim that the government has not done enough testing of UNDUE, and that it is likely to wear off on the chests and underarms (and other parts) of wearers of treated unmentionables, and cause them to regress and become youngsters. Dr. L. Oldedrawer commented that surely Matronform, Victoria's Gossip, and others would appreciate a whole new, free, generation of "youngbodies" who will require training bras, etc., all over again. No-one from Elastopocket, which is the world leader in jockstrap manufacturing, would comment on the threat of "youngbodying."

Hands Cut Off Found Floating on Ocean

2008-06-20T10:27:00.001-07:00

I read the headline of Googlenews:
Another hand, cut off, found in the ocean...
I was interested in something else that day,
and didn't read it carefully.
But the image stayed with me: a flotilla of
hands like the deadly bloom of
talented algae that glows red and
kills everything it covers.
Hands that could no longer play piano;
Hands that could no longer caress a lover's cheek;
Hands that could not press the keyboard's magic
letters to Google news and write blogs.

Who would keep cutting off hands?
I googled "hands cut off" float news but
already it was too late to catch that
sickening image. News doesn't last.
But I learned --
if that's the right word, learned --
That there is a band called Cut Off Hands,
and they must be popular and
Bands can be called anything at all, and are,
Much to our dismay. The Dog Liver Bleedouts;
The Flea Infested Ivy Boys;
The Carpal Tunnel Rats;
The Crazed Carcinogens.
You wait! They'll be bands sooner or later.

So Little Do I Know of Plants

2008-06-20T10:15:00.001-07:00

So little do I know of plants – but that
Peonies crawl with ants
making excursions across the tight buds to
Pantry? Dinner? Perfume counter?
And ferns, though trampled on and crushed
to the corm,
brown and rotted,
always come back the next year.
Chicory seems impossible, even with abuse
copying that of car tires, exhaust fumes,
gravel, dirt with no thing living
in it but germs. It just won’t grow.
Trumpet vines can overpower even wild honeysuckle,
and grow on the woodlike twisted stems.
Acorns that fall on the ground in large numbers are
treacherous to walk on --
like walking on marbles.
Some leaves stay green on one half and
yellow or red on the
other half before they fall off.
A weed can be tugged out easier if
you give it a fast quick little pull,
then wait for a few seconds – as if to fool it –
before yanking it out whole.
This almost always works!
Sycamore bark falls off
not every year, but in great batches, like
scabs being flung off new skin, every few years.
A leaf can become so waterlogged on the
creek’s surface that it will sink,
and blink yellow or green at you
from under water.

Who Are We?

2008-05-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Who are we but everything else?
Nothing's new no matter when.
What is else but us somewhere?
We've been everywhere a while.
What are footprints in the dirt?
Mud reshapes itself forever.
Why is dust to be despised?
Life lives in dust, regenerate.
Are our photos life made dead?
Are our dreams another life?

Pack It In the Sweet Case

2008-03-07T09:49:00.000-08:00

“She’s ninety-two; I think she’s ready to pack it in,” he said.
I murmured, “Ohhh, ohhh, mmmm, I’m sorry.”
Of course,
I thought of me.

I sure am not ready to pack it in.
(Of course, I’m not ninety-two, either.)
There is still too much to pack—
I could fold for the next ten years;
I could sort for twenty;
I could discard for forty after that.
Or, if I discarded all at once,
There would be nothing left to pack, so
I would have to start over.

So I am not ready to pack it in.
Into what?
A coffin?
A grave?
A crematory?
An urn?
A jar?
The skull of others? living on in flashing
synapses to fade finally into
dust?

I cannot count on tales
Told by descendents (or cabbages and kings)
around holiday tables.
I have no offspring.

I cannot count on the lasting fondness of
Young friends, because they will soon
Start their own chain of descendents,
Hung from their genitals like jewelry unpawned.
Redeemed.

I cannot count on librarians to recommend my books so that
Readers can absorb me, suck me up from a blurb.

So, no, I am not ready to pack it in.

The Master of Artemia Salina

2008-02-22T14:31:00.000-08:00

Useless, endless swarms and squirms of activity (or “comical tricks and stunts”) – were ordered by Horace Makely in 1970 from a comic book ad. Horace was a boy in private school, and as everyone else was engaged in useless, endless swarms and squirms of activity, he thought “Sea-Monkeys” that he could train to do tricks, that -- with a magnifying glass -- you could watch mating!, could make him popular.
Horace had no friends. His roommate short-sheeted his bed, put cold spaghetti in his pajamas and shunned him in study hall. Horace ordered the shrimp – “Mom, Dad and their babies,” for a dollar postpaid.
What a disappointment! Horace couldn’t see anything that looked like a shrimp, let alone the naked sexually-active “Sea-Monkeys” in the ad.
Horace had stolen two milk glasses from the dining hall in his pockets, and he poured tap water and neutralizer into both and let them sit. The next day he added part of the package of dried dots to one glass. After classes he would rush back to the room to get the glass from his closet, peering through his magnifier at the tiny shrimplings. Finally a miracle happened and they hatched. The baby shrimp struggled, as if the water of Connecticut was so different from their spawning water that they had to learn a new way of swimming. They grew, but they didn’t do stunts and they didn’t mate. Horace had kept them a secret so far, hiding them in a shoebox under piles of laundry on his closet floor.
After a week, when a few of the tiny monkeys had floated to the top of the water, Horace added a pinch of Coca-Cola, thinking it might be the kind of shock to the system that would revive them. It didn’t. Horace poured everything out through some toilet paper, picking out the dead ones, quickly putting the few fragile squirmers in the second prepared glass, which he hid in the closet again, and left for history class. Several things may have happened next:
1) In a raid on the boys’ closets, looking for hard cider and stocks of 27% alcohol Listerine, a proctor found the smelly glass and poured it down the toilet.
2) Horace’s roommate found the glass and added a drop of Pepsi-Cola, and the shrimp grew fat enough to eat with lo mein.
3) They really were monkeys, and they scampered out and ran away.
4) Horace became popular and captained the lacrosse team.
5) The glass turned over, soaked into a pile of Horace’s dirty clothes, which he sent home (as usual) to be laundered. When the box arrived at his parents’ in Faxfield , the smell from the dead shrimp reminded the maid of the beach. She quit and went back to Honduras and married her old sweetheart. Horace was enrolled in public school, and captained the A/V team.
7) Horace grew up. In 2008 he googled “sea monkey” and got 209,000 hits. Nostalgic, he sent off to Transcience Corporation for another kit.

Cinderella Goes to the Ball without a Prince

2008-02-16T14:50:00.000-08:00

Black cokeslag pearls strung on squirrel sinew, tendrils, and evaporated trainsteam, my dress stained with pawprints of mud, blood; ruddy cheeks rouged by too-cold walks -- I wear them to a ball in the rotted-red hollow tree, with white fungus shelves for deepwoods wine. No prince. A handsome stag, without choreography, bounds away from my companion Robert Browning -- part beagle, part choirboy -- who barks in a highpitched tenor, while Copernicus blurrrtrots back to the car.

Radiant Shroud

2008-02-12T21:05:00.000-08:00

I sit in the backyard at a reticulated iron table, eating strawberries and watching ants. Occasionally in my peripheral view there is the lunge or glide of a venturing shadow--a cat, a dog.
I see my own humped shadow. It could be the shadow of a rock formation. A weathered mound with a bump (head), windbent scrub pines (unbrushed hair), steep slopes that will be difficult to climb (shoulders and arms), a tumbling rock (hand, dashing at a fly). Sun on my back, I am thinking so that I can write. I am the Sphinx. The ants are caravaners in the Gobi. Each grain of sand is tuned to sing. Each weed is an oasis.
Suddenly my shadow moves. It detaches itself from my feet and rotates into a position behind me -- between me and the sun. Oh, I am so weak, so transparent. With my last strength, I turn and see my shadow pulsing on the ground, breathing with relief. I am my own shadow. When the sun is out, I will be seen fat and round as a pumpkin, and I'll be long and thin as a pole as evening comes on. When the moon is full, I will spread across the ground like a blanket, sheltering the very ants I watch in the morning.
In a lighted room, I will be that chimera on the other side of the lamp -- the ghost companion who attends a reader in the evening, the one who stands patiently outside the pool of light, the one that disappears when the reader turns off her lamp to go to sleep.
I will now be beautiful at all times. Just as all cats are gray at night; just as all women are beautiful in the dark. My life as a rock trying to affect the world is over--now I can do anything as a speed-of-light shroud of my own past.
I will race clouds across the plains, pointing the way to hot buffalo. I will enthrall children who stare out of minivans at the altercar that keeps apace on signboards and jumps ditches, just by riding on top and waving. I will meld with the single shadows of glades, and deepen the shadows of each tree and vine and bird in the bush to create obscure shade.
It has happened the way I said. I sit in my backyard eating strawberries and watching ants. I win a race with a high cloud; I cool my aged cat. A roly-poly bug's bus-shaped shadow disappears within me, then comes out the other side with a banner -- a hair that's stuck to its back.
I go back to thinking.

Pianos Don't Play Themselves

2007-12-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

In 1943 or so, my parents bought a beautiful upright piano in Memphis. My mother played Chopin and rag, and I started taking piano lessons at the age of three, and six years later I refused to practice, so the piano sat silent. I painted a picture of it, with the bench waiting for someone to sit on it. Sometimes we used the bench to hold a tray of objects collected quickly from around the house so the family could play "Memory". Thirty seconds to look at all the objects, then the cloth went back over them, and you'd write down what you remembered.
  My parents sold that piano while I was away at college, and bought a Steinway baby grand at a house sale. They asked how much it was, and the man said $150. My father, standing a few steps behind my mother, saw that she had one finger pointed down from her hands clasped behind her -- she loved to signal with eyebrows, lips and fingers -- so he said "I'll give you a hundred," and the deal was done. The piano was moved into our living room, which was bigger than the old one, and now it was my brother who played the piano. There's a photograph of my brother and me sitting on the bench playing something together. Forever.
  In the 60s, my brother rented a piano from a small company in Manhattan. They delivered it, two skinny guys who knew how, and set it down in his living room, which looked out over the George Washington Bridge. You could look inside the piano and see where some of the strings had crinkles of tinfoil wrapped around them, then look outside and see crinkles of lights on the Bridge. My brother enjoyed playing the piano with the foil-wrapped strings, but he finally took them off. Turns out, the person who rented the piano before my brother was Bob Dylan, and he'd put that foil on to give the piano a funky trashy sound.
  My boyfriend Paul and I used to find things on the street and take them home. I found him a table saw once on 75th Street. In 1969, he found a piano, and I went to watch him and two friends carry a piano up two flights of Forest Park steep steps. Paul was small and wiry, Darwin was tall and thin, Chris was tall and hefty, and I stood at the bottom watching. They didn't know what they were doing so they laughed, and the old upright jiggled and tinkled, and finally they got it inside the apartment. Paul taught himself to play, and to repair and tune. I think there was some leftover soul in that piano and The Goldberg Variations sounded wonderful on it.
  In 1991, I bought a house in Baltimore built in 1871. In 1995 an antique dealer in Charlottesville showed me the 1870s square piano he'd bought at a field auction in Crumpton, MD. I bought it for $100-- if I'd take it away the next day. A few guys unscrewed the fat shapely piano legs, and slid the piano into my truck to rest on carpeted pads. The legs rode with me in the cab. When I drove up in front of my house, my neighbors Tom and Edward were having a get-together, and so Tom and Edward and Steve and Will and I carried the piano into my living room, and Will and I screwed the fat legs back on while the other three held the piano up, and there it stood against my living room wall. Home at last? In a cold rowhouse parlor?
  In 1995, my brother hired movers to take the Steinway my parents had bought in the 1950s in Toledo from their home in Charlottesville to his mountain house in North Carolina. The mover said it was automatically insured for $2000, but my brother paid extra to have it insured for $4000, and they hauled that baby down highway 29 to Hillsville to Mouth of Wilson to Creston and wound through the mountain roads and hauled it up the mile-long gravel drive, and carried it into his vaulted stone living room. The driver hit center C -- maybe that's something they always do -- and left. It sounds like a concert hall piano now.

Linda Finds Leaf, Joe Sees Parrotfish

2007-10-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

The parrotfishleaf is still alive. Green leaf has golden fins and swam down to the path. A sapsuck bug has cut an eye that will be seen by Joe. Through the veins sugary blood is slowing. With the first frost, the parrotfishleaf will bleed out and turn brown, be crushed by feet, turn to dust, sink in the shallows of black dirt and rain. Down below, undisturbed by the current, a worm will eat the parrotfishleaf dust and poop out its remains. The thready root of the parent tree will stretch another inch, so father will eat sonleaf, or mother will eat daughterleaf, and in the spring, more green minnowleaves will venture from the eggbud on the twig, and many months later, another parrotfish will swim on a breeze to earth.

Thank God It Was a Small Picture

2007-10-02T15:45:00.000-07:00

...and a blurred screen. When Katrina hit, and the pictures of bloated bodies were in the paper and on the news, I thought I saw my friend Mickey Lee, floating face down in the water with some boards and branches. The same tan jean jacket (or is it John who has one of those?), the same cowboy boots (or is that my brother?), the same gray ponytail (or is that Paul?) Ten days later Mickey Lee called, safe from Baton Rouge. I asked him about his ponytail and he laughed. "Don't have it anymore! When your ponytail begins to look like a tired squirrel, it's time to cut it off."

One Hymn or Another

2007-10-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

The same piano Hermione had refused to practice was still in the living room, but it was fifty years since she'd maddened her mother by sitting on the stool, twisting back and forth, screaming "No, I won't" over and over. Hermione lived with the petulant ghost of the Volga Boatman and the veils of Psalms pulled over her eyes by her father. Her mother's powder-dusted room (with pearly beads rolled under gaps in the baseboards) had been closed for thirty years. Her father's room (smelling of crystallized urine and his dry-rotted galoshes) had been shut for nearly twenty years, since the day her father walked down to the river, lay down in the water, and grappled with a fallen tree until it pinned him.
One thing Hermione loved was to drive--fast and alone. She'd kept her mother's last car--a 1971 mustard Ford Galaxy. Saturdays she drove the hell out of it-- to "blow out the valves."
The husband of one of her friends was stricken with his own clogged valves while he played billiards. He was going to make a bank shot to put three balls in three pockets, but after chalking his cue, plop! he fell across the table.
Could Hermione give a few ladies a ride to the funeral in the Galaxy? No, the car wasn't up to going so slow--behind a hearse--plus with the lights on.
But she drove the piano stool down the hill and cut through a shopping center parking lot, twisting in the seat to turn, and never once had to stop. She pulled up at the funeral parlor, carried the stool in and set it down at the keyboard. Hermione was playing Chopsticks when the hearse arrived.

Brown-Eyed Handsome Man

2007-10-02T12:38:00.000-07:00

This was Memphis, 1963. One place to go late was a six-stool counter diner, where for about a dollar you could get fried eggs, toast, and cigaret ash, dusted on the grill when the cook talked out of the folds and squints of her face. She always had a Lucky Strike in her mouth. We were so young she seemed even older than she was and we'd sort of laugh about her later. Sometimes we had enough money to play "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" on the jukebox. She danced a little one time on her steel-strung legs and winked at my dark-eyed friend Mickey Lee.

Ivory Tunes

2007-10-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

Polished with milk, and tickled by childish fingers, the tuning clings to the hammers and the keys like a damp leaf does to a birdbath, until hot weather dries it up. What do piano keys do when they're not played? They tremble notes back into the elephant's tusk; the elephant stamps on the veldt; the veldt vibrates the blood of vultures, without prejudice; and some just-born composer sounds her first note, a high B#.

What a Ride!

2007-10-02T11:04:00.001-07:00

Soon we'll be off to the burial of our friend Haines. What a fine man he was. Loved his dogs, ate his apples, helped his neighbors. Now, outside the church, we look around. We'll each be driving ourselves--a race to beat the black-coated minister, who wants everything sombre and by the book. For Haines? According to rules? Hell, no.
One friend slides across the butt-shined bench seat of his old gray Ford sedan. It knows him well; every lever and knob is ready with a secret handshake. He turns the key and off they go.
Another friend climbs heartily into her old tan van--a Dodge so set in its ways it tries to drive home and she has to arm-wrestle it to go down Willow Boulevard to the cemetary. Another friend jumps on his silver motor scooter from Japan. He turns the key in the heart of the scooter's chest and it clears its throat, and goes.
I stand looking around. Gray sedan, tan van, silver scooter--all out of sight now; they follow the mischief of our dead friend as he is pulled toward the cemetary in a hearse. Well, so, remembering how our Haines loved B-flat chords and dubious harmony--he couldn't play anything but a kazoo--I find myself on a piano stool--mahogany, with little wheels on the four legs and a swivelling seat. I ride downhill on Willow, steer around the sedan, hop over broken bricks, pass the scooter with its throbbing heart.
Finally, with a wave and a halloooo! I pass my friend in the van, and the hearse too, and ride through the gates. I'm singing some song I don't know the words to, but I hear a kazoo.

Keys to the Organ

2007-08-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

THE HAMMOND 100 EXTRA-VOICE

¥ou can hear it, can't you? the sung-along sigh
of a few hymns in a Baltimore hallway next to
furled umbrellas and gappy overshoes?
Right next to the steam radiator?
Oh, there was no room for the new organ in the
living room; that's for the sofa, the collection of
souvenir pitchers, the end table with the ashtray,
The dog in the deeplap chair, the pricey
Wood-toned console with a three-speed record
player, (even a spindle for 45s),
an ocean of radio waves,
a little television screen, with a
picture tube in the back smelling of hot dust.
All fully paid off too, about 1957.

So she played out there in the front hall on
not-yet-radiator-faded indigo, tan, red
bakelite keys. Quietly, at night after supper,
one streak of light from the lightpost outside
shining through the transom on the
polished fold-up music rack
(she didn't need to use sheet music), with the
pocket door pulled between her and her
parlor husband. Even so: "Hey, turn that down,
wouldja?" when a game was on; she'd reach over
and turn the Extra-Voice knob a little more
to the left. After he died one night on the sofa,
the organ stayed out there in the hall.
She liked it out there.

The organ-player passed away suddenly,
about 25 years ago in early August.
it was awfully hot that summer.
Her daughter came back to the house and
pushed two keys, center C, and B sharp,
without even turning on the switch,
and then she gave that old organ away.

To a man up the street. He was always saying
Sure wish I could play the organ,
Boy, that'd be nice, but then he passed
and his landlord came in and sat down and
picked out the notes to something
he remembered from his childhood,
and then paid a guy five dollars to
carry it to the curb.

The organ was on the street for about
two hours, and then a young man who liked
old cars and typewriters and plastic toy ray guns
and cast aluminum electric drills,
lugged it inside with the help of a guy walking by,
who refused to take money, or even a cold beer.
The young man had his ups and downs.
The organ stayed in his living room, a parlor,
where people are supposed to talk to each other.

Having sat there for so long, the organ's tubes
were wheezing inside deep space, so when
the young man turned it on, they
expanded with heated gas that might have
smelled of percolated Maxwell House coffee
or Max Factor face powder, or Chesterfields,
or Tide-washed sun-dried housedresses and
aprons -- that is, if they had exploded.
like milkweed pods do to let out their seeds.

Sometimes the young man pulled a chair over
and turned the organ on, and waited for the
Pop! of the speakers, and faint siren calls
of the tubes heating up, and he'd
turn up the volume on the Extra Voice knob
as high as it'd go, and play Rock of Ages
by ear, like his Grampa had back in Toledo.

Then the young man had one of his downs.
When he was evicted, all his stuff, the organ too
-- with its radiator-faded keys, the soul of
E. Power Biggs, and echoes of organ concerts
broadcast Saturday nights out of Detroit
in the sixties--was thrown out.

A woman in a truck saw the organ at the curb--
under bags of trash and broken chairs--
and so she stopped and called a writer friend
in the neighborhood. Then a man who had
biked across the continent came out of his house,
bouncing with energy, and a friend of his who
loves Billie Holliday came out, and the writer
who had left his punctuation marks and
walked 14 blocks to help -- he arrived.
They all looked at the organ.

Two of them lurched the organ across the street.
It was so heavy they didn't even lift it out
of the gutter until they saw if it worked.
The woman could see that while she liked the idea
of an organ, let's be realistic about this...
would she ever play it? Probably not.
Well then somebody plugged it into the
extension cord, and everyone waited
for it to warm up. They bent over to
look at the tubes. A light came on,
and the speakers popped.

The woman, having first dibs, played
standing up, with her right knee up
against the lever, treading a maroon and black
octave. Deepest voice she ever heard --
deeper even than the original Platters'
bass singer. (Later she thought it was neat she
was wearing her old cotton pedal pushers.)
The bass notes groaned out through the golden
mesh underskirt that hid tubes and innards, and
it was one helluva
Bellow of Jubilation.

Aardpoo Nicky Copernicus

2007-08-08T17:12:00.000-07:00

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Flibberdegibbet or ADD?

2007-08-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

A philosopher in the 18th C said that there was enough to study for a lifetime under your hand, if you laid it on the ground. Amoeba, paramecium, crystals, worms, division of cells, water drops, grass blades, ants, rolypoly bugs, skin flakes, grub larvae, granite, clay, decay, beetle wing, rat hair, mosquito wing, eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, and from there to Shakespeare, witches, aquariums, fire-bellied toads, crickets, song, birds, bird poo, eggshells, calcium...get it?

Dadgummit

2007-07-26T12:02:00.000-07:00

Reading James Joyce now -- realize I woulda been him if I'd been born a hundred years ago, or he mighta been me. As he says in ULYSSES: "As we...weave and unweave our bodies...their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast [not me, it's on my temple] is where it was [waiting to be] when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time...." (lines 376-380). Anyway, took my elderdawg to the vet for an ultrasound of his bladder...there's a polyp on a stalk at the cranial end of his bladder, which shows up clearly in a lateral sounding...and it's nothing to worry about right now. Who knows? his polyp on a stalk may have been a teensy polyp on a stalk when he was born 11 years and five months ago! Waiting to be woven and unwoven and woven again. So why is this called "dadgummit"? And why is that called a "polyp"? Isn't poly a parrot? I mean, isn't poly several if not many? Why isn't it a unip on a stalk? But dadgummit came to my unconscious whistle for a word, and so in it went.