Albert's Landing

I've taken to swimming Little Albert's Landing,

From jetty to jetty in the late afternoon sun.

I can do it one way,

In one hundred modified backstrokes,

More or less,

Always keeping the sunlight in my face

And the empty hill that cradled the Bell estate on my left,

Gardiner's Island out across the bay on my right.

Literally no one on the beach or in the water for that matter

Except me, thousands of sand eels and wild-eyed baby blues,

A family of piping plovers pecking at the tide line and an osprey circling

And waiting, waiting, waiting.

I listen to my breathing, then, as I swim,

I listen to my heart beat, the sound of the water as it swirls about me,

The bright light dancing on the water,

Free-floating in this eclectic sea of hope, even as I struggle to accept these forces

That bind me to this earth,

To this pulsing sea, to this surging life around me,

To my own cell of pain.

Later, lying on a flat rock, giving my back it's heat and hardness, yes,

A man can be blind in so many ways,

Leaving his life to a future that will never come,

Circling and waiting, waiting, waiting

While all of the world pounds and swells beneath him,

Calling his name softly in its profound eternity.

Mud

The intertidal smell of mussels opening and closing as the skin pulls back. 
The black mud speckled with piss clam tunnels. 
Boys with flat sticks wiggling bare toes, a jab and thrust, clams in the air.
 Jabbing and thrusting is what boys do, piss clams flying through the air. 
Fiddler crabs peering out sideways from their hideouts. 
The boys scurry sideways to mimic the crabs, throwing long ribbons of seaweed at one another, in their hair, slapping their faces, flying though the air.

There were girls here the night before, girls and music. 

The boys swirled through their faint, sweet fog. 
The scent opened something hidden. 
The deep inside them mixed with the fog and doors opened everywhere. 
There are not always enough locks or keys to go around. 
Some of the doors are closed forever. Some doors are hanging off their hinges. 
Someone said once that everything has been thought of.

The boys think of these girls over and over again, they think of almost nothing else, they dart here and there after fiddler crabs as the bright light beats down on their bare skin and they think of girls. 

To stand on the water, to stand in a boat in the water, the salt drying in white streaks on their skin, their skin that longs for the girls hidden in the sweet, dank mud of desire before they even know it. 

Before they even know it they are thinking of girls again and again, even as they are covered in mud and seaweed and laughing sideways at each other they are still jabbing and thrusting though the sweet, sweet fog again and again and even, again.

Today is your advocate

I encouraged everyone to invest in you

Long ago we were a migratory phenomenon

So in love in dark little simultaneous conferences
And hot steaming bubbles of automobiles

Thrilling to far-flung places armed
With metaphors for social responsibility

We were a phenomenon known as ‘immovable minutes’

You circulated five million stolen moments
Capable of communing instantaneously

With what we were soon to be

I miss you; you left so suddenly
I still have all of your once-fringe issues

Rammed like a disease down the throat of your barometer

It’s a universe unto its own, all right
As I dreamed again you were dawning next to me

“It’s all about flow,” you said
Announcing the delicate technology of your luminous hips

A C T I O N P O T E N T I A L

take this moment for example
open the gate the flood of doves frightening
us like frozen little children
as if there were no mothers in the world
and I would ask, if I were there

    how to stop this death by holding
it's bleeding head under the tap?


watching you again for any signs of life
or distracting aromas
binding your hands behind you with
trans-atlantic cables

[another sun comes up]
[another goose is cooked]
[another letter lingers]
[reaching back]
[further]

remember at that moment

don't get distracted


remember losing this moment
as if you lose your keys or your last breath
unlike any other
we could spread it out like jam across a thousand loaves of bread

but there is no way

you could make
this army of  little children that we are
stop this apoptotic death
from penetrating
the glassine skin of our own history
 

I am here

I am here

Not quite a man then 

Stubble on the head neck
Awkwardly shirt off sun towel beach world

I am here years; then rain water on MacDougal Street
Front of Café Wha
Disintegrating newspapers sound from in/out
Looking for your hand

I am here uncorking a bottle of King’s wine
Small hill, golf course birthday dream
You are full with the roundness of spring flush

And I am here again with Robert Frost’s walls
The cowbirds are the only visitors
Save a lone chipmunk lightening speed
Having seen the shadow

You away, always away, always always
The yearning, the soul
There is a kernel of everything
Inside everything, inside every kernel there is everything

Drifting alone on Gardiner’s bay

Drifting alone on Gardiner’s bay,
No ship or neoprene raft between me and the crisp blue sea,
Just quantum gravity and millions of gallons of sea water
From as far away as Pretoria and Tierra Del Fuego, to make my fluid bed,
Hands behind my head, floating like a champagne cork,
My thoughts bubbling into the endless blue
Above and below me.
Salt on my lips, the sun making neon worms in the ripples.
My Cubistic world, my instinctual nihilism, my habitual obsessions,
Behind me and above me the swoosh/pause/swish/pause/swoosh
Of a fish hawk’s wings, the whimper of a dark wet mouse
Locked in powerful, unforgiving talons,
This life goes on around me, as I learn to float alone,
As I listen to my heart beat,
As I listen to my thoughts drop across the ocean like milkweed puffs,
Like water in water, sand upon sand,
With only love making me different than this ocean,
Than this warm sunlight, than this immeasurable, spinning world.

We had a predilection for flying

At least this moment, for at least this moment
We had a predilection for flying,
Sitting far back in seats 146b or 175c
Next to the window, the back of the plane
And if sometimes, passing over the marble steps of the palace
or the hidden interior of our own secrecy or sometimes after barely clipping our abyss
Of reluctant assimilation to reveal the mournful solitude of our dreaming
We would wake again drunk with the wind and everything that was flying with us
Over this dense black mirror of ocean everything that was supposed to be guarding us and
Our practiced stumbling our flight out of the tunnel our reeling into
The blinding light that we surged past now as if we were unaware again
As if we had just thrown ourselves up into the air and reached our hands out to fly

 

MAKING DEATH - MAKING LIFE

I know that you can’t always tell something is happening while it is happening, but afterwards, you probably remember what you should have done while it happened, but didn’t.

He cracks the shell of the egg on the edge of the black iron pan, as the egg white hits the hot butter he hears a bright sizzling. Or did he hear the butter blistering first?

- - - - -

I found out pretty quickly all I never wanted to know about making death suddenly early one morning right here in Providence on November 26, 1974, as I watched my son slide out of his mother's dark and baffling womb and into the tepid toweled hands of a rather robust nurse. The nurses and doctors didn't want me to be there, that much was clear. I was hastily summoned just minutes before, a green paper gown and paper shoe wraps were thrust at me and I was quickly ushered into the delivery room. My son had a name already. Oakley. We knew months ago that the child was a boy, after seeing it very clearly for ourselves on an ultrasound negative. Actually, we didn’t know, we didn’t want to know, we had two names picked out, one for a boy, and one for a girl. Oakley and Sally. It’s just that we knew he was a boy from the start.

- - - - -

Making death is like frying an egg once over lightly in a cast iron pan sizzling with butter.

- - - - -

Covered with mucous and bits of purple blood, and being held upside down by his ankles, all four of us waited for an unprecedented amount of time for him to say something. Finally after what seemed like a blizzard of swirling flakes, his mouth opened and an odd little child scream snickered out and lingered over the cars parked in the snow outside the hospital delivery room. 

- - - - -

It snowed the night my son was born; I took a photograph out of the bathroom window. The cars in the parking lot next door were cloaked in a cold, atmospheric, pallid virginity.

- - - - -

I think the hospital delivery room was silver and had blue wallpaper with snowflakes. All of a sudden, I was alone with him and every one in the room disappeared. His eyes were the color of the room and I fell in love with him instantly.

- - - - -

Making death he turns over the egg, the yolk breaks, yellow lines snake across the pan.

- - - - -

"Mike, get the car, we've got to get to the hospital. It’s time!"

The car skittled a bit as we drove away from the curb. I remember the skoshing of the wipers and the roundness of the wheels. I remember counting telephone poles that we passed. My mouth was filled with snow falling and I was exhumed with an inexplicable yearning. The night became a single black cloud that appeared over and over again until there was darkness all around us. Three of us drove to the hospital but there was another person in the car with us. Listening.

- - - - -

I knew everything I needed to know about making life at 5:31 a.m. the morning of November 26, 1974. Oakley was a million shades of red and blue, shivering, as he made his way out from between his mother’s legs. The doctor pulled his head out first with large steel forceps, then, gently guided his shoulders out. The nurse wrapped him in a heat-foil lined blanket and handed him to me. I heard the pinging sound of the snow as it fell on the cars outside in the parking lot on 170 Courtland Street. I think it was very blue in the room, cold and blue and steel. I think the doctor was quite large and wore dark rimmed glasses. I remember I was wearing green cloth shoe covers and a green disposable gown. The room had snow falling in it, and silver clocks on several walls. The doctor turned him upside down and held him by the ankles until he cried out. Then he stuck a rubber bulb in his mouth to clear away the mucus.

MAKING LIFE

1 part black seaweed

6 parts crystalline [Etymology: Middle English cristallin, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French, from Latin crystallinus, from Greek krystallinos, from krystallos

Date: 15th century]

15 parts of tears from fallen angels

35 parts of distilled water from snow that fell on parked cars at 170 Courtland Street on November 26, 1974

17 parts of the struggling roots of plants that don't exist

3 parts of things you can't remember

Put everything in a cast iron pan and fry it kindheartedly until the yellow congeals your motives.

MAKING DEATH

Follow the above instructions backwards and leave out all the ingredients.

A misread

There was love that was gone

Love to an American is way too cinematic
You know this

There was way of flesh but that also disappeared

Living on too many little islands yes there were islands in hell too she said

Then she was gone

Who hauled these islands on their love frenzy mellow

But what!  No her mellow gone too
No need to cinematize these mornings just build on homes

without any hopeless song there

Hey who the hell dropped my cinematic for such little cash?

Now he, his orchestra and every wannabe knows of the real kings in your hell

You Americans are way too gone with your islands of consumption – way too gone

You love your coffee American frenzy to the mile-end of children of your convenience 

What home with no mile-end in sight we have your melody for you

American frenzy extraordinaire and we are expecting it to please you

We know your convenience you dirty little children of hopeless Samson

Too many summers

Too many built on cloud islands

Bring home your melody king of coffee

Long gone coffee Samson of eternal summer

Who will recognize this frenetic waste of time we built for your convenience

Cultivated for your devastated coffee islands

Right up till we disappeared in the mixtape

The thalweg

The thalweg, 

foggled with frass & verjuice 

emitted a stridulous cacophony 

not expected from such a fumarole.

-         Wordnik poem

Deadfall

The other: enter the myth
Hesitation, reasonably like an apostrophe

Marking the now empty space

Who will walk the row beneath?

Non-attachment, instead

The severed trunk swings back

The unexpected, not what you counted on

a tiny rustle of wind ruffling

the fuzzy oak leaves

The sun slips down behind the hill

The rustle of wind,

Imagine a hill,
The sun balanced like an apostrophe
Marking the wind ruffling through the leaves

All the things you have done wrong in your life
A will of ones own?
Like the apostrophe
The sun slips through the trees
The unexpected empty space is a catastrophe
balanced like an apostrophe

Deadfall, the waiting, the [will happen]

child

How I remember!

A small child

A boxwood hedge

Grass spider webs shimmering in the foggy dew

Morning sky scumbled

With soft cerulean and faint rose

Perfumed with lilies and Sweetfern

the Sensual din of cicadas

Last summer

For Oakley


Remembering what you said
I took the last remaining ear of sweet corn
From the dry cackling stalk
And sat down watching the bittersweet turn color
“we eat them right in the field,
never cook ‘em, way, way best that way”
you told me, the son teaching the father

after your last summer working the corn field
off Scuttle Hole Road
this temporal contiguity, not the least lost in this fleeing moment
nor the sun and cool rain in the kernels
no longer knowing if I am here
remembering you
or you are there remembering me

You open your eyes

You open your eyes

You swing your left leg rotating your acetabulofemoral joint
The heal of your foot is about to touch the cool wooden floor
Infinite possibilities are present

The floor is no longer there
Your foot is a claw that can only write sonnets
There is no space between you and history
That which has always happened will never happen again
The wooden floor is where the exegesis ends and the eisegesis begins
Your sonnets begin to claw away all possibilities
The distance between your foot and the wooden floor
Is the immeasurable void between the sublime and the juggernaut
The cool wooden floor was never there
You haven’t opened your eyes

“All’s right with the world”
“All’s right with the world”
“All’s right with the world”

Belief is at once prophetic, magical, sublime, how futile!
The space between your foot and the floor
Is either immense, or you are moving very slowly
All Grows smaller with each passing moment
The moment becomes the distance
Your foot that was a claw becomes a foot again
All your sonnets become dust and winged insects
You recognize in yourself the sublime and the juggernaut

…and carry forth from this day forward

The wooden floor is the sea of being
That you will never slip your toe in

You open your eyes

“Poor Yorick, remembering, preparing”

New issue of 13 miles from Cleveland is out at http://tinyurl.com/32akao3
My image is here – “Poor Yorick, remembering, preparing” http://tinyurl.com/39h2g3m

lock us up forever XI

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