Aja Couchois Duncan

The Span

2011-05-07T07:13:00.000-07:00

Spanning the milky green waters of the bay, moving between here and there, yesterday and tomorrow. In between is not present, but emptiness. What is crossed and recrossed. What becomes forgotten. The bay was bridged in 1936, stitching land together with suspension and truss-cantilever. Almost 100 years later, it is to be done again. Everything is to be done again, piece by piece.

You too are restitching the same wound, moving back and forth across the puckered skin. Like sentences, repeating the unnecessary syntax. Like love. What to do with all the extra nouns. This body once belonged to someone else, this wrist, this arm once connected you to another.

The bridge can hear each mile that it crosses. Spanning one of the most seismically active regions in the world, it listens for every sigh and groan. The initial pilings were Douglas Fir, clusters of trees banded together like straw on a broom and plunged into the mud. A century later, they are to be replaced with braided steel. The metal is deaf but it can feel the shifting layers of sediment. When the fault ruptures, it will thrust the earth forward. But it is the steel that will torque and scream.

Secondary effects are often more traumatic than the first. What comes after the initial rupture. You were together then you were split in two. There is no feat of engineering that can suture you back.

Beneath the bridge lives a flock of cormorants. During the morning’s commute, while the cars head west into the city, the birds fly east en mass to their fishing site. Within an hour there are hundreds of dark winged birds swimming in rows, nearly half of them submerged in the silty water. They dive into an estuary phosphorescent with pollution, seeking their waning silver fish.

You have stopped breeding. An entire generation forgot to remake itself.

Each span is linked by Yerba Buena Island. The bridge tunnels though. Next to the island sits another, a landfill built for the 1939 World’s Fair. Treasure Island is a fictional place, a landing strip for Pan American Airway’s flying boats, the first planes to provide commercial air service from San Francisco to the Philippines. This was before the second world war, when Manila would see ten percent of its population murdered, most of the city burned. The flying boat died too, crashing one month before in Trinidad. Neither the passengers nor crew survived.

There is risk in connection. To cross sky and water. To link that which has always been apart. After the initial stitching heals, there is a violent cleaving. To begin and end with injury. To break open and closed. This emptiness, this accretion.

The falcons roost in the metal beams of the east span. Once cliff dwellers, they have adapted to modernity, to the human tendency to scrape the sky. The new bridge will have a self anchoring suspension tower, a 500 foot white blade rising out of the sea. The tower is autonomous, manifest, tethering heaven to earth. Once the sections of bridge are replaced, the falcons will abandon their nests. Biologists in white suits will foster their eggs, feed their young, release whoever survives into the wild.

What wilderness remains is the untamed expanse of the mind. You are tethered here, someplace between memory and fantasy, yesterday and tomorrow. Your heart, the dark mess of it, is home to every fledgling.

On the eastern edge is the construction site. Unlike the bridge, it is a temporary structure. At the entrance is a small exhibit of objects found during the reconstruction of the bridge. There, in a glass case, resting on black felt, are two millennia of human objects: a bottle of bourbon, a pill case, the missing buttons of someone’s shirt. Such are the things people carry and loose. On the right side of the case are the older objects, the arrowheads and obsidian skinning knives, the pestles for grinding nuts and seeds. But the most beautiful object of all is an sweat scraper, a elk bone tool curved like a hand to scrape sweat from flesh. The handle is crested with abalone beads, adorned for the monumental effort of lifting the past, its excrement, from the surface of skin.

The bridge is twinned. Past and present structures resting side by side. Soon the old will be removed and only the new structure will remain. But for now there is a window into everything you have been, everything you are becoming. You are cantilever and truss, one arm parallel to the other. Bridge this distance. Cross the hungry expanse.

Benign

2011-04-11T06:01:00.001-07:00

Three times they press into it. This thing, this lump of mammary fat that has been her hallmark, her shelf. There are two but they seem only interested in the right one, some place above her areola where they capture some image of. Something. This thing they call benign. Benign what, she asks, but they do not answer. It seems they cannot tell. Can't quite see enough of it. They try again, press her breast hard between two clear plates, take another picture of it. It is lovely in the x-ray, translucent tissue with a small dark spot near her armpit. That is me, she thinks, the part of me they can’t penetrate, the spark of me that was there before breasts and all of their encumbrances.

Legacy

2010-11-12T21:20:00.001-08:00

The woman at the Native American Cultural Center wears her Indian proudly. The earrings are turquoise but she is Creek, a member of the Cherokee Nation. You are harder to recognize. One grandfather who headed west two years before the state of disposessed Chippewa formed their own federally recognized tribe. He left everything of his heritage behind. You came later, at a time without tribe, family ties, a Native tongue. You withstand the genealogy exercise, smile, tell what you know, apologize for what you do not. She is kind, she will embrace you, but she wants to know what kind of Indian you are first. This is both old and new. Lineage is important; blood lines define clans, relationships within tribal communities. But blood quantum is new. It was established by the government in 1934, one of many gifts of the Indian Reorganization Act. Its purpose is to define membership, restrict recognition, effect the eventual termination of Federally recognized tribes. It is how you end up being a fraction of. The rules not withstanding, the Creek woman introduces you to the others as if you are one of them. But when you leave the center, by virtue of blood law, you are already disappeared.

Broker

2010-10-20T19:57:00.001-07:00

Friday afternoon, late in the recession, there is a line at the pawnshop. The woman at the counter is selling her childhood earrings, the wedding coins sprinkled, so many years ago, over her and her new husband’s bowed heads. He is dead now, as is the child she used to be. The broker gives her one hundred and seventy-five dollars. She thanks him although it won’t get her through the week. Next, the broker calls, and the man in line empties the entire content of his pockets on the glass. The quarters scatter as if a tumble of jewels. American quarters, copper and nickel, and he has twenty of them. The broker smiles, kind considering the line. These are quarters sir, he says. The man nods; he is at a coin shop. OK, the broker says, for this one, the 1985 issue, I’ll give you twenty-five cents.

At the bottom of your purse is a one ounce gold coin your grandmother gave you. It is not an heirloom. It is a South African Kruger Rand from 1979, a year alight with bombs that, despite the laws, could not distinguish race and often killed whites and blacks alike. The Kruger Rand sells for thirteen hundred dollars. Seven times what it was purchased for. It is an easy exchange, a brilliant gold coin, heavy with oppression and the violence of extraction, and a check, thin paper striped blue and gray through which money is made formal, benign. You are not catholic, not even religious, but walking out of the shop you make the sign of the cross, ask god to forgive you. Two doors down, there is a bar crowded with happy hour revelers. With so many unemployed, the end of the work week merits a celebration of both its existence and its culmination. On the sidewalk out front are four or five people smoking next to a sign that tells them not to. There is a code to live by, you know, and yet you no longer are able to make out the words.

Inheritance

2010-10-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

The Watching

It was her job, she knew to watch the boy, her brother, her twin. And she did. But the afternoon came when she forgot. They were at the beach. It was not especially pretty, but it was close to the city and the ocean breeze brought some relief from the August heat.

They had learned to swim young, but like all things, she was better at it than he. Watch your brother, the mother said, then went to the concession stand for a drink. The mother returned a half hour later while the lifeguard was pulling him out of the water. Driving back into the city, the son curled into a ball like a small animal. The daughter, cried, said she was sorry. The mother said nothing.

Later the mother stopped drinking, but the son inherited both the desire and the disease. When he drank himself into terminal illness, the daughter flew across the country to stay with him. The other chair in the hospital room was empty; the mother could not be reached. That day at the beach, he said, I was only trying to catch up with you. She could feel him dying and a part of her dying too. It was me, she said, I forgot that we are one and the same.

Karma

Everyone has at least two, she said. She said a lot of things. I believed some of them, none of them. The last time she was just as beautiful, but more naïve. Like you, she said meaning whomever she was speaking to. When he left her for the blue expanse of ocean, she had thrown herself over the balustrade. Can you believe it, she said, I shattered and he simply sailed away.

She told me she had learned her lesson. She swore off men, romance, any elevated surface. That’s where I came in. Petite, I was catlike, ermine. She called me ocelot, then kissed me. Her lips were soft but my tongue got caught on the rail of broken teeth.

Narrative

She had a story that ran like an ant trail in her head. Sometimes, if she shook her head long enough, she was able to temporarily disperse the ants. Usually they just marched diligently on. She didn’t know the beginning of it; it was as if the ants had always been there and she had simply woken up to them midway in their journey.

Others had their own stories. She talked about them with friends from time to time. Their stories disoriented her, as if she was walking an unknown street in the dark. Her own were unwanted but familiar, like the constellation of moles on her back, the scar below her left eye.

One day she shook herself so hard that the story splintered; the ants moved outward as if marking the spokes on a wheel. At the center of it was a black hole, a vast emptiness in which she was finally free.

Resentment

To let go of it, she offered her palms to the sky, as if sky wanted such things: resentment, grief, the myriad of human attachments. Later the sky made its own offering, freezing rain that fell in perfectly round pellets of ice. She put a glass bowl down outside her front door to gather it. In the morning, she found a black dog peeing into the frozen, mush filled bowl.

Attachment to Form

He shit blood at the end, his head dropping into the red and brown mess of fluid. She was surprised at the violence of it, of life’s departure. And while it was his life, his boundless pleasure in it, that she loved, it was his body, in the end, that she had to attend to. First there was the matter of wrapping and moving it out of the sun into the dark storage shed. Then ice was required to keep it cool long enough for a postponed burial. Worried about mice, or other opportunistic creatures, she stayed up that night and through the day that followed, held a kind of private wake, keeping watch over the body until her ex would return and they could bury him. The afternoon the ex returned, they unwrapped his body, kissed his stiffened head. He was no longer there, she knew, and yet it was a hard idea to hold onto. The ex cooed his name, stroked the pattern of spotted fur. It took another day for the ex to agree to bury him, but by then she no longer believed the dead should be separated from the living, interned in the dark weight of earth.

Passing

When she was young she developed a cough that wouldn’t go away, some kind of lung thing which limited her mobility. Or at least that is the story her parents used to explain why she never really left the house until she was far too old to learn how to live among others. When she asked about the physical differences—the soft fur on her ears, the way her chin drew out rather than down—they waved their hands as if her concerns were flies bothering the air.

Now she is older and her parents are dead but she is still home, sitting in the window, looking out longingly at the open field and the road that winds like a river beyond. One day she packs a bag; she leaves, walking the curves of the asphalt bank until she reaches town. Entering the first open door she finds, she is surprised by the room of welcoming faces that greet her. Either she is passing as something they might love, or she was one of them all along.

Envy

Every day comes a new thing to covet. When you were younger, it was always things that money brought. Later, you began to covet things you once had, beauty, youth, boundless enthusiasm. It is easy to get lost in the yearning, running back and forth, caught in a juniper hedged path of longing. One day you stop, part the dense foliage and peer through. On the other side is another pathway, another person racing from one end to the other. But it is clear from the way she moves that she is nothing like you. Her strides are shorter, her hands claw the air.

The Waiting

We have all done it, spent our time someplace we did not choose for a duration that we could not stand. We share this, even in the moments of it, when our awareness of another’s frustration makes our own dislike of them, their presence, their need that prolongs the satiation of our own, impossible to bear. For this moment occurs precisely when we are already burdened with it, our own discomfort.

This is one of those times, when to wait is to die a little, as all time, the passing of it, is a movement toward and away. That we are someplace filled with dying, as all places are, and yet also with living, makes both seem without consequence and yet it is here, waiting, that we are most fully aware of their significance.

And so it is morning, in this year of war and disease, in this hallway of this office, in a country that is and is not our home, that we share something, an orange, taking it apart slowly, one wedge at a time. It is here, so many years after we decided what it means to be of and from, that we find ourselves marveling at the sweet juice beneath the skin. The parting of lips, the glistening of saliva, the shocking pink of tongue.

Love

She had been known by other names, but Love was the one that stuck. It may have been as simple as the shape of her face, which most closely resembled a silphium seed, a vulva, the flesh of her own buttocks. Such are the possible sources of the symbolic image of the heart. As metaphor, the heart has been home to the divine and she was, or so her lover said, until the day when she was not. The name, however, remained.

The Oldest One At the Pig Roast

It is hard to know for sure the age of anyone in the dark. The pig, fully grown and fattened with hormones, could not be more than 10 months old. The others, the ones drinking around the fire pit, are probably closer to twenty-five. This would make her the chaperone, but she is drinking too, heavily like they are, drinking vodka and whatever mixture of juice was on the table next to it. She can smell the pig cooking, the scent of it roasting in its own juices, and she knows that she will not be able to remain quietly among them. It is not just age, or the generations of wealth they wear as if a second skin. It is that she finally understands that without her, without the exception of her presence, the series of accessible achievements that mark their lives would seem privilege. But she is here, a member of the not-disappeared, presencing a people who were not counted as individuals in the national census until 1930. And so, their success can be narrated differently. It is a meritocracy after all. The rest is just history. She drinks two more drinks, says a blessing for the slaughtered pig, and begins the dance that centuries ago someone mistook for a welcome. It is not. It is what her people danced when it is was time for the gichi-mookomaanag to sail back home.

Emerging from the Muck

2010-04-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

if they say we have come from
oceanic witnesses
then who am i to differ

we who are land and battle
no longer remember
white caps, the pelagic suffering

...

say goodbye to the fog and smoke
this lingering sadness of lung
not say and want to mean it
even the tundra blossoms
seeds blanketed in ice
like you, a tiny frozen thing
the wind carves into days
makes a stab at the heart
this thrush
sea foam and asphalt

...

there is a silicon pouch where my heart used to be
i call her bitch to show her i don’t miss her
she calls me things too terrible to mention

i do not want to talk myself out of this or any other
calamity i warn the sand crabs about
such linguistic solutions the way my father
warned me but he was oceanographic and I know
that sailors are not easily lured
by tongue scratchy barnacle
that remote

...

the source of our malice for sea life is clear
if you remember the turbulence of amniotic fluid

even the otter has questionable ethics
you can’t trust anything that eats on its back

either in or out of water it is hard
to imagine humans surviving much of anything

go ahead, submerge your hands in the black water of the spillway
to feel any affection for that which no longer reaches the sea

...

the competition between salt and sky cannot dazzle
hawk or dissuade us from our battles with atmosphere
the nuclear cloud of memory is prehistoric knowledge, is deep water
we surface by burning prairie grass and pygmy rabbit
drawing the smoke up into ourselves
when night falls we are still damp from hatching
the crickets warn of the moon’s entanglements
a towering monument overshadowing rock and river
we are woman and ox, our legs a muscular paradise of blue

...

to cross time is not
to mark its curvature
but its scales
the crepuscular death
of iridescent things opening
in this moment which has happened
has not happened
not exactly brilliant but lingering
we make months of ourselves
weeks take days call it luck or sarsaparilla
the past has no referent but scent
sweet is not unlike bitter when you bite down on it
a hummingbird is such a femme thing
but she can hurt you too

...

some say writing is thinking and others call it sinking into not action as if thought and action were disassociated, as if ex lovers at a party who can’t even smile across the room at each other nine years of fighting and sex, studying the drama of each other’s family and now they are caught in a crowded room and despite their knowledge that each has lost, they will not speak, neither will, because the lesson they learned most clearly, if anyone bothered to ask, is we are fish out of water this cannot be solved by thought or action or the pretense of either, this story which asks you to do something for god sake, or is it think something and maybe that will be enough

...

the sea is such longing for
its young, dawn, that pocked beauty
we have switched our alliance
made family out of desert
desiccant, this relative of
thirsty enough to swallow
our rage, her mouth, spitting out
cactus and scree, impervious to the hunger
wrinkled sheaths of skin

...

one way to explain it is the tree
those skinny roots stabbing into volcanic rock
the first thing to grow isn’t always pretty
the limbs are barren sticks
there are no flowers or fragrant music
it is simply phloem and xylem
emerging from the crust
an igneous womb

...

this morning is not the witch’s tit that you spoke of. so many disastrous women or so the story goes. there are others who claim not to notice the circumstance of sex. I call them liars but I know enough never to do this to their face. the earth as mother is a tragedy of subjugation and resistance. twenty miles away dawn is met by a concrete freeway overpass where she wakes, her body some broken antique toy. some parts move noisily. the others time has frozen in place. go ask her what woman means, mother or pleasure or garbage strewn contiguously so that no one place is either landfill or pristine. not containment or contaminant but that which bears the brunt of it, some dark once furry place between her legs.

...

in the beginning people said all kinds of things
which later someone took for religion
but the first words were not about god but food
then sex i know because i’ve been hungry
god has nothing to do with it
when the ocean comes and reclaims us
a few will survive, they will eat and make babies
this is my story and god is not allowed
only tangerines and sailor girls
there will be no more babies either

Ornithology

2009-12-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

...

like a bird that
invisibly wakens
and feeds its
unborn young
at midnight

when no one can
know whether things
as they are
go on

-Inger Christensen, Alphabet

...

collection

i told you everything once, everything that i knew. it was winter then. it is winter now. this weak earth year in which i put my head on your lap and found birdsong. a nesting of.

you woven tendon by tendon. crepuscular. shouldering one hemisphere.

what love is bough then horizon. this love is. this love.

fledgling. wing. onomatopoeia. the flight of you.

everything spoken. then nothing to speak of.

fog reminds me of you. dawn does. every shimmering of night.

the first opening is exhausting. then torn and scabbed over. there is no pliancy to the flesh. there is no flesh to. this bird is a wounding. this bird is no bird at all.

distribution

to cull sky. to cull anything. this misapprehension of.

there is a white stubbornness to daylight. to winter. to migratory sight. i flew across an indefinite expanse. i drew myself proximate to you.

the field is brown grass, rotted fruit, a haze of light. the field is filled with longing. every field. every page. every season. nostalgic for.

speciation

parapatric. to be adjascent. narrowly so. there are days when i have a glimpse of. the angularity of your clavicle. your radius. the featherless hues.

it takes immense force to distance species. to differentiate. it takes the earth’s shifting plates. it takes a lifetime to.

phylogeography

strewn across and through. these bits of birchbark and willow. these remnants of. what was once nest and nesting is wind and desertification. the genetic drift of you.

everywhere there are markers. mitochondria. the matrilineal evolution.

what can be told and retold. what can mean only in past tense. how we are splintered and shaped. the vicariance event.

i would narrate everything according to geologic shifts. the ferocity of a sudden river. the brutish thrust of mountain range. but we are distanced by nothing other than cacophony. neither isolate nor contiguous. a flurry of birds.

2009-12-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

too human to sit still for the endless rotation
a room full of bodies who
crave the interiority of every space
the birds burrow under wings
heat themselves in the sparse leaves of winter
if not windows then what to call the exterior
your face so strange and yet this familiar skin
we live so many lives simultaneously
who can discern known from unknown
calling everything by names learned at birth
make your palm a sword
severe the illusionary umbilical
breach the sheath of this world

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

the body is diurnal. or it is supposed to be.

all night he labors to breathe, to vomit, to flip over.

it is impossible to sleep while the lungs fill, while every cavity

of the body is drowning.

i lie beside him on the floor

holding his paw in my own.

the night crawls, some miserable

inchworm, forward.

in the morning, every extremity is cold.

his tongue is grey, folding backward.

and still he struggles. to breathe. to not breathe.

i have no idea how to ease his passage. to lessen the suffering.

panting beside him, i welcome each drop of morphine

the sickening sweetness of it on our tongue.

How to be an Adult

2009-07-08T10:46:00.001-07:00

Chapter 1

He googled trust and she did what those who forgot such things often did. She lifted her leg and peed on it, yellowing the grass, marking her turn at things. The light caught the blades of grass, the wetness of her waste, shocking in its beauty. He took the diagnostic assessment. A score below twelve meant an array of interventions. What can be done alone. What cannot. Several evenings dedicated to this. She refused the premise. Who can trust anyone, anything? Who cannot? The effect on the vegetation was alarming. The salvia bloomed a violent russet. The sage died. A mourning dove landed on the metal railing of the fire escape, cooed, then left. Mornings offered greater possibility. She tried again.

Chapter 2

By dusk they were both similarly situated. The sky exhibited its own sense of things, spreading its puffs of clouds, then darkening. She called him to say what exactly? That she was alone, afraid. He read her the results of. Fear of intimacy. Fear of being eclipsed. The sun did such things. Shamelessly. This unstoppable desire to. No one blamed it. She held onto her ancient thread. There were others who asked for less, demanded less. Who were they really? The city flickered. She went through her drawer of hidden books, the damaged child, difficult communication, loving freely. Honestly, who would read such things? She had, or tried to. He did. The earth shifted, belched. She cried. She often did. He focused on the future and worked his way back. It provided some ease.

Chapter 3

She finds it exhausting. The wind. The trees. Trying to think through the fog’s wet white coat. The child on the other side of things puts on her parka and walks out the door. Each day moving toward it. Her life. Her future. This attempt to.

Chapter 4

Everywhere, it seems, there are lovers. At the café, the women touch hands across the table, tentatively as if some dart may be hidden within the other’s fingertips. The band is all strings and heart songs. Beside her a couple slips into one another’s skin. As if to be separate, to feel the edge between self and air—a misunderstanding to be sure, but still to feel it—as if to feel it, is simply too much. To not feel it. Well that is difficult too.

Chapter 5

The question becomes eventually who to believe. There is always yourself, a person known to be untrustworthy. There is the therapist you pay to be reliable who has instructed you on several occasions to lie. There is the lover, or the object of, who cannot or does but intermittently, unwillingly, angrily. There is your sister who advises with the decisiveness of a prosecuting attorney. But how can she know so absolutely what should and should not be done? Perhaps it is living in the east, her proximity to dawn, the day’s clearest intent. You are in the west where endings are the only thing definitive. You listens to all of them, none of them. There is an echo inside the eerie quiet of you that suggests you should bend, always bend. And you do, half way over until your mouth is swallowing your foot, choking on it. This is what it means to.

Chapter 6

There is a story about a crow who tried over and over again to change his color. The raven laughed at him, told crow black is the most beautiful color. But crow was completely taken hold by his desire. He befriended other birds, borrowed their feathers, used a paste of honey and mud to adhere the colorful plumage to his breast. This is a story about compassion. When the feathers fell crow became angry. All he wanted was a bit of color. Who could begrudge him that? Everyone it seemed. So crow began taking things, plucking the brightest feathers from the parrot’s wings. The birds gathered together to discuss crow, envy, the dissolution of self. They decided to make crow a perch of wildflowers tied to the branch of a maple tree. Each day one of the birds brought new flowers for crow’s roost. This isn’t a story about crow, who never let go of his dream of colorful plumage. You can hear him now in the tree complaining. This is a story about you, about desire, the force of it. Even now, you want more than this lovely little nest.

Chapter 7

She has relearned everything. Lived the same lesson so many times it is landscape. One morning she forgets to look down when crossing the street and finds herself without ground beneath her. It had only been her relentless belief in the earth that had held it there. Somehow in the repetition she had forgot to hold still her imagination. This is the predicament, the necessary prerequisite to. She does not fall down or through but onto something new. Everywhere there are solid, non-solids. She is not solid although she experiences herself as such. Even now on the back of another cartilaginous shell, she is dreaming of objects that by their very nature have fixed positions in space. Is it only once she notices that the particles are vibrating, humming a monotone but surprisingly pleasant tune, that she sees the turtle’s beak could just as easily be the moon.

Chapter 8

Everyone has an opinion. On the corner, there is a man carrying his life on his back. When you pass, he tells you, “silence is golden.” He has been instructed to. Everywhere there are lessons. Another man with less belongings but more rage tells you who is to blame, an entire population connected by nothing other than the color of their skin. Days later you have grown accustom to hearing these strange proclamations, these demands that the complications of life, the deep suffering, be lessoned. You are not surprised when a man pushing his belongings as if a sled across the tundra begins shouting “cunt.” You tell yourself he is talking to one of his ghosts. We all are. You hold this thought until he describes her, the cunt in the blue sweatshirt with long dark hair, and it is you. You look back, shrug, you’ve been called worse. You make some internal gesture of compassion but can only manifest pity. That is until he shouts “that cunt there is having an abortion.” Something inside you stops, shuts off completely. To be named in the street by someone you do not know, cannot know, and yet he knows you. Or the ghost of you. That girl who at nineteen called herself a demon for ending what she could not begin. Twenty years later it is still your deepest shame. He crosses the street, but does not stop his recriminations. “That right,” he says, “you’re a cunt.” You do not seem able to move. Standing on the street corner, flayed open, utterly exposed.

Chapter 9

She dines on guilt or is it rage while he practices his gender, getting the inflection, walk, misogyny just right. Anger is something they both do well. It is satisfying to be able to shout what is unspeakable at a lower decibel. They circle the kitchen, enacting some inherited ritual. Everything they’ve been taught to. She grabs the reddest apple, takes a bite. He spits out the bitter wax of skin. There are so many egos in the room their appendages have become entangled. When she tries to leave, his palm is still caught in the pit of her arm. She takes the paring knife and begins to peel the newly haired surface of him. Beneath is not the girl she loved but the man who cares about nothing other than the possibility of what he can become.

Chapter 10

There is story about a crab who grows tired of his claws, the enormous weight of them. He asks seagull to bite them off with her sharp beak. Seagull loves to slip the world into her mouth. She snaps his claw between her beak, cracking the shell, but not severing the flesh beneath. Ouch cries crab, withdrawing his mangled claw. Crab decides that it was not his claws but his shell, the entire exoskeleton that he wished to be free of. This presents a greater challenge. How to become something else entirely. Crab crawls back into the crook of rock he calls his home. Using all the magic he has scavenged over the years, crab drinks a concoction of herbs, buries himself in ointment soaked wraps. For months he sings songs he learned from the ocean, birthing songs, songs of death. When he grows too big for his cave he moves farther inland, toward the mountains, toward milk secreting mammae. The earth turns slowly around the flame. It is hard to say how long it takes to become. One morning he simply wakes to himself, a grey and white spotted horse, his right front hoof cracked in two.

Chapter 11

It has become a national obsession, adulthood, realism, prudence. Even the hummingbird has stilled its wings. She doesn’t notice when the vegetation begins to mute its colors; she is too busy practicing her circumlocution. The daily parade of boys thins out. He is often alone in the street, holding one side of the gender line. A child of loneliness, he does not notice the absences. It is too intoxicating, this becoming. Too change everything and nothing, as if slipping off the dressing of skin only to be wrapped in another. When she leaves, he will replace her with pornography. Girls on girls, boys on girls, boys on boys, everyone on everything, dildos, dicks, pussies galore. This should carry him through her departure. Adulthood is trying enough, she knows, but being a chaperone, intolerable.

Chapter 12

When she leaves one room she moves into another. This is a platitude. Being obvious does not make anything less so. She is as predicable as any other member of the species. The door to the first room had been partially closed, only a fraction of the interior lit. She stumbled around in the darkness, smacked her shin against the chair. Who wouldn’t be frustrated by such difficulty? She slammed the door shut despite the body, the boy waiting in the bed. The hallway affords a kind of transition, too short to reside in. She moves toward the next room, which is larger, better appointed. Or at least she can see the furniture, the dresser covered in photographs, the trunk with its history tucked neatly beside the bed. This does not make the navigation any less treacherous. Obstacles are often intangible, but she bumps up against them again and again. The door is open, the hallway precarious. Does it really matter in which direction anybody heads?

Chapter 13

Holidays are the perfect occasion on which to celebrate the heartbreak of repetition. To wake one morning beside someone new only to feel that old sense of. Outside is the meadow, creek, morning sun bright against the slope of trees. Inside is the self with its circular narration. The laws of physics, as least the classic ones, are derived from a similar addiction to dependencies. It is how we recognize the objects around us. Is it how we know ourselves. This makes future difficult. We can move toward it, but with all of our belongings, it looks quite similar to what is being left behind. The woman beside you is not like any of the woman who came before, and yet she is eerily familiar. Another broken person. Someone who knows love as fleetingly as the winged tip of the robin flying past.

Chapter 14

If it seems as if nothing works, is it true that nothing does? Or perhaps everything works but the one thing you keep trying over and over. You should get a new hobby. Something simple, something that occupies your hands. Perhaps knitting or assembling model airplanes. Perhaps sniffing glue. Your pantomimes have produced little understanding. Maybe it is the discontinuity between your mouth and hands. You’ve always had difficulty with alignment. When the guests arrive, you hide yourself in the back of the room, the couch swallowing every limb in its blue cloud. “Where is so and so?” somebody says. A woman steps forward. She is not so and so but what does it matter? There are breasts, a medium length of nondescript hair, some lipstick. “Oh,” says somebody, surprised but not unhappily. At least there is alcohol, you think, or perhaps somebody else says, under her breath, and you believe that you have thought it. It is not a party but there are many gathering. It is not a gathering but some kind of collective act of desperation. “We matter,” the MC says. Everyone nods. So much easier to prove when there are multiple occurrences of.

Chapter 15

What is being investigated is not who or why but what. What does it mean to? She is clearly old enough to know. Should know. Isn’t that the reason for all those years seated in a small wooden chair? So much nomenclature and chronology to memorize. Even now she remembers the names of things for which she no longer holds an image. The igneous crust. Hominidae, Lucy, that brittle ancestor. Everyone knows how to live: one foot planted firmly after the other. But what if only one foot? What if the earth is not soil but water? She smashes the wooden chair into pieces. She is angry yes, but productively so. The wood can be used to craft a makeshift boat. Her hair can be used to tie the oars. Her skin, she finds, makes an excellent sail.

Chapter 16

She has come to the place in the script where she finds herself waking to her grief, a pig roasting on a spit. The meat is gritty with ash. This too had been predicted. To repeat, to compound, is carcinogenic. To interfere with a cell’s natural death. She should put the pig in a casket, say the necessary eulogy and be done with it. But it is hard to let go of the companionship of its remains. Perhaps cremation. Or a funeral pyre. Such devotion to the suffering of. She wonders if emotional excess offends god, or the collective sentience often described as such. Probably not. We all seemed to be made from the same stubborn clay. If she were to hold a wake others would bring their carcasses too. She should just get on with it, somehow lift herself from the bed. It is possible to be simultaneously both alive and dead. To dress and leave the apartment, to find oneself on the corner with no idea of which way to go. As an experiment, she covers her eyes and walks into the street, into the damp skin of fog. She can hear the cars but cannot see them. There is nothing to fear, she knows; the vehicles are filled with people just like her.

Chapter 17

There is a story about a fox who grew a multitude of tails, one for every calamity she survived. At first she was pleased with the density of plumage, but eventually she grew tired of holding so many tails up in the air. When muskrat asked her how he too could be so luxuriously appendaged, fox told him to put his nose into the fire, catch his paw in a metal trap. Muskrat being naïve, and perhaps a little dumb, did exactly that. And while his injuries were serious, his tail remained the same. Fox, however, grew two more tails, each thicker and more richly hued than the next.

Chapter 18

There are the predictable weather patterns: wind, rain, a potential flood. By dusk, the birds have bedded down in the trees and the boats have come home to roost. Despite the warnings, she swims out past the buoy, past all calls for self-protection. To be broken is to have lost the memory of. If she finds herself here, there, anywhere, then she is meant to. Or so says everything she has come to believe. She finds herself empty-handed, having lost something specific but vaguely rendered. Having found something that looks nothing like what she thought it would. Back to this place, this bay, waking or having woken to. Back to location and everything it provides. She dives down, grabs a rock, a cuttlefish. She scrapes the shell against her palm, drawing her life across its tenderness. There are plants that die at the slightest touch. She was meant to. Or no one was, but somehow she learned to wither in proximity. Proximate. This desire to.

Chapter 19

The simplest agreement can be made between two people, one predicated on common gestures and locutions. Here is an example: Subject A has concerns about Subject B, or the loss of him; Subject B has concerns about Subject A, or her capacity to. But they play the mating game nonetheless. This is their accord, to always choose the make-believe. Sometimes she slips, can’t remember that the toy should be as desirous as the boy who is holding it. Sometimes he lets go of everything he pretends to be. The agreement cannot withstand such forgetfulness, every word, every touch becomes a breach. She agreed to love him, the man he was intent on becoming. He agreed to let her, to love the person he wished her to be in return. She does, in bits and spurts. He has the predictable seizures. It should be easy enough to tear up the agreement. They have tried repeatedly. But the paper is pulp and glue. It has been difficult to wash it completely from their hands.

Chapter 20

Every dawn, there is another one. She wakes and tells herself she will no longer. She makes it partially through the day. To arrive again at the some point in the story. There is a kind of presence to it, to self-aggrandizement, self-hatred. She wonders if there is not even some comfort, the dilemma so perfectly ensconcing her. When she thinks of her mind, it is not possible to picture anything beyond the spelling of it, its alphabet of despair. She has learned to tell herself that it is only her mind, a simple malfunction. It should be easy enough to repair. She crawls out the window onto the fire escape. Despite the asphalt, the birds are all she can hear. She thinks often of her amputated wings, missing the heft of them. There is no reason, she says, to believe this body is any different than the previous one. She is alone, speaking to herself, but the sound of her voice is birdsong, nonsensical, sweet to her ears. There is no reason to believe this mind and its endless narration. She grabs the railing with both hands and swings herself over the metal bars. It is not far really to the ground, but she has no intention of landing there. She leaps out, diving, no flying, flapping her phantom wings.

Chapter 21

It has become abundantly clear that she has no idea how to be an adult. Maybe next go around, she says, hearing the familiar howl. She has taken to walking long stretches of the city, the perimeters of it, as if circling an invisible pen. Some animals live longer in captivity; wolves gain an additional six to ten years. There is the obvious issue of quality versus quantity but on that subject the wolf has not yet spoken. The wolf’s relationship to captivity has been clearly expressed. Unpredictable, untamable, the wolf will challenge the dominance of its captor. The wolf, in fact, will never submit. She has proven to be less resilient. Although bored by him, his unspoken demands, she has been seen, on occasion, licking the master’s hand.

le chat

2009-04-12T07:40:00.001-07:00

there is the cat. waiting in the grass. waiting for what we all wait for. for life, its possibility. there in the green field, adjacent the church, she sits with her back to me, to the street. her neck turned at an angle to suggest it is not attached to her body but rather resting on it casually like a hat. her ears, the golden yellow of her eyes, some quirky decoration she has turned to face the two story church. its white clamoring toward god. the church is empty. the field is empty, save the cat who needs not saving, not even spiritual uplifting. the cat is merely waiting for the next moment in life to call her to do something different than this one. this one being perfect for sitting in a grassy field adjacent a small white church. from the porch I count the moments of. there is the cat, the church, the motorcycle that sits between us. another possibility. more death than life. or rather arcing more quickly toward the end than the beginning. but not unreasonably so. one must learn to die in the same way one learns to live. the cat turns her best sunday hat toward me. it is clear i do not understand. to see only objects: the field, the church, the street, the bike. to miss the sky. to miss always what is beyond the frame. to fear what is ample. time.

it is easy enough

2009-03-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

it is easy enough to make a mistake, to choose the wrong route on your way to work. there’s an accident up ahead. cars lined in a row of snaking ants, idling their invisible exhaust. you are late; you always are. it could mean your job, your apartment, a cascading list of loss. there is an accident. you are the accident. you only looked down for a moment to change the radio station. to rid yourself of the announcer’s voice, his message of a perfect mattress, a good nights sleep. when was the last time you slept. really slept. you are only 40 but you feel 50. 90. pick a number. something to scare yourself with. dying. your mother died young. everyone in your family dies young. your attention is somewhere between the radio and oblivion when you feel weight of your car slamming into something unmoving ahead. your head slamming into something unmoving. everything rushing toward an impenetrable future. an easy enough mistake to make. it is dusk. you are not working, haven’t worked in some time. you are drinking. drinking and driving. it is the best combination of things. you can sit quietly with your bottle and watch the world display itself shamelessly through the glass. some things should be hidden. all the wires, cables, power lines. it is indecent. grey intestines roping loosely from an opening in some poor sod’s waist. perhaps it is your waist. you reach down to be sure, touch the familiar distension. one hand on the bottle the other on your swollen belly. the car steers itself, but requires the weight of your foot on the accelerator to propel it forward. you lift your foot, take another sip. the road is empty. the night descending. you close your eyes. try to remember the feel of someone holding you. the seat holds you, the seat belt drawing its arm across your chest. humming now a song you once knew. something about starlight. who knew such beauty could inhabit something already dead.

every day

2009-03-18T20:29:00.000-07:00

every day dawn finds herself naked and wonders if she has not in fact lost herself entirely in the night, her clothes, precepts, selfhood. what sovereignty can allow the proposition of love, some penetrated interiority. in this new and sudden opening there is the fragile pink of sky. the lip of wind. dawn is not alone in her discomfort. the sun too is heavy with the previous day’s misfortunes. neither can bear the tentative movement of the other. she would withdraw safely into the darkness but sun is thick limbed, blocking the door. dawn walks backward towards the window, her legs shimmering with light. she will fall. she always does. upward, into the buoyancy of it. there will be witnesses. it does not matter who. for dawn there is only the swarm of light, the heady rush of it. everything else is incidental.

There is a story

2009-02-09T19:40:00.000-08:00

there is a story i tell. a story about suffering. not because we are only suffering, but because that is the story we have been taught to tell. take a beetle for instance. it talks of nothing other than the leaf it chews. the angularity of it. the soft brush underneath. there are many beetles. far more than there are humans. somehow our voices always drown them out. take crows for instance. they have been known to fish. not with their beaks but with fiberglass poles left behind by drunken fishermen. or maybe they were just sleeping. either way the crow speaks only of fish. the cold flesh. the fragile meat. in the story i tell myself there is often buffalo. not because they are prolific, but because they occupy the expanse of my memory, its continent. the buffalo are only a metaphor. the snow is also a metaphor. bodies blanketed in white. freezing. we are all rigid with it. the story. tell something different. something about the rain. the sound of it. like walking skyward. away from one’s origins. what has been culled from one atmosphere falling gently into another.

cold streak

2008-11-04T13:30:00.000-08:00

always there is somebody dying
a little bit in every breath
in every turn of the wrist
a withering

it is fall perhaps
that makes us barren
or the wind
whatever name you wish to call her

do not snap
break
yourself
in two

A New Order Of (complete)

2008-08-31T08:11:00.000-07:00

Domain

To call it yours. To call anything proprietary.

What it means to be sentient, to be afraid.

Lanky and feathered, buzzard attempted to gather firelight.

He failed. We often do.

Spider thought her web into being. She had the light of the moon, but she too craved fire. Elaborate in her arrangement of limbs, she set off toward the amber horizon to gather it. The others nodded, smiled, followed the periphery.

All biological systems are porous, dependant upon some kind of exchange. When spider brought the people fire, her once black back pulsed with a new orange light. The people feared the worst. That she was aflame. That she had return without.

Physics has its own explanation for things. There is no buzzard or spider but always there is fire. Without it there would be no beginning or end, no attachment to the story.

Imagine the world is in fact cleaved, a split in spider’s back. Beneath the red glow is a viscous fluid. Swim into to it. Who knows what you’ll find.

Kingdom

There are four families of primates in the new world. Scientists believe that platyrrhini migrated across the Atlantic Ocean to South America some 40 million years ago on a raft of mangrove. New world monkeys differ from old world monkeys primarily in the nose and teeth. Platyrrhini is the flat nosed one with twelve premolars instead of eight. These were formed after months of eating only the bark of the mangrove raft. Even now they sometimes hang from the limbs of trees by their teeth. But it is the prehensile tail, that most wondrous limb, that make the new world primates so strange to behold. Up there in the tree she is beckoning you with a flick of her tail. It is as strong as your arm, but more supple, the surface soft with fur. If you could you would swing yourself up to her. You are the same order but a different family. You lack the arboreal. She is preternaturally flirtatious. This should serve as a warning to you. But you are entranced by the movement of her furred appendage. Come she says and somehow without limb or flight you do.

Phylum

The Americas span eight percent of the earth’s surface. Everywhere, there is water. You are all wetness, some tearing of. This is only a phenomenon of the body. Your mind has utterly left you alone. What is it to be sentient and not sapient, to hold oneself subjectively but to lack apperception, that tingling sensation at the base of your neck? In desperation, South America broke free of the supercontinent Gondwanaland. Where else was there for it to go? Then came the volcanoes, the endless erosion. An entire world was formed. When you let her inside of you, you became isthmus, this fingering of. Later she would dredge you, make a canal of your intestines, sail clear through.

The people of the new world were migrant workers. The people of the old were too. This is what it means to be conscious, to bridge past and present, self and environment, to pull oneself through. But always there are reminders. The Americas never could shake free of the cartographers, the biologists with their endless collection jars. You cannot shake yourself free of the weight, this longing for.

Amerigo Vespucci renamed himself after Amerike, a merchant who financed explorations across the oceanic expanse. To be closer to the continents. To be of and from. To be with her and to forget everything else. To hold her and name this geography your own.

The Americas are rimmed with mountains. Between lay vast plains. In the north, there are protestants everywhere. Even the immense river basin cannot wash the land free of them. What has been sacrificed still bleeds in the mountainside. The rest is leeched white. A blanketing or blizzard of. These puritans of the new world.

Class

There are many means of differentiation. To order yourself according to. To sort then judge. Taxonomy is a hierarchical arrangement. You learned this early, but somehow misunderstood hierarchy’s relationship to gender. Who could imagine that the parameters of girlhood could be so narrow? This is a problem of being; some make a study of it. Others fuck their way through, the knowledge of how being more fun than the knowledge of why. In either case, the nomenclature differs, but the effect is the same.

Pay attention to the color and texture of your tongue. This is predictive; it is diagnostic. In the center strip is a narrow groove. Many have been caught in it. Sometimes your mouth is too full to chew. This is how you learn the limits of your heart. When she follows the curve of you there is both slippage and some wooded place, what birds hatch the sky into. You call yourself wing, a feathering, but cannot navigate the wind. Any impediment really is enough to make you forget your own classification.

Without order there is some confusion about cause and effect. But you will always have metaphor. Somewhere in this juxtaposition is the capacity to transform. Your tongue riot with. Each exhalation, the birth of another century, its violent form.

Order

As if. And so. The night is only this. Always there are sirens. Injuries big enough to slip the whole world into. The city swells with them.

In the darkness, the buildings sway as if limbs. But it is we who are entangled. In daylight it is easier to see the doorways are empty. No one is seated in the chair.

I claimed to whisper the trees into being. You took responsibility for the stars hovering. Somewhere in between is the story I am not telling you.

Our imagination binds us. The world could be nothing more than dawn’s pink light. I have renamed myself mourning or morning or night no more. The dawn is non responsive. There are too many of us who claim this side of the earth over that one, whatever is temporarily facing the sun. If we could travel our whole lives in pursuit of it, we would have nothing more than. We would be. And so.

Tribe

The birds tend to flicker. Dawn does. Then the city. As if no one. The fog is almost family. It gets under your skin.

Even your dreams have discovered themselves hiding. A deliberate obscurification. You make too much of the differing. The shifting hues. We are all our own worst. Call it what you will. In this we are common.

Family

No one would wish such a thing. Or we all do. To claim everyone you have ever known. To pretend you can see the thread of. There is nothing really. Proximity. Time. The tendency of things to carry on like that. If you were to simply move to another table you would find the same glassware, the same wilted carnation. Call the woman sitting closest to you by the name of your dead not mother and carry on as if she was someone you once loved. There was so much you never got to say. Forget the petty complaints. Tell her she was handsome, remote, a little without. You both are.

Genus

In the beginning there was life – or always life – and latter it was named as such. To call each day something different and test its relationship to the previous. To restrict ourselves to what is known.

When I was eight I saw Jesus in the back seat of my mother’s yellow Corolla. He looked just like the bible school coloring books depicted him, long-haired, smiling. I stroked his beard, asked him for small corrections. A new bicycle, a different childhood. He never said a word.

Others are more often visited by Mary, the blessed one. Her apparition appears in rocks, the façade of buildings, beneath the bows of an olive tree. Always, she is the nurturer, the supplicant. But I imagined myself the only boy in a family of girls. I chose Jesus, the son, because he presented a morphology I longed to call my own.

To many of us have learned to name ourselves according to our placement on the arc. So many pairs of things. Noah was adamant about the gender restrictions. But there was no time to check every animal that walked up the plank. Inevitably it was the chimpanzee. All those budding female primates, it was easy enough to slip in between. If only she had been a little less hairy. If only she had not spent so much time touching herself. Everything had been preordained, but nothing could be predicted. When Noah tried to toss her off the arc, the other apes revolted. In the scuffle, the arc listed, cracking the hull in two. Many were lost to the murky waters. But not the chimpanzee. She is with us still, or rather her legacy, the capacity to.

Species

The Sundarbans have always been unstable. To be born. To gain and loose with every tide. The tigers do not mourn the silt and erosion. They are amphibious. Being adaptive has not assured their survival. Pollution and deforestation are as rapacious as dusk.

Weather was once an oral history. Now we know the exact temperature of the ocean, the rising levels of the sea. We can predict which islands will be swallowed by water. Chart drought through a lattice of empty riverbeds that have begun to crack and bleed.

There are other markers of our evolution. An intolerance of the things we cannot see. To say humans are distinct in their desire to understand and influence the world around them would be to miss the point entirely. That is what sentience means. The Bengal Tiger is the largest of the world’s cats. She swims quickly against the tide. If hungry she will eat lizards, fish, a villager who has lost his way. But she cannot eat the world free of sapiens, self named as wise or knowing, those who with thumb and tool wreck the very ground beneath their feet.

from Notes to Nomenclature

2008-04-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

Adze:

I should begin with adik, with reindeer and caribou. To know the geography of it, to start with its features.

Your face is this blur of fur and antler.

My story is the history of frontier, a wooded terrain. We could not see each other through the cacophony of trees. But I could hear you breathing. Some kind of wind the nose sings. Adze is a way of stripping the layers of. When the skin is stripped from muscle, cleaved from bone.

Agawaatese is not the sound but the shadow. An interception of light.

Bagijigan:

Offering. I have only this. A life without footprints.

From the rooftop anything is possible. Free of ground and its gravities, there is no track of your departure. I found a book of two tongues from which I describe twilight. I too am this in between thing.

Miziwekamig is not earth. It is adverb; it is strewn about and across. Aki is the name by which the earth is called in secret, what I would have whispered into the soft yield of your belly if you had remained. Now, alone, I could call the world akiiwan, this celestial body. To be gravity and mass, to cling to what you know. I would have given you this, my slippery tongue, but you were walking backward toward the edge of the rooftop. Beyond you was the emptiness of horizon, asphalt, another inanimate future self.

Capital:

Dawn is not self referential. Neither is dusk. If I could speak this, if I could, anishinaabe-gaagiigido.

I know only what language makes possible. A tenuous transmission of. I could describe it as inendaagozi or inendaagwad, but meaning is something else entirely. To be remembered is not to hold the idea of oneself, some bundled thing wrapped against the cold.

You once said that nouns were for accumulation, for bartering and trade. Use everything you can, you said. I have laid out all my assets on the rooftop. There is some duplication, an echoing of. In which language should I describe the different parts of me? Inzid, my foot. There is another.

By dusk the buzzards have blanketed the sky overhead. There is shadow and body, memory and mass.

I have sorted the dismembered pieces of me according to their function. Apendage is crowded, but indengway has no one beside her. What can one do with a face? Peel back the skin and her features are indistinguishable. Remove nishkiinzigoon and, now sightless, she is without point of view.

from Notes to Nomenclature

2008-04-10T08:22:00.000-07:00

Jaaga’e:

It is true, I have spent all my ammunition. I am unarmed on the rooftop, the site of your absence from.

Below the world is its own clamoring. When akiwenzii, the old man, settles in the doorway, he fills it with his accumulation, a lifetime of. I am not the only one watching. Behind the flowered curtain is my neighbor, a woman whose life is a fearful surveillance. A half an hour later, the police have come. I am like mizise, a bird hovering.

Below the world repeats itself. A policeman kicks akiwenzii’s legs, which in sleep have protruded beyond the shadow of the doorway. I shout from the rooftop, nimishoo, grandpa, but akiwenzii does he not to hear me. The other man takes out his nightstick and waves it across the spread of disastrous belongings. Akiwenzii gathers his legs, but does not flinch. Every uniform is a reference to its violent origin. Akiwenzii is old enough to know the etymology.

Nimishoo is the one whose own family called him other. His mother said as much, even without the stink of history on her breath. When he was twelve, his uncle gave him a pet lizard and a waagikomaan, a hooked knife, something to split the life from. For his gifts, uncle made certain requests. Simple things really, a touch, a brief opening. Only later did nimishoo learn to read his life according to the shape of another man’s intestines.

Who can say what it means to be spent, empty of. In one move, akiwenzii lifts himself to his knees and draws the knife across the policeman’s waist. He grabs the mess of entrails as a talisman against the other. Nimishoo knows the world is flat. More than once, he has fallen off.

Quell:

One quarter of rams prefer the horned, the horny male of their species. Older studies of human mammalian behavior found something closer to one in ten. What the ewe desires is anybody’s guess. If you sheer the coat of wool you will find tender pink flesh. Beneath your coat, you are desiccant, unyielding. You are that which cannot, won’t. You are only what you refuse to be. To quell is to rattle until the pen breaks. The ewe will choose her own direction. She is warm and fat. Her whiteness is bright against the green hills. Maanishtaanish have been called simple, docile, flock. But she is alone and grazing up toward the mountain’s spine. When night calls the wolves howl. She tucks her legs beneath her white coat and dreams of men, penned and naked, bleating like sheep.

from Worst Case

2008-03-20T16:34:00.001-07:00

In the Elevator...

The elevator is the last frontier. There are Indians and buffalo. Bring your shotgun and something to roast over the fire. You are Custer and Geronimo, Red Bull and General Jackson. Cross-pollination creates genetic diversity. You are in the elevator. You will not breed. The buffalo are hiding in the mountainside. The Indians are inside your skin. There are two types of elevators, hydraulic and cable, of which the hydraulic is most likely to fall. The lights go out. In the darkness you can hear someone breathing beside you. When the elevator door closed, you were alone. Now you are not. We all have relatives living inside of us, beside us. When the elevator begins to fall, drop to your stomach; cover your head. Don’t worry about the person breathing beside you. No one survives an elevator fall. If you die without breeding there will be one less Indian. Indians are important. Without Indians, team mascots would be reptiles and four legged mammals. Without Indians, there would be no popcorn. There was a movie about an Indian. She steered the canoe. She was from a different tribe; you wouldn’t have understood one another. But she knew better than to get into a hydraulic elevator. That was one of the lessons you lost along the way. The other lesson was more esoteric. Something about humility or was it history. Listen to your ancestor. She is on the floor beside you. She is holding your head in the crook of her arm.

Final Instructions

2007-12-29T09:41:00.000-08:00

Lesson Forty-Eight

If desire is so phenomenologically volatile then why do you keep finding yourself in the same predicament? This is one of those questions for which there are many answers, most of which are difficult to swallow. Twice you have begun casually, only to find yourself attached somehow to the idea of attachment, the sheer physicality of it. The third time you are better able to separate the sensation of flesh from your emotive capacity. But you didn’t anticipate the slippages of music. When he plays, each note opens until you are the air in which it sounds. If you had any sense you would have deafened yourself, quieted the call of his horn. If you had any sense you would have kept your damaged heart trapped in that mason jar. Instead you put your cupped palm in the glass and drew out the azure fly, an iridescent dragon shorn of its wings.

Lesson Forty-Nine

Only the most irresponsible among you would have recommend anything other than medication, several weeks of bed rest. But you have spent a lifetime attracting negligence. Gathering all the useless prescriptions and admonitions, you place them in an enormous bowl in the center of the room. They are like fish swimming around an empty glass. Such unhealthy things really. You wait for them to die one by one. It is not so bad to be alone in an apartment with a jar of dead ideas. It is the people, the ghosts that espoused them, who cause you the greatest concern. When they become too rowdy you slip out to the fire escape and watch the almost city draw to a close. It is not so different from all those nights you spent in the woods telling the stars off. Who are they really to look down on you with such bright indifference? The almost city lights obscure them. With your hands pressed against the metal railing, you search out another cosmology, some imploding luminosity to call your own.

Terminal Lesson

If space itself is expanding then you too should be less dense with every passing day. Your bones understand this principle; by now, they are nothing but air. But the rest of you is weighted, a muddied sediment caught in the swaddling of.

The last lesson is the most difficult one to learn. It is cumulative, prophetic. There is timing and phrasing to contend with. When he fingers the notes as if drawing sinew from flesh you can almost feel the wind slipping muscle free of bone. To sound oneself in the hollows of. To call the future another self and claim she left you first. This too is instructive.

When you weary of the lesson plan, you can always count on the propensity of others to be drawn to your destructive sense of purpose. As if you are some sick parent of. Tell them that their heart is in fact the enemy. Everything sentient really. You are perhaps the worst. Your capacity is entirely truncated. Trunk like. As if ship wrecked, only without ship, horizon, sea. There is no shelter, no water from which to drink, only the forever buried treasure of you. Go ahead, unearth it. You have nothing left to lose.

More Lessons in

2007-12-29T09:35:00.000-08:00

Lesson Forty-Two

Everything is perfect. Your hairdresser taught you this. He had the help of a medium who channeled the voice of angels. You rely instead on the occasional panic attack. Anxiety can be an excellent guide. Just last night you had a dream in which you were both the aggressor and the object of. Both of you were equally monstrous. When you, the you who was passive, resistant even, finally acquiesced, the aggressor, who was also you, a messy blond and theatrical you, turned her face to kiss you, she scared you, the you who was asleep, awake. How many years have you spent accepting whoever claims you? This should alarm you more than those brief subconscious moments in which you were hitting on your overly accommodating self.

Lesson Forty-Five

One day everything will feel less than. This is what they tell you and they are rarely wrong. Or they are often wrong but they are gone before you notice, before you can mention it. In the absence of articulation there is amnesia. The loss of experience is difficult to capture and so it too is forgotten. What was it, you wonder, that I was trying to say.

There are many different kinds of forgetting. There is the child left for hours in a basket, unremembered until hunger cracks her lungs in two. There is the life spent unconscious, a lumbering shape skating the edges of a room. In the periphery, there is always some percussive movement, a thudding thought of. You should know. You have once again forgotten everything. To call it amnesia would be too forgiving. You have selectively erased yourself, blurred your most basic features until you are unrecognizable, another half-truth, another half self, another amputee caught in between.

Practices

2007-12-29T09:33:00.000-08:00

Lesson Thirty-Seven

It has become necessary to understand the nature of desire. Not because you are desirable, but because you are so incredible desirous. Some days you can barely make it down the stairs without wetting your jeans. A hundred years ago you would have been institutionalized. Now you are just another single woman on the make. You mother would be horrified. But your grandmother, the one who shocked everyone in that small town in Illinois, would be proud. She was pretty enough to have any man she wanted and she chose the doctor, the married one. He was old enough to know better, but that didn’t stop him. Her parents knew enough to get her out of the state before the morality of the time got hold of her. She would have ended up in the same hospital as the doctor’s wife. Frigidity and promiscuity required medical correctives. The result was usually the same. All those women in white gowns, their hair combed and their sex parched. Desire is not bound by the order of language, but it can be constrained. Call it sin, punish the subject and the object. That ought to do it.

Lesson Forty-One

If chimpanzees resolve sexual issues with power and bonobos resolve power issues with sex, then you are evolutionarily closer to the bonobo, or so you would like to think. You are not alone. Many idealize the bonobo, a fruit eating chimp inhabiting a range south of the Congo River. It is a region at war. During the past decade nearly three million people have died and apes have been hunted to near extinction. In San Francisco, the children of hippies and the children of the children of hippies wear bonobo t-shirts, the black faced ape with pink lips smiling flirtatiously at the inhabitants of a pacific rim.

Two million years ago, the chipanzees and the bonobos split from the family tree. On separate sides of an enormous river that neither could traverse, they thrived. The chimpanzee, omnivorous and patriarchal, drew extensive scientific attention. Then Jane Goodall, who once said “on the whole, chimps are rather nicer than humans,” witnessed something shocking. In Gombe a chimpanzee population split in two, one group decimating the other and eating their murdered remains. This newest revelation, chimpanzees engaged in war, mirrored a rather ugly image of human kind. The bonobos provided a welcome relief. They are matrilineal and cooperative. They engaged in oral sex despite its failure to effect procreation. The Bonobos skull is smaller, generally thought to signify a reduced mental capacity, but their faces shows more individuated characteristics. Or so the primatologists tell us. The Bonobos could care less. They suck sugar cane from the researchers field, stretch, engage in tongue kissing, and rub their genitals against other female members of the group.

Bonobos pass the mirror-recognition test for self-awareness. Psychologist place particular importance on this capacity. The distinction between self and other and the ability to convey the cognizance of that distinction have long been held as central to the formulation of the ego, that mostly conscious trouble maker we call ourselves. The bonobos have their own vocabulary, although humans have yet to make sense of it. But their facial expressions, their hand gestures are intelligible to most. Come, they instruct, let’s play. Humans, in their incomprehension of the pleasure principle, all too often fail this test.

Time as measured by

2007-12-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

Lesson Twenty-Four

Do not romanticize the lives of others. They may have a house, a dog, 1.7 children to love and feed. Sometimes in the evenings they dance together while making dinner. Through their kitchen window, you watch them circle the table, arms sloppy with the ease of it. You have only this page to fill, this life to pour words into. Take tonight for instance. You mistook him for something better than he was. You are often doing this. If only you could see yourself through the same sweet skin of possibility. It wasn’t until he asked you to lift your skirt, just a few more inches to reveal the plump shaft of your inner thigh, that you understood the inaccuracy of your translation. When he said that he wanted to meet the lady writer, he meant he wanted to fuck her. You had confused your adjectives and nouns. You were still working out the grammar when he adjusted his pant leg making room for his hard-on, his little prize. Already the story of it was more interesting than the event. Here she is, you thought, the lady writer. You had wanted to meet her too.

Lesson Thirty-Five

Somehow, without any warning, your desiccated heart has rehydrated, a bloated corpse in the center of your chest. People can smell it. Rather than being repulsed, they are drawn as if by a pheromone, the way boars detect estrus in sows. You had thought you’d be more desirable heartless, but animals survived by avoiding those among them who could not feel. Newly resuscitated, your emotions are black and iridescent, strange insects pricking the surface of your skin. You wonder if this is what people mean by wearing one’s heart on their sleeve. You had always pictured something red and bloody, like newly butchered meat. But the sensation is more brittle, as if you are sheathed in fractured glass. When the light hits you, you are kaleidoscopic. A million fragments of.

Daily Instructions

2007-09-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Twenty-One

America does not trust its young with anything other than controlling interest in the entertainment industry. You were young once. You remember all the rules. At sixteen there is the possibility of driving and crashing your father’s sports utility vehicle. At eighteen you can leave the country, take up arms against a people who are neither foe nor friend. You can kill someone for reasons that do not concern you. But it is not until you are twenty-one that you can legally purchase alcohol. You have been drinking since you were twelve, but you take pleasure in this new ability to do so publicly and legally. This is when the problems begin, or rather, when you stop moving toward anything. You are in fact done. There are other things to look forward to. The ability to rent a car at twenty-five. Loss of bone marrow density and greater risk of fractures after thirty. The increased probability at thirty-five that your baby will be born with down syndrome. Most of prognostications for women involve fertility. For men there is baldness, erectile dysfunction. But at twenty one there is alcohol and the ability to purchase a handgun. You could always gamble or work as a prostitute in the State of Nevada. That is if you need something else to look forward to.

Lesson Twenty-Three

Prairie voles live in the central grasslands. Highly social mammals, they have become the subjects of choice for scientists interested in the biological sources of monogamous pair bonding. This is not a popular activity. Only three percent of mammals engage in social monogamy. Voles are divided on the subject. The male meadow vole does not express the paternal devotion shown by his cousin of the prairie. This causes much family strife. The prairie vole has long repeating strips of DNA dangling like party streamers above a gene linked to vasopressin. This is the best explanation they have for the prairie vole’s uncommon dedication to his mate and his young. Vasopressin is released when a body is low on water, causing the kidneys to hold onto everything it has, constricting its volume. It is hard to imagine this as pleasurable, but monogamy does not always feel good. The meadow vole lives in moist open areas and will abandon his mate, his newborn litter for the dark call of night. But if he is injected with vasopressin, he will return home quickly, the nib of his tail tucked between his stubby legs.

Researchers have identified three neural chemicals associated with monogamy. Oxytocin is a hormone released after orgasm in both sexes and in women during childbirth. If you rub your nipples you may also trigger a rush of. Vasopressin is pressure and its absence. This too makes monogamy possible. Dopamine is that rush of excitement, the nexus of pleasure and repeat performance.

When we love we are fingering this microscopic string. Another mammalian experiment of. If the DNA snippets dangle just above, we are faithful. If the vasopressin is in short supply, or the oxytocin is depleted, we are more likely to wrap ourselves up in the nearest cotton sheet and waddle to the refrigerator for a late night snack. Before departing, we will be sure to empty our pockets of everything that was sudden or elating. The night is its own intoxicant. There is a whole world yet to explore.

More Lessons in

2007-09-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

Lesson Eighteen

Some confuse anthropology with evolutionary psychology. You know better. Homo sapiens are neither highly developed nor capable of abstract reasoning. They are in fact rather redundant. You should know, you keep repeating yourself over and over. Just last week you made the same mistake that got you into this whole mess in the first place. But it takes three to make a pattern. Until then you can pretend there were nuanced differences between the two. You can describe your life as curiously ironic. But you’ll fuck up again. Then you’ll be forced to blame it all on your unconscious. Freud would say you need specialized assistance to analyze the random associations, dreams, verbal slips. Only in this way, will you have access to the sentient force of your own will. But there are always other techniques. Crack your skull and burrow your fingers in the cerebral cortex. Somewhere in there is the source of the problem. Pluck the virulent weed.

Lesson Nineteen

Eventually your own sorrow will be eclipsed by the trauma of another. You may be tempted to conflate your situations. But this would be a mistake. Accuracy is crucial. You abandoned your family. His boyfriend died in a hospital bed. You can barely stand to sit with him, to witness the vacancy. Only his fingers move, involuntarily tapping SOS messages into the kitchen rag he holds as a child would a blanket, a doll, someone else’s hand. It is not the sound of his sobbing, though it is terrible, or the image of him, a forty eight year old man wretched and suddenly alone. It is the gravity of your choices. He chose tough love and his lover died. You chose anything other than what you had. Now you have nothing. Eyes swollen red he warns, be careful, don’t ever do anything you will regret. But you both have. What else is there to say?

Two More Lessons

2007-08-09T17:48:00.000-07:00

Lesson Fourteen

Find a pen pal, preferably one in prison. Write him long letters in which you describe the minutiae of your daily life. His life is absent of trivia. Everything for him is significant, philosophic, self-flagellating. His letters are endlessly questioning. You imagine a life beside such a man, a quiet evening of rigorous introspection. You would hold hands, discuss the insignificance of your lives beneath a sky punctured with stars. When he asks for a photograph of you, you send him a picture of a woman from your cousin’s wedding. The woman is beautiful, more beautiful than you. Beyond that, she looks as if she capable of loving a man who suffers every nuanced thing. You of course are not. Your letters become increasingly cheerful, almost hysterically so. Descriptions of your weekly trips to the market are treatise on the bounty of nature, the miracle of modern refrigeration. You should get a job in advertising, catalogue the artifice of the present for the future. His letters shrink in on themselves. He is after all living in a cell. The last note he sends contains only three words. You cannot tell if it is a question or a statement. This is you.

Lesson Fifteen

A love poem will not save you. What can you do with a fleeting lyric, some hopeful rhyme scheme? Focus on other kinds of languaging. There is always the immediate satiation of propaganda. Take the cardiac transplant industry. They will tell you, a new heart can save your life. But your body will see the transplant as an infection. That is why rejection medication is necessary. Every day you will have to swallow another pill. Some combination of cyclosporine, tacrolimus, mycophenolate, mofetil, prednisone, azathioprine. This makes you vulnerable to antigens such as thrush, herpes, respiratory viruses. You have a very short prognosis. After a transplant, men have a longer predicted lifespan than women. No one has bothered to explain this. Instead they describe different kinds of procedures, different kinds of hearts. Remember that guy at the party for the aging photographer who had a baboon heart? He was drinking malbec in a lead crystal glass and channeling his dead primate. A few months later the man died too. The most successful patient survived 28 years. His heart was taken from the victim of a traffic accident. Blunt force trauma. When the brain dies the heart does not. Your own heart was removed in an orthotopic procedure, the great vessel transected, a portion of the left atrium excised. Before your chest cavity was closed, nothing was sutured to the remaining vessels. Nothing in fact was ever put in its place.

50 Ways (and then some)

2007-08-07T20:37:00.000-07:00

Lesson Eleven

Call it superstition or projection. An obsession with the figurative. The sparrow’s nest outside your front door. Or it was your front door, until you walked out of it with your hastily packed bags of clothes, shoes and books. The nest is still there. The eggs have hatched. The chicks have died. The parents watch the house mournfully from the telephone wire. You could have told them that the nest was poorly built, the walls too low, the placement suicidal. New parents, they are still learning. They watch the first two fledglings fall, one by one, the bodies tiny and rigid on the porch. The third hatchling hides in her shell at the bottom of the nest. Weeks go by. Now she is here to greet you. A white strip of feather across each cheek as if painted for battle. She is. But you are uncertain which act would be the most brave. To leave or to return. She’s perched on the edge of a nest she has outgrown, weighing the odds.

Lesson Twelve

Hominins did not always survive with their hearts intact. In the Paleolithic period, the evolutionary process affected a rapid series of genealogical aberrations. Species came and went. Homo Habilis was short with arms sweeping past her knees. When her lover told her he was leaving her for Homo Ergaster, that bitch, Habilis whipped her arm around her lover’s chest and struck with such force it cracked his sternum and depressed his heart. Habilis found her own heart had turned to stone. In this way, Habilis survived, the mother of a stone-age species that existed another five hundred years.

Homo Antecessor was without any antecedents. She made herself up daily. The keeper of the first symbolic language, Antecessor carved the history of her species into the thick folds of her skin. It was the sweet smell of her blood that drew the others. She charmed them with the patterns of symbols she’d drawn in the recess of her chin. But lust cannot be quelled by ambiguous iconography. Antecessor was the word made flesh and the first to be consumed. It was her flesh that drove them, but her heart that they swallowed whole. In this way Antecessor became a part of the future. The riches of her literate body, the meat of her, gnawed from bone.

Homo Soloensis was that island girl who dreamed of something other than river valleys and oceanographic expanse. She was gracile and unusually adaptive. This would be her downfall. What girl can be greater than the collective fear of men? When Soloensis developed a sharper cutting tool, the committee of elders worried she would threaten the order of her species. They thought first to remove her hands, but she managed to use her feet so agilely they amputated other parts of her as well. It is hard to say what she missed more, the familiarity of her thoughts, which disappeared abruptly when they split her skull and took a meal of the matter that spilled forth, or her heart, its rhythmic arrangement of color. When her heart was excised and divided among the elders, the strips of muscle twitched. Each man took her trembling ligament into his mouth and in this way Soloensis, the dreamer, became the body through which fearful Homo Sapiens persist.

Lesson Thirteen

You have always been unlucky. Blame it on that selfish gene, the ruthless evolutionary protagonist. If you were male such a narrative would be compellingly productive. But you are not. You are a woman on a bench. There are children playing. A little girl grabs a stuffed animal from the arms of another child, a little boy who cries. How can you describe the girl as more relational, cooperative? The boy more objective? Do the antics of American children in a playground mean anything other than a moment in place and time? Social biology has a lot to say on the matter. You should too. Science depends on its capacity for extrapolation. Take your own case in point. You are woman who abandoned her family, slipped through the intricate network of interpersonal connections. Untethered. In the science of sex you are an aberration, a dilemma. In the backpack beside you is your broken heart. It has long since stopped bleeding. Now desiccant, it is the size of a grapefruit, a child’s ball. Toss it into the playground. If the little girl catches it, you will have a story about the nature of sex. Unlike the biological accounts of behavior, this little experiment tells us something different. We are ruse and artifice. In the ongoing staging of self, we can become anything at all.

50 Ways to Break You Heart (continues...)

2007-07-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

Seven Sides to the Story

There are seven bison remaining in California. They live on the slope of an excavated hill. At dawn they cluster together on the western edge of fence. There is no mountainside for them to hide in. White Buffalo Calf Woman gave the Lakota the sacred pipe. She was wakan and could not be harmed by arrow or bullet. The people had other weapons. She gave them seven sacred rituals and then disappeared into the white cloud of their disbelief. There are seven bison and 36,457,549 people in California. The largest terrestrial mammal in North America, the bison live in a paddock the size of a city block. Darkly furred and humped, bison can live for up to 20 years. In captivity their lives are more precarious; they suffer from alcoholism, poverty, a sickness of spirit. 60 million bison once roamed the grasslands of North America. There are seven circling their pen. There is only one way to tell you this. We are endangered. Current rates of depensation make it unlikely that we will ever recover.

Lesson Nine

1)

Make a list of every fucking thing anyone has ever done to you. Go year by year, recalling every slight, every rejection and disappointment. This may take some time. At some point, your throat will close and your hand will spasm and freeze. Take a deep breath. Proceed.

2)

Put words in other people’s mouths. You’re a manipulator. This shouldn’t be hard for you to do. Write aphorisms on strips of rice paper and place them into every open mouth you see. When people protest, tell them “it is not wise to beat your chest if your heart is stone.” Place you hand across their lips. Put some paper in your own mouth and chew.

3)

Place a help wanted ad in the newspaper. Say, help wanted. No name or number. Nothing else. Just, help wanted.

4)

Steal someone else’s pet, preferably one of those well groomed poodles. Keep it until its coat is shaggy, the bow lopsided and stained. Then send it home. You will have what you were seeking, a bittersweet week spent in the proximity of something cherished, the stolen property of someone capable of such an emotion.

more from 50 Ways to Break Your Heart

2007-07-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

Lesson Five

Pick anything, anyone. Make them into to something greater than they are. This is a familiar activity. Remember when you cast that bastard as a revolutionary hero? Remember all that political rhetoric you used to swaddle your own heart?

The easiest solution is to make him her or her him. Some kind of biochemical transition. There’s always that Indian boy who knows enough about women to know they are not born as such; it is something they choose to become. Grammatically speaking there are two ways of being, some assignment the nouns take. But gender is as infinite as sound. Indonesian gamelan ensembles often include three gendér. Most heartbreaks involve three bodies. The best boys were once girls. That girl, the one who broke your heart, she was a boy once too.

Lesson Six

You were an anarchist as a teenager. Stole canned goods from supermarkets and spent four days in the desert with a punk rock band and an assault rifle. This earned you a picture on the back cover of their record album. It was a hot, bright afternoon. You were drinking beer in your pajamas, some teenage girl in a dry riverbed. Later things took a turn for the worse. During a break in the set, the drummer took the rifle and scanned targets from the ridge. It did in fact seem anarchistic. The other band members sat drinking in their chairs but you and the other girl decided to run. You figured he was too drunk to manage distance and movement. But your departure signaled you both as prey. In the end, nobody died. You all drove back to the city together in the same broken down van. After that, it became hard to imagine the enduring benefits of a lifetime dedicated to such social disorder. You turned instead to communism, to labor and books. This would prove to be equally disappointing. But by then you were older. Disappointment was easier to bear.

from 50 Ways to Break Your Heart

2007-07-03T14:52:00.000-07:00

Lesson One

Say it isn’t broken. A muscle can’t really break at all. It can tear, torque, atrophy. It can be stripped of skin, cleaved from bone.

If it is exposed, palpitating, slick with blood, close your eyes and imagine it belongs to someone else. Grab someone, anyone and tell them, “you’ve dropped something. Your heart. It looks injured.” Then run as fast as you can.

Rename the fucking thing. Call it memory or fear. Take a big roll of duct tape and wrap the mess of it into a tight silver lump. Put it on your bookshelf. If anyone asks, you can tell them some vague story about a dog you once had, a dog that loved duct tape, loved that odd shaped orb of it. It is easy enough to imagine. Who hasn’t had such a dog?

Lesson Two

Forget about it all together. Really, who cares if your heart is broken? It caused you nothing but trouble to begin with. Remember you’re Indian; your heart was stolen long ago. Hang the medicine pouch around your neck. Cover the hollow of your chest with herbs. When you miss the pulsation of your own heartbeat, hum the sound of its vanishing. Those white folks won’t even notice. Something so insignificant as nostalgia shouldn’t bother anyone at all.

Light Post 69

2007-05-24T14:18:00.001-07:00

Words are never enough. To describe it. Life. The ending of it. Last night on the bridge. Not night, daylight still, sunset or almost. The warm day disappearing into the windy fog of evening. A crowded crossing. The pedestrian path scattered with people, their eyes obscured by camera lenses. At the crest of the bridge, the boy swings himself up by the light post and lands catlike on the lip of the balustrade. He is young as boys are, black haired and carelessly clothed. He hovers, higher than anyone dares to be. So brave and stubborn. Then he leaps out, his arms and legs bent back as if diving into the slippery calm of a pool. The light flashes on the metal struts of his belt. He is glittering. Free. The cameras remain pointed toward the water and the islands which crowd the bay. The cars cross back and forth from one tip of land to another. Nothing stops, or shifts, or stutters. Nothing changes. The water is too far below to sound his arrival.

A Year of Living

2007-01-02T13:37:00.000-08:00

I spent the close of 2006 with my sister in her adopted city, Brooklyn, NY. So much has been said about New York, so many lives tossed in its throngs. I too love the energy of it, its relentless humanness. Everything the modern ages holds dear, asphalt, high rises, a profusion of goods on display. But by the 5th day I dreamed of mule deer, ears thrush with ticks. I dreamt a hillside dense with evergreens.

When I finally made it back to the state park in which I live, I put on my waterproof boots and tromped past the old barns through the mud and brush a half mile to the seasonal waterfall. In the winter, the water pounds the six foot drop, sounding as loudly as the city I had just fled. But unlike the cars and people that travel Brooklyn’s street, the creek is without past or future, without attachment to its own present tense. The rush of water over the rocky face of earth simply is. Its music is not music, is not organized by time. It sounds timbre, the color of.

The day after New Years I rise before dawn. Driving up the valley I see a buck, its neck burdened by antlers. At the crest of the ridge, a coyote walks its leisurely dawn. In this place, this small expanse of something other than human ambition and need, I can breath. It is a life less compelling than the urbanity of others. I write as if to compensate for my disinterest. The coyote pauses at the edge of the road, turns its head to me. Nothing I have ever said or done matters. The moon writes itself in her features.

a welcome of sorts

2006-12-20T09:55:00.000-08:00

this is less of a blog than a shameless attempt to get myself in cyberspace - a sort of aborted shuttle launch. i will be posting new work and maybe even some bloggish type things in the coming weeks.