The swirl and unfurl of the past
follows no pattern, except now.
The future lies less entangled with
meanings than with hope’s dreams.
I hold these multifoliate strands
weaving my patterns on a wind.
(December 26, 1995
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3. Differentiate and Blend
by
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Dreaming
by
I worry each detail; yet,
these are no Martin Luther King Dreams
articulated to thousands milling
around Lincoln like galactic spirals.
But ones that ferment, rumble
from below like a bronco
new to the saddle twisting
away as I lie almost asleep.
The alarm waits to ring, the
bedsheet winds about me, Laocoon
wrestling stone snakes.
Conversations I have had turn
into ones I have not;
friends and strangers become incubi
or succubi. Seductive wet kisses
entangle my next waking greeting.
These dreams grow through the night,
to turn their roots into my day,
mushroom’s pale flesh.
Like worms in a spaniel’s heart
they clot my speech–have I
told this story before? Have I
seen this person in another form?
Like waking in an unfamiliar room
these dreams entangle me
making it hard to see like Descartes
past the melting candle to
the circular cogito ergo sum , to
the dream that stands clear,
the dream that has no morning.(summer 1990)
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Cusp
by
How do we come to know:
the routines of the day,
the patterns of spring to spring,
the similarities amid chaos?
The mirrors in the kaleidoscope
give shape to random flotsam.We think we discern more
in our reflections of the world;
the future’s fixed unfolding
in a furtive flight of birds.I speak to you in my own way;
our words shape themselves
against the shape of themselves:
consensual, in anticipation of a kiss.(May 2010)
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A Prologue for an Unread Text
A few weeks ago a friend told me that she was reading a typescript I had given her several years ago. It was a series of poems titled: “Primogenitive Folly.” I went and found it on my computer and reread it and have since posted a few of the poems. At the time I wrote it, I had been reading Guy Davenport’s “7 Greeks.” I was interested in the way he simply translated the words that were there. If the greek was fragmented he simply translated the words that were there and to indicate where words were missing, Davenport would put parentheses around empty space. I liked the way the gaps, the silences, between the words , and the iconic nature of the words themselves took on meaning when placed next to one another. Bits of the Greek survived in packing material for trade goods, like an ancient world bubble wrap, waiting for a scholar two thousand years later to interpret the authorship through some strange arcane knowledge. So as I began to work out what I was going to work through during the summer of 2001, I was thinking about fragments and the randomness of the surviving words.
For several years before the summer of 2001, I had been interested in the use of constructs, fairly random for the most part, as a way to structure long poems. So I decided to use the first 64 prime numbers as a way to structure a series of poems. The total length of the series would be 64 poems to reflect the number of ideograms in the I Ching. Many years earlier I had used the I Ching as a lens through which to write a series of 250 six line poems over the course of a year. I didn’t want to limit all of the poems in the new series to a set number of lines. After worrying over how I could have a structure that was not a static shape on an individual poem level, I came up with prime numbers simply as a numerical device to limit or push the length of the individual poems in the series. I decided to use the prime numbers as a way to number the words, syllables, letters or lines of each of the poems in the series in a purely arbitrary way. All of this random numerical structuring reminded me of the habit of the some of the gentry in England in the early 1800’s, where they would construct fake runes on their estates called follys. Since I was going to write poems which purposely contained empty space and erasures, both false and real, similar to the Davenport translations of the Greek poems, I named the series before I began writing it, “Primogenitive Folly.” A bad pun since I was using prime numbers as a way to generate my “folly.” -
from "Primogenitive Folly" (20)
by
did it just occur
this thinkingand when
did it come
as a shock
a sharp wince of pain
upon leaving the cavehowling with the realization
scarred by the experienceor
like wittgenstein
slowly across the wholethere it was
daylight
and such a warm sun
should have come here long ago
-
from "Primogenitive Folly" (29)
by
Who believes?
the awareness
like sandpaper across the iris
blinds before any revelation
is exposed – –and even at that
delusion washes all
a cold salve to placate
a passive domesticity.And what of it?
the tired rantings of the self-righteous,
“You should be experiencing
excruciating pain!”But I’m not.
Like the cat curled, purring
on the end of the couch – –I am presently content – –
despite all – –
I am
happy to be
no more
than what I am
(August 2001-April 2003)
-
from "Primogenitive Folly" (55)
by
events in a field like light
from a star bending about the sun
each affecting the other in infinite exchange
a bee drifts with lackadaisical precision
linking flower to flower before heading home
across an open meadow covered with dewthe sun the flower the bee you me
bending toward each other collapsing
in a field radiant with lifein a field radiant with life
bending toward each other collapsing
the sun the flower the bee you meit’s all so succinctly repetitious
another day, like the orbiting moon
its tidal force pulling on the sea
(no thought or will to dissent
the current catches all like a net)
then releases to wash freely along the shorewater light time you me flows
quick slip twirl and fall
slow meander to merge with allwater through water air through air
events in a field suffused with light
separate yet bending toward each other
like the sun hurling toward a point
a somewhere beyond the center which holds
nothing but all in a twirl we turn toward
like a bee in a meadow covered with dew(August 2001-April 2003)
-
from "Primogenitive Folly" (58)
by
any second i will be exposed found out the fairy tale emperor nude on the street not that anyone would notice for after all who is interested in others more than oneself enough to pay attention that closely to find more than surface faults a button dangling loose on a thread a slight intrusive consonant shift when speaking after several drinks a thought would never be noticed embedded as it is in the language like sand wedged into an oyster a small irritant yet still enough with time so obviously it is not the stares and laughter of the people on the street that make me cower like a simpering syncohophant but the fear that i will expose myself to myself the mask removed as yeats went on about reveals another mask but to me without a mask it would be like staring into the face of god annihilation not because of the omnicious presence but rather the omnivorous absence that waits beneath all the fluff and blather that spews from me like the clouds of black ink from a squid in full retreat it is safer not to look to avert my glance to watch the sand dance then settle to be stirred before again returning to the shore certainly never watch the waves nor think about the moon stay at home burrow deeper instead of breaking walls cast up more i self advise mask upon mask layer upon layer bury everything beneath a multi hierarchical camouflage yet without a convergence without a center to be revealed bury the sarcophagus the king is dead long live the king
(August 2001-April 2003)
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Another Sigh
another sigh follows the first
an unvoiced prayer I read once
so prayer piles on prayer to heavennot so much the worry as the cliched
reaction and response from myself
and others: maybe it’s not truemaybe if the word isn’t spoken
the spirit will not be called
the stroke will remain yet to fallI sigh yet again worrying
the smallest ache, the slightest
difference into a panalopy of symptomsthe words, all words, are cliché
meaning trails in an icebreaker’s wake
ice fragments jostling for reformation(Summer 2006)
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Researcher In My Classroom
by
Since September I have had a doctoral canidate in my classroom doing research on writing conferences. I was leery of doing this at first, as well as eager for her to come into my room. I like the comfort level I have in my classroom with my students. I can be who I am as a teacher with relative ease after the first week of school. The students at first are entertained by my presence then settle into the routine of the class and become a part of my jabber on writing and literature. When others come into the room, I am disturbed by the presence of someone else who is not my target audience, but yet an audience nonetheless. I trusted Anna because she had been in a number of my doc classes when I was still a part of the program. I had seen her mind work, so she was not a complete unknown.
Without being disengenous I have not ever been sure what it is I do in my class, what impact/change I have on my students. From a class on Curriculum Theory with Lisa Cary, the statement from Dr. Cary, “It is not the class, but the teacher” has stayed with me. It is not the dangerous, narcisistic draw of the statement, but the implication that there is more going on in the classroom than the stated objectives or TEKS of the course. The curriculum is always broader than the course outline, and the manifestation of the unstated curriculum occurs in the presence of the teacher: what he or she brings to the class with her existance/experience as a human being in relation to the academic subject being taught. -
Risk
by
Fear lies in the demarcation
between this desire and action:a hand trailed, fingers dancing lightly,
down the length of her spine,unrealized except in the metaphor
of this pen’s nib across the page,the sensuous play of the word
as it unfolds the world we become.Yet to crawl out of my skin,
to escape the constellationsof my collective guilts,
would be to woo myself awayfrom all that I am and cross
into only that which I deplore. -
Another Construct
by
this world unfolds
like a bad script
the dialog
the plot twists
become the cliches
of these linesyet they are here
in front of me
despite themselvesas if my friends are reading
off of this page now as I write
the words spill from their mouths
like grapes from Dionysiusdo I write what they say
a stenographer documenting the day
or is my script their scriptcreation :: imitation :: mockery :: me
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What Was Said
by
A conversation is cut complete
from nonexistent cloth.
The idea embedded in a casual phrase
slips into the sludge of my meandering thought.
Everything’s imbued with meaning;
Nothing lacks for significance.Days pass, then weeks:
I return to what was said
like a child picks a scab – –
Look! there it is again
bleeding its tendril roots
into paranoid fantasies of desire.Each word, each syllable,
each intonation massaged
like fingers fiddling over prayer beads
for a meaning (my meaning),
some pattern in an ever-shifting context,
squeezing, like nits, each carved-wood rose
until the tenuous links in the chain snap
scattering all across my unsteady floor. -
Where I Live: We’re not in Kansas Anymore, or Oz for that Matter.
We live in a rainbow of Chaos.
Paul CezanneViola: Thy reason, man?
Feste: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words; and
words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 3, scene 1I exist in a postmodern universe. It does not matter that most of my life is in a world of modernity; I exist in the post-modern. Even if in All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Breman claims that the post-modern is just another manifestation of the modern, which is repeatedly building up a world only to tear it down again; the post-modern exists in reaction to the modern. When I was working on my Master’s degree in English literature in the early 90s, the best definition of the difference between the modern and the postmodern that I came across was that both recognized the chaos of the universe, yet modernism tried to impose an order on the chaos, whereas the postmodern accepts and revels in the chaos. Although I would like the world to be a predictable normal place, thus the attraction of positivism, the randomness of my experience belies that possibility. And as Nietzsche wrote, “In the end one only experiences oneself.”
I am also attracted to the postmodern paradigm because of the importance that language plays in the unfolding of thought. “One must be ready to hold word and concept in precarious tension. What this means, above all else, is that in every sign there remains the trace of ‘the other’ that eludes our grasp.” (Crotty 2003, p. 206) When I was in third grade I became enthralled by my first encounter with the paradoxical nature of language when I thought: “Nothing has to be something, or it wouldn’t have a name.” I realize now that there is more to ontology than the words we use to negotiate our encounters with the world, but language, or some other sign system of similar nature, is also the only tool we have in which to hold the conversation we have, even if the conversation is only with ourselves. I listen to my students as they struggle with giving meaning to their lives, most often the discourses they employ to this end are choked with clichés and pat phrases inherited from the dominant culture At best words allow us a way to control how we grapple with the world “always already here,” while at the same time language controls how and what we are able to say. “As Lyotard insists, there is no metanarrative that can bring things together for us. There is no language and our language games are thoroughly fragmented.” (Crotty 2003, p. 212) The ineffable is that which is on the tip of our tongues.(from an essay I wrote for a doctoral class in 2006)
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Party
by
more than an amalgam of voices
images fly in a mad pastichethe connective threads flit out
like fly fisherman in rivers of dream
casting lines to catch more
than what makes up my worldlost in what to say
I cough a stammer
take another drink
mumble another inanity,“Yeah, right, what a game – – “
then like a squirrel frozen
halfway across the street
not knowing, like Macbeth,
to go or return, I fleeso much goes by – –
thirty years and still
the same playnothing to say
on the events of the day:
which celebrity is fucking who
what Fred said down the hall
what television show is so hipIt hurts to hear the delocution of my soul
I can do nothing with the words given me
no one hears the words I sayI move to a corner of the room
glance at the cover of the one book I see
a burly man half-clad in the arms of a womanI heave a half-smiled sigh
eyes focused between here
and somewhere that does not exist(December 2009)
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