08.31.2004

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel—Samuel Johnson
If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right—Senator Carl Schurz

"Go fuck yourself"—Vice President Dick Cheney to Senator Patrick Leahy
"Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb"—America, Allen Ginsberg

08.30.2004

The more advanced the communication system, the less is communicated
The street remains a key technology in the landscape of the city

Stay humble and trust your judgment—how possible is that?
Truth to power; truth to lies . . . balderdash, truth is a lie

An act is completed in the response it elicits
A word finds meaning in its associates

08.29.2004

In stifling heat coffins that were banned are carried in the street
For what it's worth, hundreds of thousands state the claim

08.28.2004

The best image shows afresh what's always present
An image may open the represented thing to a new use

08.27.2004

The shell of summer dissolves and darkness precludes
The body's longing wells up, congeals in the mind

08.26.2004

I don't match a thing in this room
Some days the hours fit like a glove

The nothing, the they, and the the arouse most philosophers
Despite the diagnosis and the odds our hopes were aroused

After a few drinks, the "science" of a séance makes sense
After a session of prolonged sushi, severe symptoms subsided

He had never seen someone naked in a movie; it was not appealing
As we look, and lust is aroused, our kinship with Eden is asserted

He bought a length of time, cut it up, made some joys
The sky was empty, packed with light, operating like a watch

There's no point in doing this, it's not inventive
Maybe you can collage a line, or maybe I still miss the point

08.25.2004

One falls in love; one falls into a funk; one falls and falls like Lucifer
Time tootles blithely along, making music, forgiveness and seasons possible

The river passes me as I pass it, we shuttle solitary moments
Lapping waves slowly drink the temporal shore

We are like a river: moving along, full of where we've been, descending
We work almost as hard at concealing as at revealing

High in the mountains, some scenes take captives
A silence fills the hills, and feels essential to landscape

Science depends on Nature's generosity
There's more cunning in research than we want to know

When you feel silence, what has been brought close?
Single car approaches through the woods, blue jays keep yapping

08.24.2004

That poem claims the Lord can't see the fleas—maybe he's losing it
Screaming jets, dust of bombs, fog of lies . . . The truth: whimpering voices

08.23.2004

What's visible expands; what's understood shrinks
The wilderness has been bequeathed to photography

08.22.2004

Rupture in the pattern closed the door to rapture
The gone is gone and all we've got is this crummy bling bling

08.21.2004

The cat, the rat, the birds chirping—after death our lives will converge
How did the nature of a dog pass over into the culture of companionship?

Radio they listen to while they work plays Say A Little Prayer For You
Ring on her toe, capacious cleavage exposed, big gold cross hangs there

08.20.2004

Large legs lurk in the lobby; the toothbrush tickled his trachea
The body is not a plaything; his liver's no longer living

Stuck in the lobby the president nurses a grudge
No one knows what's planned until the moment it happens

08.19.2004

Limits come into focus, giving a reason to embrace freedom
We seek out freedom like the Minotaur in the Labyrinth

Sixteen: She begins to fan out across a life
Time helps the imagination with bridging

Deep silence is a kind of song
Music dominates silence like sculpture does space

08.18.2004

What in the world begets the happiness you get to live in as yours?
You may look at things as a consumer, or you may look to understand

Why look at animals? To learn to look at the human body
Please, question me with your eyes

Don't let photographs steal your memory
Don't let realism eat up your soul

I like to run my tongue there, it's like singing a favorite song
I decided to keep at it and knew I needed adverbs

He's working on a history of the noise between musical notes
I saw your face before you were born — parents' Zen

Love parsed our dances
Fate ate my chances

I am determined to do things my way as soon as I find it
They say we must X; they say we can't Y; they can to go hell

08.17.2004

Reality provides; time fructifies; imagination destroys
In the flood of sweet time: dread, disdain, detritus of despair

He got a whiff of quiet desperation, and the pond didn't look so sweet
We can't talk about it unless someone gives the words, shows us how

One day it struck him, lucid lies at the core of hallucination
Settle down, take a vacation, cultivate interest in the other

Dreams succumb to an attack of lists
The house of flies prevails through a reign of fists

Don't touch it unless you're willing to believe
Set you free? Hope will flee if you enter there

Look, the days are going to happen to you, the nights are up for grabs
Don't make an assumption that your interest changes anything

The book's truest phrase: Time is for beginners
Love is dispersed in every arrangement; Jesus, just let it succeed

08.16.2004

Boom Boom Boom in another time-zone beams down through the dish
Into the house summer night wind pushes its fricatives, spirants & diphthongs

What should I have said? Would it have changed one thing? One!
Saying is believing . . . well that's how they're acting. It's depressing

08.15.2004

The gates of grammar closed behind him.
Search for him now in the groves and wild forests of the dictionary. — Milosz

08.14.2004

Check it out warned your fate from the mud-dark waves
Summer blue drains down; the little flame boiling water is your friend

Dreamed those hills as something else—winter versions of themselves
I took your picture at this spot; you've been dead five years

As van Gogh's fields of sunflowers, so these rife rows of snaky amaryllis
Foggy beach sky marmoreal—ceiling over ubiquitous rooms of the soul

Sleeping was difficult, and none of the pills seemed to work
Things poured in—nevertheless an empty sensation held on

I praise that time for what it did not take, not for what it gave me
A realization dawned that his options were dying daily

Damn, we're damned, he slapped his knee and stomped his foot
We are place holders: disappearance does not always free up space

Each one strives for something that matters
The movies feed a time of dull imagination

The impulse goes away for days, but comes back sure as fog
A walk in the neighborhood, blocks of blessings

One can't collage a line—Lyn Hejinian; I didn't get it
I misread writhing for writing, and needed to go back pages

The dictionary explodes, I try to limit the damage
She wrote the phrase "I'm fucked up" to introduce cheer and fear

Like a non-sequitur, the neighbors return from summer in Orvieto
Writhing in fear led to writing in cheer—so, for now, good-bye to all that

08.13.2004

White umbel on every wild carrot in the field; umbral crows hop in the road
Objects enter time immutably & leave it relentlessly & improvise between

Friday the 13th and the black cat finally comes in near midnight
People with vague ideas and strong feelings are dangerous

08.12.2004

Landscape is a framework for time. Objects? there is only light
Doubt leads to form — Paul Valéry

08.11.2004

Fennel, pink amaryllis and Queen Anne's lace, pattern brown hills
Hiway distortion: landscape is content, movement is form

08.10.2004

More bad news, chaos blues, all we got to sing is these chaos blues
Time toys with things, stealthily moves through all alive

In a divinely created world, no place does not see you
The forms that most awe, quiet the space around them

Is the force that forms the world the one that time feeds on?
One thing we're here for is to praise—hunger, desire, even mortality

Death: the end of pain, suffering, sadness, and happiness
I would rather close and clear this than see it morphed to dream

08.09.2004

She never felt truth in Mother's love and now she wants a diamond ring
Shiny, swollen carpels of the sliced lemon—it tried overnight to heal itself

08.08.2004