Walking through the huge funeral and get cool in the shade light breeze, strong smell of bounce fabric softener, floral, and artificial, Listening to the sun records singles compilation, single best singles compilation ever made, having just got it cut by a Mexican Barber, World Cup, I'll be up all of the upset, he and how is the value of the teams see what countries, à la Cinderella stories Senegal and Japan. And how hard it is to root for Russia and why it is that fair? It out your Waze good while he didn't after the boys on Telemundo, channel 47 locally, is 10 times better in the announcers see on American English US primetime. He is a downright scat singer of excitement. He is like the front man, and a back up band is too weird you Tatian mutating tone of the horn's entire crowd seems to be cue. Playing. Between the two and he'll cut, I in the state somebody. I tell Junior, the Barber, to shave quotation marks on each side of my head. Took him a minute to figure out I was joking. I'm not sure I was. No lock to him to sign the girls up for swim lessons. Holding it down.

as good as anything

"You tasted it. Isn't that enough?"  -Philip Roth

Violet-tinted white sky behind brick-red house behind periwinkle umbrella passing by fading pink Magnolia tree behind shiny black and candy red cars behind cobalt blue tennis trophy behind blonde wooden dolphin in a white metal cloud. Also in frame to left is Uri Aran's plaster sculpture cast from a plastic cup lid -which we got as a souvenir of the Jewish Museum art-give-away show, "Take Me I'm Yours."

letter to Jim Jarmusch

Dear Jim

I don't know you, but your film, Paterson, knows me. It gets me. 

First the name; your man Paterson is played by Adam Driver. Driver plays a driver, the original driver, Adam. That's odd, to have the actor, himself, bringing the right name for playing a part, the bus driving ur-citizen of William's ur-town. 

The movie is, in part, through the character of Everett, about what it means to be an actor, how acting is tied to personal drama, so the fact that the actor, Adam Driver, is tied into the drama, by his very name, is noteworthy. And more than this, the actor is tied into the film via the character, having been partly written for him. This is evinced in the scene after the heroics in the bar in which you see a photo of Adam Driver in his marine uniform. This is not a staged photograph for the film, right? The actor himself, like Paterson, was in the service. Or perhaps its better to say Paterson, because the actor who played him was in the service, is in the service. Paterson's twin is, in this sense, the man playing him, Adam Driver, and vice versa, just as we are always, in a sense, the character we play.

I am an Adam too (A twin of sorts. Adam 2? Adam 12?). I love to drive. Once I put out a book of poems about driving cab in San Francisco on Kevin Ostedal's Blue Press called, "Men Who Found Out." In that book there is a poem for Ron Padgett.

Ron is a friend and mentor. Once, via an e-mail with Bill Berkson, Padgett claimed that I cheated on a test about how many "Fs" are in a particularly tricky sentence by using the double F in my last name as a "viewfinder." Twin Fs. I can't help but see that now as a precursor to all of that twinning in Patterson.

I also had a memorable moment with Ron standing in front of a group painting by George Schneeman of him and his friends 40 odd years ago, naked and sitting around a living room. I asked him if he remembered it. He said, "I sure do! It was my birthday." He was in his birthday suit.

I don't want to digress TOO much here, but I really want to tell you the story Bill Berkson told me at that show about the glorious Schneeman portrait of Bill, also naked, looking like a god, and how it got its curious yellowish color. It was rescued from an apartment fire. But maybe you've got to see that specifi color of yellow for this story to have any meaning. I've never seen another yellow like it. Speaking of yellow, the first time I met Bill he told me he liked the yellow of my shirt. So that's a hint of how I feel about Bill. 

Okay so back to the movie and driving. My initials are AWD. I see my initials all the time on cars, as if they belong there. I drove taxi-cab in San Francisco all through the 90s. "Very poetic". Like a bus driver, like meteorologist, like a doctor, like a film-maker. Aha!

I loved that you put your own words into the mouth of a ten year old girl in the movie, and the way Laura says about this poem that it is "almost like" Paterson's, which is to say, I suppose, that Jim Jarmusch's poem is almost like Padgett's. That was a nice touch. 

But the thing that gets me is that the girl is so much like my daughter, Sofia, who is 8, and the girl's poem reflects one of hers. "It's almost like one of yours."

Here's the poem. First, some background. One day Sofia and I were looking at the moon behind some clouds and Sofia said it looked like a ghost moon. I said that would be a good name for a band, Ghost Moon. I asked her what would be a good name for the title of the first album and she immediately said, "A Wishing Swirl." I said that was a good title, but now we needed a song with that name. She made up the lyrics and a melody then and there and I tried to keep up writing them down. 

A Wishing Swirl

A wishing swirl falling down a waterfall

As delicate as a rose petal

As strong as a marble hall

How far it falls from way up tall

How far it falls from way up tall

The misty mist has a strange and twisted twist

Like a monk's last kiss 

Like Mona Lisa's fist

Opening into bliss

Opening into bliss

A swirling wish fluttering in the sky 

As if it were a butterfly

On a starry starry night

In different colors very bright

And everything is going right

The actress that plays Laura is a ringer for my wife. There was the scene where Paterson and Laura go to the movies. (I always like going to the movies in a movie.) They watch the movie and Paterson points out that Lara looks like the woman in the movie, "The Island of Dr. Moreau". And suddenly I'm thinking about my wife as a reflection of Laura, who is a reflection of the "Panther" woman in Dr. Moreau, and how strange that kind of exoticism is, and how I'm implicated in this strangeness. I wasn't really so conscious of it before this movie, just how much attraction is based on impulses we are not aware of. I mean I always just thought it was her smile that got me, but if I'm honest it was more than that. And yet, and yet, to echo Paterson's poem to Laura,"There is no one in the whole world like my own pumpkin. And if I lost her I'd rip my heart out and never put it back. How embarrassing."

Pumpkins. Here's one more poem for you before I sign off, more of a song really, about pumpkins.

Pumpkin Seeds

See them grow, watch them grow,

Pumpkin seeds from nothing.

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

Pumpkins shining in the sun.

See them glow, watch them glow.

Jack o' lanterns from nothing.

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

From pumpkins to jack ' lanterns

Carve 'em up with a knife.

Scare all the kids on Halloween.

Betty Lu, she's my grandma.

Betty Lu makes pumpkin pie. 

Pumpkin pie from nothing. 

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.  

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

From pumpkins to pumpkin pie.

Serve it up with cool with cream,

straight from cow, from breast of cow.

 

Thanks for capturing it all in a film. 

Aff,

Adam DeGraff

P.S. Oh yeah, how about when I saw Wu Tang in the city and the sound went out and so they had to do the show a capella? It was better that way! It was like Method Man practicing his Paul Lawrence Dunbar rap in front of the washing machines. A great memory. I love the easter egg in that scene too, the sly reference to Dunbar's poem "The Paradox"  

moment by mom

Operation "missing I" 

in opera town where war is waging. 

What does it mean to a soldier to dance? 

It means dodging bullets. 

I'd like to dodge some bullets 

with you, Miss, I say.  

Missing you, I found I. 

QUIP

QUIP

I'm all the way on the spectrum,
or was, or can be, in a dream last night
I was clapping along to Zenen Zeferino
and Julia Del Palacio, both of whom I am
in love with. Those names alone
make me swoon.

Paolo Javier was there
Queens Poet Laureate
His second child still on the way

He graced the stage
with his perfect name.

Radio Jarocho too, the way Julia
said it, rolling the rrrrs, rrrradiohairrrrocho,
the blue dress, the voice aloft & loose
in the wisps of rain on the last refrain
We couldn't believe it was true.

Richard Joo was there and Quinn O'Sullivan
Marco Battisto and Diana Dimutru
The Sunnyside representatives out in force
Jaime Sweetman rocking that sweet Liverpudlian brogue,
plus Argentinian, Indian, Morrocan tongues too, to name a few.

There was a touch and go moment
when the sound went awry
-feedback on the monitors-
and Julia decided to take the band off the system,
walked off the stage and into the crowd
circled everyone around her and played sans amplification...

It was sudden intimacy, everyone clapping,
every one completely under the spell of the evening
as if the feeback was just for that

And then, there it was, the coup de grace

The rhythms of Julia's feet
dancing with Amoa's djimbe

Amoa from Akoko Nante
the band that played previously
came back up for the encore

the two cultures riffing rhythmically
back and forth in perfect synchrony

Amoa from Akoko Nante

Say it with me

Say it outloud

Amoa from Akoko Nante
Julia Del Palacio
and Zenen Zeferino

More pleasing words you will not find

Really

Really

Genevieve was talking in her sleep.

I thought she said, "What is real?"

"What did you say?"

She repeated, "What is real?"

"What? What is real?"

She answered, "Really."

Jesus Saves

This is a poem to be made in the future.

I read a George Saunders short story to my class today which was basically about Jesus loving the least lovable kid, a kid who desperately needed someone to find him beautiful, someone willing to die for him. A kid who's breath stunk. "The end of Firpo in the world." Great story.

And then, after their shower tonight my 6 and 7 year old daughters came in the kitchen, where I was cooking, wrapped in towels, still dripping wet, with impish grins. Sofia said, "Jesus loves you." The girls giggled. Then Lucia said, "Especially when you fart." Then they ran out of the room.

Where did that come from? It felt strangely good to hear. A funny joke, probably from Jesus himself. That joker.

This note is probably just for me.

I think I'm becoming a believer again. In the idea of Jesus. Made flesh. In us.

Good to see you at the Whitney. Thx for the inside scoop. Here’s a poem for you...

This is a poem to be made in the future.

I read a George Saunders short story today which was basically about Jesus loving the least lovable kid, a kid with terrible breath who desperately needed someone to find him beautiful, someone willing to die for him. 

And then, a few hours later, after their shower, my 6 and 7 year old daughters came in the kitchen, where I was cooking, wrapped in towels, still dripping wet, wearing impish grins. Sofia said, "Jesus loves you." The girls giggled. Then Lucia said, "Especially when you fart." Then they ran out of the room.

Where did that come from? Must’ve been straight from God. It felt weirdly good to hear. That joker.

EPITAPH (for Margaret)

She who loved the trees of goldengrove,

Her cares +lessening like the leaves falling,

Until all that are left are leaf-bare branches,

    Will love no less for all the loss

    The life at rest under winter frost

    The promise of spring's first songs.

+gathering

+increasing

This review for Promes

http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-berrigan-a-rb-degraff.shtml

It was an unexpected day. I want to write about it but I'm falling over. I got stuck in Atlanta. We had to evacuate as there was an electrical grid outage. Long walk out through dark corridors all the way to baggage claim, must've been a mile walking through dark terminals filled with electrical smoke. Surreal. People having panic attacks. One person had a seizure. 

But then, amidst the chaos, in this one corridor, there was this beautiful art from Zimbabwe, stone sculptures, and I had stop and look. I couldn't not. I thought, if this hadn't happened I would have never seen this art, nor would it have meant as much.

Finally got out of airport and into a hotel shuttle. We all got to talking in the van and I mentioned that I was going to miss my grandmother's funeral and there were warm sounds of sympathy all around. Then a grandmother said that she was going to miss her granddaughter's birth and that felt like poetic symmetry. Soon afterward this same woman had a kind of belated panic attack, laughing and crying uncontrollably and taking off her clothes. We rolled down the windows and she calmed down. After a long silence one of the men asked her if she was OK. She said she was fine now and he told her a story about how he was in the elevator with his grandmother when he was young and the elevator got stuck and she panicked and began to take off her clothes. So he said he'd been there before and he was cool with it. She said that was good to know.

Later in hotel I watched a very intense and surprising documentary about peyote on Viceland, then flipped to an old Perry Como Christmas special, with special guest stars The Carpenters. The special was my grandma's choice. Anyway, I kept feeling like my grandma was there watching it with me. Peggy Fleming came out spinning on the ice in a diaphanous white dress, a winter fantasia, and she was -resplendent- I could see why Charles Schultz always talked about her in Peanuts. Good choice, Grandma.

Afterward I walked down to the only restaurant around, Ruby Tuesdays, and they were so overwhelmed with unexpected customers that it took a couple hours to get seated and served. 

Meanwhile I danced on the scary path next to the restaurant. See pictures before and after below. 

Still waiting, I made a sculpture out of the lawn art at Ruby Tuesday's. Again again. The security guard came out and frantically told me to stop. I said, sorry I wasn't thinking. Ha ha ha ha. 

The salad bar was great and they kept bringing around free margarita shots so it was all good. Plus there was the live version of "a Christmas story" on TV. It was laughably bad, though Maya Rudolph almost saves it. 

I was seated in the singles section and we all ended up sharing stories about the night. Lots of cathartic laughter all around.