The swan flight

Some days with the girls are problems all day. Problems was AutoCorrect for how I am. Which was in turn AutoCorrect for Helen's. Which was AutoCorrect for poems. Weird how all that works. Poems all day, but I rarely have time to stop and get any words down in the cloud. So I'm dictating a sonnet of sorts to tell of a spontaneous dance to John Philip Sousa's "The hands of the sea" that has suddenly erupted around me. I put the music on because I thought it would be an appropriate background track to what happened on Mulberry Street, The Dr. Suess shiner -loaner- I got from the Queens Library today and was getting ready to read to the girls before bed. But I guess old Suess has been waylaid for now. Both girls are swimming on the hardwood sea, doing the dance of the mermaids on the march. Now Lucia's doing the Tinkerbell. Now Sofia is free-forming to the actual music, jumping up and down, doing windmills and kicks, very expressive, very Mulberry Street. The song is over and I ask Sofia what she calls this dance. She says "the swamp life." That was AutoCorrect again, it should have been "the salon fight" Closer, "the swan right" Nope, "the swan flight" So weird how that works.

The Button Holding Together the Universe

The Button Holding Together the Universe

I was taking a walk with the girls down 39th Ave
when I happened to look down and see a clump of

faded golden grass. Some would've said the grass was dead,
some might say latent, not sure what I would have said,

maybe something ludicrous like center of the universe,
but I would only say that because in the center of the grass,

dead center, was a golden button, the same faded
gold as the grass it was laying in, as if the two were fated

to be found here together; the way the leaves
were splayed out around the perfectly circular curves

of the plastic button, and the four little holes
suggesting a square, pointing to the four poles,

as if squaring up the center of all that infinite space surrounding.
The button seemed to be holding together the world, suspending

the earth itself, just as Wallace Stevens' jar in Tennessee
did -still does- holding back the hills leading up to it. I was lucky

to have been there just then, to see it all so improbably
arranged, just so like that. I picked up the lucky

button and put it in my pocket, aware now, suddenly,
but not then, yet, that I had just unbuttoned the universe, as crazy

as that sounds, even to me, but I'm not that crazy.
I didn't think about it again for a few days, but then I

put my hands in my coat pocket and there it was,
and there it was again the next day too. I would buzz

a little bit every time I touched the cool plastic
of the button between my thumb and fingertip,

like a talisman, or worry bead, or old Roman coin;
I was rubbing it like it really was some magic thing,

and not just some piece of cheap trash. Or maybe it was trash,
but either way, when I picked it up, it took on the weight of a fetish,

proven through the constant seeking of my own unconscious touch.
So flash forward to last night at Dynaco, after Anselm and Eileen read such

beautiful poems, and I'm talking to Anselm's daughter, Sylvie, at the bar.
She is showing me her button collection. Are

you kidding me with this? It was a terrific collection, but I smiled
with smug satisfaction because I knew I had a trump button. I pulled

the gold-dollar-sized one out of my pocket and unfolded my hand.
Carley Moore was there and she she asked me, Are you going to give that

to Sylvie for her collection? No, I said, I can't give her that one!
There was an awkward pause. Sorry, I said, I have to keep that one,

Because I found it perfect in a halo of golden grass, like Whitman reborn
and holding up the tender button of Gertrude Stein, like a gemstone.

I thought it was holding the universe together! I can't let anything happen
to that one, sorry, kid. Carley must've been embarrassed for me. But flipping

the whole script was Sylvie, because she just reached in her pocket,
pulled out a tiny red button and handed it to me. I took it

and then the thought slowly dawned on me that I was an idiot. I pulled
the big gold button back out of my coat pocket, rolled

it once between my thumb and fingers, for luck, or something
like that, and handed it over to Sylvie. But here's the cool thing,

the little red button is now the new talisman, and it's mine!
at least until the next time some kid wants it for her own,

and then I hope I won't be so slow to hand it over.
It's funny to think that maybe the button holding together the universe

will only hold the universe together when it's given away,
but that makes more sense to me now I have to say.

 

poem for a baker

Poem for a Baker

I listened to Anselm and Eileen on the floor of Dynaco. Floored.

After the reading a young woman sitting next to me on the floor turned and said, -These were the perfect seats.

-Oh, watching the reading from the floor you mean? Yeah, right, especially when Eileen got up on the chair.

-Yeah, it was like she was reading poems down through the clouds.

-Totally, like we were children sitting at Mama's feet and listening to bed time stories.

-Hey, is that a sky-light up there?

-I don't know. If it was it's been boarded up.

-I had a sky-light growing up in my room.

-That must have been amazing, to see the clouds and stars and sun and moon right above your bed.

-Yeah, it was, I used to look for the moon every night.

-And there was Eileen Myles reading poems from the clouds.

-Yes, and this morning I even baked a loaf of Challah.

-You wha?

-It was cloud shaped.

-Well, there you go, you got a poem right there.

Texting with gloves

Dfchjvfsfv

Uh

Dear Alice

Why are you writing to me?

No reason to convince 

or respect, or even for me 

to convince you there is no reason, 

but interest me yes so far 

as truth is beauty does,

So far as interest means glue. 

Interest is not just for boys is it?

It's coded  in our chromesomes.

Interness!

I can stand your voice 

In tones of bursting out

until my legs fall off my ears,

Ringing like shattered glass,

But I still will never have it.

I'll become it or other,

Maybe, but not here.

The destroyer/preserver card

Is a hard card to hold but I'm still

Reading aren't I? Thank you, sir

may I have another? I am

Changing it up altogether.

I will sit down 

In the pines and whiff

The Needles of 

Clear forests until

I'm inside the ascent.

Everything, even this

Refusal of weakness.

You feature him who

Will come with you

If you want him too.

His own dead eyes

Lit up in a rat.

3 100 word stories

3 stories 100 words each
 

Pilgrim’s Way

Thursday Leonard found another treasure inside the Free Library on 46^th, a CD of sing-along songs. [The Free Library is a repurposed newspaper dispenser in which one can both leave and take books, an excellent example of the gift economy at work. This library was magical and Leonard always found something perfect there.] The CD was perfect because later that weekend he was taking a road trip with his family to Provincetown. On the way there they all got lost singing, “Good Night Irene”. They found themselves much later in Plymouth, staring at a rock. What did it all mean?

 

Got Butter

When I asked your advice, miss, you told the story of two mice who fell into a bowl of cream.

The mice had no choice but to tread milk or else. The first said, "'Why wait?” The second bid her to try, "Perhaps a better fate than this?” But the first mouse just gave up. She sunk into the bowl,

glup…glup…glup. The second mouse grit her teeth and swam with all her might, swam for all that mattered, and sure enough, miss, pretty soon that mouse had churned up all the cream

into a solid vat of butter.

DEAL

Once upon a time my Skylark was broken into, my stereo stolen, and the only token left behind, forsaken, was a worn out Carhartt jacket, left perhaps because the thief was in a hurry, or got interrupted by a scary sound and scurried away without coat to sell my stereo on so cold a night to buy some crack, maybe, leaving a warm jacket in exchange for a high. I wear the Carhartt everywhere now, as if I got a steal, the better deal, and it looks good too, blue, a little ripped, functional hood, halfway unzipped.

(AN)ESTHETIC REVELATION

(AN)ESTHETIC REVELATION

The girls are down for a nap and I have a moment.

What can I do with my moment to make it a real?

First I read Elizabeth Bishop's “PROSE”,

turn at random to a letter in the middle and read,

“I’ve always thought one of the most extraordinary insights

into the ‘sea’ is Rimbaud’s L’eternite: ‘C’est la mer allee,

Avec le soleil.’.” I don’t read French, but I do know this

line and even used it once as an an opening

of a poem written for my daughters,

plucked it out of a New Yorker article on "Rimbaud in Translation":

“I have seen it. What? Eternity. It is the sun matched by the sea.”

I kept reading, my interest lit up by the Rimbaud. She

writes “This approximates what I think is called the ‘anesthetic revelation’.

(William James?).” I was intrigued now and did a google search

for “anesthetic revelation.” I arrived at a wikipedia page not for William James

but for one Benjamin Paul Blood, a 19th century Dutch character. I read,

“After experiencing the anesthetic nitrous oxide during a dental operation,

Blood concluded that the gas had opened his mind to new ideas

and continued experimenting with it. In 1874, he published

The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy.”

(The first time I had nitrous oxide at the dentist I experience

a rushing backward away from all current reality into somewhere

other, I want to say nether, and was filled with a bright euphoria

so intense that when the assistant took off the mask I took her

her and kissed her. Oddly, she kissed me back, as if

swept up somehow in my dream life.  Reality quickly came back to me.

I acted as if nothing happened and she did too.)

The Wiki article also quotes Blood that he "never lifted a finger

in anger" and that his "entire life had been fun." Wow, Blood.

Finally I read that Blood also patented a successful swathing reaper. What?

I had a moment of recognition, a kind of super-recognition;  a revelation

(perhaps more esthetic than anesthetic) dawns on me.

First I should tell you that there is another Adam DeGraff.

If you google me, you’ll probably get him because he’s a virtuoso violin player

who’s YouTube video of himself playing “Sweet Child ‘O Mine”

has gathered over a million views. He is me, or rather “I am another”,

so wrote Rimbaud, or somebody anyway. I recently noticed this Adam DeGraff 

had given a TED talk and watched it out of some kind of dopplegangerly curiosity.

Surprisingly it was not about violin playing at all, but rather

about “reaping”, literally, reaping swaths of grass by hand

as opposed to using a lawn mower. Adam said he had found his thing.

Not playing Guns and Roses to perfection on a fiddle, mind you.

There is something about scything swaths of grass that just

makes him happy he said. And this is what I remembered when I read

about Ben Blood too, the happy farmer, who must’ve also loved to reap

because he invented an improved scythe to better his own mowing style,

and who must’ve found there, like the musician Adam DeGraff, the happy secret

of deep trance through dance. I sent the other Adam DeGraff the Wikipedia link for Ben Blood.

I can imagine his surprise when he gets an e-mail from another Adam DeGraff

about his pet subject of reaping and anesthetic revelations. Then I went back and looked

at the Wikipedia page again. I noticed Blood also happened to be friends

With Lord Alfred Tennyson, another poet I love and a circular link

back to Bishop and to the poem itself. It was then clear to me that this 

entire moment was a poem waiting to be written. Therefore I am dashing it off,

before the babies wake up, so I will remember this.  (So far so good.)