HOW IS YOUR INNER LIFE NOT YOUR LIFE?

Robert Motherwell

Everything it touches...

(maybe you would be happier without a body)     (and 
not so strict with others)                (having less hunger 
for what they fail to impart)(a body is         a winedark 
tedious little house)            (you are fearful of windows
uncovered at night)(you are full                        of holes) 
                            (when the rain gets in you welcome it)

If I had three wishes I would wish for a beautiful singing voice. Instead I write about beasts (beasts who are really people) and talk to myself. I love a boy who says less every day. If there were too many words I could quell them. But how do you treat a lack? Having no tourniquet for what isn't. 

We seem far away from that day on a bridge in the treetops. The wood swayed 
and I swayed and he did not. He had a task to finish and that task was me.

I love a bottle that hurts me. Wine and a vial of my mother's perfume, who I have not spoken to since Christmas 2010 and whose whereabouts no one knows. For years I dreamt I disfigured the parts of me that resembled her. Now I dream of lost teeth and a fishing boat that fills with water but does not sink. 

I don't mourn anything but reverence is a crying sport. 

Mark Rothko

In a letter to a farmer-poet I admitted my severity. I am not one of those storied girls who keeps herself soft and lovely. I am ordered and quiet. I weigh the risks and squeeze a lime between thumb and forefinger. Ice in a glass renders me calm. Sometimes I bite the glass to test it. When I am calm I am writing myself.

I fight the urge to be your secretary.

What does that mean? 
He was driving so he could only spare a glance.

Oh, I don't know.

You think I'm a mess?
No.
Then what does it mean?

I wanted to say: I like doing things for you. Precision is a kind of love.

But instead I said I don't know again.

In a letter to a farmer-poet I started to write I am nothing like the earth! 
But I hesitated. How can a woman on earth be nothing like the earth?

Lee Krasner

Lapis is the place I entered to leave the room I was in.

A house without furniture, rooms without doors.

With the words Worse things have happened 

to other girls, you can close the conversation.

When you fail to be precise you make a fear ubiquitous. 
A decade has passed. Exactitude is a method I cannot shake. 
People think I am a poet but really I am at war 

with the very common ruining 

called forgetting.

/TRANSFORMATIONS

I have a father.

DNA results confirmed it a few weeks ago. In the month since my blood was revealed to me through cheek swabs, charted phenotypes, and insomniac nights--things have been good. Hot and lethargic as Alabama summers dictate, but good is the word. I now have an eight-year old little sister. She collects broken glass and has smart blue eyes. The first night I spent with my new family, I didn't sleep at all. I lay awake in her room, bathed in pink light with plastic stars descending from the ceiling on strings. I wondered what she was dreaming. I wondered: how does one become a sister? How does one become a daughter?

It's been surreal, to say the very least. And awkward and sweet and very--human? Can't say precisely what I mean by that. I'm making haste if not progress I'm racking up all my lost rites at once. My father even caught me smoking and pretended to be disappointed.

Back in Tuscaloosa, I spend a lot of time drinking and night-swimming. How my small town sadness perseveres. In other cities, men fish girls out from the bottoms of their glasses. In other cities, jinn emerge from the ends of lit cigarettes. In other cities I am a sailor I am a crook of the word I am published and oft-quoted. In other cities strangers are dancing to radio static that cannot reach me as I drive in silence through the inky trajectory of another nothing night.

Been sneaking into a local pub for kicks, though I never buy drinks. Being underage in a Tuscaloosa bar does not an outlaw make. Mostly I just watch my friends take on the guises of barflies. Patrick & Bruce arguing absurd hypotheticals: Foucault & Derrida fight for sovereignty of language. What kind of fight? I ask. They look at me and all the light reflects off their eyes, taking nothing in. Curious trick that may or may not be singular to bar light. A cagematch, they answer. As if it were the most obvious thing.

Thinking worlds are made and unmade in these back rooms. Latticework of smoke overhead, churning into primordial soup. Taking on spiral arms. Birds-nest, Horsehead. Progressions and lack thereof: drink, nicotine, denouement-with-hands.

I failed in my summer endeavor to write a poem a day. Not miserably, but notably. Note to self: Ambition and discipline ought to be weighed equally. And I have to write about something other than bodies.

Perhaps I need a new hobby besides all this word-hoarding. Einstein played the violin. Django Reinhardt made flowers out of cellophane. Edward II dug ditches. Peter the Great pulled teeth. Vladimir Lenin sharpened pencils. Poseidon created horses out from seafoam. St. Francis preached to the birds. Cleopatra pricked the breasts of her slave girls with golden pins. Leonardo da Vinci had no hobbies.

But mostly it's too hot to do much. Sun of claiming. Everywhere the sound of dogs panting. Days like this I wish I was a man so I could walk bare-chested through the streets as if to say: my heart is only a fist away. This heat which makes all my hungers feel overfull...everytime I turn to speak to He-who-lingers-in-my-bed-and-breast, the mirage dissolves. Now he's a saguaro now he's a citadel. Old trick, Helios.

Today is my last day as a teenager. Come midnight, I will be two decades old. Thinking I'll spend it in some dark field with hibiscus gin and Lyrids.

THOSE WHO ARE LEAVING/THOSE WHO ARE LEFT

I. THE BOY WHO WENT TO CALIFORNIA TO FIND GOD OR NOTHINGNESS OR BOTH

J. is leaving in two days for Tassajara where he is going to be counseled in Zen Buddhism and eventually enter a monkhood. I am glad for him---and also devastated. The other day we pressed the soles of our feet together, Boku-maru style, but nothing came. I worry sometimes that I have no spirit. All I have is poetry. And while people don't mind when I say that God is poetry, they are not so keen when I insist that it works both ways. Simply put: I cannot believe I am losing my best friend to God.

II. SHORT CONVERSATIONS WITH A BOY IN SPAIN

I never get used to hearing my own name spoken. "It's a beautiful letter" is so very different than "It's a beautiful letter, Amanda." I am always moved. Sadly, gladly, impossibly.

III. PORPHYRIA'S LOVER TAKES TO THE DESERT

I kissed someone I shouldn't have. Again. Yet another person that's leaving. The themes just keep recurring, it's hysterical. Only this friend is leaving for Iraq. It's maddening because he is the kindest, funniest guy I know. I cannot imagine him stalking about in Sadr City, née Revolution City. Makes me realize I have a certain scheme for soldiers, one that is probably unfair. And skinny boys who love Robert Browning and tell the best jokes don't fit in there. Anyway. After the accidental kiss, we talked about Goya and I got upset. And he said Don't worry, I'll be all right, I've got some meanness in me. I said But I can't see it I can't see it in you at all. And he says Well I pray you never have to. I can be so mean and I hope it never touches you.

IV. BIG BROTHER BRAVES THE ALASKAN WOODS

Stumbling across bears, moose, and ptarmigans. I feel his loss least of all, maybe because he's only disappeared to the places he belongs. Like myths that go to sleep in their star-houses. He used to guard my house until I fell asleep, back when I was sixteen and living alone. I feel like he's still protecting me, just from a greater distance.

V. SWEET HOME ALABAMA CHICAGO?

And then there's the part where I may or may not be leaving. I feel the South more heavily, more acutely, more somberly than ever now that I know I very well may be leaving it behind. It's as if all the ghosts are appealing to me at once with last wishes. The river is so mud-ugly/snake-wonderful I am sure it hides hundreds of poems in its lazy ripples.

romantic bandits v. 2

“ I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
— Walt Whitman

Last night some friends and I scaled the rooftop of a university building, found a hidden ladder, descended into a rotunda. Wandered the ins and outs and secret passageways. Rooms full of old filing cabinets and forgotten things, rooms full of dark and and and our voices only. I love when familiar places open themselves up to you. And yes, Old Graybeard, it was something like that.

On Losing One's Pet [& One's Nerve]

[image: Bukowski & cat ]

I keep having dreams where my feet are on backwards.


Chatwin writes of the nomadic imperative.
If this were true then an essential side

of ourselves, this need to move,

would be eclipsed by notions of culture or home
or perhaps just buried so deep that we would not recognize how much we wanted it. It would explain a lot as far as human distemper goes--the mind & motion of moving persons. Denied.

I sometimes wish I was a man.
So I could swim inside my lovers.
Because what's this skin, really?
This cursory knowledge of hands?

Mother called last week.
First time I'd heard her voice in six months.
She sounded small & young. Like a lost
15-year old girl. A drunk one.
I asked about my cat.
There was a significant pause
before she said, "She
had an accident."

No animal is so capable of self-delusion as the human animal.

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)

said Dorothy Parker.

Things We Think Separate Us From the Lower Animals:
Possessions, surnames, mailboxes, souls, engorged breasts, language, "reason," selves, the ability to invent, alphabets, mathematics, fire, extended memory, first& second order desires, wristwatches, original sin, circumcisions, shaved bodies, horrible tools, beautiful tools, necessary tools, orgasms, internal dialogues, cognizance of the absurd, epiphanies, indian food reheated, magazines, panic attacks, methodological skepticism, aesthetics, mid-life crises, fetishes, recorded histories, lyric poetry, years recorded on paper sheets, a box of vinyl records from a father, euphimism, declared majors, foresight, metaphysical projections, nostalgia, makeup, caste, class, precious jewelry, this thing they call despair, this thing they call hope, arguments for and against free will, first loves.

(things which do not really separate us.)


Cait's ex-boyfriend thinks I'm meek.
He says, You're a passenger. You just get that far-off look in your eyes all the time. I know people who are always moving, always doing, but they don't care about much. You care so deeply about so many things. But you don't do much. You're just in your head.
How can I explain to him that I am not meek?
That inexplicably, I've just always felt as though I am permanently on the outside of things?


What bothers me most about my cat is that my mother referred to him as a "she."


Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep moving.
But looking around, there's just nowhere to go!