O reason not the need

Poem: "Prayer"

2011-05-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

*

Savior
feed me your sweat --
however bitter
I thirst for it.

May the slimy earth
in its crudeness
give birth
in me to grace

and at the bottom
of my homelessness
may the home
I find be a fenceless

slippery place
that is heaven not space.

*

Poem: "God your reader"

2010-11-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

*

Writers are guarded --
it's for humans
they write -- but imagine they had
a different audience

irony would be pointless --
if you were upset
as a person is
you would say it

no need to look around
for a peer
to approve -- none to be found
or needed anymore.

You would just write what's already known
to this one you've never known.

*

Poem: "The hypostasis"

2010-09-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

Our being
was that place in the road
where one unknown thing
and another met and bled.

They were neither
one
nor were
quite two nor two's fusion.

They were separate
and yet the place
where we met
became a thing and was

and our way was a road
inside our hearts but outside.

Reflection: "Everything is elsewhere" (London, 6/24/09)

2009-06-27T23:01:00.000-07:00

*

So for those who are mad "why" is really a tragic word -- a soft articulation of the tragic -- it has a tragic sound. Not because events don't have a meaning (I believe they always and everywhere offer up meaning for whoever seeks it) but because the meaning so often can't be used. It seems to point outward to the transcendent place that is outside even "outside" or that extends beyond "extension" itself. Take something like the death of an innocent person, say that young woman in Iran, whose death a cellphone recorded.

The sane shake their heads and move on. But the mad brood over it.

They can't shake it. The event is like a string tied to something we are aware of but can't see. The string leads out of history to another dark and intuited place. A "place" with no place in the world.

"She is in heaven." What is heaven? Is heaven just the lumber room where everything is stored that doesn't fit elsewhere? No. It has an order of its own. How do we know that? How do we infer its having an order? We know this because "order" itself is one of those things that is always being killed in history. It is killed yet it survives and so must have a "place" to survive. So the transcendent itself must be ordered and orderly.

And the tragic part of this is that all the wonderful things that are killed and yet survive cannot survive here. We are here and everything we love is elsewhere. We can't let them go and move on because there is no place we would want to move that doesn't contain them. They pull us out of the world. They seem to make life impossible.

*

Now you ask the mad to get over this vast melancholy and move on. But they say no. They seem to insist on staying where they are.

What is the "why" of this?

Surely the best reason is the most obvious -- the melancholy contains a deep joy that no one who feels it can relinquish. It is like a little lane through the broken glass into the things that most matter. The core of the "why". The sustained land of what is intrinsic and beautiful and completely useless.

"Reason not the need".

But the sane rub their hands and worry, saying: you must go on. You must live. You must move forward.

And the mad are forced to see the logic of this. It seems that reality doesn't stop. It too is transcendent. There is something transcendent about history itself, always picking itself up and moving on past disaster.

Itself full of tragic gestures.

So we pick ourselves up too. We move on. We move on a little bit but never completely.

If we should break a little bit while we are moving then the poor people who love us will need to follow that breakage to its "place". The place where the breakage is stored.

Always asking this question: where is why?

I sometimes feel that in some way this place is impossible to describe to those who don't believe in God. They can continue not to believe but then can never understand this place. This storage and what it stores.

They will call it absurd and thus substitute a word for an understanding.

It exists or it doesn't.

But if it exists then humans can run away. But it never runs away.

*

Story: A sorceress

2009-06-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

*

At a certain point, desperate to win his lady's love, Gilles resorted to magic. Maybe magic -- maybe nonsense, he didn't know. In introspection and dismay he crossed the trackyard and went into a different part of town. his best friend, Peter, had told him about a sorceress in his building.

You don't have to believe, Peter said. All you have to do is ask. And then watch.

If nothing happens, you're still right where you are now. Right? The pain won't go away but it won't get any worse, man. There's no place worse than this, right?

Gilles had to laugh. Peter was like what you'd call an A student in love. All the pretty ladies loved him and always had. He'd never had to work a day in his life for love. His problem had always been fending them off. Or limiting the selection. Choosing only one.

Whereas for Gilles? There was one there was one there was only one there would forever be only one, one heart, one soul. And the fact that this one ignored him, scorned him, well that was just annihilation. It was like not existing at all but feeling it deeply at the same time. It was an unsustainable way of life. It made death sound like something easy by contrast. Little did he know perhaps.

As he walked along the flowered side path, a large limbery dog -- sleek and handsome -- ran at him. He let the big guy lick his hand and wished he had treats in his pocket. The dog flicked his head like a horse and made a gentle whinny sound, mostly a form of soft breathing. So big guy, why are you loose? Who's your owner? When Gilles reached down to inspect the collar the dog backed away. Okay. Past Peter's apartment, the sorceress's front door.

Hey do you really want to do this?

At the first ghost of a knock the front door opened. Come in, said the lady in the leotard and Gilles trundled in, feeling like a clumsy beast. Sit, she said and handed him a glass. She was so thin she looked about to break. Down into cross-legged fusion with her mat. The drink she gave him tasted like "Tang Slime" and immediately turned his stomach upside down. She'll be out in a minute, said the woman who turned out was not the sorceress.

He could not seem to sit in his low chair without creaking but every time he moved the perspective changed in the apartment, now like a long tunnel in a deep-focussed lens, what was happening to him? What was in that drink? From far away he heard the muffled sounds of someone fussing in a bathroom. Another lady came out of perhaps the kitchen holding a tray. She was wearing even less than the first one. She was intensely beautiful and her hair was white. Gilles felt more and more like a beast invading this ultra feminized space that was at least twice the size of what it possibly could have been from the building you saw from the street. He needed to get up and walk around but the chair was so very low. Not comfortable, debilitating. I'm Giselle, the second lady said. She went to the front door and opened it. In came the dog, twitching his head in a way so oddly familiar. He flattened himself onto some tiles. Then Giselle climbed on top of him and made herself comfortable, loading her weight onto the haunches, good gooood dog. There was a buzzing sound from the bathroom and then someone kicked the sliding door off its runner and a young woman burst out, clad in a towel, partly clad in a towel, clad in part of a towel. A sorceress.

Crap! she said. Walked over to a sickly potted plant, picked up a figurine and slammed it into the crown of leaves. They shattered and what seemed like a million white bugs swirled into the air. Oh, you grisly little things. She swooped a handful of them into her fist and pivoted to the center of the room smiling. Animalcules into the little pot and then grind and grind. Let us pour some of that terrible orange fluid into the paste. Get over here, the witch cried and Gilled tried to get out of his chair. He felt rubbery, doubled in size and covered in bristly hair, was that just his nerves on end? Could he walk across the room without destroying it? Could he step over that dog? Why were men so damn clumsy?

Hand me her picture, sweetheart, the witch said and the big beast that was Gilles reached into his faraway pocket and gave her something he would have been ashamed to explain or justify: it was a picture of Karen in the shower -- unaware of the camera -- something that he had no business owning or seeing. Nor could he have explained to anyone how he'd gotten it. It was clandestine, illegal, and the sorceress cooed over it, then brooded. Then she tore it into little bits. A girl like that is easy, she said. But what about you? A coarse monster like you.... Young man, you are lucky that I'm not attracted to you.

Something about the way she said "young man" gave him a sudden insight into her. She did look about 16 years old. And yet when she moved into and out of the light minute wrinkles rose all over her face, stippled lines that seemed to open and close but vanished whenever you focussed on them. She could have been 100 years old. But no, she was very young and very corrupt and it was only the corruption itself that looked so old. When she handed him the filthy brew he didn't hesitate but drank it all down. In his hideous paw the cup was as small as a thimble. So it seemed. The other girls moved around the room and seemed to be three or six or twenty girls. No towels, no need for towels. The features of their wings made the air seem heavy and he had to lean on the sill, panting heavily and staring out the window at her huge garden, her estate filled with cypresses and swallows. Jungle drumming inside his ears. Even within the vision he knew he was very sick, hallucinating, so light headed that he couldn't touch the ground with his feet. It was like the time he lay in a spa, reached forward to touch his toes and found them missing. Then the great dream-ship in his head turned abruptly left and the scene changed. Help me, help me, madame, he cried. The dog whimpered and circled below his feet.

Our merciful lady placed the namaste stone in his hand and at once he felt placed again, feet flat upon some Turkish carpet. Now you keep this stone on your person, she said. And whenever you next touch your lady, even to shake her hand, she will be yours.

He went home and slept a plenitude of time, then wasn't sure, when he awoke, how much had really happened and how much had seeped out of his usual crazy dreams. The namaste stone, that was real -- it lay on his night table. The love he felt, okay, that was just as intense and sharp and hurtful as ever.

He went out looking for Karen. It was a Saturday and she was at the church, doing something beautiful and characteristic to the sanctuary with flowers. Herself a flower, that went without saying. How it hurt him even to look at her. When she saw him she took on a look of concern, conferred with her friend, backed out into the breezeway. Before he could follow, the friend came up to him and said: If you're going to walk the labyrinth with us, there are rules.

You don't bother the other people there. You don't talk to them or touch them. You let God lie thick between you.

God. Thick. Of course, Gilles said, not understanding a word. They labyrinth was outside, lying under the pale sun, painted and partly carved on the cement. He had trounced it a thousand times, barely noticing it, on the way to some store or other. Peter used to practice his roller blading within its old fashioned curved lines. Twitching his head like a lion.

Pretentiously solemn people moved along a sinuous curve and then stood still in the center with their lips moving. Gilles clutched his namaste stone in his pocket, warm and swollen as a piece of flesh. If he could only touch her hand casually in the center of this place, then she would be his. Involuntarily, even -- that part didn't seem to matter. He stepped onto the pattern and felt it shift slightly like the deck of a boat. Because others had, he closed his eyes. He felt the nudge of something, a tug. Move this way, now this. When he opened his eyes, she was next to him on a lane moving opposite. She ignored him, they separated. She wore a pin that said: Take no thought for your life. I go before you. He began to feel intensely dizzy, surrounded by mostly women, a paltry couple of men, and they were all so quiet, so solemn, a million miles away. And the damned platform continued to turn under him. Even balancing was hard. When his foot touched the carved edge of the path his whole body felt the tingling shock. Touching it was like a sin. His palm was on the line and his head ached. Breaking a rule, Karen reached from the center and plucked his shirt, pulled him upright again.

She was so beautiful he couldn't breathe. He realized that what he wanted was not even to marry her, not (in some alternate reality) sleep with her, but just to inhabit the same world that she did. Her spirit seemed completely lifted and, being near him, lifted him up. Cured him of a depression he didn't know he'd had.

The stone in his pocket was unbalancing him and pulling him back to the ground. He didn't want magic anymore. It would only be a wall separating him from her. And his old ugly grasping soul, that was another wall.

He stepped into the wavery pool at the labyrinth's center, its hot core. People were picking up and then abandoning stray objects: a shell, a feather. Gilles reached down and put his hated stone on the exact central prick of the design. Ooh, calmness. He could feel how wrong it had been, how misshapen. It made the invisible water dirty, it sullied the air. He put it back in his pocket. This vile thing goes back to its owner.

On the other side of the circle Karen looked at him as though he were a stranger. If he was ever to win her it would have to be a different way.

That night he had the "bear" dream for the first time in many years. Something was thrashing in the backyard, shaking the bushes of flowers. His companion, a women he couldn't quite see or identify, held him by the elbow. A large creature trapped in a black bear suit, an oversized and clumsy guy with sad trapped eyes, a human -- but all animals looked human when you gazed at them. Oh look! the invisible woman said. Look! Somebody to play with!

And the bear suit flapped loose but wouldn't come off. There was no other skin underneath.

In the morning Gilles drove by the apartment building but it was as dark and derelict as a movie set. He called Peter on his cell but got no answer. At his work number the same. No one had seen him for a week.

Things felt wrong. He felt like a crude clumsy animal. He blamed it on that stone. It was a sort of clot blocking the world's normal flow of grace. Yet he couldn't just throw it into the road. He had to give it back. He drove again to the apartment building, stone in his right hand. Knocking on the sorcereress's door left an echo that seemed suffused with something, blood maybe. She was in there not answering, could that be?

But when he knocked on Peter's door the sound was different, hollow in a different way. It seemed that no one would be home for longer than he'd ever be able to wait.

He heard a snuffling noise behind him. He turned and saw the dog -- or a dog -- or was it the dog from before? He was now so emaciated it would seem he'd have trouble even walking. And he had that horrible look in his face, was it love yearning? Could a dog yearn? And he twitched his head in that all too familiar way. When he put his snout on Gilles's hand he was shivering.

I will feed you. I will feed you as soon as I can, Gilles said. The dog nudged the apartment door and began whining, no, it was not a whine but an even more complicated sound. It was worse than the sight of starvation. Just that sound.

Could you be .... ?

And Gilles turned to knock at the door, even harder than before. The echo of nothing -- something -- nothing. The sound of nobody there was like somebody there. No one. Someone. And he knocked again.

And knocked again. And again.

*

Story: Safety

2009-05-16T15:41:00.001-07:00

*

Giles would meet with his therapist in his office on the most exposed floor of a tourist hotel -- what a strange place for therapy! The location might have been chosen to facilitate the "purging through dreams" that the therapy promised. A dreamlike location seemed guaranteed to hasten the whole process. That was the theory.

The worst part -- was it the worst? -- was stepping into that elevator. The entry door closed with an indecent whoosh. Ahead not only was the whole view exposed but management had taken the glass out in order to intensify the thrill. The chute leaned inward over the fantastically high lobby, which meant that anyone careless would fall and make a permanent splash. You had just enough time to recognize the danger but not enough to ward it off. And then you were there, on a very high floor, but still 20 stories from the top, and you were hanging over all those milling people, your brothers and sisters who were like yourself looking up at you. Later how would you ever get out of here?? You were even afraid to pry your fingers loose! But when the elevator wiggled to its stop the force of attraction more or less vanished. It too was somehow mechanically generated. He tumbled to the floor and rolled out of the elevator.

Among the therapist's many sayings -- for he was a man built out of healing cliches -- was the following: I don't ask you if you wish to be cured, I only cure you. His techniques were unpleasant. Also there was no evidence that they worked. You wouldn't even find brochures with testimonials. Most who consulted him were in no shape to ask for anything like an evaluation. The patients merely came and then went. Did they ever ask themselves if they were better? If so, how did they judge? In emotional terms, Giles today was only where he'd previously been but that outcome might have been the best of all the different possibles. Without this treatment he might have been worse. In any case he came back another time. When he fell out of the elevator there was no floor beneath him. The rumor was that the very space was digitized and that management did whatever it wanted with the result.

Abruptly Giles had that sensation he hated so much, of looking out the airplane window and seeing ocean above and sky below. It was that moment when you were upside down and simply supposed to trust that the pilots knew what they were doing to get you rightside up. A panic attack had come and enclosed him so that he couldn't move. Oh don't let this happen here! when I'm not even sure what "here" amounts to: here? He wasn't going to faint or cry -- he couldn't do anything. The wings slanted and righted and now he could see the lobby underneath him. Of course what guarantee did he have that it wouldn't disappear again? And this breakdown in trust was in fact the sum total of Giles' neurosis and had the same trapdoor structure that paranoia had, namely, that its fears were largely grounded and founded -- they were true -- but had to be considered sick and demented at the same time.

The flight attendant held him by the elbow. But no she was a tourist holding a matinee ticket and only wanted to get past him into the elevator. He knew the importance of giving the impression that he wasn't suffering or sick. He stood rigid like a strong and independent man, a soldier, a guy with no problems. He moved aside for her like a gentleman from a romance. The pretence actually made him feel healthy, though it was just pretend healthy, but you get points even for pretend. And so the minutes passed. And when he walked down the corridor he was able to pretend, like everyone else, that there was a florid hotel rug under his feet. Another one of the therapist's sayings: your feet aren't crazy, only you are. So let them walk you somewhere better. Giles walked. Even though he knew. He knew it would be manipulated. But another look out the window, a whoosh of the panic returning, no. No. He walked. His ex-wife mumbled in his ear as they walked. She spoke just loudly enough that he could hear she was speaking but not loud enough for the sense to be grasped. You know how that bothers me, he said but then corrected himself, rephrased the comment, since there was a need not to antagonize her, or anyone.

Darling, my ears are buzzing, I can't hear you.

A mumble like the substructure noise on a plane.

Why are you here? he asked. I am the one who is sick.

Oh Giles, you know what the therapist always says: I divide the world not into the sick and the well but into those who know they're sick. And those who don't.

Whatever relief or knowledge you receive here, I want it too.

It is no longer safe not to "know yourself". The airplane glides, the sky turns upside down. Your children look at you strangely. The car won't stay in its lane. Strangers scream at each other in the supermarket. You get home, sit in your kitchen chair and find yourself crying, without a reason but the truth is that the reason is plain, what is missing is the realization that you should always have had: "know yourself".

As the therapist says: Queasiness is the single path to health.

Giles looked down and the plane's window was underneath his feet. He closed his eyes and took another step. The lavatory door was locked, his wife was gone. Only a tourist with a ticket in her hand, walking briskly to the elevator. Women were the only thing in the world that he really liked.

As the morning progressed, the path stretched like a rubber band ahead of him and the office receded forever until suddenly, in its own mysterious time, it was simply there. It chose the moment in which it was to manifest itself, in space: another form of realization. I can see the sense in which space could be envisioned, Newton-like, as God's sensorium, the issue being that space cannot simply exist, outside anyone's consciousness (or why would there be space instead of non-space?) and yet that consciousness cannot belong to a puny human. Because space encloses us and transcends us. It transcends us but does not transcend consciousness. Ergo the consciousness belongs to one unimaginably large. And we are mere tokens on its gameboard.

So it was that when these dreams and visions invaded Giles' own space, he had no obvious way to turn them off, given that that mega-space of mutual claims that we call "reality" was by no means under his own control. God controlled it, he did not. And the dreams, those also were of God. He hoped so.

He stepped into the long foyer. Delectable slim girls -- that is, women -- were filing, almost dancing along the corridors, hidden by the svelte columns, they had a sort of private domain, and the women were running, running. Why would anyone run in an office environment? He kept trying to see their faces but couldn't. Way down at the end of the room was the emperor, no, the therapist, wearing an expression of undiluted delight, waiting for him. Giles' feet sank into the marquetry as though it were taffy, he could not get his footing. When he reached the blue rug in front of the dais, he wedged his foot down into what was no rug at all! It was sheer air, a 20 story drop and he screamed as he fell, It was a very quiet scream, more the thought of a scream. And the therapist cried out: you needed that! You needed that!

You must learn from suffering!

When he picked himself up, he found himself at the building's utter top, as though he had fallen up not down. He was shaking so much he couldn't move. The penthouse restaurant swung above the city like a kind of lighthouse beam. Businessmen in very expensive suits wee crashing the elevator. You typed the number of the floor you wanted and it told you which letter elevator to use, but the businessmen crowded in front and wouldn't let others get on. Giles shook like the last leaf of autumn and he still could not thrust himself forward.

Finally (in the late afternoon?) a lady with a kindly and familiar face put her arm around his shoulders and led him to the open door. Let this man get on, she said. Get out of our way. Perhaps she pushed him inside. So, with his back to the spectacular view he descended to the ground floor, let himself be kneaded into the lobby and somehow, through some unrepeatable maneuver that was like opening a can, got himself outside. Later he was seen walking along the atrociously crowded sidewalk, and he was going goodness knows where. Goodness knows.

Come back soon!

*

Poem: "I looked into the icon's eyes"

2009-05-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

*

I looked into the icon's eyes
but they looked to my right -- I could-
n't turn I couldn't take my own
eyes off those eyes but wondered did

he see his father behind me?
so could I if not face to face
still feel the presence of my own
creation in the icon's space?

The self was not the center of
this gold place -- but felt an assuage-
ment rise, a great weight taken off
these shoulders lifting like a bridge.

*

Story: We get healthy

2009-04-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

*

I don't know what it is about heights. Perhaps that they aren't there. You are high, you look down and see the ground and recognize that there is nothing between. Nothing really. It's space, yes, but you see through it. It might as well be nothing. You are virtually touching the ground so why not just go there or be there or admit that you already are? Oh no no no, I say. I'm not doing that. I have an enormous will for negativity. I can't do anything but I am very powerful at resisting something happening that I don't want. Change, for instance.

So I hovered up there with the other students who were so much more graceful than I was. Always. It goes without saying. But they weren't perhaps animated by the same sort of fossilizing fear that held me as if protected in its grip, not grip, but something in its own way ethereal, otherworldly. Embedded in me, in any case. The visuals shifted in front of us, square panels with humans in the air, actually us. I don't know quite what, there were skyscrapers or cornfields in the background. A grid anyway. That was comforting. My foot touched the bleachers behind me, or above me, or back there somewhere. I hooked my foot and hung swinging. Get your shoulders down, away from your ears, the teacher said. Engage your core. Focus. Whatever you do, don't look at your feet.

As I looked at my feet or through them, I saw her gliding, Andrea, so beautiful and in control -- she was so poised she could also do the arm movements, as synchronized, so antiquarian. Whereas I huddled freezing on the side, my foot snagged, my eye all over the room. What would it be like to be nothing but an eye? To wander everywhere, to be virtual and free of risk? "Pleasures of reason are subject to a natural growth or development, reflective of the development of the understanding" (Donald Rutherford). My own reason hung deliciously suspended, it swayed and waited. Did that mean I was secretly happy to be so afraid?

The bleachers went down in reverse. That is: instead of each row extending further than the row above, they went the other way. Or I was looking at them upside down, that had to be the reason. So if I just turned my own self upside down.... And then the hunger to fall, to jump, to break through the non-substance separating me from the ground, that hunger would rest from its constant hunting for me and I could finally relax. I rescued my foot and stood motionless on the bleachers below me. . Then the bell rang and the strangers came plunging into the room. Immersed. And the clock moved forward.

I moved through the dungeons that were segregated by sweat, no, by sex. The grim statues of the warriors were staggered everywhere, too crude to go on display "upstairs". One was stuck with one sock on and one sock off, sock on sock off, another combing his hair like a hideous Spartan, another on the scale, frowning forever at the number he saw. Their balls clattered as their phantoms walked into the showers and washed themselves away. Now I climbed the old stairs and yet I found myself another floor down. How could that be? I felt the muscles in my legs. They were tired but it might have been the fatigue of going down instead of up. There didn't seem to be up just down. The room seemed to lie in the bowels of the world but there was a giant window, which seemed to have a ship embossed on it, no it was moving toward us at an angle. Then the building prudently turned and avoided the crash. All the weights clanked down. The Punishment Room turned on its pivot. Ahead of me but inaccessibly aloft, Andrea was practicing her flying. Her arms moved in perfect arcs.

Think of pain as a massage. That was what my trainer had told me. There was said to be a point in the center of a lift where everything, even the lifter, lay perfectly poised. It was a sweet spot and a still place, full of meditation and the fruits of meditation, but it eluded me. All activity in the Room was sealed both ahead and behind (did I mean up and down?) by rows of hermetic screens, behind which the "scenes of torture and violence" ever played themselves into exhaustion, a form of entertainment for some -- or perhaps a lesson. A screenful of bleeding peasant farmers from a faraway land. A turgid remake of Psycho filmed in 3D and BloodVision. The deoculation scene from Let's Go Swimming. If you tried to look away you couldn't because where you looked away to had another screen. Indeed one felt sealed inside them, both in and out of the Klein bottle, oneself a Klein bottle. One sock on, one sock off. Oh how the enormous Punishment Room weight the spirit down and so like the Psalmist I lifted my eyes, trying to find at least the floating woman who could soar outside the pain. But lifting my eyes was now like lifting steel. Were the eyes then part of the physical body? Was there no escape?

But even mouthing the word "escape" assured me that there was one.

As in a dream I floated backward letting the images grow smaller -- but this was no dream because the space had its own technical specs, which no dream of mine could ever have. That is, I was in a place, with an integrity and intensity of its own. It existed outside me. I was merely here. If I wanted so very badly to renew my relationship with Heaven, I couldn't do it in this palce. It had to be broken down so it would stop blocking our sight of God.

I looked up but the rafters were completely dark. Horrible spotlights beamed down to hurt us.

The Nazi Kommandant's wife was in her customary place, near the door to the washroom and exit. She never left the place, she was always here. Some witch stood over her in trainer's costume of saturated black. She lay on her back holding the weight, the excessive impossible weight halfway aloft. She was too weak to bob it back into its rack. It was too much of a thing to rest on her emaciated chest. So it just hovered. And the trainer did nothing to help. I stepped forward to lend assistance and I bumped into glass. We rested on the curves of the bottle. The woman was real but she was also an exhibit. What then to say about oneself? A weakness and depression began trying to enclose me or seal me off really, like a giant piece of cellophane, which I knew I'd never escape if I once let it get onto me and attached. But no. What this place lacked but what I surely had were alternatives.

I needed to pee so badly and the door to the washroom had as it were climbed to the other side of the gym. That old familiar slog to something that receded from you, a losing game. It was a pinprick in the distance, a painful rhythmic throbbing. This was the pain that wished to be subject not object -- wished not just to be felt but to be the one feeling you and then simply take over. I willed myself to ignore it because there was something else that needed to be done first.

Squeezing around the staticky flickering glass of the TV screens I stepped forward to where someone very special lay. He was so delicate that I wasn't even able to see him except when I had fasted, meditated and slowed my own seeking down. To see him you had to be in almost a hallucinatory state, one that left you unprotected from the world. I cannot explain it more coherently than that.

The ship lurched as I moved forward. He too lay on a bench, he too was oppressed by some weight. It didn't matter how much, any amount was too much. He was structurally nothing, a blob, a white larval shape. There was nothing to be called a carapace, a shell, a skeleton, not even bones. You might say I'd not known the meaning of the word naked before. He was so frail that the slightest touch, I suppose, would break him and kill him. He was like a man of soft foam. And with weights hovering above him!

The gassy liquid in my stomach began to knead itself and leap in its hissing swamp. As so often, my heart seemed to be in my penis and my bowels. And the lights on the ceiling were sputtering. Disastrous music played.

I myself was mostly foam.

I reached down or tried to, I tried to pick up that anomalous weight hovering above him. Dear one, let me take that thing away from you. But my fingers were just froth, they could not establish a grip on the bar nor could the bar hold still. Like a vision the things melted in front of me. And at that point the vision came to an end.

12/24-12/30/08

Good Friday reflection

2009-04-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

*

As Jesus walks or stumbles toward his death, he encounters the women. In Luke they are called "daughters of Jerusalem", nothing more. They lament the crime that is coming to pass and that they cannot stop. They are powerless. In the way the world measures power they have none at all. And Luke doesn't even tell us their names. It is amazing how many women in the Bible don't even have names. The Syro-Phoenician woman. The widow with the mite. The widow with the judge. They have no names yet we know intensely who they are.

Here at this moment in time you almost feel the Gospel writers are saying: Look how low Jesus has now fallen. All the men have fled. There are only women.

Only?

Only women? If the women in the Bible are only women, if they have no worldly power, why do they strike us, strike me, as of an awesome power? What is power anyway?

On Good Friday all power seems to be veiled and put away. It's true that some toy soldiers are moving forward to inflict terrible pain, a murder, but the soldiers and officials don't feel powerful. They are mechanical, as empty as machines. Evil has no freedom of movement, it is just a stereotype.

For us the power of Friday is in the figure moving to his cross. And it is surely in those women. Because they are there. They have shown up, they are present, they witness. They are with Jesus. They don't need titles and sometimes not even names to be fairly the most powerful people on the planet. How could that be? What is the power? It is not a power that can be cashed in or used. If you are Jesus's closest, witness, that's something you can't trade in for something more valuable. Nothing is more valuable than that.

These women are at the center. I want to stand next to them. At least I say that now but had I lived in their time there's a good chance that I would have scorned them as the other men were doing. Let's face it. there's a good chance I would have scorned Jesus too. Within my historical moment I am a coward and a conformist too. Anyway you have to take a contemplative distance to understand the deep worth of something that you take for granted when you just live with it day by day.

Gazing at these amazing women I can't help thinking of my mother. She was like your mother: a totally unique and powerful being who hid like so many women of the 50s and 60s inside a cloak of anonymity. In a way she didn't expect people to notice her. When she did something she certainly didn't expect it to be acknowledged or rewarded. When I was a suicidal teenager she saved my life, I think more than once. Well, isn't that what women just did? She was a life-giver and a life-saver. Hey, no awards were going to be passed out for that. Aren't life-givers pretty common?

But now she's dead and very few people on earth even know her name. And I would give just about anything to be able to stand next to her now.

*

Story: Sam and me

2009-01-27T20:05:00.000-08:00

*

I was so young. I dreamed of falling into the arms of a man. Then what? Feeling safe? There was nothing about a man or his arms that guaranteed safety. I knew what a man was. I even knew from the inside. They were all as dumb and as blind as I was. It made no sense to love them so much. But sense was something on the sidelines. I dreamed of his arms.

Sam was my confessor, spiritual guide. He was somewhat fat -- I loved fat men. He had arms that looked just right to me. I confessed many sorts of things to him but one thing I was careful not to confess to him, the love itself, my love for him, that remained unspoken and even undemonstrated. So the confessions were incomplete from the very start and oddly, paradoxically, became even more so as my love for him grew. That is, the larger it became, the more there was to hide from him. More and more as the time went by. Finally, the thing that filled my life was the one thing I couldn't say.

And, you know, as I loved him more and more, in a way I respected him less and less. Because he had no idea at all about the terrible thing playing me. He was wiser than most people I knew and at the same time very blind. Insofar as it could, my love expanded within his blindness. A piece of art for art's sake, a thing with no application at all.

He took me to his gym. Bad idea! I tried to turn away as he unwrapped the cloth and linen from his toasty body. He was indifferent to his own physical presence, the way straight men used to be, in the early eighties, say, before they came to recognize that they were pretty too, like the women that they long for. We ran along the trail, hearing highway noise that couldn't touch us. The knees sang. I was so happy in that temporary way. He was very fit for his size. Some sort of tank. Sam.

The horrible part of my divorce, he said, is that I not only miss the kids but I still love her, as much as the day we married.

I could not control my drinking and I still can't. I spend all my time running away from it. I can't actually achieve anything because I'm still running.

Kid, you are so lucky not to have an obsession like that. I do have obsessions and they're huge, I said. I was sliding open the door to my own revelation and definitely keeping it closed at the same time. Unfortunately I am great at keeping closed.

Sam, like most of the other clergy that I'd met, and all of the best of them, "supported gay rights", even fervently but he didn't have a clue what it might mean to be gay, how deep it went. He thought it was a "way of life". Without wanting to, straight people really did think it might be something superficial like a "choice". They of course didn't feel the power, the trembling. I mean, they didn't feel where it was centered.

We walked through the leafy labyrinth. He kept touching my shoulder, hugging me. Each time it felt as though my skin would simply slither off and I would just become a pool of liquid. The sheer unplaceable feeling of it. Oh you poor paralyzed penis, you don't fit anywhere! It was a gun that pointed more at me than at him. Back in the locker room I didn't know what to do. I went to the john and tried the squeeze the feeling out.. Toothpaste from a tube. In soreness longing only grew. He was so beautiful, so warm, he was more than a man to me. How could that be? What could it mean?

I was in love with his goodness -- his goodness heated me up. I didn't want to soil him, i just wanted him.

An icon with God flashing through? More likely utter idolatry? As I stepped into the shower with him I became Russia, as in a game we used to play in college. Russia? Big sad place. People on their own offering sweet kindness, giving rubles to strangers. But unable to take charge. Unable to organize. Soaked in booze. Riddled with corruption but not really corrupt, just unable to cough it up and spit it out. So decay stayed put like an absolute given. Oh, they were so resigned and their resignation was like steps that criminals climbed -- the steps basically the backs of humans who couldn't remember how to stand up again. Really we longed for a strong man to pick us up. We craved a strong man, a man without doubts. That was Russia, frozen in fear. Not healthy at all. Not likely to get better. And yet there midst all the ball-clashing warriors, the naked strangers, there was Sam, not exactly America but a little bit like America. Warm, brown and completely oblivious of me. It almost seemed that if I touched him he wouldn't make the effort to feel the touch. Oh, this dissolution of my soul, it couldn't be good.

Sam, nights dreaming of you. Mornings recovering from what didn't even happen. Sam.

So. Established distance. Went weeks without seeing you. Sam. Wandered the street at night instead of sleeping. Scrutinized every man I passed. Ah, Sam, scrutinized was the wrong word, an unhappy word. What they were was to me completely veiled. It was the veil I studied and got lost in. The shape of the groin, that I memorized. Idolatry? But none of the words applied correctly.

When I saw someone who looked like you, I would be pretty much devastated, Sam. And many did look like you. Like but not really like enough, not the same, so nothing like.

Grace fell on me even in my bad dreams. I felt affection -- well, ignorance but also affection -- for every man on earth. Any color. Any class. The unbeautiful in fact were what they were claimed not to be. Ravishing. Important. And the women I loved even because they couldn't hurt me.

Trashy roads, dangerous, with these guys like angels walking along. Sam, there was a grace. Not to mention searing pain. A spear from my throat to my butt.

In the bars, Sam. Places you would never go. Hot ones leaning back, peeling the label off their beerbottles. Feeling mentation drain. Too much noise to think through. People liked that. Music like hot syrup from the speakers. Agitation. Vital energies leaking into the darkness. So much motion would have to land somewhere. I had had to fast for a blood test, so why not? just continued the fast. So I was light headed and next to hallucination. The guy that looked most like you was at the top of the stairs, theatrical. In a single beat he just fell forward like a panel of flesh, down the stairs, joints like water. It would be some drug the rest of us never heard of. Solemn Samoan bouncers carried him out of the house, forever. Miguel stood next to me. Never ever do that, he said.

I dreamed that night of a larva, soft and white, a creature so soft that the smallest touch would crumple it and pulp it into juice. Sadness, so vulnerable -- why would anything let itself be so easily attacked? Then the morning tried to pull itself together. Was that dream creature me? Or was that a form of God, daring to enter the world without armor?

I needed my guide to help me ponder things. But it wasn't even safe to go near him, that is, near you. You you. I was left exposed to Jesus without mediation. Sitting on the edge of my bed I shook softly and silently four times but no. It wasn't that I shook but that I was shaken. Not alone, I wasn't at all.

Miguel Miguel. I found him at the coffee house and tugged him by his sleeve, for all the world like a spoiled child, right, not far from the truth, both spoiled and child. Take me home with you Miguel. Please. Let's not wait.

I need to f*******ck you instantly.

What's got into you, crazy boy? he asked. Is it that you've lost access to your clay angel?

To fat old Sam, that pious fake of yours. Then I kissed him to shut him up and he finally got up from his couch. It was low low low. Somehow we got to his apartment and climbed the stairs.

Miguel was someone that to my shame (but sort of a numb shame because, in fact, I barely thought about it) I had ignored and possibly in some strange way even scorned -- because he had always seemed to me a bit sluglike in his effeminacy and we straightish looking guys were always afraid of getting near and suffering contagion -- this is a disgusting thing for me to say much less admit and I wouldn't say it except that if I don't tell the whole truth, why even bother? But now the cards had all restacked in a different order because 1) he'd gone to church with me and knew Father Sam too; 2) being feminine is not such a bad thing, is it?; and 3) well, Miguel had this odd Miguel quality that could not be scorned. Not in my condition for sure.

He opened the door, I jumped onto the bed like a beached fish and then the wonderful part began. Ignoring my infused genitals as though they weren't even there, he slipped off my bloody shoes and solemnly caressed my feet and that was it. When I squirmed on the bed he grabbed them from a different angle that was all.

These have been stepped on and despised too long, he said.

Little wallflowers always sitting in their cardtable chairs, at the rim of the dance floor, my poor little feet, always having to dance but never being asked to dance. They melted under the unexpected attention as the rest of the body drifted into and out of sleep. Could feet be awake by themselves?

I left him at 5 am. We had been intimate but hadn't had sex, which a lot of people considered to be impossible, not to mention a loss of time. The expression "like a virgin", what it really signified was a time when knowing a person had multiple tracks, deepening intimacy that didn't go only one direction. Maybe Freud was upside down and sex was not the substructure of everything else but itself only a superstructure of something richer and leafily truer, whose existence we had stopped noticing or suspecting. You know, Miguel said, you are really a bottom at heart. You are not afraid of black men, you're comfortable with women even when they lead, you treated with respect, at least once you let yourself do it. You're a bottom pretending to be a top. That's part of being a Christian anyway. The bottom. The shame.

You know, he said, it used to hurt me so much to see you walking through that bar, twisted tighter than a pretzel. Trying to be so tough.

In the morning I had to rush away from my chaste friend. In the courtyard beautiful Lili and the others were rushing to their yoga. We kissed like apples bobbing. I had to rush home to get ready for work.

In the shower I thought about Sam. I still loved him but didn't crave him like a bad food anymore. Let that person be. I could feel him in the water but didn't try. Let it go. I will set you free of me and me free of you. My little cross bounced on my clavicle. Sam Sam Sam.

I dressed and went in to work, sort of a long ten hour sleep. Then I climbed out and scrambled home, stopping at Sam's apartment on the way -- thinking I could risk at least that. I assumed we could interact like 2 normal humans, whatever shape that interaction might take. I found him packing boxes in a half-empty echoey room. Man, I'm so glad to see you and get a chance to say goodbye.

I started helping him fill a box, moron that I am. I had to move slowly because the foundation of the floor was not quite steady. The world rocked and changed its angle like a heavy boat or rather a light boat with something very heavy in it. Looking out the window you might see west, you might see south. I had to hold my body still.

I wanted to be free of him but I didn't want him to leave. I was still lost in something like idolatry. What was so damaged in me that this could happen?

I have to go try to patch things up a little bit and at least see the children, take care of them or try, he said. It's been like living with half my organs removed. You're so stable you maybe won't understand -- how unstable and incomplete I feel. There are aspects to marriage that maybe you'll never know, in your situation. And I wonder if you're the lucky one. We all know it's better not to be so bound to the world.

As he talked I managed to look at him and saw -- something unexpected -- the image of someone I would soon not be seeing, I mean, I already saw him a thousand miles away, and me right here, trying not to stagger as the room moved like that idiotic boat. A big chunk of something was missing right next to my heart, on top of my heart. How did it feel? Was the best thing to have it just forcibly pulled out like this?

I was like a dog who'd just been given an exotic worrisome treat -- maybe it was toxic, maybe not -- and who urgently needed to take it into solitude, to taste it and break it down and see what it really was.

*

Poem: In the kitchen

2008-11-09T08:05:00.001-08:00

*

As close to me
as my own breath
were the people I
expected to be with

forever -- she sat, she stood
in the kitchen so familiar
that I didn't even need
to look at her to see her.

In my memory a crumb falls
& the dog is there
brushing my ankles
with a sweet puff of air

& everything taken
beautifully for granted
as an eternal routine
until it ended.

*

Poem: Prayable space

2008-10-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

*

He'd been unbalanced
as long as he'd been,
and too often leaned against
himself and fallen.

He was immune
to the scientific
worship of reason
because of the hairline crack

in his own.
Reality
was what you could not contain
or share -- privacy

was its being,
its burden,
its flame, though perilous to hang
from or lean on.

Community was
only where you went to assuage
reality's
intensity and damage.

The fellowship was a mercy
like the physical
law
that broke one's fall

inward
to where
the word
of God pulsed with fear.

"It's only a movie."
Was he insane?
Or was insanity
what made him ask that question?

There was a small
puncture
hole
that widened and tore

all the secular,
a place that if justice
flourished anywhere
was its only access.

This hole formed into a cell
with birdsong spattered
on the wall:
so blue and serene was the word.

It was a house of prayer
where a brokenness churned
the air
and one's eyeballs burned.

I can speak
with you here
but no not speak:
I am nothing but ear.

Through some canal the known
world lay spread
in a prayable condition
where fate was liquid

again,
something to shuck
like a skin
or unfold like

a story
whose meaning
lay
in the future waiting.

The secular
caked in doubt
while something in its interior
spat him out

into a place
beyond destitution
that was
surely big enough for everyone.

He heard piano
music behind a door
that he could open if he wanted to --
it wasn't blocked anymore.

The person
whose place this was remained
unspoken and unknown
as the puncture hole widened.

*

Poem: When I was sick

2008-10-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

*

At 17 I had the flu
and couldn't go to school.
I boarded yet I barely knew
a single living soul.

My mother brought me nourishment.
I felt her come and go
but was too feverish and faint
to thank her. Did she know?

My sickness brought along this fear:
"your weakness is your fate".
But her strength saved me from despair
and she would sit up late.

And now I'm strong and she is dead
but it still seems more fitting
the other way: me sick in bed
her at my bed's edge sitting.

*

Poem: Wax

2008-09-29T08:06:00.000-07:00

*

She was wax
in the sun --
existence had to fix
itself on someone.

Oh do not be
like the girl in the parking
lot leaning sullenly
on her thug's hip, enslaved so young.

Everywhere so many
frauds.
The only real authority
God's.

Can you go
blindly
and follow
someone you don't see,

slip the carapace
of pleasing
off, let the apparatus
of church fall with a clang,

let the inner
be exposed
though still too tender
to go outside?

She was not going anywhere.
Where she needed to be
was here
already.

If I could only
obey my own
feel for my
own intention,

nothing but wax
melting purpose-
fully in the flux
of that other one's purposes.

*

Poem: Disarray

2008-09-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

*

A sense my disarray
brought me closer to God
on a pathway
almost never trod.

I can't judge I can't
and it's not
that I won't
but I can't do it.

God's own beauty
blew me up like a balloon
Without that air I was nobody
and nothing not even a man

So for me to be obsessed
was just to breathe
God was too close to be embraced
or even simply be with.

In the presence one said
no no give me space
I am buffeted --
but in absence distress

and the old disarray,
which was good
in its own way
because it told me what I wanted.

My craving for immediacy,
considered
okay in a sex criminal or junkie,
in a believer seemed weird,

like a lunge
into worship without
knowledge
to sustain it.

Probably whatever bad thing
anyone could say
about me would cling
as a truth and never flush away,

but my God! this poem
is not about me
but about him.
And he knows my disarray.

*

Poem fragment: The X in the heart

2008-09-10T18:22:00.001-07:00

*

In that country it was as if
everyone
was forced to be alive
because deaths were none

deaths were not but only
people disappeared
as if they moved away
without a way to forward.

The deceased
there was not one example of
so it was hard not to exist.
Everyone was alive.

But there was a hole
in the flank of one house
& the people
inside were in distress

at the mess and unfixedness,
her bookshelves lined with gods,
her walls deep with celebrities
in defiant attitudes,

but where was she?
She didn't
even say
where she went.

In the hall
dogs howled --
nobody could console
the child.

But look: everyone
who is is alive & nothing
is gone by definition
no one is missing

there
is only
here
the rest is pathology,

useless tears
of spoiled
children kicking tires.
The world it has been sealed

& those removed
we do not approach
or speak of or to -- we avoid
even their touch

& O! this X at the center
of our hearts no one
will look into ever ever.
We do not look no no -- just fall in.

& O! there are no words
to say or unsay,
only these dissonant chords
we will never play.

*

Poem: Not by merit

2008-08-13T18:04:00.000-07:00

*

It's not by merit
that I live.
By grace or by error -- not by right
I have what I have.

My worth
must be applied from outside --
rooted in the earth,
watered and fed

by one whose reflection
is what you see
when
you think you're seeing me --

the same one who shines
in you the same
way -- so we wear each other's reflections,
though we feel queasy inside them.

If we back away
from our being
kin -- if now we
seem bound by loathing,

that hatred
should in fact
be pointed
inward to the naked

self whose love
for you, that too
is of
the radiant one within you.

God's embodiment
is -- I don't know -- it is so humble,
so beautiful, so low -- I don't
know -- it is out of our control.

But how can people be
"hard to be with"
having the same being obscurely
underneath?

Such sickness in the news,
warmongers
so anxious
to break the mirrors

and deny that the God
who peers from an ugly face
might be their own God connected
to their own ugliness.

Suppose ugliness embraced
took on the semblance
of grace, suppose disgust
were self-directed violence,

suppose God not only was
but circulated
actively through the likes of us
unseen and unmerited,

would we change?
Would everything
become as strange
as our breathing?

If I woke would I give
you not my merit
but the real thing I have?
And would you accept it?

*

Poem: Proving God

2008-08-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

*

When they challenged me to "prove"
my God I was struck by the oddness:
you prove something you don't have.
What you have you simply witness.

God seemed too basic to prove.
But if this was too clear to me
even to be labelled "if"
why did so many others disagree?

There had to be mediation.
We couldn't both be right.
Truth can only be one -- but the more one
it is, the more it feels remote.

My sense of truth was near
but confused, not that it was
but that I was, I suppose, there was a blur
pressed against my soul's moist glass,

something it was all too easy
to call my own desire
but what use could that be?
I longed not for myself but for another.

The world had only one will
that I could feel and it was not
my own but thrust like a staple through my soul
and was blunt yet I couldn't fathom it,

never quite managed to understand, couldn't
write it down as a to do and do it
because the need was so relentless and insistent
and all of me was fastened to it.

There was pain like a shovel
unearthing the old site
of our first warm bonding -- it still
held -- just barely -- but

could not be used
or redeemed in the day to day
bob and weave that passed
like a history in me.

My life was of little use
even to me but I held on-
to it "for dear life" and it was dear as it was
even to exist for not much reason,

praying
for change not
actually changing
so not doing it only wanting it,

as though what I want-
ed still
wasn't
attainable only thinkable.

But only thinkable? one thought
absorbed all my interest
because stakes so high were bound into it
there could be no other contest.

There was only one contest
and all else
lost its ambition to exist
if this one were false.

Goodness leaked
from our world at a rate
so unbraked
that even the measure had gone flat.

Most of my heroes were dead now
and my own soul seemed to hover
at this perilously low
caressing pressure.

I prayed for sheer prayer
craving an external
power
to erect my own will

and the sun shafted me
on a beam of hot fluff stronger
than the most sinewy
human architecture.

There I lay on a spear that was thrown
by but not decoupled
from intention.
And if it pushed it also pulled.

*

Poem: Law

2008-07-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

*

it's just telepathy
embodied when
strangers obey
a law -- in their aggregation

the cars at 4 stops
move as one -- unless an outlaw
makes the design collapse
by moving when the law says no.

A good law is a quasi-nuclear
force drawing us
into harmonious measure
at best frictionless.

Hence the deeper meaning
in Auden's suave
phrasing --
"law is like love".

It's a thing that constrains
and annoys
its victims -- you don't have independence
if your acts synchronize.

But complaining is a token --
a symbol of time
at peace: we complain
like children bickering in a happy home

and there will never be a paradise
without bickering if
you conceive paradise as a place
where humans live.

What do I want
from the law?
Ideally I wouldn't
know or want to know

the law is there.
I would have the luxury
of our living without judging each other.
I would be free

"from" it "within" it.
It would never need to be
called upon but
in not being used would set us free

to float between gears
in grace... but this is hard
to imagine seeing how injustice powers
the forward plunge of our world,

and how compulsively
even good people cheat
each other as if by
nature, as if they can't help it.

Then I would have law
not be a human creation
at all but spread above and below
the human,

well beyond
anything a poet
can understand
or write about.

It would encompass
the dead and gone
not just those few of us
who hold life's microphone.

Law would be love
when those most broken
of all have
their tiny portion

of I want to say existence
but it must be
some form of transcendence
we can align with, not see,

an alignment so incomplete
that we
die by law, yet pray for it
to come in its way: that is, completely.

*

Poem: The voice

2008-07-03T11:00:00.001-07:00

*

Where did he hear
God's voice or did
he hear it indeed, did he ever
hear a voice not his but so closely related

to his own
most intimately
hidden -- his own unable-to-be-spoken
hopes of what his own life might be

that the voice lay in his tongue
and not on his ear -- was not imposed
by circumstances commanding
but simply said what needed to be said?

It was no second you inside you
telling you what
to do
and what not,

no no, not so split.
The voice was full of a consent --
his own -- but it
was really consent, it was not constraint.

He would hear the voice then lose it
but the swing of the loss
kept him chasing the part not lost:
its rightness -- looseness --

the seam of confidence
embedded in the darkness
as if mere chance
had slipped and become conscious.

Was it possible? You could really know
what to do and lean
within this feel of assurance that held you
close and guided you in?

Suppose silence were like little wells
where God stored messaging
in virtual particles
through which our day to day swung?

How could one hear this?
Surely the body
acting would catch this voice --
or mask it more likely.

The trick would be not to cover it
with chatter but to listen
to the X squeezing the heart
for a terrible beat then gone.

The trick would be to stay open
for the can't-measure
length of endurance even
to begin to hear.

So... the poet's ear was open like
a bird's
hungry beak.
And God fed it with mysterious words.

*

Poem: Soft strips of chance

2008-06-04T10:23:00.001-07:00

*

In school he'd liked epigrams
and the way they could heave the most
unruly experiences into sums
that however simplified were not reduced.

A problem -- his own
work had never hooked the heart
of a distant person
caught up in shared hurt.

No poem was ever meant
to stand closed, intact
and pointlessly eloquent
but his did in fact.

But no. There was a cloud
of consciousness, like a chamois
cloth filled with wettest graphite, that stood
above the poem pulsing freely:

the ex-
ternal force of readership
that would flex
itself loose from an author's grip.

Around any willed object the abyss
of chance bit into that will -- but beyond
that abyss, in an almost mirrored place
a new consciousness took its stand.

So if he wrote well
(an "if" never proven)
that wellness might not be sterile,
if the reading were yet to happen,

and the randomness in
which writing lay
were a sort of moat beyond which recognition
slowly moved its eye.

In chance if there is chance there is no "unlikely"
or "impossible" -- there is no reasonable bet
you can just place over the sway
of its indifference to your plans for it.

And if this thing is wielded
by intention, why pretend you conceive
so awesome a Godhead
that just permits you to believe?

What surrounds us feels like destruction
but what surrounds
destruction feels more like creation
in its black and stylish bends,

this movement of time like a shiver that recurs
in a patterned way and seems as willed
in its careless spinning as a dancer's
pirouette through reality's perilous fluid,

a locus
of order, or of a world's slow
coming to order -- both perilous and conscious --
that seems suitable also

to be the stream down which poetry might flow
in fear of being devoured
but also -- or as though also
in a longing simply to be read.

For if he had traveled too far from
epigrams to return to their closure
still the Lord -- of epic and epigram --
stood nearer than ever -- in his fear.

*

Poem: Poor relation

2008-05-14T13:31:00.001-07:00

*

You you you -- that person
bobbing in the mirror's
current, up then inexorably drawn
down, your own self moister than the water's.

Well they said to me: you own
nothing not even you
and even this particular introspection
will be taken away and rather soon too.

I said then I will give to God
the intention through me intended,
which I wish I'd not distorted
but know that I did.

I will give what's not mine
but that the giving
of my own intention
to give at least is not nothing

if it resonates with what more deeply
exists than I ever could
and if it makes me
a poor relation but still related.

What I have no choice but to give
to God I will give anyway
I will give what I don't have
I will give my nothingness away

I will give that I'm glad
about it. No. What I give
can't even be stated.
It's a nothing there's a lot of.

I am nothing nothing nothing.
In my own what seems this weary demise
I feel myself somehow also expanding
as God fills the room. Or his breath does.

*

Poem: "Punctured"

2008-04-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

*

In church a human sound
came from
behind
him -- but there was no one behind him.

At the dance concert
the curtain never rose
but the entire stage was punctured
by a colored gas.

He held onto his chair
edge
out of fear
that he would fall onto the stage.

The dance circled
even behind his heart.
It swelled
and was rhythmically punctured --

like a something between
our death and us --
the dance lay not out front but in
the body breathed and was.

And I must be a part of this
forever he thought.
The soft gas caressed his face
and caught

his will up in its substance.
We make a community or a complete
world not just an audience.
When it ended he couldn't back out,

but followed
the dancer who looked most like
him down a still stage-feeling road
into a dream-cafe picturesque and frantic

with the need for art,
the abiding need
to speak it touch it enter it
be part of it and in that way abide,

despite Fashion that malevolent
god of fear strutting the aisle
trying to make us feel insignificant
drab and small.

Immune the dancer pulsed as if
awkwardly
with an almost corny declarative
right-now vibrancy.

I want to be
you, the spectator
said -- I mean completely
to be your

image witness lover
participant
closer than the mirror
image is to the person in it.

There is a gold tattoo
of grace carved across our multiverse,
with little characters in Hebrew
that cover our suicide scars.

If I could only get
closer to you
than that tattoo or than the inner side of that
tattoo.

Around them the cafe
throbbed with the displacement
of those who moved away
and those who stood their ground

coming back night after night --
menus slapped on
tables -- diners who when they sat
down could barely get up again --

liaisons that somehow ended
before dessert -- there were
marriages that lived and died
quickly or tried for forever.

Life was like an ode
to transience
embedded
in dance.

Lover and lover
stood on each side
of the mirror
distinct and united

inside the bright vitality
of other pass-
ersby
etched in glass.

Sometimes bodies contain such
a strangeness that when 2
of them touch
that touch dissolves and passes through --

an interaction occurs
but is so abstract
that the loneliness mirrors
itself and remains intact.

Goodbye goodbye
to our intense
reciprocity --
what we felt inside our dance.

Outside our protected
space a still unnamed disease
stood
waiting for us

to pause and it said honey
whether
quickly
or not -- wherever you are

I will find you and eat
you and afterwards take
Africa the whole of it
into my mouth as a snack.

People paused when they heard that voice
and they grew self-
conscious
held their breath and marched into the wall of

shadow at the back
of "company B"
that nostalgic and deathlike
ballet.

The survivor? He'd wake or half wake
at midnight to the sight
of soldiers marching into black
and not coming out --

then he'd suddenly wake --
to the same sight --
boys in black
night after night.

In the pit of reason's stomach lay
an abyss of contradiction
that reasoners groped to deny
without reason.

He slept through it, woke in it,
lived it -- a blackness laid
on top and under, a bottomless night
with him stretched across the lid.

In church not a mention of this.
But if he sat far back
then behind his ear the place
in its darkness seemed to speak.

Now he had become one of those adults
who do
nothing on impulse
nor do they know this nor wish to know --

but no that was not
exact not
precise not quite
it.

Fixity of place
was what he had to have,
every day the same office,
the same drab protective

home,
and in the morning the same road
wrapping him
in repetition like a shroud

for one year then twenty
and not even
gone away
because they were never there enough to be gone.

His dreams were of routine
the days and nights in denatured rows
along a boulevard of destitution,
endless personless days

and all of that just how
one lived, the repetition
meant to help you
both arrive at and be your own annihilation.

It didn't hurt.
It had the feel of
a late night news report
whose numbness was redemptive

for if time was a thing -- then a chunk
of what
exactly? each piece unique-
ly carved, bottomless and intricate,

born as if boneless, to be babied
and cooed till its unknown substance
overnight solidified
and took its place in the dance.

He found himself one night
outside then inside the old hall
of a genteel palace that
stood waiting for the wrecking ball to fall.

It was wounded like sacred space
and the troupe he'd seen long before
mysteriously was
also there.

He saw a troupe of kids expressing
what they had not
even felt yet -- things they would be feeling
in the future but not yet.

The curtain didn't rise but vanish.
The dancers pulled the room
into their gaseous swoosh.
It swept in front of and behind him.

His heart was a churn
with no place to churn against.
The dancers had not been born
when what they danced was danced,

as though what survived
death was not what stood
still but only what moved
and thus paradoxically died

and so only transient
things could become
permanently resident
in the perishing sensorium.

Something "between our death and us"
lay
in this gas
too exposed even to see precisely.

But I will take your presence
in any form that I can
whether in permanence or in transience
who knows? but in either case "in".

*

Poem: "Glove"

2008-03-20T10:50:00.000-07:00

*

It was as though the prime
of one's life were a glove
that one put on for a time
and took off

without anything
about the hand inside
changing
except that it was now outside

that is, it was still a hand
and did what a hand did
nothing had happened
to it yet it had been abandoned

or driven between gears if time were gears
or if time was just a mechanism
for maneuvring between months and years
like a dead machine that moved but was always the same,

then something was as wrong
as the glove pulled in reverse
whose fingers would now be fitting
a different universe,

with the life spilled
out of a container
first young then old
really neither.

The body was not a vehicle
or furnishing or mode, not a disguise
device or brace, nor some metaphysical
obstacle either -- there was no well known thing it was --

not sliced matter -- not in fact separate
from one's own awkward
attempts to fit it
within this or a different word.

So if he lived it was not because I
remembered him (because
even my poor memory
was less than what I once knew him as),

but could I say intrinsically?
There was a dancer's picture on my wall.
He filled his body ecstatically
but was flat as a stepped on snail.

He lived not
because I remembered him, no, the other way,
it was the life that was at the root
of what memory occurred today.

Life flexes
fingers in the glove
and seems more than it is
possible for anything to be made of.

It was not just life but his
life, not representative
just the single thing it was
and in that smallness alive

at least not otherwise,
because what
twisted in my gut was
him: the hook of him shifting in the gut.

Life covered the darkness with hair
and gave off the rude spring-green
ever-helpless odor
not of skin but of what has come to wear skin.

And one's own realization -- while it passed through
the place that aged and never aged,
would it too be able to
remain in the passing where it was wedged?

Poem: Watery substance

2008-03-06T10:35:00.000-08:00

*

He grew old without noticing --
was mental absence
a part of ageing?
Or did his caution make the difference?

Think. Think. Cast memory
back upon the sweet ones
gone suddenly or quietly but early,
because there is true absence.

The veteran's hands shake
too much to work --
he wheels his chair or leans back
on the worst bench in the park.

His buddies are dead.
Would that have been better?
He once saw a teenager explode
on a battlefield, a teenager,

and he thought
to himself wait
his life isn't done yet:
this kid's not even complete.

But complete? Where
was that now? Then the veteran
stopped thinking -- needed liquor
to wet his brain.

The poem's narrator
never went
to war nor
could he know what going meant.

He was naîve about a cost
not his to pay
at least
not overtly.

Time could be a purge of all one's
crudities and false hopes
but in the end experience
only emptied people out -- perhaps.

All roads led down into
wisdom he was sure -- life travelled down
into itself, but also into knowledge of itself as its term grew
long enough to curve back into recognition.

One's own slow death was worth having
because only from having first lost
this sense of being young
could the full sense of youth have been noticed.

"In school our teachers told us
to shape our future consciously
make the future conscious
or else it would turn to shape us its own way...

With us or without
us it would still occur
and our choice was to climb on top of it
or be dragged under.

I heard but didn't heed
their warning, not exactly, because
I couldn't decide
first of all who I in any fixed sense was

and then, much less, secondly who I wanted to
be -- no. No. I never never
knew who, but only how,
I knew only how to go after

the thing by continual questioning,
and I knew that I never wanted
to take such an awesome thing
as existence for granted."

It was of a mucousy consistency
the ground that kept humans
from plunging recklessly
into transcendence.

There was an athlete who had dipped one little bud
into Coke-white bone-
like dust and fell inside for good
and never played ball again

and shot himself -- by the sea.
One can still feel the water
sleepily
rocking his soft cadaver.

The salt water sinks and pulls itself back out
like the tears a survivor's lips will suck
up and sideways into the throat
where they will thicken and get stuck.

The parents who grieved are dead now too,
they themselves like children, faces
filled with transient woe
only in that everything now was,

transient I mean --
like the face a child would make
when its ice cream cone
fell onto the dirty brick.

"I have been one to survive
without deserving to,
I haven't earned life, I simply live.
Others did more. But that one thing, no.

Unmerited, precious,
it must be probed,
saved, understood, if only because
I must know, were they honored or robbed?

I was never Orfeo
not to look at the one I rescued,
no. Impossible not to
see then caress that sweet head,

wondering at life not death,
since life barely remains
to me as well, and we both
skirt nonexistence and both retain existence,

mysterious substance, of which
there cannot be
too much
too long too far or -- my love -- too many."

*

Poem: "There is a space"

2008-01-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

*

There is a space
around your heart, a once rigid
space where judgment was
uncomfortably wedged,

now just air,
filled with a breath
that previously you were
scared to breathe with,

now as it were
the lodging of prayer
too full to censure
itself or any other

creature.
Mere prayer.

*

Jorge: Dreams of pollution and chance

2007-12-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

*

1. So Father Sam and I sat in analysis, or he in analysis and I in meltdown. Saturated, marinated, untranscended. My esteem for him deepened by the second, and so I had none left over for myself. I hated myself. "You hate yourself but God does not seem to have that option, God loves you to the core. What does that do to your own petty perspective? Jorge, tell me."

2. My dreams were founded in injustice. They were truer than true. They were filled with knocking like a heart beating, not I think my own. Was that someone knocking on my door? Did I even have a door in the porous corridors of dreamland? Maybe no. The dream always grew assertive, it would demand to be heard. I tried not to listen, that was just another aspect of the dream.

3. The dream began when I stole someone's shell. So obviously we were animals here -- I suppose I mean "dumb" animals. I climbed inside the shell and hunkered down, I would have closed it if only I could have. Ah! The shell is a door that you can lock, so there's the door I dreamt about, anything to keep strangers out. And if the door weren't there then there wouldn't even be strangers -- one would be by definition exposed. I see (the priest said). This tender chitin-less abdomen would be exposed to everyone's forks and teeth. I would be delivered. I would be dead. And I know this because I have had time to reflect on it, and here is the most gruesome part: this reflection itself, couldn't have happened if I hadn't already had the space of reflection, which is what the shell is, the shell separates me from the sort of Darwinian chaos that I dream about, whether that chaos ultimately exists or not. I mean that its nonexistence is as scary as its existence. So it followed that I had to have the shell even to regret having it. So why must I feel so bad about something so inevitably necessary?

The knocking (Sam said) is your conscience rattling around, and did you really think dreamland suspended such things? Oh (I said) but this too is a luxury and a gift, this having a conscience and feeling bad. This proves that I have won, whatever the game is that we're playing. The one whose shell I stole doesn't have guilt or anything because she is crushed and squished by the side of the road, like that poor indecisive squirrel.

4. I took what she had -- now that was disgusting.

5. I cannot live with myself -- but I do. So obviously I can. I believe this dream guilt is largely cosmetic, something one must apply to the face as protection against the real thing. Real guilt eats the soul raw, it is like a Darwinian predator, only I do not see how it benefits or has any fight to survive of its own to talk about. It's as mindless as a shark.

6. In dreamland I am like one of those animals that nests inside another animal and eats it while it is still alive. The taste is better, is fresher that way, not that my victim is alive but that I am so appalled and horrified as I eat. The horror is like a spice. God, how disgusting we humans are. And yet they talk of innocence! And they talk of righteousness! Humans! They discuss the imitation of Christ, the ignorant fools -- we are so infinitely far from being able to imitate -- or even recognize -- those beings we pretend to be the images of -- and that we don't begin to understand.

7. So, Father Sam said, holiness would be like Groucho's country club that wouldn't be worth joining if they let such as you join. I don't think so. Now the 2 of them, Sam and the other one, the protagonist, walked through the hot mud puddles, ignoring the bar television that every dream has. The 2 men stepped into the whirlpool. It was impossibly hot -- J sank down -- looked over, accidentally saw his mentor's privacy, his groincurls, looked away quickly. And image as hot as an iron pressed against the brain. Probably the amygdala was involved, that mass of "feelers". I slid down into the bubbles to hide my -- what? to hide my feelings? Was my throat swollen? Heart throbbing? Was it just that I was so happy to be next to him? To have a friend and a ladder to God? It wasn't just that God had given me existence but that this existence was sometimes too happy to bear. An existence multiplied by itself, an abundance. Stolen from oblivion, not even mine really. Just handed to me (as opposed to someone else) by chance? What was chance? Did I even believe in chance?

8. When the atheist Dennett debunked design in favor of chance he thought he was closing a door that in fact he was opening. Chance! What was that? Something no human could ever manage -- or understand -- or even worship blindly -- because all our supposedly free acts ended up quite obviously reducing to old banal patterns recurring, not chance at all. Not worthy of being called chance. Because nobody could even say what it was. They say that human creatures are not deep enough or broad enough to use a word like chance, to mouth it like a known quantity, because it's really just a placeholder like zero, it means not even nothing at all, not even that, not even that much, not even nul, not to us. Because no one can define chance and then see what they define. They say the word it and call it awesome, that it that isn't even there. All right. I could go on. You know how every supposedly random number turns out to have factors, is caused, how sad. Jazzmakers improvisations follow rotes in the ground, have been sung a million times before, the artists' inspirations are all borrowed. So chance. So chance, what is that? It would be profound and transcendent if it existed and were not just this meltdown, this hallucination. Chance. If you don't call it design it only goes deeper -- like a tick you refuse to pluck. Dennett's chance is in fact entirely designed -- to stop discussion for one thing. But then his own silence begins to speak. The thing exorcised comes back doubled and trebled and ready to kill. Saying design exists or doesn't resolves to a single statement. "Nothing" is so scary because it is not, that is, not not scary, but not nothing, it is the "something" there that the atheist exploits and uses and that with him or without him we still fear. And we do. Of profound things there is no shading between discerning a pattern and discerning no pattern, which would be not discerning one at all because -- why? Because the light is too bright to pick it out. And the truth is that we don't even know what chance is. Nor do we acknowledge the implications of the fact that even chaos and utter disorganization have a design to be teased out. Don't even talk to me of chance. It probably exists but way beyond our reach -- there is only one powerful enough to wield chance and live. Not a journalist, to be sure.

9. So I was sitting next to Sam for a reason. Chance was not a factor.

10. And I only pretended when, just "by chance", I climbed out of the soapy spiralling mud and reached for my towel, oops, no towel at all! The waitresses circulated with their little napkins and cold-sweating glasses, little paper parosols floating, etc. I tried to think of my naked body as a kind of clothes. Men's bodies stood around as if without the men inside and that was eloquent: this is not really you but your carapace. The football team stood around the talking pizza box that I have never been able to shake from my dreamworld. Coach's eyes, they flicked around the room like black flies, I tell you. This is veristic, nothing has been added or taken away except, well, the basic laws of reason. in this place whenever the world tilts I immediately recognize that we're on a ship, if only because my body -- my shell -- has filtered out the very concept of an earthquake, seeing them as intellectual constructions, not possible occurrences, but there it was again, as if immune to the simplifying power of a dream.

11. And that was the nub: that discontinuity made the truest reality -- those fissures in the ground itself. But the moment you accept them they become continuous. Follows from this another essential that reality comes from outside my own tidy (?) being. And yet they say a dream is all "inside the head" -- but not so -- au contraire. The power of the dream is one's recognition of what in it is more than oneself, in other words most of it.

12. I sat disconsolate at the pool's side, or was it the ocean? Then Estelle stopped to pick me up and drive me to the suburbs to see... to see Estelle, though even at the moment I knew this made no sense. You can be multiple people conceptually but not in space, which only meant that this wasn't space, so what could it be instead? The casting back of one's mind into one's memory, which was only the casting of itself into itself? Wouldn't such a casting also create 2 people and not just one?

13. She drove with utter confidence, she drove with liking, she liked to drive. She came from a simpler and somewhat lovelier age when the other drivers never entertained the thought of killing you. She was polite and competent -- later they took her licence away because she turned across a double yellow line and didn't remember her name when the officer asked -- that was just temporarily flustered about it. And he was rude to her, she didn't like that. she cried, never really recovered from the loss of her driving power. Enough of that, the key to a memory is that the bad thing that happens later (in its inevitable and tragic fashion) has absolutely no effect on the goodness of the good thing that was previous, the good thing always remains intact. So that you can immerse yourself in it without necessarily at every moment recalling what came later, what indeed at this very moment must have not yet come. And you were glad. She chatted while the 2 of you drove, she didn't care you were in that inevitable dream cliche wearing nothing but your shell. Then you all arrived and greeted the little dog at the front door who peed on your foot and peed and peed. And you were somehow wearing shoes again, and they were much too nice to be ruined like that, although at the same time you weren't wearing any shoes. And you said to yourself: this is enough, wake up now please.

14. There seemed to be a theme of water, Father, and if only I could be sure it was cleansing. But I left wet footprints everywhere and climbed across Los Angeles, one wing to the other, on little stone steps as unstable as lily pads, a strange recurring dream I've had for years. Sometimes I find myself bicycling on the freeway, through the very worst neighborhoods. And I wold ask myself not "what do these dreams mean?" but simply "where does this amazing feel come from?" Because waking life such as it was so often lacked all these feelings. They where there but I didn't feel them -- not when I was awake.

15. There was a drought of dreaming in my life, Father, and I knew I could see Estelle in no other way -- because death is a most importunate presence here, in waking as in sleeping. It doesn't let us visit them, it tells us time's up before the time has even gotten under way. I pressed the liquid doorbell and looked down. The little dog had covered me in liquid waste from the shins on down -- and the little thing himself was covered, poor thing -- and no one would ever come to answer the door -- because this door was as if exorcised, de-haunted irreversibly -- no one was there or would ever be there. And as I leaned, was it to take off my shoes or put on my shoes? was it to put on or take off the pants? And then I said to myself, this is enough -- I want to wake up. Easily said, more easily done. I lay panting on the bed.

16. There was a streak of light on the wall, humble in the way it didn't go anywhere. You could see it splitting the wall in two. I felt a space around my heart, a feeling of God's being between -- as for instance, in begin between the light and what it rested on. The essence of waking was to be able to hold onto this thought for some time. Birds were singing in a dissheveled way on the trellis. Suppressed activities could be heard beyond the shell of not having to act in which I lay but even less than that, a sort of virtual rocking. I prayed in my clumsy way -- for some of the internal squabbling to get tired and desist so that the morning could come unblocked. Between things lay spread not extension but presence. I lay in a place of truths too deep to prove or almost even to share, even with oneself. Did it exist? Somet mes it was a melancholy place, too thoughtful to impress itself on neighbors, on colleagues.

17. The sun was not a sign. The sun was not a blemish. The sun was not a pointing hand. The sun was not a clue or a puzzle. The sun was not a person. The sun was not a calibrated substance. The sun was not a ploy. The sun was neither this nor that. But between the sun and the wall lay reality itself.

18. I walked into the living room and the rug crackled. Whenever I touched a doorknob I got a shock. There was Estelle in that special hospital bed they'd set up so she could be in the swing of things -- but instead she lay as if below the mattress, sunk more deeply than a body ought to go. Was I wanting her death? No no, but only closure -- yet only one kind of closure seemed possible. So every thought was pollution and time was fraught, literally freighted with equivocation. I try to pray but everything seems to have left me, she said. Oh Estelle. I answered. It isn't that, it's just -- but I have to go, I'm late for work. And she looked at me, dismissing me from her thoughts already, but not exactly. The sun fell on her collection of little animals and circulated between them -- they splashed in it. But I felt dirty getting into my car. And somehow it was once again Estelle driving the car, with that calm competence that had always eluded me, was unavailable to a walking mess like myself. She drove us into town -- through the dusk. Dusk! Well, it felt real if nothing else did.

19. May you hear a sign tonight, she said as I closed the door. I walked into the windowy building with a heavy bag in my hand -- books? gym clothes? The dreamland abridged all the business of ID cards etc. That left me time to wonder where I was. A recovery center? Well, I had just enough time to wonder, was able to wonder, while the men all moved like a slow fluid to the back room. Since I was a man, I of course followed. Father Sam was sitting in a battered cardtable chair, a battered Episcopal priest. Being who he was, he didn't say to me: you're late, you missed the service. No. He said: I'm so happy to see you!

Jorge: Bricks

2007-12-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

*

In this dream love was required. We all love here. The chaste kiss of peace.

The center of the Eucharist had become the moment of peace. This "moment" lasted for some minutes.

J began to panic. Did he love enough? Probably not. So would they notice?

Would they expel him from the sanctuary for the inadequate quantity of his love? Would everybody horribly try to repair him?

Was the love nothing but a disguised form of fear?

At the Thanksgiving dinner he'd attended a few weeks before, every single person in the act of expressing thanks had broken down into tears, except for himself. He had spoken but tears had not come.

A certain joy for him had been present but it had been dry.

I felt my mind wandering during the group prayers so I went into the parish hall bathroom. My absence so to speak wasn't alone -- there were lots of people in the hall. Preparing food. Acting out in the youth group. A few of the homeless lingering around the buffet and so they well might. I at least understood them. I understood a thing like need but love had me baffled. At least in dreamland it did.

Like a legalist trying to earn points I opened the closet to put out the necessary chairs for hospitality, but the closet had been bricked over by the new rector. The bricks wouldn't move. Then I heard the organ behind me and it seemed so far away, also somehow bricked off.

Yet I knew there was a way through those bricks if I could only figure it out. Most likely there was a breath of air reaching me through the impasse, like a winding clew. If I thus were to narrow my shoulder, and subsequently stand sideways, I might well squeeze myself through as if by a thought. And on the other side of the bricks, down a ramp of musty stairs, I did find a few of the chairs in a circle with men (only men) sitting in them. It was the other church, the secret church inside. These were 2 churches that did not so much share a building as in some arcane way hold a common interest in the space intervening between them, which I at least was finding irreversible -- that is, I could not back up. And the secret minister ordered me to sit down and so I did.

Who are you guys? I asked and they said: the men's group. J shifted with all the more discomfort in his chair for considering that he hadn't even sat there long enough to feel comfortable or not. The truth was that he detested and feared groups of men ("gangs!"). . And these guys were uglier than was possible, their ugliness was even multiplied by quantity and proximity. Not the sort to cry at a meal.

Oh give it up, J, give them a break. Soften your heart, it's the Eucharist. I needed to relax and soften. This was feeling like my dream of last night (? was it last night?) I think last night (?) when I found myself walking by the park on a windy night and watching the shadows of the walnut leaves -- just barely hanging on -- as they shook under the electric light -- and wherever a shadow touched the ground a bit of a pothole would open up -- so that walking became impossible, you had to dance and shimmy just to get down the street. And that was the way the women walked as they brought the bread in. Each one mincing like a waitress in the 50s or a reformed cabaret dancer. When they set the gifts down the men dug in. I held my own morsel like an idiot. Ever wanting to feel. To feel to feel. To be a part of reality, not a show. Then came the wine, maybe juice, and the girls danced right in, faces frozen in scowls. Oddly fetching or retching. I felt my stomach turn over and thought of the dancing walnuts. No that wasn't last night. I was mistaken, that was tonight -- had happened tonight. So this was the clew I had been craving: this very moment was constructed of dream, was not real. Oh, thank heaven.

Lord, you said that your gifts were given to "many" and you probably meant to "all" -- which is one reason we follow you, because in fact we feel compelled to be that "all" -- but the gifts must remain gifts, after all -- desired -- not just slabs of bread -- or no one will even take the trouble to receive them -- and it doesn't matter what people should do, since ultimately they will do what they will do, not what they should -- and the "many" will turn into "few" or "none" if no gift is there. But also what happens if it seems the gift has no one to receive? No one worthy?

So J stood up and walked into the kitchen where the women were working. Somehow it was steps taken down into the kitchen. He felt like a character in the Jules Verne novel, moving deeper and deeper, together with James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker and Pat Boone. Since it was a dream, he didn't worry about this.

Behind him the minister was intoning the prayers of the people and his voice was made of "nose". It was a voice with a lot of nose. The spirit was buried in a fussiness like tissue. Then the room rocked like a boat and you could hear engines turn on. The women all looked up from their kitchen work and said: you can't be in here. The head of the kitchen crew pointed to a staircase leading down into daylight. Meanwhile J saw with astonishment the chairs. There were at least a million chairs, waiting for someone to come in and sit down. But no doubt people were too scared to enter this place where after all they were not allowed.

I had had enough of this dream. It seemed to me that I was dreaming a dream that had no place for me and that that would be the meaning of the dream when it eventually crystallized in the following day's fresh air. Because outside in the daylight I saw the people from my own church now leaving -- and they greeted me with love -- with that love that was so overwhelming for me -- but at the same time they hadn't noticed that I'd been absent. So the love was real but the object of the love -- myself -- had been placed off-station or misprinted with a smear or was not answering the phone. If this love had been thrown like a brick no one had been able to catch it even as a concussion. Did that matter? I felt the way I so often felt after "church" -- that I had nodded off and missed my exit. I hadn't been paying attention! I had just been dreaming!

But when I woke up it wasn't even Sunday. I was on a pier that was separated from its marshland train-tracks by some unexplained gap. The trick was to get my suitcase off the pier and onto the train without getting either it or myself wet. This would be enough to take my mind off the strange and unsatisfying topic of human worship. Behind me a woman's voice continually scolded me to hurry up. Her voice was notably bereft of love. She didn't care if I lived or died. So this was more like the sort of reality in which, for better or worse, our lives actually occur. At least within this indifference I would be able to spend a little time figuring out just what my dreaming offered in the way of prophecy -- just what it was it sensed was coming for me. Because I have noticed -- and hope that you too will ponder -- how insistently dreams present themselves not (as people once mistakenly thought) as interpretations of the past but as most entirely -- in every detail really -- about the things that are to come, which they play as great a part in being as in speaking. And this is the source of their insistence and their fear.

*

Jorge: The coalition

2007-11-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

*

J began to dream of those who were dead -- in the last dream of the night -- and the people were quite alive in his dream -- and the dream itself was therefore quite alive in leaving him in his own perplexity and wakefulness. Well it was half wakefulness, like a heavy weight on the heart, slowing its forward movement. The weight was the dream itself and the dead people in it. There was his sister Una, carrying a book. Didn't she always have a book with her? She was soaked with the water that was said to have drowned her and carried her away. But the book itself was dry. And the club hostess shooed them forward, saying: Sit down. Sit down. We must move along. Everything is appearance. But (J said) I have to call my mom -- that is, my stepmom. Can't just sit down. So the staff brought a phone to the table, just as in some decadent German night club that one had not ever really heard of, it was so quaint and unimportant. Something in Isherwood maybe.

Are we in a boat? Una asked. Why does everything seem to be rocking? Oh, he said, that is the pyramidal neurons swaying and leaning forward -- they wish to form coalitions, they stretch their hands, trying to link. To link is to think, just as to rhyme is to climb. Ooo but this crowd makes it all sooooo hard -- I mean, just to think -- how hard it is just to think. This was not just anybody, this crowd of neurons was so select.

So these were the rich. (Psalm 74) Everyone here was middle aged but pretending not to be, and not at all liberal but pretending to be. The clothes were of the finest material and of the most gently sloping cut. Not Botoxed like faces. The folds fell sadly like children. This was fashion! Why fashion? Its purpose was to make you feel small and this was accomplished. You did. The nonbelievers smirked and the neurons fired and the dance music sort of slid across the speaker like beer-soaked boots. The floor did tilt like a deceptive boat. And look there was Estelle at last! My beloved stepmom. J's mere touch of the dial of the phone, just that alone, had awakened her or lifted her decal loose -- from the oblivion to which it was affixed -- as skin comes loose in a swimming pool. This is the loose the loss the pull of the moon. How it hurts.

Estelle of course was wearing the threadbare this-and-that clothes she always wore, her mind always on other more important things. The ladies looked at her with that certain look, the suavest of gotchas.

She moved forward, bumping into things, looking for someone. She bumped into a wall. She stood there looking at it, not moving. Unable to back up, just unable.

And I? I felt that urge one has around an old person, to help them, to right them, as if brusquely, with impatience and fretfulness, a state of emotion that helps no one, so I felt, yes I did, anger that she was there, that she was as if alive, disordering the laid down scheme of things in which she had passed away, we'd buried her and cried our eyes out. It was horrible but it happened, why is it unhappening??? And my sister Una looked at me in horror. This gift -- this rift -- this gift, why are you not accepting? Oh I needed you, Doctor Sam! No not Doctor but Father. Father Sam. I needed you to calm me down and point me once again to -- to the one you sort of represent or promote or feebly evoke -- the one, divine, the one, whom I must wake up to remember and I cannot wake.

*

A couple passed chatting: "It got so bad that babies couldn't share food."

Here is what I will say in conclusion. The neurons reach forward into what is eventually a black place, which they don't cross nor do they come out of it, not even mangled, on the other side. No, Father, the black place is simply there in my head and nothing crosses it. And no one explains it nor does it ask to be explained. And I am in the center of the blackness, sitting at a table by myself in a windowless room. And the rationalists never succeed in tidying this room. And I do feel closest to God when I am sitting there. But all alone, my love. Apparently it must be that way.

*

So Una walked over to the old woman and began gently pulling her, then she turned her 180 degrees, it was like resetting a dial. The woman looked over at me and was a total stranger, someone else's mom or stepmom. And Una herself, she looked so unfamiliar, a pretty girl, the kind that single guys open doors for. She was blinking and steadying herself as the floor rocked and I said to myself: Wait, Una's dead too. So who is that woman?

It was like a contagion. And I reached my hands to touch myself, to make sure I was really there, but that never works in a dream. The body seemed to be gently blowing against my hands, like a gentle puff of air that goes and comes. A garment that the dream itself was taking off. And the phone rang urgently but no one picked it up.

Lord, put me back together!

*

In the morning J woke up clinging to the ceiling -- or to the heating duct that abutted the ceiling. Sam stood on the floor where a human would normally be. He was tapping his foot.

Get on down now. No point.

There was no point in wasting breath saying don't know how. The frozen shoulders were an easy read.

Okay. Number one, Sam said. If you're going to fall just make it an act of grace. Fall gracefully, you might as well. Right?

Number two. Go into God. Just fold into that darkness that you dread so much. If God is everywhere God must be there, right? If God is there, maybe you'll find, well, at least the breath of your sister and your mom. So why be afraid, right?

I was afraid of my own longing to die but anyway, that was an old story, it was better to go somewhere new instead. I let go of the vent and stepped forward and then I was on the rug panting. This time I woke up for good. The priest was standing there. The room began to rock like a boat. Home!

*

Jorge: In the confessional

2007-10-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

*

In the confessional J felt free and blind -- free because he was blind. Only God and Sam could see or feel his brain. (He himself could not.)

I think (he said) I have always felt a sort of sixth port of sensation -- a sixth opening for "impressions" and perceptions and anguish to come in. It was lodged in my back and from there poked a great gash in my stomach or somewhere a bit lower down -- one of those places over which one had no control.

And these "sixth sense" perceptions I could not describe, Father. And these perceptions I could not even share.

They could not be reproduced, codified or measured. Did they exist?

When everyone said they did not exist, what could I say to refute this? They (the sensations themselves) refuted this but publicly did not. Publicity seemed to kill them.

So they afflicted me but were silent.

I would be covered with sweat and my underwear would be damp with fear. I felt most duly out of control.

Tell me, Father Sam asked. Did you feel God speaking to you through this odd opening?

Oh yes, I said -- so much so -- so very much -- in part -- fully -- yes -- I don't know!

But also demons would sometimes grab the microphone.

But yes. Okay. God as well, God on top. So that even when my muscles became strong enough to close this down -- to close it off -- I knew I must not do so. Sam.

Sam? Are you there?

Si, escucho.

Je t'ecoute. Poor cripply little bean you are.

Sam, tell me. Have you ever felt something similar?

No I have not, Sam said.

But often my heart clamps down to the point that I can't breathe. And I wonder if there is a relation.

Was any of this feeling just repressed sexuality? No not even possile. In this epoch the only thing that isn't repressed is that. It always stands at the uppermost fringe, without shading, without mystery, oddly without fear.

So I don't think any of this is about sex per se, only one can't see the true subject matter through the thick fronds of sex but that is different. It hangs down and hides the true subject matter and the true fear.

Because now it seems the subject of God has all the intense forbiddenness that sex used to have. Dark and folded and furtively put away.

But how do I even know about it? I know about it from behind me. It is this electricity between my shoulder blades -- it rustles the little black hairs there and makes them rise.

It clarifies and illumines the network -- what network? -- the great big field of relations that lights up below the reason and then passes invisibly through the reason and then materializes like an impossibility before the eyes. Father, I am scared.

Don't be. This is important.

Well, there is this other way that things come to be, I mean it's not resemblance or contiguity or God knows cause/effect so Hume just plain missed out on the most important thing happening, which I can't even demonstrate or prove or put my finger on. A thing is there and it's part of the things of a larger expanse -- they don't resemble each other, they are neither "far" nor "near" in time and space and they don't even bother with cause and effect. Yet the meaning hangs as though it were pre-strewn and pre-threaded.

Everything is darkness. I wish you were my dad. I wish I had one.

Hey, Sam said. Name a single great educational experience that wasn't made out of darkness and pain.

With little points of light laid on it. Not knowledge but really something else.

As though knowledge were, well, sort of deathlike in its way.

*

Some orgy of sorrow.

*

Well, let it be that way then! Doesn't that just mean that you want the truth and not in some "bowing for my Academy Award" fashion but really want it, with your stomach and hips engaged?

*

Father I want to be free Father from the tyranny of justify justify. So much logic and no way to be any other person but the one who grounds things in reasons whether or not they apply Father. Because Father the only times I have ever felt suicidal Father were when logic like some fashion czar pushed me to it and said -- however you feel right now, reason itself has proved you to be a failure and a void so that logically it follows that you should do away with yourself. Like the inevitable acting out of a theorem. Then Father fortunately out of nowhere I see a loopity little dog trotting down the street or I hear a tune out of nowhere's organ (both hopelessly and hopefully out of tune and sinking) and then Father logic completely dissolves Father. It isn't even there, it isn't even not there. It was just this self-contained elitist little suburb I was in and now suddenly I'm not anymore. And so I can make a start.

There it is Father -- the tune coming from right behind my back. As beautiful as my mother's womb.

*

On the blackish street a white dog, a smudge of chalk, chewing a kibble with the same closed eye contentment that Carl used to show before his stroke and even afterwards -- another world, darkness. Each of Jorge's knees would show as white, a kind of phospherence, wherever he walked. When he pulled it back it would disappear.

The presence of the minister next to him, close to him, made J's own heart swing from side to side like a kettleball. So could a heart be good exercise for the heart?

Look up ahead. Mrs Scott was closing down her stall of hot cockles, a good sale day, the world is so hungry, 800 million people hungry tonight. Lord may I rest my bones after this day. But look he's crying she said and who's crying? I asked.

She pointed to the giant sitting on an upturned recycle bin. Oh what a heave -- the asphalt it surged like salty water, look at that, that was my heart. So hot, so very hot that heart. We were sitting in a sauna resting and the gentle giant took all the room. Not malice, that's just how big he was. Where the skin left off the hair took over and all of it was sad. They said he really was gentle but so impossibly ugly that no children would talk to him or shake his hand. They thought he was diseased. White as a ghost and covered with a Jewish brush, he did suck the air from the room and he cried and cried because all the other bears were dead now. Heart attacks or AIDS. Carl too. I would have consoled him Father but I too was afraid of him. Perhaps I was afraid of catching his grief and finding out that he was me. Then right on schedule the ship heaved, the good old Dancing Queen, and we all went on deck to touch the sky and recover. But zut alors I had forgotten my orange life vest! I wasn't wearing much at all, just my hesitation. Then as if ritualized came the familiar near miss as the land homed in for the ship till we swerved. Land! Who could have known that the land was sailing too! Land! the giant cried and jumped overboard and of course the rest of us followed, our quasi electroreceptors sensing the heat of our beds just a few feet ahead and yet a lifetime away.

This all was as weird as John Ashbery being an Episcopalian, which it turns out he is. Father, I need mediation -- quick like oxygen! I believe in God but feel the remoteness of God. I think it will have to be a human who semaphorically waves me closer to God. I can't, you know, just touch God on my own.

I am prepared to die if God is on the other side of what in that case would only pretend to be death. That isn't logical, doesn't make sense, but you know, I love senselessness, it has this homelike feel. It too is me. Reality is a place that you walk around, not this thing you argue about. Father, it is so refreshing to talk to you like this! Because you are there.

I can tell you everything but what you mean to me, which I cannot and must not say.

In the darkness all the people got separated and soon I walked alone. Or almost. You could say: alone like the hotel guest in the Nabokov poem. Everything was black with these lights punctuating it but not lighting anything, merely falling on the surface. Everywhere were warm African men that you could feel but not see. They all greeted Father Sam, everyone seemed to know him. So I was not alone. Nor was ever likely to be. We climbed the stairs to my apartment and he said goodnight with a blessing. He left me alone in the apartment but not alone. May I say that God was there like a tune you can't quite hum, a neglected hymn in the hymnal or a dance that has just one step that you never seem to master. When I practiced it the floor would roll under me. I saw the land approaching via diffusion through the porthole. My home was there. When I got home I would have time to pray again, to be again, to resume this existence that now I could only dream about, although the dream felt so solid that I could put it in my mouth and chew it until it completely dissolved. As indeed it just has.

*

Interlude: old dog, ice cream

2007-10-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

*

Last night, a night deep in July, my dog got lost facing the corner, trying to leave a room that in fact he knew by heart. It was as though the room had turned. Since he was a dachshund and therefore unable by definition to back up and start again, he just faced the cul de sac and shivered. He had somehow wandered and gotten lost. When he saw me he sadly wagged his tail. I picked him up and pointed him the right way but it still didn't feel right, in fact still doesn't. Once you're in one of those turned around

places you can never really back out. This is death. We all know what death looks like when it approaches. This thing is never just approaching someone else. The approach approaches everyone. So much scary solidarity is too much to feel. And yet earlier I'd been so mad at him for wandering when there was clearly noplace to go. Wandering compulsively -- but I too am that. Compulsive. And getting mad at the old is about the ugliest and most futile of errors. Then it made me shudder to

think how mad I'd been at my mother (July 4th 2005) for refusing the chocolate ice cream she loved, when as one now sees, she knew that she was dying and I of course didn't or by nature of my role,

simply couldn't. Proving that I wasn't really mad but deeply scared. I mean, I was in a corner too, sharing the feeling that I was required to deny. And really only fools can imagine that sharing emotions like this one can have any connection with assuagement. These are not better for being shared. I swear, there he was, shivering in the corner. No emotional response to this would be

of any help. Something else would be needed. Not "I know how you feel." Please not that.

I'd say I can't evade the horrible grip that that corner had. or has and had and has. The sense it gave that death had a beauty and a meaning from which the living were not only excluded but had chosen to be excluded. But so rule-bound is the fact of living that in fact when we the living "choose" to see death as a great evil it is not a choice we have made but the role we are absolutely ethically obligated to play and so this fear involves no choice at all. Neither we nor the dead have really chosen.

And so I was ethically obligated to insist that my mother eat, while she was bound (from a much deeper and, I will insist, a truer place) to resist and say no.

*

Interlude: the ship dream

2007-10-17T10:37:00.000-07:00

*

In July I was sitting in a suburban house waiting for my dead mother to come pick me up. The house was in both Palo Alto and Palos Verdes, the quiddity separating these 2 cities having been surgically removed with an ugly socioeconomic set of hot tongs. Everywhere the same. And as I waited in this land-locked house I looked out the window and saw "a" bay and in it a large blue and white ship heading straight for the house. At the last moment the house shifted to the left and the ship passed: to the ship's left and my own right, line-dancing. Jerky. And even my dreaming self could taste something distinctly non-Kosher. "It's an optical illusion," I was told. Okay. Time then to wake up. But I wasn't sure I could.

*

Jorge: The dream of freedom

2007-08-26T00:56:00.001-07:00

*

So in my dream I was in a bar and hey I hate bars, haven't been in one for, no but there I was, I can't pretend otherwise. I was sober but the room swirled.

The caretaker's son was across the room, a hopeless person, but what do I mean? He was full of hope, he was smiling. It was other people who looked at him and felt no hope. That is, they felt sorry for him but not he for himself, he was free of that. So why feel sorry for someone who is not intrinsically a sorry sight? Well, because that was what people did.

In my dream he held a bottle of beer, wet and cold, better to touch than to drink. He peeled the label off the bottle, over and over. It was as though it continuously came off and never came off. Then he looked up and me and smiled. You're that kid I rescued from Satan. That kid. But I was forty years old.

X and Y were waltzing across Texas on the dance floor. The help was gathering the drinks the second a patron would put them down. Predators stood around the dance floor but no -- just would be predators, potential bad guys that were condemned to being good. The caretaker's son walked through them as though they weren't even there.

He walked out the front door and almost toppled into the ocean. He, or was it I, was it I who was he, I don't know, but one of us stood on the edge of the deck of the cruise ship, though a moment ago I had been in the middle of dry land, or was it he who had somehow gotten unmoored? The other ship came dead on and was ready to butt us but the street, bar and all, swerved at the last minute and averted a crash. And men in droopy t shirts walked unafraid up and down the dark.

I come in peace, said the alien or the person dressed as an alien. Mrs Scott had prepared her famous lasagne and it was not possible to pass the table without taking some, taking it in her sight so she would be pleased. And the array of foods was marvelous. We were all eating like crazy. Jorge looked across the room (was it the alley in front of the bar? was it the deck of a ship?) and saw the blonde who looked so much like his sister. But the lady looked away, now it's true she looked away but in the conversation between sexual beings looking away can be a form of looking at. The way she looked was to look away but everyone knew that -- well, what? Well, that scorn could really be something else.

The odd thing is that our bodies have lives that are different from our lives. They have already fused and separated before the idea even occurs to us. Do you think? Do you think that happens?

I think you're totally nuts, Jorge. Does it matter to me? No it doesn't.

Her dress was damp and no one seemed to notice her as she moved through the crowd. Dear Una always had this shimmer like those little curves in a soprano's voice.

When she moved down the alleyway he followed her into an old fashioned drugstore like a stage set, a place for starlets to sit and be discovered, and he did indeed sit down -- he ordered a hamburger, watching her movement in the mirror but there was none, she wasn't there, only this sort of uneven man who came into the frame of the rectangle unequally, one shoulder first, oh that's me, that freak is me. And the woman didn't register on the surface but when he looked behind him she was outside and the boats were all tilting in the water. I don't believe in that water! I believe I have made it up! Nixon's face was on the cover of the Newsweek by the door and the water sashayed, it moved like a human. Guys were jogging around the periphery not worrying about a dip suddenly throwing them into the water, hungry water! You go down into that you don't come back up at least not as yourself.

And when he looked into it his image changed and changed. Was this the way to shed your personality and become someone else?

The ships kept rushing in the face of the land but the land kept shifting its direction -- in order not to be hit, why was it afraid of being hit? What happens when we are hit?

Disaster disaster. On the other side of the water was the two towers, although we were many miles away from New York. Frightened he looked down, okay there was his image again. A Mexican, an immigrant without papers looked up and quickly looked away. But looking away is a way of looking in and looking back. The labels from the beerbottles floated semaphorically, and Mrs Scott grabbed my arm, pulled me back. Never get so close to something that wants you like that. But Mrs Scott, you have been dead for 20 years.

And the Mexican no Guatemaltecan, oh he came from Huehuetenango, he looked up at me maybe thinking I was immigration or else thinking I was himself, we are human and we just can't not look.

The water was dead, a great well of death and what could interest us more? No no no. I like gardens, not mountains and seas. But what I like is always different from what likes me. It is the second that really gets things going and flowing and sticking to the hands. There was a little box in the water that had been considerately labelled Logic so that you could know, if not what it was, then at least what someone wanted you to think it was but wait -- logic? logic??? Didn't that rule the world? Wasn't everything a mode of logic? If so, then how could it be -- how could it be... simply there?

The professor in his long black frock coat screamed and wrung his hands and jumped into the water to save the box as it receded into. Into the "into" really -- then the little man sank into the water and was gone.

And the box was gone. Were we better off without it? Or would we go back into our staterooms and find it sitting calmly on our pillow?

Jorge looked down. And down and down. That would be the next part.

The sea was like a mirror, was then wasn't then was -- a mirror of realism then, churning like the world around it. And he both couldn't look away and couldn't look out. Looking away was another form of looking in, yes? That was the logicians may they rest in peace, may they be okay but irrevocably elsewhere, that was what they hadn't understood about perception, how dirty it was, how contagious -- you looked and then you fused at what you looked at, no. You fused, and called the fusion merely looking. So the mirror moved when he turned his head.

He saw a face embossed in the water. What a sad face it was. It tried to radiate power and command but it was just a little boy's face, looking for inclusion. Always inclusion, do you accept me, monster as I am? The eyes -- they darted or they tried to dart but the web held them in awareness. Oh liquid it was inside there. It was like a sea churning. That meant that someone else could reach from behind and make that face what it was but what was it?

There was a giant triangular grid, Father -- Father Sam -- and the eyeballs were placed on it but unstably. They rolled around in it -- in perception, I guess? I chased them as though they were little balls rolling around on the deck -- of the ship? Other people too. We stepped through each other, hoping to find our own.

The caretaker's son held them in his palms, reached up, said here you go and put them back in my face. Why was he always so kind to me? What did he himself gain, Father? Father Sam.

Such was the power of the dream's undertow that invoking you brought you there. An overweight, Latino, 30ish man on the deck of the street. And if he was there, did that mean God was not too far away? Or were you more in the way of blocking him? I looked over to the table but Mrs Scott was busy putting away her utensils and wouldn't look at me, wouldn't speak. It wasn't her turn apparently. So the person whose face had gotten stuck in the mirror -- the "I" like a variable in a very complex equation -- that person shifted weight back to itself but not wanting to. The mirror turned when he turned his head so that he couldn't get out of looking. The surface was damaged, as if molten -- the objects in it bent in a liquid horrible way that made one sick.

You you you. You were stuck with you.

Then they turned their heads away from the window with the stormy rain, Father Sam and the young man, who seemed to be synchronizing his head with the other. Why does it feel so good to be standing next to him, to be synchronizing? The flesh warm and sunny and a little fat. Father Sam, not a priestly type at all. Do you bring me closer to God? Or do you block the way? The way. They walked along the strand -- in the alley some wild things were happening and Jorge tried rather timidly to block the other person's view. Don't bother, Sam said. I know all about that. Do you think I stepped out of a box? I've been a really bad man.

I was thrown out of my profession for drinking, did you know that? I have climbed back but not all the way, I mean, they don't let you get back all the way nor should they, not at all -- how can low creatures like us pretend we're Christ? What could be wronger than that? Wrong wrong wrong -- sounds like a bell. A bell? And the strand moved and made the percipient seasick. The image, the sense of self, it was not a sense but a perception from way outside. Father, father. That's something I never had, he said. The road like a snake, everything dark. Do you want to come home with me? Do you live on the street? Are these your congregation?

We are all brothers -- isn't that sad somehow? No it's okay.

When you turn your back to the window you're still on it, in it -- it's like a screen projecting you. Sometimes the film is so vivid it starts to burn.

There was an asylum on the corner. Once it was a warehouse of kissing and trade. Now there were beds for the sick and nurses to tend them. Father Sam slept here in a corner, you wouldn't really call it a home, would you? I mean it shifts every night. The deaths are appalling, good man. You go inside and you feel your skin crawl as though it were loose, shifting, ready to come off. Stomach and bowels just won't hold still. But as one dies, the sound of the sea, the murmur of the imaginary boats, and a priest to act perhaps as a mirror you can look into. No no, don't come in. But Father Sam, when will I see you again?

Dear, we are talking about transition. As it says in scripture, do not put a lot of your talk into the idea of tomorrow. Think. Where are you now, right now? But I don't know where I am. When will I see you again?

When you are missing someone have you ever tried to see their face in another person? Have you considered how one person might be as it were hiding inside another? Oh that's not good enough. Words words words. Need something tangible. Now later now. Don't know why always so needy but there it is.

In the morning J woke in such joy and desolation. The joy was desolate but the desolation a form of joy. Allthis was a dream!

Yes!

I am well and awake.

There was a giant moth resting on his tipped up toes. Moth or mouth? Through the belly of the... moth -- the belly a sort of fretted caterpillar mouth pulsing in the wind (with its little parts disintegrating), J watched the dream suck away into the waste place where all the untrue things go and have always gone. Freedom! Yes! Its dirty wings torn and hanging, the mouth flapped and looked away. The holes in the moth could be seen through. They were the soft guts of a man. It was there, not there then there. The not there was there.

Okay. You blinked and the dream was just motes of dust. They crinkled and collapsed without speaking. Only reality was left, this hard cold thing everyone "agrees about", with puckered holes in its sides. Breathing. The hesitations that everything has, even reality.

Then the longing J felt for Father Sam became -- infinite. It had no edge. Simply was. Be with me -- nothing more but just be.

You were the clew that led to God. But I, I was still my clumsy self tangled hopelessly in that same clew. I was idolatrous. But I hungered for God even then.

Did a moth have a mouth really? Did they really eat a man like that?

No. Wake up. You dismissed the thought and it broken into a billion motes (again?) and dissipated into reality, which was basically whatever was left. A bit depressing. Yet the dream remained, untrue but obscurely present, fuelling the wakefulness of day. So I got up and made my bed and myself most presentable. Walked to the stop. Sam of course was nowhere but the glory of God everywhere. The one thing that was sustained from "there" to "here" was that one thing. Humble faceless men were gathering up the red gold air to sell to museums. A giant billboard of a burnt dress hung in the sky. There was a lovely invigorating sea breeze but the sea was a hundred miles away. And the joy was desolate and the desolation a form of joy.

The glory of God was so everywhere that J had to look away. But the truth was that looking away was just a form of simply looking. It was the deepest version, the sunkest look, it was that form of looking that looked back. That looked at you. And what indeed did it see?

*

Poem: Uncle at Wednesday testimony

2007-08-15T09:28:00.001-07:00

*

Uncle, when you said
your "words can't express"
the reach of God-
's goodness,

it was not only true
when you said what they couldn't
do but all the more true
the more they couldn't.

They were
more powerful somehow
the weaker
they were and so were you

as you spoke to me
and I listened distractedly.

*

Sir Twitch

2007-08-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

(thanks to Karl Swedberg and englishrules.com)
*

WERE reincarnation
true, I would
have been a SPIDER
in a former life,
so deep and so negative is my affinity with them.

I've said before how the sight of one evokes in me a taste of flies -- and how nothing but scale seems to protect my life from their oversized hunger.

So... are they just Darwinism with all the atheist curlicues removed? Very blunt spoken creatures they are.

I have a rule that prevents me from either killing one or touching one -- except perhaps the former by an accident I may not always be sufficiently careful to prevent. This week there was an orange beauty -- carrying a tortoise shell tint like the one on the curved tines of a lady's comb -- blocking with its slanted web all access to the dog's hutch. This should have been prime real estate for such as him, given that it is home to hundreds of flies. But each day the monster looked more disconsolate -- and I didn't see any paralyzed bags hanging there either, though on the other hand, why would he have wanted to show them off to me especially? In any case, I began to wonder if he might be dead (in which case, I could enter and clean up).

Blowing on the web was oddly unproductive. Sleepy, are we? Finally, one hideous back leg twitched and swung. Was I happy to see signs of life? Good Lord, not at all really!

I kept on. No doubt what I wanted to see die was the affinity. Today the web has deflated. It is there but lacks buoyancy or sweep. And the flies continue to fly around and over and they seem to pierce and pass through.

And as for me I didn't like the life of it but I hate the death of it. I think I would revive it if I could, just as I am not a bit sorry that I can't.

We will
CALL you
sweet Sir TWITCH.

*

Jorge: Betrayal

2007-07-27T12:54:00.001-07:00

*

Jorge's relation to his Lord was subtle and complicated, a thing to be described in many words, too many words, alas infinite words. But the main word was: betrayal. J proved himself to be a treacherous friend to have and this was his humanity.

His Lord was not the handsomest or best dressed man at a given party. He was not the one paid attention to. J generally felt him rather than noticed him. His presence in a given room might be called delicate, and almost intangible.

I knew you were next to me without looking up at you. I smelled you, I felt you, oh Lord.

But the other friends were louder and claimed more attention.

Have you ever had a friend like this? One that you could rely on and who for that very reason interested you less than the fashionable, attractive one, the "role model" that most advisedly ignored you -- or scorned you -- hardly needing you, after all, being one that drew attention without ever doing or needing to do much of anything. That aloof one you pursued as meanwhile the perhaps truer friend, the drab one, stood in the background, gathering as it were the dust of your disrespect.

And he put up with this because he was a true friend, after all.

He put up with it for a time perhaps. There was as it were a time of grace.

There was a time in which you were free, there was. The briefest time. You felt it like a point between two gears -- a locus where judgments floated suspended. Temporarily the still point held. But in your ignorance you thought of this suspension as freedom not as grace. A place you could choose to be. A door with a handle under your hand.

Joyful, virtual place! A roomful of college students inside it. When you danced your foot hardly touched the dance floor. The sweat on your body burst like little stars in formation. You were free to love anyone on the planet. There were no consequences. Life was virtual and your brow always came clean.

No no, there is no such place, the clocks all said. The clocks that "coughed when you would kiss". Your friend is very sick, Myra said. I don't think anyone knows what's wrong.

I don't care about him at all, she said. But I thought you might still care.

Well, of course I care, Jorge said. His heart was as if thudding from the room next door. His heart wasn't in his body but someplace distant. Next door. Where the air is heavy with obligation. Of course I care. I had better get over there.

But one thing happened, then another. It was several days before he found himself sufficiently organized to make the visit. The infirmary was so out of the way somehow. And the receptionist was like a dragon with long beautiful brown hair that crackled as she neatened it, staring through him. Through him.

It seemed that just by looking at him she could tell what a bad friend he was. And a bad friend was a bad everything.

So you want to see him -- does he want to see you? she asked. I don't know, the boy replied.

Maybe he just wants to sleep and be alone.

No, people here do like company. Certain kinds of company. Still you would be vastly surprised to know how many never receive visits at all -- as though it were only the old who were neglected -- the world is so upside down, we're only a short walk from the center of the campus as the crow flies but really no one comes by. I do all the visiting myself most days but clearly that's not what the patients really want.

What a place! All too much like an undesirable motel, one of those with a number in its name. The receptionist shook her hair. Even in fluorescent light it glistened and gave off nylon sparks and her smile was the opposite of welcoming. One fixated on her so as not to think of the illness behind her. But really she seemed to see herself as a kind of prison guard. Was she guarding the patients' health or their sickness?

A doctor slid by in the distant background like an upright white mollusc. I'll just go right in, the boy said, if you'll tell me the room number.

Well that's the thing, the woman said. Your friend checked out yesterday.

He's long gone. But we do have a bed open, which you could use. You look like you very much need it. Those deep engraved rings under the eyes. Why don't you come back here and get some rest?

*

J's search for his friend, his Lord -- what in metaphor was no ordinary person but the person whose presence made "person" itself possible -- this search so off track and not like a crow flying -- grew long and digressive, like one of those roads you follow on a hot day without being absolutely sure you are pointed the right direction. It's the right road but what about you? Are you going the way you should? (If not, how much further and further away with every step!). Is this road the right way? And the answer to that question is just what you are on the road to find. Unfortunately the you, the person finding, is itself lost now or in danger.

J seemed to sleep all day. In classes, at gatherings. He went to his friend's room but no one was there. The old haunts were empty now (and the creatures of fashion who did congregate there were now like those old angels on a weightless pin -- they took up so little space, they didn't seem to be where they were). The boy discovered how easy it is to disappear these days, even on a closed campus -- you just avoid all the places that you used to go. No one can guess where you might be going instead. There were wanted posters for Cupid posted all over campus but no one seemed to be searching for his friend. J felt lost and dissatisfied, a very deep and well-founded and intimate feeling. Now nothing seemed to matter but the friendship that he himself had abandoned.

In the chapel they talked about him and as it were groped for him without quite finding the words for what they were doing. The women were faithful but the faith made a circle. People like Myra went from cult to asylum to cult to asylum. Where was the actual path?

In the middle of the night J would wake up and, Thank God, I'm not in school anymore. That epoch is over. But then the shadows would move around slowly like dancers -- he would wake a little more -- and once again he remembered his loss and his sorrow. They were his road and he needed to continue walking down it. That is, down or up, as if searching for which direction to search. So the next day he would spend roving the library and the student center. He even checked the infirmary over and over and even made friends with -- but no, there was no feeling left over in him for that.

The campus parties became repetitions of parties. Machines, iterations -- they lost their flavor. There was no reason to go and little not to either. All the fashionable were stuck, their faces didn't move, their hips no longer cut the air with a slash.

But sitting alone in the library, that was no fun either. The sound a page made in turning would rasp like a branch against the window. The sky outside would hang slack under its clouds, sagging with age -- and "parfonds regrets" played over and over on the iPhone.

Finally -- at a Shakespeare play, it felt like decades later -- at one of those ceremonial hieratic performances that were so popular now, that seemed to fill an unspecified void -- J saw his friend or an older version of his friend. Of course he himself was older, too, although unchanged at the same time. The friend was on a balcony, surrounded by strangers. They all seemed rather sober, a bit flayed, filled to the brim with "life experience", which tended to be mostly pain these days. They would only reluctantly part to let Jorge get closer. In fact, they were a bit like guards.

"Absent thee from felicity awhile." Why have I spent so many unhappy years?

Why are so many of us so unhappy? The drug users are not chasing pleasure but fleeing pain. They are basically medicating themselves. So many of us are so stuck in our wrongness -- much too miserable to think of changing.

I would like to change, J thought. But moved with that dreamlike slowness through the milling crowd. Seemed to be moved backward against his will. And there of a sudden was his friend leaning against the wall, in the line to the restroom.

Do you remember me? Jorge asked. Do you remember me?

What I remember, the friend said, is that you didn't like me very much. Now tell me: are you different now?

Are you different now?

*

Poem: Parfonds regrets

2007-07-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

*

We line-danced
to "Parfonds regrets"
and leaned against
the wall's own sway

then applied our hopes and blunders
to a second wall,
bougainvillea over the doors,
black cat on the sill,

strangers sudden friends,
our hips almost linked
but our hands
in shells and distinct,

with all of us looking
the same way saying nothing.

*

Jorge: The motel

2007-05-31T21:24:00.001-07:00

*

The motel the motel. It was such a grand hotel, no it wasn't, just a plain motel. Lots of babies conceived there and alas a few sent home.

Cast my memory back now. The feel of the past is what matters to the living because that feel still grasps you today and is the bed in which your present still sleeps. Or turns and wakefully twists, in guilt and discomfort. When you dismiss these sorts of things they laugh at you and still cling anyway.

Jorge. He was calling himself Georg at that time -- like the Hungarian conductor -- "gay-org" it was pronounced but hardly anyone did, not even himself.

Cast my memory back now. Smoke trees in the patio. The mysterious dried faeces of creatures one hardly saw. Little, scared and vastly hurried things. The landscape pale and denuded but the colors, they entered you at last, and once that happened would never leave. They were pale but so deeply pale.

Get their money, the boss would always say. I don't care about anything else. But don't you not get that money. You're not the caretaker, you're the cashier, I would ask you to remember. This place is on the edge. On the edge. We may not make it to the fall.

Most people in America felt that money was the secret ingredient of all abundance. Georg himself had none. Abundance yes, money no.

The young blondes would come with older companions. They would linger at the desk and chat. Mmmm, the smell of their necks spoke a language of its own. Oh no no! the maid would say. That's a mujerzuela. Shouldn't let her talk to you.

She's not going to bite me, Georg said.

The blondes were so pretty and so was the maid. But Georg was sufficiently immune to them that he saw them as friends.

*

Mindy Sue, the most beautiful, Mindy Sue with the lofty lifted body so brown beneath her heavenly gold hair. So tasty, so lifted, such a high surrounded her, even when she smoked. Her perfume was suffused with the essence of her. Which was? She was? Because it was impossible to tell just what sort of being hid beneath that gorgeous body, like an apparition surrounding her. Her beauty felt like an absence of pain. She would hold her little putter at shoulder height as she circled the motel's putting green, followed by stout Mr Rolex and sinister Count Patek-Philippe. They were fighting over her. She was like the richest item in an auction. But I am not to be bought, she said. And she would cling to the hotel clerk, her "little Georgie", like a kitten. I just know you're so immune to me anyway. That predatory macho thing, I don't even feel it. So she clung to him. And that was when he sort of came to love her.

That woman's a wh*re, the maid said. No she's not a wh*re, Georg said, accenting the *.

Anyway the currency that buys such women is security -- a sense of security -- not money. For them the money comes and goes just like people in a motel.

And anyway. And anyway.

Anyway it is not a crime to give yourself as trade for security. Only maybe it's a crime to lean for security onto something so insecure as a man. Look, the beautiful God-filled heaven lies right over you, shining in the gender-neutral pallor of an open desert.

Abundance. Abundance. Prayer always feels better than sex.

Listen. Listen, beautiful one. I think the men who love you have very good taste, Georg said. I don't think they're wrong at all. I think they're on to something. At about that time she began to spend less time on her "torn and damaged" golf swing and Mr Rolex silently fell away. The other one had won her hand or won her heart or won her. Then they traded up and were no longer seen at a mere motel. They became 2 more examples of the people who came and then went. Cast your memory back, recall the way they looked when they walked together -- she a foot taller than he. The golf club twirling like a baton. The pale sun. Then one night Georg was going to the store in his old used-up Pinto and passed Mindy Sue walking alone on the desolate road when it was still much too hot to be out.

Her jewelry was replaced by bruises and tears. They all get tired of me eventually, she said. They come and they go. So Georg bundled her into his car and snuck her back to the motel, which is how he eventually got fired but that was later, another story on a tangent from this one.

*

She would cook for him, cut his hair, pray with him and even offer amatory advice, of little use to one without a lovelife but anyway. And that phrase "but anyway" contained a world. Listen, listen, she said. Just because I'm such a mess doesn't mean I don't know what other people should do. Advice is easier from a distance. A friendly distance. Then they would go out to the club,, maybe dance together, while all the straight guys envied him his fantastic luck -- she was so beautiful that it hurt your eyes to look at her. She didn't need jewels. She didn't need anything. You are just right as is, he said. But they never went to bed together, and each day they didn't, they became closer friends. Because sex is really overrated, she said. Most guys do it so they can find a way to forget about you. It's like putting out a fire so you can go on with your life. You must know that already from your side of things.

Meanwhile the boss got suspicious when he smelled perfume in Georg's cabin. If you're harboring someone, I will turn you in.

I run a clean place here, the boss said.

*

She came out of the bathroom when he left. She had a book in her hand. Well I got my reading done for once.

Look at this: "I have not sat with the worthless, * nor do I consort with the deceitful." Who was this person?? Did he spend his whole life in a coffin?

There are not any people who are not, you know, that. That way. You can't even avoid worthless people when alone because, after all, you yourself....

Nobody could say this authentically, not really.

Meanwhile there was a rhythmic low thump on the wall. Some bears were cutting up.

In the Old Testament they were always talking about their righteousness as giving them access to God -- almost as though there were cause and effect.

What Jorge -- this pseudo-Georg -- could not understand or even cope with was the feel of God, when it was so strong and binding, and yet you didn't feel even the slightest righteousness inside you to match. Righteousness was totally God's, in no way yours, there was a terrible disconnect. He knew he was immersed in wrongness, top to bottom, and it was just something he "processed" through. It was inside him and was him. He felt indeed abandoned. And yet this same being who felt so deeply wrong also could not shake the feel of God. And the 2 feelings were not so terribly distant.

There was a different and much humbler way of being a Christian.

And the on-again off-again so-called career girl, with her lofty cushy boobs, was now his deepest spiritual buddy, a sister of agape. And the wispy sound of those fabrics swishing between her legs had become an innocent sound. She was like Thais in the opera.

"I will wash my hands in innocence... I will not sit down with the wicked." These words just had to be some wry Jewish humor. They had to be tongue in cheek. Dry desert cheek.

*

The feel of God is the feel of the past but that doesn't mean it's dead. It has been millenia that the Bear has stalked our night sky. God has always had a leash on that naughty Bear.

*
Listen. Listen. Here's the thing. Outside in air so cold that it dissipates your warmth in a second. Stars bright but not seeming close. A lit cross on the hillside opposite, if you can call space "opposite", if anything is positional or conjoined in such a structured way to be called "opposite" or "near" or "far". Oh, this is scary! This is rockbottom fear. The smoke you smoke has no reality, it doesn't even linger before it goes. And you say to yourself, this is my life, I have only one. What am I doing? Why am I wasting it? Why am I letting it disperse right through my fingers? Que hago. Que hago. What do I do? What should I do?

It would be so great (so they thought then) if that cross over there had lips, if it told you -- in the clearest possible terms -- what is to be done next. Not just to believe, not just to pray, but to do. To act the behavior that the rightness in the world says is right. But exactly what act is that?

*

Don't think so much, Mindy Sue said.

You could let the way guide you the right way without piercing it with so many holes.

*

There is a mediation to the desert sky. The holiness of the heart's affections.

*

I love you, Mindy! Georg said.

Yes, she replied. But only in an abstract sort of way.

*

On the very next day Georg's boss found her underthings in Georg's room and fired him "without appeal". Sad because just before that she'd left for good, going back to -- was it Idaho? -- together with her daddy. (Was it really her daddy?) In the morning the man had suddenly appeared in the motel office. No, I don't want a room. I want my daughter.

I want her to sacrifice all her fleshy things and come home with me, lead a good moral life like before.

There are no perverts in our home town.

We are a very churchy town.

*

He had the sober look of a heavy father in a melodrama. Mindy Sue couldn't look him in the eye. Either one of them really. He asked her what she'd been doing in this crazy town and she wouldn't answer. Georg said: she hasn't been doing anything wrong. You probably haven't been doing anything, Mindy, her father said. You have probably just been wasting your life. People came into the office and floated out while he talked -- bears, gamblers, derelicts, prostitutes, ordinary people -- and they all seemed to underline his words. You have got to come back home, the altar girls have been going crazy without you.

This was the exact moment that Georg's boss stepped into his, Georg's, room, which he wasn't strictly authorized to do. Georg took his eyes off the woman and somehow never managed to get them back on target. She was crying. Her home town must have been a dreary place.

She turned to Georg and whispered: Marry me. Marry me. Right now.

Oh you know that makes no sense, he said. Nobody screws up a woman like a husband who just won't play the part.

All right, Daddy, I'm coming home, she said and Georg's boss, simultaneously, at the same millisecond, said: What is this stuff, Georg? I warned you explicitly.

When that conversation was over, Mindy was gone and George didn't have a job. The bear that kept him from starving was a businessman from Los Angeles named Carl.

He turned out to be a rich man by desert standards -- temporarily superrich as he described himself -- and that by no means rare type, the perpetual traveler. A restless fellow. One of those people with a "second" home in every town, yet he somehow didn't live in any of them, really, and didn't live anywhere. So he was a nomad more precisely. He had a good eye for spotting good-hearted fools and a very good eye for spotting out-and-out frauds. You would disagree with him but just wait, he tended to be right. So..... You know that so-called daddy of Mindy's? he asked. Well, he was no more her daddy then he was your daddy. Not by any means. That relation was not so pure. That daddy had some very bad ideas in his head. I can always tell.

*

Carl would clear his throat whenever he was about to dispense wisdom. Then the wisdom would come.

You know, Georg.... You should have saved that girl somehow.

*

Poem: Last chance

2007-05-16T23:13:00.000-07:00

*

He wanted not to lose the fear
that came out of discrepancy -- the sense
of measure being trampled by God's step.
"No measure binds the 2 of us or could.
No good of mine is ultimately good."
There was no power of analogy
that made a stalk one climbed into the sky.

Instead there was a gap -- within
that gap a risk -- an entregar
that didn't close because one willed it to.
One's will was not the issue here.

"I am supposed to throw myself
into what is, for one thing, ignorance
but, wrapped in that, a last chance -- or not chance."

*

Jorge: The Bears

2007-04-17T22:18:00.000-07:00

*

Part 1.

The bears would indeed sometimes pray but others thought this was a hilarious stunt -- you bears are just around the bend. You bears. You bears. Always cutting up. Never really serious.

They would splash in the swimming pool, not caring how fat they were. Caring but not caring. The blubber -- or whatever it was -- would bob like a trash bag full of water and there they were half-immersed in water to start with. Bears. Heavy hairy pink. Laughable to be sure. Nacho brooding by the side of the pool.

The bears would get into a line and waddle into town. Buy beer, waddle home. Barefoot, grotesque. They acted past caring. As if past caring. Bravura.

People think the male of any species is unable to care, as if bred to be absolutely hard -- indifferent to all other creatures. But in fact the scandal was that there were these bears who cared about each other, at least gave signs of doing so -- that was bad enough. As though they nurtured each other, it was hard to believe. Also hard to watch. But apparently once you put on your bear mask you could do this, sort of be tender, under the mask, or as part of the mask -- although the mask, if it was a mask, did not very easily come off -- it was a piece of flesh attached to flesh -- nor at some point was a bear any longer able to be anything but a bear.

The official word was how great it was to be a bear. And bears spent all their discretionary time, their "real" time, with other bears, as though the slim young folks that filled the spa looking like TV stars either didn't exist or didn't matter -- weren't big enough to make a blip on the radar. Boys or girls, it didn't seem to matter. Like fading wallpaper on the farthest wall. They were there but they didn't speak, their presence didn't speak. They didn't knock you out the way they were supposed to.

Bears -- how silly they were! They would smoke as though the surgeon general were only the figment of a dream. They pooled their money in restaurants. They were even almost courteous to the server!

You can't break my heart, darling.

So these silly creatures made a splash in that desert town. The word was that in real life (what was that???) some of them were cutthroat corporate honchos (???) -- or crochety reference librarians -- or car mechanics -- and definitely some construction there in the mix. All that "role playing" was carefully put away as the irrelevant detail that it was. We're just who we are.

Everybody's in the same army. Everybody dies.

Let's just stick together and love each other. Drive each other crazy the way a family does.

*

The motel clerk would line them up -- mentally -- and give them their names. Gluttony and Sloth were easy to spot: one was always at the buffet, the other never moved from his deck chair. Lust was easy to spot and Anger wasn't far away. Envy and Covetousness were names nobody wanted but this was America where "you can run not hide" and people judged themselves by the size of their car and you just wanted the other person's car sort of like protection. So you couldn't deny the 2 were there, even if more brooding than socializing. But where was Pride? You looked around and you couldn't find Pride anywhere. Bears were a bashful group, to be sure, and the truth was that they didn't think much of themselves. Pride was missing therefore. Pride had gone to some other party. Nobody here felt Pride or was Pride or could even summon the memory of what Pride exactly was. The bliss of feeling proud, that was for other beings to know. These had not been given their share.

Indeed bears thought very little of themselves and were right to do so.

*

Part 2.

Let's focus on Tony for a moment.

Do you love me? Tony would ask. Or do you only like and admire me?

Generally no one bothered to answer his silly questions. He was like the baby Mozart asking countesses m'aimez-vous? before playing.

In the changing room by the shower he leaned over and felt something leaning over him. It was a weight at least as considerable as his own. It squeezed down on his heart.

He should have called 911 at that moment. Instead he grabbed the motel clerk's shoulder and tried to speak.

Do you love me?

The clerk took one look at his face and went for the keys of his car. Alas, a dilapidated Pinto, one of the last on earth (let's hope). And Tony barely fit into the car. The seatbelt a frill to be swept away. The heat was just impossible.

Let's not forget Nacho, he groaned as the car pulled out. That was his friend on what they called suicide watch. The clerk said nothing but pulled into the road.

There was a brief swooshy sound and of a sudden green brake fluid covered his foot. A U-turn, the furious honking of cars going 90. He ignored them, the brakes still worked.

Awful. I feel awful. Spotted for the world's heaviest weight and then my spotter walked away and here I am. Pretty sure I'm dying.

Tony managed to say all of this in a single grunt.

On the bare part of the highway the wind was so strong that it would push the car halfway into the side lane. Passing a truck was ghastly but had to be done. Then the turnoff and the little pokey road to the hospital. The pickup in front of him was going 18 miles an hour but when he moved to the left to pass, it accelerated. So the clerk ended up continually feigning to pass just to keep the speed up. His foot was oozy and sticky.

Don't die on me, guy, the clerk said.

He parked illegally because walking through such heat would have killed a well person, not to mention an obese dying bear in a turquoise bathing suit and flip flops.

There was a man sitting bleeding from a knife wound. To the clerk's shock, they came up to Tony first. He looked that bad.

The nurse turned to the clerk for a moment and said, you may have killed him, you know. You're supposed to call 911.

In the hospital, all of one's sweat begins to "change its mind" and start to freeze precisely at the point where the t-shirt latches onto the iced-up air. Simple comfort becomes unimaginable.

The proof that bears have lives outside of being bears was that one of them came into the room and turned into a nurse. Gluttony was one of the worst and messiest of them all but now it turned out that he was a most competent nurse. Go home, he told the clerk. You saved his life. So: two conflicting judgments, both true.

When the clerk got back there was a woman fuming in the so-called lobby waiting for him. She had lots of luggage and was dressed up to look like Scarlett Johansson trying to look like Grace Kelly. And she did. She was even smoking correctly. And her foot made a little dent in the floor where she tapped.

I'm sorry, there was an emergency, he said. Then he got back to work. By the end of the week they had saved Tony. But they lost Nacho.

Do you love me? Really love me?

When you get asked that question, it's not enough to say "what's love got to do with it?" like Tina Turner. Because that's not an answer but the same question asked a second time.

*

Poem: Time as once nothing but twice alive

2007-04-11T12:32:00.000-07:00

*

Time isn't when it happens - that goes by
too quickly to quite be --
but later later -- then the time becomes
assayable and felt -- its meaning comes
out of recurrence -- as though only once
were nothing and made little sense,
and only blossomed done again --
in duplication heard -- again -- again --
the first time understood the second time
and thus happening for the first time.

If not through repetition, time takes on
its meaning in pauses between
events that when they were were spurned until
they passed into the sacred perishable.

*

Poem: The myth of time as a rolled-up rug

2007-04-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

*

Our time was an accumulated space
no longer housed in the old way,
as space that hung at a haunted remove
from consciousness -- no. Now it was rolled up
like an old rug and stored... somewhere...
in its stored form no longer navigable
"in the old way" -- it lacked inches or feet
to bar one's steps -- now was superimposed
as recollection -- nowhere -- everywhere.

Our time had its own rules. Its pieces felt
recurrent. But each time one fell it fell
more deeply, carved a deeper hold
of introspection and absurd
craving. Our time moved darkly and recurred.

*

Jorge: The Other World

2007-03-31T22:40:00.001-07:00

*

So that other world people talk about -- it's not other -- it's right here -- I can kick it like a stone. It kicks right back. It's not a hypothesis or something you have to visualize. Here it is.

You know that guy who fell or was pushed off my ship? I saw him on the street just yesterday. But I don't care too much about him. I mean -- if transcendence is available -- then I'm going to focus on what is important. The one who has spread it between visible things --that One just has my heart. In awe -- speechless. So that's why I bump into things.

*

Jorge would wake from dreams and know he had just been there. In that "other" world that made the mesh of this one. And how he knew wasn't that the dreams gave him access -- no, not at all -- dreams were shallow tokens mostly -- but they just didn't have all the blocks and careful denials that waking life put up -- as if to prevent itself from feeling the closeness to heaven that simply was -- that pervaded this "closed" world of ours.

It wasn't "other", people just wished it to be.

*

Looking back at my childhood I'd thought of it as a Garden of Orthodoxy but that was wrong -- anyway thinking wasn't the mose of access to it -- although thinking took place there. It was more a matter of releasing breath -- thanksgiving and gratitude its open door. This was a door that had no frame.

People willed the door to be closed. A question of simplification. Easier to live and not to wonder.

*

Jorge stood at the door to the noisy gym. An odd kind of worship happened inside there, comparatively involute, very intense but somewhat futile. In the back corner -- where they stowed the free weights for die hards -- the Zen warrior lifted and lifted his million billion ziggity thousand kilograms of transcendent pain -- grunting with the sublimity of the effort -- and up the heavy structure went. Iron in the air, lifted with praise and joy. Nearby, the Nazi's wife on her treadmill sorrowing. . Everywhere half-naked models and ancient near-dead beings toggled past each other without touching. There were scenes of terrible blood on all the TVs. When J tried to move through the corridor a hand touched his shoulder -- the hand was "ice cold" like a Coke. He turned to face his dead godmom, his beloved stepmother -- Estelle.

Whispering.

You must believe me, boy, I am so sorry. I didn't have a clue what he was doing to you.

Not knowing something is the worst of the involuntary sins and those sins are the worst anyway, the worst of all, not knowing, with no way to repair -- there is nothing you can do. Except to have listened -- except to wait. To say: no matter how happy I am I must be missing something important to have. Then to look around.

Dying to rectify the injustice.

Jorge, I didn't look around. I didn't notice what was there.

And I can't seem to shake this off. The feeling of no way to fix this now.

*

A philosophical question: where does the "other" world touch this one? Surely they touch within this feeling of queasiness, of vertigo and unease. Wrongness swirling through the halls. Jorge felt the familiar bottomless clamp seize him and take him utterly. It reached from the bottom of the bowels up to the heart then the head. There was an elevator falling through space that had no floor. He fell in cartwheels or cornrows -- like poor Quasimodo -- yet he didn't move.

You must say something. You must try to speak.

Estelle, he said. You did nothing wrong. I loved you and still do. Estelle, he said.

I was just the way I was, Estelle. All he did, that man, was to bring it to the surface. It was there already. You were a perfect mom. I had no complaints.

Estelle.

Estelle, he said. Dry throat trying to speak. Air that wouldn't come into the lungs. Estelle, he said. He turned to say more but she wasn't there. She was dead of course, had been for many years. What remained hanging in the sterile air was perhaps nothing but unresolved guilt, first hers, now his.

He continued his trajectory now into the lockers. The college boys strutting -- their pubic furs held aloft like a flag -- shuffling behind them the old warriors aching inside every step, their balls clacking when they walked -- ancient memories condensed in the steam -- loose ugly hairs crawling on the floor -- history everywhere, clogging everything. The room almost unbearably concentrated -- and in the very near the ever so near distance, the sound of the water falling -- stroking the air like a giant guitar.

*

Poem frag: The faith of a donkey

2007-03-26T22:38:00.000-07:00

*

My fear was without privilege --
my fear was simply fear, no longer was
the sign of my having been singled out
as special, spiritual -- fear was just fear --
a shiver in this matter beings were --
one more vibration that gray flesh
gave off -- a shiver -- nothing more.
But faith reduced grew stranger than before.

*

The preacher's reversal

2007-03-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

*

In early times, when Paul tried to exercise behavior control, he did so in order to promote faith in God. At this moment, when a Southern Baptist preacher works to promote faith in God, he does so only in order to exercise behavior control. This for them is what faith is for.

The sin is huge. Preacher, if this is not true of you, then prove it by your deeds.

*

Fire prayer

2007-03-15T21:55:00.001-07:00

*

The fire was to test and try him but didn't seek to kill him.

One day the Zen warrior walked into a centering prayer service in the middle of town. The people didn't know him but they didn't say anything. The leader struck a chime and the people closed their eyes all as one. Time passed silently.

One was alone but not alone. On the inhale the rich suburban air came into the belly. it was different from the air in the town next door. Safer, slightly less mixed. No taste of gunpowder.

In the warrior's belly it turned into fire.

Could the other people hear it crackling?

Was it burning only him?

Why did it make this noise? why so much noise?

Where the peace? the contemplative calm?

Could he even remain sitting in this chair?

Fire fire fire. A thing shaped like a word. Consuming the stomach, eating whatever it found there.

He exhaled it with a rough unruly noise.

Lord, find the way to make me more chaste. Just a little more chaste.

And the fire in its fiery manner said nothing in reply -- nothing clearly. It continued to burn. It and time passed simultaneously, one harrowing thing.

The warrior took another breath. Silence. Darkness.

What were the other people doing?

There was an Audenesque cough in the distance. A second one.

A car passed a million miles away, slipping through the charred space.

Darkness. Eyes closed and thus open.

What were the others doing?

Where was God in the fire -- the fire the fire?

God was the fire but was also not absent in the thing that was burning. He was patient as the warrior was not.

Another cough and then a very loud sigh. The warrior heard a sort of shifting as though somebody was moving.

Had the others climbed out of their chairs? Were they moving around?

There was motion in the inhale and then in the exhale. Something stirring.

If he opened his eyes would he find all the others crouched around his chair staring at him and wondering who let this queer into the room?

The inhale was tense and suspended and important. Insistent. The fire burned the fire.

The warrior opened his eyes. God stood in front of him watching him. There was no one else in the room. The stare was nothing but fire.

Who are you now? the vision asked. Are you indeed one of mine?

Speak to me now, instantly. Do you wish to be one of mine?

*

Jorge: Amor amor

2007-02-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

*

You know, it's amazing (J's friend R said -- they were sitting in a wine bar with a crowd of acquaintances) but there's a whole community existing now that is cut loose from its homeland and completely fine with that fact. They come perhaps from Southeast Asia, they make their way into the west, they speak a language that would have been inaccessible to their parents' parents if not to their parents. Not just the nouns, not the verbs but even the basic thoughts (and whatever well they come out of) would have been "Greek" to their progenitors. And that's all fine with them. They have no problem with that. They smile about it.

They are comfortable here. Now. In this very strange and placeless place. Asians. Yes, J said in response, and that ease of theirs is beautiful. Nevertheless.

What about, let's say, the things very similar that the shrewd monde used to say about Jews in oh, let's say the 20s. The critics liked to say: international. Brows would rise. The critics liked to say: without a home. They would then say: comfortable. Trotting out the epithets. Then moustaches would be stroked and the hurtful word would finally come out: deracinated. Homeless. Then historically there was the whole thing that happened next. And after that: Israel.

So is being free from a place, or seeming to be free, something like passing through freefall? Is it like that neutral space between gears, the "dead" space of the French? Like a grand, expansive "awkward age"?

*

No one surely can survive long without place. Without a place, yes, but without place. No. that would be between gears. The car wouldn't move.

*

Not having a place is like being underwater. If you are a mammal, it is just a fact that you will eventually surface.

There was a boy at the university who had almost pure Venusian DNA. He walked like a man, talked like others. What then was the distinguishing sign? Perhaps only at first look the stubs on the shoulder blades. 2 wings covered with soft afterimages of feathers. They were like appendages snapped off -- he was winged.

All the others in his lineage had been put to the ban, immolated. Even Venus was said to be no more -- and looking around the world you felt this to be true. He was as the last survivor of a reprobate old tradition. The girls decided to call him Eros. Jorge would just call him E and leave it at that. Did he blush at the name? His skin blushed all the time so it was impossible to tell.

E's form of havoc lacked arrows or any form of release. His victims reported his claim to be unable either to achieve orgasm or cease trying. (Though something was transmitted all the same, as they said later.) He ached constantly with this painful craving for God knows what, something indefinable. Perhaps it was this aching to entregar, to give himself completely to another. Through the dorms he flew like wind, but one should not say "flew", no one saw him fly. Maybe despite the wings he was nothing but an unhappy human, after all.

But Jorge was sure that he was not human. One day he followed the stranger into the cemetery and watched him give an offering to his mother, was it his mother? -- fruits, wine, crushed flowers, the bodies of little bees -- it was not a dream, though surely felt like one. There was a Jewish grave by the trellis, upon which someone had marked a swastika with a black marker or evil spraycan, one of the kids from town -- or maybe, God protect us, another college student had done this, "one of us" -- and Jorge was suddenly too scared to move. Behind the grave was a garden of fussy statuary -- caryatids eroding back into their stone -- their shoulders and backs just a saddle shape in crude rock, and behind them hidden was the statue of the mother, Jorge felt sure that was who it was. The boy lay upon it. When J went back a few hours later, the demon was still there -- one could clearly see the humps under his t-shirt. And dogs were prowling on the gravel. This was not just a boy.

*

All study ceased in the dorm when he was there. After the half-year, when he left, in the first weeks -- before the illness -- an empty feeling churned inside his friends, something like a vacuum -- preoccupying, an involute shape with "can't live without you" carved out of its middle. Off the chart and with no notes for survivors, the suicides of 3 or 4 young ones, plunged from buildings or swept under trains, because life is not worth living without you. The mere pressures of studying couldn't have caused so many deaths. That was the act of a placeless one, to take away your place too, without even occupying it, just taking it. Around him, the solidest people seemed to lose their center.

Love deracinated.

Eros, can't you rest? Can't you settle down? Jorge asked. It was a terrible year, rationally unsupportable, insoportable, no soporto, no soporto. The itch to make love consumed the dorm.

Rumblings of wild behavior everywhere.

Remember we are not -- we cannot and will not act -- in loco parentis, the school said. The authorities backed away.

Everywhere sexual looseness took on the primness of a norm. We are treated as unclean, the virgins cried. Treated as unclean, outcast, something to be sprayed with room spray. We were the handful of girls who refused to play. The word shun wrapped us like a satin wrapping. The virgins were isolated, demonized. They were not to be touched in any way if not to be touched in that way. It was because they seemed so strange to everyone else. Their reserve was treated as a disease.

At midnight the football team captain would stand in the dorm hall screaming: Please have sex with me -- anyone! anyone!

The classrooms had a plaguey smell. Eros would huddle for hours in the maid's closet trembling. Then he would come out and prowl.

Jorge too had his history of love -- then suddenly none at all. Love unrequited, an ancient story. When amor went sour he retreated to his room -- a single with a soft and useless lock. He tried to nestle inside Psalm 139, prayed in the broken way that a person prays in the center of aporia:

You know Lord and I don't. You know me more intimately than I know myself. All the disgusting stuff inside me, you stand inside it somehow. You can bear it I can't. When I don't know why I do what I do, you know. So won't you at least give me a clue? Oh please oh please. Tell me why I always feel so sick.

Love music came from a distance out of somebody's speakers, an old Robert Bridges song updated: "Why is there nothing in your eyes?" Jorge fell asleep and dreamed of deity descending into the world -- a soft larval shape, white and vulnerable, deliberately exposed to trouble in utter tenderness, its openness a model for humans, a rule for behavior: do not spend all your time defending yourself and hurting others. You want to be like God? Be abundant and expose yourself to woe. Try it -- take off the carapace. That was what the music said to him. When he awoke Eros was lying at his side, having picked the rubbery lock.

With nothing in his eyes?

A pagan baby to scare us all? Just a ghoul with tight abs?

Jorge put his hands over his flaming genitals and said: Do not touch me. Don't. Don't.

And Cupid asked: Are you ashamed to be seen to be with me? or are you ashamed to be with me? Which is it?

Neither one but I am terrified of you.

Amor amor you have all the power. Everyone fears you and craves your blessing. Even though we all know you are a fake -- we know but play the game of not knowing and so do you. We are afraid to entregar -- to give ourselves up -- to the real God.

When we don't have you we feel worthless and despicable. But it is not your love I want but God's, the real God, I mean -- but I'm afraid he despises me for being queer -- even though I know he knows the why of my being and therefore understands and therefore forgives or even feels no need to.

In any case -- don't touch me because I might give into you if you do. And then I would kill you.

Love lay on its back with shoulder blades flattened and the wings compressed like coals. Its nipples stuck through the cheap t-shirt and provoked the heart they punctured. Jorge closed his eyes and felt the bed almost capsize. The other one was dry-heave sobbing, no sound, no water -- a sorrow with no issue or purpose.

I'm diseased, I'm infected, the god said. I have AIDS now -- my cells are damaged.

Please let me lie here and float through the night. The cost to you is nothing.

So they floated together without touching, chaste as two old-time Christians. And every time the pagan god shifted on the bed, everything seemed to turn upside down in the room, so that Jorge felt, "yet once more", the almost gymnastic weight of what was basically his own complete solitude. The feeling of another as dead weight.

*

Fantastically good-looking, astoundingly beautiful, don't look don't look. For the rest of his life J would wonder if he'd just been a fool not to turn, not to turn his face. Not just to give in.

One evening he woke from a lesser nightmare and felt an appendage crossing his legs, its tip on his groin. It was the stinger of a giant scorpion, resting outside attack mode, limp and hideous. The carapace scraped the sheet as the creature snored. If I don't move, nothing will happen. Jorge let his breathing take him into a distance from the one visiting, the pagan revenant, the ever recurring marea. He prayed as fervently as the legendary atheist in his foxhole. There was a divine release as he sank back into his own dreams.

In the morning the beautiful beast was gone, had even left town. That same day the reports from the student health center began. Everyone, almost everyone, was ill. Only the Asian students and a few Latinos had somehow -- mostly -- managed to avoid what the more hysterical students and administrators insisted on calling a "plague".

And we want to know who is responsible! Jorge stood in the center of the turmoil, feeling painfully well -- as though some menacing and (do not lie) bracing phenomenon had backed away from him suddenly. The sudden opening of the lion's jaw. Where is your friend? the administrators cried. We can't find even a forwarding address!

No no, Jorge said. You can't just demonize him. You have to fear and respect him and find out why he was here.

Look at all those young women in the hospital! they cried. That is Love's work!

But I don't think so, Jorge said.

*

When you offer up your entregar that's the whole point. You can't know if you'll get anything back or if so what it will be.

You have to give it to the right Person. That's how serious it is.

And if you give it you can't just ask for it back.

He was not the right one but that wasn't his fault.

*

The seasons passed irreversible. The missing person couldn't be found. A war started and young people were sent (or offered to go) overseas. You could say that life went on but in a sense it didn't. Not for everyone -- what a mystery! It moved in stops and starts and for some the stops lasted forever. Meanwhile the demon took on a legendary status on the campus but Jorge -- perverse to the end -- continued to defend him.

In a way Love had never touched anyone. His whole being had been abstract, a sort of myth-shaped hole. And there's no way he could have infected all those people they attributed to him. He had different DNA, remember?

He was Amor, he was really from Venus, not here. They are different and do things differently there.

*

Poem: Time the "Already"

2007-02-26T10:25:00.000-08:00

*

Of time, the "already", there already were
substantial quantities -- for some too much --
they stood along the curb, nothing to do --
others had none at all, or couldn't seem
to tap into the place where it was stored.
Not enough, not enough, and so they swerved
in their big trucklike cars, doomed to be late
no matter what -- and for those at the curb
and for those at the wheel -- one single time,
there was one time, not two --
stretching to cover whatever there was,
only the distribution seemed bizarre:
jagged and somehow discontinuous,
jerking and pulling sideways like a bus.

*

Poem: The game

2007-02-20T11:32:00.000-08:00

*

It was the time of solemn games when God --
the God even of those who didn't want
a God -- God would withdraw -- the God
of winter closed his mouth and subject words
were put back into assigned slots --
in a box of polished wood -- were put away --
nobody used the words, nobody could.

The way to play was to pretend
nobody played -- nor were there rules --
nor could you find the board nor were there turns
to take or not to take
nor was there anything at stake
nor any game but winter played alone
till our inertia woke us up again.

*

Poem: The wind

2007-02-17T14:52:00.000-08:00

*

There was, outside, intention roving
that wasn't yours -- you neither knew, nor had,
the will whose shivering embodiment
was these curved weeds. It wasn't just applied
from the outside. It was and was the weeds
bicycling through. You scarcely moved.

You were like paint on a transparency.
You only moved as it moved. You were pinned
to this invisible breast of wind
heaving with its brief consciousness of you,

whose surplus, yours reluctantly,
made your own brief ability
to feel available -- and its intent
held like a hostage your complete consent.

*

Stepping into the decal

2007-01-24T13:33:00.000-08:00

*

When I was a young child about 6, I happened to see a TV program that gave me a virtual orgasm, I don't know why. It was a live children's program, there was a decal or transparency filling the picture frame with the outline of a person, and then a man stepped into the decal. Nothing more than that and yet shots of joy inside me. Like a mule filling in for a horse, my groin did the work of my heart for me.

And this had little to do with sex or with the mirage object that people call "art", art as a thing to be studied. But had more to do with the way the soul places its consciousness over, under and inside things in order to tease out the reality that is there.

It was the outerness that thrilled me and pleased me. I didn't put that there -- the world is stylized, it just "objectively" is.

In John 12, Mary pours burial balm for a death that hasn't happened but is still present in the room (as Lazarus looks on) and then the people of the story step into the hosanna of Psalm 118 as though the words made the physical shape of the world they live in -- which they do, despite the hesitation of that "as though".

A good, penetrating and sorrowful translation of John could be made by substituting the word "the Christians" every time the given text says "the Jews". That means that the story -- its history, its art, its meaning -- isn't finished but continues to boil, recur and churn. Stepping inside it is exciting and dangerous, because nothing is settled. A word like "art" dodges what is happening.

*

That business of stepping in and into. One isn't a person of faith -- no such luck, one is just a person but standing in a place and in that place faith is there, like a color or a garment. At one moment the person is inside wearing the faith and "having" it, the next moment no one and nothing has moved but somehow the person is naked, and yet the realization of nakedness is itself like putting on clothes. So call it art if you want but the realization is the core, no more art than not art.

*

The Zen warrior went hunting

2007-01-19T19:06:00.001-08:00

*

When the Zen warrior went hunting he traveled alone. Broke the basic rule of safety that was: have someone else know. Or accompany. Let them be told. But instead alone. Carried his equipment without help. Traveled far. Took very little food. He hunted his own lack of appetite among the animals. He would bring a prize home if he could manage to eat the small amount that he only wanted to. Not more. He hunted this strange thing.

He set his stand in the woods. Bare and skeletal as was everything. The snow upon the oak. The oak the oak another oak. Snow on each. Snow above them the warrior below. In the air a chill no words for, there weren't words. Below a given temperature all words froze. Only what was in the pocket, only those words could be said at all.

Raccoon tracks, a deer trail. Down that trail they were bound to come. That was tradition. And crows overhead, then no crows, at least no sound of them. An hour then an hour then another hour. Each one colder than the other somehow. So in essence they were like what? The feel of them went deeper then deeper into -- but there the pocket lacked a word. Didn't have it handy.

The hunter looked around. The looking did not make a sound. He raised his weapon. Nonexistent! Air between his hands. Air held steady by his fingers. That was all. He aimed, carefully aimed. A shot in this air, the shot made of air -- that was the entirety of the shot. No animal either fell from this shot or evaded this shot. There was no shot. Here we are -- free at last -- in a world so quiet that there is simply no animal that shoots, or has ever shot, any other animal, not today, not ever. Neither simply nor entirely nor in any other way. Here it doesn't happen. And so the hunter sort of chewed on this fact. And his pockets were empty.

*

Useless poems - 11

2007-01-16T13:55:00.000-08:00

*

A certain path

This twisting pain must be the path,
what other path for one like you,
insensible to all sensible things?
Your path to God is this hooked thread of breath.

Is sun aflame? horizon blue?
Anyone else would know but you when you
notice at all think it's a sign you do.
So pain is needed, mindful pain
to wake you into mindfulness again,
a hooked blood painterly and horrible
whose spatter must not clot till even you
feel the things clearing in you, even you
feel the you hooked and reeled into
this ultimate you're blindly walking through.

*

J -- The Cruise

2007-01-14T22:10:00.000-08:00

*

You mustn't profit from acts of violence committed by yourself. J had had a friend named Arthur, a "pillar" of the gay community (a pillar with no building!) and Arthur had fallen in love with a hustler from P Street. Arthur died, the hustler inherited, no one questioned. The ex-wife grieved and wrung her hands -- no one paid attention to her. Then the hustler took on a name and an identity: Johnny People. Johnny disappeared from the community, money lets you do that. Then about a year later J took an exotic cruise to a semi-imaginary country far away from all probability. No pillars here, my Lord. Johnny was also on the cruise with yet a new name and a new persona for him to "people". And Johnny developed a sexual fixation on the elusive J but that didn't matter too much, as it turned out.

They stood in their life jackets. I feel I know you, Johnny said. My name is Kevin.

I don't know you, J said. You are a total stranger.

Maybe, Kevin said, but still... it's the strangeness that feels so familiar. Flowers in windows. The all-clear whistle.

The rocking of the boat made it difficult to think. Strangers were "exchanging the peace" in the so-called library, filled with best-sellers and out-of-date travelogues. How I am missing my daily dose of the Times, Kevin said. Also of course the Internet. One needs these things.

Did you know that I am 14 years old and horny as hell on the Internet? Kevin asked. That's the role I play there, that's my "space". My list of dear friends goes scrolling for ages. It's all just a lovely fantasy perhaps. I have this beautiful sense of freedom.

His clothes were vulgar and at the same time very drab. Without Arthur he seemed loose, directionless.

The boat had a daily wine-tasting yet it always seemed to be the same wine. Something from California with a screw top.

A midnight costume party. Many didn't have much costume to speak of and didn't speak anyway. J would haunt the library hoping someone would return a new "sensation novel". Most of the sensations one knew of had been flogged to death.

The cruise ship had filled the ship's chapel with sound equipment. You couldn't move or see the altar. A blasphemy but no one said anything. People averted their eyes. Down the corridor, Kevin won Bingo hands down and grabbed J in the crush on the way out. I want you to come celebrate with me. Thank God for J that Tina was there. Tina pushed with that amazing pectoral strength, pushed and exerted her will. Get lost, you loser. Pulsing bystanders with their shoulder-hair a-bristle. We run a polite ship here. There will be none of this, there will be none of that. Slap slap. Push the blighter to the deck's edge, push a little farther. They say he murdered Arthur. No no, Tina, it's all right. Vacationers lifted their parasols as they strolled up and down the passage, and it was up and down, such was the naughtiness of the waves. Then the parasols fell like missiles. Kevin's knocked an old man down from his walker. No. No. There will be none of that, my good man.

Tina asked: What do you think? Should I push this asshole overboard?

Relax Tina, J said.

Arthur would not have wanted such a thing. Dear gentle Arthur.

There were open sores all over Kevin's back and he was "peopled" with bruises worse than Johnny's were in his street days. When the boat lurched, his cocktail would spill and the syrup would linger in the pocked spaces. The sky was purple but not a bruisy purple, more a livid color like a piece of carbon paper that had gotten wet. There was nothing left in his glass. Kevin, you just threw it overboard. That's a crime of the sea.

The glass was just glass, Kevin said. You are what I'd call litter, man. Leave me alone.

You left him suffocated in an alley, J said. Gay people were the only family he still had. We don't do that to each other.

J said all this but kept his mouth closed. Kevin rocked into the wee hours. Disco had been resuscitated for the 100th time. When the man disappeared overboard not even the purser said anything. It isn't as though these were ties that broke down. All ties were broken. The thing about "you mustn't profit" was really more structural. That is, the person who broke human laws had then to submit to different ones, to animal ones. And then it didn't matter. Nobody notices say a dead seagull when its body disappears. Or a dead squirrel. Gurus say that the right to be human is precious, has to be attained -- not earned exactly but at least not spurned exactly. Money is so beside the point, sex is so irrelevant. Anyway it had taken this orgiastic cruise to turn J into a quasi monk. He ended up hardly leaving his stateroom. The purple light poured into the window and thickened like glue. It was hard to read by. Lots of time for thinking. No hangover, he didn't drink. No pain, no nothing. So what is this nada nada, where is your faith? He tried to pray, managed a little, but couldn't shake the hatred in his heart, not completely. This was just one more piece of damage that Johnny had done to things. The kid had maybe just been scrambling for security but but. But to let a person die. How did you pray around that? The truth is that evil is suffocating. It exists. It exists. Or if it's an illusion then equally so are the people who give into it. Surely they are the ones who don't exist. Can we just forget about them? Why not, why not? When the ship docked at some wretched unknown port, J got off and then refused to get back on. Let the world be my monastery. What I renounce is having any preference. So he turned his back on the cruise. Because he never went back, he also never heard that a man had gone overboard.

*

Thoughts about a Place

2007-01-04T13:46:00.000-08:00

*

You looked for your destiny -- or your salvation -- at the bottom of time, you pawed through time like a famished little dachshund, but you never thought to ransack place, or even tried to learn how. So you chose time over place, why? Why time not place? Would a place properly understood be your more vivid form of salvation?

*

One was careful to say place not space. Because space might perhaps be empty, defined that way -- but a place was always occupied.

*

Jane Austen fainted when they told her that her family would move. Wise lady! When one moves not everything moves and then how can you be in two places at once? Which part of you is where, and at the end where are *you*? Or put it this way: place isn't transferable. It is what it is. There is no substitute for a given place and no place substitutes for another. So if you have it you have what is not comparable or expendable, nothing you can just give away without thinking. Because you are wedged in it so far that the wedging is you. And there you stand, completely happy. Enclosed.

*

And a place cannot be ransacked either. Its meaning is not hidden at the bottom of it or hidden behind what is there or in any way extractable. Because what is there? What would that "there" be? That was what you wanted, after all. You thought you were searching for a meaning but the meaning and the search were in a place and the place was what you wanted, not the lesser things it contained. It was "already", it was, it was not hidden unless in plain sight, which only hid itself from people who didn't look at it -- oh, if they only knew! "Plain sight" was paradise!

*

What would it mean for one actually to be where one was? Would salvation have a piece of this, in its not grasping so much at an elsewhere? I mean to say, I think the transcendence is real and the imminence is real but they are just about the same. In the sense that both are intense or both are weak. When you feel them you then don't have to do so much walking, or else the walking is itself right *there*, itself placed and not really moving. Because what if time could be seen as no longer breaking down one place to reach another, but instead simply the deepening of your being in a place? Time would be the act of understanding a place. It wouldn't exactly go anywhere. Or the going somewhere would be very calm.

*

Understanding would be mindfulness with nothing reductive about it.

*

You could walk away from those aesthetic cliches -- death in a vacuum, meaningless death, meaningless life -- all those wearisome monologues that try to presuppose existence without a place. As though even absolute freedom didn't have its placement, its being placed, a place that itself is perhaps not free, or a place that is neither free nor unfree but something else. This whole bliss is "already" set down and the only part of it that is "not yet" is your relation to it. Maybe you are not "virtual" but just confused. Maybe unhappiness is not really where you are.

*

Otherwise you would be just like today's affluent ones (inwardly so very poor) who endlessly move from place to place and from address to address, starting over each time and somehow remaining quite the same -- with that "same" never quite defined or confronted or even effectively evaded.

*

If you harp on God's absence so much, is that because God's presence would be too much to bear? And because it might provide a sort of jewel shaped hollow for your own presence or absence?

*

Jorge - The shack

2006-12-19T17:42:00.000-08:00

*

Cast your memory back, let the shell of denial crack open, remember. Remember how it was with you as a child. How vulnerable and weak you were.

No thinking. Estelle sick, and soon thereafter dead. School a nightmare because the meaner kids sensed your weakness after what Max had done (or did they sense your *own* sense of having consented?). Sweet sister Una away at school with the Swiss to be finished and turned into a stranger. A stranger! And so the boys in the schoolyard said, What are you a coward? No. So you went out with them. Then when you backed down they used force. It is like some clerks' compulsion to tidiness, the bully's need to take weakness and make it weaker, as though trying to blot it out like a clerical error in God's copybook. Sad mean fools. Cast your memory back, recall how it was.

Jorge's life: blessed but so bad-feeling. Yet even the suffering came as if wrapped in God's own cotton wool -- joy itself never that far away. To suffer at all, first you have had this gift: existence. And memory is a form it takes.

They ragged you and harassed you first at school, they scented blood. Pretty boy for a greaser. Leave me alone, won't you leave me alone? Am I supposed to hit you? I don't want to hit you.

You looked soft because that's what you were. You were not the hard person you are now. You hadn't been taught to hit others to win their respect. None of that in the garden. It had been assumed that violence was a perversion.

One afternoon the two worst bullies dragged you through the weeds. There was the shack where the caretaker's son lived. The caretaker's son. Now the caretaker's son had been maybe a bit brain damaged from the war, everybody said, some invisible headwound, but that was only the start, it got much worse, he became abandoned by his friends because he couldn't find a way to do things in balance. For instance, if you lie then lie in a hesitant way so as to be believed. But he didn't lie at all. His wife said he'd lost the knack to make love with passion but not overmuch passion, not insistent, now he couldn't find the sweet spot before it bothered her. He tried so hard that she grew irritated. His emotions were not a show. When they were there they just came out -- in honesty, in fact. He'd become a bit of a Christian, the type that people find so boring.

So soon after his father refused to see him, his wife left him. One two. Then he moved into the shack in the woods, squatting on the campus land that hadn't been reclaimed yet. The place was a garden if you looked at it that way. To the shack of the caretaker's son the 2 boys dragged their prey. They pushed then dragged you through the weeds. Jorge, they took you by the shack. And you let them.

Memory does not take you to a different place, it is not an exotic locale, it is right here. All of this is here -- it is both in you and itself is you. You excavate your own present self and find, to your surprise, the past. Still living, still in fact occurring, and still in need of resolution.

They fed you with dope, which just made you feel sleepy and congested, dull and useless. Then they gave you something else and you began to hallucinate. Even the pounding felt like a hallucination. And it was like having a weakness tying you at every articulate point, at every edge. Your tongue, your throat, your brain. The parts of your body all felt depressed by a single weight. Then the things happened to you that were like what your uncle had done and the desolating thought began to hit you that you were somehow willing it on. You lay collapsed in the weeds when the caretaker's son came home. Hardly a person at all. A worm and not a man. Somehow cocooned by joy. Existing, still existing.

Now as for the caretaker's son. His dog had 3 legs. Sometimes she stood as though balancing on the missing leg. As though it was there. She was a stray, wouldn't leave, clung to her chosen master, whose name Kyle sounded like a bark. She would cross a street to follow and follow. Shouldn't have. You're not really mine. That same day a car hit her leg and drove away. From that point we were inseparable.

It was said that some boys had tried to stone the dog. (The weak hitting the weaker, our planet's Darwinian zone, place of God's abandonment, neither "here" nor "there".) When the stone hit, the dog didn't even whimper but master fell down -- 50 feet away. There was a bruise on master's belly, one on his hip, transferred, taken on. The boys dropped their stones and ran away. The caretaker's son, Kyle, he lay in front of the hut. Dog ran up and licked him, crying, Hey what's up? Hey what's up?

I love you, darling. You are my human.

*

It's not the victims barred from heaven. But for their abuser perhaps no hope? At least little hope. The "holiness of the heart's affections", you'd better cling to that. Hold fast to it with what soul you have.

The whole idea of Darwin just disintegrates when 2 hands touch. It's not scientific but just so.

*

A year or 2 later -- as experiences transfer from person to person, shifting meaning ever so slightly -- you lay where the caretaker's son once was sprawled. There were stains on your pants. Blood and shame. Your self-esteem felt squeezed like a tadpole, between fingers, till it burst. I am a worm and not a man. The one thing I know. A comforting misery. Both at once.

When the caretaker's son got back from his job -- he subbed as a bagger of groceries -- the first thing he did, he stumbled and fell down. Tripped on the stranger. Oh yeah, I remember this. He went into his shack, then the crippled dog bounced out. Bounced. Licked with fervor. You might say you were me almost, Kyle said. He poured his last bottle of sparkling water on the boy's face. A bare teen, it seemed.

I love you, Jorge said. No I mean, I really appreciate this.

Yes, said the caretaker's son. I am affirmed, that's good.

One grows ugly, trashy, bald, smelly, now fat, misshapen, stupid, feet planted wrong. The essence shines out now without superficial things covering me up. I am quite good. At least I'm adequate now.

Now to the meal. The sacred meal. Inside the shack, the caretaker's son opened the soup can, Italian wedding. Bless this lovely container we share, all food is good that you provide -- and now enough of these lovely mushy words. While the caretaker's son "cooked", you leaned on the recycled bean bag with the showy gash. There was an ornate decaled skateboard on the floor with a picture of Jesus on it. The 3-legged dog lay on her towel and licked herself. The hot plate became hot. Sacred meal. Fellowship. The holiness of the heart's affections. We slopped food on the skateboard's face -- that was the kind of meal it was. And the caretaker's son was exactly the sort of person you would instinctively have ignored or looked down on, he was gross and misshapen, a soul irreversibly scarred. For that very reason, this man was part of the cotton joy that wrapped our suffering. It was a wonderful feast and even the dog sat "agape" as an apostle would have said. Cast your memory back. Remember.

*

Jorge - Flashafter

2006-11-07T13:07:00.001-08:00

*

Important to specify the crime -- not one of hands -- the crime was not (just) of hands fumbling with a child's belt. What the men did was worse. The meaning was inside, a hot expanse of pavement in one's inside, boiling, hot enough to fry an egg on - that was the soul, burning scaps of itself - here was the crime scene, but no it still has not been said, the whole thing has not been sufficiently said.

The cracked pavement under a bum in a worn out town. Infrastructure bombed and damaged. What are you trying to say?

The crime lay in the response, that it was a response without freedom now. A child internalizes what happens to it. That is the definition of a child, that porosity. The creature that lets abuse just run off its side into the gutter, that is the adult, the very definition of an adult. Hardened. Horrible, you're already practically in the grave, to be like that. Hardened.

The crime came after the hand and lay in the response. It was the little curled up horrible thing in the midst of abuse that said: there is something enjoyable in that, after all. There is something of me in what happened. As though that was what had been supposed to be.

It was a string on a bass that was not supposed to be plucked, at least not plucked in that cavalier manner. The men plucked it, they broke it, and childhood was over in a hurry -- all in one afternoon. And that was the crime at the root of the crime.

*

Jorge - The Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 3

2006-11-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

*

The problem was the way children felt among adults -- so small, so limited, so vulnerable. So much the worm on the ground, to be either stepped on or saved -- or held in suspense, for years and years. It was like the way of the family dog, sitting in the living room. The dog may in some sense think he's human but never imagines he's on the same level as the other humans. The humans have mysterious powers for bad and for good. They can open things, do things. They open the cans of food and shut them again. They have great powers to caress and to hurt.

One needs them and yet wishes they were gone.

The sinister Max would follow the boy around. And he wouldn't go away. He stayed day after day, for a reason. Not even Estelle seemed to know what it was.

On the back porch, there he sat, every part of him far away except his eyes. Those eyes were always placed upon you. They were wet and moist and yet tight as a clamp. And it was not he who went away but Una, one's soulmate. A week away at a distant Y camp.

So make the horrible part go quickly. Tell it at a distance if you can.

The boy went into the garden by himself. The absence of his sister stood by his side. The flowers all seemed dusty and hairy. there was a rotting smell by the pond. Not just the smell of decay but of new growth too. But he didn't want either one.

He looked behind him and the back porch was empty.

Now he went past the edge of the garden, beyond where he and his sister had ever gone. And there was a cabin there or the shell of one.

The three legged dog stood in front of it and barked. A robust deep sound. Go away! Go away!

The protected space had shrunk to a square, a rectangle. At one edge the dog, at one edge the battered and maimed trees. The nymphs fled from the trees like birds, perhaps they were birds.

Behind was his home. In front of him the cabin. A hermit lived there, a young man with a beard, oh crazy one, perhaps the caretaker's son, brain-damaged, squatting on the campus grounds, I guard the creek from terrorists. We used to see him across the field, always smiling. Everything is all right now, everything is good. He stood in the fog wearing nothing. When Jorge turned around to face home he saw his uncle standing in his path blocking it.

No, I am not going to go on. You have to write with a purpose, a purpose that serves, that offers service to someone but who is served? Cast your memory back like a fishing rod but the fish in this creek are dead now. Move on, move on. Something has happened to you, something bad, Estelle said. Why won't you tell me? And Una sat next to you at night in the TV room, with the TV off, she was so careful not to look at you, she waited for you to speak. And waited. And waited. Auntie's health so bad and the fear the fear of -- no not of being orphaned but worse. Someone else as your guardian. Do not say the name, do not even breathe it.

And Jorge lay on his stomach on the bed, fingering the little Canterbury cross that Estelle had given him. It was a cross without a person on it but the locus of a person. If you spoke to it in a sense it spoke back. And Jorge would ask, over and over:

Why didn't you protect me? Why didn't you protect me better?

*

Jorge - The Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 2

2006-11-07T13:06:00.000-08:00

*

The caretaker professed to be an atheist, which was a sort of lie or evasion -- no one in the remote land called America was fully able to disbelieve in God, the belief was so to speak in the blood -- not via thinking, it was not a bypath of mentation, rather lay in the sheer act or ambience of whatever harbored thinking, it was impregnated, as all things in that country were and as any Martian would have instantly seen, with the abiding sense of intention underlying everything. Everything possible had first been made possible. There was God (named or sometimes better not) and God underlay everything. So the caretaker was in this sense a bit of a poseur but in any case he called himself an atheist. Enough of that. He was one of those people who would not answer the door. Did not answer the phone. So care was not taken, the garden had no caretaker, and it needed none. It was beautiful without any human touch. But enough of that. The garden thrived on its own.

Jorge remembered the exact day that the Garden of Orthodoxy shut its gate on him -- like a blossom snapping shut at the tap of dusk -- leaving the insects without access or escape and all the happier stories replaced by more somber ones.

Aunt Estelle was in the kitchen rubbing her hands. Una would stare at her and look away. Uncle Max is coming back from his travels, isn't he?

I supose we need to tell the caretaker to get the place ready, Estelle said. But the caretaker wouldn't answer his door.

One day the caretaker's son went off to war. It was either Korea or Vietnam or Iraq, there were so many wars, there was pretty much always a war rustling that far off kingdom. The caretaker received notice by mistake that his son was dead. The authorities had confused 2 recruits. When the caretaker received the news, all of the blood quite visiblly drained from his face and it never returned. You saw a sort of death before your eyes. No God would have done this to me, he said. Then he closed his door. Functions continued but the main thing had been blocked.

Meanwhile the son, the real son, recovered from his injuries, which were sizable, and knit the heart back together. The college paper proclaimed his return. The son came back and knocked on his father's door but the caretaker wouldn't open.

My son is dead, the man cried. I don't know who you are.

Go away!

*

Meanwhile Estelle tried to keep the children out of the way of these adult happenings but she was very distracted because Max had returned. Her husband had a wandering kind of job and a wandering spirit. He was not there when he was there. Una and Jorge hardly knew him, perhaps only had learned from him the strange lesson that male adults were remote, always preoccupied and "far", as though a species not related to -- what? To the heart's affection as it was understood. As though he was not really family. His handsomeness and darkness suggested another way of being. Adulthood for men was something you would grow up into against your will. It was a path out of here.

At the dinner table, in the living room, his eyes followed the boy everywhere and wouldn't let go. How big and strong you have suddenly become.

Now where do you go in that big garden? What do you do all day?

It's just a big place, Jorge said. We just hang out. Nothing interesting.

But I like things that aren't interesting, Uncle said.

Well, when it's hot we submerge ourselves in the trees.

I would like to do that with you, Uncle said. I would enjoy that so.

Away from adult worries.

One feels so free inside nature. Away from society's eyes. One can do whatever one wants. It's nobody's business, just your own assunto. So you can just be yourself, you know?

Then Estelle came in with her hot pad and cloudy casserole, wondering why everyone was so quiet.

Always his eyes followed you. They were like something clinging to your legs and arms, something you tried to brush away but couldn't. One's hair thickened with fear. Responses became complex, and what wasn't painful turned painful simply because it wasn't. This congested state of being was your future. The heart wished to look away, the heart muscle twisted. The loins lingered and looked back. Then the heart really began to beat strangely, so completely off the beat. Why oh why did this man have to be here?

END OF PART 2

*

Useless poems - 10

2006-10-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

*

There was a hand in the sun. It was my hand
yet not my hand. It touched me like a hand
and made me warm. Its substance was the sun.
Or else the person of the sun -- because
I felt intention in that hand -- but not
my own because at that time I had none.
I wanted badly not to block the sun
with my ephemeral trauma. To be healed
I knew I had to slow down, had to yield
and do this not in such a willful way
that the sun became only appliqué.
I had to let the outside enter me
with its most inexplicable caress
to unkink and de-stress my deep distress.

*

Jorge: Flashforward

2006-10-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

*

And after his innocence was lost -- or exploded as nonexistent -- Jorge would walk the garden of orthodoxy and watch the birds explode too, as if all the leaves had blown away in a sphere of chatter. So the fall surrounded his fall.

They were not birds but nymphs, the lost nymphs of poetry. They blew out of the trees.

They flew in a burst out of the trees, all the nymphs, all the exiled nymphs. They were too delicate to protect.

You bad man! You bad man! they chattered, as Jorge walked under them and all the roving ones stared after him. You have chased us away! the nymphs cried.

Not me, Jorge answered. I want you here. I love to watch you flashing your little skirts and flying over my head. Or hiding in the trees, which are your abode and possession, after all. Every tree to its nymph.

I have not exiled you. But his heart sank as the nymphs deserted their milieu. And the campus developers scouted yet another piece of land, hungry for dorms, hungry for labs, needing something to fill what they saw as empty absent space.

All this was well after Jorge was defiled. The birds left long ago.

*

Thoughts on place

2006-10-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

*

A place is enclosed, unlike space. It might be enclosed by sky but still it is closed. Otherwise how could one even be there? All this nonsense of being somewhere virtually -- forget it!

Perhaps this is why poetry of all the arts captures "place" so well. The lovely click-I'm-closed of end rhyme like the border of one's spiritual dwelling, yours precisely because it doesn't contain or even acknowledge all that space beyond that is *not* yours.

I have never seen a "place" captured in a photograph. Never the buzzing balmy edge of things, that gaseous outline that permeates it and permeates you and makes it yours as it binds you to it. Rarely in a painting, never in a photograph -- except maybe in a black and white photo of old architecture? maybe. Also in sepia stuff and old Civil War hallucinations. And Hitchcock's "The Birds" is full of a specific place.

*

Useless poems - 9

2006-10-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

*

A beautiful lostness
(near Covent Garden, 10/3/06)

They move from A to B, they move from B
to A -- and then cancel each other out.
Some move too certainly -- they know their way
too well and don't guess what is blocking it.
The blockage is itself an opening.
To see it, feel it, first you must be lost.
It is a queasiness, a presupposed
for knowing where you are, because to know
is pain, this knowledge is a form of pain.

The grid is in the shape of shattered glass,
it slithers in this dance of randomness,
improvisation. In the broken lane
confusion twists like a kaleidoscope
into perfection and comes to a stop.

*

Useless poems - 8

2006-10-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

*

Sonnet of the placement of a place
(London 10-1-06)

To understand the placement of a place
is past impossible -- I dream of it
by walking some monotony of bricks
that suddenly have disappeared. The foot
stands on what isn't there and I wake up.
The terror of support withdrawn conveys
in no logical way the preciousness
of having something under one. But what?
What makes the haunting placement of a place?

You might say time consists of pondering
the deep significance of place -- what is
and isn't, in succession. And the way
it now withdraws is very long and deep
to study. And I go there when I sleep.

*

Useless poems - 7

2006-09-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

*

"The hunger not to do so"

In the midst of my acting any act
there comes a voice -- like someone in a room
whose echo is offensive, much too loud
to be so inner and perhaps unreal,

a room that is not meditation but
the hunger for it -- hollowing my act,
a voice that clamors for all acts to stop.
It undermines me and will not shut up.

It has this restlessness as if it were
tied down, yet what it wants is not to move
at all -- it wants to lay my will down on
the floor and walk away -- wants this so much

that now it has become the opposite:
it wishes just to sit -- and cannot sit.

*

Useless poems - 6

2006-09-15T21:23:00.000-07:00

*

God in the body

The body has its way -- a laying down
like tracks -- of how it can bend, how it can't --
of how, by definition, it can be.
The soul is in denial. If you say
the soul is what the body lets it be
the words don't even form -- they can't be said.
Our words are like a wiping of the slate
on which they're written. Not that they are false.
Their core is sheer evasion. But their sound
is physical. It is the way a slab
of meat would cope with the emergency
(emergence?) of a leak. Some substance leaks
into and through the damage. Someone speaks
a tell me tell me. Who is it that speaks?

*

Useless poems - 5

2006-09-11T11:19:00.001-07:00

*

Judgment

I want to take the coat of judgment off
and lay it folded neatly on the ground.
Someday somebody else can put it on,
not me, not me. I want to take it off.
I won't say that it's bad or dangerous,
I won't even say that the time is wrong
for the garment to be worn, and I won't judge
the one who puts it on, if someone does.
I plan to understand much less of it.
I want to think this out a different way.
I want to hear some things I haven't heard.
The right or wrong of what a person does
will be the sound that comes from a locked room.
I heard it but I didn't make the sound.

*

Useless poems - 4

2006-09-06T23:06:00.000-07:00

*

The door

The door opened as pain, opened with pain,
was pain -- the tearing open of a wound.
To be inside the room would be to bleed.
You didn't want to pass through what this was
to pass but had no other, easier,
more civilized, more human avenue
to where the knowledge was nor did you know
what it was that you didn't know, just knew
that there was only one way into it.
Pain with the separating feel, the feel
of isolation -- no one else would know
the special grip that it applied to you
nor were you sick enough to want them to:
it was your door, just yours, yours to pass through.

*

Useless poems - 3

2006-09-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

*

The path

There are places and there are paths.
Places become internal. Paths must not.
Your path can't be explained but must be there.
No place exists without a path to it.
Depression is your path to joy.
Depression is crammed full of intense meaning
that can't be used, that really has no point
of access, and becomes unbearable.
You must walk it, which means to fathom it.
Its whole reason to be is where it ends,
your place of understanding. You must not
medicate or deny the path you walk.

Your pain is not to push down but to know.
Your understanding is the way you go.

*

Useless poems - 2

2006-09-02T21:44:00.000-07:00

*

An inward world

Why was the trip forward so much like
an excavation? How was it that the path
out of oneself chiseled this inward world?
It was like falling into one's own nerve.
Within the pain one did not feel the pain
but was the pain and became what it meant,
and what it meant was quite impersonal,
a sort of unbounded commodity.
It was an awareness that did not belong
to the one who walked its, let us say, its canyons
and salmon-colored shadows, attributes
of a personage well grounded as a place.

God was not lost. God was at home. God was
the owner of this place. God was the place.

*

Useless Poems - 1

2006-08-31T12:49:00.001-07:00

*

A horror of being

You had a horror of the sort of being
that was like standing in a light, exposed
to comment --where this comment was defining,
was itself an exposure and was you.
You wished to be not watched, simply to be
without that light of someone else outside
not understanding and not caring to.
And still it wasn't solitude you sought.
You must try to say nothing but the truth.
What you sought was the "someone else" who was
in fact inside and therefore understood
the ground and underpinning of your being
so hard to hold up to the light -- unless
the light was his not just your emptiness.

*

Jorge - the Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 1

2006-08-06T19:45:00.000-07:00

*

You were Jorge.

You looked just like Una, your sister, but with a twist that was indefinable and changed everything.

What was balanced in her face became unbalanced in yours.

What made you more than an ordinary man was that you were a worm and not a man.

When other people talked of self-aggrandizement or even self-improvement you would take a breath and scan that very self. Not theirs but yours.

It was moist, it was long and thin, it moved through the earth and disgusted the people who had to look at it. A worm nature.

Offensive to men. Beautiful to God. God felt an absence of repugnance for the worm, God even loved the worm.

Once you had been a human like the others. Una and you were children, living in the Garden of Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs, Orthodoxy is a place, a world, a realized wing. It is a place beneath the wing of God. One does not "behave well" there. One is close to God there and all behavior is intrinsically "well".

The wing itself shelters you from other kinds of living that you do not really even understand, the kinds of life that lead or unfathomably come to be led astray, de-winged, the flavors of existence that are no longer effectively attached to existence, which in effect shouldn't even be one of the possibles. Because the Garden was in fact everything and everywhere. And so in some sense the Garden still contained even the people who had simply walked away -- who had walked out of the garden one day, as if temporarily, casually, but fully intending to come back.

For Jorge and Una, the Garden of Orthodoxy was a place of sheer poetry, because God was there. They were little children, they took the bliss for granted. The taking for granted was itself the substance of bliss. One moved freely in the shelter of what was not anxious and would never need to be. For the garden thrived in the indifference of time -- not that time was absent or even suspended -- not that time ceased to do whatever it did -- but the concern was a thing that lived miles away, "in the next county", far on the other side of the stiles and hedges and small shimmering animals. There was not the constant bruising reference to time, the looking at one's watch that was said to be the definition of adulthood.

Only protected can one be free.

*

The light was horizontal like the branches of certain trees. How can it be like that? Una asked. Doesn't it come straight down. How are there shadows on these red barks instead of the ground.

I think the light comes oozing out of these dark places, Jorge said. The light comes second, the dark comes first, I think we see things in reverse -- the source is more mysterious than what we see.

The sunlight flows every which way from these dark places. The foundation is darkness -- light is like something placed on top. It's not as real.

Well, should we be scared? I'm not scared at all.

They would look back at the house. Sometimes the back door was open, sometimes Aunt Estelle, practically a widow, was standing on the porch. She wasn't monitoring them, she was simply there. She was always half doing something and half listening to the sound of children's voices. So it seemed.

Her little prayer book in her lap. The children turned and dismissed her from consciousness but not completely. Aunt Estelle. Warm and quiet. Touching the links of the chain on her neck as though it were -- almost a rosary or some such thing.

There was a pond in the back yard, the keeper of the moist stones. Tadpoles and the whiff of frogs. Fish who would surface for food and then suddenly sink into nonexistence, if existence is appearance. Beyond it, more fields and the touch of forest. The land was too still to belong to anyone. In hide and seek, so many hiding places, one had to make the effort to be found. Pine needles on the pathway, don't run barefoot. Smells of honey and tar.

There was the preternatural clarity of an intense single moment. Yes but it went on for years and years.

Look at the way those branches -- those pine branches, those branches of pine -- they almost make a square, the way they are posed in the clearing. And look at that three legged dog!

Una and Jorge wanted to catch the dog and make it a pet but -- oddly and wonderfully enough -- it ran too fast to be caught.

As though its piercing disfigurement needed to be -- here and only here -- caressed and furthered -- within the Garden of Orthodoxy that bound them all.

So the dog ran, free and free forever. And the 2 children knew better than to chase it into the infinity in which it lived.

For they knew -- and this was the Orthodoxy -- not to go too far.

Did they know? In fact, did they? Dusk would be falling, not the dusk, but the state just before dusk, a sort of tableau of clear glareless light, the anticipation of gloom. The outer woods were ahead of them, with the big campus on the other side. We'd better go back, Una said. Dinner will be waiting for us.

At the edge of the wood was where the feeling of rightness began to thin, like scarce oxygen on a mountain height.

Una, protected by an instinct her brother didn't have, would pull at his hand. The aunt would be waiting patiently for them at the back door. It was amazing how dark it suddenly was, how quickly the day's light had been sucked away. But oh how good existence was!

END OF PART ONE

*

Poem: A Struggle

2006-08-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

*

There comes a moment when she pulls away.
You find yourself fighting the very thing
you recognize and know: that she consents
to her own going, but more, as she goes
she both consents and was forced to consent
because death has become not just the choice
but what is choosing, and is what she wants,
not "wants" but can no longer not. This death
of her resistance is the death of her.
And you are also forced this other way,
to hold her here, to keep her "secular"
against her will. You have to. You have to.
You must do what your God has asked you to:
keep her alive, but she just wants to go.

*

The worm and his killer

2006-06-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

*

Ooo! Pierced.

"I am a worm and not a man."

So there it is.

The little worm slithered along the path that his worminess made. God looked down and loved his worm, that was taken for a given. It wasn't a path or a skeleton, or a safety net, just a given.

Sun, that ambiguous good, beat down.

The orioles chirred and whivered in the palm tree. They did not eat the worm nor did the woodpecker peck it.

There was a moment of not being pecked. Existence, the richest robe, the brightest gemstone, always a match for your birth.

The words of existence were few. You cannot have too much of it and you cannot hate it because even your hatred would be more existence. To exist is inexplicable and wonderful.

The worm slithered in the middle way. Neither fear nor confidence but the middle way. Not happy, not un-, the middle. Purposeful, drifting? Neither. Predator, prey? Neither one. Kind or mean? Not that. Boastful? Humble? Not there yet. Striving, at rest? Musical or dumb?

In the middle of the middle of the middle.

There was a little child with her foot in the air. Coming down, coming down. Gratuitous shape, death in shoes. Now does the cut worm really forgive the plow? Does it really? Does it really? Is that just what the plowman says?

The worm traveled neither in forgiveness nor unforgiveness, no, but the middle way, in between. Not afraid, not unafraid, no, not brave, not cowardly, not hopeful, not exactly. Ready? Open? Hopeful without grounds for hope? Existence too abundant to simply be boxed in this world?

The worm rested in God's hand, which was not a material object and was not subject to sun. A human foot was a thread it wove.

If you love God's work, you love all of it.

I will aim for the heart, the little child thought.

But she couldn't see the heart. It eluded her and twisted.

*

If hope was a sickness, the worm had no wish to get well.

*

Now if the child had simply walked away, she would be a person who had no story, which is like damnation, not having a story. But she stayed and looked down. The nisus had fled and the creature was in pieces. It was "dead" -- what is "dead"?

It is irreversible, right?

So she cried to see the irreversible mess beneath her foot. The yolk would not go back into its shell. It clung to her and defined her.

Tears of accountability.

Bottomless pain -- and everyone had it in some way. A person's story.

"I am a worm and not a man."

END OF PART ONE

*

In time the girl grew over the hole where she once killed a worm. It existed and hurt inside her. Her husband would laugh at her delicacies and phobias. Every corner of our house has a spider, honey. Why not get rid of just a few of them?

You would open a book in this house and a spider would leap out, a little fist of congealed ink.

Let it be.

Wherever the woman went, cats and dogs and children would materialize around her. It is odd how safe and strong a basically timid person could feel.

There was some Buddhist sage who lived in a hut filled with cobras. He didn't bother them and they didn't bother him. He was only careful where he sank his foot.

She attended a rather pokey church near the university. Her husband refused to go. Organ music from a time long ago -- that was what characterized the church. She was comfortable in her great discomfort there.

The sermons merely restated things long known from the gospels. The same ideas were shuffled around and re-voiced. She felt that this was appropriate.

The hymns used phrases that no real person ever ever ever could have said. They were not exactly God's words but certainly not the words of a human. She found some melodious sonnet rolling on her tongue.

One day a young woman wandered into the church and sat down. She was not appropriately dressed, not suitable, she looked like a flower child or really a grass child, as though she'd just gotten up from the grass. The worshippers unconsciously did that horrible thing that worshippers did: they moved away as if she were unclean. They stared at the stranger, forgetting even Leviticus. Elise -- shy as all get-out and far from either a mover or a shaker -- stood up and sat next to the stranger, took her hand. it was as soft and boneless as a worm. The girl was as fragile as a worm.

They went to lunch and shared stories but later in the day the elder woman couldn't remember a word of it -- just that the girl was Una. She was "one" then. But one of exactly what?

That evening, leafing through the paper, Elise found the girl's picture among the stories of brief wonders and accidental deaths. She didn't say anything to anyone. Scott kept his own counsel as always.

She set up a cot in the back room. Her husband raised his eyebrows -- just a millimeter or two -- and said nothing. Since that was characteristic, one didn't really know what it meant.

The old hymns rolled like wagon wheels through the old woman's head. Oh, not so old really. Perhaps neither one was altogether old.

*

Does that girl live here or not? Scott asked.

I feel there's a ghost in this house.

*

Before Elise went to bed she tried to run through some form of evening prayer. As always, she was too tired to focus. It often became a deep and debilitating nap.

Sometimes the psalms were there in the core of dream and sometimes they were absent.

As she fell asleep the book in her hands softened and morphed, it began to move slowly. It was so soft that the slightest squeeze would crush it. It had an ever-newborn feel.

She knew who she was holding. "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." The most beautiful one submitted oneself, himself, to utter danger, even the danger of being despised. Our God had no shell, no armor.

Elise woke up shaking and in deepest devotion -- deep in the most pierced place there was. What do I do now? Where do I move from here?

What else was there to do but what you always did? The heavy woman pulled herself somehow out of the chair's suction grip. She put on what passed for a nightie then she brushed her teeth. She navigated herself to the underground region of her husband's snore. She lowered herself to bed and lay herself down.

*

The worm's soliloquy

2006-06-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

*

Here is what I know about myself.

I am a worm and not a man.

If I do something worthy of a man, it is not me, it must have been you who have done it.

"I fell silent and did not open my mouth,*
for surely it was you that did it."

Although I have never committed a murder, my hands have this strangling thing intrinsically threaded through them. They shake with it, a worm's ghostly vertebrae. I will not deny. I will not deny. I will stop denying.

I am not -- no no -- in no way sexually attracted to children and so what terrible thing inside me impels me to insist on even saying that? Why is it necessary?

I am not different from others in feeling impelled, whenever I see something soft and vulnerable, to crush it, and this even though I myself am soft and vulnerable and essentially without defenses.

What stops me from being myself? You do, Lord.

You are restraint. You are the stopping of my native self-hoaxing. When I don't feel you elsewhere I feel you there. And this is my true vertebrae, not the other one. Insofar as you hold me back, strip me and lay me low, I love you.

Restraint is in itself a good, but I am a creature of the American 60s, the time of the worm, and so my zipper is always down, my belly and my dick exposed, everything always open and all over the place until I too am disgusted. I do not know how of myself to find measure and be measure and live within measure, to be just so. Not everywhere and everything all over the place, not standing nowhere talking on my cellphone or watching the abyss of a dancing monitor, no no no, but to be measure and to be just so. No more no less no other.

You know all this, God. Why can't i just submit to you? But in fact I know the answer.

I am a worm and not a man.

*

The worm on the cement

2006-06-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

*

He called himself a worm but the worms called him an untouchable.

*

So what did the worm do then? He pretended to be okay. He simulated the sort of life that someone who was okay would have. He pulled himself bodily out of the darkness, the mud, the massed bed that bore our color and light. Blinking like a blindman he surfaced into the light and stretched. The world was good and he himself was perfectly normal. Right with God. Average in the sin department, neither a case of bragging nor of shame. Ha ha people said. A worm and not a man. Made an S on the cement and then a question mark. He shivered, finally revealing the truth about himself. He knew that God would have mercy on who he was, not who he pretended to be.

Feet came down solidly on the sidewalk and just missed him or else they didn't.

*

And not a worm either?

2006-06-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

*

You - you strange boy - you call yourself "a worm and not a man" -- and yet the worms themselves want no part of you. They would prefer you call yourself something else not a worm. For they too have their worm standards of purity -- and you know you are not pure.

*

The life of a worm

2006-06-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

*

Here theology.

I knew a worm. Let me describe a worm.

Drank. Drank too much.

The mouth of the bottle moved its lips a hypnotic serpent.

The two would kiss. Terrible taste. Pseudo love. Nirvana for Dummies.

The worm hated this relationship. In some sense even succumbing he would not succumb.

Would say: I know God means better for me.

Now the moral folk would look at him and shake their heads.

To preserve their holiness would move away and try to shut him out from -- what?

God's grace?

But what did the rich know, in effect, about God's grace? Even Protestants now thought they'd achieved their own prosperity by their own hands. Forgetting Luther they were digging themselves up by their own root.

Meanwhile the worm drank because.

Exclusion. Bad memories. Habit.

A depression that Christians claimed to be sin. Wilderness blues.

Too deep even to explore. But God was there.

Even in depression God was there.

The worm never lost his grip on God and with his worminess even had more to grip with. A grip on God's goodness. God's presence in places mere humans wouldn't go.

The worm would often say: I want to stop kissing the bottle and kiss God instead. And this is possible!

And this was even what the drinking meant.

The drinking was a fervent wish not to drink.

Imitation and perfection seemed to be out of the question. The worm could only love God and pray.

So now the question: what were God's own feelings about this worm?

*

Poem: Christianity for worms

2006-06-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

*

So pitiably were we
unfit to meet God's terms
that we needed a Christianity
just for worms.

We had no kinship
with the saints
whose job was to sweep
us out of their tents.

We already
knew we were
unworthy
to approach the altar

so huddled
in outer
cold
unsure where

our own God was -- not was
in terms of doctrine
but for real and for us
in our desolation.

For the low and stepped on
would there be
inclusion, redemption
finally? -- or were we

tubes of hopelessness
condemned to bake
sad S's
on the sidewalk?

*

Poem: The worm in robes

2006-06-16T09:12:00.000-07:00

*

The worm looked at the photographs. It saw
itself before it had become a worm.
Elbowy humans in their long black robes.
The sun fell like a stone. One couldn't move.

The light was like a quarry where one's limbs
lay with no possibility of shade,
no hint of shade, there never would be shade.
Light was a giant slab. It couldn't blink
or flicker or not be. Not move. Not think.

Not be a place to grow. The graduates
could only back away from where they stood
embedded in this standing -- yet our God
was there -- orthogonal to our reward,
God was the shade we would soon be dragged toward.

*

Poem: The worm and the bathtub

2006-06-10T11:01:00.000-07:00

*

The worm sits on a bowl -- in pain, content,
both things at once. There is a theatre
confronting it -- a bathtub, white, recessed,
expectant, with a hollow to fill up.

The California shadows want to be
performers -- want to act a mystery
and not just be mysterious, as now.

A red towel hangs, a victim as it were,
and not just what a victim would have worn.
Cloth is kin to the creature dripping blood
into the bowl, the worm. A play begins,
a mystery. The tub is bare and white!

There is a stubborn doorway through its bright
recess -- both open wide and now shut tight.

*

Poem: Christianity for worms

2006-06-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

*

The icon looked and maybe did not like
the thing "it" saw -- there was no mirror here,
there was a harrowing disconnectedness
which was no doubt the thing the icon saw.

He saw a worm, no human, just a worm
pressing its body to the filmy break
on the protected space from which one's God
looked out and not just looked, not merely looked

but reached to pull all those within his reach
those golden, beautiful, reachable ones
who "imitated Christ" -- but who were they?
And why was everyone looking away?

He pulled -- even a worm could feel the pull.
It was suffused with blood and wonderful.

*

Poem: Truth as a walk

2006-05-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

*

What made the numbers had no number,
maker of place, the one

who lifted water like a box
and slid it under land or up in sky

then poised to fall in scintillations,
the scintillating sheets torn by the trees,

this one, the one who placed, could not be placed,
but lay and deeply lay within the waste,

a presence? could you call God that?
an absence? that was just a word

that poets used, but true words had to be
walked into, truth was more a kind of walk

that you had to *do* even to
know what you were trying to *do*.

*

Chapter 400?

2006-05-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

*

Kierkegaard somewhere said that you cannot confront another person's ilusion head-on. You need to come from behind. What does this mean? The insight will not come out of the violence of a debate -- your respondent then just digs in and fights. You need a new arena that changes all the terms.

One is convinced by one's own experience, not someone else's. And the Spirit pushes inward from between the shoulder blades, not from outward into the eyebrows.

*

Una moved through the edge of the campus with her God behind her. He flowed into her movements as she allowed him to. Just insofar. Now God was not the thesis of an argument she had. He was not a point to be made. He was not a historical artifact to be sustained or recovered or polished or put away. Not just discussed per se, not possible. He was not a set of rules, relevant or otherwise. He was not an "experience". He was not an event in her spiritual autobiography. What he was she had to keep from blocking, she had to let him come into her perception -- into the act of her perception -- fostering it, sustaining it, keeping it from its own abject death and oblivion -- so that she might somehow be able to see the way he saw. One momentary flicker would be enough to nibble on for years and years.

She looked behind but the gardener could no longer be seen. Strongly felt but not located. Ahead of her the ruined chapel, left in decay. Crumbs and condom wrappers, graffiti on the helpless softening walls. A depression one simply needed to walk through. An ugliness that ate itself up. In the windows spiders rolled and unrolled like little yoyos.

The dorms at dawn were all in a tilted condition. They leaned like loose teeth. The light they were made of seemed a wavering substance, a flashlight in a jiggling hand. The buildings were only half plugged in -- were one to pull the plug, if you reached and pulled it, what happened to the contents, their existence? If the physical plant were turned off, what happened to the life inside? Would its being turn off too? Was it cradled elsewhere? How solidly grounded was this thing, existence? In what exactly was it grounded? Where did it come from, what was its source?

So much transience littering the soul. She felt the power behind her at an impossible angle, she felt the Lord move her forward, she rested in this immense capability. She yielded to his grandeur: Gelassenheit. Then the inexpressible joy. She walked and was walked.

Her breathing breathed her and left her breathless. "You are my refuge". Do not abandon me.

By the stairwell of the dorm, 2 students she knew slightly were lounging in their old chairs dangling coffee cups. One of them stood up to get more coffee.

Una stood next to the urn but the other didn't even look at her. Didn't see her. When she put her hand on the shoulder the woman shuddered and didn't move. They were not present to each other but rather haunted by each other.

I am invisible, Una thought.

*

Then each of the women backed away from the other as though what she'd touched had been a burning stove.

*

Photons are selfish little things whose dearest wish is to eat each other up, in the Physics that seals the land of God's abandonment. Their nature was to be overenergized and deadly. Through the sweep of them -- the concatenated physical hypotheses that popped inside the dorm staircase and made it occur -- Una moved carefully, the mud on her feet burning and cracking. Over her head the building was a construct as fragile as an untended row of trees. Sycamores say that no one loved enough to groom. She expected it to wink out of existence at any moment. She reached the floor of her own room and paused to catch her breath and pray, since even though the building felt unreal, her own prayer might still be grounded and hence a point of reference, and if so, one much needed. It would be the only surviving link between herself and this space. She opened the door and instantly her roommate rose up from her bed screaming and pointing.

You're dead! she screamed. What are you doing here? You are dead!

You have been certified already!

*

Shoulder blades

2006-04-24T22:11:00.000-07:00

*

As Una walked, someone alighted on her shoulder blades. They folded like Origami in intricate linen, and the weight upon them only made them lighter than before. God was behind her not in front. He dug into her with his vivifying spade. "Where could I flee?"

Orthogonal to the divine is still the divine. You turn 90 degrees and something different stands in front of you. But the same one stands behind. Always there, but only now noticed.

*

The tears in the water

2006-04-17T11:15:00.000-07:00

*

You ask about the stream and the chapel. How did they come to be? You know about the cheerleader who cried? No indeed.

She fell in love with the football star. You are the one. He told her how special she was. The girls warned her. Be independent. Don't let a man push you around.

Good rule -- but not in this case. His words were love-infused and love-informed. He meant what he said. Surely. She abandoned herself as if he were a little god. Or a big god.

An idol in shoulder pads. Blissful love like a giant stop in her ordinary life. The stop swelled like a bruise, the life disappeared. Then he grew distracted.

The team had an away game and for some reason she wasn't supposed to go. Or didn't go. Her friend convinced her to check out the locker rooms, the sanctum of the alpha males. Let's see how they live.

There in the men's room with the toilet paper lying dissheveled on the floor. Words about her on the wall, words in permanent ink. He had written the words, she recognized the hand.

Dear Lord. That man has reduced me.

Then the cheerleader began to cry. She was unable to stop crying. She squatted on the cold gray floor and cried. The tears accumulated as she cried herself away.

The tears flowed and at the same time stood still, had nowhere to go. So the standing still became this landmark, it was on the map -- and at the same time the landmark was nothing but this constant flow. Children played next to the water. The young tour guides would bring their visitors, the prospective freshmen, to the side of the stream and stand there looking out. The chapel stood next to the water. It was the cheerleader's place and at the same time stood there empty and abandoned. Abandonment was what such a girl was. It was like her attribute. But she herself had cried herself out and was no longer anywhere to be found.

*

Poem: The hook

2006-04-10T13:43:00.000-07:00

*

The chosen one, he thrashes like a fish
upon the hook -- and the hook like a choice
one did not choose, a choice I did not wish
to have -- this choice a sheer transparency
through which the chooser, not myself,
chose my own choosing -- I have not
brought this upon myself, it was imposed.
It was thrown into me, a hook
of suffering on which my body closed.
Should I reject it, "I" becomes a word.
This I like flesh, it isn't really mine
but someone that invades me. Till my voice,
my poem has no subject of its own.
It's just a skin -- with God the flesh and bone.

*

The blade of forgiveness

2006-04-07T10:55:00.000-07:00

*

What is the pressure between those blades? Forgiveness, it is forgiveness. Given received. The shoulders loosen and relax, they go lower, they sink down -- the shoulder blades fold and brood, a dove making ethereal gulp sounds, while the heart lifts to the sky. It is forgiveness that pushes you forward. And the will? What exactly is the will? Is it the little guy who sweeps the street in front of you so that you can move at all?

*

Imitation and Kierkegaard

2006-04-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

*

Kierkegaard talks of true faith as "imitation" of our "prototype" Christ. But (1st but) imitation is impossible because the distance is too great! But (2nd but) recognizing this distance leads one to "grace". But (3rd but) "grace" then becomes a device for the human to go on living as before that same empty life and relying on "grace" like a crutch. But (4th but) all of this is what the human does only as facing forward and willing her redemption. But (5th but) that is not how it works, dear Mr K.

Grace is not in front of one to be willed but behind one and between the shoulder blades. It pushes the blades and so you move tentatively toward the God who is everywhere. But (6th but) doesn't the will get in the way of this? Or can you will to be pushed ever so gently by that push?

*

Behind

2006-03-14T09:14:00.000-08:00

*

Oddly enough, your goal is not in front of you but behind you.

Behind. Under.

Like a hand.

*

The dog in God's hand

2006-03-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

*

At the crossing, a little dog
a little dog
has 4 legs now,
has 4 legs now

looks at the girl and turns
looks back at the girl
walks to the girl
sits by the girl
wags his tail at the girl

runs away from the girl
laughing on 4 legs -- has 4 legs!
splashes in existence
swimming in the ivy like a dog swimming in the ivy.

God's hand
God's hand
my surface is God's hand

God pets the dog
God throws a bone.
God's throw. God's bone.

*

Conversion

2006-03-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

*

At transitional points, at breaks -- where the skin turns into fingernail: that is where conversion occurs.

*

Chapter 15: Green trees

2006-03-02T20:04:00.000-08:00

*

Una walked with the crown of her head as touching heaven, her spine straight as a thrust spear. The core lay upward and became squeezed. Her heart seemed to pierce the clouds. The book of the shoulder blades closed, tight shut. The granite dormitories stood skewed on either side, as if unable to resist the pressure of God's thumb. There was a crack down the front of the world's rational complacency and coherence, an opening of mathematical wrongness -- there for students to ponder, to fall through or ignore. It lay quietly across her forehead too. The world -- considered by itself -- did not add up. But as a kneaded paste of what was to come, it made a different kind of sense or was about to -- always on the verge, just like a human.

There was a man in the garden. Who was that man? He did his work and didn't look at her.

She was certain she knew him. She couldn't remember how. He was very attractive to her. Not knowing what to do with it, she took the attraction and shelved it like a book on some back shelf (behind the shoulder blades?), leaving it there to be latent and ready. Then she looked back and found the attraction unshelved, in front of her, bursting her heart. It had nothing to do with sex. As she stepped forward the man no longer stood in front of her, was no longer visible. But he was still there.

All around her were the green and succulent trees. As still as her own heart.

*

Poem & Digression: On loving the enemy

2006-03-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

*

You must know what's at stake to understand
what cursing curses and who is
the enemy one must forgive but first
there has to be an enemy -- one must
live where these stakes continue to exist --
where men are wrenched in pieces and their blood
accumulates and starts to flood
all judgment. You cannot stay wrapped
in affluence like cotton. Never boast
you have no enemy or you are lost!
Faith must be founded in reality,
this little piece of it that juts out from
the wider providence you cannot know,
except as bone that breaks the way you go.

*

The shadow of God's hand

2006-03-01T07:50:00.000-08:00

*

As she walked the mud spread and covered her -- it was a mask. One that expressed and revealed, not concealed, or one that spread its palm over untruth to conceal that and reveal the other.

God the potter spun the sharp wheel and shaped a pot or a girl. Una rolled down the hill exhilarated, hung in her cocoon of devotion. The creed was a bodily space that the body moved through. Her flesh solidified over time and flaked off. She was new.

The greatest miracle was the Crucifixion, not the Resurrection. For given an "entity" that is God, who can be surprised about its being born again from oblivion, which is merely standard behavior for a god. But that God, being who he is, would have bent forward to hollow out his own eternity and allow it to be submerged in death? Not that a given man would live forever but that God, our God, would dare to experience the other thing.

He must be crazy about us, Una said.

*

So why didn't everyone walk down her pleasant campus path, the garden walk of faith? Oh because the access was so much pain. The path was pain. So all because of pain. Or rather the fear of pain -- which is actually a form of pain.

*

The intelligent design

2006-02-27T11:25:00.000-08:00

*

If there were a God, "how would we know?" the scientist asked. (American Scientist, Jan-Feb 2006, p, 4).

The answer might be that If I *didn't* know, then I *wouldn't* know. There is no way I "would" know unless I "did" know. In pretending the slate is bare the writer is starting from a fictional position and so will never come to the one awkward fact. It is more than pre-supposed. I would say that my "knowledge" of God was hard-wired in my being -- certainly deeper than a postulate. Whatever in me knows would come from this, or this would be what knew, or what did the knowing. You can't exactly dispute about a wiring nor can you, the wire, redo the wire. Nor prove, nor disprove. This is deeper territory than the flat hall of debate, unless you imagine a debate that you ride inside like a wild train and come out as a being changed and disclosed, maybe killed. That would not be very scientific.

*

The landscape

2006-02-25T22:29:00.000-08:00

*

Had the landscape then been evil? She could not see it that way. Even the bugs being eaten were not in themselves suffering evil. Death was not an evil, it was something that occurred. Death gave life its shape.

Where then did evil come from, since it was so swarmingly there? Was the devil -- who was not a real entity on his own but more like a virus that could seize a distracted will and simulate existence -- so was his whole existence nothing but your own loss of focus?

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Suppose that suffering were something external that the will encountered as an object. Its final meaning might be what the will made of it. It might be like a weight whose lifting made you stronger. That was what it was as an object, not a subject. Why didn't it stay that way?

*

Through some terrible metamorphosis, no, it was a literal invasion and a passing through the membrance, suffering became subject instead of object, it became you. The person suffering the pain became the pain. all sentience about anything became pain's mentation, a damned entity to be sure. There was evil. There was damage. You might say that when this happened, even the devil now had hands and feet of his own to flex. But how did it happen?

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Was it about focus? Did it happen because a human, knowing it had a goal, took its eyes off the goal?

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Was it about the periphery being allowed to seep in and take control?

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Was it when the creature, already full, felt its own fangs being sunk into food that it didn't even want? Then food rose into consciousness and began its ugly sobbing. And the sobbing was waste and about waste. Something now gone off track.

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The mud

2006-02-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

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What was the mud? The mud was penance. The mud was made of penance, soul-building pain.

Her body was softer than a worm's, more vulnerable. She fell through this putty-like water and felt it reshape her. That was yieldedness. It was terrifying. An ana-baptism!

The process: you yielded to God (a yielding like death), you felt God knead you, and you then resurfaced into the world but it was now a different world. The world you left was a godless one, the world you re-entered was God's world. Here you were in no way alone.

And the filth made no difference.

And it didn't matter now how frail and damageable your own being was. You no longer brooded on that. God was in control.

And in that thought you submerged and were kneaded once again.

*

Chapter 13: The invertebrate

2006-02-14T09:33:00.000-08:00

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So Una gave herself to God to be kneaded -- a worm within the mud. The walls of the body were just about nothing -- they were liquid or putty. They were ready -- to be shaped into anything.

She fell off an invisible cliff without any purchase at all. The risk of death -- well, it was more than a risk. Was this nothing but the force of gravity? Was God really there?

As for gravity, that too was no more than a shape that God shaped.

All of the elements dissassembled and gave themselves to God.

I hate a world where all the creatures eat each other, she cried. But the cry, that was eaten too.

And the falling continued to fall. She felt her being continue to pull into pieces, softish ones. A poor shell-less invertebrate, what could it do but expose its own weakness in utter hope?

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Food

2006-01-31T23:16:00.000-08:00

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Darwinian pit, abandoned by God but perhaps not by his son. They say that Jesus recognized that food had become the subject (subject not object) within our wicked hearts and that blood was tickling our souls with lust -- a forbidden engorging -- and so he came, broke into our vile fratty games and put his own breast in the path of the fang -- "I am the bread of life" -- so that through his own and voluntary breaking-open, food could be clean once again.

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