1.
Saturday morning
I wake with a note on my desk
I don’t remember writing:
Three women’s names
Who are they?
I must have risen from a dream
I drink my tea on the patio
Of the nice “case study house”
(Clean lines
Walls of glass)
I’m renting
And watch birds hop
From branch to branch
In the turning trees
Summer is short in Yteke
Borul arrives at 11
To work on a new collaboration
How describe what happens next?
Recall Szymborska’s Nobel speech:
“Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?”
So I’ll spare you, dear reader
We’ll work
You watch clouds float by
2.
Lunch, as usual
Is at the Mount Edzo
Paul is there
As is César
And so are the two Roberts
Edzo tells us
He’s cancelled the house special
“I’m changing my menu,” he says
“How can I serve mercury?
“I’ll make you each
“A nice salad …”
César informs us of a friend
Pulled off a plane
Because he “fit the profile”
3.
I attend the opening
Of “Waning and Waxing”
At the Queen Yteke Gallery:
Promising work
From a young American photographer
“I’ve gone digital,” he says
“I love it
“But do you know what I miss?
“The negative
“Milton says
“What in me is dark
“Illumine
“That happens in a negative”
We speak of bridges, skies
And the legacy of Cartier-Bresson
He leaves next week
To shoot the disappearing permaculture
Of the North Cape indigenes
I’m invited to come along
4.
A pale white sky
A lone gull
A slate sea
And ice
From horizon to horizon
The red knit cap she wears
Is redder than any red I’ve ever seen
Ice:
A question
You never thought you’d ask
The red erases the question mark
Leaving
Other
Different
More complicated
Questions
-Marisus Borul
[Note: translated with the help of the author]
5.
Borul calls his niece The Eyes of Yteke
She’s “in counterterrorism”
Whatever that means
“I can’t tell you much,” she says
“But the closer it gets to the American election
“The hotter it’ll get around here
“Degree by degree”
It has been a strange summer
Convoys of camouflaged trucks fill the highways
And we certainly see more police
But so far
The blood’s on the net and in the papers
Not in the streets
“Blood
“That red thread connects us all,” César insists
Professor Conscience
We call him
But we’re grateful
He won’t let us forget
6.
For 90 minutes this morning
My eyes don’t work right
Have I had a stroke?
I can’t focus
Then I realize my glasses are broken
The left lens has popped from the frame
I find the lens
But I’ve lost the little screw that holds it in
I’ll get my glasses fixed
I’ll pick up new writing tablets
I’ll stop in a moment
At the Mount Edzo
I’ll drop off my check at the gallery
(I hate to be in debt
And it will only take a second)
As I list my errands
Something jogs my memory
The name of an old poem by Kenneth Koch:
“The Pleasures Of Peace”
There certainly are some
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