My favorite thing in this poem, and I think it’s extremely special, is a phrase that’s stayed in my head since I first read it, and which often comes to mind when I walk out the door each morning. It serves to remind me of the wonders I hope to encounter in the world, or even act as a kind of talismanic chant that might evoke such things.
ecstatic buckets of daytime
and that phrase is something else. It’s rapture, the rapture of day-energy, caught in words! That phrase gives me giddy joy. Thank you, Mel Nichols, for this line! [I dreamt about you last night] The fragment / image seems all the more glorious given that it’s sandwiched between an emphasizing interjection (“indeed”) and [the extraordinarily
perfect]
“in the
ellipsoidal notorious some.”
Green
shores appear;
we assume our
names, ...
Green is
green, according to
Husserl.
“She hears
the loud bells.”
"Green
is or":
if you would
like
to fill
another prescription please
press
1. the golden
mountain. "man with
five
hands". Fark
Yaraları. Scars of
Différance.
Jerk the
verbs, word honey.
Adequation
and identification,
with mediation as
their
means, but
towards what We're
running
a business
here. If it’s
9:45,
I’d think
it’s after midnight.
In
1998, a
silver-assed monkey
touched
me and
changed my round
square.
There was
a telly in
there,
as well,
but with its
own
content. I
stared at it
longer
than I
might because it
seemed
that Suzanne
Somers was in
the
video. Could
that be? Is
she
fresh enough
still? I could
be
wrong, it
could have been
a
pure nobody.
The Starlings, so
I
believe, imitate
death here in
the
theatre. And
sweeping them again
from
the aisles,
their legs of
branch,
hardened, yes,
but wingèd, Lord,
had
you not
made them to
fly
above the
earth, in the
open
firmament of
Heaven, pure coding?
I
like to
read because it
kills
me. I live
in the figurative
world.
Everything has
an almost brownish
clarity.
Who wanted
feet in the
first
place? How
did the arrow
fall
down the
chimney? & there
we
were, by
the gas station
on
the eve
of it could
be
world war
III, our arms
filter
thinning what
senses ‘eerie is
the
right word
for it’ (CNN)
100
BOOTS go
to the supermarket,
100
BOOTS visit
a cemetery, 100
BOOTS
ride a
roller coaster … and
I never wrote but to say that I had never done anything, could never do anything and that in doing something I was doing nothing. My entire work was built and could only be built on this nothingness on this carnage, this fray of extinguished fires, of crystals and slaughter; one does nothing, one says nothing I don’t know why it should be precisely here that my steps take me, here that I almost always go without specific purpose and without anything determining it other than this obscure clue: namely that
it
(?)
will
happen here“It
should be
fun / Let’s go,
leave
the dishes,
get dressed / I’m
dying,
On a
night so
murky and blue
it’s
criticism.” Its
accent was bad,
bad
like the
puke of / 15
Dr
Peppers / With
the sort of
vapor
foreshortening that
makes / A squirrel
face
into a
walrus face/ As
I
write we
are 9 years
into
this ridiculous
war. … All, the buried ones included
and without forgetting the dead ones, he specified
as an across-this-world's-swarming-and-whirling-large-
flat-floor-walking,
specifying shadow
as a snowy rain
a-flooding with butterfly- and certain kind of bread-formed
words
with cities, objects with their aftermarket, pots, flowers
on window sills, with carpets shelves light-spots measure-
sticks houses
concepts
containing partly acoustic music, partly that from the turn
of the century,
shrinking as we grow
hemmed-
in by
something in the
water
or something
coming over the
water,
wind through
the horn, a
series
of notes,
scoring what won’t
echo.
Fuckin’ A.
The farmer who
yet
sees stars
catches their elderly.
IN
THIS WORLD
the problems seep
into
me. When
the home team
loses
some men
turn off their
televisions
and beat
their wives. The
bad
news recombines
in the dreamlike
way
it often
does in poems,
only
this time,
to borrow Freud's
terminology,
the day
residues are instantly
familiar
and nearly
intact: “Spider silk
in
the milk
of goats,” “Refusing
to
acknowledge / the
legitimacy of the
mudslide,”
There was
simply nothing to
identify
with or
imitate. The whole pop-
ulation became a networked jumpiness, a distributed neuronal network
registering en masse shifts in the nation’s global state of discom-
fiture in rhythm with leaps.
Uninflate ”nose” at one end, then knot off the wattle: as the meaning continues into the wee wee, the freak stays in the picture
everything will be f-f-fine
Bowl
Of Air
and Shivers: a
cat
in heat
passes and the
[motion-
detecting] crime-
prevention light flips
on,
illumines the
driveway … the light’s
an
old court
gamelan, gong deeply
resonant,
ancient woman
plays … You are
magic!
You expand /
You are ever
crumbling /
You are
arenot a maniac …
[Note: Sources: a bunch of stuff. Another b’day poem. This is not just for me; it’s also a b’day poem for Richard Lopez. Steven Fama, reviewing Mel Nichols’ Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon, and Nichols herself, at the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica, 22 Nov 09 (Dear Ms Nichols, tho we have never met, forgive me: I dreamt about you last night or the night before, no shit. I was utterly in love); Google search results (Edmund Husserl Logical Investigations green); Google search results (Edmund Husserl Logical Investigations golden mountain); Bruce Andrews, “Please Please Did”, in Designated Heartbeat; Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (tr. Susan Hanson) (thanks, Anny!); Angela Genusa, “Empire Trust Company”, “After the Rapture” (Hey Anglela, long time no etc; good to have you back!); Allen Bramhall, “The Mall”, at Tributary, 26 Nov 09; John A Scott, Sonnets: Theatre of the Dead Starling, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (ed. Jeff Hilson); Mary Ruefle, “Impresario”, “Go Verbatim”, “Minor Ninth Chord”, “Naked Ladies”, “Where Letters Go”, in American Hybrid (eds. Cole Swensen and David St John); Jam Ismail, “Casa Blanca 1991”, in Language for a New Century (eds. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar); Howard N Fox, “Waiting in the Wings: Desire and Destiny in the Art of Eleanor Antin”, in Eleanor Antin (ed. Howard N Fox); Antonin Artaud, and André Breton, as quoted in Blanchot; Brandon Downing, “László”, “Forrest Gump “, “Phantasm (1979)”, in Dark Brandon; Levi Lehto, “Snowfall”, “Ananke: A Pantoum”, in Lake Onega and Other Poems, as quoted in Michael Peverett’s review, at Intercapillary Space; Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern, Snow Sensitive Skin; Catherine Wagner, “The Argument”, as quoted in Johannes Göransson’s review of her My New Job, at Exoskeleton, 24 Nov 09; Crg (!) Hill, “Quickly followed by catbird, the wren, the wood choir”, at Crg Hill’s Poetry Scorecard; Michael McClure, “62”, in Touching the Edge; Anne Waldman, “An Aside on Karma”, “Steps of a Bodhisattva”, in Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble; Jordan Davis, reviewing Kevin Davies’ The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, and Davies himself, at The Nation, 4 Feb 09; Brian Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said)”, at Brian Massumi.com; Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan, “Fleshy Red Thing”, Nada Gordon, “Ted & Kit” (where she quotes Ted Greenwald), at ululations, 23 & 27 Nov 09; Eugene Gloria, in Chang/Handal/Shankar; Tada Chimako, “Haiku”, in Chang/Handal/Shankar]