proteanme

More poetry from Tony Hoagland.

Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight exaggeration,

an immoderate description of the person
who at the moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.

What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what I meant behind that
was that my father was split
into two people, one of them

living deep inside of me
like a bad king or an incurable disease—
blighting my crops,
striking down my herds,
poisoning my wells—the other
standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming
with bad knees and white hair spouting from his ears.

I don’t want to scream forever,
I don’t want to live without proportion
Like some kind of infection from the past,

so I have to remember the second father,
the one whose TV dinner is getting cold
while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window

where just now the sun is going down
and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills
they once touched like a child.

~ from What Narcissism Means To Me (Greywolf Press, 2003)

This from Tony Hoagland, a poet I discovered this year and became quite taken with.

FORTUNE

Like in the Chinese restaurant, it is
the perfect forethought and timing with which
the slices of orange arrive
on a small plate with the bill.

So, while you are paying what is owed,
The sweet juice fills your mouth for free.

And the fortune cookie too
which offers you the pleasure of Breakage
and then the other pleasure of Discovery,

extracting and reading the little slip of paper
with a happiness that you maybe conceal,
the way the child you once were
is even now concealed inside you.

Maybe you will marry a red-haired woman.
Maybe you are going to take a long journey.
Maybe a red-haired woman will steal your car and take a long journey.
Maybe you will be buried next to your mother.

And when the people you are dining with
smile and read their fortunes out loud,
and ask you to tell them your own,
you smile and tell them a lie,

and they laugh and think you are weird and funny and sad
and you know that you
are all of those things,

but you don’t tell them the truth
because you don’t trust anyone,
and you never have:
that is your fortune.

Larry Sultan died. He did some really great work. I hope one day I get to see it in person.

Been listening to Pitchfork’s best tracks of 2009. Lots of great singles there. More and more that’s what I find. Not so many great records, but lots of great songs. There’s this one by Matt and Kim, Daylight; it’s been running through my brain all day.

I’m really interested in reading Stephen Elliott’s Adderall Diaries. I’ve finally got some breathing space for leisure reading after spending my fall reading strategically this writing certificate program I’m in. Not that I’ve not read some great stuff, especially when it comes to Amy Hempel and Raymond Carver, but it’s not quite the same as the thrill of finding something new on your own.

I was thinking about marriage today. And how asking someone if they are married and how the question just assumes heterosexuality. And how if gay marriage ever does happen, asking “are you married” will be just that, and not some passive way of trying to parse the orientation of queers who don’t stand out.

I read this short story by Amy Hempel that blew me away — In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried. Near perfect stuff. She worked with Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish. If’ you’ve not read her before, you’ve really got something to look forward to.

If you’re a Portlander and you ride a bike, I’m officially endorsing City Bikes as the best repair shop in town. REI is great because it’s open late and there’s this one guy who really know what he’s doing and he’ll fix what needs fixing and not try to sell you a bunch of other crap.But he’s not always there. City Bike has just always done me right. Plus it’s a collective.

Some favorite tracks from 2009.

• Sheila – Atlas Sound
• Tunguska – Cymbals Eat Guitars
• Northern Lights – Bowerbirds
• Island, IS – Volcano Choir
• I Poke Her Face – Kid Cudi
• Two Weeks – Grizzly Bear

Poems from a book called Stupid Hope.

Landscape with Arson

Have you ever watched a cigarette released from a driver’s fingers
swim through the night air and disintegrate in tiny embers?
Invisible by day, fire’s little shards, its quiet dissemination.

That’s how, one hot afternoon, no one noticed when
something desperate made the boy devise the strategy
to siphon gas from the motorcycle with a discarded straw,

spitting mouthfuls into a fast food cup until there was enough
to set the apartment complex on fire.
It happened in a neighborhood at the edge of town

where the wind sifted a constant precipitation of dust
like desiccated snow and the newly-poured streets
looked like frosting spread across the desert field.

Ducks had just found the man-made pond.
At dusk, they waddled ashore
to explore the construction site like the boy.

He started with the door. Stood mesmerized
as the fire took on new colors. He fed it litter
collected from the field. It hissed and turned green,

it splintered pink, it bloomed aureoles of blue.
But there was hardly time to admire it before
remorse overtook him and he fled.

Before the howl of sirens. He was
gone before—he started with the door—whatever
he wanted to let out.

Something can stop being true in the time it takes
a cigarette to burn to its filter. It was your crime
but it’s me who goes back to the scene. Now it’s only me

who wants to burn something for you, but there’s nothing left—how
do you set fire to the past? Only an impulse to shake free—like cellophane
peeled from a pack—something that clings.

Sometimes I conjure a fire for you in my mind,
the gnats swarming furiously above the water, up and down,
can you see it? How they mimic flame, hovering

at the pond’s edge. Lately I find myself there all the time.

Jennifer Grotz

Cause and Effect

It’s because the earth continues to wobble on its axis
that we continue to stumble down the streets of the heart.
It’s because of the loneliness of the first cell trying to swim
through its primordial pool that we are filled with a kind of
galactic fear. For example: one moment a rocket falls
capriciously into a square. Another moment, a rogue wave
turns over the fishing boat whose crew leaves their memories
floating like an oil slick that never reaches shore.
In this way we understand our dying loves scratching at the door.
In this way, each love creates its own theory of pain. Each love
gnaws the derelict hours to the bone. But because there are
so many blank spaces in history we still have time
to write our own story. Wittgenstein said our words have
replaced our emotions. He never understood how
we have to cleanse ourselves of these invisible parasites
of doubt and fear. We might as well worry about
the signals from dead worlds wandering around the universe
forever. Think instead of how the trees prop up the sky.
How the rain falls into the open eyes of the pond
bringing a vision no one expected. Here’s mine: this bee
hovering over the pencil seems to bring a message from
the deepest flowers you inhabit. Because I don’t know
where all this love has come from, because the clouds are
covered with our footsteps that know no time, I am
no longer surprised when each day comes from a new place,
because in this way, I can imagine these words getting lost
in your lungs, my fingers curling inside you as if I could
gather you inside my own heart, or tracing the slope of your hip
towards a whole other world. Don’t worry. Like us the planet
wobbles because of the shifting hot and cold zones, high
and low pressures, the pull of tides. The stars that are
these words are always closer than we think despite
the theories of astronomers. In this way, I will always be there,
a rain falling into the sea, the abandoned light opening your eyes
despite the curtains of reason, the life you give each time
you turn to me, because the stumbling breaths we borrow
from each other are all we have to keep each other alive.

Richard Jackson

Maybe you will like them too:

• Speedy Inexpensive Chaos Theory Poem About Short Term Memory Loss
• A Rainy Country (scroll down a little)
• Blessings

I started thinning things out last night, tackled my book shelves first. I’m hoping to sell some of these tomes at Powells, but I imagine a fair number will go to Goodwill, like my torn up copies of Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sorry guys, they just didn’t make the cut for me. I’m finally parting with Sisterhood is Powerful, The Women’s Room and Lesbian Woman. I don’t know why I’ve held onto such titles all these years. Maybe it’s because reading them felt like a rite of passage. But I doubt I’ve cracked one of the covers since sometime back in the early 80’s. To think I even moved them across the country.

I recently discovered Wendell Berry and was quite moved by his writing. This from a Harper’s article that could be described as commentary oh human greed: We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.

And this from Daniel Mendelsohn, who last year became one of my new favorite writers: I know a man, a handsome young man with an agile mind and a brilliant professional career, who has sex with a different stranger every night, if at all possible.