and the rain spills from the sky to quench our thirst, we choke but we do not drown. rain seeps up from the ground to our ankles, our feet drenched but we cannot move, to our knees and still we cannot move. rain bubbles up above our foreheads, tables move, chairs move, scraps of notes scrawled with something we meant to say to one another. rain floods out the windows, the roof breaks open to the sky, and we stay at the bottom, scrambling for the floor and still we do not drown.
Category Archives: general
6:13am, 7lbs 2oz
welcome to this mad mad world. be kind to it.
difficult kind treachery
it is difficult to be treacherous
and it is difficult to be kind
as if being one or another requires a difference
in consciousness, of turning
when they are both
inextricably linked
by desire & faith & an absence
of both
the suburbs
there is something nightmarish about the suburbs, i can’t quite put my finger on it, something resolute about forgetting, about assimilating, that is both subtle and harsh and constant. like the pressure on the body as it leaves the atmosphere: either you learn to live with it or you die.
it’s hard to describe lest you slam it, and that isn’t quite right either. an insistence on ignorance, or perhaps it’s a certain kind of blindness, a near-sightedness that is pervasive: property taxes, school taxes, the color of your neighbor’s skin. you are forced to consider these things as if they were fragments of history to be weighed, anchored and judged by. it’s not a lack of attention, but rather the attention to a set of details that are a flash in the pan, that matter so little in the grander scheme of things.
not to say that urbanity doesn’t have it’s own problems. but the crush of space, the living atop of one another gives rise to a different decorum, a different way of being. in the city, space is not an issue, your areas of living are more narrowly defined, your choices seem to be more rich. in any direction you turn, you find something, there is no mapping ahead, no need for a trivial kind of civility that’s predicated on class. although there are considerations of class, perhaps even more highly stratified, but because of the variety and density, it becomes a more tightly packed mosaic, a picture with more depth, greater breadth.
in the suburbs all routes are predefined, all destinations decided upon before even leaving your house. and your home becomes this kind of fortress, a kind of prison, where you keep the world at bay, keep the mongrels outside, and you are kept safe.
the problem of course is, as for the prisoner, the longer you stay, the less likely you are able to survive out there.
what is “the work”?
she asks, “what is the work?”
blanchot had this idea of the writer erasing himself in the act of writing. that the writer in essence disappears as a person, as a living thing, thrown into a cavalcade of history and memory and desire and culture in the act of writing, that the writer is no longer there. and i found that appealing as all these french ideas were and are to me, something romantic about disappearance most likely, but i understood and still understand it as well, the disassociation between the self and the act, the giving over, where you become not-you, the confusion ceasing to be an issue between the self and the act. this is not to say writing becomes impersonal, no impossible that, stupid to think it actually, but becomes other, as jabes writes in The Book of Questions, writing as the desert, as exile, or as i had echoed in “Restoration”:
in the desert one becomes other…
far from excluding us, the desert devours us,
swallows our being entirely,
and consumes us whole.
to be consumed by writing, to be devoured. how many times have been i shaken by what i found before me on the page, on the screen, that came from me, so surprised, how did i write that? did i really write that? some metamorphosis, some transmutation, some transubstantiation, some translation of you to not-you and thwarted back again amongst the living. it was also blanchot who intimated that it was only through writing we understood our mortality, we write because we know we will forget, we will be forgotten, we will die and the act of writing, as michaels points out in Fugitive Pieces, is to throw a “brick into the future.”
ah, to bruise the future, smack a brick into its face over and again, a million times, to make it scamper. that is the work.
summer fall
there’s nothing as beautiful as the fall of summer, the turn from summer to fall, the wind kicks, shakes the trees, they rustle and whisper, cicadas chatter lullabies, a certain kind of peace, the lack of a certain kind of stammer, the frenzy of pointed heat dissipates, abates, all things returning home briefly for a short while, before migration, before the harsh closure of winter.
i will always remember reading faulkner during the fall, my graduate seminar on the author in albany, the one course where my writerly instincts were not thwarted or dismissed, where they actually came in handy. sitting on the stoop, cigarette in one hand, Absalom, Absalom in another, ridiculous mug of coffee beside my feet. a lifetime ago, before that too was shattered for me by the fissures that were echoed in all english departments across the country, the politics of writing versus the politics of literature versus the politics of cultural theory. that rhythm again here, of that kind of life, of solitude and yearning, of being part of a vast stream, uprooted and buoyed, gentle and mysterious, knowing there was so much out there to learn and not being intimidated or threatened or bullied by it, but rather excited by the challenge, invited almost to wade in, to swim with or against the current.
and now fall again, sitting on the porch, different and the same, having changed again, writing again, on the work again, hand skimming the surface yet once more.
sitting outside with the little one
sitting outside, writing, the little one comes out.
“what you doing daddy?”
pitched cigarette smoldering on the grass
“nothing baby, just getting some fresh air”
she scrunches up her face, “but there’s nothing outside”
i smile, “sure there is. there’s the wind, look at the leaves, the trees.”
she settles up next to me on the bench, takes my arm around her
“yeah,” she says.
i’m fucking for real
two years ago, right around this time actually, i was arrested for drinking and driving. while my case was going through the courts, to be able to still drive back and forth to work, i had to sign up for a drinking and driving course, which i really was not looking forward to.
it was also during that time that we lost our second baby, before she was even born, at five months.
anyway, the course wasn’t all that bad, the instructor was nice enough, especially considering everything else that was going on. but one day, she made some point, the difference between a social drinker, a problem drinker and a flat out alcoholic.
“so waitaminute,” i interrupted, “because we’re all here, we’re Problem Drinkers?”
and she was beaming, nodding her head, as if some revelation should have dawned upon us.
what a crock of shit.
if i made myself vomit once, does that make me bulimic?
if i thought about suicide and hit the gas, does that make me suicidal?
if i beat someone senseless with my fists, does that make me a murderer?
if i cut myself, does that make me a masochist?
what utter shit. we’re so quick to put people in boxes, to categorize and label and fucking sanitize, keep in a corner, make safe, make fucking impotent and useless. so fucking quick to judge and dismiss, like we’ve got a full case load and no time at all to pay attention to the details.
it’s only the fucking details that matter, that makes us real to one another. without details we’re cardboard cut-outs, the kind you find at the 7-11, and just as trivial and disposable. we’re a fucking disposable society, we can’t wait to throw everything and anything away. god forbid the clutter, god fucking forbid we make a mess of anything. what a joke, what a waste.
no body fucking listens for the details anymore.
false start
up in the night, she found pen and paper, asked for a clock with a second hand, she’s been going through contractions.
and at once i am fearful and jolted, excited and awash with how quickly, how immediate the future can slam into you. i get out of my sweats, wash up, put on a shirt and some jeans and my sneakers. ready to go.
she says, they’re irregular, most likely, as the doctor said, since the baby hasn’t dropped, it won’t be until next week. i tell her to get some rest, but she wants to keep track, just in case, so she leaves on the light. i go back downstairs.
i sleep in the living room instead of the basement just in case we need to leave in a hurry. she says, i don’t want to have the baby in this house.
and because we don’t have a couch in the living room and the loveseat is too short i sleep on the floor and toss and turn along the slats of wood and find comfort in each and every ache it brings.
it’s really gong to happen isn’t it?
didn’t need you to tell me
after an hour of sleep waking with the voice in my head-
didn’t need you to tell me that i was ugly as well, but i’m glad you did like everyone else.