Author (#19)March 2008 Archives

(photo by Alicia Rose)

Come see a beautiful show with me, this Wednesday (April 2) at the Holocene. Mr. Ritchie Young and his band Loch Lomond will transport you.

The entanglement of things. Eros and ides. I recently read a friend's piece of writing that deals with the idea of extension and uncoiling, how other people, engagements, and commitments can cause you to recoil (either into yourself or away from yourself), and therefore, hinder your own extension, propulsion into the world.

As for us, we are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light. - Simone Weil

These are drifts of concepts that I think about almost every day. I myself undulate between a circling around the epistemological self: solitude, intense emotional tallying, a census of what being means, evening dasein. And then a wheel that spins among many people and along multiple trajectories, the spokes reaching further the more curious I am about a person, or perhaps the more I love them. There are some people that I love very much, that never see the spinning. Love is locked in a mirage of distance. And there are others I draw closer to because they appeal to my curiosity, they compose a necessary anthropology. I know many people, and they all mean something specific to me, even if they no longer talk to me, or if my feelings go unmatched. It is the bewilderment of this meaning-seeking that is often most interesting in human interaction. The compass of intent, the gesture of silence. As if all life were documentable.

Today was very cold. I leapfrogged from my semi-weekly Saturday morning coffee date with Derrick, then onto Bethany, who has an exciting (possible) name change in store (which rekindled my interest in shedding my absentee father's last name for something less dry, English), then over to two hours of sauna and girl talk with lovely Theda, who is a dove, pampering me with Guatemalan hot chocolate and thieved candies and listening, above all. Until the weather turns, I am happy spending my Saturday nights sheathed within my pleasure dome.

~a.

Time for a nice little [boring] post about all & sundry & miscellany. I have been busy, but everyone I know is so busy, and linear time is accelerating, and I am coiled up in my warm room, furs and thin cottons and red velvets and many surfaces softened by the color of pearl. It has been: wake up at 6AM, spend a few minutes whispering to the cats, wind my hair into some sort of nest (a friend said my hair is getting very "Antoinetty"), and work on a loosely tethered stack of poems while listening to music made of bells and hammers and spoons and brushes, that is a morning cyphoned. Speaking of Marie Antoinette, I can't wait until my hair is long enough to wear in a long cone full of feathers, like this:

I like the black mesh eye-mask she's wearing.

The rest I'll do in clumps of associations of actions/thoughts/movements/enjoyments, as I am already starting to fall asleep a little. Kundalini yoga classes. Kundalini means "coiled up" in Sanskrit, and it is about rousing the energy of your consciousness, which sits wrapped around your spine like a sleeping serpent. Sweet foods: vegan cupcakes, dark chocolate, rhubarb pie baked from scratch. The din of gamelan dinging. Scenting the apartment with thieved wildflowers. Brisk walks, smelling/feeling what is crushed underfoot. Large apples: Jazz, Braeburn, Pink Lady, sometimes I eat TWO a day! Dried cherries and ginger, soft Italian cheeses made from raw cow's milk. Little pickles. Whole almonds. New girlfriends, others more lost to me, but there is a grace in the reaching. Sharing manuscripts. The slight powder of the cherry blossoms. Pale surfaces, patterned palettes, and a tumbleweed named Terry.

Lv,
ADE

First result from Google search for "healthiest person."

Paper is again my preferred tablet, and I have shoveled my laptop aside. Cinched. There is a root trembling in the bedrock, and it says, Trash the need to explain the self. Enjoy being in your life. Work the teeth of myth. A pendulum, it is noiseless and it swings from self to self, locking and unlocking, in swift wafts.

"Now" is a swath, a frayed tapestry of crushed forest floor cherry blossom, sucking in the pink perfume. Silence from someone with a hammer-heart, he is locked, forever. I continue to care. I only hope to muffle hammers.

Learning to dance with a bird who doesn't request explanations, but does ask "What is poetry?" or "Have you ever been in love?" (perhaps only once or twice, truly?), or "If you were a mixed drink, what would you be?" It is easy, and it doesn't sheet me. I am not in the business of technical love, not now.

Winds warping immensely. Burning rose and dry sage oils. Feeling food again, daily tangelos and large apples eaten on the street, fistfuls of parsley, a long walk every day, walking very fast, musculature of the world. The cats get milk now, and I think I'm getting crow's feet. My body's surface, it is shifting, flattening in places, and the interior is a dark cool crystal.

It is called a black 'sea' of roses. For a black 'ocean' is weight. Ocean is rain. Ocean in rain is rain. The rain (the ocean that's coming down) is soundless too, her charm nullified in that that night no one is around, she's smoking a cigarette. Graceful dipping her legs stretched down from a chair in night. Rain 'at' night is that black ocean around blank with nothing but waves. The Euphrates River is the forest's choppy black waves that are not in water.

The most audible sound in my room right now is the sound of cats, furiously licking.

One of my favorite sounds lately is that of the breath of someone falling asleep, how it shifts from short clasps to longer, more orotund measures. And you know that person is very far away from you, yet still tangled up like a bramble, a dozing tumbleweed.

I am tired. Is 25 the age where you just totally lose your ability to handle your liquor? I always thought I had a thick Irish liver that could conquer unquantifiable amounts of the cheapest bottom-shelf whiskey, but my borderline alcoholic, Cherokee blood must be frothing to the surface, because today, my brain is a sponge, bleating insults and accusing me of bad parenting/malpractice.

Despite feeling like a kitten flattened by a semi, I had a very pleasant 3-hour discussion with Sean Patrick Hill this afternoon, who is an acquaintance I met through Greg a few months ago. He is a 30-something high school teacher and a poet with experience getting writer's residencies. He gave me some good advice and recommended a few places that I didn't know about, including one in an old mining town in Montana that looks amazing, and another on Whidbey Island outside of Seattle. We're going to exchange 10 poems each in the next week. He and his wife will be coming to the reading at the church this Thursday. He even offered to write a recommendation letter for my application to Caldera, which is the residency in Sisters, so...boom. Our conversation weasled quite nerdily into talking about everything from Harold Bloom's critique of Paradise Lost, to the idea of "Genius," to how obnoxious the Beats were, as is a lot of contemporary "experimental" poetry. It turns out we both like a lot of the same poets, genres, threads and thimbles. A lot of things I would like read to aloud to someone, like Wallace Stevens, anyone classified as an Objectivist, Anne Carson's pilgrimage poems, the essays of Annie Dillard, annals of Roman history, Plutarch, Horace, stormy 19th century New England lit.

Oh, and in case you haven't seen this, our website (currently in its temporary phase) is up, lookin' beautiful. Come out to our reading this Thursday!