Expect Delays Read online

On your birthday, nor can anyone

  Negate. Not the White House nor its soi-disant

  National Security. Today they don’t

  Impress us. But you, my Daily Dazzle,

  Energize the hours with purpose of your own devising!

  5

  Core

  Onomatopoeia

  Nuptial

  Noodle

  Iffy

  Edge

  6

  Cold hands, warm hearts—so February’s love is tested

  O yikes! ouch! True heart trembles at touch in winter’s bed

  Niceties meet ice-ities, no less, and must prevail

  Now cuddle close, my dear, while I wipe away that stalactite!

  Inviting pleasure’s at the heart of marriage;

  Each night in chill or heat you are fairest.

  2005–2008

  Double Valentine

  for Connie

  Can you see yourself with me

  On Earth where we’d be

  Next to one another, say?

  Never go away—

  I could, with you

  Ever eager—ecstatic, too.

  *

  Connubial are we

  On air, land, and sea,

  Nearly inseparable.

  Nearness is free

  Illumines a house—days, nights as close

  Endless even as starlight goes.

  SONGS FOR BANDS

  Not an Exit

  N.D.

  Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. — Walter Mitty

  “When You Go Rowing with a Girl, She Looks Good There”

  Consequences, delusion, ire, the normal pieties, pity, gross neglect, and heavy-handed interpretation; not to mention intentional cruelty, flirts, no less, carpools, unction, severe chest pains, abecedarian stress, and the inklings that derive from staring long and hard at, starling, sanderling, piper, spit, cheap chiseler, adenoid arroyo, pockety-pock of soon-obscene amends (consequences then, too) brought gloaming—indemnify the purple crater while optimizing into frameless wet honorific where on City Earth. Call it.

  December 1

  Gloom and misery everywhere. Stormy weather.

  Repairs

  21st-Century Facts: Darkness, ignorance, absence of manners, nuance, tact. Something the magazine philosophers—aka “public intellectuals”—won’t ponder. What a crock of shit that category has become: Begin with a perfectly diligent philosophy professor whose lectures have some spark, are compiled for his advancement in books that become the new “turn” in scholastic thinking; next he is picked up by the art magazines as a name to parade on glossy cover stock. Accordingly, the stock goes down: M. Le Prof. is flattered beyond reason (French reason having spun its wheels since at latest the 1840s), flatters himself that he can quip his way into Theory Heaven, ends up speechifying at Chelsea dinners. It’s like those old fight movies with John Garfield, boy violinist waylaid by the Mob, but there’s no Lili Palmer to set the poor boy straight. Meanwhile, an aura of sanctity grows. Is M. Rancière copyedited the same as X, Y, Z? Or, why quote Agamben when John Dewey the Third already had that thought while stirring his froth at Papaya King some forty years prior?

  Not Applicable

  He is living proof that narcissism is an incurable disease.

  Tell

  I don’t want to tell of something in the way of dictating a point of view, but to tell (like beads) the words—phrases you can turn here or there toward what might want to be said.

  Feelings drawn from words: expressivity in reverse.

  Extreme Reverie

  An afterimage of my cousin Deborah Sudran at Kenneth Koch’s and my reading at St. Marks—and was my mother there? If so how was she—nice? not nice?—with Deborah, my father’s niece? I slip slowly into my mother’s mind, tangle there so much that panic ensues—I’m inside another person’s consciousness! What if I never returned? The strong sense that this is what it is to “go” mad.

  March 5

  Monday weather forecast, front page of today’s New York Times, reads: “Dull with possibility of snow in the High Sierras.”

  Dyslexia (a simulcast with Clark Coolidge): “Invoid the affect.”

  Doctor specializing in treating US Marines’ post-Iraq trauma conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center, DC, is known as The Wizard.

  Ancient section of Baghdad, site of book market & intellectuals’/poets’ hangouts bombed to ruin. On NPR, an Iraqi poet announces his mission and that of his peers, “to keep the language from going insane.”

  The world helps the artist by revealing mystic truths.

  June 2

  Walking down a path in Grasmere with Tom Pickard behind the church where the Wordsworths are buried, suddenly I hiss thru teeth sharply, ouch, ’twas a nettle brushed by right little finger—and Tom instantly dives to the right of the path, scoops up a handful of green leaves—dock—crumples and hands them to me with a gesture that says, “Rub.” The pain subsides almost immediately, but for the slight discomfort of a sticker embedded near the top joint. Susan Coolidge says, “Wherever something poisonous is, the antidote usually grows nearby.”

  All

  All, all, everything— and one—variations on a theme.

  November 23

  I said to students in grad seminar last Wednesday: “Now I understand the great chasm that separates you from me. I belong to the last generation with immediate (grandparent) Victorian forebears. That world gone after WWI but lingering in speech, manners, habits for another fifty-plus years. I walk uphill, a woman comes down the street, ‘Good morning!’ and I tip my cap. I can tip my cap, and you can’t, not unself-consciously anyway!”

  Try to Remember

  Thirty days hath September,

  April, June, and November;

  All the rest have thirty-one,

  Except for February

  [whose days are funny, all screwed up].

  Meaning

  “Meaning is a peculiar thing in poetry—as peculiar as meaning in politics or loving. In writing poetry a poet can hardly say that he knows what he means. In writing he is more intimately concerned with holding together a poem, and that is for him its meaning.” —Edwin Denby

  March 1

  Atlanta. Zodiacal lights at sundown low in the western sky.

  March 5

  New Orleans as Pompeii—the vacancies—some people lived here, now don’t, no telling whether that was yesterday or 2,000 years (there is silence and no ghosts). Puzzling over how I had missed the prettiness of the French Quarter on two previous visits; then, standing in heavy rainfall on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse streets with Andrei Codrescu, we look straight down Bourbon to Canal—“There’s nobody here,” says Andrei, the crowds that once occluded views of doorways, porches, the grillwork, vanished. We are all Katrina; e.g., Humanity—Mother Nature’s Ultimate Pest.

  Dave Brinks and I had lunch in a little funky café near the French Market. At the step into the place was a wild pink-gold glowing parallelogram thrown, splat, on the pavement. At first, I thought it was paint; then realized it was a flash reflection from a beat-up metal sign on a post getting hit steadily by midafternoon sun.

  March 11

  Back from all of it—New York, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York, roundtrip—and all I can think of is Devastation and Poussin—they go together in unexpected ways.

  “He’s most comfortable when the world is tearing itself apart,” says David Carrier, as we walk through the galleries at the Met. Piramus and Thisbe, Landscape with a Storm, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. Event, sight, reaction—the reaction is usually a chain reaction, like the lightning strikes in P&T, but zigzagging back, back through the registers of scene. Or where there is pathos but not destruction: Phocion’s ashes gathered outside the gate, inside is an image of how civilized life might exist. Water, light, and reflections on still water (still, even in the catastrophe), the stacked, discontinuous distances. No vanishing; these are true conversation pieces, the particulars of wh
ich are laid out almost Chinese fashion for the eye to happen upon.

  “No matter which way you turn you always come up against a stone wall,” said Beckett to Jasper Johns (the wall text notes Beckett’s tone as “approvingly”). Poussin and Johns: Both show you a lot while at the same time being open to the charge of excess reserve, or tightassedness, or (as Ron says) “lack of humanity.” But wow, what they do show. One must take time with Poussin, go up close to see what is going on—in scene and paint, together. It’s the third room where his philosophy kicks in.

  Courbet seems like a clown next to him, but there’s this funny thing: women prefer the clown, lack patience for philosophical art. (How do they feel about Jasper?) David Reed points out that the unintelligible darks in Poussin are the result of aging and/or abrasion through which the burnt-umber grounds emerge, obliterating those areas not covered by bright colors (yellow, white, vermillion). Rubens used a medium ground tone; Rembrandt’s “uneconomical” lead white. Rubens can be gotten across the room, no need to go up close to see detail; with Poussin, you can see the beauty, the order, and light, but in these paintings the great thing is to imagine (even join) the company in which he worked and exhibited and discussed the pictures, the Roman intellectual audience of the 1600s.

  Again & Again Department:

  “When did the dumb-bunny bomb first hit U.S.A.?”

  —Philip Whalen, Scenes of Life at the Capital

  One April

  Hello in Milwaukee:

  Two geese flying north.

  Kinko’s “Signs mean business.”

  Semiotics means trouble.

  Compare and Contrast

  I know the thrills and spills of jet lag.

  But dirt and grime—tell me about it.

  Erratic

  “Why are you so erratic?” one of my prep school teachers demanded, confronting me in a corner of the library. I had to err to get anywhere, apparently. You don’t have to be Martin Heidegger to know that philosophy is “always already” nostalgic for poetry. (And art criticism for philosophy, and so on, round the bend.)

  Apologies to Dr. J: Not patriotism, but the appeal to good manners (or “professional courtesy”) is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

  Car zooms into pedestrian space at crossing as I proceed, blink three times, looking straight ahead, jaw slack with mild disbelief.

  Lord

  Have you crunched your numbers in the blood of the Lord?

  June 27

  Kate Sutton, apropos my account of visiting Old Industrial USA—Pittsburgh, western Massachusetts, Detroit, Chicago: “Nothing I’m drawn to more than fallen empires.”

  Everything good happens among friends. There is no “World.”

  Olympic Sun

  An American boy from Mamaroneck suspected his mother of sleeping with a stranger on a ship to Sicily. The boy sulked for the duration of the voyage. When they met up with the father in Naples the boy was horrid to him. The father’s weakness had been revealed by the mother’s infidelity. Someone said, “That’s very Jamesian.” Somehow I find this not quite right. The infidelity was all in the boy’s head.

  Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

  —Frederick Douglass, apropos 1968

  Richard Cheney, an instance of enlightened evil—evil that knows what it’s about: power, empire building, with all the trimmings. These are the interesting ones. This aligns with seeing the movie Frost/Nixon and Frank Langella’s overly generous but dramatically effective portrayal of Tricky Dick as a master of gravitas and princely smarts; as Amiri Baraka said back when, “I can learn a lot from a pile of Nixon under a stoop.”

  Privacy is marginal to violent overthrow.

  July 11

  Zimbabwe: “eyes gouged out and back badly burned.” How anyone can say this seems to be “beyond me.” But someone has (on the radio) and must. A funny idea, “brutality”—as only humans perform such acts on one another. The KPFA commentator gets all choked up. At the Chinese contemporary art show last night, looking at a lead cast of a human skull set in a glare of electric light: “Blinding impermanence.”

  August 10

  A Nation of Whiners unto Herself.

  Bottlebrush Trees: At the first sight of one of these, Kenward Elmslie laughed himself silly.

  Birds on Grand View for Jack Collom

  Parrots

  Finch

  Chickadee

  Mockingbird

  Sparrows

  Robins

  Crows

  Blackbirds

  Scrub jay

  The occasional pigeon

  Mourning doves

  & our neighbors Michael and Tom

  Walking at 7:30 a.m. (Grand View Facts)

  Serrated leaves

  A painter’s truck, “Your Satisfaction Is Our Obligation”

  Two ladies, one with dog

  The people out smoking on sidewalks in front of their houses, first puffs of the day

  Lady bearing a yoga mat (what color, forgotten—the normal purple?)

  Stones Connie “harvests” from neighbor’s yard to prop up the planter shrub

  Squares, circles, oblongs

  A dog’s paw print on pavement

  The Ages

  Whenever I see woods and fields

  warriors huddle

  dart and scatter,

  running, shooting

  shaking their clubs.

  She has a brush in one hand and a hank of hair in the other, its polar opposite.

  June 9

  In America you get food to eat. And every kind gets its poet. Frederick Seidel, for example—a poet for aging fucked-up preppies. There is hardly any meaner breed; a White Man’s Burden of abuse-engendered hatred inside and out. Satire shaming itself (per usual) in the mirror, all packaged in off-pitch metaphor and trifling technique á la the Rhymers’ Club.

  The echocardiogram in Dr. Rasmussen’s chamber. On one wall an enormous print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, systole/diastole, where’s the drain? You have a monitor band of unusual length, the good doctor says.

  On blog: “Anonymous Said.”

  At select urban intersections an LED sign flashing Edwin Denby’s mild retort:

  BUT BIRDS

  DON’T FLY WITH

  THEIR FEET

  October 31

  Those who act as if there’s only one way to think.

  (Detroit)

  November

  The movie cannot be opened.

  California lilac exhaust.

  Terrible dream this morning: Driving the car, my vision blurs, ask Connie to take the wheel to get us to the side of the road. Arthur Danto is in the back. I resume driving but not much clearer. We’re on a kind of waste dump, barren; no more car, I am running downhill toward comfort; horrible snapping dogs—some have guns where their mouths should be—gaining on me. Wake up kicking.

  1926 Letters of Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Rilke: what Susan Sontag calls “a portrait of the sacred delirium of art”—which may be just the delirium of writing letters to phantom ideal loves (whose true love, as it happens, is art, poetry) . . . This sentence already spinning away, drowning in whatever sympathy I muster for them all. But they are all so inward; hardly a moment when any of them—Tsvetaeva’s the occasional exception—tells one salient thing about their days, the weather, gossip, happenstance. Art for them is shelter, and feels puny on that account.

  Mere piffle compared to the Satanic Delirium of E-mail.

  November 27

  Fabrication of the Mastadon

  Anhedonia

  or

  Bohemia: A Desert Country Near the Sea

  Un compas dans l’oeil = perfect estimation of proportion, distance, place. Perdre le nord = lose direction, become disoriented.

  Get a shoe on that boat, son.

  Put your hand on a wall, it hums.

  Keats to his sister-in-law Georgiana re his feelings for her and for Jane “Charmian” Coxe: “As a man o
f the World I love the rich talk of a Charmian: as an Eternal Being I love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me.”

  A slice of wind

  January 31

  My father wore sleeveless undershirts. He would stretch the bottom to his thighs and then cup his cock and balls in the cotton front before putting on his boxer shorts.

  “In mathematics . . . there is an infinite number of ways of arriving at the number seven. It’s the same with rhythm. The difference is that whereas in mathematics the sum is the important thing; it makes no difference if you say five and two or two and five, six and one or one and six, and so on. With rhythm, however, the fact that they add up to seven is of secondary importance. The important thing is, is it five and two or is it two and five, because five and two is a different person.” —Igor Stravinsky to Samuel Dushkin

  I Thought I Heard Win Knowlton Say

  Acer platanoides, Norway maple—tree on a patch of Central Park (the Arthur Ross Pinetum) near the Great Lawn, a favorite play spot of my childhood, where Moses and I unceremoniously and illegally —I in Eleanor’s wheelchair, he pushing the handles this way and that—put (just about literally dumped) the mixture of Eleanor and Seymour’s ashes in the dire winter of 2004.

  Later, resplendent on an April day, 2009, with yellow-green petals, the trunk divided in two, stretching up and out against an achingly clear blue sky. Across the path, little girls in school uniforms screech under cherry blossoms.

  “The spirit leaves the body,” said the ever flat-on Alex Katz when I told him how my mother’s last breath was taken, then just went.

  February

  trophy thought

  Songs for Bands

  Bright yellow, soft green, crimson and gold, brown and gray, mouse brown and dirty yellow, magenta and purple, goldenrod, obsidian and ebony, red and blue, green, cerulean, chocolate brown and pale gray, khaki and brick red, lilac, sepia and moss, orange and white, ocher and cream, pink and tan, celadon and ivory, shit brown, cerise, plum and puce, peach and black, indigo, flesh, ultramarine