Archive for August, 2008
1.
“On your left” I said
again, as his wife yanked him
away from the ducks.
“Must be deaf,” I told myself,
and then told myself again.
2.
Toodling along
the dusty canal path, grooves
purr from his boombox
while fancy bikes speed through
his Hanae Mori nimbus.
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I sense the way the house
wants to give under its load of goods,
the way the beams will rot
under the betrayal of soil,
the way small seeds with insidious wings
will carry it all around full circle again.
We didn’t choose any of this.
Accident? It only makes sense
if there’s an opposite to accident.
Waving toward yourself the scent of lavender
growing by the front porch. It only
helps conceal the stink of last night’s fish.
Still, we cultivate the shrub. Who
would mock his own creation? Only a man.
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Well, you know I’ve had it
so I declare tomorrow a day off
from my obsessive problem solving.
I’ve gone so far as to put on a compelling
movie while I write this poem. Maybe
like Ashbery, or so it was rumored,
it will turn out to be a good poem.
But the movie’s too good, and
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I keep getting Error 425
Unable to build data connection
Connection refused
I tried to reboot her
but all of her reps said
she was working fine
Then to reboot myself
but I was afraid
I would never wake up
So I just sit here idling
the fan running occasionally
spam about all that gets through
Categories: The Grind
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I love you when you’re absent
But that is not the same
as love when you are present
And I love you when you’re present
and I love you when I’m present
but you’re not or vice versa
And I love you when you forget me
and when you forget to tell me things
and though I can’t forget you sometimes
I can forget about you
for a few seconds
which isn’t bad on the scale of things
I do and don’t think about
love being one of them
and how it’s different
from being in love
sometimes and sometimes not
not being in love is not
discussable because it
could be too many
other things
This must be love because
I love you when you are absent
present and all the rest
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It’s not a poem when there are thoughts in it.
It’s not a poem when the crickets are mistaken for jet engines.
It’s not a poem when the carpet lies like a cigar in one place all year.
Life ends when the nose turns in on itself.
Life ends when the promises made in youth scratch the windowpane.
Life ends when your bosom fails to prevent the slice that sends the ball
into the lake.
We bury our past in the hopes of the Internet.
We bury our feelings in the shade of the fledgling pear tree.
We bury our fists in the sockets of comical volcanoes.
Let’s listen to the floors creak.
Let’s listen to the swelling of distant arteries.
Let’s listen to the fall of reindeer.
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I don’t know if I can make a poem
out of the minor hell of the last few days’
misunderstandings among relatives, realtors,
lawyers, and property — land and objects themselves —
any more than I can make a life out of them.
Which is to say, with the right frame
of mind, with the right skill, the combination
of desire and will and talent, I might.
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Tony’s socks are drab white
and faded grey so that the white
is almost grey and the grey white,
almost. Sort of like Tony, which is not
to say he’s a dull sort of fellow. Quite
to the contrary, he’s a colorful character,
though muted of hue.
Tony’s socks lie folded
on a red pillow. They seem peacefully
asleep there, folded as they are
like a dog’s forepaws, or rather
a dog’s floppy ears upon paws,
asleep by midnight coals. Or perhaps
towhead hair above burnt lobster skin
from a day of jet skiing without sunblock.
Though I doubt he’s the jet-skiing type.
Tony’s socks have lain idle on
my book-closet shelf for exactly a year
today. He shucked them and stuffed them
into his sneakers as we walked off
the boardwalk and onto the sand
of Provincetown where I was taking a class
and he had the goodness to visit
while I was having the toughest of times
with my wife. The end seemed near.
We sat, Tony and I, under the shadow
of someone’s deck, neither of us loving
so much sun. We talked about marriage
and death, how little we knew about
any of them, and about my ignorance of sports,
and his dinner plans. Unaware
at first that my wife was sitting by the shore
a hundred feet away, writing in a notebook
about her heartbreak and hope.
Then he used our bathroom up
at the studio and took his sneakers
but not his socks. So that now
Tony’s socks lie, as though without
life, as though they they can’t actually
hear what I’m saying, as though
they have no heart.
Categories: The Grind
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Have you ever bit-
ten into a submarine
sandwich and felt the cold
steel blue spike penetrate?
Have you ever turned
on the radio to disc-
over your favorite composer
was dead? O Vandervleet!
Or rolled into
the lawn freshly after
mowing, when even the worms
have abandoned their tunnels?
I’ll tell you what it’s like
when you and I meet
on the other side. Here’s
too provisional. It would slip
unnoticed into judgment,
arrest, or obligatory obliteration.
The static here. The distrust.
The polite prevarication.
Or if there’s no place like
here, in a real sense, a sense
of place, of fingers and sound
or sight or anything sentient
then the secret stays a secret.
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Moving from one place to another, we felt alternately like newlyweds and near-divorcees. We never had a real honeymoon: our wedding night in a mediocre hotel (though nice by our standards, more than we afforded ourselves on what we took for holidays in those days) and, after the family left, one night in a lean-to in the Lost Creek Wilderness. I’d forgotten fire for my Coleman white gas single burner camping stove, so I had to drive a mile to the next campsite to beg a pack of matches. The cover blazoned,
“Cancun.” So with this move. We bought before we sold, moved in stages, tried to find room in a smaller space for all we thought we were.
This morning, mad as
I was before bed last night,
as I leave — a kiss.
Categories: The Grind
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From: “David Ruekberg”
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 10:34 PM
To: “Karen Llagas” ; “DeLana R.A. Dameron”
; “David Ruekberg” ; “ros”
; “Zena Cardman” ; “Vicki
Murray” ; “Tommye Blount”
; “Ross White”
Subject: Email (8/13/08)
> Please do not respond
> to this email. This is an
> automated msg.
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Where did it all go wrong? we may well ask.
This sky blue sky threatened with rain, with doom,
with change. This penchant for longing.
In the eaves of a basswood tree a starling
chatters, invader not by its own design: blame
not the bird. Along the country road
Labatt’s Blue cans litter the narrow margins
between stone wall and tarmac, signatures
of some late night high school party on wheels
for the last two years. This, too, must pass.
This must be a beginning, not an end
a voice chimes in. Ego? Spirit? Or
some unnamed construct that someday
will surely be named. The skies become
dotted with various forms of cloud someone
has identified, has found in their action
and being a common coincidence of being
and action. Thought, too travels along
paths of recognizable accidents.
Oh! the many ways of correcting anomalies,
of steering strays back, whipping us
into some shape or other. Oh! the ways
we seek escape. The abnormal, the para,
the wobble. Yet, for every discord, a chord.
For every net, a fall. Somewhere in the brush
behind my chair and pen, some animal snorts.
Nothing I expected, yet might have, could have.
A few seconds later, a half mile away, a gun
goes off, echoes zigzagging along the valley.
No relationship prior to their happening.
Not hunting season. Yet, the deer bounds.
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Living with crazy people was once thought
an act of love so desperate that saints
were burnt not as punishment but to save them
from themselves. Only the boys
grinding pigments saw through the hoax.
We know this because of the crickets’
song in August, despite the sudden cold
snap and the cicadas’ contralto. They know
what lurks in October. And they care less.
The French have a name for it,
but they keep it to themselves.
They flounce the baguette, their one
bad impression of their Chinese masters.
So what? they seem say, and make
that gesture for which they are known.
Meanwhile, children and small animals
allied by large eyes and rounded heads
are dying beneath the wheels of self-
propelled machines. As if anything
could be that automatic, that original.
Categories: The Grind
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Is it that thunderhead piling up in the north
like an advertisement of a creation so magnificent
I would have to be near dead to say, “I don’t care”?
Or is it the man who lays claim to some precious thing
belonging to me, who is so convincing that I begin
to doubt whether the thing is that precious after all,
or even mine, until I escape by falling
into a kind of Buddhist non-attachment,
and then begin to doubt even that assurance?
Or is it the taste of mediocre beer or bread
reminding me of what I could have had, or the din
of the highway three blocks away reminding me
of the country home I left, or the smell of the cut
grass reminding me how beautiful something
so pointless as grass can be?
Or is it only that I was born to cry,
that in order to come fully into this world
I had to announce my ache to live with a roaring
that only yesterday was finally translated
into a phrase I could comprehend, that something
in the world makes me want to cry because
that is the language of being in this world,
each cry a new letter in an alphabet constantly
reconstructing itself with each cry for pain and joy.
Categories: The Grind
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People are adding me to their Facebook
friends lists faster every day.
It feels strange to be so popular
in an anonymous way.
Meanwhile folks at work
and in my neighborhood wonder
what I look like.
I tried to Google them under
“people I live near” and got
a Facebook thread: “I keep
getting those email too. I’m killing
this profile now. It’s creepy!”
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You say it’s not stonewalling as your backhoe scrapes rock and passable loam five feet away from where my legs lie splayed and your dump truck maneuvers perpendicular to my front gate. It’s okay. I’ve read my contract. I know that in twenty days the wings of law will spread over me and touch my brow with their scaly glow. It’s not what I want.
I understand you don’t trust me. I’ve betrayed myself so many times, how could you? Though I warned you for five years I would someday give up the kingdom left to me. It was the one thing you wanted most.
You see, I was the false king in the story returning home after twenty years to discover his treasure lay among the roots of the cherry tree of his pauper childhood. I have no need of digging. You even could plow it up and take it. Why would I want to hold it in my hands? I just sit with my back against its roughness.
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So there you were, sawing
into wormholes. Or should I say,
boring. Looking for a kind
of existence. Meanwhile,
all your past accomplishments
still felt like future to you.
So much happier than I.
I thought. Until I interrupted
myself to listen. What was
the meaning I had been looking for?
Where was your landing strip?
But these were not the kind
of questions I should have asked.
What’s this? What’s this?
You could inquire for centuries,
etc., and never get bored.
The reverb. The echo.
The sibilance doubling back
down the alleys of infinitude.
Composing atoms. Semi-conscious
breathing things. Finally, music.
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Today’s version of the journey
began with a computer crash
and my wife’s panicked ransacking
of self out of bed.
Are you familiar with the labyrinth
of ego as manifested in
electronic architecture
and domestic détente?
Are you willing so much
as I am to let go of a slice
of time such as August 5,
7 am to noon, forever,
elbows sunk in mire of Windows
and consultations with Google
and shuffling between offices?
Then it was on to closet doors.
Poorly hung, mangled
by some former tenant’s
circular saw in the middle
of the last century. Here
at least, after five weeks
of near camping-out
in our new house
I came face-to-face
with my demons in the guise
of three pairs of bypass doors.
As you might expect, as I do,
the first two were easily fixed.
The third possessed me
until after eight. That’s when
the devils came out, intoning
their truths, as Buddha and Bill Murray
have made us well aware:
It doesn’t matter. That’s when
darkness finally fell, and its blessed
reminder of nothing.
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Self is the heat
to burn off the haze
eyes like fire
body burning
brisk winds in the ears
fan the blaze
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All it took was her lazy refusal
to push me out and the doctor’s forceps
like two fires at the poles of my skull
to make me turn my back on God
and scream okay if you want me
you’ll have to take me dead
Categories: The Grind
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Some things die.
Some things pass away.
Some things change from one thing into another.
We suffer losses.
We give things up.
We let go.
In the center we feel
a heat, a great sea,
an expansion.
At one end, light breaks
open. At the other
emptiness collapses.
After thunder, silence.
After breath,
no breath.
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We’re not going to get
all serious about all this,
are we? A hint
of nomenclature is all I need
to give me bad dreams, a hard
belly, soft willy.
I spend my days in serious detritus
as it is, as in: what to do
about the lawn, my wife, the meaning of it all.
For the sake of all the beans.
Open me gently.
Watch your thumbs.
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