Yearbook (Concluded)

And have coffee with Will, and find out about New Years. My moral idea is “conversation”? High tide, we flooded our boots and got soaked up the thighs right away. “This food is like the most appetizing drawing I’ve ever tasted!”

Yearbook (12.4)

It’s always the sun and someone hammering, and all we do, jobwise, is haunt, as if in solution in the air. Emmett dreamed he got in a fistfight with me. A maple bud has begun to open, sticky and yellow, by the hotdog mural. Receiving extraterrestrial signals, getting invited to the right parties . . . A drawstring labeled PULL in ballpoint on copper withdraws the wool curtain. This morning I dreamed it was a day so clear that if I stood on the base of a streetlamp I could see all the way across western Washington to the Cascades—a bountiful panorama of red and brown mountains and shining patches of snow and sharp blue sky—and I was nervously getting ready to take a bus across those mountains to see Michaela—which of course turned out to be true, though I proceeded to sleep till ten on a grey, rainy morning. There seemed to be a lot of strange space between our answers, and I suspected myself of amnesia before I suspected her of sleeptalking.

Yearbook (12.3)

Sore eyeballs and stiff muscles of the couch sleeper. “Soviet Mario” mushrooms. “A green mouse sneaked through the moss.” An oolite in graphite in studious fig light, clinked against and crunched across by a ringing pick into alder scrub light. My ostensible place, a problem arises, a giant invasive iris, is with the cold pizza and sweetish tap water, the things you say and do, the old stencils crusted with flecked orange spraypaint, the ados of ordinary day through fog, the lowered plummet of final attention, sore eyeballs and stiff muscles of the couch-sleeper. The sky is bad with architecture, and I have been reading everything—“Taste the delicious Bubble Teas of Bubble Island,” “A Race to Save a Brain”—but it isn’t working. We hiked out of Moscow through the woods (acacias, blue-and-red newts) to an old man’s apartment where we ate dinner (cookies, then soup, then reheated tea) and I had to speak some Russian, which went okay.

Yearbook (12.2)

Parts of these things from this drizzly murky sleepy day could be used somehow. Our agenda: Breakfast—Train to Forest Park—Walk in Forest Park; picnic—Toy store in Sellwood—read—play games—drink wine. What was was what was needed. December 10th. She held my hand and rinsed my bucket, rubbed my feet, told me a story of a person, a dinosaur and a penguin, bought me grapes, bananas, pretzels, checked out videos, read “James and the Giant Peach” to me, and left an amazing gift on my door while I was tossing and being trained by soft visible voices in the elaborate and improvisational discipline of conceiving and fulfilling various geometrical diagrams, and wondering if I dared sit up to drink water. I am wearing her oatmealy hoodie sweater. The water going nowhere.

Yearbook (12.1)

The tulip petal looks convexly pink, convincingly. At the laundromat, a twelve year old boy sits down across from me and begins to read the real estate ads. I grew up doubting my ability to buy a vowel. The rainstorm has cleared up, it seems. Picture four or five cops hunched over a table reading this poem, looking for clues. Or when you said to me, “Galvanized nails.”

Yearbook (11.6)

That it is not the story of the man in shirtsleeves and black weskit who has tinily wandered off up the large off to the right into the blue is the end of the story.

Yearbook (11.5)

I can take the time and figure out what I’m doing while I do it. I can take the time and figure out what I’m doing, a not-look can pass and pass, the Stare is a dance up a stairway nowhere letting up. The “not there” disclosed by the carpentry rubs off on the viewer. Other delights of the week included Moondog’s Sax Pax For A Sax,” pecan pie the color and texture of tar, a letter from Mona with a page in Spanish, and the last chanterelle hunt of the season. The things we are familiar with and the things with which we are familiar with them familiar us. Freely they’re palmed from tree to tree, internetting a veil of perchless similes. I heard it was snowing in the hills.

Yearbook (11.4)

Yesterday wasting in the library I looked at L. Sprague DeCamp’s book on Atlantis, and saw an illustrations of elephant-like creatures from a Mayan carving, with frontal nostrils and feathered eyes—the author supposed they were “simply” stylized macaws. “In the animistic city we saw the street was our hallway and in the country the house the mind but this still village is an embarrassing relative.” In the final analysis of the final analysis still you finally can’t leave the theater. Can you stare down a train? The stare enacts what it can’t have, giving you the slip, amazing crook coherent lines are sifting it all, untying a household, nearing a border, a little dazed, dangling low over the water—what it can’t have, a rattle a pupa, green amulet’s a stonefly: the stare. Give it a few years to sink in. The old apple tree’s secret.

Yearbook (11.3)

It is an opera in changed leaves. Between the sheets, grass from Vermont or bark from the Urals undulated and gleamed. The stare enacts what it can’t have. “How good it is for me, and burdensome, when the moment approaches, and suddenly the stretching of an arch sounds in my mutterings.” “Gold loops across the sluiced cocklackia.” Sounds burlesque, but in the dream it was all eerie and suspenseful and lovely. "It casts glances, it flashes, radiates, gleams."

Yearbook (11.2)

Open up your opera. “How does one kiss on the edge of a park, near a carrefour, in the middle of life, after a misunderstanding, watched by a South American General and fortified by several thousand novels?” Merely open up your opera: aperture of song, flecked indigo, red, saffron, silt-grey, sandusky: a live raw unintention. That’ll do, sifted. I rode from 14th and Pettygrove to 11th and Stark carrying 2 sleeves of white #3 to-go boxes strapped under the shoulder straps of my backpack, which was slung by the chest clip over my left shoulder and cut off the circulation a bit, and I could only steer with the right hand. We speak as part of a massive system of shunts and ravels, oxidizing faster than we can learn how, in the sun and salt air, churning its rickety shadow against the great harbor wall—and so we must speak directly through whatever channels clear, sparing no distinction, making the botched equations disclose through their black grillwork a square stab of sky. I’m perfecting my nervous laugh.

Yearbook (11.1)

I want bicycle races and vast essays on Ruskin or whatever and punk economics that save the polis and poems that make the trees uproot and walk or whatever, make the world horny and proud and kind.

Yearbook (10.5)

This is the way to live in fall: / ride bicycles, play basketball, / make mushroom gravy every night, / and tactfully fade out of sight. The poets’ pronoun anxiety. “The one thing language can’t do is express private, personal experience”; “A praise poet has to construct fast, in the course of each song, the community that will receive the song.” The poet’s vowel lust. “Sweet house with no style, made / with a single blow and a single piece / of sunflower wax.” Keep saying sea and meaning ocean and eating nettles, no, kelp, no, knowledge Halloween hollows into the head: first frost, next frost.

Yearbook (10.4)

Box around everything about looking or being looked at. They scribble with oil pastels all over the pumpkin, then decide to paint over it with green, red, orange and purple poster paints until it is sublimely black. Too much sun and coffee. “A hand leafs through autumn with a logic that shines like oxblood.” And he glued the book shut and called it a sequel. A Comfort Fort. The limits of your language are the roofbeams of your house, and you can hear crows and rain outside.

Yearbook (10.3)

I later laminated these frames in wax and projected them by jack-o’-lantern light onto the wall, in an attempt to cheer up the king. The incense smells good and the garden is beautiful even in October, with lots of big dahlias, and not overly neat or fancy or spectacular—brooms leaning against the walls, a traffic cone sitting in the gravel, a smallish dented pumpkin at the Kuanyin’s feet. Not “surrealism,” but people may walk up to the screen and enter the movie. Read the sheet of blank vellum between the original and the translation. Scarequotedness is on us like fog. “Should” and “agree,” what dreary notions. So listen to the music of: “39¢.”

Yearbook (10.2)

Best moment of the day so far was just now, watching a barge go by slowly down the river, pushed not pulled by a yellow tug name of “Rossisle,” loaded with three shapely mountains of Ross Island earth: first a very conical dark brown dirt mound, then a pale gray ridge or fell of gravel, and a darker gray range of sand—all of about the same height, like an ideal landscape, three mountains like three kings changing aspects as they passed, and seeming of their own mysterious wills to move as one and pull their golden caboose behind them. My ear itches and my toe hurts and I drank too much coffee and I have a Tennyson poem stuck in my head and also a Nirvana song. It is immense. Low broad tree full of yellow apples getting rained on. It is a fine tangled knot of interconnected ideas, bits of history, but too much is vague and built on equations that don’t add up. “Arts and Entertainment” in a newspaper or “Art Saves Lives” on a bumper sticker. It’s three movies’ worth of nonstop action and amnesia!

Yearbook (10.1)

The sunflower out the window looks quite bleak now, saggy and rotten, with some yellow wrinkled petals hanging down from the lower flower heads. In the bathroom you can hear rain jawharping on the metal fan in the ceiling. The electrician is in the kitchen. Snotty hearts make the city work.

Yearbook (9.5)

This airborne bridegroom without shape or sequence enters the world through your pocket, bearing all the time for time and its opposite, knowing a lot, feeling everything on. As yet unsung, not ready, uneasy, hungover probably, it is a trick of the lie or rather the light, laying it on real, awkwardly not exactly part of the weather we’re lying on. Its engine shyly breathes.

Yearbook (9.4)

A beautiful half-melted ice-cream sandwich smeared like thick wet paint on the sidewalk, and swarmed by tiny ants. A professional may read it with easy delectation, as if sipping champagne with cake crumbs in it. The sidewalk was long and straight and full of diffuse moisture, and scattered with diffuse citizens who would pass him lightly on either side. Little bits of shredded paper scattered along Salmon street for about five blocks. And the road was strewn with horse chestnuts, bits of shredded documents, peplos threads, the painterly touch. “Isolated plinths, conduits, panels of rose-red aggregates . . .” A new kind of white tar like melted ice cream in the sidewalk cracks.

Yearbook (9.3)

As a black tire runs along, leave the technician’s page a blank braced against the skimpy wind. Get all daggery on me I wouldn’t mind. Get haunted. Lubricate bike chain. And write a foul poem. You walk one more block with me, then you’ll be ready. Ha ha, bike stolen, lock removed, toeclips and reflectors removed, brakes loosened (?), bike left by the road in front of big house!

Yearbook (9.2)

But M and I’ve been invited to picnic with the Vaux’s swifts. Last night I walked to Garfield with mom and dad to see Jupiter, Venus, and the crescent moon lined up, but they were all down by the time I was out tonight. It was after the cartoons and before the museum that I kind of lost it in a Mexican restaurant. A moment’s turnstile clicks—“penetrate / Through all its azures to a final”—and you’re gone. The next night there were asteroids. It’s like a fun, freaky, but not comic cosmos where thought bends and tears like a nebula, succumbing to freeway hamburgers. And in the rush hour of the technician and his mysterious partner—other and hyphen and half of anything he goes—their clasped hands lie on the white page on the clipboard.