Perfect Bird

(a kind-of ghazal)

[poem was here]

Bonnie "Prince" Billy sings Bill Withers

Odetta

Portrait

(an older piece)

He started out 5'8", but by the time their romance was over, he was 4'3", and she didn't know what to do with him. Sometimes he would sneak into her pocket when she was on her way out to the library and wait until she was in the middle of trying to remember something important before popping out under her armpit and humming love songs toward her ear. His hum was the hum of a forgetful mime. Overall, his personality was that of a juggler irritated by a parking ticket. Sometimes, though, he reminded her of a man with sad eyes, given to slicking down his hair with something that smelled like her grandfather, making her like him terribly. "Bright Eyes," her friends called him behind his back. And it was true: He was as impudent as Charlton Heston. Bounced on the balls of his feet when he walked.

He had taken up smoking to get back at his parents for giving him an alliterative name, but then one day he told her, "You don't know what sad is until you've seen the mattress your parents slept on your whole life thrown into a garbage truck." By then he had given up smoking, and she was about to move to Canada for reasons of her own, having to do with a movie she had once seen.

When she got there, she realized that he probably missed her but that he was probably the kind of person who would give himself one day to be sad before distracting himself with ukelele lessons. She occupied herself with arranging her spices and cheering up the dog, and then on the 17th day after she moved, she got very sad while measuring the coffee.

Morning Poem

11:15 on the couch with an English muffin and really good jam.
Pomegranate strawberry (almost wrote "poem-agranate"). A plate
inherited somehow from my little (half-)brother's grandmother--

white with green garlandy leaves and yellow, orange, and blue
flowers. Halfway through the first month of the second decade
of the 2000s. I could not have imagined this when I was younger.

I'm not sure what I thought I'd be. But I love,
somehow, this plate, this jam, this sitting here. Still,
a city might fall down on itself in a place you have never been.

Port-au-Prince has fallen down on itself. What does this mean
about how we care for each other? About a sunny day in
upper Manhattan, in the year 2010? Everything and nothing.

Pray for us.

The Kind of Thing I Find Weirdly Comforting

"Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?"
--Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

8 1/2: "Asa nisi masa"

Birthday 1978, Revolver

"Lying with the Wolf"

The truth is there is no prescribed version of what artists are supposed to be interested in. They are just drawn to certain activities and they pay attention to this.

--Kiki Smith

[more images can be found here]

Max Ernst Thursday

Today

Only Child Syndrome

I was imagining something crystalline and made of city
dirt and not-knowing. So I stayed inside all day.
I would like to say some true things, the way a song
can be true, or a dance. Using my words, I can say, “I sat
all day on my couch, looking up things online. This was research.”
I can say, “I’m left to my own devices again.” Whatever
that means. I have a generalized, sisterly sort of ache,
all of us trying so hard. Think of the gaze of something
dear to you. Imagine you could stay there always.


1/3/2010
Inwood, NYC