Laying Love Down and Paying My Tithe

But one more waking from a distracting headache

and the distracting ache of guilt, the overwhelming colors

of need, the headache of logistics descending

like rain over new-shorn hair, so short

because I have the eyes and am on the inside like

an infant. New and new to everything.

Lost and lost to the past: I ran away. I was like

an animal in that way, in how I ran, and I have thrown away

photographs for the stifling disservice they do this

Current Moment.

Love me for this shivering jelly or don’t.

I will not care very much as I run away. Richly,

I consider the aspects of my body and

the way they touch other bodies: sometimes.

I’m a bergamot or a pomander or some heavy

bowed flower,

laying love down and paying my tithe.

And there is a difference between lying

and being wrong. I’ve been wrong and

wrong as I was wronged, I’ve even been right

and found in hindsight I was not. I have loved

the crown of hair, the head in the lap, the face

between knees, the little polyester slip,

I’ve baked cookies, made madeleines with

delicate orange, the fantasy of crawling away,

I’ve been pulled back by the hinge of my high-heel.

Skin has lain before me like a country mile.

I’ll undress you and dress you up

in vapor. (How much can language conjure?)

I’ll leave and leave a small space in my wake.

(It can be a face between the knees.)

I’m not frightened, not trying to talk about

water- not trying to talk about time.

I am laying love down like a laminated

card, with a heart,

like a quilt, like a dollar

I am paying my tithe

The Week Isn't Going According to Plan

May 2015

Try not to be disappointed that the week isn’t going according to plan. With all of the sun’s swift evolutions, the love of love, the time spent in lines, the hope for a change, the news tasting of chalk, stoned neighbors and excitable dogs,

somewhere along the line I got lost.

Remember how you used to swim naked in the Santa Ynez river, or how you took those magic mushrooms at the Santa Ynez river? Remember how you had to pull the car over, time and again like a shuddering cassette, to throw up on the highway?

I am sorry that higher education, though she does spread her legs, is not as desperate as you hoped she would be. I am sorry but not surprised.

Remember how you listened to Jefferson Airplane at the river and when you opened your eyes Brian was laughing in the sun and you watched peripherally familiar faces in the clouds? Try not to be disappointed that the week isn’t going according to plan.

That guy at the party was like a young soft dream or one of those cacti that look so fuzzy. Beware for they are not actually fuzzy.

Remember that time you petted a cactus that looked so fuzzy? It was not fuzzy and every quill was removed with tweezers fished from your mother’s purse. It was a Santa Barbara wedding in the mountains and you saw cave paintings and howled with surprise. Every pluck of the tweezers seemed to be that cactus intimating fuck you, or ha-ha!

Childhood is one long sunset. It is radiant like life bouncing off of a blade.

As you grow older, everything that hurts hurts twice. It hurts just as bad the second time. Pain isn’t a murky ephemeral trip anymore. Every love leaves a little bruise and when one day you walk into a table it twinges a reminder of that summer you ate magic mushrooms at the river and couldn’t drive the car very well and had all your drugs stolen and were stood up at the train station. You read poetry even then and it did hit you that your tragic sugar skeleton could not withstand all the knocking about indefinitely.

Much is indefinite.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I love you. 
Try not to be disappointed that the week isn’t going according to plan.
If you like, I’ll take you out for a crepe. The bike is ready to ride now.

Maybe Love

Maybe love will call you by your name

if you sit a little longer eating olives and alone

read a book that makes you feel things

and drink fermented tea

and rather than moving forward or

moving backward, simply levitate,

like an enchanted rug, this method is hallowed,

it has been tried.

Or in lieu of more complex plans, drive

until nearly gasless.

Think of the present rather than the past

and of how it feels,

sitting next to you in the car.

Lovingly you may find that nothing is lacking.

(I always want something different

than what I end up getting, and find that it is fine.)

Maybe I expect

that when love calls me by my name,

it will look and sound differently than it does

upon appearance- looks

like sunlight on a bedroom, sounds

like barely anything at all.

What is most stunning upon introduction

is a lack of love.

It always makes sounds,

even says things,

always looks like something or someone.

There is a little trapdoor in my closet

lined with tea-rose wallpaper.

I wonder what it will hold and realize

I have no secrets.

Our brief winter is buried in the warm
thawed earth now, I tell this to Hillary,
we were all a little befuddled there
on Broad Street.

The merchant told me that, when young,
she set her mind on living in a shack.
So she lived in a shack, in this our
teeming ghost state, and then she met
her husband.

I'm not going to send any love letters to
the void anymore, because
it doesn't seem to notice how pretty I am,
how pretty my living heart and medicine prose.
More fool me, every day.

The truth is that I drove up, past the
green quilt hills, the chalk-white Egret,
unhurried in the rice marsh, I drove right up
to this patch of quartz land to write a Great
Book.

And I did not write a great book,
but I'll drive home tomorrow

and don't grieve

(Even at night, ice on the ground bears

witness to the blackness of those “secret hours,”

always awake to the cold

sprawl,

sky’s frozen lake.)

Think of all the things you cannot hold

and don’t grieve.

(“We’re still alive!” says Rachel.)

And don’t grieve.

Don’t grieve for young times when there was less

to fear,

as you casually hurled grenades at encroaching

future,

or for the dream you had of swarming sharks,

or for men as they

make love to bottles or

women as they

make love to bottles,

don’t grieve for the unearthly procession of grandmothers

that were brought in with the mail,

for fingers lost to machinery,

for hearts lost to false hearts, or

environmental mirages.

Oh love love love look how you cry

on the inside.

Oh love love love look how you cry

on the inside

and don’t grieve

(“We’re still alive!” says Rachel)

and don’t grieve.

Don’t grieve for Jason Molina

he’s not listening.

Don’t grieve for Jason Molina,

there aren’t enough tears on tap in the world.

Don’t grieve for him, once started

where’s the stopping.

.

And all the things you cannot hold

I cannot hold.

Mornings: morning when a scrub jay

hops on the desk.

Nights full of fear and nights

full of comfort.

Sacrifice your carefully curated objects

to the truer abyss.

The truer abyss is adorned with

gold chains that slipped down the drain,

jaspers and agates that fell off

the edge of the lookout.

Don’t grieve for the truer abyss,

in truest form it both hears you

and doesn’t care.

And love love love

look how you cry

on the inside.

And love love love

don’t grieve,

don’t grieve,

don’t grieve.

1/11/15

Love Is

LOVE IS

Love is applying for jobs that you will not love because you need a job.
Love is dreaming of an almost embarrassingly modest salary.
Love is considering and then considering not and then considering grad school again. 
Love is thinking "I need to learn the format" out of fear.
Love is avoiding the novel and choosing to watch a movie.
Love is wanting to watch a romance and somehow ending up watching Deliverance.
Which you have already seen four times.

Love is being unable to outrun or outfox your strangeness.

Love is sending pieces off and having them returned to your arms rejected.
Love is sending them off again and again.
Love is writing "personal" articles and fearing who reads them.
Love is having them published anyway.
Love is the $30 you make per article, minus $2.85- the Paypal fee.

Love is learning how to sell your art and put it in your gas tank.
I mean that.
Truly.
I think that is what love is.

Love is selling your art
and putting it in your gas tank
so that you can drive yourself to peer out
at the great old vista
That You Love.

-

It is my winter legend, as if I had
walked far through a tunnel or trench,
my winter legend as if I had survived
all I have survived but at once

and this hovering blue light touches
all my gentler desires

(and my harsher desires are wrought
of hot wax and fire. Lovingly I will
dig a hole big enough for my body
in the sand of this age.)

I am almost as fearless as if
I had knowledge of nothing.

In Dutch Flat it is freezing
but not snowing.

The coal sleeps one foot below
the frost.

The pines shake and hiss:
I feel I'm yours forever, stranger land.

I negotiate the body warm and
pulsing. I negotiate its past pains
on this present day.

I know how frightened you are of fear,
of bad dreams, how frightening
the consequences of mindless movements-

but continue out of curiosity
or want of heat.

I have such an abundance of both,
stranger land.

The compass of my silent part, of my
Silent Part, is spinning.