surfacing

dream of a jamboree alone

orbit

One of my first memories as a kid was the helicopter flower. It may be a leaf. I'm not sure of the actual technical name, of course. In early April, they bud. By the middle of May they are fat with their seeds. A week later, they dry up and fall to the ground. Unlike other brown things that fall, they swirl first, like a helicopter blade. Sometimes they go for hours or days without ever hitting the ground. Sometimes they rest on the sunroof of Jettas until someone drives away and kicks up so much air they can live again.

physical systems of the environment

Today is a gloomy day. The clouds are low. The air is unstable. But the storms aren’t coming. Just little drops here and there. Today, a man in a large tractor drove all along the grass in the complex and sprayed it with chemicals. I won’t go into some long depressive discussion of cancer epidemics, chemical pollution, psalm 2:8 or the like. I’ll just say that today is a gloomy day, and I wish that I were lying in a field of dandelions.

A few years ago I went to New Orleans for a few days to visit a good friend at Tulane. I encountered all types of holiness there.

In another life, I hope to live in the quarter in the fall and write gothic novels.

I’m on my first week of summer holiday. Nothing has changed this week from last except that I feel like I’m doing nothing productive with my life. I’ve finished six poems about the Dust Bowl years, a current obsession of mine.

The Dust Storm Ends

All that returns
is beyond us –
the hides of scilla,
those tiny bells,
flat wheat
wedged between
our fingers,
the rain, too.

They return
one morning
before we wake,
as if they were there
all along,
invisible
behind the warring
dust, the dry soil
of our farm.

They come
back to life,
demanding
to be named,
like your body
when I hold you
as we make love
for the first time
since the storm.

Before going any further this summer with my sequence, I’m going to do a bit more reading. Specifically Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and Haniel Long’s Pittsburgh Memoranda. The poet and general goddess of great wisdom, Maggie Anderson, gave me a nice list of suggested reading for my sequence on the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, and also told me to look up “depression” in the OED. My favorite definition, which is now rare or obsolete: defeat, suppression; degradation.

Right now I’m listening to one of those free CDs that they give out at the Discovery Channel store, the ones that have all of these brilliant artists from all over the world that play their instruments in a way that sounds just like the weather. Actually, I think I’ll end on that note. A bit more cheerful than the beginning.

the cold comfort of chic

Since my summer break started, it seems that I have developed an unhealthy obsession with Lindsay Lohan. Though she once played the ever-lovable white American African immigrant in Mean Girls, and then her boobs followed last year with a stage stealing performance when she starred as the grown up Hermione in the Harry Potter sketch on SNL, it seems that she’s developed what the doctors like to call a little bit of a agonizingly skinny Hollywood actress needs attention immediately disorder. Gone are the days of fashionable disorders like… uncontrollable rage and bulimia. What is the world coming to?



This is Winston’s friend Larry. This afternoon, Winston ate his face. I hope this doesn’t answer my question from above.

logic

So last night, something bizarre greeted us as we came home. It was almost eleven and the outside of our building was quiet, an unusual state as a matter of fact. The lights in the hallway were on. They are those obtrusive florescent lights proven to encourage the growth of brain cancer. Anyway, this little guys was stuck to the door.


The picture isn’t great. I’ve promised myself that during the next year I’ll buy a digital camera, but this is the best my little phone can do at eleven p.m.

Last week Winston saw a frog by the door in the mulch. He was on his way in from his nightly walk. When he got up to the frog, he licked its head and then continued inside. I thought maybe he was coming back for a visit.

the time has come, the walrus said

I know that my posts of late have left much to be desired, but I blame this on the end of spring semester blues. Blues, not for classes ending, but of all of the finalizing that has to be done in order for the class to officially end. One thing I specifically loathe is writing a self-reflective essay. This task is perhaps helpful for someone that practices little to no self-reflection on a daily basis, however for others it just seems like another exercise in a long line of self-brutalizations. But as of this moment, 1:17pm EST, I have finished my work for the semester, finished the self-reflections, finished my chapbook, and am ready to go to my class reading. Perhaps tomorrow I will be in better spirits when I wake up with summer.

Last week a train went through the Cuyahoga Valley and so I snapped this picture.





I’m not sure why but the man that is cutting the grass outside keeps going past my window. The grass can’t be that long, can it? It’s not like he’s out there with pruning scissors, he’s got one of those gigantic John Deere-esque grass mutilators and just keeps mowing and mowing. He might be OC.

introductions

winston marie





sam





maurice





aello, celaeno and ocypete