Of Conversations Past

The odd remaining oxygen is now being used...by his replacement.

In these earthly paradises...with automatic settings.

Horse Head Confreres

"Dedman looked up at him
with a benign flicker of the long curling eyelashes that gave his gaze a starry expectancy. He spoke with his lips hardly moving. 'Go chop some horsemeat,' he said.

Miss Appleton seemed rather flustered and out of breath, probably from the long climb. 'Peter, translate,' she said, and then she read aloud with her impeccable quantities,

' Dixit, et avertens rosea cervice refulsit,

ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem

spiravere, pedes vestis defluxit ad imos,

et vera incessu patuit dea. '

As she made these words ring, she wore her Latin face: corners of the lips sternly downdrawn, eyebrows lifted rigidly, her cheeks gray with gravity. In French class, her face was quite different: cheeks like apples, eyebrows dancing, mouth puckered dryly, corners tense naughtily.

'She said,' I said.
'She spoke, and ... and ... glowed.'
'What glowed? Not she glowed. Cervice glowed.'
'She spoke, and, turning, her, uh, rosy crevice --' Laughter from the others. I blushed.
'No! Cervice, cervice. Neck. You've heard of the cervix. Surely you've heard of the cervical vertebrae.
'She spoke, and, turning---'

'As she turned.'

'As she turned, her rosy neck blushed.'

'Very well.'

'And, and coma, coma --sleep?'

'Hair, Peter, hair. Surely you've heard of the derivative word comose? Think of comb, as a rooster's comb.'

'And, uh, turning again--'

'Oh no. Dear child, no. Vertice here is the noun, vertex, verticis. Vortex. A vortex, a whirl, a crown of hair, of what kind of hair? What agrees?'

'Ambrosial.'

'Yes, ambrosial meaning, properly, immortal. Applied most often to the food of the gods, and in that sense descending to us with the meaning of sweet, delicious, honey-like. But the gods also used ambrosia for anointment and perfume.' She spoke of the gods with a certain authority, Miss Appleton did.
'And her whirl, her tangle--'
'Crown, Peter. The hair of the gods is never tangled.'

'And her crown of ambrosial hair breathed out a divine odor.'

'Yes. Good. Fragrance, let's say. Odor rather suggests plumbing.'

'...a divine fragrance, her vestment, her robe...'

'Yes., a flowing robe. All the goddesses save Diana wore a loose flowing robe. Diana, the heavenly huntress, wore of course a sensible tunic, perhaps with leggings, probably of a heavy green or brown cloth such as what I am wearing. Her robe flowed down--" (183-4).

Changes in how people wrote.

Who so list to hount, I knowe where is an hynde,
But as for me, helas, I may no more:

The vayne travaill hath weried me so sore.

I mae of theim that farthest commeth behinde;

Yet may I by no meanes my weried mynde

Drawe from the Diere: but as she fleeth afore,

Faynting I folowe. I leve of therefore,

Sins in a nett I seke to hold the wynde.

Who list her hount, I put him owte of dowbte,

As well as I may spend his tyme in vain:

And, graven with Diamonds, in letters plain

There is written her faier neck rounde abowte:

Noli me tangere , for Caesars I ame;

And wylde for to hold, though I seme tame.

The Artist of Screams...Behind a Closed Door...from private moments, slow motion photography

Quanto che vorrà? >> Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.

"But it was certain that Roland did not lend an ear to these warnings and a single vision held him: the one represented by Arcanum Seven, which he now put on the table, The Chariot. The artist , who, with gleaming enamels, had illuminated these tarots of ours had this Chariot driven not by the usual king seen in more common cards, but by a woman dressed as a sorceress or Oriental queen, holding the reins of two white, winged horses. This was how Roland's raving imagination conceived Angelica's enchanted entrance into the forest; it was a print of flying hoofs he pursued, lighter than a butterfly's feet, the trail that was his guide through the thicket.

Wretched man! He did not yet know that in the deepest part of the thicket Angelica and Medoro were meanwhile united in a soft, heart-rending embrace. It took the Arcanum of Love to reveal this to him, with the languor of desire our miniaturist had been able to give the two lovers' gaze. (We began to understand that , with those iron hands and that dreaming air, Roland had, from the beginning, kept for himself the most beautiful cards in the pack, allowing the others to stammer out their vicissitudes to the sound of cups and clubs, gold coins and swords.)

The truth forced its way into Roland's thoughts: in the moist depths of the female forest there is a temple of Eros where other values count, not the ones determined by his Durendal. Angelica's favorite was not one of the illustrious commanders of troops but a youth of the entourage, slender, coy as a girl; his figure, enlarged, appeared in the following card: the Page of Clubs (31).

Edible Arrangements and Human Malaise

Maybe that's because their mouths are full, devouring a masterpiece.
Or the table outside, in the pergola, where being is the center of all
Our activities, among the bees and butcher's assistants in the ground.

What is left is preserved--a still fresh animal, the low-hanging fruit

The head of the beast is bled dry for eating, and, at the center of it all,
A picture slows down the process of decomposition, before our gaping
Maws. The delicacy is brought home, until the day after when the perishable fruit
Is breathing through us. We take delight in the body, yielding to the tooth.

This famous ping pong table doubled as family dinner table and tournament board.

Diaz Kleefstra

"Seventeen is an unlucky number in Sicily; travelers cancel airline reservations on the seventeenth of any month, and high-rises here have no seventeenth floor. When the tonnaroti measure a net with a meter stick, they count aloud: 'sixteen, sixteen-and-one, eighteen.' Not surprisingly, Saint Patrick's Day, March 17, passes without a parade. But Saint Joseph, whose feast is two days later, is adored throughout Sicily.

Saint Joseph is a blue-collar saint very popular on the island; he is the protector of carpenters and orphans. His feast coincides with the vernal equinox and is celebrated in disparate, sometimes pagan ways. Residents of Palermo light three-story bonfires in the streets and burn old furniture. On the island of Marettimo fireworks are set off, in Campobello di Mazara altars of bread are made, and in Siracusa the oldest boat is burned. Saint Joseph walks through the town of Salemi knocking on doors looking for food for his family and a place to stay and is turned away three times. It is a ritual in which the whole town participates. Each person knows his lines" (85-6).

Lune Noire

I think of the alignment of the Sun, Earth and Moon (capitalized proper names for situations familiar to us and faraway in the galaxy) on the day of the penumbral (partial or incomplete shading) lunar eclipse. All three inevitably shift from the gravity, which incidentially holds them together so shortly, of their respective orbits regardless of the reasons or feelings (humans attribute to them) in the matter. An optimistic reading on the night of the lunar eclipse is that it can be applied to humans--the mysterious way signs and symbols strengthen the invisible bond of the two hands, trembling in fear of the other slipping away.

I am at a point in my life when the Artemis instinct is the only available expression for me. I wonder if the feminine receptivity to love and intimacy is a much desired, needless to say, pined for, state, but it forecloses the intense focus required for other things, mainly cultivating interests and talents etc...I remind that the lack thereof is held against me every now and then.

I was deeply offended standing in comparison to Robert or whoever, [insert name here], earlier today for the reason that inevitably channels the above archetype: a sense of worth, for me, can only be derived by who I am and what I am doing and my insistence that you work out your motives beforehand about meeting me, because you want to, and not because you have this someone else to fall back on or one who will be compelled to enter into the transactions we have commonly used, albeit somewhat guiltily. In my unfair moments, I fail to mask my contempt for other adult relationships you have had, since they are human, they involve, evolve and devolve for contrived reasons.

Did you imply that the quarter jar, like the mortgage or the weekend boat trips were his way of compensating for the apparent lack of ambition, all his life? I correctly discarded my scruples that he would be offended when I longed for his wife--for this very reason--that he intends to retire where he is. This is why I admire my brother for resorting to violence in his dealings...he told me, long ago, that the majority of people on the offensive are really cowards or that they do not care about the people or things they stand to lose. He feels guilty for being so wicked, but he feels compelled to carry out the threat for ideological reasons...so much is made of romantic love and fidelity and bravery and honesty as if these things are common currency, and so few are ever driven to move beyond personal satisfaction, sloth and laziness. In my own way, and toward more productive ends, I want to be dared to do and make things, since the failure I feel the most acutely is my own.

I hate someone so much for being the whimpering mass on the MRI stretcher amid his disdainful technicians because he justifies his life in a bland, quasi-religious fantasy of overcoming when the hedonistic path has always been extending its irresistible temptations to even someone like him. [I have always thought compulsive eaters worked out an erotic disability through the only means at his or her disposal.] What ends the short vignette of the imaginary patient is that his housekeeper is confounded into checking his Facebook page every day to speculate on what avenues he is waddling down; though he runs, in his mind, and the women he meets there. I find the irrational pull of a common-law wife in the oil-water mix, where she is fighting for the permission to do his laundry. Could anything be more degrading?

I will make it a point to close my sympathetic ear to this as much as the orator should remind herself that her suffering is self-inflicted. Like everyone's.

My quandary at work is not the work, but the perception that I am a ready victim to all forms of harassment since I hold on there beyond any rationality. As such, I am forced to consent to the flattery of some arrogant bastard in a patient's room...someone who knows that I would look through him. He would not exist--on the street.

I do not mention the intimacies of my past for the reason that the women I have known were deeply ashamed about being perceived as less than the bright, young woman obsessing....

I paid for Martha's second trip (in the semester) to Paris quite willingly because I wanted her point of view and I wanted to secure her as my sole bedfellow, away from her male caller. I suspected from the beginning that I was complicated in an egomaniac's ploy, perhaps just as meticulously drafted as my own--that she never loved me, that she would secure a pleasure trip nevertheless, at the cost of her backwards, discreet benefactor. What she could not tell me is that life had cruelly cost her as well: being so tall she created a silent yet palpable chaos wherever she went, and the Harvard dissertation was paid through ignominious bank jobs and it sadly failed to provide the validation to her ennobled reading being or secure the dazzling intellectual projects she had dreamed. She taught French and abridged philosophy to flabby, sour girls walking in late, in the afternoon, in flip flops and flannel pajama pants...and not the cultivated, young women scholars at the Sorbonne. The child, like the creative projects she desperately wanted never came to fruitition, either. When someone approached her, as an admiring vision herself, she could not say no. How could someone be so resigned? She nevertheless remained with a colleague who pledged his loyalty to her, estimating his own self-made mediocrity the same as hers, rather than risk having her lover leave her at some point in time...regardless of my pleading to the contrary.

When I met Angelina, she introduced herself as Lisa then, in a bookstore, I was taken aback by her exquisite features, of her mind too...so much so that I overlooked the cracked leather jacket she was wearing. It never occurred to me that what she wore would be much more permanent that she or I had hoped. How could she promise a life with me when she was barely scraping by? For the sake of her pride, she told me to go away...because I would eventually anyway, inhabiting some castle, that I interminably do, in the air?

Never at any point since I have known you, have I wanted to recall who these two people were to me. They undoubtedly live on when I want to learn French or Portuguese or read Sartre in my spare time, but I think about your unsubtle influence on me as well, and how it amends the problematic present day of bearing "I love yous, always" ...It is unbearable when I know they are said simultaneously, or not, as consolations in other worlds...and in other words...

No, it is not an elevated means of securing--that stuff--tokens for your affection, but the way I dispel, for me, this terrible betrayal of words, in their inability to signify a solitary person or act. I think of the ability to attest, without conscience pains, the correct, aboveground administration of narcotics about the same measure all of us require, and sadly few of us can commit to, in a love relationship.

Prognosis, Handholding and Herr Doktor (No Overlap)

Why, seeing through the fog, we bird.

"Life Along the Passaic River"

"Look at this one lying on the autopsy slab at the hospital; you can see the whole thing. Twins. About five months on the way. Just a kid she was, nineteen, with a lot of soft yellow hair piled up in shiny coils, and her mottled face half leaning toward it. Good legs. A fine pair of breasts. Well-shaped arms. She's dead all right, and if you get what I mean, that's not such a bad thing either. But good God, what for? And the way she did it! all burned down her neck that way. Some guy got to her--someone that couldn't marry her maybe. Her mother gave it to us straight when she says the kid never stepped out nights like some of the other girls. Maybe that's why it happened. She was always home, the only one the old woman could count on to do anything around there. But anyway somebody has her. She's caught. So what? You can imagine, a religious girl like that. Who's going to give her fifty dollars for a doctor even if she knows enough to find one and go to him? She knows it won't make any difference anyway. She's sunk. So she drinks the stuff while her family's left her to attend a funeral. If you can make sense out of that, go to it " (113).

We eventually added the addition

Onlookers to this motion--we are speechless--reliving life's episodes
In text. It's hard to tell, from this message, where the whale begins,
The faint welt of first meeting, the fragrance of flowers, or whether
You are well, and perish waiting. At the offering table, with concrete risers,

Texting to tell this message at an intersection or interstate, it begins.
Today is very clear with fingers on the keys. When you're driving around Silver Lake you could well perish with the offerings, on risers Of minimal concrete. Meanwhile, lush, violet-toned voices are what we have in mind.

Today is clearly what matter is most--conveyed in acronym--around
Letting the banality drive interpretation, in the most acerbic way

Allowed. Cut off by the keys. In kind, our house is made, and raises The bedding in question. We shore up to the print for the occasion.

And you thought it was just a phone. Once the province of an acerbic Waif recoiling in the kitchen. Now, we treat the subject with the runes
Of modern technology, who is sacrificed with rawness, occasional
Immediacy, each for individual versions of the clay tablet. Speaking,

Shall we toggle Greek and Latin letters with the runes, apostrophes? Into the wall she was before texts. What we said among us is artifact.

I write to look. What am I feeling, and a tentacle of neatly gardened bungalows speak
For me up from the abyss, and I am still on the hunt for plants to accent the scheme

Afforded solely by the imagination. Destined to be apart, writing now, the artifacts
Where we practiced our music, read our books--where the flowers endured the weather
Perennially softening the abyss bottom--where the scheme seems to find us, accented--

As onlookers to the motion, there so many speeches for the lost episodes of life.

until we realize.

30

"In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe. I tried to make out the walls , the dresser in the corner. It was the old defenseless feeling. Small, weak, deathbound, alone. Panic, the god of woods and wilderness, half goat. I moved my head to the right, remembering the clock-radio. I watched the numbers change, the progression of digital minutes, odd to even. They glowed green in the dark" (224).

"You would think from the way I rushed forth into the alleys, working my way through the fountains of every dirty little square and filthy gutter, in and under the sluices of each worn-out creaking shaduf, the breath of drunks in my face and the breasts of women rustling against me in many a crowd, that I, with freedom to act like a servant loose in a crowd, would know how to look, but I was in such a panic that Nefertiri was near and I did not see Her-- my sense of Her as near to me most compelling -- that the more I walked, the less certain I became of finding Her. Then the crowd became a panic for me as well. I was not used to being jostled aside by men whose clothes were whiter than mine, and was soon in such a rage that their drunkenness left me with vertigo. But then I was full of many desires that went in different directions. At each brush with a strange body, I was ready to throw the man to the ground, yet my longing for Nefertiri must also have been in my eyes because no whore failed to smile at me, and some wore balls of wax so powerful with perfume -- and such foul stuff! --that I felt surrounded by molderings of honey and old sweat. Yet, when I pushed into a beer-house jammed with louts and soldiers, as well as every kind of poor bewildered stranger from every little river-town who had come along with his God from up or down the river, I commanded so little attention that I had to grab the waitress by the arm to get a beer and that almost brought on a fight. Then, the air stank. Drunks were throwing up on the dirt floor, and this crowd, forever ignorant of palace etiquette, were kneading their pates into the earth without a pause " (613).

"The only persons who have been able to support endless free time without damaging society have until now been the polymath, the scholar, the scientist and the artist; the person of multiple culture. The only work that can never end is the pursuit and expression of knowledge" (132).