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They've changed all the names: areas, streets, roads, swamps, mountains, and streams. The Michigan Curve, The 405, Meadowbrook, Emerald Downs, I know not where they are: the blackberries, the blueberries, the perch. |
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After seventy years, they've co-opted my memories, re-made my land, cut down my forests, chased my cougars, scattered money in the streets, laced billions of cyber-bytes throughout the molecular patterns I loved |
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in the universe. Forcing me to change loves, change lives, divert my muse's musings around villages I knew, now gleaming, high-tech, glossy, glamorous suburbs. Condos stand where we tramped with black, white-pawed |
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Bootsy through snowy forests for Christmas trees, scrambled over logs and brush for blackberries -- not the evergreens! that the newbees pick. But the real, wild, conical, Northwest blackberry -- and the pale orange-pink huckleberry |
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which grows no other place: vaccinium parvifolium, not sweet, not sought -- though its delicate lace of a bush glorifies our white alder woods -- its tang, in huckleberry pancakes teases the tongue. |
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Where Bell town was has become a condo-canyon. Uncle Freddie climbed Pilchuck nineteen times. He was not afraid to walk in the woods alone, to acknowledge the animals. Now it's a terrifying |
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place to meet the terrible human. Bells ring no more. Too many die to pay attention. Gobbets of body parts reclaimed are offered to satisfy remembrance, longing, love. We're not to go |
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into the sea to feed fishes. Separation from nature is urged, often demanded, cannot be helped, is aided by the new names. We no longer know where we're going, where we've been. |
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Like salmon going upstream we leap the dams, the locks, passionate with new life we oppose the rapids and find our habitat clear-cut, the stream full of tailings -- too shallow to spawn. |
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So I keep a cougar: my buff, beige, brown, light-eyed Shiva-purna cat who daily draws blood -- his idea of tender, loving play more ruddy than my own. Menaced, I shield my heart. |
FIBONACCI VII
#27
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Reading Raban, Jonathan -- relentlessly domestic, understated, ruefully Seattle-detailed, with gloom and self revelation, with grey skies hovering, known bubble-bursts sidelined, revolving, flickering, shimmering -- more details -- as dreadful things are anticipated by page 43, |
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my heart, heavy, already in my throat, coffee-enhanced, grows frightened, trembly. I don't live on Queen Anne, but my windows rattle in the gathering, always to be expected, ruthlessly benign, gull-filled stormy |
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weather. Will I waste my Sunday woefully reading more and on without tending the things of my own life, withdrawing into the gratifying, affectless** VR*** of a Seattle book with a Seattle |
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mind? With horrid documentary drama lifted straight from the newspaper head- lines, reminding me of the time I tried to mold my own mind, grasp in my own heart,**** the rapist who chopped |
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off -- only an orange moon watching -- one and the other arms of the girl (who survived). He lived again outside prison, released once more into "civilization," to muse upon, who knows what, |
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consuming, committable phamtasma-g- oria. The gibbous, growing moon passed two days a-g- o, causing me to remember the (in retrospect) frightening visit of my, 2 a.m. Asian, skirted in my maroon scarf, begging, |
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in illuminated tears, insensate protection from its pursuing Cambodian, a protection I could not offer because it wasn't my infidel prerogative to offer from where, not my home, I was cat sitting. |
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As I reassess now, two years later, I see such entreaties might quite well have presaged (perhaps premeditated) throat-slittings. Or not. Trust is my middle name. Or was. One no longer knows |
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how humbly or hubristically or where humans are obliged to displace heart and compassion (beyond the storms that won't harm you) unto man-made probabilities which can only be master-minded by a man |
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knowledgeable of trade- tangled VR twine, things so actual-horrid nothing humane he can invent will displace them, even the Starbucks-induced, coffee-jitters high, in conjunction with which, and with whom, we are more |
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likely living out ludicrous fate, rappelling, leveraging up or abseiling -- cautiously -- lowering down, down, like the golden orb arachnids lustily, unknown to themselves, who can replace steel, accede to spinning-exhaustion with glee. |
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Benign fear, wan, wobbly-paced, grueling suspicion reared by our man-made condition: brutality -- in which one human for another human displays contempt, avarice, cruelty, nastiness, greed and, not surprisingly, comes quickly to own |
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big bunchy gobs, boodles of earth burdened with oil, inhumanity slicked. But, writing and reading, I'm made to realize, beneath the thousand poems, I've not dealt in-depth with my own horrors, saleable |
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truck. Through luck they might work into being worth a buck a memorable quease in today's market -- bloated, star-stuck, never at rest, spectacularly speculative.. I continue pages 43 to 51and sink |
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comfortably cocooning myself carefully in fiction, catastrophically angry at my fellows completely ignitable, like a lethal time-bomb, a crazy creature, deeply sympathetic with the suicide bombers, bemused by how slow this suitable |
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test is at infecting the planet. Why live under the feet of the greedy -- with the solution close at hand -- arithmetic-friendly spelling: a life for a life, a death for a death-text? |
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Follow faithfully or foolishly this abecedarius full of guilt and abstraction filling in by scrambling an alphabet for a fulsome novel, fleshy with fear and fulminations. Hearing footsteps will make me happy. |
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Xerox the complex, duplicitous world. Ax away the arrogant duplex beaux. Remind yourself the reason for fear is reflex. Shadowboxing is meant to divert simple impulses do to. It'll proceed to perplex |
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just -- judging from jurisprudence -- such playful jibes and hurting jabs, like jottings. It'll be brought forth and scheduled for jousts through eons of recrimination, lagged about with fine pine staves through my |
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aorta -- creating a difficulty in America where prevalent lying and dyspepsia establishes what you should do and what trivia any man can perpetrate with or without claiming the accumulating progeny. Pro forma |
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memory, miracles and mildly outnumbered odd Midas applications to God will marshal in and around the sky where glorious music will be trumpeted on trumpets, coronets, didgeridoos. Will I know when to |
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stop which cop without a pop who will insist he mop each pool of blood, drop by drop or seek with ulterior intentions to invalidate, then gleefully if not gracefully lop |
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quadrants, quasars from quartz reflecting invisible quarks aligned queerly in the sky, quash each hope by the approaching last page, quackery recorded, unsatisfying, stitched-up fantasies falling drip, drip to the queen's beat and |
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buzz, creating fuzz by a klutz flourishing absences, who serves ersatz after giving up coffee while shouting jeez jeez jeez and cheese, and reminds us of all that stupendous, lurid, cacophonous jazz, |
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won't, willingly endured whenever one wonders where this will end, wriggling wanly out of the alphabet wandering and pulling waxwings from the sky, losing sight of Chinese, boat, stained glass window, dog, |
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kudzu and guru, off to Honolulu or up the dry Falgu. So very many of the Tutsi and Hutu died in the tented world of genocide, covered up, enfolded in a mumu |
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vision, variegated with voluminous flowers and verve enough to last lifetimes, vindicated by good words and bad, I variously, vacillatingly feel I may be ordering... I value nothing but my own death.
*Based on my initial reading of Jonathan
Raban's
Waxwings
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PRIME 4
#31
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Apparently we've become used to feeling's absence as the wing dips, as the plane circles, Langewiesche* claims we see the tilt but that we feel no disturbance to our balance, we plane riders, we sky riders of the 21st Century. I can |
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not yet even pronounce his name, nor, fairly frequently, follow his prose. Perhaps that is because, in a deceptively simple language, he is talking about things hard to conceive. One is used to hard-to-conceive things being talked about in difficult languages, or |
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not at all. We're so used to doing, full-steam under stress, we seldom think at all -- or feel. We fly, we drive, we ski, we jump, swim, dance, run, even walk, but our minds are elsewhere -- down the wirelessness of our cellphones. |
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We're quite used to people galloping along alone talking loudly into the
night-time or sunny air. Animated, one-sided conversations, apparently with the light-years-away stars, or the sun or the gray clouds, speed up and pass us by, while we, too old to |
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go fast and too amazed not to feel, wonder what world those cell-phoners see -- or feel -- as they walk my streets talking to Saigon from Seattle, Cambodia from Canada, Africa from Armageddon, from the land of the "free" to the home of the brave Iraqis who go on living -- even beneath the waves of shock and awe -- though no |
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less awe-ful or shocked than Americans who have lost their country, their sky, their ariel perspective, and now muck about in the dirt, some trying to understand the pancaking of the World Trade Towers and others trying to cover it up. Langewieche** also reported on that scraping clean of the American bone. Or they fly unseeing about the world, |
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nose to calculator assessing profits to be made on privatizing the world,
feel nothing but the weight of change in the pocket, care for nothing except preventing people from drinking the rain. We are banking, it seems, toward a tail-spin without feeling, without even noting the lurch of the landscape. We balance on time's point. Desensitized, numb we tilt. |
PRIME 5 PROGRESSION
#32
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Each morning, getting out of bed to face the soup du jour, piping hot in the mind, or cooled to a gelatinous fog, longing to swerve into the storm, document it, return triumphant, poem waving, defining what is, stretching, turning, each morning |
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getting out of bed into the atmospheric mass, the dense soup of possibility and denial. But, of course, getting out of bed, one never gets beyond that first step of a thousand miles -- memorialized by the Chinese, counting steps along the Wall. |
"There is no graduation from the experience, only an end to each flight."* p.119, Langewiesche |
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He, being a pilot, thinks of Saint-Exupery as being romantic and in error but, stepping out of bed each morning, reality, unlike that Night Flight, begins to unravel. There are no patterns, no rules except a raft of do nots barged alongside desire, in there for the ride. No matter how distained or insulted, they return crying: "Renewal!" |
"The airplane's forward motion imposes a crude immediacy on our thoughts, so that even when we do not understand the weather, we may pretend that we do."* p.119, Langewiesche, Inside the Sky |
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First the coffee-- if we must, have our drug of choice to face the day -- or the cat's arrogant play, The News, highlighting the accelerating disintegration of the world. Who would have bet on living long enough to see all honesty, honor, compassion swallowed up by greed. We read about the past with horror, Tamerlane's Tower of Skulls, the Nazi's Tower of Skulls, the Cambodian Tower of Skulls, the Silent Majority's tower of Christian skulls. "My what a |
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lot of skulls!" remarks the Muse, excavating deep into the weather's wind, estimating, knowing, that though there may be idyll-ing from time to time ("...episodes or scenes of charming simplicity..."**) the weather will always be with us, close to the ground, where the body-parts (no definition in **) fall, fertilizer for further incursions into the storm's eye, the storm's laughter -- toes, lips, labia, bones, gelatinous masses, a testis or two falling, falling, drifting into the dangerous zone, the earth's surface, the desolated, high, fecund landscape of human minds teased by low weather, tempted by flight, watching -- as form and pattern collect, dissolve.*** |
"The terms 'high' and 'low' refer not to altitude but to pressure..."* p.120, Langewiesche, Inside the Sky, A Meditation on Flight. |