Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Analect 2.180x



30 October 2007. Gray wall-to-wall sky. Packed in and looming. Weak-tea warmth of 7-eleven sign--a dingy yellow lucite bubble with grayed-off striations (missing bulbs). Driver in dark shorts and red hat, loading dolly. A million gallons of Coca-Cola--nine million cooling units world-wide--run 'em on CO2 (even GreenPeace agrees). Beeping back-up lights and a lumbering arc as he pulls out...

Ron Rael. At the ends of the known world--four hundred years in what's now Colorado. An architecture of earth. "Until my generation we never lived in anything else."

"To see god..."

Friday, October 26, 2007

Analect 2.179x



26 October 2007. Gray cloud halo, luminous and white, backlighting the magnolia. Sun almost unannounced. Contractor in faded orange tee, standing in front of long double-cab Tundra, cell phone in hand, gesticulating. His ear-piece a tiny moon rocket, ca. 1969... The history of wallboard...

Desert road to El Centro, the Coachella Valley, an inland sea, now baked dry, parched fields and endless rows of melon: cantaloupe, casaba... Aunt Sis in the bar downtown, low porch, opening to a high-ceiling room, always dark...indelible whiff of last night's drinks. It's Thanksgiving. We gather in the backroom cafe, linoleum counter, rounded edges. A platter of spaghetti...raised eyebrows....

The blessings...

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Analect 2.178x



25 October 2007. Filtered sun, just like always. October. Two double-red brake-lights peaking from beneath extra-long horizontal run of Glacier Ice Company truck--a white tractor-trailer with its own amber flasher. Prongy blue geo mountain, scrap of white paint for snow, sign-painter script with one swoopy capital--the G. Bags of ice on iron pallet, lowered on plate of welted steel. It's going back up now, the workman trucker leaning casually against side of lift, one foot up, looking off into the mist.

Lost Distance--the planned poem book with Leonard. Two quasi-Chinamen. Someday, perhaps.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Analect 2.176x



12 October 2007. Gray and rain, glossy street, gleaming yellow curb on dark wet asphalt of the 7-eleven lot. Hunched figures, back and forth, incipient winter clothes. Interiors: Nicola curled up on the downstairs soft chair, a room inside a room. Natasha on the wicker couch, also deep inside...singing.

Taoist immortal on a Tyson Street bluff, Oceanside. The Pacific. A blue-green rubber raft, in mid-July, 1954-- paddling out with first set of fins, swirling turn in even greener water, then whooshing down the face of a wave...

The shape of a gourd. Emblematic--living form, below and then above--growing, that is, the smaller following the larger, held up to the sky...

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Analect 2.175x



11 October 2007. Autumn sun on car glass, gleaming. Rain at night, now moved east. A figure in black, ample, with t-shirt emblem, white on blue, angling across the 7-eleven lot. All my characters, exposed...in search of a play, walk-ons, with minor speaking parts... Polonius, hiding behind a curtain...

Yesterday, late afternoon. Walking with Hojin and Ayosha, up and around the quiet El Cerrito streets. Narrow white shepherd at fence, prancing up, alert. Screaming whoosh of Bart just above, slowly setting sun. Later, Yao-yo San, with Alyosha at the door. Customers pass by in delight. Kim-chi and scallions...a true friend...

(for Hojin)

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Analect 2.174x



9 October 2007. In between sky, gray to patchy blue, then again to gray. Indian summer, or beginning of the rains. Melancholia, under a pear tree... The lost shepherd--with a hint of Joseph Beuys--his tall crook hidden under heavy felt, wild companion alongside, pacing back and forth, sniffing this European... A reƫnactment, as in Jamestown, or Plymouth, even...man and the forest--except that now it's by 747 (was that true in Rene Block's day?), and an ambulance careening along the Van Wyck Expressway... Hero or victim, delivered to the stage--an actor, in any case--for history's thing...

(for Kari)

Friday, October 05, 2007

Analect 2.173x



5 October 2007. Warm morning sun, single white Caspar-the-Ghost cloud hovering over 7-eleven roof. White Salvation Army truck rumbles across the lot just below, red insignia emblazoned. Two red tail lights alongside, on polished black trunk hood, late-model, non-descript. Lots of action...

Philip Guston last night: nailing it down. The early paintings, thirties imagery, all thematic--his tiny figure on a ladder, working on giant mural. The nooses and hoods--inside or out? Ku-Klux-Klan, LA garage, merging. We jump to Semana Santa in Seville--the ur-hoods, even taller, even whiter. Question to Berta, from Bilbao: "How do you feel when you see them?" "Scared." Hovering within, unknown...

A lumpy figure in a tilt-up bed, twined geometries, and two parallel shoes, one after the other on an adamant horizontal. Face--if there is one--hidden away at the top of the slab. A monument to the impossibility of doubt... Dear sweet sleep, o save us...

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Analect 2.172x



4 October 2007. Morning light, scattered leaves. Plum and mooncake--abundant comparisons. As when the Appaloosa... Last night: reading Psalms, two voices in each line--a kind of call and response, the first part sinuous and flowing, the second, an understated return. Again, and then again, the rhythm ongoing, like ocean waves, or the waters of the Yuba--bright stream on dark stone, granite, murmur and roar...

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Analect 2.171x



2 October 2007. Gentle October sun, sidewalk-planter plum leaves shift slightly in the breeze. Woman with her son's penguin drawing--Charlie, that would be--a insistent mess of black, white and orange--intense and innocent, just the way a five-year old... His name a scrawl at the top, then again four more letters--including the ch--in a kind of wampum block on right. The bird frontal, but unrevealing except for its presence. In the background--loopy violin reprise of Brahms at the county fair--a layer of smoothness applied evenly, everywhere...

The test of Ivan Karamazov: the tears of one unknown child...