The plot hole by which you must enter in
to the story is a doozy, a real humdinger,
if you will, and it is all made of fire,
the way the stars are made of fire,
though we dream them to be utterly cold
and prickly with a sad light. Nothing
ever stops in my world to hear me
singing to you. I have always loved you,
sweet twin, beloved doppelgänger,
alien lump of word in my mouth,
language I spent three years learning
only to forget when it grew too hard
the phrases that meant something:
Dear, I am your long lost butter cookie;
and, I am sorry, it was accidental,
but I have dipped the poodle in laudanum.
Let us do away with digression
for the night, though to me
it has always seemed the heart's core,
and think on our motivation
for the lines to follow:
the suddenness of our sorrow is shocking
and the day is hollowed out
and here at this moment,
this crucial hinge of the breaking heart,
I think of the day years ago
when I was a boy and came upon my uncle,
a fish's tail clamped in his teeth,
tearing the skin from the fish with such force
I could hear it —
and I felt so strange and empty
I have never spoken of it
to anyone, or let myself on a day
whole with sun think of it.
What he was doing, and why,
I never asked; there is never
an answer large enough for a world
so huge with meanness.
And I was pulled from myself
but couldn't feel a thing,
and this is your motivation,
mirrored self, speaking back
the words I make wrongly,
lifting the heavy, crude lot of anything
I can't. You must know me
exactly, apart from yourself,
to give back to the world what I can't.
You must know the angles
of light so well the shadows
will accept you like a brother.
You must not choke back my breath
when the ashes on the wind
blind even the birds in the trees.


Paul Guest

When a person realizes that a particular action,
or a certain line of conduct, or perhaps the whole
direction of his life, has been wrong, and honestly
resolves to change his conduct, he has repented.
The Bible makes true repentance an essential
condition for any spiritual progress, and for the
forgiveness of sin. Jesus said, "Except ye repent,
ye shall all likewise perish." (Luke 13:3)

Repentance does not mean grieving for past
mistakes, because this is dwelling in the past,
and our duty is dwell in the present and make
this moment right. Worrying over past mistakes
is remorse, and remorse is a sin, for it is a refusal
to accept God's forgiveness.

Emmet Fox (1886-1951)
Irish spiritual leader, instrumental in the
founding of Alcoholics Anonymous
From "Around the Year With Emmet Fox

We raked until raking puffed our mitts with hot blisters.
Then we desisted. Wind de-raked our raking then,
spilled the tops of our piles, blew new-fallen bronzes

across brief spans of lawn. We worked like the damned:
I the Sisyphus of fall, you the Sisyphus of autumn.
Rakes dropped, we drifted through discarded wrappers

to a graveyard but yards from our unfinished raking, caught
neighbors peering down through parts in high curtains
to catch us there, looking. Oldest stone. Newest stone. Smallest.

One the size of a toaster read: I bud on earth, to bloom
in heaven. We drifted back then. With what leaves we could
muster we filled dungarees, a workshirt bequeathed

on a hook in the cellar. For the head: a plastic pumpkin.
And to keep this arrangement from the wind's
undoing, we cut utility twine in five measured lengths,

four for closing the cuffs, one to pass through the belt loops and bow.
We tangled these limbs in the limbs of magnolia.
The head balanced. Night fell. In the scant moonlight

and the light of seven streetlamps, the sealed magnolia buds
seemed a light silver, the peeling bark a lighter silver,
and the lesser branches brittle black. The figure shaking

in the limbs had shed its color, or it as also black.
The stuffed interior. The rumpled thing. The black flower
that we had meant to blossom was, blossoming.

-Timothy Donnely

...

And you that ache so much to be sublime,
And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
What comes of all your visions and your fears?
Poets and Kings are but the clerks of Time,
Tiering the same dull webs of discotent,
Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

EA Robinson

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered.

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillation of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.


-Wallace Stevens

Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing.

...Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it.We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival.

-from Mind Over Water, Craig Lambert, by way of David Allen's Getting Things Done

..> ..>
Female hammerhead sharks can reproduce without having sex, scientists confirm.

The evidence comes from a shark at Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska which gave birth to a pup in 2001 despite having had no contact with a male.

Genetic tests by a team from Belfast, Nebraska and Florida prove conclusively the young animal possessed no paternal DNA, Biology Letters journal reports.

Seth Cooke took this article and ran with it...

"The shark story (the first of those two linked to above) is fantastic for two reasons. Firstly it's extremely heartening to know that our evil ocean dwelling distant relatives aren't such vile alien killers after all and enjoy a bit of kinky eat me/beat me sex. Biting in the bedroom is great and I'm glad they think so too. Thus bridges are built between species that otherwise seemed irreconcilable. Everyone can be happy.

Secondly, the notion of a virgin hammerhead giving birth has filled my mind with reimagined Synoptic Gospels in which Jesus is a shark. Exactly the same stories, everything identical, just that one detail altered. It'd be like Porco Rosso only instead of an idealised post WWI Mediterranean it'd be all up in your Nazareth, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and instead of a pig biplane pilot bounty hunter you'd have Jesus as a fucking evil shark."

..

........

Through the demon and the deity,
under seventeen or seven thousand
years of circumstantial evidence-
the groans of soldiers coming as the spear
ignites their hearts, the spear itself, aghast-
beyond the morning that does not reveal
its rosy curl unfurling, the let-down
of a waited-for awake, death's
disappointment, the finality
of a paperweight, heft and thud
of that which holds down, tight
and always-under the mourning that refutes
its very grief as if a bastard child
come to connive himself a birthright, a name
(oh luxury and the denial)-a city
calls and shall forever call The Dead-
and they arrive. They arrive, pockets
empty of breath and full of vagrancy
thresholding the white light's obvious tunnel:
Dead fathers make the most noise. Otherwise,
it seems like rain or 1941-
a steam train grinds, trestle to track, sparks
distill the gray air (is it air at all?).
Even the climate has done itself death,
soot and pain of that which everlasts-
and it is an ocean of everlast.



Landscape 2

Here the vodka is strong and the meat is filling.
Here, the believer sings in tune but softly as a plea or a praise
and none but god can hear, or even needs to:
Jesus, Jesus you released me, you've tamed,
you've conquered my inadequate shiver of a heart.

Here my name spells desire, decree, red firm berries,
my name spells out that quiver of flesh at the meeting
of your hips and of your thighs, and flowers to burn
with praise and sympathy. The mountaintops are green and cold
and drunk on what remnants of clouds I cannot say.

Those animals that remember us do it in syllables-how perfect-
yaps and mews we now completely understand. Rub me
at the belly, feed me loyalty from the nipple of your littlest digit.
There is much to be admired here, soon enough. But oh not yet am I
to ash (I am not yet). This awaited place

will wait as a maiden for many years to come. On the unknown
but faraway day, I will arrive like chiffon lifting itself up on a breeze
and the smile of the passing sailor. I will speak of it to everyone,
I will throm and thrum and hum and grieve (a thousand griefs
relieved!) and bend at the feet of my lord who loves into such a death as this.

And yet I ask: If the child wants a snake, will you give her a fish?



Landscape, 3

There is a bridge in the distance,
and it wonders if I will cross it.

There is a bridge in the distance
awaiting my footfalls.

I say to myself these words:
I am a bride, three times over.

I am a bride in a red dress, the bloody
wife, the sacred cup of wine.

I can see only the bridge and its bearings.
What I hear is the sound of my heart,

discerning itself between beats
and gushes. Am I really dead?

Of course not. How could that happen?
How could that ever happen?

When she is born again, a woman's name
becomes wisdom and flesh.

How can a birth be a death?
My name is Jill Essbaum-sweetheart

who has eaten from the tree. The wisest apple is one
whose pulp is firm and sweet.



Landscape 3, revisited

It is steel, not stone, the bridge of evermore.
Heavy footsteps rattle its girders, and the crossing
is tenuous like acrobatics. This I could not see
from the distance. What a novice I am, bride
of ignorance, fear, the devilish set, bloody as rain
on ash Wednesday, bloody as the matador gored,
the bull's heft nose ring shining in the sun. My heart
makes heavy noises. Thump thump thump
like billy goats gruffing. The body of evidence
is a body. I can see only the bridge and its bearings.
What I hear is the sound of my heart,
discerning itself between beats and gushes. Am I
really dead? Of course not. How could that happen?
How could that ever happen? When she is born
again, a woman's name becomes wisdom and flesh.
This is how the aftermath resolves.

-Jill Alexander Essbaum

We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift. Your analyst is in on it, plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband; and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us. In announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves. But since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center, we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective. Philip Lopate

Raum. If there were one word it would be Raum. The space of things. The space of outer space. The space of night which comes through porous windows to feed on our faces. The mystical carpet where lovers wrestle. The womb of the mother. Weltraum. Not just the room in which the furniture of the world rests, but the space of the things themselves. The space made by Being's breathing. Then Innerweltraum. (The German language, the German spirit, can and must compound.) Not just the space we call consciousness, but the space where we retire in order to avoid a feeling, the touch of a lover, the plea of a friend, the threat of intimacy. Distance. Darkness dotted by stars. These spaces are always palpable, as though space were smoke, or the mountains of the heart where the last hamlet of feeling may be discerned. The various distances of death. Time itself is a spaceline. For when we are dead we journey on through what we once believed was the past. Cathedral spaces. The spaces made by music. Innerweltraum. The slopes shaped by the word in the countrysides of poetry.

A polo zealot, Akbar, "the greatest and wisest Mogul emperor of India," insisted that all candidates for public office pass a strenuous polo test by playing against the emperor himself, at night - a darkly moonless night - in chase of a wooden ball especially set on fire. Those who qualif - oh, excuse me: email. Lowell again. His marriage. As if I headed Office Central Command for routing the cloverleaf intricacy of Lowell's and Angie's emotional traffic. He hit her. He didn't. She sucked off Freddie's brother. She didn't. Also the night where every dish in their kitchen got broken. Lowell's and Angie's emotional shit is how it finally feels to me, and joins the list of fecal exotica: otter dung is spraints; cow dung is bodewash; deer turds, fewmets. If we added every offal, every spoor, and then included gleet (hawk stomach phlegm), we'd beat - at least in quantity - the fabled ten (or fifty or a hundred: it varies) Eskimaux words for "snow"; for "shit" it's anaq. This is all too much. The formal prodigality of heaven is too much: or of the heavens, to be accurate; there are seven in Jewish mystic tradition, layered as if angelic realms were strata demarcating a canyon wall (a not atypical cosmology in world religious beliefs), and in the second of these heavens "stand one hundred thousand myriad of chariots of fire" (the wheels of which have eyes, and these "are like the flames of burning coals"). Nor is the human spirit simpler. For Confucians, there are two souls, shen and kuei - that is, two kinds of soul: in reality, the body holds at least five shen (and maybe up to a hundred) and the kuei consists of seven sections. Nor is the body simple: not the weaving fan of fringe around the mouth of the fallopian tube, and not the twenty-foot-long duct that's coiled in the cojones, and not a single one of the hundred thousand beats of the heart in a day, and not the scribbley walnut gnarls of the brain - there's nothing uncomplicated about, or under, flesh. The bruise displayed on Angie's left cheek has its origin explained now by at least as many theories as the universe's. Maybe it was Lowell fueled by cheap drink and a costly rage. But then again, a woman in a neighboring town presented herself repeatedly to the police and doctors, over a span of two years, with the knife cuts that a "stalker" inflicted who turned out to be - at last, as she admitted - herself. We can't be sure. It's all too much. 3,200 feet of helium are required to lift a person; there are mornings when I wake and there's not helium enough for the weight of my eyelids. "I don't know," said Lowell, sitting on a bench with me, as if this aptly summarized his marriage-angst: "I don't know." What he means is that the element most commonly discovered in an opened human life is overloadium. And we bear the facts that are soiled by tears, as we carry the facts that are spangled in celebration; we accept the wobbly, in-and-outty "facts" of quantum physics, as we hold on to the great Truths carved of marble, and the counter-Truths of counter-marble . . . no wonder we falter, and deal in hurt. And yet I think existence wants an ever-thickened density of knowledge and connection, so that one day Information will itself have reached the threshold to become a mind - a mind of which we're neurons, know it and like it or not. "I just don't get it," Angie said when a third beer loosened her studied reserve, "why can't it 'work out'?" What she means is there are moments when we envy "the blesséd virgin Amelberga, whose body was said to have been guided upriver to Ghent by a school of sturgeon" - she was floated, trusting, cared for, through a sure, directed course. I have my version of this fancy. It's a poem of, oh, say sonnet-length; it's supple, undisrupted. It feels like this: I close the door. (Behind it: gabble and disjunction.) And I walk into the clear, black night. I'm in a great arena. Nothing can be seen - there may be nothing to be seen - except of course for the ball on fire. That's all I need. That's all: the darkness, and one burning sphere. And I follow its light down the field. Albert Goldbarth

"... You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train your for that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything...."

If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure. A. P. CHEKHOV The Cherry Orchard 1 FROM THE NURSERY When I was born, you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery, and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me, pressing the bile of desolation into every pore. And from that day on everything under the sun and moon made me sad -- even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib. You taught me to exist without gratitude. You ruined my manners toward God: "We're here simply to wait for death; the pleasures of earth are overrated." I only appeared to belong to my mother, to live among blocks and cotton undershirts with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. I was already yours -- the anti-urge, the mutilator of souls. 2 BOTTLES Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. The coated ones smell sweet or have no smell; the powdery ones smell like the chemistry lab at school that made me hold my breath. 3 SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND You wouldn't be so depressed if you really believed in God. 4 OFTEN Often I go to bed as soon after dinner as seems adult (I mean I try to wait for dark) in order to push away from the massive pain in sleep's frail wicker coracle. 5 ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT Once, in my early thirties, I saw that I was a speck of light in the great river of light that undulates through time. I was floating with the whole human family. We were all colors -- those who are living now, those who have died, those who are not yet born. For a few moments I floated, completely calm, and I no longer hated having to exist. Like a crow who smells hot blood you came flying to pull me out of the glowing stream. "I'll hold you up. I never let my dear ones drown!" After that, I wept for days. 6 IN AND OUT The dog searches until he finds me upstairs, lies down with a clatter of elbows, puts his head on my foot. Sometimes the sound of his breathing saves my life -- in and out, in and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . . 7 PARDON A piece of burned meat wears my clothes, speaks in my voice, dispatches obligations haltingly, or not at all. It is tired of trying to be stouthearted, tired beyond measure. We move on to the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Day and night I feel as if I had drunk six cups of coffee, but the pain stops abruptly. With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends, to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back to my desk, books, and chair. 8 CREDO Pharmaceutical wonders are at work but I believe only in this moment of well-being. Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again. Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet on the coffee table, lean back, and turn me into someone who can't take the trouble to speak; someone who can't sleep, or who does nothing but sleep; can't read, or call for an appointment for help. There is nothing I can do against your coming. When I awake, I am still with thee. 9 WOOD THRUSH High on Nardil and June light I wake at four, waiting greedily for the first note of the wood thrush. Easeful air presses through the screen with the wild, complex song of the bird, and I am overcome by ordinary contentment. What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment? How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples; its bright, unequivocal eye. Jane Kenyon

She fears him, and will always ask What fated her to choose him; She meets in his engaging mask All reasons to refuse him; But what she meets and what she fears Are less than are the downward years, Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs Of age, were she to lose him. Between a blurred sagacity That once had power to sound him, And Love, that will not let him be The Judas that she found him, Her pride assuages her almost, As if it were alone the cost. -- He sees that he will not be lost, And waits and looks around him. A sense of ocean and old trees Envelops and allures him; Tradition, touching all he sees, Beguiles and reassures him; And all her doubts of what he says Are dimmed of what she knows of days -- Till even prejudice delays And fades, and she secures him. The falling leaf inaugurates The reign of her confusion; The pounding wave reverberates The dirge of her illusion; And home, where passion lived and died, Becomes a place where she can hide, While all the town and harbor side Vibrate with her seclusion. We tell you, tapping on our brows, The story as it should be, -- As if the story of a house Were told, or ever could be; We'll have no kindly veil between Her visions and those we have seen, -- As if we guessed what hers have been, Or what they are or would be. Meanwhile we do no harm; for they That with a god have striven, Not hearing much of what we say, Take what the god has given; Though like waves breaking it may be, Or like a changed familiar tree, Or like a stairway to the sea Where down the blind are driven. EA Robinson

Your love is like a bad tattoo. I've done too much time in this trailer park and I will burn your double-wide down except I'm lazy. Your love is like a bad tattoo although you put it on the back of my eye. It starts "Ramona" and I can't read the rest anymore. I'm tired but I remember what it says. Something I won't repeat is what. I said "love" but meant a word that sounds like "trigger" and means "You're dead." Look it up if you don't believe me. Find it near "damn fool" and "dear god" if there ever was such a dictionary. And if there was, you sure already read it. I studied some Latin strictly due to you: Semper fidelis, semper idem, semper paratus. Always faithful, ready, and the same. Me or you, what a question. Anymore I'm like some Ophelia who took the other route, fat, drugged, and gone to seed. Alive though. Lounging in the wading pool outside fair Hamlette's double-wide in my best plastic sunglasses and checking my periphery as if epiphanies might have to sneak right up on the likes of me. I'm in need of some coy flowers, a cocktail. Somebody bring my notebook, too. I'll write one of my patented I didn't kill myself notes: Hello cruel world I'm still not leaving again, it's me. Your love is like a bad tattoo deep on my superstructure. What monks scribble on bones in ossuaries, I imagine. My latest affectation is pretending you are a house I'm haunting with my life. You don't think I'm pretending. Somebody bring me my hood. -Josh Bell