A poem by ee cummings I read during the Garden Party to wide critical acclaim.goodby Betty,don’t remember me pencil your eyes dear and have a good time with the tall tight boys at Tabari’ s,keep your teeth snowy, stick to beer and lime, wear dark,and where your meeting breasts are round have roses darling,it’s all i ask of you— but that when light fails and this sweet profound Paris moves with lovers,two and two bound for themselves,when passionately dusk brings softly down the perfume of the world (and just as smaller stars begin to husk heaven)you,you exactly paled and curled with mystic lips take twilight where i know: proving to Death that Love is so and so.
Labor Day. The average American may regard this holiday as the first sign of autumn, an indicator that he can no longer don his halcyon frocks of summer.
The US Department of Labor believes that on this day, “it is appropriate that the nation pay tribute to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.”
Unfortunately, both this statement and this very day present much woe and needless agony for those of us dismantling the strength, freedom, and leadership of the country — the American non-worker.
While others are enjoying their glorious day off with barbecues and parades, the unemployed are mired in guilt, confusion, and endless self-doubt.
Indeed, it is a sad time to be unemployed in the land of opportunity. I recently spent several months living in France, a country full of people who seem to know how to celebrate regardless of employment status. Pour ça, ils ont raison.
Unfortunately, this joie de vivre escapes most Americans. Instead, we look with envious eyes to friends descending to office abodes, imbued with a sense of duty and obligation.
(Actual depiction of ‘labor’ in the coal mines)
Consequently, in light of my current status, I am unable to view Labor Day as anything but government propaganda to inflict a dark and dolorous stigma upon its forgotten citizens.
(Part of a US initiative to combat the ‘mad brute’–a well-known personification of unemployment which began when the work-weary public at large noticed that educated, unemployed men, many of whom were artists or writers, spent most of their time womanizing and arming themselves with the pejorative ‘baton of culture,’ which they often referred to in foreign languages)
(I envision this matronly madam of communism to say: “No excuses! Get a job!”)
Instead, I turn to the old timers of literature for words of solace–in this case, Lord Alfred Tennyson in “The Choric Song of the Lotos-eaters”:
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep…
Ah, why should life all labour be?
Devotedly,
The Opium-Eater
P.S. I am supposed to be working on my book, while instead, I have whiled away the last few hours on this blog entry, which in all likelihood none will read.
It’s often in these hours when things reach us most deeply, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s time to talk about myself or perhaps I should just be writing in a journal, one of those salty old books that line the walls of this dark hold, sitting on rotting boards, rotting themselves in the humid air, this ship is full with holes and though the water comes in every night like a tide somehow we stay afloat, somehow I sleep when I do, though on nights like this one it’s hard to believe that my mind has ever been quiet, it’s hard to believe that the stars could ever stop moving or just burn out, but they do, many have already, I know that I have slept before because I can see so clearly dreams I have had and all of the ones who have met me there, alive or dead in the light now or the dark of some continent I cannot touch, I know I have slept, though tonight it eludes me, whale-like it’s song rising from the deep of my bones, echoing in my restless flesh, my ear pressed to the cool floorboards, there’s water beneath them, there must be, tonight, when sleep is a demon I’ve fallen in love with and yet can’t lure back into the bed, tonight, when sleep is the memory of dancing with you beneath the house your grandfather’s grandfather built with his hands in a land whose name your family can no longer pronounce, so deep in the earth that night alive in the ether of darkness and touch and nothing not the loudest footsteps or the earthquakes on china pouring from the boards and bursting like chinese mortars on the ribs of that ancient floor could have stirred us, nothing could have shaken us from our moorings, set sail again with me, cast off the heavy beams of sleep or waking, of work that is not the work of your spirit and leave this place where animals no longer speak and all of daemons are locked up in stories, I can’t sleep tonight because maybe the world has gotten too heavy even for Atlas to hold, a time of great reckoning is approaching and quickly, soon the sun will kiss us sweetly while passing from this side of the world to the other, night and day will be each other’s match only that moment and we will slip yet again out of the grace of long days on the hot decks of our imagination and into the half of life where darkness holds the keys and our ability to live in it, spells that create light rather than swallow it, will mean more to us than the air beneath the swallow’s short, curved wings, “come back to bed, my love” you’ll sing to me, “finish with tonight’s devils, fold your body into mine and sleep.”
A friend… not the man pictured here:
but a different man different than this one. Possibly a woman, even. Possibly a girl:
This friend who I have not pictured here, thanked me recently in the forward to their book.
I found this touching. It is a grand gesture, after all, acknowledgment.
It is broad and sweeping and indells my name forever in ink. And not just my name but a whole piece of my person. The part of me that this friend is grateful to…
my intellect,
or my cheer,
or my comfort,
or my advice,
or just my company.
Some quarter of my being is cast inside the tiny quantity of ink that holds my name. And that quarter of myself is being thanked and it is being thanked thousands of times over.
In every copy of the book that is produced, my name is produced again and that enormous slice of me is honored therein.
And further, even every time the page my name appears on is read, that chunk of me is gratiated again and again, once for each eye that sees the word.
So you can see why I found it so touching.
But then, after a time. It weighed on me, all this gratitude.
The grateful are like drunk friends who lean on you to walk them home.
And I thought of all of the people reading my name and thinking that I must have done something really quite amazing to be made so immortal, prefacing the preface of the book.
And I don’t know at all what it was that I did.
Why I was thanked.
Why I’d been acknowledged.
I’m sure I was amazing whatever it was.
But the not knowing gnawed at me.
And I couldn’t just ask this friend.
Because I don’t really know them, you see.
I mean, I’ve met them and
spent time with them and
had drinks with them and
talked with them and
along the way something was done that I’m sure was worthy of this thanks. But they are the sort of person listed in my phone with their first AND last names and both spelled correctly.
There are no nicknames between us. We were never that cordial.
I wonder if the other people being thanked on that heavy, wretched page felt the same as me.
I called a few and got only voicemails.
I began then to think less and less of this friend. My reasoning went that if my paltry contribution was worthy of thanks then their thanks therefore must also be paltry, and worthless. And so then must their book, and so then must they.
My diminishing regard for this singular person then gnawed and gnawed at me. The less I thought of them the more obsessed I became. Nights I dreamed of my name in heavy ink sitting uncomfortably on the page, the letters squirming, trying in vain to jump off and rest somewhere else–the floor maybe or the sofa.
Days I paced my room inventing revenge after revenge for this injustice that now ate at me like sitting in a gentle but incontrovertible bath of acid.
I began buying up every copy of the book I could find and then arranging them in my library, filling first one bookshelf and then another and another until the entire room was nothing but copies of the book, the forward unread, my name never seen. But this proved my further undoing for whenever I would sit in that room, surrounded by issue after issue after issue I would feel the letters of my name pressing in at me from all sides, pulsing like something hungry, or desperate, or in love.
I walled the room up then. With brick and mortar and left it to dust, but the press of the thanks never abated.
And finally at the end of my wit I burned my entire estate, house and yard and garden.
even the hedge-maze, which I know was your favorite.
I salted the earth and doused the ashes in lye.
But the sad truth is, a word once written can’t ever be unwritten.
And a thing once set to type can’t ever be unset.
And so I sit here under the weight of this horrible gratitude, like the world on Atlas.
And there’s nothing to do but let it crush me
slowly and
lovingly.
As you know, dear ones, Oola is heartbroken. Not only have I been abandoned by my most recent lover, Julian Brindle, who many of you know from his work designing erotic housewares and furniture, I have also lost my dearest chicken. An Araucana (South American Rumpless).
Julian purchased the Araucana for me as a symbol for the fresh, surprising quality of our lovemaking. You see, Araucanas lay the most beautiful pale blue eggs, and Julian presented me with the chick in one of his brown and blue “nesting settees,” specially angled to aid with certain difficult postures.
Well, as it turns out, the chick is a rooster. And in fact the fact is I am soon to lose him. He will be processed. For his crowing has been judged a problem by the other members of the brothel and so they wish to DO HIM IN! This is not an easy time for me. I, Oola, gentle soul, must now sing to him sweetly, then spin him and wring him, his blood will drain and his feathers remain for me to pluck.
With Julian and my dear little rumpless one gone, I feel myself entering a difficult, but no doubt creatively gratifying, period of mourning.
How can it be? Oola alone. Oozing Oola weeps sleepily. I’ve napped and slept and blanketed myself, knee deep in wrappings, eyes thick, spine twisting, wishing for a back to curl around, for that expanse of skin to grow, this full moon in front of me. I’m sick with it. An arching tossed lightly. I lie a pinprick, my thumbs twitch, the bloom of belly a pale blush, unlooked at. Oh Oola, I tell myself, how do I tell myself? What Oola one speaks to Oola two (speaking, always, only, of you), this poor blue Oola, truly a stewing girl, her blue blood bored now, written over and rotten with stillness, hoping only to hold you from below, where you might one day open.
Wonderful poet Benjamin “Yoshimitsu” Mirov recently wrote a poem that makes me just cry and cry and cry. He made an adorable Yoshi video and here it is on his blog, posted for the world to see.
SNOW
YOURS,
URSULA
Hayvery Body! It’s Ollie!
Crazy, right?
It’s part of the For Every Year Project started by Crispin Best… where writers and poets are composing things in honor of each year from 1400 to the present… we’re just about to hit the 1500 mark… which is pretty big if you ask me…
check it out, and check out the rest of the entries… 1492 is particularly cool…
candy of the scientist-gods.
go ‘head and get you some.
“Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man” -Zbigniew Herbert
i got up early this morning, i’d thrown the covers and caught a chill. found two poems slidin’ about.
My crooked hands shake
something unreasonable.
I can see them
roasting on glowing coals.
I don’t take them out.
I am always cold.
I am always letting off everything
like a pan of water
on a stove
without a lid.
I escape almost silently.
and then this one. i been havin’ walkin’ dreams, i wake with sore feet, though i didn’t go anywhere. four white walls often leave me feelin’ contained, that’s when i dream on walkin’. today it rained and that settled my soul a bit. i pressed my hands out the windows and washed my face. pretty sure i look the same.
A rocky walk takes me from the city.
At my back it’s only you and me, beast.
Helpless you shudder still under winter’s thumbprint.
Your guilt is contagious burn.
But I do laugh at the coincidence.
after breakfast i walked in the rain till my shoes got heavy and plopped off. still i feel on fire, my face and hands and back feel flushed. still i wonder when this fever will break?
“and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince”
