GREY LIGHT, GREEN and grey in the grass and clover. The washer cycles through the morning. K beats a yellow ball with a stick, pieces of a floor puzzle scattered on the rug. A black buzzard flew by yesterday. We watched it arc past our house and down behind trees along Boggy Creek.
And acacia blossoms
seemed as if
floating where K played
in gravel and
chalk walking barefoot—
hear the cars
go round
people doing their
thing.
And there's a bee on my knee and there's goo in my shoe. Rain in my brain and mist in my fist. There's a goose on my tooth and a barn on my arm. A goat in my throat and a bear in my hair. K laughs. Wants more paper chains. Hoa puts on her shoes. Gonna walk this baby out.
NO CONTRACTIONS TODAY, but a slow movement of fluid continues. I took K to Zilker Park where we hiked, played and looked at coots and buffle heads. Hoa slept, studied, cleaaned. Outside the days have been warm and sunny. The bullbine blooms to distraction. The moon has been full or close to it these nights wide and brilliant with an unusual candor cast by movement of light through faint, high clouds. Soon another child will join us. Now the evening's quiet. We wait as K watches TV and makes paper chains to put up around the house. Yellow and red, some already hang in the thresholds of our rooms. Drinking oolong tea, I hear the fridge humming. This is what's happening. A narrative is a span of mind on any given occasion. Mostly the mind fails us. It ruins what it touches. Its weak, human proposals cast a dark shadow on the earth. But whatever it achieves on behalf of poetry redeems it a little, I guess. I walk around, go places. See things and accommodate my senses according to these environments. Weighted, the center lies deep in an unknown region but it touches everything. Headlights pass through our windows. Quiet now in the house.
MY SON CONJURES lost images through me. I can't deliberately take it back to the beginning. There's something earlier, something prior to that even, hiding in the cells, ready to leap out with sudden surprising intensity. There's a region of grass and pill bugs, and of black uncertain movements. A place in me that lacks definition, the shape or contour of definite things. Chronos resides there too, raven on his shoulder, swinging a scythe. The other evening about dark I was overcome by a black mood. There wasn't anything to say about it. Orange light filtered through purple edges of the sky in elm branches and their newly acquired spring nodes—the little buds, those dear green beginnings. And the mood shifted as suddenly as it had come on. I recalled a native destructiveness. Like I carried some early, pre-conscious crime. There's something about the parents. We beat them down into us, eat their force and image, becoming such an outer growth of their death in us. They aren't recognized as such, but get absorbed into the organs and muscle. It's their blood on the black stone. And before that it's even weirder.
SURROUNDED BY SHAPES, experience registers in the sensual details of every day. First memories come from a haze of sudden image flashes. There were knees, my mother's bare legs. And a yellow dress covered her extended middle. The TV related men with guns, others in their lives or on foot in a foreign land and correspondents grey on the RCA screen—Vietnam. The carpet in the living room was golden, and I'd sit, running my hands on the rough texture. These are quick brush strokes. Of being in a car with my father. Of holding my twin brothers that first day home from the hospital. Posed, no doubt, for their camera, subject to the parents' will. Who were those creatures? And again, memory fails, goes out, black. Cells store the past, and then some object or image releases it. Or it's a quality, a resistance inside me, retained by my antipathy to those first scenes. Nothing vivid about it at all. It's like a smudge of color, a sullen act or refusal in the coercive field of others. Awareness grows from this internalized difference, that you won't submit to another's formal appetite. What painful acts of memory get carried against the house, car, trees and each other. The gardenias blossomed with strong fragrance each spring and there were bees in the honeysuckle in the alley behind the garage where I recall a remote region of flora, trashcans, cracked asphalt and peeled paint. Dogs barked. Men dumped their lawn clippings.
LAST NIGHT THE MOON pressed through thin clouds, leaving a ring of light around it. Almost full, K and I went outside to see grey clouds moving on dark blue, and over the moon. He was wrapped in a blanket, ready to sleep. We drove across town listening to redneck radio until after a while his eyes closed and his head fell to his shoulders. Today's crisp, bright. Hoa felt contractions last night but now she's cleaning the fridge. New features of the day shape us. Aristide flees Port-au-Prince, Marines and CIA threatening. Even local Bubbas stew over this betrayal of "democracy." They call the radio show ranting about a globalist New World Order and the decay of "our" freedoms. "We gotta stand up and fight," shouts the show's host. "We gotta wake up fast before they put all our children in re-education camps and make slaves of us all!" If Lawrence is right, and we are destroyers, and we are cold little death-worshippers, we've entered a period of reckoning and translation. But it's the figure of the black stone I pursue. From the darkness of the womb and into the light of day, these formalities continue. New spring grass shoots up from the clay and grackles this morning release a terrific racket from the trees.
TOUCH BLACK SOIL. Take roots. Sit in cool grass. Hold leaves as they break in brittle fragments. Greet the child. Abhor your dependence on knowing direction in a kingdom of sure steps. Take time and take the sound of rain to the stone in her belly that will pull us through a whitening, the wide reaches of daylight. Listen to the subtle movements in her. A tiny heart beats through an instrument held to my ears. Make measure by this beginning. Absorb these elements, nouns and verbs. Face any direction you choose but face it blacker than black, like a Haitian hot for a hit of the Loa. Ogoun the blacksmith is coming. Grasp the irons. Take hold of the new black hair wet in the flow of juice that makes us green, red black. Whatever color falls through us, heal up the old burn wounds standing too close to the heat. Betray the middle class death cult. Embrace a smooth, warm surface. Touch the wet stone through her black sky.
BLACK CLOUDS ROLLED in with strong wind. Then came rain and cool air. Now mist moves over a bright moon. The Mt. Laurel's blue blossoms spread and redbud limbs burst with tiny pink buds. Rita plays with Keaton. The earth-bound babe holds tight in its black room, moist inside the sound drum of Hoa's broadened middle. There's much to learn about this stone coming out of the dark. A new beginning in greater darkness. Our expectations are left behind. There's an unfolding before us. Open these new doors making way out again. Lawrence rants against Poe's love. Looks instead to the holy ghost that dwells within. But the holy ghost is many, all the gods inside a self. And Poe's mutable forms show something of nature's ex-stasis, that merging and emerging luminosity against a greater night. Dig a hole. Crawl into the moist soil to find out what it's like reborn to a new world. Now K nurses and Hoa reads. The cat wants out into the moist glistening evening. Take pen. Lift flowers. Fix the car windows. Look outside, my face reflected by the lamp in the window.
TWO CROWS CAW in sycamore branches. Near twilight a red sky fades under broken branches. The television flickers its magic compelling death images. John Kerry promises to defeat G.W. Bush in the November election. And Hoa sits on a purple ball in the dark room. A black sun will pass us, and we'll absorb whatever it brings. The crows leave the lower branches. They play at the purple edges of blackness. I shit in a small room near a south wall. Our house is built on black clay, a chemistry of profound density. Water once flowed here, a great coast back in dinosaur days. Now near blackness the president talks on the radio. Haitian rebels promise to surrender their weapons.
Throw a black stone
deep in the night
for the old man to find
—finders keepers, they say—
unmasked scythe
swinging Time
Creep.
And the crows know what I don't, where to go when the stones blind us.
THE GOAL'S GOING out
moving into the forms we
need to find
not know anything
or squeal about once more
(with feeling)
but completely opened
by the strangeness of
occasion—
new day now!
Five p.m. Tin foil crumpled in green grass. Hoa boils water for nettle tea and now I hear the kitchen faucet running. K skipped his nap. His voice comes from another room. He has set-up his tent now, camping in the wilderness of his bed on the floor where our heads pass out dreaming by a window as the moon lives and dies or the sun the same or stars. There's a fly carcass on the sill, dried out and half-rotted. Its delicate, translucent wings reach stiffly into the glass. It's absorbed back into the air as dust and the light's grey blue distance leaves a dull mood on the room. Only their voices now animate that part of the house. Wednesday, daydreaming, looking at sycamore pods spraying the wind.
KEATON AND JAYRA play in the front room. Last night Hoa felt cramping, drank a small glass of wine and went to sleep. But this morning there were no signs of labor. Outside the sky's grey and the air warm, damp. I've got hot tea here to direct attention, steadying it while up front K claps and jumps up and down. Mary Austin's The American Rhythm lies on the desk with other papers and letters. There's a book by Gille Deleuze with an essay on "the superiority of Anglo-Saxon literature." What a startling piece of writing. Melville, Lawrence and others figure centrally. That desire for flight runs strong through the writers I admire. They want to become, to fall into their otherness, blasted briefly at the limit of what they are and will be. This world of resistance entangles our steps, tripping us up like startled prey. The point is, I don't know where these words will take me, or by what calling the black stone will emerge. And things break in the kitchen. First, a wine glass. Then a bowl of brownie mix and raw eggs. And yesterday a mason jar fell from the counter shattering on the tile. It's break-out time. The containers are ready to release the goods.
IT'S SUPER TUESDAY and signs across the street read: "Joe Martinez for Travis County Sheriff" and "Integrity, Leadership, Strength—Commander Duane McNeill for Sheriff." A mockingbird zooms by and checked flags fly in a southeastern wind. There's trash in the parking lot and a photo of the space shuttle beside me. These barren images announce the nondescript haze of middle morning. Desire for intrusion comes strong. I crave disruptions of routine to re-orient me. Get unplugged from this human humming. And the earth-bound babe will make its way, beating death, an alien traveler. Meanwhile, numb out on work. Death preserves us, keeping feeling in control. In the auto shop this morning I speak with a Ba'haist about the new splatter-flick Passion and about gay marriage in California. "These are just distractions," he says. "There's no work, no new jobs." But it's not the deliberate and organized destruction of the American economy that disturbs me, the absorption of a landmass that is the whole world. We live on a map now. So what?
"ANY DAY NOW," we say, expecting the first pangs and plug to drop. K kisses me, holds my head in his hands a moment. A black buzzard flew over the house. "Let's follow it," he said. And so we did, sort of. Walked down Rountree adjacent to Boggy Creek, checking the sky through bare branches. Crossed Manor St. then headed back east down railroad tracks. A cold wind blew as we walked and K picked up white gravel, examining each piece carefully. First goose grass of the year grew up in patches close to the woods. Abandoned appliances stood out starkly on graffiti-covered concrete slabs. This is a period of waiting, self-scrutiny and preparation. I cherish these Puritanical habits of inwardness, much as I admire the old ways of magicized landscapes and prophecies in voices of old women. The cunning men and old wizened herbalists of England must have been something, their conjuring of spirits through matter a kind of violent necessity. What minds those first Europeans must have brought to this continent, this "collection of cosmologies." How many years does it take to absorb the power of a landmass? We're still finding out, I guess. K spits a rock from his mouth.
Quickly kiss them goodbye. Outside it's raining and the streets are slick shining with lights reflecting off dark grey surfaces. Last night the precocious K identified shapes from the backseat of the car: triangle, square, octagon and trapezoid. I don't know where he spied the trapezoid, but the words clearly defined his imagination, shaping those quick flashes of perception from the moon blue half-crescent night. And now, waiting for a heat sensor to be fixed in the car, I look across North Lamar to a field of juniper and witch grass behind chain-link. The grey sky's low and relentless, indifferent to this mechanical buzz. This human hum indeed is a drag, a methodology of concrete and criss-crossing wires. It's the destruction of the person by the black stone I look for, that black and white tension in extremis. A membrane separates and new life comes through it, not the old human form, but a deep reaching otherness like the elements animated in us. My wife, my child, my self—referencing the unknown. Pebbles in yellow paint in the parking lot. "Aristide flees; Marines step in." The news is old news, the human destroys everything. Crack its shell, let a new world in.
RACHEL CALLED LAST night. Her voice raced with New York energy. Reminds me of how slow life here goes in the provincial Southwest. But the Big Apple gives a lot to swallow. All that running around just to get somewhere on time. I fire an engine. Drive big oil dream highways. How else will I get "there." Smell of gas comes through the window at the filling station. Slide my card through. Enter code and pump. Wipe rain off the windshield. Chase down the business of the day under these elms and utility wires. You want to hold your breath for a moment, retaining a lyric possibility deep in the quiet of your most centered self. And it's hard now beyond photos to recall the first weeks after K's birth. Already he grows into something other. Something moves up from within him. There are many inside. A little wooden wheel barrow soaks in the rain. The wilderness never went away, it became figurative for something to reach out through, something inside. A dream of adventure. Hoa eats nuts in the gloomy dark kitchen. Her shirt doesn't fit over her exposed brown belly. K cries about something, naked, stomping and pleasing himself too with the sounds his feet are making.
RAIN FALLS WITH FORCE this morning, water rushing up to our curb. Sidewalk chalk drawings "melt" under the weight of those mighty drops. There goes an ibis, K's description of a gathering of purple and pink lines etched lightly on concrete. Precocious, bird conscious. Two black cats wait on the porch and the wet breeze spits water at them, the desert willow swaying by the southeastern fence. K woke early again today. Black, cold rooms, half-asleep without my glasses. I stumbled with him in my arms down the hall to comfort him. The air felt heavier, a relief to the brittle northern winter. Spring comes early to us in the South, a warm landing place for the coming babe. Our friend yesterday arrived from San Antonio with her own bundle of light—one-month old. She lay swaddled on hour couch. Woke to nurse. Drifted back into the womb-dreaming unconscious of sleep. K observed her briefly, making a feeble gesture of hello. Jenny kept her close by, sharing with us flaxseed bread. We keep bright hope, extending words. And a black stone sinks through us. An American stone of pure, unknowable cause. Keep a little piece in your pocket. From its weight derives new joy.
MANY ANXIETIES OF COURSE. Change diapers. Prepare another bottle. How keep gas in the car and its wheels turning? Money's the bottom line evil, for sure. I don't care how much of a cliché it sounds. Someone wants to screw it out of you. The holy range of words can't protect your exposed, limited body—all that awful need. Earning power of the consumer classes. Etc. An awful, exhausting yawn heaves through.
And we are given
by our words
to know or find
every day
again fast as
children grow
giving up that sent-
imental horse
shit but what re-
mains / remains.
There's a cold wind today, and plastic wrappers have blown up from the trashcan in a neighbor's yard. The mail person left a small packet of bills. We await Monday's payday with anticipation. Broken limbs line the fence with leaves under a grey hackberry. "Ear Candy" on the radio.
Grey light spreads from an overcast sky. Wind animates a few dead sycamore leaves clinging to late winter branches. I swept the house and threw the trash. Not hot of mind, gone inward, trying out new words. Cedar and elm logs rot under dead leaves and a pulled shrub. Bright green crabgrass and dandelions sprout new as the season changes, spring coming closer. Hoa and K went to buy eggs, her belly—big as it is—barely noticeable under her red jacket. Fucking last night, I reached for her but she continued stretching out, her full body long with baby across the sheets. What a strong kick that kid's got! No idea what that means, feeling movement in the quiet TV light of nothing gone out across the room and through our eyes into our skin and organs. Wish I had within me now the simple clarity of Vanity of Duluoz, a near psychic penetration of the living cells as they're caught in ever-changing time. Drawn in, the world consumes every motion or flicker of intelligence. Watch the ones you love enter the dynamic process of whatever great green moment we reach out to. This isn't a story, per se, but a relation. An account of first days. "The sun went down," K said. "And it comes up too."
A SINGLE PINK ROSE holds to the greater green of the bush. Perhaps I'll plant an apple tree while the season's right. Cold soil, warm roots. Her stomach moves with his or her bumping. A California geographer said human culture developed along coasts. Warm water on naked flesh, we adopted easily to hairlessness and marine agility. Wonder what kept us from going out totally dolphin? Some mammals returned to the saline. We kept to the shore, tending fire instead. Sound of chimes in wind. K removes his diaper, handing it to me. His anxiety's not great, but he knows the new baby will come from his mother, intruding on his turf. The great de-centering. You can only wait. Listen to election-year campaigning, that distracting claim for attention. It's the shiny green beetle and the preying mantis I adore today. Insectoid urgency replaces human calm. No intelligence but the invisible membranes around us, these words remaining through the piled leaves and newly green salvia. Even the little sparrow on my lawn or the grey cat by the gutter carry through, related by uncertain and lost gods. The earth-bound babe comes into this, to the visible from the not. Into the panoply of every day things. Words make it new, opening the softer insides through the hard shells.
COLD MORNING BREAKS through windows. There are tiny yellow blooms on the bullbine and a red wagon holds a thin layer of ice. A woodpecker gurgles or burbles somewhere near and a chorus of grackles cracks the air with shrill blasts. K wears his red buckaroo shirt, jumping from chair to couch. The gravel drive is striated with shadows. Trashcans are lined in a path of light. And the coffee eases me open to the noisy quiet. Now we turn on the Teletubbies and I see that chinaberry down in the yard through a corner of the window. It glistens in last night's dew. Spread goat cheese on crackers. Watch seeds and crumbs with small chunks of white cheese spread out on his shirt. "A last first people," hypnotized by machines. The urge to document fills me this morning, attendant to historical particulars. Like how for instance the closing of the Middle Border ca. WWI occasioned the beginning of the end of Midwest life. According to the old practice, what you put into the land was equal to its return—a devastated relation for us who give little, taking as we can. There's no reconciling this condition. Nothing I want to fix. But let's be clean about it. Don't gush over this new life without looking to that negrido. The black center holds.
THOSE CELLS QUICKLY divide, divining toward the light, from water to air. We're impersonal at best, open. I don't believe in solidity, angling for a bottom line—bottom feeders. Pierced by vertical spikes, we are related. The air moves through the window. Prepare for departure in the mundane domesticity of every day. Blinking, water in eyes, given to the buzzing yellow bath toy. He chases it, water on green tile. Sits on it, the spray long on the side of the tub.
occasioned
from hushed ranges
to find a place
among people
family in a light we can't
grasp our
selves going back
out never
fails.
Ten p.m. Drain tub. Wrap him in a frog towel. Wait for her to come home, the radiant black stone inside her.
THE EVENING BATH occupies our time. Hoa works. The cat circles my feet. K plays with a new plastic bath toy. It's yellow and it sprays a small fountain of water. Outside, the night air comes cold, a black liquid. Spaced out in books and television today. Took K to Zilker park. Went down the slide and hung on monkey bars. These days soon open us, the earth-bound babe preparing for that head-down descent. Out the shaft into air and light. And there's the pressure to make more money. Be a good parent in a sadistic culture craving a flesh-flayed Christ action hero of the American Death Cult. And the earth closes up for good somewhere. The tomb's shut tight. Seek an exit by the blast of trumpeting angels. A polytheism of things, like this buzzing plastic toy my son fondles so lightly in bath water. Death is a germ we carry, loaded into the cells at birth. Note to self: cf. Bergson on mind and matter. How the purple octopus takes me by its fat tentacles to a year ago when K moved quite differently, with less physical authority, in the water or on dry land. The goofy smiling octopus spits water from its mouth. We're delighted. We seek delight.
THE VIOLENCE IS only momentary. It's the mind that shines by the oval smile, those lines lightly etched on the face. I could bring this down tight, relating a ritual commonplace. It's the beginning of a world for me. Another coming. This election year hypes a public spectacle cast by fabulous, dangerous, other-world creatures. But from another darkness, far out, this child floats in a fluid strangeness of space. From nothing into this so suddenly. And it's still night, still under guidance of the crescented moona. I'm like a man collecting fare, finding folks a seat on a boat to a dream deep in the daybreak of our common forgetfulness. Boil water for tea. Put flame to the soup pan. Potato leek with yogurt. Observe the dark red wood of this table. Consider the vivid presence of wife as we prepare to enter our formal appetites. There are roles the cells know prior to our latent, mental knowing. It's only real at the gates of departure.
HERE SWIMS THE EARTH-BOUND babe, moving day and night. Speak through a thin shell of skin, fluid deep on the other side. I kiss Hoa's broad belly. Trace her linea negra, pubis to breast bone. Outside a perfect crescent moon points both ends up to make a horn. "Mama Luna Moona," I said to my son, rhyming with the "Foona Lagoona Baboona" in Dr. Seuss. The February night's cold, black but for that moonlight and a few silver constellations bright enough to break the city's orange aura. There's a dead china berry downed by last week's storm. It fell into the giant cane, golden shells clumped above utility wires and where a cardinal this morning sang. Her belly is warm, exposed to a steaming cup of tea. She sips it and shows me where the baby kicks. Like burbling, gurgling fluid black as stone. I touch the movement where my hand nearly cups a little butt. Head down. Open the gates. Let in the light. And my son sleeps in another room, holding a plastic toy. The air outside's quite still. There's only the sound now of traffic.