WAYLON WEARS A BLACK onesie with "sublime" silk-screened over his chest. Below the word a psychedelic image intensifies the romantic suggestion. Pink skin, chestnut-blond hair. His features are full lovely, fat cheeks and chest rhythmically pumping. There's a purple rhino, a yellow lion and a green turtle hanging over his head. A cat scratches the window on the porch, jasmine leaves trembling inside animated shadows. I'm reading a letter from Robert Creeley to Charles Olson. 1950. Here much of my thinking is magnified in the American vein. Creeley quotes O: "Wish that I cd document my own stand with this clarity. (Nostalgia). But at this point: these things come to method: granted the push to that, by way of the root." And he asks: "What is this abt. What wd you hit there." Again, answering for himself, Creeley comes back: "No. no such clarity. Rather: the oblique: afraid of conclusions: sounds: and the oddness." By way of the root—or by way of my black coarseness—that negative deposit beneath intent. Clarity, but also a method to relate the conflicting pulses of acceleration and accretion. Maybe method's not it either. The turning on toward achievement, no goal exact. What can be gained, you get by the radical will in step with the day. Behold the purple rhino as everything falls into place with it.
A CHILD PUSHES K on the playground under oaks. I check casually to see if he's okay. When he's not looking I make eye contact with the other boy, pinch up my face and sneer wildly. He runs away in confusion. Long shadows make up morning on the lawn. Parents watch their spawn climb ladders, zip down slides and chase around in deep beds of hardwood mulch. An inquisitive woman slinging her infant corners me under a slide. She wants conversation, wants to pry in and take something away from me. She asks K how old he is, but he won't give in to her. "He's two-and-half," I say, finally, sick of hearing the question repeated with good-natured hostility. I'm braced for her world opinions. She seems like the kind of person eager to share them. She discourses on the National Good and her Private Gods. In her diaper bag there's a bottle of juice for her toddler and a package of chips. I give her the quick backgrounder: one tot, one infant, recovering wife. Full time pops, occasional private eye. I feel cheap for having told her anything. K cries from the mulchy bottom by the monkey bars. The mother scolds her son for pushing. We exit between long oak shadows. At chez Smith-Nguyen, Waylon lounges, Hoa showers, the cat eats, etc. The sun shines but wild, urban grasses and weeds grow knee-high. Roses in the front window proliferate, sending many pink buds up from thorny thickets of green. Outside, a crow walks in the street, head high and cocky.
RAIN BRINGS GREEN weeds out in the yard and hackberry leaves are pleached over southern kitchen windows. A crack bag blows by this morning while I take garbage to the curb. Beer bottles are dumped in a blue plastic container. My feet are wet on the walk and the sky's peach green-grey goes off pale behind sumac leaves. I found that word "pleach" in one of Ezra Pound's cantos. It's out-of-date, probably last used in the mouth in the 16th century—"The pleached bower" (Shakespeare). But I like its quick hit, a relation of entangled branches or interwoven leaves. Because the canopy outside our window appears marvelous now despite long silken worm webs hanging down to stick in our hair and faces and clothes. The little green worms appear briefly and hold transparent threads throughout the early spring. K waves his arms, shouting playfully, "I'm wormed!" Today he has a fever while books and papers lie in neglected heaps across my desk. I write in the "American style," to quote Céline, "confused and lyrical." "The untrained mind shivers with excitement at everything it hears," says Herakleitos. Kerria blossoms burst forth yellow under a desert willow. I take my time with the day. Wonder how I'll make money. It's Friday and cold beer's in the fridge. There are cheese sandwiches with mustard. Rain drops are visible through a row of power lines. A chinaberry rots in the yard.
WAYLON GROWS QUICKLY, gaining 2 lbs. already. He sleeps in Hoa's arms, waking frequently to nurse. This morning he turned his eyes on me, let out a yelp and turned back for a nipple. Lime green sheets are piled on the bed and there's a mound of soft pillows. He looks like a curious tiny elf embedded in a garden of fluff. There's an image on TV of the national security adviser. She has cruel eyes and a bitter, turned-down mouth. The spirit of place is manifest in these harsh, tired features. It fights us, dares our flesh to stand up by what it will know. Try on new blue jeans. Turn around in a mirror. A body's quite submissive. But it knows what I don't, desperately attentive to the minutest pulsation. It listens to gods and demons and knows all about possession. A funeral motorcade crosses the Colorado. Under Congress Ave hang a million bats. We might follow the soul of the deceased one into the water of the Colorado, to drown by the slow gaze of river perch. There we float with our children, perfected by liquid putrefaction. The angels of our appetites disappear; we are alone. When the spirit's dead, life returns. The molecules reform into flesh and we'll swim up to greet a dazzling surface of sunlight and algae. Turtles plop off their rocks, startled. All that's changed is how we look. See a narrow ribbon of river and cypress bending under a breeze along dense banks. Observe this new creature, writhing back onto the muddy edge, naked and glowing for the first time.
AT THE SPIDER House coffee shop, the music's loud but the late sun comes on with perfection. It makes a rare day of tranquil leaf unfolding spring radiance. The pecan tree over us opens with bright green young buds. K drinks water and plays on flagstones by a gargoyle statuette. Students come to study. There's coffee and beer. I don't know anyone here. We're strangers, buffered by busy lives. Now grackles cry from a pecan. Reading Durrell on Provence—there aren't any olive trees here like in southern France, but white limestone exposures and these low, scrubby oaks make me think of an old world vista. Now wind ruffles chinaberries. Students download images to their laptops.
But if you see
through these
greeny topsides
to a cold core—
Give grace, dear dead
and living gods
for to spoil
sunken cadavers
with this fleshy abundance—
spectacular!
THAT MIDDAY SUN comes on full, a radiant field of white hot on the street and broken again by green shadows of neighbors' yards. Waylon's wakeful, looking across the room toward windows and out into that glowing space. He opens his lips. Gurgling noises announce a drooling regurgitation of breast milk. K sleeps and I steal these moments for my secret stone. Denton Welch relates how when walking through a wooded path his friend skewered a frog with the ferrule of his umbrella. They were terrified and shrieked, flinging the carcass. "But I saw that it was an old, dead frog," he said, "dry and hard as leather." Gruesome particulars haunt these placid surfaces. Poke at that internal cadaver, the one digging under my bones. The air opens and the sky changes and you become what you are by what goes down below. This internal geography looks like the physical world. In a little nook of a garden K and I went to look at an angel hidden behind leaves. He threw pebbles into a dense tangle of jasmine and palm leaves. We played in sticky air, minding our business tossing stones when he reached for his legs, swatting at something. Fire ants covered his shoes and red welts appeared on his bare legs. I moved him quickly from the hidden bed, brushing him. Removing his clothes the tiny ants crawled under my shirt. Now he naps. I loaf by a window between pages of a book and a notebook. The light fades in and out as the patterns of the sky change.
THE WASHING MACHINE fills with water. Oak pollen attacks my sinus cavities, snot thick and drippy. Sunlight pours over a tree trunk by a clump of poison ivy. Find some clothes. Put on a shirt—the morning rituals of social preparation. A radio voice informs the day with grim news: "The world is shit, the world is fucked, your life is dirt." I look around. Woodpecker taps into a branch for bugs. Long-time neighborhood addicts and small-time hustlers sit on a porch across the street waiting for the day to open a little. Hoa's got Waylon in her arms. She eats eggs.
Forget what I'm
supposed to do
or be or know.
"I'm not an archive,"
to quote a famous
philosopher.
That ol' drag
Mnemosyne
give it a rest
already.
Sometimes it's enough
pulling goose grass
from my shoe laces.
OOLONG STEAMS IN a small Chinese cup. Cool, moist breeze out. Rain threatens and the sky's pink, luminous with the city's deflected light. Sycamore limbs tremble in silhouette. K comes to me smelling of shit. "Papa, change my diaper," he says. Okay, sure—and an enormous cockroach greets me in the bathroom when I go to rinse the turd. Whack it with The Nation, leaving streaks on a green wall. Follow the crippled bug on green tile for the death blow and sweep it into the toilet. There are stains on the bowl. The grout's brown. Smells like a truck stop. How'd I let it get this way? The cat scratches to be let in. A siren blasts down MLK. Spiderwort blossoms purple above dense green growth in the unkempt yard. This soggy spring saturates everything—the air we breathe, my skin, the cats' flea-ridden fur, chalked-on sidewalks, mud and pebbles tracked in on my boots, a tiny yellow blossom on the winter jasmine, thick car dirt, my itching shoulder blade and my elbow cracked yesterday on a door frame. "Regular Kiss," K says, after I playfully blow a raspberry full on his lips. His hands are on my neck, insistent. He's intent to absorb our ritual embraces.
A POSSUM GREETS me in the driveway. Lifts its nose into headlights before waddling off in shadows. I bring K out to look for it. We sense nothing but moist spring air and the rustling of new elm leaves. The sky reflects a pinkish orange light and no stars are visible. It's a quiet night. We're broke—end of month. Hoa's body heals. We sit tight, listen to crickets and eat what others kindly prepare for us. Django Reinhardt plucks a vibrant guitar beat. Coleman Hawkins' full buttery sax sound opens the kitchen this evening, moths flitting in a light. Imagine a wide-open Midwest dance hall. That mid-century baritone fills the place—a Coca-Cola world of men and women feeling their bodies. Hands and machines and each other, the force of night between them with music opening through blood the corny rhythms of Kansas City. What appetite of the imagination made such a place? such a music? Jazz found America like the Loa came into Haiti. Possession of flesh and bone, hot breath in brass to embody the invisible pulse migrations of climate and atmosphere. Open a cold beer. K holds a book for me to read. Exhausted from the day. Coins in my pocket. He fingers a penny. Spins it on the wood floor midst dust bunnies and cat hair. Played this music when Waylon was born. Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter, Art Tatum, Tiny Grimes. "I Surrender Dear." "Under a Blanket of Blue."
LAST THING I do is mouth off to some Joe I'm a writer. Someone finds this out and next they want it legitimized. "What university do you work for?" they say. "You write for the papers? Does Random House publish you?" What arrogance, this vanity of the word! Deep down it's a question of authority. What outside the institution gives me the right to say anything at all? Never mind opinions zip by through casual conversations like mosquitoes in spring twilight. Who doesn't take advantage of the citizen ear? The Legitimate—these servants of The One City—seek power and manipulation. They hold their security over your doubts. They prey on your contradictions and dismay with disinterested, ironical sneers. They preach social values and duties but practice mutilation on what they most fear. They pray for order and straight sex, but jack off over a splintered cross, leather bankbook or dog-eared Homo Academicus. They are not individual. They are one. A dead god replaces language with delicate gestures no one fails to misread. There's no ecstasy of bodily spasm, a quick spray of heat to shatter the walls guarding these mammalian appetites. They hide from the stone, refusing to believe it receives sacrifice. Closed eyes in secret State sex. Children of the Globe greet them at the Border. Loosen a tie, undo a belt. Pants down. Red sky peeps through curtain seams. The Sonora desert hides the actual bodies. The literal surrounds us everywhere.
I GAVE HOPE to a crushed rock desert flowing with beer and fried chicken and illuminated images neoning the formless nighttime horizon. I was weak, but now I'm determined, strengthened by what I found when I opened my words from the corpse I carry around, petrified and perfumed so that it seems living—a seeming life. The body's flayed on a black stone by angels of the fields and the betrayed angels of the beasts I found on the living stone shined out with lust. I used to be weak, but now these global displays don't fool me. The bodies of fishermen and weavers—whole villages—lie rotting with flies in blood and bloated bellies burst with soft little thud-like sounds before black intestines begin to ooze. Inhale the burning ember fumes of Polis. Al-Khuds, the international Zombie City, spreads over the earth, securing our corpses. Zaka abandons the fields. Walls surround the little sylvan groves where once stony herms observed the quiet vicissitudes of the day. Dare I call on Gy, the warrior, or Damballah-Wedo, the snake god, to avenge the vast appetites of the One City? Or is it enough, administered thus, paying off these servants of the demiurge one bill at a time? Ezra Pound was a nut—okay, but. In this he was right: World guv is a crock. "OU TIS / a man on whom the sun has gone down…"
TAPED TO THE LOCALLY owned bookstore's a petition against The Patriot Act. Think of how hopeful I've been for this social entity: USA. There's a thin edge between the known and unknown, and the self's that limit stretched between. Lift your feet, get moving. One step after another. Untangle thickets of syntax. Slash and burn the semantic spins.
Bad Thing
lives here.
He's hunting
fresh meat
without
word care.
The ground's unclean. It receives empty, wordless shells. Men in machines cut into the street. One holds a sign above a hole: "Stop." He turns it and I read, "Slow." Proceed with caution, catching an eye, disheveled hair in my rear-view mirror. My face, a quick fragmented glimpse, comes out among jack hammers and oak trees. A plastic bag tangles in yellow lantana. Later, pour a cold glass of beer. Obey decayed appetites like memories inherited genetically, not lived. Shadow creatures live here, like beasts from a zombie movie stalking red dusk highways.
HOA AND KEATON are making a snake hat out of colored construction paper. Waylon naps in his bouncy chair, the little cherub, plump and pink. The day dissolves. K hops like a rabbit, shirtless, diaper sticking out of his jeans. And I drink strong oolong tea. It's dark now outside, and there's laundry to bring in off the line. The dishes are clean though, and I steal these moments to write, free of the day's mundane gravity, its irritating beauty and sweetness, and hard ugly edges. To be in Art without that tugging need to perform or create something suitable to others. I'm free of it—in prose's rate and measure. The dead god can't reach me here from his cold, spirit-dead world. Language moves by image, an instantaneous transmission of these perceptions. The small nothing moments pass through us here forming inner lives. They are beyond us. Not personal, but stand out in that wild unconscious surge to become translated new. To tend these passages of quiet pleasure or routine after-dinner digesting. And under it you-know-what holds firm—obsidian, inert coil.
A GREY CAT sniffs the gutter across the street. Grackles make noise in a chinaberry as the fridge's humming kicks in. Outside plants are animated by a strong breeze.
Watch these
days, head
in the crook
of her arm.
Fan spins.
Persimmon branches
catch a breeze
to scratch the bedroom
window.
Watch these days.
Fan spins.
He's hooked
in the crook
of her arm.
Here's the sequence of the stone: black, yellow, red, green and, finally, blue. The babe's pink face shines.
DREAMING LAST NIGHT of cold sea air. The country was saturated with a coastal system, and the smell of the ocean spread far into the Rockies, beyond the Plains and south, here, to Texas. This morning the air is much colder, but it doesn't carry with it the sea. When the breeze shifts to the southeast you can smell the Gulf of Mexico. But it's usually warm, torpid air then, not the air of my dream. Now Hoa rests, reading a magazine. K watches Blue's Clues on TV as Waylon sleeps. I drink coffee, a few moments alone. Books are scattered under papers on the kitchen table. Grey light comes through the front window and tiny red salvia blossoms bend with the breeze. Neighbors dump their bulk trash for tomorrow's collection: iron rails, toilets, a dryer, black chair, lawn equipment, random boards, sheet rock, metal pieces and wire. First full day of spring, a quiet house without even the sound of its pulsing this morning. Listen to the coffee go down, the sound of my swallowing stretched from throat to ears. Breakfast dishes dry on the rack. Some days the black stone remains hidden. You don't want to break your head on it. Brew Hoa's lemon balm tea. A cedar waxwing suddenly flashes by, green, brown and grey. Eyes blink behind a narrow mask.
THAT PART OF him I can't see enters the part of me he can't see. We know each other there, held in this darkness as old friends who have known each other but since lost the need of anything to say. Stripped of these bodies we continue remembering what it was to be exposed and dependent to survive so many. He is manifest and disappearing. Snail on the windowsill, a light rain soaks.
Rocking my knees.
Hey, Diddle, Diddle…
Hey, Willie Winkie…
Cold rain comes
down from yellow sky.
A burp, a sigh.
Watch his lids
close the world again.
HIS EYES ARE dark, inquisitive. He purses his lips then opens them, driving a finger through his mouth. Little red blotches spot his skin, a pink-red smooth surface on his cheeks and nose. His cord stub dropped of and I buried it in mulch under a rose bush (Felicity). His hair's reddish blond and he moves his head with neck muscles unusually strong for his age—six days. He nurses with the conviction of his cells. Every instinct reaches to survive this vulnerability. Outwardly radiant, he casts a luminous glow through blood vessels close to his skin, and he darkens the private interior corridors of my inanimate stone selves.
Hear water
on the roof.
Watch it leak
under an eave
by a window
in my room.
The babe
and me.
And water
on the roof.
WATCH MORNING CHILDREN programs after dishes, the day grey with damp sidewalks and heavy air. This after 20 minutes of NPR relating the Administration's peace keeping agenda with Biblical authority. Look at these lovely things, a plum tree in blossom or a sleeping child and his ma. Not much happening today. A dry narrative, this subjective tale of disfigurement and growth. A purple dinosaur filters through the decayed archives of my brain. Learn what to leave out. Carry a little piece of stone in my pocket. Turn it in my fingers. Others come out to play with it too. They dance on it or spin off the top of its obsidian surface. Obsius found one in Africa, said Pliny—Obsianus. Some mask it with ideals like adularia, but negative sources are exposed to expert investigators. Look at this dancing dinosaur. What evil dick invented this? And what fool needs to ask? The technology interacts in waves of cognition. Images lodge in soft tissue, provoking cells to respond. Delighted laughter shrieks from my son. He jumps up on the bed, pointing. "Look at that," he says. "What's he doing?" Barney carries a basalt block. Drops it on a child's bunny, the guts and blood oozing out from under. Next he throws a child roughly on the stone, releasing a putrid keen. Saurian saliva drips from dagger-like incisors. Strike my little stone 'til sparks fly.
TAKE TEA IN a little cup. A letter from a friend arrives with haiku translations of Hosai: "Wetting the daybreak trees, and gone, the rain." I like this despite the clumsy, enjambed phrase. Suzie, our midwife, pricked Waylon's heel, squeezing blood onto little circles printed on a card. Some days are mundane and lonely. They leave me rootless and unwound. Absorb these hours, every image in the making of us. Spirit, or whatever animating feature you want to call it, is in blood, stone, soil and trees. Why should it be otherwise? We reach these material surfaces, and it's enough, to be here attached by skin that doesn't hold all the way. The yellowing grass passes into shade cast by the southeast side of the house. Hoa opens gifts for Waylon. Redbud blossoms float pink on grey branches and the purple blue sky fades out below them making faint streaks in the distance. Heard a woodpecker's thrilling call and starlings gathered in a walnut tree. The garden soil receives late light. Moist and black it pushes out new green herbs: mint, lemon balm and comfry. "Papa, can you open this?" K comes to me with bubbles. Evening shadows troll the yard while two neighbor girls abandon pouring dirt into bright plastic buckets. They join us to watch bubbles float and burst in the breeze. "Crazy bubbles," K says running through a phalanx of translucent creatures.
HEY CRACK-IN-THE-CLOUD
sunshine shine on down
on me, on us—
here's a little world
bright between spring storms.
Toss cracked eggshells
with coffee grounds
gooey on the damp
dump of hot decay.
Squash grows up from the compost.
Here's a sponge, a dirty rag.
Ajax the kitchen tile and
vacuum the room's webs.
Beat brown rugs on a line
next to wet sheets
And yellow blossoms
stand out on the air.
Pale plum petals die
and bees buzz around.
Jets spray fuel up there.
"ENLIGHTENMENT IS: DO what
you want
eat what there is…"
—Jack Kerouac
Bananas go bad on the table and there's a bag of rotten broccoli in the sink for composting. Cooked burgers for lunch. (Grass fed, free range). Got Hot Tot K to eat rice crackers and goat cheese—a minor feat of patience. Sixty per cent of Americans are over-weight, warned NPR last week. Saw on TV inside Donald Trump's pantry where there he stored Ragoo spaghetti sauce jars and Campbell's soup. I was a fat kid. Gorged on pies and Hostess refined flour, gumming my teeth with sweets and soft drinks. Now it's beer and coffee keeps me thin.
There's too much food.
So what
do I do?
Give it away
to maggots and worms.
Whatever it is
breeds warm
in the sweet smelling macro-
cosmic earth.
DOVES COO OUT across the distance and a bell rings from an ice cream cart off down another street. The house hums its quiet afternoon electronic knowledge. By contrast, I don't know a thing, still groggy from a ten-minute nap. Carried Waylon room-to-room last night, 4 a.m. He was gassy and not burping 'til later when finally he curled into Hoa, reaching with his mouth for her breast. Now he sleeps with K. Hoa pays bills. African-American men work on a truck engine across the street in the humid air. Last night a storm hit with wide blue lightning flashes and rain streaked headlights with nearly horizontal yellow sheets. I wanted K to sleep, as the movement of the car often encourages this. The pounding rhythm came down hard, the road barely visible. Branches fell and water pooled up orange and dirty by a stop sign under one old oak in French Place and the tail lights and head lights of cars dashed out suddenly illuminating signals through the wet reflecting moving surfaces of the animated streets. K's eyes closed slowly, his head dropping to his shoulders. Now someone cranks up R & B through car speakers, the heavy bass line beating out sexy rhythms. The grass grows thick and green, children sleeping, bills paid. Hardly notice the black stone round my neck.
CHIRRING CRICKETS, PORCH light on now. Pizza hot from the oven. The house settles into a quiet of electric appliances and other outdoor noises of the neighborhood. A car door slams shut, neighbors smoke and talk by a bank of jasmine, sound of a saw blasts from the distance, somewhere else an engine turns over and men walk to a brown Olds parked these many years in a drive across the street. K won't eat no pizza, preferring instead rice sticks and raisins. And here we are with each other living in a dream of the end of the world of men at the beginning of things brand new. Listen to these crickets and the breeze on new opening oak leaves and a bright unfolding of blossoms on the redbud. The billions of gods and demons we bring stand on a petal of plum white falling in last week's slow drizzle. I see that plum white drift clearly still, thick wet blossoms like snow on the pink granite path. Owl feet. Kestrel. Voice of a jay in its cage at the Nature Center. Little beasts penned in a projection of forms dark and startling. The array of every day brings us here again, washed new by night's sleep or an afternoon nap, not eating pizza but holding instead a blue cup of water. He drinks from it, pressing it tight to his face.
AFTERNOON SOL, SUNLIGHT on the fence. Clouds cracked to let in blue sky on spring yellow blossoms. A cool breeze enters the house as sleep takes Waylon, eyes moving under his lids. The green sheets wrap him and Hoa's breasts fall out of her gown, one brown nipple still wet with a recent sucking.
And finally after
all these hours
piss on the sheets
rejoice!
Aznar loses the vote in Spain. Zapatero promises to pull troops from Washington's Crusade. Reminds me of the joke by a U.S. general: "Going to war without France is like going on a hunt without your accordion." Crusades, accordions—I still need gas for the car. Blast down Texas roads. "They think we're gonna take it," shouts the redneck radio host, "but they've got it wrong. America's under siege by corporate elitists and their puppet governments. It's a globalist agenda designed to take over our lives. People, wake up! We know how they torture the innocent. We know how they want to steal our children and take our guns for our own good. But we've got to stand up to their crass tactics. We're not their slaves. Wake up, people! Wake up!"
READ THOREAU, KEROUAC. A few lines, a paragraph. One word, or phrase, at a time, attention splintered. A book's a dream or journey out of here, this gorgeous mundane sludge of wet sky. Look around. Casually follow a train of thought toward a unique abstraction: America. Living as if under siege, hidden by new purchases. Assaulted by food and gadgets, the rain comes like an acid spray to pull our flesh back. Melt like salted slugs. Shed skin or die, reptilian and cold, and then enter a new world in these forming days. Last night a grackle corpse rotted on a Blockbuster sidewalk, its black neck feathers caught in a strong breeze. It lay inert, decomposing in a neon-reflected puddle of light. Curiously, the wind lifted those feathers, revealing a rotting underside as others slammed car doors, blue light shifting off the store door swinging open and closed. Orange sky. Utility transformers. Now sidewalk chalk dissolves in rain. Grass grows thick. I keep looking this black stone square. Hold Waylon while K and Hoa bathe in a tub of herbs, K splashing excited and somewhat deranged by the trauma of this other creature. Walk the morning kitchen with the babe close to me. His eyes are closed and his skin pink. He puts a finger in his mouth. His beautiful lips frown. This is how the world begins, with delicate, desperate sounds. His face wrinkles and reddens as a blast of gas buzzes my fingers. Human embodiment of energy.
TEA. DISHES. PUT eggs away. Hoa and Waylon nap in another room. Got Sonic Youth on the CD player. Waylon Jennings too. K plays with his blocks. The day's grey again, middle month. He knocked heads with the babe last night. Yowling penetrated the house. Cooked burgers and washed dishes. There's cat puke on the windowsill. Crumbs in corners. Keep the dishes clean. Paper chains hang in doorways. The neighbors left pizza and a bowl of irises. And I've got two eyeballs on this all. The material function strikes with relentless vigor. But when I stand back the laws of physics cease to apply. This thing, my "self," moves through, quite apart, attendant to these domestic relations. K enters his growing and divers worlds. Spinning, he dances with people I can't see. The black stone today's amorphous, a gas that spreads and reforms in us solid. The sun's black behind those clouds and we haven't seen a moon in days.
BLUE LIGHT DEFINES the black outlines of limbs and powerlines. K woke about four a.m., restless. Now another damp day comes upon us. Towels and diapers are hung on every corner and rack of the house. Waylon nurses, sleeps and pees. Bravo, sir! Hoa rests. I see her in the half-light of the new day; my meager breakfast of eggs kindly received. The earth binds us. A mockingbird this morning began its loud call just before first light.
Our measure
finds us
we go with it
where
we don't
know.
No sleep, feeling raw, but the day's humming and brighter light breaks through thin clouds. Hard to believe they'll go away, these sure and steady days. There are sparks in the marigolds. Water collects on thyme and cilantro. Black soil, wet grass. Wipe Hoa's hair from her forehead.
WAYLON HART ARRIVED in creamy vernix. Now he sleps and K plays in bed with Hoa. The rain comes light and then heavy, a day of steady drizzle. 3:52 p.m. he came, crying out before completing his womb exit. Now he's calm, quietly wrapped in a blanket. He pissed and soiled the sheets with rich black excrement, adjusting as he can to this suddenly new world. Friends came to watch Keaton. Others brought food. Drank a couple of beers. Washed dishes. Made tea. Tended Hoa and Hart. She delivered with full devout courage, to quote a friend, the babe coming quickly. A little pumpkin head with the face of a bruiser. There's music in the house and it's dark out. Played with K in his room a while, easing him through the stress of new life—the intrusive awakening coming to him. And even this lovely moment, even in the midst of this renewed hope, even now I can't help but know the black stone's great gripping gravitas. Its measure runs through, marking our green hope and great care. Sweep mud clods off the floor. Take K in the rain for ice cream hoping he'll fall asleep. The moon hides behind clouds. The sky moves in the lights it bends back down on our little family. Quiet now, K resting. Hoa sips tea, looks at me.
BRIGHT YELLOW BLOSSOMS float on a primrose jasmine's tangle of foliage. Grey mist turning to light rain. Ground coffee beans and poured hot but not boiling water into a glass canister. Makes good, strong coffee. Suddenly I'm reminded of Hemingway's relish for sensual details. The taste of food and drink, or the complex social rituals of consumption. He possessed a vivid appetite. And now Hoa says she feels something, surges coming every ten minutes or so. The linea negra separates her belly into two spheres. She inspires me with her lovely, fierce determination. K cries in protest and fear. Outside power lines crisscross a silver sky. Or perhaps it's a gunmetal sky there behind a thick range of pecan and hackberry branches. A friend wants to know the names of the tools of our utility grid, much as an amateur ornithologist desires knowledge of birds. She wants the name of each individual wire and bolt. What rocks mix into the asphalt or concrete? Where is metal smelted for our cars, or the screws and nails that keep our houses and furniture together? Do people still even smelt? Smelters the OED calls them. What plastic makes this pen? Which chemicals blacken its ink? And the surges continue. A strong cramping force brings out this earth-bound creature.
THERE ARE PLACES along Town Lake where poison ivy grows thick as a man's arm along cypress and hackberry hedges. A dense tangle of green obscures the light at points. Near the base of a giant cypress, where brown water slowly moves at the woody base, an untended park bench provides repose and a view of sky and water. It's dedicated to a deceased son—I forget the name now. Quiet there, off the main trail, small water lilies grow up in the murk and the muddy steps leading down to it rise steeply off behind. Walked down there after a train-ride through the park. The earth-bound babe will make its way into our bed soon. K this morning watched Teletubbies and Sesame Street, attention flat and total in the rhythms of the cathode ray. Hoa cooked eggs and toast, her belly hanging low under a hooded sweatshirt. Feral cats gathered for their breakfast of protein pellets. The black stone remains below us, under the surface of these days. It intrudes upon these apparancies. Keep moving, one step into another. A delicate motion of light reflected from a creek bed. We went around with other children on a small train, back through a tunnel to re-enter the park. Pink light on the water's surface.
WAITING FOR THIS labor, we read books or play with K in the park. Blew dandelions yesterday, watching the tiny hair-like pieces disperse in the wind and into our hair and faces. Ate ice cream and walked under a canopy of juniper and oak along a pink granite path in Zilker park. Above us jets released white exhaust on a blue sky. K walked along, grew tired and demanded to be carried. He lives in words and imagination, pointing out the geometric shapes he sees. We sang together the alphabet song. Alone last night, reading The Education of Henry Adams, I got a sense of a kind of tendance. Dug into that secular power of observation, not restrained by the cold habits of religious binding. Such affinities are built on the solid base of the black stone. What comes into our world from that other will find this sunlight, an increasing relation by physical molecules and words. Earlier, there were mallards and wood ducks at the Central Market pond. We stood on a footbridge throwing bread into the dark green water. Reeds grew along the banks. There were men in canoes pruning back the cattails and water lilies. Turtles sunned on rocks.