scrubbed and sour with sleep

another perpetual and unanswerable morning. i am leading an imagined and unbeginnable life.

woke before the alarm repeatedly, blearing at the sun in the shades and doing nothing, turning over, sleeping more, curving body and curling self into someone not there. fell asleep late after pushing and pushing into more and more sylvia plath, who writes disturbing things about her mother now, and discovered ted had an affair, probably. the fallibility of men. but i felt a hand on my hip the whole time while i read, and i read parts of it out loud. if you heard me. if.

on the radio an l.a. critic was discussing the new print of apocalypse now (redux) and how stunning the colors are now. and added scenes "resetting its internal clock". remembering senior year and post seven brides being dragged along to dominic's house with jr and kara and horror upon horror unable to concentrate on the screen although desperately wanted to watch it: the nightmare of them on the couch was too much. why did we turn it off? in my memory it is because the force of my discontent shattered all the windows.

spoke with jennie for an hour last night, my faraway and genius lovely girl. she says she is alright but i keep my fingers crossed for her. just in case. her advice spurred me to condense all weary and unfocused thought into two polar opposite ideas with one caveat:

1. i can go. i should go. i ought to go. what is stopping me? at worst i stand to risk complete rejection, loss of a beautiful and wordy love-affair, and also the friendship of a boy i have known hardly more than a week.

2. i can not go. this is as much a decision as a negation. in deciding to not go: i can protect everything. vital bits, self-image, brink of depression, etc. then i suffer the inevitable petering out of said love-affair, killed by too much teoria not enough practica, and also the ensuing years of doubting what-ifs and never knowing.

although perhaps august is a closed month to me, it is not so long a month and at the end of it i have two roads open. one leads firmly airport-wise and is the more frightening, the other is the same road i always walk, back home. i am not truly tied to this city. life easily transports with minimal fuss across seas. londonward. where did the plain road get me six years ago? not to seattle.

caveat: a passport is, apparently, an easy and swift thing to renew.

aphrodite on the stereo.

sunday i did all my laundry before going to the poetry exchange group. in the laundromat were a mother and daughter who spoke insistent and serious spanish the entire time. i didn't understand a word but couldn't stop listening. but oh-- the daughter was achingly beautiful. long and tan legs, ageless perfect skin, long black hair. slumbering coal and fire eyes, flashing everywhere like hummingbirds. an ordinary beauty that fascinated me. sprawled in the chair next to me between shifting scrubbing folding bleaching wringing the laundry i pretended to read liddie newton and just watched the crook of her knee in fascination. the curve of the tendon under the skin. her eyes caught mine looking at her from all the way across the laundromat and i feigned momentariness, scanning the dryers for finished loads. businesslike and informal they supervised nine or ten simultaneous loads continuously.

in the sodden haze of cambridge august heat i walked to the coop and threaded through unending tourist crowds (why always southerners?) to the corner. neil was there already and seemed more relaxed. i tried to get some information from him, but all i learned is that he isn't a professor, in fact disdains the usual academia, and instead reads voraciously on his own. no word of a job. intensely likes the sox but preferred poetry this afternoon. kept directing his comments at me.

the infamous and before-absent richard was there to lead this time. he is an old old man with white hair, a long white gandalf beard. athletic in a calm and guru-like way, the way i imagine an old yoga master might be. smooth and hairless limbs. kept his sneakers off the whole time and rested his adorable feet on the chair rung. a tendency to branch off into elaborate and not entirely important stories. redfaced and brash-voiced man joking about the chairs: "richard is a yale man." he opened with a somewhat lengthy and tangential discussion on meter, which bored me. allan and neil continued to open disturbingly random topics, swerving left and right until the woman opposite me (tan smooth shoulders, walks with a limp) began to steer them back again.

so we read gerard manly hopkins' god's grandeur which i did not recognize until halfway through, and at that point i almost wanted to recite it with richard's deep and wood-rich voice. the dove with ah! bright wings, indeed. i am a sucker for that poem. i spouted forth about melody and tone at the woman when she criticized it as overdone and suddenly felt Old Establishment, but never mind. less to unpack than last week's poem, but still a good discussion. why do i feel in my naivete that i understand poetry better than all ten other people? at heart-core i am in hopkins' shoes.

there followed a surprisingly stafford-esque poem from allan, typical and unfortunate trite ending, though. then i passed out my blackout poem. ah, discontent, old friend. when i read it i immediately felt all wrong, voice-tone scratched, parched, unsonorous, unfeeling, unmelodic. when i finished, the dark wide abyss of disgust and dissatisfaction bloomed upward. listened to the woman call me archaic three or four times, which made me hate her intensely. otherwise, guy on my right had good things to point out about my grammar inconsistencies, and complimented my natural meter and feel, and richard puzzled and mused over the wording of the last line, the precise meaning of it. the woman and the guy next to her i caught staring at me oddly, as if trying to get me to respond. they must have asked a question while i listened to neil's prattling on to richard, and i looked like a stupid blank colt as i asked them to sorry, repeat that? was distinctly and humbly unimpressed with the group dynamic. never and impossible to follow the precise beauty of eleanor's class.

man on my right with the unmemorable name read a sweet and well-turned piece about an amsterdam klipper. concluding two lines were good, the rest of it could stand some shortening, though. his poem was the most consistent, although his lisp continues to annoy the piss out of me. before we started he had quizzed me quizzically on comparative literature and what exactly that was, and was disturbed to discover that moby dick was not required reading in the department. he affects a constant sea-knowledge that is half charming and half presumptuous. minutes later he was still thinking about it and questioned me on the african diaspora, at which point i was thoroughly annoyed and no longer interested in explaining how little i knew how to define comparative literature.

that woman (who is so unmemorable i always forget she is there) with her scarred cheeks and unsure haircut, read another incomprehensible poem on death and mourning. "grief less bleeding" and other similar constructions puzzled me. i enjoy her work because she is such an interesting study, her hands and lips pale and reading the poem as if she does not remember her own words.

then the woman across from me read her stripped-down poem which was mildly good, but a trite "daddy" ending that annoyed me. in retaliation for her repetitive archaic comments i refused to comment on her poem, stubborn childish me. she projects a constant mild-soap attitude. a lukewarm assitant-professor aura. like an unhelpful jacobson center aide. i was annoyed intensely.

we ran over by a half-hour looking at neil's example of a religious litany poem (prayer=something understood) and i skipped out early. the high point of all this was that i looked in my address book and discovered what has been making the coop doors beep security alarms at me. i had put in there a sticker, a circuit from a library book i'd found. i left it in the bathroom and escaped silently through the doors. the walk home was pleasantly quiet and traffic minimal through the leafy campus. i enjoy this summer which is two-thirds over and still feel the city is not mine. the quieted sidewalks are littered with tree seeds, helicopter seeds, fallen blooms and wilted weeds. the august heat droops over the bricks and the low and darkened sun flickered on a chrome fender like a dying lightbulb, my shadow long and slow before me like a pool i could fall into.

suggesting. backing away.

in and skin: the chrome fender, the flickering bulb.

applied forces distance/time and momentum. and inertia. physics and the art of suspension.

thinking. no, dreaming. pushing it. pushing it. pushing
it.

in a bind. in a blind. sideswept. overturned/upturned. losing the moon trajectory. the linear arc in the sky and the platonic planes. inability to conjecture.

forces of perfection, or absorption. pulling it out. drawing it out. up to the surface. the vein the skin.


[and all this coalesces pools condenses on the oxide rich air and in my red rich lungs.]