The sun comes out for a couple of minutes – we were up at daybreak (the dog and I) along with the fishermen. When the siren goes off everyone begins casting flies. And in the evening when the siren sounds everyone wades back out of the stream below the trout hatchery. What sport is there in catching a fish that is used to grabbing anything that enters the water? Its not getting them to bite that is difficult it is reeling them in on a two-pound test line or less. There are sportsmen who even use thread. They won’t bite if they can see the line. The hatchery releases 12.5 trout for each tag sold that day. They all stand in the water with the big bold black numbers of their daily tag clearly showing.. A cool damp breeze begins to blow.
Breakfast – bacon, fried potatoes, a scrambled egg with coffee and salsa and a sliced banana – it has become the morning ritual – walk the dog, put on the coffee, take my pills, brush my teeth. It is good to have a routine that doesn’t vary so early in the morning. It is all of the routine that I can stand. One gets into habits that seem to become ruts, then one finds new roads to travel. It always seems to turn out this way.
Saints, like revolutionaries, walk headlong into the cold, dry wind, are always serving a hidden flame, are terrifying because of what they do not need – Stephen Dunn – What Goes On: selected and new poems, 2009 p52
Get mad
Burn the house
Down
Get angry
Lash out
Live to regret
But Goddamit!
Now that did
Feel good, didn’t it?
Rage takes the opposite path of cosmology – E M Cioran – A Short History of Decay, 1975 p42
I am sitting in the recital room at the Hotel Rex in the back of the room, more to gawk at the audience then to listen to the music. These are refined gentlemen and ladies (you can tell I am not or I would have written ladies and gentlemen if I had been nor would I have taken notice of them as you never notice your own kind or at least you pretend that you don’t) Tweed coats carefully fingering the their glasses of chardonnay and conducting well mannered and quite one-on-one conservations (no yelling across the room – Maud! Over here Maud). Oh it’s so genteel. Would the ladies stick their little pinkie in the air if they had been sipping tea and you certainly will not hear any slurping going on here.
You have to wonder when the Chronicle uses as much space to tell you that Zippy is now on Chronicle dot Com as it would have to have just printed Zippy in the first place. The Chronicle has always had a grudge against Zippy. Now they seem to be saying that only nerds read Zippy and nerds after all prefer soft to hard copy. I have made a point of tracking down all of the doggy diners still in existence (of course they are no longer doggie diners anymore – I think there are only two of the edifices remaining).
Somebody has to drive the spike, / pitch the gears, / oil the cams. / Somebody has to kill the whiskey. / Somebody has to speak. / What are the facts? – Carl Rokosi – Amulet, 1947 p16
The tragedy of society
Is the each individual
Must discover for himself
The TRUTH
There are no trail breakers
For a world without utility
When man becomes fully conscious of his powers, his role, his destiny; he is an artist and he ceases his struggle with reality. He becomes a traitor to the human race – Henry Miller – The Wisdom of the Heart, 1960 p4
The sun is trying to come out – the dark clouds move east wads – low and furiously
We experience the fever of our duration as an eternity which falters but which nonetheless remains unexhaustible in its principle – E M Cioran – A Short History of Decay, 1975 p59
The truck needs a tune up – do the whole shebang – plugs, wires, distributor. Are all the parts available? Yes. How much? I hate to go ahead and do something without looking at it first. Well, it will eventually have to be replaced down the road anyway, so it might as well be done now. So do it all. He looked it up on his computer and gave me a price. $265. He could have it finished my mid-afternoon, he said. He was working on a transmission that needed to be finished first. Go ahead, I said. I took the dog for a walk. How far is downtown, I asked. The whole town is only about a mile across, I was told, and we are on the outskirts. It didn’t take me long to see all the sights. Everything went right for the mechanic and I was out of town and headed to the next campground before noon.
Rent a flatbed with a winch. / With the right leverage / anything can be hoisted, driven off. // Or the man with a Bobcat comes in, / then the hauler with enormous truck. / A leveler or a lawyer does the rest; // experts always are willing to help – Stephen Dunn – What Goes On: selected and new poems, 2009 p120
So here I am in the Army no less
Stuck on/in a fortified hill post
Miles from anywhere
Just me and the officer
In charge of this supply depot
Large dark planes fly over
And drop paratroopers
With black parachutes
They are agilely maneuvering their chutes
Forming up into platoons and squadrons
Up there in the early morning air
I scramble to the top of the hill to
The supply warehouse to get
My rifle with its golden
Oak butt stock
The chutes are descending rapidly
Coming down into the valley
I punch repeatedly the page bell
“What’s all the racket about – It
Better be damn good or someone
Is going to get their ass kicked”
“Sir, there are paratroopers descending”
“God damn it son, can’t you see that
They are ours. It can’t be the enemy
An alarm would have gone off.”
“There wasn’t an alarm at Pearl Harbor
Either, Sir!”
“Well that can’t happen now-a-days”
And he went back to bed
I threw up my hands and quickyly
Surrendered. Better than an
Ass kicking
Because he overflows with life, the Devil has no altar: man recognizes himself too readily in him to worship him; he detests him for good reason… But the Devil never complains and never aspires to found a religion – E M Cioran – A Short History of Decay, 1975 p21
“Trespassers will be shot. Their dogs will be too.” He’s an asshole, said the toothless man on his ATV quad with his wife (a woman at least) seated behind him. At least he advertises it, I said. He had gotten broken into while he was gone and only then did he put up that sign, she said. I guess the sign works, I said. It sure scared me off. After that I wasn’t about to camp anywhere in these hills except in a designated campground, especially since it was impossible to tell the difference from private and national forest land.. Yeah, the man said, he’s an asshole. He still has a dispute going with me, trying to claim part of my land and he did the same with the Forest Service.
I’m not interested in what the public thinks. Nobody is – not even the public. Except pollsters and market research agencies (and they only do it for the money). Not even the public is interested in what the public thinks. That’s why they are listening to the radio and not stopping to inquire of one another in the street – Edward Doax – Prospect (Sept 2009)
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