Susanna Stole the Elder's Mule - Took it for a Ride on an Elevator

A disembodied voice keeps repeating “Elevator coming” but noting happens until almost two minutes later – which is a long time in a conversation for nothing to happen – is this a conversation?  The car with its lighted cage descended. It stopped and its doors opened, then they closed. It is waiting. Someone with a bicycle pushes the button and the voice intones “Elevator called” and the door opened wide as if it knew that the man had a bicycle and that he wanted to take with him on the train. The cage ascends and the shaft goes dark. “Elevator coming”, I hear again and the lighted cage descends. I’m waiting for the Pittsburgh/Bay Point train, which is due in one minute. The cage ascended empty. I get on the train and plunged under the bay.

Susanna and the Elders by Thomas Hart Benton -
       … and there was something about a pair of mules
            which was what my grandfather did
                Made a living matching mules
            And Benton was a Missourian too
           My grandmother smoked a corncob pipe
               Like MacAuthur did and my father
               Watched him come ashore, Oh well


She said that she liked to watch me shave
She had liked to watch as her father did
           When she was a little girl


And when she quit getting excited by my small gifts
           She also stopped watching me shave
I liked to watch her bath. I sat on edge of the tub
           And we talked and it had noting to do with my mother
                   
But she said that it made her feel self-conscious
Everything then just started to get
           Too damn fucked up


(When you’re in love you’re so goddamn self-conscious
            That your skin crawls – it becomes an addiction -
            but it may cause skin cancer it turns out)


Then she started informing me of what she had
            Put on lay-away and that I was to buy for her
She was very busy now and I was not to just drop by
            Any old time


There were a lot of things she needed to do
And she said she had little patience for any of my nonsense


I lost track of her, heard she had gotten married
            Some sailor that she had meet at the beach
            On a vacation to the coast


I still get a tightness of the groin splashing in water
Getting the mules to furrow a straight path is difficult
             It all seems so strange – even yesterday

Tears are round, the sea is deep, / Roll them overboard and sleep – W H Auden

It’s the serendipitous connections that make reading memorial especially if you read ten books simultaneously ten pages at a time – repeatedly discovering the same obscure words, unknown authors repeatedly cited, scenes taking place six blocks from where you sit – I just watched a rerun of that movie on tv. And when it happens repeatedly you start looking for logical connections – some significance – any significance. And it is the stretching of relationships and the denial of coincidence that causes us to invent what had not been preexistent, what makes life more interesting - good readers bring more to the reading than do good writers – but it takes good writers to get us curious and maintain our attention. Readers reading for meaning (plot for example) never get beyond being manipulated by an author-  which for them is enough. . Icarus depicted by Breughel – two poems – two writers – Auden and WCW. Not just his falling into the ocean but all the activity of the townsfolk – Icarus was (still is) only a tiny figure on the horizon of the canvas.

Dung is informative, complex – full of news flashes from the body’s interior. Shit’s an encyclopedia, volumes of urgent correspondence your organs wrote, if only you knew how to read. What is learned from smelling shampoo? … Washing is book burning – Amy Grestler – Dearest Creature, 2009 p33

The Indian woman sat across from me. She had hands clasped in her lap and kept pounding her thumps down and mouthing words that she silently keep to herself. She sat quietly with her eyes shut, her purse firmly grasped and her legs crossed. Her fringed silver net serape reminded me of conquistador armor. Was it a prayer to the blessed mother or a native incantation, or was she just trying to remember her grocery list. Maybe it was a form of meditation but then I’m getting my Indians mixed-up. She was not that kind of Indian.

The wind blows
        Spicy sheets of water
They race down the street
        Whipped up by chefs


Now it comes pouring down
As to make it hard to see
As if trying to see the cake
        Beneath all of this icing
Isn’t it about time that the groom
        Joined hands with his bride
        And helped her cut a slice
And this their first joint symbolic act
        Kissing does not count
        Unless done in a kitchen

An expert is someone who knows how to properly frame an issue in bureaucratic terms, any issue that lies within their domain of expertise

Re-enacted often enough, everything becomes mundane and your attention is drawn to the esoteric or to the unfamiliar. Constantly ensnaring and reaching beyond, the mind struggles on to both know and to learn. We spent five hours at hashing out a mission statement – it was productive time but a very exasperating experience. Now it is time to spring forward on hour.

Desire need not culminate in sexual intercourse, but may end in production. Not the production of a child or a relationship, but the production of sensations never felt, alignments never thought, energies never trapped, regions never known – Elizabeth Grosz