Hey, do you want to go to the prom with me?  I just lost my pencil.  It fell into the toilet the other night.  But that’s not where I lost it.   I don’t know where I lost it.  So, do you want to go to the prom with me?  Even though it’s not high school and my kids will need looking after, we’ll figure something out.  I’m figuring it out right now by writing a list.  Do you have a pencil?  Don’t answer that if you were only going to answer one of my questions.
               I saw you the other day, but I think water vapor was clogging the air as if the ocean had evaporated.  Through the mist I perceived you, it must have been you, and then something shrouded you- a shaggy, bedewed red-pine bough, a slammed car door, or your own secretive nature, perhaps.  Or maybe it was something about me that made you disappear.  Well, here we are again, starting out like high school sweethearts.  I’ve got some gum.

– Ari Feld

]]> http://cratemfajournal.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/a-conversation-with-someone-i-havent-seen-in-a-while/feed/ 0 cratemfajournal http://cratemfajournal.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/on-difficult-poetry/ http://cratemfajournal.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/on-difficult-poetry/#comments Sun, 07 Sep 2008 21:54:37 +0000 cratemfajournal http://cratemfajournal.wordpress.com/?p=121 ]]>

At night, air remains the same
color, though it becomes more difficult
to see through.

It contains this quavering voice,
released from a radio, dissolved
in strings and the street’s foliage.

I hear only enough to know
it is somewhere
and it sounds,

perhaps, Italian, like any voice
that air can carry and confuse.

Though, perhaps I do the confusing
by straining to make the voice clear.
Certainly, that is no the work of the artist.

– Ari Feld

Before you write a love letter, learn a new language, not to understand the vulnerability of wordlessness, I mean be fretful at dawn in a flurry of words unspoken, I mean find a new alphabet, one which delineates with virgules and diacritics to the heart, throw out phonetics, abandon letters that wail into the night, never imagine this sentence again, abandon sound, I mean find a new system entirely, ideographs that imprison your heart’s spill of ink, abandon your beloved implements for bristle-weeping, choke on smoke signals, smite the light from your eyes, go back to caves where writing was just counting what was owed, don’t forget that, how much your bones were worth in the cold, how there was starvation before there was poetry, cut out your hands if they long to describe things, there is nothing to touch where you are going, blast your ears if they start to hear music, there is no music, remember, no sound, you are dying organ of sense by sense, a full glottal stop, there is no tremble at the back of your throat, not where you are, there is a gag reflex, there is the whole world you want to spit out, there is sticky on the ground, don’t read this coagulation for substance, your phlegm is not communicating, there is no sentiment in lacunae phlegm suspends to not be liquid.

– Kim Hagerich

          In the gallery of eighteenth-century art Mindy squats abruptly, then falls on her rump and lets both legs lie askew on the sleek black marble. Trevor watches, mortified. His fingers drum. Next Mindy tucks one foot up by her crotch, like a runner stretching, and lackadaisically ties a shoe. Her shoes are tattered pink tennies.  Around her courses a nattily attired crowd and nearby stands watch a guard. This is not how one behaves! Trevor feels a headache come on.

He takes a step back, then two more, until he comes to a low granite bench. Here he sits staring into middle space. On the floor? This is just like her. After a while Trevor fishes out of his inner coat a pocket watch, toying with the fob, but does not look at it. Patience, he thinks.

            They’ve been together two months now, Trevor and Mindy, ever since meeting in a night school ceramics class. Trevor had enrolled strictly for relaxation, while Mindy was serious about throwing clay. All her pots though were lopsided. From the first day Trevor had been drawn to Mindy’s blithe eccentricity, her imperviousness to decorum, which from afar looks charming. It is charming, he tells himself, but there are limits. Of course she is so much younger, almost a child – twenty-two. Trevor is forty.

            Trevor is a free-lance writer. It’s haphazard work and ill-paying; debts accumulate. He feels though that he harbors artistic sensibilities. Oils and watercolors, grease rags and brushes litter his garage; his easel he bought on a backpacking trip in Spain. Each year he hangs on the wall an art calendar. Mindy, a recent college graduate, works as a substitute teacher; the grade she likes best is kindergarten. Harry Potter is her favorite book.  On their dates she’ll sometimes read aloud a picture book. This aggravates Trevor. Mindy’s ambition, she’s told him, is to write one – a one-hundred word bestseller.

Trevor is obsessive-compulsive. All day he taps a pattern on his belt with his a forefinger: five taps, three, two, then again. He hopes no one notices. When he’s holding hands with Mindy, he taps on the side away from her. They have not yet slept together. What will happen then? He hopes he won’t drum on her bare pink skin. Driving, he taps on the wheel. Stress makes it worse.

            This Saturday afternoon he has brought her to the Norton Simon, in Pasadena, because he wants to share with her his favorite painting. It hangs in the nineteenth century gallery, among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. The Red Headed Woman in the Garden, by Touilesse-Lautrec. In this gauzy composition a woman stands at a three-quarter angle, her back to the viewer, the brushstrokes rendered with the delicacy of a pastel sketch. Melancholy and muted, it is wholly unlike the artist’s better known canvasses – lurid depictions of clowns, midgets and whores. A sorrowful beauty is what Trevor has always found in this painting; he has not seen it in years. It calms him. And his girlfriend has never been to a museum.

            Now Mindy heaves herself up and, penguin-like, swats her wide hips. Tugs on her tie-dyed tee, her fatigues. Her eyes go all over the room as Trevor takes her hand. Her fingers, surprisingly, are tiny. He loves her fingers, her pale untroubled skin, her sweet-smelling auburn hair, all these things he loves, but he does not love her, although he tells Mindy he does. She tells him the same. Lies sustain them.

            “I embarrass you,” Mindy says.

            This isn’t so, Trevor assures her. But it is so. Mindy’s impetuous zeal does at times make him cringe. When they arrived at the museum, an hour ago, for instance, he asked her where she wanted to go first. Her answer was unsurprising. To the café outside then they hurried to have lunch. Trevor’s girlfriend is chubby.

            She nuzzles his shoulder now as they walk. “You smell like vanilla,” Mindy says.

            “Deodorant,” he says.

            “You put deodorant on your neck? How weird.”

            “It feels good,” Trevor says. He’s dressed in a sports coat, jeans, cowboy boots. A bolo tie. And his wavy black hair is shot through with gray.

            Mindy nuzzles him again. “Women find baby powder more arousing than anything. It’s a … one of those – ”

            “Aphrodisiac.”

            “That’s it,” Mindy says, her head bobbing like a dashboard pug’s. “So now you know.”

            Is Mindy cute or ugly? Trevor does not know. Her ebullient personality lights up her looks like neon in a low rent district, making what’s undesirable alluring. But Mindy is good. This too warps homeliness into something close to beauty. And innocence makes her seem china doll fragile. He tells her she’s adorable. Then he’ll spot jiggling jowls or sweat-darkened underarms. Revulsion, for a moment. Then pity. And yes, affection, that too – but always last.

            Hand-in-hand they move on, but now Mindy leads them in the wrong direction, toward the twentieth century exhibit. Trevor’s temples ache. Behind his eyes a pressure builds like a summer’s T storm. He’s tapping. And as they pass from one gallery to the next Mindy says goodbye to the guard. Who says nothing.

            Mindy has a talent for doing what Trevor wants her not to do. The guard watches them.

            Trevor touches with fingertips each doorway as they go from gallery to gallery, three times, then twists his neck around, his compulsion making him paranoid. He’s given up medication to help bankroll his love-life. He knows the risks – irascibility, mania, hallucinations. Another truth he keeps from Mindy. This exchange, then, equilibrium for companionship, is it wrong?

            Mindy spots his touching ritual. The doorways. “Maybe you need a pill, I think.”

            “What?” Trevor says. “Nonsense. I’ve never been on medication.” How easily lies come to him. The truth is something he shrinks from like finding a moth in a closet. Best to swat it down and shut the door. Anyway a writer trades in falsehoods. His dishonesty, he thinks, is a virtue.

            And then Trevor pulls up, startled. Mindy has reached around with her free hand, bracelets jangling, and thumps his breastbone three times. “Okie dokie,” she says, her voice ironical. What does she know?

            “Quit it.”

            “Touchy,” she says.

            Almost immediately they come upon a bronze on a pedestal. Head of a Jester, by Picasso. The piece consists largely of a rough-hewn and extravagant harlequin’s hat. Spiky. Flared. Inviting. Mindy reaches out to touch it.

            “No!” Trevor says, afraid she’ll tip the thing over. He’s tightly wound, Trevor. He removes his bifocals and thumbs his eyes, left, right, trying to stamp out the escalating pain. He’s dizzy, nauseous. All he wants is to introduce his girlfriend to the Touilesse-Lautrec.

            In here, he thinks, the light has a deafening quality. He blinks, grimaces. Trevor suffers from migraines, which are ignited by noise, stress, light. Arms swinging, Mindy leads him to the exhibit’s far wall where a solitary work hangs. It is enormous. Andy Warhol’s Brillo, an acrylic image of boxes stacked one on top of another pyramid-like.

            “It’s idiotic,” Trevor says.

            “It’s my favorite,” Mindy says. And she lets go of his hand, withdrawing into herself.

            “Ugly too,” he says. “Don’t!” Trevor snatches her hand as it goes toward the canvas.

            “Guess I know now how you think of me,” Mindy says.

Trevor tells her not to be ridiculous, his feelings for her have nothing to do with his opinion of the painting. His words have no effect. His words are lies. This again? he thinks. It’s a sore spot with Mindy – intelligence. Early on in their relationship she’d confessed that, because of learning disabilities, her school days had consisted mostly of special ed classrooms. Yes, she’d ridden the little bus. But what to make of this, Trevor was unsure. Retardation? Mindy’s revelation, moreover, had been voiced amid gasping sobs. He’d done his best to comfort her, reassure her. Hadn’t she finished college? And he had promised never to disparage her intellect, even indirectly. A hard vow to keep.

*

The night before they had seen a movie, then gone back to Trevor’s apartment. Kissing and cuddling. “Nobody’s never loved me before,” Mindy had said. Her grammar is quirky. About Mindy is a faint rancid tang since she bathes only once a day, in the early morning, before leaving for work; her shower head spits sand, the pipes rusted and old. Her studio’s in a barrio. And so these intimate moments here Trevor has always found irksome. All he wants is comfort. His neck, his shoulders bunched, he massaged tendons last night and imagined fine needles inserted in vertebra – the knobs, the gaps. Relief. Well past midnight they snuggled on his futon. He tapped on the blankets.

“When I touch you,” Mindy had said, “you flinch.”  Something’s amiss in their relationship. Trevor took pleasure, though, in removing Mindy’s top and fondling her small upturned breasts, stroking her thighs, investing her hair with soft quick kisses, but he was hesitant about going farther. Mindy yearned for it. What then is the problem?

“My butt’s gotten so big,” Mindy said, “I can’t sleep no more on my back.”

He wished she hadn’t shared this knowledge. Is it wrong to date a girl half his age?

Mindy said, “I wish I had your life.”

My life? he thought. Twenty thousand dollars in debt, unhappy editors, headaches. His best years gone. No retirement savings. Half-a-dozen unfinished novels, a hundred unsold canvases. Regrets.

Then Trevor pressed the heel of his hand, a thumb into his eye socket. A nervous tic. “How gross!” Mindy said, rolling away. “Would you like it if I picked my nose?” Not long afterward they rose and Trevor drove her home. He was aware he was sabotaging their time together.

Self-employed, Trevor has no health insurance. Viagra’s a budget-buster! Besides, it’s his nature to let problems go until they’ve become crises. Until it’s too late. Until nothing’s left but trouble and remorse.

*

            “Let’s see my painting now, okay?” Trevor says. Mindy starts to slink away, out of the hall, and toward the museum’s exit. Trevor follows her.

“I thought I understood you,” she says over her shoulder, “but I don’t.”

In the lobby he takes her arm and asks  what’s wrong. There’s no answer. Then Trevor has an idea. He clasps her hand and guides Mindy to the gift shop. Inside are posters, books, stationery. Trevor spots a magnet embossed with a reproduction of the Touilesse-Lautrec. He buys it and gives it to Mindy. But she refuses the gift, then turns and clomps to the exit.

And so alone he steps back into the museum’s interior and finds the nineteenth century gallery. Monet. Pissarro. Degas. He takes his time. Such opulent colors, such subtle lines, everywhere light transfigured into life. At last he finds the work he’s longed to see, the one that’s always acted on him like a sedative. He has a migraine. To be one with the red-headed woman in the garden, this he longs for, a longing clarified by pain.

In the painting the woman’s hands are unseen. He remembers his own caked in sculpting clay, weeks ago, kneading and thumbing the gray-green dough, lifting it into the shape of a vase. The night he and Mindy shared a pottery wheel. In the wet clay between them their fingers met, shyly, playfully. They laughed. Then the vase quavered, bent, collapsed. And their groping, desperate hands could not keep the thing upright. Later he asked her out.

Trevor stands now before the canvas and lets his eyes listen to the dreamy, diaphanous image, rustling gently in lavender, moss, ivory, sunlight warm and diffuse, brushstrokes mere shadows. The woman’s roseate bun, pale skin, generous bosom. Sumptuous yet understated. The woman is not old, is forever on the cusp of youth and age, awash in filtered garden light, earth-bound, ethereal, a memory. There is no glass.

Trevor knows now he is no longer young. Such pain! 

A Keatsian quality, Trevor thinks, inheres in the Touilesse-Lautrec, a wistful grace preserved for all time in an illusion of color and line. His mind reels. What Trevor wants is to be young – now, always. It’s why he’s involved himself with a love interest eighteen years his junior. To have what she is. Mindy, he realizes, is the ideal age, just past adolescence. Twenty-two!

And then a compulsion takes hold. To touch the painting, to tap a prime number pattern on a canvas that’s survived so far three centuries. How old is it? To press onto the oils the identity whorled on his fingertips – the idea has a pain-born logic. In the throes of a migraine, then, off his meds, Trevor drifts a while in a hallucinatory fugue, here but not here, inward and outward one. Then, now. He is the artist laying on paint, he is the vandal smudging the work; both acts sublime.

He reaches.

THE END

– Zachary Ash

Have I earned this pain

this dark acquaintance with the recesses of my pelvis?

Pain is a guide. It charts a detailed cartography

of the intimacy of the bowels

with the bladder and the prostate;

of their mysterious connection with the tip of the penis,

a burning trail that enables me to understand

the improbable link between my perineum and the end of my urethra;

of the intricacy of this and other tubes, sins and sinews.

Pain has shown me this.

But again, this knowledge is not the issue — have I earned it, I want to know.

Have I earned this shit I shat

this pain and this blood

coming from a swollen belly, from irritable bowels

reduced to a tumultuous nothingness,

a tumescent heaving of waters and worms.

Or have I drunk and eaten idly, my pain a well-deserved

sword for my gluttony and greed?

I stare deeply at the toilet-bowl

and try to grasp

behind my feces

my face

my crimson face in the now quiet bowl.

In a fragment of a second I see it:

a perfectly intent look passing behind imperfectly formed stools

to reach my face distorted and shredded and blooded

like an ingrate replica of my intestines.

I could compose an ode

an odd ode to my bowels

for I was given my insides like Borges or Tiresias their blindness,

as a living clepsydra,

a measure of time and courage and discipline

discipline–not rigidity

but a delicate balance

a diffuse limit for the untrained eye

a skill you must learn to master

its strictures not altogether apparent

but tangible or reachable or hopeful

for those who seek.

– Gustavo Llarull

The oily neighbor woman
Wants me allied.

Her moans in the back
Hallway shuffle in
Under the door and bully
My attention.

I tell her yes, her indignation
At the sad state
Of our dumpster is sane,
Righteous, calculated.

The growling never goes away.
It mosses my home, grows
Insolent and bushy over my escape.

–Emily Renaud

I cannot address this growing
Urgency, civilian fireworks, or
Your current desire for me to
“Make a difference.”

It’s not because I’m eating grapes
Or because I’m hurriedly pruning
A domesticated animal.

It’s because I’m only using
Language to lie, and my callous
Words would be too splendid,
Too joyful to touch the infirm.

So I must ask you to refrain from
Thinking of me if ever the time
To act is now, or only I can help.

–Emily Renaud

There used to be a difference
Between a teapot and a kettle.
The Kettle a fiery stuntman—

As time went on, you claimed
This distinction was irrelevant.

You now speak as if they
Are the same, think pots and
Kettles can both withstand the fire,
Can both be polite t company.

You tell me to put the teapot on,
And I don’t know what that means.

The problem is not that this distinction
Isn’t useful anymore, the problem is
Your inability to tell me the truth
About the objects that keep us together.

–Emily Renaud

I bought an umbrella and it rained. 

I bought a car and they built a road.

I bought a door and I won a house.

When I stole my lunch

The owner of the cafeteria died. 

When I visited his grave

The wind untied my shoelaces

And arranged them into a white rose,

And I left it for a tip. 

The leaves that fell from the stem

Bought me another car

And the powers that be paved my way.

When I looked out my office window

I thought to phone you and tell you

But you rung me first to profess your love

And that was how we settled it. 

– Jono Tosch

I found a couple bogus hands
Lying under a tree in the woods.

I had been walking for a while
Listening to the sounds I made

As I tapped the tree mushrooms
I call the bookshelves of the woods.

The hands looked new and peculiar.
I poked one and then the other,

And finding both suitably clean,
I decided to take one home.

The other I left for the future,
To another such as myself.