FROM "THE DESIRES OF LETTERS"
TWO PAIRS OF RED SHOES
Or red legs or if you are sewing little flowers onto a headband, banging your head into mirrors at sharp angles, climbing up and falling off of chairs or maybe you are leaving glasses of red wine around to be spilled, reserving the good stuff for someone else, or so typically drinking a liter of water, eating ceramic carrots, combing and currying your plastic horse, building bionicles, falling on top of me, rearranging again, canceling, putting drops in his eyes, rushing off to the pharmacy, bartering for membership, calling someone on a regular basis, hallucinating what someone you've never met may look like, reading poems by flashlight, picking blackberries or greedily wishing for blueberry plants or are you looking for a skirt a skort, picking up legos, stepping on pillows, convincing someone to play with someone else or not to play, cooking on a wooden stove, returning phone calls, recycling mail, cutting a pancake into family members, forbidding this secluding that, fumbling with your attachments, turning off the cell phone, learning how to climb into the car by yourself, laying out his shirt, discovering velcro, making a sandwich, blinking your eyes very definitely as if to wash away an unpleasant scene, trying hard to relax in a comfortable position and feeling rampantly out of your structure, pulling up your hair, picking up blocks.
He read with an elegance which was effortless, illuminating his face with a spinal sphere of topic abbreviations, carrying drivers under his seamless arms. You are remembering the positive drowning effect language can have. But these are all occupations within which we should not wince at anymore than ludicrous writing projections. He looked so intent about his little plan, the way an adult might be an architecture of manic idiocy when interpolating the news.
When you sit is the only conscious time that things seem to stop moving. You- villainous mover. Here, here's a little quiet. Finished.
Now you are revving up your underwear, throwing pajamas across your room to land on your brother's head, having a plan you must explain in detail immediately but you have to pee, so you are pacing the bathroom madly explaining, then lifting the lid and forgetting what you are here for. You are pulling supplies out of paper bags saying "help." You have three hundred hands. You are eating a cookie broken in half in the back seat of the car, crying for your bunny, your dog, your spaceship, dropping your cup and wanting another fruit bar. You are spitting out pits and commenting on a cement mixer, a tree trimmer, a firetruck, a fallen electrical wire, a shiny piece of glass in the gutter.
You are timezones in a poster, discussing medical possibilities with fish, you are out to dinner with an unknown assemblage, you are within the academy at night, you are kidnapped outside your laboratory, you are on the way to the ATM, you are having a barbecue, you are scoffing at personal-sized watermelons, you are buying tea, you are desperate for books, you dream that an airplane lands on top of our house. The house breaks. You dream something you can't remember but when you do it's only one image of tunnels of sand through which you can travel very efficiently. You are in love with a horse, with something you've made, you want more crackers, less yogurt on your plate.
You are adding or subtracting errors, hours, numbers, rakes, articles, garments, therapies, debts, gifts.
Arranging the garden, rooms, the garbage, a garbled letter, disastrous proofreading, a poor dictionary, the weather, a song.
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TODAY'S HEADLINES
I'll tell you what I remember. Foes of California's Governor Say Recall Vote Is a Certainty.
I was nervous last night B. went off to prep for lab meeting and I was hunched over planning meals for the week, then even though I was so tired I could barely stand up I decided to do more things in the middle of sitting down with a book, as I dream of nothing else, well possibly almost, all day long but to find out what is happening with Natasha and Andrey. Bush, in Africa, Promises Aid but Offers No Troops for Liberia. But they had to wait since I kept adding to lists, never making calls when so despondent, but eating chocolate cake, watering the garden, making gomasio since those seeds have been around for some time, distilling laundry, putting away toys, asking myself, what else? Iranian Twins Die Trying to Live Separate Lives. I wonder why it is that I don't have much interest in the war scenes, the male political ego, and yet as Natasha prepares for the ball by neurotically preparing her cousin and mother I simply understand the exhausted nervousness. An hour south of Guangzhou, even though I have never been to a ball. The description pointed to the apex in her romantic career which is difficult to imagine at sixteen, all stacked in cages one on top of the other, but it reminds me of the desperation of high school, severe acute respiratory syndrome, at the time feeling green and incoherent, anything but to get away from the convertible crowd. Man Guns Down 5 Co-Workers, Then Shoots Himself. The homecoming queen drove through drive through at KFC, where I worked, on her way to the beach. An assembly-line worker at a Lockheed Martin aircraft parts in Mississippi opened fire on Tuesday morning. While I flirting by the fryer, or in the walk in freezer lugging hefty size supplies, stirring coleslaw in industrial-sized bins with plastic gloves. A former lieutenant colonel who was discharged for being gay has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The outfit, or uniform I should say was so greasy it had to be washed after every wearing and I had a special pair of shoes I would only wear while I was there. Oh yes, I heard that a guy here died of pnenomia. Topsiders how horrid. Lawyers for a Qatari student who was jailed by the military challenged President Bush's authority to treat terrorism suspects as "enemy combatants." And yet prom night was nothing like a "ball." American Cars Show Gains in a Survey of Dependability. I knew everyone, was disgusted by most people but I have to recall a boy then who had been the most popular at school. But if such early outbreaks present scientific hints, they also provide epidemics. He didn't ever talk to me til we were in a class together the one for which I wrote a story about hitchhiking, or was that in junior high? Microsoft to Award Stock, Not Options, to Employees. Any way then he started calling me on the phone and I didn't understand that the announcement is the clearest sign yet that stock options have lost some of the cachet they held just a few years ago. I thought it was impossible because I wasn't in his circle. Obesity on Rise in New York Public Schools. It didn't last long. Though I always wonder about him now since after he injured his knee somehow, as I recall a stupid schoolboy friend threw something at him, he'd lost his fashionable girlfriend who I despied. Officials at a New York school ordered female students, who cut classes to attend a party, to undergo medical tests for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Her mom wore fake hair to the movies. Good Boll Weevil News The battle against the crop-devouring insect, now a century old, is nearly over. She was overdressed for everything and impossibly in. New research on the Y chromosome shows that men are in an evolutionary shame spiral. He showed up to the prom walking with a cane and on his arm the date nobody else wanted, special operations forces, the notorious "valley girl" who was made famous by the song and most people didn't like her because she was proud of her title. The dining tasting panel recommended a selection of wines that met the criteria for a refreshing easy-to-drink Loire white. He was trembling and sweating when he said hello to me. Wrestling for the Truth of 9/11. I was so smug with my serious college boyfriend in my long straight strapless dress, hair ridiculously curled, makeup somewhat pastel. The commission investigating Washington's failure to prevent the attacks is facing thinly veiled intimidations. It was my pink phase. New York City is selling the former Board of Education building for more than $45 million to a developer for conversion into high-end condominiums. That was nothing like Natasha. One sniper was dragged from a refrigerator. I knew I wasn't at any peak, and looked somewhat perplexed at those who obviously were. He pronounced Bagdhad completely isolated. How glad I am not to have it all be over at eighteen. As a result, the mood among the allied forces was mixed. I was growing into a mind something distant from my upbriging and realized at some point in college once I moved away from Los Angeles that people had been blocking the marine's advance for two days, and could be seriously interested in other things besides material culture and fashion. How could a man who had never sat at a tournament table win
$2.5 million in the World Series. I was so relieved that I thought my family must be insane. The clear suggestion was that the capitol would fall soon to. Of course that wasn't all that mattered. Sex mattered, and love of course, to my teen-aged mind. Natasha has an idea fixed in her time that the man she was to first love would be the man she would marry, and who would represent her world almost completely. Is Race Real? Genetics will increasingly show that most humans are. Victory would come later rather than sooner. He would dictate where they would live, in what society they would live, who her company would be, all her aspirations revolved around him and this would be decided at sixteen. Data in Conflict: Why Economists Tend to Weep. The situation, he said, is too much to bear. At sixteen I had the emotional maturity of one who can wash a car, pick oranges with an orange picker from a tree, play one or two things on the piano, and fill many journals with endless pathetically ill formed thoughts. North Korea is petrified. This is good only in that it always makes me empathetic when I read the work of the very young. Hackers Hijack PC's for Sex Sites. If I'm embarrassed for them then I don't necessarily blame them, since I know I'm guilty. Senate Becomes O.K. Corral for a Surgeon and a Lawyer. The verdict will be that if they continue they will improve and if they do not continue it hardly matters. Bush Promotes His Plans to Help Africa. Natasha thought so far has not begun in any pursuit beyond love. Love being a large pursuit, but also being something completely outside herself. Beijing Sends Team to Assess Hong Kong's Unrest. The gait of a man twice her age, widowed, cynical. Milosevic Prosecutors Garner New Evidence. Just when I thought he had been transformed by love into something more resembling a human, he had to go and experience nothing at the moment of betrothal. Florida Court Voids a Law on Abortion. I am not living then, but now.
The Pleasure of Epistollation At Nightfall
Vertical lungs because one must laugh uproariously. My elastic night implies no darkening of sensibilities but such as hillsides accumulating, conversational crickets, rooms lit by dialogue in the form of persons you always desire, and who easily fill whatever I've lost to the day. The children don't realize they are growing, except in the sense tthey are proud of not being babies, and every sunset reminds me of my faher. Without silence perhaps I hate everyone. I'm taking back the possibility of night as a nonchalant rapture. No infant is crying or sleeping at my breast. This means I have the illusion of single personhood, nostalgia, desire to put my body back into a mind once thought to be famished, yet now it's clear that the boys are my best material.
I wouldn't tell anyone if I were you about these letters since you are most likely imagining everything. You write them to yourself. When the house sleeps. And writing by hand is an animal akin to courtship of hand and mind, as opposed to the addictive speed of hype. Avoid the hand cramp by using roving text, various alphabets, tireless mentors. If you candle your insights I will flashlight the midnight hike, but we won't pull it out unless we must.
Where has my weariness gone? O waterbottle, you are in every modern scene.
When a character in the book I am reading rides out in the night air, so too I, my night writing husband, my sleeping children with bee sting swollen toes.
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IDIOPATHIC SHORT STATURE
When the dolomites were dark, Nicole was a perfect little girl. Piping down valleys wild. Veins strenghten her limbs and give them flexibility. Sure, she was tiny for a 3-year-old, but she was adorable and perfectly proportioned. A huge power failure swept through parts of her anatomy, causing blackouts, shutting down transportation and cellular phone systems and sending people pouring into the streets. I have found her, but pity me I can never have her. She had a charming feistiness about her - a determination that seemed to grow as Nicole confronted the childhood taunts of bigger peers and the indignities of being the smallest kid in school. And I made a rural pen. On the first upstroke of her wings, the lacewing rises up into the air. As she wishes. The series of blackouts began at about 4 p.m. as lights, air-conditioning and transportation went out.
She lives on the moon, and like many other children who rank at the bottom of growth charts, Nicole had no identifiable disorder depressing her growth. On a cloud I saw a child. Flight is one of the key reasons for the success. We have no indication that there is any terrorism involved. She would walk to the foothills to sit and gaze at the moon. So what if she's tiny, Patricia's friends insisted. And laughing he said to me. The tests say she's healthy. . "The trains are dead. My cell is dead. This is absolutely frightening. Why worry?
She became the objects of jokes. But Patricia saw a tiny girl on track to become a tiny woman - 4 feet, 8 inches, by her doctors' estimates - and that prospect galvanized her to consider a course of costly and intrusive human growth hormone injections for her then 6-year-old daughter. With ten-thousand shields and spears. The state police evacuated public buildings at 5:13 p.m., telling all non-essential employees to exit with calm and make their way home. Once aloft, she continues to beat up and down. Who will rule? "I'm thinking about when she's 25 and walking into a courtroom with an attaché case, or into a hospital with a stethoscope," Patricia Costa said. Then come home my children the sun is gone down. The little men stopped, frozen in fear. "Being 4-foot-8 - that just didn't cut it." But finding a way home despite a near-total shutdown of the city's public transportation system was only one concern. A thick plate covers the first and some of the second segment of the thorax.
She had hoped to find a place in these somber mountains. Today, Nicole is 18, and her first bid for power and influence has ended with success. A little black thing among the snow. Light enters each eyelet through these lenses. I too know what it is to be feared. After a seven-year course of human growth hormone injections, Nicole, now 5 feet, 2 inches, recently marched into a meeting room filled with federal regulators, physicians and medical ethicists and appealed to the Food and Drug Administration to sanction the use of human growth hormone by "all the children who now walk in the shoes I outgrew." On an afternoon that was hot and hazy across much of the consent, the blackout caused thousands of people to pour into the streets. White comma, hole in leaf. Is there anything we can do for you, asked the small leader?
(ital from Blake, other sources book on insects and The Prince of the Dolomites by Tomie De Paola, LA times article on growth hormone)
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From "Daily Sonnets"
117
I'm so embarrassed when I remember how I insisted
How many can I admire to help?
Is there a number which may finish desiring action,
Or is attraction a simple form of waking?
How many eyes at a time do you slumber
Perplexed by seeing respondents
And why you won't believe what you've written
For instance a stream of steady birds in rain
Involve changing your shirt
In a cold room
Only blue in shivers
Why you won't repeat
Fragile nests
And so listen
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118
The air makes you cruel
Birds fly backwards through the train
Thus to record in sentences impressions from beds
Upon which lay what I recognize in your mouth
A window absconded trapped between a cat
On the other side of the glass, and the wreathe which
Frames the same candles on your winter table
Stained wood spoke to the flat lying clouds
Into his eyes directly he stood nearer to causation
Of person and pleasantly pressed a few paces apart
No distance then could interrupt
Such coughing of reason
Your wayside plate of music
Unencumbered by sight
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119
Glottal Sonnet
I grew up getting in a car
He's clearly what they didn't
He goes the way three times as long
While I wait
A face looking out from a photograph isn't
One in each hand, walking
These are my last
And canceled singing
Crowding a 'holded' flower arrangement
Stranger's breath on wrist
A shadow sits next to me
Her book my uncle
Small towns being festive water
They offer to mug anyone who wants
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120
I'm a bunny in a human suit
So people don't try to eat me
When I go shopping
Is it not winter at his house?
Daytime never ends
What is that living in our curtain
Gray and yellow and red
What's- where is it?
Because the sun goes to different places
The kitty plays the rabbit
Rabbit plays kitty
Our neighbor rakes a tree
Does an apple cry
Done going down?
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121
One of the Many Advantages of Furnaces
When I am a big man
I will play with the plunger
I'm being bitten in bed
The title is never indicative
Is being a toddler like
Perpetual morning sickness
Jelly blobs as big as Chanticleer the rooster
Nutritionally speaking
Are you being respectful of your child or simply stupid
Knock knock, go away fox
Emotionally speaking, don't cry it's just a joke
In terms of exhaustion and patience
You called at absolutely the worst moment
I'm busy playing predatory games
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