Spine like a seahorse

To arrive is practice, conversation or conversion, a story over a field
My Sweet, of concrete or whispering, furrows of a path no longer, not
Sure, was there, and snow combed in curlicues and dog ears a zigzag
Through January. Sure you are witty, but are you any less romantic?
In my remembering, I have undone all my beliefs, it is a luxury to lay
Unencumbered here, or there, the bones flexed with tendons, the
Spine like a seahorse, the heart far from a cliche unless beating is
Innocent, though innocence is not as supple as you think, nor as flexible,
Nor as perfumed, nor convenient, or even clean: between things regret
Gathers force. I remember that day: it was cold and the coffee tepid.

excerpt, "Euphoria" Sina Queyras at poetryfoundation.org

Dreams

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—
on the path a sudden house just like a toy,
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps
and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—
a specific watch, an entire fly,
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,
a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—
can fly unfledged,
we light dark tunnels with our eyes,
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,
the choices of our heart, our tastes,
we’re swept away
by amorous yearnings for—
and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.


"Dreams" Wisława Szymborska

Winter & romantic woes both give me horrid migraines, so while I know that last week was meteorlogical I really have no clue whether the nausea is due to the low barometer or my low heart.

Saturday, Briefly

Anti-social: New LRB with Anne Carson sonnet & Hilary Mantel essay, with hot chocolate almond milk & Lu cookies

Social: Godard inspired modern dance collaboration with Bruce LaBruce, with wonderful folks & best liked man

How Should a Person Be?

Fighting it off after days of sweats & chills, throat hell, weakness, tea & soup, British period pieces & grisly mysteries, the battle nearly won, except for a trickle of constant sniffs, cat attacking the tissue box. A clean house, freshy laundered bedding, a full fridge after an outing for preposterous uppity groceries (kale, mushrooms, olives, avocado, chevre, San Pelegrino, espresso, etc). Not out at the zombie party, not my style, instead in bed with legs up the wall, reading new Sheila Heti:

My brain had not worried me when I was younger, but over the past year I had become convinced that I did not think as well as other people. No, that was putting it too gently-- that I did not know how to think at all.

LA Noire

Sleuth story with computerized Ken Cosgrove... Maybe I will take up playing video games?

Infinite Sickness

My throat! My throat! My head! My heart... Another bout of hell throat, the technical term, made myself even sicker by going into work suppressing my primary ills by making stomach swim in non-stop lozenges, left at noon having got the essentials out of the way. Ran into the Lord on the way home, having a brief "Look at that beard! You have a ladyfriend and I have a best in sneakers but maybe we should revisit the sexy times?" mental lapse while wearing earmuffs and coughing up a lung in the cold. Slept the afternoon through, now soup & tea in sweaty sheets while watching Kids in the Hall and talking about period peices with a gal pal. Jane Eyre? Oh hell yes. This is a guarantee that my fever dreams will be about Dave Foley in corsets with the Lord locking ladies up in the attic.

Inventory

Things that are new to my life (in the last year) that I really enjoy

• Aquiring blazers and cookbooks
• Cats (esp when standing on "hinders")
• Gallery gals & library ladies (both on & off duty)
• The one I like best (esp when standing in "pleased posture")
• Montreal (the city I like best? More than Bayonne?)

Things in my life that have made welcome reappearances

• Bangs
• Wide leg jeans, sneakers
• Owen Pallett & Sufjan Stevens
• Olives, tartines with chevre & cucumber
• Yoga

Seasonal reappearances that make the snow bearable

• Mashed potatoes (now with Tikka Masala sauce)
• Hot chocolate almond milk
• Fiction binges & obsessions with Marian apparations

Constants I am always grateful for

• Family & the best two gals
• Music made with moogs
• Poetry magazine

The latest issue of which bears a Giacomo Leopardi quotation "Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry." To which I reply with the words of Louis CK (I think?) "Everything is amazing and everyone is miserable."

Things I am saying goodbye to, for the season

• Oxfords, cropped pants, flats
• Oscillating fans
• Walking

Finally, pessimism

• Public transportation in this city
• Events that spiral out of control
• I am terrible at Christmas gifts
• I cannot find any good looking boots with sensible heels. I am resigned to freezing my feet while treading safely in sneakers or warm feet in a pair of lovely flat boots that have astoundingly no grip whatsoever on the ice. Everyone is miserable, there have been no good boots since Homer!

Poetry & Song

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/arts/music/23luke.html?_r=1

Why New York?! Why must you tempt me so?!

Man of My Time

Maybe it was the mustache, maybe it was the summer. However, this is now in heavy rotation and thus all is well & right in the world again.

Black & White & Read All Over

Oh my eyes & brain/heart! The discovery of Bianca Stone's illustrations/images/etc or "Poetry Comics" at http://whoisthatsupposedtobe.blogspot.com/ has left me speechless with delight.

All Weather/Swoon Letter

Danse dans la neige, 1948
photographs by Maurice Perron, gelatin silver prints
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
http://www.canadacouncil.ca/

Yesterday my boss told me that Francoise Sullivan, dancer, painter, sculptor, muse, fascinating figure, will be in town on Monday afternoon to celebrate the restoration of a sculpture for display and a fim screening, to which I cried No! because I had no idea and had scheduled a meeting at 1:30. I did not actually cry out, I made a disappointed face and sadly said "Oh I have a meeting at 1:30" resigned to my fate.


Yesterday I also ran into the one I like best. I have resigned myself to the fact (notion) that anything I interpret as interest is basic human decency, or simply the fact that he is interested in al things and people, just not me romantically.

So there's that disappointment as well. Oh well. It's missing out on making out, not an appearance by an iconic Canadian arts legend.

Hello Sore Throat My Old Friend

And you also make the case that catching a cold is not always bad news.

It gives us a chance to get off the merry-go-round for a few days. Because it causes malaise and it makes it so hard to concentrate, it's a way for the body to tell you to slow down for a few days. It's a chance for uninterrupted reading, which few of us get to indulge in the way we used to. The other possible silver lining -- and these are based on very tentative, preliminary epidemiological evidence that I offer with caution -- there were some results that came out of the studies on swine flu that suggest having a cold may actually keep flu at bay. This is controversial, but it is a possibility and scientists are looking at this now.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/09/19/jennifer_ackerman_common_cold_interview/index.html

Or, if you have some variation of a cold or flu every two months, you look unprofessional as you hack & slouch your way through work or weak & lazy because you stay home and your head is too muddled to read so you watch an endless amount of bad movies on YouTube.

Incoherent Upsets All Over

September 16: Miss Moody, watch your words.

I am not a poet. I won't claim to have any of the drive the dedication required, nor any modicum of talent (I ramble too much, I rhyme all the time, I rhapsodize romance). Therefore I hate when I judge a poem as not good or not great or simply boring or I could do better. Because I could not do better. That is a boldfaced lie. I do not have a need to write poetry. However my need to read poetry is another matter altogether.

Consider: hierarchy of needs: food & water, shelter & sleep... hierarchy of desires: books and men, poetry and shoulders. Airy spaces, the quality of light, the surface of things, the right weight of fabrics. Coffee & tea, music, sculpture, installations, theatre, wine & vermouth.

There is nothing so upsetting than _______, _________ poems packaged in a slick that bothers my fingers-- I'm talking to you revamp of __________, I don't like change and the only poems I think I like in this issue are the __________'s. I think I like them, I'm not stamping my feet in the magazine shop clutching the issue to my chest until I get home, I'm not rolling any one line round and round my brain and tongue, I actually rolled the entire MAGAZINE, not newspaper, into my bag and forgot about it until just now.

Maybe I simply hate everything about this issue because I am (simply) in a foul mood today? This is not a blog, this just a journal because I have realized that I can no longer fully truly write on paper anymore and I do not know how to fix this (boldfaced). What I mean to say is, tell me about this grey sulk, this slow sick feeling like weak tea or wet socks, yet hot like jealousy, like a sweater unraveling faster and faster as I pull at what started as (simply) one small loose thread:

I went to the library where I coudn't find anything rien du tout and where usually the gallery has just consistently great shows except our city has been taken over by art commissioned to celebrate the sports team centennial so I just didn't bother to go in.

After a day where work made me inexplicably grumpy for no damn reason, events and events and a knot of stress over tomorrow night's.

And running into the one I like best after the library and mall made me a bit upset, maybe because I don't like unexpected things even though it was expected if I could only remember what day of the week it is or even just thought back to something he said earlier in the day.

Or because I had just braved the mall to try to find thin gloves or mittens but all I found was nothing but disappoinment. Like in the romance department. Make outs and fall mittens without sequins, too much to ask for? Possibly, that's what poetry is for. Also, it seems as if the romance department is a section of The Bay, but even if it was I bet it would be "Sometimes I look at this pair of mittens and I think they are just as intrigued by me as I am by them" but face it I am hallucinating. Mittens will never return your affection. Mittens are just too damn interesting and intelligent for someone who compares people to winter accessories and mixes her metaphors and meanings like the worlds worst bartender.

And the cat just knocked over a dish of hairpins all over the bathroom floor. The other night she broke a small mug I adored.

So while I am sometimes most of the time unbearably positive and esctatic and nervous with delight, I am now sulking like a brat beacuse I can't find a single new poem that makes me lose my mind and I just had to throw the __________ down because the texture is making my skin crawl. Also what I really wanted was the new issue of the __________ but it isn't in yet. It too apparenty has a redesigned cover but it looks nice and as long as it doesn't get a petroleum slick finish, we will be okay. Everything will be okay. Maybe you should just get some sleep, you cranky petulant pouting child?

Two Men, Two Bicycles

The other night, I cut through the park on my way home in the early evening, an older man biked past me, then turned round. "Can I ride beside you?" He inquired. "It's not a good idea to walk alone." No, but thank you, I'm fine, I smiled curtly and continued walking, trying to keep brusque from my voice and brisk from my pace. " He continued on his way at a slower pace looking back every now and then, waited at the exit to ensure that I made it through alive. As he rode off, leaving my safety to the cars along the street, I felt bad for my horrified first thought of "So that's how I die."

This morning, I bundle breezed through the park, grey water and grey tights, past the buildings and green spaces the City Beautiful as referenced at Friday's panel. And then the one I like best, on his bicycle, with mittens and scarf and a hair cut. He used old fashioned expressions ("Good gracious, is that this week?") and continues to steal my heart to the point where I am walking about my blood and lungs powered not by biology but blue green grey eyes. So that's how I die.

The new Paris Review will have Lydia Davis & Frederick Seidel, so there's also that. Look, it's Fred Seidel on a motorcycle! The internet will always have what I need!

Last night I went to a panel talk/opening reception. The Toril Johannessen peice above has nothing to do with the show (natural Forms, reflections on representations, the artifice of nature). However, last night involved logical acts being disrupted by thoughts of "love" as I ran into the one I find intriguing and he left the conversation & room he was in to talk, saying that he had wanted to mention the show to me earlier in the day but here I was of my own accord while I blathered on about how much I loved this one peice and too many sweaters and then I just abruptly said "Well, I'm going to head in" and took a seat in silence for five minutes before the talk started while he went back to mingling with people. Smooth moves! Especially leaving before the reception party which he was dj/vj'ing started! Good times! Wouldn't it be nice if social anxiety automaticaly meant asexuality and aromanticism?