TAMARIND REFUSAL

TAMARIND REFUSAL

JOKESTER 

MYRIAD IMPOSTOR FLAIL

JUST TO IMPORT

WITHOUT 

AMPERSAND AND SUCH

AGUE ARGUE

GARAGE GARAGE 

Poem with a surprise

I saw my dead friend at the store

It wasn’t him though

Travel Poem

I can't write when I travel

my observations seem banal to me

what anyone else might observe

or else simply mistaken or distorted

I can't write the Fulbright travelogue, the tourist poem

I am a poor tourist, I like residing more than visiting

I do like traveling, the odd distortions of time and place

and beauties produced by disorientation

"the strange hours we keep to see them"

as William Carlos Williams put it

so jet lag is actually a good thing!

but I don't like trying to have experiences other people expect me to have

or writing down my reactions to what I see

my, those Alps are steep!

so I can't write anything about bleak and beautiful Cuba

Patagonia where I have never been

I like traveling to give a talk or meet people

interested in my ideas about things

I like being away and coming back

trying to talk to people in the language of the place

and reading novels in languages I don't fully comprehend on the plane back

Business Plan: A Love Poem

People jog in tee-shirts, but men's dress shirts are made of a thinner material

they cling less to the body, hang looser

are easier to remove by unbuttoning

when soaked with sweat

I am thinking of the short-sleeved dress shirts worn by the Mormon missionaries

in warmer climates, not of long-sleeved shirts

of course nobody would go running in a white dress shirt like that

but I propose, my love, that you and I design, manufacture, and market a shirt

of light synthetic or blended material, like that used for other sportswear

modifying the hang of a dress shirt, but for athletic use

The Man Without Qualities

In this movie I arrive anonymously at a small town

hoping to be unnoticed

this is unlikely because I am the main character in the movie

my love interest is the waitress at the diner

her smile when our eyes meet telegraphs that to the audience

her sidekick is another woman, slightly older and heavier

with a brighter shade of lipstick, as though to compensate

for not being as conventionally attractive

in real life I would prefer her

but those are not the rules of this film

the music tells you how to feel at every turn

tense, wistful, buoyant, triumphant

not us, the characters in the film, but you, the audience

for we can not hear it inside the movie

I'm sure you've seen my movie, or one very like it

the plot is much what you'd expect

I am quietly confident, haunted by a murky past

but without distinguishing features

the camera follows me around

so the viewer identifies with me, because I am no one in particular

or with the waitress, as the case might be

the comfort here, for the audience, is in the tension and release

the familiarity of the form

the way this film, that I have dreamed of today on my walk downtown,

is similar to many others, not in the ways it is distinctive

Nervous habits

I have a nervous habit

of mixing song with drink

self-defense with auto mechanics

Sun (FGL)

Sun!
Who called you
sun?

Nobody would be surprised
(I would say)
seeing in the sky three letters
in place of your face
of gold

Memento (FGL)

When we die
we'll take away
a series of visions
of the sky

(daybreak skies
nocturnal skies)

though they've told me
that dead
the only memory
is summer sky
a black sky
shuddering
in the wind

Canción morena (FGL)

I want to get lost
in the dark landscape
of your hair, María del Carmen

I want to get lost
in your eyes of nobody
playing the keyboard
of your unkissable lips

In your endless embrace
the air would have dark hair
and the breeze would have
the fuzz on your arms!

I want to get lost
in the dark landscape
of your hair, María del Carmen

He thought

He thought "Untitled Original" was the title of that song

that a get-away driver should be slow and unobtrusive

in a good spy movie you wouldn't know who the spies were

or even that is was a spy movie

he explained

we set him straight  

Opera

This is not a dream, though it has a dream-like flavor in my memory. The Mormon church in the nineteenth century believed in socialism as a matter of principle, and there was a small town run as a communal experiment. Someone had written an opera or musical play of some kind about this town, and we were going to put it on. (Some people in the church, including my older sister.) I would have been 14, let's say, at the time, though I cannot place the date or my exact age with any accuracy. I auditioned for the main part, reading through the part for quite a while. It had notes that were at the top of my range and difficult to reach. Most of it was in a kind of recitative style. There weren't arias that I remember. I got the part, but the composer wanted to charge a certain sum of money for the rights to put it on, so it didn't happen. I was disappointed when my sister told me, but nobody ever mentioned it again. It wasn't that there was a reason for not talking about it, but simply that there was no reason to talk about it. I wasn't disappointed enough to brood about it, and probably nobody else cared more than I did.

What makes this memory peculiar is that it is the memory of something that did not happen. There have been entire decades when I simply did not think about it at all, and it is only recently that I remembered it again, when I was thinking about all the times I have sung or performed music. I think it is a genuine memory because the experiment with Mormon socialism is a historical fact, and too oddly specific to be a spurious product of my imagination. The only thing that would bring things full circle would be to find the opera, somehow, or to see if my mom remembers something about it.