Date:	2005-05-23 15:55
Subject:	it's thunderstorming
Security:	Public
Mood:	curious
Music:	cirque du soliel soundtracks

and i've just realized that thunderstorm conditions are horrible to try to be productive under.

The lights in the kitchen
which we've just replaced,
are too bright wattage.
At first I thought Return them.
I need 100 watt. find the reciept,
carefully unscrew and rebox and set
aside in the passenger seat and carry
them to the store and make the exchange,
and say thank you, they were too bright.
But they creep behind my eyeballs
around the curved whites
to the cavity where there is a movie screen,
or so they tell me.

All the kitchen lights are on now,
and it's midday.
Crows and bugs in oak trees make noises now.
The back-yard could be painted
by mashing brush bristles
sideways with different shades of green
on a robiny blue paper.
That is the back-yard,
the crows and bugs are in a different place.
Their high pitches trill on my hips and spike
their way up my back. One note is twice, high,
on flesh paper with just the slightest
outline of branches coming through.
Twice, high, verberating with the light
in the kitchen to the cords on the backs
of my eyes. I wait for it to sound again.

van Gogh’s Death-place

Auvers-sur-Ois,
he is finally sunflower-anointed.
Fifteen hours
------long ago a peasant road caught his fall.
The poplars, who had stretched higher
to declare
------“there is something shabby
and holy in me!”
curled up their smudged whole buds at the shot &
resigned to be trees. How they wished to be Cypresses,
how the fence wished to be shorter, bluer, in Arles


(ignore ---'s, i don't know how to format)

i don't really know how to finish, or if i should, or what the heck i should be writing about in the first place.

but there you go.

lunch in san sebastian

The cigalas with their black eyes popping,
orange shelled bodies in the fisherman’s bucket,
the fisherman in his plaid hat, bagged shirt
selling the cigalas for—the price, he tells me,
doesn’t matter right now. No me importa, he gruffs,
because the dew covered the grass this morning,
because the sky sighs now. The fisherman sighs too
as his children ribbon through the docks on slight feet,
across blue water-wood as their sides hit piles.
Along the pier, the smallest sits with red flowers
behind her ear and red stripes on her dress. Anita,
her mother calls across the blue pier, ¡Anita!
but Anita dangles her feet off the dock
as she tears bread beside her father and the cigalas
with the whole, bursting eyes

she tosses bread to the dancing fish below. Bread
falls and the fish assemble madly, the children stop
their running to stoop and watch the ballet
and the fisherman comes to his children, and the mother,
and the cigalas are forgotten in a bucket while they all
watch until they are as slow as the dew, as slow as the dew.

fine tuning

Luanne took shears to her head yesterday
and sliced her bob more unruly. Today
I wait outside the barbershop beside a sinkhole,
peeking over to see just how deep.
It’s poured three days; Luanne collected
rainwater to drink and would not answer the phone
unless it was me or God. He didn’t call,
but she listened closely to the thunder.
At the bottom of the sinkhole lies the baber’s
sign, parking meters, Luanne’s discarded tresses,
soon the shop, highways, ourselves. Now the twirl
of scissors, jingle on the door, & Luanne
exits repaired. Limestone dissolved beneath,
says a Geologist standing outside: the hydrostatic
pressure, gravel vibrations developed to a pitch
when the storm came. He does not explain
why Luanne came to sink part of herself,
or why she erupted and I did not.

planetary model

In third grade we made the planets, and made space in our heads for nine spheres strung to a coat hanger like a wire milky way. Saturn’s hula hoops spun like the girls at recess, Earth was a tennis ball, green splotched blue cozied between painted-ping pong ball Mars and Venus, lemon. All was strung, then they regaled us with the asteroids. A fragmented snake made from recess-pebbles sneaked its way between giant Jupiter and our apple-red neighbor. (Tiny stones flew in our faces when a rubber kickball bounce bounce bounced over blacktop over hopscotch over jacks; we scooped up the plaything and kicked it back through robiny sky where it came from.) A film with two men throwing around chance and percentages showed one pebble asteroid and our tennis ball crossing paths: blazing irregularity, forward-tumbling, green-white-blue swirls, impact. Incoming airplanes with squealing pitches grow deeper as they approach. Rocks turn molten when hurtling closer. We realized you can’t kick an asteroid back through deep black sky where it came from.
As we sat by the swings, hands turning up dusty stones & sieving downward, each of us took our places as one ink dot on a letter e of a sentence of a long paragraph on a page of a book in the school library and we wished to be big again.

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it.
Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held.
Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books.
Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin.
Believe nothing just because someone else believes it.
Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.