Our next reading will be two weeks from tonight.
It will be the Contest Awards reading in the University Art
Museum at Olive and Second.
There is a list of the contest winners
on the Creative Writing office door
if you'd like to see who won.
I hope you can stay after the reading and meet Lynn,
have some punch and cookies.
It's a great pleasure to have Lynn Luria Sukenick with us
on the faculty this term.
Her books of poetry are Houdini, Water Astonishing, Problems
and Characteristics, and most recently
from Cleveland State, Houdini Houdini.
Her poems have appeared in many anthologies.
Her short fiction has appeared widely.
She did a critical study of the work of Anaïs Nin.
I'm going to miss one, aren't I?
George Eliot, Anaïs Nin--
I'm going to miss two.
You'll have to help me, Lynn.
[LAUGHS]
It was a long time ago.
[? She ?] is critical study.
[LAUGHS]
She's been acting recently at the MacDowell Colony,
and she normally makes her home in Santa Cruz, California.
She's with us for this semester, so I
hope you'll have a chance to get acquainted with this fine lady.
Lynn Luria Sukenick.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Lois.
Can you all hear me, is this as it should be?
I spent a small bit of today thinking about opening remarks,
because beginnings are so important.
And I thought I would say something
about Lincoln's birthday and Ash Wednesday,
and the beginning of Mardi Gras, and that tense anticipatory
time before Valentine's Day.
And then I decided I would rather just say, "howdy," which
you can't say in New York or California,
places I've been living.
So I'm glad you could all be here.
I'm going to read three pieces of fiction tonight.
Although I'm listed as a poet, I write both,
and I hope it will be the kind of fiction that
will satisfy the appetites of those
who were expecting poetry.
One of the pieces of fiction lasts 18 minutes;
if you have one of those watches that goes "ping,"
please don't set it.
It might be a little bit over that.
And then the next story is a half an hour
and the final piece six minutes long.
This first piece was written as a commission
for a symposium on poetry and music,
which I participated in with Robert Duncan and David
Meltzer and some San Francisco composers.
We were each given about 20 minutes
to do something connected to poetry and music.
Anything at all.
And I loved the idea of having time as a structure,
as the main condition, of the writing,
and of writing my way into the allotted time.
There are two references you might want, or need, to know.
The title is the Man with the Blues Guitar, and some
of the Wallace Stevens poem Man with the Blue Guitar,
which is a whole different thing.
And the man who invented the bass guitar
was named Leo Fender.
Although I call him Leo D. Fender in the story.
It's April in Santa Cruz, the tail end of the Northern
California rainy season.
And a composer she knows wants her
to come north to San Francisco to be
part of a panel discussion on poetry and music
in a pleasant performing space in the heart of the city.
She decides to take part and to make her contribution
in the form of a poem, a poem that will have chords in it,
a poem that will conceal the fact that it's a poem.
But her concentration keeps dissolving
in the gloomy inundations of a week of rain,
a week preceded by the inundations of a month of rain,
and in the trouble a man in her life is giving her,
or as John Cage says, "the more you're with musicians,
the crazier you get."
Day after day she goes into her study trying to find the poem,
but nothing comes.
Then finally one afternoon the sun appears, holds on,
a first line comes to her, another comes,
then another line, then the thud, thud of a bass guitar.
The neighbor's stereo finds her.
Someone else's blood thumping in her veins.
Trespass so complete there is no place to hide.
She wants to write a poem that will pull the inaudible out
of the audible.
A poem that will bring her audience peace,
but it isn't quiet enough for her to do it.
She turns to her record collection and puts on a record
at random in self-defense and as an omen,
the way she would cut the tarot or consult the I Ching.
She hears the anorexic minutiae of disco,
feels it tighten her pulses, and she dances for several minutes.
Then she sits in front of the stereo and puts in one record
after another, drowning out the neighbor's sound,
waiting for a sign.
She listens to the predictable unnerving undertow of reggae,
the philosulfuric Rolling Stones, piano wails
drowning in a golden lake of trombones,
a jug band whose lead singer sounds swallowing his tongue.
Keith Jarrett's arpeggios like runny egg white.
Marianne Faithfull's broken dolly voice.
The Beach Boys.
A saxophone that slides its hand over the world with obsession
and devotion, giving way to the copacetic hiccup
of a more avant garde saxophone and its muffled, huffing bleat.
Then 16 conga drummers, all Moslems, so it
sounds like a single drum.
She stumbles on the hits of the '50s, a generation of music
that milked every platitude of high school heartache.
No poetry, only music then.
Who's that singing?
The Pomades?
The Questionnaires?
It begins to rain again.
She puts on a series of rainy day,
ain't got no loving blues, only half listening,
trying to find the poem.
Is it Fiddling Blind Lightning Junior Sonny Boy
Smith or what singing, "She Asked for Water,
He Gave Her Gasoline?"
Is it Big Sister Little Mama Johnson doing the shouting?
Or is it the falsetto of Little Walker?
"Blues is truth," said Brownie McGhee.
Blues is not a dream.
"If you've got no love to give, don't give it to me,"
says a good woman singer.
She likes to listen to women singers, so she gives in,
chooses Billie Holiday as she always
does, sure that long ago in her crib
she heard that drug roughened voice over the radio.
No face or cocaine white gardenia
visible, a snowdrift outside the window,
her young mother washing the dishes in snowy suds.
The caressing voice had sealed her in then, had made her safe.
She had no idea the voice was singing about suffering.
And she herself sang very early, she remembers, sang
and sang after an appendectomy, wouldn't
stop singing until they gave her piano
lessons at the age of seven.
A long career in music abbreviated however,
because Mr. Bissell kept his hand under her blouse,
working his way in through the sleeve
as she practiced a simple rondo in the red cover book.
Finally, she stopped pleading boredom
to her blissfully ignorant mother, starting piano lessons
again later with Mrs. Hallowell, 80 years old,
who fell asleep before the scales were finished,
and whose elderly vagueness was echoed in her love
for the pedal from which her foot never rose.
Hump, hump, be it ever so humble.
There's no place like hump, hump.
Mrs. Hallowell, leaving her earthly home forever one day
while instructing another student and her music,
until at 15 she put a tenor sax in her mouth for the first time
in the class that was open to everyone.
The teacher telling a late comer, "here's
how you try out for the class.
I'll play two notes and you tell me which is higher."
And the teacher banged out a C, and the kid
said, "that's higher."
And the teacher said, "you're in, kid."
Which reminded her of John Cage's anecdote
about playing the Buddhist mass for a class at the New School,
one note over and over for 15 minutes
until one of the students rose screaming,
"I can't stand another bit," and Cage mercifully leaned over
to take the needle from the record,
and another student called out, "I
was just getting used to it."
Which reminded her of her favorite joke in which there
are three hermits sitting in a cave,
and one day a horse gallops past the mouth of the cave.
And a month later one of the hermit
says, "hey, that was a beautiful brown horse that ran
past the mouth of the cave."
And a couple of months later the second hermit says,
"that was no brown horse, that was a white one."
And a year later the third hermit
says, "if you don't stop this bickering, I'm leaving."
[LAUGHTER]
When she told the new man in her life the joke,
he told her with a serious face he'd have to think about it.
She turned off the stereo.
The rain sounded like handfuls of seeds angrily hurled
onto the roof.
From the neighbor's house there was silence.
She was interested in qualities of silence.
Silence like a series of hyphens.
Silence like the weeping of creatures without eyes.
Mammal silence.
The silence of fish and the silence
of humans, which depended on how they were breathing.
There wasn't any such thing as silence,
of course, if you understood that there wasn't only
the sound a thing or being makes,
but the sound a thing or being is--
its dimensions and vibrations in the space around it.
This intrinsic sound was different from adhesive
or illustrative sound, that is the sound a being uses
to get our attention, to perpetuate itself,
to draw itself into the future.
They all agreed, he and she, that they didn't have a future.
They were not in love.
Love is when you automatically correct the inexact intervals
before you actually hear them.
Still, when she tried to concentrate
on poetry and music, on avoiding the melody,
hopefully, he was the bass line that interfered.
It was only a few months ago that she
had sat on his low sofa and looked at him
as he stood above her slightly sway
backed compared to the acoustic hunch of a folk singer.
The bass guitar held across his pelvis
and aimed to one side like a gun, an intravenous cord
trailing from it and ending in a plug on the wall.
He told her she was the first to hear the riffs and phrases he'd
invented that afternoon for his "Flying to New York Change,
at Chicago Blues."
And she told him she had never been so close to a bass before.
It was like being close to an elephant.
The bigness booming through her.
Because he was so attractive, she
submitted to the loudness of the seduction,
wondering if the price of this connection would be mutation.
She did not believe that anything so loud and deep
could leave her unchanged.
She moved to a different place on the sofa
onto some Belgian springs.
Probably there was only one spot that was fatal.
Somewhere she had read that the right music could
freeze water or kill a man.
They talked and talked.
He told her that when he heard a tune
he heard the harmony line just as strongly,
and she understood that whether he knew it or not,
he was telling her about the other women in his life.
He told her that sound as it exists in time is rhythm,
and rhythm is the mood of time.
For repetition, you had to have conviction,
and all keepers of the rhythm, bass or drum,
were keepers of the flame.
Sometimes she asked him avid questions,
but lost the answers while looking
at his good looking face.
Leo D. Fender, she seemed to remember,
invented the bass guitar in the early '50s as a weapon.
D. Fender was the first to understand the relationship
between rhythm and aggression.
Because of its shotgun length neck
and its role in causing deafness,
the bass inspired a series of local guitar control
laws phased out in the '70s.
She wondered whatever happened to the big double bass
they hugged from behind, humble and barely audible.
"They put it on its side," he said,
"tensed it till it got electric."
No longer encircled like a woman,
now it was held far away from the heart,
taking the old chords with it, but propelling them so far
it could drive you crazy.
She thought of several neighborhoods
she moved away from because of those chords.
She tried to convince him of the balancing value of quietness.
"Jimi Hendrix was the first to play loud, right?"
She said, and "he died, right?"
She talked up the sense of acoustic proportion,
the logic of electric companies charging customers
according to volume.
The louder the stereo, the higher the bill.
She lectured him about music in the space heater age.
"We could dance all winter to keep warm,"
she said, the" way bees do."
Rilke said poets are bees of the invisible.
We can dance to keep the invisible warm.
She spoke to him of the greatness of poetry,
showed him Wallace Stevens' "Man with the Blue Guitar,"
and he propped up her thoughts on music and poetry
by taking her dancing at most of the venues in town.
They went to hear The Clap, the new wave group, at the Civic,
and she looked at the amps and thought,
"we are dancing with machines."
They went to Sam's in San Jose, a vast cowboy redneck
heaven with hurricane lamps and wagon wheel chandeliers,
listening to Prince Ida with a metal washboard hung
like a bib around his neck.
Zydeco's son running two spoons up and down
the ridges in zigzag rhythms as if he were stroking himself,
gleeful as a baby.
There was no doubt about it, music
was better physical exercise than poetry.
The bass guitarist hadn't yet begun
the push pulling of rhythm.
Push, pull, like a diatomic accordion unmovingly
through the unpredictable slowing
and speeding up with his attention.
They made love to The Who, to Taj Mahal,
to seven rounds of Dylan singing "Tangled Up in Blue,"
heating his under heated room with their bodies
for most of the rainy winter.
"You really turn me on," he told her,
"is not an acoustic expression."
He trusted her enough to confide that he once
thought the Beatles were brothers, but no further.
She could hear him thinking, now what do I do?
She assured him that it isn't where it's going,
it's where it's coming from.
What if you admit there's no particular ending?
Everything changes.
"No music ever ends," said Duke Ellington.
"Everything I care for happens all the time,"
said a poet she liked to read.
"I was just getting used to it," said the student
about the Buddhist mass.
Although one did have to distinguish Marcel Duchamp's
sprays, finally unfinished, was not the same as eternally
undone.
She left her house, stopped at the Hotel St. Joe's
for a cappuccino, and headed for the pier.
It was raining lightly.
She looked for seals in the dark, choppy waters
around the pilings.
She thought she heard a foghorn, single ghost
note of a bass guitar, the underbelly of things.
The gray whales were out there somewhere
dreaming in bulk, 40 or 50 dreams between soundings,
singing their songs in sleep and waking.
There was one kind of whale that had a nine movement song,
and over time the song gradually altered
until after 10 years of yawning from a given tune,
nothing was the same as in the original,
with whales of this kind all over the world
amending their song simultaneously.
Telepathy, she thought, arises as a means
of preserving culture in conditions of diaspora.
Computers were corporate simulations of telepathy,
but for whales the telepathic songs
were a form of prayer, each note an indication
to a deity they could understand.
She did believe that poetry and music were twins
in prayer in the beginning.
Devotions driving the gods down into the heart
spinning them into ourselves.
Music wasn't difficult to learn, then,
with harps from the bones and hair of mastodons,
tempi based on the rhythm of running hooves,
and chirps to deepen the breathing bring oxygen
to the blood, song giving the fire for labor,
or becoming an incantation that taunted the tribal dark.
Gulls swooped and [AUDIO OUT] mind began
to clear as the rain thinned out to a drizzle.
She imagined her body as fields of sound
in order to see how she felt in every part of herself,
to find where the static was, the secret thresholds
and securest places.
She asked herself avid questions.
What notes have you heard today?
For as the wise composer Azebub Sobelow said,
"the shape of your mind is the shape of your daily music."
She asked herself in a fascist state,
which is more dangerous, poetry or music?
She wondered what singer had said,
"give me a peach or a pear, because you
know it's been cold."
She wondered which is more efficient in postponing
death, music or poetry?
Sex was a deep postponer of death,
and she thought of the songs of courtship,
ranging from the sweetest of human murmurs,
to the yelping of hyenas mating only every couple
of years with acrimonious brevity.
She wondered if the spiral was the essential pattern
in nature, what was the essential [AUDIO OUT]??
She wondered would she ever be able to write a poem that
wasn't a poem, a meeting of the inaudible
and audible that came across as a chord?
The sky cleared for a minute.
She heard no bass line.
Nowhere was there the unpredictable undertow
of his guitar.
Everything she cared for happened all the time,
but what if she stopped caring even though she was just
getting used to it?
As the clouds began to shred away
she remembered that for the last several weeks
she had been dreaming about music.
She unearthed the dreams easily as the sky brightened
the silence around her.
I dream of Easter music rising like bread as the choir sang,
another of a silvery unplaceable song of a two-year-old,
another a nightmare stuffed with the sounds made
by swans and giraffes with broken necks,
sounds full of anger at the bass guitarist.
Another where she sat dropping a wad of paper on a bongo
drum from a distance of three feet, the weak feeling
of waiting for him to call.
The best one and the longest was a dream
where "ah dah dah" was hummed again and again giving
a breathy background to a pure melodious lead guiding her
to a place where a crowd of people
cried, "where are the saxophones?
Where are the saxophones?"
And a singing came up to her singing, "no matter what
it ain't going to look nothing, but like a poem,"
and she nodded in the dream and agreed with him.
[APPLAUSE]
Your applause allows me to drink water
without anyone quite realizing it.
I always have a hard time drinking water at meetings,
but in the desert, it's absolutely essential.
This is the half hour story, and I'm reading
an abbreviated version--
that is it will take a half an hour,
but the full story would take a lot--
what you're getting is parts, but I hope
they are the essential parts.
I'll pause when there's a significant jump from section
to section.
There will be a little silence.
And the man with the guitar and this story
bears no relation to the man in the previous story.
Those of you who are hunting for facts and biography.
And none of it is true anyway.
This is called "Still Life with Bath."
What was this again?
"Still Life with Bath."
She ran the bath full force into the long old-fashioned tub
and then she climbed in and lay like a stone in the water,
listening to the slow, buoyant voice singing,
"you can get it if you really want,"
announcing the beginning of the reggae hour.
She lay tidily under the foam as if she
were stone ground tiny after centuries of polishing
at the bottom of a lake.
She had been taking two and three baths a day
because, she joked to herself, when
she took showers she thought she heard the phone ringing.
They used up a great deal of time, the baths,
but life was made up of time mostly.
What else was there?
She slid in deeper, almost supine,
sinking into the heat and fragrance, the water touching
her every place up to her neck.
She closed her eyes and heard the bubbles
crackling next to her ears like a light distant ring.
In the bath she was safe, alone with him.
They could do nothing wrong, because they were
inappropriate from the start.
Every move they made in any direction
brought them closer to the end.
There was no waiting to understand
what time had in mind for them.
It had nothing in mind, though it would let them dance.
They spent hours flying to each other,
watching time go backward or pull forward.
New York, California, New Mexico, New Hampshire,
substituting enormities of space for the skimpiness
of their future.
He traveled to play music, she traveled to give lectures,
and the rest of the time they lived 3,000 miles apart,
talking on the flight phone that was now perfectly, quietly,
silent.
He might be anywhere.
Where did we see that crazy guy wearing a sandwich board that
said, "I need a woman," he said, "was that in Soho?
On Telegraph Avenue?"
"The streets were really dirty."
"It wasn't LA."
"No, it was cold."
"That week in Santa Fe when it snowed.
No, there are so many women there.
Can you imagine having to advertise?"
Sometimes the exact tone of his voice
would come back to pierce her before she could attach it
to meaning, so that it went directly into her body.
Advertise?
His musical voice would fade in an upward querying
tone, marveling at everything.
He loved to talk, loved to hear her talk.
"Come on, what do you think?"
Loved all responsiveness in speech, comebacks, repartee,
compliments given and taken, ensemble work.
He was the only distinctly handsome man she had ever met
who didn't secretly want to be alone.
"I just called to hear your voice,"
he would say after she picked up the flight phone.
"Say anything, I get this literally a physical feeling
when I talk to you."
And he would listen to her as if she were music,
the sound waves from her body corresponding
to some perfect score in his mind, just as their bodies
fit together perfectly in gesture, dancing, sleeping,
making love, standing close together on a crowded train.
"Listening can be difficult," he said, "most things
don't make a sound.
The carpet, for instance, is silent,
but everything can be touched, everything can be seen."
She liked that and wrote it down.
Everything can be touched, everything can be seen.
He fell in love with her quickly,
like a snap judgment that had the depth of years
of consideration.
He insisted that it was not enough to be
loved, if she was already loved by the man she was seeing.
You had to be loved for the right reasons.
"You're gentle, you're witty, you have a sense of honor,"
he said, "I've been searching for years."
"You haven't been alive for years," she teased.
He ignored her.
He was in pursuit, persuasive.
"You're a Jane Austen heroine with the body of--"
and he showed her, turning her to face the full length
mirror and the light of the one candle, opening her thin robe,
giving her her image with his hands on her
as if he were softly rubbing his vision into her skin.
She closed her eyes and felt his 10 fingers as 20 fingers,
telling her the story of her life.
She had never heard it before.
"I used to think 19th century heroines didn't have bodies,"
he said later as they lay in the wide bed, his own body
palomino, a thin film of perspiration on his chest,
a faint silvery smell on his skin.
She watched his chest rising and falling,
watched the curtains glide inward in the evening breeze
stirring the scent of jasmine into the room.
They talked until sunrise.
When I was 10 I was [AUDIO OUT],"," she chattered.
"I thought I'd never find a boy as smart as I was to kiss,
so I let Billy Emerson come over.
He was very good looking, and I tutored him.
I told him 98% of the people in Colombia are peasant farmers.
When Mrs. Penniman called on him in class,
he said, 98% of the people in Colombia
are pleasant foreigners.
I couldn't kiss him."
He laughed.
"I would have liked you at 10.
Such a serious girl.
Of course when you were 10, I wasn't born yet."
She thought of their reflections in movie lobby mirrors,
of the occasional sharp glances from passers by, women his age
the worst, clear-eyed and condescending.
Once they had cataloged those glances in the beginning
when it was almost amusing.
Boston's were meanest, San Francisco next,
New York and Los Angeles were indulgent
and saw them holding hands as young lovers.
On the bus from Worcester to Lee where friends had lent them
a house in the Berkshires for 10 days, a house filled
with American antiques that would burnish
their impermanence with continuity,
they relinquish themselves to the plush seats, relieved
to be setting out on a journey together,
and heard Yankee voices behind them.
"How you doing, Louis?"
"Getting old."
"That's healthy."
"Going to visit my kid brother."
"Jackie?"
"Yep, getting married.
Woman 12 years older than him."
"Ah, yeah," the man sympathized, "poor fella."
"Well, you know, she's got a business.
He's in it for the green."
It was the first time they had avoided anything together,
sitting there without speaking, her head buried
in Anna Karenina.
Vronsky was younger, she was sure.
She herself had no green, so there was no question.
The music was moving on now, up and down, sultry and dignified,
no woman no cry.
They had danced to Bob Marley and the Wailers
in a ballroom on Columbus Avenue.
The Wailers' hair like live twigs smeared with ocher.
They [AUDIO OUT] like wands, like waves, like semaphores,
had made love like pistons that night, a real screwing.
Bob Marley was singing about anger and hunger
and how connected they are.
That was politics, of course, but if you wanted someone
and you couldn't have them that, too, made you furious.
She remembered the insinuating sound of the drum played
by Peter the smart boy she chased in high school,
one light conga so exquisitely timed
it hurt, two notes the same and one down,
the sound a dent might make in something, off somehow,
not where you expect anything to happen.
She liked things off, unstable syntax, the frothy white
ballerina pirouetting among the syncopated dancers
in red Hawaiian shirts shrugging and swaying to the Beach Boys
on a stage where overalled dancers sprayed graffiti
on a backdrop that rolled upward,
allowing them more and more clean canvas,
another chance and another.
And after that dance concert, the night before one
of her planes to California, [AUDIO OUT]
back to the 79th Street brownstone
he was taking care of and they played pool.
She'd watched him right angled over the table, his rump
up, that perfect curve, the bright clack of billiard balls
and green felt under the chandelier.
His grace and muscle teaching her
how all the balls would fit eventually into the pockets.
He hadn't liked the ballerina, a solecism.
He liked Mozart, tennis courts, geometry
of ebony circles on white soccer balls, everything perfect.
Having set up his absolutes, however, he liked to improvise.
And before going to bed, they played hockey
with a broom and bagel down the long Italian tiled hall,
the bagel banging up against the cream colored walls,
she bent over laughing.
Come on, Raggedy Ann, play.
And when he won by inches, goal, he took off her clothes.
She pushed the door closed with her foot to keep the heat in,
the reggae lyrics buried now in the impeccable, staggered
rhythms.
"Go get your weakness and dance.
Keep lyin' up yourself.
Ah, so far.
Sapphire.
So vicious, so furious."
She couldn't quite make it out.
There was no literal truth anyway.
He had said they would never lose sight of one another.
She remembered the exact words spoken
at the end of one of their marathon conversations
on the new phone with its dry, respectful, erotic ring,
the white phone that allowed him to get through to her any time.
They had talked three hours, four hours, five hours once,
sickened by the stale intimacy with the plastic receiver,
unconsummated by touch or sight--
he was wrong, not everything could be touched or seen,
but unable to hang up.
He had made love to her over the phone.
"I want you."
They were murmuring into the receivers,
inciting each other, when they heard voices, a mother
and daughter in Santa Fe and Wisconsin,
a conversation about herbs, Midwestern, innocent.
"You should always collect the leaves in the morning
after the dew is off and just spread them out on the floor."
"You're on a line!"
They cried out, inflamed, as if a shade had snapped up
and their neighbors now peered in at them writhing in joy
and abandon on a rumpled bed.
She was really alone with him now,
in that limbo where her mind, sometimes in a loud whisper,
worked out the figures of her longing
against a wallpaper of silence.
She had become accustomed to soliloquy, loneliness,
the single voice, a solitude that worked so deeply on her
it seemed to alter her fingerprints.
His actual presence had kept her from echoes.
After being with him she always felt at one with herself,
smoothed into shape.
She breathed more easily then, as
if inhaling a meadow's sweetness,
fragrance of cowslip, oxbreath, self-heal.
Often he played the guitar and sang
her to sleep in a rich tenor baritone that
was clear at the center with the slightest
roughness at the edges, like tiny cilia that picked up
feeling from the air.
When he sang to her she became a child, time slid over
so that he had more of it, sleep releasing
her face into a youthfulness he remarked on.
He sang piercing, primitive Irish songs, Beatle songs,
the blues, and his own songs whose abruptly
modulated melodies seemed to come from a place
where things existed in their original condition
without anger, without irony, without pain.
He and she were as intimate then,
as he sat on the bed coupling them in his harmonies,
as when they were making love.
The reggae was louder now, a slow rhythm,
a rhythm that sank to its knees before it got up again.
Then Earl Zero was saying, "it's a rough life, but after a while
you see the benefits later."
His voice reminded her of deep blue smoke, distant coffee
plantations.
"I and I paralyze all weak heart conceptions," Zero said.
I and I, that curious plural.
They had not made it to plural.
"We're a hybrid," he muttered to her one
night when he had fallen into a scrabbling darkness,
"nature hates us."
Unhappiness transformed him as she had never
seen anyone transformed by it.
His blond hair would darken considerably in his misery.
She didn't know the chemistry of this, but she saw it happen.
A vein would bulge in his temple,
faint imperfections in your skin would show up
as pits in his complexion.
He would leave a light on then, all night,
to guard his fragile sleep, and get up in the morning blinking
out the new day, his eyes as sensitive as an albino's.
"A headache, I have them often, as
if I hit my head on a drawer."
His play of shadow and light drew her in
and the return of his light was always worth waiting for.
It felt like a morning light, all objects fresh
under its gaze.
"What do you do to have fun?" he said.
It hadn't occurred to her-- a blurred category.
Books, walks in the woods, travel
with the man she'd been seeing?
He took her to the arcade at the amusement park,
and chased her through the constantly changing maze,
the shrill electronic beeper announcing it to everyone.
Then she chased him, the silenced beeper
telling everyone he was hers.
They were a perfect match, each wanting the other
in the white labyrinth on the black screen,
each determined in pursuit, each skittish in escape.
Then they played the pinball machines, the most garish one,
Future Spa.
He expertly releasing the ball so it made contact.
There, there, again, there.
The hits lit up for him-- spa!
A hair's breath between no touch and the touch
that won everything.
The ball dropped down in the gutters
and raced back up again teasingly near the Future zone,
when a good looking girl at the next machine
gave him a long low-waves Hawaii satin look, and he lit up.
He looked at all pretty women as if they were the highest
waterfall in the world, with a delight and amazement
that no one could mind.
And lost interest, the ball rolling down to the bottom,
making no contact, disappearing, a clear miss,
darkness, you lost your chance.
They sighed and moved on to the machines
near the door of the arcade where
the late sunlight streamed in and presented all the gold
in his hair.
While he was jabbing at the controls of Lunar Rescue,
she put a nickel in the Your Mate machine
that sat neatly in the midst of the ululations, menacing roars,
twitters, beeps, gurgles, sick lost plane
noises, and groundbreaking explosions
that flashed around her in an atmosphere
of continuous emergency.
The card it dropped for him had a blonde on it circa 1932,
she guessed, before even she was born.
Across the way, Free Play winked like a pulse above his head,
rewarding the quickness of his hand and eye.
He was at home in those electronic complications.
The card was musty and ancient.
Your mate.
The girl was dimpled, with ringlets,
plump in a gingham dress.
A matching blonde.
Adorable as a kitchen window.
They would have [AUDIO OUT] live in an ivy-covered cottage
with roses lining the walk.
He was in luck, because she would
make the most perfect wife.
A picket fence.
He thanked her politely and looked away.
And then there's a transition.
They go for a walk on the beach, and he tells her
that he'll want children in seven or eight years--
two or three children, and she realizes
that the mathematics of that makes it impossible
for them to be together.
And then on another coast.
They were listening to subdued Mozart,
music for glass harmonica in a restaurant on the water.
He looked at her across a table set with blue napkins,
corn flowers, gleaming crystal.
"If we had a child, she'd be so smart."
"She?"
"And have coppery green eyes like yours."
"And soft lion hair like yours."
Then they both look pained as if someone had pinched their faces
with a metal clip, and he began to talk about his own childhood
instead.
There was a time, he rushed on, the summer he
was seven, when he was at the cabin in the Maine woods,
and after dinner they played Mozart on an old record player.
Sometimes she said record player and he corrected her, "stereo."
The first time he'd really noticed music
by a composer who seemed to understand counterpoint
and harmony since babyhood, his mother
told him, a child no older than he was.
I would have been 19, she thought, working in an office
to earn my way through college, while he
sat very small in a green wicker chair up way past his bedtime,
listening to the Sinfonia Concertante
against a bath of cricket sound, listening
to the life move in it, completely at home
in his own small life.
He was sitting there, he said, fighting sleepiness,
when a buck, antlers was young and wide,
and then a doe, and then a fawn on fragile legs,
emerged from the forest in the silken moonlight,
holding perfectly still, completely at peace,
elegantly gathered in the light to listen, ears flicked erect.
"In a way, it was my first experience of quietness,"
he said.
"And, you know, that evening made me
understand in some dim way that music brings things to you.
It made me think that if I could play music,
an elegant piece would come to me."
He laughed, "I'm still waiting."
He reached for her hand across the table,
ignoring the waitress who splashed
ice water into their glasses.
"Well, you've come to me anyway."
"Am I an elegant piece?"
She laughed.
He didn't mind her lightening it up.
She was just drawing back as she did sometimes
when he held her so tight she felt like balsa, breakable.
The way he drew back sometimes, too,
each of them fully responsible for this
walk along a precipice.
They would distract each other as if they were invalids
with months to live, playing gin rummy at midnight,
baking apple pie at 2:00 AM, watching
Katharine Hepburn on television till dawn,
giving each other little quizzes--
"what two plays are about moonlight?"--
reading foolish comic books when they were most anguished.
"Could this be paradise?" he intoned,
"or is it only temporary before a real terror
besiege [AUDIO OUT] bound by pure love,
they share a secret knowledge of a mythical garden.
And fate has smiled on their union,
for few people who enter the twilight zone are ever
allowed to return."
She pushed up a little in the tub
and felt the refreshment of the air on her arms and shoulders.
Its sculpted coolness had a more knowing touch
than the warmth of the water.
She let one hand dangle over the edge of the tub
as if her wrist were broken, her other hand
waving the air in time to the music, "get up, stand up."
She could hear the lyrics more clearly with her shoulders
out of the water, but the air had a disturbing smoothness,
and she slipped down again into the bath, into the beginning.
The dream had signaled that she was going to fall.
They had made love for the first time,
and she was astonished at his perfect body, a Leonardo
drawing of man accepting himself, justly, humanly,
loving himself.
She opened easily to him into the luxury of trust.
He was too young to hurt her.
He could be a [INAUDIBLE].
They laughed, wrestled each other off the bed,
read aloud to each other, smoked joints, ate chocolate cookies,
and walked blindly on a moonless path he knew by heart.
His laugh was sexual, a full wet brushstroke.
Applied to paper it would be the blue
of the Pacific on a glittering day,
surface out in the high clean waves.
She had fallen asleep immediately in the narrow bed.
The dream signaled that she was going to fall.
Buildings around a grassy court of classical proportion, pitch
black, and no sense of space as she knew it.
The ground gave way, and she was taken
into a dark, unending fold of earth.
From her throat, a shout that coated itself in
fear and became a whisper.
The falling renewed itself even after the thud that woke her
and sent her shaking to the sink for a glass of water
where she found a leaden colored mouse floating
in the basin like a bloated rag.
She had known what the dream meant and had flouted the omen.
He was like sunlight, it would be worth it.
She heard the click of acorns dropping from the live oak
trees onto the porch.
The water was cooling now.
The reggae sulking and cajoling, doling out measures
of insouciance, then silence.
The singer was holding his favors.
She waited, swished the cooling water, then he began again.
She turned the faucet to hot and brushed the scalding water
into the cool.
The Jamaican dialect was difficult.
It sounded as if you were talking about weather,
talking about weather as if weather were sex.
His rich voice hoarded all the meaning in the world--
anyone who wanted it would have to go to him to get it.
She shut off the water, and heard the announcer reel off
a list of titles, "and Telephone Bill Too Big," he concluded.
She was sure she'd heard it right this time.
Their telephone bills had been enormous.
But the radio and the water had stopped helping.
His absence was audible now, a sound only a dog could hear,
a sound that shifted atoms so that the room looked different,
odd, her face in the mirror odd.
His looking at her face had become part of her face.
"It's a pretty face, a serious face, sometimes not so pretty.
Always interesting, beautiful."
It was now dimming to nothing, non-sequitur,
a place to carry her eyes, a face going no place.
It would drive her crazy to think of him so much,
but the dullness of not thinking about him
would take her strength from her.
Only one more and she would stop.
It was July in their second year, their last night
together, they had agreed on it.
They had 17 hours left, plenty of time.
The night was so warm, the two lane
road so smooth and deserted, the moon so bright,
that he turned the headlights off and let the car glide
into the middle of the road, the yellow line spinning out
from under them like a spider's thread.
He held her hand tightly in the middle of the seat
as she tried to memorize the comforts of their silence.
"A dog!" he said, his reflexes quick, his foot on the brake,
his arm flung out to keep her [AUDIO OUT] forward.
She saw a small brown dog, flaggy tail flaring up behind,
running quite fast, and then as her eyes adjusted,
the shoulders of two men.
What were they doing in the middle of the highway?
And then the shoulders of the men, she saw,
were not the shoulders of men, but the rumps of horses,
two white horses trotting, a dusty
white in the warm dark of the evening.
He slowed down to a crawl, and the dog earnestly
herded the horses to the left side of the road
till they were alongside the car and she
could hear the clap, clap, clap, of their hooves
over the sound of the motor.
"I can't believe this," he chortled.
"Horses!"
she cried.
She could not get enough of them.
Their dusky whiteness was evenly paced
with the car, their wildness moving heavily
through the silence, their secret animal strength close
to her, powerful bodies that made the metal of a car
seem ridiculous.
They glided alongside in the shadows
made by trees and moonlight.
"We better call the police."
"The next house."
They drove on and passed no houses, but within a minute
saw two pinpoint lights enlarging
as a pickup truck came toward them out
of the other end of the night.
He put the lights on and flicked them fast,
afraid that if he slammed at the horn
it would frighten the horses who were moving ahead now,
the dog, harried as a man wringing his hands,
trying to stop them.
The truck slowed as it came alongside.
"It's a good thing you're a careful driver,"
the man at the wheel leaned out.
"I thought we'd lost them altogether.
Keep going, we'll follow," he instructed them,
and the pickup swung round in a U-turn.
The horses were going faster now and cantered down a side road
that branched off to the left.
Then they began galloping in the silence, their rumps dusky
moons, the dog keeping up, the surrounding mountains
patient, moonlit, still.
They swerved at a farmhouse with a barn
behind and disappeared into a meadow
that sloped up into orchards.
The pickup bucked to a halt. "Is this your barn?" she said.
"No," the driver said ruefully, "thanks anyway."
And he and his partner hurried toward the meadow with ropes
slung over their shoulders.
She felt small, disappointed, as if some rushing stream
had stopped.
What she really wanted was to run with the horses, run
into the night.
"I didn't really want them to catch those horses," he said.
"Me neither," she said, but when he said it, it made her uneasy.
"They were beautiful."
"Incredibly beautiful," he murmured.
"They looked exactly alike."
She turned a facet to the left and waited
to feel the comfort of the hot water replenishing itself.
Of course he wanted babies, flesh
to bind his time so he wouldn't get lost in it, someone
to look exactly like him.
The water ran lukewarm and she absentmindedly
soaked her breasts and shoulders,
the foam in flat white islands around her.
Linton Kwesi Johnson sang with a alluring menace,
"I did warn you," concluding the hour as the water ran cooler.
She squeezed the knob to the right
and got out dripping to stop the plastic pulse of disco,
he had hated that jabbing continuum.
She crawled sopping wet under the sheet and blankets,
something she learned, you healed as your body dried
in its own good time.
Once, tired of California, looking
for differences that would mask the real difference,
he'd said, "healing, why talk about healing?
Healing implies you're sick."
The bath water gurgled down the metal drain
into the earth, an odd tintinnabulation,
like a phone ringing.
She stared at the white phone in its hospital silence.
Inside, it was empty.
There was a dark, anonymous knowing buzz.
Perhaps she had only to pick it up
and he would be there in Boston, Los Angeles,
Santa Fe, telling her he loved her, wanted her right now.
That was craziness.
Someday, probably, he would call, make the dead phone jump,
and she would say, "fine, fine."
But she didn't want that cartoon of cheerful conventional pride.
She wanted the close-grained things all over again,
the old precincts replayed, with new lighting
to diminish the lines in her face and erase the 12.
She pulled her knees up against her chest under the covers
and pulled her head under to increase the heat.
She had to stick to memory and the simplest things.
Time would not heal her, it was not on her side.
She shivered a little and thought, "even my hair
gets lonely."
And she left the light on as a memorial
as she settled down to sleep.
[APPLAUSE]
This last short piece was written and performed
in collaboration with Rob Brezsny, a poet
and the new wave singer, and my partner in the Santa Cruz Prose
band.
Rob lives in Santa Cruz and Jonathan Penner
has very graciously consented to stand in for him
in tonight's performance of a piece called "Bomb."
Do you want water?
No, I'm good.
I'd like to begin by asking you to do
a small, voluptuous meditation as part of the reading.
Will you close your eyes?
The title of the piece is "Bomb."
I had a question.
And with your eyes closed, will you
breathe evenly and comfortably.
Be aware of your body.
Breathe.
And really easily, imagine painting your body
inside and outside with color.
All over.
Even the soles of your feet, even your hair,
as few or as many colors as you would like to imagine there.
Take time for this.
Now, open your eyes to time as you know it.
What's your picture of time?
Is your picture of time a slow explosion
rolling spirals of seeds splashing out
from your solar plexus?
Is it a mist with wheels?
Envision time for yourself, and tomorrow
paint your body into your picture of time.
Picture of time?
I'm worried about my picture of time.
I'm worried my picture of time.
We are not free.
Our futures are not assured.
The ambient, tribal worry is everywhere.
Remember, I was so anxious about the future?
Remember I, remember the future.
It takes future--
To feel the pleasure, to take the future of being
alive in that pleasure.
I don't remember.
We're afraid we're losing our memories.
Some of the things we remember haven't happened yet.
We remember now.
We feel much closer to all of you.
We feel much closer to you all.
We feel much closer to all of you
when we pretend we're all fighting.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Remember to feel the future.
Remember closer.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
I remember now.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
There will be no nuclear war, no final gun,
no lost feast at the bottom of time.
No lost feast at the bottom of time.
The God of time imagined the bomb into us
from the beginning, acted it out in the smaller disappearances,
giving people as much fear as they could stand
to remember in their history.
Oh, God of time and the bomb.
God of giving us so much fear that our morality collapses.
God of the past that remembers the future.
God of [INAUDIBLE] cultures and buried treasures
trespassed upon.
God of forgotten sun dials.
God of wilted dinosaurs.
God of mastodons spinning their bones into ourselves.
God of people who fail to worship time,
and so it stopped.
God of vipers and dead [INAUDIBLE]
eating away the kingdoms.
God of sheets of ice over the flowers.
Double God who gives us danger.
Who makes us safe.
God at ineluctable stasis.
God of so much change you want to throw up.
[INAUDIBLE] and water, which are so beautiful.
God of the perished mahogany in the deep Mayan pools
of sacrifice.
God of light.
Let the cumulative light fall into our bodies.
Let it protect us from those who tease themselves
with the end of the world.
Let the breath be in us now.
Let us know our bodies well enough
to allow the light to enter us.
Let us know other bodies well enough
to allow us to enter their light.
Let us gather all of our light into our bodies.
Let us become the light.
Paint our bodies with light.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]