New Year, Rainy Friday

The California winter of rain is here, has been here, and gives the impression that it will never not be here. And I am here in the bedroom of a pleasantly empty house with the pup sleeping soundly at my feet. It seems that I my at last return to myself.

The year ended in a series of minor disasters that lasted weeks (inaugurated by the Republican win)and included four car breakdowns and $500 worth of repairs and a possible cancer diagnosis for the pup (that turned out to be nothing but an abscess cured by antibiotics but like the car it took several visits to professionals and a couple of break-downs to diagnose and over $500).

But I have hope for the coming year, especially with Percy's clean bill of health and the "Creative Visualization" book I got right before Christmas. I am imagining that everything is good, so that it will be good. Try it. It doesn't cost anything.

As for poetry, my friend Aaron Kunin called me the other day. He's on his way to Montreal for a few days and wanted to get in touch with a local writer. He's one of my favorite people to talk with. He and Ange. He's read every book and seen every movie and teaches classes like Color in Film. Not like the difference between Black and White and Color but the way a color or colors are used in particular films. He has several great poems in the 3rd issue of NO: A Journal of the Arts. My favorite goes like this:

Girl and Reptile

and girl turns toward
the accident with
an expectant look

as if it had been
a deliberate
attempt to gain her

attention (her tongue
wiping the shredded
inside of her cheek)

and would you eat the
apple (again she
finds herself on the

phone yelling at a
stranger) I would peel
and core the apple

yes little brother
(her face contorted
and her tongue pressing

against her cheek caused
it to bulge) you shall
have an apple too

The flatness of the language -- the cleanliness of the language -- doesn't take any attention away from the surrealistically banal scenario. Almost like a David Lynch domestic scene rendered in poetry. A private violence lurking beneath the surface, in the mouth. An incestuous Adam and Eve though the title implies that the boy is a different species. What if The New Yorker printed this on the same page as the latest Seymour Hersch article? Wouldn't poetry then be contemporary and relevant, finally, obviously so?

Good to be back.

-- M