A Note to New Readers ...

I have maintained this site as an online archive of The Jetty, my first, enormously lengthy blog. There are over 500 posts from a roughly 2 year timespan. I'm proud of most of them - some, though, won't make much sense without the context of the online activities/daily events to which I was responding.

I hope readers can find a few sparkling pieces here amid the slate and shale. I'll keep maintaining this site for as long as blogger will allow me.

Kind regards,
Cassie Lewis

You can follow my continuing adventures in writing, at the following address:

http://www.thelittleworkshop.blogspot.com

This new blog will be less personal, less a writing project than an 'architectural
survey' of literary process and inspiration.

See you there!

Cassie Lewis

I am following silence


There is no beginning, no end. I have been offline for a few months, and "A silence like snow" was, deliberately, the final post in 'The Jetty' sequence. That writing project has reached its natural conclusion, and since that time I have focused on its genesis in me.

After looking out on Lake Ontario, I left the foreshore. I have been amid stars. This blog, pared back, rather than rewritten, has become a manuscript. And will become, some day, an object in the world, a book in my hands.

I hope the book will sit in your hands finally. Or that your hands, cupped, will be filled with
running water.

Or that images are clues that will lead us home.

My online friends ... I have had to drive down this rainy street. I have had no input except from the road, slick with black ice. Street lights every few hundred feet. Amid stars.

Soon I will start a new blog. Perhaps not today. My new apartment is latent with words' precursors. Last night my friend Christine and I sat on the floor listening to Keren Ann's new CD 'Nolita', and suddenly we saw vines springing up the walls of my kitchen.

My breath holds.

Once I know the words I'll link to them, and a new website, here.

CL

"A silence like snow"


I seem to remember Sheila Murphy quoting this phrase, but the name of the original
author eludes me just now.

*

I am going to stand silently on the jetty and look out on Lake Ontario as the snow falls
on my hat, my scarf, my gloves, my upturned face. It's a beautiful image, and that is the
image with which I am going to end this blog.

*

In yoga class today I finally understood what my teacher has been trying to show me.
There are gaps between thoughts. If you allow the gaps to become longer, the curtain
of thoughts - tinkling like rows of beads - parts and you are deep inside of consciousness
itself, deep inside silence.

*

Mine is a broken but deep faith like a river inside of me. I believe in people even
when I do not trust a word they say.

In church the other day, I rebelled inwardly at all things scriptural. I wanted to stand
up and say " you see something but nobody else can see it in your words. They can only
see it in what you do, in the degree to which you are the demonstration of your words."

Words are 'mirrors of our self-regard', to quote John Forbes. I read the bible and I see
myself. The face of God is behind my face. Until the concepts of 'face', of 'god' fall away
I can never see the face of god.

All we see when we read the bible is that of which we are already convinced, until
the gaps between words become very large. Then, perhaps, we might sense the
depth of love or fear or pain that occasioned the words.

It is the same with vows. With ordering coffee. Statements of all kinds, ordinary,
sacred or profane.

*

I am a writer, but what is behind the concept 'writer'?

*

It occured to me this morning that poems tend towards wisdom, towards depth
not because of any particular insight on the part of their craftspeople. I know
a great many poets. They are just people.

I know a great many people who are no better or worse, as people, than poets.

*

It dawned on me - the sun behind this thought - is that by virtue of its sheer
compression, poetry generally pushes a little further into the unknown than
novels are able to.

(But any novel that does so is a poem in my eyes. See, for instance, Jean Rhys'
'Wide Sargasso Sea'. And similarly, in a novelist's eyes a brilliant poem might
approach the scope of 'War and Peace'.)

*

Linguists often note how many words the Eskimo people have for 'snow.'

*

Why do we, we who speak only English, have only one word for 'love'?

*

Another word for love might be 'snow'.

*

"My god is immense, and lonely
but unbowed"

- Ted Berrigan, in 'Words for Love'

*

God is a word for love is a word for snow.

*

Language isn't enough. The most a writer can hope for is to fail with
grace. I can gesture towards a feeling but I cannot make you feel
what I feel when I feel snow on my face.

I cannot understand what you mean when you say 'love'.

*

'Failure' is a concept. As the gaps between words widen, it too falls away,
tinkling like the glass of a beaded curtain. Time, too, falls away, and in the
silence no explanation is necessary.

'Silence' is a concept too. Behind it is that towards which we can only gesture.
One gesture might be "my friendship extends as far as the hand that holds
your coffee cup now, and at other times it richochets off stars".

It is hard to know where we are going because all the signs lead to a place
without signs and symbols of anything, anything. They lead to place where
we and the universe just are.

*

This is our shared loneliness.

*

Behind it is the silence of snow.

*

'Thank you' is a gesture, readers, take my hand.

On Clarity, & A Clarification


My intention in using the phrases 'women's shelter' and 'domestic violence'
in the post I just erased wasn't to elicit sympathy. I was making the worst
mistake a writer can make: adopting recieved conceptual shorthand.

I have found myself deeply resenting the responses I have recieved to this
post, not because they have been ill-intended, but because they are responses
to something less than the truth.

Language, if it is used effectively enough, can gesture towards the truth. I'm
going to try again. Because this is who I am.

'Violence' is always, always reciprocal. There is no absolute victim, no absolute
perpetrator.

I can easily imagine a situation where my partner might have been the one
seeking shelter. Economics - as is so often the case - has charted my course.

The phrase 'women's shelter' is misleading. Men suffer. And women abuse. I
have been abusive towards my husband.

Love, even in its dissolution, is a two way street, always.

My husband read what I wrote. I never dreamed that this would happen. And
I am sorry it has happened.

Private hurts hurt all of us, and this blog has evinced this fact. I wish you had
read the love poems, Colin.

"I trust in a gentle world,
I trust in you."

The most any writer can hope for is to fail with grace.

(Rereading this blog from start to finish tonight its repetitions seem to coil around eachother a maze that enfolds itself into itself endlessly and I think this is an accurate reflection of how I think as I am writing it.

When I write a POEM it is like a cinematic instant, a DNA segment removed from the whole. It says specific things about a finite field of variables but the interactions are potentially limitless.

When I talk I am here. I am wearing a watch. But sometimes I am not here or time floats.)

Burning Bright


If I could be friends with any animal I'd like to be a tiger's friend. He and
I would lie in the sun.

Then at night the tiger would pace around the campsite, guarding a wide
arc around the fire, beside which I slept.

My pillow - made from woven-together cloths from the clothes I took
with me from when I was a princess.

The pillow would be a crazy quilt of silks and saffrons, fading with sun
and many cares.

Every morning the tiger would yawn with incredible silent strength and
flex his powerful shoulders. Cat yoga.

I would wake up, yawn, and stretch my own scrawny shoulders until one
day I would wake up and I would be the tiger and the tiger would be me.

One personality, part child, part tiger.

But also I don't want to sleep because there are so many things
to dream awake.

Snow makes the town a new town.

Life puts on its magic cloak, and I am seven years old,
up late reading by torchlight.

My sleep test came back normal.
I'm normal.

But I still can't sleep.
Can't sleep can't sleep can't sleep.

At least it is the world's problem, now,
and not mine.

Headline in tomorrow's paper:

NORMAL PEOPLE CAN'T LIVE IN THIS WORLD EITHER

(Philip Whalen's poem 'Further Notice' deals with this theme.)

I just woke from a nightmare about lawyers!

About 25 millilitres of clarity


This has been a very intense ... life. For the benefit of confused
friends, let me say

* Yes, I am still in Rochester
* Yes, I am staying in Rochester, for the next several months, anyway
* Yes, I am single now
* Yes, I am getting my own tiny place in the new year some time
* Yes, it is snowing here but
* No, I'm not riding my bike anymore because my bike needs to go to the repair store,


plus my first winter proves too cold for cycling
after all.

Insomnia Postscript


The results from my sleep study are in, and it transpires
that I have had absolutely no underlying sleep disorders
at all.

Just plain old stress-induced tossing and turning.

Cold Turkey


What a horrible image, the image of cold turkeys, because I don't think of live
turkeys standing outside in the snow, I think of frozen turkey from the supermarket,
with dimpled skin.

Where does that expression come from anyway?

I quit without patches not for heroism's sake but because I'm impatient and I like
the idea of getting the nicotine out of my system as soon as possible.

A short, intense burst of discomfort. The only problem is I have a thousand things
I need to do this week and my head feels like insulated roofing and the demands of
the outside world are tapping on the roof.

Dimly I try to follow what they say.

I'm going to give myself a break and continue to
consider August 17th 2002 my official quit day.

Momentary Lapses


As of about 10pm last night I am a non-smoker
once more.

It's interesting, there's no psychological hangover
from quitting this time. I'm well and truly "over"
smoking.

It's a habit that helps keep underdogs underdogs.

Also it's only been a month and already I have had:
one respiratory virus, one case of stomach flu, and
numerous headaches and sore throats.

My body says "I want to breathe" and so does my
heart, etcetera.

But I, the overseeing 'I', needed to say "fuck you
fuck you fuck you" for a while first.

Quote of the day


"Let us be true, then, true and sitting in an open field"

-Alex McDermott, from 'Flowers for Zoe'

"Red sky at morning "


I dip back into azure after a journey of a thousand miles.
You are something else.

History cannot be parsed.

When I stop smoking it will be for the first time.
When we next meet,

I will know you for the first time.

I'm smoking again.

*

To enact the phrase 'fuck you'.

*

Smoke mingling with
its own steam ...

*

This world so shy and cold.

Black


Impossible amounts of love.
Cities etched with it.

The day states its case thus:
truth outlined,

where a body has raised itself
from the snow.

Riding my bike in the snow.

Thanksgiving


I spent the day with the family of a friend. I was the only white person there, and instead of 'where is the trash can?' I kept saying 'where is the rubbish?' when we were cleaning up after dinner. My friend has dozens of immediate family members. They poured into the house, ate her delicious cooking, then poured out again.

It snowed last night.

*

So much to tell you ... a few weeks ago my house split in two. Dramatic timing. Love, intended as a verb, as I packed my suitcases.

Ocean sounds all through my head.

No fixed address.


*

Toronto, a dream, a fork in the road.

Quote of the day

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

- T.S. Eliot

Ellipsis


I'm taking a short break from the starlit jetty. I need to
walk to town to get a few supplies.

Back soon.

Most of the locals seem to think my plan to ride my bike throughout winter
is insane. But compared to the buses it will be heaven. I'm really enjoying
all the exertion. Cool wind on my face.

I'm starting to believe that winter is really going to happen.

*

I'm so excited about being in Manhattan this time next week.

*

Not a single thought of poetry this week, other than the nagging concern
about my inattention to it.

*

Kneeling in the wet grass and gathering orange leaves into plastic bags
yesterday at twilight.

Wheels



For visa reasons I won't be able to get my driver's license for another year. However, today I got myself a bike, my first new bike in fifteen years. Bikes have come a long way since then.

With the right gear, I will be able to ride my bike even during winter snowstorms.

*

'Visa' has become an umbrella term in my life covering all manner of hopes fraught with difficulty.

*

They make neoprene booties now that you can wear over your shoes, protecting and warming your feet when there's snow and the roads are salted.

*

The bike is beautiful and the city is small and I feel good about riding a bike again. And it will quadruple my speed of transit.

*

I need a name for my bike. A girl's name. I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks, Stephanie, for the spam fighting link I found
on your site.

Fight Spam! Click Here!

As the New York City trip approaches, I am gradually realising it is
really going to happen. After frantic phonecalls to a dozen hotels in
Manhattan, I finally found one that

* I can afford,
* the guidebooks recommend &
* has vacancies

So, We're gonna stay at this Y-M-C-A.

Hooray!

(Another correction: I think the sleeping pill recommended to me was called 'clozapam' not
'clonazepam'. I have replaced it with meditation.)

Australian Prime Minister John Howard was just re-elected for his fourth
term in office. This is not good news. It is eternally mysterious to me how
in the leadership lottery men like this keep winning, power and priviliege
notwithstanding.

I am very excited about going to New York City. I was just on the phone
to my sister, who will be sharing my hotel for a few days, working out the
details. I wore her out with my effusiveness.

Tomorrow I'm buying a guidebook. I'm going to walk from dawn to dusk.
I'm going to inhale the city.

In such a short time, can I 'know' a place? Not deeply. But I'll see it refracted
through what I do know deeply, and those knowings will gain more dimensions.

And everything I think I know, in future, will be tantalised by the bright
shifting form of what I might know someday.

Dear New York Poets,

In the next few days I will be booking flights and a hotel in Manhattan.
I will be there from Friday October 29th until November 5th, and will
be looking for poets and poems and readings. Friday October 29th and
Saturday October 30th will be completely free poetry days for me, and
the following Sunday and Monday are okay also.

Let me know if you would like to meet up, or know of any interesting
readings happening ...

The past three nights I have actually slept. Ahhh. Thank you,
gentle readers, for your tips and encouragement.

Now, back to our regular programming ...

Shooting the Messenger


Now I know what that phrase means: the doctor the other
day wasn't so bad at all. She was just so well-rested looking
that I became annoyed.

As anticipated, I've seen rapid improvements since my decision
not to have anything else wrong with me. So far I have

- started yoga classes
- quit drinking
- quit coffee

(my instincts about all three activities confirmed by the sleep
researchers online)

I have also bought three t-shirts in different colours each with
a small martini glass near the right sleeve. Pink, magenta and
blue-grey, these shall be my walking t-shirts.

Walking the streets of Rochester is the most wonderful thing.

Sunny day.

Saw another, less competent sleep doctor at the clinic yesterday. I was in a bad mood to start with. She kept showing me pictures of the ideal throat then pictures of what my own, deeply troubled throat looks like. She confirmed that I will need an overnight sleep study. She thinks I have Sleep Apnea as well as Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.

She then outlined all the terrible longterm effects, etc, etc, ad nauseum. She made matters worse by saying that such things worsen "with age".

"When will the test be?" I said

"We're booked up until December. It'll take that long for your insurance to approve the test." she said

I said "That's a long time away. I can't go on not sleeping. What can I do right now?"

"You have some clonazepam don't you?"

"I don't want to become addicted to them. And they won't help with sleep apnea anyway will they?" I said

"Just take the clonazepam dear" she said

*

I left, roused from my sleepiness by an annoyance more powerful than any illness. I walked for five hours, around and around the streets of Rochester. Past hospitals, stores, traffic lights, schools and parks.

The sun was beating down.

Then the answer came to me: I REFUSE to have any more disorders. This is just becoming ridiculous.

So the weeks leading up to my sleep test will be a kind of experiment in spontaneous healing, a la Deepak Chopra.

*

There's nothing like a condescending and narrowly inspired doctor to inspire radical lifestyle change leading to rapid recovery.

Correction


Yesterday I wrote "I abhor the Christian right". I'd like to expand on this rather bald
statement, make it fit my world a little more closely. I don't abhor an entire group of
people en masse. That would be pretty presumptuous. I do tend to become frightened
by fundamentalism of any kind though.

Quite a few times I've been hanging out in a public place, feeling a little down in the
dumps, and been approached by somebody who asks me "do you know Jesus?" It
is is this homing in on vulnerability that I find frightening. Offering Jesus at such at
time is as manipulative as offering heroin.

I tend to disagree with many political views pushed by right wing lobby groups in
the States - anti-abortion laws, anti-gay marriage laws.

But the word 'Christian' here is being grossly misused to political ends, in my opinion.
Christians are a very varied set of groups. Just as your average Muslim is peaceloving,
honourable and kind, so is your average Christian. Of course, my assumption here is
that these three qualities attend the sorts of social policies I agree with ... so it's a
self-referential circle.

Sometimes it is easier not to label at all. To simply respond on a case-by-case basis.
I prefer poetry because it does not codify. In politics one is always led into categories
and exceptions to abstract rules. "The sky is very dark and hearts dart like fireflies",
seems more politically descriptive to me somehow.

My own belief system doesn't seem to fit into any category. It's shifting, it's contingent,
its too personal to outline here.

But I do not abhor a group of people, and I am sorry I used that particular piece of
political shorthand. Political shorthand, in general, is something to watch. Lessons
learned in practicing life.

An 'enemy' is a container for all one dislikes. If the enemy possesses these
qualities they are cordoned off, and we cannot partake of them.

eg. If my enemy is violent

(I am by definition peaceful.)

How frightening to know that enemies are fragmentary things

(Terror is an emotion. You cannot destroy an emotion. No person, race
or organisation totally embodies an emotion.)

How frightening to know that we are our own worst enemies

I am awake to linear processes
A, B, C


But now and then there's a lateral jump that forms whole sentences

Little things that might bring us to a round table

*

I can appreciate a psalm // though "I abhor the Christian right" // I used to smoke heavily // though "I abhor Big Tobacco"// Disease is a great equaliser // I cannot walk past the panhandlers and not see victims of war// The sky is blue // I walk outside to touch your face // you are standing in a quiet field dreaming of flight // above human politics // an airborne mystic // "Empathy" // how might I forgive the ugliness of violence // how might I see in it burning trees // that night desire toppled cities

I have been considering an alternative, round table political system, to replace the oppositional models that dominate in so much of the world.

Imagine that: no winners or losers, just balanced, workable compromise.
Imagine that.

The only way this model would work is if we all had enough to eat, adequate health care irrespective of income, decent housing and a fair chance at life.

(Do not call this socialist, just call it an open hand if you must call it something. Do not codify it. Do not fight in its name. It is not an end to justify any means but itself.)

Forget extremism, it won't matter. It cannot survive in an atmosphere of tolerance where basic human needs and dignity are honoured. The PH isn't right.

(I am sitting at a feast with friends. War is the furthest thing from my thought. Later I stand in the small garden where I grow a few herbs and look through the thin layer of ozone into space.)

One would reinforce the other .. the round table and the round earth.

There's a rising tide of Australian poets who blog and I'm excited
to be part of that.

Have a look at Andrew Burke's Hi Spirits.

Enough's enough - Tim Yu, roving academic, blogger, poet and all
around nice guy, hasn't posted since July 30. I'm calling a town
meeting.

Quote of the day


"I depend on the stars
and the places of night

That is what it is

intent space, and
the speed which is light, growing
past any shape

the half-door or the door
slightly open"

- Larry Eigner, from 'For Sleep'

Now that my insomnia is a confirmed 'disorder', it's just no fun anymore.

It was vaguely gallant, in my mind - which admittedly was fuzzy with sleep deprivation - prior to this. Like I was guarding the world while innocents slept.

Now I'm just overtired. But science can co-exist with flights of imagination, even as it sweeps away illusions. For example, what are circadian rhythms anyhow? Are they ocean tides in the mind?

Quote of the day


"The meaning of certainty is getting burned. Though truth will still
escape us, we must put our hands on our bodies. Staying safe is a
different death, the instruments of defense eating inward without
evening the score ."

- Rosemarie Waldrop, from 'Lawn of Excluded Middle'

Quote of the day


"The sky suddenly comes up real close and your body is on
its own in the middle of the whole world."

-John Godfrey, from 'In Front of a Large Number of People"

God I hope Kerry wins. It'll be hard to know what to do next,
if he doesn't.

And he might not.

Oops


As payment from the universe for the poem I posted earlier today, a comment
might've been accidentally deleted from my comment box! I clicked the wrong
icon.

My apologies and thank you for stopping by.

Seinfeld Poem


Just think: you could write a comment in my comment box.
Wouldn't that be great?

Then I would feel loved.
And I'll comment back.
And possibly keep the comment boxes long term.

You can say anything you want.

It's not good to be so needy.
I'm working on it.

Don't worry about the comment thing,
I mean, the boxes are there but

no pressure.

Quote of the day


"all these journeys
all these bodies of water, air,
between this world
& some other
named or unnamed"


-BPNICHOL, from 'Ferry Me Across'

I'm ambivalent about comment boxes, but I'll put them out again
for a bit.

I can't vote out Bush because I'm not a US citizen. But please, please,
all you citizens passing through this blog, vote him out.

Vote him out.

I have this great anthology on my desk. It's called 'From the Other
Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990' and is edited
by Douglas Messerli. In it I found today's



Quote of the day


"The gold
hides in the ground

the way tomorrow's weather
hides in the air,

the way what I will finally know
hides in me now."

-Robert Kelly, from 'INJUNE"

Sleep

The ongoing theme of sleeplessness on this blog comes
full circle ....

Science has solved the mystery of why I can never seem
to sleep. Apparently I have 'delayed sleep phase syndrome'
which means that I was born with an inbuilt need to stay
up until 3am each night.

That's kind of a cool disorder. I must have been a party
toddler.

But I'll need to get it sorted out.

Also I need to go in for an overnight sleep study, where
they attach electrodes and so forth and monitor you. It
could be that I have some other obstacles to slumber as
well.

What was that science fiction novel about sleep? "The Lathe
of Heaven". A scary book.

Time for some warm milk.

I keep dreaming about exams I've forgotten to attend.

How to keep going in Rochester
(after Bernadette Mayer)


-Mocha shakes
-Young's Chocolate Stout
-Highland Park Diner
-Friends' blogs
-Half online, half off
-Look at very small things with your eyes, and keep warm

It's the 11th September. Our neighbour across the street, a volunteer fireman,
has loud music coming from his house. It fills the dark night

with the miracle of
excruciating sorrows somehow

survived.

The reason the true fresco link list makes me dizzy is that I think there's somethin' missing in the code: depending on which page I click on to the Jetty from, the list of referrers is different.

Or maybe it's just my computer.

Anyway, the list of referrers is back, despite its potential for 'statistical error'.

Quote of the day


"We worship our driving loves"

- Del Ray Cross, from 'Simple Life 6'

Quote of the day


"It was cold in the novel
I climbed off the sofa in old difference"

-Lyn Hejinian, from 'Oxota'

I've removed the List Referrers list from this site for the
moment.

It was making me dizzy!

Do you live in Adelaide, Australia? If so, here is a list of poetry readings you will want to attend.
The readings are organised by the poet Ken Bolton. He writes:

"Lee Marvin Readings



The Lee Marvin Readings

Monday nite 7.30 PM  *  at IRIS Cinema, behind Mercury Cinema, Lion Arts

Centre starts promptly at 7.45  *  $5  at the door  *  limited seating  *  bar

service



#1  September 6th at IRIS Cinema

SIMON ROBB

CATH KENNEALLY



#2  September 13th at IRIS Cinema

PAM BROWN (Sydney)

LINDA MARIE WALKER



#3  September 20th at IRIS Cinema

JOHN JENKINS  (Melbourne)

MARK GARNETT



#4  September 27th at IRIS Cinema

KEN BOLTON



#5  October 4th at IRIS Cinema

TERI HOSKIN

LINDA MARIE WALKER"

My theory has a little bit of merit.

(My theory that poetry blogs will one day rule the earth with benevolent whimsy.)

Culture vs Culture


At least six neighbours from our street have noticed and expressed concern that I walk the local streets, rather than driving. There are no sidewalks, so walking does feel somewhat rebellious.

I carry a backpack. Maybe that makes me look unreliable or inadequately housed. One neighbour asked if I was a student from the local college dorms. Why would a fully fledged adult walk in areas not designated for walking?

Another person asked me, 'don't you get tired of walking?' which is an odd sort of question. A little like, 'don't you get tired of standing, or raising your arm, or sighing deeply late at night?'

I am very glad of the cover of my accent. I'm not from here, so I don't understand

how little it takes to ripple the surface
of a pond.


(Of course, my attitude is mostly defensive: I still haven't gotten around to getting my driver's license, and maintaining pride in this piece of individualism is getting harder and harder... it's never been based on anything more radical than procrastination.)

Quote of the day


"Steps on the floor.
He is absorbed in
his activity, apparently
typing something.

Imagine travelling
to different parts
of the world.
Jumps off boat.

Light blue map water.
Would money be available
on trees. Imagine work
or criminal exploit."

-Kit Robinson, from 'On the Corner'

Ardent and beautiful poetry web logs are breeding and may one day
gently take over the earth.

The first autumn leaves have fallen. Beautiful crinkly
orange-brown.

Time


Since I stopped running a discussion list earlier this year,
my perception of online time has changed. Turnover time
for an email for me would usually be 10 hours tops.

Now the emails slowly accumulate in my inbox, and I get
to them in a leisurely fashion.

But I still love reading your letters and replying to them, so
thanks for your patience.

(I'm the internet retiree clipping the hedge.)

Quote of the day


"All roads lead, but how does a sentence do it?"

-Rosemarie Waldrop, from 'Lawn of Excluded Middle'

Have you read Mark Young's blog, Pelican Dreaming?

'Pelican': what a great word.
So delicate and exact.

Thank you to Shanna Compton for reviewing my 2002
postcard collaboration with Stephanie Young, published
by my tiny press, Poetry Espresso.

The press is currently sleeping, but it is dreaming of fine
poems.

*

When it wakes up it will be roses on a trellis.

*

More postcards.

Mark Young has solved the curious mystery about the referring pages
that don't. He writes:

"It's the new blogger search thing at the top of the blog. If you click on
to the next blog button blogger randomly selects a blog to go to. So, like
a room full of monkeys, all over the world people are going next blog, &
some of them arrive at The Jetty....."

Thanks Mark!

After you've read Will's blog, you should go directly to
Theatre Notes, a theatre review blog written by Alison
Croggon.

Alison is an an Australian writer who has explored many
genres. She has a homepage, too.

Australian poet Will Fox has started a film review blog,
called filmism.

Go there right now!

Curious


At the bottom of this page is a list of referrers to this site.
I added it recently.

Lately all sorts of random sites have been showing up there,
and when I go to see where they have linked to me,

they haven't at all! Curious.

Accidental and wonderful discovery of the late night ...
Nada Gordon's thesis on Bernadette Mayer's poetry,
circa 1986.

Mayer on the illusory nature of war ...


Quote of the day


"The flowers of illusions are the seeds which
Controlling lightning from below, still
The first desire for an assault which forms,
Informing turbulence with a sudden ancient grace.
The canons are unearthed, but this is not the earth."

- Bernadette Mayer, from 'The Aeschyleans'

Quote of the day

"To turn off the machinery
And quietly move among the rustic landscape"

-John Ashbery, 'Rivers and Mountains'

The return of insomnia means a return to this site.

(Art is my night light.)

(Awful line.)


*


Orlando Bloom's beautiful face looking searchingly at me from a magazine ad about climate change, jolted me once and for all today

(at the hairdresser's)

into a brave new world where ice storms are the prospect

I wonder if the world will become a movie
and we will be the actors,

fighting

In the mailbox this week:

"A Thousand Devils", by K.Silem Mohammad

Today's the day: my two year quit smoking anniversary.
I note this less in the spirit of self-congratulation than in
the hope that reinforcing my will

will keep it strong.

(A ring of steel to hold up one barnacled old pilon of the
jetty).

Quote of the day


"The imperfect is our paradise"

- Wallace Stevens, from 'The Poems of Our Climate'

Tobacco companies target the most vulnerable populations.


*


This is one reason I quit smoking.
This is another.

Quote of the day


"Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly
lost"

-Walt Whitman, from 'Reconciliation'

Following a link from Ivy is Here, I took the
"What Classic Movie Are You" test.

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

My poems


My poems are this gap between my feet
My poems are the space between my arm and my side
My poems are a big space in a wheat belt, amber fields, blue sky
My poems are the gap between me and San Francisco
My poems are outer space, immense and dark and quiet
My poems are the gap between present and future, called knowing
My poems are prescient when it comes to themselves
My poems stay unwritten for years then they spring up like grass
My poems make perfect sense to one another
My poems are spaces between urges
and all is mystery

My two year anniversary of when I quit smoking is coming
up ... August 17th is the big day.

New musical discovery: Dar Williams.


*


Random thought


The border between what was and will be is marked by the body. The body is the vessel of thought. As the body moves thought moves and ideally they should move as one. It's when they part company that the trouble starts.


*


Quote of the day


"I don't know where I am
Plus I don't know when I am
Because you insist on using fucked up military time"

-Kristin Hersch, from the song '37 Hours'

A Brain Made of Jello


I love my new, short hair.
The cat caught two mice this week.
Beer's great.

I'm sleepy.

Did I tell you? The other week Colin and I flew over Niagra Falls in a light plane. Colin was the pilot. The Niagra River is magnificently wide and powerful like a dream of abundance. Canadian Falls is huge even from the air, American Falls is smaller but more 'energetic'.

I'm fascinated, lately, by weather. More so than usual. Over the months we've been in Rochester
I've gradually molded myself to fit the moody climate. If it rains, I rain. If it's sunny, I'm sunny.


The snow is like a prize, that I will soon win.

(when winter comes)



Life shifting on its foundations as my mind
moves into the new town

(always a lag ... the body arrives before thought catches up)

My hairdresser told me she went to Manhattan for her training. I was impressed!

It's raining again.

*

I spent 3 hours at the hairdresser today, getting my hair stripped, dyed and cut. It's the same colour as before only more shinily and evenly so.

I told the hairdresser I wasn't psychologically equipped to follow a complex styling regime so now I have short hair.

It's chocolate coloured.

Now playing on my walkman:

PJ Harvey
Lou Reed
Lucinda Williams
Kristin Hersch (clever

gloom &

joy)

Part Two


Western New York is beautiful geographically. And the weather
is so moody, the drama of a thunderstorm never far away. It is
very humid here at the moment.

*** Intermission ***

After a blackout lights flicker then glow all over the city grid.

Rochester, New York


A muddy field, heavy boots and the breathtaking quality of air. Light curls upwards. Silently, art blows out the storm windows. I clean the kitchen early this a.m. Habit unspools into endlessness. Such happiness, to notice tiny things, like paw prints in the mud. America the terror of your pure heart sings the core of the world as you destroy it. Here, the earth ponders the coming winter while sunlight lifts its burden from our shoulders.

Rubic's Cube


The many-sided narrative of this life is like
an old puzzle, solved then

jumbled up

again and again.


(The analogy breaks down as colours start changing


and sunset's code resolves into pure light,
orange, then red, then gold.)

This life is a life of drama. Emily Bronte
standing in a field

(made up of dreams
of faces)





Quote of the day


"Mute music soothes my breast - unuttered harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me."

-Emily Bronte, from 'The Prisoner'

Quote of the day


"Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain"

-Edward Thomas, from 'Rain'

Quote of the day


"In small proportions we just beauties see
And in short measures life may perfect be."

- Ben Jonson

Life is wonderful, isn't it? I mean: the stars, the rocks, the trees.

Three Lessons


I. To name a thing is to give it form.
II. To rename a thing is to change its form.
III. To leave it nameless is to let it happen.

Quote of the day

"Well, don't start regretting. We've all lost a decade here or there."

- Amanda Dodd

On August 17th it will be the second anniversary of my quit day.

The Activist in Me


I really really want to contribute to changing the U.S. health system because it's badly broken. And because health is a right not a privilege.

It is just not sane to have one's level of health care dependent on one's income. A very precarious way for a population to live.

I am amazed by how sanguine some people are about this.

What conservatives don't realise is that one way or another the general population pays for what taxes don't. As though there were some impenetrable barrier between "mine" and "yours".

Myths to stave off
the fear of death

with.

Why am I so slow to catch on? Today I visited Lisa Jarnot's blog for the first time.

And thanks also for this link to another current affairs blog I hadn't seen, Raed in the Middle.

Thanks to Baghdad Burning for this link to a site documenting Iraqi civilian war casulaties.

Found Poem

Criteria of the choice
to marketing.

Communication for concretely taken-to
situations .... expose;
pit.

The Russian language has always impressed me
so much. I'll study it one day.

Then reading spam will be a cinch!

An online translation tool, Rustran, translates it thus:

"Translation:

We Invite the leaders and specialist marketing division to take part in actual seminar: "STRATEGY of the ADVANCEMENT In SPHERE V2V (On market corporative client)" 12 - a July 13 2004 The Seminar is calculated on leaders of the marketing services and advertisments enterprise, promoting its product on the market corporative client. Tax application for participation or get detailed program You may on telephone: 88(580793599)96 69387701-8264587-534692 In program of the seminar: I. THE CARD RESOURCE: · determination integer advancement in sphere V2V; · determination to geographies of the advancement for seller of the sphere V2V; · determination of the portrait of the buyer in sphere V2V. II. THE CHOICE MARKETING COMMUNICATION: · review all possible instrument advancement - a marketing communication; their particularities; · criteria of the choice to marketing communication for concretely taken to situations: · system of the stimulation of the marketing in sphere V2V; · expose;pit "


It sounds very awkward and shy, this piece of spam, in translation.

Russian spam


Just recieved this piece of Russian advertising:

Приглашаем руководителей и специалистов отделов маркетинга
принять участие в актуальном семинаре:

"СТРАТЕГИЯ ПРОДВИЖЕНИЯ В СФЕРЕ В2В (На рынке корпоративных клиентов)"
12 - 13 июля 2004 года

Семинар рассчитан на руководителей служб маркетинга и рекламы предприятий,
продвигающих свою продукцию на рынке корпоративных клиентов.

Подать заявку на участие или получить подробную программу
Вы можете по телефону:
88(580793599)96 69387701-8264587-534692

В программе семинара:

I. КАРТА РЕСУРСОВ:
· определение целей продвижения в сфере В2В;
· определение географии продвижения для продавцов сферы В2В;
· определение портрета покупателя в сфере В2В.

II. ВЫБОР МАРКЕТИНГОВЫХ КОММУНИКАЦИЙ:
· обзор всех возможных инструментов продвижения - маркетинговых коммуникаций; их особенности;
· критерии выбора маркетинговой коммуникации для конкретно взятой ситуации:
· система стимулирования сбыта в сфере В2В;
· выставочное дело; презентации.

III. ВЫБОР ИНФОРМАЦИОННЫХ КАНАЛОВ В СФЕРЕ В2В. ОБЗОР ВИДОВ КАНАЛОВ:
· массовые, личные, локальные, прямые;
· информационные каналов для конкретно взятой ситуации под конкретную целевую аудиторию.

IV. РЕКЛАМОНОСИТЕЛИ:
· критерии оценки и выбора рекламоносителя: информативность, оригинальность, интерактивность;
· моделирование рекламоносителей для конкретно взятой ситуации.

V. ЗАЩИТА РАЗРАБОТАННОЙ НА СЕМИНАРЕ КАЖДЫМ СЛУШАТЕЛЕМ ПРОГРАММЫ ПРОДВИЖЕНИЯ В СФЕРЕ В2В. АНАЛИЗ И КОРРЕКТИВЫ.


Особенность семинара: каждый слушатель в течение семинара разрабатывает свою программу,
решая стоящие перед ним в реальности задачи. Работа на семинаре ведется в тренинговом режиме,
что позволяет слушателям получить не только знания, но и навыки. Все слушатели обеспечиваются
богатым и эксклюзивным раздаточным и тренинговым материалом.

Автор семинара - практикующий консультант по вопросам рекламы и продвижения.
Преподаватель и тренер с девятилетним стажем. Автор собственной оригинальной методики
преподавания рекламы. Автор нескольких десятков слоганов и имен, для различных продуктов
и компаний. Автор 56 стратегических программ продвижения для среднего и малого бизнеса.
Автор нескольких книг ("Мастерская рекламы", "Кризисный промоушн", "Креатив в рекламе",
"Жанры печатной рекламы или сундук с идеями для копирайтера" и др.).

Подать заявку на участие или получить подробную программу
Вы можете по телефону:
0(807892850)81 969288044-365512-393363

С уважением,
Организаторы

Oh, it's back now!

Where has my link list gone? And other little mysteries of the internet.

After a month of feeling like Alice in Wonderland only more confused, and less sociable, Rochester is starting to feel like 'home' in the real sense, as opposed to the abstract sense.

I have a permanent address. I know the way to the shops. I know where to go for my next haircut. I know my neighbours' names. I more or less know what's going on.

We're hoping to go NYC soon, for the first time, which is a pretty big deal for a suburban girl from Melbourne.

A really big deal!

Yesterday I deleted several posts from the last few weeks. Blog as 'process document'.

Blogger has upgraded, which is good in most respects,
except for some reason evenly matched lines of prose
don't come out that way online as often.

I like evenly matched lines of prose.

It's hard to take lawns seriously, but I must learn I suppose.

My next door neighbour is fond of the saying, "it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."

He was referring to helping us mend the bare patches in our lawn, which were not nice to look at.

The lawn still needs work: my weekend is mapped out for me.

Quote of the day


"rainy streets no stars equals my language"

-Anselm Hollo, from 'We Are Having It Again and Without Sorrow'

Quote of the day


"Before the window's corridor where the snow flies up"

-Bernadette Mayer, 'Homeopathic Busyness'

Culture shock


I read somewhere that when a person moves to a new place their brain has to remap their entire surroundings. New neural pathways are stimulated by this complex process.

In the old place, a person knows the quickest routes, the major landmarks, the best place to go for coffee, the streets to avoid. As well as where the bathroom is when it's dark in the house.

Moving requires that an entirely new map be made. Theoretically, this might make a person smarter. One can only hope.

My instinct is that something similar happens on a lot of other levels. New social maps. New political maps. New routines.

After moving internationally, an interstate move is not much of an adjustment, relatively speaking. And things have gone smoothly.

But I get this image of my life as a big truck being steered around a sharp curve. And I'm in the truck and inertia throws me against the side of the truck, and I feel carsick.

That's what moving's like, for me.

The neighborhood reconfigures itself in my mind each day as the map is gradually drawn. At first all I saw was a blur of major features and now I'm starting to see facial expressions, hear vocal tone.

It's like very very slowly waking up.

I wonder if this is what becoming enlightened might feel like. The map gradually being drawn in until suddenly one's thought processes become synchronised with the pace of change.

Change happens constantly, and I at least am in a semi-permanent state of trying to catch up, cognitively, with what has happened.

Beautiful sunny day.

And that's Del laughing in the row of photos directly above.

Just found these party photos from my last big Bay Area poetry party. That's me and Stephanie on the bottom row.

Hello San Francisco. I miss you.

New day.

Here's a terrific poem by the Australian poet, Laurie Duggan. My thanks to Laurie for permission to post it here.



Tilt


The feeling of being here, without explanation, miraculous and terrible in a space where all is gratuitous. The grey mist of rain or the grime of windows. The sharp notes of an unidentified bird.

#

An object never before noticed on the horizon seems to advance and recede though it is stable: a highlit part of a familiar building detached from its customary anchorage.

#

The air is hard and cool. The road goes nowhere under the clouds and the high-tension lines.

#

A landscape opens up and closes in. Its benign features - signage - become, in the stilled image, markers of identity, reminders of loss.

#

The concrete soldier with raised bayonet. The head of a lion. The metal sheaths of streetlights. An invisible flagpole. The buttress of a monument.

#

The inhabitants have left the scene. Their washing, strung across the verandah, a plastic bucket: these are the clues.

#

A country mailbox. Faces of children by a road void of traffic. A handstand holds the planet for a moment upside-down. Figures in middle distance move lightly on its surface.

#

These people. Do they expect us to know them? To know what is inside this briefcase, on the back seat of that car?

#

A comforting myth: that the world and all things in it are made of gelatin silver. We rise from a chemical bath and are lovingly curated in acid-free surrounds. Or we are found, curled and cracked in a pile of refuse.

#

What we don’t see in the photographs we take: the slip of a genteel aunt, a disembodied hand, the image of ripe tomatoes on a blue cardboard box.

#

Tattoos, aniline and permanent, on flesh that withers.

#

The buildings are all in their rightful places. Then blankness. What if all this were an invention?

#

All things are concepts. But we are trapped in their consequence. The cash register and the typewriter, archaeology that surrounds us. Our smiles already periodised; those tics that represent an era.

#

There are no interiors, or what we see is already an interior. Blinding light through windows. Television presuming an outside world.

#

If you turn quickly the scene will change its shape. Laughter from the street. Your own? Memory is displaced by memorabilia.

#

A reflection in plate glass of a pedestrian walking out of shot. She walks from the bank across a car park. Then she disappears into 1987.

#

Words stare you in the face. Crazy paving and 1960s functionalism become the architecture of despair. A language of shapes dismantled like the genetic code.

#

An old calendar on which events are marked. The taper of trousers passing the demolition site. An engine meticulously restored. Hell for leather. Guarded with your life.

#

The sky darkens over a small town. Gorse on the otherwise bare surrounding hills. Power lines intersect above a memorial fountain.

#

There is no room for nostalgia. The paint is not yet dry on this edifice. Dance steps come straight from an instruction manual.

#

A distance, not local, but from somewhere else. A life led in relation to lives presumed elsewhere. A style reflecting an imagined capital. A capital as fantastic as life on another planet.

#

A dog stares backwards into history like Walter Benjamin’s angel. The future, ill-lit, waits beyond the dashboard.

#

The destination of the photograph does not include us or our concerns. It moves away at the speed of light. We remain in our own narratives.

#

Or we are held in another narrative. The lights at the crossing remain forever red.

#

Wind blows the photograph away. The weather in the photograph does not blow the photograph away.

#

A smeared window. Steam and rain. The lit shapes of petrol bowsers.

#

There is no horizon. We are shadows in a moving car. Speed is our history. There are fables behind these images that are forgotten.

#

As though, in waking, benign objects become for a moment the ogres of childhood. Walking in a foreign land where only the accents differ; alternate narratives that might be yours.



Laurie Duggan

Suddenly the news is much less abstract.

The same elements, all shuffled around,
arranged in a new configuration, as the
mind wakes up each day.

Thunderstorms outside. Light green
tablecloth.

Middle America
for Laurie Duggan


We are handed the script for a new life, asked to learn our lines. I buy a deep red bedspread, intoxicated by colour.

Concern in the neighbourhood over a fence. A source of gossip. Yesterday we let them remove the fence. The last guy put it up and they hated it. By mutual agreement it was torn down. 'There aren't many fences in this neighbourhood.' No fences, good neighbours.

I asked one neighbour, an immigrant, if there was much crime in this area. He said no, but last halloween three women in ghost costumes patrolled the street.

To the consternation of all, upon removing their masks, the women were seen to have black faces. What were black people doing in this area?

He really said this. I am frightened of what will not be said.

There are no fences but my natural openness becomes modulated subtly, I adjust to the new terrain.

People everywhere are immensely kind, within limits.

Somebody said to me in the immigration photo store, furtively, that conservatism is based on fear. Prison photos, the start of the end of an empire.

Are liberal views based on courage?

'Radical acceptance', my modus operandi. The scenery varies, the ideology varies, the temperature goes up and down.

And now some time off for synthesis.

On a personal note


After all the upheaval and uncertainty and stress, here we are. In our new house. With a mortgage. In Rochester. In the final stages of our green card application process. Not smoking.

Having wound down the wonderful Espresso discussion list.

If somebody had told me two years ago that all this would come to pass, and that along the way I'd spend six months studying algebra and PE, I would probably have passed out.

I think I'm more or less intact. I seem to be.

I think I've been in an alternate reality all week, but I seem to be waking up - with a shocking 'hangover', but also with immense relief.

Nothing stays still, of course. But a holding pattern is good.

Quote of the day


"Maybe performance and its attendant relationships exist as
a kind of collective unconscious, shared only by members of
a given production."

- Stephanie Young

We spend yesterday moving. The day before that
we spent

- signing a 30 year mortgage
- packing
- eating donuts

My stress level reached about 99% of its maximum
capacity this week.

On Happiness


Is it possible to be happy given the current world situation? What might this happiness consist of? What are its limits, what are its ethical implications?

Staccato thoughts in response, like rapid fire

The other is the self. Each new photographed death pinned up on the walls of our minds. The gravity this imposes on each gesture makes life so fraught, so hard: on what scale do our acts begin to matter? Does my refractory manner with a stranger matter?

Looking closer: does my body language matter?

The macro offers more doubt, not less. There's no pure position, anywhere. We oppose war. I oppose war. But the suspicion is always there, am I complicit?

Why do wars keep happening if not because we are all complicit.

That way lies madness, and still, a little further in the same direction, after walking for several hours in a field dusted with snow, one comes across something solid. Like a stone. A tiny core of something ... happiness despite all things.

It changes everything. "Keep warm" was Bernadette Mayer's advice about how to survive Antarctica.

Actually, it might be best if you knocked rather than broke the door down, since the house was recently painted.

(Joke.)

Domestic Bliss


The move happens this Friday ... a few days delay. We bought a set of Martha Stewart brand crockery from K Mart for $30. Matching plates!

If I start knitting socks and sewing curtains, someone please drive to Rochester and break the door down, and hand me an interesting book, and make me read it for an hour.

Pour me a whiskey too.

Thank you to Kasey Mohammad for letting us know
about this new blog...

A manuscript to reorganise. And last week it felt
finished!

(Nothing stays still.)

Dreamed this morning that we were moving into our new home, but in the dream it looked different, a bit like an opal mine, with caves, and hollowed out walls, and split level rooms.

The kitchen had cobalt paint that was peeling a little, and I said to Colin 'maybe we'll repaint it white' but he objected.

The tea towels were cerise.

Family and friends visited to bless the new house. My grandmother, who died in 2001, was there and was impressed by the sink in the bathroom. It was very large and made of mother of pearl, and had a high tech hand drying machine above it.

All through the underground house the paint was peeling, and here and there were sets of almost vertical stairs leading up to skylights, and little exits onto the grassy garden.

Home


For the past two hours I have been happier than I ever remember having been in my entire life. Doing nothing in particular. Just walking in the rain along a tree-lined street.

Oh, and I bought my cat a new collar.

Not much else.

The 'contact me' link vanished when I messed
with my template recently.

It'll be back soon.

My Weekend


When confronted with imported chocolate beer from Britain
at The Old Toad, entire cities crumble.

The 'I don't drink' city crumbled, but the 'I don't smoke'
city didn't shake at all.

A miracle.

Colin and I move to our own place on June 1st. Hopefully we won't move again for many, many years.

I want to grow moss.

The cable service we have at the moment is bizarrely comprehensive. There's Discovery Wings channel- all about airplanes. And channels devoted to almost every popular interest.

I sometimes watch the surgery shows on Discovery Health, in order to acclimate to the gore of nursing.

More on that later.

Well, I'll hide the comment boxes,
and bring them out again in a bit.

Like the best china.

Bad News


I'm feeling rejected by the lack of comments
in my comment boxes.

I don't know if I'll keep them. Maybe they're
too distracting.

I could never audition for plays.

Just pre-ordered my copy of the "Free Radicals"
anthology from Amazon.

Where else is it available, I wonder?

I'm already feeling very at home here in Rochester, and I can't work out why. The architecture is a little like Melbourne's and the weather is just as changeable. Maybe that's why.

Quote of the day

"An endless series of internalized gates and dams to modulate behavior."

-Stephanie Young

Standing outside in the warm rain tonight as Colin outlined the lifecycle of a thunderstorm as it happened. ("Weather comes down to heat and wind in different combinations... From space thunderstorms look like nuclear explosions.")

Sea change.

What can it mean, now, to live in this country, where I hope to make a home?

Leaving home has proven irrevocable - the home I left is no longer there anymore, the person I was has been overwritten by the person I am. Nothing stays still.

The act of leaving, and leaving again, has made me into a stranger both here and in Australia. I inhabit both places, but lightly.

Somehow it's been easier as an outsider to watch U.S. foreign policy.

The conservatism of Australian politics at the moment feels more like a body blow. Visiting earlier this year, I felt as though a very heavy, almost leaden cloud had settled over possibility.

The political climate can literally feel like weather. During my visit I felt, irrationally, rebuffed by my own past - for instance, when I heard stories about cutbacks to university places.

Every aspect of the weather would shift, very suddenly, whenever I encountered the warm sun of an old friend's face.

Quote of the day


"Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places ... seeing the pictures simply made it all more real and tangible somehow ... Everyone here in Iraq knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained."

- Baghdad Burning

Touching Base


Rochester has a really great chain of supermarkets
called Wegmans.

It's raining outside, very warm and humid. Reminds
me of Brisbane, Australia.

I haven't read any poems today. Strangely, I don't
miss doing so.

But will soon.

Imagining neural pathways like a map overwritten each day with a new map, the lines crisscrossing, some faint, some bold. An endless number of possible connections.

Mapping a place of infinite possible size and depth.

The atlas of the soul is the body. The body is a place of infinite possible size and depth.

As we look the cells give up their component parts, the infinitely
small overpowering the infinitely large

the universe resting in a palm

Neural pathways extending from the mind to
the hand

All one organism. My foot taps out thought
on the carpet

as I write this.

Lake Ontario


Water shining and highly textured, like a thesis on itself.
To live surrounded by fresh water.

Water hangs in the air.

Days happen, or choose not to, as though
the decision rested

in ligaments. To stretch my arms above me
in this composition

(like a room.)

Walking out into a clearing, scent of lilacs

(inhale deeply.)

Field Notes


I took issue with everything today. The air was heavy with humidity. I looked at the storm clouds. There was a little thunder during the day but not much rain.

I forgot where I was going when I went out walking and had to retrace my original intent.

Most of the time I thought about personal responsibility and where its limits lie. I stopped thinking about that because I ended up in a tiresome groove.

Stuck there, I started to think about smoking. I didn't want a cigarette. But I knew that was irrelevant. To think of smoking is to reanimate the urge to smoke.

I bought a coffee instead. And thought about how there is no such thing as an addictive personality. There are only the changes addictions forces onto one's personality.

The cigarettes introducing themselves like an appendix to who I was, then overpowering the text of who I was. And if I smoke or if I don't smoke, the pathways in my brain worn in by smoking are still there.

Back to coffee and still having the odd drink. Such mild pleasures, they should be, except they can't be because the groove of addiction is too strong. For a week they're mild and then suddenly they're not.

They hook my thinking back into the old groove.

(I have played that record too many times and if I hear it one more time now I'll scream.)

It is hard to face up to even such an insignificant limitation. My body will be okay with the new order.

("Many smokers try to quit several times before they are successful.")

(Take 5: no caffeine, no alcohol.)

Cigarettes in the past
are current,

I need never smoke again.

And now I'm on New York time.

The Jetty is almost one year old. One year on the
internet is equal to seven human years.

Just open for business: comment boxes on this site.
I hope they work.

There it is.

My link list has vanished. I hope it
comes back soon.

Spring

This week in Rochester ... It's so warm here right now that it's hard to believe in ice storms.

Balmy weather. I love the sense of the air being the same temperature as my skin. So that the skin feels like a semi-permeable barrier, and so that a person feels more open.

Winter I associate more with the intellect. A keeping of one's own counsel, a critical distance.

Summer I associate more with the body. Thought as motion. Thought as reflex.

Just realised my blog is still set to California
time.

(Add three hours to the time of writing.)

Grumpiness.

The main campus of Monroe Community College
is not in the city centre, I've been informed: the
city campus is a satellite campus.

The main campus looks great.

Apparently Monroe is ranked pretty high among
the CCs.

That's good.



I will be one million years old
by the time
I graduate.

Big day


Colin and I bought a house today.

So, another move is imminent, but the prospect of
permanence lures us forward. (Permanent residency
is anticipated as well as a permanent residence.

Many papers to sign.)

Roll on June!

(Oh how nice it will be to sit still.)

To do:
update link list

Update data then click 'refresh'.

Beautiful architecture, like a skeleton made visible.

In Rochester, house prices increase the
further away one moves from

the centre,

as long as one moves in exactly the right directions.

Gender
Race
Class


To append my earlier appraisal of Rochester,
the following story

(in which nothing happens.)

Waiting for the bus in the city was a lonely experience. The city itself is a lonely experience. With increasing numbers of lay-offs, the centre of Rochester is a long way from prosperous.

Stores exhibit old stock that looks faded. Store fronts are dirty. The remnants of prosperity long past: 4 star hotels on dessicated streets. A Hyatt surrounded by vacated office buildings.

In the middle of the day, Main Street is full of people, almost all black, waiting for buses.

Segregation feels as intense, here, as though it were legally enforced.

There were a few other white people at the bus stop: these were mostly elderly people, or people who were handicapped in some way.

Most of the black people at the bus stop were young - many women had small children with them.

There were no bus timetables in the bus shelters. People seemed willing to wait for an hour for the next bus. There was a passivity, people just hanging out.

The whole area was enveloped in thick cigarette smoke. Main Street is also home to the community college, which I had thought of attending. There was a security guard asking for ID when I took a look at the college.

Downtown is not safe. It is poor, and its expectations are low.

We don't live downtown. I'm writing this. To keep my appointment - on
West Main Street - I needed to catch a bus. I inadvertently caught

the wrong bus, and ended up on East Main Street. After riding some distance I discovered my mistake. I pulled the cord in order to get off at the next stop.

There was a young girl on the bus screaming abuse at an invisible figure. People nodded and smiled knowingly, as they do on buses all over the world when such things happen.

I got off the bus and I was in a bad neighbourhood. You just know these things, it is instinct. I went inside the nearest storefront - a Driving School - and called a cab.

I caught the cab home. It was only five blocks, but the whole way the cab driver had a bible show blaring on the radio, the preacher's theme was 'Walk with God.'

I'm not sure what country the driver was from. He looked scared too.

I'm an immigrant, but there is a heirarchy among immigrants. White Australians are looked on favourably here.

My accent has probably saved my life on at least two occasions. "She's not from here, she doesn't know." (I don't always sense where the boundaries are. Where can a woman walk? Where can a white woman walk? Where can a middle class white woman walk, and how should she behave?)

What a difference five blocks can make. My apartment is warm and the street I live on is beautiful, wide, with established trees. I didn't keep my appointment. It's about 4pm.

Danger is something different on my street. My street would not exist without East Main Street. These places are two sides of the same coin.

The sun is bright in the sky and it's a cool day. I am living in the state of New York, in the United States of America, in the year 2004.

The Middle Road


A few compromises I've arrived
at recently.

Instead of coffee ... iced tea
Instead of alcohol ... one or two drinks
(Yes, I know that still counts as alcohol
but it isn't, trust me)

Iraq, I feel my energy should be focussed more, here,
on you.


But the most obscure part

is how the personal becomes encoded with
the global

I'm really starting to love this town. I hope we can
stay a long time.

I haven't survived a winter yet, of course. But even
ice storms appeal to me

(I'm fascinated by climates
and by extreme

climates.)

Au revoir Poetry Espresso. The press and website will
remain, and be revamped

some time this year.

(Sadness. Thirtieth birthday. Time for a walk.)

Auden was talking about the necessity of love
for human survival.

What glues poems together? Maybe linguistic
cohesion is also necessary for survival.

Are they functionally interchangeable, in some
cases, in some poems?

Poetry Espresso closes on April 30th
which is also my 30th birthday.

This coming Friday.

Mostly coincidence, partly a need for a milestone day
on the road

Saying goodbye to my twenties

(field strewn with coke bottles
a mystic haze)

and to the list

"We must love one another or die" powering up like a jeep
to greet whatever

comes next.



Jen Crawford, a longtime espresso contributer, has started a new
list, called Poneme.

(Poetry like green shoots through cracks in the concrete.)

Thanks Angela for all your hard work on foam:e. Metaphorical
champagne bottles broken over the hull of the foam:e boat,

to launch her

or another celebratory gesture

(many of them).

Announcement


A new online journal! Angela Gardner writes, on poetry
espresso:

"Dear All

the first issue of foam:e is now published at:

http://poetryespresso.org/foame/

Please feel free to announce its arrival on blogs and lists as appropriate. I
have noticed that there isn't yet a link from poetryespresso so you'll have to
type/cut and paste the url until that happens.

Thanks to Cassie for poetryespresso and the environment that has created to support the creation of foam:e (and to Jen for poneme)

Please feel free to send feedback to me at

angelag-@light-trap.net


cheers!
Angela "

Auden's line thundering through my head all day
and I finally looked up the poem.

I don't much like the poem as a whole. But that
line is stuck on replay, in my head,

and it is true.

Quote of the day

"We must love one another or die."

- W.H. Auden, from 'September 1, 1939'

Part 1: Life

I'm spending the afternoon wrangling with issues
such as:

-blocked toilet

-intractability of U.S. health care system

-kind people working to fill in gaps in this system (like roses growing
over a rickety old trellis)

-I need to find a closer post office

-I need some warmer clothes

-in small towns people really do remember you, so be nice

-the thermostat says 70 degrees but it's still cold in the apartment

-amusing scene when gracious and kind landlords, an elderly couple, try to explain very delicately that the older toilets only have a 1.5 gallon capacity and therefore require a double flush for greater 'loads'. "Now, I'm not accusing you of anything ..." said the landlord and I grinned broadly.

They lent us their plunger, because some folks need them, some folks don't,
with these old toilets.

- Last week I went for a massage and the New Yorker massage therapist asked me what I did for a living that could possibly make my neck this tense. I told him I was a writer. He gave a short laugh.


Part 2: Art

The afternoon produces words as a
by-product:


- So long between poems there is moss there. It could become a National Park eventually, this expanse called 'not writing'.

- Paradoxically, a first book written. Soon to be sent out into the world.

- The way cold air feels against the skin. One feels 'sealed' by it. And opened up again when entering a heated room.

-Stephanie Young's first book, 'Telling the Future Off' soon to be published. Minds I can understand write poems, and this is the best flowing of the day (days flow in ways I understand.)

- Recognising that the impulse to walk for miles is also the impulse to write
and the impulse to eat chocolate cake

today at least.

- A well of recognition, sparks shooting off its surface

(solar flares leaping out
these instincts to communicate
but in what direction
do they fly?)

New poems starting to grow through the cracks in
the sidewalk like green shoots.

Recently I gave up coffee and alcohol altogether for about 6 months. It was so nice to see what my mind said without them: calmer statements. Fewer statements.

Then, the week before the move, I took them up again and my mind flashed and sparkled because of their fuel. They powered my life like a speedboat all the way from one coast to the other. I water-skiid behind. It was exhilarating, but there was verbal overflow, wasted words.

Now I'm sullen in their company. There's no longer enough forward impetus -miles to travel - to use up all the extra fuel. I'm sitting in one spot trying to think.

I'm just not somebody who can drink these substances successfully, probably because I've already filled more than my lifetime quota of them.

This wagon I hoist myself back on to is, I think, where I belong.

Colin says it'll all be easier on "the other side". The other
side of my thirtieth birthday, that is.

As of today we're finally out of the hotel and into a
short-term rental. Relatively speaking, life is stable
and predictable.

Rochester is proving to be a great city for walking.

I just bought my first cell phone. Already I feel more
socially integrated.

Yesterday I found a beautiful,second hand leather jacket for
only $20!

We have landed

(in Rochester).

This latest hotel is the best. I just ate a fresh berries and
yogurt parfait. We'll be here until our belongings arrive,
and we can move into our new place.

Our cat travelled independently and is now in kennels. My
last image of her was a hissing, meowing ball of fur. For
their own sakes, I hope the kennel staff love animals ...
a lot.

Walking outside the air is warm with a crisp edge to it. The
snow is finished for now.

Our rental is in the middle of town, near East Avenue and
University Avenue. We'll be huddling around the graduate
students and professors for warmth.

The buildings are so pretty. In spring, Rochester reminds
me of Adelaide, Australia. It has about the same sized
population too.

Back on the wagon.

Bright lights


I haven't had a hangover in a long time. I'm enjoying
feeling slightly delicate. The skin

made translucent like
sketching paper.

Feeling 'empowered'
by coffee. Sleep deprivation 'heightens' this.

All I did tonight


All I did tonight was go to a reading at Stephanie's house
and listen to Del Ray Cross's and Jim Behrle's poems

All I did tonight was decide to take up drinking and then
renounce it again as needed

All I did tonight was drink mango juice with rum

All I did tonight was dance with a room full of poets, though
I rarely dance, and have never before danced with poets

All I did tonight was decide to take up dancing

All I did tonight was recieve ten copies of a chapbook, handmade
and in a limited edition, called Smokers Die Younger, with a poem
of mine and one of Kasey's and others

All I did tonight was think

"To count up the last times, collect them in a suitcase and
turn to face the east"

and morbid thoughts about the last times, elsewhere,
that are absolutely final

Now the sirens in my mind are distant
and traffic lights

turn green



All I did tonight was think "I'll miss you".

Update


Now we have secured an entirely different place to stay. The '60s
townhouse fell through.

Then at the last minute we found an apartment - part of a huge,
sub-divided pre-war mansion. A nice address to have though
only a small corner of it will be ours.

I like the architecture in Rochester. And the oaks and other trees
bare and ghostly. Soon the town will burst into colour, and it'll be
nice to start our lives here with some sunlight.

The new landlord accepts cats. The cat, I think,
will accept the arrangement too.


What a palaver.


This world slightly unhinged by speed and changing distances
between my homes.

Back to California tomorrow morning.

I'm losing track of my location somewhat. Its edges are blurry.


This Friday we fly back to California for a final weekend before
we move on the 14th April.

Fortunately I'll be able to make the Jim Behrle and Del Ray Cross
reading next Saturday night. Then a sad farewell to Bay Area
poetry, though

I'll return soon, I hope, to say hello.

Rochester is relatively warm this week. There was some snow on
the weekend but most of it had melted by the time we arrived. It
looks like we've found some temporary accomodation ... a little
townhouse with 1960s carpet, floors and cupboards and an open
fireplace.

It has a basement too.

Basements seem so novel to me. Australian houses don't have them
usually.


The plan is that we'll stay there for a few months until we decide on
somewhere more permanent.

Just back from a wonderful weekend spent in Santa Cruz. Thank you
to Stephanie Young for the road trip there and back, and to Carra for
the party.

Haircut tomorrow

(I do this, I do that).

It's taking a while to become accustomed to the light
here again. Immersed in it

I'll forget

there's another sort. Elsewhere,


bricks fall off the cathedral but
nobody minds

Hitting the pavement with such force
the concrete blooms
like a wound

Silent movie playing in this old cortex

Quote of the day

(out of context)

"I don't know what I do think, but I think what I'd think
if I could think wouldn't be quite the position you outline
above."

- Robin Hamilton

Went for a swim this morning and it started raining. The man in the next lane said, 'we'd better finish before it starts raining heavily'.

I said, 'it doesn't matter though, we're already wet.'

By the time I left the gym, it was getting chilly outside, as though spring had regressed a little.



California


I remember when we were getting ready to move here singing that Joni Mitchell song with the line 'California I'm coming home'. We knew not a soul here at first.

I remember how excited I was the first time I got off the BART - at Embarcadero - and as the escalator carried me upwards I saw more and more skyline, and felt this wild elation. I was in San Francisco.

I remember my first visit to City Lights. And how it took me two more years to discover Modern Times and the Mission District.

I remember the first time I cleared customs in L.A. The man at the counter said 'you look kind of young, sister' and I said, 'I'm 26'.

He told me L.A. was no place to raise children.

I remember the first time I read Joe Brainard's book named 'I Remember'. This also happened in California.

House hunting trip the week after next, and then we pack
up and leave

on the 13th April.

Nonspecific homesickness.

Moving day is almost upon us. And we don't have an apartment
lined up yet.

But that's okay. It's ... all ... going to be ... okay.

See how fictional prose collapses, for me,
into verse?

Novel


"The music from the next room became a sort of buffer zone,
behind which I stood. I thought of the masks I'd worn, then
discarded, at different times.

They weren't really masks.

Things happen via

disjunction..."

The weather out here is so warm. Today, Colin's birthday

(happy birthday Colin)

and we had to spend the morning at the DMV. We got there at
8:10am and already there was a huge queue.

Proof that there is hope for humanity: almost everyone abides
by queue etiquette.

Mighty piles of paper through which we shuffle our feet, through
life. That's how the DMV feels.


But the day's looking brighter by the minute. So much sunny sky,
lemonade sky

and gelato.

Just arrived ... my very own copy of 'V.IMP.' Thank you,
Nada!


Quote of the day

"i look at them and see fear
the poems themselves--in form--are fear--
they are "bulwarks"
as the body is a bulwark
against endless experience"

-Nada Gordon, from 'Epigraph'

So much change. We've given one month's notice on our
apartment.

Below is a brand new poem by Heather Matthew, an Australian
writer. Many thanks Heather for permission to post.


streaming

I fold the washing hot into the cool white cupboard
the sun bites my blue back

she is dreaming of snow on her lonely landscape
ribbons of reflected light strung between rooftops

I long to call out across oceans, my thoughts stream
towards her waiting

on his bed lies a dead grey bat tiny in my upturned hand
yet when it flew last night its wings filled the shadows of the room

my footprints on the wet floor have left marks on its reflection
they fix my feet to this house

I am restless with too much completion, the burnt horizon mocks
with could have beens, I glide into the heat towards the sea

Heather Matthew

Quote of the day

"What's happening continues"

-Philip Whalen, from 'The Congress of Vienna'

Announcement


Poetry Espresso, the email discussion forum I founded in 2000,
will be closing

its coffee shop doors

at the end of April.

This notice is just a gesture towards the immense gratitude I feel
to those who have supported and contributed to the list over
the last 3 1/2 years.

The Poetry Espresso website will remain and be upgraded as time
and finances allow.

Quote of the day

"Not that the dark world was removed or brightened, but
each thing in it was slightly enlarged, and in so seeming became its
true cameo self, a liquid thing, to be held in the hollow
of the hand like a bird."

-John Ashbery, from 'Flow Chart'

Quote of the day

"Nothing outside can cure you but everything's outside"

-Bernadette Mayer, from 'The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica'

Sleepy thought. The cat lies stretched in the sun.

The sense of my two countries gradually meshing in
my mind.

Warm night tonight walking through the streets of
San Francisco, near Columbus, where all the Italian
restaurants are.

Wonderful, open windowed feelings.

Hidden pockets of memory bursting.


The family next door to us in Adelaide had four children and
six bicycles.

This seemed very impressive to my sister and I.

My sister was two and I was four. I remember the way thoughts
felt gliding through me. I was shorter and closer to the polished
floorboards and down there I heard the Australian Broadcasting
Commission's radio news theme.

I said to my mum, "The news is on".

I was the same as I am now but there were fewer pressing tasks
and more spirit for things like rain,

and the sound of the radio.



Gusts of anger, sweet, heady,
and the rain.

The light is a different colour in Australia, sparer and more
blanched. Blue undertones.

Clothes I bought while on holiday look different when I put
them on here.

Colour operates differently.


Back here, I noticed immediately the more muted, golden
tones of the light.

After almost a year of plain text, blogger offers me italics.

But I don't have to use them.

Dreams of Rochester at night, both snowy and grainy
like an old film reel.

Preparing to move.

Lavender, in the air,
in this room.

A delight to be back in this room

(my office).

It was impossible to write postcards, let alone to write on this
website, while I was away. And the reasons weren't strictly
technical.

I was just completely absorbed in being there.

I saw admired poets, some for the first time.

I saw a lot of old friends, and some I've made since leaving
Australia.

I stayed with my family and trawled with them through the past,
present, future

with more love than I had been prepared to
feel.

I went to four poetry events,
each different and each worthy of a lengthy report.

I sat on two different beaches.

I visited sub-tropical Brisbane for the first time.


There was just so much. It'll take a thousand entries here
before I've finished unpacking the last five weeks.

Today is my first day back at my own computer. And, with time to catch
up on other blogs as well as my own, I discover the best news of the
week - that Tim Yu will be only a ferry ride away from us once we've
moved to Rochester.

Congratulations, Tim, on your new job in Toronto!

Meanwhile, our move has been tentatively set (unless 'tentative' is the
opposite of 'set' as I suspect it might be) for mid-April.

One the plane from Auckland to L.A. there was the nicest British couple
sitting next to me. They reminded me of my parents. They had been
visiting their daughter in New Zealand and were doing a brief round the
world trip with two days in San Francisco.

They declared that they would "follow me around like puppies" at LAX
because U.S. customs and so forth are so daunting. Strangely, this gave
me the confidence to actually know what I was doing, or seem to.

I'm so glad we all made the connecting flight to San Francisco, otherwise
there would have been many hours of embarassed silence while we
waited for the next flight.

After five weeks in Australia, I'm flying back to the United States tomorrow
morning.

Last night I was sitting on the rocks beside the sea with my feet in the
sand listening to music. Too many thoughts to even calibrate.

To touch the sand with my feet. Listen to the waves.

The rocks were piled just beneath the jetty, and on the jetty there was
a restaurant with glass walls.

A crowd inside standing and talking, black tie I think.

I sat there curled up letting my history out as I exhaled, and breathed
in new salty air. I started to think of my history as endlessly rewritable,
and panicked I'd never finish the final draft.

But then, after an hour or so, that passed. And what's happened didn't
matter so much anymore.

It's hard to forgive oneself when there has been no crime, just a sense
of being absent from oneself. The only cure is to be present in oneself.

And that requires forgiveness. So I sat on the rocks until all I was was
a part of the sand. Sand washing over me, dry from earlier in the
day.

There is nothing more beautiful than sitting next to the ocean at night.
It has to be taken carefully though.

After an hour or so I was all right and went home.


Tomorrow I fly home.

A thousand homes like fractal images.

I have had limited internet access during my stay in Australia,
but will be back on the jetty soon.

Should be home some time in March.

(At my home
where my own computer is)

I fly out tomorrow so will say goodbye for now.
Coming soon: reading reports from Melbourne,
Australia.

Quote of the day

"My own darkness is lost time, a time from the past --
I've needed all of it to see a single thing"

-Martin Harrison, from 'Sydney Lawyer with Horses'

Great to follow Gary Sullivan's thoughts as he quits smoking.

Quote of the day

"summer is an umbrella and trails a shadow as well as blinding light"

- Jill Jones

Fashion Poem

It's summer in Australia,
It's freezing cold in Rochester,
It's cool here,

I am in wardrobe crisis!


Some shoes will help, I just know it.

I leave next Friday, not next Wednesday.

Misread my itinerary.

My smoking mind rallied this morning, with cheerful rounds
of "aren't you suddenly opinionated".

I had to laugh.

A building burning very slowly like the one in Diane Arbus's description
of her dream.

People coming and going.

Lately I dream I'm smoking and wake up frightened
that I actually have been.

Memory as a captured cinematic instant playing over
in the mind, reel to reel.

Each puff a tumbleweed gathering associations as it
rolls through the mind, so that eventually

nothing is not associated with smoking.

Punching holes in darkness.

Insomnia tonight.

Lately I hate tobacco more and more. The smoking relationship is so
intricate. Identity wreaths around these objects of desire just like
smoke and it's right now I most feel this loss.

'Who I am' becomes dependent on an endlessly repeated act, like
a child saying 'who I am' in a soft voice in a dark corridor to ward off
fear.

As soon as the cigarette is abandoned, a new cycle of edginess
begins so that the ritual must be repeated.

Before I quit in August 2002 I was smoking over two packs a day. To
say 'who I am who I am' at warp speed.

When I stopped cold turkey my body breathed a shaky breath and
began cleaning house.

When I stopped I remember feeling horribly ill for a few days, feverish,
physically, but also exhilarated as each hour passed and who I was
began to seem much less precarious than I'd imagined.

Every day though I fight the urge, not to smoke exactly, but the urge
that precedes smoking. It's an incredibly complex dance,

addiction. And an act is the cumulative effect of many thoughts, and
now I'll try to sleep.

Punch holes in darkness.

Dance along ribbons.

Quote of the day

"Resolutions:
1. rough up soft parts
2. less coffee, more wine
3. less self-defeating
4. less smoking, more coffee
5. lose: cynicism, fear, melancholy
6. aquire: wit, allure, casio keyboard
7. don't blow up
8. be like God"

-Alli Warren

Quote of the day

" the weather is blue
like a blue drink"

- TJ Desc

Stephanie Young and I have been commiserating lately about
turning 30. Today she writes:

"I declare my birthday for a fortnight in order to release the
specific day from the terrible, terrible power it currently holds
over me and my first present to myself is this poem."

Steph will arrive there, in thirties land, a little before I do. I'm
glad she'll be already settled in by the time I arrive. Good to
know some people.

I need to give myself many presents too. I think some poems
by Nada Gordon might be in order. And a driver's license.

'Milestone' birthdays have until now seemed totally meaningless
to me. I didn't understand the big deal about turning 21 at all.

But this ... this is on a different level.

I have this insane - I know it's insane - drive to 'set things in
order' somehow before my birthday. My birthday feels like a
deadline.

But it's wonderfully exhilarating too, getting older. My twenties,
looking back, seem like a much trampled park full of Coke
bottles

while the thirties are still pristine.

I leave next Wednesday, and will be in Australia for a month
or so.

Rising just before the sun this morning.

After Friday night's reading, I now know what many others have
discovered before me:

Nada Gordon is an amazing poet. I want to buy all of her books,
right now.

I will save up my pennies.

This was my result:

"Well...your alter poet is Sexton...not nearly as bad as Plath...
but still...CHEER UP, JEEEEEZ!"

Who is your alter poet?

I mean, The Yuriverses.

I love reading The Yuriverse.

Tonight's reading at Stephanie's place: Nada Gordon and Laura
Moriarty.

A wonderful night! Too blown away to type.

Quote of the day


"I walked to the jetty and sat on the end, looking
down at the water with bits of moonlight moving
round inside it."

-Anthony Lawrence, from the novel 'In the Half-Light'

Just three months left until I turn 30... My step-father tells this
wonderful story of how the day after his 30th birthday party
he woke up with new furniture in his room.

He got very drunk and went to a hotel and stole this beautiful
chair, which I'm pretty sure my parents still have.

I think he took some towels too.

I love that story.

Quote of the day


"What is my proper self
philanderer of griefs

malestar divinity
in the integrity of "A situation"

----

we who have from the start
ignored being

thinking it
a separation from anatomy

but this is blaspheme's code"


-Erin Moure, from 'Georgette'

Ivy is here.

On Error


No matter how many mistakes I make it seems
there are more to make.

I can learn from the mistakes I've made but the
probability of making new, as yet undreamed of
mistakes is not diminished.

At least I'm making different mistakes now.

Curing my insomnia has cut out a whole swathe
of the old mistakes.

But also an excuse!

Which is pretty dry reading unfortunately. Here's an excerpt.

"Highway workers warn you of their presence by using orange signs,
equipment, flags, and reflective vests. It's up to you to ensure both
your own and the workers' safety ..."

Studying the California Driver Handbook.

Despite having been adamant about not needing a driver's license
I have recanted at the prospect of snowy upstate New York.

I love buses. But cars are warmer.

And despite my diffidence, and faint amazement that cars work and
that I too could make one go, I'm enjoying the prospect.

At first I was worried I'd crash but then Colin pointed out that I'm just
as likely to crash as the passenger,

so I may as well be the driver.

Just now, I had a much delayed surge of adolescent excitement at the
prospect of my first car. With that Tracy Chapman song as a backdrop,
the one that got me through my high school exams.

("You've got a fast car
I've got a ticket to anywhere"
da da da)

I do things out of order sometimes.

Quote of the day


"The light lies layered in the leaves.
Trees, and trees, more trees.
A cloud boy brings the evening paper:
'The Evening Sun'. It sets.
Not sharply or at once
a stately progress down the sky"

-James Schuyler, from 'Song'

It's almost seventeen months now since I stopped smoking. Never
again

will I smoke

(and therefore have to quit).

Jill Jones, one of my favourite poets, has started a blog. Take a look
at Ruby Street.

The crux of the world

(ie. love, I know this)

(since corny truth is no lesser truth)

now I progress through
thinking this.

To know this,
To think this

pause.

Words sifting through things, like light sand through
my fingers

Sunset coloured pomegranate.



Books too slow
to change, sometimes, but melancholy and brave.

Light sand through my fingers as the sun proposes rising.

Rochester airport has rocking chairs for its patrons, so you can look
out the lobby window.

Watch the planes take off.

The East Coast a different country.

And what a beautiful town it seems. A population of just over a million,
most employed by one of half a dozen major businesses in the area,
including Kodak's head office.

The city centre was desolate and this gave us the impression of a ghost
town until we realised that most of its student population - from Eastman
School of Music and the University of Rochester as well as a handful of
other schools - was away for the holidays.

A lovely coffee shop, a surprisingly large number of theatres. One avant
garde cinema which is plenty for me.

The suburb of Irondequoit astounded me. A strip of houses looking out
onto Lake Ontario.

So beautiful, so still, a jetty to walk down. An ornery fisherman with a red
nose from too much drinking told us tales of the 15 foot long salmon he'd
once caught.

The lake, an almost flat, vast body of icy water so large that sand is produced
by it. A sandy beach with drifts of snow. Heavy ice packed around the pilons of
the jetty.

Rochester, John Ashbery's childhood town, seems to me now laced with
his poetry's expansive, charismatic rhythms, and vice versa.

I have nursed an overriding sense of landscape converted into something
more abstract, non-visual, snow and the shapes it draws in the mind.

We wanted to live right there and build a life around this lake, with its deep
piles of lake effect snow we hear about, its idiosyncratic weather system.
Infinite possibility within the strictest practical limits.

Sensibly, we will probably opt for somewhere more urban, closer to the
community college and to Colin's work. Everything still within driving distance
of everything else.

Buffalo, one of the nearby towns, apparently gets the worst of the bad
weather for the area.

I want to visit there.

Impressions.

Off to Rochester on Sunday for a reconaissance tour. I'll be back
online in the new year.

Today Colin and I ate curry for lunch at Shalimar. Later we went
hiking.

While we walked the late afternoon sun deepened the greens of
the hills, the sky's brave slate.

Quote of the day

"This is the longest one of the longest times
It lasts after we're dead and after all people
Are dead; how do you know
Because thoughts have lasted since the first thought
'Cause I think that we're in the first thoughts still
Lasting and we last
And we last, making real selves"

-Alice Notley, 'One of the Longest Times'

The following piece is by Melbourne writer and historian, Alex McDermott.
Many thanks to the author for allowing me to publish it here.



FLOWERS FOR ZOE



Let us be true, then, true and sitting in an open field. Let us be true then, my sweet repetition with the mawling eyes and the cheap renditions, let us be true: at this table do I sit and am I sitting. I like sitting at this table. I like the look outside of the birds in the trees, I like the function of smoking, the sound of air bubbles in fish tank water, where the fish live, trapped in wet membranes, happy, curious, lucid, unobserved. Some of that just is. I experience all sorts of thoughts and emotions just sitting here! Watch! All sorts of thoughts emotions recollections sensations resistances goads and spurs while sitting here writing unaccountably. Unaccountably my right arm aches. Possibly from last night carrying my bag from Parkville to Clifton Hill in a swift walk, at a rapid clip. This morning I woke up in bed and read for about an hour. Last night I sat at the bar at Percy’s with Zoe as we talked of this and that as she bought me beer. After that I walked her back to her lab and we hugged goodbye and I kissed her on the cheek. Then I walked up through the uni and swore when I found the gate locked then swore when I found the water tap was not giving any water (do the fuckers turn it off on weekends?) and I walked up and sat on a seat looking over the main oval with its clock tower showing 11:30 in the dim night light and the moon shone over all, practically full. Then I rolled up a smoke. College students wandered by in little groups, happy and drunk and some in love on a Friday night early in our century in this country.

Yesterday on the tram in the afternoon heading up to Carlton I changed my seat to avoid the sunshine and discovered to my delight a hand rolled cigarette with a super slim filter (my favourite) lying on the ground at the feet of my new seat. Eat. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. That night Zoe let me buy a new pouch of tobacco with her money and I was immensely grateful, although quite charming in the disarmingly frank and ludicrous way I set about getting it. We returned to our conversation about the allure and appeal of fuck-up men, feckless and improvident men, the wastrels and the fools, the ones vulnerable and broken open by what’s around them, the ones cried down and crushed, the ones quite maniacal and on the edge, then falling down, wings broken, maimed beyond repair, but alive, dammit, alive. Loveable and monstrous, charming, charismatic, doleful and melancholic, sometimes loaded with wit other times their heads clean empty of it, truthful, no good and crazy.

Sitting here I smoke my second cigarette.

It is to that brotherhood I suppose we would have to agree I belong to. It is a pleasing brotherhood to belong to, all things considered. It makes me feel like I belong, it makes me want another coffee, it makes me (when I finish study later tonight. Right now this is only my second cigarette – my day is just starting) write poetry, to both bury and celebrate this brotherhood I feel myself belonging to.

I acknowledge freely and in full use of my mental capacities that it is quite immensely enjoyable and fun to be alive.

Last night when I got home I rolled another smoke and got into bed. I prayed to Mary as I lay there looking out the window up through the span of trees and up at the blank and featureless night sky above. Prayed and thanked her for the help solace and assistance that she had brought me lately, and (quite naturally) asked for plenty more where that came from. This afternoon as I stood in the shower I paid particular attention to requesting her to pray for me until I die and then, in the hour of my death (when I die for rain to be falling when I guess my body will be falling apart completely) I request that she prays really really hard for me, and that goes for all the others that I love when they die too. Shockingly bizarre, isn’t it, the thought that we’re all going to die really? Each single person that I know is going to be dead, dead quite soon, relatively speaking. The mind tries to fathom this and conjures an indisputable fact: one day Arnold Schwarzenagor is going to die. Yes even him. Where lies the limit? In the eyes of babies their pet oceans an endless unfolding.

I pause and wait.

I pause in the dusk now and the birds outside in the trees going quite spastic and crazy with a last burst of song for the evening, I pause and wait.

I am so pleased to be sitting and writing words. Last night in my dreams I was an idiot and no-body liked me, I couldn’t belong and couldn’t fit none of it was any good, I kept doing things wrong.

Last night in the bar Zoe described to me the last few weeks before her grandfather died, when she was nearby and caring for him. In the last couple of days he began to sink out of consciousness and into death and on the last night that he was alive he lay in bed, obliviousness to everything around him. Standing around his bed were all, or many, of his family, tears streaming down their faces, left with nothing. Then someone – Zoe doesn’t remember who – said to someone else “what’s your favourite memory of Ganga?” and then it started. First one then another started talking, spilling out what they had locked inside, sharing. One person’s recollection triggered off another person’s memory, which reminded someone else of something they’d once heard he done. So it went, clusters of anecdote, various associations of value and warmth and love until, finally, they had finished drinking the whisky and the night was over and possibly the birds were chirping whistling and changing their octaves outside. She tells me this now at the bar where on the t.v. the first match of the world cup for rugby is showing. We are all Melbournians here so the game itself means nothing to us. We don’t know how it works, all those wrestlings and zigzagging dashes and chequered runs on the screen above us, and so we settle for yelling out “Go Aussie Go!” at regular, if quite random, intervals, regardless of what’s taking place on the screen. At some stage earlier in the conversation Zoe had chided me for saying “most unique”, for unique is unique. In similar fashion my girlfriend chides me for my idiosyncratic and hopelessly broad use of the word “irony”. Women eh? Sheer women.. All these quirks and errors add up, eventually, to personal style, surely. I found myself looking around for Sasha, a Russian, or Russian-born, who I’d met once at Percy’s Bar over a year ago, who told me the first line of his latest novel: “I am trying to remember what my father’s cock looked like”. I enjoyed the conversation and have looked for him whenever I’ve been passing through the place ever since. Apparently he’s a regular, apparently he lives just upstairs, but I’ve never seen him again. Zoe finished her story about standing around the bedside of her grandpa on the night before he died telling stories and drinking whiskey and I said with feeling “And that’s how you beat death” and she agreed with equal vehemence of feeling, then bought us both another round of beer.

Alex McDermott

The move to the East Coast should happen sometime in March but
we'll be back and forth before then.

I got a 'B' in algebra. I was pleased.

Horizons of snow.

Bombshell


After a long week, a sudden change of plans. An intermediary move
before we go home. We expect to be in Rochester, New York, for two
years or more

(although I'll still go home for a month in January/February.)

Colin has had a good job offer, and the nursing schools are strong.



Change

nothing looks the same outside this perimeter

2003.

Moving countries is phenomenally stressful. It's hard to fully describe.
It's about more than what needs to be done though there is a lot of
that. It's the feeling of uprooting everything from one place - all your
belongings, all your ties and friendships - and then starting again
somewhere new.

In the new place the real work starts because over a period of months
and years pretty much every assumption you had about 'how things
work' is challenged by the new culture you're immersed in. It becomes
harder and harder to hang on to your preconceptions so it's necessary
to make an inventory of all your cherished or faulty or unconscious
beliefs, decide what to keep, what to discard.

Meanwhile seismic change occurs in all your relationships simultaneously.
Friendships that were in person must adapt to distance, lack of face to face
contact. New friendships bloom where you currently live. Equilbrium must
be found in each relationship. This is painful but ultimately enriching.

It is worth it. Or has been for us. Worth it from the first day right up until
now and worth it, I'm sure, up to the very last moment. There are people
here whom I'm going to miss greatly. And places. And cultural quirks. And
the joy of fresh discovery, of looking at things with new eyes. The
landscapes, too, are heavily scored into my consciousness. The last four
years have been revelatory, hard, amazing, wonderful.

I have enormous sympathy for those immigrants who did not choose an
adventure, as we did, but rather were compelled by the political or economic
situation at home to move. But I understand now the immense energy such
people often bring to their new lives.

Going home is a much like moving to another strange country. I've changed.
Everything I once took for granted, I no longer take for granted. It'll be wild.

Running.

Miles travelled in the mind.

We'll know our exact departure date by the end of the week.

I feel like I'm living in airport space.

Great to see you on Wednesday night Tim! And great to see the other
swappers, too. David's Deli will probably be where we'll all meet up in
30 years.

(Now I'm lost in daydreams of futuristic space cars parked outside the
windows, while we sit, oldish and greyish at our reunion, eating potato
pancakes.)

Sleeplessness makes a resurgence, tonight, as I attempt to unwind
after my math final.


Concerns tracking repeatedly around a tall fence.


Big green expanses.

Like tumbleweeds


Rolling through the courtyard, thoughts gathering more thoughts
onto themselves.

The road is floodlit

at noon.

Sirens speed through suburbia, the foundations shake. A traffic
accident. Not my concern

Now I motion towards thoughts like 'the sky locks on to the world
and holds us in' and

'you hold a thought'

as though there were limits and there are

Think of the membranes in an orange, without them there
would be no orange, there would be liquid and a

hollow shell. Limits make the orange possible. But what size is it?
What is the orange for

eating for? My thoughts roll onwards down the longest corridor.


Silence has its intricate shifting limits. It's not just absence of words,
it has shapes, it could be drawn

and changes smoothly.


I'm typing this now.


The windows are all shut because the library is heated. The carpet
stays, for the most part, still.

A person could keep looking more and more closely.

I leave the room hunting through my pockets.

Tim Yu, that is.

We get to see Tim on Wednesday!

And on Friday!

Only four days left until my math final. It'll be nice to have this semester
done with.