Nothing compares

Cold stiff wind just powerful to make you fall over laughingly while taking a stereotypically majestic and self-congratulatory picture of yourself in front of massive jagged peaks srumbling in snow, and all the other indescribable beingness of winter in the mountains. The movement of wind and snow over each other, over ground and through tree, over crisp frozen lake, swerving like tiny clouds around your feet, the bleak blank empty beauty of it all, element interacting with element, short gnarled trees just trying to survive with their sputtered green, the snow blown to look like clouds looming around the moments, the mountains, swooping and swirling like birds and cigarette smoke and ocean waves, 'looks like the gates of heaven opening up, just above that lake,' says Mitch, and I agree, thinking something about how the sun, like most women, is much more alluring when covered by something smooth and white, yet still showing just a little bit of light, and her winking without being a peacock, expressing her beauty without showing it off, being beautiful without manipulating some sordid beauty out of herself.

All that type of failing language bullshit. I was going to put up my first picture on this blog of me on near a frozen lake with the sun and clouds of windblown snow behind, but my bud didn't have his camera with him. I don't know, I have been wavering between being a romantic about these sorts of experiences and then just viewing them as another particular emotional response to something that has been built up in ones mind from past experiences and Jeremiah Johnson, and that, if ones mindset is right, working at McDonalds when it's hot and humid can be of an equivalently ecstatic or epiphanetic experience as watching sunsets from mountain passes and clear wind through pine boughs etc.etc.etc., all of that, so that there is nothing necessarily more Beautiful in the 'mountain' than in the McDonald's, but that I am merely too weak/simple-minded/conditioned to experience that sort of feeling in blander situations, say, driving in downtown traffic in deep heat and humidity and nothing on the radio but bad music and static and even on NPR it's a report by that guy with the annoying voice (most NPR radio personalities have distinctive voices, if repetitive cadences, and most of them I like...Garrison Keeler, of course, rules, as does that one main gain from All Things Considered...but one of the standard reporters that I hear a lot grates me as though he is to sound as bananas are to taste).

So what is it? Do I continue holding a certain hypocritical disdain when people extol the virtues of traveling and being all adventurous, blaming their ow inability to live steadily and joyously on a certain deficiency in their system that makes them unable to Be in a steady state... or are they right? Or is it just a matter of programming, genetics, and natural inclination, that we all find our it in different places...but is it ludicrous to say that there's more it in the Maroon Bells than in the Taco Bells? I suppose that all you can say is that if people are consciously and purposefully and awareishly deciphering where they find there it, then wherever they see it, there it is.

I guess I want to avoid the narrow self-absorbedness that is the tendency of those who devote their lives to adventuring, and I also want to avoid the narrow slothfulness of those who don't think about what they're doing or why they're doing it but just doing that which gives them a sense of security. I think I usually tend toward both of these extremes in different ways and at different times, though I'm probably more often guilty of the latter.

Anyway, I'm feeeling neither very steady and regimented and logical in my ideas nor free and energetic. I promise, I'm talking about good ideas, or interesting ones, I'm just not doing it too well or interestingly. I'll come back to it later. But, basically, I had a few moments today, on a relatively short hike, when I said to myself "it's great to be alive..." which is something I always Believe, but not something I necessarily feel all the time, and I usually don't have that specific though come from my present experience but, rather, from thinking about thinking about life and experience.

Also, I like Lou Reed. I used to have a bit of a prejudiced aversion to his post-velvet stuff, since it's less melodic and more talky, but, beyond the catchy licks and riffs and rhythms, and intriguing lyrical constructions, he just Sounds cool without Sounding like he's Trying to Sound cool.

like David Yarborough.

nicole spoke poetry

I'm blowing sugar into organs.

Take This

Where the grass grows gray behind the sun’s
slowly closing eyes,
a man covered
hair to toenail
in thick black hood and
black wool blanket,
stares silent up at stars, and cries
not as in tears that splatter
like sawdust on the rock-speckled ice
to which his feet and calves are frozen
a statue stuck
in a block of cement, but like
the train-howl as it trumbles over
the dead woman’s silver body,
a rivulet in moonlight, a tear
in the rocky slab of mountain
like the rip
in the unfinished letter,
lets loose a boulder
that cruckles down the mountain,
and splatters into sawdust that
splinters in your eye.

I'm dancin' in the supermarket,
screamin' on the boulevard,
Got a picture in my pocket
And a forty-thousand dollar car,

Enumclaw Farm

Two friends trespass
through the foggy farm
of Enumclaw; the whinny of the Dun
they had not yet mounted.
O, Dusky,
how his calloused hands would reach
to grip your bridled mass.

You did not let him open
your skin to his perversions.
The night became your screaming, your
kick became his death.

O, James Tait,
did you see, inside
the dying eyes of Jake,
a picture of yourself behind
a warm young Chestnut Gelding?

Erige Cor Tuum Ad Me in Caelum

Lift up your thighs of white
blunder the eyes--
receive?
see granite curve and bend,
and turn into partner-granite
you don't deserve
baptismal bliss, but burn
superfluous idle hands
your spills that hide
acceptance of what eloquence provides?

lift up our eyes to you?
no, God, we stare and stare
upon a nearer thing
that greets us here,
Death, violent and near.

2 1235 north town and country road # 2217 orange california 92868

The alchemy and mystery is this,
no cross to kiss
but a cross pointing on a compass-face,
east, west, south, north;

the secret of the ages is revealed,
the book un-sealed,
the fisherman entangled in his nets
felled where he waded
for the evening catch,
the house-door
swinging on the broken latch,
the woman with her basket on the quay
shading her eyes to see
if the last boat
really is the last,
the house-dog lost
the little hen escaped,
the precious hay-rick scattered,
and the empty cage,
the book of life is open,
turn and read:

the linnet picking at the wasted see
is holy ghost,
the weed,
broken by iron axle
is the flower
magicians bartered for.

Madonna

Mother says no to
TV and ice cream,
birthdays and magazines-
her vulva, on a young
brown boy’s mouth
grows wet-
her children drop dirty
socks on the floor
and must be tidy
to earn back their clothes.

The material mother
cleans her kids’ fingers
just before breakfast-
her tongue leaps from dick to lips,
both hands
twist a piece of raw nipple, then
loins enclose pubis, and
neighbor-boy-crabs
in mother-love are lost.