Thursday, June 27, 2013

Tuesday, June 25, 2013:

Today, I began going through writing that may comprise what I have called, for many years, "The Emery Wheel," the working title for a book about people said to have lived before I was born . . . what I deem the book of, among others, Drusilla Taylor . . . or so I say, to myself.

After appointments with Russ Schoenfelder, who needs to complete the work on our house caused by last summer’s storm; with our ophthalmologist Dr. Germaine to re-check Karenlee’s eye; and while Karenlee was having her teeth cleaned in the office of our dentist, Dr. Muirhead . . .and before we went to saw our veterinarian, Dr. Thorsgaard, for news of Pedro’s eye, followed then by picking up Pedro’s eye RX at Med Save and Karenlee’s eye RX at Walgreens . . .
I began what already feels like a quasi-Herculean task of searching through all I have been writing daily since October 22, 2001, looking for the poems and prose germane to the new book from, so far, files that I have designated:
Jinni Land
The American Fabric
The Frozen Sea
–with a myriad of remaining files to go through, only to be followed by the winnowing that surely must follow and as quickly as I can do it . . .

All of this “Day in the Life” spiel explains, at least to myself, why I have copped out of writing today, at least so far . . . In the last twelve, nearly thirteen years, with the exception of three weeks in hospital after hip surgery–having a new hip installed–I have missed only one or two days of working at this “trade.” And that after publishing extensively since 1965.

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander


Monday, June 24, 2013

The South


“You would have to be born there.”
                          –Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

There are places where water flows without obstruction.
But the water here
was never pure.
How else justify the way men choose their own destruction?

We were flowing down Father of Waters
past Vicksburg, Natchez, gathering toward New Orleans
trajectory ample to arrive without barriers
choking the way forward and reaching the ocean

before hurricanes
took away my city and yours
that I always see as a Southerner
among the Spanish, the French, where part of me was born.

I am floating under the sun and moon.
There’s no feeling in me of fear.
Soon there will be no cities, only the ocean.
Where I would have been born, music is all I hear.

(24 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander


Sunday, June 23, 2013

Suicider

The only one there said, You may as well go home, nobody’s going to show but me . . . and you. So I took my fifth of Jose Cuervo and ten sticks of Mary Jane, along with the sheaf of uncollected poems I had planned to offer the audience for approval . . . or what? This is the Midwest, where they never say outright what they think and especially not if it may involve feeling, but leave it to you to interpret the silences.

At home I toked up between shots of tequila. I had survived the test of my work by keeping quiet. And the other thing about this part of the country is this: If you keep your work to yourself you don’t have to worry about what others think or feel; you simply keep writing until the synapses break, the wired places between brain and hands go down in the storm of, an oblivion of, your own making. Why wait to die?

I had wondered why my father asked my mother, both in their seventies, to get in the car and go down to the river and drive over the edge. I didn’t figure him to think of doing that after such a youth–cottonfields and coal mines–and independence after the second war of the world, enough to pick up and move to a country he didn’t know and begin again, even though living another forty years carried pain into his hands and legs and when he kept on smoking he couldn’t sleep.

You have to wonder why you drink and smoke dope. Is it because you want to live in Mexico now and forget the American options, taking your chances on staying alive and helping, one hopes, others to survive? Or you could eat Spam in Honolulu. Or go to Canada, but it’s too close to the States, even if you can die under a doctor’s care without paying the bill or, at best, buying medical insurance. No: Live out the paradox of liberty and happiness and how they relate to human life.

(23 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Reading of Blake alongside Ginsberg's "Snapshot Poetics"

Opposition being true friendship,
Heaven marries Hell.
They live apart, coming together
only in their duel for souls.
Blake lies on his back, cock hard
to point true north,
Catherine beside him. Let her say
how she is.

William sees through both eyes
the future:
Ginsberg coming on Neal naked
on the bed, Cassady’s hard cock
straight up. Allen says, 
Hold it there!
but no, the shutter takes him
the way he is.

The Blakes do not make love
much anymore, although
he can see shadows cast by the unborn,
but not these men so far off.
The Blakes lie naked
within their garden wall,
reaching to touch fingers,
day turning night, then back to day.

(22 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, June 21, 2013

Wish for a Young Woman

How many days are lost once sun goes south?
Calendars spill their numbers on the floor.
She who gathers the shredded year must know
already her beauty will fade with age
but be preserved by the fires remembered
for their glow illuminating the night.
Banked fires flare once embers ignite and flame
revealing her future cast in luck’s spell.

I, an old man older than her father,
wish for her that her life be companioned
by a lover who gentles her wisdom
learned firsthand from the man whose tenderness
turned to cruelty after their wedding night.
–Silence your fears, old man, her soul is old . . .

For Cherie

(20-21 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

The Gulf

The long waters weave their way to the gulf.
There are no pelicans there
without dark stains slatting their feathers.
Those whose wings can lift them into the air
are gone by now, but where
does the hell-oil not bubble up spreading over
waters that were not meant to die but are
dying.

(20 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The Animals

  1

After a Reading of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

Cats are peripatetic,
and because they are bisexual,
a study in behavior, that humans,
even the rowdy,
could learn from if time were taken
from fucking her pussy,
the Black Irish gypsy’s,
though cold turkey
is a dish not to be desired
in the event eight toms are too many
for two pussys.
Socrates, laid in his grave two years,
a venerable flame-tipped Siamese,
is busily riding the kharma wheel,
else he would lead me to the shore
purring all the way there and back,
meaning he loves me rowdy or routine:
it’s left for me to know the difference,
though first I must “feel into”
his survivor, Ali Baba Mau-mau,
a giant white as small Socrates’ hair,
the only tom unphased
when philosophers mount his back
hoping this time they can do what they need,
erasing thought for the sake of instincts
wanting only that desire be fulfilled,
and all this I could learn from Mau-mau
merely by exercising the patience
of empathy implanted in eunuchs
assuring that emperor and empress
remain faithful, they are so endowed.

(based on the 1872 first edition)

  2

“ . . . understanding of others depends on capacity to imitate behavior–the imitative response is unconscious: it may coexist with empathy but, unlike sympathy, shares activity or emotion rather than attitude.–also, empathy has objective reference and physical manifestations, e.g., perception by the observer of the mood of a work of art.”
–Theodor Lipps

“The problem of the unconscious in psychology is, according to the forcible statement of Lipps, less a psychological problem than the problem of psychology.
–Sigmund Freud

As I grow older, I fuck less.
Lest I turn up 
in flagrante delicto.
I live alone downstairs
as once I lived upstairs
abandoned years ago
though now I love with the heart
and let my cock rise and fall
obeying its own spur’s will.
Hence the unconscious.

The Black Irish gypsy
takes me to dinner
far from her campfire.
Do you use condoms yet? she asks.
I remind her I bought one once
at twenty-one
and carried it in my wallet for years
untouched. She replies,
I have one in my purse,
would you like me to put it on you?
I answer, Not here,
in the wagon yes but not at dinner,
dear.

In the stable her horses devour hay.
They whinny when she arrives.
They know why I come along
with my member roused and ready.
These horses fuck more than I
and most likely her combined.
We age. She lives upstairs
when not gallivanting the countryside.
She lets me undress and begins.
When she’s finished I begin.
One or the other is always beginnng.
We feel what we do,
but so do cats, dogs, horses, and aardvarks.

She lets me work her up once more.
Neither of us worries the other
with mention of Darwin, Lipps, or Freud.
She has no interest whatsoever
in the old shrinks. Her horses prance
the countryside and take her everywhere.
They must know what she has in mind.
When they get to stay two nights
in a stable their mistress unshackles
saddle and bridle and some day
she knows she will find a colt
among afterbirth’s placenta
and uncut umbilical cord.

(19 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Midway

No reason to go forward or backward
when you see a gyroscope gather speed
before slowing to a wobble with dust
shedding auroras around men who call
you Son, then Would you give me what I ask?
So goes the spiel to awed orphans of rubes
who flee all their fathers to slip under
tent flaps, ogling girls already women
doing hootchy-kootchy to buy tickets
sending these little men out of Egypt
downriver to reach the tributary
that carries them as far as the mamas
hawking their wares outside the ruby house
taking on the overflow of papas.

(18 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

World without End

The world we live in
has no end, except
nuclear annihilation,
chemical weaponry,
oil in the water supply,
what we’ve not thought of
we will, kill children,
get off our rocks
killing whomever,
killing forever.

(17 June 2013)

copyright by Floyce Alexander

Sonnet of Her

you can’t have everything
and why complain
the morning star is blue
chill winds sweep the moon

years to grow the nerve
to dive into your heart
learn to ride the red wave
she is said to approve of

picking her daisies
squishing between her toes
earth that loves her fertile
but must wait awhile

if you stave off your gloom
you always find her home

(16 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Hero

Girls know this boy’s reputation.
He’s hung up on baseball, even football.
Other boys say he should turn out
before he graduates, and so he does.
His mother isn’t the only female
who will worry he may turn up injured
each time he leaves the farm to go play ball.
Irene with her Castenada-deep skin,
the warm cleft between her legs, the sweet lips
next to the dark mole on one cheek she wears
like a queen who chose him to be her king . . .
In the stands on her feet, she holds both hands
to silence the crowd’s roar as her eyes see
him hurtle into the secondary
and run the man with the ball to the ground.
She promises to herself to give him
her body in the dark after the lights
go out, when the turf feels stained with the blood
and sweat that could be his or any young
hero’s. He knows he is only Irene’s.

(15 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Desert

It is hard to be poor in Monument Valley.
The rocks look at you and roll away.
You never see the same butte twice
as far as your eyes.
You might have been born here to stars
frolicking between John Ford movies,
a John Wayne Claire Trevor tryst
that went as far as breach birth.
You were left here to pick up rocks.
You like to paint faces on them
to wash off in random cloud bursts.
You draw your bow and slice a lizard
with the arrow and rub stones together
to make fire that broils the skin
until it slides off to leave the sweetmeat
and forked tongue to sate your hunger.
You built your house with sticks and dirt,
pondering each move to make it right.
You were here to stay.
The rocks were all yours. So were the stars.

(14 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Dam Site

Breath comes easy some nights more than others.
Light showers, sprays. No flow but settling over
the dam’s pour. She does not go with him but stays
alone in the room, where she can watch the eels
wriggling to the top to circle the breathing tank.
He wants to sleep inside her. Once he could, though
she was another, He wore a mask to breathe through,
there was no pump and grind, he slept between her thighs
and dreamed of sperm whales diving with porpoise 
where the ocean turns over without tides.
Lightning cracks, clouds roll as thunder rumbles,
but no rain walking, not yet, feet poised on the ledge
where water pours through his toes and mist lays
a screen concealing the dangerous edge. 

13 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Blood

We do not know our feelings well.
Is it because we have none at all?
Master your feelings, wise men say;
and we do, we throw them away.

A man’s blood from the hot country,
a woman’s from the far north:
they have struggled to find the south
wall where the sun is highest at midday.

He followed her after she followed him.
He failed. They moved from place to place.
Up here they stay. They would be at a loss
if there were no place that was home.

We love. We rage. We grow numb.
The lion learns to sleep with the lamb.

12 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Lagniappe

The bright one with piercing eyes. One leg is off under the knee.
A woman she’s never met canvasses New Orleans:
(I want to hear her say) D’ya have a little something for a friend of mine
condemned to reentry prosthetically . . .
(I never hear talk like that in America now, much less
New Orleans.) Bright? She’d knock you off your keister saying what
she thinks just being around you, you’d be in love with her
and all you have to do is pause to hear what she thinks of you.

11 June 2013 

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, June 10, 2013

Eight Poems, Eight Days

I have gone far enough to know what I have lost by now.
He sat rocking the rocking chair, recounting to himself
the mystery of losing words as quickly as he found
others, ticking them off by date and hoping the years
were concealed among his readers and would not need
to be reconstructed, that particular frame of mind gone.

3 June 2013

The lovely ladies lining the streets may not be trusted
to keep secrets when they sell their wares with stories
other men told. They may or may not know the originals.
Their bodies bearing the scars and stains of their trade,
they know what they must do to house and clothe and feed
the little ones without fathers, begat before the pill.

4 June 2013

After what I knew had been lost was found, it remained
to be preserved by hand–as though I were a scribe
chiseling words that would not be subject to fire–our site
so remote in time libraries were not yet invented, 
Alexandria far in the future. After dalliance
with fathers, mothers settled into the ruins of cities.

5 June 2013

Our garden attracts beautiful women as well as living saints.
May both find something in common: a mood, a flicker of
delight, knowing the eyes are no gauge of inner beauty.
Wildflowers ripen, petals taken by the wind and sent
to the poor, those who live under the street, not so far off
they cannot follow fugitive blooms to find their bounty.

6 June 2013

Those curious come close. They trouble themselves to cry out
their grievances to us. I don’t know what the world is about,
not now. All I trust is the confusion, the resentment, plaint
upon complaint. I go to streets that are empty, silent,
fearful. Do you know why you are not here? I know I’m not
there, but can’t say why. In the hush I ask, Where are you?

7 June 2013

Events start later than anticipated by media.
There are no warnings storms may be coming.
The wind blows, haggard souls slip in and out
          of sight, the crowd swarms.
Cops drive up and down the boulevards,
combing the night
for the unexpected, which means everything 
to the lost.
Cameras and microphones abound
with the loaves, the fish.

8 June 2013

Only in daytime can you see the sky, blue clouds turn dark.
Cathleen’s friend enters the house to kiss her husband
preliminary to the hug sought after, saying no one
hugs her like him. Cathleen smiles: she knows other ways he has
she can’t give up, though God knows she once tried for many years
to forget him, yet never refused to answer his calls.

9 June 2013

Who voted against the Patriot Act, and who would answer:
The fascista prevail, far there, far here; Who does not know why
the spear of the harpoon piercing the skin cannot be removed
when pulled back to where the tip caught hold and now can only shred;
Fascist Ahab, keen-eyed Ishmael, the Pequod’s fellaheen
citizenry: Is there no purity save the world’s white whale?

10 June 2013

all copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

"Who voted against the Patriot Act . . ."

Who voted against the Patriot Act, and who would answer:
The fascista prevail, far there, far here; Who does not know why
the spear of the harpoon piercing the skin cannot be removed
when pulled back to where the tip caught hold and can only shred;
Fascist Ahab, keen-eyed Ishmael, the Pequod’s fellaheen
citizenry: Is there no purity save the world’s white whale?

10 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, June 9, 2013

"Only in daytime . . ."

Only in daytime silver lines the sky, blue clouds turn gray.
Cathleen’s friend enters our house to kiss me
preliminary to the hug she likes. She says no one
hugs her like me. Cathleen smiles, she knows other ways he has
she can’t give up, though God knows she once tried for many years
to forget him, leave him alone, refuse to answer calls . . .

9 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Saturday, June 8, 2013

"Events start later than anticipated . . ."

Events start later than anticipated by media.
There are no warnings storms may be coming.
The crowd builds and swarms, the wind blows,
  haggard souls slip in and out
of sight, cops go up and down the boulevards
combing the streets
for the unexpected, which means everything 
to lost souls.
Cameras and microphones abound like
               the loaves, the fish.

8 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Friday, June 7, 2013

"The curious come close."

The curious come close. They trouble themselves to cry out
their many grievances. I don’t know what the world is about
by now. All I trust is the confusion, the resentment, plaint
upon complaint. I go to the streets. They are empty, silent,
fearful. Do you know why you are not here? I stop. I’m not
even there. I can’t say why. In the hush I ask, Where is that?

7 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander  


Wednesday, June 5, 2013

"After what I thought had been lost was found . . ."

After what I thought had been lost was found, it remained
to copy by hand–as though I were a scribe recording words
that would not be subject to fire–our site so far off the track
libraries were not yet invented, Alexandria far in the future;
and our sisters came by with food, for dalliance with fathers,
only to be returned to the city, excavated, settling into ruins.

5 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

"The lovely ladies who line these streets . . ."

The lovely ladies who line these streets may not be trusted
to keep secrets. They sell their wares with stories told
by others, to whom they told the original,
their bodies bearing the stains and scars of their trade,
knowing what they must do to feed and clothe and house
the little ones without fathers begat before the pill.

4 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Monday, June 3, 2013

"I have gone far enough . . ."

I have gone far enough to know what I have lost by now.
He sat on the rocking chair and kept recounting to himself
the reasons he was losing words as quickly as he found
others, ticking them off by date and hoping the years
were concealed among his readers and would not need
to be reconstructed, his particular frame of mind gone . . .

3 June 2013

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Dutch Elm

pa  pA  PA Pa  pa
la LA Lu –song of an orphaned fledgling

The condemned are always easier to kill
than the blameless who hang around
to make sure executions proceed
without incident

Who would yield such privilege to curs
whose mother loped off in the dark
with pups sired under the moon
whose eyes were closed

or to the Dutch elm that shaded houses
bringing them together with parting
lovers in a shower looking out at us
with no windows

she was crouched between his bowed legs
her lips performing the mounting sighs
he was feeling not only for the first time
but forever

and after the tree was felled the stump
remained in the way of bodies falling
where grass grew higher than the roots
surviving

In the prisons of afterthought the prophets
have their heads handed to them
above bare feet completing her dance
in braille

One day the hands arrived with orange
flamethrowers and working at night
the misery began that never ends
for the condemned

We killed the tree with all its kindred
for the good of others of a common
source spreading too thin to survive
strong storms

(2 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander


Saturday, June 1, 2013

The Day

Lights flicker as ever before the wrath
takes over earth.
Wind lashed the hair of graves that would open
under God’s wand.
So I was told as you were, as we are,
where the storms batter
down sparrows, crows and ravens, eagles’ wings
shredded, falling
into the roar of silence that is death’s
aftermath. Who leaves
this life knows they will never awaken
to love again.
The waves of the world’s oceans flood over
the earth’s waters.

(1 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander