Springhouse

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1.
The springhouse is a refuge I rarely enter:
cool as a cave in summer, warm in winter.
The grates on the windows have rusted away,
& the outlet pipes have long since silted up.
The spring seeps in through breaks in the masonry,
& a thin whisper of water covers the floor.
Phoebes nest under the rafters every April;
salamanders leave their footprints in the mud.

2.
The springhouse is the one building on the farm
that doesn’t line up with the others.
I see it every time I go out my front door,
but rarely give it a second glance.
It sits apart from everything we know.
I think of those who, for the sake of some
dangerous or unfashionable truth,
grow old in prison cells or hermitages,
no way to keep their feet up out of the mud,
no place to sit apart from the corrosive flow.

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The penis poems

1.
I voyaged between the Scylla & Charybdis of her breasts like a swift corsair, imagining the whip on straining backs & the sail bellying with wind.

I bent to kiss my reflection in her silver toenail polish.

It was 2:00 in the afternoon. I traveled her spine’s high ridge with the eyes of a newt, looking for a stream in which to molt.

The hard nuggets of her name slowly melted as I rolled them back & forth across the hollow left by my missing tooth.

“I love you,” I said, & just like Pinocchio, a wooden nose began to grow in the most embarrassing of places. And Lord help me, it was starting to drip.

2.
Don’t wake me, rooster.
Get back to your roost.

Hey shuttlecock, birdie,
look out for the net!

Just once, weathervane,
can’t you face into the storm?

3.
I learned all about couplings in the hardware store: the finer the threads, the better the grip. If you want a tight seal, you can wrap some sticky tape over the male end before screwing it in. Don’t try this at home.

4.
There’s a kind of fish that remains in coitus
for weeks. The male disintegrates
into the current: first fins & tail,
then head & body let go. All inessential
functions cease, & everything
atrophies except the rigid sex organs,
buried in the female for their entire length.
Ah, like a mystic yearning to dissolve
like a drop in the ocean of Godhead,
how I envy that fish!

5.
Janie’s got a gun – the only cock rock song I ever respected. In a world full of detachable instruments of power, it seems only fair that a woman should have one of her own. I remember seeing Tribe 8 – lesbian punk band from San Francisco, come all the way to Central Pennsylvania to play at the VFW – doing a song about gang-raping frat boys. The singer strapped on a dildo over her jeans and my bisexual friend Bill crawled up on stage & knelt in front of her, pledging his devotion in the most straightforward manner imaginable. It was, as they say, an object lesson.

6.
Stick
figure, weak thing, think
how many drink to make
you dull as a bull, or pop
Viagra to stop up all other
sensory inputs & funnel
a camel’s stamina through
the tunnel vision of your
needling eye, which, though
no pinhead, is still a mere
prick.

7.
Men get nostalgic: we will never again piss
the way we could when we were ten
& knew nothing but basic arithmetic.
Even now, when we pee, for a few moments
we can return to that state of sexless innumeracy,
can be almost as present in our skins as animals.
We pee, & our minds stop wandering for as long
as it takes to subtract a little of that ocean
that passes through our male & female bodies
every day of our lives.
Then the flow turns into a trickle, & a quick,
involuntary shiver returns us to the algebra,
the infinitesimal calculus of Dick & Jane.

Person of interest

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The person of interest – not yet a suspect – has a slate-gray suitcase and a story full of holes. The person of interest is nobody you know. The person of interest has been known to express sympathy toward the enemies of the United States, to participate in assorted protests and boycotts, to eat falafel, to beg to differ, and to compare the private ownership of land with slavery. The person of interest goes for slow, apparently random drives in the country, taking numerous pictures of public infrastructure and commercial messages.

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The person of interest, though a native-born citizen of the United States, has repeatedly expressed interest in “getting the fuck out of here,” with socialist countries such as Sweden, Canada and Moominland most often cited as desirable locations. The person of interest listens to public radio without ever becoming a member. The person of interest sometimes dresses in black and runs barefoot through the woods.

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Last Tuesday, the person of interest discussed world affairs with an accomplice for about twenty-five minutes without a single mention of the War on Terror™. The person of interest is a regular user of the World Wide Web, viewing and contributing to little-read, heavily inter-linked “blog” sites in preference to more typical internet destinations such as E-bay, naked or nude xxx celebrities and Texas Hold’em. Though not yet a suspect, the person of interest is suspected of involvement in [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], “Old Faithful,” [REDACTED], Egyptian lentils – [REDACTED PARAGRAPH] chemical fertilizer as “a disaster waiting to happen.”

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The person of interest is said to have a smooth, hairless spot the size of a silver dollar on his or her left buttock, though we have not yet been able to confirm this. The person of interest is not considered a candidate for special rendition at this time, though advocacy of ecoterrorist acts involving criminal trespass, as well as persistent defamation of the American Beef Council, may eventually lead to detention as an enemy combatant in order to protect the public and safeguard the Constitution from abuse as a cover for openly seditious acts. Worst of all, the person of interest has sought classified information under the Freedom of Information Act…

UPDATE: For those who might think I exaggerated a little about government surveillance, listen to this report.

Hard cases

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1.
I crouch beside the fire ring with hands outstretched,
doggedly seeking warmth from its circle of snow.

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2.
As the snowpack melts, little dark targets
appear on the laurel leaves.
I call it the coal pox.
Power plants a hundred miles to the west
seed the clouds with nitric & sulfuric acid.
The rain burns & the snow burns, too.
The soil turns toxic with heavy metals.

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3.
A feral housecat walks a crooked mile through the woods,
sidestepping the patches of old snow.
Long after she passes, a squirrel continues to scold,
his tail on the branch behind him like a furious mime
or a question mark come quivering to life.

Black bag

UPDATED Saturday morning to include an attempt at dream interpretation – see below.

I am cleaning out my pocketbook. This in itself doesn’t seem so unusual: in this dream, it appears that I have always carried around a large, black pocketbook just like my mother’s, though when I think about it later, I wonder if perhaps it wasn’t really an old-fashioned doctor’s bag.

What triggers disbelief in my watcher-mind – the part of my consciousness that is always observing things from a safe distance, whether I’m asleep or awake – is the vast quantity of stuff I pull out of it. In short order I remove roughly four times what the bag appears capable of holding, get frightened and stop. Most of the contents consist of food and drink items. There’s a fifth of whiskey in soft plastic, an unopened half-gallon container of orange juice, and a sizable stack of Tupperware containers full of lunch and dinner leftovers, none of which I remember stowing away. I hand the food and the orange juice to a hungry friend, who conveniently appears at my elbow. I keep the whiskey “for emergencies,” nestling it down among the keys and coins and tissues at the bottom of the pocketbook. “Look how much lighter it is now,” I say to myself, giving the black bag an exploratory swing.

*

I’m descending a steep, grassy hillside when an enormous bird of prey kites past. It catches sight of me and banks sharply, circling in for a closer look. I note the white head and tail feathers: bald eagle! And I immediately regret leaving my camera back in the storage locker. The eagle and I size each other up from about fifty feet away. The more I look at him, the more he resembles an old, old man with feathers all over his body. His face registers deep anger and disgust. He pivots in the brisk wind and sails back up the hillside, disappearing behind the far side of the ridge.

*

Those were the two dreams that stuck with me this morning after I awoke. As regular readers know, I spin dreams into blog posts often enough. But I had been inspired to take a renewed interest in my dreaming by the new blog talkingdream, which I just came across yesterday evening, following a link from Velveteen Rabbi. Talkingdream is dedicated to the notion that “Dreams have the power to reveal us to ourselves, and they are too important to ignore.” It’s the work of none other than Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and Stalking Elijah – two of my favorite popular works on religion. I was very excited that a writer of his insight and ability would be taking dreams so seriously; he says he’s recorded over 800 pages in dream journals over the course of four years. Best of all, Kamenetz has posted a draft of the first chapter of his new book on dreams, and invites comments and suggestions. Do go look.

*

In a comment responding to the first version of this post, Brenda notes that the dreams I describe “seem to be ‘medicine man’ dreams, and I suspect you are drawn towards the shaman… are already on that path.” This is a bit more charitable than the interpretations I had come up with.

Much as I might protest against Freud, I’m a product of my culture: I have a hard time seeing dreams as anything more than reflections of my anxieties and neuroses. And since I tend to be fairly self-critical anyway, naturally, a reductionist interpretation is going to occur to me long before an expansive or prophetic one.

In the first dream, it’s not surprising that I conflate pocketbook with refrigerator, both things I associate with my mother and with abundance. The magical capacity of the bag to yield more than it contains may have been influenced by a magic show put on by my niece on the evening of New Year’s Day. That’s a much more likely direct source than, say, the New Testament story about the loaves and fishes. I don’t think I have a Christ complex!

The true subject of the dream, it seems to me, was my blogging, which is, after all, the activity that currently dominates my free time. Since my mother is also a writer (and since I am also a cook), it’s not surprising that I would associate inspiration with her pocketbook – a mystery wrapped inside an enigma wrapped inside black vinyl, as a storyteller on NPR once described his own mother’s bag of tricks. My dream protagonist’s apprehension about the unlimited contents of the bag/subconscious mind probably echoes my anxiety about my tendency to say too much, to not know when to stop. His willingness to give everything away to a single friend seems to reflect my general contentment with the status quo, in which I feel fortunate in being able to share my output with just a few readers, many of whom have become friends.

What about the whiskey? In real life, I don’t drink whiskey more than once in a blue moon, and don’t generally enjoy anything stronger than a glass of wine. But if I’m correct in thinking that the pocketbook represents the source of my inspiration, then it’s natural that it would have enough room for something so symbolic of the high produced by immersion in writing or photography.

The second dream is an easier nut to crack, I think. The direct source for the eagle imagery was undoubtedly the blog Dharma Bums, which frequently features stunning photographs of bald eagles. I’m pretty sure my dream eagle symbolizes wild America, and the anger and disgust that it directed toward me undoubtedly arises from my feelings of guilt that I am not doing enough as an environmental activist.

Does that mean that the figure in my dream could not have been a messenger of some sort? No, I think it can easily work both ways. As I implied in my post on Creationism the other day, the only God that makes sense to me is one that works through natural phenomena, such as the operation of guilt upon the unconscious mind.

But I am suspicious of efforts to treat dreams as omens, personal or otherwise. There’s a kind of egotism about omen reading that’s very seductive: one gains an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance, just as in a paranoid fantasy. That’s why, even as I acknowledge the possibility that dreams are in some sense messages from Whatever, I generally prefer turning them into lyrical paragraphs or poems rather than trying to subject them to interpretation. As literary art, they remain alive and open to multiple readings. I guess it’s no secret that I have very mixed feelings about the value of literary criticism – the dream interpretation of our age. I always prefer watching butterflies on the wing to seeing them pinned and mounted under glass. And when it comes right down to it, as Zhuangzi long ago observed, who can say whether any of us are more than fleeting protagonists in a butterfly’s dream?

Under the sign of Janus

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The way the snow returns to the sky
is far more painstaking than the way it falls.
Near the end, it turns from ground to figure,
from canvas to paint. It scales the ladder
of its own self-effacement.

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So the snow withdrew into a clef-shaped cleft
& waited for its cue. This winter could go
either way.

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The witch hazel measured itself against an oak.
I want to be a tree, it sang, when I grow up –
A bird perch,
An insect metropolis,
A gallery of lichens above,
And below, a husband to fungi.

True, I am all these things already,
But not as a tree.

Defending Creation from the Creationists

Advocates of “Intelligent Design” annoy me in more ways than one. In addition to their willful misrepresentation of science and their political strategy of targeting schools and school boards, they misrepresent religion, too. As Nancey Murphy points out in an interview in the December 27 edition of the Christian Century,

Christians have traditionally understood God to act in two ways: by performing special acts (special providence, signs, miracles) and by constantly upholding all natural processes. The ID movement assumes that God works only in the first way. Therefore, to show that God has acted, the ID movement believes one has to identify an event in which no natural process is involved. This is their point in trying to argue that particular events in the evolutionary process cannot be explained scientifically.

In effect, then, the advocates of ID limit the realm of the sacred to whatever lies beyond human comprehension or rational explanation. Worldwide, few truly religious people from any tradition would make such an elementary mistake. ID advocates are as reductionist as the scientists they critique.

Another thing that annoys me about ID is the slight-of-hand substitution of a designer for a Creator. In the Greek Orthodox confession of faith, God is described as the Poet/Maker of Heaven and Earth – the one who shaped and called things into being – and this view is consistent with the creation stories in Genesis. ID, by contrast, posits an engineer. Note the difference between the ancient and modern myths: world-as-poem, human-as-creation-in-clay implicitly recognizes the essential integrity of beings; world-as-product does not. And if Creation is nothing but product, then of course God is free to violate its integrity at will.

By contrast, Murphy stresses

the view – held by most liberal theologians – that God’s action does not violate the laws of nature. Actually, because I don’t give “laws” the ontological status that many do, I would not speak of violating the laws of nature but of violating the nature of creatures. God creates beings with their own powers and propensities, and does not violate their basic natures in interacting with them.

The interview offers many more such tidbits for those who have access to the magazine in their local public library. Meanwhile, Chris Clarke takes on a creationist biology textbook currently championed by some ID supporters. Again, what really grates isn’t so much the ignorance as the hubris.

The devotee of Teilhard’s noösphere, the extropian with his imagined Manifest Evolutionary Destiny, the well-intentioned Marxist with his inevitability of change, all fall to the same teleological demon, shackled to the Great Chain of Being. And once we set ourselves apart from the rest of “creation,” we begin to resent our ties to the earth. Of what importance is a snail, a rotifer, a tiger? We begin to imagine – and to implement – a world in which we are alone.

And to implement – yes. The poet always remembers what all too many engineers forget: that words and images have immense power, and can create and destroy worlds.

Headlines we can expect to see

Abramoff Guilty Plea Leaves Reed Twisting in Wind

Abramoff: “I Never Promised You the Rose Garden”

GOP Killer Uses Silver Bullets

GOPs and Robbers Meet Cowboys, Indians

Rep. Ney: “Nay”

Rep. Doolittle “Did Little”

Sen. Burns: “Burned”

Hastert Has Dirt

Frist Frisked

Abramoff Saga “Heartwarming” – AHA

Santorum Lobby Reform Bill to Ban Grassroots Lobbying, Legalize “Gifts”

Abramoff: Disowned by Ownership Society?

Rightwing Think Tankers Spring Leaks, Spill Toxic Grease

Delay Delay: Hastings’ Lack of Haste in Ethics Probe Subject of New Ethics Probe

Delay “Messed with Texas” – Abramoff

Grover Norquist Mysteriously Drowns in Bathtub

Saipan Sweatshop Deal: Made in the USA

Lost Tribes Blame Bad Directions

GAME OVER

For the low-down on Abramoff’s high jinks, see The Abramoff Primer

Well

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The sky at the bottom of the walk-in stone well looks almost blue – an illusion. We have not seen the sun for days. The snow is mostly gone, dissolved by days of cold rain. Last night, my niece left us to return to Mississippi with her parents, and it seemed to all of us that her visit had been much too short. Between the rain and a bad head cold that she and I both got, we never got a chance to go sledding, build a snowman – even walks with her Nanna were few and far between. This morning my father and I took down the Christmas tree and put the boxes of lights and ornaments back up in the attic for another year. The tree went out on the back slope below the feeders to provide the birds with a shelter from the weather and a refuge from the sharp-shinned hawk.

*

Among the baby’s new books, there’s one with a small round mirror on every facing page, each replacing the head of a different animal. She points, chortles, repeats her one word, Dada.

The book is from a series called Baby Einstein, designed to make your child smarter. But what is the lesson? That other beings are nothing but ciphers? I think of Einstein fathering his own thoughts on a non-capricious G-d.

Dada. Very good! And see how it smears when you put your fingers on it? When you bend the page back and forth, see how it warps?