Posts

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Shorn

Up, and carrying my wife to my Lord’s lodgings left her, and I to White Hall, to the Duke; where he first put on a periwigg to-day; but methought his hair cut short in order thereto did look very prettily of itself, before he put on his periwigg. Thence to his closet and there did our business, and thence Mr. Coventry and I down to his chamber and spent a little time, and so parted, and I took my wife homeward, I stopping at the Coffee-house, and thence a while to the ‘Change, where great newes of the arrivall of two rich ships, the Greyhound and another, which they were mightily afeard of, and great insurance given, and so home to dinner, and after an houre with my wife at her globes, I to the office, where very busy till 11 at night, and so home to supper and to bed.
This afternoon Sir Thomas Chamberlin came to the office to me, and showed me several letters from the East Indys, showing the height that the Dutch are come to there, showing scorn to all the English, even in our only Factory there of Surat, beating several men, and hanging the English Standard St. George under the Dutch flagg in scorn; saying, that whatever their masters do or say at home, they will do what they list, and will be masters of all the world there; and have so proclaimed themselves Soveraigne of all the South Seas; which certainly our King cannot endure, if the Parliament will give him money. But I doubt and yet do hope they will not yet, till we are more ready for it.

my hair cut short
I am a globe where night
cannot endure


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 15 February 1663/64.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The immigrant translates

in her mind the words for custom
and care. She needs to tell the surly

landlord about the ill-fitting windows
that let in too much winter air, the hook
and eye fasteners that are loose, her fear

that roof rats have made their way
into the dark back hallway. It is
her custom to choose words with care,

but now she must find her way
more slowly. There are words in this
new tongue that continue to surprise her

as she walks to the train station
and back, that catch like little banners
on the wind, or sharper— before flying

away from what mouthed them. Some
are translucent as milk she pours
into the cracked blue ceramic dish

of the soft gray cat belonging to
the wheelchair-bound woman she
works for. Some are dark and reek

of blood or sour piss and peppers,
which her employer confirms are the same
peppers which go into pepper spray,

a small canister of which she presses
into her hand one afternoon saying You aim
this nozzle right in the face of anyone

who ever bothers you in the street. You run
like crazy, you shout Help and Fire but you
also make sure that there are witnesses.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Slight difference.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dream journal: the vulture

Turkey vulture feeding on carrion, by Kevin Cole

I’m carrying a sick vulture in a box. It weighs almost nothing. I’m worried it might vomit — what unspeakable things might come up? — but I tell myself that vomiting is something turkey vultures only do when they’re well, to cool down their legs in the summer. I stroke its black feathers, tell it everything’s all right, even though we both know that isn’t true.

I carry it into a natural history museum and it comes alive, half-opening its wings and trying to climb out of the box at the sight of so many dead stuffed animals. But the PA system comes on to announce they’re closing soon and I push the vulture back down, folding its wings like an origami crane.

Outside, we run into a two-headed mob shouting at itself. The only thing they all seem to agree on is that Trump is due to make an appearance at any moment. But he doesn’t. I sit down on the steps, unable to join the protestors in their hey-hoing at the supporters because of the vulture, who looks bored at this demonstration of health and vitality in the body politic. We hunker down.

Hours pass, and the crowd’s chanting comes and goes like surf. The vulture closes its eyes in two stages: first the nictitating membranes like fogged-up windows, then the eyelids proper like shutters. I try not to think of the lice that co-evolved with its species, its body their whole planet. Parasites! The only creatures more ignoble than eaters of carrion. If only we hadn’t evolved as scavengers ourselves. If only we could have a true predator’s implacable heart.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Grave goods

(Lord’s day). Up and to church alone, where a lazy sermon of Mr. Mills, upon a text to introduce catechizing in his parish, which I perceive he intends to begin. So home and very pleasant with my wife at dinner. All the afternoon at my office alone doing business, and then in the evening after a walk with my wife in the garden, she and I to my uncle Wight’s to supper, where Mr. Norbury, but my uncle out of tune, and after supper he seemed displeased mightily at my aunt’s desiring [to] put off a copper kettle, which it seems with great study he had provided to boil meat in, and now she is put in the head that it is not wholesome, which vexed him, but we were very merry about it, and by and by home, and after prayers to bed.

on ice one evening
after a walk in the garden

bury my out-of-tune kettle
with me in the hole


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 14 February 1663/64.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The immigrant lives

in a drafty room
somewhere in Chinatown

in a basement shared
with 4 cooks and 3 cabbies

in a shack at the edge
of a tomato field

in a garage with a door
to a makeshift outhouse

in a pantry cabinet fitted
with a cot and lightbulb

in a kitchen where a pallet
can fold out close to the stove

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dregs

Up, and after I had told my wife in the morning in bed the passages yesterday with Creed my head and heart was mightily lighter than they were before, and so up and to the office, and thence, after sitting, at 11 o’clock with Mr. Coventry to the African House, and there with Sir W. Ryder by agreement we looked over part of my Lord Peterborough’s accounts, these being by Creed and Vernaty. Anon down to dinner to a table which Mr. Coventry keeps here, out of his 300l. per annum as one of the Assistants to the Royall Company, a very pretty dinner, and good company, and excellent discourse, and so up again to our work for an hour till the Company came to having a meeting of their own, and so we broke up and Creed and I took coach and to Reeves, the perspective glass maker, and there did indeed see very excellent microscopes, which did discover a louse or mite or sand most perfectly and largely. Being sated with that we went away (yet with a good will were it not for my obligation to have bought one) and walked to the New Exchange, and after a turn or two and talked I took coach and home, and so to my office, after I had been with my wife and saw her day’s work in ripping the silke standard, which we brought home last night, and it will serve to line a bed, or for twenty uses, to our great content. And there wrote fair my angry letter to my father upon that that he wrote to my cozen Roger Pepys, which I hope will make him the more carefull to trust to my advice for the time to come without so many needless complaints and jealousys, which are troublesome to me because without reason.

yesterday my head
was lighter than my glass

in which I discover a mite
perfect as an angry letter


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 13 February 1663/64.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

The immigrant changes

the plastic bags lining the trash
bins in the lobby and rooms of Hotel
America. Her dark hair’s parted in
the middle and neatly done up in a bun.
On her left lapel is a name tag which reads
Florinda. She has the evening shift,
so the bins already overflow with the day’s
accumulation of every guests’s cast-offs: lids
and empty styrofoam cups, tissues, greasy sandwich
wrappers, crumpled bags whose insides are dusted
yellow-orange or dull brown. She ties up the ends,
careful to check for any rips or spills. There can’t
be any wayward smells, no hint of fleshy stink
or rot to mar the sanitized air in the lobby.
She hefts the bags out of the bins, onto a trolley;
pats down a double liner then snaps their mouths
over the rim. She’ll do this thirty times on this
floor, until her palms inside the latex gloves
itch from sweat and constant chafing. As she works,
a steady stream of people comes and goes: talking,
laughing, impatient with the doors; wobbling from
the bar in the early hours. They hardly notice
she is there, and that is exactly as she’s been
instructed. Upstairs, on every floor, the corner
lounges overlook the bridges arcing over the bay.
Sometimes she’ll stop to adjust the potted plants
and check the soil around their bases— how spongy
or dry, how stiff the limbs under this skylight,
every embrasure punctured with cold white light.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Slight difference

Up, and ready, did find below Mr. Creed’s boy with a letter from his master for me. So I fell to reading it, and it is by way of stating the case between S. Pepys and J. Creed most excellently writ, both showing his stoutness and yet willingness to peace, reproaching me yet flattering me again, and in a word in as good a manner as I think the world could have wrote, and indeed put me to a greater stand than ever I thought I could have been in this matter. All the morning thinking how to behave myself in the business, and at noon to the Coffee-house; thence by his appointment met him upon the ‘Change, and with him back to the Coffee-house, where with great seriousness and strangeness on both sides he said his part and I mine, he sometimes owning my favour and assistance, yet endeavouring to lessen it, as that the success of his business was not wholly or very much to be imputed to that assistance: I to alledge the contrary, and plainly to tell him that from the beginning I never had it in my mind to do him all that kindnesse for nothing, but he gaining 5 or 600l., I did expect a share of it, at least a real and not a complimentary acknowledgment of it. In fine I said nothing all the while that I need fear he can do me more hurt with them than before I spoke them. The most I told him was after we were come to a peace, which he asked me whether he should answer the Board’s letter or no. I told him he might forbear it a while and no more. Then he asked how the letter could be signed by them without their much enquiry. I told him it was as I worded it and nothing at all else of any moment, whether my words be ever hereafter spoken of again or no. So that I have the same neither better nor worse force over him that I had before, if he should not do his part. And the peace between us was this: Says he after all, well, says he, I know you will expect, since there must be some condescension, that it do become me to begin it, and therefore, says he, I do propose (just like the interstice between the death of the old and the coming in of the present king, all the time is swallowed up as if it had never been) so our breach of friendship may be as if it had never been, that I should lay aside all misapprehensions of him or his first letter, and that he would reckon himself obliged to show the same ingenuous acknowledgment of my love and service to him as at the beginning he ought to have done, before by my first letter I did (as he well observed) put him out of a capacity of doing it, without seeming to do it servilely, and so it rests, and I shall expect how he will deal with me.
After that I began to be free, and both of us to discourse of other things, and he went home with me and dined with me and my wife and very pleasant, having a good dinner and the opening of my lampry (cutting a notch on one side), which proved very good.
After dinner he and I to Deptford, walking all the way, where we met Sir W. Petty and I took him back, and I got him to go with me to his vessel and discourse it over to me, which he did very well, and then walked back together to the waterside at Redriffe, with good discourse all the way. So Creed and I by boat to my house, and thence to coach with my wife and called at Alderman Backewell’s and there changed Mr. Falconer’s state-cup, that he did give us the other day, for a fair tankard. The cup weighed with the fashion 5l. 16s., and another little cup that Joyce Norton did give us 17s., both 6l. 13s.; for which we had the tankard, which came to 6l. 10s., at 5s. 7d. per oz., and 3s. in money, and with great content away thence to my brother’s, Creed going away there, and my brother bringing me the old silk standard that I lodged there long ago, and then back again home, and thence, hearing that my uncle Wight had been at my house, I went to him to the Miter, and there with him and Maes, Norbury, and Mr. Rawlinson till late eating some pot venison (where the Crowne earthen pot pleased me mightily), and then homewards and met Mr. Barrow, so back with him to the Miter and sat talking about his business of his discontent in the yard, wherein sometimes he was very foolish and pettish, till 12 at night, and so went away, and I home and up to my wife a-bed, with my mind ill at ease whether I should think that I had by this made myself a bad end by missing the certainty of 100l. which I proposed to myself so much, or a good one by easing myself of the uncertain good effect but the certain trouble and reflection which must have fallen on me if we had proceeded to a public dispute, ended besides embarking myself against my Lord, who (which I had forgot) had given him his hand for the value of the pieces of eight at his rates which were all false, which by the way I shall take heed to the giving of my Lord notice of it hereafter whenever he goes out again.

I read word as world
that ledge of a letter
like the interstice between
the swallow and the air


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 12 February 1663/64.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

On Respectability

There are days when I no
longer feel generous.

There are days when I don’t
feel like pretending to be

a good guest in your house. Besides,
I’ve just in time remembered

it’s my house and was so mine
before you came into the picture,

so why should I have to suffer
the indignity of paying rent

or answering to a property
manager, of trying to find

an unfastened back window
or trying to jimmy a lock

in order to enter what was my
indigenous space to begin with?

I want to keep the water in the well
free of contamination. I want

to sleep in my own bed and use
my own toilet, have access

to the clothes in my closet
and the books on my shelves.

And if I want to wake up late
or sing in the shower or cook

breakfast in just my undies
you don’t have the right

to issue executive orders:
you don’t have the right

to tell me I don’t know
how to run my own affairs;

that I eat the wrong
kinds of food and buy from

the wrong kinds of people.
Don’t tell me my desire to send

my kids to good schools is unseemly;
that I pick the wrong kinds

of friends to run with;
that my values have all

gone downhill— Don’t tell me
I need to be hectored on all

the ways that threaten your own
utter lack of discernment

and respectability, hence
the daily wars you wage on me.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Resistance

Up, after much pleasant discourse with my wife, and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and did much business, and some much to my content by prevailing against Sir W. Batten for the King’s profit. At noon home to dinner, my wife and I hand to fist to a very fine pig. This noon Mr. Falconer came and visited my wife, and brought her a present, a silver state-cup and cover, value about 3l. or 4l., for the courtesy I did him the other day. He did not stay dinner with me. I am almost sorry for this present, because I would have reserved him for a place to go in summer a-visiting at Woolwich with my wife.
After dinner my wife and I up to her closet, and saw a new parcel of fine shells of her brother’s giving; and then to the office, where till 11 at night and then home after I had writ an angry letter to my father upon the letter my Cosen Roger showed me yesterday. So home and to bed, my mind disturbed about the letter I am forced to write tonight to my father, it being very severe; but it is convenient I should do it.

we prevail against the profit fist
a fine pig served with fine fat
how?

disturbed
about the letter I am forced to write


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 11 February 1663/64.