Slacker

   It is a warm evening in Paris. I have returned from a walk along the river to find that the police have invaded my loft in the rue de Seine in Saint Germain des pres where I have struggled all summer to complete a collection of stories and prose poems. They have been here before. They say they are looking for a missing poet.

   "What? Stop!!" I cry out as they begin methodically disassembling my room again. "Do you not remember me from before?" "Ah yes," replies one officer, "Le paresseaux," which roughly translated means "ne'er-do-well" or "slacker." Most of my stuff ends up in a pile on the floor, again, including a postcard from Mother that has a field of Kansas sunflowers on the front and a note on the back inquiring about my welfare. The officer looks at it a moment then shakes his head and tosses it back onto the pile. This time, using the latest digital portable scanning equipment, they claim to have located said poet deep within my viscera. It is now a matter of debate what is to be done. One fellow recommends a cesarean in order that the found poet may be saved whole. Another suggests an enema. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I awaken before any action can be taken. Disturbed by this recurring dream and in need of collecting my thoughts, I abandon pen and paper for a quiet evening's walk along the Ninnescah, its cool, clear waters barely flowing, its sands still showing my footprints from the days before.

glwarren, 2014  

Notes

  Years ago my friend Ray Wheeler told me to get out of Paris. "You have no business being there," he said in so many words. He was/is right, of course. But such travels were/are now my only venue for "leaving Kansas."  I am too old for long walks anywhere. Dreaming helps. Sorry, old friend, that I have had to go against your good advice. Don't give up on me yet. 

Gerald    

   

Miscellany I

Little Red Horse

   Blackbull rode into town on the mustang Shinka Jootsi Kawa, or "Little Red Horse." They had come from the cool forests and springs of the Missouri woodlands, westward to Kansas and the Arkansas River but would be well south of that stream by the time they reached the Rockies where they would meet up with the San Juan River on the other side and continue their journey across the rib-jarring, hoof-cracking fields of the Colorado Plateau. Their journey, as described in the tales of the Osage elder, Traveling Rain, and as first undertaken by the Osage one thousand years ago and repeated every seven generations thence, was to "The Doorstep of God." Their arrival in our little prairie town was with much fanfare and featured in all the news where it was reported that this was a journey that Blackbull had been wanting to make since he was a boy.

   No one knows what Little Red Horse wanted.

~~~~~~~~

   That was ten years ago. I somehow lost track of that story and never learned the outcome. I assume they made it. Still . . . it would be nice to have some kind of confirmation. I have googled it (using Google search engine, of course) with no luck. So if you are reading this and know anything, pass it on, either through comment or via email. 
   I need to add that "The Doorstep of God" refers to Rainbow Bridge, one of the largest natural bridges in the world, located in southern Utah. It was thought by the Osage to be the entrance to a heavenly teepee and was held sacred by various tribes in that area. (Much of what I gave you here was gleaned from an article by Rebekah West appearing in the Belle Plaine, Kansas News, Thursday, August 19, 2004.) 

~~~~~~~~

   I have recently learned that "typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, inarguably wrong." This I found while trying to 'remember' how many spaces after a colon.  The author of the above quote, Farhad Manjoo, in an article appearing in Slate online magazine, Jan 12, 2011, says it is a done deal and has been so for quite some time. The MLA Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style both "prescribe a single space after a period."  My bad. It will be hard to unlearn two spaces. The font I have been using for text, Trebuchet MS, is supposedly one optimized for use on the internet and the screen. It seems to handle the single space well. Incidentally, I checked "inarguably" and it is ok. So is "unarguably". You pays your money . . .   

  

    

  

Purging The Pocket Notebook

Some Thoughts

"So much that can neither be written nor kept inside!"

-Tomas Transtromer, Lamento

Some thoughts will hound you to the grave. 

There is no refuge from them.

In your dreams they will taunt you. 

In your lover's bed they will fondle your imagination.

Running out of places to hide, overmatched and near madness, you retreat to a drawer in the attic where a lifetime of forgotten prose resides. Resting among the pocket calculator, the pocket comb, the pocket compass, the pocket knife, is the pocket notebook you have not seen in nearly half a century. You open it carefully, lest the brittle brown pages come from together, and on the first blank page you find you write:  Some thoughts . . .

   When asked if there were any writers he turned to now and then for "nourishment," poet John Ashbery mentioned Holderlin, Celan and De Quincey, and then James Tate "who has a pizazz that always gets me started writing." (From an interview with Sarah Rothenberg.)

  Strangely enough, I've also used Tate's "pizazz" to get me going first thing in the morning. Usually it's something from Lost Pilot or Memoir of the Hawk, the latter being my favorite of all Tate's work if one excludes the selected poems volumes. Someday I will tell you why.

   Otherwise I will turn to my older notes. It has a two-fold benefit: It allows me to 'warm up' to the sound of my own voice without doing damage to the day's work; and it sometimes happens that it gives me new insight into the older piece. That would be on 'good' days. The above fragment is such an older piece. Rather than leave it in the notebook I thought to use it here as an introduction to the day's post.

   And now I am in that quandary referred to above. But nothing seems to work. Do I begin tearing out pages with the hope that something will strike a chord in me? How about this: "Thundersleet and thundersnow."  No, no. Weather related. Doesn't everyone have those?

   Or: "Windstorm overnight. The chairs are in a little gathering at the north end of the deck. We wonder if there is some kind of rebellion at hand." I remember finding that humorous. A keeper, I suppose.

   Sometimes the entries are bits of dialogue out of context, sometimes in a context that I probably fully intended to develop later:

   My father died several months ago. I have just learned it today from Mother:
   "You are where? Peru?" "Yes," I said, "Lima".
   'Well, I wanted to tell you that Jack died in August sometime," she said. I've been meaning to tell you for quite a while, but it just kept slipping my mind."

   I will do that one. It is close to me.

   From a newspaper article: "Now imagine talking holograms and avatars, working for you, listening politely as you blab on and on about some silly passion." There were times when I would have found that pleasing, but this one goes to the trash.

   "I am still plodding along with Leaving Kansas, but intend to finish before I am 70."  . . . So much for good intentions. Trash.

   The children of anonymous sperm donors. They search for their fathers. All across the country the 'fatherless' children go. . . . Keep. . . . Maybe before I am 80.

   The old farmer in overalls hanging from a barn beam. --Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End

That is how my great grandfather died. Of his ten children, the youngest, a girl, was killed in a buckboard accident. One of the twins died in a shootout with Oklahoma police. And one, the quiet one, grew murderous and was institutionalized for the rest of his life. My grandfather fled to Kansas where he married a lady, my grandmother, whose husband, a one-legged man, had "run off" with another woman. . . . A keeper, of course.

   What I have learned today (August 2007): The Palouse earthworm is a lily-scented white earthworm, now very rare, that grows to three feet in the Palouse region of eastern Washington. . . . When I was through there as a boy nearly 60 years ago, the Palouse was miles and miles of rolling, open terrain. Now it is heavily farmed and the farmers are fighting government efforts to 'protect' the earthworm.

   What becomes of the man whose whole being is focused on becoming a successful writer? "You must believe," said the fighter, "that you will prevail. If you do not believe, then you will surely be defeated. Believe and the world will be open to you."

   Champagne aspirations and a beer intellect. We have to work within our limitations. Beer intellect? Then let's forget the champagne and write about beer.  Cheers!      

glwarren, 2014

   

It's A Topsy-Turvy World

   Two young women walking on the beach came across an old man sitting on a driftwood log, whereupon they removed their bikini tops, stood on their hands in the sand, and shook their great breasts in his direction with much gusto and fanfare. "Oh, we should be ashamed!" said one afterward, giggling. "No freaking way!" said the other. "He will go home to his loneliness tonight and have wet dreams about this day. We have done the poor man a great service."

   But the old man dreamed instead of his home on the prairie and the strawberry upside-down cake his mother used to make when he was a boy. And of the visits his father and Uncle Jim and their old friend Ben Dantic had on warm summer evenings on the porch outside his bedroom window where he hung from the sill by his knees listening:

   "When I was a boy," his Uncle Jim would say, "they told us that the children were our future. Now I am an old man and they are still saying that and I wonder what ever became of us? We have been disinherited, I tell you, disinherited and forgotten!" "It's a topsy-turvy world, Jimmy," his father would say. "It's a topsy-turvy world." And then old Ben Dantic would take up his fiddle and play and sing, in an airy falsetto much too small for his great size,

I wanna hear it again,

I wanna hear it again,

    The old piano roll blues. 

glwarren, 2009, 2014