missing you is like
spring standing still on a hill
amid winter snow.
*
we stumbled into
each other’s lives like two young
children playing house.
*
when i return home
to sleep the shadow of you
covers me with day.
*
you have stamped your hour
on me, tattooed yourself on
me like sheets of silk.
*
Today Eoin and I visited Malcolm X’s grave. Or, the grave of Hajj-Malick El Shabazz, and Betty Shabazz. It took us a long time to find the stone even though Eoin had been there twice. He had made up a mnemonic device based on a painted X on the street to remember how to find the gravestone more quickly, but he couldn’t remember the mnemonic device. We split up and walked around in the sun, eyes to the ground. “I bet he’s laughing at us white devils, walking around in circles trying to find him,” Eoin said. I pictured Malcolm sliding around in socks on an empty basketball court, trying to thwart us but mostly in good humor. Afterwards we got Slurpees and our favorite flavor was something called “THOR,” after the movie; it tasted like creamy cherry Norse hunks. And Eoin smoked his beautiful black fake cigarette and my back was sweaty from walking around that graveyard full of flat stones. We left a hydrangea from my yard on Malcolm’s grave. It was blue-purple with tinges of age at the petaltips. Afterwards, in the car, we assessed how white we were: he in khakis and wearing a women’s hairclip, and my skirt was seersucker. “But we’re good readers,” I said, thinking this redeemed us. We both read the same version of Malcolm’s autobiography, which was originally my father’s. This is only the second time I’ve visited a graveyard for a specific headstone. The hydrangea’s stem was long and curved. It was the only flower on the grave.
For a while now the poets have known
the farmers and now the farmers know
the poets and they say hello and hug them
and Elle says again, You were so wonderful
on Friday night and Frankie is smiling
because it is never too late or early for
a compliment meant genuinely and I give
Frankie free zinnias by Ellie not because
she is a poet but because she is a very good
human who has such strange handwriting
that it makes people want to tattoo it on their
bodies, and she tattooed it on hers but not
in a braggy way, in a columnar/cut-off way,
and I like to watch people ask her about it
and I think to myself that I’d never tattoo
myself because I hate repeating myself
but, to repeat myself, now the farmers know
the poets and they like them for their words
and savvy presentation (I think of Scott
in the front row of the sideyard smiling like
someone gave him the exact correct birthday
present) and the poets love the farmers
for their very good foods like Nardello
peppers which are sweet and the most
divine, they’re Ellie’s favorite and she’s
a painter and a farmer, too. And life, I think,
is not as simply roasted as a pepper is, but
it is sweet to watch a farmer hug a poet
hug a professor hug a trapezist hug
a graphic designer slash table maker
hug a videographer hug me, I’m hugging
all of them one after another or two
at once at the farmstand on a Sunday,
and I think we’re all farmers inside somehow,
all artily growing or having newly grown.
At Tim’s New & Used Books in Provincetown today, I found this (“Freely Espousing” by James Schuyler, hardcover, first edition, a very rare and very exciting book to find and get to hold). I grabbed at it and threw myself on the wood floor of this tiny bookstore, set back from busy Commercial street (you have to walk down a sort of rickety boardwalk covered in vines to get there). It costs $150 and I want it very, very badly. “Does this really say one hundred and fifty dollars?” I asked the dude at the tiny desk with the cash register. The dude came over, looked at the number over my shoulder, and said, “Yes.” It’s not often that books worth so much are found on a physical shelf–mostly they’re squirreled away on some boring internet bookshelf where no one can touch them or faint over them or swoon over their very small and well-chosen fonts and the thickness of their paper and the now historical significance of their existences.
To console myself I bought “Other Flowers,” the uncollected works of Schuyler, edited by none other than JAMES MEETZE of the Summer Sideyard. I also bought the tiniest deck chair ever, because, you know, small things. They really get me.
Sometimes my life is hip(ster)/I love you Heather/I’ll (we’ll) miss you Heather
And off we go to the east…
We eat cheese we drink
rosé, eat salad (eat olives),
finish off some soup, sort
through plums & nectarines,
flip the laundry, pack jars
for presents and the house
is hot as fired bread. There’s
a pile of my paper booklets
standing in an fruitcrate
on the shelf and everyone
will get one. And anyone
who wants will know I’m
home. And friends we farm
or farmed with might miss
our little yard. I’ve packed
my new red shoes and we’ll
eat peaches on the plane.
The neighbor with the high
white socks will grumble
at our incorrectly-plated car,
the banana plant will grow
another, stronger leaf and
the chickens left last night.
The house is vacuumed,
mopped, and marveled at;
we’ll be flying through the night.
mostly just this
mixed in with this
(thanks kaz)
and misha sold four prints
and there are flowers all over the house, even by the sink and right here on the desk
and there are four dollars in “20,000 words” which means at least 2 people have my chapbooks
and maybe, maybe, some sort of art scene to remember is getting going in san diego, but even if not, even if we’re all just smartpeople in a yard for a party, it feels good to remember how many good people there are in this city, and that with some wood and tacks and trashbins-turned-to-tables and the help of farmily, art can happen right next to where we live, and even though no one on the east has seen this thing we did and made, we will bring it wherever we bring our selves, sideyard or sideporch or sideacre of a plot of land…
the frazzled state of hair in this photograph is no where near to the frazzled state of my hair right now. by tomorrow, i will be groomed. by tomorrow, 29 photographs around the yard. by tomorrow, poems and poets and flowers by ellie and good people in the sideyard hearing art, seeing art. you should come. 7pm.
I believe in signs: yesterday got some
right great news, no explanation needed,
just love inside a courthouse. I could’ve
crossed my legs and cried. Today
got punched straight in the face in the nicest
way she could have done it, two days ago,
two letters in the mail, black ink that
wouldn’t smudge. Times They Are
A Changin’, as Dylan’s wont to wail.
Time’s got a slew of whys headed straight
for its wagging, wettened tail. Yesterday
a colored message on the sidewalk, red
and pink plus orange with the arrows
pointing toward the house. Today one
block of cheese melting in a canvas
bag. To signal with one’s arms is a signal
of our times: we’re tired. We’re all choked
up. I wrote two dozen signs in waxy
pen today, words like, Stuff these Peps
with Cheese. Market signage is important,
as is signage sketched on cardboard,
like the piece above the closet that
tells me where to go. Judging from
the unkissed sky, time is rushing in
on us again, neckties and bowls
and rickshaw almost-yeses, morphing
into no’s. Ears nose and throat all crammed
with altered cries: if you duck out or
cancel on the weather, it doesn’t mean
the rain will cease. If you invite me
with your nostrils to the pleasure
of your presence I doubt I’ll turn you
down. Pried from the edges of these
brightblue eyes is a type of scuffed
acceptance: what you do won’t make you
who I think you’ll always be, but it makes
you who you are. The liars and the thieves
were right: it’s easier to jet than
stay and watch the garden go to seed, all
that food that someone loaned good soil to,
all that high green-watered need.
panache, perhaps 