fifty-five.

Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.

Van, whores don't want
ears
they want
money.

I guess that's why you were
such a great
painter: you
didn't understand
much
else.

-- Charlie Bukowski


Scotland and I are keeping each other company. Can't seem to want to eat but the sleep has been coming up from behind, around corners - Oh, awake, an hour gone.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind works. Charlie Kaufmann keeps writing that same film but each time it's truer, even with gimmick and noise. Here she is AGAIN. Every time I write today my mother calls. Every. Time. She can smell it. The phone remains un-thrown but if I scream at the wall again my throat will bleed. Isis on repeat, Dylan ca. 1973, Desire album. Sara, Sara.

So: See Et.Sunshine as it is without Adaptation-similar brutality. Tonight the papers burn and I walk to the banks of first falling backwards onto mid-river ice. Forgetting is essential to proper memory function.

But I made up my mind that I had to go on

"I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading, a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company."

-- Gaston Bachelard

Medea buried her children at the Cape.
I am through with numbers.


Like a white stone in a deep well
one memory lies inside me.
I cannot and will not fight against it:
it is joy and it is pain.

It seems to me that anyone who looks
into my eyes will notice it immediately.
becoming sadder and more pensive
than someone listening to a melancholy tale.

I remember how gods turned people
into things, not killing their consciousness.
And now, to keep these glorious sorrows alive,
you have turned into my memory of you.

-- Anna Akhmatova

Forgetting is essential to remembering.

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

-- Theodore Roethke

rows and rows of porchlights seen from airplane windows

NAME
initrd - boot loader initialized RAM disk

DESCRIPTION
The special file /dev/initrd is a read-only block device.
Device /dev/initrd is a RAM disk that is initialized (e.g.
loaded) by the boot loader before the kernel is started.
The kernel then can use the the block device /dev/initrd's
contents for a two phased system boot-up.

In the first boot-up phase, the kernel starts up and
mounts an initial root file-system from the contents of
/dev/initrd (e.g. RAM disk initialized by the boot
loader). In the second phase, additional drivers or other
modules are loaded from the initial root device's con-
tents. After loading the additional modules, a new root
file system (i.e. the normal root file system) is mounted
from a different device.

(from this here UNIX manual)

Just lost gratuitous et falsely writ (large) paragraphs in re: spring and snow and streches of silence hardening into recognizable shapes; better that way though hazardous to abused scapegoat keyboard.

It has come to a gracious, well-intended routine. To wake not quite quietly enough, to pour glasses of water and stand at the balcony rail, to smoke through The Hours with needlepin fingers (around them each curl fits perfectly). To slip under the door to lie near and away from sleep. From the sleeper, a query and a sigh and a turning over. The waking in the first place from another exhaustion of rote and intention; more intimate is the hour of quiet words preceding.

I have come to find snow and have not been to Montreal. These warm days had me driving to New Orleans with a hand out the window, eyes closed to the sun. Boston means work: small, brick, chilly but cozy with industrious drive and a space heater. There will be no poetry in Fortran nor long drives to distant counties with ashtrays on tabletops. Things antiquated are also immediate. Neighborhoods. Yarn. Vegetable markets. Business models. Plans.

We are distant difficult people and I'm trying. What day is this?


"Well, why don't you say something?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"Anything. Read to me if you can't think of anything to say."

(Arthur Schnitzler)