america adrift

My Friends & I

It was a regal dove I caught sight of on the limb of a small oak, huge in the

throat, calling his mate in his monogamous mourning, but causing a ruckus

among the other birds fluttering around trying to mimic his masterful intonation.

Ledge stones chimed in, & the Cape Brindisi, docked across the way, took my

own breath away. I was close to Brindisi once, as close as Bent Sørensen is now,

there in Rome at the conference. I wished he were here, not so much that I were

there, my traveling these days so much more local & internal than world wide.

Desiring conversation, however, I had to carry on a dialogue with myself first,

then invited legends to participate. I’d heard from Stuart overnight, Stephen &

Paul first thing in the morning, & Marianne at midday, so it wasn’t as if I were

lonely or anything. I simply like the solitudinous aspect of the trek. By the way,

it’s 78.8 degrees in Brindisi right now, the perfect temperature, while rain pours

down, again, here, which only makes me laugh. It makes me laugh is no

distraction. I got potatoes boiling on the stove, which Olson cooked up with

cabbage, & where through a long circumlocution, if not circumambulation via

the train I saw take a curve along the way reminding me, again, of either

Mexicali to Guadalajara, or Guadalajara to Mexico City, I can’t remember which,

Olson came to mind from his days down there in Mexico, where he straightly

says through his own Swedish blood, The fish is speech. (My grandfather said to

me at five: Bobby, fish is brain food.) Or letter writing from Lerma, saying that it

is the language of the glyphs he wants to communicate due to the limits of both

stone & language. Thought, too, of talks with Robert Hellman, whose name can

be deciphered receding like an ancient glyph Brad Fuller rendered on the cover

of the new book, Travels Inside the Archive, & whose daughter, Miranda, I’ve

recently been in touch with, knowing her from infancy. My copy of Olson’s

Selected Writings has the price written in pencil: $1.50. Went from Italy to

Mexico to Paris all within the space of the slow pace of my gait Kathleen calls,

not exercise, but contemplation. The rest of the gang of influence without the

slightest bit of anxiety accompanied me along the way, including Marguerite

Duras, whom I spent a late-night evening with on rue Saint-Benoît, reiterating

her belief that, “Writing isn’t just telling stories. It’s just the opposite. It’s telling

everything at once.” Which as you can see, I took to heart early on! Baudelaire

always shows up at crucial Times, along with Proust, who used Charles as gauge

by which to judge his own work. It’s no accident that Baudelaire’s “Swan,”

dedicated to Hugo, has a black woman starving on the street, or that just before

Proust reaches the end of The Past Recaptured, in which he reveals ALL the

secrets of his writing enterprise, he endeavors to recall each poem in which

Baudelaire converts observational & internal sensation into language. Before

turning around toward my ’87 Volvo, Rimbaud insisted on the essential value of

transgression, & Blaise Cendrars sent a mental postcard my way, embarking for

Portuguese-language melodies emanating out of Rio with fishermen approaching

their calling methodically.

Francis Bacon, Blood on Pavement, 1988, oil on canvas

Face the World

Kind, at three dollars a bottle wine I pick up three bottles of here in Portland,

while in NYC that fine 2007 Joel Gott Zinfandel cost seven Times that, & for

good reason. Kathleen’s favs at the Bacon show were the accessible Study for

Portrait of Van Gogh VI & late 1988 Rothko-influenced Blood on Pavement.

Give me that early 1946-47 Head I, where bestial back simian feline brain & jaw

give way to silent anguish, along with earlier, 1933, ghost-like Crucifixion in

which Grünewald’s Man vanishes, evolving into aforementioned Three Studies

for a Crucifixion, where the volcanic kiss of death erupts right out of the flesh

some critic observed long, long ago, (who was it Panofsky? probably not,

perhaps too simple an observation for him?) that flesh was indeed the reason for

inventing oil paint. For that matter, cough over the brave image of paralytic child

taken directly from Muybridge. Kathleen saw nothing but balls & pricks in Three

Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, while I swore no symbolism is

near at hand, none other than an exfoliate biological viscera laden with Truth in

pain; pour pink blood down hotel aisle carpet stained trumping contemporary

CSI TV bullshit, on top of which the great artist told David Sylvester, after the

latter asked him when he first realized death would happen to him, replying, “I

remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement and I suddenly realized, there it

is – this is what life is like.” Or to find the framing throughout his oeuvre

validated via plastic, steel, & glass cage Eichmann faced the world in in 1961 in

Jerusalem.