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Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual Memory As a Hearing Aid by Tony Hoagland Somewhere, someone is asking a question, and I stand squinting at the classroom with one hand cupped behind my ear, trying to figure out where that voice is coming from. I might be already an old man, attempting to recall the night his hearing got misplaced, front-row-center at a battle of the bands, where a lot of leather-clad, second-rate musicians, amped up to dinosaur proportions, test drove their equipment through our ears. Each time the drummer threw a tantrum, the guitarist whirled and sprayed us with machine-gun riffs, as if they wished that they could knock us quite literally dead. We called that fun in 1970, when we weren’t sure our lives were worth surviving. I’m here to tell you that they were, and many of us did, despite ourselves, though the road from there to here is paved with dead brain cells, parents shocked to silence, and squad cars painting the whole neighborhood the quaking tint and texture of red jelly. Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads to show where we have been; we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin to show what we were thinking when we hot-rodded over God’s front lawn, and Death kept blinking. But here I stand, an average-looking man staring at a room where someone blond in braids with a beautiful belief in answers is still asking questions. Through the silence in my dead ear, I can almost hear the future whisper to the past: it says that this is not a test and everybody passes. BY TONY HOAGLAND ...Created 2006-06-04 16:06:22

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual Jessica Goodfellow What You See If You Use Water as a Mirror In Shinto, the eight elements of beauty include impermanence and perishability. Choose one as your watermark. No, that is the wrong one. Begin by learning the 10,000 ways to spell water. Puddle, swamp, ice field: waters that don't move. Estuary, geyser, glacier: waters that do. At lunch today, someone said you were beautiful. The reader is beautiful, he said. You weren't there, but somewhere thinking lagoon, waterfall, tide pool. Knowing understatement is an element of beauty, you thought drizzle, fog, dew. All there is to know about beauty can be learned from water, so when you ask the other five elements, you are told mystery, incompleteness. Pause. To learn the final three is to dishonor the previous two. You must choose. But here's a clue: cove, tributary, sleet. ...Created 2006-03-30 20:23:22

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual Otherworld Even the dogs in West Kerry know that the Otherworld exists and that to be in and out of it constantly is the most natural thing in the world. — Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill This is where a woman fell to her death the other day, climbing the cliff. They found her face-up, spread-eagled on the sand, as if she'd been ravished by a god, or tried to fly. On this rare hot day in Wales, hang-gliders fill the down above, each aspiring Icarus fluttering silken, colored wings like the butterflies in the bracken, which smells, the guidebooks always say, of "desiccated coconut," like the ghost of some tropical isle. She scaled these strata of seafloor crowded up into the air until they grew green and strewn with sheep on top, where we walk and flirt with the edge that boys clamber down to fish the ledges. And though the border collies bark at azure sea and sky, and try to herd us back to safety, as if they hear something we don't out there, we lean, and listen. William Greenway ...Created 2006-03-21 19:44:50

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual The Evening Star Tonight, for the first time in many years, there appeared to me again a vision of the earth's splendor: in the evening sky the first star seemed to increase in brilliance as the earth darkened until at last it could grow no darker. And the light, which was the light of death, seemed to restore to earth its power to console. There were no other stars. Only the one whose name I knew as in my other life I did her injury: Venus, star of the early evening, to you I dedicate my vision, since on this blank surface you have cast enough light to make my thought visible again. Louise Glück ...Created 2006-03-21 19:43:37

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual Requests for Toy Piano by Tony Hoagland Play the one about the family of the ducks where the ducks go down to the river and one of them thinks the water will be cold but then they jump in anyway and like it and splash around. No, I must play the one about the nervous man from Palestine in row 14 with a brown bag in his lap in which a gun is hidden in a sandwich. Play the one about the handsome man and woman standing on the steps of her apartment and how the darkness and her perfume and the beating of their hearts conjoin to make them feel like leaping from the edge of chance— No, I should play the one about the hard rectangle of the credit card hidden in the man’s back pocket and how the woman spent an hour plucking out her brows, and how her perfume was made from the destruction of a hundred flowers. Then play the one about the flower industry in which the migrant workers curse their own infected hands from tossing sheaves of roses and carnations into the back of the refrigerated trucks. No, I must play the one about the single yellow daffodil standing on my kitchen table whose cut stem draws the water upwards so the plant is flushed with the conviction that the water has been sent to find and raise it up from somewhere so deep inside the earth not even flowers can remember. ...Created 2006-03-21 19:40:50

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual Kolmarden Zoo by Bill Coyle Over our heads, trailing a wake of air and an enormous shadow as it passed, the falcon glided to its trainer’s fist and settled like a loaded weapon there. Then, while she fed the bird bit after bit of... what? rabbit? the trainer gave her talk: These birds, she said, prey on the small and weak, adding for the children’s benefit that this, though it seems cruel, is really good since otherwise the other rabbits, mice, squirrels, what have you, would run out of space and die of illness or a lack of food. I know what she was trying to get across, and I don’t doubt it would be healthier if we were more familiar than we are with how the natural world draws life from loss; and granted, nothing is more natural than death incarnate falling from the sky; and granted, it is better some should die, however agonizingly, than all. Still, to teach children this is how things go is one thing, to insist that it is good is something else—it is to make a god of an unsatisfactory status quo, this vicious circle that the clock hands draw and quarter, while the serpent bites its tail, or eats the dust, or strikes at someone’s heel, or winds up comprehended by a claw. She launched the bird again. We watched it climb out of the amphitheatre, headed toward the darkened spires of a nearby wood, then bank, then angle toward us one last time. ...Created 2006-03-21 19:30:34

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual Stephen Dobyns An Artist Like Any Other Let's say a fellow has a little trick— he can take a rock, toss it about ten feet, then take another, toss it so it lands on top, then take a third and toss it on top of that so all three make a little tower. Each rock is about the size of a child's fist. Any bigger or any further or if he tries a fourth, then it doesn't work. People are impressed, but how many times can you watch a guy do a trick like that? Shortly they wander off. Children last a little longer. The man's wife asks to see it once a week just to be nice. His kids say, Give it a break, Dad. Three rocks twirling through the air and landing perfectly, time after time. He never misses. The man feels proud. He'd do it all day long if anyone cared, but even the dog nods off. Let's say this is some vestigial blip, like that occasional tail that nurses snip off newborns. Once his ancestors tossed huge boulders, built pyramids, even Stonehenge. You wanted something really big transported? This was the guy to do it. How many of these leftovers do we have left? Cave painters shrunk into tattoo artists, epic poets whose last sparks ignite greeting card verse. Just as some day novelists might morph into the guys who make up menus for greasy spoons. Today a man flips a stone, then two more. Presto. See how they join to form a miniature defiance of the world's natural laws, a trifling metaphor for the enigmatic? No doubt about it, the fellow's an artist like any other. The neighbor's addlepated five-year-old slaps his head in wonder. At least the first time. ...Created 2006-03-21 19:25:00

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual Who the Meek Are Not Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep in the rice paddy muck, nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles make the wheat fall in waves they don't get to eat. My friend the Franciscan nun says we misread that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them. To understand the meek (she says) picture a great stallion at full gallop in a meadow, who — at his master's voice — seizes up to a stunned but instant halt. So with the strain of holding that great power in check, the muscles along the arched neck keep eddying, and only the velvet ears prick forward, awaiting the next order. Mary Karr ...Created 2006-03-02 04:00:50

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual A Poem for the End of the Century Czeslaw Milosz When everything was fine And the notion of sin had vanished And the earth was ready In universal peace To consume and rejoice Without creeds and utopias, I, for unknown reasons, Surrounded by the books Of prophets and theologians, Of philosophers, poets, Searched for an answer, Scowling, grimacing, Waking up at night, muttering at dawn. What oppressed me so much Was a bit shameful. Talking of it aloud Would show neither tact nor prudence. It might even seem an outrage Against the health of mankind. Alas, my memory Does not want to leave me And in it, live beings Each with its own pain, Each with its own dying, Its own trepidation. Why then innocence On paradisal beaches, An impeccable sky Over the church of hygiene? Is it because that Was long ago? To a saintly man --So goes an Arab tale-- God said somewhat maliciously: "Had I revealed to people How great a sinner you are, They could not praise you." "And I," answered the pious one, "Had I unveiled to them How merciful you are, They would not care for you." To whom should I turn With that affair so dark Of pain and also guilt In the structure of the world, If either here below Or over there on high No power can abolish The cause and the effect? Don't think, don't remember The death on the cross, Though everyday He dies, The only one, all-loving, Who without any need Consented and allowed To exist all that is, Including nails of torture. Totally enigmatic. Impossibly intricate. Better to stop speech here. This language is not for people. Blessed be jubilation. Vintages and harvests. Even if not everyone Is granted serenity. Berkeley ...Created 2006-02-11 17:01:21

Journal: -------------------------------------------Mood: The Usual Margaret Szumowski The Unlikely Landscape of Forgiveness The way the land itself forgives flood and grows huge tomatoes the following year, shoots from black earth, rows of corn shuddering in the background. Still there is violence in the land, bolts of lightning that could set the barn on fire, and terrify the cows. Anger of the farmer who turns on his wife and daughters. Thirsty plants, heavy crops. He studies his little red notebook. Children and wife too much for a man under pressure. He could guard them jealously, as a red-winged blackbird guards his fields, letting no one near his beauties. He could peck out their eyes. And the half-blind beauties will forgive him. ...Created 2006-02-10 03:42:21