Upcoming Reading

Monday, April 13th, 7pm: Join Umass Alum Andrew McNabb for a reading and signing of his new book, The Body of This. The book, a collection of short stories, explores the intricate architecture of human experience where it meets the rawest forms of fledging spirituality. “The Body of This is a tough little bundle of shards that can as easily cut and make you bleed as it can reflect the one true light,” writes Brett Lott, best-selling author of Oprah’s Book Club pick Jewel. McNabb, a resident of Portland, Maine, has been published widely in some of the country’s most respected literary journals. The reading will be hosted in The University Club. Refreshments will be served. For more information, contact Thom Gulino, tgulino@student.umass.edu.

Amherst Lit Series

Local Readings and info on Juniper Festival 2009. All events are free.

http://www.umass.edu/fac/amherstlit/

A poem

How a leaf sets sail,

                        [In the autumn,]

                                    drifting without haste—

            [as a schooner meanders about whispering seas,]

To scatter over mottled landscape,

                        [wander through]

                                    with castanet’s clatter,

Speaking in child’s cursive,—

                                    [with somber lightness]

—A live(ly) mosaic with death(ly) in-sight.

Minutes in a Café

My love—how unphotogenic you are!  I see you in pictures and my mind turns away.  This one here in my wallet: Your lips slackened and your head tilted down so that the features all crowd in around your nose, the puffy centerpiece situated between twin creases of cheek.   Your reading face.  Here you skim a slim volume of verse, but I’ve seen it bear you through the loftiest of tomes—Sein und Zeit, À la recherche du temps perdu.  Often I have wondered, wherein lies the difference?  What do I see in you now, there across this table from me, that so encumbers me with ardor?  Your body is still, your manner candid, the very image of a photograph.  What then?   

     It came to me just before you arrived.  I sat here spinning a coin on the tabletop, watching its aural sphere take shape and fade, again and again, and it occurred to me to take out my camera.  Of course.

     I wait for you to finish sipping your wine.  Now I speak:

     —How does it taste?

     —Exquisite.

     —How long do you suppose it took you, the whole process of taking that sip?

     Your face grows curious, but you consider the question.

     —Eight, maybe twelve seconds.

     —Do you know the length of your favorite song?

     —You’re up to something.

     —Just humor me for a moment.

    That smirk:  I see a hardy grace from some fairytale memory, the rag-girl in rolled-up sleeves with her bucket on the floor.  From here I trace the delicate plane of neck to your clavicle, that alabaster branch where my eyes so often alight.  Ligaments tremble; a shoulder rises.  Your smile is a bodily event.

     —I don’t know…. How long is that Tchaikovsky piece?

     —The one from The Seasons?

     —Yes, the quiet one.

     —Five or six minutes.  What about your favorite book, how long did it take you to read it?

     —Ah.  The better part of last year, as I imagine you noticed.

     —Indeed I did.  And I still say that should count as eight.

     —Seven.

     —Well you have to add one for reading it in French, of course.  I swear, it feels like every book I plod through in English you end up reading in a foreign language.

     A flowing forth in your laugh.  This dim light seems drawn to you, a finely charged sepia powder swelling ecstatically around your leaning form.  Looking upon you I feel the presence of an old emotional truth so familiar in fleeting recollection yet most often strangely concealed.  How can I describe an instance such as this?  There—in the crest of your upper lip, its pearl of elegantly intersticed teeth timidly revealed: I feel the years inside me like an accretion of mineral layers, this wave of lucid feeling a surfaced pocket of primordial gas trapped far below.  A breath—just a breath—of that dusky, piquant air of childhood. 

     Pining through your image for something enormous and indistinct, I say,        

     —What’s the longest amount of time you’ve spent looking at a painting?  Or any piece of visual art—a sculpture, a photograph?

     —Mm.  Rothko.  I honestly couldn’t say how long.

     —Ah, that’s right.  Tell me again what you so admire about his paintings?

     —Well…

     Concentration moves through your mien like a language.  In silence you speak phrases of engagement, shrewdness, zeal.

     —…They just—this will sound strange, but I feel as though they’re the most human paintings I know.  You look at them and at first they’re just blurred intimations of shape and color, very simple, with no apparent defining…with no identifiable character.  But then very suddenly you begin to notice the tension in these shapes, a certain trembling, a clinging-to-form.  I see in Rothko’s work a futile but very dignified self-preservation, and the feeling I get is always something like empathy.  Commiseration, maybe, I don’t know. 

     I turn my camera on.  I cue the glowing screen to the last exposure and hand it across the table to you.

     —What do you think of this picture?  What do you see? 

     Focus still envelops you, I sense it on your skin, in your clothes, like a chill carried in from the night air outside.  Eyes intent.  I see on the surface of both their subject reflected, two bright distended squares of bluish light.

     —It’s a coin.

     —Precisely! It’s just a coin.

     I watch you sip thoughtfully from your glass.  

     —Do you like it? The picture—do you think it’s nice, I mean.

     —No, not particularly.

     —Neither do I.  Could you tell that it was spinning?

     —The coin?  No…. Well, now that you mention it I see that it’s standing on its edge.

     —Frozen there.  One one-thousandth of a second—but where did it go?  If it were recorded in the photograph the picture would still be moving, right?  It would Keep moving, in a cycle, however short the distance.  The coin would appear to vibrate.  But as it is the image is recorded and the time is discarded.    

     That smirk.

—Are you going to hit me with the punch line to all of this?

     —Yes.  I believe that time is the medium through which true beauty reveals itself.  Through which it is able to occur.

     —I think I get what you mean.  I mean it’s kind of obvious, but at the same time I can’t think of a way to articulate it.             

     —What I mean is it’s a fair trade, I think.

     —What is?

     You look down at the wine menu.  Your glass is nearly empty.  Hair falls from behind an ear, frames your face so nicely.  I wait for your eyes to seek mine.  Wait. 

     Ah: my love.

     —Having to die.

prose et poems -RB

A Beginning…

Our pain was impossible and the savage days trekked on.  One by one we started to succumb to the reality of our lives.  We had grown old in this place.  We had actually come to like it.  Although it wasn’t the whirling explosion of a place like Beijing, or the calm serenity of the Scottish highlands, it was a place of beauty nonetheless.  We had seen things in our ten years here that you could never have caught back home, even if you were the keenest observer.  But that was the long of it.  That was us trying to reconcile our hardships.
The short of it, the plain and inexorable truth, was that everything had changed.  In the last four months everything was turned upside down.  Our lives, yet again, were in havoc.  Initially, we had thought we could overcome it.  “We survived a shipwreck for god’s sake.  Doesn’t that mean we can do anything?” someone had asked.  I remember the stolid and empty responses.  I remember, too, when the apathy had turned to consternation, and when the faces that had seemed to be blocking the truth out began to know that we weren’t going to make it.
Despite this, some of us tried to remain positive.  We thought that where there’s a will, there’s a way.  We thought that as a team we could hurdle any obstacle or odd.  But your morale brakes down.  Your stamina is ripped open and lashed and bruised, and it takes you to a place in your mind where you never thought you’d go.  The darkest depths of insanity become visible, and your eyes are opened to despair.  At first it’s all hope.  But hope is quickly turned to anxiety, anxiety turns to distress, and before too long you’re living in a world of fear.

A Reverse Lipogram

A man walked along a beam.  Zapping away at reality, attempting anything and also at least a massive amount.  Human hands are sad and depraved, hard aches attack and release.  Blast beams are repeatedly weaving around, and walking as an assembled archer – ready as can allow – abundance became allowance and characters became beautiful.  All admonishment takes way, leaving cracked artifacts;  ancient artifacts crafted as artificers are able.  Ardent and able, ready as adjectives are.  And as capability overtakes, earthquakes radiate, and all awakes.

Homage to Langston

Langston Hughes writes that he knows of rivers,
And that his soul has grown deep like them.
And, although I don’t believe in the soul,
And feel more grounded than that,
I have known rivers too.
Old rivers that saw the birth of civilization,
Golden and triumphant.
I have camped on the winding wide St. Lawrence,
And pondered by the Colorado.
I’ve seen the ways of the first Tigris users,
And those earlier on the Indus.
I’ve bathed with Gandhi’s ashes too,
And seen the Ganges’ lust.
But what I’ve learned of rivers, yes,
I’ll tell you it right now:
With wind and rain they are created,
And in time is how.

Chaos Theory

So I suppose there are two ways to write:
About that which you know or that you don’t.
I like to do both, and in many different ways -
I suppose my style could resemble a maze.
Rhyming sometimes but only if it works,
Trying not to sound cliché too often.
It’s true that rhyming is often ill-timed,
And also that time is often rhymed.
But honestly I like to stick to the books,
Speaking with rainbows or entirely truth.
Magical realism is often employed,
Influences include weed and Pink Floyd.
But also Langston and Frost and not Freud,
And I hope Gabriel Garcia Marquez ain’t annoyed.
Sometimes I stick strictly to science,
And sometimes use chaos in extreme defiance:
Like
When I
Am at the end
Of writing a poem
And want to feel special.

Moon Moss or Only O

Look!
Moss grows on top of two hollow moons:
Orbs of rock only too odd,
For words do not know.

The twenty-third patriot makes a way around the cul de sac:

In the yard there is a bird someone has neglected to feed. On Sundays it grazes the azaleas. He sits next to the animal, intently on a daily basis— and is routinely passed by neighbors who send their colleagues to finish the yard work. The culprits, all of them children, have grown pomegranates to guide them home.  I see troops lined up single file on the concrete to where one small boy in blue trousers has claimed allegiance to the sun.  He continues, a profligate, fruit in palm, and smashes it down, fracturing the remains. Blood dances in its rubble. The run off lurks in the cobblestone. Suddenly refuge has been permitted in the streets, and once more they run to it, scooping with beady eyes into pairs of little hands. 

Not paying attention while paying attention in Chemistry… RB

Parts and Wholes

We are all and only parts of the whole.  But it could be said that this whole is always part of another whole, which we would be sub-parts of.  Our singular bodies can be said to be in the middle of this relationship.  Within us we have parts:  particle-parts, chemical-parts, molecular-parts, atomic-parts, and quark-parts.  Each of these parts combines to form our whole, but it is also true that they themselves have sub-parts.  These parts-of-parts, in some forms elemental and in others electronic or nuclear or photonic, also have parts, and it can only be assumed that all of these parts combine to form less or more (depending on how you look at it) fundamental parts.  This bit of cyclical nature goes down and deep and forever.  It also goes up and out and beyond.  This system governs reality.  It encompasses everything:  ourselves, Earth, our solar system, the Milky Way, the Universe.  Nature as we know it is partial and impartial to its whole.  So I ask you:  Where do you stand?

To Everyone As Beautiful As Me

I can make

love jiggle, dance

like an out

of shape stripper, or

an arthritis speckled

old man

with a lumpy

back.

I’ve heard of silence,

but don’t know

it, each movement

stagnant, bellows,

trembles, sings falsetto

for the

dog-walkers

and the

children with lollipops

on the subway

at night.

The roads are, after

all, dangerous -

potholes and pedestrians

and the poor.

Birds on a wire

sing and say,

“We whistle so

well, and you

don’t.

So speak:

What’s up

with you?”

Sometimes…

Cats are like golfballs

the less you have to hit them

the better your doing

Vacation Plans (for workshop, not Jabberwocky)

My moment comes, oddly enough, at the hotel pool.  It comes so suddenly that I have to dip my head under in the hot tub.  Already this is suspicious: I’m always telling the boys how dirty these things are and not to do that.  The heat gives a nice sting though and along with that muffled rumble it really does feel like being sealed in.  My palms seek the floor.  Beneath my right hand the foot of one of my sons recoils and my left is met by the plastic cover of the drain.  Where the foot was—it was Dylan’s—I feel now a plane of coarse cement.  I howl my lungful out and this idea strikes me: I thumb the ring down my finger and pinch hold of it.  In need of air I surface with my recovered treasure held up for display.  The rumble is more of a throaty hiss above the water and it echoes flatly in the big glass room.  Oh boy, I say, expressing my relief at having retrieved the ring.  I avoid their faces by rubbing mine and remarking that—yuck—see, the water really is dirty.  I’m going to rinse off in the pool.

     Two cold tile steps to the edge.  The wall of windows across the way is a watery image of the room primed by the darkness outside.  My body is pale, my stomach wide.  I gasp and make the plunge—

     Cold!  Calm…. Letting it out in here is a different experience entirely.  I begin to shake.  My long sobbing exhalation enters a dense silence.  The sound is audible but substantially degraded.  A murmur.  I discover that part of the release is hearing your own shrill tune resound.  That can’t happen now though and that of course is the whole point.  Ah—need air.  Better start swimming.  Can’t just splash up gasping for air again and again.  Swim it out.  Breathe.  Good.  Breathe….

     It takes twelve laps.  At fifteen I paddle to the ladder.  The boys are still in the tub.  Their faces are flushed.  They watch me climb out of the pool, pulling puddles up onto the deck.  Jeffrey reaches for a folded towel beside the hot tub.  Here, mom, he says; and he holds the white bundle out over Dylan’s head.  Dylan who now looks straight ahead, brooding intently.  He’s at the age.  Jeffrey, however, is still naturally optimistic.  He smiles as I take the towel but the arch in his brow asks for my reassurance.  Thank you, honey, I say.  Then, sensing his concern, I blot my eyes with a corner of the towel and add: That chlorine is vicious. 

     From the chaise lounge I urge the boys to dip in the pool before they overheat.  Jeffrey climbs out on to the deck, losing his trunks a little as he heaves his small frame first to his knees, then his feet.  He crosses his arms and totters, shoulders shrugged, in that urgent suffering manner little boys seem to assume instinctively on poolside decks, to the diving board at the far end.  So much he hasn’t seen!  He yells for me to watch his cannonball.  The splash is endearingly slight.  He surfaces and wipes the water from his eyes, looking to me for a reaction.  I run the towel over my body emphatically, pretending to have been drenched.  He smiles and makes again toward the board.  Dylan is in a testing mood.  He sits there staring, up to his lips in the turbulent water.  Dylan, I say, don’t let that water into your mouth—it’s filthy.  Go on, get in the pool and cool off.  He doesn’t respond.  He has John’s eyes, I’ve always thought: deeply set, penetrating.  I see that my contribution has been his talent for keeping them aloof. 

     And John—where might he have gone?  Probably back to the room by now.  He wouldn’t go to supper alone.  In spite of things I wouldn’t want him to.  Vacation is vacation: we’ll go as a family.  I stand up.  Looking down, my stomach is not as wide nor as pale as it appears in the window; still, I should make a point of joining a gym when we get back.  I tell the boys to be up at the room ready to shower in ten minutes: we’re going to have a family supper.  Jeffrey yelps his approval and flails himself smiling into the water. Dylan looks over his shoulder at me.  I smile.  As I open the door to the corridor he starts sulkily, deliberately, out of the tub.

     Tomorrow we’ll bike to the sea and in the evening play tennis.  If it rains we’ll have a long lunch and stay in playing cards, or perhaps take a cab to the cinema.  I’m not always aloof.  He’s a good man, really.  Vacation is vacation.  Now is not the time.  Later.  Tonight we’ll have supper at the restaurant and get plenty rested for tomorrow.  We’ll sort this out at home.  The boys will adjust.  My boys.  So much they haven’t seen!   

—February 17, 2009