·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Walking Theory pieces are kindly commissioned by Chris Sullivan at Slight Publications: http://www.8letters.blogspot.com/
These works are under construction; your good feedback is always appreciated.

Walking Theory #32

Strange men under hire tear out the trees,
The shrubs, the variant plants (a cactus bush,
two former Christmas trees, one silver, one green)
The others in which the eye once taken – as if the variable
Had no plan - yet better than bland, dry
Seasonal grass behind the fence aside the track.
Yet, the new owners – the inheritors - do
have their plans. Greed – or is it ‘common sense’? -
Will harvest the land into large buildings,
Myriad condominiums, multiply the former house
(c. 1874) into economic dominoes, the greatest dollar
On the foot: screw history, screw memory,
Invent the future, dollar by dollar,
Particularly if you – the landlord - live elsewhere.
Blanket the heart with speculation:
This is an old, repetitive story,
Devour the earth, eliminate the past,
Promise a large utopia in the large dollar.
What’s the issue? Be open to change,
Root one foot in what one knows,
Lean into the next with chance, liberty,
Yet, crave the two: know, love, dig by weed,
By rose, build brick by plank, landscape,
Architecture. Cultivate “close history” –
Itching, scratching, exterior, interior. What falls,
builds or grows – livable or not – the neighborhood’s hard,
Let it be beautiful, bountiful rubbing.

Walking Theory #33

The spring tree, the shiny, yellow long-pointed leaves:
Do not shed and lean against my door, early.

Walking Theory #34

Here’s to the man who swallowed his cell-phone
Who digested conversation after conversation
Who, in the morning, sat on the pot, so early, so long.

Walking Theory #35

In the twilit Park between two palms
A young man stretches a stiff rope
And, with wide shoes, hoists one foot, then,
The other, one shoe on the rope, while the other leg swings,
Gingerly, then steps forward, to touch its sole down while
the other leg now swings, also gingerly:
Another young man, Latino, dark hair, a gray sweat suit,
Black shorts, pedals his feet up & down in place
While a bright, neon-green soccer ball bounces
up & down off the top of his pointed head:
Each figure- a precision, a balance – strike it,
One last devotion - call it honor, call it play -
each a shrine to poise:
Darkened palms devour day.

Walking Theory #37

A tiny diamond stud,
Her left eyebrow:
One on the right side,
The corner of her lip:
One in the middle of her chin:
An intimate knowledge of some stars.

Walking Theory #38

I asked Terri if she’d like to go out on a paragraph
with me and things got suddenly cool, distant and strange…
Chris Sullivan

Hills built like paragraphs - each house a word - architecture either maiming
or popping open each line, call them sentences, places where one is, variously,
‘sentenced’ to live, project an imaginative continuum, each word, at best,
a powerful, multiple coupling: strong, sweet, colorful syllables
Amongst tree, flower, shrub. An impulse to weed the garden. Urban geology,
Sweet home, complication, paragraph, sentence, word: desire.

Walking Theory #39

The grammar of houses, grammar of view,
No view, lost view, the conjunction,
Conjunction in which the bad or the good,
The family argument – within, without, what one –
Carries up, down or into the hall. Go left, go
Right, go, the one who got away, the one who
Still lives in the cellar, a window or not, a
Widow, the broken, the paragraph in which
Desire meets infamy, a son in the Peace Corps,
One in Psychology, the daughter married, unmarried,
Each a unit, a duplex, the apartment multiple,
Desire compressed, opening, closing, scaling the view,
Take it home, take it far away, why a Tower,
Byzantine - blue & gold tiles - the mosaic atop the school
Shining, this morning, a beacon conceived in Alhambra,
This, in the neighborhood, in the distance, this morning.

*

No one escapes the grammar, the disclosure:
He died a drunk. In her private life
She is notoriously promiscuous, in her
Public life, ‘a mover and a shaker.’
He sold cars roaming the Parish, an
Appointment in Rome prevented
More disclosure. The Milkman rings twice.
The so-called “Geek” and his coke cans.
The General in her prison, grammar broken,
Grammar, the concealed untracked by a verb
Or a photograph, the continuous, digital interplay:
Walk binary, walk up and down the hill, mindful
World, no grammar, binary fury, an error at Oracle,
The B- C- A transfiguration, a wheel,
The explosions, the currency in the General’s face.

Walking Theory #40

“Viewer discretion advised”
We (the ______) appreciate that:
Take this poem, for example,
Syllable by syllable, word by…
One may just drop into
“The Rainbow”, or, “The Parrots Are
Puzzled Room” in which, at least,
Ask for ice cream whether or not
The movie - note the birds crowding
The tree, the hero and his lover
Are about to unleash something,
“Coin of the realm,” I don’t know,
It could be breathless & inviting,
Something better than taking the
Whole day to mop the floors, dust
Clean the glass over the art.
So just hold on, quicken the spurs
In your stirrups, crank up the amps,
Spin the gold door knobs, push in
The lacquered door, this could be
A way out, or a way in, or, hold your breath,
A nacho in the dip behind the star
Who is sitting out the second half
“on account of foul trouble,”
Though the complexity may be
unbearable, roughage on the open sea
stabilizes acute skills, the crew
hungry for opportunity when nature
releases and there you are, first in line,
magnanimous, plowing forth,
the accordion, a new lover
beckoning, the looseness
in your bending elbows, arms,
the syllable touch, fingers treading ivory,
black, white, “what is the true color?”,
wandering, as if on a horse into these,
actually they are quite sweet,
darkening, some say, swollen hills.

Waling Theory #41

The voice cracks
The poetry sizzles
Though his “Love Poem” wages much too long –
His bald head, his huge body,
He is master of silence, acute gesture,
The head leaning upward, the onset of pathos:
What more could one want?
The poem, our love, our incitement
Climbing in & out
Upon itself

(Oh come back!)

*

“Did your mama wear pajamas?”

*

Back to the messenger.

**

A finesse to the Victorians between Valencia
& Guerrero
Creamy & Scintillating in the light after sunset:

The red traffic cone on the sand pile
On the blue canvas
In the white triangle tile garage entrance:

A hand-written in black ink little white sheet
In the highest window: “No to Empire.”

*

Events in the prisons by our soldiers in Iraq (see article below on torture of Iraqi women prisoners) have certainly given a unique twist - at least in my memory - as to the significance of Memorial Day.

In fact, courtesy of the poly-cylindrical character of the Internet, we can receive information from so many different global, geographic nodes, each carrying materials and views that either conflict, corroborate or put up a whole new angle on ‘our’ view on whatever the provocative circumstances.

In light of example such as the new revelations of Iraqi women imprisoned, raped and subjected to other torture by our soldiers, I am wondering if the globe will evolve to a point where war Memorials will incorporate the memories of all sides of a conflict. Much, for example, today is made of the fact that the new WWII Memorial in Washington includes the acknowledgement of the contribution of the 50 States and six territories. In my perhaps innocent optimism, I wonder if the eventual memorial for this Iraq War will include the acknowledgement of the torture of these men and women Iraqi prisoners whose abused conditions once globally exposed became the turning point in the which the American people turned on the President and demanded an exit of its troops from an obvious disaster.

My larger question is whether an eventual Iraq War Memorial will evolve to a point where such site will acknowledge all victims - both our own misled soldiers and those of the Iraqi resistance. The knowledge of what has happened in Iraq is so globally shared, it would seem entirely narrow minded or blind to not make the site be a healing one for those we have tortured and killed, and what all else we have contributed to destroy in heritage, cultural and otherwise of Iraq.

If the America’s refusal to acknowledge the gratuitous bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is any guide,for example, I am not about to be optimistic. However, I do think the Internet is changing global consciousness in such a way - let alone the shift to an interdependent global economy - that these nationally self-serving Memorials will begin, indeed, to seem quaint. (”Quaint” in a much different sense than the President’s lawyer use of the term to unilaterally disown the Geneva War Conventions on the use of torture on prisoners as a crime).

Fundamentally here is a wish to collectively apologize and offer reparations for this killing, torture, and abuse. I wish there was one leader in this Government who could offer that. It’s something I would certainly support -otherwise this nation is going to be festering and, I suspect, go badly in the world for a long time.

Ah, with those dark thoughts, do have a good, as much as possible, weekend.

Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com

>> The other prisoners
>>
>>
>> Most of the coverage of abuse at Abu Ghraib has focused on male detainees.
>> But what of the five women held in the jail, and the scores elsewhere in
>> Iraq? Luke Harding reports
>> Thursday May 20, 2004
>>
>>
>> The Guardian
>>
>> The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed not by a digital
>> photograph but by a letter. In December 2003, a woman prisoner inside the
>> jail west of Baghdad managed to smuggle out a note. Its contents were so
>> shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers
>> who had been trying to gain access to the US jail found them hard to believe.
>>
>> The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were,
>> and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now
>> pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men,
>> it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the
>> women further shame.
>>
>> Late last year, Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women
>> detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse
>> and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention
>> without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but
>> was, as she put it, “happening all across Iraq”.
>>
>> In November last year, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base
>> at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad. “She was the only woman
>> who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been
>> raped,” Swadi says. “Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried
>> to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She
>> told us, ‘We have daughters and husbands. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone
>> about this.’”
>>
>> Astonishingly, the secret inquiry launched by the US military in January,
>> headed by Major General Antonio Taguba, has confirmed that the letter
>> smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as “Noor” was entirely and
>> devastatingly accurate. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three
>> weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humilation in
>> front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women
>> detainees - who form a small but unknown proportion of the 40,000 people in
>> US custody since last year’s invasion - have also been abused. Nobody appears
>> to know how many. But among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards
>> inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba’s report, images of a US
>> military policeman “having sex” with an Iraqi woman.
>>
>> Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked
>> female detainees. The Bush administration has refused to release other
>> photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although
>> it has shown them to Congress) - ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers
>> in Iraq, but in reality, one suspects, to prevent further domestic
>> embarrassment.
>>
>> Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been
>> harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition
>> detention centre after being arrested last July. Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who
>> investigated the case and found it to be true, said, “She was held for about
>> six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was
>> a donkey.”
>> In Iraq, the existence of photographs of women detainees being abused has
>> provoked revulsion and outrage, but little surprise. Some of the women
>> involved may since have disappeared, according to human rights activists.
>> Professor Huda Shaker al-Nuaimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University
>> who is researching the subject for Amnesty International, says she thinks
>> “Noor” is now dead. “We believe she was raped and that she was pregnant by a
>> US guard. After her release from Abu Ghraib, I went to her house. The
>> neighbours said her family had moved away. I believe she has been killed.”
>> Honour killings are not unusual in Islamic society, where rape is often
>> equated with shame and where the stigma of being raped by an American soldier
>> would, according to one Islamic cleric, be “unbearable”. The prospects for
>> rape victims in Iraq are grave; it is hardly surprising that no women have so
>> far come forward to talk about their experiences in US-run jails where abuse
>> was rife until early January.
>>
>> One of the most depressing aspects of the saga is that, unaccountably, the US
>> military continues to hold five women in solitary confinement at Abu Ghraib,
>> in cells 2.5m (8ft) long by 1.5m (5ft) wide. Last week, the military escorted
>> a small group of journalists around the camp, where hundreds of relatives
>> gather every day in a dusty car park in the hope of news.
>>
>> The prison is protected by guard towers, an outer fence topped with razor
>> wire, and blast walls. Inside, more than 3,000 Iraqi men are kept in vast
>> open courtyards, in communal brown tents exposed to dust and sun. (Last
>> month, nearly 30 detainees were killed in two separate mortar attacks on the
>> prison; about a dozen survivors are still in the hospital wing, shackled to
>> their beds with leather belts.) As our bus pulled up, the men ran towards the
>> razor wire. They unfurled banners and T-shirts that read: “Why are we here?”
>> “When are you going to do something about this scandal?” “We cannot talk
>> freely.”
>>
>> The women, however, are kept in another part of the prison, cellblock 1A,
>> together with 19 “high-value” male detainees. It is inside this olive-painted
>> block, which leads into a courtyard of shimmering green saysaban trees and
>> pink flowering shrubs, that the notorious photographs of US troops
>> humiliating Iraqi prisoners were taken, many of them on the same day,
>> November 8 2003. A wooden interrogation shed is a short stroll away. As we
>> arrived at the cellblock, the women shouted to us through the bars. An Iraqi
>> journalist tried to talk to them; a female US soldier interrupted and pushed
>> him away. The windows of the women’s cells have been boarded up; birds nest
>> in the outside drainpipe. Captain Dave Quantock, now in charge of prisoner
>> detention at Abu Ghraib, confirmed that the women prisoners are in solitary
>> confinement for 23 hours a day. They have no entertainment; they do have a
>> Koran.
>>
>> Since the scandal first emerged there is general agreement that conditions at
>> Abu Ghraib have improved. A new, superior catering company now provides the
>> inmates’ food, and all the guards involved in the original allegations of
>> abuse have left.
>>
>> Nevertheless, there remain extremely troubling questions as to why these
>> women came to be here. Like other Iraqi prisoners, all five are classified as
>> “security detainees” - a term invented by the Bush administration to justify
>> the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access, as part
>> of the war on terror. US military officials will only say that they are
>> suspected of “anti-coalition activities”.
>>
>> Two of the women are the wives of high-ranking and absconding Ba’ath party
>> members; two are accused of financing the resistance; and one allegedly had a
>> relationship with the former head of Iraq’s secret police, the Mukhabarat.
>> The women, in their 40s and 50s, come from Kirkuk and Baghdad; none has seen
>> their families or children since their arrest earlier this year.
>>
>> According to Swadi, who managed to visit Abu Ghraib in late March, the
>> allegations against the women are “absurd”. “One of them is supposed to be
>> the mistress of the former director of the Mukhabarat. In fact, she’s a widow
>> who used to own a small shop. She also worked as a taxi driver, ferrying
>> children to and from kindergarten. If she really had a relationship with the
>> director of the Mukhabarat, she would scarcely be running a kiosk. These are
>> baseless charges,” she adds angrily. “She is the only person who can provide
>> for her children.”
>>
>> The women appear to have been arrested in violation of international law -
>> not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are
>> married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have
>> previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male
>> relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to
>> find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter
>> instead.
>>
>> The International Committee of the Red Cross, whose devastating report on
>> human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners was delivered to the government in
>> February but failed to ring alarm bells, says the problem lies with the
>> system. “It is an absence of judicial guarantees,” says Nada Doumani,
>> spokesperson for the ICRC. “The system is not fair, precise or properly
>> defined.”
>>
>> During her visit to Abu Ghraib in March, one of the prisoners told Swadi that
>> she had been forced to undress in front of US soldiers. “The Iraqi translator
>> turned his head in embarrassment,” she said. The release of detainees,
>> meanwhile, appears to be entirely arbitrary: three weeks ago one woman
>> prisoner who spoke fluent English and who had been telling her guards that
>> she would sue them was suddenly released. “They got fed up with her,” another
>> lawyer, Amal Alrawi, says.
>>
>> Last Friday, about 300 male prisoners were freed from Abu Ghraib, the first
>> detainees to be released since the abuse scandal first broke. A further 475
>> are due to be released tomorrow, although it is not clear if any of the women
>> will be among them. General Geoffery Miller, who is responsible for
>> overhauling US military jails in Iraq, has promised to release 1,800
>> prisoners across Iraq “within 45 days”. Some 2,000 are likely to remain
>> behind bars, he says. Iraqi lawyers and officials aredemanding that the US
>> military hands the prisons over to Iraqi management on June 30, when the
>> coalition transfers limited powers to a UN-appointed caretaker Iraqi
>> government. Last week, Miller said “negotiations” with Iraqi officials were
>> ongoing.
>>
>> Relatives who gathered outside Abu Ghraib last Friday said it was common
>> knowledge that women had been abused inside the jail. Hamid Abdul Hussein,
>> 40, who was there hoping to see his brother Jabar freed, said former
>> detainees who had returned to their home town of Mamudiya reported that
>> several women had been raped. “We’ve know this for months,” he said. “We also
>> heard that some women committed suicide.” While the abuse may have stopped,
>> the US military appears to have learned nothing from the experience. Swadi
>> says that when she last tried to visit the women at Abu Ghraib, “The US
>> guards refused to let us in. When we complained, they threatened to arrest
>> us.”

Walking Theory pieces are kindly commissioned by Chris Sullivan at Slight publications:http://www.8letters.blogspot.com/.

Walking Theory #21

Rigorous are the riches of her wheels
She rolls past in a flaming series of zeroes -

Eternity whispers in the lonely hour:
The thin quiet lip in a cactus tip.

Walking Theory #22

Walk easy, lazy, take the bone
out of your butt, hang your ass on a bench,
let the eye float, the dream, whatever goes on
inside, merge, diverge, the bridge in the distance
punctured by an island,
let on, let off, go, go lazy, easy,
heart won, one.

Walking Theory #23

Clouds without borders,
the trail from the heart
penetrates anything, every thing:
lance the opposition, the red skinned boil,
the soldier sadly wounded, one eye
under a white patch, “I will either have
20/20 vision, something in-between,
or be blind in that one eye,” his body stretched out,
torso, head tilted up, slightly twitching.

Walking Theory #24

Crack the early morning light
Rise up hill to Twin Peaks,
Stair by stair, one steep slope, then the other -
What one leaves behind - small bricks
Fall off the back, line the side of the trail -
Pick your means, shake left over gravity
Onto the ground; what rises, purifies -
Sweat upon sweat - cleanse the earth,
Woe is great, sad and sorry -
Feet forward, one by one,
Breath a lineage to the sun.

Walking Theory #25

Follow the flower thief, there she goes
Running downhill, her loose brown pony tail
Bouncing off her spine, loose khaki shorts,
Bouquet in one hand, scissors in the other.
Today she only picks the red ones: camellias,
Chrysanthemums, even geraniums.
From corner to corner she flies: clip, clip, clip.
There’s one thing at which no one will catch her,
Red or not, she will not deadhead the fading roses:
What grows thrills, petal by petal,
Now a camellia alight on her pony tail:
Honor the flower thief, a bunch in hand,
On the run – a quick frame in a movie –
gracious gift to the eye.

Walking Theory #26

The soldier in Iraq lays down led
The plumber in the neighborhood lays down pipe
The poet lays down sentences word by word

There is no humble opinion in the world
So much goes by pruning and graft
He was a gambler in the old world,
A threaded tunic down to his thighs:
He’s a menace in the new one,
A crow’s face for eyes:

Speak to him with a silver tongue
Put a thimble and needle on his lips
Tie the thread as hard as you can,
Knot by knot, “yes” by “yes”

Kiss his lips and silver his tongue
Put bronze on his elbows
Gold on his teats

Thread him up and pull him down:
The raft in the river,
The falls downstream

Let him glow in the dark:
The ropes on the raft,
Pull him, pull him

Let the river push him, wide and far,
Let the river push him
Right on down.

Walking Theory #27

Pile perception upon perception:

At the bridge toll, the taker,
Nightshade blue on her fingernails
Nightshade blue on her lips

It’s high noon & she takes your money
Before she laughs:

Sometimes I walk to banish
And it’s not enough.

Walking Theory #28

The thick leafy, plum tree flutters fiercely
In and against the stiff, evening breeze;
It’s shadow - a round dark feathery ball -
Bounces ever so lightly, up and down
On one house’s pale amber, clay burnt wall:

Perhaps there are ways to fully breathe
One’s long path to enlightenment:
Perhaps it’s best to know
The ways to relieve & lighten
The deepest wound of all.

Walking Theory #29

Why the large, tarnished gray metal whale atop the weathervane – the plump, pocked face, the steep pitched brown shingle roof, the wind this morning from the south?
Why one architecture, then another, one square, one rounded, one elaborate, one not; one practical, efficient, once working class; one ornamental, drawn from European or Arab provinces, different centuries, assumed charming, a power, a wealth - ideally with a view to the Bay - possessed?
Why Greek - or are they Roman – gods in moss-green, tarnished bronze, atop the highest hill, vertical or horizontal on pedestals under thick, dark, tall pine amongst multiple green bushes, open white Calla lilies, clean swept, brown flagstones, a small, practically stagnant pond?
Why a Brillo box on TV, in the museum, under the nightly sink?
Why a flat iron, a tall mirror, 34 shades of lipstick, an amber plastic canister, faint colored pills?
Why an interior, an exterior or something flat, thin with neither?
Why a fine threaded black grid floated on one canvas, simulated blood spilled on another?
Why magnolia, fuchsia, lotus, bougainvillea in bloom about a
thick bed of butter-yellow, curved open petal roses?
Why a “General McArthur”, a “Whiskey Apricot”, a “Princess Diana,” each a name, a rose in bloom, a week ago at the Huntington Gardens?
Why up the stairs, on the little porch, her bright gold hair down to her lower spine, the solid black skirt, closing the door, the key turning, an interior tumbler, the sound?
Why Generals on the subject of certain prisons speak aggressively about their problems with “optics”?
Why there are over 18,000 manholes in San Francisco with no one down under treading their feet inside a pool of the freshest of spring fed waters?
Why the anguish, the body chemistry, that some get it -a gray wall of depression - through which – months at a time - not even one color emerges?
Why the mother - her 3-year old daughter seated inside the dark tinted van window – tells her she cannot say, “why the blooming lotus is so beautiful”?
Why we turn sentences into extraordinary beauty, even the black gravel in strewn layers beside thick oil-stained wooden rail ties, between rusted iron smooth trolley tracks, the smell of ancient, undoubtedly toxic, it’s forbidden to walk here, creosote?
Why the Generals at the Senate Armed Services Committee work so hard to shield, to defend, at such pains to hide from whatever the clear “top-down” implication?
Why agitate for beauty when the plurality of the opposite – the news and its spectacle - is absurd, wonderful, intoxicating, killingly abundant?
Why a wooden or metal frame, instead tacks, different color ones, edge by edge, into the butcher paper, the temporary vision constantly changed, transformed, the paper going up, coming down? Why the quest for the permanent, the lasting, the image particular - vintage, raised, ecstatic, privileged, even assumed eternally instructive, humorous, religious?
Why did the chicken cross the road? As simple as that? Outside the window, the near tree swinging its branch, leaves, the overhead Helicopter - is it the one to capture traffic for the nightly News or, the other one - blatantly voyeuristic – the eye of its camera documenting office, home, street, the Bay, each and everyone of us, allegedly protecting one’s “freedom” in the name of “homeland security”?
Why – constantly, in love or not - foot ever to the ground, image by image, thought by thought, word by word - does one, “theory by theory”, I can’t help it – do this?

Walking Theory #30

…meticulous & honorable…

May, the shadows slant south.

This line drops Rumsfeld.
This one Wolfolitz.

From here where does it go?
So elusive no one knows.

Walk against the thick:

May the butterfly well up
Out of your thigh.

Cornrow spiral jetty
Crown to forehead
Scalp as sculpture.

Razor defense, eyes that cut.

The way a walk collects today.

Walking Theory #30

Leave a spiral jetty on the hill
Little stone by little stone
Vary the color – dark to bright –
say hello, say good-bye,
Acknowledge love, hard luck,
Any measure, call it true –
Be it brother, mother, sister, father,
Friend, ex- or current lover:
Spiral in, spiral out,
Fog, cloud or clarity,
Stars may or may not flourish,
The stones one picks, lift,
Lower, plunk each to course:
Tonight the wind blows fiercely,
Stand back, eye the spiral splay:
Accurate horizon to the heart.

A tough game, art,
humanity’s other part.

**

A couple of lines from “For Paul and Other Poems”
by Lorine Niedecker.
If you do not have the book,it’s
Collected Works: Lorine Niedecker,
Edited by Jenny Penberthy,
University of California Press,
A lodestar for my current reading
& walking, too.

Spring
stood there
all body

Head
blown off
(war)

showed up
downstream…
***
From Homemade/Handmade Poems by Lorine Niedecker (Correction: poem’s lines on left margin should be “ragged left.” Computer obstacle.)

And “downstream” it is, these prisons, (”Iraq”)
This practice of torture, an American “divined” policy,
dogs in mid-bite, caught in the act,
The soul of the country “caught in the act” -
An ideology, “democracy, beacon of light”,
Its head “blown off”, “caught in the act” ,
A top down, uniform policy,
“loosen, soften them up”
There are no “innocent bystanders,”
“teeth marks and bleeding”
We are not, “spring and all”,
This horrible shit, sunk into it, way bad -
Johnny and Jane
Better come marching home,
Whimpering:
Time, very much the time, to take the teeth
Promptly out: Wofolitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith, Perle, Bush
Time, imperative: pull them, take them quickly:
They are all extraordinarily dangerous, criminal.
Take them, throw them, as fast as possible,
All the way out. There is no, absolutely no credibility
(moral or otherwise, if there ever was) for us, “head/
Blown off” to remain, do anything, in or for, Iraq.

i.e. Read, if you haven’t, all the prison articles, Red Cross reports, etc., sign all those petitions to remove x, y & z, and call Senators and Congressperson “to heed the call.”

Walking Theory #11

Walk – as the song says – into the morning rain,
Forget the umbrella, open the face, let it fall
Where it may – hair, brow and cheek – let it swathe,
Let it wash - it’s April, misery is blooming -
war in Fallujah, war in Basra, war in the heart
Let nothing, no media, no propaganda, hold sway
Let it drop - young men, women, children, mothers, fathers,
the old, the singular, each and various wounded, murdered –
Let it drop, the wisteria falling, blue and white petals, step by step up the hill –
War, war, and war again - let the walk carry the rain,
Petals in piles gather, darkness dissolve, sisters, brothers,
red scarf in a loop about the neck, falling,
surrender, her step going down hill,
rain falling, surrender.

Walking Theory #12

How much I resent the dereliction
Of my ways. Oops! Pink, yellow, lavender,
Salmon spotted inside – the foxglove are out.
Forgive me.

Walking Theory #13

In April heat look forward the split
Sourdough roll in July, thick tomato slice,
Transparent oil on white mozzarella,
Sweet delicacy of future, mount each moment,
Green Zucchini, yellow blossoms startle the market,
Maintain a palette full of constant temptation,
Spring rose, gladiola, foxglove tightly banded inside plastic and steel buckets,
If obligatory, whip bullies of war into compassion,
Embrace losses, ours, theirs, elevate adolescent rages of old men,
Crush stupidity, immortal present, future, embrace, pluck, toss dormant
Living fools – including ourselves (the future) - apparently never,
Generation upon each previous, tempted, walk on, never cease.

Walking Theory #14

Feather the heart, the sweat from a high walk,
Feet drum the sidewalk, uphill and down,
The personal trainer lays down his client
(Corner of Sanchez at 21st) on a rainbow pad,
“Bring your knees up, hold & down.”
What to do when the day looms like a blockade,
“Up, hold & down.” Breath showers the sun
showers back, “Up, hold
& down.” Feather the heart,
truly.

Walking Theory #15

Construction shapes beauty; terror. the ugly.

Walking Theory #16

Become a pig: waddle & snort,
Enter the mud (the slow swish)
Rise and parade legs ample
Without steroids, antibiotics
Or any such that drive one lame.
Indeed, waddle & snort, lie down & swish,
Gather mud as you may, torture a fly
Or two; take the washer person’s hose
With dark or brown hairy pleasure
Lift an eye ever so slowly, one at a time,
Give yourself the weight of ancient lords
Or the local cop on the beat,
Stretch and thunder each full breath
Clean out the air with snort & oink
Go friendly, go joyously, let cloven feet
Walk and shape each step of mud,
Shake your butt and twist your head,
Go wildly, at peace and goodnight.

Walking Theory #17

Go south, go into death, disassemble there.
Praise what is empty. Praise what is collapsed.
Charge the particle into nothing. Split light.
See what is there.
Wander without heart. Waste. Charm nothing.
What is sophisticated is fallow. Lie there.
Relax. Let it pass. What emerges diverges.
Go one, not two. Do not strangle there.
There is no hem on her dress. A large earring.
Water the flowers there.
The wind will wash your hair.

Walking Theory #18

Accept the fragment:

*
What’s not far may be compensated
By intense beauty…

*
To alter history
Throw a pebble in the river:

To alter the walk
Transform the Signage:

SHARP CREST
(TRUCKS NOT)
WALKING ADVISED

*
Hex those who break car windows
Cruel little thieves, punks in the night
May they chew on shattered…
Oh well, compassion, everywhere.

*
Economy down,
Gangs up:

Particularly at night
Stare down the street

Clinically.

*
Find the grove within the neighborhood,
If not, grow one, Oak by Oak, whatever
Fits the shaded premise. Go there, relinquish
Whatever shadows….

*
No dark wood is going to keep you dry.
Go there. Silken your palms.

*

Engage the interior bridge.

*

Walk & goof.
Whump, whump, whump.
The whale in a soprano moment
Six white mice in the bottom of a bird cage,
One on a swing.
The melon is a practical thing.
Seeds. Plenty of seeds.
Cut it in chunks.
Spread your lips. Chomp, walk…

*

It’s not the completed step.
It’s the step that follows.

Walking Theory #19

Rumsfeld, Rice, Bremer, Bush, Wolfolitz, Feith,
Cheney, definitely, Cheney:
We will spit these names wide across the sidewalk
Into the gutter where the poor fish, at the other end, will mutter,
“Where in the Hell?
Where in the Hell?”
We spit these names
Clear and not
Clear and not dear,
Nation’s rudder split:
Imperiled, unfouled, undoing,
A long time to walk, to unscrew
Forthcoming:

Walking Theory #20

It’s war and broadcast sorrow everywhere
Walks are multiple fragments
Salute ancestors and peers
Reckless & marvelous
Enough is never enough
Precision into proportion
Occasionally a frame
One glass of water fills another
When it’s May
Stick a flagpole in your heart
Let the garlands in your hair
Let the streamers – pink, yellow,
Crimson & blue - find hands multiple,
Lips red, desirous, burning, true.

**********
“Walking Theory” is kindly commissioned by Chris Sullivan, Publisher at Slight Publications: http://www.8letters.blogspot.com/

(Unfortunately I don’t have the formula for indenting the lines which are all “ragged left” in both poems. I will get off my lazy bones and get the techno down - but, for the moment, please optically improvise!)

141.
(Anne Carson)

but there a bowl of ambrosia

had been mixed

and Hermes taking the jug poured wine for

the gods

then they all

held cups

and poured libation and prayed every

good thing for the bridegroom.

141.
(Stephen Vincent)

The bachelor suffered terribly

Before courtship the wine glass

Singular, half full & transparent.

She held an empty glass by the stem

Walked in circles by the oak

Wilted purple vines in the near field.

Good things do not always happen

To couples.

J.F. Kennedy after
after the Bay Pigs

To stand up

black marked tulip
not snapped by the storm
“I’ve been duped by the experts”

- and walk
the South Lawn.

Lorine Niedecker

It’s probably an easy shot to say – re Iraq - George Bush is no J.F.K. & yet it’s refreshing to come across Lorine Neidecker’s take on JFK’s response to the Bay of Pigs’ debacle. The way in which her portrayal of an event now 40 years ago becomes a “forward mirror” reflecting on the posture and behavior of this President - a man who is so rigid - such an Almighty Believer - that he will never acknowledge a mistake, never change direction unless forced to. There is no doubt now - given the force of the pictures of the Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured - that the USA forces will be forced to withdraw from Iraq. “We” have fallen on our own sword and no Iraqi and/or Arab will tolerate further occupation by USA forces. It will take an enormous act of leadership, courage and vision for a new President (at this point, be it Kerry) to alter the chemistry of Arabs and Muslims in such a way as to even minimally mitigate the potentially horrific vengeful consequences of this criminal disaster and to lead this country out of this experience of evangelical corporate Hell.

Have the times ever been darker?