Six bucks on a vodka tonic – and pleased to get it so cheap. Anything but writing tonight. The sky is draped with clouds, pavement pocked with holes and rain drops. Me wanting to walk out on myself so I mosey to the car, parking lot, bar ledge, pink drink with two black straws and crystal ice cubes. Across the street lives Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, Nikolai Gogol, E.M. Forster, Tolstoy, Freud, and Shelley. Bald men and babies in the book racks, both completely confident and asleep to the world. Women in casts and tennis skirts – the same woman, actually. I walk to the window on the second floor and look down on the neon trim where I was before, the revolving door, people crossing just right of the crosswalk and people still stop. No Rimbaud in the store, bare is his place on the poetry shelf. Most – the best – writers dead. I see the local interest books for identifying the birds of Missorui for the people who don’t notice them. God books, fat books, new age books written in the 1970s. Books on bi-polar disorder jump out at me as a man with a cane coughs himself up on the escalator. The stairs fold under themselves like applause, the down set on the other side, across a broad opening, so the entire upper level must be walked through before departing. What words are these people looking for? Can they be found here? Have they been written or can I write them for them? I have no need for an audience tonight – except for the Japanese girl in the cards (I haven’t seen her face but can tell her nationality from behind). So selective and yet she carries a pink purse that matches her lips. Back outside on the sidewalks, mist, the jewelry stores closed and no more engagement rings to be sold tonight, love closed until 10 AM Thursday.
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Tags: Poetry
She climbed on the bull in mixed lighting and rode it waving an arm free in the air. I watched her balance herself with that arm and turn her hand with the same grace that hands have when they are steepled for praying. This happened early in the night when the fresh poured beer was spreading a liquor smell through the bar. An indoor dusk settled on the tables and stools as the light faded from the courtyard. The people were still finding their way around the pen to watch the patrons ride, to forget themselves – to be out, drinking and maybe take their own shot at the bull. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Bull Riding
She walks up your back, her tiny feet pushing into the natural rungs in your vertebrae. By midnight, though it seems later, her feet are moving further up the spine, then something flashes in her memory – in her dream – and they run up clear to the shoulders. Her feet are blunt, the toes curled in fear, and the push so that the torso rocks, re-settles, then rocks again, so that it is not a painful stamp, like someone climbing stairs. After the first few hits from fisted feet, you come to life. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Family Life
Confined to an orderly existence, nothing about books arranged on shelves shows how provocative the ideas inside them can be. So I keep mine on-the-go because I see them for the motion and fluidity of the material they contain, not as energy trapped in squiggles on margined pages. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Books
The boys at the Henry Wiggen’s blog are back and posting more frequently now. One of the bloggers is my former journalism professor, John Lofflin. Something he added to the site earlier in the week caught my attention. In an excellent post, he asked why so many talented writers turn to baseball as the basis for their literary endeavors. My response (re-published here) was that I loved playing baseball as a kid and that the answer might be as simple as Hemingway, Malamud, Shaahara, and others did, too. I think that response was pretty obvious, but it gave me a reason to reel off a few hundred words. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Literature, Sports
