Lekshe's Mistake

Billy C Does it Again

Purity, by Billy Collins

My favourite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
mostly of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes,
in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
and speed through woods on winding country roads,
passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

Code

I was trying to tell you
about the code.
Did you understand?
I want you to.

Like blueprints, information is embedded
in the lines and symbols
and even in the paper itself.
(the crispness of the letters, or lack thereof:  the steadiness of the hand)

It's not that I can't read it. I can,
like I read the hummingbird outside the kitchen window. like that.
I know what it is, but who knows what it means?

Complex statements--
object, object, subject, blame.
Exclamation points in all the wrong places.
The refusal to explain.
None of that makes sense.

See how the light comes in the window now that you moved the wall?
That makes sense.

Night over New Orleans

I won't see Jackson Square or Woldenberg Park or Magazine Street--not even the French Quarter, except for what I can see out the window of my room.

I --would-- like to wander down to Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, a tavern built in 1772 and rumored to be America's oldest drinking establishment; but I wouldn't want to be there till 3 AM or so and I have to be up, working, at 7 AM, looking like I slept somewhere besides the sidewalk on Bourbon Street.

So, instead, I order the chef's special up to my room and enjoy the inky darkness as it settles against the shoulders of the river. I like the silvery lights shimmering on the surface of the water and the occassional sound of a boat's horn. It could be today. It could be 1902. 

It's not Fat Tuesday nor any other holiday, and still, just inland from the mosiac of land and water, swamps and alligators that make up the flight path to New Orleans, hoards of tourists wander down to see and hear and taste the soul of the city that retired the streetcar named "Desire," only one slim year after Tennessee Williams made it famous.

They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot, right? And if they don't, mother nature comes along and drowns it every now and then. We are a small race and a skimpy blip in the continuum of being.

Even so, I am glad to be alive, to be travelling, to see this city, even from the 21st floor of a hotel whose name I have already forgotten. 

The Secret

What does it mean to "find some time"? Even I do not know. It means I am reaching. And probably not even for someone else, but for myself. This so-called self that suddenly finds itself off balance and spinning in space longs to grasp a reference point--any reference point, anything.

The bones dissolve in a moment like this. You feel wobbly. The ground that was under your feet in the morning disappears and you'd find it again but you can't find your feet to take you there.

What makes this happen? Why this body, these bones, this experience? Weather has to happen somewhere, why not here? That's what you tell yourself, but still you reach for the edge of the table when you walk by as if to steady yourself against the next fall.

Why do we resist falling? Up and down are only markers of the mind, not real places. When we fall down, there is always something further down, deeper--maybe so far down at some point that it's up. Who knows.

The brain unravels itself in these moments. There's nothing sane to say. No one to say it to. Nothing left to do but wonder, "How did I get HERE?"

And then you know, suddenly, there is no here. No I to get there and then you loose that little shred of light and you're sitting among the shards of misunderstanding and a brand new confusion.

Times like this that I know the only thing to do is to do some back exercises down on the floor and go to bed. And the sleep will be fitful and restless and I will look out the skylight and wish there was a star there, or the moon, or anything familiar at all, because I know you will not be there, breathing beside me, which is the only thing I want, or so the story goes.

I used to feel apologetic for this. I don't now. No reason to. No one has to witness this. Not even the smallest flower bends the slightest degree because of this madness. It comes from nowhere. Goes nowhere. Isn't, actually. And yet it has a weight as if it did. Leaves a wake as if it was. Feels like surely it must rip the petals off all the luminous spring flowers between here and Rocky Butte. But it doesn't, does it.

It's a secret all this. Tomorrow I will put on a clean shirt and my old black shoes that need polishing and no one will know. Not even me.

Body of Love

The body has a wish
the mind may or may not have
young in an idea
old in its absence,
I can't remember why
it matters but
it does.

The body has a song
it loves to sing.
I forget the words
empty syllables remain
even those
are
faint.

Uncharitable
self-seeking
brings momentary
relief.
We draw the line at actual
generosity
when it comes to the body
of love.

In California

We met, and he, red haired therapist, sat back in his black leather chair and drowned me in questions. I couldn't answer. I was considering them, but I couldn't answer. I heard them but I couldn't answer. All I could do was remember S and the way we used to talk after midnight and how his unfinished sentences were better than most people's poetry.

I said so, finally. "I don't know what to say." "Say nothing," he said. "I am not," I replied, ready to talk by having been told it was OK to say nothing, "wanting to do anything serious today. I have done a quarter milllion dollars worth of thinking this month and I am not wanting to say one more serious sentence."

"So say something lighthearted," he said.

Tears streamed down my face.

"I have an idea," he said. "How about I read you a story?" "All right," I said. "Stay here," he said, as if I was going to go outside that locked door.

He went upstairs and when he returned, he had a book. I put a pillow on my lap and he began reading Winnie the Pooh. And he read and I laughed and he read and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

It was wonderful.

"What was *that* about?" I said, as he closed the book.

"The missing experience," he said, with a soft smile and a look of satisfaction.

Place

Place
is not substance, not
a point in space,
more a point in time
when the conjunction of mind
and matter create
an experience
that
makes us believe there is a spot
to which we can return.

Lightning
never strikes the same place twice
because the same place isn't there
even seconds later.

Place is a figment of our
tendency towards memory, our
love of solidifying the things
we want most to revisit.

In the time it takes to
name it, place
is gone.

They are Gone

They are gone and I am here, alone. Sitting at the black table with a vase of red and green flowers, waiting for Friday. It's warm. That's for sure. It's going to snow. That's what he said. "Friday is iffy," that's what he wrote. But he meant it was going to snow--I can tell after all these years.

I am in love today. Not with someone in particular. I am in love with everyone who has ever written a book and with people who learn to swim after 50, and with the people who teach them.

I want a party. I don't want to plan it and I don't want to be the center of attention there. I want to sit by the fire and watch the others come and go. This is not new. I have been doing this most of my life.

He lights the candles and starts the music. He leaves the soft blankets turned down slightly and he tells me how things are changing on the top stories of the mansion. I ask if the gate still creaks when you open it and he says, "Yep." I must go there soon. It makes me uncomfortable to ask the butler for anything, but I'll take my cell phone and text him and he will tell the butler what to do. I'll ask to have things left on a tray outside the door.

My new pajamas have sock monkeys on them.

Rickety

I met a fisherman today
at the coffee house.
He was thirty, maybe,
had an unkempt beard
blue eyes, and a silver ear ring.

He was looking at photos of
a boat and I asked if I could see.

"We came back," he said,
"with ten thousand pounds of crab,
--beginning of the season is always best."

His hands were scarred and his
back was straight and
his face was worn with weather and worry.

I said, "I thought there was a storm at the coast
this week." and he said, "Most of the bars were closed but
we went out over one that wasn't and
it was rough
but the sea beyond that was smooth as glass."
He drew in a slow breath and closed his eyes.

I asked him if
he liked the sea best
in daytime or night and
he said,
"I like the night the best."
And I said, "Me, too," and he said, "In Alaska, where I used to fish,
the nights went on for days on end," and I knew exactly
what he meant, though I have never fished or been there.

He said, "I brought my kids a cooler full of crabs," and
I tried to imagine what it was like
to see your father coming and to know he was leaving again
before dawn, and that nothing in the house would smell like him when he was gone.

And you cracked the crab, with big sheets of the Tillamook Times
laid out on the kitchen table, and you all talked and laughed
and ate as much as you wanted and your dad
talked about how there were not as many kinds of fish these days
but that the sea itself was was the most beautiful thing,
as if the sky had fallen into water and begun to breathe
and you thought to yourself, "I'll probably be a fisherman when I grow up."

And you saw his steady, kind gaze and you ate the soft, white crab
and you knew that even though he would be gone in the morning,
he meant to love you with those tall, rickety towers of crab bodies
for which he traded his life.

Your small, pale hands cracked the crab, and you noticed the tiny
brown eyes and the delicate hairs along the shell's edge and you wondered
what the crab ate and if the crab had a family. And you fell asleep at the table
and your mother carried you to bed and in the morning, the bedroom window was open
and you could smell the salty wind and
your father was gone.

Web 2.0 company name anyone?

Do you need a name for your new Web 2.0 company? Here you go...

And if you liked that, you're going to LOVE Mark Rabnett's blog. Phew!