it began as a dream about a group of strong, sleek men in a field. In a circle. They were passing heavy reams of canvas -- unspooled from angular bolts -- between one another. Looking out at them in the field -- the way their skin gleamed -- I felt envious. "be careful what you wish for," said the dream.

In the next scene we are walking along a narrow stone path that borders the sea. The sea is black and held back with the help of a wall. We look down into the black sea, and like a cloche the ink night descends, staining our sheets. But we are sequined and lithe. We gleam along.

Now the numerous gold lights of night light up one by one -- pop! pop! pop! in the trees and along the wires. We make our way from the stony sea path to a stony, open air banquet hall of pink marble columns and luminous chandeliers of wax and iron. On the long table, enormous silver platters are heaped with heavy piles of meat -- mostly bird. Pheasant and quail and partridge. Though the meat is cooked, feather quills cling to the skin. Black feathers with green and white and iridescent spots. Folks grab a wing, feather meat, and proceed to have warbling, slow conversations about the political conditions of the government, about freedom.

And then those who have eaten the meat begin to experience a change. They shed all their rings. They retire to the stone benches where they rest and sweat profusely, fanning themselves before they acquiesce to the overwhelming desire to remove their drenched clothing.

Soon, in all of the prettily landscaped lounge areas, they are only wet bodies and piles of steaming, sopping clothes.

Somehow, with the sun-rise, this scene melts away, evaporates into the field of men passing the reams of cloth. Their sweat and nakedness a type of interminable clock. A sort of labor that never resolves.

At this point I want to awake, but cannot.

Already, it is December. How does this happen? The trees
know some things -- things we do not know. Already, my hair
has grown long, and dark. The windows fill with gray
clouds, the absence of missed things, like two hundred
versions of your childhood-self pressing the glass cold.

I'm never paying attention.
Instead, I'm following 8 red winter coats
punctuating the snowscape.
From here, their sojourn feels
impossibly slow.

I dreamed that I was in South Carolina, and all the pine trees turned red.

I dreamed of wires, connecting us.

I dreamed that the insides were all fur, nothing but.

&now (&later)

one of the things about going places is that you never go to as many places as you want to or do as many things as you want to do. At &now I talked about women and animals and presented research into my question: are they real? Wondering now if I could/should have talked about the different ways to get to that question. I realized, listening to folks discussing metaphor, that so many things are already so deconstructed in my mind that I often have to reconstruct and/or remember them to follow the conversation. Like the thing about language and metaphor. I kept thinking...but *all* words are metaphor. The word "bench" is bound to a bench, not because the material of bench-ness emanates a particular, specific word, but because that word gets made and bound to it and conventionally associated with it and its like this semiotic conjugation as all signs are conjugations, multiples. And so, for me, asking about whether things are "real" is this very layered, multiplied question. Part of what I wish I had said has to do with the connection between "reality" and the construction of knowledge -- a critique, really, of the subject/object relationship, or empiricism. It's also a question about mutuality...not a mirror, but a "being with" that, independent of anything else, honors the manifestation of the many materials and selves that are always plastic, always changing, but may be perceived, held, engaged...and the question is how we create/enter that moment, that engagement, and whether or not this is some version of the real.

of being underwater. of error. of swimming and craft. an elastic wanting...a drift...an ink black wave or spill...tipping upwards. in our sand-buildings, our little huts. I feel like laughing, but I can't.

I am like a full moon in my belly. I don't want anyone to die. the feral things -- it's all our fault. During the day you can't see in and a night you can't see out. the moon hangs like an axe, a sad axe, an unfinished question. we abandon our companions and open wounds, prisons. we say get a grip but we mean let go.

The Poetry Booth

On Sunday, we went to Los Angeles and staged The Poetry Booth near the corner on Sunset and Western. This was part of the Los Angeles Road Concerts. It was a really good day.

www.flickr.com mdetorie's Poetry Booth | Sunset Blvd. | Los Angeles Road Concerts | Sept. 18, 2011 photoset

In my mermaid eye, I

become an eyelid. lidded

glass in the little waves -- skip, skip -- the heart

has it's two halves, it's beloveds, those

internalized twins of kissing. Who

will whisper, pine siskins zipping

threads for trees, little whiskers

on the hillside, over ever water.

All along, I wondered. Your eyes

don't look at me. I mean: Don't

look at me! How raw to be seen --

to be realized. Once I was invisible:

I wanted to be seen. But now I think -- NO!

Let me let you look at me. Let me.

they take a polaroid of me

and hang it up

a woman, well-meaning, uses

a ruler to make lines, to divide

my body into parts

center line as my axis

my spine, my spindle

from there she can show me

where the hip curve is a letter off

where my waist should whittle

it was the day we had to wear leotards

mine was silver

everything felt crumpled like trash

my head jumps around because this is the way it works. ha ha suddenly I see a head without a body but with legs, jumping. I'm gathering connections. I gather gather gather and this seems to be the only thing I am good at. I may not even be good at it; perhaps it is all I can do. My projects, all of them, take years, decades. the current project is at least ten years old, perhaps more. and then there is the research project, the question, and that is 35 years old. my earliest research was recorded by others, before I could write, or speak even. I can remember the way things touched, the way I felt. fogged yellow mirror glass and the tilted room with the brown carpet and the daybeds and my mother and the sound of soap operas clotting humidly against the fly-buzz of the summer screen. I only pretend to remember. I am remembered by it -- by the house, the titled photographs, recorded in the grooves of the warped vinyl. I cannot bear to hear burt bacharach without wanting to cry. such sour dishrag chords stuck together with sirens and melting vixens all stuffed with pills. This is also true of the Carpenters and Dione Warwick. It is the saddest music in the world.



Perhaps sad is not the right word. Oh, forget it, it's not. But I can't bear it. Not because it is bad, but because it makes me feel so intolerably uncomfortable. It's like 1977 is trapped in the colors and the air.

I am an infected text

feralscape

There is so much for one's attention.

after a week a reading,

I see pelicans in their hovery, undulating, connect-the-dots. They fly in elegant lines that trace the coast.

I see a white haired woman eating bread out of the bin at the grocery store.

I see swim flick of a fin on the horizon.

I see a spider.

The bank of dense and luxurious honeysuckle near the back door at work -- its fragrance is thick and radiant. Sparks flicker in my brain.

There is too much to take in. I must sleep and sleep for what feels like years.

we are not allowed to make pictures of ourselves

light, and ash, and bone

a fine casing like porcelain, enameled pelt

tether of coal, fire

breath and flesh, aspiration

into the dark recess, into stone

the word is a discrete text

a little map we crawl into

Bellum Letters Revisited

look at how young these people are

dancing makes us human

what happens there in the occult deserts

the dissonance

the matrix contains a beleaguered pop star (does she still want to do this?)

weapons |

commercial pop's infectious repetitions

like we've been here before

like we are all just trying to find a way to make it bearable

it's so hot. who lives here? who gets to live?

google anything you want. pretend it isn't there if we can't see it.

Meditation on Plastic

as if I could press myself into a piece of wax

as if it could retain us

we retain it

we make mention of detritus

we accumulate its bits

on top of everything: pianos

falling down, ruined

the place where her lips were

there were lip prints

a synthetic rope made into knots

unweaving itself -- unthreaded

six thousand petroleum snakes

just six thousand of millions

there are too many to count

I count myself among the ruined

I, ruiner --

to say it makes the shapes tremble

I have been busily writing/making poems, but they are on little scraps of paper all over the place. I will work on posting them here.

On an elevator / of human fingerprints / of the most delicate / fixity

"a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing"

"Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted."

Today, I'm thinking that I'll be making a poetic object or poem in response to a favorite line of poetry or poem for NaPoWriMo. I'm thinking of it as a sort of commonplace book/quilting project.

Also, the Poetry Booth debuts this Thursday, April 7th. If you are in the area, please come make a poem with us!

when we all just go about because there is nothing to say

In so many ways I want to be a different person. I want to be like a sweater you can turn inside out. I want to live on the other side of the world, or in a desert, or a cave. In the middle night, under the blue halo of the porch light and in the gauze of insomnia, our backyard looks like the moon. I want to live there. I do live there.

pop music like conversation hearts -- all my tethered veins -- all the notes tied up.

When I have the energy to pretend, it's so much easier. (if only we were all pretending, if only this wasn't real) It's like something singing, like a longing for what's not there.

Meet Mr. Muffin

I've been thinking about the day and how it sliced like a sheet across the sky, the blue water line of the horizon teetering like a saw, like a glimmer of a glass edge. I wonder about my eyes -- about the accuracy of their vision, about the notes I make with my hands, my nails. I am especially attentive to surfaces -- how they are rough or smooth, or hot or cool, and how my own skin is a surface that changes, that you can touch. I am without a winter, without a new year. The things here, if there are changes, are more like rearrangements of predictable weathers. or else, one day it is one way -- extreme -- cold and black -- and the next the blue sky balminess soothes us back into a sort of dreamy submission. I get so much less done here, in California. My own body has become more solid -- in response I think the abundance of air. Looking out into the ocean, there is so much sky, so much space. My lungs feel frail, a pair of dusty wings, a pair of sheer, shallow winds that barely keep my here.

The idea is to make the babies

work; they are so photogenic

and their lungs are so ripe

and pink. All the birds come

falling down, out of the sky

like ashes. A little song sings

a-long like a little rope-gold

lasso. Spinster-whip sinister

sisters, muse-twins conjoined.

Embryos harvested for their

fossil fuels. Blood is a gas

that burns blue as DNA:

genetic pyrotechnics. All

the pink babies go pop!

pop! pop! We're so naked

in our humanity. It's like

we were all just born.

I had a dream last night about resurrection. My hamster was alive; we were wrong about her being dead. I think this was in part a wish-fulfillment dream and in part a sort of shadowy psychic residue left in my brain after watching a sad video of a mother chimpanzee reacting to death of her infant.

There are so many ways in which a bird and a girl are similar.

Of course we all write too much about birds. We write about them because they disappear. We have to figure out a way to be sad about it.

I think briefly of smoke stacks, snow, ash. I fantasize about papering over every surface with pretty patterned paper.

Sleep is like levitation. Girls can levitate. This secret power is explored at slumber parties, but then we all forget.

We used to do back flips on the trampoline. In the dark after drinking warm beer. It seemed we went higher than the pines.

The thing I miss most about South Carolina is the pines. That and the humid, evening air during summer. How the air feels like the cicadas humming. We write too much about cicadas, but why not? I've only written about them once or twice.

I put my name on a list for a baby teddy bear hamster. Her name will be Baroness Petunia Muffin Merriweather and she will sleep in pretty pink air.

I know that I am alive and I try not to forget this but to stay in the space of "knowing" is difficult. today on the beach there was all this pink. K and I walked and when we turned around there was this sudden rush and it isn't knowing but feeling and in that moment it was such a relief -- it was so much easier.

How much do you need to see to know that it is human? Color washed over movement synthesized mottled over colors a hand's border against an arm or cloth all lit up jolly rancher red and green the light and static sour and the girls so shy against their bangs the young hair moving in the shabby glow that says alive.

Haunted/Hunted

It's obvious: the whole
world is haunted. Consider
the disasters and broken
spaces, how inside we're
all broken up, a soup
of bits like plastics
in the ocean currents. Nothing
is really solid, is really
whole. We're what coheres, what
we create. It's how
we care that matters.
No life truly disappears:
we gather and relate, mark
edges and measure holes.
We've traveled through all
this time, all these years.
We're what accumulates.
We're them. Over and over again.

New Year

The days are not the same though

they feel that way. It is how I seem:

see-through, like a gun can trace

a line, a way to see. Seam from eye

to wheel, to a thread that frays

and turns to ink. Edge of a hole

where a paw marks the edge

of our map. A chart of stars

for a fur bird to make a course

through blue, black -- all the hues

we love to lack. Our lack is a fence

the same shade as grass. As glass

finds an eye, the mass of fur we track

comes blue and soft to us, in scraps.