Beginning. We were a flourish. A family who flourished. Mostly. Until the great becoming. That was my part. Everything else was not a mess. Not until a few years later. But by then things had cracked opened. For us. We were a flourishing family. Everyone except for me. I was so consumed by the fact that the veneer was about to lift. Parents have so many expectations. And siblings too, but not nearly as much. The veneer was about to lift one way or another. Even if I weasn't around to witness it. Especially if I didn't tell anyone where I was going. Or how I planned to arrive there. Or not arrive. There would have been no arrival. Only a passing. And the thin veil which covered us for so many years was not going be a bridal veil. That would come much, much later. I could tell that story but I try not dwell on current events. Not knowing their significance. That particular story is simply not allowed to be told yet.

As a family, we have always reserved the right to withhold information from outsiders. From each other. My father began many sentences, "I haven't told your mother yet---" but he certainly meant well. It was for protection. It was to reduce anxiety. He would be eating peanuts from a porcelain bowl. He chewed awkwardly, a result of dental work from years back. He had formed habits during that time, that he should be careful about the manner in which he ate certain foods. Peanuts were at the top of the list. As he chewed, carefully, he would begin to divulge the top secret information, classified until further notice. Usually, it entailed a business trip, upcoming. He withheld the information in order to be sensitive to my mother's fear of being alone. In an empty house. With large bay windows. Which overlooked a large pond where alligators could live. With only the knowledge of a floor plan. The garage door couldn't open fast enough. With a fear that crept when she watched suspenseful movies, television. Her television nightmares. Her striking my father in her sleep. Her dangerous dreams. So he told her nothing until it was too late. The flights were booked. The itineraries printed. They were in bold, like decrees. She would make clucking noises, she would pull back her lower lip. If that's how it had to be, what further could she protest. So he ate his peanuts. He watched sports. Espn. Mad Money on MSNBC, the thick-headed bald men with the power ties and New York facial tics. The swagger of men who loved to talk about the power of stocks, the movement of the ticker. The Kabbalah of monetary destiny.

I decided that everyday should be a day of new birth, every season a respresentation of the cycle of life and death... here there is both living and dying.... being born into the world like new sprouts of leaves thirsty for the water and sunshine that showers upon this earth, and there is the withering away of the trees and the grass in fall to remind us that everything must perish... this universe it doesn't immaculately care... but there will always be the promise of a new beginning, a radiance unforseen when all seems to have been laid to waste. It's never too late to begin your life again. Sometimes you have laid a good foundation for it, but it begins in the morning when you get up and crawl out of bed like the Leo Kottke song. And just like Curly said in the Money Pit, if the foundation is good then everything else can be fixed. Good days and many blessings to all our fellow travellers out there, today's a good day to be human, that's the least we can expect and the greatest we could have hoped for.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world... is what you share with someone else when you're uncool. -Lester Bangs, Almost Famous

Just remember what old Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says, "Give me your best shot. I can take it." -Jack Burton, Big Trouble in Little China

I go back to this poem time & time again, one of the most beautiful prayers I've ever seen anyone write that didn't get canonized. People should make laminated bookmarks or frame pictures of it. Naturally number one stands out in my mind, and could pretty much stand alone by itself,
John Berryman:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178869

We went to see Regina Spektor last night at Sokol and I would have to say the crowd was unruly. I joked with a girl in the audience about how I could very easily bulldoze my way to the front, since most of the crowd were females. Females with drunk boyfriends lurking toward the back near the bar. I don't think I really noticed any of this at first because I was really apprehensive about seeing her perform, but somewhere in the middle of probably her fourth or fifth song she asked the audience if they could keep it down, "I'm not lip syncing you know." I think she was right to ask that to some extent, as she is not the type of artist that you can just sort of listen to while you're catching up on Sports Center highlights... not in the least. Sokol always seems perfect for shows like hers because of the intimate vibe that comes from being in that old building, with its long history of elegant music acts. It was no different for her if people would have been able to get over themselves and their obvious self-absorption. The woman sits down and begins playing the piano as if she were just messing around in her parlor. She flitters out sweet melodies from the stage and bats her eyelashes, sometimes, as Brooke pointed out to me, having her eyes lightly shut as she plays each note and sings each lift and octave... I was familiar with a few of her songs but not all, so I could keep the objectivity I needed to truly appreciate that here was talent, here was a presence that pulled us all in. Just focusing on the lyrics, I'd here lines that rang with a graceful truth... then on a few songs, I'd find her telling kitschy (her own oft-used word) and sometimes gentle stories no doubt about personalities or situations she had known throughout her still short life. Graceful was how I would describe her if I had to use only a word. Full of gentle lightness and being, radiating out from that tender muscle that seems to beam from her ribcage is the closest sentence I could use to frame her essence...

I want to sing to you my love
My only love and happiness
Don't be so blue so blue my love
This too shall pass this too shall pass

But tell me, what have I done to deserve you?
Must have done something cause that's how it works
Must have been kind to kittens and birds,
In a previous life must have thought happy thoughts...

I found myself with tears of joy, leaping inside when she would work out a refrain, how she had found those phrases which it seems so many solid songwriters are able to bracket as the words they most want to be remembered by... word they long to fill the air with.

I couldn't help it, thinking that here is a new shining star, coming from somewhere East, I know that part of her descent is Russian/ Eastern European and that this woman has the power to influence another age if she chooses, endless troupes of lovestruck teenagers or twenty-somethings, idealists yearning for love or the capacity or the wherewithal to understand or care about love... for me, I watched my own lover's expressions intermittently throughout the show, watched as she perked up at certain songs, mumbled the words to others, expressed joy, sorrow, wonder, hope, love. The last of all being the greatest. The greatest of all being love.

And with that I leave you with some thoughts to share, courtesy of Miss Regina Spektor,

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
Told me I was beautiful and
Came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light
And he told me that I'd done alright
And kissed me till the morning light
The morning light
And kissed me till the morning light.

Brooke tells me this song reminds her of me,  and ofttimes I haven't the foggiest
idea of what people are seeing.   More and more,  I'm focused on how I'm trying to
live my life to the best of my ability rather than how people see what I do.
But this idea of Samson strikes me this time, as I am a person trying to stand,
trying to be the rock,  and along comes this woman who is so wonderful and complete
and she's Delilah,  al she wants to do is cut my hair to expose the beauty within me,
and to see me pure, as I am,  but if she cuts my hair,  it renders me vulnerable.
I don't know.   Why doe sthe Bible keep coming back to me?  The Old Testament and its
stories.  Sometimes even the New Testamnt, stories about Jesus.  

Napping Father

I remember watching my father sleep
his mouth open, sometimes, during
what for me was apocalypse, great battles
in my mind, and he would flinch sometimes,
open his eyes, that moment of recognition,
then fade, surrender back into sleep again.

I would think this great man has lived
a hundred years through me, and has whittled
it all down to how or if you can sleep through anything,
despite all the tragedy or infirmity, that though
it be fitful, you must sleep, you must give that to yourself
in order to carry on with the rest of our nonsense.

But for me, I would be nerves on the outside of my skin,
and there is this pillar, the strength of all the world,
and if you asked him, he'd laugh, maybe roll his eyes,
which would tell you it wasn't really like that, that the sleep
was really something like exhaustion, it was about surrender
by default because you can't raise your fists to the world everyday.

when the real comfort is in knowing that
all things are in order for a man, no matter what this world
gives us, no matter where we're punched, that you live
with the choices you've make, and you protect them,
if only by trusting that someone you love can watch
you fall asleep and feel like the world isn't ending,
that it's okay to sleep in this place he's made for you.

"it's interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town you were born. it's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, hiw you have tostand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. it is rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain." -Donald Miller, from Through Painted Deserts


But Love makes us do things that defy reason, it can really set us through the wheel, it can make us want to do things we would have no account for in doing... why would you want to deprive yourself of the chance to be happy? Is because of the need to fight, regardless. Void of anything you ask or beg of anyone else, or whether your wishes are granted, there is still that need to fight. Because it's in your nature. Resisting the dying of the light. But the fight alone proves that we have not given up on our ideals. Fighting alone can prove the you still very much want to devour all that now occurs.

links for eliza griswold's poems whom I read and was struck by their direct relationship and voice and tone to present circumstances

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/35-23_griswold.html
http://www.versedaily.org/wisdomteeth.shtml
http://www.smallspiralnotebook.com/bookreviews/2007/05/wideawake_field_by_eliza_grisw.shtml
http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=13664

3 October. I began my day with fear. It is my lot. I think there are days when I am spared of that. I am sure I have had those mornings. But I have made much of the practice of talking to it. It's like the grumpy neighbor that you must deal with on the way to the car, on the way to work, before you can get back to the daily business. It is that unnamble thing that I must overcome each day when it elects to appear. Maybe all of us have it because it is our cross to bear in being human. Maybe you have palsy in your right leg, maybe you have a bum hip or a terrible pain in your back. I'm never sure, but knowing that fear is my enemy. A growly grouchy neighbor, growing weeds next door. Drinking beer at six am and talking to his wife at the top of the lungs through the screen. At any rate, I prayed that the fear be removed. I prayed long and hard that the fear be removed and it was. I stood at attention waiting for a power greater than me to grant me some kind of solace... some answer that would allow me to not be gripped by the fear. When I know the hand of that something other has intervened, I know it. I still think of the long windy arguments of Hume, the rebuttals of Russell... but I side with Heidegger, Nishida, Emerson...just less fiery, wanting to be placated by the power of Now.

http://www.poetseers.org/contemporary_poets/poet_laureates/robert_hass/robert_hass_poems/meditations_at_lagunitas/

"For at the precise moment that the residents of the town started to panic, their thoughts were wholly fixed on the ones they longed to meet again. Their egoism of love made them immune to the general distress..." Albert Camus, The Plague.

Before his automobile drove into a tree dashing out his life forever, Camus wrote these lines in the middle of a study of the human experience/catastrophe. That peering insight into the human psyche, that no matter where we are, what we are going through, the thing that can drive us, save us from the pittances of inevitable ruin, is the vestiges of our spirit. Our spirit's capacity to reach out beyond ourselves to those who are "other" to us. The people whom we hold sacred, that no disease, malady or palsy can truly erase. Whether or not that tendency is inherent only in humans seems an unineteresting question, but that fact that it exists seems to be a point of marvel. It seems to me that to Camus and perhaps to people of similar temperament, that love itself, whether it be romantic or platonic really need not matter, can drive the human spirit. That desire to overcome suffering if nothing else to meet the ones we love again at the very least, for one last time, is a profound gift that has been bestowed us.

The Hindus or Buddhists say that this "attachment" is the root all human suffering however, that the sooner we can train our minds to attach less, or to try to root out that desire, that attachment, that therein we will begin to discover the beginnings of happiness. Admittedly, the Hindus and the Buddhists sometimes tend to take the stuffing out of the turkey, metaphorically speaking. They take away all that often inspires us Western folk. How we seek to take all that allows us to feel human and maximize those feelings, emotions, sentiments. Sometimes it's as if the Eastern thinkers have already dismissed that as the langishing on the fat, the very thing which ties us down---petty sentiment for weak-minded fools. And certainly, this can't be so , probably isn;t so. But if you were raised reading Western literature, you're drenched in these ideals, probably laid down by someone like Plutarch or even Shakespeare in his sonnets, that love is a lofty go, love allows us to reach outside ourselves and create connections, while the Buddhists have us questioning whether connections can exist if the self simply does not. And if the self does not exist, then how can connections exist between two identical selves that do not exist... Fiddlesticks. Mu. And sucks to your ass-mar. I refuse to believe that way, even though that sick part of my intellect wants to say, ahh learned much you have if you can this accept. I still side with the Romantics who might say that love of others helps our intellect rise into regions of heavenly thought. Love of others is like that of constant prayer to the divine. And such prayer could only be helpful to the soul... Weak reasoning? Maybe if you are a cold calculating rationalist. And maybe I'm giving up my opinion of rationalists. Let the gloves come off like a prom dress I guess.

writ.
It should be noted that the poem
came before the poet,
somewhere in the public registry.
They should place asterisks, write
in felt-tipped pens, or exchange fiction
for bold-faced, or italicized facts
in encyclopedias, not only to be streamlined
into the philosopher’s endless jabber,
but plain wisdom, like the sand bars,
or the egret or the daffodil, the stalagmite
maybe or your grandmother’s canned
beets, swirling in a sour sauce.
The message, likely, has been in stones,
predating the hieroglyph or the rune,
it has been reinvented with each set sun,
or eroded with the brine & granite.
It has staggered down the cobblestone rows,
black blood scabbed on its lips,
while the maggot preserved it through
the straights of plague, avarice
& brides undeserving of its love, & still
besmirched by the jewels which
might have stained it to gold worth
less than the leather of a pauper.
You that own its veins, never ask
to cauterize your wounds: your blood holds firm,
and you should be awake when
your messenger arrives with the mail,
you should startle at the code of the letters
In its address, the sound of it slipping through
the slot; you should hold all incoming calls.
Draw the blinds, wrap a drape around your bones,
and beat eggs & butter in celebration of its arrival.
Don’t be afraid to wander outside the city walls,
buy horses, the prize, thrifty ones, born to flight,
or a gondola with demons to its bow, a pack of dogs,
Don’t even be afraid to take the tarp to the inlet
off the mainland, forgo the pallbearers,
your disappearance may go unnoticed for weeks,
Maybe you will not need the ferryman,
or warm clothes, sweaters & mysterious cloaks:
go where the message drags you— if you’re lucky
enough you will find her naked & amnesiac,
her breast swelled out for the torso.
Her lips longing for medicine, her wrists
poised for the wrench of your bloodletting.
You will know it as a throng, a hum
through your nerves, like the scorpio unmooned,
Like a sting through your heart,
It will not relent: it will remain with you
through your molting, through the cancer of seasons;
It is rising through you, even as her loins may offend,
You have chosen to love her nonetheless,
because you are greedier than the hotel bill
might suggest, more savage than when the maids
come to clean, when you’ve broken her hips
because she asked you to, you will grab her hair
and flail between her thighs until the lights
explode from the tone of her passion.
It is like that when you have reached her hemisphere.
It is even unlike the sexy mysteries of the moon.
Somehow, you should have known that the message
was speaking to you coming out of the womb,
stretching your mother’s loins, hungry
for the basting of light, the sterling sound of the world,
The angry or curious voices colliding
with the novelty of anything but your own heartbeat;
your message was first heard in that heartbeat,
The same sounds as your body coming into itself,
It was the persuasion that you move into the electricity
of all that breathes, joining the conversation
of so many other voices, as whales, as the sea,
as the lightning, and moons, all dreaming with you,
amid the ceremonies for the dead, the script
of scrolls which will edge you through the nightmare.
The physical terror of walking on your feet,
The stark horror that the mortician will clean the blood
from the flesh of your extinguished skin.
After the rage of your extinguished skin.
There is a theme in the incredible message
that the poem came before the poet is a relief,
like the jolt of an airline, the ambuscade of winter,
like the air raid of sleep, the burn of holy wine,
Like the horizontal of a swan dive, the first cut & scar,
That we overlap with the race of the poem to its death,
that we are the skin & stink of this incredible message,
It is an exchange of breath with that unnamable thing.

This is one I knew I needed to come back to...the memory of the person about whom I wrote this has faded, but the essence of what this poem represents is still fresh today... how fresh it seems now with the is being what it is... even then, the end was always seeming to justify the means... do we give up comfort in to grow with the possibilities of the sometimes messy unknown... I don't know, I've thought always the poem answered that in a way that I found acceptable.

After Coltrane.
I just want to talk about you,
Said Coltrane to this evening,
The same where we have not met
And I am miles down roads
Which you have not seen
Nor heard this same absence
Which neither stars nor jazzmen
Can tell you how to fill.
And how their music stops between
Breaths and taps on the snare
For moments while I write, waiting
And chaos even from their lips
Is sweating and uncertain but carrying
Each crescendo and major lift,
Into sharp valleys where the horns say, move:
Tell her how you talk to her even when
Her sweat and smell can't soak
Your blankets, even when my music
Drifts into your walls after she has whimpered
Through your kisses and you have strained
To feel more like each other, have sought
Out the fallen vibe at the end of the boom
Where the boys all clap and you nod
Your head at their praise; but the back
Stage is lonely when you leave
on the plane next morning and she's not waiting
at the hotel room in a robe or an after
dinner gown with a glass of ice.
Tell her how the cab man can't give
You fare for her place and how you frown
When he pulls up at a club so full of late
Niters, clicking their ice and smiling
Broad out of their wet tongues and you can't
Get the literary crowd to talk about art
And how she pauses when she's seen the light
Tickling off umbrellas, through the leaves;
Off the awnings of the café where you kiss
Her neck and laugh like when you watched
The trains through the windshield, the mist
Forming after you took her heavy among the evergreens
While Cannonball's horns lit up the dash
And the whole gig being apocryphal
Like all endings of meanings are:
The same as forgetting to mention
Just how much you want to talk about her
With the evening, and every stranger reminds you
That they don't know you, they don't know about jazz
Or how you can read the omniscient stars.
I'm sure she's a wonderful girl, the evening said
Uncomfortably and if I were young like you
And knew your girl, I'd put down my books
And papers, and get back to the static of her nearness
I'd forget your homage to miles and jazz
And studying your art of reading the night sky
I'd get back to that place of her first music,
Just to tell her how much you want to talk about her

5.2.2007The funeral for my grandmother was last Wednesday, a week ago, April 25, and what a beautiful experience that was- and quite difficult to justify within the scope of words. My father asked me the morning I arrived in Albany if I would like to say a few words at her funeral mass. I was honored to do so, as herein I had been writing several things in terms of memories and reflections about what she meant to me. How many times she had been present in my life. So it seemed a relatively easy task for me, even if it was not under the circumstances for which I wanted to deliver such lines. But I knew she would have delighted in that. So even waking that morning, I found that I had developed a sore throat where my voice faltered often. That much discouraged me from the task but I still fought that impulse to flee from saying a few words. Even so, the eulogy was not the highlight of the funeral proceedings, but rather the vigil mass and the funeral mass that was said, was in a large attendance. From my aunt and uncle to the entire side of the Piurek family, dozens and dozens of relatives showed up to pay their last respects. I couldn't have been prouder of her at that moment, realizing how much she affected the lives of those around her. That was an honorable tribute to her life. Even the paperboy showed up, or so some of my Dad's friends who would have known her when they were younger as my father's Mom. It's a smaller town than I think we can give it credit for when so many people truly know one another.I had an incredibel time getting reacquainted with "long lost" relatives. In a lot of ways, my family was the pack of long lost relatives. They've been in the surrounding areas the whole time while we were the ones who left.

4.21.07My grandmother passed away early this morning, 3:30 Am from what my father said. I don't know how much I had gotten here but she had been in a Hospice care center since Wednesday, if I'm getting my dates correct. That's one thing that she bestowed on all of us, which might have always been one of the more impressive character traits: she never forgot a birthday or an anniversary. What might have been mistaken as an overvigilance was truly her charm as a human being, whether she wrote down people's birthdays or simply remembered them, though it was probably a mixture of both. She called my father to remind him of such things probably to his ire at times. You couldn't slip one past her, it just didn't happen very often. That was her way of being on the firing line of life, of keeping in touch with the reality around her. What a wonderful thing she had taught me. She continued to send me birthday cards, even up until this last year. I'm now thirty years old. That was the down side of her getting old, probably even to her, the inability to keep up with that. In that way, nature was kind to her, in affording her only a narrow berth of confusion. I am mostly saddened by those thoughts, the idea of her losing track of the time in the nursing home, going to bed in the afternoon because she thought it was nighttime. This from a woman who kept a tight calendar, who wanted to ensure that her bills were paid on time, that she made it to a voting booth on election day, if she could help out a given charity that she thought warranted her cause, she would make sure to give them what she thought she could spare, and by all accounts, she wanted the birthday, Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, Halloween cards, ( god that list she would have had tgo keep a list for that) all of them sent out on time so they would reach us before hand. I'm so grateful that my mother taught me to write thank you notes, however belated. Simply because I learned to send her notes back, to try to update her as best I could on what was happening with me. Some of my life became muddled, unsure, not really wanting to upset or concern or confuse her. There were just things happening to me and facets of my life that I didn't really understand yet. Things that I don't entirely know if I can understand even to this day. I look at her life, and I don't think it was spoiled in the least. My grandmother who cared about the little things, she just wanted you to know that she recognized you, that you were imprtant to her, if no other. If I have any regret in my life, it continues to be my distance from my family, the great barrier that I have left in place unintentionally. Lately, I have been asking if it needed to be there, if it's meant to stay in place. The passing of a truly great person from my life pains me in this way. How I could have been closer, how I wanted to be, so we could all enjoy ourselves as family again, or even just more often than t has been. It's a question I need to work with, to wrestle in the impending days. It just that I will miss her from my life, miss what she represented, that certainty that someone care, had left the light on, that someone would have a card for you at your birthday, that someone would tell you a story before you went to bed, that she remember what kind of desserts you liked, what you liked to drink, who your favortie team was, and on and on, Goodbye Nanny Laura, we hope you finally receive the love you gave this world..4.19.07I'd like to not dwell on the fact that I lost a day of notes that I had written down, because that makes me upset. I don't want to feel upset and I guess most people don't - that I'm not alone in that endeavor. Basically, where the attraction to drugs and drinking came from. Even so, I have had to go with this feeling, and listen to the advice of people who have had more experience with the dying of someone I care about... just in the same fact that that kind of experience gives me the language I need to move forward with the process...it's just been novel trying to sort through the memory of how her life impacted me, how our lives intersected over the years... how joyful she would be to see us, to tell us something that she had learned... all those years of stories about Tracy Schoonmaker, like she was so proud to be a part of our family, of continuing to bear our name. How she would talk to strangers on a plane,

4.16.07It has now been almost one week since we found my grandmother. This is my homage to her. Something I couldn't muster up in my younger years. I don't say that type of thing to beat myself up, just to be honest. Most people can be objective about their teenage years. In that that was what they were. I know that the fire erupted over a pittance, inflexibility, unwillingness to change. I was stubborn when I was young, and that stubbornness has followed me into my later years, but I am getting tired of the fight. Tired of arguing with family members, I don;t care about being right as much anymore. I find myself having that impulse, but there's a lot on which I bank the fact that I have gotten myself into the situation I'm in and perhaps had I heeded warnings earlier, I might have avoided the trouble, and consequently, some of the embarrassment. What was meant to be was meant to be however. Even so, I think today my grandmother would rather keep the past in the past.I couldn't help but think some of the fire & rescue men were angels indeed, shuffling around in her room, puzzled at how a woman my grandmother's age could even have made it as far as she did. She has histories, it seems, and there was no doubt about her needing to go to the emergency room...My grandmother did give you a kiss and a hug. It was gentle, not a big hug or anything like that, mild, but it was sincere, intended. She'd ask you for a hug too from time to time, but now looking back, I'm not sure if she came from a family that often expressed emotions with great comfort. We were Polish through and through, and if I've known anything about Polish families, it might be that they are somewhat reserved. But the love that is shared is deeply felt, in terms of understanding of loved ones, gratitude, honor. At least, that's how I've always read it. Fondness can be read more easily than familial love, but a strong bond does exist between family members. That alone would be interesting to try to study.Nanny Laura is proud of her Polish heritage, through and through. On this last trip, my father told me about how she could speak a little Polish but more than that, understood the language even better. I have a trickle of memory that she might have been able to add a little Polish to conversations with my Aunt Julia, who was from what I know, considerably older than Nanny Laura. This would have been when I was very young though before I was ten. So probably 20-25 years ago. Mostly, I would wonder how much my grandmother would recognize if she could hear someone who spoke in the same patterns as her sisters did. My father said he was unable or did not attempt to trace any of the Puirek lineage in Poland but that it is a high probability that there are distant cousins in some parts of Poland. My uncle Ziggy is the only remaining relative on that side of the family. But there was Julia, Bertha, Elmer (Lefty), Ziggy, Pete, Anne, Eleanore, that I can think of now. It seems strange that I should only now try to compile this kind of family history, which is really my own personal family history, but the truth is, when my father, mother and sister moved to Nebraska in 1988, our visits to New York became less and less. Therefore, our ties to the family got weaker as well, sadly. As time passed, the relatives on that side of the family died as is naturally the case. In addition, once my grandfather Eddie died in 1991, that side of his family would have weakened as well, as we, as children knew them only from afar. My grandmother, Alice, had closest ties to certain sides of her family, a lot of which have also passed on in the last few years. I have realized much too late that those people's lives and experiences are and were the last remnants of the old world from which they came. They were what was left of the unified theory of the world as we know it.They embody a strong family but not one without faults. Not one without divide ir resentment, discontent among members. It seems at times it was enough to keep each from speaking to one another, if only for just a little while.

4.15.07Not much changed between yesterday and today according to my father. Now I'm back on the phone with them, thinking more about it. How my father sometimes leaves things out (on purpose) but maybe also because he doesn't like to give disinformation. I've got to go back to work tomorrow and am realizing how much I don't seem to have been put on this earth for the purpose of working away at a job all day... not when I have these matters of the heart to deal with but then again, I feel like I learned something valuable over this weekend. Was I meant to be there for some reason, so it could tell me something about what I'm made of, literally, because when you watch family memebers go through their own personal battles, it tells you a lot about who you are, where you come from... it seems like my Nanny Laura was criticized for being "sickly" or weak but in reality she was a tough cookie for pain, a tougher woman for illness. She may have had ailments that came but she survived them. And considering what children had to fight in the late 19-teens and twenties and the little availability for medicine, it seems a miracle that they ever survived their childhood. My grandmother was born in 1916. I will always remember that date. My other grandmother is younger but not by much. She was born in 1918. Amazing to think that they have spanned that many decades. And with them goes the memory of the old country. Of this much I am ashamed. That I haven't had more time to write down stories. Not necessarily stories but as much as could be known. Nanny Laura might have forgotten more than I ever remembered about things she told me. She often wanted to let me known what my Papa James, her husband, my grandfather was like. Stories about Papa James, about when we were tiny babies and Papa James would hold us. Her mission in life was to remember, to transmit, and often to bridge the gap between the past and the present. She tried, and sometimes, I am ashamed to admit, I turned off that curiosity, I guarded myself from that kind of nostalgia. Today I yearn for it, I find it fascinating... she is fascinated. I don't know if she'll ever regain that fascination, that wonder, that earnestness of learning new things, forming opinions... her days are no longer young ones. Her heart slower than it used to be, her body losing its immunity to even the slightest infraction. This is how it becomes in the latter years. I have to pray for God's blessing, pray for his peace to come upon her, pray for quiet, for guidance whether it be in continuing on this plain or over into the next... I have to prepare myself for that...to continue no longer as it had been but in a new way...

4.14.07. I'd like to say I've never embarked on family history due to reasons of privacy but that would, in fact, be a lie. Not a cold lie, because any attempt I've had to be authoritative usually ends up with me simply being a bit skittish about revealing facts about my family. I just came home from Florida where my father's mother, my grandmother got suddenly very sick with an onset of pneumonia. When we arrived at the nursing home where she's been staying the last seven or eight months, October 2006, she was running a fever of 103.7, respirations were somewhere in the thirties and her blood pressure was peaking above 200 diastolic... so naturally we grabbed the nurse on duty and had her call the doctor to authorize a trip to the ER for closer examination. Fours hours later, she was admitted to the local hospital, then subsequently sent to the Critical Care Unit for closer monitring... my father thought she would not make it and of course, I wouldn't call her status in the clear yet, but I felt more relieved at whteher or not she would pull through...The hope is and no longer can be live or die, instead what the divine wills it... instead whther they are comfortable, whether she suffers, whether she can have some peace in her final days, however many they may be...

September 20 2007
To be sure, there's been more over the last year but how should one begin but by beginning again. The needle. Dropping the needle. Hearing those first few seconds of crackling vinyl bouncing up and down. Perhaps the greatest sound in the world, along with a mandolin, or a woman sliding out of her underwear. Inremittent moans, sighs, the sound of a congregation saying amen. The wheels of the car go round & round all through the town. I've never left. But I did hink back at some point over the last year and realized that Kesey had once talked about the prevalent importance of experience over the written language that without experience, the power of language becomes hollow. So it has been an experience to draw upon the last year or so. Walking blind.

July 28 2007
The Architect
They say he did not speak the language of people. It was mysterious but soothing to the ear like when you have a lover, trying hard to focus on the meaning, maybe the context but getting wrapped in the revelry of the sounds, the tones, moving up and down, around you. I’ve tried to chronicle as much of this life, as is my calling to bear witness. The haunting it undergoes into the veins of my consciousness, sometimes it dulls into a steady telling of the facts, an oracle in the morning, wet with dew, naked, on the mountain, reflexive. A bending back into the rhythm of what we used to know of as profundity.

January 21 2007
1.
Pax delivers himself from evil, only to plunge head on into snowy traffic. Pax creates a new vestige for anger. This lingering on anger only created an aloneness marked by a new-found sadness. All the people who used to call and inquire no longer doing so. When all else has failed....still you are left with yourself... The question is "what else, what else are you left with?" Could that aloneness ever be truly a vacuum? I remember getting sober back when and thinking about that statement, "nature abhors a vacuum," and immediately, feeling a creeping fear within myself that the black hole which would form within me would likely grow until I was entirely consumed. What a dark, dower thought but still I could not deny that something within me, felt like I was going to starve...

2.
I’ve told myself several times in the last few years
that I can’t write like that, visualizing placing
a ladder against a great white wall, and looking up
at a grand buttress, the planks of a building,
and it’s not that unfamiliar to me what is done
with the brushes, the strokes, the vision, or maybe
just my certainty that the job needs to be done—
that ladder, that raggedy, shaky, paint-splattered
ladder, so flimsy there in space: what if the wind
came in hard from the north while I was up in the eaves,
while I’m being so careful to perform, to patch
the words so you will love them, so you will
wrap your lips around them like the girls who
have loved me, or a popsicle late nights before bed,
or a blanket while you read the last pages of a horror story,
filling in the images we sew in our hearts, and
suddenly, it’s not the wind keeping me from the ladder,
it’s that I’m sleeping on the couch, below the ladder,
my eyes burning & chilling every time I regain
consciousness, how large the ladder looks, how
far apart the steps seem to be, how long the strides,
how many stairs edging their way to eternity—
surely, my breath will run out before the top, or
like sisyphus, I will reach my place, the grand place
of my oratory, of my masterpiece, only to fall
back down, to have return to earth again, only to
feel hope vanish, going down again, back to
the place where I was born, where I seem destined,
to hold a brush with workman’s hands, the kind
who does this work for skill, to eat, etches crude
drawings, dull scrawls on the walls of the world,
who knows not what he thinks, does not dine
in the halls of tradition, is a man without a country,
with destiny, will lean on the earth until gravity
bends him, until he returns to the earth—
what keeps me going back to the ladder is that
the view from the top is as inspiring as the view
from the bottom, that sometimes the ladder
is a catwalk, a bridge between seasons,
a place where I can reflect on where I’ve been
and where I’m headed, through field or stream,
whether the next step I’m considering will plunge
me deep into a rabbit hole, or whether I will
submerge from the forest untouched, and sanctified.
If I chose to write, if I thrust out my view,
I can still decide where to place the ladder,
when and how often I want to carry it with me,
it’s significance, if it indeed exists, or just lingers
as a harrowing or hopeful image in mind.
Whether to lean on the ladder, or stow it in the garage
for safe keeping, a sunny day, when it’s time
to paint the house I’ve been building, regardless,
in spite of myself, and whatever I’ve been fed that morning.

6 Feb 2007
The betrayal was not in the words, but in the omission, a blotting out of names, an interstate, a torrent of names, he was saying though he did not hope to reveal he knew her, or anyone for that matter. I’m watching myself finally do this, sort of recklessly, it is in the phone records. She can read the phone records. She pays the bill and yet, he may need to put an end to such an arrangement, for his own peace of mind, his desire to be purged of all guilt. He loved her, but had fallen out of love, and there was nothing he could do to bring himself back into the fold. When it is done, it is done. So he believed again.

After Coltrane

I just want to talk about you,
Said Coltrane to this evening,
The same where we have not met
And I am miles down roads
Which you have not seen
Nor heard this same absence
Which neither stars nor jazzmen
Can tell you how to fill.
And how their music stops between
Breaths and taps on the snare
For moments while I write, waiting
And chaos even from their lips
Is sweating and uncertain but carrying
Each crescendo and major lift,
Into sharp valleys where john says, move:
Tell her how you talk to her even when
Her sweat and smell can’t soak
Your blankets, even when my music
Drifts into your walls after she has whimpered
Through your kisses and you have strained
To feel more like each other, have sought
Out the fallen vibe at the end of the boom
Where the boys all clap and you nod
Your head at their praise; but the back
Stage is lonely when you leave
on the plane next morning and she’s not waiting
at the hotel room in a robe or an after
dinner gown with a glass of ice.
Tell her how the cab man can’t give
You fare for her place and how you frown
When he pulls up at a club so full of late
Niters, clicking their ice and smiling
Broad out of their wet tongues and you can’t
Get the literary crowd to talk about her art
And how she pauses when she’s seen the light
Tickling off umbrellas, through the leaves;
Off the awnings of the café where you kiss
Her neck and laugh like when you watched
The trains through the windshield, the mist
Forming after you took her heavy among the evergreens
While Cannonball’s horns lit up the dash
And the whole gig being apocryphal
Like all endings of meanings are:
The same as forgetting to mention
Just how much you want to talk about her
With the evening, and every stranger reminds you
That they don’t know you, they don’t know about jazz
Or how you can read the omniscient stars.


I’m sure she’s a wonderful girl, the evening said
Uncomfortably and if I were young like you
And knew your girl, I’d put down my books
And papers, and get back to the static of her nearness
I’d forget your homage to miles and jazz
And studying your art of reading the night sky
I’d get back to that place of her first music,
Just to tell her how much you want to talk about her.

How will it be when I am old & destitute
After the social security well has evaporated
And my back has definitely gone to the tank
And maybe I still have a little old wife stirring about

Will we able to tell each other that we love one another
or will she say it in a kind of montone,
matter-of-fact way as if it were an afterthought;
just another comment about the need for rain.

Will it rain so often that I'll forget what state I live in,
& have to confer with my mail to remember my zip code
How will it be when I so close to the end,
will I sleep with one eye open, afraid to shut them both for eternity.

You know, it can be seen from both sides, maybe
that dying before your time, as the euphemism goes,
might not be so tragic, since certain folks, struck dead
by aneurysms or blood clots, whiskey, do not suffer.

Or maybe they suffer but they did not wake up one day
knowing that this could be their last day, the ill-fated ones,
without disease, and it just happens to them: an accident,
or a freak change in their system, and they drop cold.

But when you have lived a long time, and know that if you
make it up there, seventy, eighty, say, you are cheating
that dark maiden, man, and you know it could come
for you any day. So you can be happy all you want,

You deserve it after all, you are cheating fate, but
maybe also you have this itch in the back of your mind,
a longing, something you didn't notice years ago,
but it's like hey, get it over with, if you're going to do it,

I mean, can't we just know, like a doctor's prognosis, or a
prophecy from some mean witch glass looker:
you will die on June 13 this year, you will be standing
in your parlor, or your garden, at 2 in the afternoon,

You'll look at the sky, it will be ninety-three degrees, unseasonably
warm, and the old ticker will stop for a second, start again,
etc. etc. but you'll be rushed to the hospital, and
within three days, that will be all you have written.

Maybe there's a reason why the gods don't want you to know
all that, to placate your fear, maybe, so I guess I just
want a little heads up, not so I can slack off for the
rest of the days, knowing where I'm headed and who cares,

But just a picture you want to see every so often to make
you grateful for all the good in life, to maybe offset
all the pits & drams too, so maybe some of the junk you
get dealt becomes less murky and honorable or dignified.