River of Play

A Momentary Silence

D and I are heading out later today to go to her mom's graduation from nursing school. So. Away from the laptop for a couple days.

Before I go, I thought I'd meditate on an amusing little thing. I bought a puzzle/adventure computer game a week or so ago. Rhem 2. The graphics are nice, but not up to, say, Myst. Plus, the whole thing takes place in a tunnel, so no big landscapes. It's a little disappointing, and the puzzles seem mostly to do with math (three equations to solve, lots of ratios to work out) and not y'know puzzling things out.

Here's where I get into a geek mode reserved for graduate students: I also found a new database/notepad application. I spent more time working on how that program worked than I did playing the game. . . And I had more fun doing it.

I'll leave with a poem (which I hope I haven't posted already) (and it's an early draft):

My experience is that you can find any game
when you drive around with your brother
stopping whenever you can for yard sales.
Take the glossy box. Shake it. I don’t know
what’s inside. Perhaps a cat or small demon.
Inside this box is a key. We could stand here
in this short person’s driveway in the wind
and hold this key. Or we could make up stories
about the key and how to use it.
Whatever we decide, the key is cheap
and you decide to take the box and the key home.

Unfold the board. There are dice in a plastic cup
as well as the key. You can rattle them, make
a satisfying noise, or pour them into your mouth.
They are sticky, and taste of salt and sugar
in almost equal amounts. The key sits in the middle
of the board, surrounded mostly by us,
and it points toward a wall with a door.
I can never remember what space the door opens onto.
Describe it to me in as many words as you can.
In as few. Speak up. Now is not the time to mumble.

The rules you keep chanting to me
go to a different game. I see no cards with witches,
no spare tires, no payday. One piece is a shot glass,
another is a tall gear, this one a knife. These game pieces
feel slick, like mercury when it came in thermometers.
No thermometer is included among these maps.
Take the key in your palm and close your fingers
around it. Does your hand smell like metal yet?
Close your eyes and imagine what this key opens.
Move ahead two spaces if anyone else agrees.

Under the Influence of Darwin

The Darwinian lit people have me thinking about family a bit. So here's a poem. Or a draft of a poem. Or something that feels like the fine old toys of poetry when I read it.

I want to tell you about the only time
I saw my father’s penis
as I held my eight year old flesh
and waited for my turn at the urinal.

What other things can you not talk about?

For him, there is only singing, a fine tenor.
Church choir after church choir.
Sunday nights, sometimes Wednesdays.
My brother and I would stay with family.

Did I mention he was a pastor’s kid?

Back from Vietnam in one piece.
Early twenties, wife and kid, always guilt
about rent, car maintenance, fad diets,
Thanksgiving calls from creditors.

And what is the body and name?

We have the same three names,
the whiskerless neck and jaws.
You cannot shock us with stories
of anal sex or heroin, though people try.

Should I take up the topic of rage?

I will never have his defoliant dreams
or children while young. He’ll never know
the boar god, Eng, or hallucinogens.
We carry our cocks, shave past the bald spots.

Lifestyle Update. . . and Poetry

D and I have been very social the last two nights. First, Mathias and his delightful companion--who now works a block from out apartment--came over for a taste of fire on food. It was Ashley's first experience with A. Bison meat, and B. sweet potatoes. We drank dark beers, dry rose, and 16 year old scotch. We talked about pretty much anything that came into our heads. But not, as Mathias notes, a lot of poetry.

Last night, we went over to Whitney "The Fabulous" Douglas' apartment for Mexican-inspired casserole. And a very tasty dessert of a dark orange/chocolate topping on vanilla ice cream. There was also some lovely strolling around the neighborhood and meeting various pets.

Today: house task fun. Gardening. And some biking. For now, a poem. . . in process.

Good Luck with That

The world starts with a drop into the right leg,
hands and left leg rise out of the rec center
fall out of your mother straight into the air,
a mat woven out of agriculture and math,
dogs, grains on a chess board, salt flats.

I’m as unstable as a cephalopod, exchanging
water and ions, nipple to mouth we begin,
one body’s edge pressed against the other
pulling, and we always forget but she never will,
the equation of need that you will never balance.

Stand there a while. This is wind against the body.
This is sexual arousal and then need.
What is the cause and purpose? Why nipples?
Wind at the beach carries minerals—salt, sand,
the piss, shit and the decay of squid, octopi, kelp.

Tell other stories and grander narratives
stories about your own attempts at conception,
schools you attended, drugs you took, sex and sex.
You have painted the bellies of frogs
and you are the universe talking to itself.

Poem? Forecast Cloudy

Here's a recent piece. Not quite done yet, but it amuses me at the moment.

Every cloud except the towering cumulonimbus
is flirty and inconstant. Watch them drift.
Lie down in a warm field with a blanket
or jacket. Have some wine with you
or coffee in a thermos or the memories of childhood
when your parents sent you out with a hoe,
a bike or a kite. All are good.

Imagine the clouds are young gods without responsibilities.
They have blown themselves here for amusement.
In one game, they surround airplanes
so that children will cry when they can’t see.
They long ago gave up on birds and their navigation
but they still like to chill cardinals that fly too high.
Cirrus, cumulus, stratus: they each play fair.

You really should pour yourself another glass
watch the clouds play chase and do impressions
that are poor because they are so far above rabbits,
ducks, dogs. Genitalia is almost always invisible to them.
The moon comes to color the clouds like old platinum
and the insects’ sounds change. Fires appear.
The field breathes cool moisture over you,
so pick up your blanket, walk down from the sky.

Silly Human, Brains Are for Sex

At least, that's what I'm getting from the squirrels this morning. Poor girl-squirrel. The one in the backyard today had four boys chasing her. She did not seem happy about this, not that I know much squirrel-ese or squirrel psychology. I did notice that they paid a lot less attention to their surroundings when they were trying to hump. They were mad for action, I tell you, mad!

And then here's a poem:

Every Board Is Like a Race

I’ve stuffed my childhood games deep in a closet,
the cartoon characters on the covers like mayflies,
dead and gone and unremembered, their only afterlife

these rumpus room diversions. Collect a card,
count pips on the dice, move ahead faster
than friends or cousins, yell at each other

until a mother brings colas, chips, the delight
of frozen pizzas on paper plates. Any game
like any other, losing a turn to a snake

or Pipsissewa makes no difference except to a child.
If the board could disappear—leave us stretched on the floor
with snacks, the smell of our hair, all of us chattering

about the taste of chalk after beating erasers clean—
how long would it be before any of us noticed it was gone,
that we were still ourselves, and that we had to go on.

Games People Play

I find myself in conversations about games. . . And then I lose all sense of self

Let's try that again. I get into conversations about games and I lurk in places where those conversations take place. Take, for example, Penny Arcade. A month or so ago, I was talking with a friend about a conversation over at PA about their interest in games with storylines and that a game with awkward play but a great story would always keep their attention. This was probably Tycho, not Gabe. My friend and I discussed the narrative nature of some games; in many cases, this narrative is a metanarrative. The story of a game of CandyLand or Uncle Wiggly might not be nearly as interesting as how the kids behaved while playing. A game like Arkham Horror has a lot of storyline built in. We also talked about games like Myst and its ilk. A category I hadn't though of were games like The Sims or Spore. Here, you build a narrative--in many ways, literally. The fun comes from a kind of writing. Now, the PA dudes--or one of them--thought that Spore looked more like a great way to craft a game, but isn't a game itself. It seems that Spore and others have found a particular kind of play that pushes away from conventional gaming structures, at least as far as gamers go--but maybe not the game theorists.

Bonus: A Poem!

The Game of Living Shapes

Rachel and I argue symbology,
our fight like Go which, instead of aggression,
requires the simple kindness of cooperation to succeed
like a conversation on a porch late at night. Students,

drunk and stumbling, play mating games,
ritual choreography sustaining the old traditions.
Rachel and I sunk in our chairs discussing
ways to deal with symbols when writing books. Hoots

from the larger darkness are not the local owls
but the drunks. Dana had poured dark wine for us all night,
but, smarter than we are, she didn’t stay to argue
about issues that were not black and white, like Go stones,

about whether or not there are good ways for characters,
past midnight with the porch light off, not to attract
bugs. Or students, who are also drawn to such things.
And to moons. Now there’s a symbol that’s hard to resist

and we replay the day we met, how the woman
who’d just divorced me never wanted to share.
Rachel’s hair, newly blond, glows without light and I
finally have the chance to grow mine out again,

and I tell her I’m going to be Jesus. She rolls her eyes,
calls me a hippie, then winks. I can smell something,
maybe honeysuckle, maybe Rachel. She says she can
hear my breathing. We define our territory

with a couple of weak rhododendron bushes
a porch rail painted white at least one
hundred times. Cars stream down the mountain,
through the intersection two doors down

and I keep bringing up writers Hesse and Eco
which Rachel says sounds a lot like Narcissus and Echo
but isn’t. She says that she hadn’t read either novelist.
I say I haven’t read many bestselling books

so we sit in the dark, drinking warm red wine
as the students swarm after their pheromones,
Dana dreams I’ll come to bed sometime,
and I struggle to explain why I like to play Go.

Poetry and Art

Just as I finished Quipu, A.E. Stallings' Hapax showed up. It'll be a very different experience--and not a book I'll use for my lists--but I'm looking forward to reading it.

Crafty Green Poet (which see at left) has an ekphrastic poem up, so I thought I'd put one up as well.

The Art of Narrative in Painting

You can easily imagine them hanging out, really,
the one boy with the horse’s head, the other
has the whole trunk, ears and small tusks
of an elephant. What’s most alive is not the finding,
no, the world bursts into color when
they’ve opened the box of Dad’s hidden videos
and flipped through the glossy magazines.

Who could do these things?

Everything goes back into the box,
back onto the shelf before the elephant boy’s folks
come back from their vague errand. Horse boy
steals one of the videos a week later.
He doesn’t tell his friend, and the dad has so many
it’s never missed. Another week or so
and elephant boy is alone without his friend.

How could anyone not watch?

There’s a scene in one, a woman with a bird’s head
chats with a honey-bear headed man. They sip martinis,
talk awkwardly. She doesn’t seem to wear a bra,
but later, after the important scene, she’s fitting one on
as the bear man lounges, hands under head, sated.
Proud. Her face is away from the camera
and elephant boy is uneasy even as he continues to watch.

What does the moment mean?

You never ask yourself these questions,
and neither does he. I remember asking once,
when Beth and I found her dad’s Playboys,
and I felt my heartbeat shift, my hips displace,
but the world remained itself. Horse boy must wait
for his simple future: the world of fathers, the practice
of shared domesticity, the search for hiding places.

Final point: the "13 Torso Methods" are usually taken from Wu Yu Hsiang's treatise on taiji.

Looking for. . . Stuff in all the Wrong Places

We're off to do the summer farmer's market in town. We'll see if it's any better this year. I have my doubts.

After that, we're into a, yes, car to find a couple of national wildlife refuges up the road about an hour or so. I will of course report back. So until then, a very silly villanelle:

Early Research

At 14, Gundy and I would sneak into Spencer’s forbidden space
to learn mysteries from art and games we barely understood.
We were careful. To be caught there would mean disgrace.

In the musk of cheap incense, looked over by Ace
Frehley on a velvet poster, we wandered past goods
that we could never take out of this forbidden space.

Boxes promised rules to get players shitfaced
with each roll. Or, better for us, get everyone nude.
Would our parents play these games? Risk disgrace?

We were sure ours were too uptight. Certainly the case
with mine, good Evangelicals. But I never withstood
my curiosity, the occult world of Spencer’s forbidden space,

the playing cards with naked women on the face,
the edible underwear, so many breasts that leaving would
be impossible. Caught in that state would be a disgrace.

To relax, I’d look at lava lamps, black lights and pace
between the headshop and softcore porn. Life was good
when Gundy and I would go to Spencer’s forbidden space
to see another adult world, risk parental anger and disgrace.

Hopefully, we'll make it back in time for the Clean Parts Reading Series (see Lovely Arc and Starlings at left),

Final Finalist

I don't have much of a post today. I've been scrubbing the house in anticipation of D's class coming for snacks tonight. Jake the Vampire Cat is stretched out awkwardly on my lap demanding attention and warmth. It's a lovely day, cloudy, cool and still very green. I'm starting to begin to relax. I'm excited to get the bikes out and cleaned and start out into the parks and countryside. Also, in the next couple of weeks I'll start in on my booklist. I'll be using this space to help me think about those text--ecopoetics, ecocriticism and poetry--as well as poems in response to my responses.

Here's the last of the prize-winning poems. I'm not happy with the end, but it'll do for now:

Three Women in the Bookstore Café

The daughter, thick and doughy, perfect
in her English and Spanish speaks
into the pink detailed cell phone.
I understand vive and Wisconsin.

Pointing at her big plastic cup,
the daughter says, “Frappachino.”
Grandma nods, though I doubt
it’s a drink from the Chihuahua Desert.

Grandma’s front teeth are ruined, dead,
but still in her head. She laughs, leans
to both daughter and granddaughter;
her hair’s not grey yet—maybe dyed—

and she only speaks her mother’s tongue.
Granddaughter colors a shiny Barbie ABC book
with erasable pens, and it’s clear to me
that this is what my father’s family did,

German crackling up from their throats,
practicing Native American place names:
Iowa, Minnesota. Until my family,
like these happy people, found their way
and became the people surrounding them.

Almost (with Cats)

I've got seven student portolios left to grade. Then I go to return them between three and five. Then, beers with the pocopo class. D still has loads to do. Whoever did this to her. . . the bastards.

It's not worthy of Christopher Smart, but it's fun, I think:

My Cat Answers the Question: “Why Are You Standing in the Doorway?”

I am exploring liminal spaces.
A threshold. You will see me at night,
gazing into the lamps—Suddenly!
The moth! A flurry of paws, claws, a fury
that leaves me. . .
melancholic.

So I rest with the moth
between my lips and sharp teeth
and feel the rustling,
the edge of its existence.
I am sad for a moment, and then savor
the power of my closing jaws.

Did not Schrödinger write
of such suspended moments?
Hamlet should have embraced
his moment and understood
that collapsing or not
is not the question. The crumpled paper
of the ruined poem is always
both toy and not. Is the art finished?
That smell from the box…
stench? Or vital information
about my intake of moths and spiders?

But we digress.
I have limned liminality enough.
When I pose in the dappled sun,
stretched muscles rippling
along the sill of the window, remember:
I am exploring, so deeply my eyes creep shut,
the spaces between one state and another.