The Next Morning

No photo today.

The helicopters are circling, have been circling since yesterday afternoon when a peaceful protest turned into an afternoon, evening, night of violence and looting in my neighborhood and in downtown Los Angeles. It was deafening. I can only write what I know and what I feel. I refuse to dwell on the looting but will sit with the churning in my stomach, shooting out my fingertips. The questions. All of our blind grappling in the darkness as if answers will come. I've argued with my own mother. Carl saw a bear yesterday somewhere and I haven't had the chance or even desire to ask him where. I set up a bird bath in my front garden, powered by the sun. Powered by the sun. I keep thinking of the Wallace Stevens' poem Gubbinal, its simplicity and paradox. How tempting it is to despair. The world is ugly and the people are sad. The body. The sun. The imagination. How to inhabit the body, the individual body and the collective body. Everyone was peaceful until the cops showed up, my son reported. Showing up. Riot gear. Helicopters, their blades slicing through air. I watched a video sent to me by a neighbor of a group of young people, black and white, bashing their way into a luxury store at a local mall. Do I care about a mall? Do I care about a luxury store? Do I understand the motivations? Will I condemn them as senseless? I felt afraid and not for my body, my white body nor, even, for the white bodies of my children or the black body of my love. There's a strangeness and goodness in just feeling something, not thinking about it, and I felt afraid. Cooped up for months. Twenty percent unemployment. National Guard soldiers standing outside a marijuana store called Med Men. Jewish synagogues and schools and small stores defaced and looted. People sweeping, sweeping it up. What it looks like to step through glass buckled and shattered, your skinny white legs and bleached blonde hair, your sleeveless arms clutching a large leather handbag, a blurry computer. Do not share the faces of the protestors, the young people admonish. The strangeness of it. Yet, shouldn't this be so? There's a timeline that leads to this moment and the urge to contextualize. The timeline begins centuries ago.

I'm thinking of Armaud Arbery running through the streets of his Georgia town, chased like an animal and gunned down, slaughtered by vigilantes who were free for months. 

There should not be an etiquette for people's responses.

Earlier in the afternoon, a billionaire launched a bunch of astronauts into the empty airless space over a world choking to death in a pandemic as hordes gathered in the streets to protest the slaughter of a black man who could not breathe under the knee of a white man. That is everything.

My Response to Everything Concerning Everything (that strange flower)

Sunset at Allison's
Twin Peaks, CA July 2019

is poetry, and it's not what I write but what I want to read, words floating up or by like fish in my mind. Wallace Stevens comes to mind complacencies of the peignoir.

In the span of let's say five minutes I scanned just scanned words strung together (scan, scroll, read?) Mitch McConnell Mitch Moscow his voice a drone the rap something about something and then a star not of the sky (the stars' wrapping) but of rap his radiance in Sweden who threw a guy across a street which I believe is assault (the Swedes say) but whom POSPOTUS wants out (of Swedish jail) encouraged by the Kardashian paper doll who put on clothes that her husband ordered up designed that covered her famous breasts and ass and fly waist and Cinderella feet so that she could pose with the men in orange, most recently, take a selfie and

S
T
A
N
D

U
P for justice reform and Ikea be boycotted (Ikea being Danish not Swedish but who cares but meatballs and lingonberries and soft-serve cones) and wait, who do we support here? 

remember: five minutes (maybe ten including the footage of the blue-eyed Eilish)

they ended with Meghan Markle editing British Vogue and insisting on freckles and then the photo of the boy standing in grass his thin-lipped sweetness smile shot dead at a garlic festival by another angry white man with a gun.

Precious child.

Another one (or two) added to the piles of dead children.


I've stood in a sunflower field with my sons in Gilroy.

















There's humor in befuddlement or is it wry or rue?





Here's the poem.


Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed —
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

Wallace Stevens



I think we (you) suffer from an intellectual laziness, a lack of imagination.


Like Stevens' also wrote:

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles. 

On another note, I am learning about pleasure.

(and no, I am not going mad but rather writing and wrestling with words)

Post Ferguson Gubbinal

The helicopters circled for what seemed like hours, and I texted back and forth with my sister in St. Louis, with a friend in Oakland and one in New York. Henry sounded despairing as people his age can sound when they'd rather shove it all under the rug of dumb. This country is dumb, he said. I hate this country. He threw his lacrosse ball up against the house, caught it and threw it again and again. Oliver mused on the cop's fate. I bet he wishes he were in jail, he said. The boys argued over whether the helicopters were news or LAPD. There's a Little Caeser's burnt to the ground! Oliver yelled from the living room. Later, There's people lying in the middle of the intersection of La Brea and Wilshire, Mom, Henry reported.

Wallace Stevens' refrain from Gubbinal won't ease up in my own head, the poem's melding of imagination and possibility (that strange flower, that tuft of jungle feathers) with our half-baked perceptions (the world is ugly, the people are sad).

Run to the hills with your poetry.


Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
and the people are sad.

Wallace Stevens

Low Country Questions

When we were children, my sister and I would ask one another the impossible question: If you had to, who would you kill? Mom or Dad? Neither! we'd scream, Neither!

If someone asked you whether you'd kill a terrorist who threatened your children (popped an olive in his mouth, an unsalted nut), what would you say (as you pull the plump mussel out of the lemon broth)? If  you toss and turn in bed all night, will those precious hours after sunrise seem heavy or deep and restful? Is the pen really mightier than the sword? Is your child's life worth more than mine? Is that child's life worth more than that one's? Or that one's? Would you send others to do your killing or would you hold them back and do it yourself?

Is Gubbinal about imagination and illusion or is there a world at all external to it?

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly
The people are sad.

That tuft of animal feathers.
That animal eye
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire.
That seed.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly.
The people are sad. 

Wallace Stevens