Departure

Off to see War of the Worlds. So excited!

Poem 11

Her hair, that of a purling wave,
argued for a miner's wages,
contended with bleak preachers,
presented utopian programs.

Her waist, that of a bust of Homer,
dreamed of butterflies, thin branches,
mocked my Blackberry dialogues,
laughed all the way to sunset.

Her cheeks, her butt, her absent eyebrow,
diminished by distance, swollen by silence.

Woodpeckers

Small, lovely, working in vain on the bamboo poles my vines twine around.

Poem 10

You belabored me with your tale of nine cats,
Your imperfect night visions, Indian hymns.
The day opened like laundry on the line,
A stack of white plates, Moroccan courtyards.
When we were older, the country seemed uncertain,
Restless, a place to find open windows and song.

We wisely wrote a never bettered treatise,
The Art of War for Dummies, prefaced by Mercutio.
And when royalties piled up, we smelled a skunk,
Undid the ballast, and up we swung.

Poem 9

Why am I built so? Why such fair skin,
Fine hair, long limbs? I am no bonobo.

Spitting

"Put the right amount of wine in your mouth, between one-quarter and one-half ounce. Once you have tasted the wine and are ready to expel it, pucker your lips, tighten your cheeks, and press your tongue up against your top teeth, broadening the tongue so that it extends past the molars on each side. This pools the wine between the top of your tongue and the roof of your mouth. The key is muscle control and force." (adapted from an article in Slate)

Poem 8

Clouds not quite fog, a curfew ignored by japing seals
And heeded by the poppies, which purse their bells
Encrimsoning the dim field. A poking curlew queries
The sand with a bill like a blind woman's stick
Jabbing the exclusive truth of what yields.

Your afternoon sighs, weary of sunlight, flowers,
Exhausting the season of light,
Refusing me words and the ready communion
Of wordlessness.

My poles, my beans

A second tripod went up this morning and already mild young bean vines are yearning for its legs.

The hills of the island

We heard an explosion at noon. We passed through clouds of butterflies. We ate on the ground, bread and cherries and olives. We made the kite emblazoned with a tiger's face go up only so far, then sink down, over and over.

Poem 7

Like any other day but
for the piano, the way she
moved her hair out of the way of
the music.

Poem 6

The scent of pianoforte
not pounded
not played
but tended to,
cared for,
embraced.

Poem 5

In the other room, somewhere,
sounds of a scuffle, or John Cage
attacking a piano. I thought of
Montana, your Syriac brow,
as the music blistered and swelled.

Poem 4

The piano in the other room
playing "Montana" eternally
reminded me of dancing
on the beach in India
sacred cowries round my neck

Poem 3

The hoary skunk died at the crossing
Slow moving, indolent thing
Never in a hurry, royalty and royally culled.
Its spirit fled (slowly)
Leaving on the air a reminder
(slipped through my open window)
Things live among us that are ever wild.

Because both books have characters who burst into flames

Did the author of The Trial read Bleak House?

Poem 2

In disarray, the leaves of humdrum Thursday
white and green, blistered red, gathering
sun and sorting shade. We walk together
through high arches, pausing where the tide sends tendrils of morning
and saying hello
saying hello.
Hello.

Poem

Correct me when I err
And when I bait a porpentine.
Defend me should she coat her
Glad rag aviator gloves with turpentine.
Perfect me, o horde of losts, for I am
But a sham, lost, guilt-burst bibber,
Persuadable as the wand'ring Yellow River.

Noodles

I boiled linguine. I let it cook well past al dente. Did I regret it? No! For the first time in decades I cooked pasta until it was soft. I dressed it with tomato sauce. It was so deeply satisfying. I adore soft noodles. Don't tell a soul.

Wild Grass apology

Not Zhu Rongji, silly me, Hu Jintao. Hu's on first.

The Whistler

I'm reading a good little book on LW (or, as I like to call him, The Whistler) by A. C. Grayling. It's apparent that Wittgenstein, who never read much philosophy, was a philistine intent on marching along his own philistine road that he believed would solve every philosophical question ever invented, but all his language games are quite silly. He appeals to teenagers and those with a sort of arrested philosophical development because he appears to be such an outsider (well, he was an outsider) and radical, but I prefer those thinkers who work from a deep understanding of the tradition to those (like Roberto Calasso) who just want to trash it.

Him and his car

My car's my best friend. My office. My home. My location. I have a very intimate sense when I am in a car with someone next to me. We're in the most comfortable seats because we're not facing each other, but sitting side by side. We don't look at each other, but instead do so only when we want to. We're allowed to look around without appearing rude. We have a big screen in front of us and side views. Silence doesn't seem heavy or difficult. Nobody serves anybody. And many other aspects. One most important thing is that it transports us from one place to another.

Gold panners

For two days, the obscene and racist players "orientation" video shot by Forty-Niners public relations director Kirk Reynolds was a front page story in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's also captured the attention of the Bay Area Chinese community: the Sing Tao Daily (Xingdao ribao, at www.singtaousa.com) ran a front page story yesterday on the video, focusing on the scenes that ostensibly show San Francisco's mayor (played by Reynolds) quizzing a Chinese American in San Francisco's Chinatown (the part is played by a Korean American employee of the Forty-Niners who has opened eleven martial arts schools in California) about a Chinese newspaper report on the football team. Sing Tao Daily published stills of the scene, which show Reynolds speaking with a man with grotesque buckteeth, a baseball cap, and a goofy smile. According to an inset piece entitled "Materials Like This, Training Like This" (Ruci cailiao, ruci xunlian), the Chinese character speaks with a heavy accent and makes a series of inadvertently humorous statements: the whole bit relies on tired racist jokes about Charlie Chan-style English. Comments like "[Forty-Niners quarterback] Tim Rattay doesn't practice with his teammates, so most of the time he plays with himself" and "The Forty-Niners are very patriotic, support the president . . . support the erection of George W. Bush" give some idea of how inane this scene is and why the Chinese community might react angrily to the news. (Please note that all text in the Sing Tao Daily is in Chinese, so my translation is unlikely to represent an accurate record of the video dialogue.)

Jesus Christ

What if Jesus was the hunky hero of a bodice ripper? The heroine's name is Artemissy Crownshadow: she has graduated from serving as domestic servant to a cereal magnate to running a small green political campaign consultancy. Jesus is the illegitimate son of a Cuban sweatshop zipper stitcher, has nice eyes, raises people from the dead. They meet in the desert.

Matua Valley Paretai Sauvignon Blanc 2004

Wonderful wine! Powerful, hugely aromatic, quite reminiscent of Seresin. I bought mine at San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant for US$19.

for readers of Ian Johnson's Wild Grass

Bad news. Mure Dickie reports in today's Financial Times that "A Chinese court has refused to hear a landmark lawsuit by hundreds of private investors whose oil wells were seized by the state and police have detained their lawyer." This is also bad news for all of those ambitious young Chinese women and men who have enrolled in Chinese law schools in the expectation that the growing rule of law will fill their pockets with renminbi.

While Vladimir Putin puts the dukes of Russian oil behind bars, Zhu Rongji sees to it that no one in China rises to a dukedom.