Lieu of laude
Mood:  bright
Now Playing: The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg
Topic: Letters to Real People

Dreyfus,

Twaddling Carlo around. I took Charles to the bakery but he couldn't find what he wanted. Marcel soon followed with some talk about what you had gone through and I asked Carlo if he regretted the Z thing.

Circum affairs, map behind. Day signals, caught between the burgee & the pennants. The note on the body before it was rushed after. The peeping out of the boat and the prospect of evening, confluence.

So little thinking, I'm quoting you as I remember. Bicycled to the ceremony, always found that admirable, though he forgot about the large bones next door and missed that show altogether.

So then, Charles again with the Mayans, particularly the figures he is there studying. Enough already, there was an iguana in the trash. So what? That like speaking to the roadside, that I myself missed the thing, her pieces, I didn't mean to but I will get up to them probably the first half of this week. You're not one of them, she said, and it stuck.

Roadside movies. Cider, the boards were part of what I liked about the woman and how the hose was something, I thought about Wendy and her stupid "ambiance," which meant blue paint flecking across the house front. Jesus, my mother thought the apocalypse had taken hold. Eventually, I set the fallen bird back on the rafter and steadied the nest.
Lots of things about the nest. Nest of light with them, to study order of the mind, or warming nest, in Jon's bathroom. The little gold fellows still half tucked and pushing with their sinuses, something I always imagined.

Excellent grouper, excellent time.

pontormo's letter
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: Letters to Real People


ribald figures thumping around, brandied about, no unwieldy, not to be trifled because of the weight of the material, myth safety, no chance of tumping. The base of the figure rocking, sound demonstration of something known all along, as the pattern sinks into the scheme, and besides color, there is the planar aspect, the sliding off the lap, the cleft of the rock, the untenable angles of all these places, all these little maps turned so that the light shines through them and spectacles the picture, just spectacles right into a fine predicament,

simple as the bear cave, sullen as the greys,

Arrow on a card, arrow on a card upon the felt. Carded arrow and ropes upon the arrow and the letters placed below the strings, tightness of the walls, tightness of the walls for letters, for all sorts.
Bedevilment, being what appears to some people as being deprived of tangible meanings. Oh arrow, promise of, oh arrow, the drama of, oh arrow, the foolery of, oh arrow, the comedic turn, oh arrow of harrowing scenes, where the village, where the village itself is drawn, where the arrow draws the village diaries, slipping into rustic hands, slipping out to mark the sheep, the very cover of the bale, sentiments of this passage housed in the folk, delivering them unto thoughtfulness & the rest.

O'Dell
Mood:  bright
Topic: Letters to Real People


Dear Courtland,

Not that it's much to do about anything, but you are in the war. You are in it. I can't believe it. I can't believe you are in Baghdad, in the history of these things being made, in the training of police, the eating of the beef tips and the like. That is you over there, whom I haven't seen in at least 4 years.

I just finished with a reading. That is what I have in comparison to Baghdad. In the latest picture I have, you are holding a chihuahua and your own head is shaved. Cody is getting married?

I feel the war not so often in Arizona. Every now and then, when Cheney comes to town for a fundraiser, I will feel the war, maybe with a single man on a sidewalk with a sign that says something about lies. Maybe that man has a big dog with him. That is the ripple of the war into my life. Of course there's television but I stay away from it, not because I fear inaccuracy or desire to transcend it.

The war here, nesting in the hearts of people connected to other people. The war here is me thinking of you and hoping you don't do anything heroic, that you just do your job and stay low.

It must sound stupid me saying that. The directionality of my language may have nothing to do with your situation. My concern is your protection, though I should be concerned with the safety of civilians and innocents, who may die everyday without coverage.

Do you remember when that man approached you in the mall and offered you a job as his bodyguard or something? That sort of thing happens to you. It doesn't to me. I never have the right shirt on. Often, I am asked to exit the photograph to clear the way for you. You are the right man in most instances.

You saw my picture and told your mother I was going through my hippie stage. I wonder. You may be right.
Though my hair is short now and the beard shortened.
I am unemployed and fairly ridiculous to look at in the mornings. I talk to my dog steadily throughout the day, which seems like a hippie thing to do. You may be right. It made me think of that time we visited Cody in the hospital and you lightly touched his face to wake him. The first thing he said: "Courtland, I hate you. You said it wouldn't hurt."

You were even the right man then, though you lied about the tonsils. For a while, Cody was off meat because of deer hunting. I smelled the firewood in the garage and it made me think that was the smell of the ranch. Was I wrong? Does it puzzle you that I rattle off these obscurities as if they connect with you? I mean the assurance, my self-assurance. Is it too much?

Did you know Andy Hagee got married? That Joel Mulkey is engaged and so is Laneice? That we are all heading into something, some building we've never been in. What is the nature of our connection now? Just old times?

A few months ago, I ran across an article about your great-grandfather's dry goods store. I wish I could have seen it. Your dad, driving me home and listening to Zane Grey audiobooks. It was nice, being in Uvalde, seeing that life. And now I'm trying to peer in at what you're doing, maybe even who you are. How does it change you? Is your sense of humor more brash? I imagine you still smile a lot, rakishly.

How weird it was to be eating with you and Laneice at Rooster's. I was with Jen. That wasn't even that long ago. You lived in Tulsa. I still can't believe that. The praying hands. The service in two languages, that's what stays with me from Uvalde. The interminable speaking and of course the river with the fish darting around and the immigrant caves.

I have driven across Texas many times since then. Many times. I drove to Austin this March. I thought about you when I was near Uvalde, how you were my best friend, how I gave you a little blue plane with propellors in your room upstairs and how we hid from Toby when he came around, how Willie Mae made sure we didn't have to see him. How Cody complained about the broken toys and how we walked on the high walls. How you met someone named Dawn at camp and how I met someone named Dawn in Arizona.

I can only have a finite number of thoughts about you, because of the time off. They feel numbered at this point, and feeling numbered is a particularly effective mode of production.

Fraternity is something I look out for. It's hard when you don't have that, having had it so long. Some people can't be brothers once they're married. That is the truth. One role forfeited for another. My suspicion is that fraternity is a heavy expense at this point in life and that it comes roaring back later, in the loose years, between the recession and the crisis.

My dad is desperate in these terms, sometimes driving an hour just to feel the part. I don't know how far I would drive, yet. You drove down for my graduation and stood with me in a strange kitchen, while they were giving me grief about the length of my speech.

Hitting the deer with your jeep. Jumping off a cliff. Joining the army. This is a progression in my mind, based on where I have and have not been. I have been inside a pool company, I have been standing over a paper cutter, I have been in front of people, reading various poems, I have been monsooned and I have heard about disaster. I have raised funds and edited rants.
I have written things and I have sewn things and that's about it. I have even taught people how to write. And any sense of pride in any experience seems not so much associated with the task performed or the results achieved, as the passing of feelings the weathering of those feelings, the idea of survival as it unfolds inside a person. How many times that has unfolded for you and whether or not there is some acceleration due to circumstances, that is something to consider. Please be safe.

Prevert, Jacques
Mood:  crushed out
Topic: Letters to Real People


Gravis,

the sullen traveler self arrests; the times of conferral have processed the vestibule. And the comma, it has returned and gives it regards to the circus, the circus of things red and things round
the morning surreys plumb the ceiling the morning surreys plumb the ceiling disturbing closure of the gesture the closure of the gesture. An inheritance happens upon a knowledge, after you, denial, after you, treasure. Amidst lacquer the camaraderie of the show, what this is, this plosive referral, from decking a separable day-trip with such a commission?

Sand Trout in the Harbour
Mood:  cool
Topic: Letters to Real People

Dear Burt,

One time you told me your penis was burning. That was summer at the swimming pool. I didn't really know what to do. I was thinking, maybe, get out of the chlorine?

Ever notice the webworms? I took long videos of them when the wind was up. I stood on top of the golf cart and filmed the webs sitting on the pecan tree. There were others but the pecan tree was right. I also set a ladder up in the woods to look out over the cooling pond and maybe spot an egret's nest. That was the plan.

When I was helping you load those volleyball poles, I felt very old, because I was adjusting to being around "old." I was slowing myself down to work with you, to lift them into the truck the right way. These are things people hardly ever mention but I can write these things to you because you have this thing, which is attached to your voice, but definitely not a part of it, that assures me you understand most everything that is going on, whether it's how to discipline an unruly horse or frying fish.

The first time I heard this voice is when I was under the altar and you were praying for me and talking through the experience, down into my face, about what was happening and and what to expect. That is the first time I remember you. That is, my first impression. Of course, by now I understand why what I did was so important. I had stepped, physically and otherwise, into the center of my church. That initiative, which has never again reared itself, is something that adults are very keen to see unfold.

I figure that's why so many people are watching me right now. If I would ever become more than a damned periscope myself, I might catch a break and not be seen as someone ready to emerge. I'm glad it was you that I remember in attendance. I can say glad because I have heard so many stories of you doing things: selling cars, busting horses, cattle drives, sausage factory, saddle stamping, line dancing, you name it.

With you, that stuff is a procession that has delivered you into the present with leftovers, very useful ones, very entertaining ones. The utility of a bolt or screw. That it's proof of nothing. Your stories never prove anything or push towards an underlying idea of yourself. It's always the outside thing that catches the twang, the elements of the story which have no ability to render something unto you, such as the heights of salt grass, and how those heights are admirable, truly admirable, in the length of time that is translated into the compressed remark, and this instance, the length of time contemplating the length of grass, on horseback, and the the lengths of that impression shown through your remarks, which bear very little smudging or disruption. The glory of remarking something, the glory of it, without trophy or capture. An off-handedness that arrives with the prompt, that's right, simultaneous. That it is there as soon as the remark, sequestered in your own understanding, receives something beyond its own lengths and undertakes to bring that something into its own. A kind of conversion experience, definitely, but never so violent as that idea suggests, though there is a basic confrontation, usually a fact that has undergone some mode of effacement.