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In my words, November 4 – 10

In English we deal with the future by using nine helping verbs called the modals: will, shall, can, could, would, should, may, might and must. Only will and shall will ever happen; all the others are possibilities, the wouldas, couldas, and shouldas of the world. Every main verb has three principal parts. To walk has its base form, walk, and two participles, walking and walked. For the definite future, English will put will in front of the base form, walk; it doesn’t matter who the subject is: I, you, he, she, it, we, you, and they will walk. In Spanish in the future to walk (caminar) changes with every subject: (I) caminaré, (you) caminerás, (he, she it) caminerá, (we) caminaremos, (you) caminaréis, and (they) caminarán (will walk). English in this regard is much simpler than any of the Romance languages.



What is the future? Do we look forward to it with hope or with dread? Is it our well made plans or a cyclone? Are we ever there yet? Is it my hands typing the words as fast as you can read them? Or kittens being born, squeezed out of their mother, licked and glistening? Or is it coming down the steps, looking down into the living room where there is a party going on, everything happening at once, while you, your hand on the banister, the precipice, the edge are kept from falling into this abyss because you aren’t everything, nor are you there yet: all you are allowed, it seems, is to be taking one more step into the next?



Today is Sunday. It’s morning. We are an hour later, which means the sun comes up sooner, at six instead of seven. Last week I started getting up at six to try to record the Raven by Edgar Allen Poe (I have been memorizing it and want to recite it on film). Because I live at the corner of 9th and C, the M9 bus comes and goes during the day, trucks stop at the restaurants, and people talk and sometimes shout. Just before dawn is quiet. Last week was still dark at 6; I had to light the couch with lamps and take down the painting on the wall behind leaving the bare white brick so nothing would detract from the recitation. Now there’s enough light at 6, but I still take down the painting.



I began to memorize The Raven at the beginning of October hoping to record a version by Halloween. The poem has eighteen stanzas, six lines to a stanza, the sixth line, a half containing the ominous rhymes for nevermore. I practice reciting on my way to work for a mile through the Lower East Side. At the SW corner of Tompkins Square where the drunks and the homeless gather at the tables and the benches in the morning, some holler as I pass: “Shut up!” or ask “Who are you talking to?” Perhaps it’s the folks who have nothing else to do who are the ones who have the time to criticize and yell at you.

My goal to have the Raven memorized and performed by Halloween didn’t happen. Lou Reed died too. The Raven was a favorite poem of his so that gave me a little more impetus to finish, but I just wasn’t ready. It’s a tongue twister. For awhile I kept saying, “Perched upon a bust of Phallus.” This morning I began to film a recital and got as far as the seventh stanza when I said, “In there stepped a saintly raven of the stately days of yore.” When I go off course, I stop; that’s it for the morning. I want to do a perfect performance, one that gets from one end to the other start to finish every second counted including the silence at the beginning and the end when I’m not talking before and after the words. One morning I will do it well; I’m not sure when but I will.


words are birds
eye is sky

is an early poem of mine written in the early 1970s. I made a little vimeo of it three years ago, but it never seemed right, so I’d change it here, and change it there; now I think it’s finally finished; the film is equal to the poem and there they are.



“What we have, we have together; what we don’t have, we don’t have together,” seems to be a good wedding vow. What do you think?

Sonnet 114

Dusk comes as I look at the Egyptian
temple by the reflection pool and the
crocodile, pink-flecked marble circa 1
A.D. as old as Christ and older than
me. It was a cold walk from the subway
cold as this smooth stone I am sitting on
near a father holding his happy son’s
hand dangling from him at an angle. Hey
when this boy’s as old as I am I’ll be
dead and that old temple there will still stand
just as it is in mid-town Manhattan
unless some comet hits us or the sea
has risen. Mundane facts keep us present
forgetting, remembering the moment.

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