Coherence? What's Coherence?

A new frog showed up in the pond this morning: much thinner than the bullfrog of spring, avocado-green, very aware but not at all afraid of us. He feels like good luck.

It also feels like Ripton, Vermont, out there vs. Friendswood, Texas. Here-- yesterday --it was Friendswood, Texas. That muggy, that swamp in the air. This morning, the car roofs are stained with pollen, which must mean the trees don't know where they are.

A few houses away, town workers are hacking off the tree limbs over the wires. An elaborate process--two trucks, flagman, orange signs, flashing lights. I'm hoping they'll take to the branches of our maple, as the privet beneath it could use the light.

So much has happened in the last eight days. Sometimes in the sped-up compression of Writers-Conference-Time, it feels as if we're growing redwood forests together, one hundred feet per workshop, but it's not the stuff of narration--or blog posts. I'll just say that I loved working with my students at the Juniper and Rutgers-Camden conferences. Talented writers, rich conversations. I, of course, am glad to be back at home, but many faces and voices--both spoken and on the page--are still drifting through my head.

As are these images, which probably have no coherence whatsoever, but I'll pass them on anyway.

(Now outside to drag the sprinkler to the next dry patch of grass.)

*****

Clam Broth House in Hoboken
(I was part of a group reading for the What's Your Exit? anthology at Hoboken's Symposia Books on the 19th, the night before we left for Amherst.)

Poet Washes Car Somewhere in NJ!

The Wigs of Philadelphia

The Uniforms of Philadelphia

The Ghost Signs of Philadelphia

The Empty Restaurants of Philadelphia

Childhood Mailbox Still Intact!
(After I finished teaching on Monday, we drove out to Cherry Hill, where we had a great dinner with Lisa Zeidner and John Lafont. Lisa and John live a few blocks away from childhood house, so we couldn't help but drive by it before getting back on the Turnpike. There are great narratives around this mailbox. My father put it up in, what--1967?)

The Houses of Wexford Leas
(These houses, also in Cherry Hill, brought out a consuming urge in me to build houses. I spent five years of my childhood designing houses that looked like these instead of making friends. They make appearances in Famous Builder and in my essay "New Jersey Notebook.")

A Bromley in Wexford Leas

Lace cap hydrangea out back in Springs

Mark's studio

New member of the pond

And the Light Tore a Hole in the Clouds

We didn't exactly plan on visiting Emily Dickinson's grave during a thunderstorm, but when the sky opened up, we were with it. Actually, it was friendly thunderstorm, as far as thunderstorms go--nothing like the poem below. A mess of rain of course, but just one big knock of thunder, and the light tore a hole in the clouds.









824
Emily Dickinson

The Wind begun to rock the Grass
With threatening Tunes and low --
He threw a Menace at the Earth --
A Menace at the Sky.

The Leaves unhooked themselves from Trees --
And started all abroad
The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
And threw away the Road.

The Wagons quickened on the Streets
The Thunder hurried slow --
The Lightning showed a Yellow Beak
And then a livid Claw.

The Birds put up the Bars to Nests --
The Cattle fled to Barns --
There came one drop of Giant Rain
And then as if the Hands

That held the Dams had parted hold
The Waters Wrecked the Sky,
But overlooked my Father's House --
Just quartering a Tree --

The Tunnel and Mount Greylock

The tunnel and Arvo Part's Te Deum. The latter on the stereo as we drove north, near New Haven. This was Sunday. No better junction of movement and sound: the mouth of the tunnel ahead of us, the speeding vehicles, the austere alleluias of the choir. The silence between the alleluias. I lifted my camera, switched it to video mode. The lights of the tunnel saturated the frame; all I could see was yellow then white, the cold, clean fire of sodium vapor filling the tunnel, and so certain was I that I'd made the beautiful movie of the end of the world, that I didn't even bother downloading it for two days. Of course the video turned out to be nothing like that. Too quick, too quiet, too much silence between the alleluias, so the description itself will have to suffice, oh well. It wouldn't have set the right tone for the week anyway, which has been much sweeter, more convivial, back to earth.

Hi from day five of the Juniper Institute at U Mass, Amherst, where we're working hard but having a wonderful week with colleagues and friends and visiting writers and students. The schedule is tight--hence fewer posts than usual on this end--but we did manage to spend yesterday's free afternoon at Herman Melville's house over the mountain in Lenox. No pictures allowed inside the house itself--I'd left my camera back on the dresser in our room, anyway--but Mark did manage to sneak a shot out the window of Herman's study, toward his beloved Mount Greylock, the view of which made the whole room vibrate. You could feel Herman's lust for that mountain still stirring that room. Maybe I'll remind Mark to pass that picture on to me. In the meantime, some other shots from the readings: Joy Williams, James Tate, Noy Holland, Mark--and Mark and me from behind.







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UPDATE, July 1: More photos. I don't have everyone, but here. in order, is Lisa Olstein, Michael Kimball, Matthew Zapruder, Leni Zumas, and Thomas Sayers Ellis

Transmutation (Or: A Fear Uncoils Itself, Testing Its Long Cool Limbs)

An elliptical video for an elliptical song. Something about that all morphing seems right for the moment, as does this poem by Monica Youn. Transmutation: more monstrosity in the everyday, or something that's coming to help us?



Ignatz Invoked
Monica Youn
from Ignatz

A gauze bandage wraps the land
and is unwound, stained orange with sulfates.

A series of slaps molds a mountain,
a fear uncoils itself, testing its long

cool limbs. A passing cloud
seizes up like a carburetor

and falls to earth, lies broken-
backed and lidless in the scree.

Acetylene torches now snug
in their holsters, shop-vacs

trundled back behind the dawn.
A mist becomes a murmur, becomes

a moan deepening the dust-
choked fissures in the rock O pity us

Ignatz O come to us by moonlight
O arch your speckled body over the earth.

Whose is the Name That I Will Call?

Stand here and name the one you loved
Beneath the drifting ashes
And, in naming, rise above time
As it, flashing, passes

For some reason, Joanna Newsom is just outside the frame, behind the harp, but that doesn't so much matter. I love the way the song keeps both reinventing itself and returning to what's been left behind. I love the way it uses disjunction--hear it break from one key to the other, one time signature to the next--to get the work done. Animation, inspiration, and the unseen: all here, as if coming from someplace wilder than Joanna Newsom, which is probably why I keep coming back to this song.

A Trip to Ocean Grove and Asbury Park

I suppose it's a mark of Asbury Park's rejuvenation that I didn't take pictures of new buildings, new facilities, new anything during this visit. Ruin and age caught me eye this time, maybe because we sensed that it wasn't long for this world. (You can see the snap and shine in that mural on the side of the theater.) Who would have known? Well, people have been saying it for as long as I can remember, ever since the bleakest days when the girders of an abandoned high-rise cast a pall over the boardwalk.

Anyway, it couldn't have been better to spend the day with my friend Alice. We walked the boardwalk to Ocean Grove; we ate lunch outside facing the sea; we walked the perimeter of Wesley Lake, where a wind pushed the muggy air aside. We drank coffee. We looked up and discussed developing thunderheads. We even walked inside the emptied Stone Pony, as part of a doomed but appealing mission to buy Mark a very particular baseball cap. Even the birds on the grass seemed to be relaxed. But before all that, a visit to Alice's house in Montclair, where I met her husband, Larry, her son, Asher, and three shining animals.

(The first four photos are of Ocean Grove, the first town south of Asbury Park.)

Hawks and Sparrows Race in My Waters, Stingrays are Floating Across the Sky

''

Oceania
Bjork
from the album Medulla

One breath away from mother Oceana
Your nimble feet make prints in my sands
You have done good for yourselves
Since you left my wet embrace
And crawled ashore
Every boy, is a snake is a lily
Every pearl is a lynx, is a girl
Sweet like harmony made into flesh
You dance by my side
Children sublime
You show me continents
I see islands
You count the centuries
I blink my eyes
Hawks and sparrows race in my waters
Stingrays are floating
Across the sky
Little ones, my sons and my daughters
Your sweat is salty
I am why
I am why
I am why
Your sweat is salty
I am why
I am why
I am why

The Mosquito (Or: The Drama and Allure, the Hard-Earned Specificity, of Any and Every Living Thing)

The mosquito. Instantly, it conjures up my childhood summerhouse, where my mother stood on the back step, shooing the three of us inside so she could slam the jalousie door as fast as she could. Could she keep them all out? You know the answer to that. It wasn't their bite we were afraid of, the pink, itchy pincushion they usually left behind--The Bactine! The bottles and bottles of Bactine, Absorbine Junior, and Calamine! Instead, it was their whine as they closed in on our ears in the dark. I hated that sound, though it was the sound of summer itself: insomnia on a hot night. Somehow I always found myself listening for that sound whether it was breezy or still, beyond the cars rushing over the drawbridge grates, the rose vines snagging on the screens.

One closed in on my desk today. As if on cue, I was struck with the impulse to slam it with my hand: my mother was a good teacher; she practically cooked dinner with flyswatter in hand. But then something took hold of me--what? The line from Rick Bass above? No, nothing as articulate as all that. But when I lifted up my camera, the insect that came back through the lens looked intricate and witty, even prehistoric, just as fantastic as any of the birds darting the crabapple. And how could I not let it do what it wanted to do just a little bit longer? And I shooed it out the door.

The Holy Sow

Wild, Wild Pigs
from the story "Ordinary Monsters"
in Aliens in the Prime of their Lives by Brad Watson

The hunters hung the boar by the heels, sliced it gut to sternum, let fall the beautiful entrails onto the ground. They removed skin, hooves, packed the head in ice, carried it and the meat back to camp. Every evening, the pigs gathered in stealth at the edges of firelight, watching the revelers drinking, roasting, slathering jowls with barbequed wild pig grease. They weren't feeling so wild, anymore. They began to believe the hunters would never go away, not until they had killed, gutted, skinned, eaten every wild pig in the world.

They went to the holy sow for advice, roused her from the mud hole from which, as long as any of them could remember, only her old gray snout protruded. They holy sow stumped around awhile, blinking gouts of mud from her eyes. She sent them into the forest to gather the roots of a certain strange plant. When they brought them to her, she grunted twice and wolfed down every last tuber.

A moment later, standing very still, a look of dull anticipation in her smallish red eyes, the holy sow disappeared, poof, she vanished.

The pigs ran screaming and squealing into the woods, certain that they were all quite doomed.

That night, however, the holy sow appeared to the hunters in their dreams. One by one the hunters rose and sleepwalked down various animal trails into the woods. They walked into bottomless swamp mud holes and sank. They happened upon and were devoured by packs of wild, rangy, slobbering dogs. They walked into the river and floated on their backs downstream, out of sight.

The pigs rejoiced, got drunk on fermented berries, fell asleep. But that night, they dreamed of their brethren turned and blackened on spits, the meat smoked tender and tangy and sweet, and woke up the next morning murderous, blond, ravenous with unspeakable lust for their own kind.