no doubt

Do you doubt that I love the things you think are funny?
Or that I think the things you love are funny?
Or that I doubt your love for funny things and thinking?
Or that I love your doubt and think you're funny?

No doubt, I love you and think most things are funny.

Love and Doubt...what funny things to think about.

story, poem

Story:

Last night. At the right place, in the perfect dress, a bit early for once. Pop around the corner to see if book shop is open because am feeling slightly adrift in spring breeze and light. Want to stand among stacks of happy endings and epic tragedies to put own life into better perspective. And kill time. Shop is dark, though, with man sitting on stoop in front of locked door. A handsome man, smoking and swirling something around a crystal glass. Turn to walk away and then turn back, dress twirling perfectly, when he calls out looking for a book? Get unreasonably shy and shrug but wait while man pulls keys from pocket, unlocks door and finishes cigarette in seemingly single motion. Very suave. Follow him into to shop. Take as much time as you want, it's just me and my whiskey tonight. Wander around, enchanted by dust, dark, absence, man, paper, whiskey, solitude. Find treasure - copies of Ashberry, Kunitz, Matthews. Man gives me all three for a song.

Poem:

The Calculus
William Matthews

There is a culture which counts like this: "one,
two, many." It is sufficient. They don't use numbers
to measure. There are so many women your wife
gets pushed out of bed. Everyone knows without a
name for it how many dead men a camel can carry.
There is so little light the dark part of each eye
grows knuckle-size.
The invention of zero will end their life. They don't
say "no moon tonight"; they say "the moon is
gone." We add this egg of absence to anything
-- then we are richer.

grace

"--o remember in your narrowing dark hours that more things move than blood in the heart."

Louise Bogan

The week was muddy and fraught with feelings I couldn't put words to, even as I wanted desperately to say something true and then to have the sheer weight of that truth anchor me to the ground. I began to slip through my own fingers, beyond Squirrel's grasp even, to the place where language has no power for redemption. And then unaccountably I thought of the freckles on my mother's arm and her birthmark. I realized without forming words: I love my mother and knew it was true and nourishing as soup. And then, because they go together, I thought of my father and the way he taps his foot under the dinner table and again I thought my father is a good man and this thought was subject to gravity as all real things are.

The screaming started, though, and metal rose up from the ground and the rain and air rusted the landscape and I worried it was too late for any words that I might find. But he set a cup of tea, settled in a saucer, in front of me and when his fingers touched the back of my hand, I nodded my head because I knew it was more true than nerve endings or rain. The sun came up in the morning and Squirrel and I walked for many miles along the river because our legs are strong enough to take us and outloud she said to me we should be thankful for this gift of motion, so we were and our gratitude was as true as the dirt under our feet and my love for her seemed more lasting than the stones.

And then Grace called last night and I could hear her shrugging across the way, seeming to say with her shoulders this is a mystery I can live with, how I came to love him when I didn't think I would love anyone this way. For awhile she spoke of being 18 and the poems we used to say each to other, the way we cut our hair and scampered through the woods at night, of the decisions and the boys and the cliffs we climbed over the sea. What lovely horrible times those were -- how good to look back and then decide to open your arms to whatever comes next she said. I am so happy for you I said because the words were true and I could not hold them back.

Rhetorical Figures

Tom Christopher

When a sentence is composed of two independent
clauses, the second being weaker than the first,
it is called One-Legged Man Standing. If it
purposefully obscures meaning, it is called Ring
Dropped in Muddy Creek, or if elegantly composed,
Wasp Fucking Orchid. There are words behind words,
and half the time our thoughts spraying out like water
from a hose, half the time banging inside our heads
like a wren in a house. When a sentence ends
unexpectedly because someone has punched
the speaker in the face, it's Avalanche Sudden.
When instead the speaker is stopped with sloppy
kisses, it's Dripping Cloud. Not to be confused
with Dripping Cone, when someone overturns
the table, or Bird Pecking Mountain, when
the sentence goes on for an hour and a half and ends
in a shaking death. If the speaker lies in the driveway
so drunk on cheap wine that one listening cannot
get close to the meaning and thus runs away again,
claiming, "For the last time," it's Pregnant Dog
Cooked in Sun. If the speaker sells everything for
an old convertible and drives out into the desert
with unintelligible shout to the pissed-off stars:
Aching Stones Laughing. Forced incongruent words
are Fishes on Fire, and are beautiful but bring us
no closer to the Truth or the Cosmos or the All,
so we either tour Europe looking for the bodies
of saints or drink all night playing Johnny Cash LPs.
Everything we have said, we have said all our lives.
Same for what we haven't said. Learning the terms
doesn't help, we're still filled over the rim with longing.
Already in this poem there is Clamshell Moon, Barn
House Burning, Cow Lowing in the Field, One Hundred
Village Bells, Moth Flurry. Not much further a Cat
in Heat, a Wailing Street, and in the end Tree Frogs
Blazing reeds with Sound.

melange melancholia

I watched a pigeon die on the early morning street.
A very old & falling down man shuffled up and looked on too.
A'int it awful to watch something suffer at the end?

If you take a hammer and you break it into little pieces,
I mean, just smash the living daylights out of the thing,
can you sift through the rubble and find the bits of fact
that held it together in the first place.

I woke up crying last night after dreaming that
dogs were chasing me through the woods
while my friends and the trees stood there, laughing.

Tomorrow is my friend's birthday and
I'm sad that I'm not there to bid her well and say
maybe we should take back all those days
we wished too hard for time to pass.

Please isn't enough. But I'm saying it anyways.
please. please.

These are pleas.

eat your heart out girls

deconstruct

She chooses inconsequential because of the narrow door inviting her to step out of the cold, the lure of belonging in the arms of the preposition. The proposition is followed quickly by the list of reasons not to go, though, once you've sunk your savings on a share of the Brooklyn Bridge; and the looming image of the man behind bars who tattoos his arms and waits to add ex to his title. The sparkling suspense of the order of things -- how they're related and what comes next-- pushes her on to the conclusion: a quick, painless end to a million different beginnings.