Articles, Poems, Aphorisms and Galleries

There’s always a snowstorm coming
and I’m always booked at a café
on the other side of the mountain
driving on bald tires to give another lecture
on Hegel’s vision
of the infinite whole
and at the last minute deciding to lecture on wind,
and snow, and their effects on discarded newspapers.
No, wait—this lecture
was about repeating the past.
There’s always a snowstorm coming
and I’m always booked at a café
on the other side of the mountain
driving in the dark
and I am insanely happy,
weaving along the winding cliffs,
careening down the other side of the summit
in a little blue car, parking, sliding a quarter in a meter
and bouncing off with manila folders under my arm,
my gabardine overcoat
flapping open like a hospital gown,
to give lectures on vision and snow and repeating the past.
And if they introduce me with an old bio
so be it. No need to mention the latest
gummy linguistic situation in words,
or my recent award
for laying on the rug
and staring at the lacy vacant spiderwebs
in the petticoats of a glass cupboard—no,
forget the laurels. What matters tonight is Time
and blizzards
and saving on your next purchase
with a coupon from your unconscious—
Now, snow.
That form of water which haunts.
It follows you indoors in obedience to air
until it feels fire, then it looks for a place to lay down
with fire, to then elope with earth, to move slowly to the sea.
I just thought I knew something
and light was pouring through me onto the floor—
but everything shifts, one moment
to the next, and leaves
a dark stain where it was.
I remember something, then panic sets in.
A metaphor no longer
holds like it used to—I master
no single existence in the past—yet here I am,
still with my name and mutant face.
It’s not real they say, the past.
Even if an ember is burning holes clean through,
cherries dropped from the tips of cigarettes, fallen
many years ago—back before they put phones in pockets
and people wrote numbers all over the stairwells
and no one stopped reading a book
to take a picture of one of its pages—ridiculous.
Instead, there were long uninterrupted hours of reading
and smoking and crying. Your own eyes wept
as they do now—though, looking back,
you’re not even sure who was weeping and who
was watching the weeping. Time is also about waiting
for an almost imperceptible change
in a single tear. The mother’s textured silence.
Disturbed neighborhood kids coming together in the woods
to echo their own households.
It’s never really about the why in crying, is it? I mean
in terms of narrative
it just comes, resembling meaning
like an old bio, resembling snow, and holding
in your mind the object of a spruce tree
at whose base a kitten is buried wrapped in a tea towel.
And everywhere
there is a white soil coming,
carried sideways by wind, and down by gravity,
a pale inflection on its many cold lips.
And it doesn’t need to know where it came from,
to know it is part of the whole
and it is snow,
and it falls on your face
and ends.
Autumn
What is sometimes called a
tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning
is only the long
red and orange branch of
a green maple
in early September reaching
into the greenest field
out of the green woods at the
edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered tired
of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer re-
minding everyone (in
our family) of a Russian
song a story
by Chekhov or my father
What is sometimes called a
tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning
is only the long
red and orange branch of
a green maple
in early September reaching
into the greenest field
out of the green woods at the
edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered tired
of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer re-
minding everyone (in
our family) of a Russian
song a story by
Chekhov or my father on
his own lawn standing
beside his own wood in
the United States of
America saying (in Russian)
this birch is a lovely
tree but among the others
somehow superficial