10/10/1998 – 6/4/2007

 
fishing in the mid morning
fishing in the late autumn
on a fallen column
that once stood on the shore
hoping the chilly spray
inhaled
at each splintering
wave
will melt the deposits
that have diminished
the flow

the beach flat and long
lines of
intertwined
serpentine
black shadow
charcoaled
on the sand

Bird feather clouds move like glaciers

sitting on the edge
sails alone in the wind
slowly billowing
full of memory
and cargoes
of
the past.

Get up and read the unfinished poem to people who really don’t care
Stand with sloppy sheets of paper held in an unwashed hand
With imperfect fingernails and read.
Forget to run spellcheck
make an error or two
Let your rough and unsanded emotion result in splinters in the fingers of all who touch
The poem.
Don’t even try to imply pain
Don’t let lust arrive incognito
Don’t offer polite moisture as tears

Get some spittle in your manicured mouth

Get up

Get up

Sing a song and hit the wrong notes
We are all listening for your beautiful mistakes.

9/14/1997

5 – 6 PM

It is one of the first lessons
It is one you are supposed to bow to
as if it was a commandment.
You cannot go home again.
What you left is gone.
if not the place
then the people
and the time.

There is no finding anything you’ve buried.
it is all washed away
like the name
of your lover
you wrote in the sand
at low tide.

There is no expedition to unearth your past.
There are no artifacts
other than those
you yourself
have saved
between thin sheets of onion skin
like thin sheets of memory.

It is all forward.
The movement is all forward.

It is the current
It is the current
There are not
two in this river.

And you are pulled onwards
towards the sea
towards the commingling
of your light
with the rest of light.
Your eyes with the rest of eyes.
Your songs with the cacophonous chorus of every song,

What you are
What you were

June 1, 1990

1 PM

B.F. Skinner is dying from leukemia
and cannot go to some awards ceremony
because he ain’t got no immune system left.

I know what that is like
because both my parents died that way
and, I suppose, I expect, the odds seem to be
that so will I.

 B.F. Skinner does not believe in God but he does believe in Pavlov.
He has a signed picture of him in his laboratory.
he does not have signed pictures from the dogs
or the bellsor the drool
just Pavlov.

He believes that it is all response.
That there is no hidden agenda.
That there is nothing behind curtain number one.
That there is no soul in the gift box of our body.
There is no essence.
There is just what goes on between the responses
that fills the spaces between pleasure and pain
                             between stimulus and response.

There is no soul
There is no God.
Nor any similar sort of nebulous
intangible
thing.
When he dies it will be in response to death.

 His daughter said
(when asked what she remembered about being B.F. Skinner’s daughter)
she said
she remembered that he used to come in every night
before she went to sleep
and read her stories
and talk to her.

The article didn’t say whether she liked it because
it was in response
to the kindnesses she got from the man
who didn’t believe in God
or any similar sort of nebulous
intangible
thing.